Bill Kristol: March to Dictatorship

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Hello, and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast.

I'm your host, Tim Miller.

It is Monday.

So I've got editor-at-large Bill Crystal back from a very non-vacation vacation.

You know, people do vacations differently in the summer.

Myself, JVL, others decided to check out from the news altogether.

Bill Crystal was texting me more than ever last week while he was with his grandchildren.

So maybe

that's a comment on the grandchildren.

Maybe not.

I don't know.

Oh, no.

No comment on the grandchildren.

I have to explicitly and emphatically, and truthfully, about that.

We did have the hurricane, which was out in the Atlantic, obviously, had spillover effects at Bethany Beach.

So there were two days of basically pouring rain and stuff.

So a little more time in the house and therefore text prone, I suppose.

And also the news, maybe you didn't notice this since you were working so hard all last week, but the news was not all great

in terms of the health of a liberal democracy in America.

So on that point, you turned out the newsletter this morning saying it's not democratic backsliding.

It's a march towards dictatorship, despotism, one or the other, both.

Talk about the biggest picture there, and then you kind of list a couple of the things that happened that we'll get through.

I mean, this term democratic backsliding has become pretty common in the last 10 years, I guess, in the U.S., but it really was invented, I think invented, or certainly popularized to describe the troubles in in Central and Eastern Europe and actually Russia, the former Soviet Union itself, after 1989, the tendency, the difficulty of getting rid of the old authoritarian habits, the old authoritarian people, of getting democratic institutions solidly embedded quickly enough in democratic habits.

And it's a very reasonable political science concept, and there are different countries that backslid more quickly than others, and some haven't.

So it's not an inevitable thing.

But the impression it gives, and I think it's especially true when it's, well, and why I think it's misleading now to apply it to the U.S., is there's just this pull away from democracy in countries that haven't had it for a long time.

It's kind of an old habit to die hard type.

Yeah, yeah, which is perfectly reasonable.

And then you'd be an idiot to go to, you know, Poland or Bulgaria or something and not spend a lot of time thinking about how do we get rid of those old habits?

How do we change them?

How do we embed new ones?

But that's not the case in the U.S.

I mean, so in a complicated way, you could say it's sort of the case in the U.S.

We have some old habits that have died hard and that are authoritarian and that didn't go away and are now we're backsliding towards, you might say.

But that's not the real story here.

The story here is less backsliding and more a genuine, purposeful march towards despotism, dictatorship.

I use the terms kind of interchangeably.

Authoritarianism seems a little too, I don't know, too fancy and too nice almost.

And as I said in the piece, there are authoritarian tendencies in every society, in every individual, in every group, and every, and they don't go away.

They can be managed.

They can be limited.

At times, they have to be, you know, part of just life in a government, obviously, at different institutions.

Authoritarianism makes it sound like it's kind of, there's a little too much of that stuff and too little of the liberal stuff.

That's true as far as it goes, but that doesn't capture what Trump and his people are up to.

You go through a list of various things that have happened over the past couple of weeks.

Military leaders, intelligence professionals purged.

Critics Holmes raided.

Obviously, John Bolton.

That happened on Friday.

You mentioned the continued Epstein cover-up.

The major corporations extorted.

I want to get to that.

Presidential control of law enforcement in the nation's capital intensified with promise that it will expand to other places.

The list goes on.

I'll give you a dealer's choice there.

I want to go through most of those.

What is the most acute for you?

I do think, don't you think, the takeover of the D.C.

police force, the use of troops in LA, and then the kind of open-ended promise by Trump that he's just going to do this elsewhere in the country,

that's a pretty standard marker.

You know, that's not backsliding.

That's Trump choosing to embrace an authoritarian and pre-dictatorial, as it were, method.

And then an awful lot of people, awful lot of people going along with it, including the entire Republican Party.

I mean, that's one thing that strikes me.

I said in the piece, I was being a little careful.

Something like, almost no, I've heard almost no Republican voices objecting to any of this.

I actually, I think I originally wrote, I owe, I've heard no Republican voices objecting to any of these things.

And I thought, I don't know, maybe one of them has been objected to by one member of Congress.

But it's really kind of amazing.

It is.

Yeah, I think on the military thing, NDC, and a couple of things have happened since we last talked about it.

And Trump explicitly said they're planning to expand this into Chicago and New York.

He went on a strange Trumpian rant about how all the black ladies in Chicago are very excited.

We just really want him to come save them, which has some psychological questions, I think, that maybe would be better explored with a therapist.

But he's doing that.

The New York, there's kind of a subtle Zoron kind of threat there and how we'll see what they decide to do.

Maybe we'll have to send the military in there.

He's gone back and forth with Wes Moore about sending the motor in to Baltimore.

I want to get to Wes Moore in a minute.

But, like, all of that, I mean, to me, like, this is

what a lot of us that were sounding the alarm had said was going to happen and warned about.

And I think that the playbook here is the most straightforward of all of the things he's doing.

Kinzinger posted something either this morning or yesterday, I forget, and I thought it was interesting on this point about how, you know, in addition to just kind of gathering, you know, whatever, military, federal government power in these big cities,

by using the National Guard in these other states, he's also, you know, kind of undermining this whole Second Amendment, the other part of the Second Amendment, the, you know, part of the need for a well-regulated militia.

Like, like essentially, the states have these rights to have

their own forces.

And Trump is like kind of slowly just

gathering up those forces.

I don't want to, you know, catastrophize about what that's for immediately.

But as you look at, you know, the march towards despotism, the combination of that, the takeover of the cities and also the co-opting of the guard, I think, you know, those go together.

And ICE.

That probably should be one

category.

I think I split it up in my little piece, but the huge expansion of ICE.

A lot of what's happening in D.C., it strikes me most of it actually is basically a giant ICE raid with some other stuff going on on the side because that is so central to their agenda.

And kind of like a fascist play.

It's like play acting with ice raids together.

Yeah, totally.

And the play acting part is really striking.

It's also ridiculous.

You mentioned the tweets and the rants and the, you know, getting peeved at people was there on TV or something like that.

And one tends to dismiss it as kind of ludicrous and ridiculous.

But then, you know, one has to remind oneself that things can be ludicrous and dangerous at the same time.

I don't think we normally think that.

And I don't know why.

I mean, normally one thinks dangerous is serious.

Ludicrous is comical, you know?

And maybe it's annoying.

I mean, it's not healthy for the country, but it's not really dangerous.

But I went back and read a little bit about the 20s and 30s and Italy and Germany in particular.

And of course, they all thought.

Mussolini was farcical, giving those speeches and, you know, reinstating the greatness of the Roman Empire or something like that.

And Hitler obviously was made fun of by many, many people, including Charlie Chaplin.

But it's hard to get get one's head around that a little bit, I find.

Maybe it's just me, but I mean, that the kind of ridiculousness and the dangerousness go hand in hand.

And maybe it actually helps them, unfortunately.

It makes it entertaining.

You know, the dictatorship becomes more entertaining.

Diary of a Man in Despair was a little homework book reading for people if they want on this point.

At the beginning of the Trump eras was something I read.

It was really striking to me.

It was written by,

you know, maybe a John Bolton type, because he wasn't really in the government, but like a conservative traditionalist type in Germany who was writing a diary about

the barbarians at the gate, apparently, and how kind of goofy and ridiculous they were.

And I'd always got this right, that like there was a general impression that Hitler was kind of silly and

clownish, but like the degree to which it was the case from people inside.

Anyway, checking through your list here on our march towards despotism.

This, I don't think I even talked about last week.

That's the problem with kind of, you know, there's just so, so much of this stuff is happening.

So I wanted to spend a second on it because Mark Kirtling writes about it in the bulwark this morning as well.

And that is the military leaders, intelligence professionals purged item.

Just a couple of the examples.

There have been more than this, but a couple of the recent ones.

Lieutenant General Jeff Cruz is the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency.

He was removed.

All indications are because of the intelligence assessment about how the Iranian nuclear facilities were not obliterated, like Trump said.

It was more nuanced assessment.

Air Force Chief of Staff, David Alvin, he was kind of pushed out into an early retirement.

Again, I guess he had offered some criticism of the focus of the administration.

These are just a couple of the latest examples.

This is a category difference from the Boltons, I guess, in an important way, right?

That it's like, it's not just the regime critics that are being targeted, right?

It's anyone offering dissent.

Right.

And this goes back to very early in Hex's tenure where he fired the chairman of the Detroit Trojan Chiefs and others, really just for the sake of firing them.

There was no evidence of, unlike in these cases, they hadn't said anything particularly.

Maybe they did when they were before Trump.

They said things that HexF found offensive because they, but they were very careful, honestly, and not political is my sense from talking to people.

Anyway, they got fired.

So part of it is getting rid of people, as Mark Hurtling says in the bulwark, who might offer a...

you know, unbiased and honest opinion.

They don't want that.

But a lot of it is the message it sends to everyone else to shut up.

And a a lot of it is bringing in their own people.

I mean, I don't think one should, one shouldn't forget that the practical effect of firing A is that you get to a point B, you know, and these are important jobs.

And so it's not just that he got rid of a guy who's going to tell the truth about a U.S.

military action when testifying to Congress,

but also they're putting in someone who's not going to.

So I think that's a very important flip side of the firings.

To the Bolton part.

We haven't spoken since it happened on Friday.

So just give me your top-level thoughts, and I'll go into a couple of things.

It's ridiculous.

I mean, that is to say, I don't believe there are any legitimate concerns.

If there were legitimate concerns, they know where Jonathan Bolton lives.

He's not fleeing the country.

They can call him up.

He has lawyers.

They can arrange a meeting.

He's not going to, they can surveil his house if they're worried.

He's going to sneak out with some documents.

For all I know, they were already wiretapping his phone.

One thing that our friend Ryan Goodman pointed out to me is Bondi had loosened the rules for phone wiretapping quite a bit two or three months ago.

I don't really know the details of this.

I don't hold me exactly to it, but he thought it was not impossible that they were doing that.

And maybe they've got one sentence somewhere where, you know, who knows, right?

And then, of course, there's these weird stories about foreign intelligence.

Who knows, again, where that comes from?

We've been down that road before with the Russians and so forth.

So yeah, he wants to punish Bolton.

I don't think we should ever underestimate the retribution part of what Trump's doing.

He wants to send a signal to people.

You're a real vociferous critic of mine, especially if you...

worked for me once or knew me a little bit enough to give yourself extra credibility as a critic, which Bolton certainly had, as opposed to maybe people who've just been anti-Trump like us.

2015, you're going to get especially targeted.

And the rest of you, just be a little more careful.

I think it has a real chilling effect.

I think that part, everyone's focused on Bolton, but I think people are underestimating that side of it.

Yeah.

Just to your point on like the ridiculousness of it, it's just worth sitting on that for a second.

Like, we'll see what they are claiming to have or whatever, right?

Or we incidentally, or we may not.

That is to say, could this thing could just be left left open for months.

They don't quite ever go to court.

They never produce, you know, the affidavit and so forth.

But it sort of hangs over and they're, they're working on it.

They've got some worrisome things that they're looking into, right?

So it's a fair point.

And like, you could just imagine there are other Trump administration officials wrote books, you know, and it's like, it's hard.

It's impossible to imagine Mark Meadows, for example, like his home being raided, right?

Like it just, it's like on its face farcical that this was, that this was necessary, like in this, in this situation.

And all you have to do is just think about any basic counterfactual about how they would act if it was a pro-Trump person that

wrote a memoir from the first term that they had some notes or whatever they come up with.

I want to shout Aaron Blake over at the Post because he flagged this quote, which I think was pretty striking from Ed Martin back in May.

He said this.

There's some really bad actors, some people that did some really bad things to the American people.

If they can be charged, we'll charge them.

But if they can't be charged, we'll name them.

And we'll name them.

And in a culture that respects shame, they should be people that are ashamed.

You'd think that Ed Barton would know that doesn't work

since he should have so much shame.

But anyway, it's talking about where they're going with all this, right?

That it's like, okay, well, we're going to use the DOJ.

We're going to hassle people or to shake them down.

Maybe we'll charge them.

Or if not, like, we're just going to create.

problems for them.

You know, the Salon had show trials, of course, famously.

I think it was, was that our friend Ben Wittis or someone else who came up with the term show investigation, S-H-O-W-investigation, that the point of it is demonstrating to others what can happen.

It's not an actual, you know, sincere investigation of a secret that has gotten out from, what, seven years ago that our enemies are taking advantage of, you know?

I mean, do you get a sense for, I mean, it's not like you and John Bolton are close friends, but like, is like what the level of concern is among him or others in that world at this point?

People very close to him are saying, you know, he's calm and not worried.

He didn't do anything wrong.

And this was expected something like this.

And they're projecting confidence.

And I suspect they have confidence that if

I think, well, I don't know, I shouldn't say what they think.

I think it won't come to trial.

And I suspect they may think that too.

And Bolton's a tough guy.

And

he's got to keep quiet or has to, but I suppose he will choose to.

It's prudent.

I'm sure his advisor, his attorney is telling him to.

Keep quiet for a while.

Now, does John Bolton not being on CNN, you know, once a week for the next two months change the fate of the Republic?

No, but, you know, it's a step, right?

It's a step.

Yeah, it's still a chilling effect throughout the entire,

you know, like this stuff is expansive.

Like, we've talked about this in the past, like with the chill of from CEOs, which get into the Intel thing next.

Like, a lot of business leaders don't want to speak out.

You know, administrators don't want to speak out.

We did a jokingly, I think it was a couple of weeks ago about how my guys, Oasis, are coming on tour this year and their band manager told them not to speak out.

You know, like all that stuff is in individual

is

not that important, but in aggregate it is.

Yeah, very much.

I mean, someone I know with very good intentions, someone I think very highly of, experienced person, I mentioned that I had, any reason I shouldn't say this, that I texted John literally in one sentence.

And I would have, you know, look, I hope everything's fine and let me know if you want to talk or something like that.

And I offered to give him a forum on the bulwark.

I threw your name in there, but that's the entire text.

You are welcome on the bulwark, John Bolton.

Formal invitation.

I mentioned to someone else who said, look, you know, they probably tapping, they probably got his phones and they probably were tapping him already.

And I don't know, do you want to be asked, do you want to be called in and asked, well, why were you in touch with him?

And do you know what?

And of course, I don't know anything and I haven't been in that much touch with him and I would have nothing to say if they called me in.

But it sort of does make you think for a minute, right?

And then, you know, maybe you shouldn't, maybe I shouldn't be talking to John Bolton because he's under FBI investigation.

And again,

the most trivial thing, obviously, whether I talk to John Bolton, but multiply that by many, many fold.

And then, as you were saying, about the business community and stuff.

Yeah, it's bad.

And JD and his Kristen Welker interview this weekend, which I did a, I did a standalone take on if people want to do that.

I'm not going to make you listen to

his voice on the podcast today because he was,

you know, as condescending and haughty and annoying as possible.

No, but you were excellently, you were excellently, I did listen to that last night.

You were excellently and indignant, but perceptively so.

It's not just that he's a jerk, but he's, anyway, go ahead and say what you're going to say.

He's clever.

He's clever about what he's doing.

He doesn't want to defend the worst of their behaviors.

So he plays a lot of these tricks where he does, you know, he does condescending lecturing

of the critics.

And, you know, he puts up straw men that he knocks down with the worst possible interpretation of what they're doing.

And the Bolton thing in particular, I mean, A, he kind of slips and says, we are investigating him, which may have just been a slip of the tongue, but is a bad one.

And, you know, when you were chief of staff to the VP, if Dan Quayle had said that, you might have said, sir, you know, we're going to use a different, like, you're supposed to say this, because it's an important distinction.

So that's one.

But the other is just that he

basically lays out this playbook where he frames it in an Orwellian way about how this is the non-political way to do the business.

He goes, we're not going to do what the others did.

We're not going to politicize the Justice Department and go after people.

What we're going to do is we're going to investigate.

And if we find anything, then he'll be charged.

And if we don't, then he won't be.

And that's the neutral way to do this.

And that's like totally demonstrating like what they're really doing, which is like we're intimidating people.

We're going to intimidate you.

We're going to investigate you.

And maybe you won't be charged.

Maybe you will, but the punishment is the investigation.

No, you're so right about the we're investigating.

I mean, it wouldn't simply be that Vice President Quaylor or anyone from any other administration wouldn't have said that.

His only answer would have been, this is being done by the Justice Department.

I can't comment on it, obviously, on any kind of criminal investigation.

Maybe it had a sentence.

I don't know anything about it, which would have been true, incidentally.

But Vance feels entitled to, you know, kind of lay out this fake, you know, explanation, you know, based on his great experience in government and being a Yale law graduate, I suppose.

You know, this is how the system works.

And we're just kind of looking into this.

But the Ed Martin thing puts the light of that, right?

Funny how they're just looking into Bolton.

They're not looking into all the, as you say, Mark Meadows and the Trump defenders who wrote books, gave interviews, said things that probably actually did

compromise national security in certain ways the moment they were out of office or when they were in office for that matter, if we can be honest.

So anyway.

They're not doing a review of the current president's documents that he had in his bathroom, the best I can tell.

I don't think that's happening.

Yeah, I believe that case was dropped on January 20th, the 21st.

I think that tells you what you need to know.

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back to the corporation extorting the Intel 10%

equity stake that the government is taking.

I was intrigued by your friend Kevin Hassep this morning on CNBC saying this.

So I'm sure that at some point there'll be more transactions, if not in this industry, than in other industries.

Trump posting about the stock price this morning and how it's up and how he's happy about that.

You know, their defense about why this is not communism is that they are not actually going to be taking controlling stake in the company and they'll be a silent equity partner.

The U.S.

government will.

But like, there's a reason why we don't do this, you know, because there are a lot of other ways for the government to bully, intimidate, cajole Intel, their customers, their competitors, if the president of the United States has an emotional and financial stake in Intel stock price going up.

This wasn't just like Intel is a company that has a lot of dealings with China and I guess controversially exports or doesn't export, I can't remember, chips of some sort that are important.

It was that Tom Cotton attacked the head of Intel, right, who's Chinese or of Chinese origin, at least.

Trump saw that on TV, immediately echoed the attack.

He came in and they cut a deal.

So in effect, he'd be back in Trump.

He and the company would be back in Trump's Good Graces if he gave 10% of the company to the U.S.

government.

So that makes it even worse.

I mean, it's not just the...

the generic arguments against the U.S.

government owning 10% of random companies or even non-random companies.

It's that you need to be nice to Trump or he's coming after your company and not in some complicated way that you mentioned even of you know going after your customers crack a barrel type thing you know he's coming right at you and the price will be a fairly substantial chunk of change and obviously total silence and subservience for the next three and a half years i mean the business community has already been pretty abject but i don't know has the business roundtable objected to this the chamber of commerce all those conservative economists i mean a few have to be fair the real the real economy yeah sure but is there a dc ad campaign?

Again, we've done this once before, but like we were both in this world, right?

Like back during the Obama era.

You know, you had actual campaigns to push back against what the president was doing, the business community did, if they did not like the policy.

Like it wasn't just a one statement.

And what was the name?

Didn't Obama have some firm that I believe we, people like us, have made famous?

I don't know, it was like some solar energy thing for some reason.

So Indra.

You're thinking of Solyndra.

Yeah, the federal government took a stake in it or helped it out because it was going bankrupt.

I can't remember.

And that was like an outrageous.

I'll have our listeners fact-check me if this is wrong, but I'm pretty sure that it was part of the stimulus and that it was like a startup money.

It was not the government taking a stake in it or bailing out, but like they gave, they made these bets in green energy companies.

Some of them succeeded.

Some of them failed badly.

So the argument was like taxpayers lost their money, which this is a legit policy argument, like whether the government should be doing this or not.

But it's not, it wasn't social, right?

It wasn't like the government taking over a company.

It was the government was investing in these industries and and some of them didn't work and the money was lost right it was essentially i think that and obama didn't call in the president of solyndra and say well if you're nice to me i'll i'll we'll give you more

just here lip bhutan is the ceo of of intel i'm gonna get this right he was he was born in malaya but to an ethnic chinese family in malaya so again this is like the attack on him is that like he was some chinese crypto you know asset or whatever like tom cotton is going after him about this and you know now we have to take a stake in the company.

We're going to take an additional stake in other companies.

And now imagine if you're, it's not just a chilling effect on Intel and their CEO or their customers.

It's if you are any of the companies that got money from the CHIPS Act, from the Inflation Reduction Act, right?

Like now, like a precedent has been set.

It's like, oh, if there was, you know, a loan provided, a government-backing loan provided, now if someone goes on TV and gets grandpa mad, the government might come in and turn that loan into their desire to have a sovereign wealth fund.

Just on the defense sphere, since we're talking about that for a minute, I learned this last week.

I don't know if this is reported much, though.

I don't believe it's confidential exactly.

One of the big defense firms hired a new consulting firm set up by former Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, very standard, kind of inside the beltway thing, for consulting, whatever.

Presumably Austin has good relations with Senate Democrats, with some Democrats, whatever.

He knows a lot lot anyway.

Anyway, it's a totally standard thing.

We could all talk about maybe there shouldn't be this stricter rules against people setting up these firms and being hired by Lockheed Martin or Raytheon or whoever it was.

But anyway, it was totally conventional.

It wasn't a huge amount of money.

They have like 30 other firms on retainer.

This wasn't, I don't think, Trump personally, but someone in Trump in the administration knew about this.

Maybe it was Hexeth or someone at DOD and apparently made a tiny fuss about it.

And the defense firm dropped, canceled the contract.

And so again, just at this level even, right?

I mean, again, it says, who cares in a certain way, Lord Austin will do fine, you know, but I mean, and his, and his colleagues there in that firm, but and that is permeated down.

That's not, so people are saying, well, Trump, stay off Trump's radar screen.

You're okay.

No, there are a lot of little Ed Martins there trying to effectuate the Trump-ist agenda in all these ways.

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I want to talk about some other news we have this morning regarding Kilmore Obrego Garcia.

He went to his ICE Baltimore check-in, I guess, backing up his trial, dismissed.

He left, went back home to Maryland, had to check in with ICE about his status.

The Trump administration, during their conversation with his lawyers, were trying to coerce him to come in to plead guilty to the charges he's facing.

He would serve

a short prison sentence and then be sent to Costa Rica.

That was the deal.

The alternative was that he would be sent to Uganda.

Or Garcia's lawyers rejected the plea deal, filed a new suit this morning attempting to block the White House from immediately shipping him to Uganda.

DHS says he's being processed for removal to Uganda.

So that's where things stand as we tape this morning.

This person, Kilmar Bregger Garcia, has become kind of this lightning rod.

Andrew wrote about this morning in the newsletter that like Trump has these two kinds of groups that he targets essentially.

One is marginalized people you've never heard of who don't have any power to push back on him.

The other is regime foes that can be used

as a wedge or as

something to push back against that his MAGA people can rally around.

Very Garcia ends up falling in both categories in this case because he initially is the former and then becomes the latter.

The details of this

kind of are irrelevant of Abergo Garcia's case because they're irrelevant to the government, right?

Like it's not as if in a different world with a different president or a different DHS,

you could at at least trust that they were trying to

get justice.

And if Gregor Garcia did not commit any of these crimes and was here and it was fine, then the process would go forth.

And otherwise,

he could be deported.

That's not what's happening here.

They're sending him to a war-torn country in Africa where he has no ties, obviously, doesn't know the language, won't have any money.

I mean, that's

an unimaginable way for our country to treat people.

It is.

And this is because he won't plead guilty.

I don't know that they're so confident if they went to trial that they would be able to convict him of anything.

And he hasn't been, to my knowledge, charged in a criminal proceeding with anything at this point, right?

He's been charged in immigration court and then sent to this gulag in El Salvador.

I mean, any normal administration would be, I've apologized to him and be leaving him alone, whatever the details of his overstaying his visa, right?

But this is in a way, Trump, this, again, is very characteristic of despotism and dictatorship.

You really don't let people get away with winning against you, you know, if you can't, if you can stop them.

Just for like what the facts about what happened, because I was kind of murky, too, on the lead-in.

So when they brought him back to the U.S., DOJ did indict him in Tennessee for unlawfully transporting illegal immigrants for financial gain, right?

They kept using the word human trafficking because I think it sounds like, you know, people in their mind, when they hear human trafficking, they hear like young girls or whatever being tracked into sex slavery.

But what's really happening, I guess, is he was pulled over when he he was driving across the country with other people who were here undocumented.

And so that was the DOJ charge.

And then fast forward a couple of months, his lawyer's moves have the case dismiss on the argument that it was selective or vindictive prosecution.

And he was released on August 22nd and returned to Maryland.

And here we are a couple of days later, where the government's going to send him to Uganda.

So another thing, just as like context, this was a massive controversy in Britain a couple of years ago now, like where they were trying to

deal with the migrant issue there.

And like rather than sending people back to their home country or sending people to some third, I think it was Sudan.

And it became like a, for a good reason, like a massive humanitarian pushback in the UK.

Like, this is not the way that you can, you treat people, you treat humans.

And the Berger Garcia case, now, maybe this will just be the one that people know and remember, but we're doing this now.

Like, there are other cases, other examples of people that the government has accused of crimes, not been able to demonstrate, and rather than going through with the court, have now deported the person to somewhere in Africa.

Aaron Powell, under these

non-public agreements with the governments of those countries.

So we don't know under what conditions he would be there.

Would he be able to work there?

Would he be able to

get some money from some relative and fly to Costa Rica?

I mean, normally one can do that, I suppose, but not if you don't have papers, I guess, or a visa or a passport.

Someone I was talking to sort of thinks, knows a little bit about this, perhaps behind the scenes, saying that he thought there were all kinds of conditions.

Trump doesn't want to look stupid and have the Ugandan government turn around, let him get a check from his family and catch a flight from Uganda to Costa Rica.

So they probably are conditions where they can't just let these people fly to other countries that are willing to take them.

So it is obviously very punitive and vindictive, to say the least.

We also don't know the other side of these deals.

Like, what is Trump getting out of the governments?

You know,

tariffs have been explicitly on the table with Uganda.

Yeah.

In the Uganda case, the lower tariff rate.

Yeah.

Yes.

And some of these other cases, I mean, who the hell knows though?

This goes back to like the Trump black box of corruption, right?

Like, are there investments into the crypto fund?

You know, are we buying a stable coin from Trump, right?

Like,

you know, it's not, none of this stuff is being done in a transparent manner.

kind of thrust into now a little bit this Gilmore Brego-Garcia fight because it's happening in Maryland, but also what we mentioned earlier about the militarization of police is that Maryland governor Wesmore.

Trump has been talking about sending military into Baltimore.

Wesmore sent him a letter basically saying, you know, things are getting better in Baltimore.

Actually, why don't you come to Baltimore and walk through the streets with me?

He's doing maybe a more kind of a hybrid version between the

Gretchen Whitmer and the Gavin.

You know, I'm not going to troll you, but I'm not going to submit.

But maybe we can

do some political gamesmanship here.

And then Gavin goes on the Sunday shows.

Trump freaks out, starts sending multiple tweets attacking him, including one where he says, also, I gave Westmore a lot of money to fix his demolished bridge.

I will now have to rethink that decision.

So I think it's grotesque on several levels and a lie.

The money for the bridge came during the Biden administration, so Trump didn't give them anything.

Even if it came during the Trump administration, it wouldn't have been Trump that gave them the money.

It would have been, you know, congressionally authorized money.

And, you know, you don't get to punish the people people of a state because you don't like what the governor said on the Sunday show.

That would have been behavior that was resoundingly condemned in any other administration.

Or like almost impeachable.

I mean, we're so used to Trump.

I gave him the money, that formulation, which Trump uses for everything, my generals.

And I did this and I did that.

But of course, it's deeply undemocratic and contrary to the rule of law.

And I just, no one else would have said that, right?

I mean, literally, you know, no matter how much, you know, how high your self-esteem was as president or how much you sort of deep down kind of thought that you should have the ability to do that, it didn't occur to anyone that you would publicly say, I gave him the money, so he should stop criticizing me.

Leaving aside the fact that it wasn't even appropriated under his, under his administration, as you say.

Right.

I mean, the other thing is just, you know, these counterfactuals get tired, but it's like, you know, if Obama had been like, I'm not going to give money to Louisiana to rebuild after a hurricane because the governor said something mean about me on TV.

I mean,

it's about the asymmetry, right?

Like, obviously, Fox would still be talking about that two decades later.

They'd be bringing that up, you know, and how they don't care about flyover country.

They don't care about regular people and they want the people to not have bridges that work.

But like.

The mainstream, rightly, like, you know, the mainstream media would have condemned him.

Their own party would have condemned him, right?

Like, the, you know, pundits, balls and strikes pundits would have attacked him, right?

This wasn't even covered this way, really.

I mean, like, Wes is on the Sunday shows, but right, like they don't, like that particular threat

is just lost kind of in the wash.

Oh, terrible, terrible.

I mean, I was thinking, you mentioned thinking Maryland, governor of Maryland, Larry Hogan, whom we know some.

And

I don't know, it'd be nice if he said, maybe he has, honestly, so I should be careful about it.

I shouldn't assert that he hasn't, but if he hasn't said anything, it would be nice if he said something about how wildly inappropriate this was and how he stands with the governor of Maryland in believing that Trump should not have any control over their you know the funds that were appropriated by by the United States Congress and a bill signed by the president would be nice I'm not seeing anything that he said on a quick glance so you know I don't know who knows maybe maybe he said something in a private event just on the Westmore thing do you have any like just on the politics of Wes, how he's kind of handling this?

I don't know if you saw any of the Sunday show coverage.

I didn't see much.

I think he's doing pretty well.

What do you think?

I mean, I feel like the center of gravity has moved in a Newsome direction

from a Whitmer direction in the last month.

Yeah, I think so.

Look, I don't.

He

has such a positive kind of countenance.

You know, he is a smiley, optimistic person,

which

traditionally in politics is kind of what people said, you know, you want is the happy warrior, right?

Like that was something that that's a kind of a common cliche in political commentary, like the happy warriors do better.

And so maybe that will still remain true.

I like the fact that he's being more visible on this stuff.

Like he could have not weighed in at all, right?

On the Baltimore, you know, I mean, it wasn't like there's an imminent threat of the troops coming to Baltimore to more or said that was coming, right?

So he chose to weigh in, chose to weigh in kind of a clever way.

And,

you know, he did sort of a more chill Gavin version, making fun of Trump for draft dodging after Trump attacked him on Twitter.

So I don't know.

I think that there's something to it.

I think that, you know, what we're asking for is for, is for people to stand up to him.

He's doing that.

Like, I think that there's kind of this emotional need for that people have to either make fun of him or to be really

visibly angry.

And I don't know whether that actually matters politically or whether that's, you know, just kind of, you know, satisfying resistance liberals like need for some emotional gratification.

I feel that way.

I need some emotional satisfaction at times.

I don't know how much that actually matters.

Like, he's not really doing that part of it.

And I think on balance, it's, it's better or sanctioned some other people on his shoes.

And he did punch back on the topic on which Trump attacked him kind of amazingly, since he has a bronze star and so forth.

But

for somehow not deserving it, I don't know.

Trump said that.

And I think it was very wise of Moore.

And I think a very important example.

You don't let that sit.

You don't dismiss it as he doesn't know anything what he's talking about.

You say, he's Mr.

Wasn't he President Bonespurs?

And, you know, whatever, whatever line Moore used.

And that, I think, is good.

It shows you're not intimidated.

It shows you're not pulling any punches.

And you're willing to hit back pretty hard when he hits you unjustly.

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While we're doing politics, one of our other Never Trumpers, Jeff Duncan, was Lieutenant Governor of Georgia.

People might remember, I thought he gave a really great speech at the DNC convention that we're all kind of trying to wash from our memories to not deal with any trauma.

But I thought the Jeff Duncan speech was good.

I don't think we can blame the L on that one convention speech.

And he did something that I've, well, we'll see how he actually executes executes it, but he seems to be doing something that I've been encouraging people to try.

I'm not sure if it's going to work or not, but I think it's worth a try, which is to have somebody like a socially conservative, traditional Republican try to run not

as an independent and not as a Democrat where he says, I've changed all my views on everything and now I'm just a generic Democrat, kind of like the Charlie Crist model, if you will, but saying, I'm going to run as a Democrat.

I still have some views on issue X, Y, and Z that might be out of step with the progressive base.

Here's how I would deal with that.

And C, would that work in a Democratic primary?

I don't know.

Would that work in a general election better than a generic Democrat?

I suspect so, but we don't know.

So I'm intrigued that he's thinking about trying.

And he hasn't announced he was.

He had an interview this weekend where he said he was looking at it.

I'm running for governor, that is.

Brian Kemp is term limited out.

And I don't know.

What do you make about that possibility?

I also have my minor way encouraging people to do this or think about doing it.

I guess he's thinking about doing it at this point.

And I think, look, even if you don't win, it might have a very positive effect.

What if you get 20%?

What if you get 30% of the vote?

Then you're part of the coalition and you bring, quote, bring your voters over to support presumably the Democratic nominee and you have some say perhaps in some of these policies.

So this is how...

a party expands, right?

The challenger, the outside element that's being recruited to the party doesn't necessarily win its first race.

But so many people have talked themselves out of doing this, it seems to me, because they probably won't win.

You know, left is very strong in a democratic primary, and it is, and you probably won't get to 51%, and maybe you won't.

But I think there's really a case for people doing this at every level of government and in every, you know, both in running for office, but also in, you know, a point of office and the like.

The state level offices, I think, also provide potentially a little bit more room to have some heterodoxy and opinion.

And so it's an interesting way to kind of test that out.

Like it becomes challenging if you're, you know, going to be, if you're going to be in a 50-50 Senate.

And it's like, are you going to be the last vote to do this?

Are you going to be the last vote to do that?

Right.

Like the stuff gets nationalized where I think this kind of model becomes a little tougher on the Senate side than it does in the governor's races.

So anyway, I hope he gives it a shot.

And it would be interesting to see exactly

what that campaign looks like.

We're seeing it a little bit in other places.

You know, David Jolly is doing this, I think in Florida and other situations.

And I just,

and you see this going both ways.

Like, what's the right way to put this?

Like, the path of least resistance in these sort of cases is to say, the scales have fallen from my eyes.

I'm switching sides.

And, like, here are all the, you know, I'm told, I'm like the Democrats' strongest warrior now or the Republicans' strongest warrior.

Jeff Van Druh did this the other way in New Jersey.

And I think that there's conceivably some.

room for that.

And if that's authentic to what you really believe, then great.

But just as a political matter, particularly in these red states, so Georgia is kind of a purple state, but particularly in red states, I'm more interested in people trying, trying this if they hold on to some heterodoxy.

And I think it'd be healthy if progressives say, look, we prefer, I don't even know who's running, but X, who's a more progressive candidate, if that's what they prefer.

But of course, we'll support.

Duncan if he wins, and we would expect him to support our favorite candidate.

I mean, it makes the big tent and the coalition a little more real, maybe going both ways.

Yeah, going both ways, exactly.

It's like, oh, if Zoran Mandani wins, maybe we should just endorse him as well and just identify the party as a broad coalition.

Just so we have it right,

there are a bunch of other declared candidates in the Democratic race, which maybe helps Duncan, frankly, and in a way that you don't have to get to 51.

But Keisha Lamps bottoms, the most famous former mayor of Atlanta, who I think probably seems like she would be a very strong candidate, and a bunch of

state legislators as well.

So, anyway, we'll keep an eye on that.

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Just two other quick things, Bill, that I want to make sure we touch.

This morning, there's reports out of Israel.

This is from Axios.

20 Palestinians, including four journalists, were killed in an IDF strike at the Nasser Hospital Hospital in southern Gaza.

It's the only open hospital, I believe, in Gaza right now.

There was one strike, and then notably, several minutes later, a second strike took place that resulted in the deaths of reporters and some in a rescue team who tried to reach the casualties of the first strike.

You know, I'm just curious at this stage.

I talked about this a little bit with Tommy on Friday.

And obviously, there's the humanitarian concerns, and

this appears to be a Reuters reporter, and this is fairly tragic, and that's something that it's legitimately concerned about.

I'm just scoping out to even the generous view of what Israel is doing now.

It's kind of like hard to see

what the outcome is that's going to be amenable to the region, to them, to the global community.

Anyway, I think that this is developed to geopolitically something that is like a massive problem for them.

I don't know if you have any updated thoughts on what's been happening.

I mean, I agree.

It's doing huge damage to support for Israel around the world.

And then here in the U.S.

And, you know, strong supporters are becoming weak supporters and weak supporters are becoming doubters and doubters are becoming hostile.

And it's, you know, that's very important.

Israel is a small country and does need some help and support, you know, various kinds of economic trade, but also with the UN and so forth.

So just generally, no one wants to be isolated.

And so it's terrible in that respect.

You know who thinks it's terrible?

Hundreds of thousands of Israelis who are demonstrating against the war in Gaza at this point, and a huge chunk of the Israeli security establishment, very well-respected former chiefs of staff and head of the Wasad and head of the Shinbeit, the FBI equivalent.

And so, and they're against it.

And they're against...

They're not against doing anything in Gaza necessarily.

Some of them probably are, but they're against the way Netanyahu has been conducting and certainly is now conducting that war.

So it's not a bunch of doves.

And then some of the pro-Israel commentary here is very either foolish or disingenuous or offensive.

I would almost say, you know, if you're not for this, you somehow don't care about the interests of Israel or you're some dupe of Hamas and you believed in some photo was not taken where it was taken or whatever.

And that's why you're, as if one, you know, as if one, as if these people, as if the former head of the IDF is making his decisions, his judgments based on that.

I saw someone kind of very pro-Israel militant type, you know, dump, oh, the IDF's been wrong about everything for 10 or 20 years.

Really?

I don't know.

It seems like a pretty impressive military organization.

You know, the Gaza situation is very bad.

I think the other thing, Iran, Hezbollah, you could give Disney Yahoo credit for doing a lot of things that strengthened Israel.

And I think we're legitimate things to have done and important things maybe to have done.

You can give him some credit for all the Abraham records and all that stuff.

But this Gaza is a real stain, and I think

maybe an indelible one.

And of course, you don't...

people don't separate he is the government he is the prime minister of israel they don't entirely separate this government from the country.

Yeah, we talked to David French about this.

And the one thing that really stuck with me and that I've been feeling since the beginning,

even as a non-military expert, but as a, as a novice, just looking at like,

you can still assess and say, okay, well, if you have a mission, if you have a war, even a just war to respond when you are attacked, like there has to be a strategy for

ending it, for like bringing it to a conclusion, for extricating yourself from it.

And like, there never really seemed like there was one, right?

I mean, like at various times, it's very, just different things, you know?

And like in this case, like we're at this point now where that is very murky.

And it makes the case of, oh,

you know, we're doing our best to, you know, to tamp down civilian deaths.

Like we're doing our best to take in humanitarian concerns, you know, but like we need to achieve this end of X, Y, and Z so we can get that.

Like, you know, without that,

A, I mean, I think people rightly start to,

the humanitarian questions take on more weight.

But B, it's like, well, what's the point of this now?

Like, you know, where are you going?

I mean, there's some in the government who clearly want to say they want to retake Gaza.

That's not even a secret or hidden.

And they really want kind of ethnic cleansing of Gaza and to just get them out somewhere to Egypt or Jordan or something.

And so that, and I wouldn't say Nesinya, who is necessarily of that camp, but he certainly hasn't repudiated it very hard now as his coalition government and all that.

But again, the price that's being paid for these people.

And there's some justice to say that if you don't have a clear alternate strategy, you tend to default maybe to this, in practice almost, to this strategy, which if it's a strategy, but to this goal, which

does not have support in Israel or outside.

Final topic, you did a

Sunday conversation with Brief Armour about the transgender military ban.

I like to keep coming back to this issue from time to time.

I think it's an important one to bring up, in part because it's just such a clear injustice and so despicable that you have this draft Dodger kicking people out of the military for no reason.

I mean, really just out of bigotry.

Like there's not even a pretense for another reason.

And secondly,

because it's both wrong in the merits, and I think it's good politics.

And I think those are good things for Democrats to talk about.

And I think they can be encouraged to talk about them because I think there are parts of the trans debate, sports, et cetera, that are pretty thorny, to say the least.

Like, I don't think this one is.

And so,

you know, I think it should be made an example of.

But anyway, is there anything else that you took away from your conversation yesterday?

I mean, I don't really know Refram well.

We've talked a couple of times on the phone, and she agreed to do this.

She's really impressive.

And her account of why she joined after 9-11, her account of her military career,

of coming out in 2016 when the transgender ban was lifted, it was finally done away with.

And the support she got from her colleagues and superiors in the military and in the Defense Department.

She made it through the first Trump term.

There was all that back and forth, as you recall.

They ended up banning new people from coming in, but she was there.

She's a colonel.

She's had serious responsibilities.

She's an Air Force colonel and now Space Command.

Serious responsibilities in many areas.

And no problem.

I mean, all the arguments that were once used that, you know, had some credibility, perhaps, or plausibility, maybe is a better way of saying it, unit cohesion, women in combat.

That's different from, you know, elsewhere in the foxhole is different from sitting around the pentagon this is literally i mean it's not even plausible that any of these could apply in her case or in many of the other cases of her colleagues and peers and so it is pure i mean i don't know what it is i mean she's an adult she's transitioned you know she's it's not we're not talking about complicated issues of 12-year-olds whose parents want one thing and the doctors recommend something else or high school is forced.

I mean,

yeah, there's no reason to do it, except if you want to just eliminate basically transgender people from, I don't know, from public life, from

national life.

You know, it really is kind of a side.

It is, in that respect, the totalitarian side of it is really horrifying, I've got to say, I think.

100% agree.

Bill Crystal, appreciate you as always.

We'll see you back here next Monday.

Thanks, Dan.

And everybody else, we'll be back tomorrow for another edition of the Bullwork Podcast.

See you all then.

Peace.

Will someone please say the unsayable?

Will someone please tell me I'm wrong?

I live every day like a sad beast of prey.

For I have to appear to be strong,

and that's wrong.

I'm too weak to be strong.

Today I met with the generals,

the head of my secret police,

Discussing conspiracies and prison facilities for opponents I can never release

There'll be no peace until they're released

Of course I'm in league with the army

It's not like I've got any choice

They officially adore me and my father before me

But Gone pointed has a firm voice.

The joke is, I'm not even a demagogue.

Have you heard me giving a speech?

My facts are invented, I sound quite demented, so deluded, it beggars belief.

It would be

such a relief not to give another speech.

Can someone please say the impossible

crowds should be out on the streets

I've lost any will to threaten or kill

I'll be easy for you to defeat

And any resistance I meet I'll beat a retreat

I'd rather that you didn't shoot me

But I'd quite understand if you did.

Watch out for the army, the generals and the mommy.

At the thought of a takeover bed,

oh, please, will somebody put me

out of my misery?

This sad dictator must sooner or later flee so that you can be free.

If you get

rid of me,

we can all be free.

The Bullard Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

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