Bill Kristol and Jared Polis: Send In the Clown

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Speaker 4 Watch Malice, all episodes now streaming exclusively on Prime Video.

Speaker 5 Hello and welcome to the Bullwork Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.
It is Monday, February 24th.

Speaker 6 We are in the upside down.

Speaker 6 One of my competitors in the podcasting space, the borderline literate Dan Bongino, is taking over as the deputy director of the FBI.

Speaker 6 So that is our big news item for this Monday, and I'm happy to be here with Bill Crystal to discuss it. How you doing, Bill?

Speaker 2 I'm fine, Tim. Yeah, I don't really follow Dan Bongino that much.
I said in morning shots that I thought he was one of the more clownish of the Trumpists. Was that unfair?

Speaker 6 No, that is not unfair. And we're about to just listen to a little clip from him that's going to show it.
And we're going to get into more in the second part of this podcast.

Speaker 6 I interviewed Jared Polis at the principal's first conference, which ended up

Speaker 6 having a lot of drama and fireworks, more so in the past five years. So we'll get to that in a minute.
But first up,

Speaker 6 let's test your theory that Pongino is one of the more clownish Trumpists and listen to a clip from his podcast.

Speaker 7 The thing that matters is what? Chad, what matters? Anyone?

Speaker 2 Power.

Speaker 2 Power.

Speaker 7 You can see what I'm out.

Speaker 2 Power.

Speaker 7 That is all that matters.

Speaker 7 No, it doesn't. Dan, we have a system of checks and balances.

Speaker 7 That's a good one. That's really funny.

Speaker 6 That is really funny, having checks and balances. And then I've got another tweet for you that he sent recently.

Speaker 6 The irony about this for the scumbag commie libs is that the cold civil war they're pushing for will end really badly for them libs are the biggest pussies i've ever seen and they use others to do their dirty work but they're not ready for what comes next they never have been you assholes wanted it now you've got it good luck

Speaker 6 uh does that seem like the temperament for somebody that we would want for the number two slot at the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's wonderful. I hadn't heard that clip.
That's pretty amazing, actually. Yeah, I mean, checks and balances, all that stuff.
Law, rule of law. So, so yesterday, really, you know, for

Speaker 2 Dan there.

Speaker 2 I mean, I say in the words that he's clownish, not knowing much about him, but I will defend myself in a sense by saying that I also mentioned that Charlie Sykes used to love to say that still says that clowns with flamethrowers can do a lot of damage.

Speaker 2 And that's the situation we're in, right?

Speaker 2 Some of them are more purposeful, some of them are more just loudmouths and clownish, and they're all committed to doing a huge amount of damage to our institutions and to our system.

Speaker 6 Yeah, I mean, Dan is clownish, and you know, when I do my MAGA research for all of you and like listen to MAGA shows, I tried to listen to his and I couldn't because, and it's literally like listening to somebody with a fourth grade reading level doing the news.

Speaker 6 And so I just, you know,

Speaker 6 I needed to at least be challenged and have my brain be moving a little bit, which every once in a while, Bannon or Candace or one of the Patrick Bette, one of these other people will at least get my brainwaves moving a little bit.

Speaker 6 Dan Bungino was unable to do that. So I didn't listen to a lot of him.
But no, he's a total hack. He seems unstable emotionally.

Speaker 6 One of the reporters tweeted like an email that he had sent him recently, calling him a dipshit and making fun of the shape of his head.

Speaker 6 You know, I mean, like this kind of really, really childish stuff.

Speaker 6 You can see just like when you watch him, like his temperament is just the opposite of even Kiel.

Speaker 6 He doesn't know his way around the building. building.
I received a text this morning from somebody that said that the top two people now have no idea how the FBI works.

Speaker 6 They don't know the rules and the policies that make the place work. They fired and forced to retire with people one to two levels down.
So all of that

Speaker 6 combined makes for a pretty, I think, ominous setup. And I think like the best case scenario is that they are.

Speaker 6 you know, that it's just like a comedy of errors. But that's probably hopium at this point.

Speaker 2 I fight these two different interpretations in my own mind. One, they're such clowns.
It's all going to blow up, and they'll do some damage, but its institutions are somewhat deep.

Speaker 2 They may not have enough time to do huge amounts of damage in a way that Trump will be suffer when they all make obvious mistakes and do things that even the Republicans who so desperately want to get along with Trump can't quite defend.

Speaker 2 That's part of me thinks that. And part of me thinks, what are you kidding yourself, Bill? I mean, they're just going to, everything, the Republicans will stick with the whole of them.

Speaker 2 They confirm Patel. I haven't heard, you've been following this more closely this morning than I have.

Speaker 2 I haven't heard a whole lot of complaints about Dan Bongino being the deputy director of the FBI from a party that once claimed to care about law enforcement and so forth.

Speaker 2 And again, having people who are unqualified, inexperienced, don't know what they're doing is, in a way, a feature, not a bug, right?

Speaker 2 If you're an autocrat, you want people who are totally dependent on you, who have no independent standing, who have no stature, because if they have standing and stature, they might resist a couple of things, and they might get some of their colleagues to resist.

Speaker 2 And if General Milley, I remember this from 2020,

Speaker 2 when he threatened to resist Trump, you know, basically all the other chiefs said, well, we're quitting if he quits. Because you know what? They knew General, they'd known Milley for 20 years, right?

Speaker 2 He was a four-star, they were four-stars. Similarly, with sort of the senior law enforcement types and senior people in every area, obviously.

Speaker 2 And that's why they want people like Patel and Hegseth and Bongino.

Speaker 6 The only pushback I've seen, and it's TBD, I'm whether this was actually pushback.

Speaker 6 There's some reporting this morning on this, but the FBI Agents Association, the Union, had put out a statement about an hour before Vangino was made public.

Speaker 6 And so I don't know if it's known at this stage whether this is...

Speaker 6 It was an intentional leak or just very bad timing and bad luck for them. It's a long statement, but it was talking about, you know, Patel, and it was a message to agents.

Speaker 6 And they said that they had brought two main concerns to Cash back in January when he was the nominee, had not yet been confirmed.

Speaker 6 The first was they said that they want the deputy director to continue to be an onboard active special agent, as has been the case for 117 years for many compelling reasons, including expertise and trust.

Speaker 6 The other thing was they wanted all the agents to be given due process if there's going to be firings over the Trump investigations. They write this.
On both points, Director Patel agreed.

Speaker 6 So, noteworthy, I think, that Trump announced this, not Patel.

Speaker 6 Here we are just again with Cash having, I think, pretty clearly, it's alleged, it's reports, et cetera, but seems to have lied during his confirmation hearing about his involvement in the firings and now seems to have either lied or been unable to follow up on his promise to the people that are going to work for him about having a competent active agent as his deputy.

Speaker 2 That competent active agent probably was not pro-January 6th insurrection and probably not pro-would not defend the truth of the big lie about the 2020 election.

Speaker 2 And therefore, Trump and some of his people there insist on those two things, I think, for any senior post. So

Speaker 2 Trump's, so to speak, everything else, I guess.

Speaker 6 You'd mentioned Millie, and that just reminded me, I don't, the news is happening so fast, I guess I don't even know if we got to this on Friday because it might have been after we taped the pod.

Speaker 6 But there also was the purge of generals over at the DOD. We now now have a new chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

Speaker 6 It was a three-star general with the nickname Raisin Keynes, who seems to have been a big Trump fluffer. And then there were a couple of other changes made.

Speaker 6 There's not been, at least that I've seen yet, any

Speaker 6 actual rationale for the firings and the changes. I don't know.
I'm wondering if you have any thoughts on... on the purging over at the DOD.

Speaker 2 No, I mean, I talked to a couple of defense types when it happened. It happened around 7 p.m.
Friday night.

Speaker 2 I was actually at the principal's first reception and chatting, as it happened with a military officer who was there in his personal capacity in civilian clothes.

Speaker 2 But he introduced himself and we were chatting and he was being pretty discreet. And I remember as I left him, you know, we talked for five minutes and I said, well, it's about 7 p.m.
Friday.

Speaker 2 Don't you think this is probably when they fire, you know, Brown and everyone else, right? I mean, this is like, aren't they big on Friday night firings?

Speaker 2 And he laughed sort of nervously and we agreed. Well, I guess nothing had happened at this moment as we were talking.
We didn't think.

Speaker 2 And I actually ended up leaving the reception about 20 minutes later and looked at my phone, and there it was.

Speaker 2 As Bob Kagan said when I talked to him yesterday on the Sunday Bull War podcast, it's about the firings, not about the hirings.

Speaker 2 You know, I don't know much about General Kaine. Maybe he'll be fine.
Maybe not. There are a couple of questionable things.
The main thing is he has no independent standing.

Speaker 2 He was in the Guard after he'd been in the Air Force. He went back into active duty.
He worked in the Biden administration, kind of amazingly, as the main military contact at the CIA.

Speaker 2 But he's not a four-star. He's not someone who's had a combatant command or been chief of staff of one of the services.

Speaker 2 Those are the two things that the legislation says the chairman should have been,

Speaker 2 one or the other. Now, the second provision of the legislation is the president could waive this when it's in the national interest.

Speaker 2 But why?

Speaker 2 Was there no one who had been a combatant commander or a chief of one of the services who could have replaced General Brown? Or why are we replacing General Brown anyway?

Speaker 2 Trump said nice things about him in his statement.

Speaker 2 So it's all inexplicable unless you assume that they want someone who is much more beholden to them than any of the actual generals who'd been around for a while, who'd served under administrations of both parties, who had a

Speaker 2 kind of independent standing would be. And then, of course, they fired the JAGs, which I think people who followed this stuff more closely than I do thought was maybe even more striking and startling.

Speaker 2 Never happened. Never is how you just wipe out the JAGS for each service.

Speaker 2 So you then are going to be interviewing and appointing JAGS whose guidance is going to be, presumably, but I think I can say this with some confidence, whatever Trump orders is lawful.

Speaker 2 So none of that kind of complicated, gee, I have a question about this. You've got to be a little careful the way you formulate this here at the White House.
I think we need to go back, Mr.

Speaker 2 Secretary of the White House, and say, this isn't an appropriate way to formulate an order to the military. None of that.
None of that.

Speaker 6 Well, just think about the type of resumes you're going to get for the JAG job. You know, like, this is not my area of expertise, but just like using common sense.

Speaker 6 It's like you have the new Secretary of Defense that has called them Jagovs, that has, you know, impugned their integrity and motives, that said that these legal officers were hurting our warfighters' fighting capability, and then it's just kind of a mass firing of all of them.

Speaker 6 And now it's like, okay, now we're going to be interviewing people to replace them.

Speaker 6 The types of person that is going to want that job at this point, I would assume, is going to be people that are on board with Anything Ghost.

Speaker 2 You know, this is one of the hidden costs, in a way, second order costs, I don't know what the right way to say it is, consequences of Trump and Trumpism here, is that the kind of people who are going to be staying in the government, some will stay as patriots, I think, and try their best to mitigate the damage.

Speaker 2 Others will stay, just they'll stay. But people who can leave may well leave.
I've heard personally about two mid-career, youngish mid-career officers. They don't want to serve.

Speaker 2 I mean, they may stay because they're patriots and they've risen pretty far in their respective services, but they don't want to be in some chain of, you know,

Speaker 2 they're not high up enough to be directly dealing with hexeth, but with Pete Hexeth and with the kinds of quality of officers and of civilian types who are coming in to the Pentagon.

Speaker 2 The military is going to be a little harder to simply reduce to loyalists than the civilian types, but they're going to work pretty hard at it.

Speaker 2 And it's not going to happen overnight, but two, three years from now, the people who will have been promoted, the people who will have acted in such a way so they can get promoted.

Speaker 2 I mean, I think it's very damaging. This is true not just in the military, obviously.
I think the brain drain from the government, but also the character drain.

Speaker 2 I don't know if that's not a word, I guess, but a term, but if you know what I mean by that, the quality of people leaving or not coming in

Speaker 2 is really going to affect

Speaker 2 just the quality of our governing institutions and the personnel in them for quite a while, I'm afraid.

Speaker 6 No doubt. You mentioned your conversation from yesterday with Bob Kagan.
We'll put it in the show notes here. We're doing kind of the Sunday Substack conversations for folks that

Speaker 6 don't want the two days off,

Speaker 6 need something every day.

Speaker 6 I haven't had a chance to watch the whole thing yet, but some pretty, I think, alarming warnings, to put it mildly, from Kagan about the path we're on.

Speaker 6 Just wondering what struck you the most from the conversation.

Speaker 2 Yeah, just what you say that, I mean, we all want to believe it can't happen here. We want to say, oh, gee, it's worse than I expected, but there's still these guardrails.

Speaker 2 ahead and there are and we shouldn't you know exaggerate it i guess but boy i mean if you had said five weeks ago was it five weeks now? I can't even keep track, less than five weeks, right?

Speaker 2 That all the guardrails that have been trampled would have been trampled and the Republicans in the Senate would have got along with these nominees and the kinds of things that these nominees have said didn't come back to bite them and the lying, as is the case, I think, with Patel.

Speaker 2 But everything, just everything, and everything Trump is doing, that of course, the betrayal of Ukraine, if you had said all of this within five weeks, I mean, maybe that's it.

Speaker 2 And maybe everything else now sort of stabilizes at this level, but why not? Isn't the safer assumption to assume assume that the pattern continues and goes ahead? And that's Bob's main point.

Speaker 2 If you think three, six, nine, 12 months out, unless we can really reverse that, stop this and then reverse it, we are looking at a very bad situation.

Speaker 6 Aaron Powell, Jr.: Did he have any tangible recommendations on things to do in the meantime?

Speaker 2 He just was struck, and I say this in the morning, Sean, this morning, that I mean, it's so, on the one hand, they're very strong, Trump and Boss causing wrecking havoc.

Speaker 2 He did win the election, not by CWA, but they've got control of Congress. Nothing can be done.

Speaker 2 On the other hand, they have control of Congress by four votes in the Senate and two at the current moment, I think, in the House. I think it's be three when they have a special election.

Speaker 2 Is it that impossible for four Republican senators to step up and stop autocracy in the United States?

Speaker 2 Is it impossible for three House members, some of whom care a lot about, just take Ukraine as one issue, to say, I'm sorry, I'm not voting for an appropriations bill that doesn't fund Ukraine.

Speaker 2 That's it. You know, I'm Mr.

Speaker 2 Fitzpatrick from Pennsylvania. I'm Mike Jerner from Ohio.
I'm someone serious who cares a lot about Ukraine, I think sincerely and has really invested in it in terms of learning about it and so forth.

Speaker 2 I don't know. Is it that much for them to do? So in a way, part of me thinks, I don't know, it's a big steamroller, but it's a fragile, this isn't a good metaphor, but you know what I mean.

Speaker 2 It's a fragile steamroller somehow. Yeah, I do wonder.

Speaker 6 I mean, at some level, if we get into the real dark place, there's some tension between like the fact that the Congress can't do anything or won't in the case of the Republican Congress.

Speaker 6 Does that impede Trump or just kind of actually allow him to further consolidate power? There's some discussions already this morning about the budget.

Speaker 6 Mike Johnson was supposed to pass the budget today. We'll see if it happens.
But like, I don't think that they're going to be able to pass anything. Like, I don't have to believe it when I see it.

Speaker 6 Like, I don't think that these guys can pass anything. I don't think they have the votes for anything.
And, you know, maybe I'll be proven wrong on that.

Speaker 6 But if that does come to pass and it's just chaos on the hill, obviously that slows down Trump's agenda at some level, but but maybe not in

Speaker 6 these power ministries, right? And maybe not

Speaker 6 on the democracy, rule of law side of things.

Speaker 2 Aaron Powell, no, that's a good point. I mean, the chaos can do, is better than submission.
Sure. But there's a limit to what it can do and what it can accomplish.

Speaker 2 And what can accomplish more of is in some of the programs. It can keep current budget levels, presumably, or prevent Trump from institutionalizing some of the changes he wants to make.

Speaker 2 But I agree in the power ministries, he has so much more power because

Speaker 2 in foreign policy and defense, he has an awful lot of ability to make stuff happen. And in immigration and law enforcement to a slightly lesser degree.

Speaker 2 Ultimately, we can't depend on simple chaos and pebbles in the road and molehills ahead of them.

Speaker 2 There needs to be an actual willingness to stand up to Trump at some point and sooner rather than later.

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Speaker 4 Get ready for Malice, a twisted new drama starring Jack Whitehall, David DeCovney, and Carice Van Houten.

Speaker 4 Jack Whitehall plays Adam, a charming manny infiltrates the wealthy Tanner family with a hidden motive to destroy them.

Speaker 4 This edge-of-your-seat revenge thriller unravels a deliciously dark mystery in a world full of wealth, secrets, and betrayal. Malice will constantly keep you on your toes.

Speaker 4 Why is Adam after the Tanner family? What lengths will he go to? One thing's for sure. The past never stays buried, so keep your enemies close.

Speaker 4 Watch Malice, all episodes now streaming exclusively on Prime Video.

Speaker 6 So speaking of which, back to the aforementioned principles first conference. Folks that were not on the internet didn't see the news over the weekend.
The Proud Boys showed up.

Speaker 6 Enrique Tario showed up and Ivan Rakelin, some others to the conference. Then the next day, there was a bomb threat that was sent in by somebody that mentioned you by name, Bill.

Speaker 6 Actually, I didn't get mentioned. So I guess maybe not they're not a podcast listener.
Mentioned several other folks. Obviously, that ended up being fake.

Speaker 6 the interesting thing about it for me uh that i think it's worth discussing the january 6th cops were there kill gannell got the courage award and they had a panel with harry dunn and michael finone and finone said this

Speaker 2 before

Speaker 6 The Proud Boys had shown up. This was him on stage just a little bit before he realized that these guys were going to show up and try to create a stir.
Let's listen to Michael Fanone.

Speaker 5 And then Donald Trump pardoned 1,500 insurrectionists. Hundreds of violent criminals.

Speaker 5 Criminals who assaulted police officers at the Capitol on January 6th, police officers like you see up here on stage today, but hundreds of other police officers who, regardless of their political ideology or doing their fucking job, Donald Trump sent them there to assault those individuals, and he pardoned them.

Speaker 5 He pardoned them. And I'll tell you why he pardoned them.
He pardoned them because he wants people to know that if you commit crimes on his behalf, he's got your back.

Speaker 5 And so now what we have in this country

Speaker 5 is we have Donald Trump's personal brown shirt militia.

Speaker 6 It's pretty striking that he said that. And then Enrique Tario shows up like 30 minutes later.
And then Cash Patel and Dan Pancino are in charge of the FBI 24 hours later.

Speaker 6 Pretty prescient observation by Michael Finnell.

Speaker 2 No, it's fantastic. And I wish more of our Democrats, you know, who are in politics would be as clear-spoken and plain-spoken and speak the truth as much as Fanon did.
I was listening to that.

Speaker 2 So I was up on the next panel, then you were up after us. I was waiting to go out.
I was running a little late.

Speaker 2 And I was there with Gary Kasparov and Tom Nichols, which was our panel, which was kind of foreign policy. And I was struck when Fanon said it.

Speaker 2 I mean, we've said versions of that, but he said it so... with such authority, and he has the kind of authority to say it, obviously.

Speaker 2 And then when, I guess, when I was on, when Gary and Tom and I were on stage is when Tario showed up.

Speaker 2 And I think it was sort of an accident that the Capitol police guys were at that point were kind of leaving. So they had gone up to the lobby and these guys came in and they had

Speaker 2 their little showdown, which did not get to violence, thankfully.

Speaker 2 But yeah, the degree to which, I mean, it's going to become normal, don't you think, that crowd boys or just, let's just say, pro-Trump vigilante types, hopefully not indulging in violence, but a certain amount of intimidation and threatening and making life unpleasant, they're going to start showing up at every anti-Trump gathering, but not just anti-Trump, right?

Speaker 2 At the ACLU and the pro-immigrants organizations and abortion rights. I mean, why not, right? And they've sort of got a yellow light.

Speaker 2 And again, I was struck that it seemed like Terrier was pretty careful not to break the law. He didn't hit anyone.

Speaker 2 So they can do an awful lot of making life unpleasant for people and deterring people, therefore, from exercising their rights of free speech and assembly and so forth by just showing up with that kind of implicit Trump has your back behind them.

Speaker 6 Yeah, the menacing element of it. I have a little bit more coming after we finish on the intimidation side of things.
But the free reign to menace people element of this is real.

Speaker 6 And again, it's almost, you roll your eyes to say it at this point, but it is

Speaker 6 just shocking that you do not have even after something like this, where these guys, you know, get pardoned, show up, menace the cops that were injured at the Capitol. There's a bomb threat.

Speaker 6 Maybe underline, we don't actually know who sent the bomb threat. And

Speaker 6 there's not like the Tom Tillises of the world who were up there on stage just like a month ago,

Speaker 6 mocking liberals or mocking anti-Trumpers who are concerned that this might happen, who are concerned that Trump might pardon the violent criminals and deriding them in the Senate.

Speaker 6 None of them have the integrity to like even send out a tweet that is like, this is bad.

Speaker 6 Like, you know, I might disagree with the folks in that room when it comes to the matter of Donald Trump, but like, whatever.

Speaker 2 I've worked with many of them.

Speaker 6 They're conservatives. Like, they do not deserve to be menaced.
They do not deserve to be threatened.

Speaker 6 And it was a mistake for Donald Trump to release the people from prison that would do this type of thing to police officers. Like, that's a pretty simple statement to send.

Speaker 6 There are plenty of those statements that were sent by Democrats when there was, I think, a non-political attack on Donald Trump, a crazy person in Pennsylvania.

Speaker 6 And not only does it not happen, there's just like not even any expectation that it'll happen, right?

Speaker 6 Like people are like, they've been so beaten down by these guys' cowardice that like, I doubt they will even get asked about it on the hill today, you know?

Speaker 2 No, that's a good point. Yeah, people just assume they're, well, they're not going to say anything.
Weak.

Speaker 6 That's a bunch of weak, weak, weak individuals. So anyway, good on Heath and Heath Mayo, who hosted that event, and all the folks that continued to show up.

Speaker 6 It was good to see a bunch of people out there. And these guys

Speaker 6 cannot be allowed to silence us with their stupid troublemaking. Lastly, before we get to Morphin Principles first, I'll play some audio from my interview with Polis and my panelist, Sarah Longwell.

Speaker 6 There was, I don't know to call it positive news or not, but the German elections were over the weekend.

Speaker 6 I think it's worth kind of mentioning because it became relevant to domestic politics because Elon Musk and J.D.

Speaker 6 Vance is campaigning on behalf of AFD, the far-right nationalist, German nationalist party. They ended up getting just about 20% of the vote in whatever it is, six, seven-way election.

Speaker 6 The CDU, CSU, led by Friedrich Murz won the election with the most votes, about 29%.

Speaker 6 SBD had 16. Greens had like 11 or 12.

Speaker 6 So on the one hand, you know, not great that the AFD is now the second party there, the lead opposition party, if you will, in Germany, but I guess it's better than them winning.

Speaker 2 A lot better. No, and they went up.
It's the bad news is it's the most votes they've gotten.

Speaker 2 Maybe they've gotten 13% or something before, the high watermark, and they're getting 2021 almost. So that's not great.

Speaker 2 On the other hand, they'd been polling at around 20 for the entire election campaign, which there, I think it's about like two months.

Speaker 2 So they didn't go up, even though there were terrorist attacks, really, and some very bad crimes in Germany the last two, three weeks that got a ton of attention, understandably.

Speaker 2 And even though Musk and Vance weighed in for them.

Speaker 2 And so it turned out that actually the German voters, to their credit, were not particularly moved by Musk doing videos into the AFD conferences or Vance speaking in Munich and in effect endorsing the AFD.

Speaker 2 And so that's a good sign. And there'll be a coalition government at the center.

Speaker 2 like the current coalition government of the center, except with the Christian Democrats on top and the Social Democrats second, as opposed to the way it is now.

Speaker 2 A little bit glass half-full and all all that. But I think, yes, the center held.
You know, and actually, in Europe, I mean, this is the great irony, right?

Speaker 2 We're supposed to be the strong country, the bastard of the West, these other Europeans.

Speaker 2 God knows, when I was a kid, the Communist Parties were getting 30% of the vote there, and then they were all wusses, and they didn't want to fight enough, and they don't spend money on defense, and blah, blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 2 And you know what?

Speaker 2 Basically, in Britain, France, Germany, Italy, a little complicated, but not as pro-Putin, Central and Eastern Europe, certainly the Scandinavian countries and the Baltic countries, the center is holding.

Speaker 2 I wish it were holding here.

Speaker 6 Yeah. And the other thing is, to your point about Musk's campaigning there, and we'll see.

Speaker 6 I mean, these guys are going to use more nefarious methods to get involved in other countries' elections going forward. They're going to do more of

Speaker 6 what the Russians did in our election, to be honest, social media kind of campaigns, that sort of stuff. And this was, I think that...
I don't exactly know.

Speaker 6 People that are in Germany were saying that the X, you know, the for you page on X was pretty favorable to AFD, you know, and so maybe there was some algorithmic monkeying around and maybe all that stuff will continue or grow.

Speaker 6 But in the meantime, like

Speaker 6 these guys aren't popular in most other countries, right? Like they do not like Trump. They are growing to hate Musk and J.D.
Vance is a zero, right?

Speaker 6 And so you're seeing this a little bit on TVD in Canada. I've done several interviews with friend J.J.
McCullough and other, and I was at a conference with some Canadian political experts recently.

Speaker 6 And, you know, a month ago, the scene was that the conservative candidate, Pierre, was kind of a shoo-in, right?

Speaker 6 That like everybody's so upset with Trudeau and, you know, inflation and a lot of the stuff that, you know, impaired Biden, but then also just he'd been in for so long and it's like time for a change.

Speaker 6 But like the Trump involvement in Canada, you've seen those polls start to narrow. And now it's like a little less certain, actually.
It's possible that Trump's bullying of Canada might backfire.

Speaker 6 I don't know whether him and Musk actually really care that much about whether these other countries have right-wing parties or if it's just like a big social media game.

Speaker 6 But it is noteworthy that now we've seen that the trend of them being unable to make a positive difference or maybe even harming the candidates of choice now in a couple of places.

Speaker 2 Yeah, the way one maybe I put it, if you include the U.S. in this, is there's clearly a backlash against Trump, Musk fans, and what they're doing and how they're doing it.

Speaker 2 It's not going that well for them. And as the results come in, I think the backlash could get stronger.
So that's the good news. And it's a healthy backlash.
It's not kind of an

Speaker 2 idiotic or radical left-wing backlash.

Speaker 2 It's just like, could we just have functioning government institutions and a decent liberal democracy here and support our friends and be hostile to people like Putin?

Speaker 2 So the good news is there is that movement, I think, here at home and maybe around the world, actually.

Speaker 2 The bad news is how much damage can they do before that movement has political effect, both internationally and at home?

Speaker 2 It's sort of a race between the increasing revulsion, really, against Musk and Trump and the willingness to begin to abandon him, them maybe, by some of their voters and some, maybe even conceivably, some Republican elected officials.

Speaker 2 But the damage is being done in real time, obviously, both internationally and at home. And that's the situation we face.
And I do think I try to make this point in morning shots.

Speaker 2 Larry Diamond, the Stanford Political Scientist, makes this point. It's kind of important to move earlier rather than later.
The autocracy just becomes embedded too much at some point.

Speaker 2 And people can say, oh, 2026 elections are going to be good. Well, I don't know.

Speaker 2 After 18 months of Musk, of Patel running the FBI and Bondi running the Justice Department and Christian Om running DHS and all kinds of information operations and other use of law enforcement to tilt the playing field, maybe calling in the military on some fake, you know,

Speaker 2 domestic necessity and so forth. I don't know.

Speaker 2 I think you can't just count on, don't worry, public opinion is going to ultimately move in the right direction and public public opinion will be reflected, you know, 100%.

Speaker 2 That's not the institutionalization of the autocracy. This is the point Bob Kagan made, is a real danger.

Speaker 5 All right, well, that's an uplifting place for us to end. Uh, Bill Crystal, um, uh, everybody else, stick around.
Uh, I'm gonna do a little intro about uh the police interview and

Speaker 6 talk about my call to arms uh with in the panel with Sarah Longwell.

Speaker 5 So, everybody else, stick around for that.

Speaker 6 Thanks so much, Bill Crystal.

Speaker 5 We'll see you back here next Monday.

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Speaker 6 All right, everybody, I got two things for you from the Principal First conference Conference over the weekend. I was on a panel with Sarah Longwell.
You can listen to all of that.

Speaker 6 If you are a Borg Plus member, go to thebork.com/slash subscribe. We posted that over the weekend on our sub stack.

Speaker 6 But I want to play a short bit from the very end that was a riff that I was doing after Tario had shown up to the conference and we were discussing, like we did last week, Robert Garcia getting the letter from Ed Martin about his comments about Musk on CNN and all these other examples of intimidation that we've seen.

Speaker 6 And I just wanted to offer everybody a reminder that at this point, to Bill's point about how the autocracy may come, it hadn't come yet.

Speaker 6 We talked about this at Adam on Friday at Kensington on Friday, and I want to continue to reiterate it.

Speaker 6 There is something to be said for speaking up and speaking out and doing so clearly and doing so without apology and not editing yourself or censoring yourself.

Speaker 6 It's important to do regardless of whether it has a political benefit because it has other benefits. It has other societal benefits.

Speaker 6 You know, it might be eye-rolly cliche, but courage is contagious and we should all do our part in any way we can, either in our communities or on YouTube, if you're me.

Speaker 6 So I'll play you a little bit of that clip from my conversation with Sarah Longwell and then the full interview with Jared Polis.

Speaker 6 Before he goes into Jared Polis interview, I gave him a homework assignment, which was to read the principal's first principles, the Declaration of Principles, because he was the only Democratic elected official to come, which I thought was really cool for him to come.

Speaker 6 But he took the homework assignment very, very literally as a high-achieving nerd that he is. And he had read all the principles and was ready to talk about them.

Speaker 6 And so if you're listening to the interview, I would assume 99.9% of you have not read the principal's first principles.

Speaker 6 So if you want to read them and see what he was talking about, I mean, they're all pretty good. It's talking about how integrity matters.
It's about the Constitution being paramount.

Speaker 6 It's the type of thing that you would expect a bunch of norms, love, and never Trump Republicans, former Republicans to put as their principles list.

Speaker 6 But to give you some context for the conversation, we'll put the link in the show notes or in the YouTube description so you guys can read those to give you a little bit of perspective on my conversation with Governor Polis.

Speaker 6 So, I hope you enjoy these conversations from the Principals First Summit, and we'll be back here tomorrow for another edition of the Bullwork Podcast.

Speaker 8 See you all then.

Speaker 5 People that are supposed to be speaking out, people that are in the political fray, we cannot be made to be afraid of these fucking people, okay? We cannot. I know these people.

Speaker 5 I know these people. They are cowards.
They are cowards. Okay? Like, Cash Battelle would shit his pants if he was in Fallujah.
Okay? So would I, by the way. But like, I know them.

Speaker 5 I know them. I know their type.
And they are cowards.

Speaker 5 They are bullies and they are cowards and they are trying to intimidate us and they are trying to shut us up with their stupid letters that they're sending from Ed Martin and the DOJ or from Elon Musk's Twitter feed.

Speaker 5 He thinks that he can bully people and shut them up for his Twitter feed. No, none of these people are worth fearing.

Speaker 5 And when I talked to Kinzinger about this yesterday, and his message to them was, come and arrest me.

Speaker 5 Come and arrest me. But until then, I'm going to say what I'm going to say.
And I feel like people need to hear that because speaking out right now is a good in itself.

Speaker 5 A lot of times on our podcast, we talk about what's the strategic thing to do and what's the smart thing to do.

Speaker 5 And I just, as I think about this, if we are really going where I think all of us think we're going towards an orbanist type government, like nobody asks the dissidents in Hungary, like, do you think that it's going to help the polls if you speak out your poll numbers, if you speak out against Orban?

Speaker 5 Nobody asks that, right? Because everyone understands that in the face of an autocratic threat, just saying no is an end into itself.

Speaker 5 And so to me, we might all go through this principles list in 2029, God willing, with a new president and discuss how many of them we still agree on.

Speaker 5 And in the public space, get to debate the policies and disagree on them.

Speaker 5 But in the meantime, our job is to say no to this, to stand up to them and to not be afraid because they want you to be afraid and you have no reason to be fearful of these little

Speaker 5 men

Speaker 5 what's happening everybody

Speaker 5 as much as I like Heath Syndrome I told him next year I want pyrotechnics like CPAC that's the only thing we'll steal from them you know just something with a little bit of a little heat get us going in the morning.

Speaker 5 How you doing Governor? Good to see you again. I was told there'd be pyrotechnics.
I'm a little disappointed.

Speaker 5 Well this is your first one. Next year we're going to make this happen.

Speaker 5 It's my home state governor. Not anymore.
I'm in Louisiana now.

Speaker 5 I'd like to trade him for Jeff Landry, but I don't think that's going to happen unfortunately. Unless you're interested.
Are you interested in moving to Louisiana?

Speaker 5 No, we're interested in welcoming you back to Colorado. Okay, you're going to get me in trouble with my mother.

Speaker 5 I gave you some homework before we got here because I believe you're the only elected Democrat here. Is that right? Were there any other elected Democrats? We had some candidates, maybe?

Speaker 5 Sadly, there's not as many elected Democrats. Democrats anymore.
Yeah, okay. It's hard to choose from.
So I think you're the only one here.

Speaker 5 And so the homework I gave you was to look at Heath's 15 principles, or maybe there are 16, we don't know, and see, you know, kind of where you think our alignment is. Where are we starting?

Speaker 5 Well, first, I mean, and you did your homework. You got it here.
I had it. Well, there's some, that's part of the problem.
There's too many of them. You guys got to edit it a little bit.

Speaker 5 Cut them down a little.

Speaker 5 By the way, how great it would be if the folks here were the governing coalition of our country and how proud we would be as a nation to create prosperity and peace in the world. That would be nice.

Speaker 5 Someday. Someday, you'll be back.
We could argue about a couple things.

Speaker 5 Still, there's 15 or 16 of them.

Speaker 5 We need EPA reform, my goodness. So EPA didn't say that.
We might be on the same page side.

Speaker 5 We need NEPA reform, too. I mean, these are things where we hope the Trump administration gets it right.

Speaker 5 We'll get to that. We will.

Speaker 5 So there's too many.

Speaker 5 And they're all good. They're all wonderful.
I look through them. I mean, we can go through them, but integrity, character, and virtue matter.

Speaker 5 That might be sort of a sad wish as opposed to kind of a value because to the voters they don't. Now, this is important because it's a value.
Every person has dignity, equality, and worth. Yes.

Speaker 5 Truth is important. I think you can combine that with no one's entitled to their own facts.

Speaker 5 So, I mean, look, I mean, somehow Martin Luther did 95 theses, but generally speaking, in marketing and politics, you got to get it to three or four to kind of resonate, you know, and I think there's ways to kind of, without sacrificing the value piece, kind of get this down to the three or four that you can put on a little card and you can put on a sign and that can mean something to people.

Speaker 5 But I'm excited by them all. Free and functioning markets deliver prosperity.
I mean, absolutely.

Speaker 5 And I think that's been forgotten.

Speaker 5 I just heard a tail in the last discussion, the danger of the tariffs and taxes on shutting down transactions between two people who are inherently better off because they make a transaction would be devastating not only to the global economy, but right here at home home in our backyard.

Speaker 5 Yeah, let's, and we also have a lot of policy overlap, you know, us former, us exiled Republicans and you, you know, free markets, free people.

Speaker 5 Let's talk a little bit about what you've been doing in Colorado before we might have to argue a little bit about politics. But

Speaker 5 our agreement is more about policy. And you've done, I mean, regulatory reforms.
You did the chainsaw before it was cool, I think, and cutting some red tape. Before it was not cool, I guess.

Speaker 5 Is that a way to put it? We got rid of 208 old executive orders. Now, here is, so I had been working on this, by the way, you know, the proper way is you work on things and you plan them.

Speaker 5 You don't just go by the seat of your plan. So it took us about six months to figure out, you know, we were going to repeal these 208 orders.

Speaker 5 And then unfortunately, because of the timing, it was during, after the election, people, you know, then thought somehow we got the idea from Doge. But I say, no, no, they got the idea from us.
Okay.

Speaker 5 We started earlier. But yeah, as an executive, I can get rid of, and I got rid of executive orders dating back to 1920 that were still in effect in our state, vast majority over the last 10, 20 years.

Speaker 5 So that was exciting. And I've challenged our legislature to do the same, to go through our rules.

Speaker 5 Because, again, unlike certain other executives, I don't think I have the power to single-handedly nullify laws. So I challenge our legislature to go back and look at all of the

Speaker 5 laws that require different rules, because sometimes an executive is required by a law to do rules and go back and eliminate some of that as well. Yeah.
And

Speaker 5 as Heath mentioned, we're like building houses. That's exciting.
You know, we're doing market-based reforms. So get government out of the way.

Speaker 5 The market and the price of housing is a function of supply and demand. The fact that demand is high in Colorado is wonderful.
People want to live there. You want to live there.
It's great.

Speaker 5 You all move out there. But we have artificial government-imposed constraints on supply.
That is a single reason why a home would cost a lot more than its replacement value, which they do.

Speaker 5 In average home price in Denver is about $600,000,

Speaker 5 which is high. I mean, it's not California high, but it's high.
And so we have basically allowed more housing to be built,

Speaker 5 whether it's townhomes, whether it's multifamily housing, the kinds of inherently more affordable housing, which ironically is often the most difficult kind of housing to get past your local planning board.

Speaker 5 The single-family homes, they let you build, but the more affordable kinds of homes are actually harder to approve. So we've made a lot of progress in that.
We continue that work.

Speaker 5 You cut taxes? We did.

Speaker 5 It was time to warm up all the concerns. When I became governor, our income tax rate was 4.63%.

Speaker 5 We cut it at the ballot box to 4.5. We cut it at the ballot box to 4.4.
And then we cut it through the legislature to 4.25%.

Speaker 5 So that's our income tax down.

Speaker 5 And you're not needlessly mean to transgender people or

Speaker 5 rejecting people from coming to your state? No, this is where we say, I like this.

Speaker 5 Every person has dignity, quality, and worth. That needs to stay there.

Speaker 5 I mean,

Speaker 5 we value everybody based on the content of their character, their contributions, and who they are. And,

Speaker 5 you know, there's good and bad people of all kinds. You were, that's, there's no doubt about that.

Speaker 5 There's some bad gays out there. Not on this stage, but they exist.

Speaker 5 I could think of a couple.

Speaker 5 Speaking of that, you were in the room yesterday with, what was it yesterday or two days ago now, where the governor of Maine, your colleague, was kind of getting into it with the president, Janet Mills.

Speaker 5 What did you make of that exchange?

Speaker 5 Well, I don't, you know, none of us had the context going in because this was until it was elevated by the president and the governor, it was an obscure thing going on with Maine.

Speaker 5 So we didn't really know what was going on at the time. But apparently it has to do with following the guidance around women's sports.
And I mean, women's sports are

Speaker 5 obviously something, like in any sports, we want to prevent cheating. I mean, everybody wants to prevent cheating in sports.

Speaker 5 You know, and of course uh steroids hormones they can all be used for cheating and and that has no place in sports and um and of course you know at the same time we want people to be able to participate it's a really it's a little so you know my um we try we have discussions at our dinner table i have a 10 year old daughter and a 13 year old uh son and we were talking about this should you know what where's the line and how do you make sure that you don't have boys sort of cheating to play in girls sports.

Speaker 5 And my daughter said, I don't understand. We beat the boys.

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 5 And she did. They had a basketball, you know, it was a girls' basketball team, and they beat the boys' basketball team.

Speaker 5 Yeah, no, my daughter beat her boy cousin in Colorado in basketball, and that caused a meltdown over Christmas. So we're not going to talk about it.
Hopefully Louie's not listening.

Speaker 5 The other thing is just, I think, the capriciousness.

Speaker 5 Regardless of what you think about

Speaker 5 where the line is when it comes to youth sports and gender, capriciousness of how Trump is acting about all this stuff.

Speaker 5 I mean, you just discuss it in a rational way. Of course, boys shouldn't be in girls' sports.
I mean it's obvious.

Speaker 5 It has nothing to do with cutting Medicaid funding for people in Lewiston. Right.

Speaker 5 And it has nothing to do with people who were, you know, born of indeterminate or intermediate genders or where they play.

Speaker 5 I mean, you know, it's you want fairness in sports, but you want participation in sports. But it's like, it's kind of, and I think those are broad American values.

Speaker 5 You want fairness and you want to provide ways people can participate. But yeah, very little of that has anything to do with like the cost of living and the real issues that matter.

Speaker 5 I mean, I think after talking to Janet Milzefer, she said there's like one kid this even affects in their whole state. Yeah.

Speaker 5 I'm curious if you got any clarity. Obviously at a human level, we got to feel bad for that kid that they're in the center of all this stuff.

Speaker 2 I mean, my goodness.

Speaker 5 So you were behind the scenes. You had to have dinner with Donald Trump last night.

Speaker 5 I was at the gay bar, so

Speaker 5 you guys can decide who had a more enjoyable evening.

Speaker 5 Do you get any clarity from the White House on the kind of random government workers that are being fired in your state, whether you're going to have any funding for Medicare.

Speaker 5 I don't know if there's no clarity from this.

Speaker 5 So in my limited time, what I talked about, and I know you came off a conversation of tariffs, like you, I believe in free trade and open markets, and trade is inherently good.

Speaker 5 You can see why he's my favorite Democrat there. We got one clapper, one clapper.
Me and Chair are the only ones left. But my concern was, and obviously we all, you know, we're hopeful that

Speaker 5 the president somehow has this master negotiating strategy. We're going to to wind up with left tariffs rather than more.
But, you know, I'm not holding my breath. But I did say, look, I mean,

Speaker 5 if there's less tariffs, I'll be the first to praise that. But I said, whatever is happening here, please try to wrap this up in the next few months because investment is frozen.
Nobody can plan.

Speaker 5 The uncertainty is the enemy of prosperity and in the business. So we're at whatever level we're going to wind up at, we've got to figure this out for your own benefit, Mr.

Speaker 5 President, in the next few months.

Speaker 5 Because if this goes on for four years,

Speaker 5 the uncertainty alone will cause a recession.

Speaker 5 We're not rooting for a recession, right? No? No, no, as I said, I really hope that somehow if we come out of this with,

Speaker 5 I'm not holding my breath, but less tariffs, less restrictions on trade.

Speaker 5 That would be wonderful. I was just speaking for myself.
I know you're good, Jared.

Speaker 5 I'm the devil on your shoulder. What about the other uncertainty with regards to the cuts? I know you had some controversy in your state about, I guess, what, forest rangers got fired.

Speaker 5 I I mean, who the hell knows? There are government workers that are in every state. Like, did you get any conversations about that? As far as we can tell, there's no rhyme or reason to the cuts.

Speaker 5 Now, obviously,

Speaker 5 we want things that are wasteful to be cut.

Speaker 5 But an example of this sort of wrecking ball approach was they actually laid off a lot of the folks involved with fire prevention, park management in Colorado, which are incredibly important.

Speaker 5 So not the firefighters themselves, but the road maintenance, the road maintenance,

Speaker 5 how you get the fires to fight them, forest forest management.

Speaker 5 So these are folks that are, in our view, and I think the view of any rational government on the left or right, small government, big government, I mean, this is like a core function thing, right?

Speaker 5 So we hope that they reverse that. No idea if they will.
Yeah,

Speaker 5 I saw a tweet as I was coming in, a rare good one, from Jessica Riedel, who's a friend of the principles first.

Speaker 5 And shared this, if Mitch Daniels was running Doge, I think we could replace his name with yours here.

Speaker 5 If Jared Polis was running Doge, they'd have already begun implementing GAO recs to fix the billions in payment errors, consolidating duplicative programs, auditing thousands of programs for efficiencies legally, competently, and with minimal disruption.

Speaker 5 That's real money. That's not what they're doing.
That's right. For every government program, you should ask really two questions.
First is, should we even be doing this?

Speaker 5 And there's absolutely things that are being done that are counterproductive that we should not do at every level of government.

Speaker 5 The second is, okay, we should do this. How can we do it more efficiently? Let's create a more efficient way of doing it.
It's not just sort of like, who's a?

Speaker 2 Let's destroy it all.

Speaker 5 Like, okay,

Speaker 5 you know,

Speaker 5 should we be doing it? And if we should be doing it, how do we do it more efficiently? Yeah.

Speaker 5 Yes, Mitch Daniels absolutely would have been wonderful. Would have been done much better.

Speaker 5 But we are what we are. And so I saw you on one of the Sunday shows over the weekend, and you seem to like...

Speaker 5 Give them the benefit of the doubt that maybe they will land in a place where they are going to actually care about efficiency. And I guess maybe that was one area where we part ways.

Speaker 5 A rare area where we part ways. Because I don't think that they have any intention to do anything.
You know, again,

Speaker 5 give them the space to see if they hoist themselves on their own petard here, right? Like with trade. As I said, if

Speaker 5 somehow this leads to lower tariffs and more free trade, that's wonderful. Yeah.
That's wonderful. Do you think that's going to happen?

Speaker 5 I'm an eternal optimist. You are an optimist.
What about, I mean, what about when it comes to the Doge? And there's got to be, do you have any hope?

Speaker 5 Do you still have even a hint of hope that this could end positively? Well, I don't have much visibility into what's going on, right? I mean, does anybody... You're the governor of a state.

Speaker 5 Have you gotten a call? It's federal.

Speaker 5 There are people in your state that are losing their jobs. They're going to tear stuff down.

Speaker 5 And again, if there are things that we don't need to do, let's stop doing them. And then the question on if there's things that we agree we should do, how do we do it more efficiently?

Speaker 5 Doge doesn't seem to be answering that at this point. It seems to just be

Speaker 5 stopping the current way, fine. But then what replaces it actually turns out to be very important.
I see that you're hopeful and optimistic. No, there's another one.
I'm going to get rid of the penny.

Speaker 5 I'm all for that. I'm going to get rid of the penny.
That's great. I'm with you on the penny.

Speaker 5 I'm taxpayers a couple hundred million dollars a year, environmental costs, the mining of zinc and copper. Yeah, poor people at the penny plant, though.

Speaker 5 It's tough. Oh, you know, we'll still make pennies for collectors.
Some of those are in Denver, by the way. You know, we have the Denver mint, but we still make nickels and dimes and quarters.

Speaker 5 I had to go there as a kid. It was a really boring field trip.

Speaker 5 We can't use the force of government to preserve horse and buggy manufacturers once the car is invented. That's a good point.
I'm with you on that. So here's the thing, though.
You're optimistic.

Speaker 5 You've heard some things that might sound nice that you could imagine you agree with. Have they actually done anything that materially would improve the welfare of a person in Colorado so far?

Speaker 5 I mean, it's only been a month. They being

Speaker 5 Trump and Eli.

Speaker 5 Has there been anything that they've done that you're like, okay, Coloradans are going to benefit from this thing? What do you think they've done so far? I mean, it's mostly.

Speaker 5 It's a lot of executive orders. They fired a lot of people.
They renamed some things. Yeah, a lot of them were held up in court.
I mean, I can't think of one right now. No, no, no.
Me neither.

Speaker 5 That's discouraging, though. I'm hopeful, Tim, on zoning and reform and permitting reform.
If they get rid of the penny, but no, it's all if, if they do this, if they do this, if they do this. But no,

Speaker 5 I mean, nothing makes Colorado more prosperous that they've done yet, or America more prosperous, in my opinion.

Speaker 5 In fact, to the contrary, the threat of the tariffs obviously is a major drag on our economy. Yeah.

Speaker 5 Well, that's not good. If the only thing

Speaker 5 that

Speaker 5 aren't some of them, with China, they're actually in force, right? The Canada and Mexico ones, thank God, are still a threat. I hope that threat goes away.

Speaker 5 But some of those are actually already been implemented, so they're already causing harm. That's a good reminder that the China ones have been enforced.
All right. They've renamed the Gulf, though.

Speaker 5 So we have a new Gulf, the Gulf of Trump. I was wondering if we could spitball.

Speaker 5 Do you want to rename anything? Like, you only got two years left in Colorado. You've updated a few things.
I'm from Littleton. That's kind of like a beta name, Littleton.

Speaker 5 I was thinking maybe we could rename that after like maybe me or Nicola Jokic.

Speaker 5 Yeah, somebody like that. Millerton? Jokic ton.

Speaker 5 Is there any other name?

Speaker 5 Would be fun. I think Colorado's would go for that.
I think that'd be awesome. Did you have any other renaming ideas? Well, you know,

Speaker 5 I tweeted on this, but when the

Speaker 5 you know, I'll try to name the Gulf of Mexico. I said we could do a compromise.
We have a place you know well in Colorado, Casabonita.

Speaker 5 I said we should call it the Gulf of Casabonita because it's a little bit American, a little bit Mexican. It's good for business.
You could sell me on that. We could maybe sell the naming rights also.

Speaker 5 We could auction them off. That's what those should be doing.
Auctioning off the naming rights. Close the national deficit.

Speaker 5 Okay. Well, I'm interested.

Speaker 5 You hit on something. Why not? Not that, but let's auction off some other naming rights.
Maybe we should do that in Colorado, too. Auction off the naming rights for one of our towns or something.

Speaker 5 I have no time up for it. Maybe in Lauren Bobert's Boebert's district.
If we're going to have to pick a place to auction off, I would probably start there. You mentioned the debt and the deficit.

Speaker 5 This is another thing I think that is like important, and I think you would be a good messenger on this because some other Democrats don't care about this.

Speaker 5 They don't have any plans actually to cut the debt or deficit. No,

Speaker 5 and we all look what Trump, what the President said during the campaign, the deficit would go up substantially. And all this talk of Doge, and again, I hope they succeed, but this is like this much.

Speaker 5 I mean, you know, whether it's USAD and these other things, it's not

Speaker 5 $5 trillion.

Speaker 5 It's not in any material way closing the deficit. So

Speaker 5 I support, in Colorado, we balance our budget every year. I think we need a balanced budget amendment to the U.S.
Constitution.

Speaker 5 And, you know, not because it's good policy, but because it's better than the alternative of not having one, as we've learned. So I think we should have it.

Speaker 5 I have asked several people what I should ask you, and everybody demanded that I ask you about RFK. So here we are.
You had some nice things to say about RFK.

Speaker 5 He's just an okay.

Speaker 5 He's okay for me. He's bad to quite bad, I would say.
But you guys are very good. Well, that's pretty good for the new administration, isn't it? I guess.
The bad to quite bad is like top of the.

Speaker 5 What are you seeing? What was it about RFK that gave you a little interest, that piqued your interest?

Speaker 5 Well, I think he's interested in, well, he is interested in health and prevention and reducing chronic disease. And that excites me.
Colorado is a healthy state.

Speaker 5 We have one of the lowest obesity rates, healthy diet. We get one of the longest lifespans.
So I'm excited to work with him.

Speaker 5 Saw him yesterday and talked to him and I think there's a lot of ways we can work together.

Speaker 5 And to be clear, and it's a shame I have to say this every time, but of course I don't believe in the nutty anti-science stuff. I'm pro-vaccine.
I'm for all that.

Speaker 5 And he said that he won't get in the way of that. So hopefully that'll be a good idea.
Do you take him at his word?

Speaker 5 We come back to our fundamental disagreements. You're a turtle optimist.
Your eternal optimism. Yeah.
I don't know. I'm not feeling that good about that.

Speaker 5 What about the other thing about making America healthy again that gets me a little crossways, I think, with RFK, which is I don't know how cutting all research to any infectious diseases in the future is a very good idea.

Speaker 5 I think that's kind of a bad idea as far as on the health legend.

Speaker 5 We need more research, absolutely.

Speaker 5 But

Speaker 5 do you feel like

Speaker 5 he's serious about that, though? I mean,

Speaker 5 we're already seeing real ramifications to programs getting cut, right?

Speaker 5 Look, I mean, you look look at the life-saving research that's been done in our generation, the previous generation, we all live healthier, longer lives, and

Speaker 2 we need more research.

Speaker 5 Okay.

Speaker 5 I'm just doing my best to just poke your optimism here. I'm trying to do it.
You're like an optimism balloon, and I'm just going to keep pinning until I find a spot where we can let the air out.

Speaker 5 What is it? What are you most likely voted for this guy? I mean, we're just saying, like, we hope we are, you know, best wishes for the country here.

Speaker 5 I mean, he's got to get something right out of the 20 or 30 things he's. Do you

Speaker 5 broken clocks.

Speaker 5 What worries you? I mean, we've mentioned the tariffs. What else worries you the most? You know, like if he called you tomorrow, he's like, We had a great dinner.

Speaker 5 You seem like the only Democrat that is normal, you know, and he gives you a buzz and he's like, Jared,

Speaker 5 what do you think I should not do? What would you stop him from doing besides the tariffs? You mentioned the tariffs.

Speaker 5 I'm obviously very concerned about abandoning our European allies and the fight for freedom and democracy.

Speaker 5 Again, don't know where that's headed, but very concerning remarks about the conflict. We cannot embolden Putin on the world stage, and I'm worried about that.
Yeah.

Speaker 5 Let's talk about the Dems for a minute and just going forward. I'm wondering

Speaker 5 how you think the Democrats can try to recapture the mantle of appealing to

Speaker 5 working people, to people that don't really like the status quo, you know, to the types of people that RFK appealed to. Let's just be honest.

Speaker 5 Like, what are some ways that you think the party can kind of not have to

Speaker 5 sort of be the establishment, right? Like, how can the party embrace being a reformer? Well, I'd like, first of all, I think these principles that you have are a very good underpinning.

Speaker 5 Again, there's too many of them, but they're promising.

Speaker 5 And really talking about prosperity, abundance, economy, I mean, you know, we are deeply concerned that this president's economic agenda could lead to less prosperity rather than more if he does what he's saying he's going to And I think we need to offer the alternative.

Speaker 5 And the Democrats have not always been

Speaker 5 pure on these issues.

Speaker 5 They've been pro-trade. President Obama and President Clinton led us into many more trade agreements, brought down tariffs, brought down non-tariff barriers to trade.

Speaker 5 We've

Speaker 5 got large and significant pro-growth tax policies. But

Speaker 5 these are things that we should lean into because it makes a difference for people.

Speaker 5 Trevor Burrus, Jr.: The Democrats did quite poorly in most blue states, like not swing states this past year, lost a lot of ground in the northeast and the west.

Speaker 5 Two places where the Democrats lost a little ground, but not too much, was Utah and Colorado. Is it just luck and the fact that there are a lot of Mormons there, you think?

Speaker 5 Or was there something that Mormons? Hell yeah.

Speaker 5 Or is there something that you did that you think might be

Speaker 5 worth looking at if you're a governor of the East Coast state? I mean, just trying to meet the needs of Colorado. So we've been focused on we talked about reducing taxes, removing barriers to housing.

Speaker 5 We also eliminated sales tax on a number of products. We implemented free universal preschool, which is a

Speaker 5 very big priority for us, preparing all kids for success.

Speaker 5 You know, and it prepares kids for success. The long-term longitudinal studies show that, and I love your, you know, your data point.
data is important.

Speaker 5 It also saves families $6,000 a year in the here and now. Four-year-olds, preschool is very expensive.
So really just trying to meet the needs of folks where they're at and

Speaker 5 grow our economy and prosperity. So

Speaker 5 do you not see that happening in the coastal states? Like what are you doing that they're not doing in California and New York? I mean the Democrats lost 10 points in New York. Like a ton.

Speaker 5 It was not just on the margins, right? It was not just a pressure.

Speaker 5 I'm not an expert in coastal politics, so

Speaker 5 I can't say all the factors. I'm not the NGA.
I could talk more about what we did do, right?

Speaker 5 So I mean, we also, in addition to cutting income tax, we cut property taxes too, and we capped any future property tax increases at 5%.

Speaker 5 So, you know, really just trying to address people's costs and concerns.

Speaker 5 We've had a thriving economy in Colorado.

Speaker 5 And that's kind of, in fact, what led to the run-up in housing prices, right, along with the artificial constraints on supply that we're trying to systemically disassemble and allow more housing to be built.

Speaker 5 Yeah. Do you look back at COVID and feel like that...
you know, there's like a lengthy backlash to kind of how that was how that was managed at all? How do you reflect back on COVID?

Speaker 5 We first met, actually, because I watched your press conference during COVID and it was around mask mandates.

Speaker 5 And you said uh you're you had some reporters were giving you trouble and you were like, I sat and read the studies and I read the studies and I decided that we didn't need to we should.

Speaker 5 You want to wear a mask? Wear a mask. I mean please I encourage you.
Right. We it's like right.
We encourage but we didn't have we said the mandates didn't make sense.

Speaker 5 And we did. We just looked at all the data and the studies and people are perfectly able to be agents in determining their appropriate risk levels for themselves.

Speaker 5 And I was glad that, you know, my parents, who are now 80,

Speaker 5 you know, did stay home a lot and when they went out, wore masks, and that was very important. Do you worry about that with regards to RFK?

Speaker 5 If we have a bird flu outbreak and kind of how we are prepared to manage another pandemic? Yeah, I just worry we don't have a lot of Jared Paulus reading the studies in charge.

Speaker 5 I don't honestly remember what he was saying during COVID. I don't remember if he was responsible or what he advocated during that.
But

Speaker 5 as I said, on reducing chronic disease, improving health, diet and nutrition, these are the huge upside for the American people if that's what he focuses on.

Speaker 5 And there'd be downside if he were to focus on making vaccines harder to get or reducing our vaccination rate. All right, final one.

Speaker 5 Next year, we don't want you to be alone as the Democratic elected here at Principles First. So could you nominate a few other Democrats you would like us, Heath, to recruit?

Speaker 5 Yeah, I'd be happy to grab a few.

Speaker 5 We'll strategize.

Speaker 5 You know, nobody comes straight to mind? I'm just worried that they're going to fall asleep before they make it through all 16 of your principles.

Speaker 5 What about Wes Moore, maybe? He's just great. Wes is terrific.
Anybody else?

Speaker 5 Abigail Spanberger?

Speaker 5 That would be great to get her. Absolutely.

Speaker 5 So

Speaker 5 we'll strategize. I think we absolutely, this is not partisan.
We should have a lot of great folks, and whether they are Ds or Us or Rs,

Speaker 5 they ought to be part of this. Because

Speaker 5 this is just on the heels of another little conference called CPAC. You may have heard of it.
And I said, we want to be big, you want to be bigger than CPAC. So you got to grow next year.

Speaker 5 That's the goal. You got to be bigger, bigger than CPAC.
Look at that. That's my man.
It's Governor Jared Politz, everybody. If only we had 50 like him, we'd be in better shape.

Speaker 5 We'll see y'all. Well, I'm about to get sick

Speaker 5 from watching my TV.

Speaker 5 Been checking out the news

Speaker 5 till my eyeballs fail to see.

Speaker 5 I mean to say that every day

Speaker 5 is just another rotten mess sure enough

Speaker 5 And what it's gonna change my friend

Speaker 5 Is anybody's guess

Speaker 2 So I'm watching and I'm waiting

Speaker 2 I'm hoping for the best

Speaker 2 Even think I'll go to praying

Speaker 2 every time I hear them say

Speaker 2 There's no way to delay that trouble coming every day

Speaker 2 There's no way to delay that trouble from and every day

Speaker 2 Wednesday I watched the riot

Speaker 5 I seen the cops out on the street

Speaker 5 I watched them throwing rocks and stuff

Speaker 5 and choking in the heat.

Speaker 5 I listened to reports

Speaker 5 about the whiskey passing around.

Speaker 5 I seen the smoking fire

Speaker 5 and the market burning down.

Speaker 5 I watched while everybody

Speaker 5 on the street will take a turn

Speaker 2 to stop and smash and bash and crash and slash and bust and burn.

Speaker 2 I'm a watching out and I'm a waiter

Speaker 2 when I'm hoping for the better.

Speaker 2 Even think I'll go to break it

Speaker 2 every time I hear a single

Speaker 2 No way to delay that trouble come and ever day.

Speaker 2 No way to delay that trouble come and ever day.

Speaker 8 The board podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

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