Bill Kristol: Taking A Wrecking Ball to the Government

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Speaker 3 Hello and welcome to the Bullard Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.
Happy Washington's birthday, 2025. While we're changing the names of things, we're no longer observing President's Day here.

Speaker 3 We're going back to the original, the traditional Washington's birthday. Observe.
It's not actually Washington's birthday, but, you know, details.

Speaker 3 And because it's a Monday, I'm here with Bill Crystal. How are you doing, Bill?

Speaker 2 I'm hanging in there. How are you?

Speaker 3 I'm doing well. Do you have any other kind of name changes you're thinking about?

Speaker 2 I remember there was like a little bit of a conservative thing in the 70s and 80s to object to the change from Washington's birthday to President's Day.

Speaker 2 I guess they were sort of mushing together Lincoln and Washington, and then, of course, they had to be on a Monday.

Speaker 2 But yes, insofar as it sort of implies that we equally respect all presidents, it's very bad. And I'm glad you're

Speaker 2 decided. I'm glad you declared the bulwark policy of

Speaker 2 not recognizing President's Day, right? I mean, if we could all just adopt whatever names we want, right?

Speaker 3 Yeah, we're not recognizing President's Day.

Speaker 3 We're deadnaming the Gulf of Mexico.

Speaker 3 That's just kind of how things are going here.

Speaker 3 Much to discuss, I guess, it seems like.

Speaker 3 Your newsletter this morning was focused on all of the trouble that has been being created from Elon Musk's quasi-governmental department of government efficiency.

Speaker 3 Many different specifics, I think, worth getting into. But I'm just at the highest level, you know, interested in what you were trying to get across.

Speaker 2 Just what a wrecking ball it is.

Speaker 2 And as Don Moynihan, the professor of political science at Michigan, says in a very good newsletter that I recommend, and he's, you know, a sober guy, serious student of public administration.

Speaker 2 The point isn't government efficiency.

Speaker 2 The point is to wreck the government and make it more susceptible, wreck the structures, you might say, of the government, of which the civil service is such an important part, and make it susceptible to Trump's personalized leadership and really to autocracy.

Speaker 2 And so all the idiotic things they're doing, if you sort of individually, it's hard to understand. Why do they want to make air travel less safe? Why do they want to

Speaker 2 damage our nuclear safety inspection regime? But if you think of it more as just taking a wrecking ball to the government, you, I think, have a pretty good sense of what's going on.

Speaker 2 And then I was provoked this morning to write about this, particularly.

Speaker 2 I was going to write actually more about the foreign policy stuff from the weekend, which was the last four or five days, which was so terrible.

Speaker 2 The IRS headline, I guess, broke last night in the Washington Post and in the New York Times.

Speaker 2 Doge is insisting on getting into the IRS and into the very, very sensitive part of the IRS that even IRS commissioners don't have access to, which has your tax returns and my tax returns and $180 million or something, other Americans.

Speaker 3 And Trump's tax returns, presumably.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and Elon Musk's tax returns. And Doge needs to get in there.
I don't know why, and look at them, I guess, and have access to them.

Speaker 2 And they're sort of resisting a little bit of Treasury, and it's up in the air. So it seems like that would be a good moment for everyone to weigh it and say, this is...

Speaker 2 It's a clarifying moment, perhaps, of what their ambitions are and why it's worth resisting.

Speaker 3 It is clarifying. And IRS, I mean, that situation is a little bit murky, I guess, still.

Speaker 3 But some of the more clarifying elements or some of the other things you referenced, I think it's worth talking about a few of them in particular.

Speaker 3 With regards to the National Nuclear Security Administration, so there were up to 350 employees that were laid off late Thursday. They showed up to the office Friday and were locked out.

Speaker 3 One of the hardest hit offices was the Pantex plant near Amarillo, Texas.

Speaker 3 The employees there work on reassembling warheads, one of the most sensitive jobs across the nuclear weapons enterprise with the highest levels of clearance.

Speaker 3 As of this morning, the administration has decided that that was an oopsie-doops, and they are going to try to bring back all but 28.

Speaker 3 But there's some, you know, kind of HR and legal questions about how to do that. Just to your original point, like this is not this is not about efficiency.

Speaker 3 I mean, you know, I'm sympathetic to the idea that there's some bureaucrats that maybe are cashing a government paycheck and aren't providing value at the level of their compensation.

Speaker 3 I do not think that is the case for the people that are reassembling the nuclear warheads.

Speaker 3 And I don't think anybody would consider that. But I don't know.
Maybe Elon thinks

Speaker 3 Big Balls or one of his 19-year-olds could reassemble nuclear warheads better. I'm not sure.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and God forbid they should actually study it for 30 days and see whether they can cut 10% or maybe increase 10% in some parts or reorganize the place. There's none of that, of course.

Speaker 2 They show up. They give, I guess, each supervisor 200, if I read this correctly, 200 characters, not 200 words, 200 characters, like on a tweet to explain what each of these employees are doing.

Speaker 2 These are the probationary employees, which means hired in the last year or two, or people who've assumed new jobs in the last years, I understand it. So they could be quite senior, some of them.

Speaker 2 They don't have civil service protections. They're easier to fire.
They just went in and fired them. I mean, it's such a wrecking ball.
It's so unserious about any of the things government does.

Speaker 2 And this one, I guess, was even this was a bridge too far. There was a public outcry and sort of congressional outcry and experts saying, What are you doing?

Speaker 2 And they did retreat, which incidentally is a good sign, which suggests to me that if there was a little more of an outcry at all these areas, including by the Democratic Party, maybe they would retreat a little more.

Speaker 3 Part of the problem, though, is it's happening so quickly, it's hard to get enough of an outcry to focus on a particular thing. So, just a couple of other examples.

Speaker 3 The FAA, we've had like six plane crashes recently. I don't know.
We didn't have a plane crash for 16 years.

Speaker 3 We had obviously the horrific one outside of Reagan National and D.C., but then a couple of other smaller incidents recently.

Speaker 3 The Trump administration has started firing several hundred FAA probationary employees who maintain the air traffic control infrastructure.

Speaker 3 We've been discussing the CDC and NIH cuts, which are just seem draconian. This one caught my eye over the weekend.
Veterans Crisis Hotline employees.

Speaker 3 This is an individual person posting on their social media. I'm devastated.
Last night, myself and many others at the Veterans Crisis line were terminated without warning.

Speaker 3 I mean, that, again, seems like a valuable service.

Speaker 3 So, when all of this stuff is happening so fast, it is a little challenging to like create the dust that necessary to get them to, you know, backtrack, I guess.

Speaker 3 And I think that's probably their point, right? Like, I don't think they mind backtracking in a couple of cases because a bunch of other stuff ends up flying under the radar.

Speaker 2 Right. I do think, though, that, I mean,

Speaker 2 the Congress, of course, the Congress is controlled by Republicans, which is a huge problem. I mean, the media can do its bit.

Speaker 2 The civil servants themselves can do a lot and and probably should be encouraged to do as much as they can, safely do really, to publicize what's happening and to explain how dangerous it is.

Speaker 2 But there is the SINCOL Congress. They do have oversight of the executive branch.
They're even organized into committees that kind of by departments that oversee the different departments.

Speaker 2 There's a subcommittee of the Finance Committee in the Senate and the Ways and Means Committee in the House that oversees the IRS.

Speaker 2 And I don't know, it seems to me just, you know, that maybe the ranking Democrat on that committee should be just screaming and yelling on every platform he can get onto, he or she can get onto, and screaming and yelling at the Republican members for failing to do any oversight.

Speaker 2 And that should be the equivalent on all these places, whether it's the FAA or the CDC and FDA and all that. I said this to some Democrat over the weekend.

Speaker 2 I was like, well, they're doing town halls, you know, and they're really laying the predicate for fighting on the budget, which is coming out.

Speaker 2 And it's really all about winning back the House in November 2026, which I don't disagree with in a way.

Speaker 2 But, you know, that's why these town halls halls are so important, Tim, because if you do a town hall on February 17th of 2025, it's really going to help you win back the house in 2026.

Speaker 2 I think you get a little more punch, actually, out of making this a huge national story of how they're destroying these important government agencies that help us fly safely and take drugs with confidence that they work and check epidemics and make sure our tax returns are treated professionally.

Speaker 2 But what do I know? Maybe this town hall where they have some happy talk with 80 people is really better. I don't know.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I mean, I think that you're right about, or this Democrat you talked to is right about, they do seem to be thinking a lot about the budget fight that is coming up.

Speaker 3 And I had Brendan Boyle over on the YouTube feed at the end of last week, who's the ranking member on the budget committee.

Speaker 3 And I think he's sharp on this and their, you know, I think that their strategies are making sense.

Speaker 3 And later in the week, we're going to have other folks from the Hill on to talk about what the Democrats are doing, the people that I think are doing a good job. That said,

Speaker 3 there was a big political story over the weekend on this about how far the Democrats are behind on messaging and platforms, particularly in the online media world.

Speaker 3 And I was quoted in there, and what I said was basically

Speaker 3 anything that you tell me they're doing well, like they should be doing 700x

Speaker 3 with that much more intensity, right? It's just the amount that Trump and Musk are in people's faces. I mentioned this the other day, but I was scrolling through

Speaker 3 one of my sports podcasts I listened listened to, and it was a non-political comment. It was just like the guy on this barstool podcast was saying, he's like, I'm so fucking sick of Elon Musk.

Speaker 3 He's like, I just don't want to hear about him anymore. He's like, I feel like the only people I ever hear about are Taylor and Travis and Elon Musk.

Speaker 3 And it's like on a on somebody that's not political, the show doesn't talk about politics.

Speaker 3 And I think that that's just a telling anecdote, though, about like volume and just like how much of the messaging from Trump and Elon is just seeping in to casual Americans.

Speaker 3 And Democrats like are doing some stuff like on the Hill and in these town halls, but like these examples, the Veterans Crisis Hotline, the FAA, nuclear, like these are all things that if you're really banging the drum, I do think, you know, just regular people are like, why are we firing the Veterans Crisis line?

Speaker 3 Like, is that really what's going to resolve our trillion dollar budget gap? Like, it doesn't feel like it.

Speaker 2 Right. And you could show up with veterans, obviously, who benefited from this crisis hotline in your district or not in your district.
But I agree. It's partly the volume.

Speaker 2 It's partly you've got to fight. I mean, the media likes to cover fights.
People like to watch fights. They don't like to watch

Speaker 2 press conferences. And I love the Democrats all this, you know, well, we can't swing at every pitch.
You know, I mean,

Speaker 2 they're so busy not swinging at every pitch, they're taking called third strikes, if I can torture this metaphor here.

Speaker 2 I mean, it's really ridiculous. So swing at every pitch.

Speaker 2 You'll miss a few, but they've talked themselves into a kind of bizarre form of overthinking where they don't take them on and they've got to preface everything they say.

Speaker 2 Well, of course, there's probably waste there. I mean, I wouldn't question that.
They don't know that there's waste there. For all we know, the FAA is understaffed.
You know, the IRS is understaffed.

Speaker 2 That was pretty convincingly shown in the debates over the last two, three, four years when Biden tried to increase it. It was a pretty engaged issue, and experts weighed in.

Speaker 2 Not much question that more IRS agents properly governed and controlled, not by Doge creeps, would help generate more revenue and a fairer

Speaker 2 auditing auditing of taxes and so forth, and especially wealthy people who are getting away with some stuff. But anyway, Democrats are so defensive, so hesitant, so overthinking.

Speaker 2 You see, this is the problem if I talk to actually a few Democrats this weekend and it kind of my head's exploding, but

Speaker 2 I've got to calm down.

Speaker 3 Swing it every pitch. I might do the meme where it's like, don't make me tap the sign again, which is that, like, actually, yes, swing it every pitch.

Speaker 3 Right now, I mean, maybe don't swing at every pitch on Labor Day of 2026, but like right now,

Speaker 3 start.

Speaker 3 Well, we're really going to beat this metaphor to death, but do anything and see what sticks. We don't know.
We can't predict what is going to stick.

Speaker 2 Right. Put the ball in play, right? You know, they could be errors.
They could turn out to have done something very stupid, like they apparently did with the nuclear safety officials.

Speaker 2 So you don't know until you challenge it.

Speaker 3 Nobody last week would have been like, you know, the real thing to focus on is the National Nuclear Security Administration, right?

Speaker 3 Like, you know, you just don't, you just don't know, especially with how quickly things are moving.

Speaker 3 While we're complaining about people on the Hill, we should also focus a little bit on the Republicans because Bill Cassidy is just going to be my cause celeb, I think, unfortunately.

Speaker 3 I don't, you know, because I just

Speaker 3 can't take it with him in particular. So, somebody's going to talk about it.
Here is a tweet he sent over the weekend. This was on Saturday.

Speaker 3 I am all for efficiency and ultimately downsizing the federal government, but firing large numbers of new FBI agents is not the way to achieve this.

Speaker 3 Louisiana specifically benefits from newly hired FBI agents. We need to add to our law enforcement, not take away.
So every sentence on that, I agree with, every single word on that I agree with.

Speaker 2 But here's the thing.

Speaker 3 The Cash Patel vote is tomorrow. So Cash is not mentioned in this tweet.

Speaker 3 Like the only action that he can take is to vote against and maybe convince some of his colleagues to vote against or to delay the confirmation of the person who reportedly, according to whistleblowers, was behind the downsizing at the FBI that he's so upset about.

Speaker 3 So, Bill Cassidy, if you're pissed about this, if you think it hurts Louisiana, then vote against Cash Patel or go out and do interviews about how Cash Patel needs to come clean about whether he was involved in this and that we need to have another round of hearings to ask Cash Patel what his plans are for the staffing of the FBI.

Speaker 3 I mean, like, this is your moment. Like, you have a moment now for 24 hours.
Now, obviously, he's not going to do anything.

Speaker 3 So I don't want to pretend like we might think that he could, but like, like, this is the window for him to do something about this.

Speaker 3 And instead, it's just this limp tweet that doesn't even actually address the person who's responsible.

Speaker 2 I'll totally agree. Obviously, Patel will be really, and to confirm Patel after what we've seen now, of course, makes it even worse because you can't pretend I didn't know what he was going to do.

Speaker 2 They've done what he wanted them to do, and he probably lied about whether he knew about what they were doing.

Speaker 2 They are senators, on the other hand, they do have appropriations authority, power. That's true.

Speaker 2 And he also could say, and incidentally, when the budget comes up, and it could be, or the first reconciliation bill, which I guess could be pretty soon, right?

Speaker 2 And then there's the CR for the government shutdown a month from now, a little less than a month from now, you can put things in writers and bills that say no money should be spent to get rid of X VIHs, or we need to have this minimum number of XVIHs.

Speaker 2 It's not like Congress doesn't have quite a lot of

Speaker 2 say on this. They don't even seem to think of that.
It's like they're so pathetic in terms of exercising.

Speaker 2 When I was at the Education Department, granted, a long time ago, I mean, if we had, you know, moved one person in Louisiana where she didn't want to go, he or she didn't want to go from one research institute to another, you know, like phone calls from the members of Congress, the senator's chief of staff.

Speaker 2 You reversed that right well, sir.

Speaker 2 We did it according to the book. I don't care.
Sometimes we would resist them, sometimes we wouldn't.

Speaker 2 But I mean, they've sort of totally forgotten that they have quite a lot of clout if they would exercise it.

Speaker 2 But of course, the Republicans are just won't take on Trump or any of Trump's agents, apparently.

Speaker 2 And the Democrats don't have much power, to be fair, but they're also not screaming enough to put the Republicans on the spot. I mean, it seems to me.

Speaker 3 Ezra Klein did a column over the weekend about

Speaker 3 how the Republicans on the Hill have become non-player characters, which are like the characters in the video game that don't do anything. Like they just exist.

Speaker 3 And like, that is, that is correct, right? It's just, it is a kind of a marvel that they have just decided that they have no role at all.

Speaker 3 And it's interesting because it is interesting to to see the McConnell

Speaker 3 play on this. I mean, obviously, I have no sympathy for him, or I'm not at all moved or inspired by his 11th hour effort to be the one person that votes against these various Trump nominees.

Speaker 3 But when he was majority leader,

Speaker 3 he at least tried to exercise some power, oftentimes in ways I disagreed with, sometimes in ways that was good during Trump 1.0. That is gone.

Speaker 3 I mean, Jon Thune might as well not exist.

Speaker 2 Right. I mean, these people do have agency.
They're pretty important people, actually. They have more agency than most of us.
But everyone has some agency.

Speaker 2 Actually, Brunei Jaresta in this conversation that's online, conversations with Bill Crystal about the Internet, makes this point, too, about regular people.

Speaker 2 Everyone talks about something going viral. Well, people choose to hit the button that allows it to go viral, and they can choose not to, and they can choose to tweet and retweet things and so forth.

Speaker 2 Now, Musk is

Speaker 2 putting a thumb in the scale of the algorithm, so people don't have that much agency in some of these cases.

Speaker 2 Yeah, but agencies, isn't that been one of our that's one of your favorite themes and JVLs and stuff? And I think it's a good one. We should remind people of that.
I don't know.

Speaker 2 Everyone's a commentator, right? No one, including elected officials who are like elected to govern, not to commentate. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Everybody's a podcaster, you know? Ted Cruz and Matt Gates are competing with me, you know, in the marketplace. It's not as great of a job as it looks, I don't think.

Speaker 3 They're all aspiring to be podcasters instead of doers. Speaking of people with agency, an update on the story we talked about with Andrew Wiseman on Friday.

Speaker 3 So we had these resignations of the DOJ over the effort to kind of, I guess, let Eric Adams off the hook in exchange for promises that he would follow the administration's immigration guidelines.

Speaker 3 The character Emil Bove has been one of the central villains of the first month of the administration, who was the person at DOJ that was pushing this.

Speaker 3 He's also the one that was pushing people out of the FBI and is mobbed up in the aforementioned Cash Patel story.

Speaker 3 Anyway, since we talked last week, we had another person resign over this, Hagen Scott, and I'm going to read a little bit from

Speaker 3 his statement because it is blistering. Any assistant U.S.

Speaker 3 attorney would know that our laws and traditions do not allow using the prosecutorial power to influence other citizens, much less elected officials, in this way.

Speaker 3 If no lawyer within earshot of the president is willing to give him that advice, then I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool or enough of a coward to file your motion, but it was never going to be me.

Speaker 3 That was his resignation letter to Emil Bove. This guy, Higgins, Scott, and two bronze stars, special forces.
In this letter, he expresses that he shares some perspective of the Trump administration.

Speaker 3 He clerked for Kavanaugh and Roberts. Times calls him a conservative Republican.
I mean, that is a pretty blistering statement for somebody with that background.

Speaker 2 No, it's a terrific statement. And Danielle Sassoon's letter, she clerked for Scalia, is really excellent.
And it's excellent partly because it goes on for eight pages.

Speaker 2 Some of it's a little dense for a non-lawyer like me, but it really explains just how terrible what's happening is. And so this statement in a shorter and punchier way, maybe, does as well.

Speaker 2 So all credit to them, all honor to them. Meanwhile, Chris Ray, who served as FBI director for, what, seven, eight years, he's just decided to check out.
I mean,

Speaker 2 he's not willing to weigh in on the fate of the agency that he led. He personally appoints, what, five, six people, the people who really run the FBI, and they're all fired.

Speaker 2 And maybe he should say a word about these were good public servants, you know, and they shouldn't be fired. And this is very bad for the future of the FBI.

Speaker 2 And maybe we need to have some oversight of all this. But no, Chris Ray is busy being a gentleman, I suppose.
And a gentleman, just I don't even know what he's doing. I mean, what are they all doing?

Speaker 2 That's, I guess I'm just, you know, now maybe it wouldn't matter. No one likes Chris Ray.
He's, but he was appointed by Trump.

Speaker 2 Again, he's not exactly a, we're not talking about a Biden operachic here.

Speaker 3 So well, Chris Ray is welcome on the podcast if he's looking for something to do.

Speaker 3 But just to your point about agency, I just, it is worth just sitting on that for a second, that him and Sassoon, like, they could have not done this.

Speaker 3 Like, they could have just gone along with this particular

Speaker 3 kind of extra legal, you know, quid pro quo sham that the administration was trying to do. It could have rationalized it's better to be in there.

Speaker 3 And so, I mean, it is a big credit to them for not just resigning, but doing so in a way that is crystal clear about the rationale and the fact that they are adult grown-ups with agency and can make choices about what is right and wrong, which is apparently something that the Congressional Republicans haven't come around to.

Speaker 3 Unre, I mean, it is wild, right? Like his whole rationale for resigning for the preemptive surrender was that he didn't want to draw additional attention to the FBI.

Speaker 3 And so that strategy totally backfires, right? I mean, like he resigns and he just like lets them walk in and fire all of his deputies.

Speaker 3 And he basically just rolls out the red carpet for the people to do the thing that he didn't want. And then it happened and nothing, you know? I mean, it just is a total abdication of responsibility.

Speaker 3 Like, I'm sorry. Like, he could have forced them to fire him.
He could have made a stink about it. You know, he could have testified.
He still could testify.

Speaker 3 Again, the cash pertell vote isn't till tomorrow.

Speaker 2 No, and I keep getting assured by people who are on the other end. A lot of the, some of the Republican senators are not very comfortable with the cash pertele vote.

Speaker 2 They're talking privately to some FBI veterans. Some of them, you know, know people in the FBI, obviously, over the years, especially if they're on the relevant committees.
They're not happy.

Speaker 2 But, you know, no one is speaking out. The one guy who spoke out, William Webster, the FBI and CIA director from Reagan and Bush, way

Speaker 2 too long ago, who's 100 years old.

Speaker 2 And he went to the trouble of writing quite a good letter explaining how damaging it is to have the politicization that we're seeing of the FBI and CIA and people totally unqualified for the job in those two positions.

Speaker 2 I think he's the only person to have held both positions. But again, there are other former FBI and CIA directors.
There are other national security officials.

Speaker 2 And they mostly just decided to let the new administration have a chance to destroy the U.S. government, you know?

Speaker 3 Well, we should also shout out the Drizz, Brian Driscoll, who is the acting FBI director, who's been really holding the line here so far. And I think he's about,

Speaker 3 he'll probably be getting fired later this week. We'll see how that shakes out.
So there'll be much more to discuss about that.

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Speaker 1 Get ready for Malice, a twisted new drama starring Jack Whitehall, David DeCovney, and Carice Van Houten.

Speaker 1 Jack Whitehall plays Adam, a charming manny infiltrates the wealthy Tanner family with a hidden motive to destroy them.

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Speaker 3 I want to do the aforementioned foreign policy stuff. A lot happening.
There are going to be talks between the United States and Russia in Saudi Arabia.

Speaker 3 Decided to do this on, I was going to say on Putin's home turf, but I guess since Kushner is the

Speaker 3 sugar baby of the Saudis, I guess maybe it's on Kushner's home turf. They will hold talks on, quote, improving their ties and negotiating an end to the war in Ukraine.

Speaker 3 Not involved in those talks is Ukraine. Zelensky was not invited.
He's showing up to Saudi on Wednesday.

Speaker 3 Unclear why. We'll see what happens, maybe for a PR effort on that front.
Meanwhile, European leaders are meeting in Paris to discuss. Thoughts, Bill?

Speaker 2 I mean, Zelensky and the Europeans are doing their best, scrambling to try to mitigate the damage that was done by Trump in the phone call with Putin and then the subsequent announcements of these that imply, incidentally, that sanctions will be lifted.

Speaker 2 I mean, the Lavrov, who's the Russian foreign minister, Rubio, had a conversation Saturday, and Eric Edelman interpreted this for me yesterday on our little Sunday podcast.

Speaker 3 We'll put a link into that. It was really good on our subject.

Speaker 2 Thanks to Eric. I mean, you know, there they're sort of implying, at least the Russian readout of the call, that, you know, we've got to get rid of these sanctions.
We have to have close ties again.

Speaker 2 And of course, Putin and Trump himself said he wants to get together with Putin and so forth.

Speaker 2 So we're, you know, just the whole resistance to Putin, which had been held pretty well for three years, incidentally, with a lot of European nations who started off, everyone assumed, and they're going to have a tough time doing this, they've held pretty firm.

Speaker 2 The international resistance, including Asian allies of ours, totally, I mean, without the U.S. there, it's hard to believe it can hold that much longer.

Speaker 2 One worries a lot about what happens on the ground in Ukraine. So, I mean, it's very bad what's happened.
And the collapse of confidence in the U.S.,

Speaker 2 the Hagseth speech, we're no longer really too focused on Europe. I mean, what's Europe after all?

Speaker 2 It's only the place where two world wars started in the first half of the 20th century that has been kept at peace for the last 80 years, basically, until Putin invaded Ukraine, the largest ground war in 80 years, which Vance couldn't bring himself to criticize Putin on his speech in Munich on whatever that was, Friday or Saturday, Friday, I guess.

Speaker 2 It's all so bad. I mean, it was all going in that direction, and that's why some of us were against Trump and thought it was very, very dangerous to re-elect him for a second term.

Speaker 2 But I've got to say, with Musk on the domestic front and the full America first onslaught on the international front, it's kind of on the, what's the way I have to say this, the worst end of what I thought might happen both domestically and internationally.

Speaker 3 Yeah, in the international reverberations, I do think that people just underestimate

Speaker 3 how it will change. our role in the world, view of us, our ability to have influence.
And there's just this one quote that jumped out to me in one of the articles I was reading over the weekend.

Speaker 3 It's by Anna Merlikina. She's a journalist who fled to Kiev from Moripol in 2022.

Speaker 3 And she wrote, the Trump statements is a chain of humiliation for people like me, people who believed that there was law and justice in the world.

Speaker 3 When you live in a world that is crumbling under your feet, the only thing that helps you survive is to believe in guidelines and civilized, democratic countries that uphold values.

Speaker 3 When countries like the United States cease to be pillars, there is nothing to hope for. Wow.
Yikes.

Speaker 2 I didn't see that. That's really powerful.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 And I think that there's just something to that. You know, I just I was interviewing Mark Salter, who is McCain's speechwriter.
God, must have been three years ago.

Speaker 3 I was living in Oakland at the time.

Speaker 3 And he was just talking about how when he would travel with McCain, you'd go to random places, like small villages and stuff, where there are people around the world that like where we had helped them when they were pushing back against a tyrant.

Speaker 3 And it was something they remembered and it gave them pride and how excited they were and how grateful they were. Like all of those little nodes

Speaker 3 had to add up to something, right? It doesn't mean that the world wanted to be perfect or it would get a great result, but it had to add up to something. And I feel like this is just undoing.

Speaker 3 We've essentially undone all of that in a month.

Speaker 2 No, it's depressing. It really is depressing and terrible.

Speaker 2 I mean, another way of putting it maybe, I think Eric might have said this yesterday, is the U.S., which has basically been on the right side, I would say, for 80 years in terms of freedom and democracy and a decent, peaceful world order, also a prosperous one, incidentally.

Speaker 2 That's not a trivial consideration, all of which has benefited us.

Speaker 2 But we've made mistakes, and there are times we've been too cozy with dictators, and maybe some of these wars are ill-advised and so forth.

Speaker 2 But on the whole, we've been directionally, you might say, on the right side. You really have to ask the question, is the U.S.
now part of the solution or part of the problem?

Speaker 2 And that's where I think it's so demoralizing for people in Ukraine and people in Europe and

Speaker 2 soon and people in the Indo-Pacific. I mean, they're thinking about a world in which the U.S.
is not basically with them.

Speaker 2 Sometimes, as I say, hesitantly, too hesitantly from the point of view of some of us hawks, sometimes to the point of view of the more dovish parts of the internationalist coalition, too aggressively,

Speaker 2 but not on the right side. And you hate to even say that.
I mean, I really honestly, I don't like saying, I don't want to say it.

Speaker 3 I mean, we're meeting with the bad guys and not inviting the good guys to the table. I don't know what else other way there is to describe it.

Speaker 3 Nikir Stormer in UK over the weekend expressed that, if necessary, the openness to sending peacekeeping troops in.

Speaker 3 I just mentioned that because just the gap between that and what you're saying from us is so wide. And it's opposite, I guess it's not a gap, it's opposite, right?

Speaker 3 Like they are actually saying that we will put

Speaker 3 boots on the line if necessary to help protect Ukraine. And meanwhile,

Speaker 3 I guess Marco,

Speaker 3 little Marco, and Lavrov are meeting about what Russia can get out of this deal. It's really, really something.

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Speaker 3 One other foreign policy thing I just had to mention to you because it...

Speaker 3 It connects to the domestic that you mentioned with Elon. Did you see the meeting between Elon and Modi?

Speaker 2 Just saw a photo of it. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 Okay. All you kind of need to do is see a photo.
Modi, the leader of India, of course, they're meeting at the Blair house, and it's like the flags are up. It's like the formal setting for

Speaker 3 a meeting between either the state leaders or our Secretary of State and their lead diplomat. On the Modi side of the table, there's like all of his advisors.

Speaker 3 And on the Musk side, it's like a couple of his children. And that's it.
And Trump is then asked about this meeting. And he's like, I didn't know about it.

Speaker 3 And he says, maybe they're meeting about business.

Speaker 3 I mean, like, you know, it's hard to even think about what to say about something like that. Like, you know, all of these, like, the whole conspiracy about

Speaker 3 the Biden administration, about Barisma, that Hunter was doing a deal in Ukraine and that Joe Biden took a phone call at some point with one of the Barisma people.

Speaker 3 And like, that was the big controversy. And here we have the shadow president meeting with a a counterparty in the Blair House in like a formal setting.

Speaker 3 And the president is saying, well, that's fine because maybe they're just doing some deals. Like the scale of corruption is just, it's really mind-boggling.

Speaker 3 And I do think it connects to the foreign policy side of this when you talk about us being on the wrong side because it's the type of behavior of an autocratic nation, right? Like that's what it is.

Speaker 3 Yeah, that's very well said.

Speaker 2 Absolutely.

Speaker 3 All right. You've been kind of a downer, so I'm going to

Speaker 3 keep kind of leaning into that. You never know how much attention to give to stupid shit like this, but Trump bleeded over the weekend, he who saves his country does not violate any law.
This was,

Speaker 3 I guess, from a 1970 movie, Waterloo, where the Napoleon character says this in the movie. It feels, it's, it's, I think, apocryphal, not a real Napoleon quote.
It's a movie quote.

Speaker 3 Republicans on the Hill are very excited about this. One Republican congressman wrote, the president is Napoleon posting.

Speaker 3 I don't know. What's your state of alarm on Donald Trump posting as if he's an autocrat, Napoleon?

Speaker 2 Yeah, Napoleon would be the best case. It also has a certain resemblance to even worse, I suppose, 20th century autocrats, but I don't know.
Napoleon was pretty bad.

Speaker 2 He did cause 20 years of war in Europe. I mean, I do think to the degree it's true, and I don't know much about this, Napoleon said something like that when he took over in the 1790s.

Speaker 2 after the chaos of the French Revolution, not excusing Napoleon, but even think of it at that level, what Trump is sort of saying is that the Republic's finished, democracy's finished, and I've got to step in and be Napoleon for the next 20 years.

Speaker 2 I guess he's a little old for the next 20 years, but those were not a great 20 years. That didn't end up working out great for France or for Europe.

Speaker 2 But again, the idea that an American president would, even if he's just, quote, just, you know, taunting us and, you know, shitposting and all that sort of stuff, it's still awful, of course.

Speaker 2 And then, of course, everyone rushes to defend him. And Musk loves it, and these Republican members of Congress love it.
They're just against liberal democracy.

Speaker 2 And they're against the liberties of liberal democracy, and they're against the democratic processes of liberal democracy.

Speaker 2 And they are for autocracy, dictatorship, different levels probably among each other about how far they want to go in suppressing freedoms and just having one guy, one man, or a coterie of plutocrats and oligarchs around the country.

Speaker 2 But that's what they're for. And they're not even hiding it anymore.
It would be nice if some Republican somewhere criticized it, apart from us ex-Republicans.

Speaker 2 And I know the Democrats don't want to react to every tweet. They don't want to swing at every pitch.

Speaker 2 I don't know, some former president, I mean, not to get too earnest, but I don't know, if a current president tweets something like that, I would think former presidents, maybe Presidents Obama and Bush could do it together, might say something about this.

Speaker 2 I mean, again, oh, they wouldn't help. Why should I do it?

Speaker 2 But of course, if none of them does it, then ordinary people think, well, I don't know, maybe it's not such a big deal, or maybe this, you know, we'd be sort of right, or anyway, we shouldn't get too alarmed.

Speaker 2 But of course, it's consistent with everything they're doing at home and abroad, right?

Speaker 3 It is. And to your point about, you know, kind of the opposition to liberal democracy in the different degrees, Musk was posting over the weekend about how he thinks 60 Minutes should be jailed.

Speaker 3 People from 60 Minutes should be jailed because of,

Speaker 3 it doesn't even matter really what the rationale was for that. But

Speaker 3 it shows you where their head's at. So you're kind of alluding there to your request from others to speak out.
You addressed this directly over the weekend.

Speaker 3 You wrote, without going all Martin Neemoller, I do think it's bad not to speak up for immigrants, transgender Americans, civil servants, women, Ukraine, and everyone that the MAGA bullies are going after.

Speaker 3 We're beyond picking and choosing who to defend. It's time to stand up and speak out.

Speaker 3 Do you want to expand on that a little bit? Should we, I guess, should we leave people with a little bit of a stiffened spine? A lesson from Neemoller?

Speaker 2 I don't think it's so hopeless. I guess I'll come back to this.
You know, it's not as, again, it's not as if Musk got 73% of the vote or 55% of the vote, right? He got Musk, Trump shows up.

Speaker 2 Well, that's a Freudian slip. But Trump got slightly under 50% of the vote.

Speaker 2 They have 53 members in the Senate out of 100, 200 and whatever it is, 18, 19 in the House out of 435, a tiny margin, half the governorships and so forth. It's not as if there

Speaker 2 aren't plenty of Americans who aren't on board this. And there are some Americans who voted foolishly, in my view, for Trump who probably aren't on board what he's doing at home or abroad.

Speaker 2 Incidentally, half the Republicans in Congress voted freight to Ukraine less than a year ago. So I don't think the opposition is impossible.

Speaker 2 I don't think we're in a kind of horrible situation of every person who dissents has to be a genuine hero or martyr or something like that.

Speaker 2 But people do need to take the threat seriously and be serious about their opposition. And they will have endless debates about the right way to oppose.
And I'm not sure I know.

Speaker 2 I really am somewhat bewildered in some ways. But I got to think just opposing a lot is better than not opposing a lot.
I I like a simple-minded view of this, you know.

Speaker 2 And opposing across the board actually is better than being really cute and selective.

Speaker 2 That, I think, is the part that a lot of the professional Democrats don't agree with.

Speaker 2 But you cannot just sit there and look at people bullying and just doing things that are obviously not complicated policy issues, but just contrary to people's basic freedoms and contrary to basic decency.

Speaker 2 Once you accept that, you are at a very slippery slope, I think.

Speaker 3 We'll leave it there. Bill Crystal will be back next Monday.
I'm sure there'll be another parade of horrors to discuss then.

Speaker 3 Everybody else, we'll be back tomorrow for another edition of the Bullwork Podcast. We'll see you all then.
Peace.

Speaker 3 And you're feeding all your chickens, but they won't lay eggs. When you open up your dry, see your tanky clothes.

Speaker 3 Just remember, I was in love with you. But let's suppose that God is gonna drop you.
No hundred dollar bill. You got to question your intentions, cause the bad ones kill.

Speaker 3 Everybody wants the same thing,

Speaker 3 everybody wants the same thing.

Speaker 3 The trading places on the chain gang. It doesn't matter how you swing it, everybody wants the same thing.

Speaker 3 When your red sign is coming, cook around and event. Now, did you live your life right, but did you just pretend

Speaker 3 that you knew what you was talking about? What side was your fence? Cause when the hair comes down, it never makes no sense.

Speaker 3 Chaos is not a virtue, paranoia loves the bases. Just imagine giant rivers overflowing by places.

Speaker 3 Everybody wants the same thing. thing.

Speaker 3 Everybody wants the same thing.

Speaker 3 The trading places on the chain game. It doesn't matter how you swing it.
Everybody wants the same thing.

Speaker 3 The Bullard Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

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