Bill Kristol: Resist the Nihilism

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Speaker 3 Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.
It is the day of the second Trump inauguration. Like most of you, I'd rather be anywhere other than here.

Speaker 3 But we're destined to be here right now. Might as well slog through it together.
It's Monday, so I've got Bill Crystal, of course, a few programming notes real quick.

Speaker 3 Me and Bill are taping this at about 9.30 Eastern and are going to be covering everything from the Trump coin on Friday night through the developments this morning.

Speaker 3 This afternoon, we'll have a post-inauguration live stream.

Speaker 3 You'll be able to get that on Substack or YouTube. When that is finished, tomorrow, we'll have on a favorite of the pod to sort through the wreckage.
So that's our schedule to Bill.

Speaker 3 Bill, I usually start these by saying, how you doing? And I'm not really asking how you're doing when I say that. That's just kind of a nicety.
But I'm curious how you're doing, genuinely.

Speaker 4 I tried to cheer myself up this morning by writing a little morning shots about how we shouldn't be intimidated by all this bluster and executive orders and the entire media deciding that Trump has conquered all and all these people accommodating and capitulating.

Speaker 4 So I'm cheering wise, trying to cheer myself up. But I I wanted to begin by congratulating you on Jaden Daniels' performance Saturday night for the Commanders.

Speaker 4 So you've been promoting him for, what, at least three years,

Speaker 4 his two years at LSU. But you're a huge LSU booster.
And I was kind of discounting that, you know, that's just Tim being excessively loyal to LSU. Then he came to Washington.

Speaker 4 And I've learned over the years to discount Washington Redskins, now Commanders fans, in a big way because they get excited when they win, you know, two games and then they end up, you know, having a miserable season.

Speaker 4 And I haven't seen many games this year, almost any. So I was totally unprepared for Jaden Daniels' performance Saturday night, which was really fantastic, I've got to say.

Speaker 3 He was unbelievable. And the Super Bowl is in New Orleans, so maybe

Speaker 3 he'll come back down to Louisiana.

Speaker 4 That's right.

Speaker 4 He'll get you tickets, right? I mean, you're at the very top of it. After the whatever family will come, Tim Miller is at the top of the list, no question.

Speaker 3 I would hope so. I'm still in the market for tickets.
So we'll see how that goes.

Speaker 4 All three of them on, incidentally.

Speaker 4 I mean, I'm happy to be a guest. Don't get me wrong, but if you got Jaden Daniels, I would step aside one Monday.

Speaker 3 I would have gladly done this whole pod with Jaden, and we could have done film analysis. but unfortunately,

Speaker 3 that is not our fate. No, he was brilliant.
He looked brilliant. The football was brilliant all weekend.
I went to a concert last night, so

Speaker 3 if I don't seem like I'm at 100% this morning, I was trying to get endorphins and distractions from anywhere I can in this moment. And I've got to tell you, it's kind of failed.

Speaker 4 That was my fate, too. I wrote this Friday.
I said, I'm going to spend the weekend watching football, catching up on some

Speaker 4 British crime shows, maybe reading a book. I'm supposed to be reading a novel, Trollop.
And of course,

Speaker 4 I made it to a football game or two, but I mean, I couldn't get distracted. And my inbox was full of all the announcements of, you know, the Trump executive orders are coming.

Speaker 4 And then people texting me, emailing me articles about the horrible plutocrats and the horrible authoritarians. And I couldn't make myself stay away for even the whole weekend, honestly.

Speaker 3 Yeah. So we got to get to the news.
I'm going to do everybody a favor. We're not going to play his voice today.
So that's my little gift to everybody.

Speaker 3 So we're not going to play clips from him at the rally yesterday. But

Speaker 3 there was one thing that happened over the weekend that's kind of tied to my feelings of despair and nihilism about all this. It was the coin.
Trump minted a coin on Friday.

Speaker 3 It is a, I guess, a Bitcoin, but it's on the Solana

Speaker 3 crypto exchange. I'm sure you're very familiar with all of this, Bill, as a big investor.
Here's the thing about it. It is the biggest...

Speaker 3 scam in the history of the presidency. And people can't process that really.
I mean,

Speaker 3 this is different than he does does the thing where it's like, get the Trump digital baseball card or get the Trump, you know, mug or the Trump shoes. And yeah, those are all scams.
He's a con artist.

Speaker 3 But this one, this is an actual investment vehicle. Like people put real money into this.
Some people could lose real money.

Speaker 3 The coin went from like $44 to $60 something back down to $44. So if you had bought at $60 and then panicked and sold, like real people could have lost thousands, tens of thousands of dollars.

Speaker 3 They might eventually, I would think, because

Speaker 3 there's no value here.

Speaker 3 I'm not an economist, but generally, I don't understand why the Trump coin has the same net worth as like United Airlines or something right now.

Speaker 3 So, you know, the whole thing is preposterous, but it's real money. It's a real scam.
People can bribe him through it. I don't know if they are.
It's not an accusation, but people could, right?

Speaker 3 Because

Speaker 3 Trump, the organization that launched this coin, which is all the Trump associates, control 80% of it. So, you know, if it goes up X amount, they control 80% of the profits.

Speaker 3 I think that Axios estimated 25 billion or something, potential profits over the weekend. 25 billion.
They made Spiro Agno resign over 10 grand, Bill.

Speaker 4 Yeah, Warren Harding was sort of disgraced in history over the teapot dome scandal, which I don't really, I think it was about oil rights, but I don't believe it was at this level of the Trump.

Speaker 4 scam and the associated grifting. I don't understand any of it.
I mean, Susan was asking me earlier,

Speaker 4 can you explain the

Speaker 4 crypto and how is it related to what are the coins called? Bitcoin. And then there's blockchain.
Blockchain is an important part of the whole thing. It's like, I have no idea.
So

Speaker 4 I'm not the best person to explain this or discuss this.

Speaker 4 But the degree of Griff, the billions apparently that he stands to make, the degree to which people could just buy favor by letting them know they're investing in something that basically flows right to his bottom, to his pockets, to his bottom line, it is beyond imagining.

Speaker 4 It's not like selling the incredibly chintzy thing of selling your Bibles or selling your sneakers. I mean, there at least is a, I mean, it's an incredible scam and,

Speaker 4 you know,

Speaker 4 vulgar and terrible at all this and taking advantage of people, but you are buying something. You're just paying 10 times more than you should, right?

Speaker 4 I mean, that's a little different from this, which is a level of grift and possible corruption that, yeah, as you say, I think we've never seen here.

Speaker 3 Yeah, we're going to have a little more on the Bibles. And I'm happy to do a private briefing with Susan on the blockchain, how crypto is sold on the blockchain, and how there are different exchanges.

Speaker 3 I'm pretty basic on this, but I think I could get people to level one. Needless to say, and I think that the key element here is just like how much money went into it.
And you just don't know.

Speaker 3 Like you can't track it. Like somebody,

Speaker 3 right when it launched, somebody put in a million. And it's like, was that someone that was in the right place at the right time? Or did they get tipped off?

Speaker 3 And just like, if you're the Saudis or you

Speaker 3 or anybody, you know what I mean? Just think about the opportunities you have to put money right into his pocket. But here's the thing.
This is how it relates to my feelings. It worked.

Speaker 3 Like it's working.

Speaker 3 There was the guy at Barstool, Dave Portnoy, said that when he saw the big rush on this, he put in 500K in the Trump coin, cashed out a million the next day.

Speaker 3 He just made a half million last night, just doing nothing, just doing nothing, like gambling on this worthless fake coin. And it brought to mind a couple of things for me.

Speaker 3 There's a guy, Ben Dominich, who wrote for the Federalists, conservative writer, was originally never Trump with us, ended up going full Trump. He was cheerleading for Trump on Fox last night.

Speaker 3 But he wrote something in 2016 that was about LOL, nothing matters, Republicans.

Speaker 3 And he wrote this: he said, LOL, nothing matters, Republicans realize the apocalyptic predictions are happening no matter what white paper you publish, and that the lights will go down in the West and will not be relit in their lifetimes.

Speaker 3 That was his rationale for just saying, ah, fuck it, just go along with this. Like, if Trump can win, then nothing matters.
That was eight years ago. Trump's now won twice.

Speaker 3 You wrote me over the weekend when I asked what we were going to talk about. And I said, maybe we should just talk about the Romans instead.
And you sent me this quote from Tacitus.

Speaker 3 For myself, the more I reflect on events, recent or remote, the more I am haunted by the sense of a mockery in human affairs.

Speaker 3 I was with somebody last night who's younger than me, and they were talking about

Speaker 3 just how that like they have this sense of like, none of this matters. Nothing matters.
I don't care about this.

Speaker 3 Why should I be concerned? I think that this is pervasive right now. And it is giving me a sense of despair that I think is going to have an effect like broadly on the culture.

Speaker 3 A sense that just why don't we all just kind of get in on the con at this point? What do you think about that?

Speaker 4 No, I think that's unfortunately, sadly, right. I mean, certainly if you're, what, 25 and under, but maybe even 30 and under, this is the world you've lived in.

Speaker 4 I mean, it's not as if we can think back, if maybe it's just nostalgia or whatever, but to other the politicians we've known into a political era that seemed a little more

Speaker 4 hang on to standards standards and to punish people perhaps even if they violated them. I don't know.

Speaker 4 You know, didn't Mark Sanford have to, just comes to mind for some reason, have to resign as governor of, where is he, governor of South Carolina, because of his little vacation there in Argentina or something?

Speaker 4 I mean, you know, that's so pathetically nothing today, right? I mean, less than nothing. So, no, I'm with you.
And I do think that it's bad for the country, obviously, in the culture.

Speaker 4 And incidentally, this is not fair. I mean, Biden is not like Trump, and the Biden administration's misdeeds are not like Trump's.
I don't want nothing comparable.

Speaker 4 Having said that, I do think Biden's pardon of Hunter, the kind of ramshackle way the pardons were done this morning without any really explaining them or

Speaker 4 the confusion of it all, that weird, you know, the ERA, the Equal Rights Amendment is part of the Constitution. I've just decided it is as president.
I mean, really?

Speaker 4 He's deciding it is, you understand, based on a ratification by an alleged, you know, alleged ratification by a 38th state in 2020.

Speaker 4 So he could have decided this on the basis of Justice Department guidance in 2021 or 2022. No, he's deciding it five days before he leaves the presidency.

Speaker 4 I mean, I don't think Biden's helping, honestly. And so here we are.

Speaker 4 I agree. The nihilism is a good, unfortunately, a good word for it.

Speaker 3 But this is the thing about the ERA. Actually, I mean, it is preposterous.
But to your point, it speaks exactly to this sense, right? It's like, well, fuck it.

Speaker 3 If nothing matters, like if none of the, if the rule of law doesn't matter, if this guy can get back into the White House after being indicted four times on different crimes and convicted, I guess he's just going to kind of wave his hand and say that the TikTok ban, for example, which was passed by overwhelming bipartisan legislation in Congress, signed by the president, affirmed by the Supreme Court unanimously, and he can just come in and be like, delayed.

Speaker 3 You know, he can just wave a wand and say delayed. And

Speaker 3 then why can't Joe Biden just wave a wand and say, we have a new amendment to the Constitution?

Speaker 3 It becomes to me, like this is as somebody who does care about this stuff, I begin to understand, like it becomes rational to start to act as if like there's no point in abiding by you know kind of these these shared agreements that we have had you know if you you're going to be you know seeing the pictures of what's happening today in the same building where he incited a mob

Speaker 3 I don't know I'll make the case to make the case to believe in something, Bill.

Speaker 3 That's where I'm at here this morning.

Speaker 3 I want you to make the case to me that I need to believe that any of this matters.

Speaker 4 I'll make the sort of negative case, which is Trump wants you to believe that none of it matters.

Speaker 4 And I do think Havel and others, Verklov Havel and others who've studied and lived under forms of authoritarianism have always said this.

Speaker 4 The authoritarians want to make everyone a nihilist because then it's all up for grabs and they're crooked, but the opposition is probably crooked too.

Speaker 4 And so, you know, why not let them be crooked and get along and not cause trouble and so forth. And I do think that's, I mean, the TikTok thing is unbelievable.

Speaker 4 It's not just what you said, that what you said is absolutely correct. But Trump himself...

Speaker 4 was of course initiated the tick tock proposed the tick tock ban way back when when he was president and praised it as late as 2023 if i'm not mistaken, right? He was still on board that.

Speaker 4 Then it turns out one of his biggest donors is a huge, big investor in TikTok. And then it turns out he has, God knows what else is happening beneath the scenes.

Speaker 4 And now he's reversing it sort of without any legal basis, I don't think, delaying it. And he's going to work something out.
Maybe the U.S.

Speaker 4 government, he said, under his control, can control half of TikTok. Oh, that'd be great.
The government controls half of whatever

Speaker 4 a major media platform is. That kind of the way things are supposed to work in the U.S.

Speaker 3 We're going to seize the means of content production, Bill.

Speaker 3 That is true conservatism. We're seizing the means of content production in short-form video.

Speaker 4 Good point. I mean, my main argument against would be Trump wants us to become nihilists, so we should resist becoming nihilists, and we should

Speaker 4 look to the future and

Speaker 4 find a leader like Jaden Daniels to lead us out of the wilderness here.

Speaker 3 I hope for people listening, they understand that I was, this is kind of a rhetorical exercise with you.

Speaker 3 I did write recently about not letting Donald Trump take my soul, and I'm committed to that, to not fully descending into complete Ben Dominic-level level nihilism, or maybe kind of close to Tacitus, I guess.

Speaker 3 I mean, I guess laughing at the mockery of a fairs, I might still do.

Speaker 3 But I do think it's still important to look at what has happened today, believe it can be defeated, and believe that there is some value in maintaining the system that we've built.

Speaker 3 But, you know, to your point, you wrote about this. I guess it was the Friday pod.
No matter what, like the era that kind of undergirded this, you know, this

Speaker 3 Western-based rules-based order is kind of over. Like that is the one, that's why I wanted to tie back to the dominant segment.
Like that's kind of right, right?

Speaker 3 Like, hopefully it will persist in a different form, but the order that got us to here in the post-war order to now does feel basically over, right?

Speaker 4 Yeah, I think it has to be recreated, and that can't be done simply by wishing that it was still strong.

Speaker 4 And it does require more, I think, bolder thinking for the obvious reason that once the thing has crumbled, you need to build anew, so to speak, not simply prop it up with patching in a part of the column that's falling down.

Speaker 4 That patching is not bad, it's at least a temporary expedient. That's why I do mention Jamie, joking about Jaden Daniels aside.
I mean, I think we do need

Speaker 4 new thinking and really new leadership. And

Speaker 4 that's easier said than done. And I myself get annoyed when I read all these articles saying, you know, people shouldn't just fight Trump.
They need to think in a fresh way.

Speaker 4 Well, I write that myself sometimes, but what does that mean? Why don't write the first part?

Speaker 4 Can I just, since we're into our feelings, what are my feelings over the weekend when I gave up on my resolution not to think about Trump, but about all this, is the number of people writing pieces about, oh, well, we can't just do what we did in the first term and just oppose Trump.

Speaker 4 I mean, that was really silly and that didn't work. We need to do something else.
Anyway, something else is and get along with him more, dealing case-by-case kind of look.

Speaker 4 Some Democratic senator said, Christina Smith of Minnesota, I don't know why, disguising her name, that, you know, she's not going to oppose everything or chase everything's foolish Trump does.

Speaker 4 She's going to watch out for the voters in Minnesota. I guess that's reasonable if you're elected representative.
But I don't know. I don't think opposing Trump for the first term was so bad.

Speaker 4 And so that it worked kind of, didn't it? He got stopped from doing a lot of bad things he could have done.

Speaker 4 A lot of people, you know, managed to stay here as immigrants, and he didn't succeed in kicking them out or making their lives, in most cases, too miserable.

Speaker 4 And he didn't succeed in a million other things. He didn't destroy NATO.
He didn't, whatever. And people resisted him internally and externally.

Speaker 4 And they lost Congress in 2018, the House in 2018, and he lost the presidency in 2020. So there's so much.
Do you find this?

Speaker 4 I was reading so many people sort of being disparaging the efforts that people have made. And I don't think that's quite, maybe we have a bit of a self-interest in this, but I don't think that's fair.

Speaker 4 And I don't think it's healthy going forward. I mean, you don't know what's going to work in terms of fighting.
I'm not for fighting every single thing. Obviously, it has to be

Speaker 4 sensible in figuring out where to pick your battles and so forth. But there's too much advanced defeatism here, I think.

Speaker 3 I'm glad you brought this up. I do agree.
Also, there's value in saying that things are wrong for saying that things are wrong's sake.

Speaker 3 This is like the thing that I, my one pundit resolution for the next two years is when I go on one of these fucking shows and somebody's like, well, do you think that,

Speaker 3 you know, do you think it'll have an impact to, you know, criticize Trump on this thing or that thing?

Speaker 3 My answer is going to be like, I don't know and don't care. Nobody knows.
We don't have a crystal ball.

Speaker 3 And nobody asked, you know, Navalny every time he said something that Putin did something was wrong.

Speaker 3 Were they like, Alexi, do you think this will have an impact at the polls when you're criticizing Putin's corruption? Like, Putin's corruption is bad for the sake of it being bad.

Speaker 3 Same with Orban, same with Lukashenko, and same with Donald Trump. And hopefully, we don't take the slide all the way down to that style authoritarianism.

Speaker 3 But I do kind of resent this notion that every, that if you took a principled opposition to something and then the voters voted for some other, on some other issue or based on some other priorities, then that opposition did not have value.

Speaker 3 I do reject that completely.

Speaker 4 Yeah. and just to add a more less elevated point, I totally agree with what you're saying, is also it's hard to predict.

Speaker 4 I mean, you never know, I find it's very hard to know what issues backfire, where they overreach, what voters click into and what they know to how the world plays out, of course, right?

Speaker 4 I mean, Bush had a big problem with the Iraq War when he was at Art Grade in January of 2005. It didn't go well for 2005 and 2006.

Speaker 4 But the things that really clobbered the Bush administration in his second term in the first year were this, they decided to have a big priority of radically reforming Social Security, which no one was aware that that's what they were running on in 2004.

Speaker 4 And secondly, Hurricane Katrina. So things happen, right? And you don't know kind of where the weaknesses will emerge.

Speaker 4 And obviously, we don't want people to suffer like a Hurricane Katrina type situation, but massive war in Europe with Ukraine, possible confrontations or lack thereof or capitulations to China.

Speaker 4 cross-pressuring of Trump space. I think there's a lot that could be done there.
I mean, I noticed that even Tom Cotton, who's been an awfully loyal supporter of Trump, couldn't abide the TikTok fact.

Speaker 4 And at least on Twitter, was criticizing it. Will he do something in Congress? I don't know.

Speaker 4 But I think you got to test a lot of different issues, partly because you just got to do the right thing and say the truth for later. Maybe someone will pick it up a year later when the polls change.

Speaker 4 But also because you don't, practically speaking, I think people don't have a good, I don't have a good track record, I should say, of knowing kind of which issues are going to hit and which aren't.

Speaker 4 And final point. For all the talk about how powerful he is, and I myself have said that he's triumphant and dominance and so forth, and he is.

Speaker 4 There's no point, I can't wish that away exactly right now. His actual approval, favorable, unfavorable rating, if we could just be back to politics for a minute, is slightly underwater.

Speaker 4 CNN had it minus two, and I noticed 538 average was minus one. He's gone up from about 43, 44% to 47, 48% since the election.

Speaker 4 I don't think that's a huge rise, given that he had a pretty good honeymoon. No one was attacking him much.
People were capitulating right and left and excusing him right and left.

Speaker 4 And, you know, I actually am surprised he can't get above 50, which he is not above. So it's not as if we're looking at, you know, King Kong here in terms of American politics, FDR in 36 or something.

Speaker 4 How can one even think of opposing him? And incidentally, just to take FDR, it occurs to me as I say, FDR. So he was really powerful, right?

Speaker 4 He wins the biggest reelection victory maybe in American history in 36. Democrats control, I don't even know what, three quarters of Congress or something like that.
He's

Speaker 4 getting America out of the Depression and so forth. And he stopped on his big court stop packing scheme, what, a year or two later?

Speaker 4 I mean, things do move fast in politics, so people should be less, uh, yeah, less deterministic and less defeatist than they are.

Speaker 3 I like you have some grandkids there that are at least keeping you grounded.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I'm sorry about that in the background. It's cute.

Speaker 3 No, I love it. I think it's cute.

Speaker 4 Yeah, yeah. I'll turn off the recording of it.

Speaker 4 It's just a plea for sympathy. You know, they are there.

Speaker 4 We're at our son and daughter-in-law's house, and they're the two-year-old, three-year-old, and almost three-year-old and just five-year-old are very much enjoying the sew.

Speaker 4 This must be outside enjoying the sew. They seem to be inside enjoying having been in the snow.

Speaker 3 The sounds of the the children are the only thing giving me a little joy.

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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.

Speaker 1 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 1 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 watch malice all episodes now streaming exclusively on prime video

Speaker 3 all right we have to do some news i don't really want to but um i'm out of the feelings into the news uh you mentioned the pardons President Biden issued preemptive pardons for Mark Milley, Anthony Fauci, members of the January 6th Committee, and the cops who testified before the committee.

Speaker 3 They write: the issuance of these pardons should not be mistaken as an acknowledgement that any individual engaged in any wrongdoing, nor should acceptance be misconstrued as an admission of guilt for any offense.

Speaker 3 I don't know. Just in the interest of candor, and I guess daily listeners of the pod will know this.
Initially, I was for this after the election. It seemed like the right thing to do.

Speaker 3 Increasingly, I was persuaded against it by a couple of people who were on the list for getting preemptive pardons because you can say that the issuance should not be mistaken as an acknowledgement of wrongdoing, but even still, tacitly, it kind of is.

Speaker 3 And in addition,

Speaker 3 there is the precedent. And

Speaker 3 I don't know. We might still have a rule of law in 2029.
I would like to be open to the possibility that there's still a rule of law in this country in 2029.

Speaker 3 And if some of Donald Trump's henchmen commit crimes, that they might have to be held to account for them.

Speaker 3 I don't don't have much hope that Donald Trump will be held to account, but maybe there is still hope that some of the people around him are.

Speaker 3 So I fall down on being opposed to this after consideration, but I do think it's a tough call. I don't know what you think.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I'm skeptical at least of it and more or less opposed. I mean, if individuals were contacted and said, yes, I would like one.

Speaker 4 I don't begrudge Anthony Fauci, who's 81 years old, who's going to be unjustly gone after, certainly, by the Republicans and maybe by the Trump administration.

Speaker 4 Of course, it doesn't stop them from being called before hearings in the House and so forth or in the Senate. But I don't begrudge that pardon.

Speaker 4 I guess he accepted it. But they did it in a pretty haphazard way.
It's the members of the Gender Exix Committee and staff. I happen to know some of the staff.

Speaker 4 I know some of the members, Liz Cheney, Adam Kinziger. I have the impression they didn't want the pardons.

Speaker 4 I don't know that they were, it was explained to them exactly what they're supposed to do now. If they don't want them, do you not accept them? Can you not accept a pardon?

Speaker 4 Even I think it's legally murky, actually. Maybe you can, but no one, again, my impression, I know this for a fact, I won't say this is an impression.

Speaker 4 Many people who may be on the list didn't know if they were on the list and don't know now as we speak at 9:30 in the morning. I mean, it's been a bit of a chaotic thing.

Speaker 4 And so, Mark Milley, I mean, I don't know, I respect Mark Milley, but you know what?

Speaker 4 Mark Milley, there would have been totally free legal work volunteered for him to defend himself against baseless charges.

Speaker 4 And I almost think, wouldn't he welcome standing up to these bullies and making a point about proper behavior as a senior military officer.

Speaker 4 So I'm disappointed in the pardons, I guess is the way to put it. And I don't think it helps.
It gets back to the point we discussed a little bit earlier. I think it's unfair.

Speaker 4 It's not like pardoning, God knows, a bunch of January 6th rioters. But will it be used that way by all Trump defenders? Absolutely.
Biden did his pardons? Trump did his pardons.

Speaker 4 What's the issue, right?

Speaker 3 We're going to get to the January 6th, folks. But one more Biden news this morning.
Use the word disappointed. That's probably a little bit understating where I am on this topic.
Dr.

Speaker 3 Jill Biden and President Biden will host a tea and coffee reception in the Blue Room this morning.

Speaker 3 It's probably happening as we speak right now, actually, with the Trumps, before all four ride to the U.S. Capitol together for the inauguration.
Gag me.

Speaker 3 Was the tea and crumpets necessary? I don't think it was. I don't know.
Some people might disagree with that. It feels to me

Speaker 3 it's not the biggest deal in the world, but it's a no for me, I guess, as Randy Jackson would say.

Speaker 4 It's a tradition,

Speaker 4 I guess. I seem to remember it from when we were leaving the White House on January 20th, 1993, at the end of the Bush-Quayle administration.

Speaker 4 Not that I was there, but the Bushes did it for the Clintons.

Speaker 4 Vice President Quayle, I don't remember if he had to do it for the incoming Vice President Gore, and I'm sure if they were supposed to, they did it in a nice way. But yeah, it's a little bit.
much.

Speaker 4 I mean, it gets to the broader point. You can be a traditionalist or an institutionalist, as people say a lot these days.

Speaker 4 But at some point, simply being a traditionalist or institutionalist in the kind of sense of, I'm just following this because this is what was done before,

Speaker 4 it undercuts actual institutionalism or healthy traditionalism where you're upholding standards. And I don't think it would be amiss.

Speaker 4 President Biden shouldn't gratuitously necessarily attack Trump or anything like that, but it wouldn't be amiss to simply pass on this crumpets, as you say, and meet him at the Capitol at noon, right?

Speaker 4 You know, I mean,

Speaker 4 yeah, I don't know.

Speaker 3 You can't really sell me on, I'm an institutionalist when we're doing smiley photos with Donald Trump at the White House and having tea.

Speaker 3 And I'm not an institutionalist when I'm adding amendments to the Constitution randomly a couple days before the election. That just isn't a match for me.
You kind of need both or neither.

Speaker 3 I would be on the side of neither. You could sell me on both, but the either or is not working for me.

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Speaker 3 To Trump's moves. So he had a rally yesterday, and as part of my pledge,

Speaker 3 people just don't need that in their life today. He had a rally at the, what are they calling it? It was the MCI Center, the Verizon Center, where the Wizards flag, Capital One Arena now.

Speaker 3 And he talked about how he plans to pardon the hostages today, is what he called them, and how that was going to make people very happy. Elon got to speak.
The vice presidential elect did not.

Speaker 3 I thought that was interesting. It was, you know, Trumpy.
It was garish and

Speaker 3 absurd. You know, Stephen Miller was doing some racially motivated attacks on people.

Speaker 3 It wasn't quite at Madison Square Garden level, but again, I mean, it is in sharp contrast with the tea this morning, I guess, that Trump decided to have a non-traditional pre-inauguration rally where he talked about releasing the people that savaged cops at the Capitol.

Speaker 4 And I guess having moved the inauguration indoors, there's not space for all the buddies and donors and others, prospective donors who are going to pay quite a lot in effect to be there.

Speaker 4 So they're being shuttled over to the Capitol One Arena, which is where the Capitols and

Speaker 4 the Wizards play, 20,000 seats. I'm sure, I don't know, maybe they get the nice boxes there at the top so they don't have to sit just in the

Speaker 4 upper deck.

Speaker 4 But I mean, I don't know.

Speaker 4 Do you think someone's made this point to me yesterday when I was was giving up on my attempt to stay away from Trump stuff this weekend that the grift could really get to people?

Speaker 4 No, I mean, the grift and the plutocracy side of it. I mean, it's so evident and it's so grotesque and it's not available.

Speaker 4 I mean, I guess individuals can buy these Bitcoins or whatever, but it's not the grift that is available to wealthy people, even your buddy there.

Speaker 3 They're taking on risk, the individual people that buy the Bitcoins. I mean, who knows? The Trump Bitcoin could go to the moon and it could just go up, up, up forever.
You know, what the hell?

Speaker 3 The rules of capitalist economics seem to not be applying these days, but

Speaker 3 they're at least still taking on risk, right? Like the plutocrats are not.

Speaker 4 Right.

Speaker 4 The people who, yes, and you read these articles, the banking CEOs, of course, the financial guys, but a million others too, just kind of glorying in their access and in their ability to get things done.

Speaker 4 And well, of course, we've seen this all with Bezos and Zuckerberg and so forth. I don't know.

Speaker 4 People might look at that and think, this is, I mean, there's always been an element of this, God knows, two chairs for capitalism, not three. And always an element of robber barons and all that.

Speaker 4 I was thinking about that. I got to go back and reread about the robber bears.

Speaker 4 Robert Barons was obviously a pejorative name for these business sites, but my impression of them is I'm sure they were not beyond a little bit of, you know, jimmying the system and paying off state legislatures and, you know, whatever to maybe government agencies to get the right railroad route or the right oil drilling permits or something.

Speaker 4 But they did produce oil. I mean, they did like actually, you know, there are actual railroads that were built by these these guys, right?

Speaker 4 And then they gave some money to philanthropy and they have, we have Carnegie Libraries and we have, you know, the University of Chicago from the Rockefellers and so forth and Duke University from Mr.

Speaker 4 Duke. And I don't know.
I mean, was that, does that make up for whatever misdeeds they did? I don't know. I'll let other people judge that.
But there's not even a pretense of any of that now.

Speaker 4 I mean, it's all just, don't you think? I mean, it's just. grift, 100%,

Speaker 4 all grift all the time.

Speaker 3 It's the exact opposite. Not only is there not a pretense of that public-mindedness, they're actively hostile to it.

Speaker 3 Mark Andreessen said this, like the VC who is in Trump's inner circles, been, according to the Washington Post, been interviewing people for jobs, who has tons of interest in crypto and AI, was a seed donor to the free press.

Speaker 3 Did notice the free press got a nice exclusive leak from the Trump administration? I don't know if Mark Andreessen was involved in that, but

Speaker 3 like he said recently that he was,

Speaker 3 I don't know exactly the words, but resentful towards this notion that like, you have to make all this money and then to be good in liberal society and you have to give it all away.

Speaker 3 Like, he was attacking the exact thing that you're talking about.

Speaker 3 Like, this, this other, you know, this era of, you know, exceptionally kind of wealthy, you know, the Rockefellers, the Carnegies, et cetera, they made all this wealth for themselves, but then also, you know, redistributed back in various other pursuits.

Speaker 3 And so, again, it's just like, you can not like the Rockefellers and have plenty of complaints about that, but it does seem better than the alternative, which is making ungodly sums of money and then being resentful when being told that you might have some obligation back to the people in your society.

Speaker 4 Aaron Powell, Jr.: And those guys didn't treat workers well all the time, and there are many swagger labor unions and so forth.

Speaker 4 But the degree of contempt these people have, and you see this in the rhetoric around Doge in particular, for actual civil servants, look, I call them bureaucrats, not civil servants, if you don't want to be so nice to them.

Speaker 4 If it's at the education department, for three years, I've worked with them at the White House, saw them a little less directly. But

Speaker 4 some of them, there can be changes and reforms, and maybe they have too hard to move them around or to fire them and so forth.

Speaker 4 The idea that these people though deserve no respect at all, who are working for middle class, sometimes if they make it up near to the top, upper middle class salaries, working quite hard, trying to do the right thing mostly and doing jobs that it kind of important that they be done.

Speaker 4 And it's one thing to treat them with a certain kind of politeness, but deep down think, okay, we can really improve the system here. You know, it's too bureaucratic and so forth.

Speaker 4 They're not treated with any courtesy or politeness. And I find it kind of disgusting, honestly.

Speaker 4 And I suppose this is just me, you know, Washington, D.C., deep state person who knows a lot of people who work in government talking. But it's really terrible, I would say.

Speaker 4 And it just shows what they made a lot of money, fine. No one's actually proposing to take away, Joe Biden was president for four years, or the Democratic Congress for two years.

Speaker 4 They didn't take away a lot of those people's money, quite the contrary. They're richer than ever at the end of the Biden administration.

Speaker 4 Now they're presumably going to be even richer than ever because of all the grifting, if nothing else.

Speaker 4 But they can't just sort of politely enjoy being billionaires and respect other people who haven't succeeded that way and haven't, you know, whatever, for whatever reason they didn't choose to, or

Speaker 4 they weren't able to work the system quite that way, or they didn't have Elon Musk's promotional, self-promotional abilities, or to be fair, they didn't have some actual abilities, conceivably that some of these people have, I don't have them either, but those abilities.

Speaker 4 But the notion that you should basically respect your fellow citizens.

Speaker 4 And you should respect people who are making $50,000 a year working as nurses and people who are making $140,000 a year, working as in the higher ranks of government, and you should respect people who are making, you know, working for you.

Speaker 4 And that's all out the window. And I got to think that's corrosive.
It's A, it's very corrosive. And B, that it does fit into the kind of nihilism.
But is it sustainable to vote?

Speaker 4 Is that what people don't want that, I should think.

Speaker 4 That's why I wonder how much the plutocracy side of it, the grotesqueness of the grifting side of it, could end up hurting the Trump administration politically.

Speaker 3 I do think it's possible. And I do think that there will be some backlash.
I sometimes worry about the nature of the backlash. And I think a lot of it will also depend on the results.

Speaker 3 Good news is I'm not expecting a lot of great results from the Donald Trump administration. We've got these executive orders.

Speaker 3 I wouldn't have a lot of time to kind of sift through all of them and discuss the impact.

Speaker 3 You know, there's going to be, I guess, potentially, according to reports, declaration of emergency on the border, ending all kinds of DEI programs within the government,

Speaker 3 ending any efforts to accommodate people who have a different gender identity than the one that they were born with. Those will be eliminated.

Speaker 3 We've already mentioned the pardoning of the people that beat the cops at the Capitol on Donald Trump's behalf and potentially the TikTok extension.

Speaker 3 I'm wondering if you have any thoughts on any of those in particular or big picture. It feels almost silly at this point to be like, conservatives used to be against

Speaker 3 executive fiat.

Speaker 3 And I think this is probably something that has been really pernicious throughout this century.

Speaker 3 I mean, Bush, you know, did Bush did more on executive orders than previous presidents had, at least the recent previous presidents.

Speaker 3 Obama then did more than him, and then Trump and, you know, obviously Biden with student loans, et cetera. So this has been kind of an ever-escalating thing that I oppose.

Speaker 3 But I think it's, I don't know at this point how to roll it back. So any big picture thoughts on the executive orders or any of the individual items?

Speaker 4 Yeah, no, we'll have so much time to talk about. I guess one thing that strikes me is he's doing it all with such shock and awe.

Speaker 4 We had a good piece, a great piece by retired general, Lieutenant General Mark Hurtling about, you know, shock and awe, that doesn't always work out so well.

Speaker 4 And how he first heard the phrase as a maybe junior officer, I guess. And it's like, I don't know, is that really going to work on the battlefield? And it works for like a day or two.

Speaker 4 And then if you're not ready to dig in and do the hard work over the, for the counterinsurgency and so forth, that didn't work out so well in Iraq.

Speaker 4 And he sort of makes the point that maybe that'll be the case here or implies that'll be the case. That could be the case.
I sort of feel that way. I think on immigration in particular,

Speaker 4 I put it this way. The impression he's he's giving is that he can do everything and that the executive orders are going to solve all these problems.

Speaker 4 And on the economy, I suppose that there's been pretty good, actually, energy production under Biden. Maybe it'll go up some more.
Maybe in some other areas he can do some things.

Speaker 4 He can make some people's lives unjustly unpleasant in the transgender realm and other such things. Immigration strikes me, he's claiming he's going to solve this problem.

Speaker 4 And I wonder, and I'm basing this partly on the conversation I had with Aaron Reichland-Melnick and other stuff that people have written recently. It's

Speaker 4 A, it's not clear how much it's a problem as opposed to a good thing for the country to have these immigrants working here and how much of a damage he's going to do if people get deported or self-deport because they're so fearful.

Speaker 4 And again, leaving aside almost the human damage in a way to these unjust, the injustice of what's going to happen, he's taking a lot of responsibility on.

Speaker 4 And I just wonder what that looks like six or twelve or eighteen months from now.

Speaker 3 You know, there's a reason presidents don't mind sometimes saying, I'd like to do this, but Congress has to act and Congress is being recalcitrant here and what could I have done you know i think trump's not giving himself much of an excuse in that way i agree with that i think another potential thing we'll kind of see how it plays out is there's now going to be a big gap between the shock and awe and when they actually do anything you know it's going to take congress a long time to do stuff and so this is why generally people

Speaker 3 in addition to the fact that Some presidents cared about the limits on executive power and, you know, had like legal experts and people within the government reviewing these sorts of things before they got announced, is what traditionally said, you know, there weren't 200 of them or however many that ended up being on Inauguration Day.

Speaker 3 But also, just politically speaking, you know, you kind of roll them out over the course of a month or two while your agenda gets moving through Congress.

Speaker 3 And so I think that's also something to monitor. One other thing, Senator Ron Johnson told reporters this morning that Trump is talking of tariff revenue of as much as $1 trillion.

Speaker 3 Just obviously preposterous on its face. That would be about a 25% tariff on all imports.
Johnson says he's trying to talk Trump out of it, but doesn't know what he'll decide.

Speaker 3 So that's another thing to monitor coming down the pike.

Speaker 4 I remember this number, I'm sure I've got it wrong, but like maybe $80 billion in tariff revenues right now.

Speaker 4 That would be a pretty big increase in tariffs, which will have unanticipated or anticipated maybe economic consequences, which will not all be good. That's what I mean.

Speaker 4 I mean, in a way, yes, I was thinking as you were talking about a month or two, I guess Roosevelt introduced maybe the concept of the first 100 days in 1933. They had to really get going fast.

Speaker 4 And 100 days was considered lightning speed. And that's kind of lasted, hasn't it, even into modern times? I think Gingrich talked about the first 100 days in 1995 with a contract for America.

Speaker 4 And that gives you at least a little running room. You also get Congress on board.
So it's sort of like a lot of people.

Speaker 4 He's doing this all himself. It's on him.
It's on Steve Miller. It's on Ross Fog.
It's on J.D. Vance.

Speaker 4 And I do come back to something we have discussed a bit, which is I'm not so sure all these guys are that popular and all their ideas are that popular.

Speaker 4 And all these cabinet secretaries are going to be like, oh, yeah, they're the guys we want enforcing this.

Speaker 4 Because, you know, Pam Bondi, she's really thought through the legal complexities of how to do all these things and how to deprive

Speaker 4 some people of some civil rights they thought they had without actually harming other civil rights or harming people in ways that are totally unjust and and the same in some of these other policy areas.

Speaker 4 We really trust Pete Hex asked to kind of he understands the military well enough.

Speaker 4 He has enough experience managing huge institutions to really get rid of the DEI stuff without actually doing huge damage.

Speaker 4 I mean, mean, maybe this will all work out a little, you know, maybe they'll have a good run for a week or two or three. I suppose they probably will.

Speaker 4 But I kind of feel like two months from now, this could feel pretty different than it does in the first blush of shock and all.

Speaker 3 I agree. All right.
I'm going to leave us with this. We are about an hour and a half away from Donald Trump putting his hand on the Bible as we tape.

Speaker 3 And we had a little bit of news last night from country music singer Lee Greenwood about what Bible Trump will be using. Let's take a listen to that.

Speaker 6 When Donald Donald Trump puts his hand on the Bible and swears the oath to take care of the country and he's the 47th president of the United States, I'm hoping it'll be this Bible, which is released tomorrow as a tribute to Donald Trump, the 47th president.

Speaker 6 It's GodblessUSABible.com. There are only going to be 5,000 of these.
And I know he's going to take the oath by putting his hand on several Bibles. He might do this one as well.

Speaker 7 You know, Lee, when I teased earlier that, hey, maybe Lee will sing us out in a bit when he joins us, a viewer wrote in and said, no, no, he needs to save his voice.

Speaker 3 It's turtles all the way down, Bill. It's Grift all the way down.

Speaker 3 We are, we don't know, maybe putting our hand on the God bless the USA Bible, which you can just get if you go to Lee Greenwood's website.

Speaker 3 And, you know, only a little bit of a cut of that is going to go to the president-elect. And only 4,000 of these bad boys.
So get them while they're hot.

Speaker 4 I can't.

Speaker 4 I'm at a loss for words.

Speaker 4 You know, it's So usually often in these inaugural speeches, if you go back and skim through them, they begin, the presidents, incoming presidents, begin with a little riff on the Bible that they've, you know, this is the Bible George Washington used, or this is something that my family, you know, and it kind of is a nice way of getting into the solemnity of the moment, but also its greatness, the peaceful transfer of power that Washington began.

Speaker 4 And now 200 years later, I think this was a big, I think George H.W. Bush did this in 1989, if I recall.
And of course, well, Trump can't very well do a peaceful transfer of power rhapsody, can he?

Speaker 4 That's That's not kind of his thing, you know. One thing Trump said, final point of it, over the weekend that I didn't get any attention.

Speaker 4 Where was this? I think it was in his speech yesterday. I saw a clip of it.
They stole the election from us in 2020. We're not going to let that happen again.
And it struck me as ambiguous.

Speaker 4 I mean, maybe saying there wouldn't be fraud again, and they'll have changed the rule.

Speaker 4 I don't know what they'll do with the federal government, but they'll change the rules so those votes can't be stolen, allegedly, in Georgia and Arizona and Pennsylvania.

Speaker 4 It had a slightly more ominous sound to it, too, as if, like, you know what? We may not be allowing an election that removes us or our party or himself, if he wants a third term or J.D.

Speaker 4 Vance or whatever, from power in 2028. There'll be an election, don't get me wrong, just the way there is in Hungary and Russia for that matter.
But the playing field will be pretty tilted by that.

Speaker 4 And I don't know. You know, I've been one who's not gone down that path of we'll never have another election again or whatever.
But you look at TikTok and you look at X and you look at...

Speaker 4 what they're doing with the federal government and the amount of money they'll be doling out to friends and allies and making clear that if you aren't on board the re-elect, the next re-elect or the election advance or whatever, that money goes away.

Speaker 4 It is,

Speaker 4 I don't need to end on a down note, though.

Speaker 3 No, this is an appropriately alarming endower. Final note from you, Bill Crystal.
I had a text, I'm in New York.

Speaker 3 If I'm going to be on MSNBC today, if people really want to suffer and do self-harm and watch me talk about it on the news. And so I don't have my usual setups.

Speaker 3 My texts are popping up here on my computer.

Speaker 3 And as you are giving that alarming you know, at the close to this podcast, I received a text from a friend that said, Trump getting inaugurated on MLK Day. We are a failure.

Speaker 3 I can't really do much better than that. So

Speaker 3 I'm going to leave it there. Everybody else, come hang out with us if you want, post-inauguration if you're desperate for like-minded folk on YouTube or on Substack.

Speaker 3 Otherwise, we'll be back here tomorrow for another edition of the Bullwork podcast. Thanks to Bill Crystal.
We'll see you all there.

Speaker 3 You're working too hard,

Speaker 4 you're living too fast.

Speaker 4 Hands over your eyes with a foot on the gates.

Speaker 4 And the best I can tell,

Speaker 4 the crowd seems a shame.

Speaker 4 It sounds like a warning when they call out your name.

Speaker 4 The boy genius has grown now.

Speaker 4 The competition got fears.

Speaker 4 And you'd rather be anywhere other than here.

Speaker 4 But it can get so much

Speaker 4 worse.

Speaker 4 I reckon it will

Speaker 4 invest in

Speaker 4 Hills.

Speaker 4 Last night was a long one.

Speaker 4 You made a lot of new friends,

Speaker 4 and your band was on fire right up till the end.

Speaker 4 You met a girl from the suburb,

Speaker 4 but you missed all the cues.

Speaker 4 I bet you don't remember me tying your shoes. So, boy, genius has grown now,

Speaker 4 and you're an angry young man.

Speaker 4 Well, I won't be around when you die in the van.

Speaker 4 I got kids of mine, mine.

Speaker 4 Not much I

Speaker 4 will

Speaker 4 investigate your

Speaker 4 heels.

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

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