Bill Kristol: Resist the Nihilism

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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, 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. 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.

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

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.

Bill, I usually start these by saying, how are 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. 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.
So I'm trying to cheer myself up. But I wanted to begin by congratulating you on Jaden Daniels' performance Saturday night for the Commanders.
So you've been promoting him for, what, at least three years, two years at LSU. But you're a huge LSU booster.
And I was kind of discounting that. You know, that's just him being excessively loyal to LSU.
Then he came to Washington. 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 two games, and then they end up having a miserable season.
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.
He was unbelievable. And the Super Bowl is in New Orleans, so maybe you can throw him back down to? I mean, you're at the very top of it.
After the whatever family will come, Tim Miller's at the top of the list. No question.
I would hope so. I'm still in the market for tickets.
So we'll see how that goes. I also- Shouldn't you have him on, incidentally? 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.
I would have gladly done this whole pod with Jaden, and we could have done film analysis, but unfortunately, 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 if I don't seem like I'm at 100% this morning, I'm trying to get endorphins and distractions from anywhere I can in this moment, and I got to tell you, it's kind of failed. That was my fate, too.
I wrote this Friday. I said, I'm going to spend the weekend watching football, catching up on some Britbox crime, British crime shows, maybe reading a book.
I'm supposed to be reading a novel, Trollope. And of course, I lasted, I made it to a football game or two.
But I mean, I couldn't get distracted. My inbox was full of all the announcements of, you know, the Trump executive orders are coming.
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.
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. So we're not going to play clips from him at the rally yesterday.
But there was one thing that happened over the weekend that's kind of tied to my feelings of despair and nihilism about all of this. It was the coin.
Trump minted a coin on Friday. It is, I guess, a Bitcoin, but it's on the Solana crypto exchange.
I'm sure you're very familiar with all of this, Bill, big investor here's the thing about it it is the biggest scam in the history of the presidency and people can't process that really i mean they he this is different than he does the thing where it's like get the trump digital baseball card or get the trump you know mug or the trump shoes yeah, those are all scams. He's a con artist.
But this one, this is an actual investment vehicle. Like people put real money into this.
Some people could lose real money. 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. They, they might eventually, I would think, because, you know, there's no value here.
I'm not, 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. So, you know, the whole thing is, 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? Because 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. I think that Axios estimated 25 billion or something, potential profits over the weekend.
25 billion. They made Spiro Agnew resign over 10 grand, Bill.
Yeah, Warren Harding was sort of disgraced in history over the Teapot Dome scandal, which I don't believe, I think it was about oil rights, but I don't believe it was at this level of the Trump scam and the associated grifting. I don't understand any of it.
I mean,an was asking me earlier what's what can you explain the the 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 i'm not the best person i'm not the best person to explain this or discuss this but the degree of grift 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 it's not like selling the incredibly chintzy thing of selling your bibles or selling your sneakers i mean there are leases of i mean it's incredible scam and and and and you know uh the vulgar and terrible and all this and taking

advantage of people but you are buying something you're just paying 10 times more than you should right i mean that's a little different from this which is is a level of grift and possible corruption that yeah as you say i think we've never seen here yeah we're gonna we're gonna have a little more on the bibles and i'm happy to do a private briefing with susan on uh on the blockchain and how crypto is sold on the blockchain

and how there are different exchanges.

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. 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. You can't track it.
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 or they and just like if you're the saudis or you you know 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 like it's working for uh you know there was uh the guy at barstool dave portnoy said that you know when he saw the the big this, he put in 500k in the Trump coin, cashed out a million the next day. He just made a half million last night, just doing nothing, gambling on this worthless fake coin.
And it brought to mind a couple things for me. There's a guy, Ben Dominich, who wrote for The Federalist, conservative writer, was originally never Trump with us, ended up going full Trump.
He was cheerleading for Trump on Fox last night but he wrote something in 2016 that was about lol nothing matters Republicans 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 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.
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.
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. I was with somebody last night who's younger than me, and they were talking about just how they have this sense of, none of this matters, nothing matters.
I don't care about this. 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, 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? 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. I mean, it's not as if we can think back, maybe it's just nostalgia or whatever, but to other politicians we've known and to a political era that seemed a little more, was to hang on to standards and to punish people, perhaps even if they violated them.
I don't know. Didn't Mark Sanford have to, it just comes to mind for some reason, have to resign as governor of, where's the governor of South Carolina, because of his little vacation there in Argentina or something.
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, and the culture. 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.
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 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? He's deciding it is, you understand,

based on a ratification by an alleged,

you know, alleged ratification by a 38th state in 2020.

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.

I mean, I don't think Biden's helping, honestly.

And so here we are.

Yeah, I agree.

Nihilism is a good, unfortunately, a good word for it. But this about the era actually i mean it is preposterous but it to your point it speaks exactly to this sense right it's like well fuck it 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 and i guess guess he's just going to kind of wave his hand and say that the TikTok ban, for example, which was passed by an 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.
You know, you can just wave a wand and say delayed. And then why can't Joe Biden just wave a wand and wand and say we have a new amendment to the constitution it becomes to me like this 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're going to be seeing the pictures of what's happening today in the same building where he incited a mob.
I don't know. Make the case to believe in something, Bill.
That's where I'm at here this morning. I want you to make the case to me that I need to believe that any of this matters.
I'll make the sort of negative case, which is Trump wants you to believe that none of it matters. And I do think Havel and others, Valkov Havel and others who've studied and lived under forms of authoritarianism, always said this.
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.
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. It's not just what you said, what you said is absolutely correct.
But Trump himself was, of course, initiated the TikTok, proposed the TikTok 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. 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 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 government he said under his control can control half of tiktok i'm great the government controls half of one of the major you know a major media platform is that kind of the way things are supposed to work in the u.s i don't we're gonna seize the means of content production bill that is that is true conservatism we're seizing the means of content production in short form video 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 um look to the future and uh find a leader like jaden daniels to lead us out of the world i hope for people listening to understand that i was this is kind of a rhetorical exercise with you i did write recently about not letting donald trump take my soul and um i'm committed to that to not fully descending into complete ben dominich level nihilism or maybe kind of close to tacitus i guess i mean i guess laughing at the mock affairs, I might still do. But I do think it's still important to look at what is happening today and believe it can be defeated and believe that there is some value in maintaining the system that we've built.
But to your point, you wrote about this, I guess it was the Friday pod. No matter what, the era that kind of undergirded this, you know, this Western-based, rules-based order is kind of over.
That's why I wanted to tie it back to the dominance. That's kind of right.
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.
Yeah, I think it has to be recreated. And that can't be done simply by wishing that it was still strong.
And it does require more, I think, bolder thinking, for the obvious reason that once the thing is crumbled, you need to build a new, so to speak, not simply, you know, prop it up with patching in a part of the column that's falling down. That patching is not bad, incidentally, as a temporary expedient.
That's why I do mention, I mean, joking about Jaden Daniels aside, I mean, I think we do need, you know, new thinking and really new leadership. And that's easier said than done.
And I, you know, 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.
Well, I write that myself sometimes, but what does that mean? Well, I don't write the first part. Can I just, since we're into our feelings, one of my feelings over the weekend when I gave up on my resolution not to think about Trump and about all this is the number of people writing pieces about how we can't just do what we did in the first term and just oppose Trump.
I mean, that was really silly, and that didn't work. We need to do something else, I don't know whether something else is, and get along with him more, feeling case-by-case kind of look.
some Democratic senator, Christina Smith of Minnesota, I don't know why I'm disguising her name, that she's not going to oppose everything or chase everything's foolish. Trump does.
She's going to watch out for the voters of Minnesota. I guess that's reasonable if you're elected representative.
But I don't know. I don't think opposing Trump the first term was so bad.
And so it worked kind of, didn't it? He got stopped from doing a lot of bad things he could have done. 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.
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.
And they lost Congress in the House in 2018. And he lost the presidency in 2020.
So there's so much, do you find this, 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, 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 sensible in figuring out where to pick your battles and so forth.
But there's too much advanced defeatism here, I think. 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.
This is the thing that 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, uh, you know, do you think it'll have an impact to, you know, criticize Trump on this thing or that thing? I, my answer is gonna be like, I don't know and don't care. Nobody knows.
We don't have a crystal ball. And nobody asked, you know, Navalny every time he said something that Putin did, something was wrong where they're like, Alexei, 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.
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.
But I do kind of resent this notion that every you took a principled opposition to something, and then the voters voted on some other issue or based on some other priorities, then that opposition did not have value. I do reject that.
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.
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 don't, how the world plays out, of course, right? I mean, Bush had a big problem with the Iraq War when he was inaugurated in January 2005. It didn't go well for 2005 and 2006.
But the things that really clobbered the Bush administration in his second term in the first year, where 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. And secondly, Hurricane Katrina.
So things happen, right? And you don't know kind of where the weaknesses will emerge. 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 cross pressuring of trump's 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 tick-tock flack and at least on twitter was criticizing it will he do something in congress i don't know but i think you got to test a lot of different issues, partly because you've 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.

But also because, you know, 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, you know,

are going to hit and which aren't.

And final point, for all the talk about how powerful he is,

and I myself have said that he's triumphant and dominant and so forth, and he is, there's no point, I can't wish that away exactly right now. His actual approval, favorable, unfavorable rating, if we can just be back to politics for a minute, is slightly underwater.
CNN had a minus two, and I noticed 538 average was minus one. He's gone up from about 43, 44% to 47, 48% since the election.
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. And, you know, I actually was 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, FDRdr in 36 or something how can one even think of

opposing him and it's only just to take fdr as a curse to me as i say fdr so he was really powerful right he wins the biggest re-election 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 getting us 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 i mean things do move fast in politics so people should be less uh yeah less deterministic and less defeatist than they are i like you have some grandkids there that are at least keeping you grounded yeah i'm sorry about that in the background it's cute no i love i think i think it's cute yeah i'll turn off the recording of that it's like it's just it's just a plea for sympathy. No, they are there.
We're at our

son and daughter-in-law's house, and they're the two-year-old, three-year-old, almost three-year-old,

just five-year-old, are very much enjoying the snow. They're supposed to be outside enjoying

the snow. They seem to be inside enjoying having been in the snow.
The sounds of the children are

the only thing giving me a little joy. I'm Rodney Williams.
And I'm Travis Holloway.

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All right, we have to do some news. I don't really want to, but I'm out of the feelings and into the news.
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.
They write, the issuance of these pardons should not be mistaken as acknowledgement that any individual engaged in any wrongdoing, nor should acceptance be misconstrued as an admission of guilt for any offense. 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 of the election. It seemed like the right thing to do.
Increasingly, I was persuaded against it by a couple of people who were on the list for getting preemptive pardons. Because, you know, you can say that the issuance should not be mistaken as an acknowledgement of wrongdoing.
But even still, tacitly, it kind of is. And in addition, you is the precedent.
And 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. And if some of Donald Trump's henchmen commit crimes, that they might have to be held to account for them.
I 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. 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. 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, I don't begrudge Anthony Fauci, who's 81 years old, and who's going to be unjustly gone after, certainly by the Republicans and maybe by the Trump administration, because it doesn't stop him from being called before hearings in the House and so forth or in the Senate. But I don't begrudge that part, and I guess he accepted it.
But they did it in a pretty haphazard way. It's the members of the January 6th committee and staff.
I happen to know some of the staff. I know some of the members, Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger.
I have the impression they didn't want the pardons. I don't know that 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? 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. 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. And so Mark Milley, I mean, I don't know, I respect Mark Milley, but you know what, Mark Milley, there would have been totally free legal work volunteered for him to defend himself against baseless charges.
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? 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.
It's not like pardoning, 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. What's the issue, right? We're going to get to the January 6th, folks, but one more Biden news this morning.
You were disappointed. That's probably a little bit understating where I am on this topic.
Dr. Jill Biden and President Biden will host a tea

and coffee reception in the Blue Room this morning. 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.
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.
It's not the biggest deal in the world, but it's a no for me, I guess, as Randy Jackson would say.

Yeah, it's a tradition, 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-Quaile administration.
Not that I was there, but, you know, the Bushes did did it for the clintons like vice president quail i don't remember if he had to do it for 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 i mean it gets to the broader point you can be a traditionalist or an institutionalist as people say a lot these days but at some point simply being a traditionalist or institutionalist in the kind of sense that I'm just following this because this is what was done before, it undercuts actual institutionalism or healthy traditionalism where you're upholding standards. And I don't think it would be amiss.
President Biden shouldn't gratuitously necessarily attack Trump or anything like that. But it wouldn't be amiss to simply pass on this to you, Crumpets, as you say, and meet him at the Capitol at noon, right? You know what I mean? Yeah, I don't know.

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.

And I'm not an institutionalist

when I'm adding amendments to the Constitution

randomly a couple of days before the election.

But that just isn't a match for me.

You kind of need both or neither.

I would be on the side of neither.

You could sell me on both.

But the either or is not working for me. I'm Rodney Williams.
And I'm Travis Holloway. Welcome to the Wealth Break Podcast, a real conversation about finance.
Let's be honest, building wealth doesn't look the same for everyone. I feel like sometimes being broke is a cycle in that we might have to revisit that.
And we're not stopping at success stories. What happens when it doesn't go right? How do you cope with it? Because wealth isn't just about money.
It's about creating a life where you thrive and help others do the same. Listen to the Wealth Break podcast on the iHeartRadio app.
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To Trump's moves.

So he had a rally yesterday

and as part of my pledge, we're not

playing any audio from that because

people just don't need that in their life today. He had a rally at what are they calling it was the mci center the verizon center where the wizards play capital one arena now and uh he talked about how he plans to pardon the hostages today that's what what he called them and how that was going to make people very happy elon got to speak.
The vice presidential elect did not. I thought that was interesting.
It was, you know, Trumpian. It was garish and absurd.
You know, Stephen Miller was doing some racially motivated attacks on people. Wasn't quite at Madison Square Garden level.
But again, I mean, it, 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. 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.
So they're being shuttled over to the Capital One Arena, which is where the Capitals and 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 upper deck.
but I mean I don't know do you think someone's made this point to me yesterday when I was given up on my attempt to stay away from Trump's office this weekend

that the grift could really get to people. 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.
I mean, I guess individuals can buy these Bitcoins or whatever, but the grift is available to wealthy people, even your buddy there. They're taking on risk, the individual people to 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? The rules of capitalist economics seem to not be applying these days, but you know, they're at least still taking on risk, right? Like the plutocrats are not.
Right. 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. And well, of course, we see this all with Bezos and Zuckerberg and so forth.
I don't know, people might look at that and think, this is, I mean, there's always been an element of this, God knows, two cheers for capitalism, not three, and always an element of robber barons and all that. I was thinking about the right.
I've got to go back and reread about the robber barons. Robber barons is 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 jimmying the system and paying off state legislatures and whatever to maybe government agencies to get the right railroad route or the right oil drilling permit or something.
But they did produce oil. I mean, they did like actually, you know, there are actual railroads that were built by these guys, right? And then they gave some money to philanthropy and we have Carnegie Libraries and we have, you know, the University of Chicago from the Rockefellers and so forth and Duke University from Mr.
Duke. And I don't.
Does that make up for whatever misdeeds they did? I don't know. I'll let other people judge that.
There's not even a pretense of any of that now. I mean, it's all just, don't you think? I mean, it's just grift 100%, all grift all the time.
It's the exact opposite. Not only is there not a pretense of that public-mindedness're actively hostile to it marky andreessen said this like the vc who is in trump's inner circle has 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 did notice the free press got a nice exclusive leak from the trump administration i don't know if mark andreason was involved in that but um like he said recently that he was 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 because he was attacking the exact thing that you're talking about like this this other you know, this era of, you know, exceptionally kind of wealthy, the, you know, the Rockefellers, the Carnegie's, et cetera, that made all this wealth for themselves, but then also, you know, redistributed back in various other pursuits.
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 know, you might have some obligation back to the people in your society.
And those guys didn't treat workers well all the time, and there are many, that's why we have labor unions and so forth, but the degree of contempt these people have, and you see this in the rhetoric around Doge in particular, for actual civil servants, okay, call them bureaucrats, not civil servants if you don't want to be so nice to them. I was at the Education Department for three years.
I've worked with them, and at the White House, saw them a little less directly. But 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.
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 are kind of important that they be done. 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.
It's too bureaucratic and so forth. They're not treated with any courtesy or politeness.
And I find it kind of disgusting, honestly. 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.
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 with Democratic Congress for two years. 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.
Now they're presumably going to be even richer than ever because of all the grifting, if nothing else. 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 they weren't able to work the system quite that way, or they didn't have Elon Musk's self-promotional abilities, or to be fair,

they didn't have some actual abilities conceivably than some of these people have.

I don't have them either, but those abilities.

But the notion that you should basically respect your fellow citizens, 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 the higher ranks of government, and you should respect people who are working for you. And that's all out the window.
And I've got to think that's, A, it's very corrosive, and B, that it does fit into the kind of nihilism. But is it sustainable? The vote, is that what people don't want that, I should think.
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. I do think it's possible.
And I do think that there'll be some backlash. I can sometimes worry about the nature of the backlash.
And I think a lot of it will also depend on the results. Good news is I'm not expecting a lot of great results from the Donald Trump administration.
We've got these executive orders. I wouldn't have a lot of time to kind of sip through all of them and discuss the impact.
You know, there's going to be, I guess, potentially, according to reports, that question of emergency on the border, ending all kinds of DEI programs within the government, you know, ending any efforts to accommodate people who have a different gender identity than the one that they were born with. Those will be eliminated.
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. 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 executive fiat. And I think this is probably something that has been really pernicious throughout this century.
I mean, Bush, you know, Bush too did more on executive orders than previous presidents had, at least the recent previous presidents. Obama then did more than him and then Trump and, you know, obviously Biden with student loans, etc.
This has been an ever-escalating thing that I oppose, but I don't know at this point how to roll it back. Any big picture thoughts on the executive orders or any of the individual items? We'll have so much time to talk about that.
I guess the only thing that strikes me is he's doing it all with such shock and awe. We had a great piece by a retired general, a retired general Mark Hurtling about shock and awe.
That doesn't always work out so well. He first heard the phrase as a junior officer, I guess.
It's like, I don't know, is that really going to work on the battlefield? It works for like a day or two. And then if you're not ready to dig in and do the hard work for the counterinsurgency and so forth, that didn't work out so well in Iraq.
And he sort of makes the point that maybe that'll be the case here, or implies that could be the case. I sort of feel that way.
I think on immigration in particular, I put it this way. The impression he's giving is that he can do everything and that the executive orders are going to solve all these problems.
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. 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.
And I wonder, and I'm basing this part of the conversation I had with Aaron Reichland-Melnick and other stuff that people have written recently. 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 damage he's going to do if people get deported or self-deported because they're so fearful.
And again, leaving aside almost the human damage in a way to the injustice of what's going to happen, he's taking a lot of responsibility on. And I just wonder what that looks like six or 12 or 18 months from now.
You know, there's a reason presidents don't mind sometimes saying, I'd like to do this, but, you know, 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, 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's like traditionally, there weren't 200 of them or however many that ended up being on Inauguration Day.
But also just politically speaking, you kind of roll them out over the course of a month or two while your agenda gets moving through Congress. 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. 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.
So that's another thing to monitor coming down the pike. I remember this number, I'm sure I've got it wrong, but like maybe $80 billion in tariff revenues right now, 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. I mean, in a way, 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. 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.
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. He's doing this all himself.
It's on him.

It's on Steve Miller.

It's on Ross Fogg.

It's on J.D. Vance.

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. And all these cabinet secretaries are going to be like, oh, yeah, they're the guys we want enforcing this.
because Pam Bondi, she's really thought through the legal complexities

of how to do all these things and how to deprive people,

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 the same in some of these other policy areas.
We really trust Pete Hexeth to kind of, he understands the military well enough and he has enough experience managing huge institutions to really get rid of the DEI stuff without actually doing huge damage. I 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. But yeah, I kind of feel like two months from now, this could feel pretty different than it does in the first blush of shock and awe.
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. 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. When 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.

It's GodBlessUSABible.com.

There's 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.

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 boys.

It's turtles all the way down, Bill.

It's grift all the way down.

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.

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.
I can't, I, yeah, I'm at a loss for words, you know. It's usually often in these inarguable speeches, we go back and skim through them.
They begin, the president's, incoming presidents, begin with a little riff on the Bible that they've, you know, this is the Bible George Washington used, or this 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 it's it's greatness the peaceful transfer power that washington began and now 200 years later i think this was a big i think george h.w bush did this in 1989 if i if i recall and of course well trump can't very well do a peaceful transfer of power rhapsody can he that's not kind of his thing you know one thing trump said to get final point of the over the weekend that i didn't get any attention i was where was this i think it was in his 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 i mean maybe saying there wouldn't be fraud again and they'll have changed the rule i don know what they'll do in the federal government, but they'll change the rules so those votes can't be stolen allegedly in Georgia and Arizona. And that 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.
Vance or whatever, from power in 2020. 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 and i don't know you know i've been one who's not gone down that path and we'll never have another election again or whatever but you look at tiktok and you look at x and you look at 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 of dance or whatever your that money goes away i i it is yeah i don't mean to end on its down note though no this is an appropriately alarming and downer final note from you bill crystal i had a text i'm in i'm in new york 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. My texts are popping up here on my computer.
And as you are giving that alarming close to this podcast, I received a text from a friend that said, Trump getting inaugurated on MLK Day. We are a failure.
I can't really do much better than that.

So 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.
Otherwise, we'll be back here tomorrow for another edition of the Bulldog Podcast. Thanks to Bill Crystal.
We'll see you all there. You're working too hard.

You're living too fast.

Hands over your eyes with a foot on the gas.

And the best I can tell, the crowd seems ashamed. It sounds like a warning when they call out your name.
The boy genius has grown now. The competition got fierce.
And you'd rather be anywhere other than here But it can get so much worse I reckon it will In Vestavian Hills Last night was a long one You made a lot of new friends And your band was on fire right up till the end You met a girl from the suburbs But you missed all the cues I bet you don't remember me tying your shoes

So boy, genius has grown now And you're an angry young man Well, I won't be around when you die in the van I got kids of my own

Not much of When you die in the van I got kids of my own

Not much of the will

In their stadiums The board The Bulldog Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown. I'm Rodney Williams.
And I'm Travis Holloway. Welcome to the Wealth Break Podcast, a real conversation about finance.
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