Bill Kristol: Cannons All the Way Down

Hey, everybody, when I taped this with Bill this morning, we were discussing these legal motions from a couple of Trump's underlings, including Walt Nauta, that was trying to delay the release of the Jack Smith report. They'd put in a filing with Judge Eileen Cannon.
Since we've recorded, those motions have been denied. And so as of right now, there are no legal barriers to the release of the Jack Smith report.
So hopefully we'll be seeing that soon and we'll be discussing it later this week. Up next, Bill Kristol.
Hello and welcome to the Bulldog Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.
It is Monday, so we've got Bill Kristol live from washington a big moment for washington the football team has won a playoff match on the backs of lsu grad jayden daniels first in 20 years i believe the first playoff victory in 20 years and they can go to detroit next sunday which next weekend i was thinking about this will be a good distraction from the inauguration that's coming up monday this will have pretty good i don't i don't follow pro much like I used to, but it seemed like at least on pretty good playoff games next week, right? We will have some great games next weekend. That distraction will absolutely be needed.
Our friend Ben Stillner's severance is coming back. Maybe on Friday, I'll create a list for people of various distractions from the inauguration.
You need Monday, 9 a.m. to midnight, 15 hours of things to watch and I'll

I'll

I'll of various distractions from the inauguration. You need Monday, 9 a.m.
to midnight, 15 hours of things to watch.

I'll work on that assignment for our listeners.

I guess I wasn't going to do this,

but since you brought it up,

I was going to pretend like the inauguration

wasn't happening for this hour,

but we'll just do briefly.

Because he announced just,

just right before we were coming on,

the schedule for the inauguration,

which includes on sunday night a

mega rally followed by a candlelight dinner so not not exactly traditional to have a rally

you know a partisan rally before the inauguration which i'm sure will have a message that they leak

to the media that's like about unity and blah blah blah the night before he's gonna have

a mega rally and then and then a nice candlelight dinner who knows a picnic or something

Thank you. leak to the media that's like about unity and blah blah blah the night before he's gonna have a mega rally and then and then a nice candlelight dinner who knows a picnic or something it's all grift isn't it i'm sure i haven't seen it but i haven't seen the announcement but trump can't personally i don't think still benefit from ticket prices to the i don't think the integration you don't pay for to go there right so people can go to that in the old-fashioned way as a public civic event.
But Trump can't miss 24 hours without the chance to charge people for something, and he can charge them. I assume maybe there's a price to get into the rally, and then certainly a candlelight dinner.
Is it with him or just with other people? With him. Oh, yeah.
Oh, wow. Very nice.
Yeah, I guess that must be it. I don't have it in front of me, but somebody reported that there's a report out there that Trump, they've already filled up coffers for the inauguration because of all these suck ups pre submitting to him.
And so one of his fundraising advisors was saying to a corporation, well, you know, you could just give the money to the pack instead. Yeah.
So, I mean, like the grift is just couldn't be more out in the open at this point, as if the 40 million for Melania wasn't enough.

All right.

We have a little bit of actual news here. So we're expecting today, you read about this in the morning newsletter, the Jack Smith report, for people who have not been following this that closely, the favorite judge of Donald Trump, Eileen Cannon, put a stay on the release of the report based on some kind of ridiculous rationale.
She doesn't even have any jurisdiction, obviously, over the Jack Smith trial. She only has jurisdiction over the classified documents case.
And today there's another delay because Walt gnawed up one of Trump's flunkies, who was not indemnified by the Supreme Court like Trump, so he still is going to have to face trial over the classified documents case. He filed a petition, or his lawyers filed a petition, to delay the Jack Smith report because it might prejudice the jury and the classified documents case against him.
And there's no connection between these two things. Besides, they're just two separate crimes that Donald Trump was indicted for.
And yet, Eileen Cannon obviously is doing what NADA and the Trump lawyers have requested. What are your thoughts on all that? Trump's justice problem is going to drop the case against NADA and the other Trump employee a week from now.
So it's all ridiculous. Yeah, no, I mean, Thursday, it seemed like the 11th circuit, they were going to tolerate it.
Cannon's three-day, somewhat random, three three days we have to wait till after that decision and then the report could be released which would take us to today and then over the weekend there were various back and forth specs and forth however you say that and um culminating in the uh filing that you just described which may or may not delay things much i mean the lawyers i've talked to seem pretty confident we'll get the report maybe it'll be delayed a couple of days this week, and maybe Trump will go to the Supreme Court if the 11th Circuit says no way, and that'll take a day. But it's not 100%.
And the degree to which the Trump people just, they don't give up, they try to exploit every ambiguity, or they invent ambiguities, they invent legal doctrines, they invent, it's pretty impressive in a way, maybe a a little bit of a lesson for the rest of us, that if they're going to play the system this way, and the Justice Department is playing it very straight, as I say in the warning shots, and to their credit, I think, you got it, the Justice Department of the United States, they're not supposed to cut corners or avoid things, and so they're scrupulous at all this, and they're answering these objections as if they're serious objections, but it is kind of a lided or one-sided thing right i mean it's uh let's wait for them to gain the system and and get the advantages of that while you know people that are scrupulous are penalized it's been said before it's an original thought for me but there is you know the rule that the defendant has an opportunity to get a a fair and speedy trial you know it is one of the things that underline our justice system. Like, what about the other way around, right? And United States versus Donald Trump should in the United States also have the benefit of a speedy trial, apparently not.
And Judge Cannon's the person who really denied that in the classified documents case, and now trying to reach over to even a lettuce, and the Supreme Court denied it basically in the January 6th case, and now Canada's trying to reach over to delay or stop, really, the release of both reports. One already is apparently not going to be released, at least for now, the classified documents report, because that case continues against the two Trump employees.
So the degree of, yes, the degree to which they've all gamed the system, including the judges, and this, I guess, is the point I try to make this morning a little bit, that, you know, the lawyers are too polite. Everyone's too polite to say that Judge Cannon is behaving as a pure partisan political hack.
People are too polite to say that to some degree about the Supreme Court too, I would say. And the next four years, Trump's going to appoint 200 Judge Cannons.
Trump learned a lesson, you know, he complains bitterly about the Trump-appointed judges who ruled against him in November and December of 2020. That's one of his big grievances.
I appointed them. Don't they know who they're supposed to be loyal to? He's not making that mistake again.
His White House counsel isn't going to make that mistake. Pam Bondi, as a chairman general, is not going to make that mistake.
We're looking at judge canons all the way and the Republican Senate confirming all of them or 95% of them and Pam Bondi run Justice Department, which is not going to be scrupulous as Merrick Garland's has been. So it's going to be, this is a little bit of a foretaste of what four years of Trump could look like.
Cannon's all the way down. I want to play, speaking of this asymmetry, Chris Ray was on 60 Minutes last night as one interview since he decided to resign his role as director of the FBI.
He addressed some of the questions about Trump's grievances about the classified documents case. I want to play that and then just talk more broadly about the interview.
Part of the FBI's job is to safeguard classified information. And when we learn that information, classified material, is not being properly stored, we have a duty to act.
And I can tell you that in investigations like this one, a search warrant is not, and here was not, anybody's first choice. We always try to pursue, invariably try to pursue, the least intrusive means.
First trying to get the information back voluntarily, then with a subpoena. And only if after all that, we learn that the agents haven't been given all of the classified material, and in fact, those efforts

have been frustrated, even obstructed, then our agents are left with no choice but to go to a federal judge, make a probable cause showing, and get a search warrant. And that's what happened here.
I just wanted to lay all that out because it speaks to exactly what you were just talking about right where the fbi follows every rule here right like they go to trump in a friendly way you know and say hey you might have forgotten that you have these classified documents do you want to hand them back no subpoena they go around the subpoena and then eventually they have to go and seize these documents back as is required as is their job as as the federal bureau of investigation to to protect these classified secrets like they didn't know trump was going to be back in the white house you can't do something based upon that and so they do all of that they follow the rules and then you know, after all of his delay tactics don't work, then gets to say, oh, they're targeting me. You know, he gets to flop around on the ground and say, oh, the government, the government is targeting me.
And the concerning thing about this is that worked. that effort to convince people that he was being unfairly targeted that there was a politicized

government coming after him, he convinced not only his cultists, but like a broad swath of other folks in the media, particularly in the alternative Joe Rogan's type media, to buy his story here. And what you see is Ray and the FBI and our institutions punished for going about it the right way yeah and i guess joe biden had some documents it turned out from his vice presidency and maybe from before from the from the senate days classified documents in his garage or something i don't remember how we know that but we knew that it's like his lawyers were going through it and discovered summer at some point at what when there was a general concern about classified documents after trump had a massive cache of them.
Pence had a couple too, I think, which he gave back. Biden totally cooperated, invited the FBI to come in and search, and they did.
The documents were sent back. There was a special counsel whom Garland, again, being very scrupulous, appointed to look into this so there couldn't be a conflict of interest with Garland himself biden appointee looking into it or someone he you know he someone reporting directly to him and uh so he gets special counsel robert hurr who does a report which is damaging somewhat to joe biden right says they can't prosecute him for this because he wouldn't have a good enough memory in any way and be sympathetic figure old guy and that's report that's releasedland.
I mean, think about that for a minute,

right? The sitting president of the United States, who didn't do anything wrong, really,

has a report released. And I'm not complaining about that.
That seems right. But detailing

sort of what her found. And the ex-president of the United States, who purposely takes

masses of documents, lies about having them, orders employees to hide them and, you know, I don't know what,

mess around with the cameras and all that kind of stuff in Mar-a-Lago.

He's got a grievance and he gets lucky, I suppose,

with the judge to whom the case is assigned.

And the judge basically runs the clock out for a year and a half

and he's trying now not even to have a report that might be critical of him.

So the disparity there is pretty extraordinary. Okay, so let's get the devil on our shoulder out here.
Is it the lesson that Democrats really shouldn't play by these sorts of rules? That there should be a little bit of Calvin Ball going both ways? Yeah, or at least they should know that their opponents are not playing by these rules. And maybe they still should, in my view, try to obey the law and so forth.
But there are ways to do so. And there are ways to be more aggressive, obviously.
And I think maybe not bending over backwards would be a good start and playing hardball within the constraints of legitimate baseball as opposed to sort of polite batting practice pitching. And that's unfair as opposed to Garland and Justice.
I don't have a grievance. I mean, I think Jack Smith did his best at all.
But I've got to say, when you go back and think about it, that the idea that the Justice Department spent two years prosecuting every person who stormed the Capitol, which I'm for, and didn't start the case against Donald Trump until after the January 6th committee, I think it was at the very end of 2022, I think, when Garland announced that, what were they thinking? I mean, who was responsible for all those people storming the Capitol? If they didn't find a crime, they didn't find a crime, but at least investigate it in a very serious way, not this very tiny, they did almost nothing really until the January 6th committee did its thing. So I don't know.
In retrospect, that was a very bad decision by Biden and Garland. And the other interesting things from the Ray interview, and we'll get the right expert in here to have a broader conversation about this at some point, but his comments about China, I think, were very interesting.
Sixth Minutes was trying to direct him to talking about terrorist threat, given what was happening in New Orleans and stuff. And he was like, actually, the thing that I think has been underapp is the way that China is, is breaching our infrastructure in various ways.
I thought that was interesting. I have a broader combo about that.
But then the rest of the convo is just, again, Ray, just doing the well, I wanted to make the transition orderly. It's kind of goody two shoes stuff about how, oh, there could be, you know, the Bureau can't be politicized.
And it's all kind of a worldview that's like, yeah, that all makes sense in a 2011 world, but they've nominated somebody who's literally stated that he plans to politicize the Bureau. And so don't you have to act differently? And I think that's really what we're saying here.
It's not about going around the law or not following the law or not respecting our our democratic norms and institutions it's about it's about recognizing you know tactically you know that that just saying oh i'm going to cross my t's and dot my i's and while while the other side is just shameless about uh about their plans for corrupting the institution i just don't think that makes a lot of sense right as you say you don't have't have, no one wants anyone to break the law here, but so fine, he's now resigned. I guess he's about to resign or he has, I don't know if he's officially resigned yet, but anyway, he will have resigned on January 19th.
He could testify about the bureau, which he knows a lot about and how dangerous it is to politicize it. And therefore, Kash Patel should not be the next director of the FBI.
He can make clear that he's fine with people who he doesn't agree with on everything, and that there's a bunch of people who have supported Donald Trump who probably are capable of leading the FBI in a decent way. But why doesn't he join other, like Bill Webster, the longtime-ago former director of the FBI, in opposing Patel? And that's the part that's kind of amazing, right? He's going to quit, and then he's going to say, well, as a former director, it would be inappropriate for me to testify before Congress or say anything like that.
Exactly. I don't have the exact quote, but he said he didn't want to embroil the Bureau in more drama, in more political drama than necessary.
It's like, it's too late. The horse is out of the barn.
It's run around the track a few times. As far as the FBI being in the middle of sort of political hay being made out there, it just felt naive to me.
He would do more to oppose politicization of the FBI, which I assume is an institution he really cares a lot about, if he came out against Patel. I mean, he would at least try to create a little bit of a barrier, a little bit of a guardrail against the total politicization of it under Bondi and under Trump.
And maybe that would work a little bit, as happened, incidentally, in the first term, where people were very alarmed and screamed and yelled. And Mike Flynn was dumped as national security advisor in a month.
And in fact, some of these guardrails held a little bit more than they would otherwise, because people were so willing to be alarmed including jim comey to speak of the this particular instance right who trump fired and he went he got fired but he didn't then think i'm not allowed to speak about anything that happened so yeah none of these guys ever seem to say like thank god that flynn was kicked out like what he did after he was pushed out of the trump administration i going around on a tour around the country, talking about QAnon, you know, and talking about deep state conspiracies. This man was going to be the national security advisor.
Imagine what would have happened had it been him instead of John McMaster. And yet the people you guys write in the morning chastity about Lankford, about how Lankford, you know, said, I forget which of the crazy Trump things he was talking about.
He's like, ah, you know, this isn't going to happen. This is all bluster.
You got to sort of wait things out. Like the responsible ones, you know, never then talk about the value of the times when the guardrails held, then they go silent.
You know, it's not like there's anybody out there in the Lankford, Cotton, McConnell world who's using this very example. Like, you know, look, there are times when we need to protect Trump for himself.
You can imagine them saying this, right? This wouldn't be my preferred route, right? But it'd be better than doing nothing, right? Them saying, you know, look at how Mike Flynn and how dangerous that was. And we went through the normal process, and he was investigated, and he was replaced by H.R.
McMaster. And that was an upgrade.
You can imagine people saying that, but nobody ever does. Yeah, and just to close that loop, a circle, I mean, I believe Fatal personally has appeared many times with Mike Flynn and is a big supporter of Michael Flynn.
So it really kind of really just brings home the point here. All right, We have other hearings this week.
Hegseth is Tuesday. We're going to be live streaming some, maybe all depending on how good it is, of that on our YouTube page.
Make sure you subscribe to the Blurk on YouTube. You can press the little alarm bell to see when we're going to go live on that.
Kristi Noem, Bondi, Russ Vogt, Duffy are Wednesday. It's got Ascent, Treasury, and then Bondi again on thursday that's kind of the schedule for now all right look you know in the afternoon sometimes you don't want the third or fourth depending on how much of a sicko you are dose of caffeine for the day have another coffee it might affect your sleeping at night and so i've been turning to our new sponsor, Mudwater, for that afternoon pick-me-up.

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And Tulsi Gabbard apparently has been flipping her view on Section 702 in her conversations with Republican senators. I think Lankford mentioned this.
Section 702, if people aren't familiar, of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, FISA, it allows the U.S. government to collect electronic communications on non-Americans located outside the country without a warrant.
This has been a big flashpoint among kind of the isolationist right, Rand Paul, etc. And this is the horseshoe, Rand Paul and Tulsi have been fighting the use of this tool.
But it's obviously a tool that would be used as the person in charge of coordinating intelligence across agencies. I'm just curious your thoughts on the hearings coming and Tulsi flipping on 702.
702 is kind of complicated. But A, if Chris Wright is very concerned about China, one reason he probably knows what he knows is because of 702 and intercepts of communications.
I think it's the communications with American citizens, which are masked and, you know, which are mega data and so forth.

And then they have to get a real FISA warrant to open those up, so to speak, as I understand it.

That's what, let's say, responsible civil libertarians have been worried about.

As I understand, the Bill Tulsi introduced in December 2020, it would just get rid of the whole program.

The whole NSA ability to intercept these communications from abroad, including from abroad to other people abroad, certainly from abroad to here.

which is kind of important to know. I hope she doesn't get any credit for this ludicrous flip-flop at the very last minute when she's been harping on this thing for years, and she's unqualified in a million other ways.
Hey, they're all in excess, so unqualified. One doesn't even know where to begin.
Russ Vaught, I hope he gets asked about the things he has said publicly and also been filmed saying when he thought he was in private. I mean, he's a pretty extreme choice for a very powerful position, OMB director.
I don't know. We'll see.
It'll be interesting to see how sort of well-organized the Democrats are, how focused they are in their questioning, and whether any ofans sort of have any interest in being at all tough or or serious and also whether you know the fbi reports the democrats insist on knowing what's in them especially in the case of hexath or did they just let the two top members they don't even i don't think they've gotten the fbi briefing yet they got a briefing from the trump transition team and what the fbi told them the whole thing sounds very squirrely and i don't know i hope democrats are tough about this because i do think i mean trump himself has won the election so it's a little hard to go after him now honestly and we discussed this the other week i think and and it's not hard but i mean it probably politically you gotta give a chance to become president and see what he does these nominees didn't win win anything. They're just picked by Trump.
And I totally legitimate to criticize them and to say, and if one wants to speak to Trump voters, say, unfortunately, the president's made 15 fine nominations, but three or four of these are problematic. It happens.
It's our every president loses one or two of his nominees. Things he didn't know.
He thought Pete Hexeth was a charming guy in Fox. We didn't realize that he had this whole history and we're saving trump from himself as you said a minute ago right so i don't know we'll see how much of that there is we'll learn a lot since hegseth's first on the block so we will learn a lot from the except nomination on tuesday and um we will obviously be having a lot of coverage of that here uh to point about how democrats manage this, there's one Democrat in particular that has taken a different approach from everybody else.
It's John Fetterman, Senator from Pennsylvania. Him and his wife went to Mar-a-Lago over the weekend, met with Trump.
Trump loves attention, loves a convert, says he's a common sense person, not conservative or liberal. This is a long way from when Trump had said that Fetterman is taking heroin, cocaine, crystal meth, and fentanyl, and that his brain didn't work.
So big flip there from Trump. Is he at risk of a party switch? Is this just a strategic gambit where he's trying to do things a little bit differently to play nice? Is it self-preservation? Is it the stroke? I don't know.
What do you think's happening with John Fetterman? Yeah, and more broadly with others who, there's other tendency, other members have shown, made at least much more minor steps in that direction. I mean, I'm not sympathetic to the argument they have to do this to preserve,

you know, to get reelected or something.

It's like the votes on the immigration bill last week, 48 of them in the House.

Really?

I mean, they're up,

at least the House members are up in two years.

The Fetterman's up in four

and others are up in six.

I mean, really?

Is anyone going to remember a vote

in January of 2025?

You know, in terms of their reelection,

it strikes me as ridiculous

or a trip to Mar-a-Lago.

I mean, Fetterman's kind of a character, so it's hard to generalize from his case. He's a senator.
He's not in the position we're in. And I can totally see if there's a tax bill in April and he has to look out for his constituents or things he believes strongly in, in terms of policies and deductions and so forth.
He should go to the Treasury Department and talk to them. He should go to the White House and talk to Trump or to other relevant officials.
Making the pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago is different, don't you think? I mean, that part of it is what rubs me so wrong, right? If Trump invites Democratic senators to the White House two weeks into his presidency, obviously they'll go and he's the president of the United States and they're senators and they have a million things to talk about and some of them they might end up agreeing on but the pilgrim the pre-presidential pilgrimage to mar-a-lago and then all the you know talk about how what a wonderful conversation they had that's not good here's the thing that bugs me about it like the whole like oh guys chill out stop getting your hair on fire it's like this feels like a contrarian, you know, real talk kind of position. But all it is, is it's just a total CYA.
Anybody can do this, right? And it's so easy to be like, guys, chill out. It's not gonna be that bad.
And then if things get bad, be like, well, I've changed my mind, right? Like, things have gotten bad. I'm now gonna weigh in.
It allows you to kind of posture as more serious when it's really just, and it's not childish, but it's just kind of like surface level, right? Like, it's like, Oh, well, you know, I mean, anybody, like, let's just chill out guys. Calm down.
Who knows? Cause like, I guess that's objectively true, right? Like we don't know yet. So I'm not advocating for people like running around with their hair on fire saying Nazism is coming, but it does feel like there's a middle ground between that and like doing thumbs up pictures with all the nominees like do we have to do the thumbs up picture with all the nominees i feel like there might be a more productive way to say hey i'll meet with these nominees and see if we have common ground in certain things or you know whatever it is like the fentanyl crisis or what i like there are certain issues that we can work together on.
The urban centers are good at that. Tammy Baldwin did this.
She worked on a bill with J.D. Vance that was relevant to the people of Wisconsin.
I interviewed about this. And that's what you're supposed to do as a person in the legislature, right? The thumbs up pictures and like eye rolling and anybody who is expressing legitimate concerns about Donald Trump trump coming in that part annoys me i don't like that i totally agree obviously and it's again if you actually care about influencing the behavior of these nominees because you're going to be a senator and they're going to be many of them are going to be cabinet secretaries and sub cabinet and and the like you should be tough on the things that they're saying or have said in the past and have said they would do in the past.
You should be tough on that and say, well, that's unacceptable. Now, look, I'm open to having a conversation.
Maybe I'm even open to voting for you as a Democrat, if anyone wants to say that, but you've got to assure me that you're not going to do A, B, C, or D. Or Trump has to assure you.
If you're going to talk directly to Trump, did he ask Trump any tough questions? Did he ask Trump whether he would order pam bondi to not do investigations of people that are on cash patel's list i mean i have no impression i didn't read carefully all the accounts i guess of that fetterman's visit but i have no impression that there was any sort of sending a message to trump well no if he did then trump wouldn't have been talking about how great and how smart he was right i mean you don't have to read all the read all the accounts. That's the other thing with the Fetterman is now that you mentioned it, now I'm getting my hackles up.
He does this thing where people ask him about, well, you know, Kash Patel said this, or, you know, so-and-so said that. And he's like, well, yeah, I haven't seen that.
And when we talked to him, he told me he wasn't going to investigate enemies. So that's okay.
And it's like, wait a minute. No, Fetterman ran as a progressive, right? Like far more progressive than either of us.
And so if you have nominees coming in who have stated plans that are in stark contrast to what you have said your preferences are on various policies, then it's your obligation as a senator to vet through those. If it's like a Tulsi situation where he asks her tough questions about something and they're like, you know what, sure, I said that on Steve Bannon's podcast, but I changed my mind.
I'm going to do this instead. I don't know that I would really still believe them, but at least then you're doing your job of vetting the person rather than just being totally dismissive of any concerns about these nominees and doing nicey--nicey thumbs up pictures i don't dig it at least lankford got tulsi to flip flop right now we don't i don't still think she's still i think she's qualified i don't trust her to run dni having said that they can literally now i believe very hard for her to come out against 702 or not to support its reauthorization and so forth, right? I mean, once she's there, having said this publicly.
So I think, yes, at least minimally get the commitments on the things that are important for the country. I do want to see the holdout.
My one caveat on the Fetterman thing is just in order to be consistent with myself. The Democrats do need people who just talk normal.
And Fetterman does that, right? I know, I know, I know. Take a deep breath, Bill.
I know that you love the, you know, high-minded Straussian talk and the quoting of Churchill. I like Fetterman.
Going back to the Greeks. And I know you like all that, but the Democrats could use a mix of people and they could use one person in there who does wear the hoodie and just is like, come on, bros, I'm going to chill out about this.
Like there is some value to that posture. And I guess that's just why I keep coming back to the thumbs up photos.
I feel like you could achieve that. He could get the value out of that without being so obsequious.
Yeah agree i look i rather like fetterman from what i know of him i've met him just a few times actually i joke i saw him a couple different events in the last few months for some reason this was before this last stretch but you know earlier in 2024 and i said you know i think i'm probably a little bit to your left now but that's okay we have a the democratic party a big tent. He was already moving to the – I was spending more time attacking the left.
We had a sort of jocular, very brief exchange about this. You had a jocular exchange? You didn't quote Euripides or anything? No.
You're just two bros? I like to adjust my remarks to the – no, but Federer's a smart guy also. I mean, he's got that whole shtick, but it's not like he's not a – Anyway, I don't have a look i think he's a good politician he won in pennsylvania uh we were happy i recall defending him quite a lot after that stroke incidentally when everyone was oh my god how could you support someone who's not you know in totally great shape and i remember we published articles in the bull work about how people recover from strokes and having a stroke is very different from being you know 80 years old and and not being able to do things and so forth and when you're you know middle-aged and you can recover and so forth so yes we we are not an anti i don't i really think jvl loved fetterman didn't he wasn't he pushing fetterman for like i'm hoping he can come on sometime we can have some of this stuff out i like it we're we have been a pro fetterman publication so we we say all this from sorrow yeah and i like heterodoxy i and i'm happy if he wants to to leave the party norms in certain ways like there are a lot of elements of it i like the smiley thumbs up pictures maybe we can stop that's i guess that's my number one that's my number one issue the visits to mar-a-lago let's chill out on those on the other side of the coin on the more normie dem whatever you want to call it traditional dem side of the coin while we're doing while we're doing little nitpicks um i do it we've cannot cover the dnc race I like your take on the DNC chairs race broadly.
But I have to, you know, in order to be fair here on the podcast, if you're going to criticize the heterodox suck up to Trump Dems, I also need to express my concerns about the more mainstream Dems and their strategies. The key players in this chairs race are Ken Martin, chairman of the Minnesota DFL, and Ben Wickler, the chair of the Wisconsin Dem Party.
Martin O'Malley, former governor of Maryland, is also in the race. There's this guy, James Skoufis, who's been creating a star.
He's kind of a lefty populist state senator from New York. There's some other people running, but those are the main players.
Wickler, I think, is considered the favorite. He did this tweet over the weekend.

We unite our coalition by making sure everyone's at the table. As DNC chair, our leadership team will lift up our full coalition.
Black, Latino, Native, AANHPI, LGBTQ, youth, interfaith, rural veteran and disability representation nobody talks like this nobody talks like this okay you can be for diversity and and i and be for having voices at the table while just talking normal stop okay stop what is interfaith does anyone know what interfaith is? What is ethnic? A-A-N-H-P-I? I had to Google it. NH is Native Hawaiian.
Do we really need Native Hawaiians at the table at the DNC decision-making process? And if there's a talented Native Hawaiian who happens to be a good strategist, sure, great. But is that a key part of of democratic outreach like invite the best people who know how to win get perspectives sure i'm all for this like say hey if i'm at the dnc we're gonna get perspectives from from people to you know to make sure we aren't in our bubbles like right or have diversity when it comes to race but also college attainment you know religion you can say that in a way where you sound like a normal human.
Listing out interfaith, ethnic, I understand it's a little bit of a nitpick, and this is kind of just like woke copypasta, but it just has to stop. So anyway, I don't know if you have any thoughts on that or the DNC chairman's race more broadly.
I mean, I know Wickler a little. I like Wickler, by the way.
I'm picking on him with love. I'm picking on him with love.
Good job. But it is, he must have thought he was having trouble on the left, you know, with some of the DNC members.
It's saying the DNC is a representative organization and, you know, and it's quite diverse. And Hawaii has DNC members.
They're not being discriminated against. Hawaii's governor, actually, was here, was talking to people about how, he's a doctor, if I'm not mistaken, was talking about how dangerous Robert F.
Kennedy Jr. would be as secretary of HHS.

So I like, I think his name is Governor Green.

I don't know as much about him, but he seems like an impressive guy.

Anyway, yeah.

I mean, so why go through that whole ridiculous thing?

It just kind of confirms one's impression of the DNC.

I mean, whether the DNC matters.

I don't know.

Didn't you work in a previous life at the RNC for a year or two? I did. I did.
How was that? Here's the diversity that you could use. Bill Simmons, I think, is a sports pod guy.
He used to say coaches and NFL coaches need a director of common sense on the sideline of clock management. Just like somebody who's played a lot of Madden who can be like, don't do this.
I's like i'm gonna have an 18 year old kid who's played a lot of madden that's like don't do this coach like i just know that this is a bad idea the democrats need that they need like a 22 year old twitch streamer to just sit next to whoever gets this job and when they see a draft just be like no i'm sorry people people talk like this. I don't know what ANHPI is.
We're not going to do that. A 24-year-old Twitch streamer to just veto tweets I think might be a useful person to have at the table while you're adding people to the table.
These committees aren't as important as people think, is I think the point of your question. And there are two different models that are useful.
One is just raise a lot of money and put a ton of money into ground troops

and data and door knocking.

And it's just,

this is behind the scenes,

you know,

and you know,

you're just,

I was about to say making the trains run on time,

but that,

that has,

that has kind of a negative connotation these days.

So you know what I mean?

Just,

just make sure the operationalizing of it is good. That's been most of the RNC chairs, frankly, going back to like Ken Melman, like all the way forward.
Reince was, I think, chosen under that rubric. Then he kind of, you know, started to enjoy the limelight a little bit.
But, you know, the new RNC chair, whose name I'm forgetting right now at the moment, from North Carolina, Watley, Michael Watley just came to me. I think he is in that rubric, right? The other model is the more like, I am the chief communicator for the party while we're out of power.
Terry McAuliffe was maybe more in that role. Dean, I think might have seen himself as operationalizing, but was more of a public facing.
So either of those models are fine for me, right? None of the candidates there, Ken Martin, Ben Wickler, and Martin O'Malley, I don't think are going to be seen as the chief public face of the Democratic Party. I don't think any of them fit that bill.
So, given that, really their job is just do no harm on the public facing stuff and make sure that the actual party is running well behind the scenes is raising money. So that's it.
If you cut away all the BS, that's it. And it's not really about ideology or any of that.
Not at all. Wickler did a good job in Wisconsin.
They got the governor re-elected. He wasn't the greatest candidate.
They got Tammy Baldwin get re-elected. They lost the Senate race to Johnson, but it was pretty close, and lost the state this time, obviously, but close.
They get closer, I think, closest to the three Midwestern states, I think, Blue Hall states. So he has a perfectly good claim that I know how to do this kind of thing.
They won a judicial race, too, that was important. And he went after the Republicans and reduced their margins, I think, quite a lot in the legislature.
The whole Democrats, just if I can take a second on this, there's a kind of fantasy world they're in now of like, we're going to redefine the party in this way, we're going to be centrist on immigration, but we're also going to be populist on this, which is all fine, and they should all try that out, and different people should say what they believe or say what they think works politically or both. But for now, it's about opposing Trump and stopping him from doing as much damage as possible and establishing yourself what you believe, what you would do really by contrast with Trump.
I mean, that's what a good opposition party does. So if his tax bill is all for rich people, you say, look at this tax bill.
It's a disgrace. We should help the middle class or the poor.
But the idea that they're going to sit around in sort of endless meetings about how they can really rebrand the party is childish. Now, they have a couple of elections this year.
Good candidates, I think, Spanberger here in Virginia. Mikey Sherrill in New Jersey would be my preferred candidate for governor there.
Help those two people win governorships. You know what? That would actually really help.
Help some younger members of congress become spokespeople on different issues

in a more organized way than they can do when they're just sitting in some committee on the

minority that would be a good idea do some stuff around the country with you know the jason crows

and jay gawken classes and others or even aoc this is why i like yes i totally yeah i got this is why

we both of us were for aoc is taking that oversight chair role because the most important

thing right now is defining trump and the trump administration negatively, and she's good at that. And instead, they gave her a seat on energy and commerce.
I'm like, I'm sorry, AOC going to bat against Trump and using her media power to do that is the highest and best use of her, not trying to argue for the Green New Deal or whatever while you're in the minority on the energy and commerce committee no matter what your you know view is of that as policy like none of that is going to happen like there's not going to be you know i mean i say this it's pretty macabre given what is happening in la but there's not like there's not going to be meaningful legislation on climate that the progressives like on the energy and commerce committee this time like that this is your point right you can have the ideological fights but like the fight right now is an anti-trump fight yeah i mean if they can adjust if they can help us in legislation that's fine it's not mutually exclusive sure chris murphy i've got to say i think you had him on didn't you have him on fairly recently i can't i've had murphy on not that recently but yeah he's been good though i mean i've got i don't know him much at all and i didn't really follow him very close i mean he's very outspoken on gun uh control issues uh which was fine good and some other issues and uh but i've got to say he seems to be one of the few people who's like internalized the notion that okay what we need to do on cap the way we define ourselves as different, as something new and different is by opposing Trump and thinking of interesting ways to do so, then you're not just defending Biden's accomplishments from the last few years and or before defending whatever, you know, the Obama administration, you know, and you find your way into the positions you need to be in. And you never know ahead of time, incidentally, in my experience of this, what issues take off, right? And what fights take off and what nominees blow up and what departments turn out to have scandals.
And suddenly you're making your name on something you didn't really expect to be. Murphy at least seems to me to have a feel for that in a way that most of these other members are busy sitting around.
Yeah. And the other thing Murphy's doing is making that and saying, we need to do this behalf of working people getting back you know i think that's right like thinking about how can we reframe this trump fight or putting us on the side of regular people working class people against entrenched powerful interests that's a smart use of time you did a tweet which you do sometimes about bullies and this is related to this you wrote as i've gotten, I've had to acknowledge the sad fact that in this world of ours, bullies often prosper.
But my loathing of bullies has also intensified over the years. And as bullies are ultimately weak, I do think that Putin's Trump's and Musk's, if resisted, can be defeated.
This is the mindset, right? No? Was that just, you don't actually believe? No, I didn't believe that. I'm sorry, what was I striking? No, you just made an eyebrow.
You made an eyebrow. no is that was that just you don't actually believe no i didn't i'm sorry what was i striking no you just made an eyebrow you made an eyebrow that was like maybe i was over my skis on that maybe they can be defeated no sometimes eventually they could eventually they can be defeated no that you i find the bullying side of my maga and i had a musk and the tech pros and so particularly repulsive i gotta say they they could have views that i really think are bad for the country and obviously i've argued with people for decades about such views in different foreign policy and in other areas but that's one thing to earnestly have such a view and advance it it's the really repulsive bullying and the taking pride in being bullies and that other people taking pride in supporting them because they're bullies that i i just find kind of personally so off-putting i guess like musk behavior is just appalling and so it's a case sam harris who i had on recently was doing an interview with bill maher and uh he was like telling a story about how musk had been had tweeted out a link that the pizza gate guy tweeted out it was like a it was like a clip of harris and they used to be friends K clip of Harris talking about immigration.
But it was clipped in such a way that they totally got the point backwards that he was trying to make. And Sam emailed Elon, who had been his friend, and was like, hey, you got this wrong.
And by the way, the guy that you're sharing this was the guy that thought that there was child abductions happening in the basement of a pizza parlor with no with no basement and and he said musk replied fuck off right and it's just like that's it it's like i can do what i want i can smear people we can attack people i can bully people and you know if i'm challenged you know i i can just you know tell you to go pound sand it's a particularly unappealing trait and but i do think maybe like the glimmer of hope is that i don't think it's a trait that wears well maybe right are you convinced about that you seem unconvinced about your own your your own take so i i don't think it wears well that's why i wrote that i'm usually'm usually pretty sincere when I write. Sometimes you're doing thought experiments.

Yeah, right. Well, you got to do that too.
And once, I don't really look at the response,

but you see the responses sometimes. And someone had responded quite intelligently

something about how, well, I think what Bill underestimates here is how much people

like bullies and bullying. That there's more support for it than you would like to think.
I tend to agree with you that people don't like it ultimately, and that it wears thin, and if one can organize in response to it in an effective way, one could really fight back effectively, actually. But I don't know, the MAGA experience is a bit of a wake-up call, the degree to which people like being part of the bullying crowd as opposed to standing up to the bullying crowd right yeah even billionaires even mike you know zuckerberg and all that bullshit about this is you can do this on some other show but on the what does he what do you say that he realizes now that facebook they need more of a culture of masculinity or so what is he even talking about i mean they need more of a culture of masculinity.
Yeah, this was on my notes, but I was like, I don't know if Bill Crystal's right. No, you should have someone better talk about that.
But yes, I'm just teasing you about like, yeah, we need more of a masculine energy that celebrates aggression more. Mark Zuckerberg, give me a break.
Give me a break. All these people is just so it's so fucking embarrassing i have one burning question for you before i let you go because i've been i've been having people message me about this is the old national greatness conservative inside you at all when it comes to greenland is there anything firing inside bill crystal you know from 90s bill crystal that that says, you know, Greenland? I don't know.
I don't know. Trump? Trump, I don't like.
But Manifest Destiny to Greenland may be a little appealing for you. Yeah, I don't like Manifest Destiny.
It's a historical matter. But I used to joke in the 90s, hey, you know, parts of Canada, if they want to join the U.S., that's fine.
Obviously, they should want to join. We shouldn't be conquering them.
Then they would have some issues with how they would separate themselves from the rest of Canada, but that's sort of between them. I don't have a problem with if Denmark decides it's too much of a pain in the neck.
I guess they pay quite a lot of money, actually, to support the people in Greenland who don't really have that much of an economy there, I guess. If they decide it's too much of a burden for them, and if Greenland wants to become part of the U.S., that would be fine, and they would have to figure out how they should have votes, you know, as should people from D.C.
and Florida. Yeah, maybe they'd be part of Alaska, some kind of like coalition of the islands, I don't know, or something like that, or far-flung places.
It has a little bit of resonance. So someone texted me, actually, when the Greenland thing started to see, which is, wow, the New York conservatives really have taken over the Trump administration.
And, but so, but on the other hand, just as someone who does, you know, if we could be semi-serious for 20 seconds, Denmark has been totally, as I understand it, I asked so far a policy guy about this, I don't know anything about it. Are we having problems like we're doing what we want to do in Greenland? Not at all.
Denmark's perfectly, it's a NATO ally. They're perfectly happy.
If we asked to send 10,000 troops to Greenland tomorrow to guard it better or something like that, they'd be fine. And there are American troops there, incidentally, on and off, I gather.
And if we want to exploit the minerals there, if Trump doesn't put tariffs on everything and destroy the world trading system, we have very good relations, good trade relations with Denmark. We import stuff, we export stuff.
So fine, so let's get the rare earth minerals so it is just such performative I had thought before it was performative bullshit you know just it was just bullshit and a way of keeping people off his back as he sells out Ukraine and the important stuff maybe he realizes that if you want to be on Mount Rushmore you probably it's not a bad idea to expand the size of the U.S. and maybe he's more serious about it.
And Greenland looks big on a map. It looks very big.
I swear to God, that's what this is. Greenland looks big on a map.
That's what it is. And the people there look white or whitish.
I mean, so, I don't know. And that's good.
The place is white in general. It's very snowy, you know.
Trump likes that. He doesn't want one of those places with dark people and a lot of sunshine, you know.
None of are on the list for acquisition. How about just give Puerto Rico a state of this actual place with millions of Americans? All right.
I just wanted to see if that light was still shining. It had a little.
It had a little. But not, incidentally, if he were saying, you know what, we need to really help you.
Can we have a chance to topple Putin? Look at the energy problems they're having. give you a little, it had a little, there's a little, a little.
But not, incidentally, if he were saying, you know what, we need to really help Ukraine, we have a chance to topple Putin, look at the energy problems they're having, you read about this warning with Gazprom, and we really can double down on Ukraine. And incidentally, I'm not a, you know, Ukraine should join NATO.
And if Denmark is, if Greenland's too much of a burden for Denmark, we could take that off their hands. That's a consistent greatness position.
But Trump is not for American greatness. Trump is for bullying a couple of little countries, mostly even symbolic bullying, I would say.
Taunting Canada, being idiotic about Mexico, honestly, which is a very important country that we need to be in good terms with. And then not standing up to either Putin or Xi or I predict Iran.
He's going to be bad on all the big challenges. They'll be bad from a hawkish point of view, including the Trump hawks in the administration, you know, I think on all those issues, on all those things.
That actually requires like serious policy and tough trade-offs at times, right? Maybe, maybe he'll realize that he won't be a successful president if we lose ground to Putin and to Xi and to the Iranian theocrats. But I don't know.
I don't know. I'm not pissed.
I'm not very that I'm very worried about, actually, the Ukraine situation. But Bob Kagan had a good piece on that in the Atlantic last week.
Very long piece. You can read it at your leisure.
We'll put it in the show notes, Bob Kagan. All right.
Thanks, Bill. Chris, we also have our, we should say Jen Rubin has left the Washington Post and she's starting with your friend, Norm Eisen, an outlet called The Contrarian to fight the autocrats.
So FYI, that's the people desiring to fight autocrats might be leaving some of the other more legacy news outlets. A Thousand Flowers are blooming.
So I don't know if you have any thoughts on that

welcome welcome welcome in the

anti-autocracy water

I was going to say it's really it's not really warm

it's freezing

it's freezing here

in pro-democracy and anti-autocracy

world but welcome welcome

yeah but if you want to do a polar bear plunge with us

we'll accept you come on in

alright thanks for Bill Krista we'll be back tomorrow with another edition of the Bulldog Podcast. See you all then.
Peace. Sometimes when I say night and night, I forget you're out of sight.
Like living before you were gone. So I read up on the afterlife.
I won't believe in Jesus Christ Just somewhere we can all belong

And deep, move slow

I'm living in a state

Back home, this land is ungrateful

It grows, something's gotta change

I know And I'm stuck somewhere in between Your death and my lucid dream I'm no help lately, I know But I'm tired of trying to prove my worth To be accepted on this earth

Baby, I'm ready to go

And days move slow

I'm living the same

Black hole, this fire is on the grave

Echoes, something's gonna change

I know

The Bulldog Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper

with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.