Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts

Hello and welcome to the Bulldog Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.
We are back. Hope everyone had a wonderful holiday or is still having a wonderful holiday.
Much has happened since we talked last. We'll be getting to Timmy's Oscar-worthy Bob Dylan performance, of course, at the end.
Jimmy Carter's passing, the coming debt limit and speakership showdowns here next week.

2025 foreign policy outlook, Musk versus MAGA.

But our guest has implored me that the place to start today is MAGA versus Miller.

And it is, of course, Bill Kristol.

Bill, I hope you had a wonderful Hanukkah.

And I turn it over to you.

What were you curious for more info about my encounter with our old friend, Carrie Lake, in Phoenix a couple weeks ago? Good to be with you, Tim, and Happy New Year a little ahead of time. Yes, well, you wrote so well about your encounter with Carrie Lake and Laura Loomer playing the peacemaker at that insane Charlie Kirk event that you seem to like going to each year.
Is that some kind of character defect there? But anyway, I feel like there must be more color that you can give on that. What exactly? You went to like a party, you know, an after party invited by whom exactly, if I could ask? Yeah, correct.
So I had interviewed Steve Bannon, and we talked about that. Both articles were put in the show notes if folks were taking a break.
This was, I guess, the Friday before Christmas. And I interviewed him about kind of the future of MAGA.
But the newsy bit that he talked about was, you know, how from his perspective, Kash Patel is going to follow up on his plans to target the people that were in his book on the so-called enemies list. I think that's particularly newsworthy because there are a lot of senators, even John Fetterman, a lot of Republican senators acting like that's not going to happen.
And so I think that could be an interesting data point, given the close relationship between Cash and Steve for a confirmation hearing. So anyway, after that interview, it's just one of those things where MAGA takes over downtown Phoenix.
And so we're in a hotel, we were doing this interview. I go downstairs to the hotel lobby, and I just bump into people, Bill.
I don't know. These people, they know me.
They're from a past life or from this current life. Some of them really hate me as a MAGA provocateur.
Some of them are old colleagues that I work for on campaigns. So I started chatting with some people in the lobby, including Matt Gaetz.
I don't think that I include the Gaetz bit in the article. I saw I could see Gaetz in the lobby.
He was definitely a little bit chastened, I would say. The last couple of times I've seen Matt, he's been very brash and shit-talking.
We're about the same age, and he supported Jeb initially. So I know Matt decently well.
I definitely think he was a little bit chastened, and his wife was right next to him the whole time I saw him. And, you know, he said to sneak off to do an OAN hit, his new job.
He's a competitor now, I guess. I did tease him about that.
I guess the only news or anything he said was kind of about how he wants the deportations to be able to start day one and how that impacted, you know, the importance of having an attorney general in their day one. Again, could be BS and bluster, but interesting thing to say.
So during all these conversations, I get invited by somebody that I had known to James O'Keefe, who you might know from Project Veritas. They do the undercover stuff.
He had an after party. So it's like they have all the speakers and the blah, blah, blah.
And then at the end, all the college kids go to try to get some MAa lovemaking on and they go to these after parties and this one was hosted by james o'keefe he was going to do a dance performance but unfortunately i was unable to stay for that because of the gary leg confrontation started to get a little awkward in there um so i don't have any video of the james o'keefe dance number that he did although i've seen some of it on the internet. People are very curious.
And yeah, I go in there. Frankly, most people either don't know me or are curious about my presence.
And I was having a pleasant conversation with somebody, as pleasant as it can be in that audience. I think it's interesting to actually hear them off of social media, right? And try to understand what they really think about things.
Andrie just kind of blindsides me like she sees me before i see her and she comes sprinting up to me like i'm you know i'm i'm prey on the savannah and like immediately starts at first she had her arms wide and i thought she was gonna hug me like i don't know why i just i had a i just had this feeling like maybe she wants to bury the hatchet it was a it was an incorrect malcolm gladwell blink assessment of what was about to happen and instead of hugging me when i go to kind of touch her on her shoulder she immediately says don't fucking touch me and start screaming at me you're a piece of shit over like for like a minute and then turns around and then turns back around and comes back for more starts calling me a piece of shit again says i'm an alcoholic she points at my drink was the only drink i'd had that night she seemed a little i don't know in this new regime with the with uh the lawsuits going around i don't know what she was but uh she definitely her eye was definitely not looking square at me i guess i'll say that she had a wandering eye and she was just looking up at me, attacked my outfit and said I didn't care about fentanyl mothers, said I was a piece of shit over and over again. And I like, I'm just, I was just trying to deescalate.
I teased her a little bit about, I was like, you had this new great job as the director of Voice of America. Shouldn't you be happy? Why are you so mad at me? And yeah, out of nowhere laura loomer emerges and says to gary like yeah he is a piece of shit but like you know let's chill out a little bit so there you go laura loomer the racist conspiracist de-escalated the attack who then was then was was in the news a lot later in the week with her fight with elon musk and the two things that are amusing about this are you saying casually truthfully that you knew matt gates from the old days when he was a jeff supporter i mean it just such a it brings home so wonderfully in a way what it was like 10 years ago when these people were either not who they are today or they were who they were today but it's a different circumstance and so they manifest differently or whatever this is how societies work mean, there were elements of inside of all of us are elements inside of Matt Gates that he kept inside because he thought it would help him to advance his career, to act more like Jeb Bush or his dad, Don Gates or whatever.
And, you know, he has been unleashed for his worst impulses have now been unleashed, you know, but it is important for people to, I think actually, he's quite as close to it, honestly, as we are. I mean, to understand that.
I've been very struck by this, too. The degree to which people, one sort of knew they weren't entirely where one might want them to be as human beings, but they weren't obviously psychopaths, you know, or sociopaths or racists or anything like that, at least not obviously.
And they were in our circles, as it were, in different ways. And the degree to which that happens in a society and that 10 years, many people have written about this, obviously, in terms of Europe in the 20s and 30s and all that.
And 10 years later, they're just sailed off into a totally different place. And anyway, it is just kind of interesting.
These people didn't come out of nowhere. I mean, a lot of them were, yes, in that world, that part.
I like that part. I like Laura Luma being a peacemaker.
You correct that that is true that there are people who shape-shifted or whose you know darker impulses were you know unleashed by the trump era i will say this though that crowd though it's like very mad you know what i mean like there are select people there's select people that have embraced it in various ways i can couldn't frankly try to k the event who is like a basically a sean hannity college republican you know that was just a hack like so there's some people like that including charlie look i said this article there's something we said charlie gets some credit like it's hard to imagine a democratic group that four days before christmas has 20 000 people flying somewhere to go gather

for something like this like it's a real grassroots enthusiasm but the types of people that are drawn to it it is strange like i guess the other color that i didn't include in there is like one example is this guy the washington post did a big takeout on him he was the deep state marauder ivan something he's wearing a shirt called retribution he has this black book i guess of people that of people that should be targeted. I'd never heard of him.
And I'm pretty deep in this world. Mainstream media outlet like wrote a takeout on him about kind of how this is scary.
Like there's this guy out there that has this list of people for the constitutional sheriffs and the incoming administration to target. And it is scary in a certain way.
But then you meet him. And it's like, this is an insane person.
This is the person that like Steve Bannon would want to hang out with. I was just standing there in a certain way but then you meet him and it's like this is an insane person like this is a person that like steve bannon wouldn't want to hang out with like i was just standing there in a group and he comes up and starts ranting about like really wild-eyed crazy stuff and then like he leaves and i was like who was that to people i was like oh you don't know ivan the deep state marauder i'm like no i don't how old is he he was probably he's probably 40 it's hard to tell he didn't really look that great just like how you've said we've said many times in the inverse you can feel very comfortable at a freshman democratic orientation these days even if we disagree on the specifics of regulation policy it's usually like high achieving high sociability normal people it was a motley crew to say the least i mean i sort of assumed that the young people who've never seen another world if you're 25 you got into this world maybe when you were 17 you've never been in a pre-trump republican world obviously or even in a pre-trump world you know politically that you're you're all in you're a true believer i guess i've assumed the older people and i want to come ban in particular as a good example of this i think i'll come back come back to him in a sec.
They have to have some sense of distance or irony or something.

They remember a past before this.

But maybe I'm wrong about that, or they don't necessarily have distance or irony,

because after all, Carrie Lake, of all the people,

you mentioned Matt Gaetz being a Jeb supporter in 2015.

If you went to Arizona to do an interview with a local anchor,

the interviewer was probably Carrie Lake,

and she was a totally normal, ambitious, pretty anchor person on a local anchor the interviewer was probably carrie lake and she was a totally normal ambitious pretty anchor person right on a local news tv station so i think i'm wrong to think that only the young are fanatics correct me if i'm wrong about this but i've always thought i knew about it a little bit when he came to washington 2013 ish and started various enterprises and told me he's going to compete with destroy the defeat the weekly standard and all this he always felt a little different to me and i think he that's and he i think he has a different attitude towards you too and towards us in a way i mean more of a i'm not sure he wants to crush us and won't you know blink for a minute when we're sent off to the camps but on the other hand i don't know i feel like it's a little different he has a little more sense of what he's up to and what he's doing and what we're up to and so forth. Am I wrong about that? Does that permeate a little bit beyond him personally, if I'm right, or is that just him? Yeah, I think he's a pretty unique character.
For people who do want to Google this Deep State Marauder, Ivan Raiklin is his last name, R-A-I-K-L-I-N. Bannon is savvy.
A lot of these people are stupid, is like really what it comes down to.

A lot of them are stupid.

And so Bannon, I think in one way, you know, you can't get into a man's head or soul and

kind of who cares and who would want to be.

But there's a through line back to 2013.

I think that he has a level of genuineness about certain aspects of the populism, right?

About the economic populism, about the nativism, closing the borders, the borders about going after the rich i mean see what you want about bannon bannon is like the only one out there at these events tucker i guess now too so maybe i'd throw them him in the same category who is like talking about we should tax the rich we should go after the billionaires we should go after the big bankers like that their populism is a little bit more a full spectrum right-wing populism in a way that's kind of scary right but it's also authentic it's not like the fake and so i do think that him like there is this kind of puckish you know you know troublemaking nature of like sure i'm going to go along with the hunter bind and his or whatever chinese agent or the voting machines and so that's all very dangerous i don't want to minimize it but like i do think that both are happening at the same time, right? Like there is, I will go along with this fake performative populism in whatever I need to do to keep Trump happy, while also actually having a real populist agenda that I want to advance. And this really does take us to the Musk fight.
Yes, very much so. I mean, I'd say also a real, I don't use this term, but I mean, semi-fascist agenda.
I mean, Bannon read all these wacko Italian fascists from 1920. That guy, Evola, I think I first heard of him from something Bannon wrote or said or something.
So there's a kind of worldview. It's a very dangerous view, in my opinion.
And it's deeply anti-liberal in the broad sense of liberalism. And therefore, it can lead to people being sent to camps.
It's not like he's a nicer guy or has better outcomes than the more simple-minded, rabid, 23-year-old MAGA types. But it is somewhat different.
Anyway, Bannon weighed in on it. So let's get to – well, I'm curious.
So at your thing, this is pre-Elon Musk versus everyone, pre-MAGA versus Doge is the way I think of it, I guess. Did you see any indications of that at your...
A little bit. I mean, so in two ways.
So we spoke about this during the Bannon interview, and he was very blunt. He's been critical of Elon going back to 2018.
I think there was a tweet going around about Elon bragging about how Bannon attacking him is the best PR he's gotten six years ago.. So, so this is longstanding, you know, like this was simmering, you know, it was under the surface during the campaign.
You know, they were allies of convenience, you know, during the campaign, Moscow's putting in 250 million or whatever he put in to the campaign, insane amount of money. You know, they weren't gonna fight somebody that's paying you, like, frankly, right? You know what I mean? Like, you don't, you don't bite the hand that feeds you.
And so this was always under the surface. So there was no tension at the convention.
I will say this, though, on stage, I could sense, I think I kind of referenced this in the article, that like, this isn't lasting. There was not a coherent worldview being presented from the stage besides trump adoration right like literally it was going speaker back to back it was like ben shapiro sounded like paul ryan 2012 if he if he thought that donald trump was a prophet as well like if he had those two views together then it was bannon who was doing his made of this quasi-fascist stuff and then it was ben carson like who sounded like you know a Christian conservative.
And then it was Tucker who was doing his made of his quasi-fascist stuff. And then it was Ben Carson, like who sounded like, you know, a Christian conservative.
And then it was Tucker, who was like even more insane than Bannon, sounded like a Marxist revolutionary, right? Like it was Don Jr. went up on stage after Bannon and Bannon was attacking Mike Johnson for not passing the spending bill.
But Don Jr. didn't understand Bannon's critique.
And so he was attacking the 15 people who opposed mike johnson there was no coherent message and then there was some of the tech guys patrick bett david some he's not really a tech guy but business guy there were some of these other new mega people who spoke i guess i didn't see elon teal or andreason or sacks or kind of like the core of that group that i when i think of them but the fact that there are these disparities i sensed that though i wouldn't have expected you know a week later they would have been at each other's throat on twitter and what do you make of the disparities that is i think on the one point of view someone pointed this out to me at a hanukkah gathering last night we were chatting about the list you know there were like a million fights within mussolini's camp and governments from 1922 and 19.

I thought it's funny to say.

I thought you were to be like, there were a million fights in the Reagan GOP.

I don't know if that's what you're talking about.

That's true.

No, not to the Mussolini.

No, but I'm just thinking of like, you can have a pretty nasty authoritarian regime that

has a lot of inconsistencies and different types and some genuine arguments about, in

Mussolini's case, he was anti-clerical, then he's pro-lending the church.

He's got the church on board and stuff that annoyed some of his early supporters they held power nonetheless and i guess do you think it's a serious you know thing that they're gonna have to resolve can they just live with the tension between i guess one way to call it is MAGA versus DOGE i don't think that's a bad way of putting it right MAGA versus tech bro for people that don't really understand what DOGE is but DOGE is a tech tech bro crypto coin. That's the term they've kind of adopted for themselves.
Yeah. I mean, I feel like obviously there are more humans in the MAGA camp, I think, and who voted for Trump than in Doge camp, but there's more money in Doge world and that ways that matters to Trump too.
I don't know. What do you think of it? Trump seemed to side with Elon.
So just really quick back on for people who haven't paid as close of attention as close attention. Essentially what this all started when Trump appointed an Indian American immigrant to be an AI ambassador or czar.
Advisor in the White House. Yeah, advisor.
A low-key job. But this is a person who's been a big advocate for H-1B visas and all these sort of immigrant visas to bring workers particularly to Silicon Silicon Valley, but also other industries.
And this exploded in this paroxysm of racism from the MAGA world, but also just people that were feeling betrayed. Why is Trump bringing these people in? Being against visas such as this so that American workers can get jobs is at the core of what MAGA is.
And then Elon and Vivek and all of them started defending this appointment and saying you could reform H-1B, but we need to value immigration. And Vivek did some weird analogies about like Saved by the Bell and how Indians have a better culture in order to rationalize us.
Yeah, the Saved by the Bell stuff spoke to your generation, right? It did, it did. I was like, what are you talking about? I did not catch those.
did not catch those references, personally. Well, Vivek clearly wasn't watching enough Saved by the Bell because he didn't really get the references exactly right.
Zach had a better SAT score than Screech. But anyway, so this fight, some of it, I could see how somebody might think, oh, this is just like the king's court fighting for attention in any regime.
I do think that the immigration thing, though, if there is anything that is core to mega it is immigration and nativism and elon went so hard to the map on this he sent a tweet that talked about how he will go to war saying f you to somebody who had been attacking him over this there was this tweet by autism capital which is like a crypto thing where they were trying to summarize the fight and the two factions on the right and this guy writes that the the tech right or the doge right is saying that american workers are too retarded to do these jobs and you can't out train being retarded and elon musk replied to that guy saying that pretty much sums it up this was eye-opening so like to, again, you're not going to kick Elon out because of the money, like I said earlier. But it does reveal a fundamental rift, right? That if these guys aren't willing to swallow the tech guys, their views on immigration, then eventually I would think that they're going to lose out to the Stephen Miller wing internally.
And I guess the last thing I'll say about this, I'm curious your thought is that the immigration fight could be the first fight because Revote and those guys want a reconciliation bill in the first 30, 60 days. This goes back to what Gates told me about doing the deportations day one.
They want a reconciliation on immigration to fund the border to fund the jackbooted thugs to fund whatever else they

you know they've come up with asap so they can get moving on their deportation plans and so

who knows maybe they end up just kind of ignoring the legal immigration part of the fight and they

can move forward but it's not like this is something that's going to simmer and then

they'll deal with it in 2026 you know and it's coming soon so anyway what do you think

Thank you. the legal immigration part of the fight and they can move forward but it's not like this is something that's going to simmer and then they'll deal with it in 2026 you know and it's coming soon so anyway what do you think yeah i don't know i mean i agree it's it's unpredictable which of these fights just as this one was totally unpredictable and was maybe needn't have happened it wasn't like this was going to happen people eventually well yeah eventually but it could have happened six months from now they could have all been on they had demagog demagogia to say the least about the Haitians in September.
And Elon and Vivek seemed to be perfectly comfortable with that and didn't either object to it or in Vivek's case, I believe, joined in on it. And that was from Trump advance.
That was not like, gee, wacko, you know, third tier MAGA people, right? So they weren't exactly rallying to the defense of legal immigrants there, dark skinned legal immigrants there. In a certain way, this could be put off again.
They could all agree on deporting criminals, on even deporting non-criminals. They're not H-1B holders.
Obviously, the people that these are holders, they're deporting. And the money, I guess, in that original reconciliation could just be for border security and for funding all the deportation and the expenses of it, the administrative judges and so forth.
It might not address the legal legal issue, I guess is what I'm saying. I don't know.
I think generally my view now is very hard to predict. When you have an administration like this with so many impulsive oddballs and Trump himself at the top and some, so many things they want to do or say they want to do, some of them conflicting with others, who knows what rifts open when and how and what I think is very important for Democrats and for the opposition to be very flexible in that respect.
It's important to take advantage of these risks. I do think that, and this is one.
And if that weakens Trump a bit and knocks him a point office approval, that's all good. I mean, that's what has to be done.
I don't know if you agree with this. I was talking about this last night too.
I mean, for the next few months is a matter of chipping at Trump and chipping it, especially at the appointees who are weaker than Trump. Trump's the strongest person.
Vivek is weaker than Trump. Musk is weaker than Trump.
Kash Patel is weaker than Trump. Pete Hex, chipping at all these different figures, nominees, policies, where there are cross-cutting cleavages.
That I think is probably the opposition agenda for the next few months. At least, you can't just, Trump's won the election, you can't stand up on January 21st and say, he's not, he shouldn't be president or I'm not normalizing his presidency.
Well, that's fine. I'm not for normalizing his presidency, but I mean, he's president, he won an election.
So, I think that in this respect, the willingness of them all to go fighting trump's relative unwillingness to intervene pretty quickly to stop it does suggest there could be an awful lot of this going on on a million issues i mean it could happen on ukraine it could happen on well they're obviously just on tax policy i mean what if bad it actually says it's gonna happen on tax policy it sort of does get to the fact that congress still exists if they want to pass legislation they have a narrow majority in the House, only a very narrow majority of the House, not that big one in the Senate. I know they all got to capitulate to Trump, mostly, but maybe not forever and not on everything.
And so I kind of think there are more vulnerabilities there than one might have thought in the aftermath of Trump's victory and Republican control of everything. And we're doomed.
I think he looks way weaker than he did the week after the election. I don't think that there's...
Is that right? That's interesting. I think so.
I mean, I would have expected people to be much more in line. And maybe that changes January 20th.
A month from now, he looks stronger than he does now. And he's just been focused on golfing and being the DJ at Mar-a-Lago and who knows.
I don't know.

Maybe he gets in there and you see Iron Fist Trump appear. Though I kind of don't expect that at this point, but I think it's certainly possible.
On the just immigration rift as an example, I do think that the vulnerability is kind of a public stuff. So there might be a temptation to be like, oh, well, this is all who cares.
Let's not focus on their little petty fights but to me i think that is where you know you can create fissures and divide them is over this public stuff because the nativists are going to win the private fight right like elon already showed that he doesn't know what he's doing like like on this government shutdown thing and elon doesn't even know like the committee process I wasn't even sure that there were two different chambers of Congress a month ago. I'm not 100% sure he was.
And so I think that Elon is not going to win the internal fight. Now, Trump, I think, sided with him on this H-1B thing in an interview at the New York Post.
So at the top level, Elon is winning and access to Trump is winning. But who's going to be writing the immigration bill? Stephen Miller.
Who's going to be writing the rules that DHS puts in place as far as dealing with asylees or dealing with dreamers or whatever

it is? Stephen Miller. It's not going to be Elon and his buddies.
And so that tension is going to

bubble up on the public facing stuff at some point. and it's just really quick on the tax thing they're only gonna be able to lose two votes in the house like they're gonna end up having disagreements on the tax thing that are in the details devils in the details on this stuff that's not like about these big thematic things it's going to be about you know like whether can extend the salt deduction, like the New York and California Republicans might decide to beat hassle on that, right? Like, and Trump's not in there writing this bill, you know, so they're not going to feel like they're opposing Trump if they're opposing certain elements of the tax bill, they're going to figure out how to make it work, you know, to pass the reconciliation rules.
It's just like very challenging. Again, there's going to be stuff that Vogt and Miller can do, like separate from all this fighting, that's going to be very alarming and dangerous.
I'm not saying this is a clown show that they'll end up doing nothing. But like the big legislative fights, I think are going to be a lot messier than I had maybe anticipated a couple weeks ago.
And I think the notion that they can do two reconciliation bills, I think that's kind of nuts. I mean, they're going to have to jam it all into one and just exert maximum pressure to get to 218 on that one bill.
The idea that they can do that twice within the year, maybe if Trump gets stronger, but it is very strong. Six months ago, I remember saying one of these meetings of what are we going to do if Trump wins? You know, we gamed out some of the stuff, which was actually kind of useful.
People were much too complacent, I'd say, about what could happen. People were too complacent in the meeting where you were planning.
Yes, it was all like, and they were all like, I'm worried that the IRS could come after some of the 501c3 organizations. I think I said some version of, I don't know, why don't you think that it's, why won't DOJ just launch criminal investigations of all this? Or why won't Musk fund, you know, a million civil defamation suits? Oh, no, I think the IRS.
I mean, people were not alarmed enough. Having said that, I made sort of obvious point, I thought, was that the transition was important.
That if Trump, if he won the election with 51 percent of vote, let's say 50 percent, and enters office at 55 or 57, he's in very strong shape. An elected president who has a honeymoon.
If he enters office with 45, he's in weak shape. And if he enters office with the same 50 he had in the election, he doesn't have much momentum.
And I think that's where we are now. I did look up just kind of his approval.
There isn't that much polling and it's a little meaningless until he's president, I suppose. But he's around where he was in the vote.
Actually, his approved, disapproved was like 51, 49 or something like that. So Trump has not built momentum.
I very much agree with you. I don't know how much weaker he is, but I think somewhat weaker.
Some of these cabinet picks, there's enough resistance to Kennedy and Patel and Gabbard that I don't think that's going to be a smooth show over the two or three weeks after the new Congress gets sworn in this Friday. And so I agree that he has various problems coming conceivably in these areas.
And the Congress, yeah, there still is a Senate and there still is a narrowly divided House. And they're going to want to give Trump certain things to start with.
But it's a good question how many of those things. And every defeat, every obstacle, in my view, though, helps.
Anything that slows the momentum. The one thing I would say about Vaughn and Miller, though, is they do understand this better.
And it was interesting. So Musk intervened against the continuing resolution, the CRA they'd worked out.
Trump changed the topic to the debt ceiling, the debt limit. Remember? I don't know if that was Trump having studied deeply the debt ceiling deadlines.
That was Vaughn, presumably from OMB, kind of knowing this stuff and saying, Mr. President-elect, we need to, if we can push this back, that'll help us a lot.
This is kind of not what we want to deal with in our first six months. And Trump's refocused on that with a tweet that you caught my attention to.
I actually missed it last night. Let me just read that really quick, because you mentioned, so the new Congress constitutes Friday, they're going to have to elect a speaker.
and so there are two fights coming even before he gets in in addition to the confirmations which which will start before the inauguration as well and boy will we have wall-to-wall coverage for you of the pete eggshell confirmation i've got i've got big plans for that here we go this was trump on the debt ceiling the extension of the debt ceiling by a previous speaker of the house he's talking about kevin mccarthy a good man and a friend of mine from this past september of the biden administration to june of the trump administration will go down as one of the dumbest political decisions made in years kevin just can't catch a break sarah's crushing him on panels matt gates is owning him trump is just calling him a good friend but then saying he made the dumbest political decision in years. Anyway, Trump writes, there's no reason to do it.

Nothing was gained, all caps, and we got nothing for it.

A major reason that McCarthy's speakership was lost.

The Democrats must be forced to take a vote on this treacherous issue now during the Biden administration and not in June.

They should be blamed for this potential disaster, not the Republicans.

It's interesting that Trump sets the debt ceiling timeline in this bleat as June. Some experts have said that the debt ceiling would hit quite a bit before that, early here in 2025.
Regardless, yeah, I'm curious your big picture thoughts on, I mean, are the Republicans going to be able to extend the debt ceiling? Will the Democrats want to help them?

Can Mike Johnson navigate this and stay Speaker?

Again, it's like much more challenging than I think it might have seemed from the perch of November 5th.

Yeah, I think it's very interesting.

I can see why Trump wants to get it out of his hair, so to speak, before he has to take

office.

I'm not sure he's right that it's such a huge problem for them in May or June.

They'll resolve it the way they've resolved debt ceilings in the past. But anyway, he's decided this is someone told him and maybe he's right that it's such a huge problem for them in may or june they'll resolve it the way they've resolved debt ceilings in the past but anyway he's decided this is someone told him and maybe he's right that this is the last thing he needs to be dealing with the same time that he's dealing with all the other stuff we've been talking about so let's do it and let's sort of semi-blame biden ripped a piece of legislation biden would have to sign it trump wouldn't be in the embarrassing position of signing a huge expansion or delay you know or extension does

he care about that though who cares he's the king of that's what i don't quite understand but they've told him it could screw up his i think it's the house guys i think they're worried about chip roy and them that like that there are enough house guys who are just out there on this that they can't do it and he would have trouble getting democratic votes without making real concessions on the tax package on immigration or something so that's that's fair enough and so therefore get it done now so i think it's not a crazy idea of trump's because let me just back up i think they will bring it to the floor next week and as people have sort of forgotten that congress gets constituted mike johnson and and the new majority leader john thun in the senate could do stuff in the next two weeks just because biden's still president now normally you don't when there's a change of office in the presidency because you're not passing, you're passing your legislation, not the Biden administration's. And so why would you do that until your guy takes over and can sign it, right? So normally the new legislation goes on January 21st, you know, but it doesn't have, of course, these legally constituted bodies, the Senate and the House.
And I do think Johnson now sort of almost has to bring to the floor or try to bring to the floor a debt ceiling extension. He can't get enough Republican votes to pass it because of the chip royalties of the world.
Now, maybe they think, though, this puts Democrats in a tough place. And maybe they're right.
I mean, do Democrats all vote against it? It is kind of. I mean, Democrats are on record a million times saying this is stupid.
We should get rid of the debt ceiling. I have a Democrat that is a listener that has been texting me saying that he thinks that is a win for the Democrats to be like, let's extend it.
Let's get rid of the debt ceiling forever. Let's just do it now.
Yeah. And I can make a case that fighting it looks petty and actually ultimately self-defeating.
They're not really going to, Democrats are not going to really destroy the U.S. economy because of some fight they're having with Trump on immigration or tax policy.
So it's not a good thing for, Congress never wins these debt ceiling fights in the end, I think. So maybe they should give it to Trump.
On the end, if they give it to Trump, some Democrats will complain, are you kidding me? The first thing before he's even president, we're making Biden sign a debt ceiling extension to take political pressure off of Trump. That's not what an opposition party should do.
And part of me sympathizes for that, incidentally. That's the side I'm on.
And people will scream about that. On the other hand, the other option isn't so bad.
And that could be like actual legislation that's on the floor of the House on January 7th or 8th. So the next two weeks are going to be pretty wild between the nominations.
And I heard from someone else this morning, who seemed to know what he was talking about, I'm not sure, that there are other things they want to bring to the floor now. Some of them they'll pass, and I guess they can hold them, you know, not send them until the 20th if they have a week or something to hold them at the desk, or it takes a week to get through both houses.
But that they're not going to not legislate for these two weeks. And they want some of this stuff to pass so Trump can sign it on the 21st and so forth.
But in this case, they want to make Biden sign it. I've been very focused on the nominations, but actually there could be a lot of activity in the next two weeks.
And some of it could strengthen Trump and some of it could weaken him, right? Yeah. As somebody who still has some of my vestigial Republican positions, I think the government is too big.
I don't know. I think that having a debt ceiling is not actually that bad of a thing.
And so you're not really going to win me over on the argument that the Democrats should grab this great opportunity to get rid of the debt ceiling forever. I think that the debt is going to be a problem coming here in the next few years or decade.
So I'm not for that. My strategic Republican brain is on here, which is make Trump and Chip Roy work this out.
All right. This is their problem now, not the Democrats problem.
They shouldn't bail them out of this problem. But I do think that there will be Democrats who have earnest views that the debt limit is a problem and that we should take this opportunity to get rid of something that is stupid and potentially harmful and damaging to the country.
I understand that perspective, though I don't share it. No, and I tend not to share it too, because why do it now? I mean, you can just tell Johnson, we're open to voting for this in two months when we have a normal process going and we can talk about how to package it with something.
We're not going to give you this just in the first two weeks. I think that's a defensible position.
But the Ro Khanna's of the world are busy telling everyone that, you know, we got to work with Trump where it's appropriate. And we can't, we got to not just be an opposition party.
And if Doge has a good idea, we need to be for this good idea. And a lot of these guys, I don't know, they might be tempted to sort of,'s look like we're want to cooperate with trump at first i there are many cross currents in this including within the democratic party not just within the republican party so yes i guess it'll fail well i don't know i don't know that'd be a very interesting question for actually for hakeem jeffries and those guys can they hold their members together on it what did the democrats suddenly splinter and half the stories next week are democrats in disarray not just republicans Democrats have been together Say this did the Democrats suddenly splinter? And half the stories next week are Democrats in disarray, not just Republicans.
Democrats have been together. Say this about the Democrats.
Maybe too much agreeableness, frankly, has been part of the reason that's got them here. But the Democrats were lockstep on the fight before the holiday over the government funding.
So I expect that they'll continue to be lockstep. Jimmy Carter died yesterday after a long time in hospice.
I feel like so long that I feel like we've already done a Bill and Tim tribute to Jimmy Carter at one point. He wanted to stay alive to vote for Kamala.
Unfortunately, that did not yield a positive result in Georgia, but that was something that he, I think it said to his son. So I'm just wondering if you have any, I didn't get to meet Jimmy Carter.
I assume you did, working for Quayle, get to talk to Jimmy Carter a few times? I did. Well, you probably weren't even alive during the Jimmy Carter presidency, right? I was not.
I voted for Ford against Carter. I voted for Scoop Jackson in the primary against Carter, and I voted for Reagan against Carter.
So I was not a Carter supporter. I didn't hate him or anything like that.
I just thought Ford would be a better president. But what was striking about Carter was just to go through that when I was, I guess, was in college and grad school really in 74, 5, 60s emergence.
It was kind of crazy. One term governor of Georgia, not well known even when he was a governor, not the most famous liberal Southern governor that, you know, at the time even kind of, and he just campaigned and it was going to start at 1% government as good as the people and post Watergate it hit.
And there were enough still kind of Christian conservatives in the democratic party to give him support of the South, but he also can't fit. It was a good government guy sort of, you know, northerners like Northern Democrats like Southern liberal Democrats who've gotten elected if only to one term.
I think it was that a one-term governorship in Georgia. He won the nomination somewhat amazingly, almost lost the election.
Ford started 20 points behind

and came within a point. So I had friends who were for Carter.
They thought he would save the

Scoop Jackson, Hubert Humphrey, Cold War wing of the Democratic Party. That did not happen.

I mean, historically for my generation, that was the moment that neoconservatives moved to

the Republican Party. Some of it happened in the late, in the early 70s, 1970s with Nixon, and, you know, in the 73, 4, 5.
But really, it was the failure of the Carter administration, the perceived failure, let be fair, in both economic policy and in foreign policy that led to the sort of everyone being fine with Reagan by 1980. Whereas in 1976, you know, even in quite conservative, neoconservative circles, Reagan was like maybe a bridge too far.
You know, the Panama Canal really is at the core of our foreign policy agenda and stuff. Apparently it's back.
It's back, yeah. Trump remembers that.
Trump remembers those days. The Carter administration was an important moment, but more, I think, honestly, because because it and i agree to which the perception somewhat similar to the democrats today he was not personally that left wing he had been the more conservative candidate but the party just seemed to be in disarray and the left was pulling the chains and the teachers unions wanted an education department so they got that it was all stuff that you know it's not really very important in the big scheme of things probably but it let a lot of people go to the republicans and and obviously the failures of both the economic economy and foreign policy in iran especially in the hostages helped get reagan elected so it changed america his presidency changed america not in the ways he hoped honestly i think i met him a few times when he was in his post-presidency when he was vice president quail's chief of staff carter was always going on these foreign trips mostly contrary to the you know to what our foreign policy what the bush administration's foreign policy was he was going to bring peace to the koreas you know he was going to go visit north korea or some crazy thing well i think he got a little involved in the right up to the gulf war he was going to make sure that war didn't happen and talk to saddam or to people close to saddam i can't remember so of course he would come of course but he would come to the white house as a former president to get briefings on this ship and you know we would all the bush administration would try to prevent him from doing too much diplomatic damage from our point of view um but everyone was very polite it was a different era george hw bush but he of course would see president carter but somehow i my main memory is this may have just happened once or twice i can't remember so it was since quail was vice president that was a high enough level to deal with the former president but also quail was vice president and bush could happily slide after his 20-minute meeting with carter could let quail and quail's office organize the briefings for the former president and the nice lunch at the residence residence with the assistant secretary's estate of whatever region, you know, Carter or some outside experts that Carter was going to and stuff.
So I have this vague memory of sort of as chief of staff, like handling in some weird way, some of Jimmy Carter's visits to Washington and to the White House. And he was always personally courteous and pleasant to me, I've got to say, but in my very brief dealings here.
But that's my main memory was the sort of, this was a vice president's lot to go to a lot of funerals abroad and to deal with things that the president doesn't really want to deal with. And Jim Baker, the secretary of state, did not want to spend a lot of time, you know, discussing policies with Jimmy Carter.
And so there we, and Quayle was such an unusual matchup with Carter in a funny way. I think i once joked with carter that you know quail had been elected the same year as carter well they were elected in the same year in 76 quail was a knocked off an incumbent democrat in indiana in the same election in 76 the carter won the presidency and became a house member of the house at age 29 i think it was i don't think carter thought this was as amusing as i did though i think what do you know about quail is that quail was this kid who got elected and opposed about every single thing he tried to do as president for four years yeah right anyway different era a good and decent man this is a different time and i wish we could go back to uh having those kinds of disagreements carter i curse heterodox nature on social policy is something for the Democrats to think about.
You know, in the end, you say he gets kind of bogged down by the left or the perceived elements of his policies being too far left. But to get elected as a Southern governor, I mean, he took a number of views on cultural issues that were, you know, moderate or more accommodating towards the conservative side.
And that's maybe something that Democrats are gonna have to learn from a little bit going forward. In addition to his personal decency, you tweeted, I do want to include this from Ronald Reagan, speaking to Jimmy Carter in 81.
Mr. President, I want our fellow citizens to know how much you did to carry on this tradition.
You've shown we are a united people pledged to maintaining a political system which guarantees individual liberty to a greater degree than any other. Yeah, he praised Carter for the transition.
But a pretty nasty, pretty tough campaign, Reagan versus Carter in 1980. And certainly the liberals thought it was the end of the world when Reagan won.
And even though they didn't love Carter. So that was that was nice of Reagan.
And we'll see if Trump, I guess Trump will say some version of that, maybe. They'll write some version, a sentence like that for him to say about Biden.
I wonder, what do you think? No, I don't see it. I don't see it.
You did a great interview with Eric Edelman. People don't know, we have a foreign policy podcast called Shield of the Republic.
And Eric Edelman is one of the co-hosts. He was part of this bipartisan commission analyzing the national defense strategy.
You did an interview with him on Crystal Conversations. We'll put a link in the show notes that I just had a chance to listen to yesterday.
The interview is from, I guess, about a week and a half ago now. But it's very much forward looking at all the different threats.
I don't know, maybe if you have a one or two sentence takeaway from that, and then we can direct people to a longer conversation.

I mean, Trump inherits a world with many challenges and crises, leaving aside the

merits of Trump's own views and appointments. And I think that's, we were talking earlier about what

issues could flare up. You know, during the campaign, it was all, well, voters don't care

about foreign policy much, even when some of us would say, well, can we talk about Ukraine for a minute? But in the real world as president, foreign policy does affect how presidents are thought of. Biden learned that, I think, with Afghanistan, but of course, Carter learned that with Iran.
One could find many, many instances, Bush with Iraq. And I don't know, some of these decisions Trump faces, even if he were running the kind of administration we would be much friendlier to, would be tough decisions and not easy ones to implement, even if he'd went in the right direction.
But I mean, dealing with Putin, dealing with Xi, dealing with an Iranian threat where Iran is both, this is, I think was Eric's, one of his most interesting points, Iran is much weaker than it was a few months ago because of the damage Israel has done to Hezbollah and then the fall of Assad in Syria. But that weakness could lead them to sprint towards nuclear weapons.
And there's some evidence they're doing that. And what is Trump going to do? What is Trump going to do if Phoebe comes to and says we need to attack? I mean, I think the degree to which we could have foreign policy headlines in the first two, three months of the Trump administration has been a little underestimated, I think.
The nuclear weapon point was super interesting. And I just direct folks to listen to the whole conversation.
My additional takeaway was just for an unstable president, for a chaos president, he is coming into a much, much more chaotic world than he came into in 2017. Totally.
And so, you know, I just think that that is a little bit underappreciated in the conversation, that there are a lot of tough decisions, a lot of interest to balance. Sure, there's always risks of things to prop up, but there was much more stability globally in 2017 than there is right now.
Totally. Yeah, largest land war in Europe in 80 years, major changes in the Middle East and who knows for better or worse or both, obviously.
Xi Jinping, much more aggressive, it looks like, than he was seven or eight years ago. And us having committed to be more confrontational, which is fine to me, with China.
But then what does that really mean? And then Trump flip-flopping on that with TikTok and all. Incidentally, are any of those China hawks who were all telling us how tough Trump was going to be on China? I haven't seen their apologies there.
I haven't seen a lot of statements. I haven't seen a lot of statements on Trump's TikTok flip-flop.
No, I haven't either. We'll keep an eye.
I've got a little alert for Tom Cotton's press office. We'll see if anything comes out of there.
All right, Bill, I do need to recommend to folks, I assume you did not go see a complete unknown timmy chalamet as as bob dylan no actually i we had dinner with our daughter and her husband matt uh and eddie and they um they had just seen it actually so what was their review what was their review very positive very positive great i wasn't worried that i was blinded after i love timmy long time timmy fan and so i was always gonna love it our in-house culture editor sunny bunch not not big on timmy and so i was worried that i was gonna be biased you know have my own own perspective but my straight guy buddies that like bob dylan were all positive on it are all blown away i maybe generationally maybe not you know if you knew really knew new bob dylan i don't know i guess I would say maybe your perspective might be different. But I thought he was just phenomenal.
And Edward Norton as Pete Seeger was really great. I would highly recommend it.
I had feelings at times during it. And my main takeaway is I wish it was two hours longer.
It stops in like 65. You don't even get one on the tracks and some of the other later Dylan stuff.
So maybe we can get a sequel out of it. I don't know.
So there you go. That's my holiday recommendation to people, a complete unknown.
Okay, maybe we'll go see it. We thought after talking to Anna, Matt, that we might go see it.
I mean, Dylan was, it's funny, Dylan was huge, obviously, when I was young. But he was already, not in the past exactly, but other people were singing songs that I listened to in high school so i would have what 68 69 70 there were many dylan songs but there are at that point already being sung by other people right because his voice was not considered that good i still think andrex most famously yeah yeah i mean i still think listening to dylan singing dylan is kind of a interesting and and captivating in a certain way and timmy nails it It's so close.
He's so close. His voice is so close.
He gets close. It's not the same, but it's different enough, but it's in the ballpark.
It's really good. I look forward to seeing it.
Yeah, Bill Kristol, everybody else. We'll be back tomorrow.
Our plans for this week, we've got a pod tomorrow. We're bringing in all the faves this week.
So you've got a pod tomorrow. We'll have a pod Thursday.
We're going to take off New Year's Day one more day for you guys to enjoy your family or football or hangover or whatever it is that you want to do on New Year's Day. But other than that, we're going to be back with probably more than a full schedule, probably a double schedule, as Bill points out.
There's going to be a shit ton happening in January. So we'll be here for you.
Bill will be back next Monday. Enjoy the last somewhat peaceful week.
And we'll be seeing you back here tomorrow.

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