Bill Kristol: Fake Nicey-Nicey Sh**t

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Speaker 2 Hello and welcome to the Bullwork Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.
It is Monday when you're listening to this. So we have Bill Crystal.
It is Sunday and we're taping it. I'm hangry.

Speaker 2 I'm quite hangry, actually.

Speaker 2 Haven't been able to eat all day. I've got to clean out my whole system because I have one of those middle-aged men procedures tomorrow.
And so, you know, if J.D.

Speaker 2 Vance starts shooting at the drones or some other nominee has creeped on a woman for the cabinet and like that, all gets announced Monday morning. You'll have to wait

Speaker 2 for my fresh take on Tuesday. So, me and Bill, Bill, and I are both working through the elements for you on a Monday.
How are you doing, Bill?

Speaker 1 I'm doing fine. Thanks, Tim.
Good luck with everything tomorrow.

Speaker 2 I'm going to be fine. It'll be fine.
I'm going to be fine.

Speaker 1 We'll do our best here to, I guess, there was kind of enough news to talk about here if we're short of whatever happens in the 12 hours until Monday morning.

Speaker 2 Hold down the four.

Speaker 2 There is enough news. The theme of the show today is going to be pre-capitulation and just and people's just total unwillingness to buck up for the fight ahead of us.

Speaker 2 It begins with our friends at ABC News.

Speaker 2 The backstory on this, for people who haven't watched it closely, is as I guess George Stephanopoulos talked about how Trump was found liable for rape and technically he was adjudicated as for sexual assault in a in a civil suit.

Speaker 2 And the judge, in rendering the verdict on that, did essentially say, I did say that colloquially, what we're talking about here is rape.

Speaker 2 The judge said that during the judge's verdict, but it was not technically the case, you know, based on the actual verdict.

Speaker 2 So Trump sued ABC over this, and ABC settled this defamation lawsuit for $15 million.

Speaker 2 And I just think this is going to have real ramifications. And I guess we'll just start there with your opening thoughts on on that, Bill.

Speaker 1 It's really terrible. I mean, the knock-on effects, the intimidation effects going forward.
I mean, this was a very,

Speaker 1 the lawyers I've talked to, for whatever it's worth, and I think this is the consensus. Trump has lost many lawsuits like this.

Speaker 1 You don't have to show that every word you say on a television show or on a podcast is literally and absolutely correct.

Speaker 1 You have to show that you were, first of all, it's not clear that Trump was defamed. I mean, people have never heard this charge before.
What are the damages to Trump?

Speaker 1 But leaving that aside, you have to have to show what? Is it reckless disregard?

Speaker 1 Or, you know, that has to be sort of like Stephanopoulos was cautioned 10 minutes before the show, don't say the word rape, but he said it.

Speaker 1 If that's in the definition documents, I doubt it is, then maybe the ABC was right to cave and pay $15 million to the Trump library, which doesn't exist yet, I guess, and a million dollars of legal fees.

Speaker 1 But this kind of, as you say, preemptive capitulation is just terrible. I mean, Disney has a very big legal department.
They have access to extremely good law firms.

Speaker 1 If they felt they couldn't defend this, I think every other, not just broadcast entity, but other places that have people who are discussing Trump on

Speaker 1 any medium, I mean university councils, the chilling effect will be very great, which is the whole point of these civil lawsuits.

Speaker 1 And it does remind one, I think some smart people said this a few months ago, a few weeks ago, when we were all correctly very upset about cash brutality at the FBI, it's not only the criminal things he could do from the FBI.

Speaker 1 It's the civil lawsuits that Trump and Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and everyone can fund to try to bankrupt people, intimidate people.

Speaker 1 And they've already gone after our friend Olivia Troy and they've gone after others. And I don't know.
I worry that now it's going to just open the floodgates.

Speaker 1 I will also point out finally, it turns out that Susie Wiles, the incoming White House Chief of Staff, had dinner with the head of ABC News Monday night at Mar-a-Lago.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it was Deborah O'Connell, the Disney executive who directly oversees ABC News, dined with Susie Wiles in Palm Beach last Monday.

Speaker 2 To me, this is just, I mean, and we talked a little bit about this with Dan Applebaum on Friday. Just another example of these big, powerful corporations deciding that

Speaker 2 it's just not worth it to draw any additional attention onto ourselves. You know, we know that Trump is capricious.
We know that he's vengeful. So let's try to just survive the four years.

Speaker 2 We'll tuck our tail between our legs. We'll mind our P's and Q's.
There's A, there's no evidence this is going to work.

Speaker 2 And in a world where you have corporate corporate control over some of these media institutions like this, like the, as you said, like the chilling effect element of this is really staggering right now.

Speaker 2 You can't not assume that people in private conversations, you know, who go and speak about this stuff on the media and go and speak about Trump, especially people that aren't wealthy, that don't have the resources of Disney, you know, might be like, you know, it's just not worth leveling criticism if it's going to bankrupt me.

Speaker 1 I was in touch with a scholar of, like, Anne at Apple-Bama, a different person, but a scholar of European politics and of Hungary. Orban did a lot of this in Hungary.

Speaker 1 And of course, Trump's tried to do it over the years. The American system isn't that friendly to defamation suits for public figures, and he's lost almost everyone.

Speaker 1 But Orban shut down plenty or gained control or certainly intimidated opposition media in Hungary. And when I've been saying, you've been saying, I think, well, the U.S.
isn't Hungary.

Speaker 1 Let's not overdo this. It's not going to be that easy to intimidate everyone in the U.S.
and use the legal system in the U.S. the way Orban used it in Hungary.
But But here we are.

Speaker 1 And again, this isn't even a Trump-appointed judge doing anything. This is the company.

Speaker 1 Again, not just going into hiding a little bit, maybe, I don't know, dragging out the case and not making a robust defense of free speech.

Speaker 1 This is conspicuously and visibly paying up before the inauguration. I mean, this is paying protection money or whatever.

Speaker 1 And it just, the message it sends to everyone else is not only do you have to not offend Trump, you need to pony up.

Speaker 1 And indeed, aren't they ponying up for the inaugural committee now, all these billionaires?

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Several have committed a million, Zuckerberg, others, Benioff.
To your side, like the protection racket element of this, right? And that just ties all together.

Speaker 2 Like, Disney was going to win this case, right? And so to do it so ostentatiously, right? Like, oh, we're going to contribute to your presidential library, sir.

Speaker 2 Like, let us go down on our, let us kiss the ring. And can we contribute an additional wing to your palace, you know, that honors you? Can we put a statue? Like, the whole whole thing is preposterous.

Speaker 2 And just back to the original point, just because I want to get it exactly right on what Judge Kaplan said about the rape. He said this, the finding that Ms.

Speaker 2 Carroll failed to prove that she was raped within the meaning of New York penal law does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump raped her, as many people commonly understand the word rape.

Speaker 2 So, again, like Stephanopoulos, I think, runs afoul of this by using adjudicated, but it's a very fine line.

Speaker 2 And the standard, as you mentioned, for these public figures to defame in America, it's very different in Britain and other places.

Speaker 2 But like in America, the standard of defamation is so high, it's like really hard to imagine that they would have lost this. And so the manner in which they're doing it is just really horrible.

Speaker 1 Incidentally, if they had lost, they would have lost. What would the damages have been? It would not have been much more than $15 million.

Speaker 1 I mean, how much does damage to this interview with Nancy Mays do to Donald Trump's reputation, given that he lost the civil case against E.G. and Carroll? You don't have to make a big deal.

Speaker 1 Disney doesn't have to go to soapbox. ABC doesn't go to soapbox.
They just say, look, we're going to let this go to the judge. We're going to take depositions.
You know, we want this.

Speaker 1 We hope it works out quickly. And we're not trying to make a point here.
But we defend our people when they say something in good faith.

Speaker 1 They didn't have to grandstand on behalf of free speech.

Speaker 1 But again, this is a whole different world from just quietly litigating the case and maybe giving a million dollars to the Trump inaugural fund, right?

Speaker 1 This is that very conspicuous, unnecessary, preemptive collapse on a core First Amendment issue.

Speaker 2 Yeah, very conspicuous.

Speaker 2 It was the Republicans Against Trump Twitter feed that posted, I prefer to live in a country where the government fears the free press, not where the press fears the government.

Speaker 2 I thought that was really well put. Yeah.
Because the first part of that is also an important category now that is another downstream effect of this Trump win is that

Speaker 2 Republicans, and frankly, not just Republicans, you're seeing this from Eric Adams, and I'm sure you'll start to see this from some Democrats.

Speaker 2 Now, because of the world in which we live and because of the fragmentation of the media environment, the essential view of politicians now, I think, going forward is going to be, just ride out the storm.

Speaker 2 Who cares about this? Like, how much could it hurt me for the media to write about this? I think we're seeing this right now with Heg Seth as a prime example of the cabinet officials.

Speaker 2 Any kind of media firestorm of this nature previously would have led to just the quiet stepping down of the nominee and replacement with somebody else. It is,

Speaker 2 I think, dangerous to kind of the short, medium term of our body politic.

Speaker 2 If you are in a place where both of those things are true, the politicians have stopped being worried that they're going to be held accountable.

Speaker 2 And the press, who ostensibly exists to hold accountable, is now panicked that they will be targeted. And so they're not even going to do their job.

Speaker 1 For me personally, just reading about it last night, I felt the worst I've felt since November 5th. I felt as the most ominous firebell in the night or whatever term you want since November 5th.

Speaker 1 Obviously, the appointments of the nominations of Patel and other things are pretty bad and ominous, and other things Trump and his people have said. But I felt like this was really a moment.

Speaker 1 It's not just that they're going to try to do things in the government they shouldn't do. It's that the whole

Speaker 1 what's not the government, corporate America, civil society, if you want to use a fancy term, is preemptively capitulating. You can have a government that's bad, and that's bad, obviously.

Speaker 1 But if everyone else is kind of not going along with their attempts to to intimidate, there's probably certainly some ways limited damage they could do, and other ways they could do great damage, which is the government of the United States.

Speaker 1 But still, this really, I think, just takes it to another level in terms of civic or social damage.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And the bad news came right on the heels of the announcement that they want to make standard time permanent.
So it was really, it was a really ominous 24 hours. Where are you on that?

Speaker 1 I don't know.

Speaker 2 Permanent daylight saving. It's my number one issue.
Okay. This is, I was just...

Speaker 1 Are you to lose or for you?

Speaker 2 We did a whole YouTube video on this, which you can can watch. But since then, I saw a graphic, and it's like in June now with permanent standard time, the sun will be coming up at 4.15 a.m.

Speaker 2 This is insane. Nobody wants this.
We like our evening sun. Okay, we're going to move forward.

Speaker 2 While I'm hangry, while I'm upset about Daylight Saving and ABC and Deborah O'Connell, Mitt Romney was on Stage Union this morning. God love him.

Speaker 2 I just kind of want to strangle him. I mean, I want to strangle him like you want to strangle a loved one, though.
You know, just like,

Speaker 2 why?

Speaker 2 Let's just listen. Let's listen to Mitt and Jake Tapper.

Speaker 4 You said in an interview a few months ago that, quote, there's a good chance that the Republican Party

Speaker 4 is going to need to be rebuilt or reoriented and that you want to have a voice in the post-Trump Republican Party.

Speaker 4 Do you think that there's still, do you still think there's going to be a post-Trump Republican Party? Or is MAGA now the Republican Party?

Speaker 5 Oh, MAGA is the Republican Party, and Donald Trump is the Republican Party today. And if you were to ask me who the nominee will be in 2028, I think it'll be J.D.
Vance. All right.

Speaker 5 He's smart, well-spoken, part of the MAGA movement.

Speaker 4 You said something pretty harsh about him a few months ago, though. You could not have less respect for somebody than...

Speaker 5 Long ago. I'm not going to rehash history.
And we've worked together in the Senate since then.

Speaker 5 But

Speaker 5 that is what the Republican Party is.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 2 So this is... Obviously enraging because it was the whole premise of him not endorsing during the campaign was that he wanted to have an impact on the Republican Party going forward.

Speaker 2 Now, he's already conceded that that's over because Donald Trump won.

Speaker 2 I don't really know that Mitt's, given what we know about the election at this point, that Mitts' endorsement would have mattered one way or the other. That said, couldn't have hurt.

Speaker 2 And the thing that bugs me the most about this, though, is just going back to this capitulation. It's like, okay, well, it is what it is.

Speaker 2 I'm backing off my comments about how disgusted and horrified I am about Donald Trump and J.D. Vance.
And even though I'm leaving the Senate now, I'm going to make nice.

Speaker 2 And we're going to, you know, hopefully, you know, these are smart guys and be able to figure out like what purpose is served by this? What is the point of this?

Speaker 1 God forbid he actually announced that he's going to try to do something, maybe not within the Republican Party, because I share his pessimism about that, but in other areas to build up a non-MAGA agenda for the country, a central, you know, liberal centrist agenda or recruit young candidates to something, right?

Speaker 1 I mean, he's just going to, if he wants to retire, I guess that's fine. But again, why doesn't he retire and just stand by his previous comments?

Speaker 1 Does he really have to say, well, I've worked with J.D. Vance since then and stuff.
Really? What have they been working on there in the Senate? I don't know.

Speaker 2 It's just this false hope, right? Like, on the one hand, the false hope annoys me, like, this idea that, oh, we're going to be able to work with these guys.

Speaker 2 And, you know, who knows, it's better not to, you know, ruffle feathers. So let's just kind of see how it plays out.

Speaker 2 Like, that part is annoying to me in particular because I just, I don't think that's going to be true.

Speaker 2 But more, it completely kind of invalidates all the arguments against Trump and Vance that he made.

Speaker 2 He made these deep moral and ethical arguments about Donald Trump the man, about the way that J.D. Vance has humiliated himself, about how the illiberalness of their ideology is wrong.

Speaker 2 And like to just turn around then and be like, well, you know, they won, so we'll see how it goes. It makes people wonder, like, well, were you genuine before about when you made those arguments?

Speaker 2 Because how does A meet B? You know, and when you say what you want about Liz Genie, when you see her doing interviews now, you know, she's not backing off anything that she said before.

Speaker 2 And you can throw an ascendance at the end that's like, well, I hope to be wrong. I hope to be wrong.
Whatever. Great.
I hope to be wrong. We're not wrong, though.

Speaker 2 And we've already been proven right once. We're going to be proven right again.
And so, like, why?

Speaker 2 It almost like plays into their hands, right? By saying, like, see, these guys didn't even believe it. It was just rhetoric.
It was just political rhetoric.

Speaker 1 You sent me a couple of quotes from Romney. I hadn't watched anything this morning and hadn't even known he was on these shows.

Speaker 1 And the other one, I think, was that you have to admit that Trump has brought in the middle class and the working class to the Republican Party, something like that.

Speaker 1 And I read that just as I had finished reading a New York Times article, big New York Times article, which is online, I assume in today's Print Times.

Speaker 1 Eli Zaslow, the reporter, I think, was from Georgia. Very moving about a guy who's been here since he was five years old, family,

Speaker 1 hard worker, churchgoer, wonderful person, undocumented. His mother came across the border to work in Georgia.
She also seems to have been, maybe both parents, I can't remember, were hard workers.

Speaker 1 He married a girl from Rome, has a father-in-law who voted for Trump. And it's caused some strains.
And because he's very worried, they're very worried about him being deported.

Speaker 1 And they're spending money on lawyers. They don't have that much any extra money.
And it's causing just terrible psychological distress on them and their little kids.

Speaker 1 The father-in-law is sort of, well, you're not the kind of person they want to deport. And so, according to the article, the 40-year-old or so Docker recipient, Dreamer type, says, Well, I don't know.

Speaker 1 He says he wants to deport us, and don't we have to prepare for that in case it were to happen?

Speaker 1 What do I do? Can I get a lawyer? But it takes out the immigration system, so terrible. And he's like, The guy, the father-in-law, is this big Trump supporter, is they're belligerent.

Speaker 1 Yeah, they're not going to deport you. Get there to deport you, they're going to have to come through me.

Speaker 1 Which I found particularly, I've got to say, I don't mean to, you know, these are individuals, and I don't know, maybe the quote was out of context. I found particularly infuriating, I must say.

Speaker 1 You know what? They don't have to come to him. And if ICE wants to deport him, unfortunately, he's not going to, and he's a kind of a prepper.
He's got guns and all this kind of stuff.

Speaker 1 So I don't know, maybe he will get in a shootout with some ICE agents, God forbid. But I mean, it's just the whole thing.

Speaker 1 But anyway, it's a very moving piece about this, about this one DACA recipient. There are 10 million of them.
So I'd read that. And look, how did this guy, the father-in-law, come to vote for Trump?

Speaker 1 And so he describes why he did.

Speaker 1 It's all MAGA lies, MAGA conspiracy theories, wild exaggerations, playing on anxieties that a lot of immigrants have come to that part of Georgia, they work in chicken processing plants and so forth.

Speaker 1 It's caused some tensions and problems. But again, sort of like the Ohio thing, wild exaggeration of the problems.
He seems in his own life to be doing okay, so far as one can tell.

Speaker 1 And he's got a son-in-law who is actually a DACA recipient. Mitt Romney sort of admires Trump.

Speaker 1 You can sort of tell from that clip, you know, for bringing in the working class and the middle class, but an awful lot of of those people he brought in.

Speaker 1 He brought in not because he explained that his policies would really help them economically.

Speaker 1 He brought them in by appealing to, worse than appealing to, by magnifying and capitalizing on and amplifying whatever xenophobia and

Speaker 1 bigotry was there already. I was angry after reading it.

Speaker 2 You should be angry. And Myers is a good word because you sense this in the Rodney interview.

Speaker 2 that there is like a you got to hand it to him kind of thing right like i ran for president they rejected me. Like, Trump must be doing something that I wish I could have done.

Speaker 2 And, like, that is the thing that is the most dispiriting about all of it and a little bit enraging.

Speaker 2 It's like if good old-fashioned Mormon church-going, milk-drinking, follow the rules, Mitt Romney cannot just internalize that, you know, sometimes people are rewarded for doing things that are wrong, which is, you know, the basic moral of

Speaker 2 every children's book. And I'm sure plenty of plenty of Mormon texts.
Plenty of adult books here. Yeah, plenty of adult books.

Speaker 2 And you got to hand it to them now and just say, all right, well, Trump got this one right because he more successfully preyed on people's grievances and bigotries than I did.

Speaker 1 It makes me upset. Also, just one last thing,

Speaker 1 the looking up to Trump, which is very common. Look what he did.
Now, it's impressive, three times nominee, twice winning.

Speaker 1 Maybe Romney got 47, a little more maybe, percent of the vote against Barack Obama, finishing his first term,

Speaker 1 brought the country back from the depths of a terrible recession. Donald Trump got 49.8 or something percent of the vote against Kamala Harris succeeding Joe Biden.

Speaker 1 I'm going to just stipulate that Barack Obama was a stronger candidate than Kamala Harris, having only 100 days to run after Biden pulled out. Why does Romney even feel defensive?

Speaker 1 He ran as good a race as Trump. I mean, just empirically, you know, he got 2% less, 2.5% less.
It's not like, you know, he was humiliated, lost the football game 52 to 0, right?

Speaker 1 I mean, he did a little bit less well than Trump. I don't know.
I just, so the whole kind of semi-admiration and semi-almost awe for Trump is very, that is, it helps Trump, though.

Speaker 2 A great deal. Here's one more.
Joe Biden posted this over the weekend. I have no idea why.
He wrote this, I pray to God that the president-elect throws away Project 2025.

Speaker 2 I think it would be an economic disaster. I believe the only way for a president to lead America is to lead all of America.

Speaker 2 Like, again, like, what is this? What is this? Why are we doing this? Like, why are you doing a smiling picture with Donald Trump?

Speaker 2 Why are you doing a post about how you hope that he will throw away Project 2025? He's appointed all the people that did Project 2025 to the administration.

Speaker 2 And then you're singling out the economic part of it. What are you even talking about? It's just this fake, nicey, nicey shit with Trump is endemic.

Speaker 2 It is like from the Disney people to the sitting president to Romney.

Speaker 1 They're all all doing this. Yeah, totally.
I like fake, nicey, nicey shit. That should be the title of this podcast.

Speaker 1 We denounce fake, nicey, nicey shit.

Speaker 2 Oh, we're hopeful.

Speaker 1 We pray.

Speaker 2 We pray. Maybe Donald Trump will turn the corner.
Year nine. He'll throw away Project.

Speaker 2 What are you talking about?

Speaker 1 He is president. He's sort of...
sort of still head of the Democratic Party, not really, but he could, in fact, say some things that would remind people of how dangerous he's been.

Speaker 1 He knows the executive branch better than anyone else. Well, sort of, or at least once did and still knows knows some of it.

Speaker 1 He could say a few things that would make Trump's life more difficult, I should think, going forward and show. I mean, I don't know.
I tweeted after reading that New York Times piece.

Speaker 1 I was so tweeted. I X'd and Blue Skydeed after reading that Times piece because I was so just furious, really, and moved by the piece, very well reported.
I said, I don't know, can Biden not pardon?

Speaker 1 all the docket recipients? I suppose he can't. I mean, I don't quite know.
Being undocumented isn't really a crime, so it's not like pardoning someone for a crime.

Speaker 1 On the other hand, I've done zero research on this, so I'm just making all all this up. Carter did pardon or amnesty, didn't he, all the draft avoiders who had gone to Canada and so forth.

Speaker 1 Why is it that different to pardon people here and to say treat them as if they've been documented? Anyway, I don't know.

Speaker 1 Couldn't they be thinking of things they could do to help doing a little more than they're doing to cushion the country from the damage Trump wants to do?

Speaker 2 It does feel that way. You talked on the conversations with Bill Crystal, with Jack Goldsmith, who is over at Law Fair and a Harvard professor who knows this stuff well.

Speaker 2 I'm just going to cop to the fact that I haven't had a chance to listen to it yet. It's on my list while I'm in between trips to the bathroom tonight.

Speaker 2 But did Jack have any insight on that fact?

Speaker 1 So, I mean, Jack is very cautious and judicious. I mean, honestly, so, and is speaking as a kind of balanced law professor.
And, you know, not everything needs to go as badly as it might.

Speaker 1 But I would say, given that he, I don't know, is

Speaker 1 a touch more conservative than we are. But I think he believes strongly in executive power.
But anyway, he knows the executive branch extremely well, both justice and DOD. And yeah, it's alarming.

Speaker 1 I think if you know who Jack Goldsmith is, if you know how careful he's been, if I can put it in a simple and crude way, not to sound like us quite over the last two years.

Speaker 1 And I don't mean this, Jack is a serious guy. It's not like he's sitting around thinking, I don't want to sound like Tim and Bill.
It's just that this is who he is.

Speaker 1 But if you know who he is, and you watch that, you see that even someone who kind of wants to see whether there mightn't be a case to be made for some of these reforms and civil service stuff and executive authority.

Speaker 1 And after all, the president is elected and people report to him. He is pretty alarmed.
I say, especially interestingly.

Speaker 2 And we were talking about the Schedule F, this?

Speaker 1 We didn't get into that quite as much.

Speaker 1 The thing he seemed personally most alarmed about was national security, interestingly.

Speaker 1 A fair amount about the rule of law stuff from DOJ, but really the national security implications of having a Patel at FBI and then having a DOD this dysfunctional.

Speaker 1 I think he's always been someone concerned about national security. His work in 2002, 2003 was kind of post-9-11 work.

Speaker 1 It was also rolled back and got a lot of big fights with the Bush White House by rolling back the John Dew torture memo. So he's not some kind of mindless, you know, hawk, do as much as you can.

Speaker 1 But he's seriously concerned about national security. And he's very worried about just what four years of these guys being totally silly and demonstrative and just random, I don't like the FBI.

Speaker 1 So we're getting rid of the counterintelligence division. How much real damage that could do to our national security.

Speaker 2 Excited to listen to that. We'll put a link in the show notes.

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Speaker 2 I want to go and talk about a couple of news items or thoughts from

Speaker 2 the progressive wing of the Democratic Party and try to

Speaker 2 position woke Bill Crystal as far left as possible just to prove all of your enemies right. Here's Bernie this morning on the morning shows.

Speaker 6 It's not talked about enough. We are moving rapidly into an oligarchic form of society.
Never before in American history have so few billionaires, so few people have so much wealth and so much power.

Speaker 6 Never before has there been so much concentration of ownership, sector after sector, power of Wall Street.

Speaker 6 And never before in American history, and we better talk about this, have the people on top had so much political power.

Speaker 6 We can't go around the world saying, oh, well, you know, in Russia, Putin has an oligarchy. Well, we got an oligarchy here, too.

Speaker 6 And in this last election, in both parties, billionaires spent huge amounts of money to elect their candidates.

Speaker 2 Huge. Sometimes I just, you know, I was watching the clip and I was like, you got to hand it to Bernie.
I don't know. I want to hear what Bill Crystal thinks about that.

Speaker 2 It's hard to argue with that right now.

Speaker 1 I mean, he's been reading, he's been reading Warning Shots, obviously, and also my ex and Blue Sky feeds. And I've made this point.
I don't think it's quite the same in both parties.

Speaker 1 And I think, honestly, it's the political power side of it that's most scary. I mean, it could be bad to have too much inequality of wealth.
There could be more progressive taxes.

Speaker 1 And maybe we need more antitrust and to break up companies all in this respect there's not much similarity between biden and trump i mean the the just totally shameless elon musk and trump and the dealing as we've seen the the courting favor and appointing i mean the meshing that is more like orbon or i would say the aspects of putin and uh is super dangerous so i'm glad bernie's come around to the Bulwark point of view on this, you know?

Speaker 1 I wonder if Bernie ever used, I wonder if he used to use the word oligarchy a lot. That was, that's sort of an old-fashioned word.
I don't know if the Marxists really use it that much.

Speaker 2 Millionaires and the billionaires. I mean, yeah, they call oligarchs.
I don't know. We'd have to go back to the to the transcripts from his 16 speeches.
I don't know. It's a good question.

Speaker 2 I guess why I really wanted to play it was

Speaker 2 in order, besides getting you and Bernie on the record as being on the same side on this one, was

Speaker 2 I'm sympathetic to the fact that this is actually a more fruitful ground for Democrats and all of us that are trying to challenge this incoming administration than some of this other stuff.

Speaker 2 Like, I just, the brazenness in which they're doing this, just tying us back to the whole Romney thing about the middle class and the guy you're talking about, it's like it didn't stick with Trump in the first term in any way that he had all these Goldman Sachs people around him.

Speaker 2 But I feel like it's just so much more brazen this time that it feels like

Speaker 2 something that eventually people are going to be like,

Speaker 2 this is out of control.

Speaker 1 Jr.: The Democrats, I think, and I'm no expert on this at all, but need to go back and really look at FDR.

Speaker 1 I mean, they all want to go back to Clinton or they want to go back to Obama, which is understandable.

Speaker 1 They were in modern America. FDR was off a long time ago by now.
But he would combine. I mean, I think of him, I always admired, who grew up admiring him, not knowing that much.

Speaker 1 But, you know, he won the war, obviously, and got us out of the depression and saved capitalism. That was kind of the standard semi-conservative defense of FDR.

Speaker 1 That unlike, you know, he protected by strengthening guardrails, limiting the abuses, and so forth, he actually ended up saving capitalism.

Speaker 1 And I think FDR said this himself, or certainly his defenders did at the time.

Speaker 1 But FDR also used a lot of what would today be called class warfare rhetoric and denouncing the malefactors of great wealth and had policies that were, in some cases, pretty radical.

Speaker 1 So I think there's a way to combine a kind of healthy, anti-oligarchic, semi-populism with

Speaker 1 pretty free market, pro-market,

Speaker 1 non-huge government program type policies, I think.

Speaker 2 Yo, there's so much of our info out there on the internet these days.

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Speaker 2 AOC on the younger end of the

Speaker 2 spectrum, there's a lot of discussion right now about how she is trying to get a spot on the oversight committee and that there should be Democratic turnover.

Speaker 2 And the other congressman that wants that gavel is Jerry Connolly, more of an old-line Democrat type.

Speaker 2 Do you have any grand thoughts on whether the Democrats should be turning over gavels to AOC and be more mindful of generational change on the Hill?

Speaker 1 All my moderate friends, of course, are for, you know, think, oh, my God, AOC is the face of the party. I've got to say what I've seen her, if you're going to oppose Trump, why not AOC?

Speaker 1 You know, I don't want her to run the country. I'm not sure I want her to chair some actual important committee if the Democrats ever win Congress back.

Speaker 1 This is oversight, so it's entirely an oversight of the executive branch. It's a, let's call it adversarial investigative committee.
She's not going to be making policy in most areas.

Speaker 1 So my instinct, Jerry Connolly is incidentally the congressman from right around here. So I'll probably hear from his staff and stuff.
But my instinct is to think, why not do AOC?

Speaker 1 I mean, and people are freaking out on the center about, oh, my God, can you imagine AOC? So what if she's had an oversight for two years, not the end of the world?

Speaker 1 And she's pretty good at making these arguments, I think. But what do you think?

Speaker 1 Don't you have more I have have a little more faith that AOC will go after the worst things the Trump administration does than Jerry Connolly.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I'm of mixed views. On the one hand,

Speaker 2 I strongly believe that the Democrats on the Hill have been too timid over the last eight or nine years and that they should be much more aggressive in oversight and tactics.

Speaker 2 And this is like the question that I ask every Democratic congressman that wants to come on this podcast is, you know, are you going to work with Mike Johnson and bail them out when they can't fund the government?

Speaker 2 Are you going to, you know, push investigations? I just think that they've been too timid,

Speaker 2 in particular on the Hill during the Trump era. And so will AOC

Speaker 2 be more,

Speaker 2 you know, aggressive? Will she be better at getting attention for the corruption stuff that we've just been talking about? Absolutely.

Speaker 2 She also is,

Speaker 2 you know,

Speaker 2 she lets loose, which I like, but sometimes she lets a little too loose, you know.

Speaker 2 And if you follow her social media feeds, I mean, there's stuff that she does that I just don't think that gets that much attention now that I think would get a lot of attention if she was, you know, running this committee or running for president as far as

Speaker 2 kind of really eye rolly type identity politics type stuff that she does. Some of her messaging around the Luigi United Healthcare thing was a little, you know, makes me cringe a little bit.

Speaker 2 That's the kind of balance, right?

Speaker 2 I don't know, you know, but maybe you have to take the good with the bad in something like this but I do think that particularly for the oversight thing I'm not as unlike you I'm not as hostile to it as as one might think I agree with the way you put it yeah so just give AOC oversight and then we'll all support Richie Torres against AOC in the 2028 Democratic primary it's gonna be a good primary right two young members of Congress very you know is that a Democratic primary for what office president

Speaker 1 we're skipping a few generations here maybe you have they didn't didn't you get that memo? We're going down. We're going down.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I've got some issues about that head-to-head. But we can do a 2028 hot stove another time.
All right. Well, do you have any thoughts on the drones? People are concerned.

Speaker 2 People are seeing stars. Larry Hogan saw Ryan's belt and thought it was a drone.

Speaker 1 He hasn't quite recovered from his difficulty.

Speaker 2 Twitter that

Speaker 2 saw lots of lights over the Capitol is very concerned. It was just those planes landing at Reagan.
So I don't know. Do you have any worries?

Speaker 2 Do you have any friends on the inside that can provide any state secrets to our listeners?

Speaker 1 I have no secrets and no thoughts, except to say two people randomly over the last 24 hours of just texting with them or chatting with them actually more about other things.

Speaker 1 I mean, it's social, personal, family stuff kind of have both said, I don't know. It seems like it can't just be, there seems to be something there.

Speaker 1 And they're not thinking it's like, you know, some deep state whatever, but it's aliens. Yeah, aliens, right? So I don't know.

Speaker 1 I don't know. I haven't followed it enough.

Speaker 1 It feels like there's maybe enough that it isn't literally just airplanes landing at Newark and at LaGuardia, or maybe it is literally just airplanes and FedEx drones or Amazon drones delivering stuff.

Speaker 1 Maybe it is literally that. I have no idea.

Speaker 2 I think it's literally that, but I'm open to aliens. You know, it's been a weird month.
So let's mix things up. I don't know.
We might welcome them as liberators. We'll see.

Speaker 2 Bill Crystal, thank you so much for doing this on Sunday afternoon for me. We will, wait, I won't see you next week.
We'll be on on a holiday next week.

Speaker 2 We'll see you in two weeks for the Board Podcast. Enjoy the holidays.
Everybody else, we'll be back here tomorrow for another edition of the Board Podcast. I hope.

Speaker 1 You better stay aloof when the truth moves. A suicide will ensue.
So who's who to shoot? The bullets go soon, soon. Pain is the porn power.
The painted popplace ship. It's faded.
It's more foul.

Speaker 1 Famous is Hox in. Hollywood off the bus park.
And a little destructuck. In a waste with a goldface.
Be the greedy with dumb dump. You and me in a beauty, people lame and he pump up.

Speaker 1 Little dragons of fat rap, two to the face he fuck up. Walk in a zone of get less, wake in a fog of fight night.
Eat with a sip to sell trash, sleep with a orphan, tell hats.

Speaker 1 Calling me, son of Zoe Doubt, hold out, know that homes, blowed out, sold out. Without extra man bonus, tragedy smurks first.
A middleman shirt burst. Wet it up, wet work.
Get it up, get murk.

Speaker 1 A rabbit and crosshairs, mechanical fox hunt. Be quiet to hunting now.
The method is awesome.

Speaker 2 The Bullard Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

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