Michael Weiss and Thomas Zimmer: Competent and Radical

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Speaker 4 Hey, guys, we had a few technical and logistical difficulties on this show, but the show ends up turning out great. I think you're going to love it.
You're going to learn a lot.

Speaker 4 We've got two very smart guests. As I mentioned yesterday, we are going to have Mark Hurtling on to talk foreign policy, but we had a scheduling snafu, so we switched that out.
He'll be on again soon.

Speaker 4 And we've got Michael Weiss on to talk about foreign policy. And then we added to that Thomas Zimmer, who is a historian who looks at democracy around the world.

Speaker 4 And he wrote this great post on Substack about Russell Vogt and kind of about the evolution of right-wing thought towards this more post-constitutional moment and why that is particularly scary and how that's evolved from the Tea Party days.

Speaker 4 Both guys are super smart. Then, as a bonus, on top of that, on top of the scheduling staff, though, the power went out here in New Orleans during the podcast at one point.

Speaker 4 We have very, very strong, the best infrastructure here in these red states. You take the good with the bad when you're to New Orleans.

Speaker 4 So, you might hear a little difference in the audio quality between this and the interview. And then, after the power goes out, the audio might change again.
So, apologies. We did the best we could.

Speaker 4 The content, though, the content is A.

Speaker 4 So, stick around for the content and appreciate you. We'll be seeing you on the other side with Thomas Zimmer.

Speaker 2 Hello, and welcome to the Bullard Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.
I'm delighted to be here today with a new guest, visiting professor at Georgetown. He teaches 20th-century U.S.

Speaker 2 and international history with a focus on transatlantic history of democracy and its discontents. We have many discontents right now.
He writes Democracy Americana on Substack.

Speaker 2 And the co-host of a podcast, Is This Democracy? It's Thomas Zimmer. How you doing, man? Welcome to the pod.

Speaker 1 I'm doing well. Thank you so much for having me.

Speaker 2 As people might notice, you're German. Yes.
That is not a Kansas accent. So I welcome you to our great country, land of the free, and our late constitutional republic.
Welcome.

Speaker 1 As of yet, still, I guess, right?

Speaker 2 Still barely. Hanging on by a thread.
I had reached out because you wrote a piece for your sub stack about Rust Vote called Meet the Ideologue of the Post-Constitutional Right.

Speaker 2 And in it, you had an insight that I think some people, particularly on the left, miss.

Speaker 2 It's kind of like this distinction of kind of this evolution of the right and the change of how they kind of see the world now versus maybe how the Tea Party right did or how the religious right may have in the 80s.

Speaker 2 So I kind of want to talk about that in an academic way. But first, you're also going to go into Vogt's background.

Speaker 2 So for people who aren't familiar with him, let's talk about Russ Vogt, the super nerd, and

Speaker 2 why

Speaker 2 you might not think that the Omison Management of Budget Director would be the person to be most concerned about, but you make a strong case for it.

Speaker 1 So talk to us about vote yeah i mean he is in many ways i think he's had a fairly normal if you want to call that career path as sort of a career operative who had positions almost at almost every level inside and around the republican party in washington dc over the course of almost two decades i think he's in his late 40s now i believe and he went from low-level staffer to high-level person who is sort of pulling the strings in the background.

Speaker 1 He was a congressional aide, a part of the think tank and a lobbying machine, a campaigner, and then a member of the Trump administration.

Speaker 1 I think in terms of where he comes from, he used to be, people used to see him as kind of a fiscal hawk, you know, that sort of small government conservative who's looking for ways to, you know, cut the budget and maybe cut departments or whatever.

Speaker 2 Cut red tape, yeah, singing my language.

Speaker 1 Yeah, no, absolutely. So that's what he was known for.

Speaker 1 And then to me, he's interesting because he is, I think, very much emblematic of the trajectory of these kinds of people who very much talked about themselves as small government conservatives to people who now,

Speaker 1 whatever you want to call him now, that's not what he's talking about now.

Speaker 1 He now wants to mobilize government and use of the coercive powers of government to impose a certain vision on American society.

Speaker 1 These are the same kinds of circles who, when Barack Obama was thinking about using an executive order, called him a tyrant.

Speaker 1 And now, I mean, this guy, he himself has, will gladly tell you that he has drafted dozens, maybe hundreds of executive orders. So there's a trajectory there.

Speaker 1 And I think that is really worth getting into and sort of trying to understand what's going on there.

Speaker 2 I think that's right. And so this kind of radical constitutionalism that he gets in, and he is emblematic of this trajectory, right?

Speaker 2 Because he was on the, it's not like, you know, I came from kind of the rhino, moderate, squishy Republican background. Yeah.
That was never him, right?

Speaker 2 And he worked for the kind of Tea Party types and the more, the more radical part of Congress. And so he was in some ways always on that on that trajectory.

Speaker 2 But like the way that they talk about their political project has changed dramatically.

Speaker 2 Like the Tea Party, right, was, you know, and obviously there was a racial element of it with Obama and there were cultural elements to it, but they really were focused on kind of cutting the government, dismantling the government.

Speaker 2 Some of the language that you do still hear from like. Elon and Vivek about Doge, right? That we got to find efficiencies and all this.
So that was really what it was focused on.

Speaker 2 It has evolved from there and they admit that it's evolved, right?

Speaker 1 Like it is the stated thing, their stated vision that that they see the world differently now so so talk about that and what's changed yeah i think what's interesting is that this language he himself calls it radical constitutionalism that's what he wants that's what he says what is needed now and it's really quite interesting how

Speaker 1 someone like russell vogue he will not even talk about himself and his own political project in the idiom of conservatism anymore like these people will tell you conservatism is no longer enough that is sort of the rallying cry of these kinds of circles so he calls it what is now needed as radical radical constitutionalism because he says there is just nothing left to conserve, right?

Speaker 1 So he would probably tell you, okay, so 20 years ago, this sort of traditional small government conservatism, that's what was needed if you were a constitutional conservative.

Speaker 1 But because in their understanding, the left, the progressives, the socialists, honestly, he uses all those terms interchangeably. It's all kind of the same.

Speaker 1 They have, in this understanding, completely taken over. They've taken over government.
They've taken over all the major institutions of American life. They are in charge.

Speaker 1 And so now there is nothing left to conserve. So this kind of a conservatism of limits, a conservatism of preserving and conserving, that's just not good enough anymore.

Speaker 1 What you need now is counter-revolution. They talk about this constantly.
Counter-revol, they call themselves counter-revolutionaries, right? So again, not at all in the idiom of conservatism.

Speaker 1 So what he will say is, basically, look, what we did 20 years ago was the right thing to do at that point, but because this leftist revolution has already happened and it has succeeded,

Speaker 1 what we're left with, nothing short of a proper counter-revolution will now suffice to save the nation and save real America and whatever they talk about.

Speaker 1 And I think that is how they make sense of their own trajectory and how they would tell you this is not just hypocrisy or it's not just there is no tension.

Speaker 1 It's just a reaction to the fact that the leftist revolution has succeeded. And so now they have adapted to that.

Speaker 2 There's nothing left to conserve is really the key line there, right?

Speaker 2 And that the I think you wrote that they believe that the natural order, the Mockingview, the natural order itself has been destroyed, right?

Speaker 2 And so if you put yourself in that view, right, where then you are the counter-revolutionary that needs to tear everything down.

Speaker 2 And in a weird way, they've positioned kind of the democratic establishment as the small C conservatives in the traditional sense, not of like, you know, pro-life or whatever, but in the sense of like conserving the existing institutions,

Speaker 2 conserving, you know, the American Republic, right? And

Speaker 2 they no longer see that as an important goal.

Speaker 1 And it's not just the Democratic establishment, it's the Republican establishment as well.

Speaker 1 And it's even like Vogt will tell you that he thinks what the Federalist Society is doing is completely misleading.

Speaker 1 And that's just not good enough because they also like that type of originalism is also not good enough because it pretends we still have a constitutional order that you can preserve, but you can't, right?

Speaker 1 And I think it's really important when he says, he constantly says we're in a post-constitutional regime now, he doesn't just mean, you know, a kind of formalistic view of how, say, the different constitutional actors relate to each other.

Speaker 1 And it's not, it's this idea of a natural, quote-unquote, natural order or divinely ordained order that was supposedly enshrined in the constitutional order, supposedly enshrined in the nation's founding documents.

Speaker 1 And that has been destroyed. So it's a much more fundamental, a much more, the stakes are so high, so existential for these people, right?

Speaker 1 Because it's not just, oh hey should the administrative state do this or that no for them this is just a manifestation of fundamentally the natural order has been undermined by the radical left you look if you really believe this if those are the stakes right

Speaker 1 if the constitutional order was the only thing that sort of made america good and noble and kind of kept the the evil forces of modernism and all that kind of stuff at bay and if that has been destroyed then yeah it totally makes sense to say we can't just sit here and do like small government conservatism.

Speaker 1 We need to do something more, right? We need to mobilize the coercive powers of the state against, you know, this sort of unnatural leftist enemy. And that's where this guy has sort of arrived.

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 2 If your brain has been so broken that you believe that the entire American project was threatened by the existence of a black president, then yes, yes, it does make sense that you need to tear it all down rather than rather than go back to classical liberalism or the sunny Reagan optimism.

Speaker 2 A couple quotes from him, and then I want to get into kind of what that means for what their agenda might look like. He wrote this: this is after, I think, one of the Trump indictments.

Speaker 2 Do not tell me we are living under the Constitution. Do not tell me that these are mere political disagreements of Americans with different worldviews.

Speaker 2 This is only the most recent example of a post-constitutional America furthered by a corrupt Marxist vanguard.

Speaker 2 And then his other favorite line, the favorite line of all these radicals, is the hour is late.

Speaker 2 To justify their actions, you know, it means the collapse of America is imminent.

Speaker 1 This idea that there's so little time left is just pervasive in these circles. They will constantly say this.
This is our last chance.

Speaker 1 This is the one chance we got now with Trump coming back to power. If we can't sort of

Speaker 1 reverse course now and make this counter-revolution happen, it's not going to happen.

Speaker 1 And I think the fact that he says a Marxist, I think this was a post on sort of a lengthy post on ex-Twitter or something, what you just quoted, that is so revealing, right?

Speaker 1 He really doesn't make any difference between socialism, Marxism, communism, liberalism, progressivism. It's all the same.
It's all this kind of subversion of the quote-unquote natural order.

Speaker 1 You can't come to an agreement with those people.

Speaker 1 This is not someone who thinks about the political conflict in democratic, small D democratic terms, right? Oh, you have a political opponent, you disagree with them, and

Speaker 1 you kind of work it out. No, this is a fundamentally illegitimate, fundamentally...

Speaker 1 anti-American project that he sees on the quote-unquote left that doesn't need to be like bargained with, it needs to be destroyed.

Speaker 2 I want to play a clip from that kind of secret video.

Speaker 4 The video with these undercover journalists, they're at the Center for Climate Reporting, where he talks about some of his plans, and then get into that.

Speaker 2 So, let's listen to this: Russ Vogt talking to some undercover journalists.

Speaker 6 80% of my time is working on the plans of what's necessary to take control of these bureaucracies.

Speaker 6 And we are working doggedly on that,

Speaker 2 whether it's

Speaker 6 destroying their agency's notion of independence, they're independent from the president.

Speaker 5 Vogt has also been preparing documents based on fringe legal theories, arguing the president has the power to use the military against protesters.

Speaker 6 George Floyd obviously was not about race. It was about destabilizing the Trump administration.

Speaker 6 We put out, for instance, a 50-page paper

Speaker 6 designed for lawyers to know that the president has the ability both both along the border and elsewhere to maintain law and order with the military. And that's something that

Speaker 6 it's going to be important for him to remember and his lawyers to affirm. But we've given them the case for that.

Speaker 2 So there are two important points in that. bit that I want to focus on.

Speaker 2 One is where he talks about taking control of agencies that see themselves as independent, DOJ, FBI, et cetera, who the hell knows, maybe in the Fed.

Speaker 2 And then that last bit where he talks about how all the time that he's been spending on these memos that are designed for lawyers, like that they've been thinking about this and they've been thinking about the ways that they can use the current legal structure to advance their extra-legal or post-constitutional plans.

Speaker 1 Again, this is not dismantling the state, right? They want to do that. They want to get rid of the Department of Education, whatever.

Speaker 1 But what you heard there was, no, we're going to take over a government and we're going to do it by A, purging, purging the government, purging the state of, you know, the leftists, the bureaucrats.

Speaker 1 And by the way, he sees all of these career bureaucrats experts as just part of the leftist takeover of government.

Speaker 1 And so he was, even in the first Trump administration, the biggest proponent of Schedule F, this presidential executive order that would convert thousands, maybe tens of thousands of career civil servants into political appointees and then make them fireable.

Speaker 1 That's what that is about, right?

Speaker 1 And so that's what they want to do again: purge government, purge all these agencies, departments, every part of the administrative state of what they see as the enemy within and replace them, replace them with loyalists.

Speaker 1 That was very much part of all the sort of big right-wing planning, Project 2025 being one of the big planning operations on the right, is of this idea, we need to get rid of these people and we need to find our people to replace them with.

Speaker 1 That's one part of it. The second part is they're very clear that their project is fundamentally not popular.

Speaker 1 You know, if you tell the American people what they actually want to do, people will say, that sounds not great. So they know this will lead to protests, or they are expecting protests.

Speaker 1 And I think one of what when you hear Russell Vogt talk about sort of his biggest regret from the first Trump administration is precisely that in the summer of 2020, during the George Floyd protests, they did not invoke the Insurrection Act to use the military to suppress those protests.

Speaker 1 And they're 100% clear, this will not happen again. Next time we'll be ready.

Speaker 1 They think they had too many of those Federalist society rhino lawyers in and around the White House who kind of talked them out of this.

Speaker 1 Trump wanted to do this in the summer of 2020, but they didn't. They were sort of talked out of it by lawyers, legal counsel, whatever.
And so they're 100% clear. This must not happen to us again.

Speaker 1 Next time, we will absolutely use the military. We will invoke the Insurrection Act.
And so that is what they've been preparing. That is sort of his, one of his biggest frustrations is precisely this.

Speaker 1 We were much too lenient. We allowed protests.
We shouldn't do this.

Speaker 2 I think it's interesting that that's one of his biggest frustrations. Because again, when people try to wrap your mind around this, it's like, okay, he's this nerdy guy with glasses.

Speaker 2 He's in charge of the budget department. It's like, well,

Speaker 2 you know, does it matter if he has some kind of fringe beliefs about turning the military against American citizens? And the answer is kind of yes, right?

Speaker 2 Like the OMB, like the management, the M part of OMB is important.

Speaker 2 And working with Stephen Miller and other people within the executive branch, it's kind of taking control of all of these agencies in ways that would give him some purview, you know, over cracking down on protesters.

Speaker 1 Yeah, he himself calls OMB the nerve center of the federal government. And I think he's kind of right about this, or at least you can use it that way.

Speaker 1 It's always a question of what do you want to do with these institutions and agencies.

Speaker 1 And for him, and I think you saw this in, again, in the first Trump administration, he became director of OMB in 2019.

Speaker 1 And some of his greatest hits were he held up military aid to Ukraine because Trump wanted to pressure the Ukrainian government in terms of delivering dirt on Joe Joe Biden.

Speaker 1 He directed billions of dollars from the Pentagon to Trump's border wall fever dream. He was the most aggressive proponent of Schedule F.
So this is a powerful position if you want to use it that way.

Speaker 1 And he absolutely sees it as a kind of position where you can bend the entire machinery to the will of Donald Trump. And that is, I mean, to be clear, he really sees Donald Trump as a gift from God.

Speaker 1 That's how he describes him, literally, a gift from God, someone who is precisely the right kind of radical figure to lead this counterrevolution.

Speaker 1 He is entirely devoted to, again, bending the entire machine to Trump's will.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and it's important to add to that, you know, because he also is a radical on cultural issues, right? Like he said, get from God.

Speaker 2 Like he specifically says, I think in another clip from that interview, which I didn't play, about

Speaker 2 reinvigorating Christian nationalism and infusing the administration with Christian nationalist views. And I think the budget will also have views on that.

Speaker 2 And this ties to your point about how they know it's unpopular.

Speaker 2 Like there are ways that they kind of might be able to reduce access to contraception and change rules via HHS in ways that advance their religious and cultural agenda without having to pass unpopular bills through Congress.

Speaker 1 Aaron Ross Powell, this is another reason why vote is important or interesting, because he is competent, right? He knows how government works.

Speaker 1 And I think

Speaker 1 in the first Trump administration, there was this saying, oh, malevolence sort of tempered by incompetence.

Speaker 1 As we're once again, sort of looking at what we're in for with the second Trump administration. And we see a lot of fundamentally incompetent people because Trump insists on nominating them.

Speaker 1 But then on the other end of the spectrum, there's people like Russell Vogt, who

Speaker 1 he knows how government works and he knows how to make it work. I mean, I think people tend to think that sort of the extremists, the nutty MAGA people are also sort of incompetent.

Speaker 1 And conversely, when you go up on the competence scale, you tend to go down on the nutty ideology scale.

Speaker 1 But that's again and that if you look at people someone like this he this is a truly committed ideologue right he really means this kind of stuff he's fundamentally not on board with any kind of pluralistic vision of a democracy in which people have disagreements and they kind of you know try to come to some sort of i don't know consensus or understanding no he's not on board with that he's a truly committed ideologue but he's also very competent and so these are the more in that sense i think these are the more dangerous people that we need to worry about it is tough to find people that are both competent and radical.

Speaker 2 That's what makes them so noteworthy. You had one other post on your sub-site that I just wanted to talk about a little bit.
It was from about a week or so ago now. And so

Speaker 2 the news has changed a little bit.

Speaker 2 But it was partially in response to President Biden's kind of smiling

Speaker 2 first day of school picture fest with incoming President-elect Trump and kind of tying it to Joe and Mika going to Mar-a-Lago and Bezos and Zuckerberg going to Mar-a-Lago and like all of the

Speaker 2 people who are presumably at least small L-liberal that had opposed Trump that are participating in this anticipatory obedience already. So talk about that and

Speaker 2 why we're seeing that and why you have concerns about that, particularly in the context of kind of your work looking at authoritarianism around the world.

Speaker 1 I'm concerned about this also, honestly, frustrated, because I think modern society and sort of complex modern societies and modern states are difficult for any authoritarian regime to kind of bring in line, even if they're fully competent.

Speaker 1 But, you know, since the election, I think ostensibly anti-MAGA political leaders and liberal institutions have kind of really assisted the Trumpists in kind of bringing the machinery online in line.

Speaker 1 I'm not saying Biden should completely sabotage the transition. That's not the position, right? You have to worry about state capacity and you have to worry to some extent about norms and precedents.

Speaker 1 Fine, but why do you need, why didn't you do a photo op with the first lady on the premises of the White House? This sort of signals normalcy to people, right?

Speaker 1 It signals to people it can't be that bad.

Speaker 1 If Trump really was, I don't know, a fascist, whatever, or like a fundamental acute threat to American democracy, Joe Biden and Jill Biden wouldn't be doing that, would they?

Speaker 1 So this is signaling normalcy. It signals a kind of accommodation to power, a kind of acquiescence.

Speaker 1 And the best example, honestly, is the way the kind of Musk Ramaswamy joined, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, has been treated, where you have sort of democratic governors go on Fox News to say, oh, this is really interesting.

Speaker 1 We really need to do something about government waste or whatever. As if this was kind of a good faith effort at government reform.
Come on,

Speaker 1 it's not, right? It's not.

Speaker 2 A real organization or, you know,

Speaker 2 something without a Paul Patrol logo. Yes.

Speaker 1 Or you have like Bernie Sanders just a few days ago praising Musk for supposedly like pushing back against the military industrial complex. What are we doing here?

Speaker 1 This is the kind of legitimization and normalization of these people that we, no, we shouldn't do this, right? We should be very clear that this is not a department, first of all.

Speaker 1 It has no legal or constitutional authority. And these people are not good faith actors actually concerned about a government efficiency.

Speaker 1 So we shouldn't be sort of normalizing it in that way because we will at some point, right? I believe things could get potentially really bad in the Trump, in the second Trump administration.

Speaker 1 And at that point, we will need people, the American public, to actually not look at Trump as like a totally normal, you know, president, a totally normal administration, but we will need them to be clear about, no, these are dangerous, fundamentally anti-democratic forces that are in charge of American government right now.

Speaker 1 And we need to think sort of clearly and grapple seriously with how do you deal with that.

Speaker 1 And I don't think the right way to deal with that is just signal normalcy and pretend, oh, we're in a normal transition.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And particularly for no gain, gain, is, I guess, what it comes down to for me.
It's one thing if, you know, who the hell knows what the future holds.

Speaker 2 You get into the fall and they really do want to cut government waste. And there's some program that Bernie and Eli that they agree on.

Speaker 2 And you work together on a bill that goes through the normal process. Like, okay.

Speaker 2 But to just do it for a press release, like to give them legitimacy and to just do a smiley photo op to give them legitimacy for no gain for yourself.

Speaker 2 You know, I mean, like, I think that probably the best way back for power for the Democrats is a failed Trump administration, not working with the Trump administration on stuff.

Speaker 2 So, this doesn't mean that there won't be moments to work with them and there won't be times where you have a responsibility to the public, but to do it now for no political gain seems rather misguided.

Speaker 2 I agree with that. Okay, Thomas Zimmer, thank you so much, man.
Um, he's visiting professor at Georgetown. It's Democracy Americana on Substack.
The podcast is this democracy.

Speaker 2 Let's stay in touch as our democracy teeters or is restored.

Speaker 5 Who knows?

Speaker 1 Who knows, right? Who knows? Thank you so much for having me on. Thank you.

Speaker 4 Thanks so much to Thomas Zimmer. Up next, friend of the pod, Michael Weiss.

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Speaker 2 All right, and we're back with kind of ad hoc foreign policy correspondent Michael Weiss, editor of The Insider, a Russia-focused independent media outlet he's also the host of the foreign office podcast former investigative reporter for cnn how you doing man good man how are you so much happening in the world apparently we have a coup in south carolina or south carolina south carolina we might have a coup in south carolina we have a coup in south korea as we're taping things are happening in syria you've been doing a lot of reporting on syria i want to get to that the protests in georgia russia and ukraine but uh foreign policy starts at home so i need to uh pick your brain a little bit on some of Donald Trump's appointments first.

Speaker 2 We've got a friend Cash Patel who's been nominated to be the head of the FBI, even though we have an FBI director whose term doesn't expire until 2027.

Speaker 2 You posted this on the X platform. The FBI arrested more than 1,200 January 6th insurrectionists who falsely claimed the 2020 election was stolen.

Speaker 2 Now the Bureau is about to be headed by a man who agrees with them. Morale will be the first thing to disappear at this law enforcement agency, but not the last.
Talk about that a little more.

Speaker 5 Yeah, look, I mean, the FBI traditionally is a culturally conservative institution. A lot of Republicans are FBI agents.
There are a lot of Republicans who

Speaker 5 support Donald Trump and who thought that the investigation into Russia's attempt to sway the 2016 election wasn't a righteous one. So there's divisions within the Bureau about a lot of stuff.

Speaker 5 But when you have somebody whose

Speaker 5 avowed remit as the incoming director is to dismantle the so-called deep state, to hollow out basically our first line of defense, not just for counterterrorism, but counterintelligence, the infiltration of hostile foreign actors.

Speaker 5 I mean, just today, the FBI released the indictment of a woman who it turns out was an FSB officer or agent rather, who had infiltrated the DC think tank circuit.

Speaker 5 I mean, we have a lot of problems in this country.

Speaker 5 And let's tear it up and start all over again is not a good starting point for somebody who's going to be heading, you know, one of the not just a law enforcement bureau, but one of the key constituents of the intelligence community.

Speaker 5 And yeah, Cash Patel is a conspiracy theorist. And even more than that, I think he is such a slavish loyalist to the president and willing to do whatever Donald Trump wants.

Speaker 5 John Bolton, a guy I'm not super fond of quoting, I think had a fairly good line, which is, you know, this is going to be Trump's Berea, which is

Speaker 5 Joseph Stalin's head of state security, and then, you know, rather famously overthrown himself when Stalin died. I don't think Bolton is using those words lightly.

Speaker 5 I think that there is a great deal of fear and mistrust in terms of morale at the Bureau. I mean, a lot will depend on what he actually does on day one.

Speaker 5 A lot is also going to depend, frankly, on, you know, this is a sprawling. government agency like any other.
It has bureaucratic mechanisms in place.

Speaker 5 It has people who are professional law enforcement officers, but also civil servants who know how to stop radical change from happening at least overnight.

Speaker 5 Whether or not those bulwarks and sort of institutional obstacles remain in place, I don't know. I'm hearing that they were very much in place during the first Trump administration.

Speaker 5 So a lot is going to depend on that. A lot also, frankly, is going to depend on the president's own feelings about the FBI.

Speaker 5 So prior to this appointment, I was hearing scuttlebutt, and take this with a pinch of salt, but that actually his relationship with the Bureau has improved somewhat because of the assassination attempts on him.

Speaker 5 And I would add to that also because there is not, so far as we know, an active counterintelligence investigation into his activities with various and sundry foreign governments.

Speaker 5 So he may decide that actually now the Bureau is doing a good job.

Speaker 2 That Egypt money, that Egypt bag investigation is over.

Speaker 5 And also, look, I mean, keep in mind, the Iranians are still gunning for Donald Trump. It's the FBI that's stopping the IRGC from killing him.
And Iran, he has no love for, as we well know, right?

Speaker 5 Russia is a different story, perhaps. But it's just a terrible appointment for so many reasons.
And again, I mean, I've yet to see the impact day of.

Speaker 5 But right now, I'm getting a real sense of foreboding from people both working in the FBI, but also who have left the FBI and are certainly aware of

Speaker 5 the culture.

Speaker 2 Two thoughts on what you said there. One about the Patel being a conspiracy theorist.

Speaker 2 We covered this pretty thoroughly with Alina Pot Clabrow yesterday, but there was this one nugget that I had missed that I think it's worth sharing with everybody.

Speaker 2 When Patel was promoting his children's book about King Donald, who was persecuted by his political foes, he offered 10 copies in which he signed the books and added a special message.

Speaker 2 WWG1WGA, where we go one, we go all, which is the QAnon slogan. So he's like signing children's books for people with the QAnon slogan.
I mean, like, he's not exactly,

Speaker 2 it's not like he's like a casual conspiracy theorist. He's one of the main promoters of the right-wing conspiracy theories that led to Pizzagate and January 6th and on and on.

Speaker 5 And QAnon is absolutely the subject of investigation by the FBI, right?

Speaker 5 So, I mean, this is the problem when you're big upping, when you're amplifying the very enemies of the United States that the agency you are now meant to head is meant to be keeping tabs on and arresting when they commit crimes.

Speaker 5 I'd say that's a big problem, wouldn't you? I'd say that's

Speaker 5 perhaps even a national security breach.

Speaker 5 And this is what I mean.

Speaker 5 And also, look, you know, there's a list of people, the enemies list that Trump and his Confederates, including Patel, have compiled, which include former FBI officers and directors.

Speaker 5 And, you know, again, G-Men don't like it when you start going after their own kind.

Speaker 5 You know, there is a camaraderie that obtains here, even if there is, as I mentioned earlier, disputes about protocol and practice.

Speaker 5 And look, I'll give you one data point, which I think is kind of revealing.

Speaker 5 So, because of the aftermath of the crossfire hurricane investigation, the Mueller report, and then Trump's attempts to not just re-litigate this, but dismantle it, dismantle the very premise and raison debt for these things, which was rooted in legitimate counterintelligence.

Speaker 5 concerns, morale took a beating at the Bureau, such that, I mean, I was told that agents who should be applying for 302s and doing surveillance and going through all of the paperwork and bureaucratic protocols to do their job and surveil subjects or persons of interest decided, you know what, juice ain't worth the squeeze because I don't want to be hauled before Congress or have my name outed in the New York Times and then start to have my family swatted by MAGA and QAnon crazies, right?

Speaker 5 So imagine what's going to happen now when you have to answer to a guy like Cash Maria.

Speaker 2 Correct. That happened already.

Speaker 5 I mean, I don't know.

Speaker 2 And it's happening currently. It's happening.

Speaker 5 And yeah, there's going to be a lot of early retirements, I would expect.

Speaker 5 A lot of people who just don't, they're not going to want to have to put up with this.

Speaker 5 And they're going to be fearful for not just their livelihoods, but, you know, as I say, being doxxed and exposed as perfidious agents of the American Stasi or whatever the hell these people are portraying them as.

Speaker 2 I know. I've already been talking to some agents that are experiencing that type of targeting during this transition.
But just broadening it out beyond cash.

Speaker 2 And you have Tulsi at DNI and Heg Seth potentially at DOD. It's a little bit of a mixed message you get with having then Waltz and Marco in other positions.
Like the broad view.

Speaker 5 It's a veritable team of rivals, Teddy.

Speaker 2 I don't think it was intentionally a team of rivals. It was a team of rivals

Speaker 2 if you're thinking about it as like the panel on the five. You know, you want to make sure you have all of the points of view represented from a Fox News panel.

Speaker 5 InfoWars and WikiLeaks team of rivals.

Speaker 2 But the same issue with Patel, I think it has to be a question like with your sources across

Speaker 2 all the national security posts, across the intelligence agencies, across the law enforcement agencies. And I just wonder what people are thinking, how people are processing this,

Speaker 2 what they're expecting, what concerns are

Speaker 2 at the broadest sense about this team that Trump's bringing them.

Speaker 5 Well, you know, look, a a lot of people, first and foremost, are concerned:

Speaker 5 am I going to receive a paycheck? What's going to happen to my pension, right? I mean, you don't want a president coming in and saying, I'm going to fire everybody.

Speaker 5 And even if legally, there's no grounds for this, right? I mean, it's the harassment, it's the concomitant effects of declaring somebody an enemy of the state.

Speaker 5 So, you know, I have, in my reporting on the GRU, on Russian intelligence, on Havana syndrome, gotten close to a number of former CIA officers, one of whom is Mark Palmeropoulos, who I'm not afraid to say has become a very good friend of mine.

Speaker 5 Mark doesn't know if he is going to be here on January 20th, meaning should he stay in the United States?

Speaker 5 Because lawyers are telling him and telling others who signed that letter questioning the veracity of the Hunter Biden laptop story, maybe you should cool your heels abroad somewhere.

Speaker 5 for the foreseeable future, just because Trump and his team have made it very clear that these guys are in their sights. Now,

Speaker 5 that is a pretty terrifying prospect that people who worked for the CIA, the FBI, or other government intelligence law enforcement bodies who guard us while we sleep, who have done things

Speaker 5 on behalf of this country they cannot talk about, but should it ever come to light, and it always does down the line when the history books are written, are decorated heroes for a reason.

Speaker 5 Suddenly, they become targets of their own government.

Speaker 5 I mean, the sense of betrayal, the sense of treachery that they must feel, and also the deterrent effect that this will have on people volunteering to go to work for these services, right?

Speaker 5 You know, and even more to the point, and this is something that comes up.

Speaker 2 Oh, and there's like an Adam Smith effect. There's a deterrent, but also who it draws in.
Who it draws in as well.

Speaker 5 And also the ability to recruit and run assets in the field. You know, I mean, if you're, you know, let's say you're a...

Speaker 2 This is a really great point with Tulsi. Use Tulsi as an example.
And if you're an asset, how you might be processing that right now.

Speaker 5 Right.

Speaker 5 So, you know, Tulsi Gabbard, who has made no mystery about her feelings about Bashar al-Assad, Russia's gruesome intervention in Syria, and other things, which should raise the eyebrow of the IC, is now going to be the head of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Speaker 5 So MAG apologists who,

Speaker 5 or I should say MAG-adjacent Republicans who don't particularly like the cut of her jib are trying to persuade people, well, it's just a coordinator role. It's kind of like a sinecure.

Speaker 5 Don't worry, she's not going to make policy.

Speaker 2 Bullshit.

Speaker 5 She prepares the presidential daily briefings. So, what the president sees on a day-to-day basis in terms of here are all the national security threats in the world, she will have purview over.

Speaker 5 She has the ability to declassify intelligence, which she can do rather selectively to advance an agenda.

Speaker 5 And this is somebody who has gone to Damascus, taken tea with Assad, a genocidal dictator who's used chemical weapons against his own people, come back and said, he's our friend.

Speaker 5 We should support him. Now, if you're the CIA and you're trying to recruit Syrians, which I know you want to get into the discussion of what happened in Aleppo, it might be a good time.

Speaker 5 It might be a good time to start doing that. Are you going to think twice, three times, four times about whether or not this Assadist, who's now

Speaker 5 sort of the wrangler of 18 different intelligence services, might declassify intelligence that could expose you, out you, and put you in harm's way, very real harm's way in a country like Syria?

Speaker 5 I should should say you probably are going to think two, three, four times.

Speaker 2 Same with Russia. Same with Russia.

Speaker 5 Let's say you're a GRU colonel in Moscow, and you want to become what's called a defector in place, which is to say you don't actually skedaddle to the West and get resettled, but you stay in your job in Russian intelligence.

Speaker 5 But

Speaker 5 you're an informant, you're an agent of the CIA. You've seen what Putin will do when the U.S.
government is not working against their own assets. I mean, look at what he's attempted to do on U.S.

Speaker 5 soil with respect to defectors here.

Speaker 5 Look at what he did to Sergei Skripal, who was an MI6 agent, after he had him in custody in a Russian prison for many years, pardoned him, released him in a prisoner trade.

Speaker 5 He still dispatched agents, officers rather, to go and poison him with a military-grade nerve agent years later, right? So you already have that kind of damper on going to work for the other side.

Speaker 5 Now, all of a sudden, you have a credible suspicion that people who are working at very high levels of the American intelligence community aren't exactly kosher and might be secretly or not so secretly sympathetic to the government you're trying to betray.

Speaker 5 This is going to have an impact. It probably already has done, you know.

Speaker 2 And what about the intelligence sharing with our allies? I think it's a potential issue, right?

Speaker 5 Look, there is no closer intelligence relationship in the world than that between the United States and the United Kingdom.

Speaker 5 I mean, the Anglo-American special relationship, I would say, starts there at the intelligence level. It's almost like we are one country in that respect.

Speaker 5 I have heard from people who, former but not so former, on the British side, we are probably not going to be giving everything, knowing some of the people who are coming in now. That is,

Speaker 5 I mean, I wish you had somebody who's worked in, say, the CIA or the NSA on the podcast next to me, because I'd love to hear their reaction to that. That is a staggering development.

Speaker 5 And that's just the UK, which, as I say, I mean, other countries that don't have as close of a relationship with the United States are also going to feel very much the same way.

Speaker 5 I mean, I've been hearing from people in NATO intelligence services, particularly after the Gabbard appointment, you know, what the fuck is happening.

Speaker 2 Well, let's do that in January. Before Mark flees the country, maybe we'll have him or somebody on with you in January.
Let's make that a date.

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Speaker 2 I want to get back to the Syria developments because this is the part of the podcast where, well, almost this whole podcast is you educating me, but like, you know, I at least have ideas of things in these other spaces.

Speaker 2 Like the Syria rebel attack on Aleppo happens over the weekend. I'm seeing this in the news, and I know literally nothing.
So

Speaker 2 we're going for, you know, remedial what is happening in Syria lessons from Michael Weiss right now. So let's start there.

Speaker 5 Okay. So let's put it this way.
This did not happen out of nothing.

Speaker 5 This is a very opportunistic set of events, which I think I wrote a piece with my ISIS book co-author, Hassan Hassan, and we call it a unique Cincada nation of circumstances. So let's start there.

Speaker 5 Number one, what's happened in the region over the last year?

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 5 Iran has

Speaker 2 fallen apart.

Speaker 5 Its regional strategic project, the so-called ring of fire around Israel, the projection of its power in the form of paramilitary organizations and militias, most important of which its prize asset, Hezbollah, utterly decimated.

Speaker 5 Senior leadership of Hezbollah has been wiped out, including Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah.

Speaker 5 If you believe the Israelis, they've taken out 80% of Hezbollah's arsenal of short and mid-range rockets.

Speaker 5 Hamas has been destroyed in Gaza, although that's more limited.

Speaker 5 But by and large, the IRGC has taken a pounding. And the IRGC was largely responsible as the ground army for Assad's recapture of so much territory in the last decade.

Speaker 5 I mean, there was a point at which it looked fairly credible that Damascus could fall to a consortium of different rebel groups, including those backed by the CIA, backed by some Gulf Arab states, backed by Turkey, and even backed by Jordan.

Speaker 5 CIA ended its program several years ago under the first Trump administration. We have no assets in place here except in one base in southern Syria, Al-Tamf.

Speaker 5 former Free Syrian Army rebels we recruited and are stationed there. And mostly they're there to kind of monitor Iranian shenanigans

Speaker 5 in that part of Syria. But we have no skin in the game except in eastern Syria, where we are there strictly in a counter-terrorism capacity to fight ISIS.

Speaker 5 So we have this group called the Syrian Democratic Forces.

Speaker 5 They are led by Syrian Kurds that are aligned with the PKK, which is a designated terror organization, but we like to pretend that it's not because they're really good at fighting ISIS.

Speaker 5 What has happened now is a former al-Qaeda franchise, and I'll get into why we know it's former, which has spent the last several years creating a state apparatus in northwest Syria, Idlib province, and a state apparatus that does things like controls the traffic, electricity grids, had a COVID relief plan, jihadis who do sort of technocratic governance, believe it or not.

Speaker 5 They have been champing at the bit to go on the offensive against Assad because they realize he has never been weaker than he is now. As I mentioned, his

Speaker 5 not his strategic partner, his patron, the Iranians, are a busted flush, more or less. The Russians are, as you may have noticed, preoccupied elsewhere.

Speaker 5 And so they have been asking their patron, the Turks. The Turks control the border crossings in northern Syria,

Speaker 5 at least in this part of the country. They pay the salaries of HTS, the group I alluded to.
They give them weapons. They have garrisons in Idlib, including with artillery, that are there to protect

Speaker 5 HTS, sorry, from Russian and Syrian onslaught. The Turks have kept them at bay for several months saying, no, we don't want you to go on the offensive.

Speaker 2 Can you talk to us about why the Turks are sponsoring them? Can we get just a brief aside on the Turkish perspective here?

Speaker 5 So the Turks have absolutely no problem lying down with Sunni Islamist radicals, particularly those who will advance.

Speaker 5 Turkey has one overriding national security concern in Syria, and that is the aforementioned PKK.

Speaker 5 And for many years, since our counter-ISIS mission got underway in 2014, Turkey has been pissed off at the United States for partnering with, as I say, a designated Kurdish terrorist group, designated by the U.S., not just by Turkey, by the way, which Turkey has been on and off at war with for 40 years.

Speaker 5 This started as a separatist movement inside Turkey. These guys, their headquarters is the Kandil Mountains, but the Syrian branch or affiliate of it is now

Speaker 5 you know, our eyes and ears on the ground in eastern Syria to contain and ensure that ISIS does not come back and rebuild the caliphate.

Speaker 5 So the Turks have maintained this is ludicrous, this is contradictory, and also insulting.

Speaker 5 We are a NATO ally, and it's like if Turkey had come to Mexico and started building an al-Qaeda franchise, but that's how they compare it.

Speaker 4 All right, Michael. So, right as you're explaining to me

Speaker 4 all the different geopolitics, all the different sides here, the power goes out in New Orleans because we have idlib-level infrastructure here, down here in our beautiful Western.

Speaker 5 No, idlib-level infrastructure is better than you have in New Orleans, apparently.

Speaker 4 Maybe. So anyway, my question was, that I was trying to get the answer to, you're talking about the Turks and their role here in supporting the rebels.
Yeah.

Speaker 4 And what I'm trying to understand is, so on the one hand, the Turks' main security concern is the PKK and the Kurds, which are U.S. backed, right? And so A,

Speaker 4 why isn't the U.S. more concerned with the groups that the Turks are backing?

Speaker 4 And B, what is the strategic imperative for the Turks then in going after Assad and the Shia and the Iranian-backed groups?

Speaker 5 Trevor Burrus Well, the answer to your first question is the U.S. is deeply concerned about the groups that Turkey has sort of given patronage to.
So I need to be a little bit more specific here.

Speaker 5 I'm trying to keep it broad. So Turkey has its own consortium of slash ex-Free Syrian army members and frankly just mercenaries that they have built over time known as the Syrian National Army.

Speaker 5 I refer to them in in the piece as their new janissaries, if you know your Ottoman history.

Speaker 5 They've dispatched these guys abroad to foreign conflicts, including Libya, where the SNA has fought General Khalifa Haftar's army there, which is backed by Russia too.

Speaker 5 So Turkey has been sort of projecting its power using proxies that it's recruited and built up over time as part of, I think, frankly, their own... regional hegemonic designs, right?

Speaker 5 Erdogan, in many ways, fashions himself as a new sultan. He wants not a recreation of the Ottoman Empire, but definitely he wants to make Turkey great again, and this is part of that project.

Speaker 5 HTS in Idlib

Speaker 5 is headed by Jolani. Jolani was sent into Syria in 2011 by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who at the time was the head of what was known as the Islamic State of Iraq.

Speaker 5 Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi wanted Jolani to start creating the ISI franchise in Syria, which, as we know, became ISIS. Jolani, though, had his own grand designs.
He's megalomaniacal.

Speaker 5 He is a native Syrian, unlike Baghdadi, who's Iraqi.

Speaker 5 And over time, he decided not only would he break with ISIS and create his own show in Syria, which was known as Jabat al-Nusra, but when Jabbat al-Nusra became an al-Qaeda franchise, he played similar games with Ayman al-Zawahiri, the head of al-Qaeda after bin Laden's death.

Speaker 5 And what had started as a kind of public relations gambit, I'm breaking with al-Qaeda, actually became a legitimate rupture with al-Qaeda. Now the U.S.

Speaker 5 sanctioned HTS and Jalani there's a bounty on his head because they don't trust him and they think that this guy's a terrorist.

Speaker 5 But it gets complicated because HTS has fought the actual al-Qaeda franchise in Syria known as Huraz al-Din and he has gone to war with ISIS many times.

Speaker 5 So there's this weird thing where a jihadist is fighting transnational terrorists that we're more concerned about than some

Speaker 5 scruffy little Syrian national jihadist organization, which perhaps is not so scruffy anymore, thanks to many years of indulgence by Turkey and the fact that Jolani has

Speaker 5 evolved in the sense that he understands the way to win hearts and minds in Syria and to do the kind of state-building enterprise that bin Laden and Baghdadi could never achieve because they were too brutal or backward requires a softer touch.

Speaker 5 So I would say that what HTS is like is the Taliban, right? They are an authoritarian, Salafist organization, but they legitimately want to govern and they want to have that administrative capacity.

Speaker 5 So Jolani has seen Assad's hollow shell of a regime over the last several years and been champing at the bit to go on the offensive and to take him on.

Speaker 5 Because of events in the Levant, particularly, as I mentioned earlier, the weakening of Iran's strategic project, because of Russia being distracted.

Speaker 5 They still have plenty of military assets in place in Syria, but Putin isn't all in in Syria anymore because he's got bigger fish to fry in Ukraine. Jelani sensed an opportunity.

Speaker 5 Turkey, for several months, kept him at bay. Don't go on the offensive.

Speaker 2 Why?

Speaker 5 In the midst of all of this, Turkey and Syria have been engaged in a kind of pat to do of reconciliation talks.

Speaker 5 Turkey wants to make a deal with Assad whereby Assad and Turkey jointly, but really Turkey leading the charge, eliminate the PKK as a threat to the Turkish border region, right?

Speaker 5 And for several months, actually several years, since about 2017, the Russians have brokered negotiations.

Speaker 5 The Russians would love nothing better than to see Turkey welcome Assad in from the cold because that's a preliminary for sanctions relief and also the international recognition of Assad.

Speaker 5 He's made deals, he's been normalized with all of the Gulf Arab states, but Turkey is the holdout. And again, it all comes down to the Kurdish question with the Turks.

Speaker 5 Finally, in the last month, MBS, the Saudi crown prince, tried to organize a face-to-face meeting between Erdogan and Assad, and Assad snubbed him.

Speaker 5 So Assad, who is this petulant pygmy in Damascus, who has mortgaged his country to Iran and Russia, who one-third of the country is an American protectorate, and the northern half of the country is a Turkish protectorate, completely at cross purposes with one another, he thinks that he is an equal player to Putin and Erdogan.

Speaker 5 He thinks that this is a peer contest. And Erdogan and Putin disagree on many things, but they have this kind of bromance, right? They're strategic rivals.

Speaker 5 Going back for historical reasons, I mean, the Crimean War, the Black Sea region,

Speaker 5 Turks don't want the Russians there, and vice versa. As I mentioned, Turkey sent the SNA to Libya to clean a Russian proxy's clock.
Turkey has helped the Azerbaijanis in Nagorno-Karabakh, which

Speaker 5 were Russian peacekeepers, right? We're on the ground there. And yet, every time Erdogan and Putin punch each other in the face, their respect for each other only increases.

Speaker 5 They have several things in common. Number one is a deep abiding contempt contempt for the United States and the West, which they see as culturally bankrupt.

Speaker 5 Number two, they love to make their Assad bend the knee. Yeah.
And they would love to show him who's boss. So Turkey finally threw its toys out of the pram and said, screw it.

Speaker 5 They let HTS off the leash. The SNA, their janissaries, are also part of this offensive.
And here's what nobody, I think even Jolani, the head of HTS, reckoned with.

Speaker 5 How easily it would be to take Syria's second city.

Speaker 4 Another comparison to the Taliban.

Speaker 5 The rebels before this, yes, from 2012, but really up until the mid-teens of the last decade, it took them years to. I was in Aleppo in 2012 when it began to fall to the rebels.

Speaker 5 I was in the Baba Hadid quarter, which I think a week or two earlier, before I got there, it was Ramadan, had fallen to a consortium of different rebel groups. These guys basically just waltzed in.

Speaker 5 The regime evaporated. It crumbled.
They ran away. And now HTS finds itself the keeper of not just, I think, all of Idlib province is now theirs, but most, 90 plus percent of Aleppo province.

Speaker 5 And now they're going on the march in Hama, where if they really do make a play for Hama city, that's going to be very difficult for Assad and his backers.

Speaker 5 Because that poses a strategic threat to the hold on power, and it certainly poses a threat to Russia's main interests, which are their two coastal bases.

Speaker 5 Latakia, they have an air base there, and Tartus, it's their only warm water port, and also there's a naval base there.

Speaker 5 So that could actually tilt the scales against HTS and, I guess, this broader Turkish project.

Speaker 5 But they're doing incredibly well for an insurgency, albeit one with the supervision and the kind of invisible hand of a major state power, a NATO power.

Speaker 5 And the United States is sort of nowhere to be seen here.

Speaker 4 I want to get to the Russian part of this to close the pod, but just on the U.S., it seems like we're nowhere to be seen here because we don't have, like, who are we rooting for?

Speaker 4 Not to put this into sports terms, but I, there doesn't seem to be like a clear benefit on either side of this to the U.S. interests.

Speaker 5 Right.

Speaker 5 So, the National Security Council put out a statement, sort of mild delight at the fact that Assad's sort of getting buffeted because, you know, as they said in the statement, this is what you get for relying on Iran and Russia.

Speaker 5 Happy in a way to see Iran's clock further cleaned by HTS, but there is no love for this organization, right? They're a designated terror group.

Speaker 5 A lot of people in the IC believe everything that I've just told you about Jalani's state building, that's all just a figly for, you know, Al-Qaeda light or al-Qaeda curious, as I think Mark Palomaropoulos put it on MSNBC.

Speaker 5 So it remains to be seen. You know, if Jalani,

Speaker 5 what he is angling to do, because he has also become a student of geopolitics and recent international events. I mentioned he's sort of modeling himself on the Taliban.

Speaker 5 Well, since we withdrew from Afghanistan, the Taliban is the de facto ruler of the country.

Speaker 5 The United States is still engaged with it to implement the Doha Accords and also, frankly, to keep tabs on ISIS-K's franchise in Afghanistan. The Taliban is at war with ISIS-K.

Speaker 5 Russia is basically on the cusp of recognizing the Taliban diplomatically, lifting sanctions.

Speaker 5 I mean, Putin is on the record saying these guys are the de facto rulers, and they're our ally in counter-terrorism. So, Jalani is saying, ooh, I want some of that.

Speaker 5 Get me some of that Taliban actually.

Speaker 4 Putin might just switch sides.

Speaker 5 Exactly. He's like, I am your ally in counterterrorism.
I fight ISIS. I fight Al-Qaeda.
I have no quarrel with Iraq.

Speaker 5 I mean, it's kind of extraordinary because ISIS is a genocidal organization that thinks all Shia, the Rafida, they are only meant to be put to the sword.

Speaker 5 Jalani is saying to Shia-led Iraq and the militias, which are built by Iran, stay out of my country and I'll leave you alone. That's heresy to ISIS.

Speaker 5 And yet this is part of his kind of pragmatic approach. Now, whether he's successful or not, I have no idea.
I mean, you want to lose a bet, try to predict what's going to happen in Syria, right?

Speaker 5 But a lot of people did not see this coming, least of all, I think, the American government. And now we're kind of like,

Speaker 5 hey, my name's Paul, and this shit's between y'all.

Speaker 2 Like, we have no skin in the game.

Speaker 4 That's the other place.

Speaker 5 Yeah, except to protect, again, the SDF in the East and ensure that ISIS remains down and out there.

Speaker 4 The tie to Russia here, as you've alluded to a couple of times, obviously

Speaker 4 Russia being distracted, shall we say, in Ukraine, but also weakened, I think relates to the Assad weakening.

Speaker 4 So I'm curious your view just on the other news out of Russia recently is the crashing of the Ruble and kind of their economic stability teetering.

Speaker 4 And so I'm curious your view on just that, the domestic status in Russia, as well as the status and the latest in the war in Ukraine.

Speaker 5 Look, everybody I ask, how long can Russia sustain this war? Let's start with their losses in manpower and materia.

Speaker 5 British intelligence estimate that over 700,000 Russian forces have been taken off the chessboard.

Speaker 2 This is unbelievable, extraordinary.

Speaker 5 I mean, it dwarfs what they lost in Afghanistan, which of course helped precipitate the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Speaker 5 And yet it's Russia has this sort of, we have this conception of it like Mary Poppins handbag. You just keep pulling stuff out, you know,

Speaker 5 at a disproportionate level to the naturalism.

Speaker 4 Is that true? I saw some, I saw the TikTok, you can never trust what's on the Chinese spy, but I saw some TikTok videos of the Russians conscripting people at clubs.

Speaker 5 Was this the same? Well, I have no doubt that's true. I mean, and also they're offering them ever greater incentives in terms of salaries.

Speaker 5 I mean, you could live like a king on the money that you would get, except for the fact you're going to be sent to a front and turned into hamburger, right?

Speaker 5 They're also, though, I mean, to underscore their manpower problem, I mean, you don't go recruiting North Koreans if you're doing well and winning a war, right?

Speaker 5 So 10,000 plus North Koreans now in Kursk, possibly already deployed to Ukraine. They're tricking Indians into becoming mercenaries for them.
They've recruited Cubans.

Speaker 5 They've recruited now Houthis, according to the Wall Street Journal. So they're trying to throw as much into this meat grinder as possible.
And their losses are staggering at the equipment level, too.

Speaker 5 I mean, I've lost track. There are people who study this stuff on an hourly basis, but it's, again, you would think that this is not sustainable.
And yet, and yet, Putin doesn't care.

Speaker 5 They are pressing ahead in Donbas, making more gains in the last month, maybe two months, than they have since the start of the full-scale invasion in 2022.

Speaker 5 The Ukrainians are beginning to see the writing on the wall that, okay, look, Trump is coming in. We might not have unlimited security assistance.
Everyone wants to cut a deal, but what kind of deal?

Speaker 5 You know, we need to have leverage over the Russians.

Speaker 5 And then there's this kind of fingers-crossed hope that the economy in Russia simply collapses and that's going to have some immediate impact on the battlefield.

Speaker 5 No doubt it'll have an impact on the battlefield.

Speaker 5 I'm a little bit skeptical and wary of people who tell me, though, that it's going to be game over for Putin, because I've heard that for many, many years.

Speaker 5 I mean, it used to be if the price of oil drops below $100 a barrel, that's it. His regime is toast.
That was like 15 years ago, you know.

Speaker 1 Yeah, right.

Speaker 5 So I would take kind of these projections with a pinch of salt.

Speaker 5 But, you know, look, the Ukrainians are absolutely, you know, ecstatic at developments in Syria because that's weakening their strategic adversary, and they're hopeful that it's going to redeploy or, you know, sap even further attention away from what's happening on their soil.

Speaker 2 There's also a weird kind of like resignation about Trump in Ukraine.

Speaker 5 I mean, I have to tell you, like in the last few weeks, what I'm hearing from inside the Biden administration about how the Biden administration really didn't want to win this war.

Speaker 5 It wanted to sort of manage the conflict, how an overriding fear of Russia's loss of the war in Ukraine and also collapse of Putin's regime is what's guided everything.

Speaker 4 Kathy Young wrote about this in the bulwark today. I'll put it in the show notes.

Speaker 5 And this is going to come out. I mean, knives have been sharpened over the last several years, and I think they're being unsheathed now.
And I mean, I'm going to tell you, like, you know,

Speaker 5 Jake Sullivan, who gets better press than anybody I've ever seen as a government official.

Speaker 5 I mean, it's like, you know, you can't write about him without saying, lantern jaw, Jake Sullivan, who on Monday masters the topography of inner Mongolia and on Tuesday, you know, can tell you

Speaker 5 the trading value of the yen. I think that that sort of hagiographic style is going out of fashion real quick.

Speaker 4 Yeah, we've got a run, and I think your dog is sending a message to us that she or he has heard enough. Always.

Speaker 4 Or say it's a guard dog worried about Mark and worried about those having to flee that had a warning.

Speaker 5 Well, he's a puppy, so he's always going off about something.

Speaker 4 My final thing that this is just a quick follow-up on that,

Speaker 4 the Ukrainian acceptance, I guess, or coming to terms with Trump coming.

Speaker 4 What does that look like? What does that mean? You think

Speaker 4 just acceptance that there's going to have to be a negotiation or acceptance that they're going alone or

Speaker 4 acceptance of what?

Speaker 5 It's driven by several things. Number one, they think they know Trump because they've had to deal with him before.

Speaker 5 There's an element in Ukraine that says, well, remember, this guy gave us javelin anti-tank missiles when Obama wouldn't. He sanctioned Nordstream 2.
There are actors in place.

Speaker 5 I mean, you mentioned Rubio and Waltz. Kellogg is an interesting character, too.
The Ukrainians respect him. They see him as sort of a Cold War hawk.

Speaker 4 He's crazy MAGA, but also pro-Ukraine. Also pro-Ukraine, and he understands the Russian.
Good news for Ukraine, maybe bad news for protesters in America.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 5 I mean, there is a great deal of wariness about people like Gabbard. Patel doesn't factor in for them.
But J.D. Vance, though, is the problem.

Speaker 5 And you'll notice when Zelensky gave an interview to the New Yorker several weeks ago, It's unfathomable for Zielinski to say anything untoward about any American official, but he said that Vance was, quote, too radical.

Speaker 5 And what that means really is he knows that the people who Vance has surrounded himself with would love nothing better than to just forfeit Ukraine to Russia. Yeah, pull the plug.
Right.

Speaker 5 But then there's a sense that, well, okay, Trump is going to come in with sort of these highfalutin expectations for some masterful, beautiful peace deal with Putin.

Speaker 5 And Putin's going to do what he does with everybody, which is... rat fuck him and Trump is going to get angry and then Trump is going to sort of release the hounds.
That's how the Ukrainians steal it.

Speaker 4 That's the hope.

Speaker 5 That's the hope. And also, this is driven, though, and again.

Speaker 4 I would love to live in that world.

Speaker 4 That's sweet, though. I love trade optimism.

Speaker 5 Yes, but it's driven by a great deal of frustration, bordering on contempt for the Biden administration.

Speaker 5 Biden was great with the optics and solidarity, rallying allies, and security assistance has come, right?

Speaker 5 I mean, we're now giving Ukraine weapon systems that we said would have precipitated World War III in February of 2022.

Speaker 5 But the Ukrainians say not only did World War III not happen, and now you know it, we should have had those weapons before the full-scale invasion.

Speaker 4 Bill Kristol gave the Bulwarkian pessimistic view of that potential outlook, which is that Putin ratfucks him and continues to press forward with his conscripted soldiers

Speaker 4 while the U.S. abandons them.

Speaker 5 He has really no intention of stopping the war and

Speaker 5 his overriding immigration. Well, the U.S.

Speaker 4 abandons Ukraine, I meant.

Speaker 4 Rather than that making Trump mad and

Speaker 4 unleashing the dogs, it leads Trump to just say, fuck it.

Speaker 5 The only thing, I mean, let's just be very kind of realistic here. So, Ukrainian sentiment has shifted.
There's a huge morale problem now, whereas there wasn't before.

Speaker 5 There's desertion in the ranks, whereas there wasn't before. Incoming recruits for the Ukrainian army are old.
They don't want to fight. They cannot fight as well as younger men.

Speaker 5 A lot of the best, most battle-tested soldiers were killed in places like Bakhmut and so on. Ukrainians will not, and Zelensky cannot afford politically to do a deal with the Russians unless there is

Speaker 5 real security guarantees, not like a Budapest memorandum kind of thing where like, you know, we pledge to consider maybe one day bringing Ukraine into NATO.

Speaker 5 So the term he's using is now the umbrella of NATO security. Well, what does that mean? Realistically, what it means is boots on the ground.

Speaker 5 British, French, Polish, Scandinavian, Scandinavian, Estonian soldiers basically guarding a ceasefire line, ensuring that another attack on Kyiv cannot happen.

Speaker 5 And in Europe, people are beginning to seriously discuss this. Kayakalis, who's now a Eurocrat and in a very sensitive position in Brussels, a high-powered one at that, is talking openly about this.

Speaker 5 So the Europeans, I think, sense that, okay,

Speaker 5 they were more expecting of a Trump victory than I think a lot of people in the United States were. So they've actually kind of resigned themselves to what's going to happen in this country.

Speaker 5 And that means more of the onus shifts to them, both in terms of support, material support for Ukraine, diplomatic support, and then, yes, putting their money where their mouth is and, you know, telling the Russians thus far and no farther on the battlefield.

Speaker 4 So we'll see how it plays out. There'll be many more, I think, unfortunately for us and for the Ukrainians, for the world, opportunities for us to get reports from you, Michael Weiss.

Speaker 4 So thanks for coming on in a pinch at the last second here. Really appreciate you and the puppy.

Speaker 4 And I do believe it's the first mention of the Janissaries on the Bulwark podcast, and they got several shout-outs today. So, appreciate you.

Speaker 5 The way things are going, it won't be the last.

Speaker 4 All right, my friends. We'll talk to you soon.
Take care. And thanks also to Thomas Zimmer.
We'll be up tomorrow. Another edition of the Bulwark podcast.
See y'all then. Peace.

Speaker 2 White does the sun go on shining.

Speaker 2 White

Speaker 2 does the sea rush to shore?

Speaker 2 Don't damn

Speaker 2 it's the end of the world.

Speaker 2 Cause you don't love me

Speaker 2 anymore.

Speaker 2 Why do the birds go out singing?

Speaker 2 Why do the stars go above

Speaker 2 Don Danger?

Speaker 2 It's the end

Speaker 2 of the world.

Speaker 2 It ended when you said

Speaker 2 goodbye.

Speaker 2 Why

Speaker 2 does my heart go on beating?

Speaker 2 Why do these eyes of mine cry?

Speaker 2 Don't they

Speaker 2 know

Speaker 2 it's the end

Speaker 2 of the world?

Speaker 2 It ended when you said

Speaker 2 goodbye.

Speaker 5 The Bullworth Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

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