Bill Kristol: A Power Play for Autocracy

Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.
It is Monday, so I'm here with someone who did not go to Mar-a-Lago over the weekend to reopen communications with Donald Trump. It's editor-at-large of the Bulwark, Bill Kristol.
Hey, Bill. And you didn't go either, Tim.
You know, I know we both got the invitations and it was tough, I had to juggle other commitments I had here.

I'm not really sure about that idea of opening communications with Trump and the value there, but hey. So what happened? Yeah, it was Joe and Mika went.
They opened morning, Joe, this morning. People can look at it online.
I'll link the explanation for why they went, the value of opening communications back up with Trump. They became so much a part of the resistance over those, I guess, the last seven or eight years.
But in 2015-16, they were pretty on the side of normalizing Trump. I'd say important, important may be too strong, somewhat important in normalizing Trump among a certain set of people in New York and sort of business types who watch Morning Joe.
We got in a very testy exchange.

I used to be a pretty regular guest on there in September, October 2016,

where I said something like this.

I mean, at that point, I think it was against Trump for president.

But, you know, I said something about, well, you guys certainly spent a lot of time with him

and made him seem, like, you know, respectable.

And Joe really didn't like that.

And we had a, for TV, I'd say a fairly, what do they call that in diplomacy? Frank and candid exchange there for about 10 or 15 minutes. So anyway.
That might be a fun one for the archives to go revisit. In the morning, Bill Kristol admonishing morning talk hosts.
You know, you got to consider the importance of morning talk hosts now that that's a key qualification for becoming the head of the United States military.

There's so much to do. I do these little outlines for the show.
And like, usually it's like six or seven. I have 11 points.
So I don't know that we're going to get to everything today. A lot

happening. No shortage to discuss.
But I just want to start at the biggest picture. You opened

the newsletter this morning with kind of a little bit of a meditation on something our friend Robert

Traczynski wrote over at the Unpopulist about these nominations broadly. And Robert wrote that every appointee is selected as a deliberate negation, even a mockery of the function of government.
He or she will be in charge of. These individuals are not merely unqualified for their offices.
They're disqualified. They're anti-qualified, the antithesis of what the offices call for.
So, I mean, it's been a week since we last got together, and the picks have just gotten worse and worse then. So I'd like to just start with the biggest picture, and then we'll take each of them individually.
Fred Drosinski's point that was so useful was looking at them together, seeing the forest, not just the trees, and that there's a pattern. And the pattern is one of not just not caring much about good government, the good administration of government, a government well-administered, very important, the federalists said, but actually scorning it and mocking it and almost discrediting it.
And one thing that happens when you do that, of course, is you open it up, all the rules and standards and processes all go away. So if you're an authoritarian, sometimes you'd think you, and this is a point Robert makes, you'd think you'd want competent people to execute your authoritarian plans.
And you do sometimes. And so that's one side of the ledger.
But you also want sort of people who are just going to destroy the normal norms and processes so you can arbitrarily do what you want, order what you want, arrange things for payoffs for you and your friends for doing what you want. So I think it's a Trump power play, a power play for centralized, personalized autocratic government, sort of masked by the craziness and wackiness of the picks.
Yeah. And just to kind of beat people down, right? Like at some levels, we go through each of these.
It's like, you know, where do you pick the fight? And I guess maybe some of them will probably settle on gates because of personal feelings right but it is the flooding the zone of the shit element it's flooding the nominees to this effect right because you know there's only going to be so much appetite you know on the hill for resistance i guess i do wonder kind of how you think about balancing that at the broadest level i saw you had a little dig at john fetterman uh over the weekend, the Pennsylvania Senator who was on with Jake Tapper saying that Democrats can't freak out over every tweet or every appointment. It's still not even Thanksgiving yet.
It's going to be a long four years. And so there is kind of that sense of, okay, well, you got to be calm and pick battles or maybe the contrary view of just going headfirst into trying to stop each one of these.
So I think Trump wants to destroy the internal barriers in the executive branch,

of which there have been many.

The Department of Justice doesn't take orders from the White House

on who to prosecute, et cetera, et cetera.

He also wants to destroy the barriers to executive power,

of which advising consent by the Senate is the actual constitutional barrier.

It's not even just a legislative or customary barrier.

And that's

the talk about the recess appointments. And the recess appointments would be the real destruction of the barrier, but using the threat of recess appointments to get them to just confirm everyone is almost as good, right? Then it just makes the barrier kind of advice and consent becomes entirely nominal.
So no, I think they should oppose, from my view, the four that are most obviously unfit and inappropriate.

I accept it defense,

Gabbard at Director of National Intelligence, Kennedy at HHS, Gates as Attorney General. If I were a Democrat, I'd vote against a lot of the others.
I don't think they're good appointments. I think their policies will be pretty awful.
They're not really distinguished appointments, but Kristi Noem, you know, really will be an excellent, I'm sure, Secretary of DHS, making sure no dogs get across the border or something, you know, alive and stuff. But that's a different level, I would say.
That's, you know, okay, a governor gets appointed to some cabinet position that he or she isn't really great at, but whatever, you know, and same with Stefanik at the UN and so forth. So I think that's, I guess I'd make that distinction.
But among the four, I don't like the argument that, I mean, it may be that Trump vaguely thinks that, well, if I lose one, it makes it easier to get the other three. I think the right position to take is those four are unqualified.
And if one goes down first, the attitude should be good, three more to go. Yeah.
The Hill put out an analysis of the nine possible senators they see as creating trouble. I'm just going to give the nine names here.
Murkowski, Collins, Curtis, Cassidy. Curtis is a new senator from Utah replacing Mitt Romney.
Todd Young of Indiana, Tom Tillis, North Carolina, Mitch McConnell, Joni Ernst in Iowa, and John Cornyn in Texas. I don't really buy the last two.
I don't really buy any of them, to be honest, except for Murkowski, but I particularly don't buy the last two. How do you kind of assess that landscape? I mean, I think there could be different coalitions for different appointees, because there is, I mean, maybe there still is some sense that the Senate should work according to some procedures and organization.
And one of the organization, the ways in which the Senate is organized is by committees. And so there could be people who would focus on the candidate who comes up through their committee or in an area which they have some claim to expertise and special competence.
So I'll give you one example who's not on that list, Tom Cotton of Arkansas. He's not an election denier.
He voted with McConnell on that, which incidentally, and he's also pro-Ukraine, which are two reasons he's not in the Trump cabinet, in my opinion. But he's been a pretty, gone along with Trump on almost everything.
Also, no signs of sexual assault. No signs.
But he will be chair, assuming Rubio gets confirmed, which he will at state, which is one where it's fine to confirm him, I think. He will be chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
I do think people should put pressure on him or just ask him. He does not get a pass, in my view.
I mean, the other is fine. He's not going to vote against some of the Robert Kennedy Jews.
He doesn't care about those issues and know about them, I suppose. I mean, he should still vote against them, mind you.
But on intelligence, he's chair of that committee. Is he really saying as chair of Senate Intelligence that it's fine for Tulsi Gabbard to be director of national intelligence? Is he saying he's happy to spend the next four years working with her in improving the intelligence capacities and defending the intelligence capacities of the United States government? So I think you can sort of separate some of these.
There's some like Collins and Murkowski, I'd say McConnell maybe, who are more generally available in opposition because they're not pure rubber stamps for Trump. But there were also particular senators, particular roles,

whom one could imagine opposing some of these nominees. I concur that people should ask Tom Cotton about that.
I'm not exactly optimistic. You should have him on the show tomorrow.
He'll be happy to come on because he'll know we talked about him and stuff. Yeah, a formal invite to Senator Cotton.
Come on, and we'll rearrange the schedule for you. I'm really happy to talk about Tulsi Gabbard as head of DNI.
Another big picture way to look at this that I think is worth considering, Sagar and Jetty is another podcast. Breaking Points, you wrote this, I saw this morning.
I just realized we haven't talked enough about how big a part of the male shift to the right over the last decade is a backlash to Me Too. He seemed to be saying that in a positive way.
And I guess there is some insight there in the sense that we have gotten, as a result, a Me Too cabinet. We had over the weekend, Pete Hegseth nominated to run the Defense Department, Washington Post's story about how he paid a woman who accused him of sexual assault as part of a non-disclosure agreement, though he maintained their encounter was consensual by Higgs as telling he was drunk, she was sober, he got taken advantage of.
Take that for what you will. He also published a column in college that claimed that rape required both the failure of consent and duress.
And as such, women who are really drunk and are passed out cannot experience duress and so that cannot be a rape that was a take that he had uh back in 2002 so there is some concern uh according to reporting that there are other potential things that might be coming out on this i don't know at this point it seems more like a positive for uh trump appointees to have these kinds of accusations that are what do you think? I mean, it is astounding that three of the four most controversial picks on other controversial, I would say, on other grounds, which is manifest unfitness for the position, also are, what's the right generic term for them? Let's say sexual, credibly accused of being sexual abusers and at the very least. Adventurous.
What's that? Adventurous? Yeah, polite. I mean, but honestly, they could all be criminals.
I mean, if we could just be honest here, and of course, like Trump himself. So, I mean, it is Gates, Hegseth, and Kennedy.
I mean, the Kennedy stuff, people are focused, I guess, correctly maybe on, you know, his unbelievably reckless irresponsibility about vaccines and about other things. But that story about his, sadly, the wife who killed herself, and the diary with 27 and sexual encounters that year, I don't know, the year before, something like that.
And his relishing that and talking about it with his late wife and so forth. I mean, it's all horrible.
Exhumed her body. There was a funeral plot that she didn't want to be in and exhumed her body, put it somewhere else that she didn't

want to be against her wishes.

Interesting choice. What is that?

Yeah, it's not, as I guess I tweeted,

it's not a bug. It's a feature, apparently, that you have

really, it's not just attitudes

or slightly old-fashioned

or back

when you, you know,

stuff in the workplace that was slightly inappropriate.

In each case, we're talking

not just credible allegations, but honestly, just

Thank you. or back when stuff in the workplace that was slightly inappropriate.
In each case, we're talking not just credible allegations, but honestly just evidence, truthfulness of really appalling behavior. I mean, don't you think? It's really, I mean, we're at a level with Gates and Kennedy, probably heck Seth, that I don't know.
Yeah, I do think so. But none of it sounds as bad as what Donald Trump has done.
He's the commander in chief. And so that is what makes this challenging for how on the Hill, I mean, many people on the Hill have demonstrated that they have just no, and they're happy to be hypocrites.
So I guess maybe your explanation is based on hypocrisy or based on post facto whatever. You come up with some rationalization.
They've become experts on that, the Republicans on the hill but it is hard to then you know kind of explain in long form like why that you know this thing that this accusation with hegseth would be disqualifying whereas making donald trump the commander in chief is not i agree with that but i mean this is their constitutional duty they have to vote unless it's a recess appointment or unless it's voice voted through, I guess. So it's a little different.

I mean, Donald Trump is president.

Some of them didn't vote for him, honestly, I guess.

Todd Young and I think didn't.

Collins and Murkowski. Others said Collins, Murkowski.

So to be fair, I mean, they weren't, from our point of view,

profiles and coverage and standing up to in certain ways, but they didn't.

They said they didn't vote for him.

Cassidy voted to convict him once.

This is an actual vote they cast as a United States senator on an individual

fulfilling their constitutional duty.

Thank you. they said they didn't vote for him or Cassidy voted to convict him once.
This is an actual vote. They cast as a United States Senator on an individual fulfilling their constitutional duty.
And the Hags, I think it's just worth mentioning the searches because it's like in a world where Gates and Kennedy and Gabbard aren't nominated, like all of the focus is on this. I mean, it's an insane choice.
He has no relevant experience to run a bureaucracy such as this, in addition to his personal behavior. For me, the other thing about Hagseth, and this is not a puritanical podcast.
I support everybody's choices, whatever they do in a consensual manner. But I do think it's also interesting just when you're looking at the type of person you want to be in charge of the military.
Hagseth, I don't know if you know this, was married three times by age 39. He was divorced twice in 11 years.
I know a lot of 39-year-olds now, since that's around my age, and it's hard for me to think of one that is already on marriage three. I know some older people, you know, life is long.
Even in those cases, though, I can't think of anybody that impregnated someone that worked for them, ending their second marriage of the three. Even if the story is true that he's telling about this in this non-disclosure agreement, it's like, I got so drunk, I got so bombed that this chick girl took advantage of me, and I had to pay a non-disclosure agreement.
And maybe if he had the relevant subject matter experience, but you go from somebody who has no experience running big organizations, no experience leading the military. And then on their personal life, they're just a disaster.
Even if he didn't rape her, like he's a disaster in his personal life. And it seems to me that like most of the buzz on the Hill is he's going to get through.
That's all the ones that they're worried about. And I think that's pretty telling.
They seem to think he's the most likely to get through it. I'm a little doubtful because I haven't studied the timeline if he takes us personal life closely.
But I think there's an encounter with a woman who did charge and went to the police three or four days later to complain about assault. It wasn't like she just decided 20 years later to bring this thing up.
This was in 2017 it was at some california republican women maybe event i believe and she was there as a staff or something as a delegate i don't even know but anyway he's he's excess out there and taking advantage of his i guess he's speaking of his fame and all this i i assume and um but this i think takes place if i have the timeline right while he's still technically married to the second wife but has already had the baby with the third wife. You know, or is about to, but I think, takes place, if I have the timeline right, while he's still technically married to the second wife, but has already had the baby with the third wife.
Or is about to, but I think maybe already has. I don't know.
I mean, with the third wife to come. I'm going to have to get out the cork board to get to be certain about that.
Yeah, we need a whole whiteboard. You can do that tomorrow with some guests, maybe who knows more about how these things work.
I'm sure Jen Psaki will be very excited to do that with me.

Yeah, that would be amusing.

Very high ratings.

It would get more ratings.

Jen Psaki with the whiteboard with Hexeth, that would be something.

Anyway, I guess we shouldn't prejudge who's the most likely to be shot down as more stuff could come out, I guess, about Hexeth. Just to put it bluntly, the only reason why the conventional

wisdom in D.C. is that Matt

Gates is going to be tough to get through, and

Hegseth is going to be easy to get through,

has nothing to do with their qualifications

for the job, because they're equally unqualified.

If anything, Gates might be more qualified,

frankly. The only

reason that that's the conventional wisdom is that

Gates is mean to his colleagues,

and they don't like him personally, and Hegseth sucked up to them on fox and friends totally i mean show like that's literally the only difference totally i mean i the last thing i want to do is say we're that seems to be defending gates but he is a member of congress and you know so it's like not totally if he didn't have the personal life he'd had and if he wasn't loathed by his colleagues it would be a very weird appointment to have such a young person who practiced law for two years and has been a member

of Congress for what, of the House for six, to become attorney general. But it wouldn't be

quite as crazy as Pete Hegseth, who served, I think, honorably in the military 20 years ago

as a junior officer. And since then, it's run nothing.
And in fact, the little groups he ran

kind of didn't go very well. And Vets for Freedom way back in the 2007-8 area.
I was a tiny bit involved with that, so I know a little about that and then other things. Then he becomes a Fox host, and you can just see his comments on the record.
He's sort of buffoonish about the military and stuff. Anyway, it's funny.
Someone I know was speaking to some people about Hanketh, who's someone in the national security world, a senior kind of guy.

And one general said to him, I mean, this is, he asked the general, what do you think of this?

And the guy said, it's ludicrous.

I mean, the guy's not just unqualified, it's a slap in the face, really, to everyone who spent 35 years, you know, in the military or in the civilian side of national security world, building up the standing and the experience that you need to have to be Bob Gates or Leon Panetta or Bill Cohen or whoever you want. I mean, Chuck Hagel, who I kind of opposed in 2013, but I mean, how many leap years is he ahead of Exeth? He's not a member of Congress.
He's never run anything. He's of no stature intellectually or in terms of...

So he did write a best

seller about woke. Good point.

Anyway, but I was interested in this,

but this person also told my friend,

I don't really think I should say anything publicly

because I

have relationships and stuff like that.

So it would be interesting to see how many

ex-generals and ex-sect-efs come out and say, this is just ridiculous. I'm not holding my breath.
Moving on through the Me Too cabinet. So the Matt Gaetz story, which I appreciated in the newsletter this morning, it was a trigger warning for people.
So I will give people as well a trigger warning. I guess coming forward this week is the lawyer for the two accusers, young women that were accusing Matt Gates of having sex with at least one of them while she was 17.
The story is that when he was a freshman in Congress, they were having a lot of sex parties, including Matt Gates having sex with one of these women on a game table, on a poker table of some kind, many witnesses. So that will be, I guess, coming out this week.
And to my point earlier, the pushback against Gaetz seems to be much stronger right now based on interpersonal relationships. I want to play one little bit of audio from Congressman Max Miller of Ohio, who's not very great in his own right, but he had some thoughts about Matt Cates he shared with Manu Raju on CNN.
A member of Congress and the job that he has done here, and it has been abhorrent. I'm not the only one who thinks this way.
I just say the quiet part out loud. And I wish other of my colleagues would have the same courage to do so.
But him as a member of Congress should not be the most powerful law enforcement individual in our country. And everyone knows it.
And he's not going to get confirmed. And so this is solely based off of his job as a member of Congress within this body that has caused more harm, made us spend more money, has put us in more paralyzation than any other member.
It's a couple of things there, Phil, before I get to you. I want to analyze that mega Congress is not sending their best either.
Max Miller doesn't sound like he's splitting any atoms there. I think paralysis is the word that he was looking for.
And I also want to note that he was very specific. He wanted to be very clear with Manu that he's not basing his opposition to Gates based on the stories with the young women uh it's solely solely on his behavior in congress so this so this is not don't get max miller wrong okay he doesn't have any issues with gates his private behavior but like i guess if you got to hand it to max miller which i don't want to do you know the rumors out there that half of the senate are saying privately that they won't support him but it's to me it's like i'll believe it when I see it.
Put up or shut up. So at least we have one person out there in the House, so not in the Senate, it's not relevant, but it's telling, I guess, that he's willing to say it on CNN.
Totally. I mean, it was taken seriously enough that the charges against him that the Republican House went through with this ethics committee investigation, which apparently has produced a big fat report report, which he quit two days ago from the House to get ahead of because I guess they don't issue reports if you no longer a member of the House.
Big controversy about whether it'll become public or at least be sent over for the senators on the Judiciary Committee to read. Pretty amazing not to.
If an actual body of Congress run by, indeed, his own party has produced this report, you'd think you might, it's kind of relevant to the decision these senators have to make. They need to insist on that, in my opinion.
But the Gates defense, he realizes, yes, as a 37-year-old, I don't know, something like that, member of Congress, he went to these sex parties with drugs. Sex parties.
And had sex presumably in some various forms or various, well. I think we can take out the presumably.
I think that it's pretty clear that during his freshman year of Congress, he was having sex with younger women. Younger women.
His defense is that it's not true that they were 17. They had just crossed.
They were just 18. They were 18 years old.
I mean, so what are we talking about here? Sorry for partying, Bill. That's Gates' defense, because there's a difference, obviously, and he needs to try to stay literally out of criminal prosecution.
But, I mean, how disgusting is that? I mean, I just, I don't know, man. It does seem like you're cutting a fine line there.
There are a lot of options you have as a 37-year-old wealthy son of somebody that's very successful. You can party.
You can go out there and have a good time. Nobody's begrudging you.
Being on the 17, 18 line, it's cutting it a little close, to say the least. If a woman was 18 and if there was no actual assault or something like that or drugging women to get sex and so forth, I'm not sure that he should be expelled from Congress for this.
I'm not sure he should be prohibited from ever having any kind of job anywhere. But again, if you're nominated to be Attorney General in the United States, presumably there's a little bit of a higher bar.
And you can vote against people to be Attorney General or Secretary of Defense or Secretary of HHS without thinking these people should be put in jail tomorrow. Some of them probably should be, but that's another story.
You make a good point. The confirmation thing is not a kind of, you know, the equivalent of, I don't know, disbarring him, let's say, in Florida as a lawyer.

I'm not sure whether that's justified or not, but that's a whole different story. They have to affirmatively vote.
This is why I think it's a little more likely that these people go down than other people think, I think, because it's not just you look the other way and the next thing you know, they're in the cabinet. That would be the way it would work at the recess appointments, obviously.
But they are going to have to stand up and say yes in the floor of the United States Senate to Matt Gaetz as attorney general. Well, they might have to do that if they don't do the recess.
But a good lengthy explainer on the recess thinking from Philip Rodner in the board this morning. People want to go read that.
One reason it's tempting in addition to all the just obvious reasons of making it easier for Trump at all, that's why some of the senators would like it. Some of the senators would get to say, oh, I'm not sure I would have been able to vote for him, but I'd take it out of my hands.
What could I do? Right? Yeah. We were forced by this recess appointment.
Yeah, you make a good point. You know, like even for the more libertine among us, it's like, hey, you know, it's just one of those things where it's like, you want to go out and go to sex parties and bang on card tables and like do blow? Okay.
But that might limit your ability to be the top law enforcement official in the country, right? Like, unfortunately, if you want to be the top law enforcement official in the country, it does seem like kind of a minimum bar that you are law abiding. And that's, those are sort of the sacrifices that you have to make when you kind of decide how hard you want to go.
You know, you think it'd be the sacrifice you have to make, but maybe not anymore, I guess, you know, Donald Trump gets to be the commander in chief. We'll see.
I'm intrigued by how the Gates thing plays out because these people hate him. What becomes the stronger pull for them? Their loathing of Matt Gates personally, or their desire to make daddy Trump happy.
I kind of think that that desire to make Daddy Trump happy might win out, but we'll see. I wanted to play this audio because there's a lot of chatter on the right in the MAGA world.
Scott Jennings, I saw this morning, it's like, you're calling him Hitler, and now you want to work with him. And it's like, okay, yeah.
I mean, we did say some mean things about Donald Trump, but it's just always worth remembering what the people who worked for Donald Trump said about him and what the people who want to work for him said about him. And I want to play this video of Tulsi Gabbard just a few years ago talking about Donald Trump's foreign policy.
I call upon all Americans to stand side by side, including those who've been supporting Trump, no matter what he says or does, to recognize he is simply unfit to be commander in chief of our patriotic men and women serving our country in uniform. He's essentially treating our troops as mercenaries, acting as if he is Napoleon or a king.
Unfit to be commander in chief, acting as if he's Napoleon or a king. That is, she wants to be the head of the DNI.
I mean, that's as bad as anything anybody else has said around here on the bulwark. Some people will be like, well, you know, politicians say that all the time about the people that oppose them.
I don't know. I don't remember, like, in 2012, anybody on the Romney or Obama side saying of the other person that they're unfit to be the commander-in-chief.
It extreme statement but she also went on in a tweet i would mention that uh being saudi arabia's bitch is not america first i liked that tulsi a little bit better but she also is like flying under the radar right now and to me is maybe the most insane choice we're gonna get to our rankings at the end but like when you mentioned cotton at the top is there any sign that any of the national security republicans like have any issues with this i mean she's a assad apologist and and putin apologist and putin stooge i think it's fair to say and god knows how much explicit you know connection and coordination there's when she went to see assad uh i think when there were sanctions and so forth and didn't tell a colleague she was going to do it. Well, she was a member of Congress.

I mean, pretty astonishing when she was a Democrat, I think. And so I don't know.
You could imagine, I'm not in any way defending, I hope they all go down, obviously. You could imagine the Defense Department running adequately with Hexeth as a kind of nominal secretary of defense, going around giving idiotic speeches and showing off his tattoos.
You can imagine, I guess, the Justice Department working adequately if Gates doesn't do anything and he has decent Deputy Attorney General, though that's tougher and that's a more real, even more of a real problem. HHS, you can just imagine Kennedy, again, being bloviating and not actually trying to destroy the National Institutes for Health or something like that.
And Congress might stop him from doing so. The one place I don't think it's tenable is intelligence.
What do you do if you're a senior intelligence official and you get a request from the DNI's office for a briefing on Syria and the Syrian opposition forces? Or on Ukraine, what's happening in the fight? How's Ukraine using their new missiles or whatever against Russia? You can't have any confidence that information is not going right to Assad or to Putin or to their people. So I think the intelligence community almost becomes impossible to even understand how it's going to work.
Maybe Ratcliffe, as head of CIA, cuts Tulsi out somehow. But I mean, you're now at a level of real government dysfunction in an important

area. Paralyzation, you might even say.
Yeah, that is just almost unimaginable. And that's

why I do wonder where even Tom Cotton thinks to himself, I'm not going to say anything publicly,

I'm going to send private emissaries to Trump, we'll find some excuse, we'll send her off

somewhere else. I can't be chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee charged with oversight of our intelligence when she's the director of national intelligence.
I want to move on to RFK. We were talking over the weekend, and again, just thinking about this through the prism of, are these people confirmable? The RFK element has something that these others don't, which is like there will be a powerful lobbying interest group in pharma that is going to try to stop it.
What do you think about that? Do you think that there's any appetite for stopping RFK through people who have more concerns about vaccines or other issues? I mean, I was talking to someone this weekend and being more of a national security person was more going on about the others or a law person. person.
And he made the point to me that he's more of the business side of things. And I said, I guess Kennedy could make it.
And he said, no, no, this is real. I mean, with all due respect to your national security friends, they're doing their best.
They can get organized. They can write a letter.
They have some associations that kind of represent them, presumably veterans for foreign wars or something. Maybe they would come out, veterans of foreign wars, maybe they'd come out.
But this is real politics. I mean, pharma is a really big player, especially in Republican circles.
And not just pharma, the doctors, the hospitals, I mean, and others in various worlds that RFK has said terrible things about,

can they accept RFK as secretary of HHS?

Maybe they get private assurances that they'll have no power.

But I think you're looking at real lobbying by powerful groups

who will privately tell these senators, this is key for us.

This is key for us, if you want to.

Now, maybe they won't have the nerve to, maybe they'll back off too.

Maybe Trump's people can go to them and say, you don't want to do this because you're going to lose contracts, and this is the trouble with having an autocratic leader. He has leveraged the other way as well.

But I guess that changed my mind a little bit about Kennedy being maybe the more likely one to get through, because I think, you know, this is a serious lobbying effort. I gather, at least my friend expects there to be one that should be underway very soon.
Maybe it's underway privately even now. Now they'll want to keep it private.
They'll want to find an out. Maybe he just goes to the White House.
Trump says in a week, look, I don't want to go through all this mess. He'll be sitting in the White House at my right hand and we'll have a, quote, normal HHS secretary.
I guess that would be one way out. I'll take the other side of that bet if your friend wants to have a friendly wager.
I think that there's a lot of false confidence among the traditional DC class, the old interests about what their power is. And I think that at this point, they do have a ton of influence.
I think they're even more influenced than in the old days on some elements of the legislative process right because um just you have a lot younger people frankly working on the hill there's a lot fewer and like you know there's been a lot of turnovers there's a lot of fewer like you know people with institutional legislative knowledge and so there's a lot of writing of legislation happening from interest groups and so you know getting little things plucked into bills and stuff, I think they have a lot of influence over. But these sorts of fights, I don't know.
I don't see it. It's a good point.
I mean, I was just thinking, going through the scenarios here. So, pharma hires, I mean, they're not idiots.
They're going to hire every single Trump-related firm they can, and everyone, you know, Su Su Wild's old firm, Kellyanne Conway, Scott Jennings, $30,000 a month, you know, or a week. God knows what these rates are these days.
Kellyanne is going to make banks the next four years. They're all going to make a fortune.
I assume Jennings still does this kind of stuff, even, you know, in addition to being a CNN guy. So they're all going to try to go to the guys.
Here are the two questions. I think you're right.
One is they might tell them, look, we're going to work with you quietly to make sure your reimbursement rates are good and they're not putting price caps on your drugs and 19 other things. That's different.
But we can't take on Trump frontally on an extremely high profile nomination. I think that is possible.
Here's a question. Will those people work for Pharma? I mean, in this moment, on this issue.
Some of them will. Our boy Brian Ballard will, and the big firms.
But I mean, maybe I mean, maybe they'll work after, you know, later to mitigate the damage. So I think you make a good point.
And this is sort of old Washington. You've got pharma going after you.
It's probably pretty hard to get confirmed to say he's just secretary. New Washington, Trump's Washington.
Maybe that doesn't matter as much. They still will be powerful, as I say, in the actual legislative process.
And this administration will be more corrupt than any of the other ones. Right.
So they'll put in their former pharma head as assistant secretary for drug reimbursement, and they'll do great. And Kennedy won't know what's going on because he'll be out giving speeches about how many chemicals are in McDonald's, French fries, or something.
Hosting meetings about how we're going to stop research into drugs and gathering people together, feeling important. If you're going to UFC fights, being on the plane with Trump, there's just going to be a lot to keep him busy as Secretary of HHS.
I want to move to the domestic side and talk about Treasury first. And Marco Pudo was writing about this for us over the weekend that this guy Howard Lututnick, was in line to be head of Treasury.
You might have remembered his insane speech at the Madison Square Garden rally. He's a finance executive and apparently is also running the transition.
He was going to do a Cheney type situation where he appointed himself. Apparently, he's been annoying Trump.
I guess that's one can't do, right? You don't hear a lot about this usually in confirmation processes. The person is bugging the Napoleon.
But in this case, Howard Letnick has been getting under Trump's nerves. So he's going back to the drawing board, looking for other people.
And it's one interesting situation for me, where Trump seems to be acting a little bit more pragmatically because of one thing. He cares about the market, right? Like he doesn't want to spook the market.
He knows the market isn't getting spooked by Tulsi or Matt Gaetz, so maybe they should be, but they might get spooked by a crazy person at Treasury. And so he's trying to balance somebody that will do the insane tariffs, but also won't spook Wall Street.
And he's trying to kind of get the Goldilocks there. Yeah, I think, and maybe someone who won't really do the tariffs, but will pretend to enough that Trump can declare victory, sort of like what he's written in the first term a little bit with China and stuff.
Yeah, I was struck by that. I was on some of these finance TV shows for eight minutes on Friday, and I've been on these kinds of shows for some, and they're pretty pro-Trump because this is, you know, the CNBC, Yahoo Finance world.
Cutting red tape. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Deregulation. And the markets got up when Trump was elected quite a lot.
And I remember I was struck that they were a little more open to the notion that this stuff is double-edged. I mean, you've got to be – this is the just total arbitrariness of the way he'll run things combined with a couple of the actual policies of which tariffs is probably the biggest.
And I guess the markets have given back most of their gains from the first few days after his election. I haven't followed that closely.
And so I do wonder how much Trump, if he's following this stuff closely, he probably does follow this stuff closely, is worried that someone who's going to just not be reassuring to the markets, who's not a Gary Cohn, he's not going to go all the way to Gary Cohn, but maybe there's an in-between place he can go and semi-reassure the markets and lay the groundwork for not totally spooking the business world. The business guys do have some clout, the donors.
I don't know. They're so intimidated.
That also strikes me in the old days, for better or worse, and maybe you could say for worse. If you appointed someone who all your donors are against, you would hear about it or thought about appointing such a person.
Do they even have the nerve to call up Mar-a-Lago now and say, I raised $40 million for you, and I would just appreciate it if you take a look at someone else? There's a Trump documentary. Some of the clips have been going around.
The one that's been viral on social media is him dictating the tweets tweets for some reason people find that interesting the one that that jumped out at me is it's a short clip maybe about a minute after the debate with harris and the documentary crew is is with them backstage and trump talks to rubio and then vance and the camera's kind of behind at a distance like it doesn't seem like it's for show. It seems like he got off stage.
It's their first conversation. It's like, what did you think? You know, like, what do you think? Right? And Rubio and Vance both tell him how great he did.
You know? And it's like, I don't know. Like, it wasn't like a, it wasn't caveated.
You know, it wasn't like, well, you know, I well, these guys are going to get you on this one. But I was just like, no.
And then Trump's over there going, no, I thought it was maybe the best I've ever done. Anyway, I'll find the clip and put it in the notes for people.
But I don't think that people give them bad news anymore. I just don't think that there's a lot of evidence that people do.
No, I'm sure you're right. I mean, as you know, having been there after debates and trying to give bad news sometimes, Rubio wanted to be Secretary of State.
He was not going to give any bad news. Vance, VP pick, Wetz Jr.
That's a little tricky and awkward, I would say. You'd be kind of...
I mean, I think the normal person in such circumstance would sort of say, I think it was fine, sir. You were excellent in so many ways.
I do think we have this one issue we probably should clean up. You know what I mean? Yeah, sure, sure.
Now, the staff and normally the people who give the semi-bad news, I mean, even after a little hemming and hawing, I don't know. Does none of them even, I guess, I don't know.
I don't know. It's like the Susie Wiles thing.
People are like, Susie's normal. We're going to put her in there.
It's like, I think that Susie will probably be pretty good at preventing Nick Fuentes from getting an Oval Office meeting, whereas some of the other people might not have even gone that far. But there's no intervening.
There's been no breaks on the Matt Gaetz appointment or any of these appointments we've been discussing. So I don't think there's any evidence that nobody's reporting is like, well, you know, a lot of people internally were saying, oh, saying, sir, you should be a little more careful.
I don't know. They're going to come at you on this Gates pick.
None of that has leaked out. No, I think that's really a good point.
Caputo's reporting has been excellent on this for the bulwark, but Mark Caputo, but the, just two points. I'm going to just, Susie Wiles, I think, yes, will be a chief of staff who keeps the trains running and so forth.
But I can't believe she's going to have that much substantive effect. Maybe a little bit of warning.
This one could be controversial, sir. But who's the top policy guy in the White House? Steve Miller.
And who I think behind the scenes is having a lot of influence? J.D. Vance, especially on the issues he cares about.
He's the one who said, if you voted for Ukraine aid, you're not it. Cotton, Pompeo went up to the hill to argue for it.
No. You've got to have voted against it, as Rubio did and Waltz did and Stefanik did, even though they had all been supporters of Ukraine before.
You need to bend the knee on these issues that Vance cares about. And I think that would also be true.
I wonder, on Treasury, you'd think you'd have less influence. It's not his area, so to speak.
And someone told me this is sort of third-hand kind of thing, that Vance's influence, and it will continue, and certainly Davis Vance knows that personnel matter. So he'll be interested in the second and third level appointments too, deputy secretary of this, assistant secretary of that.
So I think Vance and Miller, and they're working together with Tucker Carlson on the outside and Elon, that's a powerful cadre of people close to trump but again it probably trumps so to speak the the kind of people we're talking about weighing in you know and saying oh this is a little risky right for sure uh and the elon thing takes me to the other uh point i want to get to about the domestic appointments it's not a cabinet thing right so it's a little bit of a category difference but mckay cubbins in the atlantic today was talking to um some folks of our allies in europe and it was interesting that some of the people he talked to were actually pointing to the domestic elements as almost more concerning than the than the foreign policy stuff which they kind of expected the portugal's europe minister said to mckay about the musk influence i don't know if you saw this in another country you would see it as an acute sign of political decay when billionaires and oligarchy are taking over political policy i do think that's a fair point like at some level the musk we see the fcc appointment to somebody that is very friendly to musk's interests when it comes to starlink like musk apparently is living in mar-a-lago maybe he'll overstay his welcome eventually and this will go away but um you know at some level you know from the farthest remove you look at it and you're like i mean you know if this was happening in a third world country like it would just be evidence of a total loss of credibility of democratic institutions no i think that's a key point i mean a of people are saying, well, look at the corruption, the amount of corruption will be unbelievable. And I think that's true.
But also it's beyond corruption. I mean, that's okay.
Maybe that's, you know, price you pay service, whatever, you can tolerate that, the system can tolerate that, but it is the kind of merging of aspects for the private and public sector, the oligarchs and the government, you know, becoming one and the need to, therefore, if you just want to survive as a business, to be on good terms with the government types and the government types being pressured to do favors for the oligarchs. It is, feels like Putin in the 2000s or Orban actually quite a lot in the last 10 years, you know, and so they can't quite do in the U.S.
what Orban succeeded in doing in Hungary, I guess. But the degree to which we could get down that path, I would say one last point.
I mean, people are still underestimating. Now it's like shock and awe.
So, oh, my God, it's a real look at these people. Can you believe it? But people need to also think, what's it going to look like 3, 6, 9, 12 months from now? And when they do get more people in the government at second and third and fourth years, when they do change schedule, do the schedule F thing to, you know, make so many more of these civil service appointments political.
I think that, so it's a real governance crisis of democracy. It's not just a unpleasant four years of corruption.
I think the first term was a little more like that. You know, Jared gets his two billion from the Saudis, but the government mostly sort of still worked, you might say, in the way it should.
We cannot count on that this term. So now we get to our alarmism rankings.
It's a tough little exercise to think about which of these things alarms you the most if you had to rank them. So, Bill Kristol.
You want to go first? Sure, I'm happy to go first. Me and Sam Stein did this last week on YouTube.
Guys, out our youtube pete if you haven't subscribed yet um and our rankings were opposite which shows you kind of like how it's uh it's uh in the eye of the beholder but uh for me tulsi is one for the reasons that you laid out at some level we might have somebody that is actively rooting against u.s interests in charge of intelligence and like the downstream effects of that are hard to really calculate. And we just might be out of the intelligence business, actually, for four years.
And how malign actors will be able to take advantage of that over the next four years, I think is tough to calculate. She's one for me.
Hegseth is two, just because the absurdity of the choice and the broad remit that he has. And so number three for me, this is where it gets tough because I think that Elon's role and RFK and Gates, you can make a case for any of them.
I think that RFK, though, I'm going to have third just because we're already seeing declining vaccination rates. And I mean, the potential impact of that, the potential of my buddy's an infectious disease doctor, and he said that he wants to freeze all infectious disease research for four years.
I just think it's hard to kind of calculate what that damage could be. So I put that third and then Gates fourth and Musk fifth.
The Gates thing, I think it's an absurd pick, but the legal system quasi held in the first term right and like the idea of targeting foes and all that like you're still going to need to get prosecutors to do it and gather evidence and go in front of juries and i just think like there are a lot of potential checks there to limit the worst behavior though there will be some bad behavior and so on some level i almost think musk might be worse than him i might switch those last two. So anyway, that's my list.
Yeah, I didn't realize we were including Musk. I mean, Musk is very bad, I think.
You don't have to include Musk. No, I mean, he's not just, he's not getting a government job.
He's getting this fake government job. They've been very careful to specify it's not a government job, this fake office of government, whatever the hell, an account of, you know.
Doge. Something, Doge or whatever.
Because, of course, if you've got a government job, there still are regulations about conflict of interest and disclosure, which he, of course, doesn't want to do for a second. That's the degree of corruption with the Musk thing.
He goes around. He's got Trump's imprimatur.
He can find out anything he wants anywhere in the federal government. Who's going to say, no, I'm sorry, I'm not giving you this information? It's proprietary.
It's not something we're supposed to share outside of the government about bidding on contracts. contracts i mean the degree of advantage he has now in terms of his businesses and the unwillingness that anyone's gonna have outside or inside inside or outside the government to take him on so i think the musk thing is actually very bad but but a slightly different category tulsi number one for the reason you you said i agree with the others are a little hard i guess i would make the slightly different different argument that Kennedy is probably more checked because he can't actually arbitrate.
He can't personally change the way NIH works. He can't change the appropriations there.
I don't know that he can even change the drug review process. A lot of that is congressional or could be congressional.
And there would be this, as we were saying earlier, and that's the case where pharma can weigh in and say, well, wait a second. And every state gets billions of dollars.
NIH's budget is $40 billion. It's not every state, but states get hundreds of millions or billions of dollars of NIH grants to their own medical schools and hospitals and research organizations.
And their senators are going to be aware of this. So I kind of think you could imagine most of that stuff going on despite Kennedy.
I agree that the effect, though, of him just denigrating vaccines and what that does to parents and their willingness to get their kids vaccinated. And then when you don't have a critical mass of people vaccinated and so forth, that's dangerous.
Gates and Higsteth is, I guess, also, I would say, I kind of think defense probably runs on its own a little more than justice. I could argue that one either way.
You made a good case that a lot of the legal stuff, of course, you still have to get juries to convict and all, but I don't know. They have quite a lot of discretion to justice, and they can decide to investigate a lot of things.
They could just, including people like you and me and organizations that we were part of and so forth. I don't know if he can penetrate justice down to the second, third, fourth levels.
I mean, you could have a lot of abuse of power. And so the final point, both justice and intelligence community, I've personally not talked to people, and I'm not out there looking to talk to them.
I don't know how many people, but people have gotten in touch who are looking to leave. Career people.
Not even particularly left wing or anything, just career people. They can't operate sincerely and honestly in this environment.
So I think, again, a little more there. If you're an NIH, maybe you figure, you know, at the end of the day, Congress will protect me.
So slight differences with you, but not much difference. Yeah.
Steve Bannon will be clipping this. Crystal, RFK, least bad.
Miller Gates, least bad. Appointees, endorsement from the Never Trumpers.
No, they're all bad. All the appointments are bad.
You know, risk assessment is a valuable exercise. And then I take your points on justice.
All right. Well, I didn't get to the Russia-Ukraine wars escalating.
We talked about that a bunch last week. And so I refer people back to our conversation then.
And I think you're very insightful points about how you see Putin now moving into Ukraine further. And maybe we'll decide that he doesn't actually need to deal with Trump on this.
We'll continue pushing forward TBD on that. I wanted to also mention at 4.03 a.m.
this morning, Trump sent a bleat confirming he plans to declare a national emergency and use military assets to engage in a mass deportation campaign. I thought it was interesting he did a 4 a.m.
and also more to discuss on that later this week. So, Bill Kristol, any other final thoughts for me? I didn't even know about that 4 a.m.
thing, but yikes. Well, that's a whole other thing we should talk about.
You'll talk with other people about it. We should talk about that.
Mass deportation remains one of the biggest, don't you think, sort of top of my list, terrible things, but also potential backfire

things, it feels like, for Trump.

Yeah, top of my list. Okay, we'll make sure.

Mass deportation conversation. Unfortunately,

we'll have many Mondays, I think,

to discuss that, but we'll do our best to get to it

next week. Thank you to Bill Kristol.
Everybody else,

as I mentioned, we've got Jen Psaki tomorrow,

and so come hang with us then.

We appreciate you tuning in, and we'll see

you all tomorrow. Peace.

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