Robert Kagan and Bill Kristol: It's Already Happening Before our Eyes

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Speaker 9 Hello, and welcome to the Bullard Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.
It's Monday, so it's Bill Crystal, but we have an added guest, a friend of Bill Crystal, a friend of the pod, Robert Kagan.

Speaker 9 He is at the Brookings Institute. He was a member of the Washington Post editorial board until last Friday, right after we finished taping.

Speaker 9 The Washington Post decided that they were not going to endorse in this presidential election, despite endorsing in many other political races.

Speaker 9 And Bob Kagan took that opportunity to resign from his position at the Washington Post, and we're delighted to have him here with us today. What's going on? I don't know.

Speaker 11 Lots, I guess. Thanks.
Good to be here.

Speaker 9 Lots.

Speaker 9 Good to be with you. Okay, I want to start here.
Because there may be some listeners that are with me on this.

Speaker 9 I think that there's some righteous outrage, of course, at Bezos, and we're going to talk about why. But like, should newspapers even be endorsing President? Should we even be doing this?

Speaker 9 Why is it important at all that the newspaper engages in endorsements? I kind of wonder if that's maybe an outdated practice anyway.

Speaker 11 Okay. Well, I don't think the discussion as to whether we should have endorsements or not is important at this point.
I mean, that's a very interesting theoretical question.

Speaker 11 I'm sure the Columbia Journalism Review can take it up, and we can all discuss that sometime.

Speaker 11 But that would be unfortunate a distraction from what's actually going on, which is the takeover of institutions by a would-be dictator.

Speaker 11 And I think the journalists, I get the sense that the media loves having discussions about the media. There's nothing more exciting for them about that.

Speaker 11 But I think the result of that is, and I'm not accusing you this, obviously, but I think the result of that is to lose sight of

Speaker 11 what's really important about this, which is if people wanted a sort of model of how a free press winds up getting dismantled in a democracy that is becoming a dictatorship, this is how it happens.

Speaker 11 It isn't

Speaker 11 sending jack boots into the Washington Post and destroying their presses.

Speaker 11 It's, you know, it's someone like Jeff Bezos deciding that his business interests require him to, you know, basically deprioritize the Washington Post in his overall business empire.

Speaker 11 And that's what he's done. I would say the Washington Post, he placed the Washington Post third behind the protection of Amazon and behind the protection of Blue Origin.

Speaker 11 And that's the consequence of having, unfortunately, you know, big mobiles running media organizations.

Speaker 11 But, you know, the television networks are also huge corporations and huge conglomerates and are also vulnerable to this so if people want to see how it's going to how the free press is going to be dismantled one of the so-called guardrails or institutions this is it's happening right before our eyes Yeah, so you got the two of you have you both edited a book together.

Speaker 9 I've listened to many of your conversations. I believe I just pulled this up.

Speaker 9 I believe it was five years ago that was your conversation you two had that I'd recommend we'll put in the show notes about authoritarianism and the threat to the liberal world order.

Speaker 9 I feel like Bob, you've been at the forefront of kind of going there as far as using the words fascistic, authoritarian, whatever, with regards to Trump, where maybe some other commentators were a little bit shy to do that.

Speaker 9 After what we've heard from John Kelly and Mattis recently and Millie, people are feeling much more comfortable talking about that.

Speaker 9 But explain, you know, at the kind of biggest level what you think is happening with the Trump movement and why you think it's important to just call it what it is.

Speaker 11 I called it fascism because it's so clearly fascism. I don't think that, you know, I don't want to make a big, get into a big semantic argument.

Speaker 11 We can sit down with Robert Paxton and like, you know, parse this stuff out over the years. But first of all, fascism is the malady of democracies in particular, and it's a malady of the popular age.

Speaker 11 You know, there was no fascism when you had monarchies. This is a

Speaker 11 purely a function of having popular government, or at least, you know, governments that need to have some kind of popular legitimacy.

Speaker 11 And so if a democracy goes bad, it's likely to go bad toward fascism because fascism appeals to people. I mean, it appeals to a broad number of people.

Speaker 11 And in fact, Trump would be nothing without his followers. It's his followers that give him power.

Speaker 11 It's his followers that initially cowed the Republican Party to turn over all its power to Donald Trump.

Speaker 11 And it's his followers that have, I would say, even these corporate titans afraid, because after all, these are their customers, among other things, in addition to their not wanting to get on the wrong side of Trump.

Speaker 11 And so, you know, what we saw in Madison Square Garden, I watched the news coverage of it, and I thought that there was a certain amount of continuing surprise that Trump would say these horrible things or people on the stage would say horrible things and the audience was lapping it up.

Speaker 11 But of course, Trump in many respects has been playing directly to this populist mob, if you will, throughout the campaign.

Speaker 11 And really, the only thing that I find shocking is not that there are millions and millions of Americans who don't in any way believe in our democratic system.

Speaker 11 They don't believe in the principles of the founders. That has always been true, as I have gone through in some detail in a book I published this past spring.

Speaker 11 But, you know, the real question is, why are people who like write for the Wall Street Journal going along with that? Why are so many people who are not necessarily...

Speaker 11 I mean, look, what we're looking at mostly is the John Burke Society, the McCarthy movement, the Klan, all those groups wrapped up together and sort of grown.

Speaker 11 But where where were all the people who used to say that they were against all that kind of stuff on the Republican and conservative side? That's the part of this that I find rather amazing.

Speaker 9 Yeah, it's both the conservative kind of elites, if you will, and as well as like the business elites. It takes us back to the Post thing.

Speaker 9 I'd like to hear from just both of you on like that Bezos question of, and many historians have written about this, Tim Snyder wrote about this, we had him on, but how people adjust their behavior in the face of authoritarianism.

Speaker 9 And I think like that, to me, is the biggest takeaway from what was happening at the Post. But anyway, Bob, you go first and Bill, I want to hear what you think about that.

Speaker 11 No, that's right. And Jonathan last wrote a great piece, which exactly spells out what's going on here.
And by the way, this was predictable.

Speaker 11 I don't want to, I'm not trying to pat myself on the back because who cares, but I also predicted it was predictable that eventually corporate interests would have to find some way to accommodate themselves to whatever the government was going to be.

Speaker 11 And it's not about Republican and Democrat, even it's about Democratic or non-democratic.

Speaker 11 And we saw this with Jamie Dimon back in at the beginning of this year when he made those friendly comments about Donald Trump, which he's been, you know, interestingly, he's been beaten up a lot about it.

Speaker 11 I know that his wife is very unhappy about it, but he's never really retracted any of it. And he is not endorsed Kamala.

Speaker 11 And what that's about is that was Jamie Dimon, head of whatever vast Morgan, I can't keep track of what all these conglomerates are, but basically saying to Donald Trump, hey, I'm good.

Speaker 11 You know, you're not not going to get any trouble out of me when you get elected.

Speaker 11 So, and also saying to, I would say, you know, maybe his stockholders that, you know, don't worry, we're going to get along with this next guy regardless of what he is.

Speaker 11 And I think we're seeing corporate America very rapidly move in that direction. And it just happens to be that the most glaring and sort of shocking example of this is what Jeff Bezos has just done.

Speaker 9 Bill, I want your take on that, but since he invoked JVL, I want to read from his column this weekend for anybody that

Speaker 9 has not seen it already. He was cribbing also from a piece that Christopher Harrison wrote.
And he writes: America's oligarch moment makes us more like 1990s Russia than we want to believe.

Speaker 9 Russian democracy died because their institutions and politicians were not strong enough to enforce the law. Sound familiar.

Speaker 9 I could identify half a dozen laws that Elon Musk has already broken without enforcement.

Speaker 9 Bezos censored the post because he knows that nobody will enforce the law and keep Trump from seeking political retribution.

Speaker 9 Where are we on the 1990s Boris Yeltsin Russia trajectory?

Speaker 10 I mean, Bob was in Russia for some of those early, some of the, I believe, just before, well, right around there, just before then, right? So you should talk about that too.

Speaker 10 No, I mean, the capitulation of elites of institutions is one of the marks of the descent into authoritarianism. It's an important mark.
It follows the rise of the authoritarian and his movement.

Speaker 10 And then different institutions collapse at different times. But I guess what I would say is that it can happen faster than people think.
And it can happen.

Speaker 10 People doing it are people who five years ago were, you know, certainly wouldn't have thought of doing this and thought they were, I don't know what they really thought about themselves, but they were treated respectably.

Speaker 10 And here's the most striking thing, though. They're still going to be treated respectably.
Jeff Bezos is going to pay no serious price for this. Jamie Dimon paid no price.

Speaker 10 I mean, yes, he was a little bit, a little tongue-clucking. I bet Jamie Dimon was not disinvited to one single...
you know, Davos type event or elite type event in, you know,

Speaker 10 in Wyoming or wherever those things are and, you know, in Aspen over the last six, eight, nine months.

Speaker 10 And I bet actually a lot of people quietly told him, yeah, that was probably, you may be right about that.

Speaker 10 I guess the last point I'll make, but I really want to hear Bob on the kind of analogy with Russia, but also Turkey and many other places, incidentally, Hungary.

Speaker 10 You know, they're not the U.S., we're stronger than they are, I suppose, and have stronger guardrails, but we don't have super strong guardrails.

Speaker 10 But anyway, getting back to Diamond, they paid no price. And they think they're,

Speaker 10 I don't think they're doing the right thing. They're doing a savvy thing.

Speaker 9 They think they're being savvy.

Speaker 10 Yeah, they don't think it's much regret on their part about what they're doing.

Speaker 9 Bob, where are you on the Yeltsin scale for America? How Yeltsin-y are we feeling?

Speaker 11 Let's stop blaming Yeltsin. There was a complicated situation there.
I don't think I'm going to really put it under on Yeltsin.

Speaker 11 I'm always a little wary to some extent of analogies with other countries. Let's not lose sight of the fact that all this is being driven ultimately.

Speaker 11 It's not the only issue, but I do believe it is very much a central issue by race, by the question of race.

Speaker 11 And that is a particularly American problem because of our history of slavery and our history of hostility to immigrants.

Speaker 11 You know, that's what immigration is really about, which is something also the media hasn't really been able to figure out. They keep talking about immigration.

Speaker 11 And the Democratic Party, by the way, has given away tremendous ground on this. But the immigration issue is a race issue, as Trump has said, it's about poisoning the blood.

Speaker 11 And so race is at the root of all this.

Speaker 11 Anyway, that's why I just want to say I don't like to go too far with comparisons.

Speaker 11 But it is important to remember why communism was so popular after World War II, because, of course, people saw these corporations in Germany obviously line up with Hitler.

Speaker 11 And it's very clear that even though capitalism may depend on liberalism, capitalists do not and certainly don't feel that they do.

Speaker 11 They know that they can do absolutely fine in a Trump administration, and they will know how to deal with Trump, by the way, which is to pay him off.

Speaker 11 I mean, they'll find ways to pay off him or the family or whatever, and they'll do fine. And by the way, they have billions of dollars, so they're well protected, et cetera.

Speaker 11 The only way it's interesting, I mean, not the only way, but it's interesting to talk about other countries, but we're really talking about our human beings. This is the behavior of human beings.

Speaker 11 under certain circumstances.

Speaker 11 And the circumstance here is one driven by fear of an all-powerful dictator, which then has a logical consequence in the behavior of human beings, including even people who like to think of themselves as standing up for principle.

Speaker 11 All of a sudden, they're thinking about their jobs. You know, they're thinking about their careers.
They're thinking about their families. And this leads to all kinds of behavior, both...

Speaker 11 you know, openly craven behavior like Jeff Bezos, but also rationalizations for why you should never resign from the job that you're in. You know what I mean?

Speaker 11 All those Trumpy people who worked for Trump and knew he was terrible, but never resigned.

Speaker 11 They all had to be fired, as far as I could tell. Not a single one of them resigned.
And I think we're seeing that playing out now in other areas, and we're going to continue to see that.

Speaker 11 You can count on the fundamental selfishness of human beings, you know.

Speaker 9 You can see how that, by the way, that hurt their credibility.

Speaker 9 We all were saying this in real time, but like the John Kelly stuff, it would be much more credible now if that interview was taken in 2018 or whatever when he had.

Speaker 11 After his resignation, which never happened, right?

Speaker 9 Right, exactly. Just as far as human beings, one more thing.
So have you gotten any pushback? Are any of the flunkies calling you, Bob, and saying, hey, it's not like you think?

Speaker 9 Are they providing any spin besides the obvious for why the lack of endorsement?

Speaker 11 I'm getting radio silence from the post in all directions. So I haven't heard a word.
That's telling, I think. I haven't heard a word.
Well, look, I wasn't, you know, I'm not.

Speaker 11 I was with the Post in this capacity for about 25 years, but I was never like, you know, I'm not some of those people who like their whole identity is wrapped up of being at the Washington Post.

Speaker 11 That's their whole life in some respects. And so, by the way, I mean, you know, my resignation was relatively easy.
Other people have much harder choices to make, and I respect that.

Speaker 11 But I also can see the rationalizations that people come up with why it's really better to stay.

Speaker 9 I want to just also, while we have you, lend your authoritarian expertise with a little bit more on the MSG rally and your reference to how race underlines a lot of it.

Speaker 9 I just want to play one clip from the rally. This was Stephen Miller, who will be, I guess, in charge of the Donald Trump immigration regime if he is to be elected again.

Speaker 9 Let's listen to Stephen Miller yesterday at Madison Square Gone.

Speaker 12 The cartels are gone. The criminal migrants are gone.
The gangs are gone. America is for Americans and Americans only.

Speaker 12 One man.

Speaker 12 And that man, ladies and gentlemen, that man took a bullet for you. He took a bullet for democracy.

Speaker 9 America is for Americans and Americans only. And only our cult leader can save us.
What do you think about that? And maybe the context, the historical context of that rally, Bob? Well, yeah, I mean,

Speaker 11 that has been a constant theme throughout American history.

Speaker 11 By the way, if you go back and read, as I had to for the research I did on my one of my more recent books, read back the statements of the grand wizard of the Klan in the 1920s, when the Klan was a

Speaker 11 really big national institution.

Speaker 11 It was fairly respectable. Politicians thought nothing of going to Klan rallies and speaking, etc.

Speaker 11 And he said all this, you know, the country's being taken away from us by, you know, make your list, Jews, obviously, blacks and others.

Speaker 11 And this is a constant theme, but it's always been, you know, when I say, when I mention the Klan,

Speaker 11 the membership of the Klan was something between 3 million and 6 million people. If you listen to the language of the John Birch Society, this is the language of the John Birch Society.

Speaker 11 It's just that we never expected these people to take over an entire political party.

Speaker 11 These people have always been there, but now they've risen to the forefront. They've taken over the political party because the party has allowed itself to be taken over.

Speaker 11 So now we have effectively people who are using Klan-like rhetoric in open, in the public, and we're all very ho-hum about it, it seems to me.

Speaker 9 Yeah. The ho-hum thing was the most striking thing to me, Bill.
I'm interested in your thoughts as well. But so I was there, I tried to get in last night, and Madison Square Garden did sell out.

Speaker 9 And there were a couple thousand people outside that were left out including me after after spending two and a half hours waiting with the very fine people who went to attend this event and chatting with them but the thing that struck me the most was just how ho-hum it was the people waiting in line were very like it was not like rabid you know types of people outside like you know it wasn't like some of the trump rallies that you see a very like a very working class like it was a lot of people that have office jobs that were standing out there with me people that had money and fancy scarves that had flown in from other parts of the country to be there.

Speaker 9 The protests outside were pretty, we appreciate everybody that went out and had their voice heard, but it was pretty meek. And it was maybe an 80, 90 person protest.

Speaker 9 To me, the thing that was the most striking was how perfunctory it was.

Speaker 9 So anyway, I don't know, Bill, what your kind of observations are on that or, you know, kind of how it relates to the 1939 of it all.

Speaker 10 Yeah, or the 1920s of it all. I mean, we still read about that history.
And even, I mean, I know a little bit about it, but it didn't really come home to me until actually I read some other stuff.

Speaker 10 And then Bob's book, The Spring. You know, it's just how deep that is in American history, how prominent it was in the 1920s, the story of the American South.

Speaker 10 We talk a lot about these other countries, and I think there are things to be learned from them, but there is the long story of the American South post-Civil War, which is very much this pattern, incidentally, of a total normalization of terrible behavior, but then a kind of elite putting a nice gloss over it.

Speaker 10 You know, the gentleman, bourbons of the South ruling sort of in collusion with the populist mobs and making it a little more respectable for.

Speaker 11 Good reference. J.D.

Speaker 9 Vance recently said that he sees MAGA as the inheritors of the Bourbons, the Southern Bourbons, and their fight against the Yankees.

Speaker 10 Anyway, no, so anyway, Bab, you bab, no, I mean, this is the thing.

Speaker 11 I mean, this is what I, you know, so I would say it looks to me like basically over the last few weeks, the movement, and culminating in the Madison Square Garden thing, and I hadn't heard the Stephen Miller thing.

Speaker 11 Well, he's right out of central casting, but the movement is, and Trump and everybody, it's bearing its teeth.

Speaker 11 It's showing its claws now in a way that I think it, you know, it hadn't been quite so clear. It was like, let's talk about the economy, you know, a terrible economy.

Speaker 11 But now they've gotten to the essence of what this campaign is about, which is white supremacy and white Christian supremacy in America.

Speaker 11 The fact that there are Jews going along with this, in addition to some blacks, is really quite extraordinary to me.

Speaker 11 But they're bearing their teeth, and this is having no effect on places like the Wall Street Journal.

Speaker 11 I mean, here we are descending, I think, very rapidly into,

Speaker 11 by the way, what is likely to be a violent situation, because I think the violence on the right is really growing. The FBI is clearly worried about the militias.

Speaker 11 The militias, you know, really were quite active in North Carolina, you know, driving FEMA away. And all this is just getting as ugly as it can possibly be.

Speaker 11 And the Wall Street Journal editorial page is writing about how Kamala Harris is this and Kamala Harris is that. And I just think, you know, do they not see what's going on or do they not care?

Speaker 11 That is, of course, at the heart of this whole question. And I'm afraid I have to go with they don't care.
They are also perfectly willing to live in this world that Trump is about to create.

Speaker 11 And history will not forgive them. I'm sorry.
Whatever Trump is about to lead us into, we will eventually find our way out of, I believe.

Speaker 11 Even after democracy fell in Athens, it was resurrected by one of my father's favorite favorite figures, Thrasypoulus. And that will happen again in America.

Speaker 11 And people will remember who sided with the dictator at this critical juncture.

Speaker 9 Well, Bob Kagan, thank you for being the one to care and speak out. And we needed the Thrasypoulos reference to get us through our Monday.
Bill Chris was going to stick around.

Speaker 9 We're going to do a little bit more politics, politics, polls and ads and such.

Speaker 9 But I felt like in this moment, it was important to have Bob give us an inside look it was having at the post and also the wider picture of the threats ahead.

Speaker 9 So thanks so much for coming on the Bowler podcast. Hope to see you again soon.
Thanks guys. Thanks a lot.

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Speaker 2 Get ready for Malice, a twisted new drama starring Jack Whitehall, David DeCovney, and Carice Van Houten.

Speaker 1 Jack Whitehall plays Adam, a charming manny infiltrates the wealthy Tanner family with a hidden motive to to destroy them.

Speaker 2 This edge-of-your-seat revenge thriller unravels a deliciously dark mystery in a world full of wealth, secrets, and betrayal.

Speaker 1 Malice will constantly keep you on your toes. Why is Adam after the Tanner family?

Speaker 5 What lengths will he go to?

Speaker 6 One thing's for sure, the past never stays buried, so keep your enemies close.

Speaker 1 Watch Malice. All episodes now streaming exclusively on Prime Video.

Speaker 9 All right, we're back with Bill Crystal. I want to talk more about MSG and some of the recent polls, but man, much to chew on there.
I thought JVL was dark.

Speaker 9 That was a pretty ominous report about the state of the level of alarm from Bob Kagan. But what were your reactions to what he had to say?

Speaker 10 I mean, Bob is usually not, has not been, I've known a long time, an alarmist because he's a historian and he always takes a somewhat longer view.

Speaker 10 And if you do that, you often say, well, we'll get past this. So at times when I've been, can you believe our foreign policy, how bad it is?

Speaker 10 Bob has been a little bit of the, you know, look, the America always takes its time to react, unfortunately, and we pay a price for it, but eventually we kind of come around.

Speaker 10 That's one lesson he takes from a lot of our history. But the fact that he's so alarmed is alarming.
He's not an alarmist by nature. He's been right about this from the beginning.

Speaker 10 He wrote that piece in 2016 in the Post, and he used the word fascism. He said it was an American style of fascism.
It's not going to look exactly, obviously, like Italy or anything like that.

Speaker 10 But he saw it early. And, I mean, the degree to which it has progressed is obviously startling nine years later.
Nothing derailed it. The loss in 2020 didn't derail it.
January 6th didn't derail it.

Speaker 10 The indictments, God knows that didn't derail it. But

Speaker 10 the wildly, increasingly evident authoritarianism and radicalization of the movement hasn't derailed it.

Speaker 10 And now we see in these last days of the 24 campaign, the respectable institutions capitulating more quickly as the movement gets more radical and more distasteful and more contrary to the American tradition, right?

Speaker 10 I mean, that is very strange, you know, so that it's bad. I think he's right about that.

Speaker 10 It's like you would think if someone had told you what's going to go in this direction and this and this, and these are the kinds of speakers you're going to have at the actual closing rally of the presidential candidate of one of the two major parties in the United States.

Speaker 10 And we're going to have Stephen Biller, arguably Trump's top policy aide in general, not just on immigration, saying that, you know, What was it? America is.

Speaker 9 America is for Americans and Americans only.

Speaker 10 I mean, unbelievable sort of statement. And I can say this as a matter of personal privilege almost for a Jew to say such a thing, I find just so sickening.
But, you know, it's fine.

Speaker 10 Let them keep out the Jews in 1940. There's nothing wrong with that.
It's only for us Americans who are already here. Whatever, which ones, when they were already here?

Speaker 10 When Stephen Biller's great-grandparents wanted to come over? Should they have just been left wherever they were in the Eastern Europe? I mean, the whole thing is sickening.

Speaker 10 And the fact that there isn't war of reaction is striking. Not only not more of reaction against, I don't know, was anyone dropping ship? Has there been a single statement?

Speaker 10 Except for a couple of Republicans nervous that they might lose some Latino votes in their states or districts.

Speaker 9 So there was one of the other clips that was playing. I'm not going to play it because it's just not even worth playing, but there was a comedian.
People can hear my air quotes if you're just on

Speaker 9 audio that made some joke about how Puerto Rico is an island of trash in the ocean. And he had made a watermelon joke about black people.
I mean, it was just horrific.

Speaker 9 And there were a couple of statements, Rick Scott, a couple other people like tisking that because they know the political vulnerability of this, just like trashing Puerto Ricans and there are 400,000 Puerto Ricans in Pennsylvania and like not even doing the tongue-in-cheek type racist joking stuff that Trump and Vance like to do.

Speaker 9 You know, it's just like flat, like straight at it. Puerto Ricans are trash.
So they did put out some statements on that.

Speaker 9 But to me, the interesting thing about the speakers at the rally, this was ties to what Bob was talking about too, about the Wall Street Journal. Is like

Speaker 9 Mike Johnson was really the only one who you could call

Speaker 9 something like recognizably a traditional Republican, right? There are things about Mike Johnson that are weird as well, but like his remarks, the types of issues that he focuses on.

Speaker 9 The final eight speakers were like Elon Tulsi and RFK Jr., who were all Democrats two minutes ago. It was JD and his populist demagogy.

Speaker 9 It was the Trump family members, speaking of like a third world authoritarian oligarchy. It was like another business leader who was just totally off his rocker.

Speaker 9 And then a couple of wrestling celebrities, you know, Hulk Hogan. And there's no traditional.

Speaker 9 And then in Trump's remarks, I wrote about this in the article Friday about my pitch to Nikki Haley voters, to traditional Republicans to vote for Comwell this one time.

Speaker 9 And if people haven't read that yet and shared that with your friend or uncle or whatever who might fit this bill, please go do that. Even the message of Trump doesn't have any of that anymore.

Speaker 9 Like in 2016, he mixed the Trumpy stuff with the old school Republican stuff.

Speaker 9 Like his message now is basically tariffing people, mass deportations now, targeting foes, domestic oil production, which is your one traditional plank, I guess, for the oilmen out there.

Speaker 9 And, you know, grievances, cultural grievances. Like, that's it.
Like, that, like, that is

Speaker 9 his stated message, that's his on-message message right now.

Speaker 9 And so, to have that be the core message and have it be surrounded by this kind of parade of freaks,

Speaker 9 I think is it's startling, as Bob said, that the Wall Street Journal types are going along with it. And it's also very telling about what the administration will look like.

Speaker 9 Like who will be in the room? And it's these people.

Speaker 10 And the other thing that Miller said, I guess almost all of them said, actually, Vance said, was, and incidentally, they wanted him dead. Right.
There was this huge, you know, they, the they,

Speaker 10 what is that, a third plural without an antecedent, since they can't specify it, since it's perfectly evident the assassination attempts was by some guy who was not part of any Democratic or deep state they.

Speaker 10 But nonetheless, they, all the Trump, almost really, almost all the speakers said that. And so they're willing to stir up

Speaker 10 genuine anger, obviously, and hatred, and with a, just a flat-out lie, and also one that would imply a massive conspiracy into the deep state and and and and so forth and the enemies of the people the democrats and the enemies within and it's all laying the groundwork for i don't know i i'm with bob but the kinds of authoritarian actions we could see maybe not on january 21st 2025 but six months in 18 months in if there's some quote provocations that give him an excuse to do things i think are much different from anything we saw in the first term certainly and probably different from things we've really even been thinking about.

Speaker 9 Yeah.

Speaker 9 And the other thing that you have also is all of the election fraud stuff and one of the striking things to me standing outside with with the vulk was um just like how many casual overheard convos i had you know i wasn't like quizzing people like i was just kind of like moving around and like i'd talk a little bit to some people or i'd just stand there and like overhear conversations it's just like matter of fact it was stolen from us in 2020 they're not gonna we're not gonna let them do this again and again not the crazy people like people that also had you know their charles schwab app on their phone like people that were

Speaker 9 dressed and talking about work. I was over here in conversation between like a younger guy and a guy, I couldn't, it wasn't like a father-son, it was maybe an uncle situation or something.

Speaker 9 And, you know, he was giving him work advice and business advice. And then that was seamlessly transitioning into like concerns about election fraud and how it was taken in 2020, right?

Speaker 9 Like matter of fact. And that to me, even in a loss for Trump, we have this acute danger for a few months at least that Kagan was talking about, about violence.

Speaker 9 And I want to play one other clip from the rally from Tucker Carlson on this point.

Speaker 13 It's going to be pretty tough for them 10 days from now to look in the eye to America with a straight face.

Speaker 13 It's going to be pretty hard to look at us and say, you know what, Kamala Harris, she's just, she got 85 million votes because she's just so impressive.

Speaker 13 As the first Samoan, Malaysian,

Speaker 13 low IQ former California prosecutor ever to be elected president. It It was just a groundswell of popular support.
And anyone who thinks otherwise is just a freak or a criminal.

Speaker 13 At this stage of the game, after nine years of listening to their lies and finding every single one of them totally false, no, it's not safe and effective. And no, she's not impressive.

Speaker 13 It's very hard for me to believe the rest of us are going to say, you know what, Joe Scarborough, you're right.

Speaker 11 You're right.

Speaker 13 She won fair and square because she's just so impressive.

Speaker 13 I don't think so.

Speaker 13 And to me, that is liberation.

Speaker 13 It's the freedom to say what's obviously true as a free man and not a slave. And I just want to say thank you, Donald Trump, for that.

Speaker 9 It's like a triple layer cake of offal there.

Speaker 9 You've got the racism, you have just like the Trump culty praise from somebody that you know privately said he despises Trump in text messages and that Fox deposition.

Speaker 9 And then you have just this laying the groundwork for January 6, 2.0.

Speaker 10 I think that last point's really important. And just for people who focus on it, where does that 85 million come from? Well, Biden got 81 million votes, I believe, in 2020.

Speaker 10 If Harris were to win, or even not win, but runs kind of where it looks like she's running at 48, 49%, at least of the popular vote, she'll probably be a little bit higher turnout.

Speaker 10 She'll probably get a few, maybe quite doesn't get Biden's percentage. She'll probably get in the ballpark of 85 million votes.

Speaker 10 She could well get more votes than Biden got just because of turnout, even if she doesn't do better as a percentage. And so Carson's pretty carefully laying the groundwork to say it's incredible.

Speaker 10 It can't be the case. It can't be true that Kamala Harris got 85 million votes, which is probably what she's going to get.

Speaker 10 So it is just flat out laying the groundwork for denying the election results and leading to, what, violence.

Speaker 10 Or a coup, I suppose, or getting Republican legislators to, though there may not be enough Republican legislators in the key states, to overturn these results.

Speaker 10 And if there aren't, if they're they're Democratic legislators and Democratic governors, as there are in some of these states, then you're talking about civil unrest there, or you're talking about going to the Republican House in some complicated way and trying to get them to refuse to accept these results.

Speaker 10 I mean, on the one hand, they're all such buffoons and so,

Speaker 10 you know, it's so childish in some ways.

Speaker 9 It's like Hulk Hogan can't even rip off his shirt anymore. It's like Hulk is like limping up there on the stage, doing just this

Speaker 9 campy down market imitation of his former self. And he's like trying to to rip his shirt and he can't even do it anymore.
It took him like three tries.

Speaker 9 It's just, it is really obscene, like absurd. Like the scene is absurd.

Speaker 10 I mean, you know, Kamala Harris had the line at the convention that was so accurate, I think.

Speaker 10 I think she said something like, in many ways, Donald Trump is an unserious man, but the consequences of putting him in the White House are very serious.

Speaker 10 And it's a little hard to get your head around that for a minute.

Speaker 10 I mean, and I think he gets away with a lot because he's so unserious in a funny way, you know, the whole shtick and the boutine and all that. But the consequences are serious.

Speaker 10 As our friend Charlie Seyche used to say, a clown with a flamethrower still has a flamethrower. And in this case, the flamethrower is the key thing to focus on, not the clownishness, I think.

Speaker 9 And in some level, I actually think the clownishness is important

Speaker 9 because,

Speaker 9 again,

Speaker 9 And I talked about this on Friday in the monologue about Trump and responding to what Ezra Klein had said about how the dangerous part of him is he has this disinhibition and that he had people around him that were more inhibited, that prevented some things the first time.

Speaker 9 Like none of those people are around. Like it's important to realize that the crazies and the clowns and the extremists will be in the inner circle this time.

Speaker 9 I mean, and they were at times last time too, you know, but but it was like a mix.

Speaker 10 I said it was more of this just mix of like you had Reince Priebus and these traditional Republicans and you had these generals and he brought in a couple business guys like Rex Tillerson and then you had Bannon and you know like you have this like there's no mix left this time it's just the crazies and the clowns and for those respectable types who they might suck in they will have had to have bent the knee and made clear they're not going to do what Mattis and John Bolton and Gary Cohen did or tried to do sometimes or even Jeff Sessions you know I mean the degree to which we just take it for granted of course he's going to fire uh the special counsel of course he's going to have attorney general who's going to turn the whole justice department into his private litigation arm the i notion i mean jeff sessions in the trump first term accused himself because he was told by the career attorneys at justice that he had to do that.

Speaker 10 It was the right thing to do. And then Rosenstein appointed Mueller and so forth.
I mean, that is such a different universe from the one we'll be living in if Trump wins.

Speaker 10 And that is something that the Wall Street Journals of the World simply refuse to even confront. It's evidently true.

Speaker 10 And they pretend that, no, no, it'll be kind of like the first term, some distasteful stuff, but basically it'll be fine.

Speaker 9 I've got a counter view. This is just across the transom here.
So you get to react to it live. It's from our friends friends at No Labels.
No Labels writes this, calm down, America.

Speaker 9 Our founders put in a system of checks and balances that will be guardrails for whomever gets elected, whether you like it or not. There are no communists or fascists being elected.

Speaker 9 We live in an emotional social media world where everything is exaggerated.

Speaker 10 Our founders are very worried about demagogues taking over, and they did try to put in guardrails as much as possible.

Speaker 10 And they say several times in the Federalist Papers, at the end of the day, you know, you do depend on the public to have some basic common sense or and virtue, to use a word they use, to resist demagogues.

Speaker 10 Also, they didn't, some of these institutions and guardrails have been very badly eroded over the years. So that's just disingenuous, don't you think?

Speaker 10 Do they believe that or are they just saying that as a way of, I don't know what?

Speaker 9 I mean, it's my whole hell knows. Mark Penn could be writing it.
He's clearly for Trump.

Speaker 9 Yeah, I mean, no, I think that I think you can never go wrong with questioning the motives of the folks over at No Labels.

Speaker 10 But it gives every all these business types. I was in New York York last week, very nice business people, actually, and

Speaker 10 responsible, nothing like actually Elon Musk or even Bezos or anything like that. But look, they're

Speaker 10 living there in their own world. They've got to run their corporations.
And they're thinking, what if Trump wins?

Speaker 10 And so we talked a little bit about that in terms of some of the policies, tariffs, and stuff. But it's also very clear, they're not going to fight.
No, and that's true, they should.

Speaker 10 I mean, what does it even mean for them to fight if you're running some big financial services firm? They're going to hire people to lobby the Trump administration.

Speaker 10 They're going to be an unbelievable amount of money sloshing around, even more than for the last several years in MAGA world.

Speaker 9 Think about how much money is going to be sloshing around. And his whole economic plan is just going to be arbitrary tariffs.
And it'll be a crony capitalism palooza.

Speaker 10 Yeah, Egger makes this point well.

Speaker 10 And Andrew makes this point well in Morning Shots that the tariffs thing is very bad economic policy, but it's also just an invitation to grift and graft and payoffs and sucking up.

Speaker 10 And as you say, to kind of a corporatism that was one reason why people reacted against tariffs and so you know what let's just have people pay taxes

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Speaker 9 All right, I want to talk a move to the political side of this. Kamala is giving a speech at the ellipse on Tuesday.
I have some thoughts about that as a strategic move. I'm wondering what yours are.

Speaker 10 I'm sort of uncertain. What do you think?

Speaker 9 I think that they're doing it for attention. And so I'm for it for this reason.

Speaker 9 Kamala gives a pretty standard stump speech when she's out there. It's a good stump speech, but that's what she gives.
So it's hard to make news, right? If you're her.

Speaker 9 And this was, I think, the point for the rally in Texas. You wanted to get abortion into the news.
You wanted to get Beyonce into the news. You have an event in Texas with Beyonce, right?

Speaker 9 So, I think that the tactic side of this is pretty obvious. It's the comms team

Speaker 9 trying to say, okay, how can we get ourselves some share of attention here as we head into the final stretch? The strategy side, I think it will depend more on

Speaker 9 what she does, how she talks about all of this.

Speaker 9 I continue to think that her job for the last week or so that we have here is one, continuing to do everything possible to highlight why Trump is unacceptable to the Mickey Haley voter types who still are wavering.

Speaker 9 Like you want the, before they go in, you want the last thing that they remember to be the thing that they hate about Trump. And so I think this is a useful tool in that.

Speaker 9 I think there's a second goal that is continuing to kind of introduce new, like she just has a challenge that Trump doesn't still, which is to people that aren't paying attention, she's still trying to introduce herself to some small segment of the electorate.

Speaker 9 And I think that is related to the third thing, which is turning out the core constituencies, which is where the celeb stuff comes in. So that's her job in the ground game.
So to me,

Speaker 9 that speech is aimed at that first category. And I'm sure she'll have some other things that she's going to do that aims at the other two.

Speaker 10 I basically agree.

Speaker 10 She needs to read, and speech writers need to read your excellent piece from Friday, and I'm sure they will on how to went over what to say to the sort of doubting Haley voters out there.

Speaker 10 And, you know, there's a bit of a silly, I think, and disingenuous sometimes backlash against, you know, don't focus on Trump.

Speaker 10 I mean, you know, you should be still selling your, I don't know, healthcare plan or something like this. I don't know, a week out.

Speaker 10 They've spent hundreds of millions of dollars on their own, on her middle-class agenda and on her own middle-class roots, which is good.

Speaker 10 And they raised her from, you know, she took over down three or four because of Biden, and she went to about maybe plus three. Maybe now it slaps down to about...

Speaker 10 plus one because they kind of ran that sort of ran its course, I would say. At the end of the day, you do need to alarm people about Trump.

Speaker 10 Maybe not using terms like fascist if people don't think those, you know, the Americans quite get that. Just explain concretely what he will do in terms of our liberties and freedoms.

Speaker 10 And that's, God knows, should be enough.

Speaker 10 And just quote some of the things he said about using the military and about deporting 15 million people and about how proud he is of the Supreme Court that gave us jobs and he'll have a chance to make more Supreme Court appointments.

Speaker 10 I don't think it's very, this doesn't need to be rocket science. And I don't even have a strong view on which of the many, the list of things you could cite would be most effective.

Speaker 10 They can, they can test that.

Speaker 10 But I am struck that there are some on the Democratic side, this one super PAC Future Forward, are busy telling the New York Times that they're not really certain about this attack on Trump.

Speaker 10 And if only they could, you know, what tests best is really helping people more with their senior care. You know, well, that does test well because you know what? Everyone likes that.

Speaker 10 Of course, it tests well. But Trump himself could just say, I'm for that too, which is what he said incidentally at the rally.
And it's not a real test.

Speaker 10 And the degree to which, if I could just complain about some of our new Democratic friends, could they, you know, if they're running the $700 million super PAC that Biden blessed, and then Harris, to her credit, didn't shake up, took it over, kept the same people there, put Anita Dunn on the payroll there from the Biden White House.

Speaker 10 They've gone ahead and spent hundreds of millions of dollars on ads. They've been treated respectfully, left on a loan, so far as I can tell, by the Harris campaign.

Speaker 10 I don't know how much good they've done, honestly. And they can't shut up for the week before the election.

Speaker 10 And whatever little stupid internal disputes they're having, or whatever Biden resentments they're still nursing months later, they can't just keep to themselves. I really find it kind of astonishing.

Speaker 9 Yeah, we're going to put out this memo from the PAC. The PAC whose ads aren't that good, by the way.
We've mentioned this several times.

Speaker 9 They're just kind of boring. I just, I don't know who they're for.

Speaker 9 To me, this is, this is going to, I'm going to stand like, this is when Charles Barkley goes on at NBA and TNT after the basketball games. He's like, I'm not so sure about this analytics.

Speaker 9 Sometimes I talk about that. But the thing is, testing basketball and testing television advertisements is a different ball wax.

Speaker 9 Because you're basing your message testing on these ads, just to show behind the curtain with people for a little bit, is like you have people that are watching the ads.

Speaker 9 A lot of times it's like people that are like playing some sort of game online, like you're playing a video game or something.

Speaker 9 And to get to the next level, you've got to watch an ad and tell the person whether you like it or not. And it's like you're assuming a number of things, right?

Speaker 9 One, that people know what actually persuades them, right? Number two, that people are really paying attention that closely, right? And it's out of context. Like you can't run a real experiment.

Speaker 9 You know, it's not like, again, it's not like a basketball game where you just played a basketball game and now we've had an experiment.

Speaker 9 You can't run 100 elections and do ads with fascism ads and then ads with middle class ads and see which time she does better. Right.
So a lot of this is a little bit, a little bit of pseudoscience.

Speaker 9 But so they have the little pseudoscience and they're going to

Speaker 9 the media to complain about what the campaign is doing. I agree.

Speaker 9 It's stupid and wrong. And I think that there's certain things you can learn from testing.
And I've got friends that do message testing. I've been asking them about what it's showing.

Speaker 9 And, you know, one of them says to me that, like, if you put the word Nazi in there, it just tanks. And that makes sense to me, like, intellectually.
Like, people, like, they're like, okay, really?

Speaker 9 He's a Nazi. You know what I mean? And also, anybody that thinks that he might be a Nazi is already voting against him or is a Nazi themselves and is already for him.
Right.

Speaker 9 So it's kind of like, is that that persuasive of a message? So

Speaker 9 there are things you can learn from this. But yeah, I'm with you.
This notion that, like, okay, well, nine out of ten voters liked the very generic ad about

Speaker 9 how they would pay less for health care. And only eight of the ten voters liked the ad that mentioned that Trump might be a fascist.
So we should just do the boring ad about health care.

Speaker 10 I don't know.

Speaker 9 I'm not sure it's as clear-cut as that. And I think that with their $700 million, they should run what they think is right and let the campaign do some stuff.

Speaker 9 And I think a mix of messages is really probably right.

Speaker 10 Which is what they've done and what the campaign has done. And they've spent all in there much, much more on the positive and healthcare messages than on the Trump dictatorship message, let's call it.

Speaker 10 And John Kelly, there's a very modest buy, apparently, promoting him, even though there is data that we've seen it, that having Republican messengers and people who worked for Trump as the messengers of Trump's danger does work better than a generic statement.

Speaker 10 If you have an ad with some voiceless, nameless narrator just saying Donald Trump is very dangerous, people go, what's that?

Speaker 10 If it's John Kelly, who was Donald Trump's chief of staff, he's a retired four-star Marine General, here are his words. That does seem to have an effect.
But anyway, they test this.

Speaker 10 The Harris people make up their own mind. I've got to say, all all in, though, I just want to say this as we approach the end.
She's not a perfect candidate.

Speaker 10 There are some things in the campaign I would have done differently.

Speaker 10 She's run a good campaign, and it's been a good campaign, and the campaign has been a good campaign.

Speaker 10 They hit the key things they had to do, the launch, the convention speech, the debate, very impressively. I'd say in all three cases, incidentally.
Not every campaign pulls that off.

Speaker 10 Certainly not a campaign that had to get organized after Biden dragged his feet on whatever it was, January, July 20th, I guess, when they finally got out. So the campaign has done a good job.

Speaker 10 The candidate has done a good job. The Super PAC, I don't know.

Speaker 10 You can't prove the opposite of what would the world be if they hadn't spent the $700 million they raised, but it's not so obvious to me that the Super PAC has done such a great job.

Speaker 10 And there's the Super PAC in the New York Times whining and complaining and covering their ass ahead of time in case Harris might lose.

Speaker 10 So I'm just annoyed at them. Maybe you noticed that.

Speaker 9 I agree. No, that's great.
That's a good rant. That reminds me of the rants I used to do about the Jeff Rowe run to Santa Super PAC.

Speaker 9 The media also loves talking to fancy strategists at these things and like treating them like they're really Svengalis.

Speaker 9 And I'm like, Jeff Rowe spent nine figures to watch run his candidate lose half his vote share from when he started.

Speaker 9 How great could their ad test message testing have really been? Anyway, final thing. I want to talk just briefly about the Senate.
There's our two New York Times polls out.

Speaker 9 And, you know, the state of play is essentially this, that it would take something very surprising, I think, for the Democrats to win the Montana Senate race right now, even though John Tester is a good candidate.

Speaker 9 It's just the nature of our polarized times. And so, if that if that is the case, and then the Republicans win in Montana and West Virginia, that puts them at 51 senators.

Speaker 9 To get back to 50-50, the Democrats would need to win either Texas or Nebraska. The Times Cienna has a poll out this morning that has Trump up 10 in Texas, but Cruz only up four.

Speaker 9 And then in this Nebraska Senate race, I've been trying to get this guy on, so we'll see if we'll see if we can make it work for the election.

Speaker 9 But he's an independent candidate running against the Republican Deb Fisher. Deb Fisher is only up by two.
And this guy's kind of like a working class, kind of populist independent type, you know,

Speaker 9 a little bit Manchin-y, a little bit tester-ish, kind of like a union guy that's running but is more moderate on cultural issues. And Dan Osborne, and he's run a very good race.

Speaker 9 And that race looks very close and might be a potential out, not for Democrats, since he would be an independent.

Speaker 9 He said he wouldn't caucus with Democrats, but it would be a way to keep the Republican number down to 50.

Speaker 9 So anyway, I don't know if you have any final thoughts on the Senate races, but just wanted to bring that up.

Speaker 10 These things sometimes do surprise, and I think they're a little less baked in than presidential numbers for obvious reasons.

Speaker 10 People don't know the challenges well, and in the case certainly of Osborne and Nebraska, to some degree, even all red and Texas.

Speaker 10 So I'm a little more open to the notion that we could have surprises in both those races, actually.

Speaker 10 And even Tester, incidentally, Tester's closing, it looks to me like, and she, he's got problems, and tester's a very impressive candidate who you know it's not is it out of the question that he pulls even and wins i don't think so so that's a good point i would say just in general i i don't know why i feel this now i i was you know i talked to too many people late last week and they were all down to the dumps so i guess i got slightly down to the dumps but since this is our next to last discussion on before the election i'm actually slightly optimistic i don't know i just feel like

Speaker 10 there will be some revulsion among some voters against trump and trumpism and at the end of the day if you look at the actual polls and the actual swing states, they're even, basically.

Speaker 10 They're really almost totally even. But Harris is as much ahead by one point in some states as Trump is ahead by one point in other states.

Speaker 10 And I see no reason why the late break shouldn't be even tiny bit to Harris, even or a tiny bit to Harris. And she could, I think she could well win.
I actually do think she's going to win.

Speaker 9 That's a great place to leave it. I'm with you.
I'm an emotional roller coaster. I said this in the post-game that we did last night after the Madison Square Garden event for members.

Speaker 9 If you're not a member, this is your moment. Levork.com slash subscribe.
We have Bob Kagan on at the top.

Speaker 9 I guess some people might have some extra walking around money after they've canceled their Amazon Prime and Washington Post subscription. So

Speaker 9 you could come join us for some of these members-only events that we have. But I am an emotional roller coaster because that's just my nature.

Speaker 9 And I'm also upset just about the fact that we even are here at all. Right.

Speaker 9 And like, so even if she does win narrowly, I'm going to be happy for a minute, but I also am going to be filled with rage at the fact that we even had to do this, that had to sweat this out.

Speaker 9 That said, as Pluff has said, the race hasn't moved in a month. Just hasn't.

Speaker 9 You can look at micro adjustments or whatever, but she's had a narrow lead with a narrow path through the blue wall, maybe with North Carolina.

Speaker 9 And that's been how the race has looked, like essentially since after the debate. And it felt differently then because, you know, it felt like the momentum might have been going up and right.

Speaker 9 Like, and maybe the sky was the limit or whatever. But, like, just because it felt differently then doesn't mean that the race was different.
Like, the race is what it is. It's very close.

Speaker 9 It's narrow. She has a clear path.
God willing, she holds on in the states that she needs for the clear path.

Speaker 9 But I think that's what the state of play is going to be like until next Tuesday or maybe next Thursday or Friday. So buckle up.
Stick around with us for that, Bill.

Speaker 9 Thank you for your uplifting, though. Final note.
We will be back. This is not our last.
We will have one more reparte before Election Day.

Speaker 9 And we'll be back here tomorrow with another edition of the Bullard Podcast. We'll see you all then.
Peace.

Speaker 9 And the lights came on in the middle of the night.

Speaker 9 What I should do with my life, how I should spend my time

Speaker 9 on the star,

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Speaker 9 And then the lights came on in the middle of the night.

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Speaker 9 Look at me a white

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Speaker 9 Far and made the world, it would be all white.

Speaker 9 Oh, what a pity the world's not white.

Speaker 9 The Bullwork podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

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