Bret Stephens: Pray Kamala Wins

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Speaker 4 hello and welcome to the bulwark podcast i'm your host tim miller in a couple minutes i'm gonna have brett stevens for you we're gonna have an exchange about why he's voting for kamala harris kicking and screaming and uh we'll talk about elon musk having phone calls with putin apparently and coordinating with Xi.

Speaker 4 That's not at all concerning. But before we do that, as I mentioned yesterday, I want to revise and extend maybe the remarks that Ezra Klein made on his podcast earlier this week.

Speaker 4 He had this monologue that I thought was an important attempt to, one, explain why the age issue isn't sticking with Trump, and two, come up with an alternative, more precise explanation that might help wavering people understand what makes him so uniquely dangerous.

Speaker 4 So I'm about to sum up what he said here, but if you want to go listen to it, his podcast is What's Wrong with Trump, and then you can come right on back.

Speaker 4 But to distill it down, Ezra explains that it is an age or cognitive decline in a vacuum that people notice with Trump, like people were noticing with Biden.

Speaker 4 It's a specific character trait, which he calls disinhibition.

Speaker 4 And that disinhibition is both his great strength and his fatal flaw.

Speaker 4 For shorthand, you know, for us armchair psychologists, they're those big five personality traits, and disinhibition is basically the inverse of conscientiousness.

Speaker 4 Now, as I was listening to this podcast, and Ezra was describing how disinhibition manifests itself in Trump, you know, the way that he vamps on stage and the way that he makes fun of people, and the way that he was willing to say things that other more typical politicians won't say, I began to have a little bit of an identity crisis of my own because, in some ways, that describes, well, me and most of my closest friends he's talking about boldness a willingness to push boundaries risk-taking high extroversion domineering at times i'd be lying to you if i said a gag about arnold palmer's graphite shaft would be out of place at happy hour with my buddies down here in new orleans but we're not like trump right

Speaker 4 I mean, sure, he's certainly disinhibited too, yeah. But there must be more to it than that, or else, well, I'm going to have to to go find a new therapist.

Speaker 4 So before I get to my dissent and the reasons that I think there is more to it than what Ezra laid out, I want to highlight the part of his insight that I really agreed with and the implications of that for the last 11 days of this campaign and, God forbid, for a Trump 2.0.

Speaker 4 In landing on this inhibition, Ezra was trying to solve a puzzle.

Speaker 4 How do you explain the threat of Trump to people who listen to Dan Crenshaw when he argues that Trump can't be that scary since the first administration turned out okay.

Speaker 4 Now, one way to go at that would be to remind them that the year 2020 and January 2021 existed, but that has seemed to have limited efficacy with people.

Speaker 4 So instead, Ezra proposes that we can explain how the threat of Trump 2.0 is greater through this prism, Trump's disinhibition.

Speaker 4 Because even Trump's most stalwart fans will grant that he lacks restraint.

Speaker 4 And nearly all of them would concede that in the first term, Trump had people around him who were much more conscientious and inhibited, and that prevented some of his ideas from being implemented.

Speaker 4 Now, Magus might call that the deep state, but the rest of us would recognize these inhibitors as the traditional politicians and bureaucrats that have staffed administrations our entire lives.

Speaker 4 We got some fresh examples of this from the latest John Kelly reveals, the most tangible of which he expanded on with the Washington Post last night, talking about how during the Floyd protests, Trump wanted a Tiananmen Square 2.0.

Speaker 4 He wanted to shoot the protesters, the peaceful protesters who'd gathered outside the White House and in cities around the country. His team, the generals around him, had to talk him off the ledge.

Speaker 4 They had to inhibit him.

Speaker 4 And so that's where we get to the one thing about Trump that everybody agrees with. Trump and his team, Kamala and her team, Ezra, me, anyone that covers Trump, all of you.

Speaker 4 There were these inhibitors that existed in the first term and that they had some impact.

Speaker 4 We could maybe disagree on the scale of how much impact, but they had some impact in preventing Trump's worst ideas from being implemented.

Speaker 4 Or, I guess, if you're a MAGA person, they had some impact in preventing his best ideas from getting implemented. Now, these people are largely gone.
Jared and Ivanka are out. Don Jr.

Speaker 4 and Lara Trump are in. Pence is out, J.D.
Vance is in, et cetera, et cetera. Ezra argues, once people understand this, the nature of the threat comes into focus.

Speaker 4 If we agree that it's Trump's disinhibition that at times leads to bad outcomes, it's scary to think of what a second term looks like when there isn't anyone to check them.

Speaker 4 And here's where the age issue really comes in. That notion is even scarier when you contemplate an 82-year-old Trump suffering from one side effect of aging.

Speaker 4 The mind's ability to control itself starts to weaken, making disinhibition worse. I'm on board with that analysis.
It's obviously true. But the point here is to be semantic about it.

Speaker 4 Like, what is at the root of the threat of Trump? And I think it's worse than just disinhibition. The negative examples of that trait, rudeness, tactlessness, impulsive actions, are all speech.

Speaker 4 This is mostly a person not caring about how other people feel.

Speaker 4 In short, it's kind of mean tweets. And I concur that not caring about how other people feel is a bad trait, particularly in a president.
It's childish.

Speaker 4 It describes me and my buddy's own failings much less at 40 than it did at 21.

Speaker 4 But it's also not exactly the trait that comes to mind when you think of Mussolini. That's because Trump's disinhibition is about more than not caring about people's feelings.

Speaker 4 It's about not caring what happens to others, not caring whether they live or die.

Speaker 4 If you doubt me, send your regards to Herman Kane at the Big Pizza Box in the Sky, or to the January 6th rioters toiling their life away in prison thanks to to Trump's lies.

Speaker 4 But even more than just not caring what happens to others, at times it seems as if Trump actually revels in other people's pain.

Speaker 4 To borrow from Adam Serwer, being cruel and causing the suffering of foes is not just a side effect of his disinhibition. It's something he intentionally engages in.

Speaker 4 Purposeful cruelty, total disinterest in the well-being of anyone but himself. I'm not a psychiatrist like my friend George Conway, but I think that there's another clinical diagnosis for that.

Speaker 4 So, maybe sadism is too pejorative to be effective politically. Accusing Trump of enjoying others' suffering is surely not something that will land with his supporters.

Speaker 4 But that doesn't make it untrue. And when you add that layer onto Ezra's case, things become really ominous.
A disinhibited and reckless Trump surrounded by people unable to control him.

Speaker 4 That's very bad. A disinhibited and reckless Trump who wants wants revenge and actively intends to cause harm to others is a nightmare that I can only pray we don't have to live through.

Speaker 4 On that uplifting note, up next, Brett Stevens.

Speaker 4 All right, welcome back. I'm here with an opinion columnist at the New York Times.
He's the winner of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for his work as a foreign affairs columnist.

Speaker 4 He's also former editor-in-chief of the Jerusalem Post, and the government of Russia has barred him for life. It's Brett Stevens.
How are you doing, Brett?

Speaker 3 Good to see you, Tim.

Speaker 4 Welcome to the Bulgar podcast. I want to get into increasingly contentious material, you know, as we go to the end.
So let's start on a few, let's start on a few agreements, huh? Okay.

Speaker 4 There's Wall Street Journal story, your former colleagues out this morning about how Elon Musk has been talking to Putin.

Speaker 4 One of the sentences here was: Putin asked Elon Musk to avoid activating his Starlink satellite internet service over Taiwan as a favor to Xi Jinping.

Speaker 4 What's our concern level about this, about rogue Elon at this point?

Speaker 3 You know, if I may boast, I didn't like Elon Musk when he was cool. I wrote a poem, I think, in 2018.
I called Elon Musk the Donald Trump of Silicon Valley. That may be even

Speaker 3 truer than I realize, given his foreign policy inclinations.

Speaker 3 I think we're reaching a point where a guy like Musk has power not over, say, the everyday lives of our children in the way that Mark Zuckerberg and other social media entrepreneurs have had, but power in foreign policy.

Speaker 3 And I think this also came up with Ukraine in the early stages of the war. And

Speaker 3 that's simply frightening. The idea that an American citizen, a private citizen, would undercut the foreign policy of the United States just strikes me as absolutely bonkers.

Speaker 3 And all the more so for an immigrant who owes his entire fortune to what the United States has given to him.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I mean, there are two kind of angles to this that are both pretty alarming. One is sort of the how we got here angle.

Speaker 4 I interviewed Walter Isaacson for his book on Elon, and we spent a decent amount of time on that. So it was like, it was just a pretty disastrous failing of the U.S.

Speaker 4 federal government that we're in this situation, where we're kind of beholden to this.

Speaker 4 Even if it was a more stable person besides Elon, that Elon has this kind of dominance with Starlink.

Speaker 4 And we are where we are at this point, but this is not usually the nationalize an industry podcast. But

Speaker 4 what, I mean, doesn't the government have to start thinking about either creating a competitor to Elon or creating new strictures around him?

Speaker 4 I mean, he's the top government contractor like, at this point, with serious national security implications.

Speaker 3 Well, and look, and I have to say, in some ways, to the good,

Speaker 3 given the failures of some of the competition to do what he's been able to achieve.

Speaker 3 I think particularly of the failures of Boeing when it comes to, say, bringing passengers back from the International Space Station, but also so much of our aerospace industry. I don't know.

Speaker 3 I mean, I have to assume.

Speaker 3 I'm not a lawyer, but there are legal authorities to to prevent a private American citizen from interfering in a way that materially damages the foreign policy interests of the United States.

Speaker 3 Certainly in periods of conflict or potential conflict, but I'm speaking outside of my lane. I just don't know.

Speaker 4 I guess my point is, even in a Democratic administration, even with Joe Biden as president or with Kamal Harris as president, it's already concerning enough that we have the top government contractor kind of engaging in this foreign policy and where he has has essentially, I guess, not a monopoly, but a quasi-monopoly on critical national security infrastructure.

Speaker 4 And then you project out to that same person then being the biggest donor to Donald Trump, acting outside the law.

Speaker 4 We don't have an FEC basically, but acting outside the law, I think, pretty clearly in how his super PACs are acting, both with the million-dollar giveaways that now the DOJ is investing and has clear coordination with the Trump campaign.

Speaker 4 And then Trump gets in there. That would be kind of an unprecedented, ominous situation.
I just, I think about all the Republican fear-hongering about Soros and Soros' control over the Democrats.

Speaker 4 Like, there's really no parallel to the kind of malign influence that he could have if Trump wins.

Speaker 3 Well, you know, it's funny how time and experience begins to shape your views differently. I mean,

Speaker 3 I used to be of the view, look, you know, if you're wealthy, you want to contribute to politics. That's an expression of free speech.
Money is a form of speech.

Speaker 3 I've begun to rethink that, particularly the influence that extremely rich, somewhat strange dudes with limitless cash can have on the shape of American politics.

Speaker 3 By the way, I say that also with respect to George Soros because I'm no fan of the kinds of DA, progressive DAs that he has openly and proudly supported.

Speaker 3 But in the case of the ability of a single individual to potentially invite aggression by dictatorial foreign powers against American allies, it has a particularly fearsome aspect.

Speaker 4 I guess the last Musk point, which you're ahead of the game on, but like the anti-Semitism side of this, and he's running the most overtly anti-Semitic ad I've seen.

Speaker 4 I don't know if you've seen this, but

Speaker 4 it's targeting the Muslim community in Michigan where it's like Kamala's husband, Doug, is a Jew, and Kamala listens to Doug. It's like an insanely anti-Semitic ad.

Speaker 4 And then the proliferation of anti-Semitism on Twitter. And I just, I just kind of wonder.

Speaker 3 Even I'm surprised. I have to say,

Speaker 3 every Blue Moon will look at references to me on Twitter.

Speaker 3 I try to stay away from it because I basically think that it's like crack cocaine.

Speaker 4 It's free basing, actually. I think it's free basing.

Speaker 3 I wouldn't even know the difference.

Speaker 3 But what strikes me most is just how much anti-Semitism in various directions attaches to my name, like right-wing anti-Semites, left-wing people, Muslim anti-Semites, the whole gamut.

Speaker 4 This takes us to kind of what I want to spend a lot of time on. So I wrote this morning about kind of the case to Nikki Haley Republicans who might be wavering.
It's kind of like the case to Brett.

Speaker 4 I didn't need to make the case to Brett Stevens since you said on Monday that you were kicking and screaming.

Speaker 3 Two days ago, I was at the University of Michigan, and some guy stands up and he says he's head of the Nikki Haley for Kamala Club.

Speaker 3 So apparently, I'm now, although I'm not a voter in Michigan, I guess I'm part of that club now.

Speaker 4 All right, great. Yeah, so I was making the case not to those who have already come come to the decision for Kamlo, but for those who are still wavering.

Speaker 4 And I want to go through that, but like one subsect of that, like I have a close friend who deeply cares about Israel, whose mother lives in Israel, who has concerns about campus anti-Semitism, who has concerns about the Biden-Harris policy there.

Speaker 4 I've tried to push back by offering that the campus anti-Semitism is a problem, but you have this far-right anti-Semitism that is increasing, particularly on the website of Donald Trump's biggest supporter, and that like like on balance, the Biden-Harris administration maybe rhetorically has been kind of limiting in BB, but has been working with Israel.

Speaker 4 So as somebody that I think would fit that bill, what's your message to people who have Israel and anti-Semitism as a prime concern? And has that, has them wavering?

Speaker 3 I don't think there's any

Speaker 3 wisdom in

Speaker 3 trying to debate what's worse, the River to the Sea crowd in Morningside Heights at Columbia, the I Want to Murder Zionists coalition up there, or the Tucker Carlson people platforming Hitler apologists.

Speaker 3 I think the lesson of Jewish history is you can't pretend that you have more friends on one side than the other. Anti-Semitism is

Speaker 3 a bipartisan phenomenon. That's always been the case.
I got to tell you, Tim, I have real concerns about a Harris presidency with respect to Israel.

Speaker 3 I worry about answers like a ceasefire now type answer that spares Hamas, that spares Hezbollah, that doesn't allow Israel to emerge from the war with the sort of the reputation of having established deterrence against its enemies.

Speaker 3 It's actually one of the reasons why I agonized for as long as I did with respect to endorsing her. I was never going to vote for Trump.
I made that clear, but it was one of my real misgivings.

Speaker 3 And I also worry that she seems, this came up in her town hall conversation in Pennsylvania the other day.

Speaker 3 She seems acutely aware of courting the votes of the ceasefire now crowd, whether it's college students or traditional Arab American areas of Michigan, and that that is a big part of her political thinking.

Speaker 3 And for all kinds of reasons, you know, most of all, my concern for Israel's security, that that's distressing. So that's what made part of this decision so difficult to me.

Speaker 3 And I still worry about it. I still feel like I'm taking my chances with her.
I just think that in a binary choice with Trump, at the end of the day, he's unthinkable.

Speaker 4 Just onto the Kamala side of this, and then we'll get into Trump. Is that right, though, that you think that she is spending a ton of effort reaching out to the ceasefire now crowd?

Speaker 4 I mean, she was campaigning with Liz Cheney this week.

Speaker 3 Look,

Speaker 3 she answered, she answered a question from a voter who expressed her,

Speaker 3 made it clear that, you know, where she stood on the Israel thing. And in all the ways that she could have answered the question, it didn't give me a lot of comfort.

Speaker 3 I mean, I could have seen her answering the question by saying, you know, the road to a two-state solution lies through the defeat of Hamas.

Speaker 3 That was the answer the administration was giving a year ago, nine months ago. And she's shifted away from that.
So I hope she surrounds herself with advisors who

Speaker 3 see the point. I don't feel certain that she will.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I mean, I guess if we had on somebody,

Speaker 4 we should have done left, right, and center.

Speaker 4 If we had on somebody that was, you know, if we had Mehdi Hassan on, I think they would say, well, she didn't even have a pro-Palestine person speak at the convention, right?

Speaker 4 Like that there had she refused to meet with them. She's not really put like any sort of arms limitation on the table.
The Biden-Harris administration has worked with Israel, right?

Speaker 4 I mean, given the complex nature of the coalition, I don't know.

Speaker 4 And I guess, couldn't you see that she's kind of balancing it in a way that is actually decently supportive of the pro-Israel side of the equation?

Speaker 3 I'll keep my fingers crossed. I guess that's the best answer.
I don't think we really know. And what worries me a little bit is I'm not sure she really knows.

Speaker 3 I don't see

Speaker 3 a real conviction politician. I see a politician who's trying to place herself in the center of whatever the political moment demands.

Speaker 3 And there will come a time in America's relationship with Israel, and I think in the next four years on a whole number of fronts, where you're really going to need a conviction politician.

Speaker 3 It's one of the reasons why there's a side of me that regrets Joe Biden's departure.

Speaker 3 Because, you know, when it came to Taiwan, when it came to Ukraine, and when it in the wake of October 7th, you saw a guy with real convictions.

Speaker 3 I think the execution leaves something to be desired in places, but the basic instincts were generally right.

Speaker 4 I guess I don't have anything to disagree with there. I do wonder if you look at Harris and again, considering just being practical about things, right?

Speaker 4 Like putting the ideal or the perfect aside, like having a politician that's not particularly a conviction politician on most issues, who has pivoted to the center on a lot of issues, who talked at the convention in a way that was not kind of the identitarian left, right, that was talking about the importance of America's role in the world, the importance of entrepreneurship.

Speaker 4 I mean, like, I don't know. At times, she sounded like a 90s Republican at the convention.
You know what I mean?

Speaker 3 Isn't that good? Isn't that good?

Speaker 4 Wouldn't you rather have that? Then, like, it could have been the other way, right? I mean, she could have taken over and tried to rally the base and pivot to the left.

Speaker 3 You're asking me to be enthusiastic

Speaker 4 about... I'm not asking you to be enthusiastic.
I'm not requesting enthusiasm. Just practically speaking, isn't that good, though?

Speaker 4 I guess my point is you were saying it is a critique that she's going to look to move to the center.

Speaker 4 And I'm saying in a in a divided country in a divided washington like shouldn't those of us in the center take that as a win shouldn't we be like great she's going to try to find the center the the consensus yeah i mean i i basically my hope for kamala is that she is uh essentially an opportunistic politician who understands that

Speaker 3 The

Speaker 3 advantages accrue to

Speaker 3 people who bend towards the center and the kind of the traditional American American consensus. My fear is that that consensus is going to be dramatically challenged over the next four or eight years.

Speaker 3 And I don't know where her instincts lie. So we'll have to see.
I mean, as I said in my conversation with Gail the other day, for me, this is a 99.9% vote against Trump and a 0.1% vote for Kamala.

Speaker 3 If you want to convince me that it should be.

Speaker 4 90-10.

Speaker 3 Yeah, 90-10, 80-20 something.

Speaker 3 I want to be enthusiastic.

Speaker 3 I love my country.

Speaker 3 I hope for the best.

Speaker 4 I'll get you to 80-20. Let's do it right now.

Speaker 4 Then we'll talk about the 80. A, I think it would be good for the country to have the first woman president.
Her brother-in-law works for Uber.

Speaker 4 I mean, like, she, like, they say they call her a California progressive, but she's really a Silicon Valley, like corporate center-left liberal.

Speaker 4 She has time and again been given the opportunity to do the Hillary thing and make this campaign, being like, I'm with her and making it about identity politics. She's rejected that.

Speaker 4 She would have a mandate if she were to win. Having campaigned with Liz Cheney, having campaigned on the importance of the U.S.

Speaker 4 role in the world to follow through on that, I've only had one private conversation, but my one private conversation with her, I thought she seemed very passionate about her trips to the Munich Security Conference and working with our allies abroad and how important that was.

Speaker 4 So, I don't know. Doug is a corporate lawyer.
Lesbie Barn Socialist, that's 20%.

Speaker 4 I'm just getting you to 20. I'm not trying to get you to 50-50.

Speaker 3 I totally hope you're right, right, but

Speaker 3 I just got to tell you what I see. Okay.
Okay, great. For instance, the other night, again, in the town hall, because it was a kind of a more unpredictable forum, right?

Speaker 3 I assume she didn't know the questions in advance. I see a person who sticks to memorize talking lines and then struggles when she's outside those lines.
I see someone who

Speaker 3 has a vision about the economy, which is deeply flawed.

Speaker 3 If you think that the reason we've had higher prices over the last few years is price gouging by greedy corporations, you are just economically completely illiterate.

Speaker 3 I'm sorry, that's just I'm just describing reality. It is a foolish, laughable thing to say.
And by the way, it's even more laughable because she had an easy, there was a potentially easy answer.

Speaker 3 I don't know why her advisors didn't say that. She said, well, you know, most of inflation is a function of monetary policy, which is set by the Federal Reserve.

Speaker 3 And the Federal Reserve is run by a guy who was appointed by Donald Trump. Easy A answer, right?

Speaker 3 Why did no one think to say that to her?

Speaker 4 Because she wasn't trying to win Brett Stevens's vote and because the country is economically illiterate. I don't know.

Speaker 4 I had Carville on a month ago and he was like, and Carville is basically like, yeah, obviously it's economically wrong, but we want to win. We want to beat Trump and it's a winning issue.

Speaker 4 Biden talked about price gouging too. He didn't actually do anything.
It's not like she's going to do price controls.

Speaker 4 You can't have any legitimate concern that she wants to install Venezuelan price controls.

Speaker 3 That's what she was talking about. You have to, at some level, take her

Speaker 3 at her word, right? Otherwise,

Speaker 3 it's all just kind of like some kind of political kabuki dance signaling, all of it's meaningless. Like, well, then in that case, I don't know.

Speaker 4 I was just trying to get you to 20%, though. It seems like that's still gettable.
That's still, they're still there.

Speaker 3 You know something? I actually think

Speaker 3 when I answered Gail, and I answered her really sincerely, okay,

Speaker 3 I think that for that portion of voters like me who hate Trump but really have doubts about Harris, I'm meeting them where they are.

Speaker 4 This is why you're on right now.

Speaker 3 I agree. I'm not trying to sell them a lemon as a Ferrari, although I've heard sometimes Ferraris can be lemons, but that's another story, right?

Speaker 3 I'm just trying to say January 6th is an unforgivable crime in American history.

Speaker 3 And the moment we start rewarding violent attacks on the sanctity of the electoral process, the moment we get to that place where that becomes normal, we're going to lose everything.

Speaker 3 Presidents come and go, except the president who doesn't want to go. And that's it.
That's the whole argument. But to me, it's just decisive, right?

Speaker 3 And that's why I was able to overcome all of these misgivings.

Speaker 3 If I go out there and start writing columns saying, you know, I talked to Tim Miller and, you know, he kind of convinced me that, you know, Kamala is actually going to be a centrist.

Speaker 3 She's a kind of a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, et cetera, et cetera. I don't think I would actually,

Speaker 3 first of all, I don't believe it, which is why I wouldn't say it, but I don't think I'd win over any wavering voter.

Speaker 3 I think the only wavering voter I'm going to win over is someone who's like, yeah, she's really not great.

Speaker 3 I so wish it were another Democrat, but you have to draw a line in the sand against certain crimes against the United States.

Speaker 4 I agree with like 90% of that.

Speaker 4 I do. I do.

Speaker 4 My entrepreneur case is

Speaker 4 my entrepreneur case was a little bit, you know, I was just trying to, I'm trying to win you over. You know, it was a little bit persuasion.

Speaker 4 I'm 100% sincere, by the way, about my views about her view of America's role in the world. It shocked me, actually.

Speaker 4 The one time I saw her off of Talking Points and heard her talking about this, I was actually shocked by just how genuine she was in this.

Speaker 4 And I was encouraged, and I told people about it in real time.

Speaker 4 And this was in March, back when when she was VP. It was not, it was before she was nominated.

Speaker 3 Can I tell you one thing? So, I met with someone who knows her pretty well. I've never met her.

Speaker 3 And one of the things this person said to me, which actually gave me comfort, is he said, she knows what she doesn't know.

Speaker 3 Now, that actually is a sign of great wisdom.

Speaker 3 I always respect people who know what they don't know and are willing to say it.

Speaker 3 And one of the things I've been urging her to do, and something actually Barack Obama sort of did in 08 when there were doubts about his experience, is to sort of give a list of the people she's listening to and maybe hint at who could be in her cabinet.

Speaker 3 There is a long list of outstanding Americans whose party affiliation we don't know, who could serve with honor and distinction in key roles of a Harris administration in the way that I think a lot of Americans found comfort in the Truman administration when he staffed up with people people like George Marshall or James Forrestal as his senior advisors.

Speaker 3 I think that would be very smart. I think that would move a number of voters to say, you know what? We're going to be okay

Speaker 3 under her presidency. These are serious people who aren't going to screw up the country on the march to turning us into Oakland, California.

Speaker 4 I moved out of Oakland down to New Orleans, so I hear that. There's some great things about Oakland.

Speaker 4 First Fridays is really nice, but it has some problems from a uh from a management standpoint that is a proactive point that i totally agree with my last thing on this and the case i made denicky because i totally agree with you by the way and i said this to liz and to all of the never trumpers who've gone out to support her i was like talk about the ways that you disagree with her or that you have reservations i think that makes your endorsement more powerful so i'm totally on board with that the more negative version of of naming a cabinet is that she will be checked Like this is the other thing I just like to people that see the threat of Trump, the argument I was making this morning is like she'll have a 6-3 Supreme Court against her.

Speaker 4 She's going to have a 51-49 Republican Senate at best. And so we have a Chevron ruling.

Speaker 4 If you're just making a simple risk-reward calculation and you look at the elderly man on the other side who tried a coup already, and you look at her with hopefully named some cabinet people around her and a 51 Senate and a 6-3 Supreme Court, like what it like, I don't actually understand why that's a close call when you look at it in the context from which we've came.

Speaker 3 That's another point I was making making to Gail. If she wins, I hope Republicans retain one house of Congress.
I'm not even sure which I prefer. Maybe the Senate, which seems likely.

Speaker 3 I mean, my prognostication is the House will flip to the Democrats and the Senate will flip to Republicans. But I know the Nebraska looks, Nebraska race looks close and interesting.

Speaker 3 Let me ask you this question. Would you want Republicans to keep one of the houses of Congress?

Speaker 4 I mean, if we're just in magic worlds where I get to pick my future, I would like for her to be able to do policy.

Speaker 4 And I think having a 50-50 Senate where Dan Osborne or John Tester are the 50th vote, they're not going to pass anything that is too far outside of what I would wish for.

Speaker 4 And I think that it becomes very challenging for her. I mean, look, on the list of bad options, her with a 51-49 Senate is, again, also totally fine.

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Speaker 4 One of my underlying premises is: I think things are basically fine.

Speaker 4 Like, we have some policies that I don't like, and things are obviously not fine Ukraine if you're living in Ukraine or Israel Gaza Beirut But like if you're an American like right now like things are basically stable and basically fine and the idea that we would blow everything up with Donald Trump is absolutely insane It's like a it's like watching a friend who has a good life and has a wife and kids and is having a midlife crisis and is like you know what I'm gonna do?

Speaker 4 I'm gonna start doing blow and marry the stripper and you're like what like

Speaker 4 why why Your life is fine. You know, that's, that's like where I see things.
And so I would be okay with whatever. Like a 51, a mixed Senate, like a close Senate.

Speaker 4 I'm not concerned that socialism is coming if John Tuster is the 50th vote for Kamala Harris's agenda. I'm just not concerned about that.

Speaker 3 So this is, I think, you're kind of putting your finger on really the fundamental question about this election because, you know, I talked to my Democratic friends. And that's sort of their view too.

Speaker 3 Like, okay,

Speaker 3 there's the usual turbulence. When has there not been? And yeah, we did have this unfortunate bout of inflation.
Seems to be brought under control. Crime is coming down.

Speaker 4 Isn't that true?

Speaker 3 Well, yes and no.

Speaker 3 Certain categories of crime are coming down. Others are going way up.
And the ones that are going way up are quality of life crimes or things like auto thefts, shoplifting that make

Speaker 3 people feel scared about everyday life. And if you live in New York City, you just have conversations with normal people.

Speaker 3 You know, 10 years ago, I mean, I never thought twice about letting my kids ride the subway. I just assumed the subway was safe.
Doesn't feel that way anymore.

Speaker 3 I don't think I'm reflecting some kind of New York Post whacked out, you know, extremist view. I think

Speaker 3 this is the feeling of a lot of Americans, at least until fairly recently, the explosion of homelessness in every city in the West

Speaker 3 makes you feel unsafe. I got to say, you know, I do well economically, and I cannot believe what I pay in my everyday life of picking up a bag of groceries and never spending.

Speaker 3 And I'm not buying foie gras and, you know,

Speaker 3 the finest smoked salmon.

Speaker 4 Come on, Brad.

Speaker 4 All right. You're at the New York Times now.
All right. You don't have to.

Speaker 3 I live more simply than you probably think. But I'm thinking to myself, gosh, if I'm noticing the price of these everyday goods,

Speaker 3 what is a normal American family making, let's say, $60,000, $70,080,000 a year feeling about this?

Speaker 3 I just think that the idea that things are fine is a comforting illusion of what my buddy Peggy Noonan called the protected class. And that is what liberals have missed.

Speaker 4 Here's the thing, though. There's always discomfort in life is suffering, right? Like there's always discomfort in life.
I mean, sure, yeah.

Speaker 4 Is the crime in New York as low as it was during the halcyon days of the early aughts? No.

Speaker 4 Is it better than it was in the 1980s? Were we thinking about putting in a like down market Mussolini in the White House in the 80s in New York? Like, no, nobody's doing that.

Speaker 4 Like, was inflation painful? Like, absolutely. Like, is our economy doing better than every other economy in the world? Yeah.
Like, are people out there struggling? Is it hard? Is life hard?

Speaker 4 Like, is life annoying? Does everybody everybody wish they could go on a better vacation? Like, yeah, like, yeah.

Speaker 3 I think, no, I think this is a real mistake.

Speaker 3 I think this is a real blind spot that those of us who have kind of gone through the Biden-Harris years and said, yeah, you know, okay, so it's a little bit worse, but, but not dramatically worse.

Speaker 3 I think we're really, when we say that, I think we're really missing. the way in which a lot of Americans are experiencing their lives.

Speaker 3 And when you're first hit with giant permanent increases in the price of many staples, and then you're hit with higher financing costs on account of higher interest rates, mortgage rates, it is infuriating.

Speaker 3 And it happened fairly quickly. And we can have a perfectly legitimate debate as to the causes of it and say the role that the pandemic played.

Speaker 3 But people look at the administration that constantly said, there's no crisis at the border, inflation is transitory, America is now respected in the world.

Speaker 3 And what they see is something very different.

Speaker 3 And by the way, on the international front, I think we're reliving the 1930s and I can't think of anything good about the 1930s except for a handful of movies. So that worries me.

Speaker 4 Hopefully we don't elect Lindbergh.

Speaker 3 That's why I don't want to vote for Lindbergh.

Speaker 1 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 destroy them.

Speaker 1 This edge-of-your-seat revenge thriller unravels a deliciously dark mystery in a world full of wealth, secrets, and betrayal. Malice will constantly keep you on your toes.

Speaker 1 Why is Adam after the Tanner family? What lengths will he go to? 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.

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Speaker 3 Please ask your healthcare provider about any questions regarding your health or your baby's health.

Speaker 4 I want to go back to the domestic though for a second. I hear what you're saying.
I'm not trying to diminish anybody's individual concerns. What I'm trying to do is treat everybody like a grown-up.

Speaker 4 You say that it's kind of condescending or whatever to like say, to treat people like their problems aren't legitimate. I think it's condescending to baby people.

Speaker 4 If you look at the polling crosstabs, Trump does the best. among people making six figures plus still.

Speaker 4 I know that like the party's trying is like, has put on this working class sheen and that Trump's super fans, a lot of them are more working class.

Speaker 4 But like Trump does the best among people that are in the protected class you're talking about. White, six-figure making, ex-urban Americans with big houses and boats.

Speaker 4 Like when you see the big Trump flags on houses,

Speaker 4 it's not in the ninth wart in New Orleans where the Trump flags are going up. I don't think that that's right.

Speaker 4 I mean, I don't think that the suffering is so great that it rationalizes like, oh, okay, well, let's burn it all down. Like, it just doesn't, those things don't make sense to me.

Speaker 4 I don't, I think you're, I think you're babying people with their rationalizations a little bit.

Speaker 3 You know, I used to, I used to actually take exactly the view that, that you did.

Speaker 3 And I don't anymore in part because, first of all, Trump support, yes, he has outsized support among people making six figures.

Speaker 3 All of my liberal friends in New York and Boston and Chicago and LA making six figures or more who are voting for Harris, she also polls well among actually higher income people.

Speaker 3 I just think that this idea that the hoi polloi are just

Speaker 3 cranky and willing to flush their democracy down the toilet for the sake of

Speaker 3 the illusion of control or authority or better times. I think that's objectively wrong.
And I think it's also bad politics. By the way, you got to meet people where they are, just telling you, like,

Speaker 3 you know, like, don't worry about it. Grow up, you know, man up, do better.

Speaker 3 It's not going to win you a lot of votes.

Speaker 4 Well, it might be bad politics. I don't disagree with that, though.
I don't think that's what Kamala Harris is saying. That's what I'm saying.
I don't think, though, that

Speaker 4 it is objectively wrong. To me, I go to the New York Post site.
You can have alluded to it. I've just fallen on the other side of this equation.
Like, why are people angry?

Speaker 4 Why are people turning to Trump? Why are people upset? Because they're in an information environment where people are lying to them.

Speaker 4 In a column earlier this week, that you wrote that, you know, if Kamala Harris loses, that will be partly the Democrats' fault because they participate in the politics of name-calling and condescension, Pollyanna, that's part we've been talking about.

Speaker 4 I mean, I get maybe that Democrats should do better on all that, but like most of the people that are voting for Trump aren't even consuming that.

Speaker 4 They're consuming it through the prism of what Fox or Newsmax or their TikTok feed or Ben Shapiro or whatever tells them. You know,

Speaker 4 I think that what explains their anger is their consumption.

Speaker 3 Well, I think the liberal side is also feeding itself a highly strained version of the news and

Speaker 3 misinformation exists among liberals as well.

Speaker 4 Just see my comment feed after the Joe Biden debate. Of course, the liberals are getting it too, but I mean the anger part.
I guess this is my point.

Speaker 4 Are most Trump supporters aggrieved because they're experiencing suffering and crime is a big problem in their community and inflation has crushed them or most of them aggrieved because they are living in a stew of anger and hate that is being fed to them and they're being told that like trans prisoners are the biggest problem that faces them and that you know their kids are gonna you know go into school as James and come out as Jane and like what is it like which is the real reason why they're upset and like I think it's the second I think that's the wrong question I think it's it's an amalgam of things first of all you know on a good night, Laura Ingram is reaching, what, one, two million people, usually like the same people every single goddamn night.

Speaker 3 I think you're overstating the extent to which right-wing media feeds this. I think people are responding to their own experience of life and events.

Speaker 3 I think there's a lot of anger and bigotry and misinformation.

Speaker 3 And I also think there are, in my view, rational responses to major policy failures, which my corner of the media, I'm not meaning the New York Times in particular, but sort of my side of quote elite media, misses or plays down or

Speaker 3 doesn't pay the kind of attention that it requires. And so it's very hard to say.
I mean, I just want to resist the overgeneralization.

Speaker 3 Well, these Trump voters are just living, as you put it, in this stew of

Speaker 3 rage and misinformation. I just don't see it that way.
I think we're all living to some extent in a stew of rage and misinformation, and we make sense of it in different ways.

Speaker 3 I wrote this column, was it this week, last week? I've written so much, I can't, the one that you were just referring to.

Speaker 3 I wrote this earnestly because I think that the way in which a lot of liberals, prominent liberals, conduct politics is self-defeating.

Speaker 3 You know, one of the things, one of the reasons why I thought Bill Clinton was such an extraordinarily successful politician is he really worked hard to make people feel that their concerns matter deeply to them.

Speaker 3 And right now, I hear a lot of prominent liberals working hard to make people feel like

Speaker 3 their concerns are essentially fictitious. And that's just, I think, a terrible way of winning people over into a broad coalition.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I don't know. I feel like I'm going to need some receipts on that because I think that that is a complaint about like pundits.

Speaker 4 I don't think that that's what Kamala Harris and Tim Walls are doing. I mean, I think that would maybe be a fair complaint about Donald Trump.
I mean, like Donald Trump called...

Speaker 3 Kamala Harris gave an interview in front of Chuck Todd two years ago. Couldn't believe it.
Couldn't believe it. The political ineptness.

Speaker 3 She said, I think I'm quoting this directly, we have a secure border. The border is secure.

Speaker 3 Okay, that was just total, either she didn't know what she was talking about or just total gaslighting, right? We did not have a secure border. We had a historic wave of migration.

Speaker 3 We can have a perfectly legitimate debate about why that's happening and whose fault that is. But to just say right now we have a secure border was a preposterous comment.

Speaker 3 It's not just the, you know, Joe Scarboroughs of the world talking to the to the morning faithful here.

Speaker 4 Yeah, okay, sure. I agree with that.
But that is not exactly what your criticism was. Your criticism was you're saying that like she doesn't.

Speaker 4 She doesn't make people feel like their concerns are valid. Like, that's not what I hear.
She talks about her middle-class upbringing. She talks about economic concerns all the time.

Speaker 4 She talks about people's worries about

Speaker 4 their families.

Speaker 4 Is she as good as Bill Clinton? No.

Speaker 4 But like, I feel like that there is this, we are in this world where, and I guess me and you, since we're on the never Trumper edge of liberal world right now, like there's always this self-reflection of like rending of garments and saying, well, did we do this right?

Speaker 4 Did this candidate, the Democratic candidate, do this exactly right? And like Donald Trump is out there saying that if you don't like him, you're an enemy of the people.

Speaker 4 Donald Trump is out there saying that the country is a garbage can and that we are the world's garbage can it's just like if you want to talk about somebody who does not give a about concerns about of people that are not him or his own supporters like he's the poster boy for that right i mean so i just don't get it you and i could have hours of happy agreement about the utter that'd be boring but let this conversation not erase the fact that I am voting against this guy for a reason.

Speaker 3 I called him the Ugo Chavez of American politics back in 2015. I don't think I've ever wavered from that view.

Speaker 4 We're not erasing. Unfortunately, you're like a stand-in.
When we booked this, you hadn't decided yet.

Speaker 4 So unfortunately, you're a stand-in for like the person that's like one tick over from you, who's just like, I just can't decide. I just can't decide between Harris and Trump right now.

Speaker 4 So I'm going to write, I'm going to do vote for neither of them. But no, I'm not trying to erase it.

Speaker 4 But I just mean the degree of difference, though, like your criticism that you're offering of Harris is like, Trump does that times 100.

Speaker 3 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 Trump is worse.

Speaker 3 How many times can I say that? Trump is worse. That's why you should vote for Harris, because it's a binary choice.
Trump is worse.

Speaker 3 He's a danger to our institutions. He is corrosive to the soul of our democracy.
He's a bigot, an ogre, an isolationist. And the worst part about Trump for me, well, all those things are terrible.

Speaker 3 I don't know if this is the worst, but okay.

Speaker 3 As an old-fashioned Reagan Republican whose first memory of an election was Reagan winning in 1980 and who believed in the architecture of the liberal world order and believed in the benefits of immigration and believed in a growth economy open to competition from around the world,

Speaker 3 a Trump victory assures us that we will not have a healthy conservative movement in the United States, mainstream movement, for generations. And I think that puts us on a path to long-term decline.

Speaker 4 We're going to clip that. I should have included that in my article to Nikki Haley voters this morning because that's another good argument.
There's so many good arguments.

Speaker 3 That's the best one.

Speaker 4 I guess this is the frustrating part for me.

Speaker 4 And this is why sometimes my frustration shows on the 991 element, because it's like, to me, it's the easiest call I've ever had. I voted for Kamley yesterday, and I said that I worked for Jeb Bush.

Speaker 4 I love Jeb.

Speaker 4 I was very proud to vote for him in the hopeless primary. I was like, there are a a lot of, I worked for a number of candidates I liked.
I was proud to vote for them. I've never had an easier call.

Speaker 4 It's like, it's never been an easier call to me. And that's why sometimes I just, I get frustrated with this.

Speaker 4 Okay, we're going to microanalyze the concerns that we have when everything you just said about Trump is just so obviously true. And that's the thing that frustrates me with people in that.

Speaker 4 in the Wall Street Journal Ed board world and the Brett Baer,

Speaker 4 all these people who are my friends, I just get so frustrated.

Speaker 4 It's the narcissism of small differences. I get so frustrated because it's so obvious to me.
Do you not share that frustration? It doesn't feel that obvious to you, I guess.

Speaker 3 This is to me a much tougher choice than Hillary Trump or Joe Trump was.

Speaker 4 We're post-January 6th now, though. Yeah.
Because you assumed January 6th happening eventually was baked in and your assumptions of Trump, I guess, in 2016.

Speaker 3 Yeah, kind of.

Speaker 3 I mean, given when I look back at what I wrote about him, I think it was actually kind of predictable that it would, not that specifically, but

Speaker 4 like

Speaker 3 something like that but I'm just talking about on on policy Hillary and Joe Biden Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden were centrist had a long history of being essentially centrist mainstream liberals

Speaker 3 Kamala has flirted with the left at different times certainly in her 2019 run which is when I first sort of started taking notice of her and she has not distinguished herself as a particularly nimble candidate in the few months that she's had but you know to me, it's still

Speaker 3 when I finally realized I got to make a choice, Gil is right. It's binary.
I can't just sit it out. It wasn't hard to make.

Speaker 4 All right. Final thing, putting back your foreign affairs hat on, we kind of got waylaid by Israel in the context of the domestic discussion.

Speaker 4 But as you look to the next administration, and the threat from Iran, I guess it maybe looks a little different than it did six months ago, given some of Israel's recent successes.

Speaker 4 What's happening with Putin? What's happening with Xi and China? How do you assess the threats? Like you've kind of alluded to this a couple of times in the podcast that you think

Speaker 4 that we're going to face big challenges on this front in the next five to 10 years. I'm just open-ended kind of closer to assess the threats that face us abroad.

Speaker 3 I think we

Speaker 3 are going to see four years of very severe challenges, not just to our allies, but to the United States itself on multiple fronts.

Speaker 3 The introduction of North Korean troops into Russia, possibly Ukraine,

Speaker 3 is going to be remembered as a historic moment. There is a new tripartite or quadripartite agreement, to go back to the terminology of that era, between

Speaker 3 China and Russia and their no-limits friendship between North Korea and Russia, between Russia and Iran.

Speaker 4 Possibly a quintuple with Elon and Trump as the fifth-headed monster, given the private phone calls, but who knows? At least a quad.

Speaker 3 That is really scary.

Speaker 3 And that's why I really pray that Kamala wins, that she surrounds herself with advisors who believe in the necessity of defending the free world against all of its enemies, foreign and domestic, and that she is capable of rising to what will be, I think, early crises because the Xis and the Putins are going to try to test her very early on in her presidency.

Speaker 4 Where do you see the test coming, most likely?

Speaker 3 153 planes last week, Chinese planes surrounding Taiwan, a blockade of Taiwan, let's say,

Speaker 3 or a rapid effort by Iran to go for a bomb. It could come on any number of fronts.
Russia supplying targeting coordinates for the Houthis. I mean, that's aiding and abetting piracy.

Speaker 3 So it could happen in any number of ways.

Speaker 3 By the way, not least of which is a small Russian incursion, quote-unquote incursion into, say, Estonia, some kind of probing effort to just see what she does.

Speaker 4 All right.

Speaker 3 On that happy note.

Speaker 4 Yeah, that's a good, that's a wonderful thing. This is why we brought you on, Brett Stevens.
This is the weekend podcast. It's Friday.

Speaker 4 Everyone listening was stressed about the New York Times-Sienna poll showing Trump leading by one.

Speaker 4 And so, rather than do deep dives on that and obsess over that, I was like, we're going to bring on Brett Stevens and we're going to talk about

Speaker 4 the potential incursions from our four greatest threats abroad. So I appreciate the time.
And come on.

Speaker 3 I just have to tell you.

Speaker 4 you so we're going to end us on a happy note or what do you have to tell me

Speaker 3 i'm going to tell you it is uh i'm one of those i just don't listen to podcasts i'm just not a podcast person i have a dear friend my oldest friend from from university of chicago days beach schwartz and he's a he's he's very difficult to define politically i guess he's on the left but he is such a fan of your podcast and he's like my friend beach he's like has have you been on on on the bulwark podcast it's like the best podcast.

Speaker 3 And he was saying this for a while. And then you contacted me.
And so I was like, okay, I'd better do this podcast.

Speaker 4 And he's right. Thank you.

Speaker 4 Shout out to you. We'll be sending you a personalized gift.
We'll see what we got on the side. Never Trump from the Jump.
We'll come up. We'll come up with something fun.
And

Speaker 4 very much appreciate it. Thanks so much to Brett Stevens, to the professor, to Beach.
We'll see you guys all on Monday. It's Monday.
So we'll have Bill Crystal.

Speaker 2 Peace.

Speaker 3 See ya.

Speaker 3 Everything is cool.

Speaker 3 Everything's okay.

Speaker 3 Why, just before last Christmas,

Speaker 3 my baby went away

Speaker 3 across the sea to an island

Speaker 3 while the bridges brightly burned.

Speaker 3 So far away from my land,

Speaker 3 the valley of the unconcerned.

Speaker 3 I was walking down the road, man,

Speaker 3 just looking at my shoes,

Speaker 3 when God sent me an angel

Speaker 3 just to chase away my blues.

Speaker 3 I saw a hundred thousand blackbirds

Speaker 3 just flying through the sky.

Speaker 3 And they seemed to form a teardrop

Speaker 3 from a black-haired angel's eye.

Speaker 3 And that tear fell all around me.

Speaker 3 And it washed my sins away.

Speaker 3 Now everything is cool.

Speaker 3 Everything's okay.

Speaker 4 The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

Speaker 7 By the time I hit my 50s, I'd learned a few things. Like how family is precious.
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