Bill Kristol: Fanning the Flames

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Speaker 16 Hello, and welcome to the Board Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.
If it's Monday, we are worldwide with Bill Crystal. How you doing, Bill?

Speaker 15 I'm fine, Tim. How are you?

Speaker 16 Doing pretty good. What a world we're in.
We've got to do this again. There's another assassination attempt, apparently, against the former president.

Speaker 16 Yesterday, Trump was playing a round of golf when a Secret Service agent spotted a rifle at the scope in the bushes outside the course.

Speaker 16 The Secret Service opened fire on the man who was able to get away.

Speaker 16 It's still unclear whether the alleged assassin was able to take a shot at at the agents or if all the shots were going his direction. His name is Ryan Ralph.

Speaker 16 What the fuck is happening, Bill? I guess is my question for you.

Speaker 15 He has a criminal record. He seems to be a disturbed individual.

Speaker 15 It's good that nothing came of it and no one was hurt. And Secret Service seems to have moved with speed.

Speaker 15 Of course, there was the immediate attempts to take political advantage of it, but he's a little unclear what his politics are. They seem extremely confused.
But he was for Vivek.

Speaker 15 He wasn't wasn't for Trump. He was for the Ramaswamy Haley ticket.
I don't know. But before that, he was for Sanders.

Speaker 16 He was 2016 Trump voter. He was 2016 Trump voter.
In 2019, he got very into Tulsi. Then he hoped Bernie would beat Biden in 2020.
Then when Biden won, he was for Biden.

Speaker 16 And then in 2024, yeah, as you mentioned, he was for a Vivek-Haley unity ticket.

Speaker 15 But mostly he's, I think, a disturbed person. The one thing that interests me a little bit is so he sort of pretended, or maybe he really thought he was, trying to help Ukraine.
It's very unclear.

Speaker 15 But the Ukrainians saw he was a kook and rejected him. Actually, he never had anything to do with Ukraine.
And I guess went there once, but nothing came of it.

Speaker 15 The Russians are now trying to take advantage of this and say that this whole assassination attempt on Trump might have been a Ukrainian operation.

Speaker 15 This guy clearly was a Ukrainian operative or something, which is ludicrous, but it shows how much the Russians are into.

Speaker 15 taking advantage of anything that happens here to sow division, to help Trump actually, and to use disinformation very aggressively.

Speaker 15 It's why a friend of mine had tweeted me last night, who follows this stuff very closely, a disinformation expert, saying the Russians are going to take advantage of this.

Speaker 15 And I thought, oh, come on, this guy's so obviously just a kook. Can they really promote this narrative? And will it work? And he wrote, texted back, they will promote it.

Speaker 15 And about an hour later, Medvedev, the former prime minister, promoted it. And then the question is, will it work? And one would normally say, well, of course not.
It's ridiculous. But I don't know.

Speaker 15 It'd be interesting to see how much MAGA picks that up, right?

Speaker 16 Yeah, I mean, I think that their kind of first-order response is just more like kind of more in the machismo sense.

Speaker 16 Trump put out a bleat that was like 0-2, you know, for two tries to get them that failed. And so I think that there's going to be a lot of that.

Speaker 16 And then you get into the, I can't even tolerate this time, like the discourse about Trump's campaign manager, Les Vita, talked to Mark Caputo about this, our colleague, but also was publicly posting about this, about how like this is the responsibility of people that say Donald Trump is a threat to democracy as if like just stating observable facts is a problem now.

Speaker 16 Like clearly,

Speaker 16 I don't think that discourse is a problem here. You have a man and Ralph, who, as you mentioned, is disturbed, also has, somebody put it this way, a wrap sheet the size of a CVS receipt.

Speaker 16 A lot of it was traffic tickets, but also included theft. It included a 2002 arrest for carrying a fully automatic machine gun.

Speaker 16 Well, I guess at this point, we don't know how he got the AK-47 with the scope that I guess that he had on the golf course.

Speaker 16 But to your point, I mean, it's like, this is a disturbed man who has access to firearms.

Speaker 16 I think, really one fair open question, Biden, as is typical for him, acted responsibly, said, thank God the president is okay regarding Trump, and then said, quickly, the Secret Service needs help.

Speaker 16 Yeah, I mean, maybe there's some Secret Service potential criticisms here. And I guess they did do their job, but I don't know.
I mean, Trump's been golfing at this golf course for nine years.

Speaker 16 Is there not a more secure way to, you know, kind of handle the perimeter? That seems like a fair thing to look into.

Speaker 15 I worked for the Secret Service when I was in government government so many years ago, and I had a high regard for them. They seem to have screwed up in other respects in the subsequent 25, 30 years.

Speaker 15 On the other hand, I mean, they're pretty impressive when you actually see them up close. And I don't know if you can secure the perimeter of entire golf course.
What are we talking about then?

Speaker 15 I mean, building a wall, really, or we have agents at every hole, or five at every hole, or 10, and you know, the fairway. And then it's not that massive an organization.
So I'm not blaming anyone.

Speaker 15 It's good that it didn't happen. The idea is, you say the MAGA talk, we can both say that Trump is a real threat to American democracy and that people shouldn't shoot at Donald Trump.

Speaker 15 They shouldn't try to kill Donald Trump and they shouldn't use violence and no one should encourage violence of any sort.

Speaker 15 And we can further say that, in fact, the encouragement of violence is lopsidedly on one side. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris do not routinely encourage violence, and Donald Trump does.

Speaker 16 Correct. Yeah.
I mean, Donald Jr. was complaining about various people

Speaker 16 sending tweets that he felt were not appropriate about his dialogue. And it's like, it's the guy that was posting a Paul Pelosi Halloween costume, which was like a hammer and underwear.

Speaker 16 And Trump was still, even after the first attempted assassination against him, was still making fun of Nancy and Paul Pelosi at his rallies weeks later.

Speaker 16 So I just, I will not abide any kind of conversation about the rhetoric being at issue here. I do think the Secret Service thing, you make a fair point about the course.
I think it's fair.

Speaker 16 We had a lengthy interview with Carol Lenig a couple of weeks back. We'll put in the show notes if anybody missed that.
And I think she's very good on this, has been covering this for decades.

Speaker 16 And I think that's good to follow her recording on this as it goes forward because I think that clearly there's going to need to be some changes at the Secret Service. All right.

Speaker 16 Now we have J.D. Vance.
This was before the attempted assassination. We had J.D.
Vance doing the rounds on the Sunday shows.

Speaker 16 He did three interviews, mostly dedicated to his lies about Haitian immigrants eating pets and abducting pets.

Speaker 16 And I could play a million clips from it, but I just picked one that was my favorite/slash the low light of his tour this weekend. Let's listen.

Speaker 17 And if we're going to take the first-hand accounts of people who are on the ground in Springfield, why don't you bring on some of the people on your program who say that the migrants are eating their pets?

Speaker 17 You're applying a double standard here. You're saying if one person accuses J.D.
Vance, I'm going to take that person's

Speaker 17 gospel truth. You have somebody else.
Even if you misrepresent it.

Speaker 17 If you have another person who's saying they're eating the cats, you're going to completely ignore them, attack them, silence them, and harass them. them.

Speaker 17 That double standard is why people don't trust the media and why we're not talking about public policy 51 days out from presidential election.

Speaker 16 Why are you not interviewing the imaginary racists that I made up? Dana, why aren't you having them on your show?

Speaker 16 Why are you harassing the people that are advancing lies and smears? It's so unfair. The media is so unfair, Bill.

Speaker 15 I mean, as I understand it, the woman whose original Facebook post got blown up has said she didn't have any first-hand knowledge, and she very much regrets having been used in this way.

Speaker 15 So, I don't even know who they would go interview there in Springfield. It's really a disgrace.

Speaker 15 And there's an elected city manager in Springfield, and there are plenty of local business types and pastors, all of whom say this is all rubbish. And leave aside the eating of the pets.

Speaker 15 I mean, who knows if one pet somewhere in America has been eaten in the last year or two or three by immigrants or by natives, right? The whole thing's a lie.

Speaker 15 The Haitians weren't dumped there, as Trump keeps saying. They're not illegal, as Trump keeps saying.

Speaker 15 They were sort of asked to come by several business leaders as they opened up some new plants and there were not enough people to fill these jobs.

Speaker 15 The data, you can look at crime and public school and other kinds of data for Springfield, a very normal, kind of average, what's going on in Ohio. The whole idea that it's been a disaster is wrong.

Speaker 15 But fine, we can have a public policy debate, I suppose, about temporary protected status and whether that's a good thing that Haitians have it and so forth. But that's not what J.D.

Speaker 15 Vance has tried to have. I miss J.D.
Vance's long speech about temporary protected status and how many people have it and how he would choose to administer it and what the laws are about that.

Speaker 15 I miss that. It seems to me that the whole thing began with him repeating false rumors and he knew they were false.
Can we just be honest about this? He wasn't taken in by anything.

Speaker 15 He was lying and he knew he was lying.

Speaker 16 He said if I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, I don't know who's suffering here, then that's what I'm going to do.

Speaker 16 If I have to create stories, he said that yesterday. So yeah, he slept.

Speaker 15 He showed up. Creating stories about minority groups who feel different to the people who are already there, that really has a wonderful history in the 20th century, right?

Speaker 15 That never goes off the rails and leads to violence or anything terrible. I mean, it's so mind-bogglingly irresponsible.

Speaker 15 The combination of fanning the flames of hatred with the lying in order to fan the flames of hatred.

Speaker 15 You know, it's one thing to take a crime, an actual terrible crime committed by an immigrant who came across the border, let's say, and that those happen, obviously, as terrible crimes happen in other ways, too.

Speaker 15 It's demagogic, it's irresponsible, but I mean, presumably, it's at least a factual thing that the crime happened.

Speaker 15 This is another step, really, isn't it, of just inventing the problem and then lying about the people whom you're demonizing.

Speaker 16 Your newsletter this morning, I think, hits it right. If folks haven't got it, you can sign up at thebuler.com, but it's Vance Trump and the politics of hate.

Speaker 16 And you cited this interview he did with James Pogue, who's really good. I don't know why they were publishing James Pogue and the American Conservative, but

Speaker 16 don't judge the rider based on the outlet in this case. But in his interview with J.D.
Vance, J.D. said to him, I think our people hate the right people.

Speaker 16 At the time, J.D. is, of course, talking about childless cat ladies and, you know, whatever, coastal elites and people that went to Oberlin or whatever.

Speaker 16 But this is where that kind of mindset ends, right?

Speaker 16 That we hate the right people, but it's not, it's not really, we're not really just talking about CNN here, really, when we talk about hating the right people.

Speaker 16 We're talking about these immigrants that are coming to Springfield to work and to live the American dream.

Speaker 16 That's who he wants to hate.

Speaker 15 Yeah, totally. I mean, using hate is pretty striking about other Americans.
He could say, we dislike them or we disagree with them. Our people disagree with the other right people.

Speaker 15 Our people, I guess, is the Trump supporters. He was trying to get to vote for him in the Republican Senate primary in Ohio in 2022.
They became his people, and Trump supported him, and he won.

Speaker 15 But yeah, the conceit is that the right people are the liberal, the horrible liberal elites.

Speaker 15 But that, you know, when you peel peel that back after one second, it turns out the attack on the liberal elites is just a mask or an excuse for cultivating bigotry against immigrants and against racial minorities and so forth.

Speaker 15 I mean, again, it's not like J.D. Manson spent a lot of time explaining how liberal elites brought the Haitians to Springfield, Ohio, right?

Speaker 16 Speaking of, obviously, during the Trump administration in 2018,

Speaker 16 it was when the sort of Haitians started to move into Springfield to work on some of these jobs. Like the whole thing is.
Yeah.

Speaker 15 Liberal elites are not sort of morally relativistic about eating cats. You know, that's not what they are.

Speaker 15 On some other issues, you could say that they're destroying traditional norms, but I don't think animal eating, I think if anything, the liberal elites are slightly nicer to animals than Donald Trump Jr., who's slaughtering a million of them as he goes on his hunting expeditions.

Speaker 15 So the whole thing is fake. I mean, that's, I guess, what strikes me.

Speaker 15 And I say this as someone who participated in criticisms of liberal elites for decades and at the Weekly Standard and when I was in politics with Dan Quayle and so forth.

Speaker 15 I think we were sincere. I think we thought the liberal elites were doing some damage.
I don't think we used,

Speaker 15 who knows what our deep motives are, and I now regret some of those attacks because they could be taken this way.

Speaker 15 But I don't think we thought we were using that just as an excuse to demonize, you know, certainly minorities of different kinds, whether cultural or racial or ethnic.

Speaker 15 And I think we were sometimes pretty careful to try not to, actually.

Speaker 15 But here, I don't think the mask is pretty much off. This is not about, as you say, his dislike for, I don't know what even is, criticism of any actual elites.

Speaker 16 Criticism for the people that criticized his Netflix movie, I think. Yeah, yes.
I think those are the people that he's really mad at, the people that gave bad reviews.

Speaker 15 Trump's a billionaire says he is.

Speaker 15 And Vance is a Yale law school graduate who went to Silicon Valley and did quite well in the two or three years he sort of worked there with Peter Thiel and so forth before coming back to Ohio to get.

Speaker 15 tens of millions of dollars of funding from his buddies to help him win a Senate seat. So, like, who are the elites here? Trump and Vance? Compared to Harris and Walls?

Speaker 16 A story dramatized by Ron Howard.

Speaker 16 What are you doing? What are you fucking talking about? Just to your point about how there are ways to talk about the policy questions here that are reasonable and fair.

Speaker 16 And, you know, the Ohio has a Republican governor. Ohio's run by Republicans.

Speaker 16 So, again, like the whole conceit that we need the media to care about this so that the liberals will take this seriously It makes no sense in the context of this issue because Ohio is run entirely by Republicans.

Speaker 16 But I want to play kind of a lengthy clip, but I think it's important just to listen to what a normal, what a Republican politician would have sounded like in 2011.

Speaker 16 Here's Mike DeWine talking about this on the Sunday shows.

Speaker 18 And here's a question I never thought I would have to ask, but do you see any evidence as governor of the state that Haitian immigrants are eating pets?

Speaker 19 No, absolutely not. That's what the the mayor said.
That's what the chief of police has said. I think it's unfortunate that this came up.
Let me tell you what we do know, though.

Speaker 19 What we know is that the Haitians who are in Springfield are legal. They came to Springfield to work.

Speaker 19 Ohio is on the move and Springfield has really made a great resurgence with a lot of companies coming in. These Haitians came in to work for these companies.

Speaker 19 What the companies tell us is that they are very good workers. They're very happy to have them there.
And frankly, that's helped the economy. Now, are there problems connected? Well, sure.

Speaker 19 When you go from a population of 58,000 and add 15,000 people onto that, you're going to have some challenges and some problems. And we're addressing those.
We're working on those every single day.

Speaker 19 Primary care is essential.

Speaker 19 The other thing we're working a lot on is driving. We have Haitians who, frankly, many times have not driven before.

Speaker 19 We need to get more driver's training, and we're working on that. So these are things that we are working on.
Springfield is moving forward.

Speaker 19 I've always felt that,

Speaker 19 as the governor of the state of Ohio, you know, we want people who want to come here who are legal, where they come from another state or another country, who want to work.

Speaker 16 It's a normal, pro-growth, pro-business, Republican. That's who's running the state, and that's what J.D.
Vance is trying to elide. What did you think about Mike DeWine?

Speaker 15 No, I thought he was excellent. I mean, he's a 77-year-old.
I've known him a long time, actually. He's 77 years old, and the bad news is he's the pastor of the Republican Party.
And J.D.

Speaker 15 Vance, at age 39, having won a big primary in 2022, is probably, we can get back to this, but I fear very much the future.

Speaker 15 I was in Ohio, I was in Cincinnati, so it happens giving a talk there, so he talked to a bunch of people.

Speaker 15 And I just asked, as a sort of thought experiment, if there's a primary in 2026 for DeWine's governorship, he ends his two terms, do you think a J.D. Vance type wins or a Mike Dewine type wins?

Speaker 15 And we don't know. We'll see.
Obviously, it depends on how Trump does and what happens in a million ways. But they were not optimistic about the Mike Dewine type future.

Speaker 16 I mean, the favorite would obviously be Vivek. Right.

Speaker 15 I think he'd be a favorite.

Speaker 15 So I'd say, A, B, I wish DeWine would just say incidentally, I can't support Trump and Vance for president and vice president while he's at them because he's still nominally supporting them, which I find slightly annoying.

Speaker 15 But he was good on TV Sunday, so I give him a bit of a pass, I guess.

Speaker 16 Don't give him a pass. You don't need to give him a pass.
I didn't give him him a pass, actually.

Speaker 15 I've criticized him three times for it, but I'm giving him more of a pass than I'm giving the others.

Speaker 15 Also, where are the other Republicans? As you say, the state's full of Republicans. They have supermajorities in the state legislature.

Speaker 15 That district is represented by a very conservative, election-denying Republican.

Speaker 15 He hasn't called on outsiders to stay out and called, you know, let's have comedy and let's work on these problems, nor have other statewide Republican officials that I know of, Republican Speaker of the House, the state Senate leader and stuff.

Speaker 15 They're all hiding in a corner because they don't want to offend Trump or Vance or their supporters. Nationally, Andrew Egger made this point this morning.

Speaker 15 Almost no Republican members of Congress have spoken up.

Speaker 15 You know, who's really good on immigration in the sense both of having liberal policies, which I agreed with, but also very decent in his rhetoric about it in recent times, who's kind of a prominent Republican, a guy named George W.

Speaker 15 Bush.

Speaker 16 You might remember him. Yeah.

Speaker 15 And, you know, God forbid he should say anything because, I mean, he can't get involved, I guess, in any actual issue that's affecting this country that he does care a lot about.

Speaker 15 Isn't this a moment for Bush to speak up?

Speaker 16 He can fundraise for Dave McCormick.

Speaker 15 Do it.

Speaker 16 And that's allowed. It's a private fundraiser.
He can fundraise for Dave McCormick. I'm sure he'll say something oblique in criticism there.
The difference also is just so striking.

Speaker 16 I re-watched the Palin Couric interview a couple months ago. Sarah Palin for all her problems, which we don't need to reliticate now about preparedness, et cetera.

Speaker 15 Like her actual words.

Speaker 16 in these interviews about immigration, about some of these divisive issues are orders of magnitude more responsible than what what J.D. Vance is saying.

Speaker 16 And I just, I think that that fact alone is pretty telling. What do you think JVL's writing today about how Trump is winning? What's this? Like, here we go.
We're 20 minutes into the podcast.

Speaker 16 We're talking about immigration. If anytime you're talking about immigration, that's a win for Trump.
What do you say to that?

Speaker 15 Yeah, and I think that Trump, I mean, Marca Puto suggests, reported in the book, that some of the Trump people believe this or say they believe this. I'm dubious about it.

Speaker 15 I think it's a little too facile to you. Anytime they're talking about X, we're winning.
Well, yeah, sort of. I mean, we've been in campaigns and you want the debate to be on friendly turf.

Speaker 15 But if the debate is on friendly turf, but your guy is making such extreme points that people are dropping off from supporting him, and it's not being framed in the way you want, I'm not so sure he's winning.

Speaker 15 A border, if we were debating the border, I think Trump probably would be winning. Every poll shows he's winning that issue.
He's managed to get us off from the border onto...

Speaker 15 Haitians in Springfield, which I'm not so sure he wins that debate. So I'm a little less confident or worried, I guess, that Trump's winning this debate politically.

Speaker 15 And I think the Harris campaign has been smart a couple of ways. The Harris campaign has been smart enough to engage it.
They don't need to do this.

Speaker 15 People like us, if I can say, need to push back and say what the truth is and push back against Trump. I wish other Republicans would do it.
I wish George W. Bush would do it and et cetera.

Speaker 15 But I think the Harris campaign has been pretty smart. The other thing is, we do tend, you and I have discussed this before,

Speaker 15 you know, you see wherever we are and we're watching urb media and so forth, and we assume that's kind of what voters are seeing.

Speaker 15 Voters in the swing states are seeing, I mean, an unbelievable volume of ads, both on TV and digitally.

Speaker 15 Now, those hit diminishing returns, and I've always been more on the side that urban media matters than paid media. But I wonder what's happening in paid media.

Speaker 15 I bet the Trump people, I think, are up with border ads. They were at least last week when I spoke to someone in Pittsburgh.
And I don't know exactly what Harris is up with, maybe more positive ads.

Speaker 15 Those could be doing some damage.

Speaker 16 Harris's ads are really gauzy right now. Very

Speaker 16 positive and gauzy.

Speaker 15 I'm more worried about Trump's ads on the border and on crime, sort of the more traditional demagogic Republican message, as opposed to the extreme Springfield, Ohio Trump message.

Speaker 15 I'm worried those could be doing some damage. But I also think Harris is up with a lot of stuff on abortion rights.
That was extremely strong for the debate. Other people are echoing that.

Speaker 15 So I don't think the Harris people are falling into a trap here. And so I guess I feel okay.
And I think empirically, I don't know what you think.

Speaker 15 I looked at some polls over the weekend, some state polls. Harris is doing pretty well, and the Democrats are doing pretty well.

Speaker 15 I mean, I was struck at some of the state-level stuff, including the down ballot stuff.

Speaker 15 Democrats are doing awfully well, and Harris is not going to lose if the Democrats hold some of those margins in some of those state races.

Speaker 16 Yeah, I want to get to the polls. Just one last thing on this.
I mean, I understand the argument that all things being equal, it'd be better for Harris to be talking about abortion.

Speaker 16 And, you know, there's a, you wrote this morning, there's a horror story out of Georgia where somebody was, a woman, was not getting abortion services because the doctors were worried and kind of stalling about whether like this situation was illegal under a new Georgia law.

Speaker 16 Like that would, on balance, probably be a better thing for the media to be talking about.

Speaker 16 That said, like the people Trump is losing, there's always this focus on the people Trump gained, like the working class whites, essentially, and now some working class black, younger men of color.

Speaker 16 The people that Trump lost, he didn't lose on policy.

Speaker 16 The people in the Atlanta, Charlotte suburbs, they are grossed out by this. And

Speaker 16 they're not interested in having a just unapologetic racist

Speaker 16 saying that immigrants are dog eaters as the president. They aren't.
They don't like it. And so I do think it cuts both ways.
I just had to share this one last thing on this.

Speaker 16 You know, Jan Harold Brunavant? Brunvant? You know who that is?

Speaker 15 Can't say I do.

Speaker 16 He was best known for popularizing the concept of an urban legend. Here he is in 1987.
Have you seen the bumper sticker that proclaims save a dog, eat a refugee?

Speaker 16 Or heard the joke about a Vietnamese cookbook called 101 Ways to Walk Your Dog?

Speaker 16 Neither of them would make much sense if you've missed the rumors that Oriental immigrants are taking their neighbors' pet cats and dogs and using them for food.

Speaker 16 The refugees are said to have stolen the pets from cars outside parking malls. These stories have surfaced all over the U.S., especially where immigrants have resettled.

Speaker 16 So it's a 1987 urban legend, 50 years later, being advanced by a guy from Yale. It's about all you need to know.

Speaker 15 Fuck it. It is all we need to know.
It brings home to me, though. We talked about the Vance pick at the time, and I think I was very much of the view, and I think you were too, that it was important.

Speaker 15 It was a sign of where Trump wanted to go in this campaign and where he thought the party should go in the future and maybe where the party would go in the future, because being the vice presidential nominee, even if they lose, gives him a real standing he wouldn't otherwise have had as a second-year senator.

Speaker 15 And clearly, he's very close to Don Jr. and Tucker Carlson.
So there's a whole network there, and Vivek and Peter Thiel.

Speaker 15 This has really brought home to me how, even if Harris beats Trump by Biden-type margin or whatever, in November, I mean, how difficult any kind of coming back to DeWine normalcy for the Republican Party will be.

Speaker 15 It's been a depressing weekend just to see the demagoguery and the racism and the nativism, but also thinking about the fact that, and again, to see the lack of pushback by anyone.

Speaker 15 No one out there is thinking, I can make my name in the Republican Party by being the 45-year-old version of Mike DeWine. I could stand up against this.

Speaker 15 And a year from now, I'll be regarded as the guy who had the courage to do the right thing.

Speaker 15 I mean, Liz Cheney has done the right thing, others have done the Kinzinger's, Adam Kinzinger's done the right thing, that their future is probably not in the Republican Party.

Speaker 15 So, in that respect, it's a depressing sign for the future of the Republic.

Speaker 16 I think that's true. I'll give you, here's my silver lining on that.
One other thing that both of us were on at the time was that J.D. Vance could be a rare instance where the VP pick was damaging.

Speaker 16 And I do just think that it has solidified this impression among people that, like, this is a very extreme ticket.

Speaker 16 And if you had Doug Bergham as the VP pick, he wouldn't be creating four-day news cycles about racist hallucinations, about immigrants stealing your little German Shepherd.

Speaker 15 No, that's really a good point. I mean, it was the case, I think, that Vance was the one who started it and Trump jumped on, right?

Speaker 15 So, I mean, Vance is really affecting the race in a way that a VP candidate doesn't normally.

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Speaker 4 Get Ready for Malice, a twisted new drama starring Jack Whitehall, David DeCovney, and Carice Van Houten.

Speaker 8 Jack Whitehall plays Adam, a charming manny infiltrates the wealthy Tanner family with a hidden motive to destroy them.

Speaker 11 This edge-of-your-seat revenge thriller unravels a deliciously dark mystery in a world full of wealth, secrets, and betrayal.

Speaker 13 Malice will constantly keep you on your toes.

Speaker 2 Why is Adam after the Tanner family?

Speaker 10 What lengths will he go to?

Speaker 2 One thing's for sure, the past never stays buried so keep your enemies close watch malice all episodes now streaming exclusively on prime video

Speaker 16 all right let's look at the polls so there's an abc episode suggested it has harris up 652.46 nationally it's pretty good abc episodes has been a pretty good poll for her there's been kind of a battery of polls going uh since the debate in national that have mostly showed harris up about four on average uh there was one poll that went the other direction that had Trump up, actually, which could be an outlier, but bears mentioning.

Speaker 16 The most interesting poll to me that came out over the weekend was in Iowa, which isn't a swing state per se, but Ann Seltzer's Dwayne Register poll has been very good and kind of this canary in a coal mine in a lot of ways in past cycles about like what way the political winds are blowing.

Speaker 16 And it showed Harris down four, 47, 43.

Speaker 16 Trump won Iowa by eight. Trump was winning in her last poll over Biden by 18.

Speaker 16 I thought that was pretty significant. You said you were looking at some other down ballot polls as well.
What have you seen out there?

Speaker 15 No, I think Iowa is significant. And, you know, the white voters, if I can put it that way, in Iowa, I'm going to put it that way.
I'm just going to say it analytically. The white voters in Iowa.

Speaker 15 It's Iowa.

Speaker 16 It's Iowa. The people are white.

Speaker 15 No, but they're also socioeconomically and in terms of education, not that unlike the white voters of Wisconsin and even Michigan. And Wisconsin, they're actually quite

Speaker 15 like in the sense that they're pretty close by. And there's some data that show they go the same way.

Speaker 15 So if Harris is running four points ahead in Iowa, that's not because of increased turnout among young blacks or anything.

Speaker 15 So that would suggest that maybe that's the case also in Wisconsin, where she is actually running a little bit ahead of where it looks like of where Biden was.

Speaker 15 And generally, I think is a good sign for Harris. And Ann Selzer is a very good pollster.
So being four points better than Biden is strong. The other things I would cite are some scattered races.

Speaker 15 Well, in the Senate races, the Democrats are just clobbering the Republicans. And maybe that's because they're incumbents in some cases, and the Republican candidates are particularly weak.

Speaker 15 But the numbers, the margins are great enough that it's just hard to believe that in Nevada, in Wisconsin, in Pennsylvania, actually, that Trump's going to run that much ahead of Dave McCormick, if Dave McCormick's really losing by, you know, six-plus points, and some of them are double digits.

Speaker 15 I don't know. I mean, it's hard to say.
North Carolina, the Republican gubernatorial candidates losing in double digits.

Speaker 15 Trump's a much stronger candidate, obviously, people are capable of splitting their ticket,

Speaker 15 but to that degree, I'm not sure.

Speaker 15 So I think there's a fair amount of evidence that sort of beneath the surface, and this is also true of some of the of the favorability ratings and so forth, the ballot test is Harris plus three or four nationally, I'd say, at this point.

Speaker 15 Feels to me like the underneath it's a little stronger for Harris, maybe.

Speaker 16 Yeah. We've got Amy Walter on tomorrow, so we're going to do a real deep dive, get nerdy on the numbers.
Another good indicator, gas prices down seven straight week.

Speaker 16 I just sort of these sort of more economic kind of soft indicators. I mean, like the soft landing of the economy, we are going to have a rate cut coming.
We were driving through New Orleans yesterday.

Speaker 16 My husband was like, ooh, we're under three bucks on gases now. Just kind of those sorts of things.
It's down enough for people to notice.

Speaker 15 I think that's not nothing. Harris, I think, should really leap on this.

Speaker 15 And again, without going to the mistaken Biden direction of defending all the policies of the last three and a half years, I think she now has a chance, Carville me at this point in the conversation I did with him, to sort of make people worry that Trump will disrupt what is a decent progression in the economy.

Speaker 15 She should actually give a speech. It'll be boring.
People won't watch the speech itself to the Detroit Economic Club or something like that.

Speaker 15 But it will get some stuff out there, some real data, and not just in an interview with local news, but really lay it out of what Trump's economic plan might do to threaten what is now pretty obviously less inflation, increasing wages, a good stock market.

Speaker 15 People get a little worried.

Speaker 15 I mean, they're not happy with the economy, so you can't be in the position of being complacent defending mourning in America, but you can be in the position of warning about what Trump could do.

Speaker 16 Yeah, and talk about moving the right direction going forward. I think that's right.

Speaker 16 We'll put, by the way, a link to the Carvell interview in the show notes it was it was classic james it's very good and worth people's time if they're looking for some bonus audio content uh this week i do have to add the one you know element that that has me wearing my adult diaper this morning in the data the nate silver model shows now a 23 chance of a popular vote electoral college split that has me worried that's all i don't i don't have any deeper thoughts than that that just has me worried people should remain worried i mean even if i'm right to be a little optimistic optimistic, I'm like 60-40 optimistic.

Speaker 15 I'm not 90-10 optimistic or 80-20. Things that have a 40% chance of happening happen a lot.

Speaker 15 And we have seven weeks left. Is it seven weeks left, I think? Six, seven, seven weeks left.
And Trump has closed pretty well in the past, helped by James Comey, obviously.

Speaker 15 He's outperformed the polls in the past. That could be different for all kinds of reasons.
Amy Walter, I'd be curious to know what she thinks about that.

Speaker 15 But there's an argument that this year he won't outperform the polls, but absolutely no complacency or not even any confidence, really.

Speaker 15 I just think a little bit of Harris stalled out for two weeks after the convention bump, such as it was. Then there was the debate.
She did extremely well.

Speaker 15 There was, I'd say, a fair amount of nervousness the first day or two after the debate. Well, maybe it's not going to translate into vote share, into actual ballot test.

Speaker 15 And I think there's some evidence that it is, and it's translated into higher approval for her. And then on the voter registration numbers, Tom Bonyer stresses this.

Speaker 15 It's a little dicey to know how to interpret all these things, but they seem to be disproportionately younger Democrats, that last wave of new registrations.

Speaker 15 And they're pretty big numbers in some of these states.

Speaker 16 The one flag is they're disproportionately younger, unregistered, actually.

Speaker 16 And so they're not registered with party.

Speaker 15 Yeah, which he models as Democrats.

Speaker 16 Which he models as Democrats, which I hope is correct. But, you know, I don't know.
Maybe I've been spending too much time looking at the SEC College Game Day audience

Speaker 16 among the Georgia boys that are going to the Georgia game. And so, I don't know.

Speaker 16 That had me a little worried, but yes, I think it's probably, probably a good sign on the voter registration, but it is a model in question.

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Speaker 16 I want to do a couple of build-a-provocateur items here before we leave.

Speaker 16 I've been, you know, modding your Twitter over the weekend, and you're one to give a contrarian view from time to time against the conventional wisdom. Here was one.
You suggested that after the J.D.

Speaker 16 Vance interview rounds, that maybe Tim Walls doesn't debate him. Why debate him? Donald Trump is going to be ducking Harris.
Why should Tim Walls let J.D. Vance spread his lies to a bigger audience?

Speaker 16 Was that a tongue-in-cheek suggestion, or do you really believe that?

Speaker 15 Mostly tongue-in-cheek in the sense, I think, just practically hard for Walls to get out of the debate now that they've agreed to it.

Speaker 15 But the idea of treating Vance as if this is a legitimate policy debate and allowing allowing him to repeat these lies to what would be a bigger audience than he'd say.

Speaker 15 He can go on all the face the nation and

Speaker 15 CNN State of the Union he wants, but he's getting to two, three million people there, even with some people being showing it again on Twitter and stuff, a few more million more.

Speaker 15 The debate would have a very, very big audience. And you hate to see him spreading these lies and possibly inciting violence and the like.

Speaker 15 So I do think there's an actual reason that Walsh would have to say, I won't do this. But I suspect it may be impossible to pull that off.

Speaker 16 Yeah, I agree. I was intrigued by the suggestion.

Speaker 16 I was less intrigued on the, on the count of not giving Vance this audience, which I wish he didn't have, but I feel like it's just the unfortunate reality of our increasingly debased society.

Speaker 16 But on the point of pressuring Trump, like on the side of pressuring Trump, it does feel like Trump is, I think maybe because it was this switch in candidates. I don't know.

Speaker 16 I feel like if it was, if there had only been one debate and Harris had been the candidate the whole time, and then he was like, I'm not going to debate again.

Speaker 16 I feel like there would be a lot more negative attention on that than there's been on Trump so far. I don't know.
Maybe this is, again, as Jeffrey Goldberg called it,

Speaker 16 the hard bigotry of no expectations for Donald Trump that he gets away with this sort of stuff. But I don't know.

Speaker 16 If Harris was saying that she wasn't going to do the second debate, I feel like that would be much, there would be much more discussion and concern about that than there has been about Trump ducking it.

Speaker 15 No, that's a good point. That's a good point.

Speaker 16 Okay. Your other build of provocateur comment is going contrary to the media, the elite media pearl clutching about Kamala Harris's lack of interviews.

Speaker 16 She did do one additional sit-down interview with a local Philly reporter that was pretty uneventful over the weekend.

Speaker 16 But it seems like the consensus, even here at the bulwark, among most of your colleagues, is that she should be out there more. She should be doing more.
She should be more visible.

Speaker 16 And, Bill, you were saying why? Kind of. I don't know.
Why not just let J.D. Vance go out there and like, you get all the attention for his mendacity?

Speaker 15 Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.: I think she's pretty visible. I think she should give a

Speaker 15 speech every day, which she's doing basically in swing states.

Speaker 15 I would say like a couple of policy speeches just as a way to fill in some blanks, to get the policies out there so people don't complain that she's vague on it.

Speaker 15 And so people can do serious analyses, which will show incidentally that her economic policies are better than Trump's, that she increases the budget deficit much less and is much less inflationary because of tariffs and stuff.

Speaker 15 I think she could do the same in a couple of other areas.

Speaker 15 When the Supreme Court's going to come in October 7th for a new term, give a speech on Dobbs and other related issues in terms of the next president. We'll make a ton of federal court appointments.

Speaker 15 I prefer speeches. She's not great at these interviews and I don't blame her.
They're not so easy. And I think when you're, she's probably being counseled to be cautious and not make news.

Speaker 15 But I don't know, my experience in politics is when people do things for the sake of get out there because people tell you you're not out there enough, but you don't really have a sharp point to make.

Speaker 15 Now, if she had each day a point she really wanted to make, I mean, if it's, you know, an interview that was appropriate to make that point, I have no problem with that.

Speaker 15 She should get out there when the Fed cuts rates. But again, is it better to give a speech or do maybe an interview with a financial journal? But you never know, right?

Speaker 15 Then I just think she's been excellent in the speech, convention speech, excellent in the debate. She should give a couple more speeches.

Speaker 15 I'm not so crazy about random interviews where there's a pretty big MAGA world out there that will seize on any hesitation, any slight self-contradiction. I don't know.

Speaker 15 I don't think it's needed, honestly.

Speaker 16 Yeah, I basically agree with you. I guess my caveat is: I think that she should do more soft interviews, like, you know, more culture interviews.
Like, why not? And I think Walls should do.

Speaker 16 Walls is pretty good.

Speaker 16 I think maybe they've been holding him back a little bit because it would seem weird, maybe, for Walls to be doing wall-to-wall, fun, fun, unintended there, interviews while she was not.

Speaker 16 But I'd like to see him more in like sports interview world and like doing the kinds of things that Trump's been doing. Trump has been doing a lot of non-conventional interviews.

Speaker 16 So I don't think there's anything, you know, you could not credibly criticize her for doing that when that's mostly what Trump is doing. So anyway, I guess that would be my one suggestion.

Speaker 15 No, I think that's a good, a good emendation. And Wallace, I hadn't really thought about the sports thing.
He's an actual former football coach. I mean, assistant coach, as Trump likes to insist.

Speaker 15 Defensive coordinator?

Speaker 16 That's not.

Speaker 15 Totally. I mean, and I think, didn't they win a state championship one of his years? They did.
So I don't know. Wouldn't he be good on this?

Speaker 15 Shouldn't he walk over to Game Day sometime when it's it's up in the Big Ten and do something there?

Speaker 15 And, you know, an awful lot of people watch football, especially in a lot of college football, which is only one step away from high school.

Speaker 15 And so he has players who probably went on to play in college and he can certainly talk about it. Anyway, I kind of like the idea of him doing a lot of sports.

Speaker 15 And then maybe Vice President Harris, I think, should be good at the broader cultural stuff, but why not, right?

Speaker 16 More Harris. Cooking shows, black media, music.
I don't know, maybe. Taylor.
Ideologically aligned podcasts, for instance, maybe. I don't know.
If any come to mind. Those are just some ideas I have.

Speaker 15 And you're a sports fan. Even though you're an SEC person, you're

Speaker 15 going to have a good discussion.

Speaker 15 You'll study up on the Big Ten, won't you, for a few minutes and you can do a good discussion with Wallace?

Speaker 16 Yeah, me and Wallace can talk about the way Wisconsin got their ass beat by Alabama over the weekend. That's a big SEC supremacy.
We can talk about that.

Speaker 16 I have to do this just as one more item on the craziness of the Republicans as a sense for where things are going because this stuff just gets to disappear in the ether.

Speaker 16 And so I feel like if anyone is going to talk about it, it has to be us at at the bulwark. I don't know if you saw this.
So following the debate, there were these dual arguments in MAGA world.

Speaker 16 The people close to Trump had to pretend like Trump won.

Speaker 16 Trump actually won, right? You can't harm his ego by saying that he lost.

Speaker 16 But then as you got further out into kind of MAGA conspiracy world away from the Mar-a-Lago headquarters, they felt more comfortable.

Speaker 16 acknowledging that he lost, but blaming it on a conspiracy, naturally. And one of their conspiracies was that there was a whistleblower at ABC, gave all the questions to Kamala.

Speaker 16 They had another conspiracy that there was maybe an earpiece she was wearing. It's unclear what exactly tips they could have given her when the questions were like abortion, immigration, the economy.

Speaker 16 I mean, it wasn't, it wasn't like there were a lot of very rare questions out there, unsuspecting questions. But anywho, Marjorie Taylor Greene over the weekend tweeted this.
The ABC whistleblower.

Speaker 16 who said Kamala Harris was given debate questions ahead of the debate has died in a car crash, according to news reports that was a tweet by a sitting member of congress let's see how many hours it was later a few hours later she replied this story appears to be false and i'm glad to hear it so like i just

Speaker 16 like

Speaker 16 you guys have sitting members of congress like advancing conspiracy theories about the deep state offing people just constantly and that's just like part of the cult soup that they're swimming in over there in the mega media and it's just like i don't know had mikey sheryl like tweet it out about something like this.

Speaker 16 You know, I mean, you would just be dog. Democrats would be dogged constantly, but MTG just gets to kind of throw out assassination conspiracies without

Speaker 16 any reprimand, I guess, except for here with us.

Speaker 15 Well, it's Donald Trump and J.D. Vance's party, and they get to throw out, Vance gets to say they've tried to kill him, talking about Trump, or they.

Speaker 15 And Trump gets to speculate on whether the earrings did contain,

Speaker 15 you know, like an ear piece for people to tell Kamala Harris what to say. So I guess, you know, the rout begins from the top, right? I mean, it's, and it is, it's a little hard to get indignant.

Speaker 15 I mean, it's not hard to, you should, but it's hard to get indignant about Marjorie Taylor Greene when Trump and Vance are sailing along with, you know, three or four or five points behind, as JVL likes to always say.

Speaker 15 How can this be even a competitive race, really?

Speaker 16 How can this even be a competitive race?

Speaker 16 It's really fucking flummoxing. I do have to say.
All right, final topic. I don't know if you watched the Emmys last night, but The Bear is not a comedy.
This is more of a statement than a question.

Speaker 16 The Bear gets nominated in all the comedy sections. It is this cooking show that is, there's no laughs.
It's deeply depressing and it's ennui and anxiety-riddled.

Speaker 16 And meanwhile, Hacks is the best comedy that's been on TV since Office Spacer 30 Rock. It's brilliantly done.
If you've not watched Hacks, you must watch Hacks. Thank God, Justice for Hacks.

Speaker 16 Hacks won the best comedy Emmy, which they were denied last year. But even still, the actors on the show, Hannah Einbinder, were denied it because

Speaker 16 the bear, which is just kind of hard to watch, actually.

Speaker 16 It's just very boring. The prestige bear actors got instead.
So I'm offended by that.

Speaker 16 I don't know if you had any deep thoughts on the Emmys, but I just did feel the need to get that off my chest before the show ended.

Speaker 15 That was eloquently said. No, I didn't see them, and I don't know any of the shows.
Slow horses,

Speaker 15 does that qualify? That's a very excellent non-comedy show.

Speaker 16 Check out some nominations. I don't know what that is, but I saw that mention.

Speaker 15 Oh, no, it's an excellent British spy kind of

Speaker 16 series. We're giving each other self-homework.
I can slow horses, my British spy series.

Speaker 15 No, you should. Slow horses, you're like, Mac Herron, the novels are really terrific, and he's writing them.
I mean, they're current, Mac Heron.

Speaker 15 And then the bit has been turned into an excellent TV series, too.

Speaker 16 Well, I'm looking for a thriller. I look into Slow Horses hacks.
They're working on season four. It sounds like good for them.
It is.

Speaker 16 It's really funny. If you just want to.

Speaker 15 Okay, I should watch that. I'll tell Susan.
Okay, we should.

Speaker 16 Yeah, take a gummy.

Speaker 15 And if you need a look. We'll do hacks.
You do slow horses and we're broadening each other's cultural references here.

Speaker 16 We'll report back. Thank you to Bill Crystal.
As always, we'll see you next Monday. Tomorrow, we will be back with Amy Walter.
Thanks, y'all, for listening, and we'll see you again soon. Peace.

Speaker 16 sing to see.

Speaker 16 Sharpened

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Speaker 16 to the body.

Speaker 16 Here night,

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Speaker 16 we are hiding

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Speaker 16 Here the soldiers em

Speaker 16 in the river

Speaker 16 we

Speaker 16 will

Speaker 16 The Bullard Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

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