Bill Kristol: Rally Around the Flag

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Speaker 3 Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.
It's Monday, June 3rd. And finally, we're back with Bill Crystal.
He had a little holiday, then we had a Memorial Day.

Speaker 3 And I know you guys have been missing his always uplifting takes and historical anecdotes. Bill, welcome back.

Speaker 4 Yeah, that's nice of you to say that, claim the people have been missing it. I've gotten sort of the opposite impression, but it's good to be back anyway.

Speaker 3 I don't know if that's true. Come on.
We have the Trump verdict, which we discussed on Friday with Ben and Ron. But I guess I'm just curious about your

Speaker 3 top-level thoughts here, having had a weekend to let it all settle, and what you think about both the political and substantive fallout from the verdict.

Speaker 4 So on the political side, I think the people who said this could have some effect are a little bit vindicated, or at least for now, having a little bit the better of the argument than the people who just poo-pooed it all.

Speaker 4 There are three polls. All of them have Biden getting a point or two, which, you know, is very small.
It's March of Error, but they're all in the same direction.

Speaker 4 I think the reaction of the Trump campaign, and you've talked about this, and we should talk more about it maybe, is it has been so over the top.

Speaker 4 And they're over the top on everything, so it's hard to maybe make too much of a conclusion from this. It's not something they're relaxed about, I guess I would put it that way.

Speaker 4 And they feel like, it feels to me like they're very worried and that people, some weak Trump supporters,

Speaker 4 uncertain voters, undecided voters, could be swayed by this.

Speaker 4 The ferocity of the response to Larry Hogan, who's running for Senate in Maryland, who has some interest in distancing himself from Trump, and whom you'd think the Republican Party, even Trump, not that he's a great party guy, but still would want to have a Republican senator if possible there, even if he's not going to be totally reliable.

Speaker 4 The ferocity with which they jumped on him when he issued a perfectly aneda anodyne vanilla statement about respecting the rule of law was pretty striking.

Speaker 4 And it was Lisa Vita, you know, who's that, that's Trump. He's not just doing that as a random, you know.

Speaker 3 Oh, let's just talk about Larry Hogan. Let's just do that right now because

Speaker 3 we have the audio of what Lara Trump, who's, you know, a Trump family member, in addition to Lasavita, said about his, as you mentioned, Anodyne statement that we respect the justice system.

Speaker 3 Let's listen.

Speaker 5 Does the Republican National Committee support Larry Hogan for Senate?

Speaker 6 Well,

Speaker 6 I'll tell you one thing. I don't support what he just said there.
I think it's ridiculous.

Speaker 6 And I think anybody who's not speaking up in the face of really something that should never again have seen the light of day a trial that would never have been brought against any other person aside from Donald Trump.

Speaker 5 But does the RNC support his bill?

Speaker 6 He doesn't deserve the respect of anyone.

Speaker 5 He doesn't deserve the respect of anyone.

Speaker 6 He doesn't deserve the respect of anyone in the Republican Party at this point. And quite frankly, anybody in America, if that's the way you feel, that's very upsetting to hear that.

Speaker 5 So are you willing to cede the Senate seat in Maryland to the Democratic Party and not support Larry Hogan?

Speaker 6 What I'll tell you is that we, of course, want to win as a party, but that is a shame. And I think he should have thought long and hard before he said that publicly.

Speaker 3 That's insane. I mean, that's harsher than

Speaker 3 any Republican official said about any of the January 6th, like, you know, condemnations. So what does that say to you about where the GOP is at?

Speaker 4 There was some poll. Again, take all these polls with a little bit of self-grays of salt at this point, but it's like 55, 35 people saying they agreed with the verdict.

Speaker 4 That's mostly capturing just the partisan split, but it's capturing the fact that maybe there's 10% of those voters in the middle who are Trump-inclined, assuming the race is 45, 45, right?

Speaker 4 But who are sort of willing to say, yes, that verdict might have been correct. Now, a lot of them are then going to say, but it's not a reason to vote for Biden.

Speaker 4 But the more it seems to me that La Savita and Lara Trump and these people make this a sort of defining issue of Trump loyalty, if you're one of those voters in the middle, don't you think, well, if this is a defining matter for Trump, what does that say about Trump and about, you know, can I really continue to rationalize my vote for Trump?

Speaker 4 It's not really about any of these other things that I don't like about Trump.

Speaker 4 So I think it's had a little more effect than people expected. Biden's statement was very good on Friday.

Speaker 4 I thought the 90 seconds he added to his Middle East speech, I was sort of down at the dumps early Friday morning that, oh my God, Biden's going to give a long speech on the Middle East and not even mention this.

Speaker 4 And there were people apparently counseling that in Democratic circles. He did choose to mention it.

Speaker 4 I don't know if that was because he thought it was the right thing to do, which it was in my view as president, or whether they had some polling and focus group data that suggested it was, you know, confirmed our sense, that my sense that it's,

Speaker 4 or the other data sense, that it's not a bad thing to sort of issue to use against Trump. Now, they haven't followed up much over the weekend.
It was the weekend.

Speaker 4 But I am nervous that they will do what they've done in this, as in so many other instances, have a one-shot little offensive and not have a sustained effort.

Speaker 4 Look, there are a lot of issues that Biden's on the losing side of, fairly or unfairly, you know, inflation and immigration. This is an issue he's on the winning side of.

Speaker 4 He's basically with a majority of the American public. You've got to hammer that kind of issue home in a close race, I think.

Speaker 3 Yeah, let's talk about the Democratic side of this first. I've got some more Republican delusion to get into, but you tweeted this morning, I noticed, Michael Tomoski over at the New Republic.

Speaker 3 He writes, says, Democrats, the ball's in your court.

Speaker 3 You can buy into the lazy and apparently wrong conventional wisdom that says the verdict will make no difference, or you can create a reality in which the verdict makes a big difference.

Speaker 3 And that's, you know, sort of supporting your point that it's not just him out there, Dan Pfeiffer, making a similar argument, others, I was on MS.

Speaker 3 We were hashing this out with a few different people that had differing views. I was making the Pfeiffer and Tomoski and crystal argument.
I think that they're going to do this.

Speaker 3 I think that they have to. To me, what this really comes down to is

Speaker 3 one,

Speaker 3 I think that there's a substantive case.

Speaker 3 Let's just take the politics out of it for a second, that this should be made, that we, that America doesn't want to have a convict as president, that we shouldn't have a felon as president, that if Donald Trump wins, then I think it contributes to the idea that he won't leave if he thinks that there's jail on the other side of the presidency.

Speaker 3 So I think that there's some real substantive concerns here. And then on the political side, the people the Democrats need to get to are the people that aren't listening to the Boulder podcast, right?

Speaker 3 Like the people that are lower, every poll says this. The people that are paying less attention to this race is who Joe Biden's underperforming with.

Speaker 3 This is something that can break through with them if they carry the message.

Speaker 3 So to me, on both the substance and the politics, like they have to lean in and not be worried about the bad faith Republican attacks that they're politicizing the justice system or whatever.

Speaker 3 What say you to that notion?

Speaker 4 I totally agree. And I would just add one foot on the political side.

Speaker 4 I think there are some of those also swingish, let's call the middle class, upper middle class, college educated Republican voters who voted for Haley and aren't crazy about Trump.

Speaker 4 I think it's the kind of thing, you know, convicted felon, they're not used to in their businesses having a CEO who's a convicted felon.

Speaker 4 They're not used to hiring convicted felon, you know, think it's great to have a convicted felon as the coach of their little league baseball team.

Speaker 4 Or I'm focused on that because I went to so many little league baseball games this weekend, but, you know, or pastor of their church or whatever.

Speaker 4 I just feel like it's something that could hit home a little bit.

Speaker 4 It should be put in a broader context of his general loathing and contempt for the rule of law and his promises to violate it in 10 other ways.

Speaker 4 But it is a kind of a proof, isn't it, that it's not just the tweets, right? He actually carried out a conspiracy to violate the law.

Speaker 3 And I think that also they have to make sure that they win this argument over whether it's politicized. And in some ways, maybe this feels counterintuitive, right?

Speaker 3 I could understand why some in the Axel Rod is making this argument and others that, like, boy, you don't want to play into the Republicans' hands and make this seem like it's very political and that Donald Trump didn't...

Speaker 3 didn't deserve this, right? That this was some kind of persecution.

Speaker 3 Then the thought there that'd be put forth by Axel Rod, et cetera, is like, well, if you don't talk about it as much, then maybe it doesn't seem like you were politicizing this, like you were staying above the fray.

Speaker 3 They have to actually win the argument that this wasn't political. And to me, that means going out there and reminding people that, yeah, Donald Trump is a convicted felon in this case.

Speaker 3 By the way, there are three other cases where he's been indicted, where grand juries came in. He was found liable in civil court.
for sexual assault and for fraudulent business records.

Speaker 3 Then there was the Trump University case from before he was even a politician, where the business was found liable for fraud. And by the way, he's surrounded by a bunch of criminals.

Speaker 3 You know, there are a bunch of other criminals that are in his orbit. So they have to go out and make that case so that people have the armor, the rhetorical armor to push back against their friends.

Speaker 3 You know, when this comes up over a beer or on the sidelines of a little league baseball game, and they're like, this seems politicized.

Speaker 3 It's like, no, actually, this is just a guy that has a long history of criminal activity. The Democrats have to make that case to people because a lot of people don't know that.

Speaker 3 Or they don't think about it that deeply. Maybe don't know.
They don't think about it that deeply.

Speaker 4 Right. Well, or, you know, they're willing to put it aside.
I agree with you. Some don't know.

Speaker 4 Some are just willing to put it aside gently to focus on what they don't like about Biden, immigration, or inflation or, you know, something else. He's old.
And

Speaker 4 you need to drag it back into front and center stage. I very much agree with that.
You don't have the choice anymore.

Speaker 4 If different circumstances, a year and a half before an election, I don't know, you could choose, I'm not going to highlight this. I'm going to highlight something else.

Speaker 4 It's June, what is it, June 3rd?

Speaker 4 I mean, this is an issue you know we're three weeks away from the first debate yeah and i think your point is i hadn't really focused on the downside of not making it okay if trump gets away with this the whole raft of legal and ethical issues almost gets undercut it feels to me like you know you're not going to make a big deal of the fact that an actual jury convicted him of three to four felonies but we're very upset that he used a i don't know a term about uniting the rich or whatever one of those things that stuff is not as important actually and it is more just beating him up for idiotic things and offensive things, don't get me wrong, that he's saying and dangerous things sometimes.

Speaker 4 But still, it's more speculative, you might say. This is real.
So I agree. If you don't do this, you're sort of seeding that whole mess of ethical and legal issues that should be used against Trump.

Speaker 3 There's another point that Joe Biden has that I think he's going to be reluctant to use, but his allies should, related to this conversation with the Politicized Justice Department.

Speaker 3 As we were talking today, Hunter Biden is going into a courtroom in Wilmington, Delaware, named after J. Caleb Boggs.
You know, it's a J. Caleb Boggs courthouse.

Speaker 3 And Caleb Boggs is the guy that Joe Biden defeated in a shocking upset that got him into the Senate in the first place. So, you know, everything comes around in politics.

Speaker 3 Hunter Biden goes in there today. He is in separate trial.
This is on the gun charges where he lied on the document about whether he was using drugs when he got a gun.

Speaker 3 And then he has a separate trial later this year on tax fraud charges. Yeah, it's almost like, do I have to say it?

Speaker 3 It seems pretty silly that we spent a whole weekend listening to half the country and even some like quasi-respected people arguing that Joe Biden is masterminding some DOJ plots to target his political foes while his only surviving son is walking into a courtroom today, a federal courtroom.

Speaker 3 Joe Biden put out a statement about this this morning that was mostly just about how he loves his son.

Speaker 3 And so Joe Biden's not going to be making this case, but shouldn't the Democrats just be banging the drum on this as loud as possible?

Speaker 4 Yeah, and I cringed a little bit over the last week when he was, partly was the anniversary of Bill Biden's death, was with Joe Biden a fair amount. And then I think he and President and Mrs.

Speaker 4 Biden wanted to be with Hunter Biden last night in Delaware, and he was at the state dinner. So I thought,

Speaker 4 could he just maybe

Speaker 4 doesn't have to see his adult son every two days?

Speaker 4 You know what? He loves him. He wants to show support.

Speaker 4 And in a certain way, you could even say that strengthens the fact, doesn't it, that he's letting the Justice Department go ahead with no interference at all in a case that he probably

Speaker 4 almost certainly deep down believes is unjustified. And a lot of respectable people have qualms about.
But again, he doesn't raise that.

Speaker 4 So, in a way, he deserves even more credit, I'd say, because it's clearly very painful to him.

Speaker 4 It's not some distant relative or brother he hasn't gotten along with for 20 years or whatever, kind of thing.

Speaker 3 Not the black sheep or whatever.

Speaker 4 Yeah, yes, I think others could make this point.

Speaker 3 You know, I think that what you kind of alluded to there, even for those who think that the Bragg case

Speaker 3 was

Speaker 3 weak or frivolous or whatever, I think Ben Wittis made a pretty strong argument against that on the Friday podcast.

Speaker 3 But even if you were to say that it's like, okay, this is sort of frivolous that you would charge a former president with this, it does feel like there was some politics there.

Speaker 3 Like Hunter Biden is not on trial for like drug smuggling. He is on trial today for a paperwork error.

Speaker 3 Even if you want to diminish the Trump conviction you know, and use rhetoric to diminish this as much as possible, you can say it was a paperwork error.

Speaker 3 It was a misfiling of business records and it shouldn't have been taken so seriously.

Speaker 4 That's all the hunter thing is.

Speaker 3 That is just how the justice system works. That's particularly how the justice system works.

Speaker 3 If you volunteer to put yourself in front of the cameras every day, you know, and like that's part of the risk of doing business. But it was, there was a long time where we expected more.

Speaker 3 from our people in public service and that scrutiny comes with it. And that was

Speaker 3 part of what was commonly accepted in political life. That is just another thing that's been debased.

Speaker 4 Incidentally, the stronger cases or the more important, I will say it's fair cases, January 6th, the classified documents.

Speaker 4 It's not like those of us who believe in the rule of law wanted the Gragg case to come first. We didn't control it.
It's a federal system. Biden didn't interfere.

Speaker 4 But why aren't those other cases up there? Because Trump and Trump-friendly judges, but leave aside even the judges. Trump himself has tried to delay those cases as much as possible.

Speaker 4 That's not like a theoretical statement or a fancy argument about how, if you look in the details of his pleadings, he's cleverly moving it off.

Speaker 4 He literally has asked that these cases be put off time and time again, whether it's the Supreme Court with the January 6th case or with Canon. And that's what he's actually arguing.

Speaker 4 Now, he's entitled to argue that as a legal matter. He can say, this one isn't ripe yet, or I need more time for this, or this has to be adjudicated before we can do that.

Speaker 4 But he is the one who's responsible for us not dealing with the, quote, more serious cases, not the anti-Trump forces, which, of course, the Wall Street Journal and all these Trump enablers and apologists.

Speaker 4 And can I say incidentally, they are worse than ever the Wall Street Journal.

Speaker 4 We have not spent enough time criticizing the Wall Street Journal editorial page, even though you and I are slightly obsessed with this and do criticize them some.

Speaker 4 The degree of sophistry and dishonesty and just apology for terrible things that they're peddling is really extraordinary and doing real damage.

Speaker 4 Anyway, but it's Trump who wants us not to be able to judge his behavior in the quote more important cases.

Speaker 3 I'm going to be a crazy person.

Speaker 3 Everybody just has to deal with this podcast over the next three months, just speaking to everybody like idiots, because I want everyone to be able to have this language with them.

Speaker 3 Because, you know, sometimes it's just hard to navigate, you know, the farago of bullshit that these guys put out about, you know, what is happening, you know, with the Justice Department, how Trump's being targeted, how it's so unfair.

Speaker 3 And even like Susan Collins is like convinced by this: if Joe Biden was masterminding this, if the never Trump forces were masterminding this, well, you wouldn't have picked the Brad case to go first.

Speaker 3 You know what I mean? If Joe Biden was a puppeteer behind the curtain, the Jack Smith case in DC would be the one with Judge Chucken.

Speaker 3 But this has gotten delayed thanks to Trump's buddies on the Supreme Court and other interference.

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Speaker 3 To the Wall Street Journal thing, if people aren't reading JVL's newsletter, the triad, you really should go to thebuler.com and sign up. Here was Peggy Noonan last week.

Speaker 3 She wrote this: The tragedy of this campaign is that one of two old men, neither of them great, neither of them distinguished in terms of character or intellect, who are in each way an embarrassment and whom two-thirds of voters do not want as presidential candidates will be chosen in this crucial historic moment in which the stakes could not be higher.

Speaker 3 Then she goes on, when was the last time you saw anyone try to address the other side with respect and understanding?

Speaker 3 This is like, you do feel like you're in an insane asylum, right? Where you're like, what is the comparison here exactly between Trump and Biden on these points?

Speaker 4 And the journal editorial itself, that is the editorials on the editorial page, not one of their regular writers like Peggy Newton. I think this was on Thursday or Friday.

Speaker 4 Bob Kagan called it to my attention because I can't really read it anymore. It just gets me too annoyed.
And the journal editorial said with a straight face, Mr.

Speaker 4 Bragg might have opened a new destabilizing era of American politics, and no one can say how it will end.

Speaker 4 Really? Alvin Bragg opened a destabilizing era of American politics? Didn't some stuff happen before Alvin Bragg decided to bring this case in 2023 that was kind of destabilizing?

Speaker 4 That's the editorial page. That's not one colonist.
That's something goes through some process where they look at each other's work and so forth. I mean, how pathetic is that?

Speaker 3 Take some accountability. You know, criticize Joe Biden, criticize Alvin Bragg, all you want.

Speaker 3 But like this notion that it, this just broad attempt to wave hands and muddy the waters and be like, boy, you know, look at how the Democrats have been breaking the norms too.

Speaker 3 Did you see the politico story last week about the Alito thing? About how Joe Biden hadn't weighed in on Alito and how progressive groups were mad at him for not attacking Alito harder.

Speaker 3 Like, this is the position that Joe Biden is at, right?

Speaker 3 Like, he can do what all of these folks at the Wall Street Journal Ed Board claim that they want him to do, you know, and rise above it, not engage in petty partisan bickering.

Speaker 3 And they give him no credit. There was no one editorial on the Wall Street Journal page.
It's like, good on Joe Biden for not going down in the gutter on these Sam Alito attacks.

Speaker 3 So he gets no credit for it when he rises above. And then he gets attacked by us, like the left, for not being more aggressive.
It exposes how bad faith these attacks are from them.

Speaker 3 There's nothing he can do to get credit. They only just look for opportunities to try to smear him to make it seem like he's the same as Trump.

Speaker 4 Incidentally, I think I wrote this last week in one of the morning shots that he would be entitled, in my view, not to, you know, go down to the gutter or anything, but he does make a point about the kind of jurisprudence that Thomas and Alito believe in, that it produced Dobbs, along with the Trump nominees, those two plus the Trump nominees, to the court, and that it's going to produce other things in the next four years if Trump gets another four years to appoint maybe Supreme Court justices and certainly federal court judges.

Speaker 4 That is a totally legitimate argument for candidate Joe Biden to make and for President Joe Biden to make about the future of the country. Maybe you shouldn't say Alito and Thomas by name.

Speaker 4 He should just say the kinds of justices Donald Trump likes and whom he will appoint. But it's perfectly legit.

Speaker 4 And the moment he does that, the Wall Street Journal editorial page and every high-toned conservative columnist and anti-anti-Trump type and Ross Dathet will all be pro-clutching about how, oh, this is terrible.

Speaker 4 He says he's the institutionalist, but how now he's criticizing Supreme Court justices.

Speaker 4 But if he does, to his credit, he's done it a little, but not as much as he could have, incidentally, make a big issue with Dobbs. But the way to do that, honestly, is a forward-looking argument.

Speaker 4 That's already happened, Dobbs. And states are doing what they're doing.

Speaker 4 It's a forward-looking argument about contraception, about all the implications of things that Thomas and Alito have said they care about.

Speaker 4 And I worry a little that Biden is holding back from making that criticism because he's worried that he will look like he's politicizing stuff, but it's totally unfair criticism.

Speaker 4 He's very much entitled to raise the issue of what kinds of court appointments is the next president going to make.

Speaker 3 Speaking of things he could raise, I'm just throwing this out there.

Speaker 3 I agree with your high-minded points, but you know, could they not do a 15-second TikTok video where Joe Biden's raising the flag right side up?

Speaker 3 Just being like, unlike the insurrectionist court justices, unlike my opponent's son, unlike the Heritage Foundation, I still love America and think that the flag should be raised in the proper manner.

Speaker 4 This is great. Minds working alike, but in the morning shots this morning, I say something like,

Speaker 4 shouldn't Biden just stroll out of the White House today and gesture to the flag and say, you know what, it's a wonderful thing to...

Speaker 4 I'm so proud to be in this White House and to represent the American public and so proud that we fly the flag every day.

Speaker 4 And he doesn't even have to say right side up, though he could say those words if he wanted to really dig it in a little more.

Speaker 4 But yes, I I agree that they do bend over too much backwards, in my opinion. I mean, Garland never says anything, obviously.
Biden has a real sense of restraint about it.

Speaker 4 And they don't have many surrogates either,

Speaker 4 you know, who are more than just random, not to insult them, but members of Congress or whatever.

Speaker 4 So there's no one who kind of has the weight to get a lot of coverage if he says a version of what I just said or what you just said.

Speaker 4 I think the upside-down flag is really appalling. And you maybe have discussed this already five times on the podcast.
I don't know.

Speaker 4 But I went to the Little League games on Saturday, Saturday, and there was the flag flying. I thought, you know what?

Speaker 4 America is a great country, and it's nice that they have a flag, and it's nice these kids are playing.

Speaker 4 Many, in my area, it's maybe 60% Biden, 40% Trump, but plenty of the parents and coaches and umpires on these teams are not Biden supporters necessarily.

Speaker 4 A lot of them are Republicans, and some of them were Trump supporters. And you know what? They're playing Little League, and it's a great country.

Speaker 4 And it's not a country where the flag should be flown upside down because we're in horrible distress because Trump was convicted by a jury of his peers peers after a five-week court trial.

Speaker 3 Anyway, exactly. This is the thing.
People should do political protest all they want, but these people are denigrating America and turning the flag upside down over a total lie.

Speaker 3 Here's some of the right wing. We did a little bit of this with Philip Kowski on Friday, but here's some more since then.

Speaker 3 The Montana Republican Senate candidate, Sheehi, is out with a new ad today that says Donald Trump is suffering, quote, state-sponsored political persecution led by Joe Biden. Like, that's just a lie.

Speaker 3 TV stations shouldn't air that. That's just a lie.
Tim Scott was saying Joe Biden's two-tiered injustice system, injustice system. He's weaponizing the justice system against his opponent.

Speaker 3 That's a lie. 10 Republicans now, since we last spoke in the Senate, have said that they're unwilling to pass anything else this year besides national security related stuff.
So that's appointments.

Speaker 3 It's approving people to jobs administration. It's any bipartisan legislation.
It's things like the Farm Bill. They're working on a farm bill right now.

Speaker 3 I guess we're not going to do the farm bill because Valvin Bragg-based Mike Lee is leading that effort. I guess they think this is a political winner for them.

Speaker 3 Again, I think this can be used against them. Do people really want this? Like they want the whole government to stop working because of a jury verdict in New York?

Speaker 4 Just from a conventional political analysis point of view, I think everyone has been saying kind of correctly that if this election is about Biden's job approval, Biden's in deep trouble because he's underwater, it's the incumbent president.

Speaker 4 If the election is about Trump's favorability, he's in some considerable trouble because he has always been unfavorable, at a majority viewing him unfavorably, and that remains the case.

Speaker 4 Doesn't all this hoop-lah make it more about Trump than Biden's? Again, from a very practical, but legitimate political point of view, not low-road, just kind of political thinking.

Speaker 4 Don't we want three weeks here of discussion of the trial and of the Trump world's reaction to the trial, which does bring out, we discussed this a little recently, I think, which does bring out the extremism, I think, of MAGA.

Speaker 4 It's not just, you know, that there's a whole movement here, which is just willing to say at the the drop of a hat, the justice system is illegitimate. Everything is corrupt.

Speaker 4 The country's in horrible shape. Let's fly the flag upside down.
That is not where people are.

Speaker 4 And so I think this is the right thing to do and to argue, the right argument to have, but also a politically wise argument to have.

Speaker 3 Yeah, and unwise for them. And I do think like putting some meat on the bones of like, you know, in DC, the smart set is like, well, it's an election year.

Speaker 3 The people aren't going to do anything anyway. This is all for show.
Who cares about the Mike Lee thing? This is where your congressional surrogates can work.

Speaker 3 You know, this is where Chris Murphy's and Brian Schatz's and the folks that have social and Jasmine Crockett who was on last week can go out and say, no, actually, there's stuff we could do this year.

Speaker 3 Like, you know, A, this immigration bill that Donald Trump killed. There are things we could do to make the border better.
We are working on the farm bill right now.

Speaker 3 That is important for working class people who need their snap benefits, for farmers that need to know what the new rules are going to be going forward. So like there are things we could do.

Speaker 3 We're going to need to appoint people to, you know various positions at the government that do have real jobs, real responsibilities.

Speaker 3 And like these guys say no because they're having a temper tantrum.

Speaker 3 I think that there's a way to kind of take the middle ground there and educate people about like the real ramifications of the crazy.

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Speaker 3 Donald Trump was on Fox and Friends. Did you suffer through that?

Speaker 4 Have you seen any of that? No, but I saw little clips of it, you know. You watch these shows, Tim, so I don't have to.

Speaker 4 That's my view.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I know. I know.
I do have to say, I was on, I was flying home from New York, and Delta, this is a free ad for Delta. They do a nice job.
You know, you've got the live TV.

Speaker 3 If you're a Sky Miles member, they give you free internet. They're not nickel and diamond yet like these other airlines.

Speaker 3 So I was just flipping through all those Sunday shows and just really reveling in watching all these guys squirm. Anyway, here is Donald Trump's plan for the military in the next term.

Speaker 9 Are you going to fire those generals? The woke generals at the top? Because people have been talking about.

Speaker 10 Yes, I would get rid of them, yeah. But But see, now I know him.
I didn't know him before.

Speaker 10 I came in. What do I know? I was a New York real estate person, but no, I'd fire him.
I would fire them. You can't have woke military.

Speaker 3 Joe Biden's off to France on Thursday to commemorate the 80th anniversary of D-Day. Donald Trump's planning on firing the generals in the military because he thinks they're too woke.

Speaker 3 I don't know. He thinks that they care too much about black people or something.
I don't exactly know what the substantive criticism is there.

Speaker 3 What say you on that split screen?

Speaker 4 I mean, again, the wise people in D.C. say foreign policy doesn't matter.

Speaker 4 I still think at the end of the day, Commander-in-Chief, if Biden looks, which he will, I think, sober and serious and behaves appropriately in France, and Trump is saying these things on the other hand, Biden is going to stay high road when he's abroad, as he should.

Speaker 4 There should be surrogates. And that would be, again, they could do two things at once.

Speaker 4 They can do Trump's conviction, but they can also have people who've served in senior positions, including in Republican administrations, out on TV saying, this is dangerous, what Trump is saying.

Speaker 4 It undercuts us. I mean, at home, obviously, to start firing generals for political reasons.
Also, countries abroad, people abroad will look at this and say, this is a serious country and so forth.

Speaker 4 So, yeah, I think it should be taken. I suggested on Twitter that Biden also uses most of what's happening in Normandy, and then he has, I think, a state visit.

Speaker 4 He presumably has a dinner with Malcron and all this. But he should think about going...

Speaker 4 I think it's 50 miles from Paris to the cemetery that Trump didn't go to when it was drizzling or maybe raining.

Speaker 4 I don't remember in 2018 and where he made his comments to John Kelly about suckers and losers, the cemetery that's right near Bellow Wood where Marines fought in 1918.

Speaker 4 He could just say, I'm just going to pay my respects. You know, we did Normandy for World War II.
I also want to pay respects to the Americans who fought in World War I never mentioned Trump.

Speaker 4 Obviously, it'd be kind of a nice.

Speaker 4 Maybe it's a little too trolly, but I don't know. I just feel like it's apparently a very beautiful cemetery, too.
I've not been, so yeah.

Speaker 3 Maybe. I think that

Speaker 3 at minimum, just an explicit case about this commitment to our allies, commitment to democratic principles, commitment to the things that

Speaker 3 those who died at Normandy fought for.

Speaker 3 I was watching your conversation with James Carville. Carville makes kind of an aside point as he's known to rapid-fire points, but one of them was kind of an aside.

Speaker 3 And I don't know if you guys ever go back around to it, but if you look at the numbers, one of the groups that Biden is doing

Speaker 4 better with

Speaker 3 than expected is older voters, particularly older white voters. I remember this from 2016, too, that

Speaker 3 that group was kind of the slowest to come along with Trump. And I do think that there really is,

Speaker 3 you know, a, at least maybe only on the margins, but it's some of like a recognition for people that either,

Speaker 3 you know, as we saw, some veterans that are traveling over there, they're still alive, or their family, their younger siblings, their kids.

Speaker 3 A lot of them have kids when they're 18, so their kids are pretty old.

Speaker 3 So they're kids that look at Trump, and the echo is just a little too loud for them to the bad times, to the Mussolinis. I don't know.
Am I overthinking that, do you think?

Speaker 4 No, you're totally correct. And again, I think the smart, you know, always out of how many voters is going to move.
Well, I don't know, 1%, 2%, 3%.

Speaker 4 Plus, it's the right thing to do, obviously.

Speaker 4 It was very moving, I thought, those little video of the 100-year-old, really, soldiers and landing at Charles de Gaulle Airport and, you know, being applauded by, I guess, some expat Americans, but I guess mostly French men and women waving American flags, right side up American flags, to

Speaker 4 thank these people, what, 80 years later, it's kind of amazing, isn't it?

Speaker 4 I mean, for D-Day, it wouldn't be bad for President Biden to quote President Reagan's very famous remarks, obviously on the 40th anniversary.

Speaker 4 He doesn't have to say anything about I'm being bipartisan here, but it would be a nice put him in the tradition of Reagan, so to speak.

Speaker 4 And there are people, there are still some Reagan Republicans, some of them, unfortunately, a little bit tempted to go to Trump. So I don't know.
I think this trip could be a plus for Biden.

Speaker 4 And I mean, obviously, it's important for the country in all kinds of ways in terms of NATO and what he says abroad and

Speaker 4 thing for a president to do. But particularly because the Trump trip to France that got the most attention was where he refused to go to a cemetery with American Marines in that case.

Speaker 3 It really was a moving video of the vets. We'll put it in the show notes

Speaker 3 if anybody didn't see it over the weekend. All right.
One more clip from Donald's appearance on Fox and Friends.

Speaker 3 Maybe the only interesting question that the trio of Fox hosts asked him was whether the American people are ready for the reality of what the biggest deportation in history would look like.

Speaker 4 Let's hear what Donald Trump said about that.

Speaker 11 Do you think the public will have the appetite, the stomach for watching deportations on their television screen?

Speaker 10 Well, that question is so

Speaker 10 great and so tough. Donald, because you know the radical left is going to start saying, oh, look, so you'll get rid of 10 really bad ones

Speaker 10 and one, you know, beautiful mother who they think is guilty of something and maybe she is, maybe,

Speaker 10 and it'll become a story or a family that's a good family and came in wrong and, you know, they're going to show it. Then it's going to always be tough.
It's not going to be easy.

Speaker 10 And we have to use a lot of good judgment. But the way you get rid of them is the local police.

Speaker 10 You know, the local police know these people by their first name, their middle name, and their last name. The local police are great.
They're just not allowed to do their job.

Speaker 10 They're afraid of losing their pension. They're afraid of losing their wife or husband.
They're going to lose their house. They're losing everything.

Speaker 10 And one of the things I'm doing is giving local police immunity from prosecution.

Speaker 3 Okay. A lot to unpack there, Bill.
But the one that really jumps out to me is Trump's little aside. Maybe she's guilty of something.
Maybe she isn't. And here he is.

Speaker 3 The whole interview, the whole discussion is about how the Justice Department system is so unfair to him, even though a jury of of his peers convicted him unanimously.

Speaker 3 Now here he is saying, if I get back in by presidential diktot, I'm just going to start sending people on buses out of the country.

Speaker 3 Maybe they're guilty of something, maybe they aren't, but whatever, it's worth it because we'll get the 10 real bad guys. That cognitive dissonance didn't seem to sink in with anybody on set.

Speaker 4 No.

Speaker 4 Weren't you struck also by there is a way in which Trump is smarter than a lot of his supporters. He is a salesman for 40, 50 years.
He's a fraudster and a grifter and all that.

Speaker 4 But he sort of knows what plays and what doesn't.

Speaker 4 And he has the sense, I think you could tell from that, right, that there's some downside to all this macho, you know, insane nativism and deporting a bunch of dreamers who've been here 15 years and a mother with three kids who are working hard and so forth and haven't committed a crime, except for people who came here, which wasn't crime exactly, but they're undocumented.

Speaker 4 And they've been trying to get documented and working hard and paying taxes.

Speaker 4 I think Trump has, again, Trump sort of has more of a sense on this issue as on others like abortion that public opinion isn't quite where he is or quite where his where MAGA is.

Speaker 4 One point, Carvo always makes so many interesting points in passing on these conversations. You know, the main themes, honestly.

Speaker 3 We know what James's main opinion is about this campaign.

Speaker 4 Yeah, and they're not that different from a lot of other people's main opinion. There are only so many themes to go around.
But the real little insights that he has at times are very good.

Speaker 4 And I think the point about Trump, at the end of the day, 45% of the country supports him. Hopefully you can knock that down a little.
But MAGA really isn't supported by 45% of the country.

Speaker 4 And in polling, for whatever it's worth, it's got like 25% support. And it's counterintuitive to people who've been fighting Trump maybe for seven or eight years to say this.

Speaker 4 But being a little less Trump-focused, a little more MAGA-focused, a little more extremism-focused might be wise for the Democrats. But I think, again, and tie back with what we've been talking about,

Speaker 4 the reaction to the verdict in some sense that the Trump verdict is as damaging, could be as damaging as the Trump verdict itself, right?

Speaker 4 I mean, the kind of craziness, the flag stuff, the kind of anti-American stuff that MAGA is into. And I think same here.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I agree.

Speaker 3 It's kind of why I think he's been so distracted by the trials. It's kind of why I'm surprised that Trump and Las Vita and them didn't crack down more on Project 2025.
Because he is smart.

Speaker 3 He doesn't want to carry all that.

Speaker 3 baggage around his neck of every specific policy item that like the some random far-right weirdo and the bowels of the heritage foundation thinks or that what stephen miller's like what's happened in his warped mind like donald trump Trump doesn't want to have to carry all of that as part of his actual platform, and he has had to now.

Speaker 3 And when he is actually talking extemporaneously, he tries to wiggle out of that stuff as much as possible.

Speaker 3 Though I will say, the one other substantive thing, which he says repeatedly, which I think that in his mind he thinks is just, oh, I'm just supporting the cops.

Speaker 3 Not the Capitol Police or the FBI, but the good cops, the cops he likes. In practice, again, it speaks to the danger of what Trump plans.

Speaker 3 Like, if you think about this, it's like what his proposal is, when just put directly instead of in his like roundabout queens way of talking, is, okay, we're going to give the green light to deport as many people as possible.

Speaker 3 I'm going to empower local police jurisdictions to do that. And then we're going to give them immunity.
So if they do anything that's improper, they don't got to worry about that.

Speaker 4 They're not going to worry about all the paperwork.

Speaker 3 They can rough people up. They can take people.
They can, you know, they can fudge around the edges.

Speaker 3 And, you know, in certain jurisdictions, won't be in all jurisdictions, but in certain jurisdictions, like where they have crazy sheriffs, like in Arizona and stuff, we're going to give these guys carte blanche.

Speaker 3 Like that's very

Speaker 3 ominous.

Speaker 4 Yeah, totally. And he wants, I think, immunity for police and law enforcement, period, not just on immigration issues.
So, I mean, that really is crazy. I mean, really, we want police forces.

Speaker 4 No one can be disciplined for anything they do when they're wearing the uniform of a law enforcement official. That's not healthy.
They already have too much immunity.

Speaker 4 We had a good piece on this at the bulwark about a week ago, the quote, qualified immunity, which is pretty close to absolute already, frankly, and it allows for an awful lot of bad police behavior.

Speaker 4 But that's always a difficult line to exactly where to put that. But certainly the absolute immunity is a terrible idea.
Trump really has a 1989 New York mentality about this, right?

Speaker 4 You know, you can't go wrong being on the side of the cops against the criminals.

Speaker 4 And that was certainly true for Rudy Giuliani in 1993, and it was true in New York politics for a while and a lot of politics for a while.

Speaker 3 What happens, though, when the cops are the criminals? Or when the candidate is the criminal.

Speaker 4 And it's, again, it's one thing to be sort of to react against excessive left-wing, you know, criticism and micromanagement of cops or whatever the semi-legitimate cases were in the 80s and 90s.

Speaker 4 That's, again, the immunity issue. Maybe again, I'm sure Biden's advisors are nervous about taking that arms.
You don't want to fear pro-criminal and anti-cop.

Speaker 4 And Biden's always been actually pretty pro-police in a legitimate way. But I think precisely because he has been pro-police, saying this is really a recipe for authoritarianism.

Speaker 4 And this is literally saying, do whatever you want, and the president's going to make sure you pay no price if you beat up some innocent person, kill him, whatever, right?

Speaker 4 Do all kinds of other things as a law enforcement officer. I don't know whether this is a wise one to highlight or not, but as an actual governing matter, it's very scary.

Speaker 4 You have a guy who's willing to embolden vigilante groups to act on his behalf.

Speaker 4 You have a guy who's willing to give every law enforcement officer in America, there are almost a million, I think, apparently absolute immunity.

Speaker 4 You have a guy who's willing to pardon people who commit crimes. We know the J6 hostages.
You put all that together, that's authoritarianism.

Speaker 3 All right. Final topic.
I save this one for the end. Dessert.
Our friend Dean Phillips says this.

Speaker 3 Donald Trump is a serial liar, cheater, and philanderer, a six-time declarer of corporate bankruptcy, an instigator of insurrection, and a convicted felon who thrives on portraying himself as a victim.

Speaker 3 That's good, Dean. I liked that.
Next sentence, though.

Speaker 3 Kathy Hochl should pardon him for the good of the country.

Speaker 3 I don't know. I'm not like, this is absurd.

Speaker 3 Where I fall on this is if I thought that we were dealing with a counterparty in a democracy where the people on the other side would acknowledge and give credit for that type of action, then I would maybe think that it'd be worth listening to.

Speaker 3 But I don't know that that's true. I think that then the Republicans and Trump would just say, this shows that it was politicized from the start.
They're pardoning me because they know, right?

Speaker 3 So to me, I just don't think there's any... any argument for it.
But sometimes you're contrarian, Bill. So I thought maybe you, you and Dean might agree on this one.

Speaker 4 No, not on this.

Speaker 4 If two years from now there's a jail sentence and Trump's been defeated and is sort of retired and Kathy Hochle wants to commute the sentence to good behavior or whatever, wearing an ankle bracelet at Var-a-Lago, I could live with that.

Speaker 4 But not now. And what about these other pending cases? Again, these guys all want to be kind of clever, contrarian.
Does Dean Phillips believe that all the other cases should just be dropped?

Speaker 4 The January 6th case, the Classified Documents case, which is an absolute clear-cut case of his misbehavior, illegal

Speaker 4 breaking the the law, and then trying to cover up breaking the law and getting others incriminated in that. I don't know.

Speaker 4 So, no, I think at this point, there are times when, you know, Ford-Nixon kind of thing, yes, if Trump loses, retires from politics, says he's never going to do it, you know, dissolves MAGA, as it were, you know, and goes into some grumpy, you know, golf-playing retirement, could there be a case for not letting every prosecution go forward and not letting jail terms go forward?

Speaker 4 Yes, but that's we're not anywhere near there.

Speaker 3 Indeed, we're not. We're so not near there.
I had this dark thought over the weekend.

Speaker 4 I was like, even if we beat Trump, then

Speaker 3 the 2028 Republican primary campaign will still be totally run on whether you'll give blanket a mutiny and pardon to Trump.

Speaker 3 Like that will be an anti, you know, willingness to pardon Trump if you, you know, beat whatever, whoever the Democrat comes out to be. So like we have a minimum of

Speaker 4 Where are we? 2024.

Speaker 3 So we have a minimum of like four and a half years left of Trump pardon discussions,

Speaker 3 No matter what happens this November, anyway, uh, unless he dies. Bill Crystal, thank you.
It's been too long. Good to be back.

Speaker 3 If you want more, Bill Crystal, we'll put his conversation with James Carville, the Raging Cajun, in the show notes. It was 51 minutes.

Speaker 3 I don't know if it was an uplifting 51 minutes, but you know, teach their own. You might enjoy it.
We'll see you back here next Monday. Thanks so much, Bill.

Speaker 4 Thanks, Dan.

Speaker 3 All right, we will be back tomorrow. We got a double header, so it's going to be a good one.
Let's check y'all in. Peace.

Speaker 4 And a small semi-sphere.

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Speaker 3 The Bullark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

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