Adam Kinzinger: A Small Man

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Speaker 4 Hello, and welcome to the Bulwark podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.

Speaker 4 I'm here with the resident bro and chief, Adam Kinzinger, former Republican congressman from Illinois, senior political commentator for CNN, founder of Country, first author of the book Renegade, Defending Democracy and Liberty in Our Divided Country.

Speaker 4 He also writes a sub-stack newsletter. He's also, he's also sick.
He's like, he's doing, this is like the Jordan Flu podcast for you you remember the jordan flu game yeah it was like uh

Speaker 4 i know i'm just i did like a little uh hey it's morning what's what's going on i'm feeling great and then i'm not feeling great all of a sudden so we'll get through it it's all right we're just we're gonna make sure you have your z biotics you know and we're gonna make sure that uh you know you're just like jordan elevating over byron russell in the nba finals i want to start with what the president of the united states was doing yesterday.

Speaker 4 I know that that's unusual for a news program these days to actually listen to what Joe Biden said. Better to talk about Stormy and the missionary position or whatever, the kids on campuses.

Speaker 4 But Joe Biden gave a pretty interesting speech on Holocaust Remembrance Day, and I want to play two clips for you.

Speaker 5 We've seen a ferocious surge of anti-Semitism in America and around the world.

Speaker 5 Vicious propaganda on social media.

Speaker 3 Jews

Speaker 5 forced to keep their

Speaker 5 hides or keep us under baseball hats, tuck their Jewish stars into their shirts. On college campuses, Jewish students blocked, harassed, attacked while walking to class.

Speaker 5 Anti-Semitism,

Speaker 5 anti-Semitic posters, slogans

Speaker 5 calling for the annihilation of Israel,

Speaker 4 the world's only Jewish state.

Speaker 5 Too many people denying, downplaying, rationalizing, ignoring the horrors of the Holocaust.

Speaker 5 And October 7th,

Speaker 5 including Hamas's appalling use of sexual violence to torture and terrorize Jews.

Speaker 4 Now,

Speaker 6 here we are,

Speaker 6 not 75 years later, but just seven and a half months later.

Speaker 5 And people are already forgetting.

Speaker 6 They're already forgetting

Speaker 6 that Hamas

Speaker 6 unleashed this terror. That it was Hamas that brutalized Israelis.

Speaker 6 It was Hamas

Speaker 5 who took and continues to hold hostages.

Speaker 6 I have not forgotten, nor have you,

Speaker 6 and we will not forget.

Speaker 4 I want to get to the actual war policy with you in a second, Adam, because we might have a little disagreement on that. We'll see.

Speaker 4 But just on the rhetoric side first, you know, isn't this what people have been asking for him to do?

Speaker 4 Like, there's no, oh, and also Islamophobia and also, it's all he's serious, but there's no trying to, you know, be like all bigotry matters and this, you know, it's focusing on the one problem, right?

Speaker 4 And isn't it what we were hoping for Republicans always to like go out there and give a speech and say, I'm concerned about the domestic extremism on my side? They never do it.

Speaker 4 Shouldn't he be getting out of boys for this?

Speaker 3 Well, he should be getting out of boys. He never does, obviously.
And I think this is the, I don't know if this is on the media, if this is on us, if this is on the White House.

Speaker 3 But when he goes out there and he says, you know, normal things like this, right? Stuff that you're listening, you're like, well, this is a president. This is what we should hear for a president.

Speaker 3 They need to be out there promoting it. They need to be out there talking about that as well.
But it is so nice to hear somebody very openly say, this anti-Semitism is out there.

Speaker 3 This anti-Semitism is wrong. Yeah, I didn't hear any two-sidism to that.
So I thought it was pretty solid. And we'll see if the Republicans give him credit.

Speaker 3 I think I know the answer to that one already, though.

Speaker 4 No No Republican politicians are given credit. I don't know, maybe Mitt.
But the frustrating thing for all this is you have, you know, I got in this fight on TV with this guy, Eric Levine.

Speaker 4 I've mentioned this a couple of times. I think it's really telling because there are a lot of people that are like this, that are like, they are on the right.
They don't like Trump.

Speaker 4 Some of them are Jewish. Maybe some of them are just good friends of Israel, non-Jews.
And they see what's happening on campus. They see what Elon Omar says or whatever.

Speaker 4 And they're like, you know, the left. I'm really worried about the left.
They're on the side of Hamas. They're on the side of Hamas.
And so I'm going to have to vote for Trump.

Speaker 4 When meanwhile, you have Trump's actual opponent repeatedly saying like, no, fuck Hamas. I will not forget.
I'm not going to change. You have these people in your life, right?

Speaker 4 Like, can this break through with any of these people? Is there a, can we send them an audiogram of Joe Biden talking about this?

Speaker 3 Yeah, good luck with that. I mean, yeah, you know, you can, but when people's minds, if you send it to them and they're like, oh, he's great.
He's going after, you know, anti-Semitism.

Speaker 3 Gee, they're not playing the clip where he was being anti-Semitic or where he's also talking about this other side as well, too.

Speaker 3 So I think, I don't know if it would have that much impact in it, but yeah, it's just a massive difference. It just depends ultimately to people.
Who do you want for president?

Speaker 3 What kind of a president do you want? Do you want somebody that can lead your better angels, that can send you to a better place? Or do you want to wake up angry every day?

Speaker 3 and have somebody that is using a serious issue, not trying, you know, like anti-Semitism and what's going on in Gaza, not to bring us together, but to tear us apart.

Speaker 3 It's nice to see the difference for a change.

Speaker 4 Well, if you want to go listen to the whole speech, do it. I wanted to play a good bite of it.

Speaker 4 I was sending my Biden friends Attaboys yesterday because, you know, I complain about them enough on this podcast when they don't do well. Let's talk about the broader issue, though.

Speaker 4 Some people then will take it to the next question and say, all right, well, that's good on Biden for condemning anti-Semitism, but he's putting some conditions on Israel.

Speaker 4 You know, he's not giving full-throated support to Bibi. Some of the weapons are moving slowly.
I guess the IDF pushed back on that notion today in a new story.

Speaker 4 But how do you assess the Biden administration's conduct when it comes to the actual war?

Speaker 3 I mean, I think they're doing as well as they can do, taking the political reality.

Speaker 3 taking the fact that

Speaker 3 there is no way for a war in Gaza to happen where it's not just some

Speaker 3 awful story. Let's think about this.
In Mosul, for instance, when we were going after ISIS, we basically leveled the entire city of Mosul.

Speaker 3 The difference is people that lived there had an opportunity to get out, and the only ones that stayed are ISIS.

Speaker 3 So what you have in Gaza is basically like that, a very dense area where there's these terrorists. The problem is...

Speaker 4 And way denser than Mosul. I mean, it's like one of the densest places in the world.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 Yeah, way denser.

Speaker 3 But the point is, though, they cannot leave like people in Mosul did. They cannot leave for refuge because the borders are blocked in Egypt and Jordan.

Speaker 3 So, you know, you sit there and you look at that and you're like, okay, that's a terrible thing. The bottom line, though.

Speaker 3 I think Biden is doing as best as he can when it comes to Israel because he cannot give Bibi, who is unpopular here, he's unpopular in Israel, a blank check to do it.

Speaker 3 We have to talk about things like precision strikes. We have to talk about counter-terrorism.
That's really important. You've got to keep the world on your side as well.

Speaker 3 So that's, I'd give him a solid B, I guess.

Speaker 4 All right. Well, we're basically on the same page on that.

Speaker 4 Maybe that, maybe, our one little disagreement on this is: isn't there also a reason to not give Bibi a blank check because there's no reason to trust Bibi and that they have a good plan right now?

Speaker 4 I don't know. You know, I was listening to some other podcasts on this, and somebody put this better than I did.

Speaker 4 And it's like the two goals of Israel, their stated goals, are eradication of Hamas and getting all the prisoners released. And it's like, they're kind of in conflict, those two stated goals, right?

Speaker 4 And like, no, there's no real clear plan for achieving both at the same time. Right.

Speaker 3 Well, and that's what happens when

Speaker 3 you kind of create a plan or create a sense of what you need to do. Uh, in an emotional time, you usually put out a standard that you may or may not be able to meet.
How can you eradicate Hamas?

Speaker 3 Is that Hamas's military power? Is it Hamas's entire organization? Does that mean to the last Hamas person

Speaker 3 is alive? And so I worry that Israel set out a goal that is too big, but this is where the U.S. can exert that influence is just to make sure that, okay, your goal is too big.
What's your real goal?

Speaker 3 What can we really do? Where can we get you through? Like, how can we try to switch Hamas out with the Palestinian Authority, for instance? And that's about the best you can do.

Speaker 4 I was hoping for full hawk, Adam, so I could sound like humanitarian squish, and you were going to be, you were ready to be bomb, bomb, bombing Iran over here. And like, look at this.
I don't know.

Speaker 4 That's fine. This is great.
We're growing together.

Speaker 3 You know, I guess if I wake up not feeling well, I'm a little more dovey, I guess. That's maybe the thing.
Next time, I'm going to be like, hey, that thing I said about Iran.

Speaker 4 You know, Adam's under the weather right now. He's like, can't we all just get along?

Speaker 4 All right. Let's move on to Stormy.
How much did you get to see yesterday? Or, I mean, we can't see any of it. It's too bad that there aren't cameras in the course.

Speaker 4 So, how much did you get to catch of the I didn't catch much of it yesterday?

Speaker 3 I just got the top lines.

Speaker 4 Okay, well, we'll have a fuller report with Ben Wittis tomorrow um from the courtroom but um i just wanted to talk to you about just the broader question of kind of the political ramifications for something like this the thing that struck me yesterday about the stormy testimony is two things one

Speaker 4 trump comes off in the story that she retells as absolutely disgusting which is not like that surprising right um given that it's trump and that he bragged about grabbing women by the pussy and all that but um you know i I don't know.

Speaker 4 I think some people have an impression of the stormy situation where it was like, oh, you know,

Speaker 4 they're both getting something out of it. He's a celeb and he was suave and, you know, she was, you know, liked being around Trump.

Speaker 4 And like the story she actually tells is, is like, no, she was grossed out by him. He's trying to pressure her and say that she can get director roles if she sleeps with him.

Speaker 4 And he's got a security guard standing outside the door. So like, it wasn't like rape, but it was like kind of rapey.

Speaker 4 Have people internalized that? Is that just just me that's saying that that is going to be a turnoff for folks, or does that not matter? Is this all baked in? Where are you on that question?

Speaker 3 I guess I want to say I'm in the middle. Okay, great.
What I cheat towards is saying it's already baked in.

Speaker 3 You know, the thing that kind of holds me on the other side is once he gets the conviction, once he gets that, he becomes the convicted rapist, or he becomes this and this and this.

Speaker 3 Does that change when you hear it? When you hear convicted felon? Maybe. But honestly, I think it's all just baked in.

Speaker 4 Yeah, that's maybe true. I don't know.
I just, I do think that there is a misalignment still between Trump's actual behavior with women and the reality of it for some people.

Speaker 4 Maybe bringing that into alignment more can help. The other thing is, like, he's there in court, and there is just this pathetic nature of it.
Yeah.

Speaker 4 You know, she's up there talking about how bad he is at sex, and she's up there talking about how he coerced him, and how him and Melania sleep in different beds, and he's forced to sit there and kind of just mutter under his breath and get finger wagged by the judge.

Speaker 4 It's a small man

Speaker 4 there. And this is where I do kind of wish there were cameras in the courtroom.
But is there an error to take out of the balloon here?

Speaker 4 Maybe not on the merits of the arguments, but just like, this is not a winner. This is not somebody that's beating the deep state right now.

Speaker 3 That's one of the things I've always argued is that if you think of a typical Trump supporter, if you come out and say, look, Donald Trump scares me.

Speaker 3 Donald Trump, you know, I'm worried about Donald Trump. Like some of them love that because to them, it makes him more powerful.
So I think when you can take Donald Trump and say, look, I get it.

Speaker 3 He wears a long tie and he says crazy words, but he is not the courageous man that he lets himself out to be. Donald Trump is small.
Donald Trump is a victim. Donald Trump whines.

Speaker 3 Every time Donald Trump says something, it's about himself and how he's a victim of something. And all of a sudden, the Republican Party has become the party of the victims.

Speaker 3 I think there is a certain subset of people that would work on, but that message has to keep getting hammered home.

Speaker 3 It's kind of one of the things I'm focused on with the country first is that message of, look, Donald Trump is not the big, bad, scary guy, actually. He's just a victim.

Speaker 3 And he was president of the United States for four years, and he still was overtaken by the deep state and everything. You know, it's like, this guy is a small man.

Speaker 3 And I do think that is a kind of thing that can help with some people if that message is just hammered after a while.

Speaker 4 My other favorite story from so far this morning. I don't know if you were drinking your Nyquil, if you've seen it, so maybe I can just

Speaker 4 surprise you with this. There's New York Times revelation about RFK Jr.

Speaker 4 That is in a 2012 deposition, RFK Jr.

Speaker 4 admitted that he had brain worms.

Speaker 4 Not like brain worms, as we like to say colloquially here, like Lauren Bobert has brain worms. No, he literally had a worm that ate part of his brain and died inside of his brain.

Speaker 4 And his behavior started to get so weird that his friends asked him to look to see if he had a brain tumor. And he went to go see a doctor.

Speaker 4 And the doctor said, no, you have a dead brain worm in your brain. And then he testified to this.
That's how this came out.

Speaker 4 They testified to this in a court case where he is claiming that he ate too much fish, and the mercury in the fish led to the worm. And I mean, is there a more perfect story for RFK Jr.
than this?

Speaker 4 Like if you told me yesterday, they're like, there's something great that's going to come out of RFK Jr. He has an actual brain worm.
Like, okay, come on.

Speaker 3 I don't know whether to laugh or whether to feel bad or what's going on here. But yeah, that's.
I mean, I think you can laugh.

Speaker 4 He's recovered. Yeah.
I mean, I guess maybe not mentally. He's not fully.

Speaker 3 Well, yeah, I think there may be some lasting impacts there, but that's the craziest thing I've ever heard. And how do you get brain Now I'm scared.
Like, I don't even want to go outside.

Speaker 3 I want to go outside because I don't want to get a brainworm. Where does that come from?

Speaker 4 Well, if you listen to RFK Jr., I'll tell you what you should not do since you got the brainworm. Don't eat fish.
Okay. Don't take vaccines.

Speaker 4 Do take steroids. Yes.
That's pretty important. That is

Speaker 4 important.

Speaker 4 It's an interesting combo when you're trying to live the health, the health and wellness life.

Speaker 4 Where are you at on the brainwormed RFK at this point? Are you feeling like,

Speaker 4 what's your concern level for how much he might help Trump, hurt Trump? What's your assessment on that?

Speaker 4 It's my one that I'm just really still uncertain about.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I am too. You know, you look at these numbers and, you know, some of them show it actually obviously helps Biden.
I'm still of the belief that he is helpful to Trump in the long run because

Speaker 3 you think about it. If you're a Donald Trump supporter, You're not going anywhere.
He's like Coca-Cola, right? Like, you're not going to go get RC. He is the man.
I don't think they're going anywhere.

Speaker 4 I mean, he's like RC, kind of, I guess. Yeah, he is.
If you're an RC person, you've already made a choice. Yeah, you've made a choice.
You've made a countercultural choice. You're sticking with RC.

Speaker 3 That's it. So just given that, you know, Donald Trump's folks are a cult, I think it's just more obvious that he's going to help Trump.
But it is possible. You know, we'll see what happens.

Speaker 4 My worry on this is black voters. I talked about this a little bit with Bakari Sellers last week, and he was less concerned about this.

Speaker 4 I'm going to have additional conversations about this in the coming weeks with other folks that are really kind of deep in that community and kind of know the voter electorate.

Speaker 4 But the numbers are the numbers. And there was a Pew study out that looked at Biden 2020 voters and what they're doing in 2024.

Speaker 4 The amount of ground he's lost with black voters in that time is alarming. It is, yeah.
And so maybe the theory is that they come back home in November when the choice is clear. Okay, maybe.

Speaker 4 Like Kennedy's existence, does it offer an off-ramp for somebody that's unhappy with Biden, either about inflation or Gaza or whatever? And they're like, I can't go all the way over to Trump.

Speaker 4 Like, this is ridiculous.

Speaker 4 Like, the polling that shows that Biden's losing out black voters doesn't actually show that Trump's gaining that much, despite like his awesome spin that black people love felons. Yeah.

Speaker 4 But it does show this like undecided is up. And I do worry about Kennedy with that group.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I think with really anybody out there voting, if they're not happy, you know, if they're like, oh, I can't go with Biden or I can't go with Trump, they're probably going to go for Kennedy because he's going to be the protest vote.

Speaker 3 This is like the Ross Pro.

Speaker 4 And who are the unhappy groups, right? Like, let's just talk about this actually, because it's really another thing I wanted to bring up yesterday was Indiana. There are three unhappy groups.

Speaker 4 Non-college black men, mostly, young voters,

Speaker 4 okay, and you

Speaker 4 like Wall Street Journal, college-educated, classical conservatives, right? Like, those are the three main groups that are unhappy with the choices.

Speaker 4 Other people are unhappy, but like, those are the three biggest groups. Like, the two groups that Biden is struggling with, those voters, Kennedy might be a natural fit for.

Speaker 4 Like, the people that Trump is struggling with, Kennedy is not really a good fit for, you know, which is this college catalog.

Speaker 4 And so, you see this a little bit in Indiana yesterday, which I think continues to be the one green shoot for Biden, which is like six figures Republicans turned out to vote for Nikki Haley yesterday.

Speaker 4 What are they doing? They're not going to RFK, right?

Speaker 4 So,

Speaker 4 are they going to Joe Biden? Are they going home?

Speaker 3 They're not going to RFK. They're either going to go home or they're going to go to Biden, and a few will peel off for Trump.

Speaker 3 But here's where I've, where I think it's really important is like, if you think about who are the Haley voters in terms of what they care about,

Speaker 3 they care about foreign policy, right? They're defense voters. Ukraine matters.
Yeah, it's important to reach out. It's important to talk to them.
But it's important to show a strong foreign policy.

Speaker 3 Foreign policy is the one thing, thing, especially as the roles have kind of changed, that is kind of the gateway drug for people to come over to the Democratic Party because the Democrats are now more hawkish than Republicans on some of these issues.

Speaker 3 So, yeah, I think if the Democrats and Joe Biden can show we're making progress in Ukraine, we're at least supporting them, we're fighting hard, we're standing with our allies, that's one thing you can do to win that 20% is just say, we're for a strong America.

Speaker 4 That kind of relates to a Substack post that you had the other day. And I don't have the headline in front of me, but it was something about this tale of American decline might be greatly exaggerated.

Speaker 4 I have kind of a specific angle on this, but why don't you, for folks who haven't read it, why don't you explain the case that you are making about

Speaker 4 the state of America today on the world stage?

Speaker 3 Well, look, the bottom line is: you know, there are signs that America, as an empire, if you consider us an empire, is in a state of decline. A state of decline with internal disagreements.

Speaker 3 China's on the the rise. So just by

Speaker 3 contrast, we're in decline. And the question is, can we reverse that or not? And I think there's this expectation or this kind of acceptance from people that, yeah, we're in decline.

Speaker 3 There's nothing we can do about it. Let's live our life.
Let's burn through cash. Let's do whatever.
Let's not believe in anything anymore. Let's vote for RFK.

Speaker 3 And that's a big concern.

Speaker 4 Here's my inclined on it. And you can riff on this film.

Speaker 4 I had David Sanger on a couple of weeks ago, and he's sounding the alarm about the great power threat with China and Russia, which I concur with.

Speaker 4 And, you know, he basically talks about how we've both parties have basically fucked this up for a quarter century now. And he makes missed two points on that.

Speaker 4 The one area I kind of didn't think he made that strong case was that he was arguing that these threats to America are urgent and severe, like in this great power battle.

Speaker 4 That the threat to America is urgent, timely, severe. And I'm like, okay, well, I do think it's an urgent and timely threat if you're in Eastern Europe right now.
I buy that. And if you're Taiwan.

Speaker 4 Is that an urgent, timely threat to America? I don't know. So I've been thinking about this.
I've been noodling on this for two weeks. And there's a 60-minutes piece.

Speaker 4 I think it was this past Sunday, maybe it was two Sundays ago, about the border. And the point of the piece was about the hole in the border and that the border is a real problem.

Speaker 4 And a lot of the points they made are very merited.

Speaker 4 But one of the points they're making was that a lot of the people coming through the border are Chinese and not just poor Chinese, middle-class Chinese.

Speaker 4 Middle-class Chinese are like buying plane tickets to Mexico City.

Speaker 4 You might have to stop off somewhere else, but like buying plane tickets to Mexico City with their savings and then taking the trek across the border.

Speaker 4 60 Minutes framing of this and many people on social media's framing was like, how great of a threat this is. But I saw that and I was kind of like,

Speaker 4 hell yeah, home team. Like, I wanted to get out my Hulk Hogan thing.
You know, a real American. I'm a real American.

Speaker 4 Like, if middle-class Chinese are going on long journeys to sneak into America, that just feels like a good indicator that like the American carnage and American demise might not be quite as imminent as people say.

Speaker 3 Well, that's exactly right. I mean, if you look at every indicator of where we're at, I mean, the economy is fairly strong.
You look at new business starts.

Speaker 3 New business starts basically are mainly immigrants, usually first-generation immigrants. What is it, like 70% are not native-born Americans.

Speaker 3 I mean, if you really look at the numbers, America is actually doing good. We're holding our own.
We're doing well. We've just got to kind of recommit to this idea that we are good.

Speaker 3 We've got to recommit to the idea that this is worth fighting for. And that's why I think it's important to say we may feel like we're in decline, but we're not.
And ultimately, it's our choice.

Speaker 3 And if we sit around and we just bellyache and we hire you know, presidents that are going to go and do nothing but divide us, that's where we're going to make those choices.

Speaker 3 Are we going to bring a divider in here to continue us on this slide or somebody that can inspire?

Speaker 3 And I don't necessarily think Joe Biden's going to be the biggest inspirational president his second term, but he can actually paint something that matters and gives people hope, gives people something to fight for.

Speaker 4 I do think if the Democrats can take one thing from us, the new immigrants, to their coalition, at least temporarily, maybe more permanently for some than others, if you can take one value that we're bringing, I think that the Democrats could do well positioning themselves as the America is great actually,

Speaker 4 right? Like party. Like not America needs to be great again.
Like America is great now. And part of America being great is a lot of things that liberals value actually.

Speaker 4 That you know, diversity is part of the reason why America is great. A lot of the companies coming out of blue states, California is what makes America great.

Speaker 4 Our culture, music, you know, the Kendrick beating Drake and the beef. Like there's a lot of things that make America great.

Speaker 4 And sometimes I felt like, not always, I don't want to pay it too broadly, like there's some on the left that like feel

Speaker 4 uncomfortable making that case, right? Because it's like they want to focus on all the ways that can be better. That's the whole point of progressivism.
That's why the word is progressive.

Speaker 4 You know, I think that Obama's actually pretty good at this.

Speaker 4 And the Democrats have lost some of that Obama flavor of being able to, you know, combine uplifting American values and American strength while also saying, yeah, and we can do better about this, that, and the other thing.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I mean, there, like, there's not been an inspirational president like that in how long, right?

Speaker 3 I wasn't a huge fan of Obama, but like when he would talk, you, you could hear that and you'd recognize that's somebody that cared, and there was a lot of passion behind that.

Speaker 3 But yeah, I just think we're not in that now. That's not that moment.

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Speaker 4 I have another news item for you. It's hopefully going to...
I think you're going to be interested about something that's happening.

Speaker 4 I don't know if it'll brighten your day. I'm not sure actually what your habits are in your private time, but we're about to find out.
There's a new policy proposal.

Speaker 4 It was kind of tucked into the Project 2025 thing at Heritage. And over at the Daily Wire, Michael Knowles, who's like a Ben Shapiro secondhand man, was interviewing Johnny McIntye.

Speaker 4 Johnny McIntyre is on the inside circle of Donald Trump, was in charge of Donald Trump's staffing, would likely be in charge of that again in a second term.

Speaker 4 He also starts to write stuff dating site and posts very cringe TikToks about how MAGA people can find other MAGA people to mate with. But here he is on this podcast.

Speaker 4 Let's just take a listen to his new proposal.

Speaker 8 The elephant in the room, which is a stain on not only society, but the entire dating culture, which is pornography.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 8 And I think whenever America bans that, which will be happening at some point, everyone will be much better off.

Speaker 4 Banning porn. Since this is the bro cast, I felt like this is important for us.
You know, I'm not a big porn man myself.

Speaker 4 I've got a lot of vices, but I do think that that shouldn't land great with the barstool bros, porn banning.

Speaker 4 And in your new home state, Texas, I don't know if you know this or not, but porn hub is functionally banned, you know, because of rules that were put in state by the state government.

Speaker 4 So I don't know. Is this an opportunity for Democrats? Are they brave enough to take the pro-porn opportunity?

Speaker 3 I think it might work to everybody's favor just to stay completely away from anything with porn in it,

Speaker 3 pornography, anything like that. So I like,

Speaker 4 I don't know if they'll be anti-urban. So this is just me.
This is going to be a lowly fight. Adam, people say that I gave up my principles, okay?

Speaker 4 People say that I gave up my small government principles when I aligned with the Democrats, and I did not. I still believe that we should limit the size of government.

Speaker 4 I still believe the government shouldn't be telling me what to do.

Speaker 4 And I sure as shit don't think that Johnny McIntye should be telling me what I want to look at, you know, on the internet on Sunday night when I'm alone in my home.

Speaker 4 I don't think that anybody should be told what they should be watching. You know, it reminds me of Chairman Xi demanding that the men on TV all be manly men and not sissy men.
This is America.

Speaker 4 In America, we do porn, beer. We also do good stuff, but people can, you know, do what they want.
No?

Speaker 3 Yeah, I mean, that's, it's, we do, we do.

Speaker 3 Johnny McAtee is really was one of the biggest kind of inducements or one of the bigger kind of points of rot in the administration in terms of creating a lot of mistrust.

Speaker 3 He was always grilling people. You know, are you loyal enough to Donald Trump? He was kind of his henchman.
What a just a terrible dude.

Speaker 3 And what they do is they'll go on these podcasts then, or they'll make comments to try to be as crazy and as terrible as they can because then they can make money off it.

Speaker 3 You want to go out and say, well, we're for banning porn or we're for, you know, whatever it is. I think in that same interview said something about repealing the right for women to vote.
It just

Speaker 4 joking. We're just joking.
just a little jokeroo because he got found out. Yeah, we're going to ban abortion at zero weeks.
We're going to ban porn.

Speaker 4 We're going to tell people what bathrooms they have to use. You know, we're going to tell teachers what they can talk about.
This is the freedom party. We're also going to ban cell-based meat.

Speaker 4 You see that? Yeah. John DeSantis banning cell-based meat.
That's another freedom thing now. Yeah.
You're a real meat man, though, I guess, probably.

Speaker 3 You know, I like real meat. But look,

Speaker 3 I'm not opposed to a lab-grown meat. I don't even know what it means, but I'm not that opposed to it.

Speaker 4 It might lead to brainworms, I guess, would be the concern. But as long as the FDA is vetting for brainworm risk.

Speaker 3 Yeah, well, let's hope they are.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I don't think we should be limiting innovation. I've got one final topic for you.
In yesterday's pod, we had Jeff Duncan.

Speaker 4 What a great American, that guy. Lieutenant Governor.
And he's a CNN colleague of yours.

Speaker 4 The difference between the Jeff Duncans of the world and the Bill Barrs and the Paul Ryans, you know, we can go down the last champ. It's like,

Speaker 4 why is it so hard for people to to do the simple thing Jeff Duncan did? Because he came on this podcast yesterday, and I don't think any of our liberal listeners were like, I love this guy's politics.

Speaker 4 He was like, I love a heartbeat bill. And, you know, we got to secure the border.
And this is not a fucking Rhino squish. But he's just like, guys, we can't do Donald Trump.
It's a no.

Speaker 3 What's your take? Yeah, the great thing about him is he takes his faith very seriously. He obviously is really passionate about this.

Speaker 3 And I know that, like all of us, it's kind of a difficult decision when you make a decision to endorse endorse in a party that is not part of your identity but ultimately you are accountable to you you're accountable to God you're accountable to your family and that is when I have been talking to Jeff about it that's something that he has very close to his heart is that idea so look you know every now and then there's a bright star somebody that's going to do the right thing and on the sidelines the people that don't you know, the Elise Stephanix, in their heart, in their soul, they know what they've done is wrong.

Speaker 3 And so it just makes it, you know, it makes it harder for them, but good for Jeff.

Speaker 4 In a world of least to Fonix, be Jeff Duncan. All right, Adam.
I was going to keep you around for the mailbag, but you've just been gutting this out on the mailbag alone. No, you're doing great.

Speaker 4 I have Rokana on tomorrow, your former colleague. Do you have any gossip about him or any hard questions you want me to ask him?

Speaker 3 No, no, just say hello. That'd be the best.

Speaker 4 Just say hello? Just say hey. There's no like cafeteria, cafeteria chat.

Speaker 3 No, nothing good. Nothing good.
I'll text you if I get something good.

Speaker 4 Okay, you can text me if you get something good. Adam Kinzinger, the House bro, former congressman, a great American, a Jeff Duncan in his own right.
We're going to have him on again soon.

Speaker 4 Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. You just power down some Peptobizimol.
Make sure that you don't have any worms in that brain. We'll be seeing you soon.

Speaker 3 All right. All right, buddy.
Later, homie.

Speaker 4 Thanks.

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Speaker 4 Okay, that was Adam Kinzinger just, you know, doing his best Jordan Flew game impression. I'm going to do a little mailbag here for a bonus for you guys.

Speaker 4 Remember, you can reach us at Bullworkpodcast at thebullwork.com if you have mailbag questions. I've been getting a lot of the political questions.
I've been giving great life advice, I think.

Speaker 4 I think I've improved like four people's life. So, you know, if you're looking for life advice, you can send that in too.
Here we go, Steven. What is the fringiest political belief you hold?

Speaker 4 I had some great questions, by the way, but I'm doing this on the fly because of the Kinzinger illness. And so some of them were just too good for me to give you my off-the-cuff answers.

Speaker 4 This one, though, I have an off-the-cuff answer for. On the left side, I guess I wouldn't say that I'm a prison abolitionist because I do think that violent criminals need to be in prison.

Speaker 4 But boy, I think that there are a lot of people that we have in prison that shouldn't be in prison.

Speaker 4 And I think that, you know, the criminal justice reform stuff in Congress is probably even pretty mild for me.

Speaker 4 If you listen to that serial podcast about the kids' juvenile detention center in Tennessee, I mean, it is just like, it is nauseating to think about these teenagers that are getting put in juvie for truancy.

Speaker 4 Like, what? You know, we can figure out ways, volunteer service, public service, more money invested into social workers, you know, to go into these communities.

Speaker 4 Think about the money we can invest into social workers if we weren't spending so much money, you know, on our prison industrial complex. So, look, violent criminals need to go to jail.

Speaker 4 I haven't really thought through the implications of my views with regards to white-collar crime because I do think we need to punish the white-collar criminals.

Speaker 4 But nonviolent offenders in prison, particularly Juvie, is a no for me. And that's pretty fringy.
Okay, my fringiest right-wing view. This is going to make some people hate me, but like,

Speaker 4 I do not want the, don't get me wrong, don't get me wrong, people, don't take me out of context.

Speaker 4 I do not want the Donald Trump administration or the Vivek Ramaswamy administration or any of these freaks to have access to Schedule F's.

Speaker 4 This is the reclassification of career government employees as political appointees. It makes it easier to fire them.

Speaker 4 And, you know, I got to tell you, we probably could benefit from having some of the members of the administrative state reclassified to make it easier for the government to shrink or to grow or to reorient itself or do a number of different things.

Speaker 4 And there are a lot of these folks I think probably should be cut. The number of people we have as federal employees is way too big.

Speaker 4 The number of people who are doing jobs that like really, you know, they could be moved around.

Speaker 4 I just, I've got, I'm not going to call anybody out, but I've got some buddies that have federal government jobs, you know, GS-13s or something that I think the Republic could survive if they weren't in there.

Speaker 4 There was like a moment in 2009.

Speaker 4 I wish I'd had my political reawakening by like 2009 because there was a moment of like tech bro neoliberal leftists who wanted to do liberal good governance stuff, but also wanted to just completely overhaul the federal government and streamline a bunch of shit and bring in new people who are getting paid more money to do more important things, various oversight.

Speaker 4 I worry about this deeply when it comes to AI. There are a bunch of areas.

Speaker 4 We're seeing this a little bit with Lena Khan, which you were talking about in that Amazon interview a while back, where if you actually put good people in at the FTC who make a competitive wage,

Speaker 4 then maybe we can have some good government regulation and oversight. So nothing against you.
If you work in the federal government, I'm not putting you on the chomping block, but I don't know.

Speaker 4 I mean, Rick Perry wanted to cut a couple of agencies and he forgot one of them, but he wanted to cut a couple of them. You could probably sell me on that.

Speaker 4 So, all right, those are my friend Geospolitical Beefs. You can get mad at me in the comment section.
Carmen, again. So, I guess Carmen has asked us twice.

Speaker 4 She wants some bulwark discussions of the states in which Democratic senators are vulnerable.

Speaker 4 I have kind of been falling short on this, on the Senate races, which are really important because the Democrats basically need to run the table, you know, given that West Virginia is off the board.

Speaker 4 And I think that's going to be very challenging, or they have to pick up a blue state. The most vulnerable senators are in Ohio and Montana.
Sherrod Brown and Tester.

Speaker 4 Both are really good politicians and really good senators.

Speaker 4 It's just like Susan Collins is literally the only example of a senator that is running way ahead of what her party's presidential candidate does in these races. We're just in a different era now.

Speaker 4 So I think it's going to be very, very challenging for Tester and Brown, but that's the top tier.

Speaker 4 Then you move on to the next tier, which are Senate races that are happening in the presidential swing states. So you've got Bob Casey in Pennsylvania.
You got Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin.

Speaker 4 I did a great next-level interview with Tammy Baldwin, by the way. We'll put it in the show notes if you're interested in that.
It was one of my Sunday interviews with Tammy Baldwin.

Speaker 4 She surprised me how much I liked her.

Speaker 4 She was super candid and very interested in bipartisanship, very interested in, I think, looking at the Democratic Party in a more healthy way about how they can appeal to rural and working-class voters.

Speaker 4 Anyway, check out the Danny Baldwin interview. Then you've got Michigan, and then you've got the open Kristen Sinema seat in Arizona.
Oh, and Nevada. You have Jackie Rosen in Nevada.

Speaker 4 So I would tear those out this way. I feel pretty good about Ruben Gallego right now in Arizona.
Carrie Lake kind of has all of the Trump baggage with none of the positives.

Speaker 4 Ruben offsets some of the ground that Trump is, we're about to get to in Nevada, some of the ground Trump is making among working-class Hispanic voters because Ruben Gallego is Hispanic and has a lot of credibility in that community.

Speaker 4 So I would put that at the sort of bottom of the list if you're looking at this from a Democratic perspective. The ones that you're most worried about being Ohio and Montana.

Speaker 4 And then the next batch that I would be worried about is, I think, Nevada, because Jackie Rosen just doesn't have this brand that Baldwin and Casey do.

Speaker 4 I'm just generally worried about the demographics of Nevada compared to some of these other states just because college educated percentage, percentage of Hispanic voters, working class.

Speaker 4 So Jackie Rosen would be the next one. And then the Michigan, I guess I'm tentatively put on that tier right now because we still don't know who the candidates are going to be.

Speaker 4 Alyssa Slotkin is the preferred Democrat from Michigan, at least from my perspective. The Republicans have a wide open primary on their end as well.
So we'll kind of put a hold on Michigan for now.

Speaker 4 And then the next tier down from that would be Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, just because, like I said, Baldwin and Casey, I think, have been very strong senators, very good ties to their communities.

Speaker 4 Both are running ahead of Biden right now, which is concerning if you look at the poll numbers. And so I'd look at that.
And then you get to the potential pickup opportunities.

Speaker 4 You have Florida and Texas, which I think are both stretches. But I also had an interview with Colin Allred a while back.
If you want to check that, we'll put the Allred interview as well.

Speaker 4 That was before he actually announced, but it was still pretty interesting about kind of Colin All Red, the person he's going up against Ted Cruz in Texas.

Speaker 4 So, you know, if I'm assessing where you want to give your money, volunteer resources, Ohio and Montana at the top, Nevada and Michigan next.

Speaker 4 I'd put a star next to Michigan, TBD on how the primary shakeout.

Speaker 4 And then I would have on the third tier, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Texas, and Florida, two defenses, two offenses, if you're the Democrats. And then below that, for now, Arizona.

Speaker 4 You also have that wild card race with St. Larry Hogan and Maryland.

Speaker 4 I'll do a deeper dive on that because I think that's going to be an interesting race from a bulwark-y perspective because, you know, Larry Hogan, good man and a vacuum.

Speaker 4 I'd be very interested in having Republicans like Larry Hogan in. I would want to support him with Trump on the ballot.
You're like, ugh.

Speaker 4 Anything that gives Republicans any more chance of having a trifecto where they have the House and the Senate and Trump gives me the willies a little bit, given the Project 2025 element to this.

Speaker 4 So that's just a quick overview, back of the envelope, a little bonus for you guys since the Kinzinger interview went a little short. I will go deeper on all those races as we get ahead to November.

Speaker 4 Send me your hate mail on my fringiest political beliefs. And we'll be back tomorrow, as I already mentioned, with a bit from Rokana and also a report from New York from Ben Wittis.

Speaker 4 I hate doing this. I hate telling you what's going to be on tomorrow because you never know.

Speaker 4 It's live to tape, but it's live podcasting. We're doing this stuff on the fly, and maybe one of them won't show up and now I would have jinxed it.
So hopefully not.

Speaker 4 Hopefully we'll have Roe and Ben with us tomorrow. We've got a great slate of folks ahead.
Thanks for being with us every day on the Boulder podcast. Thanks to Adam Kinzinger.

Speaker 4 We'll see you all tomorrow. Peace.

Speaker 4 The same worms that eat me will someday eat you too.

Speaker 4 We'll meet you.

Speaker 4 Nibble on your feet, Emily. Nibble on my toes.

Speaker 4 They become the same when our bodies decompose.

Speaker 4 You'll turn into dirt someday, same dirt as me.

Speaker 4 Like one becomes a two, and two becomes a three.

Speaker 4 The same worms that eat me will someday eat you too.

Speaker 4 They're gonna eat you.

Speaker 4 gonna nibble on your hair

Speaker 4 Gonna eat you up

Speaker 4 Gonna slither all around you

Speaker 4 Touch you everywhere

Speaker 4 We got the same worms

Speaker 4 We got the same worms

Speaker 4 We got the same worms, baby

Speaker 4 They're gonna eat you

Speaker 4 Same worms that eat me will someday eat you too.

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

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