Bill Kristol and Andrew Egger: Lying Is the Price of Admission

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Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast.

I'm your host, Tim Miller.

It's Monday, May 6th, probably the most urgent Holocaust Remembrance Day we've had in a while.

We've dueling protesters behaving badly on campus.

Israel's ordering evacuations in Rafah.

There were some GOP VEEP auditions this weekend.

A former president is on trial.

People are scared that the bird flu is back.

And I'm excited to have have our dynamic morning shots duo with us to talk about all of that.

We've got Bill Crystal, you know him, and also Andrew Egger.

Andrew, have you been on this podcast before?

Were you here in the early days?

Yeah, back in the very before times when frequently it was just Jim Swift, Charlie Sykes, Andrew Egger, dudes chatting, Bullwork podcast did that a number of times.

But I guess you've sort of cleaned up your act around here since then.

Dudes Chatting, I wouldn't know if we've cleaned it up.

Dudes Chatting, well, welcome.

For people who don't know, you were an OG Bullworker.

You abandoned us for the dispatch.

It's okay.

Nobody's feelings are hurt about that at all.

And now you're back.

Do you have any personal anecdotes you want to share with people who are

new to the Andrew Egger experience?

Oh, like anything interesting that's happened to me in the past five years or something like that?

I don't know.

Yeah, I don't know.

I used to be the sort of bright-eyed, dewy child when I was here first at the age of 23 or so.

And now I'm much older.

I'm a little, you know, thicker around the middle.

I have two kids now.

Two children.

I've become much wiser and more melted looking in appearance.

So we will be the judge of how much wiser you've gotten, though.

I have been enjoying your morning shots dispatches.

People should sign up for morning shots if they haven't at thebork.com.

Bill Crystal, before we get to all that news I referenced, I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you about kind of the big thing happening in the culture over the weekend.

And the people want to know what your take is on the Kendrick versus Drake beef.

This is what Tim always does to me.

You know, now he's annoyed because in the morning shots, which just went up about 20 minutes ago, I confess, not confess, I'm proudly say that I'm a Knicks fan.

I so much enjoyed it, it was such important for my youth when they won in 70, especially with Willis Reed.

And then in 73, they haven't won in five decades.

This could be the year with olders, but of course, Tim can't tolerate that very thought as a true Nuggets fanatic and a yokic guy at all.

We're happy for the Knicks.

The Knicks are kind of cute.

I mean, you actually follow this stuff so much more closely than I do.

Do you think it's even plausible that the Knicks would have a shot at the finals or winning it all against?

I mean, there would have to be some injuries in Boston, I think.

But it's cute and fun.

I think they can go to the Eastern Conference finals and get a win and get people excited.

People in New York need joy.

So that's fine.

That's the kind of condescension we get these days from people who are rooting for a team that didn't exist, didn't exist in 1970 or 73.

You know, just kind of this latecomer fake team.

We existed.

We were just in the ABA.

Okay.

With the red, white, and blue ball.

The multicolored magical ball.

Anyway, you need to do some research.

I'm going to send you a document by next Monday.

Well, next Monday, you're on vacation.

So you have three weeks, actually.

Bill Crystal's going on vacation for a couple weeks.

You have three weeks.

At the end of May, I would like 100 words from you on the Kendrick versus Drake beef and let me know which side you fall down on that one.

I wish point they'll each have released 600 more songs.

Attacking each other.

All right.

We had to start with some levity because A.B.,

you know, as is her want, is a downer on thebulwark.com today.

She has an article.

It's pretty bracing, headlined, Biden risks radicalizing the center, referencing border protests.

I didn't really love the headline.

No offense to whoever wrote it.

But the underlying point that there's a sense of chaos out there that is reflecting poorly on the president in the eyes of some people in the middle, I think is probably right.

The question of whose fault is that, I think, is something we can hash out.

But, Bill, what did you think?

Why don't you give us your two cents on A.B.'s warning?

What would you call it?

Avery's Cassandra call to the Biden White House today?

Right.

Cassandra was right, I think, right?

Yeah, I guess she's a censor.

Yeah, no, I'm a big fan of A.B.'s piece, and she just looks at what's happening on campuses, ties it into the border, where she points out, most of it's on campuses, but she points out on the border that Biden said when the border, he negotiated the border deal, or rather the Democrats and the Senate negotiated the border deal.

Biden was for it.

They got, what, 47, something like that?

Democrats and the Senate to vote for it.

They went all the way, even though they didn't like it much.

Biden said when Trump blew it up, we're going to hold Trump accountable.

We're going to hold Republicans accountable.

They're the ones who are preventing us from fixing the border.

He hasn't really spoken about it much since, and he certainly hasn't done anything.

He hasn't urged Congress to pass it immediately.

He hasn't done much or anything really in the way of executive action.

The combination of the inaction on the border and relative inaction, I would say.

He gave a good speech Thursday, which Andrew wrote about in Morning Shots, but on the campuses, and the sense of chaos that comes out of both of those is bad for the incumbent president, who is Joe Biden.

I struggle with this a bit because I think objectively it is true that the perception right now, both globally and domestically, is that things are in disorder and that

that is going to fall on the president fairly or unfairly.

I look at these issues though and it's like,

okay, so the Columbia commencement was canceled today.

That's terrible.

I feel horrible for the Columbia kids, especially the ones that worked really hard to get there and deserve to have their day.

But does that affect anybody in suburban Atlanta?

Like, not really.

Like, the border thing is big on Fox.

I get it.

But Arizona, it's going to be big.

We talked to Stephen Richer about that a couple of weeks ago.

Is anybody in the Rust Belt state, are there any of the normal people in Waukesha County that are going to decide this election impacted at all by what happens on Columbia's campus or in the hole in the border near San Diego?

Yeah, I mean, you're right that to a large degree, it's an optics problem primarily, and it's fair for Biden's defenders to say, largely, this is an optics problem, particularly the campuses thing.

I mean, very easy to argue, the border stuff is the opposite of an optics problem.

But I think the political danger for Biden here is that so much of his brand in his last competition against Trump, which is the rematch that we're getting again this November, is that he was going to be the order president and not like kind of the hard-edged law and order president, like send in the troops and tamp things down that Trump made his brand, but just that we're going to lower the temperature, we're going to get things back to normal.

And I think the biggest optics problem for Biden is that it's kind of a worst of both worlds situation here where he is is kind of becoming seen as that law and order, jackbooted cops guy among so many of these young progressives and with these campus protests continuing to spiral further and further out of control.

I mean, they're sending in the cops at a lot of these campuses, but things are only getting worse.

And Biden is kind of identified with that kind of establishment force for a lot of these young people.

But on the flip side of the coin, you have, you know, more moderate centrist type people who don't identify with the campus protests, who don't pay that much attention to all these sorts of things at all, but do just sort of have this sense that there hasn't been the sort of return to stability and normality and order that was kind of the thing the president was hanging his hat on in his first election campaign against Trump.

And one of the things that we've seen from this, and A.B.

brought this up in her piece, is it is starting to make some of the like harder-edged law and order stuff that Trump continues to promise taste more like realism to a lot of these kind of, you know, to the extent that we still have persuadable voters to these persuadable voters.

You have the border being the most salient issue that Pew has polled for three months in a row.

You have, you know, a stronger embrace of even Trump's own promised tactics on the border.

You have more and more people in the middle saying, well, okay, maybe before these were things that we thought seemed beyond the pale, but now, you know, maybe that's just what you need to do because obviously the status quo isn't working.

So it's a really, I do think it's actually a really dangerous political situation for the president to be in.

Yeah, I agree.

it's dangerous.

I struggle with this, though.

It's like, okay, yeah.

I mean, the world's complicated.

Things happen.

You know, terrorists attack countries.

You know, you have insane strong men that want to bring back the, you know, old Soviet Union, half the world away.

Like there are some 18-year-olds who are acting badly.

It's like, what?

So we want to change the head of government to a shit-throwing monkey?

And like, that is going to be the thing that fixes all this?

It's a little hard to stomach.

No, I mean, I actually sort of make that point this morning in the news.

I was going to write about the protests this morning and maybe about the VP audition for Trump.

And I felt I really couldn't.

You got Putin threatening the use of tactical nuclear weapons.

I think it's a bluff.

It's a bluster, but whatever.

It reminds us there's a massive, the largest land war in Europe in 80 years is going on.

We have what's happening in Gaza, obviously.

And then we have Trump.

you know, dead even in the polls for president, running an explicitly authoritarian campaign.

Those are the big things.

I totally agree with that.

And, you know, we've had campus protests before.

These are, I don't like them, and there's a lot to be said about them.

Not good for our campus, not good for colleges, not good for our politics, I think.

But yes, not in the same level of problem.

The one thing I would say, though, is it's a little too easy to say, well, Columbia, no one in middle America cares about that.

I don't know.

I think in suburban Atlanta, they care about Emory University.

And Emory University has just moved its commencement for the first time ever, I think, off campus because they can't guarantee security to some other place.

I'm not sure what it is, a private venue of some kind.

Michigan had disruptions at its commencements last weekend, and I kind of think voters in Michigan probably noticed that.

So I don't know about the politics of this.

It may turn out to be utterly forgotten by October, and it's a blip, and maybe people don't blame Biden, or they shouldn't blame Biden for it.

But I kind of worry that it does spill over in the way Andrew was saying.

Okay, well, there are two related things I want to bring up.

Jake Aunkincloss, Avie quotes this in her piece as a Democrat out of Massachusetts, makes the side of the argument that one political response to this for Biden should be to care less about the protesters' interests.

That's not, I don't think, the majority view in the Democratic Party, but I think it's worth at least listening to what Jake had to say.

If these protesters' demands were met by the president, these hostages would be doomed to die in captivity because Israel would be ceding its leverage.

Now, I don't...

These protests are non-monolith, obviously, and different protesters have different points of view.

But the overall character of these protests, Alex, is in fact anti-Semitic and pro-terrorist, and Democrats need to roundly condemn them.

We cannot be worried about the electoral impact of so doing.

We've got to do what's right, not what's politic.

And frankly, the margin of victory for Joe Biden is not going to be college students in California anyway.

It's going to be Nikki Haley voters in Michigan and Wisconsin and Pennsylvania who

probably don't have a lot of sympathy for overprivileged, underinformed kids on Ivy League campuses.

Whoa,

he went for it there at the end.

I think that's maybe right, but isn't it true that Joe Biden's going to need big turnout from kids at the University of Wisconsin and need to do well with Nikki Haley voters in the Milwaukee suburbs?

Isn't that like the fundamental challenge here?

And why, I think, isn't that why you have people on the left side of the Democratic Party that are like, why isn't he pandering more?

Or why isn't he, you know, listening more?

Maybe pandering is not the word they'd use, listening more to the protesters and why you people like Auchinclaus and Moskowitz and others saying fuck these kids basically

but but isn't the reason why Biden's not doing either of those things because he needs both I would just say I want to Andrew on this since he's closer in age than we are to this but Most kids at the University of Wisconsin the University of Michigan and Penn State are not on the side of the protesters.

This is where I think the myth is.

It's very unclear.

I mean, they're a little less pro-Israel than older Americans.

They may be more sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinians.

A lot of people are sympathetic to that, but they are not in favor of these protests.

Nowhere have they gotten massive support from the student body.

I don't know of any place the student government has endorsed them even or anything like that.

And in Michigan, in fact, when they disrupted one of the commencements, like one of the schools, so they could dance and theater, the parents, so I agree that this might not just be the students, but the students and the parents started to shout USA, USA.

I don't think these protests are popular even among the young voters Biden needs to get.

Let me give you one anecdote to that effect, if I could, which is that a couple months ago, I attended a Biden campaign event.

I can't remember now which college campus it was on.

I think it was a satellite campus of the University of Virginia, but it was his big kind of restore Row reproductive rights event that he did with Kamala Harris, the vice president.

And that was the event, at least one of the events, the one that stands out in my mind, where he was repeatedly heckled down by pro-Palestinian chants, you know, the Genocide Joe stuff and all that, like throughout the entire remarks.

One of the people that I happened to talk to when I was doing interviews before he got there was this young woman who turned out to be president of the UVA College Democrats.

And her stance on it was remarkable because she was there to support Biden.

And she was, you know, she was kind of of the opinion that the president kind of had his head in the right place by leaning into the reproductive rights stuff.

And she was not among the people who were arrested at UVA this weekend as part of the encampment, but she was also kind of very sort of torn on the, when I asked about the Gaza stuff.

And this was before the event where, like I said, he was repeatedly shouted down.

And she was very worried about it being a sore issue among many of her peers, just for the reasons you describe.

I mean, it almost doesn't matter what he does.

The structural problem is that this is a thing that is pitting different members of his coalition against one another very angrily and very aggressively.

And it makes it that much more difficult, again, no matter what he does, to put the big tent together in November.

Yeah, I think that what Bill kind of alluded to there, what you both are getting at, is right, is that if you just look at the data, and there's now been a decent amount of polling among young voters, like, yeah, they are directionally sympathetic for good reason, I think, to the plight of the Palestinian people and the humanitarian concerns there.

But that's different than going along with the only solution is anti-fader revolution or whatever the people, you know, they're chanting at some of these things.

I don't know if the students are there at a median level.

And I think that Joe Biden can turn out, as you see, the people that are most likely to turn out among young voters are already with biden at pretty similar levels to 2020.

one last thing more of a comment than a question on these guys is the uh there's a story over the weekend that the big donors you know gates foundation source all the big donors that fund the biden campaign and super pax are also funding the protests that seems unhelpful you know maybe they should have some cross-agency meetings at the nonprofit to say like like let's make sure that all of our donations are aligned the same direction against donald trump that might be just one suggestion for the donor class folks that listen to this podcast.

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This is Larry Flick, owner of the Floor Store.

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I have committed the crime that I criticized other media outlets of already this morning because we're halfway through the podcast.

There was a video over the weekend from Ole Miss, Hattie Toddy.

There were some protesters,

Palestinian protesters, on the square there.

And there were a much larger crowd of counter-protesters of American flag waving fret bros.

And there's a black woman that was videoing the counter-protesters.

one of these guys shouts back at her using monkey noises and like monkey arms like he's an orangutan several republican politicians tweeted that video approvingly including mike collins of georgia the guy's already been kicked out of his frat and you know ole miss kids are going to do what ole miss kids are going to do and not not that i'm making excuses for that but like

The thing to me that was the big takeaway is like, A, it tells us a lot about the state of the Republican Party that a congressman can approvingly tweet a video like that and not have any concern that he's going to face blowback from his peers or like the media or that no one can hold him accountable anymore because none of the conservative media will give a fuck about this.

And two, you don't hear commentators being like, well, this is really going to reflect poorly on Trump.

Why is that?

Tell me about, explain to me, Bill Crystal.

Why is that?

Oh, my God.

No, but you're right to focus on the Republican members of Congress and the kids are the kids and it's bad and they should be

reprimanded and disciplined if that's appropriate.

But it is amazing that the Republican congressmen, they're the ones who are supposed to be adults.

On the left, I would say I feel the same about the kids to some degree.

I give them a bit of a pass.

They're kids.

It's the faculty who have been really appalling at some of these universities.

So let's hold left-wing faculty accountable.

Let's hold right-wing congressmen accountable.

Yeah.

Andrew Olemas taking care of business.

That was Mike Congress, Mike Collins, Republican of Georgia tweet.

Yuck.

I mean, there's basically two possibilities, right?

One is that he's just kind of openly leaning into the, yeah, shout racist epithets at the protesters for the USA angle of it.

And the other possibility is that it was kind of a thoughtless retweet.

I mean, it's an interesting video because like it's the kid in question just kind of like comes into the side of the frame for a few seconds.

It's not like the main point of the video.

It's the most shocking thing from the video because otherwise it's kind of a boring video.

So it's not implausible that he could have just been sort of like retweeting the protest.

And then the bigger problem is Republican.

Let me just say that you never apologize.

I mean, like, in Republican politics, apologizing or backing off is weakness.

You could never be seen to be like, oh, wow, sorry, didn't realize that there was horrible racism going on in that video I approvingly retweeted.

It's a big mess.

And I totally take the point that, like, yeah, I mean, how much of our collective media attention are we going to spend on kids behaving badly, whether it's this kid or, you know, the worst of the worst of the pro-Gaza protests?

I mean, you can make the point that like just as that kid didn't necessarily speak for everybody at that protest, I mean, the same thing that we've all been doing of like seeing the worst excesses

from these protests at Columbia or UCLA or wherever and using those to characterize the whole gang, it's all very messy.

And there's very little reason to think that it's going to hurt Trump at all.

I'm happy to stipulate that Mike Collins did not intentionally tweet that to do monkey, making monkey sounds of black people and endorse that.

But like if you accidentally tweet out a video that that includes somebody making monkey sounds of black people, then you know, the right thing to do is say, I'm sorry about that.

That was not my intent.

That was a mistake.

I was focused on the USA chant part of the video, and you know, we'll correct that.

Like, that feels like the normal thing that good-natured humans would do not that long ago, but that's not what we're doing anymore.

I'll say one final thought on this.

I do think we need to sometimes take people back from the brink.

And I like the number of smart people that I've heard make the claim that, like, oh, you know, the behavior of this student or that student is going to make the difference.

It's like, if you're making your decision on who should be the leader of the free world based on what offends you most by a 17-year-old, like you are making a very smooth-brained decision for yourself.

So I think everybody's just got to like step away from the brink and we can discuss on the merits, what's happening on these campuses, concerns.

Are we concerned about rising anti-Semitism?

Yes, President Biden's going to give a speech about this tomorrow.

This is all worth discussing.

But, like, I think we need to be able to grade Donald Trump versus Joe Biden on the merits, not based on what's happening on the quad at Ole Miss or Columbia.

The VPAuditions this weekend.

Can we do VPAuditions?

I want to start with seriously alarming and end with comically absurd.

If that's okay, we'll just kind of gradually go down.

The vice president apprentice that we had on the Sunday shows this weekend.

Most alarming, I'd like to nominate Tim Scott.

Let's listen to him.

Senator, will you commit to accepting the election results of 2024?

Bottom line.

At the end of the day,

the 47th president of the United States will be President Donald Trump, and I'm excited to get back to low inflation, low unemployment.

Wait, wait, Senator, yes or no?

Yes or no?

Will you accept the election results of 2024 no matter who wins?

That is my statement.

But is it just yes or no?

Will you accept the election results of 2024?

I look forward to President Trump being the 47th president.

Kristen, you could ask him multiple times.

Senator, just a yes or no answer.

So the American people, the American people will make the decision

for President Trump.

That's that clear.

I don't hear you committing to the election results.

Here's the job.

Will you commit to accepting the election results?

This is why so many Americans believe that NBC is an extension of the Democratic Party.

At the end of the day, I've said what I said, and I know that the American people, their voices will be heard, and I believe that President Trump will be be our next president.

It's that simple.

I've said what I said, Bill Crestel.

It's that simple.

What do you think about that?

I mean, it shows the unbelievable corruption of the Republican Party by Donald Trump, but the willing, that's what I'm looking for, collaboration in that corruption by all the people who want to suck up to Donald Trump, go along with Donald Trump, or in this case, be selected as VP by Donald Trump.

A United States Senator cannot say he will accept the election results.

I mean, what do we, that really is, that is way beyond one bad faculty member at Columbia or one, you know, racist kid even at O Miss, right?

Yeah.

And Andrew, it's like, to me, again, if we were living in a 2018 world and you're a Republican politician, you're going on TV and you feel like you're getting railroaded and they're asking you these absurd hypotheticals.

Okay.

You know what I mean?

I can kind of understand how a politician might not be prepared for something like that.

But like the Capitol was stormed over this.

Like we've all been over this and over this.

And like the threat is actually real and tangible.

And we saw it happen.

And he still can't answer a basic question about it.

And it's not that necessarily he wasn't prepared to answer it, but in his decision tree, there is no other answer than the one he gives because he's not going to come right out and say, well, of course, I'm not going to commit to accepting the results because I'm only going to accept them if Trump wins.

But that's what's demanded of him.

I mean, that is the price of admission to be considered for this position is I'm not going to do you like Mike Pence did you if it ever comes to that.

I mean, Bill, you said it's really chilling to see this from a sitting senator and not just any sitting senator, right?

I mean, Tim Scott ran for president against Trump, supposedly as kind of a a friendlier, you know, more cheery, more positive, hopeful vision for America, supposedly much more as an institutionalist, had a lot of goodwill from his colleagues in the Senate, had a lot of goodwill from Republican donors.

And I really do think, I mean, it just shows, you know, Trump has been successful for a lot of reasons, but one of the things that has allowed him to grow so unchecked for the last decade is just the total vacuousness, it turns out, of that whole kind of establishment coalition of Republicans.

I mean, it's really, it's really alarming to see that kind of thing.

It's especially alarming for me just in the nature of what happened.

We already saw the damage that will be wrought by a lie such as this, and you're continuing to do it, laughing, chuckling about it, and like trying to be cute.

It's like, it's like, be serious, Tim Scott.

Like you are, that's to your point, Andrew.

Like he's supposed to be the serious one.

They don't have any that are offering a modicum of seriousness, as more evidenced by that.

Let's listen to Doug Bergham do a slightly less humiliating version of the same dance.

You believe Joe Biden won the 2020 election?

I believe that Joe Biden won the 2020 election, but I also, based on the number of votes we're in, but I think that because of COVID, there was a huge number of irregularities because we changed a bunch of rules in certain places, in certain precincts, in certain states.

And the number of mail-out ballots, not mail-in, we do absentee ballots in North Dakota.

We do use, make sure we're verifying signatures.

But when you're mailing out more ballots than there are people that are actually on the registers for the voting rolls, that creates a massive moral hazard.

And then when you've got unmonitored drop boxes and a bunch of single-bullet votes that only vote for one candidate, I think all of us have to say, is that the way we want to have elections?

I don't know what you're talking about.

So I think that 2020 was a special case.

I mean, you agree with that.

Well, a single bullet vote is a ballot that comes in where no,

it's very unusual to get that many ballots where someone just votes for president and not for anybody else down ballot.

That's what I'm talking about.

Attorney General Bill

that is a.

Attorney General Bill Barr said that there was no a significant fraud that would have changed the results of the 2020 election.

Do you disagree with that or do you agree with that?

Well, again, we're talking about, what are you talking about?

What happened before the ballots came in or after they came out?

Hey, we counted up all the ballots and this.

Yeah, and I'm saying, I just said it.

I think that there was a special set of circumstances around COVID where we had did things like we've never done before.

The millions of mail out ballots was a new thing for America.

And when you mail out more ballots and they just go out to, I mean, I know people in states where they got three ballots mailed to them.

You know, that's a problem.

And we should all be concerned about that.

Okay.

Okay.

I've had enough.

I forget how long this goes on for, but that's like the Winnie the Pooh and the tuxedo version of the Tim Scott thing.

If only one ballot comes in and three go out to a house, it's still only one ballot counted.

Like it's just this smoke and mirrors bullshit to try to figure out a way to answer a question in a manner that he doesn't think will piss off Donald Trump, right?

Isn't that all this is?

Yes.

The weird thing about this, I mean, like, it would be completely reasonable in a whole alternate universe where Donald Trump had not done what he did in 2020 to say, okay, what happened with the COVID kind of shuffling of policies on how we vote?

We can't let that kind of thing happen again.

We need to have measures in place for if it transpires that people can't get to polling places safely in a future election because the ad hoc thing we did was not all that good.

It didn't work out all that well.

But he pairs that, and they always do this.

He pairs that with the slurry of kind of half-truths and outright fabrications.

I I mean, the multiple ballots thing, it's always impossible to tell exactly what they're referring to, but just to drill down on that one thing.

Almost always when that was a talking point in 2020, there was just a confusion going on between ballots being mailed out and ballot applications being mailed out.

There were a lot of these people were like, hey, I got three ballots

mailed to my door.

Isn't that possible fraud?

And you'd see officials being like, actually, no, these are applications that you would now need to send in in order for us to send you your one official ballot.

And there's a million things like this.

And by the way, if you sent in two ballots, that would have been the fraud.

If you would have sent in two ballots, that's the fraud.

Getting two is not the fraud.

Sending two back is the fraud.

Anyway, sorry, continue, Andrew.

Well, just one other thing is that like there's a hundred million of these allegations that go around.

And when it comes to politicians just sort of gesturing at them, it's just this abstract kind of force field of supposed fraud things.

But I mean, each of these individual things were drilled down on, were litigated in 2020.

That was the whole point of all the court cases that we had, and nothing came of any of them.

So, I mean, the idea that you could go beyond the, let's make sure we have policies in place that this doesn't happen again, to therefore it's impossible to say who won, just remains a complete fiction, whether the guy who said it has a good head of hair or not.

I want to actually be tougher than Andrew on this.

It was not an ad hoc chaos in 2020.

The pandemic hit in March of 2020.

People didn't have policies in place because we hadn't had a pandemic like this in a century or actually ever, which made it seem to me at the time to make it very dangerous for the political goals.

State officials behaved very well in devising devising policies that got the highest turnout we've ever had in a presidential election with the least actual credible charges of fraud, period, period.

I mean, they went through this pretty carefully in states like Georgia, right?

I mean, it's not like there were no recounts.

It's not like there wasn't a hand recount in the closed states in Arizona and Georgia.

There was almost no fraud and not even any errors to speak of.

So they did an admirable job, the election officials in 2020, the governors and the secretaries of state and so forth.

And the idea that this has been turned into an instance of fraud, I mean, Bergham has the much more complex and, you know, kind of semi-fake judicious version of it than Tim Scott.

It's really bad for the country.

I mean, I'm just repeating what we've all said a million times.

Yeah, no, no, no, but it's important.

I think it's important to say because we still have, I still get an email.

We still have some listeners that say, ah, but come on, you know, all of the drop boxes and, and, you know, this stuff, and it was different in different states.

And certain states, they put more drop boxes in places where, that are better for Democrats.

And, you know, there are certain ways.

And they'll say that to me.

I always go back to to that with, but wait a minute.

Were there any votes that were illegal?

Right.

Because that is, okay, if you want to say, oh, well, maybe we should have done it in a way that was more fair where every county got more drop boxes.

Okay, okay, I guess.

But in red states, they were doing the opposite where they were like taking voting locations away from people.

Like that seems to me to be a bigger problem than giving more voting locations to people.

But like, as long as the vote count is right, as long as we are giving people more options to be able to vote and they use those options and they did so in a legal manner in order to cast a ballot, isn't all that good?

Isn't that good?

Like, what is the problem with this?

No one in Georgia, to take the one state where this was most stressed with the drop boxes.

No one told the red counties they couldn't have more drop boxes.

They didn't like the fact that the, guess which counties?

The black counties had drop boxes.

Because you know what?

A lot of those people work and it was very hard for them to get to vote.

And in the old days, they could have, they might have had other ways to do it.

And it seemed like a good idea to have drop boxes where there was no evidence of any fraud.

The bullet voting that he's talking about, incidentally, I believe in Georgia, I could be, I think I'm right about this, there was an undervote for president because there was some unhappiness with both of the candidates, right?

So there was a higher vote, I think, in the Senate races.

And that's true, actually, in a few states.

There's no evidence of systematic people, you know, that would be fraud, right?

If someone came and just voted for Biden, Biden, Biden, Biden, and didn't care about the rest of the state.

They went to an old folks' home and just put Biden down for everybody.

That's what it is.

There's no evidence of that.

I mean,

the degree of just flat-out lying and bullshit there is about this is really, well,

and it was Republicans in charge of at least Arizona and Georgia.

Right.

It was Republicans in charge of both those states.

And they let the counties decide how they wanted to do some of these things.

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One more thing on this because we got waylaid.

That's an important thing to get waylaid on because I think it's so obvious that sometimes we don't actually talk about what the tuxedo Winnie the Pooh fraud accusations.

We don't talk about the details of them.

Just one more thing from either of you.

It just also says something about the fundamental corruption of the party, that there is now this like anti, even people that might fundamentally have done the right thing in a different circumstance, right?

Like if their incentives were correct, this is not to defend Doug Bergam or Tim Scott, but in a different world, these are people like all of us that have angels and demons inside us.

And like if the incentives were correct, they would not be doing this.

Doug Bergham would be glad to run for vice president on the back of, you know, his work as a businessman and his hair.

Like the presidential campaign that he ran.

Right.

That would be what, but he cannot do that because now Donald Trump has made it so that the ante for being welcome in this party now is that you have to lie about what happened in 2020.

And like, think about how corrupting that is.

And that goes to something else you've written about, Andrew.

The guy, Charlie Spees, used to be my lawyer, normal Republican lawyer guy.

He gets hired to the RNC a couple months ago.

They pair him with another lawyer who's a fucking lunatic, who's like an OAN TV star.

And now two months later, he's out because there, there, I guess, was some rumblings about the fact that he wouldn't fully endorse the lie about 2020.

Like, talk about just the level of how corrupting that is and just kind of how deep it's gotten.

Yeah, I mean, so we wrote about this in morning shots a few months ago when Speez was hired alongside the other lawyer you mentioned, Christina Bobb.

He was hired as the RNC's chief counsel and she was hired as their head lawyer for election integrity.

And they have utterly different resumes, right?

Like Speez is a long, long, long time, extremely elite Republican election law lawyer.

And they brought him on because they needed one of those in that position.

I mean, they're facing all kinds of unprecedented

questions.

Yeah, like unprecedented questions about what they can legally do in terms of moving money around to pay for Trump's legal bills and merging the campaign and the RNC's operations and in kind of new and interesting ways and coordinating with outside groups.

And kind of the pitch from Trump advisors to Trump was, yeah, this guy's not like your guy, but he is a crack shot at all this stuff.

And he's going to be totally helpful.

And so they install him in this top job.

Meanwhile, they bring on this flaming lunatic, Christina Bobb.

She is an attorney, but she's better known as a former anchor for OAN during all of the Stop the Seal stuff we've been talking about.

She was a big cheerleader for all that stuff on air.

Behind the scenes, she was working to help a lot of these fake elector schemes in some of these states.

She is now under criminal indictment in Arizona, as of a few weeks ago for some of that work.

And so they bring on these two lawyers.

One of them gets charged with felonies, but it's the other one who Trump has his sights on running out of the room because he's a disanus guy who doesn't think the 2020 election was stolen.

I mean, it's at a certain point, there's just no way for a guy like that to continue on within the party, and you're left with a party of Christina Bobbs.

The one other thing, if I could just add, I mean, Andrew did excellent reporting on this both at the time, two months ago, and then followed up some this morning.

But Charlie Spees, however, in his resignation statement, says he's sorry that he has to leave.

But of course, he's committed to electing Republicans, including Donald J.

Trump, in November, which again is sort of the, you know,

you're run off by Trump.

Trump puts out a truth social thing, you know, dumping all over Spees.

He didn't have to say he's not going to vote for Trump.

He didn't have to say he's going to vote for Joe Biden.

He could have just kept quiet and just say, I look forward to helping, you know, continuing my work in November, right?

But he has to explicitly mention that he's still on board with Trump because you never know what opening could come up in the next Trump administration, I suppose.

And, you know, he doesn't want to be ruled out.

Or he needs other clients.

He doesn't want his other clients to dump him.

He doesn't want his other fucking clients to dump him.

And this is just, this is a whole pathetic thing about it.

Go ahead, Andrew.

There is also this weird, like perverse sense of honor among this like strain of really establishmentarian party guys where it's like, Trump's going to run me out of town on a rail, but I'm going to take the high road by continuing to reassert my dedication to the cause, to the party, and even to him.

And it's like a noble, I don't know, it's so weird and gross.

You're too nice, Andrew.

Tim is totally right.

It's all about the clients.

It's all about Ben Ginsburg was the best established Republican, best established Republican election lawyer.

He was anti-Trump.

He thought Trump was bad for the country.

He's given up his Republican clients.

Charlie's not willing to do that.

Ben Ginsburg was the name you said, by the way.

Chuck, I just want to get that right because I have two ex-lawyers from my time as a Republican, Ben Ginsburg and Charlie Spies.

And one of them has acted much more honorably.

And I think that's right.

And just to Andrew's point, because this was, I analyzed this in the book quite a bit.

Yeah, clients and money is part of it.

But there is, I think maybe honor might not be quite the right word, but there is this kind of clubbiness where they convince each other that they are important, right?

That it's critical that they are there, that they are the essential men, right?

That they cannot let the party be taken over by these lunatics.

We must stick around.

And then they all hang out together and tell each other, you know, so anytime they start to feel bad about themselves, you know, they have six guys they can call who can rub their belly, you know, and be like, no, man, no, you're doing the right thing.

We need Charlie Spees.

If Charlie Spees wasn't in there, just think about how bad things could get.

The Capitol might be stormed.

There might be shit smeared on the Capitol.

Cops might die.

You never know what would happen if Charlie Spees wasn't in there.

Okay.

I want to finish with some levity.

The worst vice presidential audition so far has to be from the fair governor of South Dakota, Christy Noam.

Let's take a listen to her.

Talk about her meeting with Kim Jong-un.

Talk about meeting some world leaders and one specific one.

Quote, I remember when I met with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un.

I'm sure he underestimated me, having no clue about my experience staring down little tyrants.

I've been a children's pastor, after all.

Did you meet Kim Jong-un?

You know, as soon as this was brought to my attention, I certainly made some changes and looked at this passage.

And I've met with many, many world leaders.

I've traveled around the world.

As soon as it was brought to my attention, we went forward and have made some edits.

So I'm glad that this book is being released in a couple of days and that those edits will be in place and that people will have the updated version.

So you did not meet with Kim Jong-un?

That's what you're saying?

No, I've met with many, many world leaders, many world leaders.

I've traveled around the world.

I think I've talked extensively in this book about my time serving in Congress, my time as governor, before governor, some of the travels that I've had.

I'm not going to talk about my specific meetings with world leaders.

I'm just not going to do that.

This anecdote shouldn't have been in the book.

And as soon as it was brought to my attention, I made sure that that was adjusted.

Such weird language.

As soon as this was brought to my attention, an anecdote.

Wasn't an anecdote.

It was fake.

Andrew, what did you think about that?

So, one, even over and beyond being like a bizarre dodge of the actual question, it's still a lie because, one, she's supposed to have written this book.

So they already did the whole, oh, it was the ghostwriter thing, but she narrated the audiobook.

She has read, I mean, she's, she's run her eyes over the passage at least one time and spoken that fake anecdote into a microphone.

And I don't know, it's I, there was a theory going around on Twitter when the Cricket the Dog stuff first came out a couple of weeks ago that maybe this was like some weird 3D chess bank shot way for Christy Noam to take herself out of the vice presidential runnings without having to actually tell Trump she didn't want to do it.

I found that kind of compelling at the time.

Increasingly, I just think that she is completely not ready for primetime politician who cannot walk three steps without stepping on a rake and just got a completely unearned boost in Republican politics by doing nothing during the early months of the COVID pandemic and has been kind of riding that ever since and is now just sort of being exposed as someone who cannot appear on television without putting her foot in her mouth, I guess.

Yeah, let's just be blunt.

She doesn't seem smart enough to be able to do a 4D chess strategy for getting not picked by Donald Trump.

I think that Occam's razor is at play here.

Bill, I've got one more for you.

She wants to murder Commander.

Yeah, let's take a listen.

At the end of the book, you say the very first thing you would do if you got to the White House that was different from Joe Biden is you'd make sure Joe Biden's dog was nowhere on the grounds.

Commander say hello to cricket.

Are you doing this to try to look tough?

Do you still think that you have a shot at being a VP?

Well, number one, Joe Biden's dog has attacked 24 Secret Service people.

So, how many people is enough people to be attacked and dangerously hurt before you make a decision on a dog?

Well, he's not living on the website.

That's a question that the president should be held accountable to.

You're saying he should be accurate.

That's what the president should be accountable to.

What is the number?

And I would say about Republicans criticizing me, these are the same Republicans that criticize me.

All right, that's enough.

Make a decision about the dog.

Make a decision about the dog.

That's quite the euphemism for dog murder.

Commander, meet Cricket.

Bill, what do you think?

Do you have any dogs you want to take out?

You could call Christy and Corey up.

Maybe they might take care of that for you.

I mean, I sort of was hopeful when it came out that she's such a liar, that maybe she hadn't killed Cricket.

Maybe Cricket was living a pleasant life of old.

This was Andrew's idea when we were chatting over the weekend that Cricket was leading a pleasant life of old age at someone else's house, you know, that or the cricket never existed.

What about that possibility?

Her meeting with Kim Jong-o never existed.

Maybe this is a way.

I'm just rationalizing because I don't like the idea of her shooting that nice 14-month-old terrier.

We can pray the cricket never existed.

I do have to say, you know, other vice presidential gaffes in history.

Misspelling things, maybe.

Oh, my God.

Does seem kind of mild.

It does seem kind of mild compared to dog assassination.

This was a good week or two for my former boss, Dan Aquila.

Is that what you're saying?

Yeah, I do.

I think so.

Anyway, man of integrity.

Didn't Dick Cheney shoot a guy once?

That was very good.

Dick Cheney did shoot a guy.

Speaking of you being,

I do have one final thing.

You know, I'll spitball on potential subjects for the podcast today.

And Andrew, I felt like the good way to introduce Andrew to the crowd that wasn't here for guys chatting in the early days would be to let him, you know, send us off with kind of a one-minute Alex P.

Keaton style spiel about a new little data point that came out today.

The U.S.

federal debt, given interest rates, we're now going to pay $1.7 trillion over the next 12 months.

1.7 trillion.

If you look at the chart of what our debt payment is, it has skyrocketed over the past couple of years because of interest rates going up.

That's concerning to me.

I assume that's concerning to our young Alex P.

Keaton, Andrew Egger.

And so, Andrew, tell us what you think about that and what you think about being compared to Alex P.

Keaton.

Yeah, well, I assumed when you texted this was some sort of like first time on my Bulwark podcast hazing sort of ritual because I had to Google who Alex P.

Keaton was.

I'm the old one now.

No.

I will say that my dad would be very happy to hear us talking about this because that remains his kind of like old school Republican leading issue is like when the heck are we going to get serious about the debt?

And I think probably one of the lessons of politics in recent years, sort of across the board, you could make the point that people will start caring again about the debt when it actually collapses and you have to start doing more than just sort of like maintaining these payments under the table.

But it's not great.

It's not great, Bob.

Not super happy that

Republicans and Democrats are completely in unison, that there's nothing to be done other than maybe cut spending on the poor.

That's kind of the rust-vout approach these days.

I guess, well, Democrats don't want to do that.

Republicans are into that.

But mostly

it's just more and more deficit spending as far as I can see.

Well, guess what, Libs?

If you're going to be in a pro-democracy coalition with us, while we're paying $1.7 trillion on the debt, we're going to be mentioning it for one minute at the end of the Bulwark podcast every once in a while.

That's part of the deal.

Bill Crystal, thank you for being with me.

Andrew Egger, welcome to this edition of the Bulwark Podcast.

We'll be seeing you again soon.

Christy Noam, let me tell you: if you tell no lie about Kim Jong-un and cricket, then I won't tell no truths about you.

We'll see you all back here tomorrow and in a few weeks with Bill Crystal's take on the Kendrick Lamar and Dirk Beef.

See y'all then.

Peace.

Them superpowers get neutralized.

I can only watch

I'm not sure if I can do it.

A pathetic master manipulator.

I can smell the tales on you now.

You're not a rap artist, you're a scam artist with the hopes of being accepted.

Tommy Hill figure stood out, but fool boo never had been your collection.

I make music that electrify them.

You make music that pacify them.

I can double down on that line, but spare you this time.

There's random acts of kindness.

Know you're a master manipulator and habitual liar, too.

But don't tell no lie about me, and I won't tell truths about you.

The Bullard podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brad.

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