Bill Kristol: A Tacky, Low-Life Con Man

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Speaker 2 Hello and welcome to the Bullwork Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.
It is Monday. I'm here with Bill Crystal, and it's President's Day, but we're giving you a holiday episode.
We're working.

Speaker 2 Bill, how are you doing? I'm fine, Tim. How are you? I'm doing pretty well.
All things consider. I'm in California and it's raining.

Speaker 2 It's like an Arctic river here, which is not exactly what you want when you're coming to Los Angeles. And I wish that Alexey Navalny was president of Russia and not dead.

Speaker 2 But besides that, I'm doing pretty good. I'm desperate for your insights on Navalny.

Speaker 2 I know you've been talking to eggheads all weekend, but before we do that, if you wouldn't mind indulging just a little report from the idiocracy campaign trail, happy to have that always.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, let's make sure, in case folks were enjoying their weekend and they missed Donald Trump's campaign stop this weekend in Philadelphia. Let's get a couple of those reports.
Wow.

Speaker 4 A lot of emotion. There's a lot of emotion in this room.

Speaker 2 Thank you.

Speaker 4 Thank you.

Speaker 4 So the really nice thing is we have lines and I want to thank Chase and I want to thank Alan.

Speaker 5 There was a big win for Trump this weekend. Hours after he launched his new sneaker line and a surprise visit to SneakerCon in Philadelphia.
The gold never surrender high tops officially sold out.

Speaker 5 No word yet on if the limited supply of $399 kicks will be restocked.

Speaker 2 So there you go. You heard the booze and the mixed reviews to Donald Trump's announcement at SneakerCon, followed by the Fox News Sputneck report about our former president, Mountain Duke Camacho.

Speaker 2 You know, from your campaign experience, anything like that, selling branded sneakers, anything like that you can recall from campaign trails past? Yeah, it doesn't really ring a bell.

Speaker 2 I remember with Vice President Quayle in 92, we tossed, you know, Bush Quayle t-shirts to the crowd occasionally where we stopped at waffle houses where our subtle campaign message was that

Speaker 2 Bill Clinton waffles on the issues so we visited like every waffle house in 10 swing states or something in the in the south but that was kind of the extent of it those we gave away for free we didn't sell the the bush quail merchandise uh that the vice president tossed out so the sneakers really are 17.99 sneakers i think right that you can buy the gold-plated crummy sneakers on i guess they're crummy i shouldn't say that just the gold-plated high-top sneakers which trump is selling for 399 that's a pretty impressive markup to get your donald trump logo on them It is beyond belief, but I mean, he's such a tacky, low-life con man, right?

Speaker 2 But as Charlie Sykes liked to say, right,

Speaker 2 a clown with a flamethrower still has a flamethrower and can be very dangerous. You know, an incredibly tacky con man can still be, I guess, the dangerous leader of a dangerous authoritarian movement.

Speaker 2 I don't know.

Speaker 2 It's important to just take in the surrealness of it, like the idea that this would be a campaign stop, that this guy who

Speaker 2 is just having to pay hundreds, millions of dollar judgments against him is now you know trying to con people into you know a whatever that is 20x markup on sneakers and that he's speaking at a convention it's like the kind of thing that pete rose would do you know after he got kicked out of baseball like that like i'm going to show up at a convention and sign some things to get a little extra scratch for my whiskey and yet that is the person that is overwhelmingly winning the republican primary to become the president i do think that that's rather notable I mean, that's certainly unusual.

Speaker 2 It is amazing.

Speaker 2 And of course, he's been a con on his consumer-facing ventures in his 40, 50 years as a con man, as opposed to his intra-business kind of dealings, which is what he got convicted on in New York, where he was, you know, lying to a bag, basically, right?

Speaker 2 Falsifying records. But he's always been, of course, a con man and dealing with normal people.
And in fact, taking advantage of them.

Speaker 2 I mean, here, at least I suppose people know what they're paying for, you could say, whereas the Trump University and some of those other things are really astonishing.

Speaker 2 I think you and I both, I mean, we were involved right in trying to publicize the trump university stuff in 2016 and for one fleeting moment i thought you know what this could really do a man because this is understandable people it's just a flat out con of you know people who don't know better who don't know much who he's just taking advantage of the of people in a way that's a little more complicated than gee he's running a shady real estate empire or something like that you know right and of course it had no seemed to have had no effect at all right so i don't know it's really well i do think that maybe hopefully there's one accidental slip that might have helped Biden, which is we can't be in a recession if you're selling $400 sneakers.

Speaker 2 So this is where Trump's hubris is going counter with his talking points, because he's got to say that they sold out the sneakers.

Speaker 2 But if you're selling out $400 sneakers, we're living in a time of abundance, not a time of American carnage.

Speaker 2 No, Tim, those sneakers would have only been $349 in the Trump years, and now they're $399 thanks to Biden's inflation.

Speaker 2 Once again, you're just trying to

Speaker 2 cover up the devastation, the unbelievable damage that Joe Biden has done to our country. This is greed, inflation, and action.
Okay, Bill, I want to get all of your thoughts about Navalny.

Speaker 2 You have a great newsletter this morning, also about the political implications. But first, I want to start.
We have this morning.

Speaker 2 Donald Trump finally, almost three days after the death, has put out this statement about the sudden death of Alexei Navalny.

Speaker 2 It said, it's made me more and more aware of what is happening in our country.

Speaker 2 It is a slow, steady progression with crooked, radical left politicians, prosecutors, and judges leading us down a path to destruction. We are a nation in decline, a failing nation, all caps.

Speaker 2 MAGA 2024, he sent out another bleat that was one of those syllogisms that said Putin is to Navalme as Biden is to Trump.

Speaker 2 So he compared himself to the martyr and also said that the assassination of Navalme reminds him about how America is failing.

Speaker 2 That's a little bit of a departure from the foreign policy of of your kind of era.

Speaker 2 I mean, it's a departure from every decent American president, every honestly decent human being who comments, has commented on the Divaldi death, which even if you're not in favor, conceivably, of aiding Ukraine, or certainly not in favor of the kind of foreign policy I'd be in favor of, people have still said, you know, this is terrible and want to express sympathy to the family and condemn Putin for jailing and murdering political dissidents who want free speech and free elections in Russia.

Speaker 2 So, I mean, you don't have to be, you know, a huge Biden supporter or a neocon internationalist or a lover of Ukraine to say that.

Speaker 2 But I mean, Trump really reveals, I mean, it's unbelievably just, you know, vulgar and debased, obviously, to compare himself to Naval Lee.

Speaker 2 No sympathy for Naval Li, no expression of sympathy, no expression of disapproval for Putin, no condemnation of Putin. I mean, he really is all in for Putin, basically.
It's really startling.

Speaker 2 And this takes us to your newsletter this morning, which talks a little bit more about the domestic political side of this, was headlined, hanging Putin around Trump's neck. Let's talk about that.

Speaker 2 I mean, I think you point out in the newsletter rightly that even in spite of all of the pro-Putin propaganda that we have now seen from Tucker and from Trump and on Real America's Voice and all these right-wing news outlets, you know, his approval rating is still in America 13%.

Speaker 2 And overwhelming opposition to him, generally, these sorts of, you know, the murder of a foreign dissident is not the type of thing that flips an American election.

Speaker 2 But you're making the argument that there really is a way to kind of use this moment against Donald Trump politically. So talk about that.

Speaker 2 It could be a moment if you combine it, of course, with the invasion of Ukraine, which we're now two years into, unbelievably brutal.

Speaker 2 If you combine it with the New York Times reporting this weekend, which I'm not sure got huge pickup, but it's pretty astonishing about Putin planning to put nuclear-armed anti-satellite weapons into space and the implications for that, which are really startling in terms of not just warfighting, but also in terms of just disrupting our economy and our society by knocking down satellites, knocking out satellites, and how much that ability to do that would strengthen Putin, just as his vague threats about using nuclear weapons have deterred us and others from doing some things we probably should have done to help Ukraine.

Speaker 2 And then you put those two things together with the murder of Navalny, not the first God knows dissident he's murdered, but brings it home, I think, the character of his tyranny.

Speaker 2 I wonder whether whether it could break through.

Speaker 2 And I wonder if after February 24th, 2022, after the invasion of Ukraine, we are in a slightly different world from that post-Cold War world from 92 on, where foreign policy, allegedly at least, didn't matter in elections and probably didn't except for 2004, I suppose, after 9-11.

Speaker 2 I'm old enough to remember the Cold War years, and foreign policy did matter. It's just really worth bringing home how appalling Trump is.

Speaker 2 I mean, let's say I was a Reaganite, and I was for Reagan and against Carter and Reagan against Mondale and Bush against Dukakis. And we thought those people were too

Speaker 2 soft on communism, isn't quite fair, but

Speaker 2 we thought their policies were not tough enough in dealing with the Soviet Union. Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis, they were for the Soviet dissidents.

Speaker 2 When Natan Sharansky was imprisoned and then released in February of 1986, I'm sure that this is true, that Mondale and Dukakis were pleased and said so and denounced the fact that he was ever imprisoned.

Speaker 2 The spectrum was there were policy differences about how to deal with the Soviet Union, but the leader of the other party was not in favor of the Soviet Union.

Speaker 2 I mean, and I just come back to sort of how astonishing that is about Trump. And in the more dangerous world we live in now,

Speaker 2 does Trump not pay some price for that? And could not a good campaign help make him pay a price for that? Appalling is a good word for Trump's behavior, yes.

Speaker 2 But the clownishness, I think this is what kind of ties for me, the sneakers

Speaker 2 to the more serious message here, because, you know, I mean, there is this kind of notion of taking Trump seriously, but not literally.

Speaker 2 He gets a pass from people sometimes, like, even if he just does the bare minimum.

Speaker 2 If his comments about this was just the bare minimum, that's kind of like, you know, this is wrong and Putin is terrible.

Speaker 2 And, you know, but like, it also makes me think about how the deep state's coming after me. Like, that would still be really gross and bad, right? But he's not doing that, right?

Speaker 2 Like, he is literally kind of basically siding with Putin in this situation in the middle of the Tucker nonsense that we talked about last week, in the middle of the invasion in the middle of the story about the warheads in the space and i i do wonder if that is kind of a way to make this argument the hanging putin around trump's neck in support of just kind of the broader argument to your wall street journal republican types that's like this is just too crazy like this guy is too fucking crazy we cannot risk it yeah that's a good point to maybe make it make the argument not just the sort of solemn foreign policy argument that i guess i make in the newsletter this morning but tie it to the cloudishness so that it's both terrible and

Speaker 2 unserious, I guess. Yeah, preposterous.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's both seriously appalling and ridiculously preposterous, right?

Speaker 2 Right. I don't know.
It's a funny combination, but that's Trump. I mean, he is, it's probably why he is an effective demigod.

Speaker 2 I guess the flip side of that is one reason he's gotten away with so much is the ridiculousness allows people to say it's just the tweets, right?

Speaker 2 It's just he's a kind of clownish character, and I don't approve of all the things he says, but in reality, he's more, you know, he'll be more serious. And that was 2016.

Speaker 2 And to some degree, even 2020, where people could look back to an administration that had McMaster and Mattis and Esper and so forth.

Speaker 2 This is where I do think it is different post-January 6th, post-February 24th, 2022, that the cost we pay for the combination of clownishness and terrible, you know, pro-dictator views, maybe that could be brought home to people more.

Speaker 2 Aaron Powell, Jr.: The other side of that coin, you mentioned it, the New York Times reporting about the Warrens, but you've kind of been having these conversations.

Speaker 2 I'm just curious to pig your brain, like, just about the seriousness of the threat from Putin, not the obvious elements of the threat to Ukraine, but the

Speaker 2 expansionary nature of that, right? Like talking about the warheads in space, what else might be coming? Like, what in the policy expert world, like, what are the feelings right now?

Speaker 2 I mean, it does feel like there's been a change from like last year, where maybe the view of Russia was like, this invasion has been incompetent and sure that they're evil and sure that they're a threat.

Speaker 2 But, you know, I mean, it's kind of revealed how pathetic they are. Is there a sense with that new reporting that that's changing at all?

Speaker 2 Aaron Powell, Jr.: Yeah, I think that combined with the fact that they've, you know, stuck it out in Ukraine and made a little advance in the last week, and the pressure at home, the disqualifying of this anti-Putin presidential candidate who, you know, seemed to be getting a little bit of attention and momentum.

Speaker 2 I mean, a year ago, people kind of thought, well, maybe it'll be evident that he will have failed in Ukraine by now. Maybe it's a lesson.

Speaker 2 Maybe some of the elites turned against Putin, a member of the Progozin, however you say his name thing, in summer, I guess, late summer, and that, you know, evidence of certain weakness.

Speaker 2 But now he seems to be pretty firmly in control in Russia.

Speaker 2 He seems not, he's not going anywhere in Ukraine, and he's building weapons that would, so he wouldn't use them, one hopes, but it would give him more blackmail or bargaining power what he does, whatever he wants to do after Ukraine.

Speaker 2 So I do think there's been a bit of a shift in sort of the seriousness of the danger, a little less cockiness about, well, it's a declining power and he totally miscalculated.

Speaker 2 And, you know, maybe there'll be a coup next week, which will depose him. You don't hear that so much anymore.

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Speaker 2 As far as now looking to Ukraine, it's like the other political issue related to this, right, is that we have still the House of Representatives hanging in the balance.

Speaker 2 I'm interested in your view on kind of whether the political dynamic has changed at all for Johnson in order to pressure him to do something. And on that account,

Speaker 2 here's President Biden talking about the House going on vacation amidst the unrest in Russia.

Speaker 7 Anything you can do to get ammunition to the Ukrainians without a supplemental from Congress?

Speaker 8 No, but it's about time they step up, don't you think? Instead of going on a two-week vacation?

Speaker 8 Two weeks.

Speaker 8 They're walking away. Two weeks.

Speaker 8 What are they thinking?

Speaker 2 My God,

Speaker 8 this is bizarre. And it's just reinforcing all the concern and

Speaker 8 almost, I won't say panic, but real concern about the United States being a reliable ally. This is outrageous.

Speaker 2 So thoughts on both Biden's message there and whether, you know, the politics is kind of changing for Johnson on whether he can kind of hold the line on preventing this from coming up for a vote.

Speaker 2 I mean, the two weeks recess is bad. It was previously scheduled, I guess, as the defenders of the House will say.

Speaker 2 But of course, they've now been delaying the passage of this Ukraine package for four months, which not only has done real damage on the field, and we've seen that recently in reports from Ukraine, but also has done damage in terms of telling the Europeans, no, we're there and you guys should do more.

Speaker 2 And so it's had a very bad effect. And it's good that President Biden's calling it out.

Speaker 2 I do think enough Republicans are saying, at least enough House Republicans are saying we do need to do this one way or the other, that kind of thing, that they're beginning to, they're putting real pressure on Johnson.

Speaker 2 Will they really put the real pressure on, though, which is to say, I don't know, some version of we're going to vote against you unless you do this, or we're going to sign a discharge petition, vote against you on other things, or vote against you as speaker, or temporarily defect to Hakeem Jeffries and make him speaker for a week or two and let him pass this.

Speaker 2 I mean, usually, I mean, I don't know, but this is a question whether Devon Lee will change and that reporting about the space weapons will change this a little bit.

Speaker 2 I would say still last week, there wasn't enough of a sense of urgency, in my opinion, about doing this.

Speaker 2 There's still a little bit of, well, we're going to try to work it out over the next several weeks. We have a government shutdown to think about two of those, so it's kind of complicated.

Speaker 2 But I really hope they come back with a sense of urgency. President Biden, I think, was good.

Speaker 2 But, you know, one thing that's helped, I do think, actually, is Nikki Haley, who's been very good on Ukraine and very tough on this set of issues.

Speaker 2 And it's not that she's going to beat Trump in South Carolina. And it's not that, I suppose, that any House Republicans are supporting Haley.

Speaker 2 But I've got to think it helps a little bit among certain class of Republicans and Republican donors to sort of legitimate the argument that we just can't go all the way down the Trump path on this set of issues.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I want to get to the alien of it all, but just really quick first on the funding.

Speaker 2 It was pretty striking to me, I thought, that there was the briefing with Zelensky at the Munich conference that J.D. Vance refuses to go to, right?

Speaker 2 And the main takeaway from this meeting is what you're discussing, like that there have been real damage to the war effort.

Speaker 2 This delay has caused like real on-the-ground damage to Ukraine's readiness, et cetera. And Vance doesn't even show up and basically says, I don't need to hear from him.

Speaker 2 I know, I know what I've already known, right? So that shows a lack of courage in itself. But to me, it's pretty striking that, like,

Speaker 2 despite the fact that there's a very concerning amount of the Republican Party that has become among at the voter level that has become sympathetic to this isolationist argument that we shouldn't do anything in Ukraine at the politician level.

Speaker 2 They got 22 Republican center votes. There's still plenty of people to get this through.
And the group of those that are resisting is very small and pretty petulant and petty. And, you know, like J.D.

Speaker 2 Vance can't even engage on the, on the issues. So it feels like if Johnson just can bring this up, you know, like the group that are opposing it is still pretty weak, at least in Washington.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's about half the Republicans in Congress.

Speaker 2 It'll probably be about half in the House, but they'll get 300-plus votes, I think, if it goes to the floor, which will be good, actually, a good signal to the rest of the world that we have one and a half responsible political parties.

Speaker 2 in America. I mean, on the J.D.
Vance thing, I've been to that security conference several times, and they have a congressional delegation, which Vance is part of, senators and members of the House.

Speaker 2 And then they have a few hangers-on journalists, you know, think tank types and so forth that I've been a hanger-on a few times. The conference itself is, you know, the tedious.

Speaker 2 And I mean, there's some good speeches and some bad speeches, but you're sitting in a hall. You could be watching it on a live stream.
You don't have to be there.

Speaker 2 There's some big single mingling, which if you're a foreign policy elite type, is good, you know, and useful.

Speaker 2 But the one thing that the members of the delegation, the members of the House and the senators can do that the hangers-on can't do is go to these private meetings with other heads, with heads of state or foreign ministers from other countries, right?

Speaker 2 That's why you go on the delegation. I mean, that's the point of being there.
Because otherwise, J.D. Vance didn't speak at the conference.

Speaker 2 He's just sitting in the hall like he's an audience for all the panels. And the fact that he would skip the meeting with Zelensky, he allegedly has concerns about Ukraine.

Speaker 2 He allegedly has concerns about why we're not pushing much harder for a ceasefire and why people are continuing to deny. He doesn't have the nerve to raise them in a private meeting with Zelensky.

Speaker 2 That's really pathetic. It is.
It just shows like the weakness of their arguments.

Speaker 2 To me, what it says is if the whatever you want to call it, negotiated peace, whatever words that they're using now, like side of this argument was stronger, they would not need to lie so much.

Speaker 2 They would not need to lie so much about comparing the American deep state to Putin. They would not need to lie so much about the state of affairs in the war.

Speaker 2 They would not need to duck meetings with Zelensky. I do think that it exposes just how really weak their argument is and reveals the fact that, like, honestly, they're backfilling.

Speaker 2 They recognize that voters and conservative media don't like this and they're coming up with post hoc rationalizations for opposing it.

Speaker 2 Otherwise, you know, you'd be up for a conversation like that, right? You'd want to reveal the weakness of the pro-Ukraine funding side. You'd want to go for that reason.

Speaker 2 Well, you might want to, I took on Zelensky. I confronted him, you know, right? That's sort of more normal.

Speaker 2 You might say, what you do if you're opposed to a policy and you have a chance to speak privately and personally with the leader of the country whose policy you're unhappy with. But you're right.

Speaker 2 It's interesting that he ducked that meeting. Yeah.
For example, I would not turn down a meeting with Donald Trump or someone from his orbit to discuss the election fraud.

Speaker 2 I would be very excited to take that meeting. I would not hide and say, oh, well, I already know that Donald Trump's wrong.
Why would I need to meet with him?

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Speaker 2 Back to Haley, though.

Speaker 2 So, you know, we've discussed this a little bit, but I do think it's worth putting a finer point on. Again, here's a moment where she is speaking the obvious truth.

Speaker 2 She is sounding like a traditional Republican. She is sounding like a responsible leader.
I think that is all good good and useful. And yet not getting any cover from anyone else in the party.

Speaker 2 And so this would be the negative. Earlier, I was saying, well, maybe all these events happening at the same time put more pressure on Mike Johnson to kind of get this to the floor.

Speaker 2 And that's a green shoot. The other side of that, Colleen, is this feels like it should be a moment for Haley that's coming up on the South Carolina primary.

Speaker 2 This is an issue set that's a good contrast for her. And she's saying the right things about it.
But the environment around it is, again, people people are just not stepping up to the plate.

Speaker 2 It doesn't feel like to me. No, it's a good point.

Speaker 2 And if she gets crushed in South Carolina, I suppose it could have the opposite effect of signaling there's no, there's only 25 or 35% support for Haley's position among primary voters in South Carolina.

Speaker 2 I mean, 35% is not nothing. And she has stepped up pretty well.
I mean, she now says she's not, she won't say she'll vote for Trump in the general election.

Speaker 2 I mean, people like us and who've been critical of Haley and wished her to be more forthright in staking out the alternative position to Trump and criticizing Trump personally.

Speaker 2 She's certainly doing that now, maybe could have done it a little earlier, but she's doing it. And so let's see if the voters of South Carolina react at all.

Speaker 2 Again, with the poor voters, not poor voters, but the voters of South Carolina, it'd be nice if they moved more towards Haley.

Speaker 2 But what about all those members of Congress and other Republican big shots and conservative elites? How many of them are saying, you know what would be very important?

Speaker 2 Vote for Haley on Saturday in South Carolina. That would really send a message.
I mean, it's really pathetic that all these senators voted for aid for Ukraine to their credit.

Speaker 2 They have pretty sound views on it. Could a few of them possibly like go to South Carolina and say, hey, I'm Senator so-and-so from here.

Speaker 2 And, you know, you may not like me about everything, but I've actually voted for Trump twice and I intend to vote for him if he wins the nomination again.

Speaker 2 But I think it'd be very important to really vote for Nikki Haley.

Speaker 2 I mean, The total absence of anyone doing that is because they think Trump's going to win and they want to get along with Trump still, et cetera, et cetera, or they just think it's hopeless or Mitt Romney even, who I respect, obviously, and who's been good, you know, well, it'll just turn off more voters.

Speaker 2 I don't know about that. I mean, they did all vote for Mitt Romney 10 years ago, you know, in a general election.
It's not nothing, right? I just, the fatalism is very, is very bad and damaging.

Speaker 2 I probably wouldn't help if it was just Mitt.

Speaker 2 But I think that what you're saying is like, you can imagine a world, it almost feels ridiculous to bring up these sort of counterfactual hypotheticals, but I do think it's important.

Speaker 2 Like in normal times, right? If you go back to 2012, even 2016, what Marco did in South Carolina, right? You have the big event with Nikki and Tim Scott.

Speaker 2 It would create at least news and attention and pressure and interest if even just you got together five of them. You know, could you pull together a couple of the Trump national security people?

Speaker 2 you know, like Bolton and McMaster and two senators and one congressperson and Dick Cheney or whatever. I don't know.

Speaker 2 Like, could you get a rally with seven of these people that are all together saying, this is important. We need to focus on this.
That would make, I think, it feel less limp.

Speaker 2 Like it would make Nikki's arguments feel less limp. It would force the hand of the media to cover this and take it seriously.

Speaker 2 I don't think it would lead her to victory, but I think that it would be a meaningful show and force that there's not just total capitulation to the Putin side of the party, and yet that's just absent.

Speaker 2 Totally. I mean, you could say the same thing about a lot of young, youngish veterans in Congress, some on the Republican side, some on the Democratic side.

Speaker 2 Some of those Republican veterans have been good, actually,

Speaker 2 both on Ukraine and also in condemning the criticisms or Trump's dismissal of Michael Haley, Nikki's husband's service.

Speaker 2 He's now stationed in Africa, in the heart of Africa, I think, in the South Carolina National Guard.

Speaker 2 One of them could show up in South Carolina and just say, hey, you know, I mean, it's great what Nikki's husband's doing for the country.

Speaker 2 And I served and Donald Trump didn't, incidentally, and shouldn't be disrespectful to those who are serving. But again, there's been very little of that.

Speaker 2 Well, I want to close with you had in the newsletter this morning and the missive from the letters that the Free Press reported on between Sharansky, you mentioned earlier, and Navalny.

Speaker 2 And I thought it would be nice to hear in the end just kind of any final thoughts you have about Navalny from a legacy standpoint or what we've learned about this fight that now goes back, God, a half century and something that you've been involved in.

Speaker 2 I mean, there's such moving letters. It's two letters.
Navalde wrote Sharansky from the Gulag

Speaker 2 saying he'd been able to get a copy of Sharansky's book, Fear No Evil, and how much it spoken to him and it meant to him. And then they have a very, very nice exchange.

Speaker 2 I mean, Sharansky was such a huge figure for me and sort of my generation. I hope Navalde is for, honestly, for your generation.
And unfortunately, he's not out.

Speaker 2 You know, we didn't, I don't know, there's no prisoner exchange this time, and he's dead. But I just hope this death has not been in vain.

Speaker 2 And I think it's really up to all of us and from the administration on down to normal citizens here to try our best to make sure that it's not been, that his death has not been in vain. Yeah.

Speaker 2 The one thing that struck me in the letter from Navalny, you know, is where he talks about how the virus of freedom is far from being eradicated.

Speaker 2 It's no longer tens or hundreds as before, but tens and hundreds of thousands who are not scared to speak out for freedom and against the war despite the threats.

Speaker 2 I hope that is true, but you just, you see what is happening in Russia, the arrests over the weekend of people that are showing up. And I think that is such an important element of this, right?

Speaker 2 Is not getting worn down from being willing to speak out. And the risks that we have here in order to do that are very little.

Speaker 2 And that's why it's so frustrating when some of these Republicans refuse to do the right thing as compared to the risks faced by people that are speaking out in Russia.

Speaker 2 To me, that hopefully is the thing that can be taken from this, the legacy that can be taken from this from Navalny, that he did not have to go back to Russia, right?

Speaker 2 There are plenty of opportunities to stop speaking out, that that is really the key element, you know, if this authoritarianism is going to be, is going to be overthrown or going to be combated.

Speaker 2 Yeah, no, that's well said.

Speaker 2 And I mean, the combination that Navalde showed in the letters and otherwise, too, of incredible courage and good cheer and kind of sense of humor almost about it and you know is really extraordinary.

Speaker 2 It's a human thing. And we began with Trump and the sneakers.
I mean, just as human beings, you know, we should all want people to be like Navali and not like Trump. Understatement of the year.

Speaker 2 Thank you, Bill. It's been a wonderful President's Tay session with you.
I will be back tomorrow, and we'll be talking next week. Thanks, Tim.

Speaker 2 The Bullard Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

Speaker 1 This is Matt Rogers from Lost Culture Eastas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang. This is Bowen Yang from Los Culture East with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang.
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