Bill Kristol: Escalating the Authoritarian Project

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Hello, and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast.

I'm your host, Tim Miller.

It is Monday, and he's back, editor-at-large, Bill Crystal.

Hey, Bill.

Hey, Tim.

How are you?

You had an opening sentence to the Morning Shots newsletter this morning, which people can get at thebulwark.com if they haven't.

It comes out every day.

And,

you know, it's a sentence I don't like to deal with around here, but I think that it's worth setting up our conversation today with.

You say this.

It's sad but true.

Donald Trump has had a strikingly successful first seven and a half months in office.

Is that right?

Do you think is that right?

Or are you being Bill Crystal, just trying to get under my, you know, get under my skin on a Monday morning?

Well, I think being Bill Crystal is coincident with being.

being right, obviously.

So I don't make that distinction that you so cavalierly and I'd say even eagerly make, but yeah i'm big i'd say sometimes bill crystal is right and sometimes he's a troll he's trolling with maybe a hint of truth underneath the troll maybe something exactly i'm i'm i'm i'm maybe being saying it a little for effect and i do say in the piece actually that his popularity is down and his especially the intensity is down and that's an opportunity for elites to seize if they would only step up but i mean just the authoritarian project what i mean by that really is is further along after seven and a half months than i think even you and i thought it would be and it doesn't seem to be losing much steam It's not as if, you know, things are now, there's huge reactions and

he's losing control of these cabinet agencies.

And if he has another seven months like this, this nation is in deep, deep trouble.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: Yeah, I think that there are kind of two ways to look at it, which is why I'm being a little cheeky, right?

Because on the one hand, if defined that way, right, consolidation of power, stamping out of internal foes to the extent they ever existed, or internal challenges maybe would be a better bet, like, you know, fully getting everyone within the Republican tent on board with the authoritarian project, like which he has essentially with, like, I guess, Thomas Massey as the one standout now from that, occasionally, at least in Murkowski.

No.

Rand Paul.

Rand Paul.

Rand Paul, every once in a while.

No internal dissent.

You know, there's no, none of the lawyers or generals around last time.

And I think that part is definitely moving apace, and he's been more successful maybe than we might have worried.

I think, and this kind of relates to the poll number stuff that I do want to get into a little bit.

Another way to look at it, though, is that he's been pretty unsuccessful at delivering anything that actual people would care about.

I did a similarly trolly, cheeky post over the weekend.

So I wrote something to the effect of, you know, he has successfully

changed the name of bodies of water and a cabinet to make them less woke.

And he's grifted $5 billion in crypto for himself, and he's brought back measles, and he's passed an unpopular bill that's going to make 90% of the country poorer.

But he hasn't really done anything that

might yield broad popularity that could have been another path towards him gaining more authoritarian power.

You know what I mean?

And I think that you see some of that in the polls, right?

Like that he's been more successful at winning these internal battles and doing these performative, you know, fascistic things than he has been at actually delivering results for people.

Aaron Trevor Barrett, Right.

And popularity is itself a lever of power.

So insofar, as you say, he's been very good at the internal levers of power, but he's lacking for now, I would say.

I mean, he hasn't had a catastrophic collapse of popularity, unfortunately, but it's weak enough that I think we can say he hasn't succeeded in firming up that lever of power.

My only qualification to what you said, which I agree with, is in between the public down here and the internal federal government up there are a whole bunch of institutions, obviously, and in the private sector and civil society, other levels of government.

And he's been unfortunately pretty effective at intimidating them and bludgeoning them and reducing their possible opposition for now, at least.

And that, for me, that's the middle ground that's key.

I think it's very hard to stop him from obviously the kind of internal control he's unfortunately accumulated.

Hopefully, the public remains skeptical because I don't think the policies will work.

So I would think those numbers should go down a bit more, even.

But that in-between level is where there's been the failure of opposition.

And if that failure stays, continues for too long, you know, the public can be at 34%

and we could be in a recession and he could be, you know, consolidating his hold over an amazing number of American institutions.

He sent me an article this morning about our old friend Ken Griffin.

He's this billionaire, a hedge fund guy that has been a big Republican donor.

He tried, he's more in the Nikki-Haley type mold, but has at various times been very accommodating to Trump.

And he, I was on some panel and spoke out against the Fed moves.

Frankly, his comments were pretty perfunctory, just about how this is bad and what the importance of the Fed is and what it should do.

The striking thing to me about the article you sent to me, though, was the subhead from the New York Times, which wrote this.

The criticism from the hedge fund billionaire and Trump voter is a rare rebuke of the president by a corporate leader.

I like that is the pretty telling part, right?

And it's such a difference from where we were at in August or September rather of 2017.

And where a healthy democracy, honestly, should be at and a healthy democratic capitalist system.

should be at.

No, it's it's really, I mean, here we are.

He's done tariffs, which they're all against.

He's, well, but okay, tariffs we'll maneuver our way around that but the independence of the fed that's sacrosanct well okay he's fired lisa cook he's threatening jay powell his nominee says he's going to join the fed while taking leave from the council of economic advisors and finally we have this very mild gee i'm kind of concerned it's really unwise of the president kind of concerned about that i mean the yes so in that respect the the the piece was sent i hadn't seen it it was sent to me by someone else who's very much where we are on trump and on these issues who's been trying to work in the business community to rally opposition.

It was like, hey, maybe we're making a little progress.

But my friend also acknowledged that it's kind of sad that we think one expression of concern about his attempt to totally destroy the independence of the Fed is sort of as much progress as we should be making.

So there's the tech oligarch roundtable last week that happened.

You've seen that, you know, where all the guys came in.

And the one striking part to me was like Tim Cook was in there at Apple and there's this video where he's thanking Trump.

And he says thank you to him eight times over the course of two minutes.

Thank you for this.

Thank you for that.

Is that right?

It is.

And it's, it's like the fact that he believes this level of obsequiousness to be necessary is a more alarming sign than the, than the act itself, you know?

Right.

One more thing on the polling because I got off of it, but we'll be optimistic for one second here, and then we'll get into the news.

You write this.

For all the talk of Trump's removable mega base, the percentage of the public who strongly approve of him has gone down 10 points in seven months.

And for all the failures of Democratic politicians and institutional elites to push back on him, the percentage of the public strongly disapproving of him has increased by 10 points over that period.

I did interesting, you're looking at a YouGov economist poll where, you know, his top-line favorability number is down a little, but it's not, it's soft, but it hasn't, you know, it's not in catastrophic.

It's not in Bush Katrina territory or Trump, January 6th territory, or anything like that, right?

Or Biden, most of the second, last two years of his term even.

But underneath that, kind of the amount of people who say, I'm really foreign is going down.

I'm really against him is going up.

And there's something there, I think.

Yeah, in January, that was, I think, 34% strongly approved, 36% strongly disapproved.

So basically, that was a wash.

And then actually, the weekly somewhat approved and somewhat disapproved were about the same number.

So he was about 50-50.

Now the strongly approved is 24, I think, and the strongly disapproved is 46.

Just from a political point of view, and you've been through this in Canvas, that's a pretty big gap.

I mean, the strong leads matter, right?

The somewhats, by definition, are kind of movable.

The somewhats maybe don't show up that much in the midterm election, et cetera.

2446 is a pretty massive gap.

And one thing that I do think it raises questions about is all the conventional wisdom, which I guess I've shared to some degree.

Well, the MAGA base, that's impenetrable.

You might peel off a few people here and a few people there, but I don't know.

That was 34, and now it's 24.

Some of those people moved over to somewhat approve, obviously.

And some of the somewhat approves moved over to disapprove.

So that's what happened.

but still the fact that 10 out of 34 percent what's that about 30 30 percent of that 34 you know were able to be moved over strikes me that maybe that base isn't quite so impenetrable and maybe there are those people who were strongly approved on january 20th and then a relative of theirs got caught up in an ice raid or they are running a small business that's paying a price for tariffs or they realize the health insurance premium is going up 20% next year and suddenly it's like, ooh, I'm not strongly approved anymore.

So I'm slightly heartened by, I'm heartened in general by the, you know, it is not great poll numbers, but I'm particularly heartened, I think, by the sense that maybe there are more, some of these strongly approved voters are actually movable.

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I'm going to move on to Trump's wars.

I know

he's the anti-war president, he promised everybody, but he's working on a couple of different wars now.

The first is the one on Venezuela.

You had a conversation yesterday with Ryan Goodman about the legal ramifications of that headline, did Trump just order a murder at sea?

Folks can watch if they want, but what were your takeaways from that conversation, what we've seen regarding that attack on a Venezuelan boat?

Right.

It's so careful and so good.

And I think he went with the legal situation, but also what facts we know and don't know.

And I would say he's very careful.

And he's used the word murder.

And I had tried to review the stuff pretty, you know, a little bit before our conversation and go over, we don't know that they were sweating travels.

We don't know that they're heading for the U.S.

We do know, Rubio said this, that the president, we could have intercepted that boat as we intercept many, many, many small little boats, you know, a thousand miles away from the coast of the U.S.

We intercept them, we board them, we arrest people and so forth.

We chose not to.

That was very revealing, a mistake of Rubio, actually, to say that, because he wanted to send a message.

I think Rubio said something like that, sent a signal that

they're going to get blown out of the water.

But that is not legal.

I mean, that is not within the president's power to do, especially because we don't even know that they were drug smugglers.

So I think the facts are very bad for Trump.

I think the law is very bad.

And for me, the big reveal is they haven't explained anything.

I mean, after the Iran attack, the attack on the Iranian nuclear program, as there often is in these cases, the Pentagon had a big

press conference.

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs explained what had happened.

Hexeth explained what had happened.

There was maybe a little bit of guilt and glily or whatever, but still there's enough, some presentation of facts, some presentation of why they did it, how they did it.

Zero.

And they haven't briefed the Hill.

They were supposed to on Friday.

Their letter to the Hill responding to the War Powers Act, they have to send a letter within 48 hours is unbelievably lame, unbelievably vague.

Doesn't actually say they're a member of that particular Trendaragua gang, say affiliate terrorist group, affiliated, or these, we assess that the people on this little boat were affiliated with a terrorist group, which they've designated a terrorist organization, but which that does not give the president the right to kill them anywhere in the world.

It means we can put sanctions on them and so forth.

So my sense, and Ryan had a couple of people who talked to him within government too, there's a little bit of a panic within the Pentagon.

I mean, those people take somewhat more seriously the laws of war and their obligations to have a good government.

Yeah.

Well, some of them, that's a question.

So, one of the big questions is where is the Pentagon?

I mean, where is the military at this point?

I've kind of assumed the military would be a pretty good bastion against the kind of erosion that, let's say, we'd assume that ICE is going to do, but the kind of flagrant obeying illegal orders.

Maybe not so much, or maybe this is an outside case.

Maybe there is pushback within the Pentagon, both from civilians and military.

But the fact that they haven't said anything is, I think, shows they have a problem.

I hope it shows they have a problem.

And I hope we hear more from within, honestly, of people saying this was not the right thing to do.

It really wasn't.

And actually, I've got to say, the more I read up on it and then talked to Ryan, the more convinced I became this is, I mean, the conventional political view, oh, who wants to be defending possible drug smugglers?

It's a loser.

I can already hear all the Democratic politicians.

It's a loser politically.

You know, no one's shedding any tears about this little boat that got blown up a thousand miles away.

But I think it could be a pretty pretty big deal if it, if it becomes just a symbol of the reckless lawlessness and maybe a murder at sea of 11 people who could have been two or three people's human smugglers, if you want to call them, that not maybe the nicest guys in the world.

And the other eight could be people trying to make it to the U.S., including children and stuff.

I mean, it's really pretty.

Or somewhere else we're not the U.S.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, well, I just, to your point on the DOD, and this is why one of Pete's first jobs was getting rid of the JAG officers who, you know, who he smeared and then wanted to get rid of.

Pete has said this like explicitly.

He does not feel like he and Trump are limited at all by laws of war.

I don't think that's even an overstatement.

And so it'll be interesting to see like with the rest of the military establishment, how they react to it.

On this Venezuela thing, like you, I mean, I was.

instinctively opposed to it initially, but have become more and more radicalized the more I've read.

I mean, we had a listener who wrote in, who's in Trinidad, and is talking about kind of like what this type of boat coming from Venezuela to Trinidad is like decently common, right?

And like you're saying, a lot of times it is not drugs.

It's like it's human smugglers.

They're smuggling other people.

Maybe they're not even coming to America, by the way.

They're just going to islands, right?

But there are plenty of other things that could be happening.

And I've read a couple of long articles on this.

Was also, I forget who sent it to me.

I was doing a deep dive on the Coast Guard's Reddit page.

It's like Coast Guard members commenting on what they saw about it.

And a lot of them are also pointing out that like the story doesn't really make sense.

You know, Coast Guard guys who have done the thing where they intercept the boats, you know, and board it and confiscate the weapons doing the more traditional, you know, within the rules of war, within the rule of law, rather, effort to intercept these boats.

They're like 11 people on a boat that size.

Like, that doesn't really seem like a massive drug smuggling effort.

It seems more like the human trafficking or some of these other things.

So, you know, again, we don't know, but to your point, the fact that they have not provided legal rationale, not not provided any

specific evidence, to me, it's really more reminiscent of the El Salvador situation than it is of some of their other activities.

Well, I obviously totally agree.

And I just, two or three other, just little points that Ryan actually made, these points.

The Coast Guard seems to have been entirely cut out of this operation, which is kind of astonishing because this is what they do for a living.

But if you read those little snippets we have of what's been deployed down into the Caribbean, and in any case, there's no account of the Coast Guard being consulted, being, could you try to board this, this little boat, before we blow it out of the water?

Coast Guard's cut out.

Why?

Because the Coast Guard does this all the time, because the Coast Guard knows and has pretty deeply, I think, embedded in its DNA certain ways of doing this, the laws of war, also American laws, incidentally.

It's not just laws of international war.

They're actually American laws against killing people floating around in the high seas.

You know, it's not like that's a crime if you do it.

you know, here, not just an international crime.

But the Coast Guard being cut out struck a friend of Ryan's who worked at the Defense Defense Department at a high level and very much follows these things as very significant and very alarming.

This was a Hellfire missile.

It may have been a drone, actually.

It may have been from a helicopter.

But if you think about the chain of command you need to make this happen, it gets much narrower and tighter.

If Hexeth can tell one person, who tells one person, and then suddenly a drone gets launched, as opposed to the whole Coast Guard and all the things that would be involved in that.

And the lawyers seem to have been cut out.

Ryan was told that the lawyers at the Pentagon, the highest level lawyers, civilians, certainly, maybe whatever Jags are there, still were not in the loop.

And of course, that's consistent with everything Hexeth and Trump have said about how they want to conduct military operations.

So the whole thing gets worse the more you hear, the more you look at it.

And of course, the less they say.

And not only aren't they saying things now, which is certainly true, there's this stonewall now.

They canceled the congressional briefing on Friday and so forth.

But also at the beginning, it was full of misstatements and lies, right?

Rubio said, or someone said, well, maybe it was probably going, maybe it was going to Trinidad, I think he said.

And then Trump said, it was going to the U.S.

And so, oh, I guess it's probably going to the U.S.

ultimately, Rubio, ultimately, the U.S.

I mean, it has, you and I have been in much infinitely milder situations of politicians dissembling.

It all has the feel so much.

And then they snatch for these phrases they think will help them.

There was an imminent threat because they vaguely remember that you do get to use force if there's an imminent threat, ticking time bomb, al-Qaeda guy, you know, landing in 10 minutes somewhere.

What the imminent threat?

This boat is literally, it was a thousand miles away i mean it's like a little speedboat and it had drug allegedly it had drugs that's the that's the worst case they couldn't i mean it's ludicrous so i think the more you look at it the worse it is yeah yeah and not surprisingly the most condescending and douchiest defense of the administration's actions has come from the vice president i want to read a couple of his remarks on it

He posted this on X, killing cartel members who poison our fellow citizens is the highest and best use of our military.

A Democratic shit poster named Brian Krassenstein replied to him saying killing the citizens of another nation who are civilians without any due process is called a war crime.

JD responded to Krassenstein.

The vice president responded saying, I don't give a shit what you called it.

I've got another JD tweet on that that I want to get to, but what do you think about that?

The vice president responding saying, I don't give a shit if we're doing war crimes, I guess.

I guess they don't.

I mean, it says a lot, right?

I mean, Trump pardoned war criminals in his first term, and people objected.

People in the military said this is a horrible precedent that's being set.

And now we have not just the pardoning of people who committed war crimes previously.

And to be fair to those people in the real heat of battle in Afghanistan and Iraq with a huge amount of pressure doesn't excuse them, but different situation.

Here we have the president and the vice president cheerfully, I guess, ordering president at least ordering.

what could well have been a war crime and without any of the normal checks of someone saying, wait a second, Mr.

President, we need to do this or we can't quite do that or shouldn't we do this first?

And so the signal Trump advance is sending is we're going to keep on doing this.

Who cares?

Yeah.

Here's his next one.

Doesn't get much douchier than this.

Here's Vance tweeting, basically trying to set up a contrast between the Democrats' policy and the Trump administration's.

He wrote this, Democrats, colon, let's send your kids to die in Russia.

Republicans, colon.

Actually, let's protect our people from the scum of the earth.

Did the Biden administration send our kids to die in Russia?

I missed that part of their adventures in foreign policy.

I mean, well, how can we even discuss it, right?

It's pure, what is it?

What is it?

How would one even describe such a level of disease?

I mean,

it's all of the buzzwords.

It's Orwellian.

It's gaslighting.

It's condescending.

It's false.

It's just, it's propaganda.

It's all of those things.

It's hard for me to believe that works.

I mean, maybe 20%, 30% of the public

thrills to this toughness and sticking it to them.

And 40%.

I just feel like normal people, including a huge number, people who served in the military and

who've thought a bit about these matters, just look at that and think this is the president, the vice president, in this case, of the United States.

I don't know.

It's pretty appalling.

Yeah, I would be less certain it worked if Donald Trump hadn't been re-elected a second time.

So I don't know.

I think it's probably worth debunking.

You have to give him credit for the efficiency of the lying.

The lie to word count ratio is very

tight there.

I mean, like, A,

even in the most maximalist view of the most hawkish Democrat, I don't think any of them wanted to send Americans into Russia.

Like the idea, or unless is JD doing this little thing there where it's a little wink about how Ukraine is really Russia?

Maybe he's doing that.

Maybe it's like a, maybe it's kind of a subtle nod to his friends in Moscow.

I don't know.

It's either that or just a brazen lie.

And then, you know, it's just, I just think it's worth mentioning that let's protect our people from the scum of the earth.

And if you're going to start with people who fit the definition of scum of the earth, Pluton, I think, would be the top of the list.

So,

okay.

I mean, he's the one that's actually kidnapping people and murdering them.

The idea that

you don't have to engage with the merits of your summary executions in the Caribbean by just stating that these people are the scum of the earth, you know, is just also, and it's like it's pure propaganda.

It's straight out of the Haitians are eating your dogs book.

It's like, we don't actually know who's on the boat.

You haven't fucking told us who was on the boat.

Maybe they're the scum of the earth.

Maybe they're desperate poor people that were trying to, you know, that were fleeing communism and were taken advantage of by human smugglers or trying to look for opportunity somewhere.

I'm not saying it was that, but we don't know.

And like this just committed effort to dehumanize everyone that is trying to come into this country.

And we don't even know if these people were, I think is working.

actually or at least at some level it worked on the campaign.

I guess it did.

And I guess with the deportations, that's the same thing, right?

You just say that this guy is a member of a gang, and then you never say that you were wrong.

Now, in this case, incidentally, Hexeth had said we know that there was a Hexeth at Trump.

We know the names of these people.

You know, we're trying to reassure everyone that this was all done.

That, of course, has been zero.

They've released no names.

They could have, incidentally.

They could have said, here are the people, right?

I mean, just, you know, like Suleimani, when they killed him, they said, this is Soleimani we went after.

The whole thing just reeks of, yes, that they probably got it all wrong, actually,

and did something really terrible for the U.S.

government to do.

Their way of getting through this, though, is to just, I guess, escalate and try to brazen it out.

One last thing I think I feel compelled to mention is: I mean, J.D.

Vance wrote an entire book about how his mother was a drug addict and how he had many family members that were drug addicts.

I kind of find it hard to believe that Mrs.

Vance never gave some of her drugs to somebody else.

And so I just,

I don't know that we want to, as a government, set a precedent that anyone who gives drugs to another person can be executed by the United States military.

I don't know that that would have worked out that well for J.D.

Vance and his family growing up, but there we are.

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The other war that we have going is in Chicago, potentially.

Trump posted this.

It was a meme that said shy apocalypse now, referencing the movie Apocalypse Now.

And it says Chicago is about to find out why it's called the Department of War.

Yeah.

I mean, I don't know whether they are

what they're going to do.

I think it's decently possible that they actually, you know, kind of pull back on the Chicago plan and move more into places like my city and other cities and red states where they have less legal challenge.

But again, I don't know what we're supposed to do.

Like pretend this is a joke or laugh about it or not take it seriously.

But you have the President of the United States posting that he is planning on bringing war to Chicago.

And that's the stated text of his post.

Right.

And the Department of Defense, which he now wants to call the Department of War, War, is going to be used to do that.

So he's literally saying what is the most kind of constitutionally impermissible thing to do.

Well, it's almost the literal defense of an authoritarian takeover, using the military of a country against the citizens of that country, right?

To intimidate, to take away liberty from the citizens of that country.

And that's what he says he's going to do in Chicago.

As you say, he may back off a bit.

Fritzger and the Chicagoans are...

putting up resistance and there are legal questions.

But between that and essentially in Venezuela, their letter to Congress under the Four Powers Act says

we reserve the right or something like that to have further actions of this kind.

I'm not confident they don't bomb some sites in Venezuela.

They may think that gets them out of the problem war, right?

This is in a way just the introduction to a more serious campaign was we're going to the root of the problem and getting rid of the drug cartels right there on the ground.

And between Chicago and Venezuela, I thought Trump at least internalized the lesson, wars don't work out well for presidents in the last 20, 25 years.

And so he's going to, to, you know, he was war shy, I would say, right, as a candidate, and to some degree in his first term.

I think now he's internalized the authoritarian lesson, though, that he's not taking on Russia, of course.

He's not taking on China.

Total retreat on the China front.

But you know what?

If you're an authoritarian, you want to bully, of course, those who are vulnerable and weak at home.

But it's also good part of the authoritarian

MO to bully weak sisters nearby.

And so I think it's of a piece if you think, step back and think, how do authoritarians behave as they're taking over power?

You want to have some foreign enemies who are really, really unpleasant, but also kind of, you can really beat up a lot and can't really hit back at you too much.

And you call them the scum of the earth.

So it's very much of a piece with the Haitians at home and the whole deportation stuff, right?

What do you make of the change of the name, Department of War?

Do you have any hot takes on that?

It's so childish and performative.

And

of course, Trump has nostalgia for World War I and World War II.

Some of us look back at that and we have the highest regard, obviously, for those who, our forebears who fought there and died there in those two fights.

But you know what?

World War I and World War II were failures of American foreign policy and of that global world order.

And one reason it was called the Department of Defense versus what's called the National Military Establishment is because the whole country decided in the late 40s, we can't just have a little department of war that kind of occasionally goes fights wars, you know, and then dissolves, basically, which is kind of what happened.

Before then, we need to have an infrastructure that can help deter war and maintain peace around the world.

So in that respect, the symbolic change is a little bit appropriate.

Trump wants to go back to the world of, I don't know, when we had a Department of War in 1938.

How did that work out?

You know?

Yeah, I think that's right.

I don't know.

It's maybe wishful thinking, but I do think

it's bad branding.

Trump's usually pretty good at the branding stuff, but I think it's kind of bad.

I mean, I understand that there's a certain element of his most, you know, the rabid, bloodthirsty parts of the base that are going to be keen on it.

Right.

But I don't know.

At some level, you know, one of my complaints about the Democrats recently has been like a lot of times Trump's putting something on a hat and the Democrats are pushing back with a white paper.

And this is a little bit caricatured, but like there's some truth to that.

And I feel like he's giving the opposition a pretty easy and definable pushback on him, particularly the kind of anti-war opposition that he brought into his coalition.

You just can't lie about the fact that he brought in new people in the Tulsi, RFK space or in the kind of younger, I don't want to get drafted men space.

He had some effect there.

And I think that this might make it easier for Democrats to push back on it.

Maybe not.

Interesting.

Yeah.

And it's so, it's such a nostalgic thing.

It's from when he was a kid in what, the late 50s, early 60s at that military academy, his father's parents sent him to so he could get some discipline and I guess get into a, you know, have decent college or something that he's like, he learned about MacArthur and and Patton, and that's when real men were real men and all this.

Not needless to say, it had no effect on his bone spurs and so forth.

Yeah, you're right.

I wonder how many people have nostalgia for those good old days when we stumbled into World War I and World War II and lost hundreds of thousands of people.

Hey, everybody, we are going on the road this fall, and I want to see you.

Sadly, our Toronto tickets have already sold out, so I'm plotting a return to Canada.

You guys just wait on that.

But there's still tickets left for our events in Washington, D.C., and New York City in October.

Come join me, Sarah J.

V.

L., for two nights of camaraderie and joy and resistance and podcasting, and maybe some special guests at the D.C.

event.

We might give a big middle finger to the masked agents of Donald Trump that are roaming the city's free streets.

And we'll be back in New York a couple times later.

The first time we've been in New York in ages.

The last time we had a live New York event, it was, I can remember, because it was during the Nuggets title run.

And me me and a handful of the folks who came out went and watched Jamal Murray put up 40, I think, on the Lakers after the podcast.

It was quite enjoyable.

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We'll see.

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See you all on the East Coast.

He's getting pretty old.

It's an important thing to mention.

We have some questions about his health, and he's also 79, and his references are very old.

It's not just the war.

And so I want to give people a trigger warning here.

We don't usually play Donald Trump's voice, but it's too funny for me not to listen to this.

I want to talk about Scott Besant and his performance on the Sunday shows.

Before we get there, Trump was at one of these.

He's turned the Rose Garden into, you know, the Mar-a-Lago pool deck.

It's kind of a part Mar-a-Lago, part Panera bread kind of vibe there outside the White House.

And at the club, they're calling it the Rose Garden Club.

They're calling it the Rose Garden Club.

I just feel it, it makes me feel sick.

It's so pathetic.

I mean, it's really low class.

I mean, it's really Banana Republic stuff.

But anyway, at that Rose Garden Club, Trump was praising.

Was he praising?

I don't know.

He was weighing in on his Treasury Secretary and Commerce Secretary.

And you can hit the fast fast-forward 30 if you don't want to hear him, but let's hear it.

Scott Besant is here, who's done a fantastic job.

He's one of the people,

one of the writers of it, gave plenty of good ideas.

And I think Howard is here someplace.

Where's Howard?

Ludnick Howard.

Thank you very much.

I call them the Bobsy Twins.

They're the most different human beings I've ever met.

I just, since you mentioned the nostalgia for World War I, I was like, I don't, what are the Bobsy twins?

Was that a World War I-era thing?

I thought Bill Crystal might be able to enlighten me onto that reference.

Yeah, I don't, I didn't, I didn't read the Bobsy twins.

They were a little too, I don't know.

I think maybe they were more for girls.

If I can go date myself by saying when they were like, Hardy Boys were for boys and Nancy Drew was for girls or something.

I don't really remember.

Yeah, they were twins, I think.

That's my main memory.

That's all you got.

But I think I was hoping you could tell.

This is a Google Google.

You've undoubtedly researched this and you're going to.

I didn't research it.

I thought I was going to ask you.

I was going to ask you.

Yeah, I got a human resource for things that happened way before you were born.

And I'm usually happy to play that.

I'm usually happy to play that.

Well, I just think the important thing that we've learned here is that Trump's cultural references are so old that Bill Crystal doesn't even get them.

Okay.

He's dated Bill Crystal.

So a couple other more important items with Scott Besson.

He was on Meet the Press yesterday.

Andrew Egger wrote about it also in this morning's morning shots.

But

it's pretty bad.

I don't know.

This goes back to, I think, the real vulnerability and potential threat that these guys have.

I want to play a couple of the clips.

Here he is talking about the impact of the tariffs.

Just bottom line, Mr.

Secretary, do you acknowledge that these tariffs are a tax on American consumers?

No, I don't.

Even though you have companies saying they are going to have to increase prices, and given the fact that 86% of these tariffs so far have been paid by

the market.

Yes, Goldman Sachs.

Yeah,

which I said, I made a good career trading against Goldman Sachs.

Okay.

Just to say that's not actually true.

Reuters reported last year that Besant, as a money manager, had years of inconsistent performance that contributed to a nearly 90% decline in his hedge funds assets.

So look, he's doing better than me, but I don't think he's doing better than Goldman Sachs.

I'm

pretty sure that betting with Goldman Sachs over betting with Besant would have been a better bet.

And that's the reason why last year, before he became Treasury Secretary, you would have heard of Goldman Sachs and not heard of Besant.

Anyway, you're pretty bad territory there trying to defend the tariff record if that's the best you got.

Right.

Isn't that well?

That's what they do.

They say, you're quoting the New York Times,

you know, so it's wrong.

When the New York Times is quoting John Deere, the actual company, I think, report on their own business, which presumably John Deere knows

how much damage terrorist is doing to their own business and has no interest in exaggerating that, quite the contrary, probably.

And yes, and then I think his answer was, well, he's just quoting the New York Times.

Yeah.

And they are so bad.

So maybe all that together does add up some to allowing not just Ken Griffin, your friend Ken Griffin, but a normal, if I can put it that way.

Yeah, hey, Ken, what's up, bud?

Small business man and a woman around America looks up at some point and says, these people do not know what they're doing.

And incidentally, I'm now paying more for this and that from abroad.

And incidentally, the health insurance went up, as I said earlier.

You wonder if that could come together in a way that weakens him a little more than we've seen so far.

There's no better way to make clear that Besson doesn't have any economic arguments that are strong and that these guys covered his bear than what he falls back on here in the next bit.

So let's listen to this.

He's talking about manufacturing jobs and the fact that the report on Friday showed that we'd lost actually manufacturing jobs since Trump has been in.

Mr.

Secretary, you know, the economy did add nearly half a million manufacturing jobs under former President Biden.

In this case, since April, again, you're actually losing manufacturing jobs.

Is that problematic for your policy?

Well, a couple of things, Chris.

We're going to get the revisions for last year, next week, and there there may be as big as an 800,000 job downward revision.

Again, this would be the second downward revision, so I'm not sure what these people who collect the data have been doing.

It's good.

We need good data.

Secondly, what we are seeing is the jobs that are being created are going to either native-born or legal Americans.

Most of the jobs created under the Biden administration went to illegal aliens.

Either the data is false, or if the data is true, it's the illegal's fault.

Like that's like, that's literally what he's fallen back on.

Like that you can't trust the data.

You can't trust your lying eyes.

And that, oh, but what you can trust is that some good white people have gotten jobs, but

it's all of the lost jobs.

You don't have to worry about that, the numbers being bad, because that's all the people that are self-deporting.

And it is extremely thin gruel, in addition to being demagogic.

And it's a lie, I think.

I don't think most of the jobs, I mean,

I think there's some data showing that quite a lot of jobs went to immigrants with work permits.

And that's been the case for quite a long time is we have a declining native-born workforce.

I mean, that's just a fact due to birth rates.

There's nothing to do with it.

And so you can manipulate, you can make it sound like they're taking away jobs when, in fact, they're just the people who are showing up to work.

Isn't it interesting, though?

He's the guy.

He was the enlightened guy.

He's a Wall Street guy.

He's not some kind of low-level demagogue like Steve Miller or Tom Homan.

He wouldn't be a nativist or anything.

And then it, you know, it takes him 10 minutes in the administration, and he's playing the most vulgar nativist card as well, right?

Indeed.

Not only that, he apparently wants to start throwing hands.

I got to say, just before I read the story, a gay man willing to throw a bunch.

I don't hate that.

It's a good rebranding for my people.

Nothing wrong with that, occasionally if it calls for it.

But I don't know if you want that from the Secretary of Treasury.

Here we go.

This is from Politico this morning.

Last Wednesday evening, there was an event at a new place called Executive Branch.

I don't think you would have heard about that, Bill, because it's the Trump World's new Georgetown Club for the Uber Rich.

So I don't think you're going to be on the invite list there.

I had heard that all these so-called Georgetown cocktail parties were bad, and that's why Trump came in, but I guess they want to do their own.

This one, they're having a birthday party for Chamath Pallahapatya, the all-in podcaster.

Anyway, at this party during the happy hour, Besant confronts Bill Pulte, the finance official that is going after Lisa Cook and others with mortgage accusations.

Besant, why the fuck are you talking to the president about me?

Fuck you.

I'm going to punch you in your fucking face.

Then Besant goes to the host.

He starts karening.

That's a little bit more and stereotyped.

It's either me or him.

You tell me who's getting the fuck out of here.

Or he added, we could go outside.

Pultey comes back to do do what?

To talk?

No, Besson replied.

I'm going to fucking beat your ass.

Besson also got in the girl of Elon Musk.

And if you remember that, that was during an Oval Office fight.

So two near fights from Scott.

We haven't seen him actually

throw a punch yet.

But

I don't know.

To me, that doesn't sound like somebody who feels very confident about the stability of his position in Trump world and the direction of his portfolio.

Maybe that's overeating it, but I don't know.

That's my view.

Yeah, the idea that the Treasury Secretary, one of those senior people in the cabinet, is worried that some

Nepo baby who's running some housing thing we've never heard of, but who seems to spend all his time just digging through mortgage records to try to

attack unjustly, mostly, Trump's opponents or perceived enemies.

The idea that Besant thinks this guy, I mean, he thinks he's a threat.

His objection to Palty, according to this piece, is not that Paulty was doing other things.

It's that he's telling Trump bad things about Besant, I assume, trying to get Bessant out of there so he can get the job.

I don't know.

I have a question.

Hold on.

Back during the HW administration, you know, any of the cabinet secretaries

go after a mid-level staffer threaten to punch them?

Did that ever happen when you were with Dan Quayle?

Did you ever see, you know, I don't know, Nick Brady or Lewis Sullivan or any of you?

Jim Baker was, you know, George Schultz.

George Schultz ever threatening to throw down?

Jim Baker once had a stern talking to with me, which I won't go into the details of, but when he came back to the White House at the end, the last two months to run to take charge in our failed re-election effort.

But that was intimidating enough, but he didn't threaten to beat me up.

Hmm.

I don't know.

I'm kind of just looking through the cabinet here of HW, looking to see who the most likely person would have been to have been in a fight.

It's hard to find somebody.

Jack Kemp was kind of.

Yeah,

he was

a strong guy.

He was a little hot-headed.

All right.

So that's the latest from Besant.

He's gone full nativist.

He's threatening to fight people at Georgetown clubs.

And he's one of the Bobsy twins.

TBD on what that means.

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I want to ask you about uh the government shutdown fight coming potentially this is I think going to be one of the key uh tentpole news items of the month Ezra Klein wrote over the weekend about this I want to read a little bit from that he says joining Republicans to fund a government that President Trump is turning into a tool of authoritarian takeover and vengeance or shut the government down are their options.

I'm not going to tell you I'm absolutely sure Democrats should shut the government down.

I'm not.

At the same time, joining Republicans to fund this government is worse than failing at opposition.

It's complicity.

It's one of those things where every ounce of my instinctual being says, fuck them, shut it down, fight it.

We'll see what happens.

Let the chips fall.

I don't think it's crazy to argue that maybe there's a different approach that would be more strategic, though.

Kind of the, if they're already digging, you know, why stop them, you know, from digging their own grave on some of this stuff.

What do you think about the coming fight?

Yeah, I'm sort of where you are both in the instinctive, they need to fight.

Whether the way to fight is to shut down the government is a subordinate question.

I do think it looks to me like the Republicans are going to cave on the Obamacare subsidies and try to extend those for a year or two.

I think Democrats should not accept, they should insist on permanent extension.

I think they need to insist on things that are hard for the Republicans to agree to and that would be a genuine victory, not one medium-sized victory.

And I don't mean to minimize there are people whom that would help, but it needs to be broader than that, right?

Maybe RFK vaccine stuff.

I feel like

they need to get enough to make it legitimate that they will be keeping a government going that's doing a lot of things that we really, really don't like, but they get real things out of it.

And I would say maybe tariffs, maybe RFK vaccine stuff, maybe the Obamacare subsidies, maybe Medicaid cuts, maybe all of those, though.

At least start with all of those, I would think.

think.

This is really where I fall down on the strategic side of it.

And the thing I worry about with Schumer is I had Murphy on, Chris Murphy on, I don't know, maybe a month ago now, and asked him about this because we all saw this was going to come, you know, they're going to hit this cliff.

And I said, what, what are the things that you would want to get out of it?

And he listed a lot of stuff, a lot of the stuff you just mentioned.

And it was still sort of amorphous, right?

And if you go back to the first fight, it was also kind of amorphous with what the Democrats want.

And so to me, it's kind of like, if you end end up doing this thing where you get in this world where the Democrats are like, no, screw you, shut it down.

And the Republicans, you know, are like, whatever, fine, because they don't want to fund anything.

And then you have Fox World blaming the Democrats for the shutdown.

And you have MSNBC World, just broadly speaking, like cheering the Democrats for fighting and blaming the Republicans for, you know, saying Trump's president.

It's his fault.

They need to come to the table.

This is all because they've cut Medicaid funding.

They've cut health care for people.

I just kind of think that's like a fight to a draw.

Like, that doesn't really do you any good.

It's fine.

It's better than not doing anything.

But to me, I think that,

and this is what I'll be asking Democrats who we interview over the next couple of weeks, it's like, what are the specific demands, right?

If it's like, okay,

we will work with you to fund the government if you give us this, that, and the other thing, then okay, like then that's a real fight, right?

And so then if the Republicans don't do it, then they can say to regular voters, you know, that this is what it was, the fight was over, right?

Like, we're not going to fund the government if the Republicans won't, you know, permanently, you know, extend your lower health care premiums or they won't, you know, whatever.

I mean, there are a million things that could possibly be.

So figure out what the most popular ones are.

This is maybe a roll for a pollster and, you know, have them not be generic fucking pollster words, but like specific things that then people can be like, oh, okay, well, the Republicans

won't do this.

And so they're not going to fund it.

Then that's like a fight on winning turf, right?

And I think that is kind of where I land on it.

In this case, I may be overthinking this, but I think the turf's a little bit tougher for Democrats in this way.

They don't control either branch of Congress.

I think if people see the opposition party controls one or both branches of Congress, okay, they understand it's divided government.

So there has to be a negotiation.

And then it becomes who's being unreasonable, whatever.

Republicans control both houses of Congress.

Now, it happens that you need 60 votes to pass this legislation.

So the Democrats do have have a kind of veto, but they would be shutting down the government with less, presumably fewer than 50 votes, you know, which is, I think, looks more problematic.

I don't say overthink it.

Maybe no one cares.

But I feel like it's a little more problematic.

And part of me thinks, you know what?

If they want to cut Medicaid and make people pay more for health insurance and do all these other terrible things, and they control the presidency and majority in the House, the majority in the Senate, maybe Democrats are just obscene to let them goddamn do it.

I hate to even say that because you don't want to make people, you know, hurt.

Obviously, these are real things.

And if you can get real advantages for people, it gets to be a tougher trade-off.

But part of me just thinks

this is their agenda.

We, the Democrats, can't fundamentally change it.

And so

maybe there's a way to, I don't know, to structure the fight so that at the end of the day, the Republican majority clearly embraces all these bad things.

It's more nuanced than it looks, right?

Like the easy thing is just to be like, yeah, fight, fight him, fuck it.

Let's go.

Whatever.

You know, say no.

Don't ever support him.

It's supporting this complicity.

I mean, that's kind of where I was the first time because nothing had like really happened yet.

And so

I thought it'd be important to like lay a marker down.

Here we are now, seven and a half months in.

And their legislative agenda is

extremely unpopular, right?

And so anyway, you'd never want a Democrat to actually tell them to actually vote for the budget.

Like that's where the problem comes in.

Like, how do you figure that out?

Like, like you said, maybe it's abstentions or whatever.

I don't know.

I think it's a complicated fight.

And I hope that there are some smart strategic thinkers over there on the hill trying to figure out

how to frame it up.

Your point is so important because, however, it plays out in the very end, you do have a fight going on for X number of weeks.

And

using those weeks to make a concrete and

memorable critique of key points of the Republican agenda is very, very important, as opposed to a generic, kind of, you know, mushy, hard-to-follow objections to, you know, to the agenda as a whole.

Or rescissions.

We need to make sure you can't do rescissions.

It's like, well, nobody knows what rescissions are.

Anyway, you've mentioned it twice.

We're coming up on like people's healthcare renewals and the numbers are going up.

And maybe it's as simple as that.

Like it's the fact that they've let this stuff expire and folks' healthcare costs are going up.

But TBD, much more on that to come.

I wanted to make sure we got that to you.

Okay, final topic.

I feel like we have to mention this because the Republicans do such a good job and Fox World does such a good job.

If you watch Fox on a given day, it's kind of insane how stupid some of the topics are sometimes.

Like, they really will

get people fired up about the dumbest possible things.

Like, you find some crazy liberal that has created a rule in a wheelchair basketball tournament, and like they get,

they get a whole segment on the five.

Um, and so it's like, okay, what is a way to push back on that?

Well,

last week at the U.S.

Military Academy, they canceled plans for a ceremony to honor Tom Hanks, recipient of this year's Sylvanus Thayer Award, because Trump is mad that Tom Hanks was mean to him, apparently.

They've canceled Tom Hanks.

He has, I think, I guess, done a lot to promote the military versus various movies.

He's been a great American.

I don't know that a lot of people have huge problems with Tom Hanks, very popular.

And the Republicans are like, no, the cadets do not get to meet Tom Hanks because he's been mean to Mr.

Trump one time.

I mean, it is very weak and pathetic, and I feel like they deserve to be mocked over it.

Yeah, totally.

I mean, the pettiness of authoritarians can sometimes,

calling attention to that can sometimes do as much damage as the truly grotesque abuses.

You know what I mean?

People know who Tom Hanks is.

They don't know who a bunch of Haitians in Springfield are, I guess.

And so it's not the same thing, obviously.

But yeah, no, I think mocking is good.

And the degree of thought control, whatever, the degree to which they're just willing willing to unembarrassedly, we can't give this award to this person because not because this we've, you know, not even because there's a fake problem with this person or a fake ideological objection.

The person's a radical, you know, socialist sympathy.

You know, it's just purely Trump.

I guess I didn't even know this.

Trump didn't like it for some reason or he criticized Trump.

Yeah, he's spoken out against Trump.

Yeah.

And they're just such babies.

It's really, this is extremely pathetic.

All right.

Speaking of babies, final, actual final topic, the first Bulwark staffer, Ben Parker, had his first baby last night, Leo, one day old.

Congratulations to Ben Parker.

We like babies around here.

So I wanted to give him a shout out.

Bill, do you have any other final thoughts or do you have well wishes for Ben Parker?

Well wishes.

A well-deserved shout-out.

Ben's great, and Olivia's great.

And I trust everything's going well.

And that's, yeah, it's nice, nice.

Bulwark babies.

That's good.

We're doing it.

All right, everybody.

We'll be back tomorrow for another edition of the Bulwark Podcast.

We'll see you all then.

Peace.

what a beautiful day.

Baby,

what a beautiful day.

I got a wild with your mother, and did on the bed.

She should kiss me on the neck.

Should I kiss her neck.

She'll let me go tired at your mother.

You can pick her plants.

She could.

And darling, I can't.

Oh, baby, I can.

How could you know, baby?

Yeah.

That's a beautiful thing.

How could you know, baby?

What a beautiful game.

Sure, I touch your belly.

But I mean, the entire

end okay,

baby.

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

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It's that signature confidence with a right-now attitude.

From standout denim to all eyes on you sets.

This drop brings the heat wherever you wear it.

It's real.

It's bold.

It's iconic.

Just like you.

So own the spotlight.

Own your moment.

Own your true.

Shop the icons collection available now only at truereligion.com.

You want your master's degree.

You know you can earn it, but life gets busy.

The packed schedule, the late nights, and then there's the unexpected.

American Public University was built for all of it.

With monthly starts and no set login times, APU's 40-plus flexible online master's programs are designed to move at the speed of life.

You bring the fire, we'll fuel the journey.

Get started today at apu.apus.edu.