Bill Kristol: Trump Wants Troops in Portland

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Hello, and welcome to the Bullard Podcast.

I'm your host, Tim Miller.

It is Monday.

I'm back in America, no problem at customs.

So, you know, we still have free travel across borders here.

JBL was a little worried about that.

He did not come to our live show in Canada because he was worried about his habeas corpus.

But luckily, our corpus is fine, and I'm back in New Orleans, and it's Monday, so I'm here with Bill Crystal.

How are you doing, Bill?

Fine, and welcome back.

We were worried.

We were counting the minute.

We were looking at our watchers nervously here, as you know, to see.

I was waiting for the call on my phone from, you know, do you get one call when you're detained by ice?

By people who are in the middle of the morning, you wouldn't be it.

You wouldn't be it.

I got a little worried.

I'm wounded.

I'm a little bit wounded here, yeah.

That I'm going to be calling.

Well, I want to start as you did in the morning newsletter here with

what is happening tomorrow.

There's a bunch of stuff happening today too, so we have much to get to.

But tomorrow there will be a meeting, a gathering of the generals and flag officers at Quantico.

Initially, the initial reports were that it was going to be, they're going to be hearing a rousing speech from our weekend talk show co-host, turn secretary of war, Pete Hegseth.

And we've learned now since that Trump is also attending.

The president will also be there.

So you wrote about this for the newsletter.

Mark Hartling wrote about it for us this morning.

What do you make of this gathering of generals tomorrow?

I will say that I wrote on Friday even that I assumed Trump would speak, and I thought people were being, frankly, a little credulous and believing some of this reporting.

I mean, I think they were reporting accurately, but they were being told by the Trump White House that, gee, this was just something Hegseth thought up, and not sure if Trump's going to attend, as if Trump would pass up an opportunity to speak to 800 general and flag officers with much hoopla, and as if Hegseth would do this without Trump telling him to, I think, basically.

So I think this is a little more planned than I think the reporting again has been too much like, oh, that Heg Seth, what a jerk.

He thinks he can give a pep talk to a bunch of generals.

And Trump was kind of confused.

And I think this is a little more ominous in that it's part of a general plan, which they execute in their own chaotic way, granted, to

get the military as much on board and to send the signal.

down to the troops and to the public that the military is on board with Trump's agenda.

That agenda including blowing up boats in the Caribbean and use of troops domestically.

And Trump's going to give a speech and I think he might mention those things and he might try to have a few friends there in the audience start some applause so the generals are put in the difficult position of do they applaud for something that's

they probably have real doubts about a lot of them or do they sit in their hands it looks bad i mean mark kirtling's piece which he's a obviously retired general and knows more about how they will behave than my guesses he seems more confident that they will just be kind of stone-faced and silent applaud politely for things that are uncontroversial tributes to our troops and so forth.

But I hope that's the case.

I hope they really understand they're at risk of being used as props for Trump's political agenda, and they really should resist it.

And I think they should, one reason I wrote this this morning, and I think one reason Mark wrote it, is to try to get that idea out there ahead of time to these generals themselves.

They're intelligent people.

They know what they're getting into.

Yeah, sure.

They shouldn't just wander in and then suddenly find themselves applauding for something they don't want to applaud for.

So, well, we'll see what happens tomorrow.

It'll be interesting.

It says Quantico, so that's about 30 miles miles south of here.

The Marine Corps, obviously, where Marine Corps officers are trained in the officer candidate school and then the basic school.

Why are they dragging them to Quantico?

I mean, I've been to Quantico several times.

It's fine.

But they do have the Pentagon, a rather large place that has many auditoriums that are very well set up to suit a thousand guests.

The general officers are all familiar with the Pentagon.

They all have kind of suites they could use there.

But I do think this is a little bit of yanking them out of their comfort zone.

Quantico is small.

It's the Marine Corps headquarters, so to speak, headquarters of the Marine Corps University, and where they do the, as I say, the officer candidate schools and the basic schools, an infantry officer school, and so forth.

But it's not a big, fancy place.

I've been in that auditorium they're going to be in.

I think that's the one they'll be in.

There are only a couple there.

And it's like a big college auditorium.

So these four stars will be crammed in there, which I think is part of the point, you know, and to get them out of the Pentagon where all their support staff will be and get them there kind of alone individually, you know, to Quantico.

So that'll be, it'll be interesting to see how much the White House and the HECSF have thought through the optics of it, how much implicit, not explicit, but how much, as it were, silent pushback they get from the general officers.

When you said you put it out there in the hopes that there's some reading of it, I will say we have some evidence that there are some flag officers listening to the Shield of the Republic podcast, which people should listen to about foreign policy.

About the Morning Shots newsletter, not as sure, but you never know.

It might get forwarded through.

There's just one other element of this I just wanted to get your take on, which is Trump does this a lot, like where there is like a kernel of truth to something they're trying to address.

Like if you if you read military experts, like we maybe are a little bulky at the top of the pay scale, I guess, with generals and flag officers and four stars, like we may have more than are necessary, a little top-heavy, I guess.

And so you might imagine a world where it's like, you know, you have a serious effort to kind of review that and like put people on a retirement track or, you know, whatever to try to right-size it.

And so if you consume

whatever military media, like that is just kind of something that's out there in the ether.

And so to me, a worrying thing is that this is of a piece of what Trump does in other places where it's like, well, people say we have too many generals.

Let's have a gathering of them.

Let's see who's loyal.

Let's see who we think might be a troublemaker so we can kind of get rid of anybody that's not fully on board.

That to me does not feel like a paranoid way to look at this.

I don't know.

What do you think?

I think that is the right way to look at it, how much they can tell from this one gathering.

But I think the broader signal it sends is obviously that, you know, you're supposed to be, and they wanted someone was quoted saying that, with getting the horses in there and whipping them into shape, they want people to be a little intimidated by the notion that Hexeth can call them there and they'll be observed and they could get called back.

But I very much agree with you that there's no need to defend the current structure of the

entire general officer corps.

I have no view on that, honestly.

And it may well be more than we need.

And

they may have more support staff than they need.

I've sometimes thought that when in meetings at the Pentagon and elsewhere.

And to be fair, I don't think that's kind of where the criticisms would come from.

I will say a lot, again, a lot of the slightly credulous coverage in the media, though, has been sort of, this could be controversial because Trump wants to downsize the number of four stars or three, you know, or generals and flag officers in general.

And that's not the real thing to be concerned about.

You know, it's like the sensitivities of these people that some of them might be put on retirement tracks, as you say.

It is the political selection and the general political intimidation and the broader conveying of a message that it's Trump's military, not the United States military.

Going through a couple of the topics that you mentioned about what the military is up to, Trump put out the bleat, I guess, that he's authorizing full force for sending military, sending the Department of War.

That's what we're calling it now, Department of War.

Been really successful at renaming things.

I think that he's been the most really, I think, successful at so far in the first nine months is renaming things.

There had been some protests outside the ICE facility in Portland,

including, I guess, somebody had a guillotine out there.

Not one in use, but one for show, which is allowed in a free country.

You can have a non-working guillotine outside the ICE office.

But it's worth noting that Portland was where some of the most intense skirmishes between law enforcement and groups were back during the Black Lives Matter protests.

There were organized right-wing groups that were causing trouble then.

That's where you usually roll your eyes when you say the word Antifa, but I think that there are some actual antifas uh in portland not the pretend antifa that is everywhere in the country and you know uh hiding behind the bushes all around you according to trump advance and so i i don't know i like to me this one is a little bit more ominous than even kind of the suggestions it's sending into my own city in new orleans where it's just kind of preposterous and mockable and bad but like in this case i i do wonder if they're kind of champing at the bit for a conflict here and that and they maybe see portland as an opportunity for that I don't know.

What do you think of that?

I think that's right.

I think they certainly are counting on people remembering 2020 and they're busy.

Trump is busy conflating the video from 2020 with the video from today.

I mean, this summer, they had a little bit of hubbub in June.

I think since then, I think from June through September is almost over, 28 people or something have been arrested outside of the ICE facility there, and many of them for misdemeanors.

And in the last month or two, it's dried down to almost nothing.

Both federal arrests and Portland police force arrests.

I mean, there's been a lot of video about how relatively quiet it is.

There are people protesting many days, you know, a few dozen, and they're entitled to do so.

But I think they're very much counting on Portland's reputation as being weird, crazy, far-left, Antifa-friendly city.

And as you say, there was a fair amount of damage done there in 2020.

Maybe they're trying to provoke.

something like that again, or in any case, they're trying to capitalize on it.

And I think it is ominous because there's no pretense here that LA, there wasn't that much of of a pretense, honestly, but there had been pretty big ICE raids and there was some, quote, resistance to it.

I don't even know that that's the case here in Portland.

And so what are we even talking about?

And the memorandum, we discussed this at the time, the memorandum he issued, I think it was July 7th,

when he sent the troops, when he mobilized the troops for LA,

was not about LA.

It was explicit.

I could do this anywhere in the country where there's evidence of or threats of or even like rumors of, basically, protests that could lead to problems.

So he's moving right down the path we all saw coming, I think, honestly, that he wants to normalize this, not just in LA, not just in D.C., but in Portland and Memphis and elsewhere.

And it's now being gradually loosened from any demonstration of urgency, necessity, danger to ICE officers or anything like that.

And just a generalized, I don't know, I'm kind of unhappy about what's happening there.

So I'm just going to federalize some National Guard.

And in this case, over the objection of the governor.

I was reading Playbook this morning, and they described it this way: the deployment of troops, that the administration sees this as a heads-i-win, tails-you-lose situation, because

if the protests de-escalate, if there's nothing there, then Trump can say, oh, it's another success when we send the military in that brings peace and quiet, and so we should send it to more places.

If there's an escalation of violence, then he also gets to say, oh, we need to send in more troops to do this.

To me, I just thought that that's kind of an obvious point that that's what they want, but just in an ostensibly sort of neutral reporting effort of the administration, that it's just stated, like that the administration would see it as a victory for there to be more civil unrest so they could use the military to crack down more.

It's pretty astonishing that that is just kind of accepted, that that is where we are, that the administration at some level wants that.

Don't you think, though, that the notion that Portland is a war-ravaged place, as Trump said,

there's been enough video, I feel like, over the, maybe it's only people like me who have been too online the last 48 hours, but there's enough video of what's going on in Portland and people testifying as to life in Portland that maybe they'll have a tougher time selling this than they did for LA or for DC.

I don't know.

Yeah, I don't think Portland is a war zone.

Portland is, I think, probably the top American city that I've never been to, that I'd like to go to.

So I can't speak to it.

Like on my list of, there are very few really major American cities I haven't been to, but on the list of the ones I would want to go to that I haven't been, Portland is at the top.

So I can't speak to life on the ground.

When I was Vice President Quayle's Chief of Staff, he gave a speech in Portland.

I think it was in the 90s campaign.

I can't remember.

And it was actually one of the, I mean, more vocal and slightly disruptive, I guess, demonstrations outside the hotel that we've had, you know, like actually banging pots and pans at night and so forth, which the Secret Service tries to keep you a little bit away, but they didn't.

So I remember Portland a little bit from that.

And I guess wasn't it a big site for the, what were those big protests at the end of the 90s against

World Bank, yeah.

Yeah.

And so it is kind of has a bit of a reputation as a rowdy, lefty city, but very nice city, though.

Yeah, as a contrarian anti-leftist young man in college, I wore around a World Bank hat during those protests.

Hopefully trigger the hippies.

It didn't really work, actually.

And I was just being a brat.

And if it's the Secret Service was not very happy about these protests, they got a little closer than they wanted and so forth.

It was no big deal.

Quill Cool gave the speech.

We did whatever we did.

We left town.

Didn't occur to us that, hey, let's just mobilize some troops here because there's a lot of noise in the street outside of our Hyatt Regency or whatever.

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You mentioned this on Slack.

You want to talk about the relationship to the NSPM7

EO.

I just have to say, I did the Philip DeFranco show this morning.

People can check that out if they want.

This is the first question he asked me out of the gate.

It's Monday morning.

And I was like, NSP, like all the acronyms started to confuse me, but I guess this is one we have to learn.

So explain.

So 60 seconds, and we'll get, there's been more.

I think our friend Tom Jocelyn is writing a big thing on it.

And Arnold Porter, the law firm, has a nice little summary of it of the national security presidential memorandum.

That's what NSPM is.

Seven.

There's that, and there's an executive order, and they're sort of different.

The security memorandum has no legal force, but it's normally used often for very major national security strategy documents.

Some of the famous documents from the Cold War and stuff are national security strategy memoranda.

But the combination is very dangerous because we put the executive order, which has legal force, together with this memorandum, and basically

the war on terror is being applied to, quote, domestic terrorist organizations, which in turn are being characterized as such based on no actual proof of their being involved in actual terrorism, but that they have said certain things or been associated with certain groups that may occasionally, or individuals who may occasionally have done things.

And some of the speech that these groups have funded or just engaged in itself could have possibly been related to such actions.

I mean, it is a very fast slope when you read the presidential memorandum and also the executive order basically going after protected speech because it might have something to do with

something Stephen Miller thinks shouldn't be happening in the U.S.

And I'm not being too rhetorical here.

If you look at Arnold Porter, which is a very serious law firm,

they are pretty shocked by it, I would say, if you look look at this memorandum.

I will put the link to the Arnold Porter analysis in the show notes for folks that want to read that and freak themselves out.

Other related item that you mentioned is Venezuela.

So we've already been just gathering these boats out of the Caribbean.

There was a report from MSNBC, I guess, over the weekend that we're weighing possible strikes inside Venezuela and four different sources on that.

Seems like a credible report that that's something that they're thinking about.

I have some political thoughts on that, but I'm wondering just what your top line is on what's happening with us shooting down the drug boats and the broader Venezuela strategy.

I don't have any real view on what they're trying to do except, well, they're trying to create a fake kind of war situation, partly to legitimize what they're doing at home, I suppose, in terms of their crackdown on Venezuelan immigrants here.

It's all, you know, we're at war with them.

It's all a big narco-terrorist state.

And so we're entitled to deport them to El Salvador.

We've already seen that and elsewhere.

I do think from a legal point of view, there's not much difference between striking Venezuelan citizens in a boat and Venezuelan citizens necessarily at home, right?

I mean, once you justify people think you say the words in international waters, and it somehow creates a different legal situation.

I don't know that that's the case.

So I suppose it's plausible that they're going to go ahead and do this.

I don't know.

This is going to go against the instincts of both of the contributors to this podcast.

Sometimes admissions against interest carry a little bit more weight.

I like the strong military side of the Democratic Party, the

wing that is interested in global engagement that we've seen, the Seth Moulton crowd.

That said,

I think that this Venezuela stuff presents a big opportunity for the Democrats to try to win back some of the people, voters, particularly young voters, particularly disaffected young men who really bought into the idea that Trump was the anti-war candidate.

And I think that the Democrats, it seems to me, maybe this is wrong, that they're a little hesitant on this.

It's kind of similar to the immigration stuff.

Like, we don't want to be seen as the wimps or the pro-fentanyl party or whatever.

So we're not going to weigh in on this.

And I just think that's wrong.

I think that they should be banging the drum on this aggressively.

They're changing the Department of Defense to the Department of War.

They're calling it Department of War now.

They're gathering all the generals.

We're bombing.

people in the Caribbean.

We might go into Venezuela.

The Israel war is not slowing down.

The Ukraine-Russia war is not slowing slowing down.

I think this is an opportunity to say to some people out there who thought that they were signing up for the anti-war party that they were wrong.

Not to tell that they're wrong, but that, like, hey, look at what these guys are doing.

This is an issue that Democrats should try to recapture and say, no, like, we are the responsible party when it comes to foreign policy.

You cannot trust these guys who sent a makeup artist to a foreign gulag.

Like, you can't trust that the people they're bombing in the Caribbean are even actually drug dealers.

Like, why should we assume that?

They haven't proved it.

They've they put the wrong people into El Salvador.

Why wouldn't they bomb the wrong boats?

And that this is going off the rails.

And if you signed up for this because you thought you were part of the Tulsi, Gabbard, Glenn, Greenwald, whatever like manosphere, you know, wing that didn't want war, this isn't what you signed up for and that you should oppose it.

What do you make of that, Bill Crystal?

I like that.

And I would just say I haven't spoken at least to Seth Bolton about this, for example, or to Jason Crow.

You probably agree with that, yeah.

But I think they would agree with that.

I mean, they are people who believe strongly that we should have a strong military.

If we have authorized to use force, we should do it.

They also, I know, Seth's case went out of their way at times.

We're very careful, as they tried to be very careful, not to kill civilians, even in real war zones at the height of fighting.

I mean, actual, literally, in the middle of battles.

I've discussed that with Seth and with others who served in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And so this kind of cavalier attitude towards killing civilians when you could turn board the boat, as the Coast Guard has done in other cases, and arrest them, this cavalier attitude towards, let's just bomb Venezuela because we don't like some of the drugs that have coming to the U.S., which may or may not be coming from Venezuela anyway.

The Democrats can have the best of both worlds here.

Maybe I'll just rephrase your thing in a different way, in a way, by being genuinely tough on defense, but also not cavalier about the use of force or about killing people.

Just while we're doing foreign policy, I think, any thoughts on the perceived pivot from Trump on Ukraine and what's happening there?

I mean, I wish we still don't have sanctions on Russia, of course, but look, to the degree that he's lost hope that he could magically bring peace about and is a little disenchanted with Putin, that's better than the alternative.

Yeah, that's about where I'm at, too.

And I'll believe it when I see it also.

Well, I know that's another thing you would agree on.

One bleat is not satisfying me on this.

It feels like one call from one of Trump's old buddies that rented a Russian buddies that rented a high-rise from him in New York, and maybe he starts changing his tune again.

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There are a couple of more mass shootings over the weekend, and I kind of want to talk about the political discussion around all of them.

In Michigan, as right now, there are four dead, eight injured at a Mormon church.

It was a veteran to the extent this matters.

He was pictured in a Trump 2020 shirt.

And then in North Carolina, there was another veteran that shot up a restaurant, multiple deaths.

Important to just kind of note here on kind of some of the context around this shooter.

Earlier this year, he filed a lawsuit about a civil conspiracy against him.

It's related to some local church.

He said it was masterminded by the LGBTQ community and also white supremacist pedophiles.

He thought they were all coming for him because he's a straight man.

He had an AR-15.

Caroline Levitt's response to this is there was appeared to be yet another target attack on Christians.

J.D.

Vance tweets nothing about North Carolina and Michigan.

He tweets, awful situation, nothing about motives.

I'm so, it's fucking so sucks so bad to be in this country.

Like it's like you can't even keep track of all the mass shootings.

And I look at this and you look at the North Carolina thing, and it's like, this is a crazy person.

Like, sure, he cited the LGBT community, but he also cited white supremacists.

And this is like a guy that shouldn't have had a gun.

This is a guy with mental health issues that shouldn't have had access to an AR-15.

But I worry about kind of the broader political narratives around all of this, where, you know, people only like weigh in on the motives of the shooter if it matches their political preference.

And so if you're like a consumer of right-wing media, you probably don't even learn what the motives are of these two people.

And we've seen, which I covered this last week or two weeks ago, in some progressive media circles, there were a lot of conspiracies around what the motives were around the Kirk shooter and others.

And I don't know.

I don't actually even really know what my question is, but it's a horrible situation.

And I'm just, I'm pretty worried about the way that this news is being processed in our society in a way that makes further examples of this more likely rather than rather than more likely for us to try to address the real causes.

No, I very much agree.

And it's just these are individually individual cases.

A lot of them disturb people.

They seize on some grievance, right or left.

I mean, politicians should be responsible and not giving them encouraging violence.

And there are some genuine, pure, so to speak, political violence, but that does not seem to be the case.

Usually, you're right.

Everything's politicized, both who the shooter is and also who the victims are.

So we have, you know, oh my god, it's an attack on Christians.

Well, I mean, and I say this with all due respect, and I'm sure I probably shouldn't say episode will be misunderstood, but you know what?

I mean, there's nothing particularly ghastly about killing people in church.

I will agree with that.

Having said that, you know, killing people at a restaurant or at a Mormon church.

Yeah, in a North Carolina restaurant or a Mormon church in Michigan or a gay nightclub out in Florida years ago, I mean, or at a synagogue.

I mean, it's, it's all murder, you know, and we should just be against murder.

I mean, it sounds so stupid to say.

And I do think, I mean, but the guns are a real problem.

I say this as someone who was once and remains somewhat skeptical of this lot of the easy talk about gun control.

It's not so easy to know exactly what policies would work, but it is insane, the prevalence of very powerful guns in this country.

And we're not good at mental health, including for veterans, incidentally, which I think, and that those are actual policies that can be addressed.

You know, this is like we actually spend X amount of money on mental health at VAs.

We could spend X plus, you know, X to X amount of money, or we could spend it better.

I mean, I'm totally agnostic on how to do this, right?

But that would be worth saying and worth emphasizing, I think.

Yeah.

And again, like, that's what I'm saying.

Like, you look at these trends, right?

There's a way to look at both of these shootings over the weekend and say, ooh, well, you know, it's a couple of MAGA people that did the shootings, and so it's a political issue.

Or there's a way to look at it and say, well, look, what do they have in common?

They're both veterans.

They both had mental health issues.

They both had easy access to guns.

And if you look at it the first way, there's kind of no solution to it.

Like we're just part of, it's just, we're just in some internal civil war where there are bad guys on the other side that are going to shoot people.

If you look at it in the way of, like you just mentioned, where it's, we need to deal with veterans' mental health.

We need to deal with maybe ensuring with red flag laws that people that have mental health issues don't have access to fucking AR-15s.

Like that is not a solvable problem, but at least something that like we could move together as a society.

And that's a part of the reason why I just don't like the way that we're, that we process all this stuff now and like through a partisan lens makes me so uncomfortable.

So I interviewed this guy from the Daily Caller last week.

And folks didn't see it, it was on YouTube.

Daily Caller is a right-wing outlet, MAGA outlet.

Me and Sam had done a video making fun of the interview they did with the president, which was solicitous in the extreme.

And the editor thought it was unfair and said, I want to come talk about it.

And I was like, okay, let's let's talk about it.

I'll have you on.

We'll do an interview.

We did an interview.

And during the interview, I pointed out that one of the questions that the reporter asked the president was

something where they cited a stat that 50% of the recent mass shooters were trans.

And I just said to the guy, I was like, that's just wrong.

Like, it's just not true.

And, you know, you say you're a fact-based outlet, that you have an ideology, you're a fact-based outlet, that's not true.

And he

wouldn't really give a good answer to that.

And then we have two more mass shootings this weekend, obviously, that have nothing to do with trans.

And it's like, if you're a consumer of the Daily Caller and you're watching that interview,

like you come away thinking, like, oh, like the solution to the violence in this country is some new laws related to trans people, which is insane and inflammatory and wrong.

And I just, I haven't pulled up the Daily Caller today.

I know they had a...

article last week after I did the interview where there was one of the columnists was saying that we need more violence in the streets against the leftists.

It's just hard for me to imagine.

I'll just pull it up right now that like it's talking about

the problem with these two mass shootings and how they're veterans and how they were people that had supported Trump.

And so anyway, not that we expect better from the Daily Caller, but it is pretty, I think there's a pretty telling anecdote about where we're at.

In their interview with the President of the United States, they're trying to get him to blame trans people for all the mass shootings.

Which he's happy to do, incidentally, or I don't know if he was in that particular case.

He's certainly happy to blame, apparently,

trans people or the attempt to secure rights for them for the government shutdown, which I believe is literally has not an issue that the Democrats have raised.

I think it's not in contention.

Whatever's in the current CR that the Republicans have passed is in there.

So the demagogue on the trans issue in particular, I mean, this is not, you were making a broader point, but is really appalling.

I mean, but it starts from the top.

I mean, I'm happy to criticize the Daily Caller, don't get me wrong, but we've never had a president.

Well, never.

We have had many decades ago, certainly on race issues in particular.

Not really a president who just has gone after a vulnerable small community in this way and

obliterated any possibility, I'm now going to say, of a sensible discussion of the real policy issues of paying who should pay for what operating.

You know, there are some actual policy questions here.

What the age, what age is appropriate.

Yeah.

Yeah, but I mean, that you just can't even raise it.

And honestly, I personally feel almost reluctant to even raise some of these cautions, I would say, about where maybe you do want to stop a little short of the more radical or complete, you might say, trans agenda, because it just seems to be giving aid and comfort to bigots and demagogues.

So here we go.

To this point, I pulled up the Daily Caller site.

I don't see anything on the North Carolina shooting.

On the Michigan shooting, the headline is about how this guy hated people of the Mormon faith, which is maybe true, I guess, but doesn't.

And then it includes how it's a target attack on Christians.

We'll see how all the readers of the Daily Caller translate that.

Nothing about any of the other stuff, though, that we had mentioned.

And then at the bottom of the story, apropos of nothing, a separate shooting in Annunciation Catholic Church in Minnesota was by a male who identified as a woman.

Wow.

So, like, just like randomly, like totally unrelated to this, they bring up that one other trans shooting.

I don't know how we unravel that if we just have bad actors out there all over the place trying to make every tragedy the responsibility of people they hate.

So, anyway.

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The shutdown, we talked about this a bit last week.

Today we're taping this right now.

It's about 10.30 in the East.

So in about four hours, Trump is going to be meeting with Schumer, Thune, Jeffries, and Johnson.

What do you think?

I think it will not be a productive meeting.

I'm sort of annoyed that, I don't know, Schumer and Jeffries have put so much emphasis on trying to get this meeting.

I could have done without it.

You know what?

They can communicate without going to the White House.

I don't know.

I worry they're being set up for a pretty good, you know, Trump's not bad at this kind of stuff.

And it's also when you're in the White House, I could say this is someone who worked there, it is your home turf.

You have an entire apparatus to support you, to tell the press, you know, this very well, to tell the media press where to go,

to invite them in afterwards to the oval or before, you know what I mean?

It's like you're not an even playing field.

Now, I guess there, I was on some call this morning and someone said, well, no, it's a closed press meeting, trying to reassure my me.

I'm worrying.

Occasionally, I worry about the Democratic leaders in Congress.

I know that's a shock to you that you think

they are totally in command of everything and the messaging and the PR.

But anyway, I was expressing a little concern and, oh, no, it's a closed meeting.

It's what it says on the schedule.

It's like, really?

We trust that.

Ask Gretchen Whitmer about that.

I think she was going to have a closed press meeting.

And then all of a sudden, she happened to be in the Oval Office and the cameras came in when Trump decided he was going to target Chris Krebs by executive order.

Okay, well, we'll see.

We'll be covering this more this week.

I think that we've kind of said our piece on what we think is an appropriate strategy for the Democrats here.

I do think it's a pickle that they're in a little bit.

But this is why, and I I guess I talked about this with Ezra last week.

This is why kind of having lack of confidence in the Democratic leadership on the Hill to be able to message this correctly matters, because this is really a messaging fight, right?

It's not a substantive fight.

I mean, maybe, like, who knows, like maybe they'll get some substantive concessions out of Trump that will help people.

And if so, okay.

But like from the political standpoint,

This fight is all about raising the salience of things that Trump is doing that are unpopular and stiffening the Democratic Party's spine to fight him.

And it's about that more than the substance.

So that's why a lack of confidence in Schumer and Jeffrey's ability to speak about it

matters, because that is the stuff that really matters here, actually, not the negotiation specifics.

Yeah, I also think, and maybe I'm wrong about this.

I think there's a way, I think the Democrats will lose the shutdown in some technical sense, which that is to say the government will reopen at some point, more or less, along the lines of the Republicans' continuing resolution.

I don't think that means they lose politically necessarily if they succeed in highlighting these issues.

They have to arrange the end of it in a way, in my view, that maybe they let they force the Republicans to change the filibuster or they let them get cloture somehow by having some people just abstain on that vote.

But they need to vote, in my view, this is not where I think Jeffries and Schumer necessarily are, against funding Trump's government at this point.

On the final passage, whatever on cloture votes, on the final passage, Democratic Party has to say, we're not funding ICE, we're not funding this use of this troops, we're not funding what Trump is doing in all all these areas.

And, you know, we're against this budget.

Now, if quirk of the Senate rules means that

they can hold it up because they have more than 40 senators, and that's a slightly complicated thing to figure out how to, and maybe I'm overthinking it by distinguishing cloture and final passage, but I think they want to be on record as not funding what Trump is doing with the U.S.

government.

I agree.

Just while we're talking about Democratic leadership, really quick on Hakeem Jeffries, Eric Adams, the mayor of New York, who was indicted for taking favors from Turkey and then got favors from the current Trump administration in order to get him out of the indictment.

Somebody who has left the Democratic Party and who has aligned himself kind of close to the Trump administration.

I mean, not fully on board.

I don't think I've seen him in a red hat.

Some can correct me if I'm wrong about that, but pretty closely.

He dropped out of the race in order to help Andrew Cuomo.

And Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic majority leader, put out this statement.

Eric Adams has served courageously and authentically authentically for decades as a member of the NYPD, the New York State Senate, Brooklyn Borough Hall, and as our 110th mayor, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Was that necessary?

Yeah, I don't know.

It's like, you know, some, he's, I guess he's known him in Brooklyn a long time.

It's nice.

At the end of the statement, he says he'll be weighing in on the mayor's race again soon.

Who cares, right?

Does anyone ask him that question?

Why don't we just complicate the mamdani, not mamdani issue here in the middle of everything else, right?

I feel like they're so inept, both in terms of the politics of this, but also the substance of this one.

I mean, this was really a corrupt deal with the Trump administration.

Yeah.

People resigned over it from Southern District of New York Attorney's Office.

We all praised it.

Actual, courageous public servants, actually.

And

I believe at the time, probably Jeffries and Schumer praised.

They should have, if they didn't, certainly everyone else on sort of the, not just Never Trump world, but in just pro-like rule of law world, praised Danielle Sassoon and the others who resigned, very eloquent letters.

So this was a real outrage, this deal.

And now Jeffries is pretending it never happened and it's all fine, right?

So, how serious can one take them when they say we really stand against the Trump administration and the rule of law?

Well, not so much against them when it's held, you know, when they're okay with Eric Adams, sort of against them with Comey, because we sort of like Comey, maybe.

I don't know.

I mean, it's really, but again, what was the point?

What was the, as you sort of said, what's the need for it?

Did he have to put out any statement?

Did the world need to know Hakeem Jeffries' judgment on the Eric Adams dropping out of the race?

Certainly not.

And like, certainly, if you're going to, you need to land, like, even if you're going to say that, because you would go way back, you have to talk of lambast him for the corrupt dealings that he's had with this administration that, like you said, resulted in the resignation of actual courageous public servants.

This is what I said to him when I had him on.

So it's not, this is not.

me hiding the ball or whatever.

Like, I literally had Jeffrey's on the show.

I was like, are you going to endorse Zoron?

And he did it, the whole thing.

And I just said, I said to him,

putting aside actually even the principle of it, just get it over with.

Just rip the band-aid off.

Like, if you're ever going to do it, just get it over with.

And like, why he's allowed himself to just when he has all these other more important fights in front of him.

Like, even if you have real disagreements with Zoron, like, the right thing to do is just to rip the band-aid off to say, hey, he won the Democratic nomination.

I'm the leader of the Democratic Party in the House.

I support Zoron.

I have some issues.

You know, me and him have some disagreements on various things.

We're going to work that out.

Let's people within a party, but I'm focused on fighting Donald Trump.

Easy.

Done.

And yet this thing is drug out for like six weeks now.

And it's like,

anyway, I think it demonstrates why people have questionable confidence in what's happening.

Incidentally, I don't think you should endorse Cuomo, but if he were to endorse Cuomo, you know, it goes way back with Cuomo, I'm sure, maybe he thinks Cuomo would be a better mayor, then just endorse Cuomo.

Just say, you know what, this is a very exceptional situation.

Cuomo was governor of the Democratic governor of New York, and I think highly of him.

And honestly, I think he might be a better mayor than Zoran.

I mean, whatever he wants to say, but you're right.

Say

he's not going to learn new information about either of them in the next few weeks.

So he just looks like a coy politician.

I'll be holding back my endorsement here, but it'll certainly be before, what did he say, before early voting begins?

It's like, so

yeah, I mean, I think endorsing Cuomo would probably have caused him some problems on the hill.

It's just you're the leader of the party.

But yeah, your point, your point.

I take that point.

He should endorse Zoran, but I'm just saying that even if he didn't want to.

He's just the leader of the party.

It's like...

Right.

well, he could say, this is a difficult issue.

I've known them both forever.

I'm not endorsing anyone.

Period.

That's it.

I'm sitting it out.

Voters of New York.

Good luck.

Make your choice.

All I'm saying is he has managed, as you say, to get in the worst of all possible worlds, it seems like.

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I did a rant about this over the weekend for YouTube, but I need to even extend my remarks further.

We're going to bail out the farmers.

John Thune was on Meet the Press over the weekend talking about it, and I want to just play for you the clip, though.

At At the end of the day, our farmers are probably going to need some financial assistance this year.

And a lot of the revenue coming in off the tariffs is what they would use to provide that.

So

Trump puts in the tariff regime, predictably creates a trade war.

The result of the trade war is China doesn't buy our soybeans anymore.

So

the farmers don't have the customers to sell their soybeans to.

So because of the tariff regime, we got to bail out the farmers.

We got to to give them a handout.

We're going to pay for that bailout with the revenue that we've taken from people who are going to Walmart and Home Depot and had their bills increased.

So, we're going to take this, you know, we put a sales tax on the American people.

We're going to take the revenue from that, not put it into anything that helps the American people.

We're going to, the people that pay into that tariff, we're going to take that money and give it to bail out the farmers.

And on top of that, why I wanted to extend my remarks on this was in addition to that, we're also going to bail out Argentina because Trump is friends with Malay.

And guess where China is getting their soybeans from now because of the trade war?

Argentina in Brazil.

And so, like,

I mean, it goes against, it is, it is really, there's a phrase going around about mega communism.

It's mega communism, is what we're doing.

It's like a totally state-run, it's a failed state-run economic platform where you kind of give handouts to friends, the farmers and the Argentines, and those handouts are going to come at the expense of people that bills are increased.

It is just an absolutely insane and maddening policy, and people should be pissed about it.

Like, I want to keep bringing it up because people should be pissed about it.

And I do hope that maybe that is something that will resonate with people.

They're like, why are you, why is my money going to the farmers and to Argentina?

It does, it is, in addition to stupid policy, it is a direct affront to the

America First ethos.

And it shows that Xi is taking Trump to the cleaners.

I mean, all this tough talk about China, Republicans, oh man, they're really going to go after China.

Xi basically said to Trump, forget it.

I'm cutting off all purchases of soybeans.

He knows what that does to American soybean growers, which is a big part of the American egg world, I gather.

And

what are we doing about that?

Do we have some tough policy against China that's going to cause Xi to rethink?

Maybe I missed that.

It sounds to me like Trump actually has been talking a lot recently about how he really wants to have a meeting with him.

He didn't even say he was going to have a meeting with him, I think, later this year or next year and work on all this stuff.

And he won't let the time when he's president come to the U.S.

So the Democrats, this, again, is a case where they go to the best of all worlds.

They can be helping farmers.

They could be objecting to tariffs, which is a sales tax, as you say, on consumers here in the U.S.

And they could be tougher on China than Trump.

You're exactly right.

And they shouldn't let Thune get away with this.

I mean, you know, no, we don't want a bailout.

Thun's pretending it's like a natural, it's like a force of nature somehow stopping these soybeans from being shipped to China.

I don't want the sales tax I pay at Home Depot to go to Jon Thune's favorite soybean farmers.

I don't want that.

Like, that's not what that's not what I'm interested in.

And frankly, I would have liked the cost at the Home Depot to be cheaper and not to be more expensive because Trump is in some sort of stupid trade war.

Now, the whole thing is outrageous.

Just one more thing on the China.

This TikTok deal fucking stinks to high heaven.

And I'm trying to get somebody on that's like much deeper into this.

But just on the surface, in addition to the people being in on this being MAGA, and so there's some, I think, legitimate concerns about what that means for the algorithm and what kind of material, particularly young Americans, are being fed by the TikTok algorithm.

There's also, like everything else with this administration, an obvious corruption happening.

The valuation of TikTok was $14 billion, which makes it equal to Snapchat.

And I love and honor Snapchat here.

I had a show on Snapchat for a while.

And somebody's worked there.

It's good.

I use it.

I to message with friends from time to time.

That said,

obviously, TikTok is worth a lot more than Snapchat.

TikTok is worth, some people say, $100 billion.

And they valued it at $14 billion.

And so you do wonder what that deal is happening behind the scenes with China.

Why were the Chinese on board with that, like that low valuation?

And

what's happening behind the scenes to make that happen?

These MAGA billionaires, Ellison and Andreessen and all of them, in addition to potentially, who knows, having control and being able to monkey with the algorithm in some ways, also are going to get a huge payday out of this, you would assume.

The valuation will go up.

They'll be able to sell some of their stock.

And it is a swampy,

weak, not America first handout to his friends.

Totally.

No, I totally agree.

You should also, and it probably is tied in with the corrupt deal with the UAE, which allows China to get all these chips that they're not supposed to get, incidentally, from a few months ago.

So you should get someone who I don't know that much about it, someone who knows the Tic Tac stuff well, though, because it really is.

Trump sells it just in such a blatantly political way.

Well, this will make the young people happy.

You're in Virginia.

I feel remiss that I've not mentioned the Virginia governor's race at all much lately.

There's also the New Jersey governor's race happening.

Right now, Mikey Sherrill is running against in New Jersey.

We talked about a little bit with Kensinger on Friday.

In Virginia, Abigail Spanberger, friend of the show, is running for governor against the sitting Lieutenant Governor Winsom Sears.

You know, we're, what, six weeks out from the election there?

I think folks have felt pretty good about Virginia in and off year, but it will be an early signal.

You know, the scale of the victory, I think, will matter.

I mean, I guess you don't want to count your chickens, but

how do you assess what's happening in your home state?

The polling looks like she has a comfortable lead.

Indeed, the whole Democratic ticket seems to be ahead, even though she's clearly, I think, the strongest, the gubernatorial is the strongest matchup.

So I think it'll be fine for Spanberger.

And I think Democrats will win at the state legislative level, too.

But I don't know, these elections can be a little surprising and tricky, but this one doesn't feel that way.

I like her very much.

I co-hosted some event for her, so I'm biased.

But I mean, I think she'll be a very good governor.

She's a very serious and sober person.

I wouldn't say she's not the most dynamic candidate, honestly.

And she's more of a serious person, as you'd expect a CIA analyst to do.

But she would like for a while.

It'd be nice to have seriously.

Yeah, no, I think, and the state, I mean, Yunkin hasn't been able to do too much damage to the state because the Democrats control the state legislature, but it'd be good to have Spanberger in there.

People I know who follow New Jersey more than I do are worried about the Sheryl race in New Jersey.

Or, I mean, she's running against a better candidate who ran a good race in 2021 and lost to the incumbent, Phil Murphy, by what, four or five points, as I recall.

Now, that was a bad year, presumably for Democrats because it was Biden, inflation in Afghanistan, and so forth.

But he's already had a lot of people vote for him.

I guess the easiest way to look at it in New Jersey.

And I don't quite know why.

I like Mikey Sherlin.

I think she's kind of an exciting and good candidate, but some people think it hasn't been that great a campaign.

So that one seems closer.

New Jersey, and I asked her about this.

I asked Corey Booker about this when he was on.

Neither gave particularly satisfying answers.

New Jersey moved a lot towards the Republicans this last time.

You know, it didn't end up being close, but if you look, I don't have, I had it for them, and so I'm trying to go from memory, but like New Jersey was like closer than Iowa or Ohio or some, you know, states that like used to be swing states.

Yeah, I think that's right.

States of Democrats won recently, like Trump got closer in New Jersey than they, than Kamala did and some of those, you know, former swing states that have gone red.

And so, I mean, that's worrying.

And I do think that it's going to be, it's important just to be clear-eyed about where we're at.

And sometimes people are like,

Trump's numbers are down, but man, and if that New Jersey race even ends up being close, I think that should be a little bit of a wake-up call for where the party is at, Which leads me to my final political topic I wanted to just get to with you.

Ezra, when he was on last week, made what I thought was a pretty anodyne, innocuous point about how

that essentially people have accepted as fait accompli that Democrats can never win in these red states like Arkansas anymore.

And I think his line was that, you know,

for a lot of people on the left, you know, they can imagine the end of America easier than they can imagine the Democrats winning a seat in Arkansas.

And he thinks that's stupid and they should fight for it.

And if that means having a pro-life candidate in Arkansas, they should have a pro-life candidate.

This caused a lot of angst and anger online at Ezra,

this little exchange we had.

I have some thoughts on it, but I'm just wondering what you think about the Democrats' conundrum.

And he was putting this in the context of the Senate, particularly when it comes to being competitive in additional states beyond the current map.

I mean, I'm old enough to remember Democrats relishing Rahm Emanuel when he was number three, I think, in the House in 2006 and was charge of the Democratic Congressional Committee, I think,

recruiting candidates who were appropriate for different parts of the country and different districts to try to convey the message that they weren't going to change the position of the Democratic Party nationally on major issues, but that they were, you know, in touch with their districts and that they would have a certain amount of freedom to cast votes according to their conscience on some of these issues.

And the Democrats won a big victory in 2006, and maybe that wasn't a crazy strategy, you know.

Yeah, I think so.

My point on it is:

Donald Trump, and this relates to what we were just saying about New Jersey.

Donald Trump won

24 states by more than 10 points, by 10 or more points.

Okay.

So for the Democrats to,

you know, get to 52 seats, they need to win a state that Trump won by 10 points.

The Democrats really have an inside straight they have to run in the Senate.

And that is assuming that you win the Senate seats in all the Democratic states and in all the swing states, right?

Or you could have a Sveterman who could be a Democrat that won't vote with you on stuff.

Or you could have a Dave McCormick in Pennsylvania who's going to be a Republican.

You have a Ron Johnson.

You have Susan Collins.

So for the Democrats to be able to govern and get anything done, they need to expand their map to these states.

And that means coming up with creative solutions for how to win and actually trying to win and not just running generic Democrats in these states.

And a lot of people that got mad at Ezra are folks who are more from the populist left side of the party.

They're like, well, don't listen to this shill, this moderate shill.

Like, what we need to do when in those states is nominate lefty populist types like Bernie or Dan Osborne or Zoron or whatever.

And my message to them was, okay, sure, try it.

Okay, try that.

And there are a lot of states out there.

I think that if the left thinks that that is the best path, they should go and recruit.

They've recruited this guy in Maine that everybody loves Graham Plattner.

I hope I get a chance to talk to him at some point.

Find the Graham Plattner of Mississippi or South Carolina or Iowa or whatever and run it.

run that play out, and let's see if it works.

Ezro is, I think, offering a different option, which was find people who are more socially conservative and try to run them and see if that play works.

The point is that the Democrats have to try to do things differently, or else they're never going to have more than 50 seats in the Senate and they'll never be able to do anything.

And so, if your main thing is that you care about people's basic rights and protecting them, and you care about economic inequality and fixing that, well, you got to win Senate seats to do that.

So, let's try some different methods for for doing that besides the current plan, which is just a bitch about everybody and how mean the MAGA is and how bad people are, because that's not doing it.

Shitposting Ezra Klein on Twitter is not the answer.

Trying to find a model that works is the answer.

The only German truth I would say in this criticism of Ezra Klein, I think, was that he picked the pro-the life issue, the pro-choice issue, as the kind of example.

I think in two or three of these red states, the actually the pro-abortion rights position is one referenda in the last few few years so i think maybe it's not it's a little bit of like of a issue from 10 years ago maybe in in that sense but i very much agree in principle with what he's saying and it's ridiculous it's a huge country you know what i the centers should chill out about mamdani and the left should chill out about ezra that's my that's my record could everyone just fight trump you know they're not going to do it they're not going to pass any legislation in 2027 2028 and if they and if it's important trump's going to veto it but they can't get over obviously the only thing that's important to do is to get people that are democrats in there so you can investigate the trump administration right?

And so you can check him and challenge him and his authoritarian projects.

So if that means having a Joe Manchin or a Zoron in the Senate, that's fine with me.

That's great.

And either way, it would be much better than fucking Davos Dave McCormick or whoever is Jon Thun, whoever presents as a normal person, but is going to rubber stamp everything that Donald Trump wants to do.

Okay.

End of rant.

We're going to end with a laugh.

Can we end with a laugh?

That was a good rant.

You could end with a good rant, but we just want to end with a good rant.

We need to cheer ourselves up here.

There's a big investigation happening right now at the United Nations, and it's a serious matter, and we should take it seriously.

And I want to play Maria Bartroma covering it this morning on her Fox News show.

Meanwhile, the United Nations is promising a thorough investigation.

After President Trump said that there was triple sabotage at last week's General Assembly, of course, he's referring to the escalator, which stopped as soon as he and the First Lady stepped on.

Escalator sabotage, Bill Cristo.

One of our great friends in Canada brought me a crocheted subway sandwich with a sub resistance, which I appreciated, which I gave to my daughter.

Thank you, Canadian fan.

And now we need a crocheted escalator.

Escalator resistance, triple sabotage.

Well, triple sabotage is a great, that's a great term.

Isn't it?

It reminds me, what's that term from the

John Belusha movie?

Now my mind's going, you know, it's like double secret.

Double secret probation.

Yeah, double secret probation.

It's like triple sabotage.

You know,

what is the triple?

The escalator and the, I think, the teleprompter, right?

Didn't work.

Yeah, the teleprompter.

I don't know what the third is.

Maybe the air conditioning was a little low.

Yeah, maybe it wasn't suitable for President Trump.

Do you think we ever get to the bottom of who did it?

You know, I think with Cash Patel working out and Telsey Gabbard combining their forces, maybe there needs to be a national security memorandum on getting to the bottom of this terrible assault on President Trump.

Poor Melania, the real victim of our society.

It is.

She had to walk up the escalator stairs.

What a burden.

Bill Crystal.

Thank you so much.

We'll be doing it again next Monday.

Everybody else,

see you back here tomorrow for another edition of the Bulwark Podcast.

Peace.

The names have been changed to protect the innocent.

Each step is intricate.

I rap magnificent.

Knew this kid named Ronnie.

Used to make cash with Caesar.

They made a lot of money back in the 80s.

Crack fever.

Caesar was an overachiever.

I came thin at 18 and a half.

He got knocked and left Ronnie to watch the team and his staff.

Plus his crib, his jewels, his whip, and his girl.

And Ronnie's self-interest had him living in a different world.

He rocked Caesar's change, he pushed Caesar's range.

Smoking mad rules all day with Caesar's change.

Not to mention, he pushed up by Caesar's wifey.

A move like that, my man, extremely seisty.

It all run back to Caesar in the bed.

They found Ronnie's body in the playground by the swings.

Anyone can get it, for sure.

It don't matter, dog, especially when a nigga tries committing sabotage.

There ain't nobody to trust.

It's when it's gotta be ready.

It's like

Treachery, deception, it's best to keep a weapon.

When you think that they be brethren, they underhand your plan.

It's over for the cowardly, we want my phone hollowing.

I'm going with the power be, I'm scheming to get even.

Dissension can occur from within one's ranks.

The chain can be weakened by just one length.

Pricks be gallivating from one crew to the next.

Musical click-ass niggas catch two to the chest.

My usual guess is that they choose to digress.

Disillusioned by greed, causing you to distress.

Just do what's best, clean house, leave out.

Them punks can't touch what they can't beep out.

See, I'm a raw nigga, and like my pops, I'm a law giver.

Can't throw a wrench in my game, I'm a boss figure.

Take you under my wing, it don't matter.

God dead you if you try to commit.

Sabotage, rise for me now, nail from the down.

Time to pass judgment, can't feel for you now.

Lay in your bed, accept your fate.

Try to clean it up, accept your late.

From the streets to the industry, Read the chemistry.

This gangstar shit.

Making a living, see.

We put it on them when it's war.

It's war.

Sabotage a happy jump in the fall.

There ain't nobody to trust.

It's like sabotage.

The Board Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

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