Bulwark Takes - The Center Left Needs Someone With Balls (w/ Tim Miller) | Bulwark On Sunday

Episode Date: March 9, 2025

Tim Miller joined Bill Kristol to chat what happened at Trump’s address to Congress, how the Dems should really respond to the insanity and more. Join us next Sunday for another edition of Bulwark on Sunday.

Hi, welcome to Bill Work on Sunday Live. I'm Bill Kristol. I'm joined by a colleague, Tim Miller. Special treat today. I'm going to miss Tim's podcast. Tomorrow morning, he's on a plane somewhere, so he'll have an upgrade from me. But I'm upgrading to Tim, so it's working out fine.

Bill Work on Sunday. That was an appropriate slip there. I'm excited for that. Yeah, Bill Work on Sunday. Yeah, why not? Don't Work on Sunday? You think that's what I said? Yeah. No, bill work. Bill work. Don't work.

I don't know. It's hard to keep track. Who's your guest tomorrow? Essie Kupp will be on tomorrow and she is as filled with righteous rage about J.D. Vance and Donald Trump and Elon Musk abandoning our allies in Ukraine as I am and so I'm excited

to hash it out with her. I look forward to watching that. Let's begin with Ukraine. You did a wonderful podcast, very interesting podcast with a young man I hadn't heard of that you knew or knew of anyway. We never met, but I've been following him on social media for a while. I just nerd out on the Twitter, Ukraine stuff, and some lists. And he had a documentary that I'd watched a couple years ago. And, you know, I mean, when I woke up on, I guess, what was it, Friday morning, and there had been a lot of reports from Zelensky himself, et cetera, about the bombings, I just thought it would be valuable for people to hear from somebody that's actually there.

And, I mean, the points that he was making was pretty alarming. You know, he said that in Kiev, you know, there'd been airway silence from time to time still over the past few months, but like not that often. He said they're going off all night. I'm getting my times in, so I forget if that was Thursday into Friday or Friday into Saturday. And then again, the next night, he did say, we've been texting, he did say it was a little quieter last night. The other thing that was, I think, most noteworthy of the conversation is just the amount of material that was getting through. I think that this just ties directly to the most important and most shameful action so

far of this administration, which is the ending the intelligence sharing. Because, you know, with U.S. intelligence, the Ukrainians had done a very good job of blocking a lot of, you know, the bombs and drones, et cetera, particularly the older bombs that were breaking through. They also kind of had a good awareness on where, you know, the Russian lines were. And he was pointing out that some, you know, some of their units were coming up hiding, essentially, right? Because they'd been essentially pinned down because we knew where they were.

And so the ramifications of it are massive. And I think it's, I guess it hasn't gotten worse in the sense that that was the most acute night of bombing. But just as far as our posture towards them has gotten worse, you know, I've been reading the, you know, things are serious, and you're back to reading the Institute for the Study of War briefings, right? And, you know, they're pointing out that outside of Kiev in the east, you know, the bombardments have really increased. And, you know, you got the Polish,, oh, I forget, what was the prime minister?

The Polish defense minister, one of the Polish ministers, like getting into a fight with Elon and Marco on social media, I mean, over Starlink. And it's ugly right now. Yeah, the intelligence cutoff just for me, first of all, people should watch that, listen to that podcast,

or at least read the transcript. It's really interesting and moving. And this young man is over there. And where's he from originally? Ireland. Ireland, yeah. And reminds one of the kind of human, what's at stake. Anyway, it's depressing.

The intelligence cutoff, I do think, is another level of pro-Putinism. You know, not committing to further aid, not committing to NATO membership, some of that Biden had been ambivalent on the NATO side, the further aid, they maybe don't need it right now. So you could resolve that in a month or two. The intelligence in real time, cutting off the intelligence, that's just pro-Putin. I mean, I mean, I don't even see how you can say it's anything else, right? It just helps him fight the war again, kill more Ukrainians. No, it's what everybody says. I mean, look, if you're on these kind of Ukrainian military feeds, like it's just, like that has been the most dramatic, like real result. And I mean,

Zelensky's tweeted a couple of these examples, but they're more of, you know, I mean, just mass bombing, they're going after infrastructure, but like people getting injured. There was one case, one instance in particular, where the Russians bombed a factory. The, you know, the first aid team, first responders came in to kind of help deal with it. Then they bombed the same spot again. You know, I'm just horrific stuff. The kind of stuff that was happening at the beginning of the war that was still happening, but that, you know, had been, had been tapered by the, the Ukrainian defense. So, you know, this is the whole thing. It's just like, we're doing it for not like what I guess, um, I forget who I was talking to this about on Friday, but I, you know, and the only argument that you have is, is, is just to say that like, they are trying to pressure Zelensky to the negotiating table

so that he can surrender. Right. Like, like what is the other rationale for this right like besides they want it to get worse worse so he feels pressured to you know negotiate on their terms and so I mean that again like just puts you squarely on the side of Russia yeah or, or they just want to destroy Ukrainian morale. I mean, that double tap that they've used in Syria and elsewhere. You attack a civilian target, then you attack the people who were in the emergency teams coming to help the wounded. And it's a horrible thing, obviously. Maybe it breaks morale, maybe it doesn't.

But they also kill people, which they seem to want to do i mean it is just brutal and um yeah and then you have jd vance complaining that ukraine protesters were shouting at his daughter yeah if you saw this he's like tweeting complaining that and if you look to the video they were totally appropriate and what they were doing the protests but you know i somebody had sent this video of a three-year-old girl in ukraine that had like lost a leg that's walking and it's like i'm sorry okay like if you want to abandon a free people that are being attacked uh then like you're gonna get criticized for it and i'm sorry that you're on a walk with your child but like they're they're actually people dying and being and being injured because of it and in that exchange i watched the full video on the cincinnati tv stations put it up like the most interesting part of just like listening to him off the cuff is one of the women who was protesting was like

like the russia has a history of this it was crimea it was and it's kind of muffled what else she mentions but then and then you know she's like then ukraine they're always the aggressor like they're always the one that's responsible and JD says basically like well that's your opinion you know like you can't even acknowledge even in like these private exchanges like Russia does anything wrong and like meanwhile Marco Rubio shitposting the Polish like it's a very dark situation it's horrible and I mean I don't care about the JD man I mean it's not worth getting into a great length but yeah it looks like the Secret Service. I work for a vice president.

I have some familiarity with how this might work. So he wants to go to his home as opposed to the vice president's residence here, which he lives at, the Naval Observatory, for the weekend with his family. I suppose that's fine in Cincinnati. And they've got the street pretty well blocked off, though. The protesters are not outside his door, right? They't know what the block away i'd say it looks like on the video i mean and he wants to walk with his walk his three-year-old which is fine obviously yeah and he could walk around in many ways without approaching the protesters he wants to kind of have a bit of a confrontation with them or maybe let's be nice and say he wants to

talk to the public then he gets all offended because these people are not willing to what please tell him that it's not a terrible thing they're doing to cut off the aid to Ukraine? Right. I mean, there is no, I mean, it's Calvin Ball. There's nothing that they could have done. You know, I mean, the whole thing was just him wanting to be, to play the victim. You know, meanwhile, he's responsible for just this horrific turn on, you know, on the ground in Ukraine. Anything to be done about it? I mean, do you find that Democrats who you talk to think it's conceivable that, I mean, this is an issue which half Republicans voted to aid Ukraine less than a year ago, including the Speaker of the House,

in a rather eloquent speech, actually. I went back and looked at it for a minute about how important this was, and it was a morally right and just cause and so forth. I don't know. Is anyone going to do anything about this or i mean i don't yeah i don't think anyone's gonna do anything but i do think this is an issue that is worth you know everybody's kind of tired of like shame republicans like do the right thing because we all know they're never going to do the right thing but i i do think this is an issue where they so many of them have public statements like that as you mentioned in Mike Johnson's that are eloquent that are passionate that are committed to

like the Ukrainian cause you know I mean that Brian Fitzpatrick from Pennsylvania you know is saying that he would do everything that he could to defend and defend Ukraine you know Don Bacon's on six minutes like you've seen this even Thune back in the day like Thune and johnson both have said that so i do think shaming them and just at least on the intelligence thing being like they're like you have power like these republicans have power now if they want to they have a big budget vote that's coming up this week right and and if you want to protect the ukrainians you could just say to the white house like i'm not going to vote for your budget unless you turn the intel back on and we start working with ukraine

like they could say that's not a crazy ask um given the severity of the situation i don't have any expectation any of them will do it but i think it's a pretty simple message and it's worth you know at least humiliating them on it is and i i get it just i feel like it's a pretty simple message, and it's worth at least humiliating them on. It is, and I get it. I feel like you're just shouting into the wind at this point, obviously, on the Republicans on the Hill. But I feel like it's a little different. They are way – other issues they haven't opined on one way or the other, or they're vaguely in favor of cutting government. So they're not going to take on Doge, even when it's terrible.

Or they'll take it on in the way some of them are, which is they'll protect their own little districts. Tom Cole is very proud that in Oklahoma, three things have been reopened. You know, I mean, it's fine. He represents Oklahoma. He is also in the leadership of the House Republicans. Maybe he could represent the country a little bit, you know. But on Ukraine, I think it's foreign policy. People don't care. But it's sort of the opposite. I think of all the issues, it's many republicans have been to keeve they've spent a fair amount of time to be fair to them learning about it thinking about how to help them best criticizing the by demonstration for not doing enough the mike mccall's of the world former uh with the republican former chairman i guess of house foreign affairs uh people like that and um yeah just the idea that they can't.

And what would it take? Three of them. Three of them. Three of them. I have to say what you said. You know what? We can't. Maybe it takes a few more of some Democrats,

in fact, but not really. Right? We can't support the Republican budget unless. We're not even asking you to change the overall orientation. We're not asking you to change on NATO involvement. We're not asking for everything here. We're not asking for more funds. We're not even asking for more military material. It's like

we're just asking that we continue our alliance with the Ukrainian victim. Provide them intelligence that saves lives. And it does save lives. That's what it does. It doesn't necessarily even change the course of the war, honestly. If we're going to cut off the aid, they're going to have trouble. Anyway, Europeans will or won't step up, honestly. If we're going to cut off the aid, they're going to have trouble. Anyway, Europeans will or won't step up, etc. This is, yeah. Okay, I'm going to, maybe I'll write about that tomorrow morning. I was thinking about Ukraine anyway,

but it's so simple. And it sounds so simple-minded to say, you know, three of them or six of them or something could just say that. It's not that hard, right? And there's more than, maybe more than six of them that privately hold that view, I guess is the other point. Totally.

Right? And so, you know, it's not like it's a request that is outside of what they would prefer. Right. It's like, give up a huge part of your agenda. Yeah, right. He didn't want to cut off intelligence in real time to Ukraine in the first or second week of March, right? That was not, I mean, he was never going to be pro-Ukraine the way others might have been, but, ugh, depressing.

Meanwhile, on the domestic front, what strikes you about what's going on with the Justice Department and everything else, the Doge-Musk-Rubio fight? That I've ignored. I think you may have paid more attention to that. Yeah, just because that's funny because we went to such a dark place i think it's worth uh um enjoying it if you haven't read the times piece i think it was swan and haberman on on this white oval office meeting between trump and musk and rubio and duffy and i i said online i was like i think this is like

a reverse portlandia there's a show portia, that like spoof solved like the progressive, you know, verbiage and stilliness of progressive meetings. This was like a reverse of that. Like you have a reality TV show star and a like a rich billionaire and a guy who used to be a normal Republican. And they're all arguing. And like their arguments are not, are just not even sensible. Like Duffy, actually the reality show stars, the one making those sensible argument, which is like, I need more FAA officials. Like try, Elon can't fire them. Can't like just fire them randomly. Then Elon's like, Oh no, we were just filing the DEI FAA people. You know, it's like, it must've been DEI that was the problem. It's like, what are you even talking about? And then, and then Trump

like chimes in and he's like, you know he's saying well what you should really do is replace the dei people with some mit grads you know and put them in the faa it's just like i mean how much is an faa person making 160 grand like you think that mit people are going like it's just the whole thing just shows a total disconnect with the reality of how the government works. And it's really alarming. And that's the funny part. But at the Atlantic, Isaac Stanley Becker has a piece today about just how the FAA's staffing situation is worse than we realize. And here we have just the Keystone Cops shouting about DEI in the Oval Office.

It's telling. The other thing about the exchange that was interesting is Trump did have to bleat. Everything is good with Musk and Markel. Like they are not in a fight. That is fake news. So it's always a sign of real news when Trump has to tweet that something is fake news. I thought that was actually like a fake tweet. I thought that was like a joke, you know, like a parody tweet.

All right. So comical that Trump in caps is saying there's not after everyone after this fight is reported on quite reliably. The principles don't really deny it. Right. I don't think Trump has to say, oh, they're getting along great. You see, that's an easy guy to get along with. You know, it's amazing. We'll be able to have some spirit there. They're getting along great. You see a lot of cities you've got to get along with. It's amazing.

We'll be able to find some spirit there. But anyway, it's a disconnect with reality, but also just a disdain and contempt for reality. Like actually, FAA people are helping planes fly safely. It's kind of important. And if it takes X number of people, it takes X number of people. It's a tiny, trivially small investment in a country that's flying billions of passengers. I don't even know how many, right? Millions of flights and, you know, making that system as safe as possible.

And the idea that, you know, you're going to fire, we're getting tough, we're cutting that bloated FAA. I mean, it's so farcical. Maybe there are particular people who could be moved and stuff, but that's not what they're doing. That's not what they're doing. Someone in government pointed, if I could take a second on the DEI thing, someone in government made a point to me, someone who's in an agency and is in DEI world and is not sympathetic to it particularly. But a lot of the people who are working in DEI, they were just assigned there. I mean, it's not like if you're in government, like in any corporation, right?

It's like you don't get to choose exactly what you work on. And someone would say, we need some people to do this. Go do this for a year. Then we'll bring you back to or move you to a next job, which is the one you've wanted in, you know, something else. I'm making this up, obviously, enforcement. And I'm making it up, but I'm not making it up in the sense that this really happens.

And the person went there for a year because his or her boss told him to. And then suddenly they're like DEI agents hostile to American principles and they're fired. It's really insane. It's really insane. And you kind of went over the Tom Cole thing, but I haven't had a chance to talk about that. Well, go ahead and talk about it. Yeah, I know. And it's just crazy, right? Like you have this Oklahoma congressman, this old line Republican, like tweeting about how he saved these three things in Oklahoma from Doge. And like the whole thing just betrays how ridiculous it all is and how capricious it is. And, you know, it's like, OK, well, if you don't have somebody like Tom Cole, if you have a MAGA member who doesn't actually care about his district, then you're boned.

If you have one of those veterans hospitals, you have a Democrat, you're boned. If you have one of these Social Security offices like it's just an insane way to run the business and i don't know i was um i don't know if you saw it stacy abrams was on chris hayes trying to defend her program and i don't actually think about it yeah yeah i don't know anything about the program all i know is i watched her explanation and it made it worse rather than better and so i just pointed that out. I was like, Democrats, you know, people just genuinely, including Democrats, by the way, including this was a big initiative of Clinton Gore, like people genuinely don't like when

there's just obviously waste and corruption. I don't know if it was either of those things for Stacey, but it surely didn't seem like it was useful. And, you know, I had these guys like, oh, now you get it. Now you're pro-Doge, like replying to me. And I'm like, no, like you guys, like this is not complicated, right? Like we can review programs. We can streamline things. God knows every organization could use that. But like what is happening here is inhumane. I liked your boy Al Green's comment on this. Maybe that can get us into Al Green. Al Green was talking about how it was just inhumane. Like you're not treating people with dignity

and you're not being serious about it. Like it is just, and like that's the part that is awful. Yeah. And Tom Cole, I think is chairman of House Appropriations. He had been chairman of House Rules. He's a very senior member and has has been sort of the establishment wing you might say of of the speaker johnson uh you know uh group and uh if he thinks it's wrong to close va hospitals he should stop them from closing everywhere at least until there's a thorough review and so forth and the same with social security officers or whatever else he saved in oklahoma it's really irresponsible actually he literally is going to sign off on a budget that's going to allow these things to continue to be closed, right? Yes. That's what they're working on this week. Crazy.

What do you think of the budget stuff? I haven't followed it as closely as I should have. I don't know. I'm interested. I do wonder if the fact that things are going bad for them, just objectively, might make the House Republicans more likely to just be like, okay, we'll just do a clean budget here. I'm not going to stir up trouble right now because we already have enough trouble out there. But who knows, right? I mean, it's a ridiculous budget if you are talking about cutting the deficit and debt, right? I mean, even the most friendly assessment of it, I think, by one of the MAGA economists, had like $890 million increase. And it's going to be much more than that. It does have the Medicaid and Medicare cuts.

And they haven't specifically said what they are. But it's from this bucket that there's no other, you know, there's no other program that has that level of funding. And so it's just like, it's going to have to come from Medicare and Medicaid. And so I don't know. I mean, at the beginning of the year, I would have said, I think that they shut this thing down. But now like elon's kind of shutting the government down ad hoc and maybe they don't feel like they need to fight it right now um but i will just kind of depend on you know you're asking me to get inside the brain of chip roy you know like it's going to depend on like the brain of like these couple random people are

they going to want to stand by their you know cuts or are a handful of people in the center, which I have no hope for, going to stand by their opposition to Medicaid cuts? I feel like it sounds like there's some momentum behind this quote clean CR, continued resolution for the rest of the year. It's not really clean. That's another question. Maybe the Democrats can expose some of the actual kind of hidden cuts there. But that's different, of course, from the actual reconciliation bill that has, I think, $380 billion and all this, which has to, which coming up soon, I mean, they do have a pretty heavy lift just as a kind of even a normal circumstances. They do.

The reconciliation bill will be, so it's worth mentioning both these things. The reconciliation bill on some levels will be easier because you only need 50 in the Senate. But on another way, it's going to be much harder. It's what builds in the Medicaid votes. I mean, the CR is just the CR. Exactly. So we'll have the details and the devil's going to be in the details on this stuff. The other thing I should have mentioned about this continuing resolution, though, is you do need Democrats on this one in the senate right so this is a little bit of a different calculation we've i've had gone around around many times about how democrats should not be supporting a clean cr uh in the house uh because like make mike johnson govern in the

senate because of the filibuster they do actually need 60. um my interview with Fetterman, which was not exactly encouraging, to me it seemed like he would be for keeping the government open. But you're going to need six other Democrats. So that part of this might get a little hinky. That could be pretty interesting. Well, since we're transitioning down to the Democrats, so to speak, you mentioned quote my man al green i don't know i i just woke up friday morning and i was so annoyed by all that when i first got censured and i was actually kind of moved to see them singing we shall overcome there in the well of the house and mike johnson

ineffectually trying to gavel them and after then it's quiet and then shutting the house and then i went back and looked at the little video. I didn't watch the state of the internet, but of Greene interrupting. And everyone's being so high and mighty, oh, my God, to quorum and respect for the presidency. And some Democrat even said, I have a deep reverence for the presidency. You know, you're not supposed to have reverence for the office of the president. He's the president. He's elected. You should respect him. You probably shouldn't routinely do what Al Greene green did but it was kind of an extraordinary moment anyway so i went by

slightly over the top morning shots friday morning defending al green and then there was various huffing and puffing but um but then then reading this weekend there's no one to ask you about you know the various democrats hand-wringing and worrying oh we can't look this we can't seem at all angry because that would be terrible you know and we have to look very calm and cool and collected i thought oh what do they do you know i'm still i'm in the pro-algreen mode but no it's funny though is i forget who wrote it so i'm sorry for not shouting you out but there's like another sub stack post or somebody's like the the the dividing lines on the left right now in the pro-democracy movement are not really ideological and they're more about like tactical and what posture to take and you know they're like you got al green and aoc

and bill crystal that are like we should be more aggressive uh so those are your new uh new partners in crime there but i count me in that bunch i just i don't i don't i think things are very bad i think that there are a hundred different things that you could rant and rave about right now. I do not think that these people should be given any quarter. I don't think that they should be treated in the way that they would never treat Democrats. And, you know, I mean, I think that there's risk associated with that. You know, I've been joking on the pod. I'm like, every time I'm like, the Dems should do more, Dems go do something. And I'm like, ooh, I don't know about that. So, you know, so there's risk associated with all that.

But I don't think that much. I think a lot of this stuff is a conversation. I guess my main point is this. A lot of these tactical conversations are a little bit of fart sniffing among a bunch of people who are hyper engaged in politics. Totally. And they have different views. And some views are better than others. But like the only people that are even aware of their views or their tactics are people that read the morning shots or political playbook or the punch ball newsletter.

Right. Like, and in order to reach other people that are not political junkies in order to like break through and the fucking algorithms that they are consuming like the only way to do that is to try to play on trump and elon's turf and to use like really highly emotional and passionate appeals and talk about things that regular people are interested in and you know maybe there's a trickle down i also don't know that who care. We're also very far away from the election. But that's my basic view. It's a lot of conversation around what we should do that is focused on what a bunch of people who are already in the tent think.

And a bunch of people who are already in the tent read. And we appreciate all the people that are already in the tent read and we appreciate all the people that are in the tent reading us but like uh from a strategic standpoint it is not incumbent on me to not to talk not talk about something on the podcast because it's not politically salient for the democrats whatever it's like the people listening to my podcast have pretty have a pretty developed view right and i think that like the democrats should just think about how to how to come how to come and use the people that listen to our podcast as like an army of their own to kind of go post their own things and get out into their communities. I think that's useful. And I think they should think about how to get outside of the bubble.

So to me, the Al Green thing was fine. It was a net plus. I don't think it's whatever. Can it be the memorable moment of Iwo Jima? There won't be a statue of him or anything but i think more like that less timidity yeah anyway they also have alissa slotkin giving a good response afterwards which i like i like alissa and i um so that's fine you can do both i mean this is where they're also wrapped around the ax that's a big opposition you want a big opposition movement you want a big opposition

party but really more than a party movement, which I will incidentally say they should use more non-politicians to convey their messages in that respect. People watching this are often going to be better messengers scattered around the country who know a lot about what these cuts are doing to their communities, are better messengers

than some 20-year Democratic politician. But it's also good to have Alyssa Slotkin give a thoughtful response, and good for Al Green to show some righteous indignation. I don't think anything, the idea that this is hurting voters or damaging the Democratic brand, no one cares about the Democratic brand right now.

There's no election, except in Virginia and New Jersey and New York City, I guess, until November 2026. Whatever the Democratic brand will be, it'll be the candidates who show up and what the issues of 2026 are and so forth. But for now, I think energizing people who like Al Green while reassuring people who like Alyssa Slotkin, you can do both.

The party's a big party. They're too much, think that they have to control it all. In my experience, having been on the other side of this a little bit in government, it helped the Democrats when they were in opposition

to the Republican administrations I was part of or to the Bush administration, which I was mostly friendly to. It helped the Democrats to have a lot of different voices, actually. It helped to have the kind of troublemakers and indignant people and then the kind of sober, oh, no, we're going to govern in a responsible way. They got the best of both worlds in some ways. I mean, so I very much object to the kind of pretending the election is tomorrow. So they have to, quote, control the message, A, and B, that the politicians matter more than the people, if I can put it that way. Yeah, and C, this notion that they can't have more than one voice or attitude or that one attitude might be reasonable for something, for some set of issues and another for different kind of issues. Al Green's constituents are going to be hurt by this budget.

He's allowed to say that, you know? Yeah, I mean, we were talking about this a little bit on the phone, but, like, my view is, like, one thing that's missing that is devoid we're filling, I guess, is, like, we could use some people in the Democratic Party that are moderate in policy, but radical in temperament and tactics, you know? Like, that's fine.

And, by the way, I think they, as I always say, I'm like, I think that the Democrats should have a populist left part of the party. To your point, like, you've got to appeal to a lot of different people. But I was annoyed about the censure vote. Like, the types of politicians that I would like the most in the Democratic Party, you know, Glusenkamp-Perez, you know, Moskowitz, right? Like, they were the ones that were, were you know saying we should play nice and and hold hands and and voting to center al green and i don't know i can we could use everybody's talking about how the left needs a rogan i want the center left to have an aoc

like somebody with some fucking balls like she has that's a good that's a good uh that's a good formulation i may have to steal that to the uh yeah i don't know i'm your muse i don't have to write no it's good no you're you're will you um before we go we'll do one of the things we're going to talk about that i want you to rant about is um the doj stuff because i i skipped over that and what they're targeting perkins cole etc because i do think it's really alarming i mean just the degree to which i i i yeah the degree of politicization i mean it's so, the degree of politicization. I mean, it's so beyond the kind of marginal stuff that Bush tried to do a little bit with Roe, with the U.S. attorneys, some stuff that I guess the Obama administration did.

But again, I mean, they're just, you have Ed Martin, this, I guess, acting now was the interim U.S. attorney for D.C., very important job, just doing stuff that people couldn't have believed. I mean, really is, you pick it up and you think this is a, maybe Hungary, or maybe a little worse than Hungary. I mean, it's probably not worse, but it's more dramatic to see it suddenly here. It was Hungary's a little more gradual, perhaps in the way they went in this direction. Targeting the law firms, targeting, you know, no due process, no nothing, executive orders. Again, one thing, Edin does do something okay he's an irresponsible jackass who's dc uh the u.s attorney for dc the eo the executive order targeting uh perkins coy i think it's pronounced the the law firm um was signed by the president that's a presidential executive order targeting one law firm for what for representing hillary

clinton commissioning a study which they ran out of the perfect at the time the people who did it happened to have left the firm but they didn't even distribute it's just what law firms do it sometimes they studies they commission aren't aren't 100 accurate it's actually more accurate than people think that but that's a whole nother debate i guess they settled one case if i can't remember some charge against them like it which i'm sure every law firm has done in the last 10 years. And they have some internal DEI procedures, which again, every law firm basically,

at least in Washington and New York and so forth, had over the last bunch of years. And for that, they're supposed to what? People there lose security clearances. They don't have access to... Government officials are instructed by Trump

not to deal with them basically maybe they can't get into government buildings who knows how much of this stays up in court but I was on one thread with some lawyers and there's a lot of we've got to stay in solidarity with them which is good and I think they're a great firm they can survive that they can fight back

it's good that they're going to fight back and someone else said look look, this is damaging. I mean, this is where you can't be complacent about this. If you're a corporate CEO and you're thinking, you know, you've had a whole bunch of cases and possible cases and negotiations with the U.S. government, which most big corporations do, probably.

Can you hire a law firm or keep a law firm as your main legal representative who the president of the United States has ordered cabinet officers not to deal with? You've got to owe it to your shareholders to get someone who can get on the floor and make your case. So this could well damage that firm, especially if the other law firms don't show solidarity, which I'm not sure if they will.

I think there's a piece today I haven't read yet in the Times, maybe a journal or something about how there's not a lot of solidarity so far to either Perkins or to Covington. So just previously targeted. Again, the degree of authoritarianism, the degree of purposeful targeting, of trying to shape outside things. It's one thing to ruin the government and shape the government and do huge damage to government institutions. They're now trying to shape all the institutions on the periphery of the government or outside

the government in business world and civil society and so forth. And that is real authoritarianism, right? It's not just authoritarian government. You try to create an authoritarian society. Yeah, no, this is just another one of those examples, kind of the political we were talking about earlier, which is this is so alarming. Obviously, white shoe DC lawyers are not going to be the sympathetic victim here that you run a campaign on. But it is extremely scary and alarming to have like the federal government

individually targeting law firms, limiting their ability, limiting people's ability to get good representation. You know, there's only so many law firms that have expertise and security clearances and all this kind of stuff. I just think it's a real, it's a big deal. And the white shoe guys may not be sympathetic, but a lot of what they're also being targeted for now, it looks like, is doing pro bono work for poor immigrants and for poor, you know, victims of police brutality or any other liberal cause, just a decency causeency cause i'd say that the trump administration doesn't like uh whoever steps up to help the haitian immigrants in springfield ohio that trump and vance are going to want to throw out i mean they're going to be targeted so it does

really have an effect on on pro bono work and on on sort of legal representation uh and advocacy for groups throughout society not just for the you, the corporation that has to, you know, that's representing it's presumably kind of, it's not such a sympathetic figure. So, right. Okay. Great chat. Thanks for doing this. Inappropriately, slightly worried and dire note to end on. Thank you for joining me today here Sunday, Tim, and I look forward to seeing you at SC Cup Monday and then resuming things with you a week from Monday.

All right. Sounds good. See you later, Bill. Thanks. Thank you all for joining us.