Bulwark Takes - Top Trump Aide Quits Over Iran War | Morning Chaser

Episode Date: March 17, 2026

Andrew and Bill are going live to discuss Joe Kent's resignation over the war in Iran and other news of the day.

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Hey, everybody. I think we are live. Welcome to Morning Chaser. It's Tuesday morning. We're here, as we always are at 10 a.m. I am Andrew Eger, White House correspondent for the bulwark. This is Bill Crystal, our editor at large. He and I write the morning shots newsletter. And we are here to talk about some of the stuff we wrote about today, some of the stuff we didn't write about today, some of the stuff that has broken even just since we put this newsletter to bed mere moments ago. So you're getting some screaming fresh up-to-the-moment content on YouTube if you happen to be one of the 10% of the 10% of the, people who have actually tuned in as we went live and who are not going to join us in 10 or 15 minutes. But thanks for watching. Thanks, Bill, for being here. Let's talk a little bit about this thing that just happened, which is Joe Kent, who is the director of the National Counterterrorism Center under Trump, top sort of Tulsi Gabbard ally for the past few years, resigned from his position effective today over Trump's handling of the Iran War. Let's just look at his letter that he just sent out. Again, this is just a few minutes ago. President Trump, after much reflection, I've decided to resign from my position as director of the National Counterterrorism Center

effective today. I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran. Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby. I support the values in the foreign policies that you campaigned on in 2016, 2020, 2024, which you enacted in your first term. Until June of 2025, you understood that the wars in the Middle East were a trap that robbed America of the precious lives of our patriots and depleted the wealth and prosperity of our nation. In your first administration, you understood better than any modern president how to decisively apply military power without getting us drawn into never-ending wars. But this is crazy. Early in this administration, high-ranking Israeli

officials and influential members of the American media deployed a misinformation campaign that wholly undermined your America-first platform and sowed pro-war sentiments to encourage a war with Iran. This echo chamber was used to deceive you into believing that Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States, and that you should strike now. There was a clear path to a swift victory. This was a lie and is the same tactic the Israelis used to draw us into the disastrous Iraq war that cost our nation in the lives of thousands of our best men and women. We cannot make this mistake again. It was an honor to serve, jump into the bottom. It was an honor to serve in your administration and to serve our great nation.

Kent obviously also says he praise Trump will reflect upon what we're doing in Iran. the time for bold action to reverse course is now. So this is, I mean, it's remarkable from about 15 different perspectives. Obviously, it's a big black guy for Trump to lose anybody, you know, to any top figure in his administration with this sort of remarkable assessment of what's going on in Iran. But also, Joe Kent is sort of a strange, weird sort of ancillary MAGA figure. Bill, can you just talk a little bit about where he's coming from and why he would be the kind of person to pull this sort of move now?

Yeah. So he's not, I mean, he runs the CTC. counterterrorism center, which is not an operational center. It's a research center. It can be useful for administrations, is my understanding. But he was put there because he was a failed Trumpy, MAGA, Republican congressional candidate twice in 2022 and 2024 and very extreme. I mean, I'd say on the MAGA spectrum, on the friendly with neo-Nazi extreme side of it, very anti-Israelist, you could tell from that letter, accused of being somewhat anti-Semitic, but tangled with our friend Tim Miller, our colleague Tim Miller a few times.

or at least Tim called him out on things, and he got all upset at Tim, as I recall, in 22 or 24, I can't remember. Anyway, he's not a counterterrorism expert. He doesn't know anything, honestly, about anything more than anyone else, about intelligence, about the war, anything like that.

And he's not at top. He's had no role in, I'm sure, planning it or evaluating what's happening. So what should... He's sort of a heggs-sat-the-figure in that way, and that he's a combat veteran who's very Trumpy and was kind of put in there

for that more than any particular specialization. Right, but he has... So what shouldn't make it sort of someone who's like in the middle of the war planning is quit. But obviously, on the other hand, I think politically it's interesting because he's going down the path that Tucker Carlson, Marshall, Rensue Taylor Green, and others on that part of the MAGA right have gone. And he's, as you said, I guess the highest rank, you're the only visible person to actually

resign for the administration, others like Thomas Massey, have criticized Trump in Congress, Marjorie Taylor Green, Tucker Carlson, media voices, Candace Owens. But so I think that's politically kind of interesting. I mean, he's an ambitious guy. I guess the point I'm trying to make is this, well, I'll just develop the point I was trying to make to conclude it in this way. He's not, he's an ambitious guy politically. He's right for Congress twice.

That's clearly something he just, that's his path forward, he thinks. And he, therefore, I'm going to just say, whatever his principal views on this, he thinks that there's a political path forward in MAGA world, in Republican world, in being anti-war, and being anti-the-Iran war on the grounds that Israel suckered us into it. You're doing, it's the Middle East, it's Iraq all over again. Israel was not particularly in favor of the Iraq or, incidentally, they were much more focused on Iran even back then. But anyway, and so that for me is what's interesting.

It's one thing for Marjorie-Tegreen, who's at least temporarily out of politics, Tucker Carlson, who at least doesn't say yet that he's running for president, others, to kind of take this position. It's another thing for a guy who has run twice and wants to run in the future, I'm sure, to visibly decide I'm going to be the guy who, the first guy to quit from the Trump administration over this, I'm going to be the guy who's going to be a sort of headline guy. Here we are discussing him, you know, as an opponent of this mistaken move by Trump. Trump has said over and over, Maggie is what I say it is. And it's just sort of interesting that here in March 26, someone who was a huge Trump supporter

is saying, nope, actually, Maca, isn't what you say it is, Mr. President. Yeah, yeah. If you're just joining us right now, Bill and I are talking about the sort of very, very late-breaking just in the last few minutes news of Joe Kent, who was, I guess, the director of Trump's National Counterterrorism Center, who has just this morning announced that he is resigning over the war in Iran, basically saying Trump has been hoodwinked by Israel and the pro-Israel in America and neocons over here into a disastrous foreign policy course. Yeah, I mean, Kent, it really is hard to overstate how sort of like unique and, or not unique, but the particular splinter.

Yeah, the particular splinter of Maga that he comes from because it's not just like the anti-war thing. I mean, Marjorie Taylor Green was broadly anti-war. Charlie Kirk was broadly anti-war, sort of from like a domestic policy standpoint where it's like we're getting, you know, tied up in too many things, too much nation building overseas. Pete Hague said this this way. too much nation building overseas, not enough, you know, domestic policy focus, not enough spending here at home, these sorts of things. I mean, like the classic line that you would hear a few years ago, why are we so interested in policing Ukraine's borders rather than our southern border, basically that impulse. And Kent is from a smaller, weird or worse element where, I mean, he kind of burst onto the scene in 2022 as a congressional candidate who was willing to play footsie,

much more so than almost anybody else, with Nick Fuentes. And the growth. And the growth, and their sort of extremely white nationalist vision of of sort of America First that was very much tied to this sort of like overarching monomith that basically all of the problems in America today are the fault specifically of Israel, the state of Israel and its lobby here. And you see that a lot in this in this letter. I mean, it's like Donald Trump, I'm sorry to say this to the America first crew. He does not need to be talked into like big explosive military conflicts of He likes those things. He likes throwing around American power. He does not want to get embroiled in lengthy conflicts. That's what he's struggling with now. But he and the vast majority of the maga base like the

idea that America can throw its weight around on the world stage and kind of make smaller nations do their bidding and, you know, lead with firepower in that way. But as you say, this is not an infinitesimal splinter of the party. There are a lot of people who sort of feel this way. Nick Fuentes and the Gropers are sort of a growing presence on the right, especially among young people on the right, as we've talked about a lot of times in the past. And this does feel, I think you're absolutely right to say this is less of like a really, you know, less of a particular commentary on the specifics of how this war is going, although as we will get around to talk about, is not necessarily going all that great and more of a sort of like

you say, political opportunism here where he realizes there's this growing energy, especially among young people in the Republican Party, and he's kind of putting himself forward as a vessel to hopefully capture some of that. It's interesting to see this kind of in contrast, and I'll, I wonder what you make of this bill, with J.D. Vance. I mean, J.D. Vance, not nearly as sort of exclusively of that wing of the party, but has made a lot of overtures to that wing of the party, is liked among some people in that party. Not liked by Nick Fuentes, by the way.

Nick Fuentes hates J.D. Vance. So we should say that. But is sort of seen as another possible vessel of sort of more isolationist sort of Trump inheritor going forward. He can't get out like this. You know, he's sort of stuck in there. And that has been sort of a problem for Vance in recent weeks where it's like, hey, I thought this guy was kind of

the whole reason he got aboard the Trump train in the first place was so we would not get involved in conflicts like this. I mean, Vance is Trump's vice president unless he chose to break with him, which would be dramatic, and Trump couldn't fire him. That would be an interesting. We haven't had that in America politics since, I don't know, Henry Wallace, maybe if even then, where the vice president explicitly breaks for the president and then he could live there in the VP's residence for two years arguing with Trump. That would be exciting and novel. But Vance does not have the courage in my view to do that. And plus he probably figures he's better off just being Trump's heir. So he's stuck with Trump. I think, you know, a lot of our friends, you know,

who know Vance and know of what Vance has said in the past kind of think, well, Vance is maneuvering. I think there's some truth to that, but you can maneuver all you want. If you're Trump's vice president and he goes to war in Iran and that becomes a defining part of his presidency, you're associated with it. It's like Huberonfrey and LBJ or something like that. You can then at the end try to distance yourself a little bit and so forth. So I think Marjorie Taylor Green and Joe Kent think, okay, Vance is going to be the pro-war, whatever he he might say, a candidate, we can get this, there's at least a decent chance if the war goes on and doesn't go well, that the war is around Vance's neck in 2008.

And the Marjorie Taylor Green Joe ticket will be the, you know, right wing much more than just America first, but really anti-Israel and much more, much friendlier to more extreme MAGA, the Trump sold-out MAGA ticket. It seems a little hard to imagine now, as Trump has been, as he himself. says correctly. So he is mad guy, so dominant. But, you know, a war that goes badly and a recession that follows and so forth, that could feel pretty different by 2028. Yeah, I mean, we don't know what's going to happen. I do still think it is crazy for anybody who thinks like that's going to be a path to sort of broad Republican victory that soon. I think that, you know, if they think that,

maybe they do think that. They're probably kidding themselves, although who knows, you know, a truly catastrophic war can lead to remarkable political outcomes that you did not anticipate. I do think, though, that even if that does not materialize, there is a political energy, again, particularly among young people, where you're not necessarily, you know, ready to parlay it into a presidential, a winning presidential run in two years here or anything like that, but in terms of sort of laying groundwork for growing stronger and stronger and stronger

as a part of the party that just didn't count before. I mean, like Republicans fled association with people like Nick Fuentes until about the day before yesterday. And now, and now, you know, they have really established what appears to be a beachhead. And it seems like, you know, this war is an opportunity. At least they see it as one to further and further establish themselves as at least a force to be reckoned with inside the party, if not, you know, a majoritarian force, certainly within the party constituency right now.

It's weird. It's weird because we're talking about all of this. You know, we don't like Joe Kent. He's a bad, bad guy. to the extent that the Republican Party goes along with him, it will be to everybody's sorrow. And yet it's hard to argue with certain parts of the substance of the critique here. I mean, obviously, there's a lot of sort of Israel baiting in there.

But for the most part, the pitch here is this war is going badly. Trump didn't say he was going to get us into these sorts of things. And yet here we are with no end in sight. And that part's true, right? I mean, here we are. And I guess we can stop talking about Joe Kent a little and just turn to that because that's what we were going to talk about. before Kent resigned, seconds before or minutes before we went on the air here.

Everything that we're seeing right now is this weird split screen in Iran where we do have basically military supremacy there. You know, we're hitting the targets that we want to hit. Targets aren't getting hit just because we're choosing not to hit them. Top Iranian leaders keep going down. Israel assassinated a couple more of the very senior most Iranian officials who are left just overnight last night. And yet, we have not yet proven the ability to cripple what is their biggest hold over us,

which is their ability to snarl, you know, trade through the Strait of Hormuz, to keep oil traffic basically ground to a standstill. And they have us over a barrel as far as that's concerned, because they know that, you know, Trump is hypersensitive to, you know, cost of living pressures and especially fuel pressures, energy pressures, which has been kind of his one feather in his cap, as other things have gone badly economically during his second term, that the price of gas has been low. And that has, you know, skyrocketed overnight. The price of oil, Brent Crude, just yesterday hit $100 a barrel for the second

time since this war started. And Trump has sort of pivoted shamelessly from one position to another position to another position when it comes to what he's trying to do about it. And the fact that he is, you know, so frequently just sort of throw in spaghetti at the wall and just seeing what sticks is not necessarily reassuring markets or other countries or anybody that he has a plan to fix this. Let me just walk through a couple of these, you know, Trump's own statements over the past few weeks as we've gone through this war, specifically related to the strait. So this was just a couple days after the war was launched. This is something he threw up on truth social. Effective immediately, I have ordered the United States Development Finance

Corporation to provide at a very reasonable price, political risk insurance, and guarantee for the financial security of all maritime trade, especially energy traveling through the Gulf. This will be available to all shipping lines. If necessary, the United States Navy will begin escorting tankers through the Strait of Hormuz as soon as possible. No matter what, the United States will ensure the free flow of energy to the world. And you can see from my my little Microsoft paint graphics work there. That was when the price of oil was just barely pushing 80 bucks a barrel for Brent crude globally. It was going to get worse from there. A couple days after that, Donald Trump is picking fights with various allies who were sort of saying,

okay, we'll send some ships to help you out in the strait. He posted the United Kingdom, our once great ally, maybe the greatest of them all, is finally giving serious thought to sending two aircraft carriers to the Middle East. That's okay, Prime Minister Starmer. We don't need them any longer, but we will remember. We don't need people that join wars after we've already won. It's over, And it's nice of you, Prime Minister Starmer, to try to, you know, shuffle in once all the hard works over and, you know, get a participation trophy. But we're too smart. We don't need you, you know, buzz off. We're doing fine without you.

But then Trump realizes sort of belatedly, oh, wait a minute, we actually do not have the military ability to just protect trade through the straight. And in fact, that is just beyond us. And so he has spent the last couple of days doing all sorts of different things. One, he's letting Iran send its oil tankers through the straight, unmolested now. They're the only ones who can really get through because at least they figure some oil getting through is better for prices than none, even though that is directly going to enrich Iran and only Iran. And then in addition to that, they have been, Trump has sort of turned on a dime.

He is now trying to browbeat other countries into sending more of their ships, exactly the same sort of thing that he was scoffing off the UK for offering to do a week ago. He's saying, no, now not only do I want you to do it, but you have to. to do it or we're going to have problems in terms of our trade relationship. Let's just play a couple of clips real quick here from the last couple of days of some things Trump has been saying now on this front just since this weekend. Yeah, I hope you guys could hear that. That was on Air Force One, so there was a lot of kind of background noise there. But the basics of that, we're demanding that these countries come in and protect their own territory because it is their territory. It's a place

where they get their energy. They should come in. They should help us protect it. We should, Maybe we shouldn't even be there at all because we don't need it. We have a lot of oil ourselves. I mean, the whipsawing here from policy ask to policy ask, from demands to stay away to demands to come now. I mean, what can you even say about it? It's hard even to do political analysis here. But Bill, give it a shot. I mean, what do you make of Trump sort of spinning all over the place on this? Well, he's failing. They didn't plan for this, though they should have. And so that's striking. And I think it's diminishing, further diminishing confidence in our allies and allied governments.

And for that matter, as we wrote about winning shots of ally of the people in those countries in the U.S., just as a partner, as an ally, you know. And so Trump's handling of the war has compounded the failure to plan before the war, which is really pretty striking the more you look at what they seem to have not done as opposed to even other, as opposed to all other administrations, Even planning well does not ensure the war goes well, but planning badly probably increases the odds quite a lot that a war is going to go badly. We're not planning at all. And that's, that's virtually the case here. I mean, I would just say a couple of things also footnotes really what you said. On energy, it really is a big problem. I mean, it's not just that Trump is particularly sensitive to gas prices and to, you know, into markets. So he is more so than a president who, you know, had a real firm foreign policy vision and is willing to endure some pain. But the actual cost of the energy price hike in terms of the world economy and not just oil is very considerable.

And the supply chain effects and so forth. So I do, I personally, what do I know? I'm totally no better of predicting these things than anyone else. Maybe a little worse. But I kind of wonder if we're already in the recession or are going to be very close to what. I just already were kind of crawling along. And that's a pretty big hit to take. And on oil, fertilize or other things, supplies chain issues, uncertainty for the future,

which causes things to seize up. in their own way, and as you sort of suggest, not helped by Trump's own performance. So I think the energy issue is important. The other thing is it's not just that the war's not going well, but he's reaching a point where he has to sort of do more or begin to figure out how to get out. You know, it's sort of taco or all in, I would say, all in meaning using this Marine 31st view, the Marine Expeditionary Unit that's on our route from Japan. We're drawing down 80. which is supposed to be our main focus, wasn't it, of confronting China to fight this war. Maybe if we thought we're going to do this, we should have had that marine unit in place,

you know, before the war, as the war began, and now it's going to take another 10 days, I think, for them to get there, which means if we want to use them, we sort of bomb away for 10 war days. And the straight, I guess, stays closed for that long. And that's what markets are reflecting, not just the current price. So I do think the escalatory side of it is also, you know, someone like Kent isn't an idiot, we can sort of see that we it's not like Trump's going to, I mean, he could, he could taco tomorrow, but if he's going to take the all, I'm in this far, I've got to keep going approach, which I don't know, he seems to be rhetorically leading a little bit towards. I've never believed he would do that.

I've always been on the side that he's going to taco his way out of this and with some face-saving, you know, we won, we pulverize them. It's over with Iran's degraded. And that's where it's okay. I've always, I still kind of think he's more likely he does that. But I guess the odds have gone more towards him going all in. And then you're really in an escalatory scenario with all kinds of things happening. And so I think that's why someone like Joe Kent looks at this and Marjorie Jellick Green looks at this and they all think politically speaking, sort of like being Gene McCarthy in Vietnam, maybe you don't become president.

You don't even win the Democratic nomination, but you do change things ultimately. And McGovern gets, you know, wins the nomination four years later and Bobby Kennedy gets, without belaboring the analogy, I just think there. looking at this going forward and thinking, it's not just that this isn't good, it's conceivably getting worse, both in the real world and in terms of the politics here at home. Yeah, yeah. Let me just say real quick, for those of you who have joined us since we started here, I'm Andrew Eger, that's Bill Crystal. We write the morning shots newsletter for the bulwark. We're here live at 10 a.m. on Tuesdays, talking about what we've been writing about and other stuff that's in the news. I mean, the point you make

there about all of the different ways in which even before this, we were just sort of limping along. The U.S. economy was just sort of barely limping along in a lot of ways. Our relationship with our European allies was just barely limping along in a lot of ways, right? I mean, these, the affordability, I mean, Trump's Trump's political fortunes were just barely limping along. I mean, he'd been losing races left and right with just months to go ahead of these midterms. And all of these, you know, have opened sort of like catastrophic new avenues for potential collapse, right? Potential economic calamity, potential sort of diplomatic calamity as these wedges get shoved further and further between us and our NATO allies. Obviously, we've been talking a lot

about the potential political downsides for the president. Let me just put one more fine point on the allies bit of it. This was from morning shots today because Trump, like I said, has been asking around now, kind of going around shaking his hat, saying, please send warships to the straight to help us protect commerce. He's been saying Europe should do that, and he's been saying China should do that because they are the ones who actually consume that oil. It only affects our oil prices more indirectly because, you know, when the prices go up globally, prices go up here, too. But we're not really using the oil that's coming through. That's what other countries are using. But Europe has basically turned a cold shoulder to this. I mean, the defense minister for Germany,

Boris Pistorius, said on Monday, this is not our war. And he asked what Trump expected, quote from, let's say, one or two handfuls of European frigates in the Strait of Hormuz that the powerful American Navy cannot accomplish. I mean, it is impossible to read that and not see it as kind of like a backhanded remark about all of sort of the just bad blood Trump has been building up in Europe with years and years of just sort of scornful talking down about how, you know, they basically, they just freeload off of our military might. They can't, you know, they're useless in a crisis. We don't really need them for anything. They need to be pitching in more and more.

And now, you know, he is sort of turning on a dime to say, look, send us more stuff or we're going to be really mad at you. But not just talking down. I mean, he actually didn't consult with them before going to war in their neighborhood. As he said himself, one of the clips we played, Europe depends more and cares as closer to Iran and maybe should care more about the strait than us. We're a long way away and sort of not really because it's different kinds of oil and stuff, but sort of self-sufficient net on oil and energy, Europe, much less so. Asia, much less than Japan, really dependent on oil from the Gulf.

We didn't talk to them. So it's not just that he's kind of been a jackass and he's unpleasant to them, is he literally didn't consult our most important allies, the NATO allies and Japan, before going to, before engaging in the biggest military action that the U.S. has launched in, what, 20 years, I guess, I mean, probably bigger than even the attack on ISIS in 2015 and stuff. So, I mean, that's pretty, what do you expect then, A, and then B, as and Fistoria sort of makes this point, the Trump appeal to them is just an attempt to make them look bad to his maga base.

Germany's Navy cannot help us open the strait. I don't even know anything about German's Navy, and I'm just going to stipulate. If the U.S. Navy can't open the straight, the U.S. Navy plus a few German frigates can't open the state. Germany is not a naval power, and most of these countries are not naval powers. Britain a little bit, but not much, actually. I think they had one aircraft. They just drive out there, one aircraft carrier that's left. So that's in a way, it's also a farcical about it.

I mean, if we want to open the straight incidentally, we probably, you know, we have the Navy, we have the Marine Corps. We are a massive military power. We could probably have some allies help us a little, as they did in Iraq and in Afghanistan, but just like there, it's both ultimately going to be U.S. force. Trump doesn't want to use it or has so planned so badly for this war

that we're not able to use it now, fine, then don't use it, and we'll have to accommodate the price rise, and then think about whether to keep going and so forth. But it's just an excuse. I mean, in a way, when you think more I thought about this, the appeal to the Europeans, which I think does look kind of desperate and flailing, is also an excuse for the MAGA base here, for Trump to be able to say, oh, look at these horrible Europeans, they won't help us when they should help us. And China, do we want China now to be kind of a military partner of ours in the Middle East? Is that really what we've come to? So it's both flailing around, but also, I think, just the evasion of his own failures as a war president. Yeah, yeah. And maybe even the more

astonishing thing is that this sort of rhetoric coming from our erstwhile or hopefully maybe still European allies, we would like to consider them still our European allies. This is the rhetoric that is coming from their current political establishments, which have, which have, you know, a long history of working hand in glove with America on all sorts of things. And these are the people who are speaking in these terms. But we have no confidence that, you know, the military or the political establishments of these countries a few years down the line will even be this willing to kind of go along with America. And this was kind of what you wrote about this morning, Bill, in morning shots of this

kind of astonishing political poll of sort of the populations of some of these allies. So can you just talk us through that a little bit? No, and I think you put it just very well just now that it's that I wasn't really thinking when I just put it on this poll exactly about the direct electoral implications. But yeah, we've got pretty pro-year, a very pro-American government in Germany now, and reasonably pro-American in France and Britain. And yet this is what they're saying. What happens five, ten years from now in terms of the United? So the Politico poll did a serious poll. I looked at it a bit.

It seems like big numbers and well-respective. organization they have doing it for them. And basically the people of Canada, Germany, France, and the UK, now it's not just that they don't, they distrust the U.S. Okay, fine, they don't trust Trump. I don't trust Trump either. So it's not crazy to say, yeah, just trust the U.S. under Trump. That was the way they asked the question. What do you think of the U.S. under Trump? That's not crazy. And there's always been anti-Americanism in these countries. So fine, maybe that's all that's capturing. They trust, but what's new is they trust China more than the U.S. under Trump. moving against China for the last several years. In fact, it was a victory of the first Trump

administration and the Biden administration to push our European allies to be tougher on China. They were totally negligent about this 10 years ago. Hey, it's trade. We were 15 years ago, 20 years ago. You know, hey, more trade. That's great. They didn't see this sort of strategic threat coming. We spent a lot of time pushing them to get more serious about that. And to their credit, they did. Ukraine finally helped for that a little because China was helping. Russia, you know, was in lead with Russia, and they see that threat very, very clearly. And so they've been sort of moving in the right direction from our point of view and from, let's say, a China Hawk point of view, which is allegedly the point of view of the Trump

administration. And in fact, now Trump has just undone whatever progress we've made in Europe. And I was talking with the European diplomat three or four weeks ago, who wants to be tough on China, who's actually forecasted in a way this poll by saying, I don't know that we can sustain that anymore. I mean, why is China more reliable? China doesn't really. and lower terrorists every year, every month. And now China's not launched, it didn't even say this, but the war hadn't begun,

but China's not launching wars in our backyard or anything. They're not a good regime. They're very unpleasant. They're human rights records, horrible. They steal some intellectual property. But, you know, there are thousands of miles away from us. We can trade with them without great risk. And why exactly are we being tough on them?

Especially then, as you said, when you guys are giving them all this AI stuff through, I guess, Qatar or whatever, the Arab countries, the Trump families cut all these deals with. And when you add all this up, I think you've got European elites and the European public much more fundamentally distrusting the U.S. that has ever been the case for all the rifts we had on Iraq and during the Cold War and fights with DeKal and all this history, this is a much deeper rift.

And the Iran War has made it deeper yet and is pushing them to being at least neutral, let's put it this way, between the U.S. and China, which is a very bad geopolitical outcome. Yeah, neutral's not good for us. China is very, very, very large. They have a lot of wealth. They have a lot of power to throw around. And the whole point of all of those actions to isolate China that you've been talking about here, the whole reason we were doing those in the first place is that China already, you know, it is far from its zenith of economic and political global power, but it already had been so shameless about throwing itself around in international institutions and enforcing all sorts of, you know, I mean, people maybe remember 10 years ago when when there was a whole, like,

minor crisis, this is so small, but it's kind of illustrative of, you know, suddenly there were a bunch of NBA players who were afraid to say bad things about the regime in China because the NBA is large in China. China's a giant market for this sort of thing. And China was willing to, you know, slam shut market access to, to that product. If, for instance, random NBA players acknowledged to the plight of the persecuted Uyghur population in China. I mean, everybody got this object lesson in the way that this regime, as it continues to grow and grow and grow and have more and more weight to throw around, would exercise that on a global scale.

And the argument that America made, which was a self-serving argument in a lot of ways, I mean, in the sense that it was good for us, it was better for us for all these people to be more willing to enter into these relationships with us than into relationships with China. But it was also a true argument that that's not. not what you want to see. That's not what you want to see from a dominant global economic power. We want to be able to isolate them, make them hurt for that sort of thing, until they're willing to stop doing it and come play nice with the rest of the free world and participate in that way.

And the only way to go about getting that was to actually isolate them in some respects, was for us to build closer ties with Europe and Japan and with the rest of the world and make it harder for China to sort of spend its way to global deploy. and isolate us. And now, I mean, just a couple of years, just one year of this guy, one year of this guy appears to have completely undone everything because unlike China, we are not, you know, leading with a smile. We are not coming to Europe and saying, you know, yeah, yeah, we've got all that oppressive stuff going on at home, but we're going to be great for you. We're going to be really, we're going to bend over backwards to make a great

relationship with you. And you can kind of ignore all that other stuff. We do exactly the opposite. We go to Europe and we say, you know, things are going pretty well at home. We've got all this money and stuff, but we're worried we're not squeezing quite enough out of you. And that has been the policy of this White House economically with trade and now with foreign policy as well. And I mean, we've just seen it over and over again. So it's all very grim. None of it's good. None of it's going any place good. I don't know, Bill. You have anything else on this before we, before we turn to perhaps more pleasant matters? Yeah, we should go briefly to more pleasant matters to close with a little peep at the thing maybe. But yeah, I'm old enough to remember when the Trump base

and Trump personally and Mago World was very upset with China for not being, and not incidentally, maybe correctly upset with China, for being not transparent and not candid about the origins and progress of COVID, you know. That was not ancient history. I believe they were quite the China, what did Trump call it? The China hoax? No, the China disease, China is something right. They were something.

I don't know. Yeah, something right. That's right, China. And anyway, that was kind of a problem with China. I remember Tom Cotton and people going crazy about this. And here we are, six years later, and we're sucking up to China ourselves, dealing with them, and alienating, driving our allies really into, not driving them into their hands, but making much easy for them to accommodate China as well. So really, this is where I think that just, you know, we're all interested in, and it's worth discussing,

because it's so important Trump's own psychology in this, because that's what's driving a lot of way to conduct in the war. So it's totally legitimate. It's important to talk about that. but the actual real geostrategic consequences are pretty serious. So something cheerful to end on, Andrew? Yeah, I guess you can call it cheerful. I don't know. It's all the, yeah, that's enough Iran for now.

Let's talk about one other thing that's a little bit more forward-looking. It's all forward-looking because who knows what's going to happen in Iran. But one other thing that's happening on the domestic side, which is that the Department of Homeland Security remains unfunded. Christy Noem, the current secretary, she's out of here in a couple of weeks now. The Senate's going to try to get Mark Wayne Mullen in as her replacement. But he will be taking over, at least it's looking like right now, he'll be taking over an agency that remains unfunded because Democrats have remained

sort of united in their demand that they're not going to give this agency or this department any more money until ICE and Border Patrol accept some civil rights-oriented reforms about wearing uniforms and badges and not masks and not shoving people that they just randomly profiled on the street into unmarked bands. You know, little things like that, wearing body cameras, but also committing not to use those body cameras to assemble a Panopticon-style surveillance net

against protesters who are following them around and filming them and things like that. You know, the little things. They don't want to give DHS more money to continue any of those tactics. The White House has said, you can't tell us what to do, and we're not going to bother.

But it's starting to get more politically sharp because the effects are starting to be felt. Different parts of DHS, for instance, the TSA are going without paychecks now that they missed their first paycheck this week. And so, you know, the fire is sort of being kindled under both Republicans and Democrats in the Senate to make something happen here, to move something along. But right, so far, it's all just a game of chicken. Everybody's sticking to their guns. There was an interesting interaction yesterday in Texas between Senator John Cornyn, who's a former member of Senate Republican leadership. He is now facing a tough MAGA primary.

But he was, I think this was outside an airport in Houston. I think maybe he'd been talking to some TSA people. But he bumped into Democratic Representative Greg Kazar, who is also down there, you know, talking about this issue. And they had an interesting little interaction that was overseen by a Texas Tribune journalist. So let's take a look at that. Senator, Senator, I was hoping that we could. Why don't you tell your Democrats to vote to pay these poor payers?

Let's do it. Let's do it. No, you do it. No, no. I voted for it time to time again. Let's talk for a second, Senator. There's a bipartisan bill to fund just the TSA. Can we do that to the other? Not acceptable.

You want to fund? How about all the terrorist attacks like we've seen down 6th Street? You want those to continue? These people are keeping us safe. Tell the Democrats to vote for funding the DHS. Let's let each one. Would you fund the TSA? No.

Sounds like instead of bringing people burgers, he should bring them their paychecks, which involves funding TSA. Yeah, so, I mean, that's the whole fight right there, right? Democrats are basically saying, we'll pass a bill. We'll pass a bill to fund everything in DHS except for ICE and the border patrol. Republicans are saying, do you think we're crazy? If we do that, then we'll have to give you your demands. They're trying to keep it all tied together. Yeah, I mean, to be fair to the, I would even be a little stronger.

I mean, Patty Murray actually on the floor of the Senate tried to get United and was concerned. last week to fund all of DHS, except for new funding for ICE and Border Patrol, which already have huge amounts of funding. It's only from last year's bill. But why give them more funding without the reforms you've mentioned? I think that's a very reasonable position. And actually, Rosa DeLauro, who's in Democratic leadership in the House, introduced a bill to the same effect a couple of few weeks ago. The Democrats haven't emphasized that. I don't know why it's maybe they thought it was too complicated a message. But now I think with TSA, you know, with the TSA problems, much more evident at airports, I believe.

they're beginning today or tomorrow, the Democrats are always a little slow on these things, but they're going to start really having press conferences and emphasizing. And I think there's some, and maybe even introducing a discharge petition to try to, maybe it's already introduced to try to get this funding for not just TSA, but Coast Guard and FEMA and the other parts of DHS out there. I think it's a very easy, honestly, once they explain it for a couple sentences, it's a pretty easy position to defend. We have a dispute over ICE and Border Patrol. We're not closing them down. They got the money, but we just don't want to give them new money without the safeguards you mentioned. And we're happy to fund the rest. We'll see the Republican's position is,

oh, that's, you know, they know they lose leverage in that case. They may never get the money for the new money for DHS for ICE and Border Patrol. So they have to make the argument the court and makes, but let them make the substantive argument that ICE and Border Patrol need additional money to what they have. That's in a way what Gordon's saying, I guess, to keep us safe. So anyway, I think the Democrats will spend this week really trying to. trying to clarify their position, which they already had, but really make it much stronger and be the people who want to fund TSA. I don't have a good feel exactly on how much, how much worse the airport situation will get, but I got it's supposed to go somewhere late

next week, so I hope the Democrats can bludgeon the Republicans into getting some money to DSA, but not at the cost. I just don't think the Democrats are going to fund ICE and Border Patrol without these reforms. Yeah, yeah. It'll be interesting to see how much hardball the White House decides to play here, and in particular how much Christy Noem decides to play here kind of on her way out the door as her last official act as the Secretary of Homeland Security. I mean, you remember during the last shutdown, they went, you know, they were completely shameless, you know, just like utterly, utterly, utterly shameless in using official government resources to prosecute the Republicans case. I mean, they were putting up, you know, billboards basically at every THA, TSA,

in the country basically saying, sorry about the long lines, the Democrats are doing this to you, that kind of thing. So we'll see whether we get that again. But yes, I think Democrats are correct to be trying to make as, you know, bring as big of a bullhorn to this fight as they can. I'm saying, we would like to fund the TSA. We keep voting to fund the TSA. It's Republicans who don't want to fund the TSA. And why don't they want to do that? Because they want masked, planes, close, ice agents to keep showing people into unmarked vans. So that's We'll see how that all goes. I think you're right. There's going to be a lot more conversation about that going forward. It's that discharge petition that you mentioned, Speaker Jeffries is actually behind it.

I'm sorry, not Speaker Jeffries. Minority Leader Jeffries is behind it, which is a weird, a weird dynamic that this discharge petition apparatus, this sort of procedural move that was barely, barely ever even seen before this Congress is now sort of the go-to operation. even for, you know, minority party political leadership, which is just sort of a commentary on how weak, how Speaker Mike Johnson has gotten, how sort of badly procedure has just fallen apart in the house in general. But we don't need to dwell on that because we've been talking about a lot of stuff for a long time now. I guess we can kind of just wrap up. Bill, do you have any closing thoughts before we split? No, I think a de interesting will be. But I think your other point about the war is very important. War is a dynamic. And we've seen that already in the two and a half

weeks this force has been going. And so we can, we have to discuss it each day by day. But we sort of do have to discuss it day by day and should because, you know, it changes and the real world situation changes, the politics of a change. So when you're, you know, people underestimate wars. I mean, in terms of their dynamism, their unpredictability, and sometimes their political consequences. Well, then, I guess it's a good thing that we're not actually at war and this has all been just sort of a military excursion as the president likes to. to say, because if we were at war, that could be a real problem for a lot of people. I guess we'll leave it at that. Thanks,

thanks, Bill, for coming on and talking about this. Thanks to you guys all out there who are watching, who are listening, who are catching up with us later. We hope you'll head over to the bulwark.com. Subscribe to Morningshots. Bill and my newsletter goes out every weekday morning. It is free. You don't have to plunk down a single dime to get us in your inbox every day. And we hope you will subscribe to our YouTube channel as well. Thanks everybody for watching, and I guess we'll see you here next week.