Bulwark Takes - Trump’s Pay-to-Play World Tour

Episode Date: May 15, 2025

JVL and Bill Kristol discuss how Trump’s authoritarian playbook depends on public corruption, loyalty tests, and billion-dollar payouts. And why the business class is just fine with it.

Hello everyone, this is JVL here with the Bulwark's Bill Crystal. A lot of stuff is happening, all of it's bad. Before we get started, hit like, hit subscribe, follow the feed, because if you're gonna be on a rocket sled to hell, you might as well be there with friends. Bill, our president, our favorite president who has been doing all the deals, just said that he was going to do something very tough to the Iranians, but he decided not to because they have a very strong friend, an advocate, and a friend that will never abandon them, the Qataris. And, you know, for some reason, who could say why, he's really listening to what the people from Qatar have to say.

Our relationship now is very strong with Saudi Arabia. Nobody's coming. Nobody's going to be bothering that relationship. Nobody would be able to break that relationship because of my relationship with the crown prince and the family. Who could say whether he's really made up his mind or changed his mind or whatever on the topic of iran but of course saying the quiet part out loud people often say it's kind of crazy for him to do that but he doesn't understand that that's hurting him and is a pr price to be paid and i think you and i have both discussed this a few times but it's really worth making the point i think it helps it's of course it helps him to say the quiet part out loud right

this what he said about Iran. If people think they can influence Donald Trump by giving him a gift of a few hundred million dollars, how many more gifts like that is he going to get? If you are out for bribes, you need to let it be known that you're out for bribes. You need to let it be known that the bribes could be successful, at least for a while. Maybe there needs to be a new one down the road. You need to let it be known that if you don't bribe the man, you might pay a price. So if you're going to be a kleptocrat, you don't need too much publicity. Well, let me back off. If you're a mob boss, therefore, you need to let it be known that if you don't pay the protection money, the restaurant's going to have an unfortunate

fire. And maybe there should be an occasional unfortunate fire, but it spares the other restaurants in the neighborhood that sends the message. Now, the mob bosses are a little careful about letting it all be known that they're running a protection racket because the cops might, you know, they can't pay off enough cops and the cops might shut it down. But you know what? The great thing about Donald Trump's current position? He controls the cops. He controls the Justice Department. So he can be, he's really figured this out, I do think, over the course of the last two, three, four months. He can be totally brazen because Pam Bondi and Kash Patel are not the cops,

and therefore totally to his advantage to be public about the corruption and the fact that, and the bribery. Well, and the other thing that he has is that he has a cult behind him, which isn't going to leave him. And this is again, the, I feel like I was onto this early. I think you were onto it reasonably early. The cult like nature of his support is a qualitative difference and it allows him to do things that, that other people can't. And maybe this is how it is in all authoritarian systems. I don't know, right? Well, I think what you're saying, I mean, what you're saying is cut like, which I agree with, is also another way of saying he's an

authoritarian leader, not a normal political leader, whose people might leave him if they disagree with a decision he's made on an issue that's important to them. He's not pro-life anymore. I can't. I'm a pro-life voter. I can't be for the pro-life politician. He's left our fold. When you're an authoritarian leader, the cult sticks with you. And then the authoritarian thing really compounds the kleptocratic side of it.

Because if you're an authoritarian, you also want to, of course, intimidate people. And again, to do that, you need public examples. You need a demonstration effect. You need people to pay a price for opposing you. And conversely, you need to have people who are capitulating seem to be rewarded, or at least not criticized or attacked or having their life made miserable. And so again, people are saying, well, he's doing all this stuff very publicly but of course he wants the demonstration effect of going after the law firms and universities and individuals you know chris krebs and miles taylor and all that and could he lose in court

sure the courts might still be the last remnant of the old regime upholding some tradition you know standards of kind of law and order but he's willing to pay that price he doesn't care because how many people want to go through that? The court gains. The universe of people who have the resources to do that is reasonably small. He's behaving in a classic authoritarian way. The demonstration effect, you can intimidate a lot of people by going after only a few. It's pretty efficient. That's what he's doing. And people are being intimidated, incidentally. And so the combination of the kleptocracy and the autocracy is just proceeding faster and more dangerously than maybe even I expected. Again, we're less than 150 days in. So another thing he has learned and figured out pretty quickly is that the real money is not at the level of rich people or even oligarchs.

The real money to be made is at the level, the level of sovereign wealth and nation states. Right. In that, you know, we think of like, wow, I mean, Elon Musk wrote a check for $250 million to get this guy elected. Right. Well, the Qataris just handed him 400 million. Yeah. Like without even thinking about it. Right. I mean, that's where the real money is. It's I forget which country is doing a deal with him. Maybe it's Abu Dubai or Abu Dhabi. And they're going to use his world liberty financial crypto to to consummate the transaction, which, of course, gives him a taste of two billion dollars. So he's figured that out as well, that at the nation's day level. And this is actually in another this is another sort of grand unified theory of Trump. So why does he dislike our traditional allies but like our traditional enemies?

And it's because our traditional allies tend to be liberal democracies where corruption is reasonably held in check and the governments can't pay him off. Right. In order to pay him off, they would have to do stuff which is illegal. That would create political risk for the people within government. Whereas other autocracies and monarchies just do whatever they want. Just write him checks and hand him bags of cash. And so that is another reason why he sees those people as his natural allies. Totally. I mean, Putin obviously has done this at home and has done the equivalent of the threats and the payoffs abroad and paying for parties a little less publicly because he's got slightly

different incentives and constraints maybe, but not that much less public. I was thinking about Putin. I think I took this out of the Morning Shots piece this morning that seemed a little over the top and hysterical. But if people want to read this morning that seemed a little over the top and hysterical. But if people want to read it, they can see how over the top and hysterical it is anyway. But I said, you know, Putin, the poison, a lot of people say, why is it he make it so obvious? Why does Putin make it so obvious that he's poisoned someone? They could poison people probably and not have the whole world basically know that, A, it's a poison that's from Russia. B, there's a Russian operative who's like, you know, with a guy 10 minutes before he got sick and so forth. It's clear that Putin wants people to know he did it. That's the intimidation. If someone mysteriously has a sickness, that's no intimidation

effect. And I think people have, again, I even feel this personally, underestimated the degree to which publicity is a feature, not a bug of not just the corruption, but the authoritarianism. And the authoritarianism, as you say, at home and abroad goes together. Someone else said, I saw yesterday, why is he happy? Elon Musk was kind of drifting away from politics, a little out of favor, a little popular in the U.S. Why does he have Elon Musk with him on this trip? Here's why. Is he signaling to every oligarch in the U.S., every plutocrat in the U.S., you know what, he remembers that Elon was with him for the 250 mil, when a lot of them weren't with him.

And he's giving him the payoff of being front and center with the Saudis, with the Qataris, with all the people who will pay big, big money and cut very profitable deal. Now, the other business types have gone along. They got quite a lot of, they're getting quite a lot out of this trip too. I mean, the degree of it and the sickening character, if you're familiar, if you think of America as a somewhat different country

from all these, you know, Middle East plutocracies and oligarchy. No more we ain't. Yeah, that's not where we are. But I mean, all these business people going along, thrilled to be there, cutting deals. Trump's announcing their deals. This notion that the business people are really going to turn on trump you know what they've kind of got over that

initial that they see it's dangerous you know we don't succeed if you if you just suck up to trump i've always thought that was a stupid liberal talking point honestly a wishful one let's say you know they're gonna he's gonna come for you eventually maybe he will eventually come from go for schwartzman who was number two on his carefully ranked list of business followers who were with him. But for now, he's sitting fine. And for all we know, he's getting a bunch of deals. And so are the people from the other companies. Again, the degree to which we are just in a different world. And therefore, final point I'll make, and I do say this in Morning Shots, it's not, you know, Nixon cut corners. That was tricky dick. He accepted that he was living in a rule

of law regime, if I can put it that way, and then wanted to break a few laws and wanted to cover up the thing. Trump covers up nothing. Why is Trump not involved in coverups? Why is Richard Nixon's nickname Tricky Dick? No one thinks Trump is tricky. He doesn't want to cover it up because he is- He's about the first impeachment. He is transitioning us to an authoritarian regime. He's not trying to cut corners in a liberal democratic regime. So I want to talk about two other constituencies here. I want to talk about the business community and I want to talk about the people.

We'll start with the business community. Somebody said this to me the other day and it was such a fantastic phrase and it crystallized something that I've long sort of thought about, but hadn't put it this way. The goal of every capitalist is to achieve escape velocity from capitalism and to get to a point in the world where they can use the government to create a command economy that benefits them. And we're really seeing that with our business class, I think. And there is nothing to be done about it now. Should the day ever come when the opposition party has controlled government, it does seem like something should be done to the business class to try to lessen their power to collaborate with any future authoritarians. Is that wrong? Totally correct. I think Peter Thiel, I never really read, honestly, very carefully his book from zero to one, but I think that's kind of explicitly what Thiel says.

The point of business is not to be in a free market of competition. To be a monopolist. To be a monopolist, which is another way, in a sense, of saying what you just said, I think. At least it's a cousin of what you just said. And I like the escape velocity formulation, because that's correct. Yeah, you want to be free of the constraints of fair and free and fair competition in markets. Trump, of course, has internalized that very well. He never was interested in free and fair competition. It was always, for him, a combination of grift and sort of vaguely semi-criminal activities and so forth. So he has no, he doesn't have the attitude that

a normal, if you will, CEO would have of, well, I guess there are these rules and we, of course, might cut a few corners, you know, but we're basically in that system. No, they want to be freed from the system. I very much agree with that. I think it's a very good formulation. And incidentally, I just saw someone, an old acquaintance who's a little Trumpier than we are, but not really Trumpy, more Trump acquiescent or adjacent and so forth. And he was talking about what he thought could be OK. And ultimately, it was clear he expects there to be a reversion to the meat. He expects, you know, people to show up like in the first term.

They're going to cut some deals with the universities and not really strip billions of dollars from them. They're going to the business community is going to kind of come back to normal. It's not impossible. I mean, who knows what balance of forces might drive Trump in that direction and drive enough Republicans in that direction that Trump feels he has to go in that direction. But I think that's sort of wasn't, I mean, it was kind of crazy to think even back in November, but it wasn't totally crazy to think before the appointments of Hexeth and Bondi and Patel and Tulsi Gabbard, before they all got through, that was a huge, in retrospect, if I can interrupt myself are going to balk if you try to go too far. Gets them all through. Then he browbeats, of course, the business, the oligarchs, and the tech guys, and they're all totally on board. And they're at the inauguration, and that all goes well. And then Elon Musk, I mean, the degree to which he's been just getting

away with it over and over, and getting away with beginning a transformation of the system, and succeeding in doing so without much backlash, some little bit of erosion in popular support. So we shouldn't ignore that. But nothing yet from the elites that's serious and significant. I would ask your friend, who in the business world is incentivized to go back to normal? Because it certainly isn't the people with the most power. Those people have now, unlike in the first term

when they kind of resisted Trump and, you know, like Tim Apple went and pretended to do a groundbreaking, but he was really it was barely going along to get along. They've all now figured out that this is the world and they know how

to maneuver in it. And by doing it, they're actually advantaging themselves. They're better off, right? Why would they want to go back? Now, one friend of mine said, you know, some of the law firms are having trouble getting younger people once it's capitulated. So maybe the signal there is they won't be better off in a year. I'll believe it when I, I believe that some young people are resisting. I believe that. But I believe in a year that they're, whether if Scatham's profits aren't higher than they've ever been, you know.

And conversely, I believe it if a couple of the firms that have resisted aren't paying a real price. So I continue. Yeah, but I'm with you. I think the only thing that will change it has to be real world effects. Maybe some of the stuff's just crazy enough. Tariffs and everything else. And these deals don't actually work, come out well, because guess what? The Saudis and Qataris aren't very reliable partners, and Trump himself isn't a very reliable guy. And maybe some of these people six months from now were thinking, well, that's just, none of that's come through from the sovereign wealth funds and so forth, you know. It's possible that there's disillusionment with authoritarians, you know, they don't always win, right? And they make mistakes. But I agree with you that the degree to which we're now in a transition to authoritarianism or in an early stage authoritarianism and not in a kind of breaking some

rules of a healthy liberal democracy, that for me is the fundamental thing that's underappreciated. Well, I mean, let's put it this way. You appreciate it. If this were a normal liberal democracy and Trump was, what is he approval rating right now? Minus eight? Yeah. Then you would, we're staring down the barrel of midterms. You would see some Republicans beginning to position themselves to run for president in 2028. and you would certainly, by the time we get close to the midterms, you would have at least three or four people who are your obvious top-tier contenders. That isn't going to happen.

That's not going to happen. None of them are going to position themselves to run for president. They're all going to sit and pretend that Donald Trump might run for president. That's a nice thought experiment to bring the point home. I mean, another one that just occurs to me as you're talking, and I mentioned Nixon earlier, we know what happens in a normal liberal democracy if people try to get away with stuff that incidentally is like one-tenth or one-one-hundredth of what Trump's doing, but leaving that aside.

But John Mitchell at Justice was a little bit Pam Bondi-like, and there were elements of it, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and so forth. We know what happens. What happens is what happened in 1973 and 74, which is it didn't work. You know what? He fired Elliot Richardson and Archibald Cox, and everyone went crazy, and the Republicans on the Hill even, and the judicial system was tough enough to deal with him and deal with it quickly with Judge Sirica and a million other things.

I mean, the media was more anyway, the business world did not rise up in Nixon's defense, though he'd been friendly with them and so forth. Yeah. So it is it is a good. Yes, I agree with you. We're not in. I hope we can get back to being in a normal liberal democratic world. But that isn't really the political world we're living in, I'm afraid. So, and this brings me to our final point. I'm going to enlist you in my decade long running conversation with Sarah, our friend, Sarah Longwell of the Bulwark. You noted that Trump is transitioning from being a political leader to an authoritarian leader. I propose that for some significant portion of his supporters, not all Trump voters, but if you're looking at the pie chart of Trump voters, a very large slice, maybe it's half, maybe it's more than half. They are no longer attracted to him for the

political reasons. They are now attracted to him for the authoritarian reasons. That it isn't about like, oh, well, he's doing what I like on life issues, or he's doing what I like on trade. It's now, oh, he's doing the authoritarian stuff. And I like that. Where do you, I mean, is this a yes, no, maybe? I'm proposing this. I'm not stating it as fact. I'm going to counter propose this sort of thought experiment, but this question, which I think is a genuine question and the right question. So let's just say it's 50%. And that makes, let's make it easy. And let's say that half the country voted for Trump, which is basically right. So 25% of the country is just loves, likes or loves the authoritarianism

and different flavors. And for different reasons, probably different bigotries, like different parts of it, but they, they're totally on board. I guess my only question would be sort of on this is, so on one hand, that's terrible. And that 25% is 50%, probably because of enthusiasm, is 60% in the Republican Party, and because they're much more tough-minded and much tougher-minded and much more intransigent than the other 40% or 50%. They win primaries and they throw their muscle around. And so for now, they dominate. One could, if one wanted to go in a slightly Sarah-like

direction, say on the other hand, there's still only 25% of the country. At the end of the day, you know, one could imagine the Republican Party deciding to be, the other 25% of the Republican Party deciding they have a better shot at winning in the future if they're a little more acceptable to the other 50% of the country. So which way does the pie chart cut, if I can put it that way? Mixing many metaphors there. and i think that's but i think it's but but i would say the history of authoritarianism is that they do start off with 25 i mean literally that's like the vote for the authoritarian parties often in these transitions to authoritarianism but that 25 is more ruthless is more uh unified is more willing to play hardball,

and that therefore the business leaders, many of whom probably personally are a little more than that other 25%, get sucked into that 25%. And then young people see what's the way up in the law firm or in the business world or certainly in politics. Someone I know, again, one of the rather few people I know who deals with the Trump White House a little said, you know, in the administration, he said, this person privately is kind of sympathetic to where my friend is, but, you know, he's 32 years old.

He's in an agency at a pretty high level, much higher than he would be, you might say, in normal time when they're in more competition for some of these jobs. He knows that Steve Miller wants to do A, B, or C. It's a four years. He has a chance to really move up pretty high. You could be, you know, a very high three or four years now.

He's going to cross Steve Miller. Maybe he'll rationalize it, you know? So again, all the dynamics are, what worries me the most is the dynamics are in favor of the bad 25%, not the good 25%. If, if the coalition of Trump is 50%. Yeah. Yeah. It does. And I, you know, I said last thing, but I'll do one more thing. I am persistently, I was reading, I don't know, one of the sub stacks that I follow who I think it was Noah Smith who wrote like 4,000 words about how Trump has turned America into a laughingstock and terrible governments. And then like the last three sentences, he's like, and of course, the Democrats have just been feckless and haven't, you know, haven't haven't presented a credible opposition. And I I'm a little bit tired of this because I think the reason people do this, and by this I mean blame Democrats, especially elected Democrats,

is because it's to avoid having to confront that the real blame lies with voters. Because I'm happy to stipulate the Democratic Party has not been perfect, maybe not even good. I criticize them for fecklessness as well. I would love it if they could play perfect baseball and only have leaders who are incredibly charismatic, smart and effective. And if they could only make the right choices at every decision point. But that's not real life. And that's not how any politics ever works. You know, every political figure is imperfect. Every political party is imperfect. The blame here really isn't on, honestly, not even on Republicans as much as, you know, as it is on voters. It's the voters who choose this stuff.

Like, I am sorry, but it is not like, you know, oh, if only Democrats could craft the perfect candidate with the perfect set of proposals, and then they could simply muzzle everybody who's on social media so that no progressive anywhere says anything stupid or offensive, and they know, and the economy is perfect, then in that case scenario, then they could really, you know, put a stop to this. And I'm sorry, that's not how things work in a liberal democracy. It's on the citizen ring. I mean, my version of what you're saying, if I can take it to the elites, though, and I don't disagree with what you said, is the but the Democrats argument, which is an argument

made by elites, right, who want to justify going along with Trump. When you think about it, these same elites, and some of them are friends or ex-friends or acquaintances of mine, have been involved in the Republican Party for 20, 30, 40 years. They know the Republican Party has been, when they were in the middle of it, when they were the most enthusiastic for George W. Bush or for Mitt Romney or for Newt Gingrich in 94. They knew it was an extremely imperfect combination of imperfect types. So the idea that, and what they think about the Democrats, would you, you know, if you get into a serum, they would say, yeah, well,

they like some of the Dems are okay. Some of them are, it's some are kind of a business. Some are a little crazy on the Elizabeth Warren side from their point of view. Some are pro-Israel. Some are not great on Israel, but again, all of that was true of the Republicans, right? I mean, and there they, they, they,