Bulwark Takes - Will Things Ever Go Back To Normal? | Bulwark on Sunday

Episode Date: March 3, 2025

Bulwark Managing Editor Sam Stein joined Bill Kristol to discuss Trump's meeting with Zelensky, the DOGE purge impact on global health and why incremental change might be better than radical moves.

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guides you, but keeps you in the driver's seat. Manage your business from one dashboard and keep it growing with built-in marketing features. It's time to turn your daydream into your dream job. Go to Wix.com. Hi, Bill Kristol here. Welcome to the Bulwark on Sunday, our live stream. And I'm very pleased to be joined by Sam Stein, my colleague. Sam actually watched the Oval Office event in real time, right? I was stuck at a conference. I was enjoying a conference, a little bit of a reprieve from Trump actually discussing some other things. And I found out about it pretty quickly. But what was it like to... So let's just begin, your dive right in if that's okay to uh from so sure it was i'll just say it wasn't much of a reprieve if you just get right back into it as soon as you step out of the conference but i'm glad that you

got that hour i appreciate it i appreciate the sympathy and the concern for my mental well-being but so what was it like you're there and you're when you're in the office that it was just so I'm sitting here And here's how it works is that you get pool reports, and I think I don't want to get too technical But you begin to see Updates and text on email about what's happening and this is from the you don't see in the pool And the reason the reason I'm yeah exactly and the reason to go through this is because this will give a sense of how radical and dramatic it was so the early pool reports are like oh zielinski and trump are talking about the minerals deal they're you know

there's some exchanges they're going back and forth it's nothing extraordinary um and then the pool reports start taking a turn uh and you start to see a dramatic exchanges ensued between Zelensky and Trump. And you're like, what? What's going on? And then you start then you get one. It's like J.D. Vance's is, you know, yelling at Zelensky and Zelensky is yelling back. And you're like, what?

This cannot be like because you just this is not ever happened in the office. And then you start to look, OK, well, where's the video? Right? Like, I need to see the video of it. And then you're starting to look, okay, well, where's the video, right? Like, I need to see the video of it. And then suddenly, at a certain point, the video comes out. And then you begin to really get a sense of just how grave the situation actually was. And the pool reports almost didn't do it justice, because, yes, it was a very tense exchange, but you couldn't really appreciate the theater of it and how crowded that room felt. And the fact that there were other cabin officials sitting around and that

Zelinsky was just there and the body language and seeing it in real time, that added an additional element to it that made it not just a tense exchange, but a momentous one, frankly. And so when you're watching it, you're getting bits and pieces coming in and then suddenly the whole picture. And it was just, I was floored by it. Yeah. I was struck how many just texts and emails I got in the next hour or two, including from not that political friends and including for some friends who were much more Trump adjacent, let's just say, than I am sort of really shocked and amazed by it. So talk about it. It seems like you said to me off yesterday you thought it was a setup. Explain.

Well, so first of all, I got the same text you did. Non-political friends who are like, did that really just happen? There's something vivid about the video that I think people are just kind of shocked to see. This is a country, a man we've admired a lot who refused to flee Kiev despite the advice of our State Department on February 25th, whom there's been bipartisan support for for three years in the U.S. Obviously, Trump was at a different place on

this than the Biden administration or than half the Republicans in Congress. But he had been sort of mixed in his signals to some degree. And then Zelensky was here to sign a deal, to sign a middle-ears deal. So he was accommodating Trump on that. Anyway, so then, and Zelensky was here to sign a deal, to sign a middle-list deal. So he was accommodating Trump on that. Anyway, so then that's why it's such a- So, yeah, so my theory of the, yeah, my theory of the case is that it, whether you want to

technically call it a setup or not, the preconditions were there for exactly what they wanted to happen, which was they wanted to admonish Zelensky and humiliate him. And it was very evident from from the get-go i mean when zielinski stepped out of his motorcade uh to get into the oval office trump was there to greet him but he didn't greet him in any sort of diplomatic way he mocked him for what he was wearing he said oh nice of you to dress up sort of laughed at him uh and you could tell from the jump uh that this was not gonna go particularly well um and then there was other little nuggets uh that sort of gave away the game i thought for

instance there was a poor report uh that some white house aides uh were whispering each amongst each other in the oval being like oh this is gonna get good you know like they were ready for the drama uh now i know subsequently there's been uh sort of some revisionist uh analysis here about well you know it was going fairly well for 30 35 minutes and then zielinski you know questioned vance and and that's what set it all off um but um i think that sort of is credulous to an extreme i think it's very evident that umance and Trump, but really Vance, honestly, wanted to have a confrontation. Vance actually asked Trump to interject and pushed Zelensky and then made this whole thing, well, he never even said thank you when he has to thank you. And, you know, ultimately, it didn't end well. I don't think anyone thinks it ended well. But I also

think the other thing to consider is that this was the ultimate home court advantage, right? I mean, here you have this guy who's coming into very hostile turf, honestly. He doesn't speak the native language. It's the old office. It's overly crowded. There's not just Vance and Trump, but Marco Rubio, other cabinet officials sitting around. There's dozens of cameras, and they are just on top of him. And maybe he should have come in with a different tack. Maybe he should have thought about not getting into it with Vance. But to me, at least, just analyzing it, it would seem pretty evident that they wanted to pick some sort of confrontation or fight with Zelensky to at

least lay the predicate to say, he's not a good serious negotiator. He's not interested in peace. Therefore, we can do X, Y, and Z. I think that last sentence is very important. I mean, people say, well, Trump got exasperated or Vance lost his temper. And Vance has always had more of an anti-Ukraine view than Trump and all this. But at the end of the day, Trump probably wants, it's pretty safe to say, he wants to lay the predicate domestically for justifying a radical change in position of the U.S. government on Ukraine, for maybe just walking away from Ukraine, maybe for siding with Putin against Ukraine. One way to do that is to have this confrontation in the Oval and immediately spin it. And this is what was striking to me, as Zelensky was rude, Zelensky isn't a partner for peace,

and therefore you don't sign the minerals deal, which Trump maybe wanted or maybe didn't really care about. But Zelensky is the guy who's the obstacle because it fits very much into the one condition Trump cited a week ago for Ukraine for the peace talks was going to be new elections in Ukraine. He's trying to have regime change in Ukraine to make it easier to sell them out and to come to a deal with Putin and a different, more accommodationist Ukrainian government, it seems to me. So that people who are thinking this is just psychological, Trump being Trump and Vance being Vance, I think they're missing. It fits into a, it's somewhat logical from their point of view. I think it fits into a pattern. Yeah. And I think the tell also is just how quickly every single cabinet official and Republican lawmaker is up with an identical tweet saying, thank God we have President Trump

standing up for the American interests. And then of course, everyone adopted this idea of, well, I mean, even Lindsey Graham was like, well, I think now we need to get new leadership in Ukraine if we want to have an actual enduring peace deal, as if Zelensky has been the obstacle, not Putin. I'd say especially Lindsey Graham, because since he doesn't probably really, really, really believe it to the degree, who knows what he really believes in. Who knows? I don't know anymore. But to the degree that he's always calculating about how to be in Trump's good graces, he saw, in a way, the point of it. The point of it is to discredit Zelensky. To discredit Zelensky as a partner for peace, to discredit Zelensky as an appropriate leader for Ukraine, and therefore

get a process, conceivably, of undermining UK. So that was the core of Lindsey Graham's tweet, right? Yeah. And for Graham, especially, I mean, there's just like a week ago, he was out there publicly praising Zelensky as like the most amazing leader in favor of Western values in his lifetime. How you can do a 180 based off of a singular meeting with Trump is remarkable to me. I guess I'm really interested to see. I know it's supposed to happen. I'm not sure what the status of it is, this upcoming Putin-Trump meeting, because obviously there will never be... He's not going to admonish Putin in any way similar to what

he did with Zelensky. He'll be highly accommodating is the expectation. But are we really going to have a U.S.-Russia alliance to push Ukraine into the peace negotiations where they have to go to the Europeans for assistance? It's hard to really fully comprehend and give justice to how quickly this all turned in a matter of months. And again, I think that meeting with Putin is going to be really remarkable for what it says about Trump. No, I think that's really true.

And also, I think in this meeting, some of the Europeans, I think, will notice this a little more, maybe than American commentators who are focusing understandably on the drama of it and Vance and so forth. The degree to which Trump excused Putin repeatedly for, you know, well, look, Putin's had a rough time. I mean,

this Russia hoax was an attack on Putin as well as on me. I mean, he really made it seem as if he and Putin are these two innocents who were, you know, I don't know, the justice department inexplicably decided to go after or something like that. I think at one point Trump said something akin to, Zelensky is too critical of Putin. He hates Putin too much to possibly make peace. It's like, yeah, you know, I think he probably is justified for hating Putin.

But yes, it's all, there's a weird, I guess it's not weird because we've lived with it for eight years now. There's a consistent thread of empathy that Trump has for Putin, where he sees himself as a sort of a co-traveler on this world journey with Vladimir Putin, and that they are the ones who need to restore some sort of semblance of order on the global stage. And Zelensky is the one who disrupted it. And that, I mean, I'm used to this from Trump at this point. I think the more newsy thing in a way has been how quickly this meeting has given all the Republicans, save a few, the permission structure to basically adopt something similar in terms of their positioning. We'll talk about that a little more as you follow this closely on the Hill and not just the Hill, but sort of conservative thought leaders and so forth, influencers. Yeah.

How much, is there any real reaction the other way? I mean. The one person who has spoken out forcefully on the Republican side against Trump is Lisa Murkowski, who put out a tweet, who said, I think she was such a sickened by or something like that uh the spectacle and that happened but to to a person i think most republican officials um said oh it's really unfortunate what happened but zielinski really you know did this to himself uh and this was a mistake and maybe we should actually consider you know getting new leadership

in there. Some of them are couching it by saying, well, we still stand with Ukraine and therefore we're opposed to Russia. But I don't see any appetite for new aid for Ukraine at all on the Hill. And even if there was, it would have to go through Trump. And I can't imagine at this point that he'd sign off on it. But the crazier things have happened, I suppose. But it really seems like there's very little opt out on the Hill to even push the envelope

on new aid for Ukraine. So we're at this weird place where the Republican Party's position on this is that they support Ukraine, but they won't do anything to support Ukraine. And they also think the Ukrainian leader might need to go. It is pretty astonishing. I think it was Senator Wicker, I think who's chairman of the Armed Services Committee, has been a big Ukraine supporter, a genuine one.

Went there, has been there a couple of times, I think more. He had a, if I'm not mistaken, he tweeted a photo of himself from the morning, from Friday mid-morning, meeting with a bipartisan group of senators,

including him, meeting with Zelensky at a sort of favorable, this was very nice to see, you know, Zelensky,, meeting with Zelensky at a sort of favorable, this was very nice to see, you know, Zelensky, good meeting with Zelensky or something. And I think he or his staff deleted, presumably on orders, deleted the tweet after the Oval Office meeting, which is sort of a level of, I don't know what,

sort of Orwellian, like, I'm going to make this photo go away because I was being nice to Zelensky six hours before, right? I presume that the White House was the one who instructed him to delete it right i mean like they're not unless they're so proactively scared of trump but it's either way it's like such a bad look and um it does raise the question of like are there principled foreign policy positions that um for these republican lawmakers that where they're unmovable on it and and I'm not sure at this point I mean I really am not I think that's you know I

think China instantly do we that would be a good so their claim has been for some of them at least a little uncertain about this Europe stuff and you know the Europeans have to carry more of the burden but China we're really tough on on China. I am curious to see if and I think when Trump accommodates Xi and says he's basically not so keen at defending Taiwan 10,000 miles away and all that. How many of these China likes? Okay, well, you know what? The Asians can worry about Asia and the Europeans can worry about Europe. Right. Let's say in theory, I don't want to get too far ahead, but let's say in theory, China does something, some provocative military action in and around Taiwan.

And Trump naturally says, well, that's halfway across the globe. And we don't want to start World War III. Let's not be fools. And the time it is. And we have a trade deficit with Taiwan. And they've been very bad. And they're super in the way of the head. They've been bad to us.

Yeah, yeah. It's about time. Right, OK. If they want our help, they can pay for it. I just don't see a future in which any serious Republican leadership would be like, no, no, Mr. President. That's just not the current political climate we are in. I tried to read up a little bit on what the Europeans were saying

Saturday and Sunday, and a friend of mine happens to be in London, sent me some clips from British TV and then then another, someone else I know has translated, hopefully, some headlines from the German press. What were they saying? They're amazed. For them, they've been sort of half hoping that they can manage the Trump situation. He'll maybe get, you know, there has been bipartisan support as recently as less than a year ago for ukraine here maybe they'll be a deal to get some aid then they'll do more i think they've i think they and appleman made this point earlier this week in that conversation i have with her i mean they're stepping they're stepping up and saying things even a week before this yeah obviously the european leaders didn't say before we have to really maybe take the lead we can't really count on the us and defer to the

us as we used to merit said that after his election victory in Germany. But still, there was still a sense of we still, now it's sort of, you know, the alliance is over. They are looking ahead. They think, I mean, is NATO sustainable? What does NATO mean? Do we really think Trump is going to follow Article 5 if the Russians start messing around in Estonia? Do we, I mean, just the degree to to which everything stuff that we've all seen happening and confident on a lot of the poll work i would say and our friends eric adleman and ellie cohen have been terrific on this on on

the shield of the republic podcast and we've written a lot about it kathy young in particular but many others are currently but it's all it all kind of has come clear, I would say, this weekend, really a moment. The flash, the light sort of became unmistakable. Well, I thought the reaction from German leadership was very telling, where they just were, like you said, they're just like, well, we cannot rely on the U.S. anymore, and we have to plan for not doing that. As we're speaking, NATO Secretary General Mark Root said, you know, that they believe a number of different countries are going to up their defense spending, which is what Trump wants. But also, I think they're doing it because they believe that there's not going to be really any US support going forward. And then I thought, subtly, but actually not so subtly, because he's got the world's biggest megaphone. But over the weekend, Elon Musk was endorsing US withdrawing from NATO and the U.N., you know, that's the president's top advisor. That's not nothing. It seems unreal to me, but maybe it shouldn't, because this has been sort

of where this has been heading directionally for some time. Obviously, this is exactly what Russia wants, and they must be just overjoyed in the Kremlin right now to see all this happen. They've been cheerful in their public comments. I think – Oh, yeah. But I think you're right. The responses that they've recorded to the Zelensky meeting have been unbelievable. Yeah.

I mean, you're right. We saw so many times in the first four years that Trump would move in this direction, say something. An advisor might like it. He'd get pulled back. But then he was pulled back by the Mattises. And then he would fire Mattis. But then at the end of the day, he ended up with Mark Esper. And he would fire Tillerson. And then at the end of the day, it's Pompeo. I mean, Bolton replaced McMaster. I mean, the degree to which he just never quite was able to put a team together, or't want to maybe to really pursue this agenda.

But we warned, we said, we argued the second term would be totally different from the first. And I think this is a very good instance of it. As is domestic policy, maybe we should just take a minute on that. I mean, you've been covering it very, very closely, what Doge has been doing in some of these areas, firing workers, but also the real effects on public health. I mean, just say a word about that. I mean, and that people keep waiting for it to kind of, okay, they've done the initial burst, but now it's going to go back to normal. But it doesn't feel that way, does it?

I've been trying to figure out what the, because obviously at some point you imagine there's going to be, we'll hit like some sort of new equilibrium, right? Where they're done and we have this totally revamped government that's you know just completely cut down in size and we'll now we have to figure out how to live with this but they're not done they're not even close and i think they're just getting started um and part of that is because um what elon has done is actually not um actually the big project.

Elon's just kind of out there firing away and throwing whatever he can against the wall. And a lot of it's not actually sticking. A bunch of the stuff that he's cut, they've had to rehire. He's been shot down in court a bunch of times. His efforts to terrorize psychologically the government workforce have succeeded to a degree. But we've seen, interestingly enough, cabinet officials push back have succeeded to a degree, but like, you know, we've seen, interestingly enough, cabinet officials push back on it to some degree. That's like the appetizer. That's the amuse-bouche or whatever the hell you want to call it.

We're getting to the Russ Vought stuff where he's going to systematically really, really pare down these agencies. Incredible reshuffling of different departments that will see reductions that would make the early ones look small and um there are things that i think are people aren't going to appreciate until they get the consequences of it so i'll just give you one example um we had a conversation with Matthew Capucci, who's at the Capital Weather Gang, about these cuts that they're making to the National Weather Service. And they're absurd. The National Weather Service gives us obvious, important information on weather patterns across the country that helps innumerable number of industries, shipping,

anything like that involves weather, right? Disaster uh shipping you know anything like that involves weather right uh disaster preparedness fema things like that um they're just gonna cut thousands of jobs from that and the idea and this is a rest thought thing is that they want to turn the weather service into a for-profit enterprise more or less where we would sell weather data to companies like accuweather so that they can use that in their forecasting um that is insane uh whether uh data is a public service we pay for it because it's important it's no different than paying for a postal service right uh but these are like the projects here and there that they're producing and you you're starting to see real impacts, but it's just going to get much, much worse. Yeah, I'm struck that people a lot of the coverage, understandably, has been

the effect in government, government workers being laid off or let's call it the direct effects. But the indirect effects, the second order effects are really striking. With some of these cuts and changes are both very large and very radical. It's what so the universe was, I was at this little conference, there was a professor from a major university and she said that all her hiring and expenditures of her department, which is not in the sciences have been frozen because of the cuts to reimbursement for the sciences, for the biomedical stuff, for the NIH stuff.

They have a big medical school, this university, they just looking at the whole budget. Now it's reasonably wealthy university they can end up you know tightening their belts on but it's not a disaster some assistant professor of political science doesn't get hired this year i guess you know and it doesn't maybe not a disaster for a bunch of uh young but if you extrapolate you know hundreds of universities at the medical school and in the science departments, biomedical and stuff. And, you know, people are looking abroad for jobs. People are thinking about just not go into, you know, public spirited research and go work for a drug company, which isn't terrible.

But again, I mean, the degree of grain drain and of people looking to leave who's promising you know they've invested 10 15 years in that age they're on a pretty good ladder to near the top and suddenly what's you know so i think i think people haven't really is yeah i haven't i wasn't i haven't fully sort of internalized kind of the indirect effect of this you know yeah no i i and this is i've spent a lot of time talking to people in this field specifically, and I think this is, we're going to look back and really be shocked at the damage we've done with respect to science and scientific research. The, yes, I, at the University of Iowa, this is an interesting, this was one of my anecdotes for my piece, but once it became clear

that NIH was going to cap indirect costs that's administrative costs to help support the research the university of iowa sent out a note saying we will stop hiring graduate research assistants which is insane i mean we're talking about people who are coming up and want to do science and they're just not going to be hired if you think about doing that over every university, now I'm not saying every university is going to take that type of step, but we're going to cut off pathways for thousands of promising young scientists. And then that's just one agency, that's NIH.

I mean, this is the same thing is happening at NASA, for instance, the NSF. I've been told reliably that foreign governments are ramping up trying to recruit people to come to their country because they have more welcoming funding climates and frankly i've talked to a lot of scientists who feel like that's what they have to do because they're not in it to like you know make money they're that's why they wanted the government job is because they wanted to do research that was you know maybe long shot research but that's the only entity that do research that was maybe long shot research, but that's the only entity that would support that type of long shot research because private enterprise wants to support research that they could then use to turn a profit. And that's not always the case.

So our brain drain will be epic and bad. And it's one of those things that you don't feel in the moment. But down the line, boy, we're going to look back and say, why did we just eat all our corn seed? That was so stupid. Yeah, it's so stupid. I mean, just two footnotes to that. The stupidity partly is the macho. We're doing it all at once. Shock and awe.

You know, the fact is, if the University of Iowa were told, we're going to take your re-inferring rate down from, I'm making this up, from 52 percent to 42 percent next year. And we want to aim for getting it all the way down to 25 percent in four years. OK, they'll make different. They'll plan accordingly. I would still we could still have an argument about whether this is going to hurt our biomedical research in the future. Right. But at least to do it all at once is just I mean, what's the point of that? There's not the savings are trivial, utterly trivial in terms of a few billion dollars and a massive budget, right? So it's just to, what, punish and penalize public-spirited scientists? I mean... I don't get it. I don't get it. And who voted for this? Like, no one ran on this. Trump didn't do this in his first term. I mean, he did one or two gestures in this direction of abrupt changes, but really he didn't and got talked out of it or Congress resisted.

Congress could resist some of this. Do you think a little bigger chance of congressional resistance here than on the foreign policy stuff? There was like a little. Yes, I definitely than the foreign policy stuff. I mean, on the USAID stuff, I mean, USAID has been dismantled. Let's let's just call it what it is. And the people I've talked to there, they're in a state of complete PTSD over this because it just happened so fast and there was no one standing up for them. I mean, occasionally there was Jerry Moran in Kansas

because he had food from a state that needed to be shipped overseas, but no one was standing up for them. With the NIH and the science, you do see, because every state has a major university that depends on this stuff, you do see some Republicans saying, I'm not totally on board with this. Like Katie Britt, for instance, down in Alabama, there was a number of universities there that rely heavily on these things and they stood to lose hundreds of millions of dollars. And she said, can we get a carve out? I don't think we should get a carve out. I think we should just not do the policy.

So there is some constituency here that's standing up, but I've been totally unimpressed by the opposition. I think what is the downside for advocating for science funding? I mean, again, it's not saving, cutting it is not saving you a lot of money. If anything, every economic model shows that investing in this stuff actually pays off fivefold down the road.

And there's no rhyme or reason to how they're doing it. It's just like you said, it's just a complete ax. Boom, 15%. I saw there was some study released Friday. I don't think it had anything to do with politics. This is just when they got the data. Sloan Kettering testing an mRNA, I don't really understand this stuff, but an mRNA vaccine on cancer, pancreatic cancer, which is one of the worst.

Pancreatic cancer, yeah. Hardest, lowest cure rate seeming, seeming remarkable levels of success. You think people might say, no, I have no, I assume directly or indirectly there were NIH funds involved in this. So if it's like some catering, at least an indirect support. And I don't know, it feels like that would be something people should start saying and look at you really going to this is of course, it cuts also on the vaccine issue. It's just like Robert F. Kennedy is slowing down vaccine research. So, you know, go after anything as quickly as possible without any sort of insight into what's happening. And quite literally, I mean, it's been reporting about these doge boys who are just there sort of

like checking boxes, like actually going to need that. And it's like, they don't really know what they're cutting. I mean, I think that's fair to say. So we have that on one hand. And on the second hand, we have this burgeoning movement of anti-vaccine skepticism that is coloring a lot of this research. And so when you have these mRNA vaccine breakthroughs, it's running right into the fact that you have Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at the head of HHS, who clearly is oppositional to this type of stuff. And then of course, all this is happening as we're seeing really shocking global and domestic health moments, right? The measles outbreak in Texas is bad. It's really bad. We have an RFK saying and being like, well, we've had measles outbreaks a couple of years in a row.

Now it's like, well, we haven't had an infant die from measles. We haven't. And he's not, I was talking to some folks like, you know, a normal HHS secretary would be out there publicly saying people need to get the vaccine. People need to get their kids vaccinated for measles. Normal HHS secretary would probably go down to Texas, frankly, and see what's going on, hold a press conference, promote public health, promote science-based public health. We don't have that right now. So that's domestically. And then on the foreign, there's so much happening problematically in the foreign. But most immediate is there's been outbreaks of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo. And we pulled out of the WHO. We don't have

monitors to do this stuff, and nor do we seem to care about these things as if we didn't just experience issues with Ebola a decade ago. So we are in a bad spot in terms of our public health expertise and in terms of the resources we're spending on it. Yeah, I hate to end on a gloomy note, but I think it is. Is that gloomy? I mean, it's important. I think what it has in common with our policy stuff is, you know, you don't know what damage you're doing when you take an ax to NATO.

Exactly. In terms of world stability and nuclear proliferation and a million other issues and say nothing could see will be terrible outcome in Ukraine and you don't know what damage you're doing to domestic you know health and well-being when you take an ax to a whole bunch of programs you know the measles thing was just unbelievable I mean the idea that you wouldn't say look this is an outbreak I think we can keep it on here you can try to be sure people a bit but we're have a special task force set up here at LAH.

We're monitoring this 24-7. We know, and some of that's just talk, but that really is actually important. And we're coordinating with the Texas Department of Public Health, and if they need more experts, we'll send some people in there. I mean, that's what a normal government administration would do. And that's one reason we do have pretty good public health in this country, actually, is that we stop a lot of things.

We nip them in the bud, right? One hundred percent. And we're just not... And for some reason, I mean, again, this goes back to the idea that actually incremental change, incremental is good. Dramatic change can be bad. And just because you have this sweeping vision for cutting off the bureaucracy or dramatically reversing decades of proven scientific research or unengaging from the world stage,

and you think it sounds radical and cool, and you want to mix it up, that doesn't mean it's good. Sometimes stability mixed with some incremental change is what you need, not this. That's a good note to end on. Sam Stein, thanks for joining me today on Bulwark on Sunday. Thanks, Bill.