The Bulwark Podcast - Adam Kinzinger: Bat**** Crazy

Episode Date: June 20, 2024

Felon 45 didn't even really like being president and no one is taking his ludicrous tariff plan seriously—but Republicans can't stop tripping over each other to show him their fealty. Plus, Putin's desperate trip to North Korea, Netanyahu shows his ingratitude to Biden, the national debt keeps growing, and Trump's fond memories for his glory days on The Apprentice.

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and you had to carry me on your shoulders, but you did a good job. You were the wind beneath my wings. Sometimes you got to do it for each other. I needed Will Salatin on Monday. I had a jet lag plus hangover. I did okay? Yeah, you did. You found something deep within to pull that off, but I'm sure you had to take a couple-hour nap after. I did okay? Yeah, you did. You found something deep within to pull that off,

but I'm sure you had to take a couple-hour nap after. I did. I took a lengthy nap afterwards. Okay, before we get to business, two plugs real quick. Next week, Kenz and I are doing an Ask Me Anything for the founding members of the Bulwark. We will also be live in Dallas, Texas. That's right. Big announcement right now.

In Dallas, me and Adam in the flesh, drinking beers, September 5th. So mark that on your calendar. And so if you want to do either of those things, go to thebullwork.com. And on the top, you can click on Founders or Events for more information on how you become a member, how you come see us live. If you just want to listen to the podcast, that's fine too. But yeah, those are your ops for more Adam and Tim time. And get it now because it's going to sell out in 48 hours. We're going to sell out, baby. The Denver thing is going to be bumping tomorrow. It is.

I've been getting lots of texts about it. All right. Let's have a little laugh to start, huh? People have been telling me I've been a little too dour this week. So we're going to start with a little laugh. Let's take a listen. There's a fellow out there with a new book called Apprentice in Wonderland. It's a retrospective on The Apprentice and how important it was. So you'll not be surprised at all to hear that Donald Trump did six interviews with him for this book. Six! Dude's got nothing better to do. Running for president. Won't talk to any media outlets, but if you want to call him and talk about The Apprentice apprentice he will make time for you so so let's just hear a couple of the highlights from the republican uh presidential nominees discussion about his past life as a reality show host let's listen first his thoughts about joan rivers there was some cognitive questions about where he was and what he was thinking and um he would he would from time

to time become confused because you wrote at one point about Joan Rivers, him telling you that she voted for him in 2016, I believe, even though— He confidently told me and declared that Joan Rivers voted for him when he ran for president, and Joan Rivers died in 2014, so she would not have been able to vote for Donald Trump. Yeah, and you—because you talked about his memory. You wrote that, you know, on some days I have the feeling he has no idea who he's even talking to that he actually forgot or didn't remember that the two of you had spoken at your first sit down interview. Right. So my first sit down was in May. He wasn't doing a lot of interviews. And then we sat down

again towards the end of the summer. And when I sat down, I, you know, there was a very blank expression on his face. So I asked, do you remember when we spoke recently? And he said, no, I have no memory of that. And he couldn't recall. He said, it was a long time ago. And then we had to start from scratch. So, the interview started from square one, where he started telling me the same exact stories that I heard in our first interview. Two observations from me there. One, if he was a young blonde woman, I think Trump would have remembered him. So, the memory is, you know, just, it's fading. One, if he was a young blonde woman, I think Trump would have remembered him. So the memory is, you know, just it's fading. It's not fully gone.

And two, I love just the quick gay fact check there. It's like, no, Joan Rivers death, 2014, actually. Sorry, bro. But what do you think about that? Now, we had the CEO meeting this week where some CEOs also had a similar piece of feedback. First off, like, how do you even get on to Joan Rivers? Like, what is the stream of consciousness that leads to Joan Rivers voted for me? Right? Like, that's a weird lie, weird person to pick. If you're gonna lie, you know, you can make up anybody.

Yeah, I mean, he always says Jesus does. So just stick with that or something. But like, here's the thing, what he does very well that Joe Biden doesn't is like older men, they have these memory lapses. I have memory lapses and I'm 46. But, you know, Joe Biden will stop and think, right? He'll just kind of not freeze, but he'll stop and be like, okay, where was I? Donald Trump just garbage talks his way through it until he's either on to something totally different or he finally catches his place. But I think this is actually one of the more things that maybe things like the debate, maybe the next whatever is going to bring it out. But Donald Trump is not the mentally sharp guy that his people are trying to betray. And again, he's just good at covering that up. And by the way, how do you do six interviews for a book? I'm not a bajillionth as famous as Donald Trump trump and i would never sit for more than like two interviews i'd be like okay if you can't do it in two we're done right like i can't i can't do it just like oh

wait we're gonna talk about me and my reality career just come on by come on by mar-a-lago you can sit in the golf cart with me whether it was a lie about like i don't not sure if it's worse to be to create a lie that joan rivers voted for you or to be confused and dementia riddled and believing that joan rivers really voted for you both of those have their own flaws let's listen to the other clip from the author here because this i think is the joan rivers thing's kind of funny this one speaks to some deeper derangement related to the 2020 election lies let's listen to his confusion about what his role is in afghanistan and he was happiest when he talked to me about hosting the apprentice it was the thing that brought him the most joy we watched clips of the show together we watched the theme song

and he really lit up he watched firing the firing of Omarosa. And then he would talk about what he did at the White House and he would become gloomy and resentful and unhappy and referred to Afghanistan and Joe Biden. But he also seemed to think that he still had some foreign policy powers. And there was one day where he told me he needed to go upstairs to deal with Afghanistan, even though he clearly didn't. He told you that while you were interviewing him at Trump Tower, he told you he needed to go upstairs to deal with Afghanistan? With the, quote, the Afghanistan is how he referred to it. That is the strangest thing, Tim.

Look, by the way, I sat in the Oval Office where Donald Trump said he wanted to abandon Afghanistan. I mean, that's a whole other story. But the fact that he's trying to put this on Joe Biden, first off, this is all Donald Trump. Joe Biden could have changed it, but Donald Trump left him, set him up to fail. The other point I want to make on that is he lit up when he talked about The Apprentice and he was dour when he talked about being president. This kind of checks with what people say where they're like, he hated being okay he he didn't enjoy it he's always wanted to be a hollywood entertainer and i think you see that yeah i think you see that in him and

it's like i wish he would have just been a hollywood entertainer i you make him as famous as tom cruise but at least he's not damaging the country look with the i gotta go deal with the afghanistan i, either he is, like you mentioned, so adept at lying that he just pulled that one out of thin air, or he is truly confused. And I guess only time's going to tell, but it's not something I think we should paper over lightly when we're talking about who's going to be in charge of the most powerful nuclear arsenal in the world. Yeah, I agree with that. One of my buddies texted me about this kind of topic about how he did all these interviews and how he lit up you know remembering the highlights of his life like when he fake fired amarosa love that let's watch the highlight reel from when i pretended to fire

amarosa on a tv show maybe we could have gotten out of this problem if i don't know a network had just given him another show yeah maybe this would have been the greatest and best use of the nbc comcast dollars instead of put him in top gun three like you know fatty's revenge or something like that like great just do it you'd be famous you know you can fly a big you'd have to fly a big heavy jet but you could do that and rich guys jeffrey katzenberg over there the biden campaign let's get on this let's have a let's have a meeting about this. Yeah, it reminded me of the Afghanistan thing. It reminded me of, it went to cover Lin Wood in South Carolina after the pandemic, like in 2021.

And Lin, again, it's, you know, who the hell knows what these people like. Do they believe this? Is it a put on? Is it a little bit of both? But at this event, he was advocating this notion that Trump was still really in charge. The thing that's worth why it's worth taking it kind of seriously, that Trump is like delusional and thinks that he's, you know, the generals are still reporting to him or whatever, is that that's like a common trope in MAGA world. The deep part of MAGA, like not Fox, not even really Newsmax. But once you get down the pipeline into real kooky world, into the Telegram feeds and, you know, the Mike Flynn events, like there are people that really do think that like that Trump is still in charge of the QAnon crowd. Yeah, they do. And it's weird.

It's like a five or 10 year old that plays, you know, pretend like walking around the house pretending like he's a cop or something like that. And I guess I don't know the psychology behind it. But like, when you spend years convincing yourself that something is right, you spend years accepting lies, and in some cases, repeating lies over and over. I've got to imagine, I mean, there's a reason that the Bible warns against lying. And I think it's more than just God likes truth. It's because it does something to you. These people that are like habitual liars, for instance, they often say like they can't help themselves. They have to lie.

It feels like it changes the brain chemistry in some way. And it's like people are so desperate for community that they become unmoored from reality. You see that in this QAnon circles, this idea that you and I have been accused of drinking baby's blood and harvesting adrenal chrome, which by the way, is exactly the plot to Monsters, Inc. But these people believe that there are kids that you scare them and they release adrenaline and then you inject that adrenaline into your body.

This is some kooky stuff. But look, if I truly believed the Democrats were harvesting children's blood, I would probably have a tendency to get violent because why wouldn't you, right? That's the scary part about it. And maybe he just doesn't know when he, you know, it's hard for him to check back and forth because he's talking to Mike Flynn. You know what I mean? So he's got to do the pretend game sometimes and other times. It's hilarious and it's pathetic, but it's also a little alarming just listening to caitlin collins our friend i did want to ask you about one of the things because i was watching you yesterday with my old pal scott jennings i'm kind of jealous

of you and kind of jealous of caitlin you know that you guys that still get to spar with people like on ms the you know the magas don't come right they don't give it a shot what's that been like like have you do you feel like you've still gotten to kind of go back and forth with folks a little bit or a little bit but it's like when you get in a fight like an argument you know 10 minutes later you're like oh i should have said that right that's kind of the thing that haunts you because like at the moment you can push back but yeah i mean like yesterday it was was scott and i and we were talking about this good McGuire race or whatever. You know, he's going to tow the party line and I've got to call out reality.

I enjoy doing that because he was stone-faced. I think I said something like it's picking between dysentery or the flu. So take your choice. And then, you know, we were talking about how people are unwilling to go outside a mog. And I said, this is exactly how you build a cult. And he said, well, I think of Donald Trump more of a party boss, which I guess I get that analogy too. But no, it's a cult. A party boss still had people that would get jobs from him.

And that's why they liked him. They're just scared to death of this guy. So yeah, I enjoy it. But at the same time, it's frustrating because as you know, you get like 20 seconds to respond to something. And usually it would take 20 minutes to really get into it. Okay. Well, if any of the mags in the green room want to come on the Bulwark podcast, I have some muscles that need to be stretched out. You know, it's like if you, you know, get an atrophy.

It's like if you don't exercise for a while. Speaking of that good McGuire race, I don't want to talk to you about it. This is Bob Good was one of your colleagues for people that don't know this race neck and neck race bob good was the you know very fine gentleman who primaried our friend denver riggleman because denver officiated a gay wedding that was like literally the reason why that this primary happened um the pictures came out of denver officiating a gay wedding and bob good is like you know we can't accept that. Good wins that primary.

Here's how Ron Filipkowski describes Bob Good. He's as right-wing as it gets, chair of the House Freedom Caucus, rock-solid right-wing voting record. He also opposed McCarthy. But then he endorsed DeSantis against Trump. And so that was his big, that was his gay wedding officiating. Bob Good endorsed DeSantis against Trump. And so that was his big, that was his gay wedding officiating. Bob Good endorsed DeSantis against Trump. And so this guy, McGuire, challenged Good literally only on the premise of the fact that he will be totally servile to Donald Trump in every single way and completely serve Donald Trump. And as we stand right now, it looks like we're going to be in a recount, but by a very narrow margin, McGuire is going to win over Goode, whose only crime to MAGA was endorsing DeSantis. That's not party boss, that's cult, right?

Yeah, it's cult. And they spent $10 million in this race between the two sides. And I don't know how that breaks down. I think McGuireire obviously had a lot more but think about this like when you and i were kids in politics like we may spend 10 well we wouldn't spend 10 million but whatever the equivalent was at the time on a race because the difference is somebody that's like against trade versus for trade or somebody you know whatever the issue is the only thing that differentiates these two is that, like you said, Bob Good, for a brief moment in time, endorsed DeSantis. The second DeSantis went out, Bob Good was deeply in with Donald Trump. And Donald Trump saw that as a slight. There's also another unique side, which is Kevin McCarthy came in and played pretty heavy as a way to enact revenge, which I don't blame

McCarthy for doing that. Because Good was one of the eight or whatever it was that originally, one of the Gates eight that originally, yeah. Yeah. He kind of like led the charge. But look, when I left Congress, Goode was the batshit craziest member of Congress. And now he's not batshit crazy enough. And this is like, I say this to my former colleagues all the time. It's like, why are you guys staying in? Because literally the price of admission now as a Republican is 100% fealty to a man. And you can't vary from it. This is how you build a cult.

And that's why it is a complete cult now. Because enough people in the cult have been executed that tried to escape or tried to do something outside of that. And now everybody's just completely in soon. They'll all drink the Kool-Aid. It's the Ken Buck thing for me. It's so similar. I mean,

maybe by the time you got there, Ken was more towards the middle of the caucus, but like, so I'm from Colorado, right? No, never. Uh,

but Colorado and like Ken Buck was in that 2010 class with, I'm not a witch, Christina O'Donnell and Sharon Engel. That was like this, that first wave of tea party candidates that primaried more mainstream Republicans. He was priming against Jane Norton at the time, who is the mainstream lieutenant governor of a guy that I'd worked for when I was a kid.

And he wins that, then loses the Senate race and ends up getting in the House. But it's like everybody in that race, it's like, this guy is a lunatic. This guy is bad shit. He wants to burn everything down. Like he's not, you know, and then he ends up being the one that's like, I've got to leave Congress. Things have gotten too crazy for me, you know, and now good as a guy, it's like, he's not crazy enough. We got to replace him. It really is astonishing. Yeah. And if you think about like when Ken Buck came, he, he wrote a book. Like, I don't know. We were all kind of making fun of him because he wrote a book his freshman year. But he wrote a book and it was like talking about the cocktail parties of Washington.

And, you know, these people get together and consume alcohol. And we were making fun of that because it's like, what a prude. You know, yeah, we all drink. And look, he wasn't super good during impeachment. He wasn't super good during impeachment he wasn't super good during january 6th but i do give him credit because he eventually hit a point where he's like my moral conscious won't allow this and the question to me tim is why does everybody else's moral conscious allow it i don't i don't get it yeah it's like if ken buck if ken buck is like this this is getting a little

too yeah too lunatic loony tunes for me isn't that a moment for self-reflection, I would guess, with some of your other colleagues? You would think so. And what about, yeah, the Tom Coles? Who's a good guy but plays the game? The people that are there that are playing the game, how can you guys do that? Obviously, it's foreign to me, but some people can make it work.

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Here's a special limited time deal for our listeners. Right now, get up to 60% off your Babbel subscription, but only for our listeners at babbel.com slash bulwark. Get up to 60% off at babbel.com slash bulwark, spelled B-A-B-B-E-l dot com slash bulwark. Rules and restrictions may apply. Speaking of the evolution of the party, the tariffs topic is pretty interesting to me. Joe Perticone wrote earlier this week for the bulwark, you should get his newsletter if you haven't. He went back and read one of the articles he wrote when he was at business insider maybe six years ago now in 2018 where he's interviewing

republican senators who were unhappy with trump's tariffs right it was marco and it was all these guys and then he went back to the same people now and obviously all of them have changed their tune there's nobody that's speaking out about the fact that trump has a blanket tariff proposal he they floated this proposal of eliminating the income tax replacing with tariffs steve ratner put this out this week trump proposal to replace income taxes with tariffs would be a tax hike on the bottom 90 percent and a tax break for the top 10 percent the top one percent would save 20%. The bottom 20% would lose 25%. I mean, to call it regressive is just an understatement.

It's insane. It's anti-growth. It's everything. It's just people are lock, stock, and two smoking barrels on this thing. It is. I mean, you think about the inflationary pressure that this would bring. And here's the weird thing, Tim. So back in 2017 when we did

tax reform which by the way i'll defend tax reform to the end of the day because i still think it was really beneficial to stuff the trump tax reform yeah the one yeah because it's like the main thing wasn't the personal tax it was the corporate tax because he had all the corporate inversions that stopped anyway that's that's another subject and the salt yeah yeah so sticking it to the connecticut people yeah i was an illinois guy Illinois guy, so it wasn't great for me. Yeah, you were kind of sticking it to yourself then, actually. That gives you a little bit of credit. That gives you a little bit of credit.

Country above party, brother. Country above self. So one of the things that Paul Ryan wanted to do was a border adjustment tax. I don't know if you remember this. I do remember this. Basically, they have a VAT tax overseas, but yet when they ship that good over to the United States, they strip the VAT tax. And so it kind of unfairly competes here. And so what they were trying to do was to say, okay, if you're going to strip the VAT tax, we're going to add that back at the border. So it's kind of a tariff,

but it puts, you know, imports on equal footing with domestically produced stuff. And it would have raised like a trillion bucks. It actually made sense. The people that stopped it are the very same people. It was Southern Republicans. They are the very same people now that are all in on this tariff thing. They stopped this because of Walmart. And this actually was a reasonable thing, which is like a light VAT tax. It would have been great because they have no moral principles.

At the time, it was like, oh, Walmart doesn't want this. Now, it's because Donald Trump made a, it's ludicrous to think that you're just basically going to have a sales tax and that's going to cover everything. And that is going to crush poor people. It is going to crush poor people that now go to McDonald's and have, you know, are complaining because they have to spend eight bucks are now going to have to spend $16 while the hedge fund manager can easily afford to go from 50 bucks to 100 bucks for his lunch because now all of his stuff is tax free. It's insane. It's not even serious policy.

This isn't even something that would be welcomed in the old Heritage Foundation to be debated because it's so ludicrous. So that's my question is it because it's so ludicrous that more mainstream people are not speaking out and i understand why marco rubio is not speaking out and i don't really understand but i guess he wants to be donald trump's vice president because he hopes trump dies or because his brain's been broken one of those two things or maybe both but like the walmart ceo went to the Trump little gathering the other day. Why are not, you know, just more business guys, you know, with public personas, with, you know, public platforms speaking out just about how disastrous this would be both for business and for consumers. Do you think?

It's probably two things. It's a little bit fear right i don't want to go against trump and especially if you think you're the walmart ceo and you know to you the most important thing is not ukraine or any principles or truth it's all you know i want donald trump in there but why wouldn't joe biden be better for the walmart ceo than donald trump i think so yeah because i actually think a surviving democracy is probably better, you know, for Walmart, but they don't think that way. Not like Walmart's struggling right now. Right. No kidding. And, but I think the other thing really is that nobody's taking it seriously. Like you kind of alluded at the beginning. It's like,

they're like, this is, this will never happen. It's Donald Trump being Donald Trump. But at some point, can we as Americans say, if nobody takes what the guy running for president says seriously, maybe he shouldn't be president of the United States? That's a problem. Yeah, right? Like, it's an issue. Oh, God. Okay. A little something. There was some really bad debt news this week. The United States were on pace to add trillions of dollars to the national debt over the next decade and were borrowing more quickly than previously expected. The bigger projected deficits were driven by the student loan cancellation, $100 billion, the cost of new aid packages for Ukraine and Israel, higher than expected outlays for Medicaid, and slight softening of the economy. You know, the numbers are just preposterous.

It's just no way that the math works on this. The Republicans obviously aren't going to do anything about it. So, like, we need a couple of Democrats, some liberals to actually start taking this a little more seriously. Yeah. I mean, here's the thing is, even if you take the aid package, the student loan package, and you subtract that from the deficit this year, it's 1.7 trillion, not 1.9. I mean, we're at the point now where it's like money almost doesn't matter because we're in such debt. It's modern monetary theory, baby. Yeah, it is. And this is something that probably won't surprise the listeners here, but would surprise most Americans. We're now spending more in interest on our debt. Okay. So wasted money

than we are on all of national defense. I remember in Congress, I was, we'd look forward and be like, there will be a day in which we'll spend more in interest than on national defense that days today. So we sit here and we talk about all these expenditures that interest is ballooning. The other thing is social security and Medicare and Medicaid. As you know, nobody can talk about that, but that is driving this country to bankruptcy. We should have people your age and my age planning on a different social security system than what our parents get. And keep in mind, this $1.9 trillion deficit is in a record-breaking economy. What happens if we hit a recession? Where are we going to be? And at that point, I don't see a way

out. All we need to do, we're never going to become debt free as a country. All we need to do is get the trajectory of debt and deficit in a better trajectory than where we're at now to keep the faith in the American system. And that's easy enough to do, but that's going to take bipartisanship like a Bulls Simpson approach or something. And, you know, that takes leadership leadership which we haven't seen much of there are a couple of cranks republican cranks in congress who talk about it but don't back up their talk right like they don't actually force any action on it the way that they would on on culture issues well they talk about it with like ukraine if they don't

want to do ukraine they don't talk about it like you know it's just like oh we can't do ukraine because of the debt but you know they want a sales tax like you would think there'd be some discussion about this one thing that i wanted i wanted to bring up because we just don't you have a chance to talk about this enough because all the craziness in our former party but this is really inflationary like the weirdest thing like we're in this weird world where it's like everybody says inflation is the number one issue now you look at there's a monolith poll yesterday and inflation is like basically the one two and three issue like one is issue is inflation two is economy three is my bills are too high or something and yet there is nobody that's actually proposing anti-inflationary

economic policies in any meaningful way right like the biden student loan that proposal is inflationary as we've discussed the trump economic proposal is inflationary. As we've discussed, the Trump economic proposal is inflationary. Even if you go to the states, like state governors who are often like, oh, I'm going to give you a tax break on this. Like that's inflationary. Like when the economy is doing well, when interest rates are high and we're trying to tame inflation is actually the right time to try to deal with this. And literally nobody wants to do anything about it. Yeah, that's right. And by the way, if you think about World War II, you know, the selling of war bonds, one thing before I really understood monetary policy, which I'm not an expert in, but is like, I always wondered why

would the federal government sell war bonds when they could print money? And it's again, it's an anti-inflationary thing. It's like, we need to, yes, we're going to put a ton of money into the economy, but we have to likewise pull money out of the economy so that we're not Venezuela running, you know, two or three thousand percent inflation. That's the risk we run into now, because obviously, look, the Treasury prints money, you know, they buy up the debt and you end up basically with all this money in the economy. Now, with a trillion dollar interest payments, it's a real danger. And the problem is if we get to a point where we go to auction for bids and debt, and I've been to a debt auction before, it's all automated now, but it's pretty sobering to see. And all of a sudden, nobody's buying that debt. Then you have to raise interest rates on the debt to attract buyers. And now you end up in that, what Paul Ryan used to always talk

about, that kind of fiscal cliff, that debt spiral. Again, the thing that can prevent it is not going debt-free. It's not even balancing the budget, but it's putting us in a trajectory where it looks like it's improving because that's all you need is people to keep the faith in the monetary system to keep it together. This message comes from BetterHelp. Can you think of a time when you didn't feel like you could be yourself? Like you were hiding behind a mask at work and social settings around your family? BetterHelp online therapy is convenient, flexible, and can help you learn to be your authentic self so you can stop hiding. Because masks should be for Halloween fun, not for your emotions. Take off the mask with BetterHelp.

Visit BetterHelp.com today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P, dot com. Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump's pal, met with his other, his pen pal, his love letter. Big man, big little man, Kim Jong-un. It was a very strange scene putin lands in north korea and the big little man's waiting for him there at the tarmac and then you know they go to a rally where a bunch of automatons are like screaming about dear leader it's giving 1931 oh so soviet and uh it's just like what do we make of this? Second visit, I guess, from Putin to Kim in the last year.

And they hadn't visited in a while. So clearly something is afoot. Yeah, this is Putin's desperation. Look, he's expended a lot of his ammunition. If you remember in Ukraine, he was actually on the ropes until Iran ran to his rescue. And then North Korea gave 5 million rounds of ammunition of one, whatever there's is 132 or whatever. And they burned through a lot of it. A lot of this ammunition is old. So a significant amount of it is blowing up barrels as you know, from artillery

and killing the artillery crews. But he is so desperate. So and I think in exchange, he's given some nuclear technology or missile technology, something like that. So he's gone over there to beg for another arms package from Kim. I'm sure he'll get it because he's got to keep this war going until the US election in November. Brian Kilmeade did a tweet where he's like, Joe Biden has driven these authoritarians together and Donald Trump never did it. Well, they're coming together because they're increasingly desperate to survive. You know, Vladimir Putin is going to Kim Jong-un, not because Joe Biden doesn't make him afraid. He's going to Kim Jong-un because he desperately needs him to keep his war machine going. Look, if you're Ukraine, and this is another thing that gets under my skin,

when people say Ukraine is losing, when you're a defending country, the only thing you have to do to win is keep defending. If you can keep defending, you're winning. And Ukraine is winning right now. So this is why it's important to keep a foot on the neck. But that's what you're seeing right now is this increase in desperation. You know, Xi in China is using Putin's desperation to his advantage because the tables have turned now and she can kind of control Russia a little bit. So it's the she's advantage. And then, you know, obviously, Putin is desperate not to lose this war. We should probably do a Ukraine update. I haven't had a Ukraine focused guest in a few few weeks. What is your sense of the state of play now that the budget, you know, it's kind of gone through and, you know, the latest from the folks you're

talking to the advocates over there? Yeah, it's improving a lot. So basically right before the budget passed, there was real concern that the lines would break. One of Ukraine's big challenges right now is manpower. They have this asinine law, it's kind of Soviet, where you're not even draftable until you're 27 years old. In the United States, you're almost not draftable at 27. It's like 18 to 30 or

whatever the draft age is. They've lowered that to 25 or 24. And now they have new people in training. So the personnel situation is improving. But that was a big challenge with Ukraine. And now US weapons are starting to flow to the front line. It's still not 100% saturation where it needs to be, but it's much, much better. If you're watching the internet, you can see many more videos again of Ukrainians blowing Russian stuff up. I'm sorry, Adam, I've got to interrupt you there. There are not any videos of what's happening in Ukraine. I keep hearing this, what's happening on the Mac, right? That is the craziest thing. You and I were texting about that. We're like, people are saying there's no videos.

There's no war. Like what? Just type something in. That's like madness. But anyway, the administration opening up Kharkiv, which jokingly we call all of Russia near Kharkiv now, for weapons to attack has made a huge difference. So basically right now, every offensive that the Russians have tried against Ukraine has been pushed back. I think Russian offensive power has culminated, which means it's kind of at its max point and it can only decline now. And I think Putin is all he's got left is hoping that Donald Trump wins. And

by the way, Tim, almost 600,000 Russian casualties in two years. That is more, at least close, to what the United States lost in all of World War II, liberating two countries. Russia has lost by almost no gains. Wow. And not to mention the F-16s are coming soon, which will be helpful. Yeah, and we've talked about this a lot. You get a lot of people that are like, what have we gotten out of this? I mean, talk about just the crippling of this geostrategic foul.

Okay, I want to move down to one more foreign policy issue. Bibi Netanyahu, speaking in English, said in a video earlier this week that it was, quote, inconceivable that in the past few months the administration has been withholding weapons and ammunitions to israel that's not really true they withheld one weapon a very strange broadside at the biden administration you know before he's about to speak to congress i note the comparison like the comparison between we're discussing ukraine like the way zelensky dealt with the republicans who were totally fucking him you know zelensky was still kind differential making a pitch trying to win them

over and yet like joe biden's been shoulder to shoulder with bb in the face of a ton of criticism and has you know expresses one or two you know areas of disagreement and he's like trashing him and a video. And like this week, I don't understand what's going on. And I don't really understand why he's coming to a joint congressional session. What's your, maybe you can explain it to me. I've never been super pro BB, but I've been probably a little more pro Netanyahu than you were until this moment, because I looked at this and I saw this video and it made zero sense to me. Zero

sense strategically, zero sense politically and militarily. Like the United States is literally keeping Israel floating when it comes to these weapons. The only thing I can figure out, Tim, is he is now investing in hoping that Donald Trump becomes president, because Trump's going to love this, by the way. And the other thing is, he's simply playing to his hard right domestic audience in saying, the US is screwing us. That's why this isn't going super well. It was a huge blunder. I don't know what he thinks he's going to accomplish, besides creating further daylight between the US and Israel. And it's worth mentioning, look, we don't drop many 2,000-pound bombs. These are huge. Okay, 2,000-pound bomb is what you drop. Yeah, it's what you drop to level a building or a bridge

or something like that. That's the thing we've held back for a little bit. I don't know if it's still being held back out of human rights concerns. And honestly, and I'm very, again, hawkish on what Israel needs to do, but that is a legitimate concern when you're dealing with a densely populated area. Dropping a 2,000 pound bomb is very hard to be precise in casualties. A 500 pounder, a 100 pounder, you can be more precise. So I don't think it's unreasonable what the Biden administration has done or asked for. And Bibi is really screwing himself in Israel, but he probably only cares about his political situation. And yet the joint session. Yeah. I guess maybe the Democrats don't want to be in a position of, of like protesting him. I mean,

maybe they're calculating that that would be worse than having him here. But man, I don't know. It's a pickle. It is. And I think, you know, look, obviously Johnson invited him because he, I'm sure he believes, you know, in what's happening. I'm not going to take that away from him. But also there is a political advantage, which half of the Democrats, which by the way, if any of them listen, don't boycott the speech. That never helps your side.

Just go. No, respectful and then criticize then go on tv and criticize if he if he criticizes you know you can criticize but go he's coming to the congress go hear what he has to say and unfortunately half of them are going to boycott it and it's going to look really bad for them okay last thing speaking of strange videos by political leaders i did notice that you had some thoughts about uhjorie Taylor Greene's workout regiment. Interesting post from her this week. You know, I don't exactly know what the words are on the moves.

You're more of a workout man than me, so you can explain what she was up to. But I don't know. Would you, for the listeners who haven't had a chance to see it, would you recommend that they go check that out on their Thursday evening? If you're in the mood to be like to wtf your day yeah like here's the thing she posts these videos and she did it like before she was in congress like doing some workout in the hotel room and she tried to play it off like it was some covet thing well listen if you want to be a influencer in in fitness please go do that like i think that's great if you want to be an influencer in fitness if fitness, please go do that. Like, I think that's great. If you want to be an

influencer in fitness, if you want to be a Congress woman, okay. Nobody cares about your workout videos. The only people, and this is, this is my public service announcement to everybody. The only ones impressed by videos of you working out are you. That's it. Oh, maybe a couple of potential lovers. I i get it if you are not a congressperson if you're a human and it's like yeah it's a little embarrassing and annoying to post your you know bench press video to your 1000 instagram fans because you hope the two people see it but sometimes you got sometimes that's just what you got to do because you don't want to send it to the two people because that's even more embarrassing right this is a different animal than that you know when you're in congress it is you've never thought

about that though bicep curls i mean you know you could you never thought about just kind of showing off the guns or anything on instagram no i mean if i did dude it was like the internet i know that right and i want to be known from my head not my body so you know i've got a i've got to be modest i appreciate that adam kensinger it's so good to have you want to be doing this about twice a month and uh remember like i said if you want to know more about adam's workout regimen the one place that you could ask him about that is during the founders ask me anything because that's private that's not going out in public that's just for us so at the founders ask me anything if you want to join the bulwark at

the founders level go to the bulwark.com. We'll be in Dallas September 5th. Adam will be back on the pod in July. Thanks brother. Enjoy the rest of the week. You too. Great seeing you. Alright, we'll see y'all soon. Up tomorrow, one of my favorite guests besides Adam and a mega mailbag. So see y'all then. Peace. Are we in frame? You better walk, bitch. You better walk, bitch.

You better walk, bitch. You better walk, bitch. Now get to walk, bitch. You better walk, bitch. The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.