The Bulwark Podcast - Bill Kristol and John Heilemann: Taking a Wrecking Ball to the Military

Episode Date: July 27, 2026

Not only has our lousy commander-in-chief allowed the country's missile inventory to be dramatically depleted, Hegseth's politicized hiring and firing of officers has come home to roost and is doing real damage to the military as an institution. Meanwhile, Zelensky says he'll show Trump proof that Russia is helping Iran in the war, and Laura Loomer has done an about-face and now says she's on Ukraine’s side. Plus, the wet, hot DSA summer hits its peak in the Michigan Senate race, Bibi is going to try to save his hide, and Republicans in swing districts have been given the all-clear to distance themselves from Trump.Bill Kristol joins guest host John Heilemann.Show notes: The NYT on the diminished stockpile of Patriot antimissile interceptors  John's "Impolitic" podcast Jon Cohn on Whitmer's endorsement of Haley Stevens Lauren on the troubles at the DNC Bill's "Bulwark on Sunday" with Epstein survivor, Dani Bensky Andrew on Trump bombing at the White House Correspondents Dinner Get 10% Off your entire order & take advantage of Ridge’s Annual Sweepstakes by going to https://www.Ridge.com/THEBULWARK #Ridgepod

Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Bullwark Podcast. I'm John Heilman. I'm the great, extraordinary honor. Really, it's like the thrillable lifetime in a lot of ways to be able to sit in the chair normally occupied. I mean, not literally the chair, a metaphorical chair, Bill, normally occupied by Tim Miller, who's off, you know, gallivanting around Europe, having all kinds of fun and leaving this, leaving us, basically here. We're like home alone here. It's a little bit like we're the Culkin. We're the Culkin brothers here. I'll be McCauley. You can be cured in and we'll have fun here on the show today until we're back next week. So for all of you who are like, it's kind of sick of the replacements, the fill-ins, the subs, the redshirt team here.

He's back next week, so everyone can get excited about that. But Bill, I was delighted when I was asked by Tim to fill in for him. I was like, I want to do a Monday because Mondays are Bill Crystal Day. And so here we are. Good to see it. It's nice for you to say. I wanted to do Monday when I heard you were pinchedding for Tim. It's a big upgrade.

You know, I'm going to tell Tim that also next. next week. We'll see if our, we'll see if Tim's loyal fans out there before I get now, 72,000, you know, text messages, emails and posts on social media. How could you be so disrespectful to Tim? He goes away for one week until you guys are jumping on them. No, it's great to have you, John, and you can fill Tim's shoes. There are big shoes, but I'll do my best. And I got to say, it was an eventful weekend. I also like the notion that it's a Monday podcast, which basically kind of do a little bit of looking backward because we never, we don't have quiet weekends anymore in our politics.

It used to be back in the day when you and I were younger men, we used to spend weekends in D.C., you know, patting around the title basement, taking a bike ride now and then, you know, switching off. But every weekend now is another cavalcade of horrors. Before we jump into all this stuff, is what's like at the end of this weekend we head in this week, what's like at the very kind of like, here's your, the biggest thing you were fixated on over the weekend,

what was like really most front center in your mind? I mean, one of the bad things about Trump era is when, instead of being fixated on whatever your favorite baseball team is not doing too well or thinking back still to Spain's fine victory in the World Cup, you do get fixated on the things that have to do with Trump. So I guess the military stuff, I guess we'll talk about this. But, I mean, the degree to which one knows that Hague Seth is a very bad Secretary of Defense, I'm now worried that he's doing much more damage to our military than I previously had thought, which, you know, that's one of the institutions you think holds up best under adverse circumstances. and it has many, many times. Right. And I had talked to a couple of people who've served in the military

just sort of randomly. Matt, it saw them or talked to them over the weekend, and they did not disabuse me of my fears. You know, so we headed into the weekend after, I would say, all of last week the question of, there's war plans now in front of Trump. He's backed into a corner. Nothing he's doing is working.

And might he, under those circumstances, just decide to finally go forward and do the thing he's been threatening to do, basically for the last five months, essentially, which is like rain hellfire down on Iran and escalate the war in a really dramatic way. And the news of the weekend was, he was presented with those plans.

There was a thoroughgoing debate. And he decided, no, he was not going to do that. Although the reasons for it are, I would say, to the extent the reporting is, suggests that the reasons are basically, we don't have enough bombs anymore. The munitions stockpile is so low that General Kane was,

basically like, I don't think this is a great idea. Talk a little bit about that and how we've managed to find ourselves. You were just talking about Hegsseth. There's a lot of things to criticize to Pete Hegsteth, but one of them, it would seem to me, is it's the case that we've left ourselves in a situation now where we basically can't fight a major war. We used to need to want to fight two major wars in two different theaters at the same time. We can't even really fight one now, given the state of the munitions, according to a lot of this reporting. Yeah, no, it really was striking. And I was, I guess, a little rattled by that. I mean, one do, obviously that Donald Trump is not a great strategist or a strategist at all,

and he's doing this based on a kind of hubris and a whim, and that it's very foolish, and we were going to pay a price for it. But the degree to which it's not just him being a bad commander-in-chief, but drawing down our stockposs, I think especially of the things we use to shoot down incoming stuff, and that's presumably why people were killed the week ago. Not presumably, that is how people were killed. You know, the casualties that Trump doesn't want to acknowledge.

The Trump Defense Department doesn't believe we're part. of the war on Iran even really unbelievable, right? That thing, actually that thing was on my mind. I should have mentioned that. I guess I wrote about it last Friday, I was so furious when I read that Thursday night, right, that they've removed those four army soldiers killed in action from the website. I mean, that's terrible.

But then it turns out to be, I won't say the tip of the iceberg, but a kind of indication of something much bigger, which is the military is kind of complicit, I would say, in the cover up of how bad things have gotten in terms of our, as you say, our munitions, especially anti-grown, anti-missile, anti-aircraft, maybe anti-aircraft as well, munitions in the region. Then over the weekend, there were stories weren't there about the appointment of the new

Chief of Naval Operations for the Navy and how incredibly politicized that was. You put that together with all the firings we've seen, obviously. So we have hirings and firings politicized. The stories about West Point and the lack of free speech anymore of teaching at the Military Academy there. There's sort of one thing after another that just made you think, it's not just that Trump is a bad commander in chief, it's not just that Hengseth is really kind of repulsive, I'd say, Secretary of Defense.

It's that they really are doing some real damage now to this one institution that has held up so well over the most of recent decades through thick and thin. And I had thought, and do think still, is probably holding up better than most of our institutions in the federal government against the Trump and Trumpist onslaught. But it turns out you can do a lot of damage, you know, when you've got a Secretary of Defense

and people willing to go along with him and he removes the people who might have stood up to him and he's got the backing of the White House. And he, I guess, wanted to show Trump that everything was going great. So he just, they just, I can't believe the military. I thought this was wise. They know how many interceptors they have, right? And they don't think it's a good idea to shoot the wall off in the first two or three weeks. But Hegsteth must have been insisting on it. And sadly, people in command seem to have gone along with it. What do you think about that? I mean, you've covered this stuff for a long time. I mean, well, I think that the, to your broadest

point, CQ Brown, who was the chairman of the joint chiefs when Trump came back for Trump 2.0, he was an African-American gentleman, he was removed. And the argument was, it was the beginning of heggis, kind of war on DEI, right? And Bill, I think that to your point about the way in which the damage has been done to the culture of the military, that was the first thing, because the thing that you and I both know, and I'm not a Pentagon reporter, but I've been around for a long time and talk to a lot of people who have been in the military, in the military, at the highest levels and all the way down, is that the military is the most meritocratic institution in America. It's a life and death thing, right? You don't get to be chairman of the Joint Chiefs on the basis

of DEI. They have no time for DEI. It's one of the wonders of the military is that it's been this meritocratic institution that has also proved to be, because of that, one of the great mechanisms of social mobility in America where extraordinary figures from various parts of the American diaspora, the American gorgeous mosaic, have been able to rise up to the tops, Colin Powell, the most notable. The CQ Brown thing was like they're starting to wage war on a culture of DEI that doesn't even exist. And I think that you've seen that now play out over the course the last 16 months, not just the DEI thing, but the ways in which all of these things have become politicized. And I don't think there's literally an American institution that one should have more

reverence for the military, for those reasons. Not to say that everything that the Pentagon's ever done has been great, but that the institution itself, the damage that's been done, I think, is, you know, I don't think we've yet counted the cost to it. And I don't think we yet have our arms around it. And I do think it's one of those things that when we get to the other side of Donald Trump, that is going to need a significant amount of repair and serious repair when we think about, like, what damage has been done to American democracy by Donald Trump over the last 10 years. This is one of those institutions where. where whoever decides that they're going to be in charge of leading the Democratic Restoration, America,

the first place, one of the first place they're going to have to start is on the military, counting the actual cost and then doing that repair work. Sorry to go on at length about that, but I think it's like one of the things that most upsets me, even though I am not a veteran, but I've come over time to really appreciate the value of this institution, American life, and to see it degraded the way it's been degraded over the last 16 months is really upsetting. No, absolutely. And I mean, I've been a critic of the military. I'm not a veteran, and I don't assume,

have great knowledge of military affairs. I remember when I was a critic of Rumsfeld and Casey's original strategy in Iraq in 2003, 2004, I was following John McCain's lead, the late Lindsay Graham, actually, and people who knew a heck of a lot more about it than I did, and actual people who'd served and were serving and quietly were talking to us about the lack of a counterinsurgency strategy and so forth, and it wasn't going as well as Rumsfeld's Pentagon was saying. Even there, they made mistakes, I think. But, you know, they were the mistakes that get made in an institution, and a bureaucracy by individuals, by systems. And that's when they got fixed a little too late, unfortunately, in Iraq.

The surge work, but it was too late to really save the overall enterprise and probably shouldn't have done it if it was going to be mismanaged the way it was. But having said all that, it was still a very well-functioning institution. And people respected it and people respected people coming out of it, as they should have. The way I was pregnant to someone over the weekend, actually was talking about this, he said, well, you've been a critic of the military. He said, yeah, there are times when I thought their leadership was B or even C or C-plus. as opposed to A or A minus.

But that's just life, right? I mean, that's different from taking a wrecking ball to it. Yes. And that's really what we have now. And I agree very much, too. We don't know how many people have left. How many people, I just talked to someone today this morning, actually weirdly, who has a relative in the military, not weirdly, but I'm just talking about this person.

Up for promotion, not at the general officer level, but not too far below that. Uncertain what's going to happen. Uncertain whether he or she should stay in. you know, I don't want to give away maybe gender to give away too much. But yeah, I mean, just the degree to which people have left, people have requested assignments to get them out of Washington. I talked to someone for whom this was the case recently. And again, it's probably not good for this person's career.

It's less of a fast track, but couldn't stand really being in the Pentagon and the kinds of things that were happening and worried that at some point this person was worried that he or she would have to make a real decision that would be unethical or, you know, contrary to what they thought was writing. There's a story in the Washington Post this morning. I think it's in the post about these drugboat hits, which I think you and I have both been very unhappy about and very dubious legality and sort of seemed like murder on the high seas.

This happened last October, and they were, by the judgment of almost every military, senior military person that I've spoken to who is no longer in the military, across the spectrum, ideologically, they all are like, those look like war crimes to me. Yeah, and it turns out they're not even cutting back on the flow of cocaine. So it's not just doing things you and I, and I think most, people don't like or don't like too mild think it really wrong to do and not the u.s should not be doing them it's also not working it's like we want to i mean honestly it would be one thing if they were doing things that we thought were over the line but okay you know that's sort of how war is blah blah blah

it none of it's working they're not slowing the drug traffic they're not winning the war in iran god knows they're not straining out deterrence around the world they're not making us more respected they're not only not making us more like to or more trusted they're not even making us more fear. And if we're only 18 months in, to your point just a minute ago, we've got two and a half four years of this. I mean, I could go on at great length about their drug boats, but you don't need to be an expert. All you have to do is watch a few seasons of narcos to know that like blowing the, an isolated drug boat out of the water. You could blow 50 of them out of the water. And for the cartels, that's like cost of doing business. That's not going to change anybody.

It's not going to change the, A, it's not going to change the gross tonnage of drugs coming into the United States. And number two, it's not going to create any kind of incentive, a disincentive to keep trying because those are expendable. Those are drug mules. They're expendable. That is all, like, it's a rounding error on the P&L for the narco states and the narco terrorists who run the drug cartels in South America. So again, you have to be a genius to know that this is not going to be effective in addition to being morally offensive and legally offensive that it's going to be a total waste of time. And that is what it's proving to be. And what a footnote to that, in fact, I think the article shows that says that they've, in fact, the drug cartels have adjusted their way of getting, you know, they go closer to the shore.

They don't go into international. They use bigger boats near the shore instead of small ones and international waters. So again, that's something that Hagseth, I guess, and unfortunately I worry about Kane and about some of the senior people. I assume they know better, but they're not speaking back or they're just overridden or maybe they don't know better in some cases or they just decided to go along. But, I mean, this lesson that, you know what, the enemy can change its motor stop veranda. It can change the way it's doing things. if we start to do things one way, that's kind of an elementary point about life in general, not just about the military. And do they seem not to have thought about that about Iran or about the

drug votes? This segment is sponsored by the New York Times. So John and Bill's conversation today relied on a lot of original reporting. We had things like Lauren Egan's deep dive into Ken Martin's woes at DNC. We had Politico story on Bibi Nanyahu's efforts to get a meeting with Trump. We had NBC in the New York Times reporting on the state of the military and the conflict in Iran. Before John and Bill could give their takes on these stories, however, these reporters had to track those stories down. They had to interview sources, and they confirmed the information and then write about it. The foundation of news commentary is fact-based reporting. This show and every other show with commentary on current events, that depends on original fact-based reporting.

The Bullwark, Politico, NBC, the New York Times, your local paper are all sources that you can trust for fact-based reporting. Here's one example from John and Bill's conversation. Over the weekend, Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Swan at The New York Times published this crucial story about the White House's deliberations about the next move in Iran. Now, Eric and Jonathan relied on sources they had spent months and years developing to give us insight into the highest levels of decision-making. They found that Trump had been persuaded by his advisors to hold off on escalating our attacks on Iran, at least in part because of concerns about the dwindling stockpiles of munitions.

This is a huge story. It reveals that under the Trump administration, the U.S. military has been so poorly managed that we don't have enough of our weapons we need to fight the war that we started. And while this may not be a surprising story for those of us who have been critical of the administration, without fact-based reporting like this, the rest of us are just guessing about what's actually happening inside our government. So wherever you seek it out, nationally, locally, support fact-based reporting. So let's just think about a little bit more about the Iran thing. You know, Mike Walts went on and did a round of the Sunday shows and basically said, you know, we have all the munitions we need. And also at the same time, the munitions have been left in a terrible state by Joe Biden. He's the one who screwed us here.

And you're kind of like, dude, you're really literally contradicting yourself in every one of these interviews. He's saying, talking out of both sides of his mouth, the war now is on hold, right? The potential escalation of the war is on hold for the reasons that we've just talked about. you now have this week the funeral of Lindsay Graham and it's got a lot of four leaders who are in town. One of them, we'll talk about both of them, frankly, because they're both important in different theaters of operation right now. One of them is Benjamin Netanyahu has been banging on the door at the White House trying to get a meeting with Donald Trump. Has not been back to the Oval Office to see Trump since the meeting, now famous meeting from Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan's reporting where he made the case for why not only we should go to war, why it would be relatively easy to have regime change and have an uncorka, an Iranian revolution

from the streets. He's now back and he's going to get to see Trump tomorrow. What do you imagine that meeting is going to look like? There's obviously a lot of tension between America and Israel now, tension between Trump and Bibi now. What do you imagine now who's going to try to get done in that meeting and what will be a win for him coming out of it? You know, I don't know. I mean, I don't know how much his pressure or the pressure of his allies has caused Trump to not do what really was the obvious thing to have done after two or three or four weeks or even six or eight weeks, which was to say, okay, we did a lot of damage. You can put a nice face on it so it doesn't look like a humiliation to the U.S. even though it is a little bit, I would have been that a little bit

and say, you know, we're getting out. Okay, and the straight-of-war moves isn't open quite the way it was before, but they'll try to paper that over. And so that was the obvious exit for Trump. I kind of thought he would take it, actually, about too. I mean, I think I've been right about Trump that he didn't want to go to a full-scale war in a ground operation. He knows that that's not a good idea. But I was wrong that he would just take the L, as I say, put the best face on it and get out. So now here he is, five months. Five months.

He's showing up on the fifth anniversary, isn't it? What is today, the 27th year? So he's showing up on the fifth anniversary of Trump and Israel going to war against Iran. It has not been good for the U.S. It's not been good for Israel, incidentally, in my opinion. Will he try to persuade Trump that, yes, you can still do it, go for it all? I just, I mean, with what ground troops? I mean, to seize the straight and then to try to go after the regime change.

I mean, whatever the possibility of doing that was five months ago, and it didn't, it didn't, I don't think Trump was ever going to do quite enough. Well, I'm not sure you could have, honestly, but I don't think he's going to do it now. So I honestly don't know. I don't know. Do you have a thought about what he's going to say? I mean, I think Netanyahu at this point is extraordinarily highly focused on his re-election. In addition to, obviously, I don't mean to say that all of the region. security concerns that everything else Israel is doing is not in his mind. But I think, you know,

his reelection is going to come before the midterms. We know what the midterms have done in terms of shaping Trump's calculus. It remains the case, I believe, that Donald Trump was a lot more popular figure in Israel than Bibi Netanyahu is. And that's not to say that Netanyahu has managed to turn his bellicosity into a political strength for a long time, but he is barely holding together that coalition that he needs to hold together in order to continue to be prime minister there. needs Trump's support. I mean, Trump actively turning against Netanyahu in that election would potentially be the end of Netanyahu. And so I think, you know, my guess is at least part of what Bibi's doing in this meeting is trying to get things back on track enough with the White House that he

doesn't have to worry about the prospect of Donald Trump turning actively against him and thereby ending his reign in Israel and then putting him in a position, as we all know, where he's going to have to go back and face these court cases against him for corruption. and a whole bunch of other accountability that he would have to face if he doesn't get reelected. I think that's got to be pretty close to the top of his mind when he gets in there, which is just like, hey, boss, can we get back to being friends again? This kind of mounting degree of tension and antipathy is not really good for my politics and therefore for my senior years.

Now, that's a really good point. You know, I hadn't really the election, how much of it for BB will be an election visit. And it's not like that would mean he will pull his punches, won't it? Probably. So, for example, the Saudi nuclear deal, which is another very bad thing. the administration has done. Israel is actually against it. And normally an Israeli prime minister would, I think, feel it compelled, as, you know, from his point of view, it's just country's national interest to say, here are all the cautions about that. And if you don't have the kind

of inspection standards even, what are we doing, giving this path to nuclear weapons to another regime, to another nation in the Middle East? I mean, but maybe he'll pull his punches on that, but then he'll get criticized maybe at home. I don't know. He's probably at a tough position. But you're right. I think for him, he needs Trump, at least nominally on board. I guess they'll talk a lot about the Abraham Accords, which both have touted as big change events in the Middle East. How's that worked out, incidentally? There's Abraham, of course, was signed, what, 2018, 2019 or something? Since then, we've had, you know, huge attack on Israel, the war, obviously in Gaza and elsewhere.

Now the attacks on Iran, and Iran seeming stronger than it ever has been, closing the Strait of Hormuz, something they never did after all, during all these decades of being at odds, to say the least, with us, and of course, with Israel. I mean, the whole thing is, I guess they'll try to paper it over, huh? The level of inconstancy, foreign policy and constancy on Trump's part, and I didn't say incontinence, although, you know, one could metaphorically go there too, but inconstancy, which is like the notion of doing the nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia was on the table for, I mean, it felt like basically it was on the table for like a couple of heartbeats.

I mean, and before it was pulled off again, is a general matter not great for American foreign policy to be constantly, you know, we're doing this, no, we're doing that, we're doing this, no, we're doing that. Consistency is an important attribute. But do you think that there was ever any, I mean, I looked at that deal from the very beginning and thought, there is no way this is going to happen, right? Given the kind of pushback you would get from Israel and from others, the notion of opening up another nuclear Pandora's box in the Middle East, I just sort of thought, somehow that thing's going to fall apart under pressure.

And I don't know, maybe it's only temporarily falling apart, but the fact that it fell apart quite so quickly made me think, you know, this is not really, this is not a thing that's along for this world. No, you could be right. On the other hand, they did sign something, as the Saudis pointed out. So I don't know. And there's big business interests, real business, as well as Trump family business interests, interested in this. So I really don't know. But your point about the inconstancy is really important. And again, it's one thing to have, obviously, administrations change policy over time and the country's changed policy over time. But yes, to change it every 24 hours is not good on a matter of some real importance. I mean, this is where I do think everyone in the world looks at this and says, come on. I mean, we cannot depend on. these people. It's not just that they're not nice to us. It's not just that, you know, they're not trustworthy the way allies are supposed to be. They're just undependable in the most fundamental sense. And if Saudis think they

need to have nuclear weapons now, which is sort of what was signaled by this, right? They're pushing for this even more than they happen. What do Japan and South Korea think? What do other nations think? I mean, I just think the degree to which the whole thing is fraying because of, really just because of Trump. And I mean, obviously, there were reasons

it might have frayed anyway. I don't want to deny that. But actually, under Biden, a lot of this, the alliances in some ways to come back together a little bit more. I'm not going to defend every aspect of Biden's foreign policy. God knows. And it wasn't inevitable, I think, that this whole order would crumble to the speed it has. This war really has been really bad, really a disaster, I think. I thought it was going to be bad. I didn't quite expect it would do this much. The damage would radiate out in so many directions. You know what I mean? Right. Totally. You guys know we love Ridge Run here. They make amazing power banks, wallet's luggage, and premium everyday gear. The power banks in particular

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No purchase necessary to enter, but every dollar you spend gets you more entries. That's ridge.com and use The Bullwerewerex. After purchase, they'll ask you where you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them our show sent you. So let me get to Zelensky here, the other meeting on Tuesday, both these meetings, same day. Another leader who was in town for the Lindsay Graham funeral. And someone who, frankly, the loss of Lindsey Graham is a meaningful thing because there was, well, you can say a lot of things about Lindsey Graham. A lot of things have been said about Lindsey Graham.

But one thing that Lindsay Graham was not inconsistent on was, say, support of Ukraine. and if you're Volodymyr Zelensky, you show up in town kind of thinking, you know, I have some work to do here. He's got this meeting to go see Trump. And the most incredible thing about this story is the way in which suddenly at the center of American foreign policy with respect to Ukraine, Laura Lumer, Laura Lumer, who as bat-shick crazy as anybody who's ever been on the MAGA right, suddenly starts talking like a completely sensible, sane person and says, you know what? I realized that a lot of the stuff that right-wing MAGA podcasters were saying seem to be influenced by Russian propaganda. And I suddenly decided, you know what, I should go over to Ukraine and see for myself.

She did this interview with the AP where she explained why she's now done a total about face and is completely on the side of Zelensky. I put my other business on hold for about two weeks to come to Ukraine. I've received messages all day from different people and media and politics and people just who follow me online who said, wow, I didn't realize how much we've been lying to. People love being keyboard warriors and saying things are fake, but they should come themselves. I was once that person too, but then I decided to come to a war zone and see things for myself. So, Bill, I saw JBL and some of your colleagues there and Sarah, I think, saying, you know, in this one very narrow way, Laura Lumber sounds like she may be the last sane person or the biggest still grown up in the MAGA coalition, but she was quoted in that story, that AP story.

She says, it's looking good for Ukraine, right? Going into this meeting next week at the Oval Office is looking pretty good. And there was the interview she did with Zelensky, Trump on So True Social retweeted, retweeted or whatever they call it, the interview that Lumber did with Zelensky and wrote very good with about 14 exclamation points as his want. what is going on there in your judgment about Zelensky's standing with the White House and about suddenly him embracing, I mean, if you're, if Vladimir Zelensky, you'll brace anybody who will help you help you with the White House, presumably, because you're trying to, your mistakes are existential. But what is going on there from your vantage point?

I mean, God knows. I guess two things. I guess I do know. I think Ukraine is doing much better than anyone expected, including me 18 months ago. It really, and really a kind of remarkable story. I bet historians, military historians, you know, five, ten, twenty-five years from now, we'll write the story of this country, one quarter of the size of the dictatorship that invaded it, written off at the beginning, and then written off sort of later after Trump comes in, and we did cut off tens of billions of dollars made. And somehow with its own technological development and innovation and ingenuity, I mean, the drone stuff is really kind of amazing.

I talked to some military types, and they are amazed by it. I mean, and Trump sort of wants to be on the side of winter, And so maybe that makes him less anti-Solensky, plus Putin's disappointed at my stuff. So that's good. It's very important that Zelensky hold on, the Ukraine, hold on, and he possibly win. There have been some internal issues of Zelensky, minister, defense stuff and all. I can't quite. But it being a democracy, there was a lot of pressure on him.

And so he actually rescinded the initial appointment he made, sort of different from Putin's Russia. So that the Selensky side. I mean, on the lower-lumor side, I mean, I have two minds, I imagine most people are about this. on the one. You don't want to give her a lot of... At least two. At least two minds. You don't want to give her a lot of credit, you know, as a kind of serious observer and sued of these things, who knows what's really going on there. But having said that, I've got to think it's got to have some effect in Mago World when one after another on different issues, March retellatee Green, on Epstein, whatever, Lumber on Ukraine, start to say, wait, we rely to. I mean, it doesn't have some, I mean, it's kind of some effects, even on that impenetrable Trump base, I think. I don't know how much any of those individual, the individual people, like whether it's Luma or MTG, I think that to the extent that their comments, they amplify a growing sense among a lot of people who voted for Trump that they have been lied to, that Trump either lied to them specifically on some specific set of issues or that was in general that he turns out to be a fraud and in this all for himself and isn't really different from every other politician that they disdain. I think it, you know, that rhymes with a growing sentiment. And to that extent, it's kind of part of the atmospheric difficulty that Trump finds himself in right now in terms of not having that many people

who are willing to want to stand with him. And it's worth saying as we kind of transition out of this. I mean, I think one, the last thing about Zelensky here, interesting. I thought this one thing that I saw over the weekend, which was that's one of the things Zelensky is going to do is share evidence with the White House showing that Russia is assisting Iran in targeting American bases in the Middle East via satellite surveillance. And it said in this reportage, it said they had specific dates. July 19, the 20th, when four bases fell within the area of interest of Russian satellites, two in Bahrain, one in Georgia and one in Kuwait. I mean, Donald Trump likes to be with winners, as you said.

Donald Trump has also liked to be with Vladimir Putin, who is, you know, I guess in his mind is a winner. For a long time, he thought Zelensky was a loser, even though Zelensky, to your point, has done one of the most extraordinary things in the history of modern warfare and being able to do what he's done over the course of this conflict. But I just wonder when the rubber meets the road, where Zelensky is sitting there trying to basically say to Trump, look, you want to win this war in Iran. I have specific evidence that Russia is helping Iran. Here are the evidence. Here are the dates.

Here's the receipts. Whether that cuts any ice with Trump or whether that is the kind of thing that an irrational world would cut ice with any president but just won't with him because of whatever kind of core reflexive Putin love that he and fear or admiration or, whatever that he just won't let go of. Maybe at least helps Republicans on the Hill say, well, whatever the president might have reacted, this seems pretty convincing, and we do need to pass this package that Lindsay Graham was working on, actually, of sanctions on Russia, at least. So I was saying this thing about how Trump, his various people inside the administration who are willing to say whatever he wants them to say.

But anyone outside in the Republican Party, the reality of the midterms coming into view is really starting to change certain things. the ground. And one of them is we've reporting this morning that that the White House is now telling, as I knew this day would come, Bill, I predicted it many times. The day has come where the White House is saying to Congresspeople in contested districts and to Senate candidates in contested states, feel free to start putting some distance between yourself and the president. Something that, you know, now who knows, Trump may decide to attack those people when they do it, when it actually comes to it. But the fact that the White House is now telling people, yeah, it's time to start to

cut and run here is really kind of extraordinary. And one of the ways, one of the best illustrations I can think of as to why that might be the case was Donald Trump's rather extraordinary performance at the White House correspondence dinner, which I would love to speak with you about a little bit here. I know Tim does not like to play sound of Donald Trump on the show. And I'm respectful of that. I understand the rationale for it, but I was reliably informed that it's not a hard and fast rule. And then if we're going to talk about this White House correspondent's dinner, we want to, we've got to let people see what we're talking about because I assume most normal people were not watching this on Friday night for reasons that we can get into.

Donald Trump attacked a lot of people over the course of this hour and five minute long speech that he gave Bill where he attacked, you know, every, all of his normal political enemies and, you know, went after Governor Newsom and Adam Schiff and Chuck Schumer and attacked Bruce Springsteen and said that Springsteen's tour was bored in the USA. He's attacking all of people. But the most extraordinary in this rambling in. sane, lunatic performance was his decision to suddenly turn on J.B. Pritzker. You can't have somebody like a J.B. Pritzker, who I understand is not present, sadly.

But, you know, some people say, never use the fat word. And I know, I would never call anybody if I had my own problems. You know, it's not like I'm perfect. Sir, in the back, don't call him a fat pig, okay? I'm sticking up for him. Don't call him you. You can't do that, sir. You can't call J.B. Pritzker, a fat pig. Please. All right?

Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Everyone's trying to figure out who is that guy. Does he exist? But the nice part is when you do that, the press can't get you. Because I'm defending a man who obviously has a problem. Actually, he's lost a lot of weight. I saw him recently.

He lost quite a bit of weight. I don't know what the hell. He's got no chance. Got a no chance. I don't even want to say about that. Bill, I don't know if you've watched the full speech. I'll just let you speak to the Donald Trump performance at this insane event that I can't believe anybody in my business thought it was like a reasonable thing to go, knowing that

something like what happened would happen. Well, I totally agree on that point. And I agree that he seems to have bombed. I didn't watch it, needless to say. And I haven't watched all of it or even chunks of it much. Andrew Eager had an excellent piece on it and Warner Shots this morning, which we pushed to look at, though, about how pathetic it is that Trump wants,

still wants to ingratiate himself with this White House correspondence dinner. You know, that's like, it was something he went to, what was it, 14 years ago now and got insulted by, he thought by President Obama, and he just hasn't, like, he finally gets his chance to insult everyone, I suppose. But how sad is that? You're president of the United States.

You're the most famous person in the world, I suppose. And you still got a show that you can do it. But how lame was that thing you had. seen the fritzker clip honestly even read about it. I mean, it seems to be a piece with many other lame pseudo jokes that went over horribly. I mean, yeah, I, he was, he was terrible. He was terrible. I mean, even by, like, I sometimes, I will say, he could be funny. He could be funny. He can be funny. There are times when Trump is actually, you know, it's part of the secret to why the man has one election place over the course of the last 10 years, not three times as he claims, but is that a lot of

normal people think Trump is, you know, is sort of funny. It's not my, again, it's not my preferred mode of humor, but I understand that he sometimes can be quite funny. This was not funny. This was just like incoherent and addled and mean and sort of just anybody who's ever found anything charming about Trump, they were not present in this speech. It was just a kind of rambling, adled, savage, stupid kind of performance that I think that even his biggest fans, if they watched it, honestly, would be sort of like, uh, he seems to have lost. not just as fastball, but his curveball, his slider, and his knuckleball all at once. Yeah, no, very much so.

And so I don't know what effect it has. And, you know, I hope you're right that even Republicans are moving away from it. I don't know. On the one hand, they vote dutifully for this stupid war that they don't support in reality and for the defense budget increase that is very unpopular, that they probably, some of them don't support. And they're going to vote for Todd Blanche, despite the fact that they probably know he shouldn't be a attorney general. So I'm just curious, because you follow this stuff closely. you're shrewd about it and look around the corners,

maybe very effectively sometimes. Do you think there really is erosion, will be erosion in support for him on the hill, or will it be more a little bit of just tonal change of attitude? I think it's important to make a distinction between erosion on the hill in the sense of what they are, when they're forced to vote on something, versus what you're going to see in battleground districts

and in Senate seats that are up for grabs, where, I mean, Trump is in Michigan. We'll talk about Michigan in a second, but Trump is in Michigan today. I can tell you, I think this will be the last time you'll see Donald Trump in Michigan. Mike Rogers is not going to invite Donald Trump to Michigan between now and Election Day.

I don't know about Ken Paxton. That might be one exception, but if you're running for Senate in Maine, if you're Susan Collins, Donald Trump's not going to be in Maine. And what the White House is saying to people now effectively is, not so much, hey, feel free to vote against us, but is, hey, feel free to. start making arguments on the campaign trail that are either implicitly or in some cases maybe in a little bit explicitly kind of contrary to what Trump says, to not have him, not invite him to the

district, to kind of put kind of some distance between yourself. You don't have to be tied at the hip to Donald Trump going forward. And I think that's going to be an enormous relief for any Republican who's running in a, as I say, in a battleground district, in a purple district, in a swing district or in one of these Senate seats that that is to get a determined control of the upper chamber. I think you're going to see, you know, you can go around the map. You're not going to see Donald Trump in Ohio. You're not going to see Donald Trump in North Carolina. You're not going to see Donald Trump in Iowa. No one's going to want Donald Trump in their district or in their state if there's, if it's going to be a close election. And I think the White House is just basically signals to those

people. It's fine. You don't have to pretend like you want Donald Trump to come here. And going forward, I do think on things on high profile things like a lot of these nominations that it will still, there still will be a lockstep loyalty. I want to see a situation in which the United States Senate reject something Donald Trump wants before I'm willing to countenance the notion that that might start happening with any frequency. There's not been a single example of it in the entirety of the last 16 months. So until there's one example of it, I'm not going to open my mind to the possibility of a whole bunch more examples. I'm totally with you on that.

On the other side, I'm just curious, you've been through some of these midterms as I have. Do you think it will work? The quote distancing? I would say in the past, it doesn't work, right? I mean, I was old enough to remember 1994, and a bunch of Southern Democrats, Tennessee, for example, really did distance themselves from Clinton in pretty big ways, and they lost just as badly as if they had never died.

And 2010, I mean, we've been through these wave. If it's a wave-ish election, I kind of feel it will be, it feels like almost it's the worst of both worlds. Some of the Trump people won't turn out. And the normal swing voters, as it were, will say, well, they still need to check Trump. We need Democrats to control Congress. I don't know.

the elections have been more nationalized than they ever have been, number one. And the overriding sense of most voters is correct, which is that the Republican Party is the party of Trump and that they've been basically operating on autopilot at Trump's behest. They're right about that and putting a little bit of distance between themselves and Donald Trump and doing a speech that says, hey, I know Donald Trump is kind of pretended like affordability's a hoax or whatever. I don't think it's a hoax. I think it's real. It's like, that's not that's not going to help anybody. People, you know, the median voter is like the Republican Party is the party of Trump. And if they are interested in punishing Donald Trump, they're going to punish

that party. And also, to your point before Bill, they're the level of enthusiasm. And this is the thing that there's been some reporting on over the weekend. In fact, I think a piece, good piece in the Washington Post that basically was said that Republicans are starting to just freak out over the lack of enthusiasm among, among core Republican voters. And I want to get to, while we still have time, I want to get to a few of these domestic things. We'll go relatively quickly through them. Michigan is the one race in the Senate where Democrats are still nervous. Georgia, which was the other seat, they worried about losing.

They're not as worried about that anymore. Assoff has been better than expected performer, has been a way better than expected fundraiser, and they got the nominee that they wanted in Mike Collins, the Trump-backed nominee, rather than the Brian Kemp-backed nominee. So I think people are not as worried on the Democratic side about Georgia. But they're really worried about Michigan. And we have a debate tonight, the last debate between Abdul El-Sahed and Haley Stevens. We also had Gretchen Whitmer, who remains a very popular governor in Michigan, who decided to endorse Haley Stevens, I think not surprisingly, but on Friday.

Let's take a look at that. As governor, I've had one strategy, get things done. And that strategy informs everything that I do. And that's why I'm endorsing Haley Stevens for the U.S. Senate. Just like me, Haley will do whatever it takes to get things done for the people in Michigan. And we need her now more than ever. Republicans in D.C. are making your life harder and more expensive. Tariffs, custom Medicaid, soaring gas prices, it's all piling on.

Luckily, Haley is taking them on and putting money back in Michiganders' pockets. She helped President Obama save the auto industry and protect 200,000 Michigan jobs, brought billions home to rebuild Michigan manufacturing. Took on Big Pharma to lower the cost of prescription drugs, led the fight to block Republicans from defunding Social Security. And she's standing up to Republicans right now as they jack up the price of gas, groceries, and health care. Haley is as Michigan as it gets. She grew up in a middle-class household.

Her parents ran a landscaping business out of their Ford F-150, and she'll tell anyone who will listen about her first-oldsmobile. She knows what Michigan families are going through. And that's how I know she will always put Michigan first. Haley Stevens has been the candidate of the establishment, the Washington, D.C. establishment, not a good thing in this cycle. Abdul El-Said has been the candidate of, has now been endorsed by basically everybody on the left from Bernie Sanders, AOC, Elizabeth Warren. This is a very nationalized race.

And I would say it's like a microcosm of what's been going on this summer in the Democratic Party. You've got the wet, hot DSA summer that we've seen in some of these primaries in New York and in Colorado. You also saw the fallout from the Platner thing in Maine. And so the notion that possibly Abdul El-Sayed, he's a rising figure, he's had all the heat. There's polling shows the races within the margin of error. But he's kind of had the momentum in that race. But now people are looking up for reasons that we can discuss and saying, this guy might be just too far left for this very, very, very, very purple electorate at Michigan. What do you see on the horizon there for that Michigan race?

I mean, I guess with the primary just a week off. So, well, no, yeah, pretty close. I kind of think Stevens might have, I think McMorrow dropping out the third candidate, and then having Whitmer, who's a bit of popular, obviously, and reelected governor of Michigan endorsing. I think, I don't know, I bet on Stevens. I mean, I also think she's just an underrated politician. She's tough. She's won in the past in house races. So I think she has a pretty good chance. I do think she has a better chance of beating Mike Rogers than El Saeed. I also think, the one thing I would just like you tweak if I were writing Grecher-Witmer's little thing. There was good. Actually, I thought pretty effective. I'm sure she was advised what to say by the

Stevens campaign. You know, I talk about what she's been, what she's done in the past in Congress. I actually leave all that out. First of all, a lot of it was attempts to stop things from happening that didn't happen. What you did with Obama 15 years ago was on the car bailout? Maybe if you want to mention that, I guess in Michigan, that's a big deal, understandably. But still, it's got to be a more, she will stop Trump from doing more damage over the next two years, and Mike Rogers won't. There's no reason you can't be establishment and also be forward-looking, shouldn't be. And there shouldn't be a reason why you can't be establishment and also saying, I'm going to be as effective, more effective in stopping Trump. With those slight tweaks, I thought it was an effective little ad by Gretchen Whitmer.

And I guess I think Steve is in pretty good shape. But as you say, you would have lost money betting on the establishment people in some of these races this year. I thought the most effective parts of that video are the parts of the end, which he's I started talking about her being more, as Michigan as Michigan can be. My mother was from that peninsula of Michigan. And when I saw these videos going around of her, that was she was being mocked by the left for her kind of Chris Farley kind of, you know, Michigan way and all that stuff.

I'm like, everybody I have ever known in Michigan from Mackinac Island North, there's a Haley Stevens in every ice cream parlor in every roller rink. You know, like there's that, that's someone who sounds a lot like a lot of normal people in Michigan. and you can make fun of it, but I think that that part of Wittner, the Whitmer thing that kind of keyed in on the notion of, she's one of us. And that's, you know, that will obviously be, to some years, will be coded as kind of an attack in a way on El-Sayed.

But the biggest concerns I think about him, if you're really, if you're focused mostly on electability, has been his unwillingness to climb down from things like his advocacy of defund the police, his embrace of Medicare for all, which is, you know, I understand that it's a putting aside, whatever the policy arguments are for it, it is a thing that, you know, I had Adam Jelelson on my podcast on Impolitic the other day, and Adam had done, the searchlight Institute had done a big piece of research about, about the political problems with Medicare for All.

He's going to be easier for Mike Rogers. Now, it might be that because he's popular with the base, he can drive more turnout, but if I'm Mike Rogers and I'm thinking, who do I want to run against in this race, I'd rather run against El-Sayed, and has nothing to do with the fact that he's hanging out with Hassan Piker or that he's a Muslim American, that he's a bunch of issues that I think are to the left of where the median voter is in the state of Michigan. And I think that that will be the big concern if El Ceyat does pull this office, that they've got them up an electrifying candidate, who also was just, there's this reporting and political playbook this morning, who seems to be

more interested in fighting with Democrats than he is in fighting with Republicans. You know, there's a kind of like, if I win this race, we were going to primary John Federman, you're like, why are you talking about primary and John Federman, rather than talking about beating Donald Trump and winning in the general election, I just think these internecine fights among Democrats, like your priorities are kind of screwed up if that's where your head's at when it comes to El Saeed. I think that's right. I think don't you think if Stevens wins, let's leave aside the merits. I mean, I prefer on the merits, honestly, but still just on the electability.

I think Democrats end up, they got lucky in Maine, honestly. And I think they end up with a pretty good slate of candidates in these key Senate races. I mean, if you just go one by one, it's kind of, there's some older ones, some younger ones, some more establishment ones, some more, you know, sort of progressive ones. Boyd Cooper's a very different candidate from, I don't know, you know, from Haley Stevens or from Tolomico. But really, if you just go Iowa, Texas, Ohio, Alaska, even Kansas, it looks like, Montana maybe, but then also the key states that we've mentioned, they ended up, I mean, it's not perfect. When is it ever, though, in America, in politics? I mean, it's a pretty strong, I would say, electorally. say even substantively slate and mostly youngish, which is good for the Democratic Party.

It's good to look like Ossoff and Tala Rico and Haley Stevens, not like, you know, necessarily like with all due respect to Chuck Schumer and Dick Durbin and all these characters. We should mention, of course, Troy Jackson became the former nominee. And there's the early polling is heartening to Democrats who are thinking that maybe the platinum implosion will be the best thing that happened to them because his support was looking pretty soft. And Troy Jackson is, you know, people have been saying for a while that a generic Democrat, beat Susan Collins.

The early polling suggests that he's got a two or three point lead even before he's really in the race there. So that's a reason for Democrats to be cheerful. The one thing that is not a thing for Democrats to be cheerful about is the state of the national party. And I got to get this in just because Lori Egan, for the bulwark did a fabulous piece that broke a bunch of news about just how bad the financial situation is the DNC. I could go on about this at great length.

But Bill, you know, you look at Ken Martin and you think about. I mean, is that guy had a good news cycle since he got, became the chair of the DNC. The parties broke. They're using the headquarters as collateral on loans. There's a literally, literally mortgaging the furniture over there. And, of course, there's the autopsy and all the other things that he gets a heat for. I mean, I guess my question is, do you think that that guy will survive? And do you think it matters?

I mean, I'm inclined not to think it doesn't matter too much. People I know who are really in real politics think a little worry about the money stuff than I do. I assume the money can go to the other committees and to obviously these days to Super PACs and stuff and to the campaigns themselves and get spent probably just as well. There's some issues I guess to get a better rate if the DNC works for them and all that, you know, TV rate and all that stuff. But yeah, I don't think it matters that much. The irony will be Martin will probably have done a horrible job. Then they'll win the House in the Senate. Can you dump the chairman after you win both houses?

I guess you can, right? They probably should honestly. He really does seem unusually. You and I have seen many party chairman who weren't great. He does seem one usually not good. Yeah, the problem is that people say things like, well, you know, your ROM should do it. And you're kind of like, you know, I don't know.

Back in the day of Haley Barber at the RNC and Ron Brown at the DNC, when the parties were more powerful, you had serious people who wanted to be party chairs. Like, apart from the fact that Rahm is running for president, Rob would never want to be the chairman of the DNC again. I mean, maybe you could maybe convince like Terry McCullough, who doesn't seem like he's like overemployed right now to come back in and raise some money for the party. But like part of the issue here is that like the chairman of the Republican Party, I had to look this up. Do you know who the chairman of the Republican Party is right now?

Yeah, that's a good question. No. Yes. I ask you that question because I looked at this month because I didn't know. But isn't he running for something? No, it's it's now the head, the chairman of the Roaldigan National Committee right now is a guy named Joe Gruters. Joe Gruders, who is a Florida state senator who Donald Trump likes a lot. and is someone who I guarantee you, not just me and not just you, but almost everybody who

covers politics and lives this stuff could not pick out of a lineup. This is a job that's been devalued to enormous extent. And it's because the central parties, I mean, maybe in the wake of the Supreme Court's decision about spending, the parties will start to rebuild some power because they'll be able to direct funds in a different way. But man, this is not a job of a serious person wants anymore. And so, I mean, I don't know. I think, you know, unless the Democrats collapse completely and don't take,

control of either the House or Senate. I think if that happens, Kim Martin's out pretty quick. But if they take control of one or both, can be very hard to get rid of that guy. The last thing on my list, Bill, for you is you did a conversation with an Epstein survivor over the weekend that I think is worth promoting. So why don't you just find this on the bulwark site. Talk a little bit about what that conversation was like and what you got out of it. Yeah, Bullwark on Sunday with Danny Vinsky. I mean, she really, I had seen clips of her. and she testified against Blanche week ago Thursday, and so you could see clips of that

and people saw them, and then she was on a couple of interviews afterwards and stuff. But I actually, she was, it was really personally for me, kind of not just interesting, but moving. I mean, she was just so eloquent and herself, but obviously moved about the situation, about the general, of course, neglect of concern about the Epstein survivors,

but about the, as she made the point, it's not just about them. You know, this isn't just about getting justice for them, for what happened to them in the past or the truth out about them, it's for the future. If we're going to have the attitude that, oh, well, I guess we're not going to investigate anyone. No one gets prosecuted.

The whole thing gets washed under the shrubbed under the rug. What does that say about going forward about our attitude towards these terrible crimes? And so she was very eloquent on that and very, you know, just impressive. I've interviewed you as you have many, many people over the years online and on podcasts and otherwise. And she was one of the most impressive that I've had to, the pleasure of talking with for over half an hour. Well, everybody should go take a look at that. Make sure you go and read Lauren Egan piece about the DNC.

And actually, you know, Jonathan Cohn also has a piece of about why that Gretchen Whitmer endorsement in Michigan might matter in a way that endorsements don't generally in this day and age because of Gretchen Whitmer's not just being a two-term governor, but also she's still sitting, I think, her approval rank, still north of 50%, which is, you know, almost unheard of for either party at this point, given people's unhappiness in general and their disdain for all elected officials in both parties. Bill Crystal is great to see you. Thanks for coming on.

Thanks for everybody here at the Bullwark. Thanks for having me on. Hopefully, I haven't totally destroyed the franchise and it'll still be left standing for when Tim returns from wherever the hell he is. The Bork podcast is brought to you thanks to the work of lead producer Katie Cooper, Associate producer Anzley-Skipper, and with video editing by Katie Lutz, and audio engineering and editing by Jason. Brown.