The Bulwark Podcast - Bill Kristol: Diaper Tantrum

Episode Date: October 27, 2025

Trump was so embarrassed by Canada using Reagan’s warnings about tariffs that he had a little hissy fit and decided to punish Americans for buying Canadian goods. And by the way, stuffed shirt Scott Bessent: Real American soybean farmers are being hurt by tariffs while you bail out Argentina and pretend that your dainty hands are tilling the soil on the farmland you bought as an investment. Meanwhile, the White House isn’t even pretending that it’s going after corrupt moneyed interests, as the Trump family rolls in dough from the most entrenched swampy types in DC. Plus, Dems get pressure on the shutdown and Trump weighs in on the VP gimmick for 2028. Bill Kristol joins Tim Miller. show notes Scott Bessent saying he's a soybean farmer Monday's "Morning Shots" For a limited time only, get 60% off your first order, plus free shipping, when you head to Smalls.com/THEBULWARK.

Hello and welcome to the board podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. It is Monday. So, of course, we've got our editor-at-large, Bill Crystal. Hey, Bill, what's happening? Tough weekend for LSU, Tim. I was thinking about you. Yeah, we're not talking about it. You know, we can talk 20 or 30 minutes about it if you want, give you your analysis, the coaching situation. I think I think our viewers would be very interested in that, yeah. Things are going much better with our trade policy than in Baton Rouge. So let's just go straight into that. The president has decided to put an additional 10% tax on American consumers buying maple syrup and such from the Canadians

because he was very unhappy about an ad. You wrote about that this morning, reflected, harkened back to, you know, the good old days where we could tease Canada lovingly, you know, as you would do in the weekly standard from time to time. What do you make of this, if anything? It's funny, the piece, I know that you just sort of said it. I realized I didn't even mention of the piece, but of course, I just take it for granted. The utterly rampant illegality of everything Trump is doing.

He's just, I don't like that ad. 10% uprise and hikes in terrorists for you. What law is governing that? An emergency exception that he can use for national security reasons. I mean, it's beyond anything that he's just doing this. And people, as I say, even I didn't scream and yell about that too much which I was moving on to make other points about how crazy and destructive as terror policies were. In my case, since I published Matt Labash's excellent piece about how Canada was kind of the great white wasteland of the North or whatever the heck we called in on the cover in 2005.

It was prompted by, remember all this people after Bush, George W. Bush won't re-election. They were going to Canada there for like a few weeks. And so that was the Leibesh went up there and attributed some of them for amusing piece. Anyway, in addition to not the illegality, just the craziness of the hill. Right. I was thinking about an interview I got coming up later this week and I was kind of mentally prepping for it. And I was like, you can't, part of the reason I can't have, I want to try to have more people that are at least, you know, whatever. I have a different perspective on Trump on the pod just to kind of like hash it out.

Because he did win the popular vote last time. But you can't have Republicans on a show to talk about the tariff issue because none of them are for it, right? None of them are for a random 10% tariff on Canada. I mean, like, what I, you know, Peter Navarro, like a handful of cranks are actually for it. But, like, even like the protectionists, I don't think that this is how they imagined, you know, their protectionist tariff policy being put in place to help reinvigorate manufacturing. And everyone else is against it.

Everyone that's on TV talking about Trump on Fox or, you know, et cetera, is against it. But no, but none of them say or do anything, even though this is ostensibly John Thune and Mike Johnson's. job to govern this, and there's zero coming from them. Especially on tariffs with this literally in the Constitution. I mean, the idea, yes. It's funny, I had the same or analogous experience this week, some conference. A lot of alerted political science, con law types for a while, and talking about what went wrong,

why isn't the orange checks the balance is working in? At the end of the day, you know, the system does not work, of Congress does not exercise any authority or take any responsibility for anything. I mean, it doesn't check the president in particular. And but then, you know, we'll, of course, Congress, Congress isn't working as kind of a euphemism or a mask for saying the Republican Party is preventing Congress from doing his job as the Democrats would presumably, you know, or say they would fix a lot of the, check the president out, a lot of these things or try to, the degree to which we've just slid in nine months. And so the first term had its problems in this respect, but really people in Congress still vaguely thought they should push back on things, right? I mean, that's my vague memory at least and did sometimes somewhat successfully, including. some Republicans. It's really

the capitulation is complete and Trump is just a little dictator raising now, is this the most important thing in the world? 10% additional tariffs on Canada? No. I mean, but it's not nothing and it's the predicate for anything else he wants to do anywhere and he's yeah. But Argentina, Argentina is

great. And it's stupid. It's bad. You know, Archangina is doing great in Canada. Okay, let's get to that because here we go. You know, look, I should say that the Treasury Secretary was out this weekend doing the rounds and all the Sunday shows. And you'd think that and the Treasury Secretary would have a sensible argument for this tariff, right? Let's listen to what he had to say about it.

This week, President Trump abruptly broke off trade talks with Canada and put another 10% tariff on Canada in response to an ad that the government of Ontario ran. It features former President Ronald Reagan. Why is the president setting trade policy based on a television ad he doesn't like? Good question. Well, Kristen, let's think about this. This is a kind of propaganda against U.S. citizens.

You know, it's, it's siops. Let's think about this. It's siops. The Canadians are running siops on us. So we have to punish who, the American people. We've got to punish people. We've got to put a tax on Americans buying Canadian goods because the Canadian, the sneaky Canadians are running siops on us.

What the fuck are you talking about? The Sikh Canadians are showing a correct, an accurate video of Ronald Reagan criticizing terrorists. Such a siops. That's terrible. That's terrible. Cyops. I give you a lot of credit for being early on the real loathing of Scott Bessent.

I want to say that our fine treasury secretary. He is terrible. I mean, there's something about him. He's not as insane, obviously, of some of them, but he's not a guess as unqualified as, you know, Bondi or Hank Seth. But that mock earnestness and condescension with which he explains these things, I don't know.

I think he's in the top three or four of the worst. It's like from a different era. Yeah. It's just like this. He's like his stuff shirt, elite, like condescending to the people. It's like, this is Maga? This is the forgotten man's representative? You know, I just, he is just so phony.

Anyway, let's just keep doing it. There's one of the clip I had to play of Scott Besson. Speaking of his phoniness, he wasn't just asked, obviously, about the tariff, the random tariff we're putting on Canada because Trump had a diaper tantrum. but also about the fact that we're like really, really harming farmers in the country. I saw some economic stats on Iowa that are decently alarming compared to the rest of the country that came out over the weekend, harming farmers a bunch of places, particularly obviously the soybean crops, since China's no longer buying our soybeans.

Stuffshirt Scott was asked about this on ABC. Let's listen to that. China has been boycotting American soybeans, and American farmers have really suffered. Do you see a real light at the end of the tunnel there that may allow soybeans again? Well, Martha, in case you don't know it, I'm actually a soybean farmer, so I have felt this pain, too. For the audio listeners, you almost have to watch the video of that on YouTube because he's so proud of himself with this talking about. He kind of smiles, says that, I am a soybean farmer as well. Really, Scott, those hands, those little dainty hands have been in the dirt?

Just because you purchase some land that other people farm does not mean. You felt the pain? What pain have you felt? He lives in an unbelievable Barbie. Actually, I think he sold the Barbie Mansion house. I've been corrected. He lives in a different, unbelievable house, no longer in the Barbie mansion, extremely rich. He's a soybean.

He wants us to think he's a soybean farmer feeling pain. I haven't looked at the fact checking on that. What is it? His hedge fund bought some share of some farmland, you know, is probably raking, right? He's probably mistreating farmers on some farmland they bought or something like that. But the nice touch about that, fitting into your stuff shirt,

cloying, smarmy, Scott Besson thing is the, Martha, in case you don't know it, I mean, what is it? He's so, he's relishing. They prepped for that. He had that in his back pocket, the kind of, the trump card he was going to play on Martha, that, you know, that I am,

a soybean farmer, Martha. Yeah, have you really, have you been out in the fields, you know, that son? And he's suffering a lot, just like the actual farmers who are watching their crops and their livelihood go down to the twos and highway. He's Scott Bessett is really paying a big personal price. Yeah, he's got $25 million in farmland in North Dakota. And it's generating good news.

This is, you know, according to a quick search on this, we can correct this. But it appears to be that he's generating about a million in rental income for him and that soybean line. I wonder if that rental income is affected by the fact that the actual people farming can't sell the crop. I kind of find that hard to believe. Do you think he's letting them off the hook? Do you think he's not charging them? No charge this year? That would be a good thing.

We should start that campaign. Yeah, we should ask God. Is he giving the people renting this land for him a couple months off, since for no reason we started a trade war with China and they can't sell the crops on the land? I wonder. Something worth looking in too. He also, I'm not going to do any more audio. We can only take so much. But he also obviously defended the Argentina bailout.

I mean, you do wonder when. this stuff, or if this stuff, like, ever begins to add up to create, like, real unrest in farm country, you know, the fact that we're bailing out Argentina while they're allowed to sell their soybeans, and we aren't? Yeah, aren't they selling the soybeans to China, maybe, I think? So, yeah. So it's like, I mean, it's, like, actually the worst of all worlds. Argentina is an ally, he explains.

So I thought, how crazy is that? I mean, is Argentina an ally? But they are one of the 20 non-NATO major allies designated over the last 20, 30 years, sporadically by various U.S. presidents, which is fine. We do a little more military cooperation with them than we would do with a non-NATO major ally. There are a lot of countries that are non-NATO allies. I think Tunisia and Kenya, it's not like a huge thing necessarily. But Canada, if I could just come back to close the loop on that. Canada is an actual NATO ally. Canada is a founding member to know. Canada fought with us in World War II. They fought with us in Afghanistan. It's the longest

undefended border. I think it's the longest land border of the world, but it's the longest undefended land border of the world. It's kind of, it's wealthy. It's four times wealthier, I think, per capita than Argentina. It's had a very good run, actually, the last century, which Argentina hasn't. And we're bending over backwards to help Argentina and Canada, which is sticking it to Canada. I mean, I feel like there's a little bit of, I thought Trump was at least a hard-headed Realpolitik type guy. It's kind of more important to have good relations with Canada than with Argentina. And leaving aside all the other things we have in common with them, as I say, we owe them in some ways for fighting with us.

I mean, it's really, ugh. I can build this one for you. An ally now means somebody that is an ally with the Donald Trump family and Trump court. Totally. Totally correct. It is Trump first, not America first. You're absolutely right.

It's a personal ally of the Trump family in some corrupt scheme. They're engaged in. Right. That's what it means to be an ally. That's why El Salvador is an ally, Argentina is an ally, and Qatar is an ally. Canada, no. No, we're not Canada anymore. We might even invade Canada.

Who knows? But Qatar, they have Sharia law over there, but they gave Trump a plane. MBS, Saudi Arabia, is an ally, beheaded and be handing American journalists writing for American outlets. And they're an ally. El Salvador's prisoning people, imprisoning people on our behalf in Argentina. So it's a good, the coalition of the, well, there's something here, the coalition of the Trump willing. We'll work on this. We got some storms this weekend.

in New Orleans. So that meant the neighborhood part-time cats back in the house. This cat is a wimp. This cat is kind of like me. It's a Louisiana cat. Likes the heat, likes summer. Once that temp goes back under 70,

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because you are a bulwark listener. Get 60% off your first order plus free shipping when you head to smalls.com slash the bulwark. One last time, that's 60% off your first order plus free shipping when you head to smalls.com slash the bulwark. On the corruption stuff. You guys wrote about this morning shots and or did, but I think it's worth mentioning the two items.

One is on this drone company. The Pentagon awarded a significant contract to unusual machines, a company that retains Donald Trump Jr. as an advisor, I'm sure, based on his expertise in drone warfare, it has his work as somebody that can provide a lot of guidance and wisdom to the CEO, you know, when it comes to development of this type of weaponry. Shares in the company jumped 13% on the news that they got this contract. It's worth reminding Judd Legger,

him pointed this out, that Trump Jr., in one of the many podcasts that he does, talked about how he helped screen candidates for top Pentagon jobs and explicitly discussed looking for candidates interested in moving more defense spending into drones. So that's convenient. I'm like, among Hunter Biden's biggest haters that were not involved in like actually trying to uncover his laptop, I did not a fan of Hunter Biden, was ridiculous that he was on the board of Ukrainian natural gas companies. But this is just totally on another level from anything that was happening that was complained about endlessly on Fox. Yeah. And actually, what's really kind of chilling about this is the Pentagon is now wired enough to be giving contracts to this firm. So it's not just the White

House thing, you know, putting an individual on a board. That doesn't require the bureaucracy to be colluding. It just requires Trump and himself, Biden, if you want, you know, to be doing unseemly or maybe illegal things in the case of various Trump White House pay. and so forth. It's not just one person, right, to make this contract happen. There are a whole bunch of people, I guess, going along with this, pretending it's a legit competition, signing off on various documents. You know, the Pentagon has a pretty big bureaucratic structure for these grants. Or maybe they just went around it. I don't know. But again, it sort of gets the question of how much can Trump ruin the U.S. government in four years as opposed to simply personally

kind of drifting from it, right? That's happened before in a way, right? And certainly at the municipal level, right? People make money off. you know, get payoffs for deals. But, I mean, how much you can get the whole government operating this way, or at least good chunks of it? And that's bad. And also goes to, like, the JVL, favorite JVL topic about, you know, even in our best case scenario where a Democrat gets in in 2029 and they're a reform, whatever, you're going

to have to weed out these corrupt actors, like, throughout the entire government. Right. Which is a very different challenge than what happened in, uh, in 2021. Anyway, on the corruption. side. Our colleague JVL is really fired up about the White House ballroom, wants to raise it from the ground if the Democrats ever get back in charge. And I appreciate his VIM and Vigor on that front. I've had less passion there. The donors, the corrupt side of it, though, I do feel like needs an even greater microscope because it is, it's truly insane what they're

doing. They are privately funding this, the Donald J. Trump ballroom. And the people that are funding it, Eager pointed out in the newsletter this morning, many of them are these companies trying to get back in his good graces because they had stopped donating to Republicans after January 6th. So all these companies took a principled stand after January 6th are just like Bill Cassidy and Mitch McConnell. Corporate America is no different than Bill Cassidy and Mitch McConnell. I will be principled for a week. And then, oh, uh, uh, things have changed. And now I'm going to give you a million dollars to your big dance hall. And so that's one element of it. But the other element that I think is worth just really being explicit about is these are the most

entrenched interests in Washington. This is the traditional swamp. There is this maga swamp that we're talking about, right, where it's like Trump and all these kind of weird characters from the Star Wars bar that are like, you know, getting favors and stuff. That's happening. But also the traditional swamp has just totally co-opted him. And it's all the big defense contractors, tech companies, are all now giving him money, and there's no even, like the White House isn't even pretending to do the, you know, we're going after the corrupt moneyed interest element anymore. Like that part of the mega populism is just gone,

and they're happy to be co-opted. And I think there's some interesting, and obviously the policy, the potential actual corruption there is interesting, but also politically, potentially a vulnerability for him, I think. And vulnerability, but also a strength, because obviously if it were just the mega swamp and corporate America were uncomfortable with it or even rebelling against it or saying, we've got to stop this, it's too crazy. That would be better politically than corporate America and oligarchic America and billionaire America

saying, okay, we've all figured out how to kind of co-opted ourselves or go along with it. I mean, it's unclear who's co-opting whom, I guess you could say here, right? I think it's mutual backscatching. But these are powerful people. If the U.S. government and the most powerful corporations in America are engaged in mutual backscatchery with no oversight, no checks within the executive branch, no congressional checks, not much in the way of judicial checks, because that part's pretty hard, I guess. That's kind of a bad situation. And I do think, incidentally, that's sort of the pattern of other authoritarian regimes. They come in with populist rhetoric. They maybe go after one or two people to make an example, one to oligarchs or something.

But at the end of the day, they become powerful by the intermeshing of the huge corporations and the corrupt administration. For sure. And I hear what you're saying on the mutual back scratching versus somebody getting co-opted by the other, because that's true, right? They're both co-opting each other in a sense. I mean, just looking at the one direction, though, I think is important, just in the sense of, like, if you are one of the big government contractors

or one of the big tech companies, right? It's not hard to imagine a different type of Trump administration that goes directly at you because they started that. Like, Doge, like initially Doge, that was what Elon was going to do, right? Like, we're getting ripped off by these military contractors. You're going to go in and go after them. The big tech companies are all woke and are censoring Republicans and we're going to use our anti, You know, we're going to use the tools that they've used to go after media companies and law firms,

to go after the tech companies. And that isn't happening, right? Like, this administration's not going to go after any of them anymore. And they've totally managed to buy off Trump just by, like, buttering him up and now getting him this fancy theater. But also by, like in the media case, don't you think, by actually changing their media properties coverage and now buying more, it sounds like with CNN, I haven't really followed that in detail, but I don't fully understand it, Paramount, CNN and all this. buying more so they can have more pro-Trump or at least Trump acquiescent coverage. In that respect, it's scarier in that way, I think, yeah.

Just because we've seen the change of behavior. I guess that's definitely true on the media side. Probably not from the big military contractors. I mean, I guess maybe they probably change their hiring a little bit. Like, you've got to worry if you're a woman or a person of color that is, you know, being hired for a contract. But besides that, not really changing that much and now getting a, a White House that is just, you know, completely aligned with your interests, noteworthy.

We'll be trying to speak to some of the populist magaritis about that, see if any of them are upset. I mean, is this going to strengthen the, and shouldn't it strengthen, really, the populist side of the opposition and of liberalism? No doubt. No doubt. To that point, I guess we should say, I was going to get to it later, but I was pretty struck last night, and there's a big rally in New York for Mondani that mayor's races up here, eight

days a lot of energy you know again it's new york a lot of people in new york you know you can fill a rally but it's for mayor's race i don't really recall eric adams or bill de blasio like filling stadiums really or mike bloomberg um so noteworthy in that sense noteworthy also in the speakers at burney aOC kathy hokel did speak and the crowd started like shouting her down tax the rich So, okay, but you can kind of see how a merger of the populist and more traditional left might emerge that way, like, regardless of what the actual views are, like, where the Democratic Party ends up on like more traditional ideological lines as far as views on taxing and spending and dues on social issues, like the idea that there will be kind of an anti-establishment, we need to go after the existence. power structures and ripped them apart, root and branch. That element of the left, I think, is certainly empowered by what we're seeing. But someone like me would prefer if that became a sort of, I don't know how to put it, free market populism where we go after these corrupt big

businesses in order to have real competition and smaller. But, I mean, who knows, that will be strong enough to, as opposed to a more traditional, just kind of. Somebody should try that, though someone should try that um and it's hard to think about who would hold the mantle of this david sarada fellow denver nuggins fan a lefty burney staffer who like i think he won't even be mad at me for saying can get pretty can get pretty off the chain on the internet sometimes all right so david is maybe one of those who'd probably do better off of twitter than on but he wrote for us a thing about how like there needs to be kind of a democrat mccain where if you go back to that mccain what would have been 2000 race, primarying Bush, which obviously you know a lot about where he

was, he really was kind of foregrounding more of like these reform type issues, like, you know, campaign finance, cleaning stuff up. I mean, that could work for the, and it certainly would be better than some of the more, you know, how shall I say, vanilla type of Democratic campaigns that we've seen, you know, trying to do a, okay, you know, we need to actually clean up the system, populist left thing that goes after some of the billioners, some of the corrupt big corporations, goes after the Trump corruption, right? And have that be an alternative to the whatever, the more DSA socialist left type populism. Maybe that would not work. Who to hell knows? But like, that would certainly be worth a try. And there's not really anybody carrying that mantle.

And Murphy is trying to do it a little bit. But Murphy's also sort of flirting with the Bernie wing a little bit. So there's not anybody that's like really sticking that out at this point. that there's an opportunity for someone to at least give that a try. Yeah, I agree. And you'd be, the centrists are so, I mean, you know, defending the establishment, sometimes correctly against really irresponsible assaults, but that they, they are going to be timid about doing this. And then the moment someone says you sound one bit like AOC or Bernie, they'll all freak out and go back into centrist, you know, crouch. So that's a bit of a problem. And then the left has, you know, create some problems itself with some of their stuff. So it would be interesting. Yeah, we need a McCain

Democrat, right? I mean, I think if you want to think of it this way, maybe the, There's Romney, and this is kind of a stupid way I'm putting it maybe analogy, but there's Romney Democrats, totally down the middle, honest, decent, centrist, whatever. Then they're alike, that's what do we call them,

Santorum Democrat, you know, true believing, believer, populist radicals. We sort of, McCain is kind of neither Romney nor Santorum. I don't know if that's for our republic. Those who remember Republican races, this is a maybe...

Yeah, and I don't mean McCain Democratist. So just if we're going to play out this out for people who are listening who are maybe not following the nuances of this. I don't really even mean it in the sense of like a hawkish. No, no, no, I'm not thinking with that. Yeah, talking about his branding as kind of like a reforming maverick type person who could like

emerge, because McCain was basically policy-wise, like in the establishment of the Republican Party and he went against the Bush tax cut. So he was a little bit, you know, of a maverick in that sense. So like somebody that would be in the just sort of main body of the Democratic Party, but who prioritizes like these sorts of reforms and, you know, kind of more populous type issues of, you know, kind of going after the big, big special interests, right? Which is what McCain did on the right. Anyway, it might be something interesting there.

While we're talking about what's happening, the cell types, we have a shutdown. Potentially, an end to this is kind of emerging, but in a very hazy way. And I've been saying for a while, it's like hard to see how anybody's incentivized to stop at this point, like both sides are being served by this in various ways. But the American Federation of Government employees is out this morning urging Dems to stand down. Snap is going to go away next week. You've got some states, Jared Polis of Colorado, some others are coming up with creative ways to make sure Snap can keep going. But in other states, Snap will not be available food stamps for people. And so that's like real harm being done to folks. What's your sense for the state of

play and how the Democrats can handle it from here. I've always thought the Democrats might lose this in the sense of not get the policies they are fighting for, but win it well enough politically in the sense of highlighting for everyone that these are, that the cuts are Republican cuts in health care and some of these other areas too, and they just didn't have the ability to stop them because they weren't willing to make government workers pay even more in the way of lost wages and stuff. And that's what the American Federational Government employees is saying, and that is a fisher or break in the pretty, you know, solid wall of support for the Democrats among the liberal

interest groups. And I don't blame them. I mean, they were representing hundreds of thousands of employees who aren't getting paid into some of them. These are not all, you know, well-off people. So, and maybe it's better for the Dems to figure out a way to, I don't know, hate to be the council of slight retreat here, but maybe figure out a way to lose on the policy while blaming the Republicans. And they just scream and yell over and over and then just say, okay, you've been back a day, where the, you said you might fix some of these cuts in Obamacare and in Medicaid, where are the fix? And just kind of keep insisting on it over and over again, but maybe I have to yield on

keeping the government open. This was the thing from the start was my issue with the shutdown strategy. It was always just like, what is your end game if you're the Democrats? Like, there isn't one, really. Like, they never had one. And so it's not really great to get into a battle where you don't really know how you're going to get out of it. That said, I think it's been effective so far.

at least at raising... If they give in tomorrow and it'll be annoying for 48 hours as Michael Johnson and Trump and everyone will take their victory laps. But after that, I kind of think the demos will have come out of it okay, actually.

Yeah, I think so. And I probably wouldn't give in tomorrow. But yeah, and I think that the... No, I know. Yeah, look, I think that there's probably some more work to be done on just making sure Republicans hold the bag on the premium increases

on the insurance because that's just really starting to hit with people. And it's really next month that the preponderance people are going to see that. And so probably, and this is where says the other weakness of the Democratic strategy from the start is that the shutdown is a PR game. And so I'm trying to think about like, who is the point people on carrying this? Hakeem and Chuck, not ideal point people for carrying this from a PR standpoint. But, you know, figuring out a way to raise the salience on this and put pressure on the Republicans. As you said, they said that there can be a vote on this. Okay, is there

going to be a vote on this? How are we going to do it? When is it going to happen? Is the House going to pass it? You know, so putting the pressure on them on that front, maybe even doing it, quote unquote, deal where it's like, okay, we're going to have a vote on this. Let's make that. Let's see them do it. Can the House pass that? I don't know if they can. Maybe they can. Will Mike Johnson really bring it up as far as extending the Obamacare subsidies? I find that kind of hard to imagine. Maybe he would. So I think that there are some things that they'd have to do to execute an endgame here, but the pressure from people that are being materially harmed by this will increase. And you can't totally ignore that if you're the Democrats based on the types of constituencies that you have, I don't think.

Speaking of votes, how about a vote on the Epstein files? I think the process of, I'm going to say, of giving it, I didn't mean tomorrow, but, you know, over the next maybe a couple of weeks, in ways that make both maybe cut a deal or try to get promises or if you don't get the promises, berate Republicans for not accepting things that they said before they would accept, whether it's a vote on Epstein

or the actual fixing of the Obamacare premiums and stuff. I think there's a way to manage this, but yeah, it's not maybe these... And you do have to then seat the Arizona Congresswoman, which is insane that Adelaidea Grealva, her father had passed by then she won the seat in the special election, the fact that she hasn't been seated, it's been almost a month. I don't even, like, I don't know, times of flat circles I don't have it in front of me,

but it's been a while. A little more, I think a little more than a month, maybe. Yeah. And the fact that Mike Johnson is holding that up, a big part of why is that that give the Democrats to votes to release the Epstein files and doing that as a cover-up effort and, you know, just as part of the general way in which, like, the Republicans bully, you know, don't have any, you know, care for the rules or responsibilities of, of governance. I think it's pretty, this shows the asymmetry of things where we expect this

type of behavior from Republicans. You can imagine the inverse, like of Nancy Pelosi or whatever, not ceding, like some Republican that won a special election and like how Fox would act around that, how it would be treated, total hair on fire outrage. And this is a total hair on fire outrage moment that she hasn't been seated. And then you add on top of that, a big part of the reason she hasn't been seated is because of the Epstein cover up. Yeah, I agree. I mean, maybe the broader, I mean, do you agree with this? This is like slightly extension of this point. I mean, in a way, the conventionalism among political types is, you know,

kitchen table issues. So the health care issues are the strongest. That's why the shutdown is strong. And it's nice to have these no kings rallies on the side. Maybe the opposite is the truth. And I think I want the opposite to be the truth, so I don't trust my judgment on this. But maybe no kings is the strongest message. And the other stuff's fine.

It's good. And it gets to real constituencies. And it's a real issue. I don't don't get me wrong. But maybe at the end of the day, we kind of with Epstein and with the seating of someone who's been unjustly denied her seat for over a month and with all the other, you know, belated, just scorn of law and ethics and corruption, maybe that's called the no king's message. It's good if the no king's message emerges as the key message, maybe.

Well, and I also think that it's like the timing on all this matters, right? Because, you know, sometimes there's a fighting the last battle element. I guess I would just say pretty obviously that the no king's message is probably not the right message for reaching. the marginal voter, the working class voter, the Democrats struggled to reach in the 2024 election? Sure. But that's not really who they're talking to right now, right? Like the MA, off-off-year midterm elections in New Jersey and Virginia, pretty high education states. Virginia, obviously, with a ton of government workers, you know, New Jersey with the sprawling,

New York suburbs that JVL lives in, et cetera, right? Like the type of person you're talking to is a little bit different, is the type of person that is more animated by this, by this thing. You read about this morning, or Andrew did. You know, you're also trying to engage, highly engaged people who do things like the boycotts and going after companies that are yielding to Trump. Like, you want all of that to demonstrate you have momentum, right? Like, there is this element of there's political advantage right now to demonstrating opposition

strength rather than opposition weakness, and people, I think, are going to be more animated by, just broadly speaking, a No King's message, then your health care premiums are going up. Now, again, I think that the marginal voter, you know, some of you want to turn out next fall on the midterms, 2028, like, that's a different calculus probably. But given what the political environment is right now, I don't think that's a crazy observation. Speaking of No Kings, Trump did something, are we allowed to say when Trump does something kind of encouraging? Yeah.

Trump does something kind of encouraging this morning. There's a lot of catastrophizing here at the bulwark. I'm because things are bad because we're in a catastrophe. So it's good. It's appropriate to catastrophize when you're in the middle of a royaling catastrophe. That said, Trump was asked about Bandon's 2028 musings this morning. I did a little mile ago on Friday where I talked about the right thing to do towards the Bannon musings is make fun of him and point and laugh and just talk about how embarrassing this is that he wants an 83-year-old slathering on orange makeup to, you know, be like a,

King Lear, like meets weekend at Bernice in 2029. But still, people are nervous about this for good reason. And Trump was asked about this in the plane this morning with Marco Rubio standing behind him with like a Cheshire cat grin on his face, which is just repulsive. And the headline is kind of, you can look at it two ways, right? Like, I'm sure we'll see a lot of headlines in left media outlets in particular, which is Trump saying something to the effect of, I'd love to run in 2028. He says something to that effect, right? But, like, he does so in this manner where he's being cheeky, and when he's asked specifically about the one constitutional area that's like the grayest as far as him being able to run again, which would be him running as a VP and somebody else running as president and then that person resigning or, you know, just being, you know, kind of a, you know, whatever acting president or Trump has all the power. Trump specifically rules that out.

and he says it's too cute I don't think the people would like it could he change his mind in the future sure are there other fucking things that he could do sure are there plenty millions of things you're worried about with regards to Trump trying to hold on to power illegally absolutely

but I thought that was noteworthy that he specifically ruled it up well he rules out that VP gimmick because he says correctly I think it's too much of a gimmick I guess I'm slightly more with the lefty media outlets and the catastrophizing than you

but you know I'm kind of to your left these days and what can I say yeah you are I kind of think like he's signaling that I just think he could well do it. I mean, who knows what his health will be and stuff like that. Bannon's saying over and over that he's going to do it. Bannon's pretty plugged in, I think, so I don't know. I think they're laying the groundwork for the option of him doing it, A, and B, very much laying the groundwork for it not to be simply a clean hand off to Vance or to Vance and or Rubio. I mean, all the griff, I was thinking about the corruption we were talking about

the grift. It's risky for him to let anyone but the family almost take over. This is why they authoritarian is don't give up power, why they do dotter on until they're in their 93 years old or whatever. They are nervous deep down that whoever takes over might have once been with them, but maybe he or she will decide I can get good press by kind of, you know, getting rid of some of the denouncing the corruption of my predecessors. That's the other thing that happens in authoritarian transitions, right? So I wonder, I took it a little bit more as him signaling that, as he said, I would like to do it and that he might do it. I'm not sure how different we really I'm slightly...

Yeah, no, that's okay. I was just trying to look for a little ray of light. No, it's good. It's good. You should do that occasionally. It's tough out there. You could do that on Tuesday through Friday. I don't think so.

That's not acceptable on the Monday. That's not acceptable on the Monday, you know, on the Monday podcast. I know who's on tomorrow, so I'm not expecting, I'm not expecting much optimism. The most compelling counter argument is the fact that he has acted brazenly illegally in a lot of these. ways and why leave power, you know, why give up power when, if you assume that whoever replaces you will target you. And while Donald Trump might have immunity, broad immunity, Donald Trump Jr. doesn't. Eric Trump doesn't. And it seems to me like they're involved in

some illegal schemes, some illegal corrupt schemes. And I don't know that Donald Trump actually cares about his kids. So maybe he doesn't care about that. But it's not worth noting. It's trying to say the VP scheme everybody brings it up and I think it's just worth noting he said he thinks it's too cute I had one other Trump item but I kind of wanted to end with a laugh but it's too late we're here now I just I want to let we're going to do it we're on Trump on the plane I know people don't like the Trump audio so you can hit the fast forward 30 seconds 30 seconds but I got to do it because he um he was discussing the Democrats well let's just listen to it They have Jasmine Crockett, a low IQ person.

They have AOC's low IQ. You give her an IQ test. Have her passed, like, the exams that I decided to take when I was at Walter Reed. I took, it was a very hard, they're really aptitude tests, I guess, to a certain way, but they're cognitive tests. Let AOC go against Trump. Let Jasmine go against Trump. I don't think, Jasmine, the first couple of questions are easy, a tiger. an elephant at your rap, you know, when you get up to about five or six, and then when you get

up to 10 and 20 and 25, they couldn't come close to answering any of those questions. It's interesting that the Wright wanted to bring back the word retarded when this guy got into the office again, because it's just like, what? The first questions are easy. It's a tiger. It's like a three-year-old. Those are three-year-old questions. Identify this animal? That's one and a half years. Those are like your first words. It's like, Mama, Papa, Tiger. Like, what are you talking about? And so that he still thinks that that test that was, like, tested whether you have serious dementia or not,

demonstrates that he's smarter than you should note black women, women of color. Yeah. Well, I mean, the low IQ thing has just become a term for black or black and Hispanic, you know, minorities. And, you know, women, maybe a little more often than men, but I think he maybe uses it about men, too. the racism, can I just say at this point? Now that I'm becoming just a left-wing lunatic. I mean, the racism and misogyny in Trump world is increasingly just the mask is off.

Don't you find this when you look around at some of the... I mean, it used to be the really fringe types who would just say it. Now it's the... That it was the sort of fringy megatimes, but they would still sort of hint. Now it's just, at least online. It's not quite with most elected officials yet,

but it's pretty astounding. And Trump, of course, is not hiding anything. AOC is an intelligent woman. I mean, I think there's very little doubt about that. And I say this is someone who would, you know, prefer the Cheneapy the presidential nominee in 2028 of the Democratic Party. So, I mean, it's, well, it's just ridiculous. He did it.

Elephant. Does that appeal? What do you think about it though? Why does he want to do it? I mean, that's an interesting question. Like, is there some part of, I think the base likes it, I guess, right? He likes doing dog bullhorn racism, dog, you know, it's like not really dog whistle, but he likes doing it because he thinks people like it.

He thinks it is a little, makes you a little rascally. He's a little bit of a troublemaker. He likes to do that kind of stuff. He likes to see liberals do outrage, you know, about it and, you know, say, oh, why don't you guys coach your friends? Like, they like doing that. So I think that's part of it. It's also a power thing. And it's like how he puffs himself up, right?

So it's himself up. Like, these women are stupid, you know, as black and brown women are stupid. So I think it's that. If I was saying, I would probably try to find something. some other points there are other arguments that he could make and he made a lot of money in his life and there are other things you could turn to besides the test where he

is correctly able to identify the outline of an elephant that is kind of amazing he's really proud of himself for that it's like you can see it is a childlike in a sense of not most children are not evil and mean like and cruel like him but you sense that like

pride of a child who does something for the first time very well Oh, it's like, Papa, Papa, look what I did. Anyway, Mark Hurtling, I want one more thing from you and then let you go, is in the Bullock this morning on what's happened in the Caribbean. And he writes, Why are we moving one of America's rarest and most capable instruments of military power from a theater of genuine danger to one of political ambiguity?

He goes to talk about how we did Gerald Ford Aircraft Carrier, super carrier now coming to the Caribbean to like chase these allegedly drug boats. It's pretty strange. And, you know, it all comes in, like, around, you know, these other moves to make it seem like they're pretty serious, potentially, about some sort of effort in Venezuela. In addition to the fact, the Trump, last week, I guess it was, just taught when he was asked by Phil Wegman at a press conference about this. And he's just like, I just want to kill him. We're just going to kill them. How about that? If they were trying to bring drugs, we're going to kill them. I mean, I think Mark Herald species is very good. It really shows how kind of crazy if you're

serious military leader, as he is, you know, how this just seems ridiculous posturing. And he explains why that's the case and why it's not the right, it's not what you need to have in that area. And it is taking real assets away from great power competition areas or Middle East type areas where you might want to have, you know, a giant aircraft carrier that can, you know, for which 80 sorties, I think I believe it is, can be flown it kind of quickly and at one time against Iran or whatever. But, you know, he doesn't, honestly, Mark doesn't consider. well, maybe we really are going to go to war with Venezuela. I mean, I just reading the piece, I kind of thought to myself, Mark is such a sane person that even he thinks this is foolish posturing, and I'm not going to put words in Mark's mouth,

he's perfectly capable of imagining the other alternative too, but that he doesn't quite dwell on the fact that maybe he's planning a massive bomb or large bombing campaign against Venezuela, and maybe that he thinks that's the predicate to getting rid of Maduro and stuff. I've discounted that. I just think Trump, isn't it, he does know the wars are tough to pull off if you're a president, and they often hurt presidents who get involved in them. And, you know, he's been pretty cautious in that direction.

He loves blowing up innocent, you know, little boats that can't fight back with people on them, some of whom may be connected to drugs, some of whom are innocent fishermen. But I don't know. What do you think? Is it possible? I think I've underrated the possibility that he's actually going to launch major air strikes against Venezuela. Yeah, you know, what is the Maya Angelou quote? If they do this, if they show that they're going to do this, just believe they're going to do it.

I'm kind of getting there on this, you know? Look, I have no prediction. I'm like you. I think it's crazy. And he has shown an unwillingness to do this. You mentioned before in other areas. He doesn't want to be the war president, which is one of the great gifts that we have, frankly, that he doesn't. It could be the inverse where we have a 12-year-old that thinks that's like the best way to demonstrate how tough he is is to invade lots of people.

So there's that. And just the part of Venezuela is such a. an absurd choice. It's just not a threat in any way to us. There's oil there. But he hasn't really blurted out the I want to take their oil thing, which that could be a Trump thing. You remember that he would talk about that during Iraq. So I don't know. All I know is that they're doing the things that you would do if you're going to start a major campaign in Venezuela. So we'll see. One last thing. I forgot to mention when we were talking about Bannon. Last week, I said that his interview where Bannon was talking about 2020. It was in the Guardian and was in the

economist. I should show out the economist folks who were doing that interview. And the other thing I did in that modeling that has turned out to not be wrong, but the lay of the land has changed. I was talking about there was some optimistic clearance on redistricting. Virginia acting, Colorado looking to acting 2028. That doesn't help that much for 26. But Virginia potentially ready, you get three more seats out of Virginia, I think really pretty easily. If you look at those maps. And then there are two other, you know, smaller issues. But if this thing ends up being on the margins, the stuff matters, where Indiana was originally looking to redistrict, they're going to squeeze out, block a seat, a Democratic seat, just one seat that felt like Mike Pence talked

people off the ledge behind the scenes. It seems like now Mike Braun, the governor, is going back at it. So Indiana's back on the table. And then Illinois, this was from Lauren Egan's reporting over the weekend for us. I just need to read this because it's so crazy. This is the state center, Willie Preston, the Senate chair of the Illinois Black Legislative Caucus. There's no world where I could accept a loss of black representation, certainly not a voluntary gift of black representation so that the Democratic Party could win. This is crazy talk, like letting identity politics get in the way of this here. When I had Pritzker on, I was trying to understand what he was talking. There's some worry that some of these districts that are majority

black in Illinois go from being like Democratic plus 20 to Democratic plus 10. So conceivably, at some point one of those black legislators might be in more of a swing district than they had previously been in, and so conceivably they could lose that seat at some point. The times are too serious for this type of stuff. And if Illinois, which is already gerrymandered quite a lot, so they can probably only squeeze out one seat unlike Virginia, if Illinois can do something that would likely gain the Democrats a seat in November of next year, they need to do it. Like the difference between the Hakeem Jeffrey, so I should know as a black guy, being Speaker of

the House next year, and Mike Johnson is pretty dramatic when it comes to the future of the country. So, anyway, I don't know if you have any final thoughts on that. No, I agree. I guess on the slightly optimistic side, this thing is hard to game out. I saw some study, quote, study, but I'm genuinely sort of pretty serious attempt to game this out. If Dems could win the generic by eight, then all these Republican redistricting issues become, what do they call it, dummy dummy manders. Dummy manders, because you've suddenly created a lot of instead of wasting, quote, wasting votes in an R plus 20 seat, you created a lot of R plus eight seeds.

And if the whole country goes D plus eight, you're suddenly created a lot of democratic, narrow victory. Eight is a lot, though. It is a lot, yeah. It's a lot. Eight's a big, midterm wave. It's 2018, I think, was eight. Yeah, look at that.

Bill Crystal, nailed it. It was eight. Got to air that. Air that. 18 was eight. We're going to air that. 2018 was eight. I don't know.

I'm not feeling 2018 any quite yet, but we'll see. I think people are pretty surprised by Trump last time, and so I think we're in a little bit of different moment. But, okay, good. So a little mix for us, Bill Crystal, negative about Trump running as a third turn of becoming a dictator, optimistic about how the gerrymandering might backfire on the Republicans in the midterms. That's what we like here, okay? You don't, you know, you can't be predictable. You got to just, you know, tell people where you're at and on some things optimistic on the end of American democracy. kind of negative. Bill Crystal,

appreciate you very much. Thank you, Tim. Everybody else, we'll be back here tomorrow for another edition of the podcast. See you all then. Peace. Welcome, this is a farmhouse. We have cluster flies alias. And this time of year is bad. We are so very sorry.

There is little we. can do but swat them she didn't beg oh not enough she didn't stay when things got tough I told the lies she got mad she wasn't there when things got bad I never ever saw the northern lights I never really heard her cluster flies never ever saw the stars so bright In the promise things will be all right I never ever saw the northern lights I never really heard of cluster flies Never ever saw just start so bright

In the promise things will be all right All right, all right, all right, all right, all right Walk this morning to the stinging Everyman rise from the ash Each betrayal begins with Trust every man returns to dust I never ever saw the doors and lights I never really heard a cluster flies never ever saw the stars so bright and the farmhouse days will be all right I never ever saw the northern lights I never really

heard of cluster flies never ever saw the stars so bright in the front house there's be all right the board podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brett.