The Bulwark Podcast - Bill Kristol: Do Something

Episode Date: August 26, 2024

Some of the people best suited to make the case against Trump are the jilted Cabinet members and others who worked with him—doing the right thing is never the wrong thing. Plus, McMaster's preposterous spin, appreciating the words Kamala didn't say in her speech, making Trump own RFK, Jr.'s antivax views, and the gamesmanship over the debates. Bill Kristol joins Tim Miller. show notes: Adam Kinzinger on speaking at the Democratic convention Tim on the big fish anti-Trumpers who should endorse Kamala already Bill on the key line in Kamala's speech

This is an ad by BetterHelp Online Therapy. October is the season for wearing masks and costumes, but some of us feel like we wear a mask and hide more often than we want to, at work, in social settings, around our family. Therapy can help you learn to accept all parts of yourself, so you can stop hiding and take off the mask. Because masks should be for Halloween fun, not for your emotions. Therapy is a great tool for facing your fears and finding ways to overcome them.

If you're thinking of starting therapy but you're afraid of what you might uncover, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online, designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist and switch therapists at any time for no additional charge. Take off the mask with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P dot com. Landlord telling you to just put on another sweater when your apartment is below 21 degrees?

Are they suggesting you can just put a bucket under a leak in your ceiling? That's not good enough. Your Toronto apartment should be safe and well-maintained. If it isn't and your landlord isn't responding to maintenance requests, RentSafeTO can help. Learn more at toronto.ca slash rentsafeTO. Hello and welcome to the Bullwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. It's Monday, August 26th, and if it's Monday, it's Bill Kristol. What's happening, man? How are you, Tim? I was going to say, you've recovered from the convention, but I guess neither of us was in Chicago, so we had less to recover from, right?

I guess. I was on the late night shift with Jen Psaki until 2 a.m. every night with MSNBC, so I needed a little rest this weekend, but I'm feeling good. Those are your normal hours. That's life in New Orleans, right? This is true. It was Morning Joe that pissed me off. I'm like, no, please don't make me come in at 6.

I can handle the 2 a.m. shift. Anyway, we're all good. We can sleep when we're dead. As Tim Wall says, we both have creed accords out this morning. So we'll talk about our written stuff. And then I want to get into the RFK endorsement of Trump and maybe Trump at Arlington today and some debate, debates about debates that are happening. But first, your morning shots talked about what you saw as the most important line from Kamala's speech. And I guess I haven't heard your big picture views on Kamala's speech yet since Friday. So why don't you talk about that? The line was an unserious man and a dangerous moment. Talk about that line and your perceptions of her acceptance

speech. I thought the speech overall was very good. And I reread it a couple of times. I reread it early Friday morning before I wrote the piece Friday and noticed it was more subtly and deftly put together, I think, than maybe a normal paint-by-the-numbers political speech is. I mean, I thought we can talk about it if you want, but various aspects of it were just done well, I thought, and both disciplined, but also personal, which is difficult to do, right? She really hit her marks. She didn't say certain things she didn't want to say, did very much say things she did want to say.

I was very impressed by the speech. One thing that did stand out from just watching it on TV Thursday night, though, was this two-sentence paragraph early on in the speech, well, but after the first third of the speech, which is the biographical part, and she turns to Trump. In many ways, Donald Trump is an unserious man, but the consequences of putting Donald Trump back in the White House are extremely serious. And I'm thinking it's kind of unusual, right? I mean, why that first sentence? I mean, the second sentence tees up a whole bunch of consequences of Trump's second term, which we've all made those arguments many times, and she made them perfectly well, I thought.. Obviously, they have the sense, and they must have this from focus groups and polls,

or just from life, and I have it, and you have it, I think, too, maybe, that he gets away with a ton because he's unserious. It makes it harder to prosecute the case for how dangerous he is because he's such a buffoon and reckless and childish and self-indulgent and undisciplined and all that, and even some of the really horrible things about him that are genuinely pretty horrible, there's his personal behavior, and what he says about Medal of Honor winners and so forth, you know, it's a bit of a distraction from the true danger of a Trump second term. And I think she wanted to sort of say, you can think he's unserious, but here's really what matters. And so I wrote a little bit about that this morning. And again, emphasizing the point, a point we've made many times, but I

feel like people don't quite still necessarily come to grips with, including some of our friends who are kind of don't like Trump, and he's not real conservative, and he's not a real decent person, and he's a liar, and he's a hypocrite, but they don't quite come to grips with the core issue, which you discussed very eloquently in your piece, which you should talk about, which is how extremely and extraordinarily dangerous Trump's second term is. Trumpism is what's really, really, really dangerous, not simply Donald Trump. The two halves of that couplet, I mean, the unserious part was a through line throughout the entire convention right they wanted to minimize and mock him right rather than play into his strong man

ness that was in both the obama speeches it was in tim wallace's speech it was in a lot of the people's commentary throughout the week they wanted to make him small not big not strong and i think that is kind of why you include that in addition to sort of just the acknowledgement that that's a view that people have. But on the dangerous side, I think the other part of your newsletter this morning that is just worth lingering on for a second is, you know, something you talked to James Carville about a couple months ago, which is that Trump, the unseriousness in some ways, gives him some buffer with certain types of voters that makes him more popular than his

agenda is, right? Like, that's why Project 2025 is such a useful cudgel. That's why J.D. Vance is so much less popular than him, frankly. Like, there's something about the unseriousness that people like and make him feel less extreme you know than than maybe some of the other elements of MAGA and it's important to kind of tease out both of those things to make the strongest case to swing voters and the unseriousness I very much agree with that and the unseriousness also gives an excuse to let's say Trump excusers and Trump adjacent types Wall Street Journal National at all, to deflect other people's dislike of Trump and hostility and opposition to Trump into, well, you don't like the tweets. You don't like his personal character. I don't love it either,

frankly, Bill. But we've got to get back to this. I mean, it's a way of minimizing what's at stake. That's not why Trump does it. Presumably, is who he is and he just is being himself. But the effect, creates, I think your Friday newsletter was about the optimistic feeling. And I think that there's a bit of an optimistic feeling about the election, obviously, given the total turnaround over the last two months. But in addition to that, for me, it creates just a hint of optimism about the future. Not that the Republican Party is going to come back to you and me, really, but that the worst, most pernicious aspects of it are actually less popular than Trump, right? That the imitators are less popular than him. And if he can be, if you can chop off the head of the snake, then the rest of it is actually weaker than him, which I don't think a lot of people have really embraced, right? In some

ways, I see him as the clownish one, and like the other Republicans is more normal and more electorally powerful. And like, that's not really true, at least with the MAGA Republicans. Right. I mean, he's more popular than DeSantis, as we learned. He's more popular than Vance, the numbers suggest. They don't, people don't like the harsh, the harsh, more people don't like, some people do like, but a bigger majority don't like the true heart of Trumpism, MAGAism, and the authoritarianism and cruelty, et cetera, of that movement. Trump is, in a way, its best salesman. He was the original salesman, you might say, not the original one. I mean, Buchanan and other people were the original ones, and they didn't do that well either, right? So Trump had a certain ability that enabled him to take it to a different place.

And I kind of agree. I mean, Greg Sargent has a good piece about this in The New Republic. I mean, Post and Harris kind of points towards this, that post-MAGA politics could be a little healthier than we think, though it could also be, in terms of the Republican Party, just an even greater consolidation into the core hatreds, you know, and grievance mongering of MAGAism, but probably with less ability to get, it looks a little more like Michigan and Pennsylvania in 2022, right? West Nostrado and what's-her-name, the Michigan governor's candidate, they lose by 10 or 15 points, not by one or two points. Now to my piece this morning, as teased on Friday's podcast, Jeff Duncan was so good. Adam Kinzinger writes for the Borg today about what it was like to speak at the Democratic National Convention. We'll put that in the show notes, and I highly

recommend you read his article as well. He'll be on with us later this week. So I say this with no love lost for Jeff and Adam, who are great, or Olivia Troy, who I was texting with this morning, who I love, and others that spoke at the convention. But there are a lot of bigger fish that were absent from that convention. And there were a lot of people that, given their past comments about Trump, you would think might have had something to say about who to support this November on the stage where the audience will be the biggest for their argument throughout the rest of the year. That did not happen. That included all of the people that worked for Trump, Kelly,

McMaster, who we'll get to, Mattis, Tillerson, you can go down the list. It includes friends of the pod, Mitt and Liz. It includes the people that ran against them, my former boss, Chris Christie, Kasich. You can kind of go on and on. None of them were there. None of the old Bush administration officials, cabinet officials, Condi, Bob Gates. Not to say that any of these people are like a magic bullet, but you would think that given the stakes and given what Kamala has laid out as a pretty friendly policy, at least when it comes to foreign affairs and the commitment to the Constitution and the rule of law, that these people would be more willing to come forward.

And they haven't. So I laid out the reasons why I thought that was. Some of them more generous than others. And I'm curious, after you read that, where you come down on why you think all these folks were absent. I thought it was an excellent piece, as I told you. And incidentally, I mean, it is striking. Mike Ludig, the former judge, in his career in 30 years or plus in public office, was more conservative, I think you could say. More of a really hardline kind of philosophical and ideological conservative than most of the names you just mentioned, who were, you know, pretty conservative, some of them, but, you know, had tinges of moderation or whatever, some bipartisanship. There were some compassionate conservatives in there. There's some people that weren't

particularly ideological in some of the foreign policy folks. Right, exactly. And Ludig, I mean, so much to his credit, and I'd say the same about Liz Cheney, incidentally. She hasn't quite said yet that she'll vote for Harris, but she will, I mean, so much to his credit. And I'd say the same about Liz Cheney, incidentally. She hasn't quite said yet that she'll vote for Harris, but she will, I believe. They looked at it unblinkingly and crossed the bridge, you know? And I give them just a ton of credit for that. And they both say, and Kinzinger says this in his speech too, Adam, that he wishes he had come to this view earlier. I mean, Adam voted against impeachment in 2019 and I guess said he voted for Trump in 2020, as did Liz Cheney.

I don't know about looting. So, yeah, I think a lot of these people, for various reasons, have sort of stopped short. And they have their reasons, and let's just assume a lot of it's good faith or whatever. But I think underlying, this is now, I'm not going to psychoanalyze you, but underlying your piece, I would say, is the same thing that I am thinking about. Please put me on the couch. Underlying my own piece, which I only sort of realized is kind of like, you know, how it is after you wrote, I wrote it, I was like, why am I writing it? Is a little bit of worry. I mean, I am optimistic. I think the convention was good. But I think you have the sense in your piece that, you know, not everyone is stepping up with the urgency and the straightforwardness, clarity that the moment requires and deserves. And I make the point in my piece that people aren't quite coming to grips with what's really the real dangers as opposed to sort of deflecting a little bit into, I don't like Trump much. I just sit it out.

I don't like Kamala's left winger. So, I mean, I just kind of, you know, take a pass. I mean, I think it's of a piece, don't you think though, those that and I think we're and I think both of us probably are worried that if not everyone steps up, but if people minimize the danger, it's not a laid out, even though Harris is at a fantastic first five weeks. Absolutely, that is underlying my thoughts. You've correctly psychoanalyzed me, I think that there's a hint of complacency, even at the convention, when there's some elements of it that i i felt like were a little short like overall it was i think it was very strong i

thought the bomb was very strong and kamala was very strong in particular as well as adam and jeff duncan you know there were some parts that it felt like gosh could this rhetoric have been used against mitt romney you know like there were some of the politician speeches. I just, I didn't felt carried the urgency, the fierce urgency of now, if you will, that is required by this moment.

I thought that Kamala's speech was a clear exception to that. It is the section that she in particular that you referenced, but then she goes on to talk about like, imagine what this guy will do now that the supreme court has given him carte blanche essentially now that he you know will be able to have an entire staff of of you know people that will advance his most pernicious whims frankly and not even desires but whims and act on them like who are the people that are best suited to like remind folks of that and like the answer is the people that worked for trump right like they're the people that are the

best suited to emphasize the danger and the scale of the threat with credibility and the fact that not a single one of his jilted cabinet members were there i just thought it was a big mess i think this is you know subtext in the piece but as you mentioned like i do think there are a couple things at play for if we're going to be fair one is like you said this is not reporting but this is tea leaf reading and an informed understanding that like liz is going to endorse kamala this fall at some point there's some strategery going on i'm not privy to those conversations but i think that's gonna happen i think there also was which was my second point like there were some logistical

elements to this that there was a very short sprint for the harris team to to get this convention going there's been plenty of reporting i think by you and others my friend jonathan martin about how lackadaisical the biden team was before the debate on like reaching out to these people and like creating the relationships and the trust to like you know have them actually campaign I think that the Biden Harris team was a little late to the ball on this if we're being honest that said you know their phone numbers are gettable. If Mark Esper or whatever, John Kelly or anybody, Chris Christie wanted to get Jen O'Malley Dillon on the phone, I'm happy to share the phone number.

It's not that hard to find these people, so it's a little bit of a two-way street here. But I think those two things were happening, and that is the one green shoot that hopefully now we can get these folks off their ass i don't know what do you think yeah no i think so and i think some of them you know might have thought they they were comfortable doing it in a different setting or they think they have more effect in september or whatever i and the convention planners may have thought that too because obviously they can their phone numbers

are gettable but so are the numbers of the people you mentioned by by stephanie cutter or david fluff or vice president harris so they may have sort of had a tacit agreement to sort of let's so are the numbers of the people you mentioned by Stephanie Cutter or David Fluff or Vice President Harris. So they may have sort of had a tacit agreement to sort of, let's save some stuff for later. So I think that that is true, but only in a deep minority of these cases. As you sort of suggested, probably a miscalculation. This is the one moment everyone's focused on. And I think the cabinet officials or the people who serve in Trump's White House, the Trump administration officials have a special responsibility. They can stand up in a way that others can't, including even Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger and people who were in Congress when Trump was

president, or people who ran against Trump like Christie and others. We saw him in the Oval Office. They can say if they wish to say, I'm not going to discuss confidential conversations that I had about defense matters or Secretary of State matters or any other matter, Treasury matters. But I'm just going to tell you, this man should not be president again. This man, we cannot have this man as president, which means we do need to support Vice President Harris. That is not a very difficult thing to say, in my opinion. They believe it. They've said the first part of it, a lot of them, that he's terrible, he's irresponsible, he's dangerous, he shouldn't be president again. He's the most flawed person I've ever met in my life, in the case of John Kelly. But then they can't quite cross the bridge to the logical conclusion that I find,

not just bewildering, but off-putting and wrong. I mean, it's just not right. You know, these are serious people. They've had very senior positions in the U.S. government, many of them have been four-star generals or other very prestigious posts, and they need to kind of do the right thing here. What was the quote you used in your piece a couple of times? Really a wonderful quote from Kinzinger quotes it? No, it's from Jeff Duncan. No, Jeff Duncan. Yeah, it's from Jeff Duncan's son to Jeff Duncan.

It was really nice. Doing the right thing is never the wrong thing. Yeah, yeah, that was good. That's sort of on the cabinet side. On the convention side, I will say that I thought Harris' speech itself showed a much deeper understanding, in a sense, of the campaign than a lot of the Democratic politicians. Who looked at the Democratic politicians. They gave Democratic speeches. That's okay. Someone has to do that.

You know what I mean? Not just her speech, though. I would say the convention organizers, which is the campaign, which means who's only the people who are in charge for the next 10 weeks, also had an understanding that was very much, I think, like the vice president's personal understanding. Who spoke in that last hour? Kinzinger. They didn't have to have him in that prime time one hour before Harris. They could have had him the day before or something. Leon Panetta, not a Democratic governor or senator, someone who's last in office in 2012, but Secretary of Defense, sort of a bipartisan figure, you might say, been in every senior position in the government and Congress and then Chief of Staff

and then SecDef, and gave a very strong, not partisan speech, quoted Ronald Reagan, made by little heart go pity pat, you know, there, 25 minutes before the Democratic nominee for president was about to get up. So I thought the fact that they gave kinzinger and panetta such prominent roles was a uh a sign that the campaign is thinking about this race in a strategic way that i think is is right i agree with that and we honor leon panetta here at the bulwark he's always welcome on the podcaster to write for us yeah he couldn't have been bob gates or condi rice or mark asperg this is again is my point. I just wouldn't have had a little bit more oomph, but I agree with you. It was good. Or a letter from three of them released that morning or, or, you know what I mean?

Or the day after even, because he was saying, you know what? We agree with Leon Panetta. It's not, I mean, just to be clear. Yeah. I think your point, making a point, the convention is a unique forum, but you're making a broader point about speaking up. I mean, Ludwig didn't show up at the convention, but I think his statement on the Monday of the convention was important. Just to stick on this for one second,

because I think that this is also important. Kamala's speech, again, if you're being as generous as possible to these people that really don't deserve our generosity, like maybe it's like, you know, it's his whirlwind and it,

Biden was kind of this, you sort of knew what you're going to get with him and Kamala's coming in. And I don't know a lot about her foreign policy. I don't know a lot about her. I don't want to get out over my skis and endorse somebody and then have it turn out that she wants to have an arms embargo on Israel or something, you know, something that I couldn't support. She gives a convention speech that demonstrates just an unceasing and passionate loyalty to the NATO alliance, a commitment to defeating China in the competition for the 21st century, a commitment to take whatever action is necessary, that was her quote, to counter Iran and its proxies. She pledged to make certain that America was the strongest,

most lethal fighting force in the world, which caused some lefties on my social media to be clutching their pearls a little bit. She paid tribute to American exceptionalism and vowed to defend our democratic ideals against autocrats around the world who are rooting for Trump. At this point today, August 26, what more do these people want? the foreign policy conservatives all right like if you're mike pence and you're like oh she's pro-choice whatever i don't agree with that but okay but if you're condi rice if you're jim mattis hr mcmaster like what more do you want than what she gave what she gave i mean that was that was a mccainian convention speech on the topics of immigration and foreign policy. And if I can go like one step over from that, if you're an anti-Trump, but sort of anti-anti-us,

you know, anti-Trump conservative, you know, person who's very worried about the Democratic Party, oh man, they just, they're never going to walk away from the wokeness. They're never going to abandon grievance politics. It's all identity politics there. Tim, don't you know that? I mean, that's clear there. It's also crazed redistributionism and hatred of entrepreneurship and also kind of anti-American, frankly, no pride in the American history. We've heard this a million times, and there are elements of truth of this about aspects of the Democratic Party. Has any Democratic and almost Republican, honestly, could mention speech been further away from this? I mean, I had thought of the contrast with Hillary's speech even in

2016. Hillary's not exactly a raving left winger in the party. She ran against the left, obviously, with Sanders. But still, if you look at that speech, there's stuff in there that made people's skin crawl a little bit. Huge amount of glass ceiling talk, big emphasis on the first, last, finally, centuries of injustice overcome, first woman president. I don't mean to mock that, but that was the tone. None of that from Harris. She alluded to the fact that she would be the first woman president, but didn't even, didn't make that a part of her pitch. Never, glass ceiling, never heard it, right? Race mentioned once in the speech in a context where she sort of says we

shouldn't, I think she's telling a story about her mother. You need to do the best you can and forget about race, color, and all this other stuff. So, I mean, what more could one want if one were an anti-left, anti-woke, anti-identity culture type of moderate? Even conservative. Even conservative. Yeah. National Security, American greatness conservative, if you will. Literally, what more could she have done i guess is a point i she just she sent every signal that she will

continue the bipartisan american tradition of supporting american strength at home and abroad and i to a point that it made some people on the left uncomfortable and yet still i'll continue down the list. You know, Chris Christie, the Bushes, Dick Cheney, they're just on the sidelines. Like, I just, I don't understand. She's giving you everything you want to accept it. On the woke thing, just because you mentioned it, Nate Silver had like a really good article on this on Friday that I've been noodling on. He talked about how she kind of invoked her racial identity in ways that were much more aligned with kind of like the pride in the American immigrant experience sense, rather than what he calls the nails on the chalkboard tones of social justice leftism, where you're talking about the negativity of,

you know, the challenges facing marginalized groups. He writes, there was an optimism, a quality that is sometimes in short supply among Democrats and completely absent from the matrix of intersectional oppression. In fact, Harris turned some woke tropes around 180 degrees. It's Republicans who are pessimists, who are weird, who are unpatriotic. I just noticed that too, right? Like there was no even hint of oppression Olympics there, the absolute opposite. Right. As you say, the diversity side of it, if you want to put it that way, was much more in the traditional American appreciation for

diversity. I'd be Joe Lieberman in 2000, talking about his parents and grandparents and how proud they weren't all alive, they would have been the ones who were passed away of him of a Jewish American having this chance, this opportunity in this great country was much more like that. Then, you know, I'd also got some grievances here, because my father's from Jamaica, and my of a Jewish American having this chance, this opportunity in this great country. It was much more like that than, you know, I'd also got some grievances here because my father's from Jamaica and my mom's from India. And there's been discrimination against both in American history.

And I'd like to recount some of that. And again, it wouldn't necessarily be wrong to do that, but yeah, no, that would have been a totally appropriate thing to do. She chose not to, she chose not to very much.

Yeah. To a single out one last person here, HR McMaster's doing the rounds this weekend he's still in a book he's welcome on this podcast we're inviting him on this podcast actually i'd love to talk this through with him he's in the atlantic this morning i don't even know what to say about it i'm like almost speechless about his article in the atlantic this morning it is called what trump got right about national security. So doing exactly the opposite of what I was calling for in the bulwark.

There are two things just to highlight the absurdity of this article. Here's a quote. He being Trump found it difficult to even utter the phrase human rights. Okay, that's good. But became impassioned when he witnessed cruelty, such as the serial episodes of mass murder in Syria. Are you fucking kidding me? HR McMaster. He became impassioned when he witnessed cruelty. Donald Trump.

Like, what are we doing? Why do we have to make him into another person that he is? Bill, he goes on. Here's towards the end. Epictetus. Epictetus.

He cites the great stoics epictetus defined the discipline of perception as the quality of clear judgment in the present moment trump could see the contours of complex situations and was in the habit of challenging assumptions and conventional wisdom but his conflicted vision of the world and america's role in it clouded his judgment at times. Epictetus, he has some traits that are similar too. What is this? It's a real stoic type Trump. Look, I defended McMaster. I've known HR.

Some, not very well, but some for a long time. I was a tiny player in the agitation for the surge in 2005 and 2006, and McMaster was key in that, having successfully done counterinsurgency earlier in the war. I taught his book at the Kennedy School when I was a guest lecturer there for a couple of terms in the 2000s, a really excellent book on Johnson and the incredible failures of Johnson and the Pentagon, both Johnson and the Pentagon in Vietnam. So I have a high regard for H.R. I saw him when he left the White House, actually. And it was totally off the record dinner and all this. But I mean, he does not have a high opinion of Donald Trump and does not think he should be back in the Oval Office. But for some reason, he writes this piece, as you say, that's, I mean, I guess he wants to defend his own record. But the truth is, I mean, I defended his going in, because I thought he could stop a lot of bad things from happening. And maybe he did. And that's an adequate, he doesn't need to defend Trump. He can just say, I was there for over a year. I believe I kept certain guardrails in place, kept certain things from going off track. And also, we accomplished a few things.

Fine. But yes, you say, why the general statements about Trump, manifestly false statements about Trump's character, about Trump's judgment and so forth. I don't even understand it. He doesn't need that to defend his decision to go in, I guess is what I'm saying. I think that's defensible as a matter of national security. And maybe it was right, maybe it was wrong. I remember arguing with friends about it at the time. But you know, I think it's defensible. But yeah, it is disappointing. One of the funniest parts of the piece, I guess the piece is sort of an excerpt from his book. So maybe this is a little harsh way to criticize it, but since he probably voted months ago, but he had one paragraph begin something like, whoever is to become president in 2025, he or she will have these challenges. It's in that elevated foreign policy. I'm above politics. I'm just talking about the

world out there, China and AI and all this. He chose to have it reprinted in the Atlantic. He could have edited it a bit. There's only two people who could become president at this point, basically, in 2025. I mean, absent medical disasters or whatever. And, you know, there's something insane about writing a piece about American foreign policy today with a kind of whoever becomes president. I think it's important that it captures your point, though. Totally. Yeah.

I wouldn't do this, but whatever. If you felt like you had to defend the record, you can imagine writing an article about how, you know, Donald Trump had a bunch of people around him that served honorably, like occasional points, like we channeled his instincts for good. I don't fucking know. You know what I mean? Like we, you could imagine a way to write it that doesn't shine Trump's turds and like puff him up as if he has some of these like stoic values of seneca it's ridiculous to describe him this way that's like doing like a fanzine it's like a comic book where you're like taking somebody that's good in public life and like giving them superhero traits that they don't really have and like it's just it's preposterous and i just think doing this

now tory's on face the nation yesterday if you going to put out a book right now, and you had eight years to do it. So if you're going to put out a book right now, it's incumbent on you to actually render a judgment on what is best here going forward. And what is in the Atlantic today is preposterous. And you know, his successor is National Security Advisor, John Bolton, whatever one thinks of him. And he had his own punch pulling, if that's the right word, in 2020, and not coming forth early enough in the impeachment and so forth, and then writing in Reagan or whatever he did. But still, he's actually much clearer, I'd say, in his judgment

on Trump. His judgment is that the guy was, well, he says it, right? He's totally unfit to serve again. Now, John still wants to somehow not vote for a Democrat, I guess. I haven't heard from've, I haven't heard from him recently on this, but, and that's another quarrel we can have with them and should have with them. But it's sort of surprising if you'd asked me 15 years ago, or five years ago, eight years ago, who's going to sort of step up more, if I can put it this way, H.R. McMaster or John Bolton, I probably would have said, oh, John's a Washington creature and Republican. He'll be less of a hack. Yeah, yeah. H.R. is, you know, impressive kind of intellectual general. It would be less of a hack. Yeah, yeah. HR is, you know, impressive

kind of intellectual general. It is disappointing. It is disappointing. Well, we're just going to keep looking for the ways in which Trump is similar to Epictetus over the coming weeks. I'm sure there'll be a lot of opportunities to highlight those. RFK Jr. has rendered a judgment, though, on the election. he made an endorsement over the weekend let's take a listen in my heart i no longer believe that i have a realistic past electoral victory in the face of this relentless systematic censorship and media control so i cannot in good conscience ask my staff and volunteers to keep working their long hours or ask my donors to keep giving when I cannot honestly tell them that I hand the election over to the Democrats with whom I disagree on the most existential issues, censorship, war, and chronic disease. I'm sorry to make people listen to his voice, but we had to get to that end part,

because that is critical. He gives three reasons for why he has to endorse Trump. He cannot let Kamala Harris win because of the issues they're the most important face in the country censorship the war in ukraine and vaccinating children that's why he endorsed trump he thinks trump is more on his side when it comes to abandoning zelensky not vaccinating our children and ensuring i guess i don't even know what the censorship thing is related to. Yeah, it's amazing that Elon Musk bought Twitter and is running Twitter and is actually putting a big thumb in the scale on what's promoted on Twitter and also all kinds of bad, you know, disinformation stuff. Under the Biden administration, there's such

horrible censorship, you know, and Robert Kennedy was incapable of raising money for his campaign. Donald Trump wasn't capable of getting the Republican nomination. I mean, it's so farcical where it just won't begin, but it does tell you a lot, right? I mean, he's right that Trump's closer to run those issues. I think this could be used against Trump, sort of our earlier conversation, that the more MAGA-ish the Trump campaign becomes, the more, and also the more conspiracy theorists, you know, theorist-ish the Trump campaign becomes, and also the more conspiracy theorist-ish it becomes, the more people look up and say, I kind of find Trump's something kind of interesting about him, but these people are crazy. I mean, I do feel like there's a chance here to exploit this, and maybe it hurts Trump. I don't know. What do you think?

Painting Trump as anti-vax and pro-Russia and in bed with the weirdest people in politics, I think is helpful. I do think that if you just look at the straight math, that RFK is probably right that he was hurting Trump more than Kamala at this point. I think that he was hurting Biden more than Trump for various reasons back had Biden stayed in. But I think Kamala has sort of gobbled up already, not all, but most of the RFK junior voters that were gettable for her. And so it might help Trump a little bit on the margins. I don't think the endorsement does, but just him being off the ticket might help him on the margins. That's a little bit concerning, but I do think that the Democrats and my friend Liz Smith, who they've deputized to do this, are going to be able to have a heyday making Trump own RFK's craziest views and anti-vax views. And I don't think that that's

particularly helpful. I just think it's worth going back to the censorship thing for one more second. It is kind of a mystery to me why this continues to have such purchase in this country like this idea that like free speech is a threat this is the golden age if you're a person that has insane and weird and conspiratorial views and you want an audience or a platform for it there's no time in world history where you could have a bigger platform for your freakishness than right now in america i mean like what would rfk jr have done if he was running in 19 you know somebody who tried to run in 1976 on a quack platform like you wouldn't have been able to learn about them like they wouldn't have been on the network news they wouldn't he has these huge platforms on

youtube on twitter you can communicate directly with millions and millions of people. Who's being censored? What are they even talking about? Like, it is totally nonsensical. There's a certain type of person that that line is resonating with, I guess. Yeah, I guess. And the anti-vax stuff is interesting. I was struck.

I think I'm right about this. At the convention, maybe the first night, I can remember the first two nights, there was what seemed to me at the time, and I think to other people, a surprising emphasis on how bad a job Trump had done in fighting COVID, which believe me, I think is true. But I think the conventional view in a certain kind of sophisticated circles, not even pro-Trump circles as well, the COVID thing's a mixed bag, the schools, the Biden administration didn't do a very good job on, or Democratic governors didn't do a very good job on, and better to leave that thing kind of aside. I think the Harris people must have discovered in focus groups and through polling that, you know what, people

are pro-vaccine, and people are grateful to have the vaccine. And even on COVID, people do not want the kind of leadership, if you want to call it that, that Trump showed. And you don't have to get into the weeds of defending every, you know, liberal school, every school district that didn't open, you know, that put off opening under pressure from the teachers union as long as they should have, maybe. I wonder if the vax thing is more of a potent issue than people think, because people have been a little spooked by it. You know, it's just, it's not fashionable these days to be straightforwardly pro-vax in a funny way, you know. The other endorsement from this world that

trump is getting today reportedly is from tulsi gabbard which is not a surprise endorsement supposedly he's also been helped she's also been helping with debate prep going to mark caputo's reporting for the bulwark i just mentioned this because it is also striking this imbalance like the inverse of the people we were talking up before it's like the pro-putin isolationists like tulsi see very clearly which side they're on like they are lining up behind trump rfk and tulsi and david balzac and all these people that like want us to want us to concede to putin and ukraine they're all lining up behind trump they're not sitting on the sidelines being like well i don't know he's got a couple neocons around him,

I don't know what he's going to do. But for some reason, they're counterparties. And other people are talking about the HRs, the condis, etc. Why don't they see the choice as clearly as Tulsi sees the choice, I guess. And Ukraine is one of the issues that really divides the two campaigns. Some of these others are a little complex, tax policy, who the heck knows, right? Congress. With the pick of Vance, Trump has put himself clearly on the anti-Ukraine side of the Republican Party. The Democrats have been pro-Ukraine, a couple of things I wish Biden would do that he hasn't done, but, and half the Republicans are pro-Ukraine. It's a political matter. This is where I thought Panetta's speech and Kinzinger's speech and Kamala's own speech was actually very important.

She spent a fair amount of time on Ukraine, but she knows that this is an issue that unites her supporters and divides Republicans. And it gives her a chance to win over some of the good Republicans. Almost every name you've mentioned, I think literally every name you've mentioned is pro-Ukraine. But you think, OK, they're foreign policy experts. The most important issue in the world in foreign policy today is Ukraine. I think it's pretty indisputable. There's a clear division between the two parties on it. Do you need to know anything more, really? I mean, you'd like a defense budget that's 0.3% higher, and you'd like a slightly different tweak on the China policy, and Israel, maybe one sentence less

about humanitarian suffering in Gaza. I mean, really, are any of those things, I mean, it really is unbelievable when you think about it, that people are kind of wavering or holding back or doing a lot of chin pulling about tough choice for me, you know? Yeah, to me, it's just like if Tulsi and RFK are on one side, I don't even know how much more I need to know than that about the fact that I'm on the other side of their of whatever choice they're on when it comes to should be the next president trump is today at arlington it's the three-year anniversary of the afghanistan withdrawal it's interesting like this is the one issue that cuts both ways for him or his policy was indistinguishable from biden's on this but it is almost like the fig leaf for these people right because he has a legitimate criticism of the way that the Biden

administration handled the withdrawal horribly and dishonorably, frankly. His actual policy wasn't any different, was maybe worse. But the fact that he's there today shows that he's trying to have it both ways. Like he wants to have Tulsi and RFK and also keep these other people on the sidelines by attacking Biden on Afghanistan. Maybe that's working. I don't know if there's any efficacy to that, but I think it's notable. Yeah, it's not stupid politically for them. It's dishonest, but not stupid. And incidentally, on the Afghanistan thing, if I can just go on another 30-second rant, some people we know have been criticizing some of us, I guess. They've never said quite my name. You know, we're

just pro-Harris and pro-Biden, and we've given up on whenever, you guess, though never quite by name. You know, we're just pro-Harris and pro-Biden and we've given up on whenever, you know, we pull our punches, we don't criticize them. I do believe on Afghanistan, the bulwark is probably published. 50 pieces critical of Biden, including in real time at the time. I mean, people, I was very upset. We were very upset. And then subsequently for three years, Will Selber's been on this in a really deep and powerful way, I'd say. And fine, so we don't agree with what Biden did. And to the degree Harris defends it, who knows how much she was involved, honestly, but we don't agree with that. So we're capable of saying that, you know,

I mean, this notion that I don't want to be defensive about it. I think I just point out that you have said it, and Will Selber has said it, and JV Ellis said it, and Sarah said it, and we've all said it. And that's just a indeed let's do let's do some debate talk there is some gamesmanship afoot from both teams i think it's worth worth kind of just looking at it trump was on truth social last night bleeding late into the night about how he doesn't like john carl He misspelled his name intentionally about George Slopidopoulos, about how ABC is the most unfair of all the networks that he's been watching their shows lately. Apparently he's included into his TiVo rotation and he does not like how unfairly he's been treated and maybe he shouldn't do this debate. He should do all the other days. So

Trump is soft peddling. Maybe he doesn't do the September 10th debate with ABC. Harris then meanwhile, Brian Fallon, I think sent a pretty funny line, one of her advisors talking about how Trump's advisors are attempting to muzzle him to the muted microphone. The Harris team, I think is very smartly trying to re-negotiate the frankly idiotic negotiation that the Biden team did with Trump where they demanded that his microphone be muted, which like helped him, which is something that we all said beforehand. I still can't possibly understand what their rationale is for that. So the Harris team is trying to troll Trump into unmuting his microphone so that we can see

real, authentic, unmitigated Donald Trump, un-muzzled Donald Trump. So anyway, I'm curious what your thoughts are on what's happening on both sides. In my day, I did the 92 negotiations for Vice President Quayle against Al Gore, in coordination, obviously, with the Bush and Clinton folks. And we all knew there was going to be the debate. And we went through the, you know, there was genuine jockeying for, you know, could we bring in a prop? We wanted to bring in Gore's book to prove that he hated automobiles, you know, and no, you can't bring in a book. But we knew there was going to be a debate.

We knew it was basically what the rules were going to be. And it was all kind of pointless jockeying, which people on the outside would be well justified in ignoring. I don't know. I'm not so 100% certain there's going to be this debate. And I can see people on both sides sort of wondering whether it's in their interest. I mean, Trump has skipped debates, you know, certainly a little bit in 2016, obviously, with Hillary and, and certainly the primary debates this last time. Harris, I guess, hasn't really skipped debates. But on the other hand, she's not been in a general election debate. So I'm not actually

sure what I would even advise people to do at this point. Do you think Harris has to really, has to debate, basically? I don't think she has to debate as much as Biden did. Biden absolutely had to debate. We kind of saw why. Harris, I think, should debate, but doesn't have to in the same way that he did, that Biden did. She has to debate as long as Trump is going to i guess i will say right like she can't be seen as ducking it you know and playing into this idea that she you know is hiding behind a teleprompter and it's not like there has to be some level of demonstration that she is kind of up for the task of engaging on the issues if trump pulls out though i i don't know that she should be the

one that's like absolutely forcing the issue right in the way that Biden had to be. Trump, I think has to debate, which is why we'll have debates is really what it comes down to. I just I don't think that you can be the machismo candidate, who's losing altitude, losing momentum, and who's afraid to debate the black woman. I just don't see how that works for him. So I think in the end, Trump has to debate, I think they know they have to debate. And I think that they're trying to has to debate. I think they know they have to debate. And I think that they're trying to work the refs. It's possible that Trump is so fucking wrapped around the axle about ABC that they end up

canceling that one and just do one debate because I think that they've also tentatively agreed to the NBC debate, both sides for later in September. So I think that's interesting. The mute button thing I find to be the most interesting, which is like, can the Trump campaign really get away with saying we want a mute button? I don't know. That's kind of an interesting back and forth. I hope that we end up without the mute button, but it'll be interesting to monitor. The Trump campaign will take the position that they agreed to the rules back then. The rules included the mute button, so they just stick with the rules.

And I guess that's the obvious compromise is stick with the rules, which the Harris campaign doesn't want to do. They want to, quote, change the rules and stick with ABC, which the Trump campaign allegedly doesn't want to do, and stick with the schedule. I guess it's the most likely outcome. But I could see it sliding and this debate disappears because there's continued disagreement and there's only one debate in October. If Trump thinks he's gaining a little bit by Labor Day and doesn't need to have a debate on September 10th, I mean, who knows, right? I think that the polls will show. And there's been one poll since the convention, which had tariffs up seven nationally, which

I just, we need to see. I want to see how things shake out. It's going to take, you know, a few days to let the actual convention settle in. And you need kind of a battery of polls to be able to look at an average. So we'll see. But if that one turns out to be representative of the polls we see, then Donald Trump absolutely will have to debate. I wanted to leave us here on this, you kind of alluded to it at the top, but I want to circle back to the Harris speech. There was one element of it that I thought was really well done and you highlighted it and me

and AB did not mention it on Friday. And that was how she weaved through the story of her late mother throughout her bio and kind of what it said about her campaign message. And anyway, I just thought it'd be nice for you to leave us with your observations on that. Yeah, what it said about America. I mean, you know, it's always it's hard. I mean, we had a few not having written many convention speeches at this level, obviously, not at the presidential level, but having written speeches, you know, it's hard not to be formulaic. And especially on the bio part, it's hard not to either be kind of boring, honestly, or self-important and self-aggrandizing. I prosecuted all these cases and I got an award in 2013 as best prosecutor or whatever, right? I thought she really, the device, if I can call it that, though I think it's a sincere device, but let's say the rhetorical device, of doing a lot of this through the prism of her mother, parents, that it really becomes her mother, her mother's experience in America, what her mother counseled her, how much she admired and admires her mother, her mother's memory now, the family, the sister. I mean, I think it was a very humanized, it seemed true. And again, it was a real American story in a sense. It wasn't just

about her. Maybe that's a way of putting it. She talked about herself without seeming to talk totally about herself. And that's a very difficult thing to do. And usually the talk about yourself part is not, I think Nate Silver makes this point, just comparing parts of Harris's speech to Clinton's speech. I mean, Hillary is, you know, you may not know that I, as Secretary of State, I traveled to 112 countries. That is not really the kind of sentence people are like, oh, that's great. And she avoided that pretty thoroughly. And what, as I say, with the mother was actually quite an interesting story and a kind of recognizable story to americans of all sorts i think yeah for sure and i think that michelle obama hit it as well right and so it ties like through it's a through line through the convention because it's her mother imploring people to do something just as we're imploring some of our

former friends to do something so uh with that with the wisdom of kamala harris's mother we'll leave it there i think me and bill are going to do a short episode next labor day so you guys will have something so we'll see y'all all then thanks to bill crystal tomorrow it'll be friend of the pod mark leibovich we'll see y'all then peace Oh, I ever wanted, I think I'll regret this Your moment was so cruel Oh, how I'm all that rings me But I do, I finally do There was no proof of how my mother raised me But I do, I finally do You're an all-embracing boy

I guess I couldn't help trying to be The best American girl You're an all-embracing boy I'm just a man who can do it all. I'm only a proof of how my mother raised me. But I do, I think I do. the bulwark podcast is produced by katie cooper with audio engineering and editing by jason brown