The Bulwark Podcast - Bill Kristol: Republicans Are a Mess

Episode Date: August 10, 2026

The party is sticking with Max Miller despite the very credible domestic abuse allegations. Not only is this a gift to his Democratic opponent, Brian Poindexter, in that red district in Ohio, it’s also likely to impact the Senate and governor's races there as well. Meanwhile, Tucker and MTG are talking about creating a third party for 2028. And Trump is losing to Iran so badly he can’t even make a coherent argument about the war for his biggest fans. Plus: the ankle monitoring of Haitian immigrants is very Soviet-era Eastern Bloc, defense contractors don’t want Ukraine making Patriot missiles because they can do it for less money, Trump is literally giving Mexico territory so he can build his corrupt border wall through Big Bend National Park, and Tim keeps his promise and shares some history on bananas.Bill Kristol joins Tim Miller.show notes: Tim’s candidate list, including Ohio’s Brian Poindexter Monday’s “Morning Shots” Bill and Eric Edelman on the munition depletions Tim and Isaac Saul on the bulldozing of Big Bend Jim on the governor’s race in Ohio NYT profile of Brian Poindexter Bill’s “Bulwark on Sunday” with Col. Bree Fram Atlantic piece on Ukraine becoming a military powerhouse Go to Dupe.com today and find similar products for less. It’s 100% free to use. Stop wasting money on brand names and start saving with Dupe.com today.

Welcome to the Bullwark Daily. I'm your host, Tim Miller. It is Monday. So we are back with Bill Crystal. We're in the doldrums of August. And, you know, there's still terrible news out there, though, in the doldrums of August. How are you doing, Bill? Yeah, I'm doing fine, but I agree that the news is not universally great. We're going to run through some of the stuff. I'm going to start here because it seems like me and Bill are the only ones who are upset about this. So I'm going to put it at the top of the podcast. The U.S. Senate on Friday did pass. a government funding bill that will prevent a shutdown to the midterm elections. The CR passed 90 to 6. So only six, only five Democrats voted against it. Actually, Rand Paul always votes against this sort of stuff. The senators, according to reports from the Hill types, notice, and punchball,

senators seem to be gearing up for a bigger fight in December. Why? Why just, I don't know. Hard to say. I saw silver lining. Bill saw silver lining. One silver lining I saw. I saw is that the CR does push back the ban on weed beverages, which I can't believe that

they're going through with. It's just a disaster for small business people all over the country, including in red states and districts, but we're going to need our weed beverages to get through the midterms. So any delay on that, I guess, would be good. Decides that I'm mystified why all the Democrats went along with this. I guess I should say, forget the bill. It's not over yet, or I wouldn't have led the show with it. The CR they passed in the Senate is different than the House, now the House has to vote on again. So conceivably, this, you know, if Hakeem Jeffries and the Democrats in the House decided that they wanted to pick a fight over something, that is still possible. I encourage them to do so. Bill, what's your thoughts in the state of play over there on the Hill?

You know, you and I have this in common that we take a position. It loses 90 to 6 in the United States Senate. And we're still thinking, hey, we're right, you know, what are those 44, whatever they have, 41, I guess, Democratic senators know that we don't know. I mean, look, it's a CR, so there's some argument always for keeping the government open, and not getting into a frantic September bargaining, which parts are going to be open and stuff. But they are funding a lot of bad stuff. They're funding the ongoing operations of ICE, the ongoing operations of the war, the ongoing operations of this and that.

If I at least would have made Republicans withdrawing the reconciliation bill a condition of the vote, maybe they did that tacitly because the Republican, or quietly, the Republicans did withdraw or have not moved on the reconciliation bill, which has the $60-plus billion for defense and various other appropriations, most of which are probably bad. So that is a bit of a silver lining, which means there still will be fights in September, as you say, partly in the House as they move to accept the Senate bill. If they don't accept it, then they have to go to reconciliation. Not reconciliation, I'm sorry, to a conference committee. Wasn't that a thing that used to happen in the other? And I kind of remember that for major pieces of legislation. That seems not

to happen anymore. But anyway, so it still is alive in that respect. And that as I say, there still will be fights on reconciliation and on other issues as well. Well, these guys don't work, really. And so the House is not back until September. Right. I think very end of August. And I think the Senate is September 14th right now. It's like unbelievable. So this could be one of these situations. I mean, we're being a little glib about But as I recall, the last shutdown fight, or maybe it was two shutdown fights ago, was really, it was the events of Minnesota that, like, caused it. The Democrats were on path to kind of doing this, you know, continuing kicking the can thing. And then there's this righteous outrage for good reason over the behavior of ICE that then gave a kick in the pants to the Democrats, you know, who are like,

okay, well, we can't fund this government right now, and that kind of led to the last fight. A long time until September, I guess. Now, who the hell knows what's going to happen? What horrors the Trump administration will inflict upon us between now and then? But I do think that anything that kind of extends that timeline creates a possibility that there's another galvanizing kind of event to organize around. I agree.

Just like the facts of this is that this is kind of continuing of the status quo through December versus a reconciliation bill would have given them more money for the stupid war and for the stupid war at home in deportations. But to me, even still, the status quo is like a no. The status quo is a no. Anyway, and I just, I don't see just stealing the argument of the Democrats, I guess it would say we don't want to give them anything going ahead to the midterms. We feel good about the midterms.

We don't want to give them the opportunity of saying that we're shutting down the government and that is harming people. I just don't see how that would be an effective argument for the Republicans. I think that is their private political argument. We're winning. Let's not rock the boat too much. I always get worried. This is like teams going into prevent defense much too early, you know, I feel like.

But psychologically, it's a bad sign that they, in a sense, went along with this. The Democrats won the previous two fights politically, right? The first was at the end of September, right? It was September, October. The government shut down, which coincided with, Trump dropping some war in the polls and extremely good election results last November in Virginia and New Jersey. And then the second fight, as you say, was after Minneapolis on DHS. Ultimately, they got that funding back through their earlier reconciliation bill. But that fight did really help, I think,

brought home that there was a split between the two parties on this fundamental question of mass deportation. And substantively, they had to use the reconciliation to fund it. You know what I mean? So, like, again, that could have been something else that the Republicans had done to pass. And And the Democrats successfully got that funding out of, you know, the broader budget. Republicans had to use reconciliation. So again, this is like a minor win in the grand scheme of things, but the Democrats are in the minority. And so minor wins are what you're going for.

Right. Two wins in a row. And God forbid, they should pursue the same strategy at her time. That's kind of too complicated for the Democrats. So they've talked themselves into, I think, an excessively passive strategy, but not the end of the world. No, not the end of the world. But I'll note, again, it's like, it's our people.

This is really why I feel like it's incumbent upon us to do it because it's like, who are the no votes? Warren, Sanders. Tim Kane, shout out to Tim Kane, was the one guy that I saw on the bill from more of the mainstream party that was. I think on the war probably was what moved to him. He's been very outspoken on the war powers stuff. And he's right to be incidentally. And they couldn't demand a vote from Republic. I guess they don't need to demand a vote.

I guess those resolutions are privileged. They get votes anyway. That's why there have been so many of them. But they really need to be ready to fight on the war and on ice and on everything. everything else in those two weeks that they're back in September. Some of this is just messaging and positioning. And like, this is just my view on the war thing overall. This isn't 2003.

You don't need to do the thing. We're like, oh, we're worried that if we fight over war funding, the people are to be mad at us because we're not funding the troops. It's like nobody wants this. The president doesn't even want the stupid war. Like, nobody wants a stupid war. Plant your flag in the ground, you know, and make an argument on the funding side of this that you're not going to provide another penny for this thing.

This thing that nobody wants, it's hurting people in America that's hurting our standing abroad, and that's achieving no results. So we're going to get back to the war. Sorry, there's my war ramp. But let's just stay on the hell for a second. Max Mill, because you wrote about this morning for the newsletter. Today is like ostensibly the deadline for Max Miller, the very credibly alleged domestic abuser that the Republicans are running in an Ohio House seat for him to get off the ballot be replaced by somebody else. You pointed out to me that technically he had to write a letter by Saturday, actually. The deadline might already be passed, but ostensibly today is the final day.

The Republicans, Donald Trump and Mike Johnson in particular, the NRCC, have not done anything to push him aside. They've stood beside him. They've continued to enable him. And, man, and I just think it's just another pretty stark example of just the weakness and cowardice of these guys. Yeah, it's amazing. A few senators have spoken up, but only because their colleague, Bernie Moreno, who's the father-in-law, ex-father-in-law of Miller, the father, obviously, of Emily Moreno, who was married to Miller and abused by her, she says, quite credibly, only because they were sort of supporting their colleague. If the victim here had been someone whose father was not a senator, I don't know that any senators who had spoken up, but more

to the point, the House members, who were actually Miller's colleagues have been incredibly silent, led by their leaders, if you can call him that. Speaker Johnson, who's busy giving interviews about how, you know, life is complicated. What did he say? We're all flawed human beings, something like that. I mean, it's really a little philosophy there from the speaker. You know, we said, God forbid, we should actually do anything about someone who's been charged for this and speak out against him, really urge him to resign from the House, or at least not run for reelection, say you wouldn't, the NRCC shouldn't provide funding for him, et cetera, et cetera. But no, they're so passive.

And once Trump and Johnson are okay with it, they seem to be fine with it. It's amazing. The excuses they find for not taking a position on something. His opponent in that House race, Brian Poindexter, I don't want to pretend like I know a ton about him, but I do want to read the lead of the New York Times story about him from over the weekend. Brian Poindexter until recently a little-known Democratic candidate in a solidly Republican House district lit a marlboro cigarette

and jammed a screwdriver into the latch of a shed door he had built. He ignored his phone, which had been blowing up because of the Miller scandal. Quote, it's crazy to have him running for Congress, said Plain Dexter's father, Bob, who had made bolts for a living until he retired last year. He was watching his son work. What would be really crazy if he won? You know, Democrats looking for guys that are smoking cigarettes and fixing shed doors. So that's a good start.

And we've been flagging this from before. the Times flagged this is a solid leader, Republican House District. It was always in that kind of batch of house districts that I've been really focused on that we included in our list, which we put again here in the show notes, people missed it a couple weeks ago. These kind of R plus 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 seats that, sure, in a good Republican year, our solid R. But it was, you know, kind of in that next edge of vulnerable seats even before this scandal. Yeah, and I think Miller in 2024, Trump wanted by fairly comfortably, but I think Miller got like 51. something-something percent of the vote. There was some independent candidates. It was margins a little bigger, you know, as more than three points or something. But yeah, so he's never been super popular, nor should he be, you know, unqualified Trump staffer who was vaguely involved and helping to organize, was involved, not just vaguely, helping to organize the January 6th, the speech by Trump. I guess he was some kind, maybe he was an advanced guy or something, I don't know, and helping arranging the speakers at that just terrible rally, which, incited the insurgent, the storming of the capital. So he's involved in that, that he wins in

2022 because Trump endorses him. He's the son of a very son, grandson, nephew, whatever, a very rich family in Cleveland, the Miller family. But it's never been so far as one can tell particularly popular in the district. So I do think that's a wittable race. And I think all the Ohio races are winnable. I think this will spill over to the sedentatorial race, the gubernatorial race. It looks like the Democrats are at least even in both of those. Maybe Ohio will go back to being what it was in our youth, Tim, you know, when it was an actual swing state, the closest state in 2004.

Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up because that's where I was going to go next, too, because I feel like I've given Ohio a little bit of short shrift compared to some of the other big Senate races, in part just because it's a little more, you know, there's a kind of status quo with Sherrod Brown against John Houston. Houston did not handle this scandal with any sort of honor or integrity. And he spent days avoiding saying anything, and then kind of put out the most tepid, imaginable statement about Miller.

And then over in the governor's ratio of Amy Acton, running against Vivek, my old pal Vivek, who I followed around Iowa. Vivek, I didn't realize this until yesterday because I was kind of getting ready for the pod. Like, Vivek's already spent like 40 million on that governor's race, and Acton spent basically nothing, at least on the airwaves, and it's tied. So, and he's spending a ton of money just to barely stay above water. the data center issue massive in Ohio, one of the biggest states in the country for the amount of data centers being built. And like they gave this insane tax break to the companies that's going

that's causing a budget hole. And Vivek was out there cheerleading all that. So between the data centers and Max Miller and obviously all of the economic wreckage, Trump is bringing, yeah, all of those feel winnable for the Democrats for the first time in a minute. Yeah, I agree very much so. And it would be nice to have. Ohio back as a real swing state. It's nice to have Ohio with Democratic governor and senator and a couple of extra members of Congress, perhaps. The other Republican politics thing that's just bubbling around, this one to mention,

your old friend Tucker, you hired Tucker, right? You hired Tucker. You're applying for Tucker? I did. 1995. He was 31 years ago. He was 24 years old, I think, 23. And did work for the weekend standard for five years.

It was a good reporter. I think in 1995, I was sneaking liquor out of my parents' cap. I've had two young of an age. So we all make mistakes in 19. We all made some mistakes in 1995. There was, I guess, a meeting of the minds, if you want to call it that, between Joe Kent, Marjorie Taylor Green, Tucker, Thomas Massey, talking about potentially creating a third party, like an America first party, talking about 2028. Coming out of that, you know, there's obviously like Will Tucker run is kind of the top line thing that people discuss out of that. though I think that Tucker

the short of that I think basically is if Trump tries to get behind Rubio like maybe Tucker decides to get in but I think Tucker would be pretty satisfied advanced but that's kind of where I think stand now but MTG is our argument is the two-party system is a complete and total failure

I'm 100% totally completely disgusted with both parties on adverbs this is not nothing I don't I'm not sure that this is a successful party I don't think this is the beginnings of a successful party per se. But it's, it is a real political issue for the Republicans. I mean, who knows where these people all end up and who knows what Trump does? And does he run again?

Does he try to get Don Jr. instead of Vance or Rubio? But the odds are not nothing that there's a genuine third or fourth party on the on the right, right? An MTG-type America First Party. Maybe it's not ultimately the Republican Party splits in half and we have a sort of 1912 type situation or something. But maybe it is Buchanan, right? What if you can to get to an half percent or something in 2000? I mean, I don't think that's at all out of the question, especially if this war drags on and Trump can't end it. And Trump just seems generally unpopular enough that they don't feel intimidated by Trump or by the Republican establishment. It's certainly not intimidated by the Republican establishment in any case at this point.

But Trump presumably could squash this personally maybe or maybe not even. Who knows where he'll be a year and a half from now. It's a pretty, you know. Sorry to bring up bad memories for some of the listeners. but Buchanan almost as a spoiler for Bush in 2000 and ends up being a spoiler or gore because a handful of people accidentally voted for him on the butterfly ballot who meant to vote for Gore in Florida.

The point of that story is you never know what can impact these kind of things could have, right? Like it might feel like a kind of silly gadfly thing on the side, but the thing that's got going for them is they have an actual base. Right. And I think that a lot of times I get, I would get phone calls and you would I know for here. about why can't Jeff Flake and whoever, Joe Manchin, start a third party?

And it's like there just isn't a real support base for that. Like there's some people that might support that type of third party in a situational environment, depending on what the other two parties put up. But most people who would want that, like, are either happy with the center left Democrats or, you know, are the tiny percentage of like Nikki Haley, Wall Street, John, Republicans who still exist, right? Like, this group has a real potential base to build from that could cause a lot of problems. And obviously, they have huge megaphones.

And Trump has made it possible for them. Like, this would not have been possible if Trump had not made his own bed by, like, getting in bed with the tech oligarchs, covering up the Epstein files and starting the stupid war with Iran. Like, Trump made this insurgency within the party possible. Yeah, I mean, part of me wants to say, yeah, no one. who's anti-Trump and anti-Trumpism and anti-authoritarianism should count on on this. They could end up with a pretty unified authoritarian ticket and party in 2020. I mean, Tucker's like 10-point plan was pretty fashy.

Yeah, totally fashy, yeah. But, you know, not like fans would be that much less so. So they could, it could be the threat. It remains very great. Having said that, on a general contrary principle that people are always, you know, kind of wrong in these kinds of things, there's been so much publicity about the Democratic Socialists and the huge fights for the Democratic Party and God knows where they, you know, it's going to be ripped apart at the seams. I kind of assume just on contrary principles

to the Democrats will end up being reasonably united in 2028, and this fall for that matter, actually. And it's the Republicans who might beneath the surface finally sort of start to come apart at the seams. There's so much wishful thinking. That's one reason I'm so hesitant to even say for 2018, 2020, 2020, 2022, 2024, even 2026. They're not really, as we saw with Max Miller. They're not coming apart at the seams. I mean, no one's denouncing him or an Epstein in the 50 out of 52 for Todd Blanche. So one shouldn't expect it, but it does feel that there's more

real tension on the Republican side. Trump has held together personally a lot, right? I mean, the personal character of his leadership, I hate to even credit, but it's true, it wouldn't be happening without Trump. And so ex-Trump, if Trump does step aside or is forced to

just have to step aside as he's 82 or whatever, it could begin to really fracture in a way we haven't seen since 2016, I guess. I agree with that. and what's the line? These things happen very slowly and then all at once. I think that's something to continue to monitor.

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there and but like you said, bubbling was under the scenes. There were potential fissures that would have been exposed eventually. The war supercharged that. I was listening to one of the kind of America Firsty podcast that listened to over the weekend. And they played this clip from Trump talking in Nevada and we're just mocking him. And we don't play Trump's voice on here. John Howman broke that rule when he was guest hosting for him with Jill Crystal. We didn't warn him.

We let the guest hosts do their own thing. Okay, everybody could be a little nicer to John. So I'm just going to read it, the Trump quote. Get comfortable because it's long. Here's Trump, I think, off teleprompter in Nevada because it was supposed to be a messaging event about the economy. So I don't think Iran was supposed to come up at all. And then he does this Trump thing where he does an aside. And we're doing the same thing, by the way, in the lovely Islamic Republic of Iran.

We're knocking the hell out of it. knocking the hell out of them. I'd rather make a deal because I don't want to kill people. I do not want to kill people. But at some point, we're going to. We'll not want to kill people, but at some point we're going to. We're set for the biggest attack of any attack, and we've hit them very hard the last few months,

but we're all set for the biggest attacks since World War II, and they called me and they said, please don't do it, sir, let's talk. And then they said, we never said that. You know what? The fake news knows they did say that, but we are talking. Let's see what happens. but they respect us.

They respect us. It's been 47 years, but really it's been 50 because they've been saying 47 for three years. It's been 50. And no other president has done what you should have done a long time ago because Iran could not have a nuclear weapon. Can't have it. But just last week, last week Kamala Harris called for eliminating the electoral college. That was Trump in Nevada on the state of play with the Iran negotiations. He also said it could open as soon as this weekend.

it's Monday, it's not open. He called Axios and said, we're low-keying it, we're only semi-negotiating with them. How can you listen to that and think that this person has any, any, at all grasp on what's happening or any plan or any idea?

Plus, maybe threatening the biggest attacks in World War II is not a popular thing to do. Do people really want to have the biggest attacks that's World War II? I kind of doubt that, you know? That's what Tim Dillon was saying. Who was listening to is doing. He's like, this is crazy!

He's like the biggest attacks on World War II. He's like talking like a crazy person. And then he's like, oh, but we said we do it. But then the Iranians called me. And then they said we didn't call me. And it's like what? He's lying. He's just obviously lying and lost.

Like, he's lost. And the straight-in-form moves is closed. If we just come back, it's funny how much, the press comment just kind of lost sight of this. They're busy covering the big back and forth. They should remind people occasionally, the street is not open. And for all the talk, it opened briefly, sort of open briefly. And now we're basically just saying, yeah, we hope, we hope Omar and Iran can work out a deal, which is like 90% Iran telling Omar.

not what they want to be, needless to say, where the straight is open at Iran's sufferance. And that seems to be fine with Trump at this point. And plus the nuclear program, he's sort of talking about less. I mean, but Iran is making it hard for him to surrender because they kind of keep wanting to rub his face in it. And therefore, he might, I suppose, try to revert to force. Yeah, I mean, the WSJ reporting says the Trump privately told senior A's he could just walk away from Iran if they open up the straight of Hormuz. So all he wants now is just back to status quo and he could just quit. And the Times is saying that Iran said Monday that the straight is going to remain closed

until the United States agrees to their demands on a variety of things. That's going to be very hard for him to agree to. Iran took out an oil tanker in the street yesterday last night. So they're still firing. It's just a disastrous situation. And I guess the point of reading his gobbly guck from Nevada is that, he doesn't even have a story that he can tell about it. Even like his loss to Biden,

like the story that he was telling about the 2020 didn't make any sense to anybody who's in touch with reality, but it was like a coherent story for people living in his false reality. He doesn't even really have a coherent story to tell his fans right now on our own. You know, that's a good point, I think. And I've been struck by that just talking to some, I don't know, various social occasions with people who are not that political and stuff.

And yeah, it's like, what is this about the weapons? Don't they know how to use weapons so they don't run out of them? I mean, there's enough mismanagement combined with the lack of any strategy, combined with the fact that the war's unconstitutional or illegal, combined to the fact that it's just super foolish and has been executed badly and hexass of a buffoon. I just feel like all together it's adding up to more maybe than just,

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Start saving money with dupe.com today. You had Edelman on the Crystal Conversations over the weekend. It was pretty good. I was listening to that just because I'm trying to wrap my heads around what the particulars are about the story. like our munitions being depleted. And then this is something that Edelman knows well. I point people to that if they want a deeper dive.

I was interested also in this story from the Atlantic saying that Lockheed and Raytheon are refusing to license Patriot missile production to Ukraine because I think the Ukrainian manufacturers are going to be more efficient that would be able to improve and produce them at scale and for less money. I think this is an interesting like two stories to bring together, right, which is kind of the corporate corruption of this White House in particular. Obviously, this is something that goes, this is not unique to this White House, but like, but just the White House is totally for sale.

You know, these big DC interests can buy these guys off. And so we have, we've gotten into a stupid war where we're getting dangerously low on material that we need simultaneously to the fact that like the Ukrainians are doing what you would think that like a free market pro. national security Republican administration would be excited about, which is like innovating and coming up with ways to make weapon systems faster and more effective. And we're standing in the way of that, too. Yeah. And in the conversation with Eric Edwin, but also the one I did when I was picturing for you, actually, with Margaret Donovan, who served in the Defense Department in the last decade as a JAG.

And then yesterday with Prefram, who was kicked out of the Defense Department because she had transitioned 10 years before and had an honorable and distinguished career, but that's not good for, in the Trump X-eth world, you just go around finding people who literally transitioned 10 years before and had utterly spotless records and just purge them, you know, because they're transgender people. But we talked a little more broadly also about what's going on at the Defense Department, so she was until December, so she's in touch with them, lots and lots of people. And it's bad.

I mean, I think the degree of just dysfunction, mismanagement, good people leaving. bad people sucking up to their political masters to get promoted. The defense won already needed to be reformed. It's going to be a huge task in 2029 to sort of rebuild it in a good way and reform it at the same time and get over and restore some culture, whatever the institutional problems, and you're right, the kind of interest group, Lockheed, Raytheon type problems, procurement problems. I would say that you think the culture of this military was pretty impressive. People respected the military in America for good reasons.

You know, there's a kind of professionalism, a kind of serious and sobriety, sometimes a little bit bureaucratic. But that's now, I think, is at risk because of Trump and Heggseth. I do think that it was like the Doge critique that Elon offered, right, which is like there's all this waste in the Defense Department. And, you know, and like it's something that like, despite him being awful in every way, like he'd seen firsthand, he's like, I created a SpaceX and we can get, we can get, we can. can get into space and NASA can't anymore. And so, like, that's a coherent critique, right? And then they just botch it in every way possible by putting forth these, you know, buffoons and, you know, not actually really caring about the outcomes.

But, like, I do think, you know, in the Democratic side, it's like, it's funny. Like, the story offers something both for, like, the abundance, efficiency Democrats and, like, the Lena Khan Democrats that are like, hey, we need more competition. We should break up these big companies that are. controlling, you know, defense contracting. And also we should be, you know, bringing people in that ensure that, like, taxpayer money is being used to pro. Like, all those are all, like, legit critiques of the old Defense Department

that now have been totally exacerbated by these guys. Like, like, now it's worse than ever. And then you layer in top of that, getting back to your other point, just the buffoonery, there's no feeling of competence, you know, there's no meritocracy who's getting promoted, who's getting fired. why. And to me, it's like that last point is why you can't go to HECSF, right? Like, Trump wants Stoogis in these positions. Trump doesn't care about that. I mean, Trump is embarrassed by the Ron Roy. He would rather win than not. But like, he doesn't care about like military

effectiveness quo for the purpose of that, right? Like, he cares about it about in service of fluffing himself up. Right. And so he needs people that will continue to do that. Right? So I don't know. To me, it seems like maybe I'm wrong about this. Well, the future will let us know. But I feel like Mike Seth feels like among the safest. And he's doing what Trump wants in terms of the politicization of the military. And he's been pretty aggressive and not incompetent exactly in that. I mean, he's been maybe some of the particular things haven't been good from a PR point of view. But he's got a lot of people intimidated is what I gather. You know, by firing the generals he fired, by promoting the ones he's promoted, by making

clear that he's willing to just reach into the ranks and politicize everything. It's not ineffective. I mean, it's a terrible way of being effective turning us into a third rate authoritarian military, which we're not, thank God, there yet, or even maybe near there, but in that direction. So I agree with that Trump doesn't care about any of that, if anything, he likes that's doing. It's just a kind of Christy-nome PR question. It's a Pan Bondi question for me at this point. Does he think he's better off with just the political side of it? But it's not so easy to find someone else. I mean, if you find someone, and also in that confirmation fight, if he waits till after November, really risks, you know, allowing a Democrat,

certainly Democrats from the Senate, right? Risks turning over a lot of rocks about what the heck was happening there in the Defense Department. So. And you have to find somebody that is that you can trust to be as loyal as Hegg-Seth and that also presents a slightly more competent than him. Right. It feels like that person could exist. Blanched. Yeah. Yeah. No, the equivalent of or Jay Clayton, I guess. Yeah, it feels like it, but maybe not, because military is a little more complicated. I don't know. I feel like there's a lot of pent up. A lot of people have been quiet who've left in military, have been fired. I think too many of them have been too quiet, to be honest. If you get, you know, a lot of, but whatever, they have their own culture of that and they also have incentives not to speak up in some ways. But I feel like there's a little pent-up stuff beneath the surface there, and maybe the firing of heck Seth would unleash some of it. You mentioned Blanche. We didn't talk about it because Friday also emotionally beaten down by the events.

Do you want to share any thoughts about Tom, Tell us, and John Cornyn and Bill Cassidy? I mean, they're pathetic. Cassidy, the vote's pathetic enough, but what he said on TV yesterday about how, you know, this is really why for the history books, when you really have one of these major moments and I feel honored privilege to have been part of this major moment, a major moment of pathetic capitulation. to Trump. Having capitulated on Robert F. Kennedy Jr. 18 months before, having gotten assurances, having watched them all just violated, as he himself, even as acknowledged, right? And then I'm just going to do it again with Todd Lynch, you know, and not having met with the Epstein survivors, really, really horrible. But 50 out of 52. Like, honestly, like, he should donate his brain to science for psychological testing because the self-delusion here is remarkable. People get confused with a lot of things. Like, hopes and expectations. and are different.

Some people are like, Tim, I can't believe you're a surprise that Cassidy did that. I was like, I wasn't surprised. I said at the top, I'm not surprised. So like, when he decided to go speak because these guys have delusion of grandeur, I was like, I feel like there's an outside chance

that the decision to speak is signaling that he wants, you know, to be seen in this historic moment as somebody that did do the right thing. Because like, Blanche was getting in eventually anyway. Like McConnell's either getting replaced or he's going to rise from the dead. be able to make the vote, right? So like, Lance was getting in. So I was like to go speak might

mean that he wants to. But, and so I was kind of half right. He turns out he was speaking because he thought it was a historic moment that he wanted, you know, to get attention for. It was just that he thought that his moment was to, like, totally cave to Donald Trump's corruption of the Justice Department. And just one more point. I'm just you were right to, I mean, neither of us was really surprised, but it wasn't crazy to think that, maybe it's a different circumstance in this way. Our friend Greg Nanziata, who runs the Society for the Rule of Law, who's a genuinely conservative lawyer, worked for Republicans on the Hill,

on judicial and confirmations and that sort of stuff. And I'd say, to his credit, but still quite conservative, I'd say it's jurisprudential views and all that kind of thing, very much opposed to Blanche. And he made the point, there's a very good point. He said, look, they all voted for these horrible candidates in January and February, and we warned them that they were going to be horrible, and they were horrible. And they deserve no pass for that.

On the other hand, you could at least tell yourself, then, well, we don't know. Maybe they'll be better than I fear. Let's, you know, defer to the president, the new president on his first round of appointments. Todd Blanche has been deputy attorney general and then acting attorney general. We have a record of how Todd Blanche is going to run the Justice Department under Donald Trump. It's not a speculation the way some of these other people you could have said at first was a speculation. And Greg is very, very tough on this. He says it's such a disgrace, therefore, to have confirmed this guy, having seen what he has done on the, politicization of justice, on everything else he's done there, on the dishonesty, on the Epstein

cover-up. And so they deserve, the 50 out of 52 are still willing to go along. It really is extraordinary. Utter disgrace. That's the right word. I want to do immigration a little bit. You guys have been covering this well in morning shots, in part because Jim Swift is in Ohio and able to go to Springfield. But, you know, the removal of the Haitians is just so, horrifying. Like the situation back in Haiti is awful. Remember the Donne Roe doctrine, given that this is in our hemisphere of anything that we should be trying to help the conditions in Haiti. Everybody made fun of Kamala Harris that her job during the Biden administration was the root causes of immigration, which is a very challenging job. And it's like we don't have total control over what's happening

in Central America. But like, I don't know, we could at least try to help the conditions in Haiti instead of that, we're planning on sending people back to it. So you posted one of these and there's so many now like this really saddening video of a guy in Ohio, Haitian guy, getting an ankle bracelet put on them because the government wants to monitor all the Haitians now so they can't run away. And it's very Eastern European socialist in these images and the actions of the ICE officials. So I don't know. one more there is to say about it besides the fact that it's horrifying.

But I don't know if you have any thoughts. No, just that. I mean, it's one thing to, you know, send people back to a country they came from, or Mexico, I should say. And if they're not a personal threat, you know, okay, maybe we should keep them. Maybe we shouldn't send them back. They've been there for 10 or 30 years, obviously, in my view.

But here you are literally sending people who came here back to a place where they are, could well be killed. I mean, no question about it. And totally unnecessary. They're doing fine. they're working hard. No one in Springfield wants them to leave. No one in Miami wants them to leave.

And didn't you, I think you retweeted or commented on this. This guy made me so mad. I couldn't play it. I thought about playing it, actually. And then I was just like, I'm so upset. He runs a chain of creole, I guess, food trucks. Maybe there's some Rick and mortar stores too. It's like Haitian food in Miami.

And the guys, like, my business is going to collapse because the people that work, the Haitians that work in the kitchen and the two other jobs are all like going into hiding now or some of them were self-deporting or doing other things. And he's like, and he voted for Trump. And he's like, I couldn't believe. Trump said he's going to be a businessman. What is this doing to my business? I just wanted to scream at the guy. I was like, they did a whole thing about how your people were cat and dog eaters. Like, what did you expect? Right. I agreed. I covered this story on Bullock takes with Ike Saul over of Tango. news and similar to your conversation with Eric, if people want to deep dive on this, I'd

encourage you to go check that out on the board takes feed. His family is from kind of the big bend area of Texas, and he has a house there, and so has a really personal view on what's happening. And the story where Trump now, the wall is still being built. It's hard to kind of keep all these stories, you know, in hand, right? And the wall wasn't completely built during the first term and they didn't build it in stupid places and, you know, ran out of time after four years. There's lawsuits, et cetera. And now they are putting the wall through Big Bend National Park. And, you know, everything about this is outrageous and stupid. It's like the cost of it is insane. It's 10x what the proposed cost was, you know, $16, 18 billion of our money is going to be spent on

this stupid thing. There's no crossings that happen here. It's the most desolate part of the border. It's mostly a tourist area where people go because it's beautiful, the national park. You can see the dark skies at night. If anything, they're going to make it easier to cross there because in order to build the wall, they've got to build a bunch of roads to get the construction guys in there. And so now, like, the tiny number of people that did cross the border here, it ended up in this kind of desolate national park.

And a lot of times ended up having to just concede themselves to Border Patrol. now potentially they'll have roads to be able to get out. So it might actually help the coyotes that are trying to get people into the country illegally. And the most humiliating part of it, like in addition to the fact that it's a waste of money, it's stupid, it's counterproductive, it's going to harm a national park. We're also seeding territory to Mexico as part of this project because just the way that they have to place the wall,

there's like land that had been American land, which I guess came from Mexico originally, that now is going to be on the opposite side of the wall. And some of this is like eminent domain. We're taking private property from people, building a wall in their property, and then giving some of their property to Mexico. So Trump has been talking about a lot of territory expansion, but so far only territorial concessions from Trump. So that's a typical Trump story as well. Crazy.

It was a good conversation. I learned a lot from, I don't know how to think about Big Band. I've never been there. But yeah, it seems like a beautiful place. And totally, again, what's most striking is you say totally 100% unnecessary. again in other circumstances you can at least there's some argument on the other side what's there there's no one crossing it's insane yeah the maga sheriffs down there are like we don't want this what are you doing right did make me want to visit big bend because i actually didn't know a lot about

about it but it's challenging to get to which i guess the point okay i had some listeners that gave me some negative feedback about something which was that when i came back from vacation i said i promised banana facts because i was reading about sam's murray who is a Norlinian of some, I was about to say a great Noralini. I'm not sure about that. A Norlinian of note who started a banana company, ended up instigating a coup in Honduras on behalf of his banana company. Then he ends up taking over United Fruit, which is like kind of the big bad fruit company that is behind, you know, our phrase, banana republic. Some of what United Fruit did was just unconscionable. So anyway, I learned a bunch about bananas.

And I just wanted to, I felt like with Bill, with you here, you have surprising knowledge about things. I just wanted, do you have United Fruit anecdotes? Do you have any thoughts about the fruits trade? I used to work for them, you know, back in the day. Were you born in the period where bananas were a delicacy? They funded many neocon efforts? No, no. I know very little about them, except this degree of American imperialism back then was a little bit surprising to those of us who wanted to believe they were younger, slightly edifying, you know, sanitized version of American foreign policy. But anyway, that's what United Fruit did, I guess, a couple of countries, and maybe just a couple.

And what banana republic were the phrase banana republics company? No, I have no strong opinions about bananas. I'm not a big banana eater, honestly. I am a big banana eater. They were non-existent in the country in like the late 19th century, beginning of the 20th century. But even before the middle of the 20th century, the bananas became the most popular fruit in the country. We gave people a banana, United Fruit Dead, when they got off the boat at Ellis Island. It was like a welcome to America because the Europeans had never seen a banana before.

And so in some ways, it was like the most, was a very American fruit at that time. The power that they got came not so much from the bananas. Here's an interesting, relevant, I think a relevant lesson for our current day. I mean, I guess it was the bananas, but we ended up, But Zimuri and then United Fruit separately and Honduras and Guatemala and elsewhere, gained so much power because in able to get the banana from Central America here fast enough, you know, you can get to people's grocery stores or local, you know, markets. At that point, a lot of times it's like still like fruit and vegetable markets. You just had to create a ton of efficiencies.

So they were going into these countries, buying up tons of land, creating the roads, creating the railroad, similarly to California now, promising to create a railroad for the government and then only creating part of it so that the railroad doesn't make it all the way through the country. They had their own ships, they had their own ports. And so this is how you know, you get the power as a banana company to like do a coup because it's not it's not just from money. It's that you're controlling the infrastructure. So I'm stretching this very much to the AI, oligarchs of today and what they're trying to do, buying up all the land, you know, controlling energy generation, controlling communications channels. We should learn from the countries that allowed

the fruit companies to get out of control to such a degree that they were more powerful than the governments themselves. I think that's a good lesson for us on the banana front. That's good. I like that. It's even worse today because, of course, the bananas probably couldn't conspire against their human overlords and escape confinement to, God knows what, what AI's going to end up doing, which I think the bananas are pretty in that respect. The bananas have, well, they have more interesting traits than you would think, but I'm not going to waste all my banana facts on people on one podcast. So we're going to, we'll save some more for later.

Lastly, a lot of buzz on my social media about Chris Hayes going on to Ponsave America over the weekend in a pink tank top with a gold chain. And that was the outfit that he wore on the podcast. A lot of discussion. I think he looks great. That's just me. But it made me wonder, and it made some others on my tech chain wonder, if you might ever consider that wearing a pink tank top and a gold chain

onto this podcast on a Monday. I just going to give people a different look. No. That's Bill Crystal. We will not see him next Monday. He gets to have a little break. Thank God. Hardest working man at the Bullwark, Bill Crystal.

So we'll have another one of our Bullwark friends standing in from him. And we'll see you on August 24. Great. All right. Everybody else, we'll see you back here tomorrow with one of our old friends. Looking forward. and audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.