The Bulwark Podcast - Bill Kristol: The MAGA Elites Are Such Frauds

Episode Date: February 2, 2026

JD originally made a name for himself as an economic populist but now spends all his time lying and ignoring the woes of the white working class. Stephen Miller is far more interested in authoritarianism than the American worker. And the biggest MAGA warrior of all, Steve Bannon, was downright smitten with Jeffrey Epstein. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is busy trying to hide the identities of other co-conspirators in the Epstein documents. Plus, the CBP has no business being deployed on the streets of American cities, Tulsi wants foreign election interference, the good news in a Texas special election result, Trump is flailing at another business—the Kennedy Center—and Bad Bunny previews his message for the Super Bowl Halftime show.Bill Kristol joins Tim Miller.show notes Monday's "Morning Shots" Bannon's "interview" with EpsteinLearn a new Language and get up to 55% off your subscription at Babbel.com/BULWARK

Hello, welcome to the Bullwark podcast. I'm your host Tim Miller. It is Monday. It is Groundhog Day. It doesn't feel like Groundhog Day with Bill Crystal. You know, Bill Crystal is always keeping me fresh. I'm sad to report that Pung Satni Phil has seen his shadow. So we will have six more weeks of winter, which the people of the South, we know that already.

And I think it's an underappreciated abdication of this administration right now that, like, red state Republicans don't have heat and electricity and their schools aren't open for weeks in Mississippi and Tennessee and Texas and the administration and DHS is, you know, they're focused on other matters. I don't know. Not really constituent service oriented. We blue state, Virginians don't have, our Fairfax County schools are staying closed again today. But I don't blame them. I mean, honestly, it's not safe. I mean, the kids have no place to wait on the sidewalk for the buses and stuff because it's like piles of ice everywhere. But somehow Fairfax County should have, like, is it impossible for them to have ice breakers as well as normal

snow plows? I don't know. I guess it's very, very. unusual love to get, honestly, a week of freezing temperature and stuff. Anyway, it's been cold. Yeah, some local government failures, but I will say just in a normal administration, you know, U.S.D.S. and FEMA, and the president, and vice president, even, and the National Guard troops surging

towards the places where they've been weather-related deaths and people are out of their home. They don't even talk about it. It's not even a thought, right? In the old days, it would be like, well, maybe they could deploy some National Guard to help out with some of the tasks to free up war. The soap power operators, zero, no. They're busy. They're arresting the worst of the worst, Tim, deporting and

teleporting and El Salvador and stuff. It's really making us safer as a country and better off, I think, you know. And Christy had another nip-tuck appointment last week, so she couldn't be focused on this. All right, well, we have much bad news to discuss, and a little bit of good news, too. We've a little bit of some political good news, which we get to. But I want to start with Minnesota. ProPublica got the names of the agents who shot Alex Preti. It should be worth saying that the government still has not confirmed this. the time it was taping, you know, the Minnesota Governor Walls' office, the mayor's office can't confirm this. This is, I guess, from a leak to ProPublica.

But the agents in question are Border Patrol agents, Jesus Echoa and Reimundo Gutierrez, and both are CBP. CBO is not releasing any additional information about the deadly incident. I think worth noting that they joined CBP respectively in 2018 and 2014. So this is not really a training story of, you know, somebody that just, joined. Any thoughts on the drip, drip of information about this killing? I think we've all learned a little more about Border Patrol on the one hand and ice on the other than, at least I have than I knew before. I obviously had a sense of what they were up to. Border Patrol really turns out to be a, I mean, a problematic agency. Maybe you have to be

problematic if you're roaming the border and dealing with gangs of coyotes, as they call them, and, you know, human traffickers. I mean, you know, it's a tough job. They were never meant to be deployed to cities. They were never meant to be dealing with peaceful demonstrators. They were never meant to be dealing with people who are, you know, harassing them a little bit in the way demonstrators do, but within their constitutional rights. They're supposed to be dealing with people or arrest them if they're breaking the law. I mean, I would say they're not the people you want policing the streets of major cities. And we've seen that now. And I do think there, it's not a recruiting thing.

It is the nature of that agency. And a little more so in the last 10, 15 years, as the border stuff has seated up obviously than before. ICE was more of a not a big, you know, contact with the people agency. I picked up the people in jails who were undocumented immigrants, who was finished serving their term perhaps in some local prison or whatever, drove them to the airport and put them on the planes out there. I'm being a little too glib, but it's sort of basically what they did. And of course, there there's been massive recruiting.

We know the nature of that recruitment, very white nationalist and, you know, ridiculous, macho kind of stuff. And so the combination of the two is really bad. I mean, in this case, it is, as you say, it's not new Border Patrol agents. It's people who have been around for a decade. I think ICE, if I've seen the numbers correctly, like half their agents will have been hired in the last year, who's volunteering for ICE now. I mean, so the combination is very bad. These are not people who are into disciplined law enforcement on the streets of our cities and, you know, being respectful of both citizens' rights and immigrants' rights.

It puts the lie, as Andrew Rager argued in this morning's warning shots. I mean, I think even if Trump were sort of sincere about the de-escalation thing, which I don't think he is, these agencies, have a momentum with their own now. Yeah. I think that's absolutely true. I know. Agar was really good on that. Folks should check that out in the newsletter. But he just flags one story. This is from Saturday in St. Peter, Minnesota, it's about an hour south of the Twin Cities. You know, the legal observer driving behind an ice vehicle, recording them with their dash cam. Ice vehicles box are in. Agents pile out of the car. They draw weapons. They scream at her, get out of the car, get out of the car. That just doesn't sound like the type of behavior of a group of people that have been told.

that they need to deescalate, calm down. And so, you know, we haven't had any killings over the last week, of course. But there isn't a ton of evidence that things are meaningfully different in Twin Cities or in the other places where these agencies are deployed for that matter. That's an important point to make, too. It's not as if they're not doing stuff elsewhere. We've seen stuff on videos online that are pretty horrifying. The thing for me that really, by striking to me, is they love breaking windows.

Their first reaction seems to be if someone's in a car and is little confused about whether he or she's being asked to get out or whether maybe she should pull over first or whether she doesn't have to get out, they bash in the passenger side or the driver's side window. And this is true, not just in cars, but it seems to be true in houses. And now wasn't there a car dealership or some kind of dealership in Utah of all places? Or they just, they love breaking glass. That has not historically been a good predictor of like lawful and respectful and behavior that's respectful to citizens. and it's only to minorities, right? The other part about this, and they'll be kind of more conversations with this

over the next couple weeks as we get to funding is, I think that is like the key fact, what you've mentioned, what Iger wrote about, just about how these agencies have a momentum of their own, they have rules of their own, like, you know, Donald Trump isn't overseeing

every action that they take, right? And so if you have this huge surge in funding to the orgs, and they're hiring these people, and you're putting Border Patrol in a place where they shouldn't be, and you have all these new ICE agents, right? Like, this stuff is going to naturally happen,

even if they do try to rein it in a little bit. And so I think as these negotiations go on in the Senate, like to me, it would be great to get some wins on demasking them and to change some of their policies and that I think those negotiations are happening. But if they still have this level of funding that's greater than the U.S. Marine Corps, like, this stuff is going to continue to happen.

And I think that's the key point of the funding debate and why it has to be defunded, clawed back. I think that coming to some sort of deal that doesn't claw back the funding in some ways, I think it's going to be pretty misguided. Yeah, I agree. And they just need to fight the funding thing throughout the year, too. Whatever deal happens in the next two weeks or doesn't happen,

there's still all that money they got in the bill and the reconciliation bill a year. But that money, people talk about it as if it's, that money is just obligated. It's not obligated. It's authorized, but it can be unappropriated for next year. And this happens all the time. Weapons get multi-year appropriation.

was, of course, you can't build a jet plane in one year, so they have a five-year schedule. But then they sometimes changed their mind to cancel the jet plane. And so they killed the last three years. That should happen. It really needs to happen. They need to defund and also deploy, if that's a word. I mean, they need to sort of, it's not just a matter of the masks,

which is important and all that of the stuff. They just need to get them out of the streets of the cities, basically. Now, there's no ice agent ever set foot in some street somewhere if he's doing, you know, something short. but the notion of these roving patrols, huge numbers of them all geared up in the kit. I mean, they are eager to break the glass and to push the people down to the cement and to get the handcuffs on and to hold them for several hours without explaining what they're doing. Or send them, 100 of them were sent from Minneapolis to Texas to be processed and examined.

And then they're released in Texas and told them to make their own way back. I mean, it's just cruelty is the point in some respects. On that point, with the cruelty being the point, you can't let yourself get too upset about what a few random assholes say on social media. But the degree to which the Magogools were, like, kind of delighting in the fact that it was two Hispanic officers that killed a white liberal. You know, the right has really, you know, taken on the worst elements of identitarianism and identity politics as well. And, you know, I hate to, like, even think about it in that frame. But it was pretty crazy, like, the number of people who were basically, like, trying to rub it, like, own lives rub it in their faces. See, it's Chola and Gutierrez.

That's pretty bleak, I guess, is my only thing to say. You follow the Maka Ghouls more than I do. I get myself annoyed by reading occasional either Trump acquiescent types and the anti-anties and all this. They have been amazingly unconcerned about this. These sort of high-toned intellectuals, very civility is very important, Tim, and all constitutional government. This is really what the Republican Party stands for against those mobs on the left. And here we have... I see you saw the Rich Lowry interview.

I didn't actually, but I did. But I'm just mad. I'm just, is it going to confirm my point? He was doing a high, mind of defense. He's like, it's getting a little ugly out there. You know, some of this is impractical. You know, some of this is impractical, it was his concern. The Wall Street Journal is more like,

I might hurt them in 2026, so they probably should cut it out. But, I mean, if you actually want to be restriction of immigration, which I don't, but I mean, you need to be very tough on this. If this is the price to be paid, and there are scholars who've written about one of the cases against the kind of mass deportation-type efforts is that inevitably it begins. and it brings these civil liberties to abuses.

You can't do mass deportation without it. Various scholars have made these points based on studies in a whole bunch of different countries. But if you want to claim that you can do it, you've got to be tough on these abuses, right? It's sort of like when we defended, perhaps a defender of the Vietnam War. Even I'm not that old.

Of the Iraq War, of the Iraq War. You know, I was appalled by Abu Ghraib and all these things. I was genuinely appalled. It wasn't like a matter of tactics. But also, if you wanted to be a defender of the war, you couldn't be acquiescent in the excesses. and the war crimes that happened, you have to be tough on it. And to be fair, the Bush administration was,

once they found out about these things mostly, I think. And the military itself was, the military understood this. There's zero of that. I mean, zero of that in ICE and Border Patrol. Right? I mean, think of the military. Think what the military did when they found out about things. Removing people, trials, court marshals, people, Trump, of course, later pardoned who are now

have high positions in excess defense department. But still, they did their best to discipline these people. There's not a mere pretense of any of that now with Border Patrol and ICE. So it's really bad. It's bad for civil liberties, as I've been obsessing about for the last week or so. It's very bad for 2026 and the threats it poses to free and fair elections. So very bad. We'll talk about that.

They need to be tough on the hill. They need to not obsess about every detail, as you were saying, you know, about the masks, this, and the body cameras that, look, they should fight all those fights. But they need to basically curb ICE and border patrol as much and as thoroughly as possible. What are your midterm concerns at this point? You're one of the lawyer texts and I am. Mine is simple that if you step back and say, if Trump's not going to do well in the midterms, which I don't think he is, the Republicans aren't,

what can they do? Well, they can put their thumb on the scale. What's the best institution to put the thumb in the scale? They have a bunch of things they can try, obviously. But they've got this paramilitary force roving around that can be deployed to cities, to blue cities, including blue cities and red states, which are particularly important places for some House elections

and for some key Senate elections if the Democrats are going to pick up, Senate seats and it can be deployed. The governor won't resist their deployment. They can do a lot to make the playing field unequal in the month or two before the election. Speaking of which, there's some limits to that. Here's the positive side of the coin, which is voters will have their own say in this in some level. And how about not talking about a blue city and a red state? How about a red city in a red state? Fort Worth and Tarrick County over the weekend. Taylor Remit, as an Air Force veteran and union guy, won a special state Senate.

seat would have been a Trump plus 17 seat in the last election. Obviously, you know, this is a off-off year, you know, special election on a Saturday, cold weather, right? Like the turnout is very low. That said, you know, Tarrant County, Texas, it's not exactly, you know, a hotbed of liberal thought. And for him to win that seat, it's pretty meaningful, I think. I think it was a big deal. And And suddenly, it is precisely because the electorate is going so much against Trump that I worry the most about them trying to overcome the wishes of the electorate in November. So these are big districts, I can quite realize. There are 31 members of the Texas State Senate, so there are 35, I think, Texas members of Congress. So these state districts are each as large, literally, I mean, the same size as a congressional district.

They don't always coincide with the congressional, but they're the same size. Now, it's a special election on Saturday, so they've got to turn out of just under 100,000. They'll get 250 or something in November. But 100,000, it's not one of these special elections, it's 7,242 to 6,1009. I mean, you know, we're talking 100,000 voters. This particular district is red, as you said. It's a huge swing from 17 plus 17 Trump to plus 14 for the Democrat this time. It was held by a Republican who had resigned, I think, to run for some other office.

Tarrag County as a whole is a swingish, reddish, swingish district. I think Biden carried it very narrowly in 2020 and then Trump in 24. It's suburban, ex-urban, Fort Worth, Dallas. A couple of detailed things. I got too much in the weeds on this. People tried to see what was really happening. It doesn't seem to have been particularly a differential turnout. It wasn't that Republicans were bored and were busy watching college basketball or something.

And the Democrats all knew they were supposed to get out. The elector seems to have been Republican-ish, as you would expect in that district. But some Republicans had a lot of independents vote a Democratic. And there was a good Democratic candidate, a young guy, a veteran, kind of read a centrist campaign. he was outspent by a lot. So it does seem to have been de facto referendum on Trump. Trumpism in the Republican Party. And certainly the Texas Republican Party is a very Trumpy Republican Party.

So I think it's pretty meaningful. And again, it's meaningful because it fits into a pattern now, special elections and of the Virginia and New Jersey elections. Possibly the only district where low oil prices is hurting Trump in the country. Maybe that one in Midland. But, you know, some oil folks down there going, what is happening? Why are we going to Venezuela? The price of barrel is already too low.

But it is absolutely meaningful. It's another meaningful thing for me, and folks are oftentimes reaching out. I'll be like, where, like, you know, do you have advice? Like, what races matter? Where should you help? I'm getting texts from Democrats all the time. And that district, you know, to me speaks to what you were writing with us a little bit

in the newsletter. You mentioned it. Like, the House, the Democrats are going to win the House, barring some crazy thing happening at this point, right? and some crazy thing might happen, whether that's election interference or the hell knows. Some like outside force that comes in and changes the dynamics. The Senate is a much different animal.

The places where, you know, the Democrats had to compete are very tough. We've talked about this a bunch. But you look at some of these stretch states now that you mentioned. Iowa, Kansas, Alaska, Tel Totoa, Ohio, maybe also Texas, depending on how that primary shakes out. but those states are not any less red than this district was. Again, this is not an apples to apples comparison, but since the special election on a Saturday.

But it does mean that if the political environment keeps getting worse and worse for Trump and the Republicans, that one or two of those might be winnable for the Democrats. And to me, you know, that is where there's going to be less resources. There are plenty of resources in the North Carolina and Maine Senate races, right? and in these big house races. But some of those guys might not have as much. And so I look to that. Just one other thing, we're doing a live show in Texas in Dallas, March 18th,

and Austin, March 19th. And the tickets go and sale this week, and people need to jump on them because the Minnesota event sold out in one day. It was unbelievable. We had no idea, a big, huge venues. We appreciate everybody. We're looking into other ways that people can be involved in Minnesota because we are caught off guard by how excited you guys were

to come support Minneapolis. So we appreciate everybody. Anything else in Texas before we talk about Little St. Jeff Island? The only thing I would say is that it is suburban Fort Worth, mostly suburban, some ex-urban. It's not that different from the suburbs of Wichita or of Des Moines. I mean, it's Texas a little further south, but maybe a little more Republican,

but anything close to this degree of movement going, you put a lot of Senate seats in play. Winning the Senate as well as the House would be so much bigger than just winning the House. I mean, just as a practical matter. what you could do with control of both bodies in 2027 and 28. All right. If you ever felt overwhelmed by the idea of learning new language, you're not alone.

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On Epstein. I'm hating this story now. It's just so gross. You know, I'm reading the emails and it's like, who isn't in Epstein email? else. And like everyone has emailing this guy over various things. Most of them, like Elon Musk, wants to get invited to the most wild party on the island. You can read between the lines and what he expected what was going to happen to that party. Some other people got maybe kind of wrapped up

unnecessarily former Broncos quarterback Russell Wilson was in there. There was a big lot of discussion about this on social media. And then he had to post that he was like, talking about rich people problems. It was like somebody like an intermediary was, I told them to find me a plane and the intermediary went to Epstein on my behalf for the plane. I don't know. Maybe we'll let Russell off the hook on that one.

You know, all these guys are in there. Let Nick, you know, lied about it. Musk lied about it. Trump lied about it. Obviously, plenty of Democrats, there's Kathy Rumler, this Obama lawyer, who's now a Goldman Sachs lawyer,

who was like getting presents from Epstein and her emails are insane. I'm not really sure what to make of all of it. I feel very gross and yucky about the elite networking set. And I feel like my biggest takeaway is non-political. It's just that people are so desperate to like want to hang out with other rich and famous people that they don't use any judgment or moral rectitude at all in these sort of situations. And then there's kind of like a second, obviously even grosser category of people that seem to be involved with the women and girls, to be clear.

I don't know. As a political matter, I'm not sure kind of where this stands. So I wonder what you make of it. I'm not sure either. I very much agree with you on let's call it the sociological cultural side of things. And I do think, look, all elites have corruptions and problems. And if you pick up the rock, it's not quite what it looks like on the outside. And I'm sure it was true at first side.

It was true. God knows it's true of the Gilded Age. But it's bad. And I do think, yes, I think it tells us something about our country and our society that's not good. It didn't have to be this bad, right? and this permeating everything. And after he's convicted, I mean, this isn't one thing where people kind of knew in 2002.

We're talking 2017, and people are hanging out with him cheerfully and stuff. So that part's creepy. And I do think it'll politically have some effect of pushing people at a, I don't know, left wing or social democratic or anti-rich elite, not just living in bubbles, but being protected from the law.

I mean, which gets to the second point. I mean, the second point is the administration's behavior. And I do think some of the critics are missing the point, six million pages, three million pages. Look, they have done nothing to clarify what actually happened. They have not released the documents that everyone agreed would be the most helpful ones, the 2007-2008 draft indictments, the charging documents from 2019, the 302s, the FBI inquiries. They have not released what the survivors want to release. They have purposely gone out of their way to not really comply, but sort of comply with the law

in the most unhelpful way possible, the administration. Any normal administration, you have to release a bunch of documents. You release them in some order with an index, with some explanation. Maybe you have the experts who worked on them, not Todd Blanche, but some, you know, worker be say, here's what we found about A, B, and C. A lawyer who has experience dealing with sex crimes and sex trafficking, you know, the type of people that they fired, like Jim Comey's daughter, right, would, like, put out a memo.

They've got out of their way not to cooperate with or coordinate with the survivors. forever's had no idea this thing was coming on Friday. So the whole administration strategy is catch them off guard. Maybe we confuse everything in the first 72 hours. Maybe the story goes away. So in that respect, the bad faith of the administration is really striking. I mean, they have bad faith about everything, so maybe that's just the way they operate.

But generally, it is striking how much they don't want people to see what some of the obvious questions are. And I guess they want to stick with their original assertion that basically no one should have been charged without anything. All those people we see on the emails arranging the flights and arranging the meetings, and then the people about whom the victims testified in the 302s and were in the original 2007, 2007, 2008, draft indictment. I guess they just walk free. So I find that both disheartening and kind of repulsive. It's important that the administration not get away with this, I guess, is what I would say. These are made clear that they are not cooperating in good faith. They do not want to get to the bottom of this. They want this to go away.

I think that is important on clarifying. You know, you just point my arrow the right direction on this, because I said this at the start of it. I was like, look, this will be all sounded fury signifying nothing if there aren't co-conspirators that are charged or, you know, that are brought to the forefront, even if they don't have enough information to charge them, right?

Because it's like, it's implausible and impossible to imagine that it was just formerly Prince Andrew and Jeffrey Epstein and Galane that were involved in, you know, illicit sexual behavior with young women and girls, right? Like, it's impossible to imagine that. And given all of the,

circumstantial evidence we have pointing to other people being involved. And if D. And Cash Patel testified that there weren't any others. These emails do not do anything to support that narrative. And so we'll continue to, you know, kind of play that out. But if they don't, right, then there is really no other way to look at this, but kind of like a big cover-up in their in their haphazard way also, you know, dealing with, you know, the minor amount of pressure they have on their right flank. Just the only other thing should be mentioning that leaked out with this with Epstein is the Bannon interview of him. The interview, quote unquote, it was a media training where Bannon pretended like he was

60 minutes and he was interviewing Jeff Epstein for an alleged effort to do a 60 minutes interview. This is like before he gets re-arrested the second time. I tried to watch some of it. It is really, it's a really tough watch because Bannon is very, like almost smitten with Epstein, you would say. and like asking Epstein to explain to him all of his brilliant insights and why he has these math symposiums with Stephen Hawking

and all these brilliant people and how he gets around the tax code. And the only thing that is potentially relevant to that is just any potential notion that the MAGA guys were not just totally mobbed up with him and are totally interested in protecting him is completely revealed to be false by this. I mean, just given all of the Trump administration officials in there and, like, Bannon's just obsequious, like, treatment of him, you know, their preferred narrative of, oh, this was all Bill Gates and Bill Clinton,

I think has been pretty fully eviscerated. I wouldn't recommend watching it. No, I did. You handled the bad end. The Bannon beat excellently, so you don't need any help on that. But, you know, is there a single actual, authentic populist, like Trump supporter? I suppose there were a few out there in the country that we've never heard of.

I mean, is there anyone who actually believes any of that stuff? Or is it just a whole bunch of corrupt elites who just wanted to, you know, get rid of the current the centrist liberal establishment or the centrist Republican establishment, I suppose, so they could get their hands on everything. Ban and Tucker, all these people. I mean. Yeah, this is one of my favorite hobby horses. Thank you, Bill.

Let me go off on a good faith nationalist populism has never been tried. It's like the communism thing where it's like there's some real communists out there. There's some good communists just waiting around the corner. And it's like supposedly there are good faith, nationalist populace, people that just have conservative social values and, you know, want the government to be more responsive to the economic needs of the Volk and, you know, want to go after the corporate elites that are preventing people from being able to achieve their hopes and aspirations. And like they all turn out to be France. All of them either, A, want to be elites or are really. more excited about doing right-wing conspiracy-mongering. There's no across the board, like this happens time and again,

where you would imagine that in theory, maybe what a authentic, like, right-wing populist policy platform would look like. But none of the leaders of the movement actually care about any of that stuff. And, by the way, and most of the voters don't want it, like is really what it comes down to. I guess the two leaders that we've seen who do care about it, I guess would be Thomas Massey and Marjorie-Tilligreen and they're both out of favor with the movement because they took some part of it seriously.

You know, and I suppose in economics, they might be one or two people who took seriously the notion that he cared about the working class and it's going to bring manufacturing jobs back and all this. I think about like there's that guy, the commentator Orrin Cass. He does kind of the white papers, the Winnie de Pooh and the Tuxedo MAGA stuff.

But it's like there's a reason why he is doing that like in having symposiums, and Russ Vote and Stephen Miller and Scott Bessent are like running the government. And why J.D. Vance is the person, I think, who most encapsulates this. Like, you could have imagined after

Hylbaed elegy, like, decided, like, he saw something about the white working class and working class broadly and how they're being left behind, and he thought that the old free market fundamentalism was wrong, and he wants to pivot to focus on them. And it's like, he never talks about any of that stuff. All he does,

is lie and make up stories and do right-wing culture war nonsense. That is what is actually animating him, and it's what he animates the voters. Like really, all of them being J.D. Vance and all these guys just fundamentally wish that they were the elites in charge and that they were

the gatekeepers and that they could hang out with fancy elites. Vance literally becomes well known by writing a book called Hilbilly elegy, you know? And it's about this. And now there's not a trace of it left, really. I mean, a tiny rhetorical traces. very, very few.

And now he's hanging out with Peter Thiel. Stephen Miller, who becomes famous, is the super militant. They're taking, the immigrants are taking jobs of all these hardworking, you know, Native Americans. Again, he and his wife there, are they even pretending to be interested in, I mean, they're interested in being brutal authoritarian, I suppose. But again, with them, they're enjoying the, you know, the high life. So far as one can tell here in Washington and Mar-a-Lago and stuff.

The whole thing is such a fraud, such a con. okay that was a good four and kind of an obvious point one to one yeah I know it is an obvious point but I'm gonna do it once a week advance is a good exemplar of that really because they're gonna try to like do this like they're gonna try to turn vance into the authentic nationalist populist economic populace cares about the working man thing and I just I refuse to let it happen like you cannot you know shit on my head and tell me that it's a hat okay like I know it's I know what's happening Tulsi Gabbard it is groundhog day actually I lie to the top where I said It's not Groundhog Day with Bill Crystal.

Right now it is Groundhog Day in our society because once again, we have a whistleblower complaint. This was apparently against Tulsi and late May of last year. This is a Wall Street General report. This complaint is so highly classified and sensitive that it's currently locked in a safe. There have been months of wrangling on how and weather to present it to Congress. I guess the whistleblower and their attorney is just kind of reading between the lines, got sick of the stall and decided to alert the reporter. I don't know that, but that seems like the most likely way that this got out.

It is obviously extremely reminiscent of the Christopher Steele dossier, which turned out to be a lot of bullshit. And the report from the Ukraine call, which turned out to be extremely legit. And so here we are again. Who knows if this is related to Russia or otherwise. It's a decent place to suspect with Tulsi. I guess my other other observation is that Tulsi did seem to go very quiet for a while. Yeah. And like we didn't hear a lot about from Tulsi.

And then she showed up in Georgia last week, you know, looking into the ballots from 2020. And now we have this report. So that's eyebrow raising. And maybe conceivably eyebrow raising and potentially related to the thing you were talking about earlier about election concerns. Yeah, my only comment on Tulsi, which is really courtesy of our friend, Tom Jocelyn, who noticed this. Trump, what he says, it was fine for Tulsi. It was important to Tulsi to be there in Georgia. he said because she's got to make sure the elections are

legit or not rigged or something going forward. I mean, too much of the media coverage in a way of all this is Trump's revenge, Trump's obsession about 2020, he hates the people in Fulton County, which he does, and he's a racist, and so he hates Fulton County, and so he hated what happened in 2020. So he wants revenge for that.

I take all those points. But he is thinking a lot about 2026 and 28. And the fact that Tulsi, who's DNI, director of national intelligence, is there in Georgia and is sort of part of the team working to prevent election interference and make sure we have unrigged elections. Put that together with the ICE stuff we were discussing earlier

and her being able to, hey, there's foreign interference here. We need to send a lot of federal troops into Georgia because they're busy doing God knows what. They're on the ground. These people who want to defeat Trump. I mean, Tom Jostom made this point on Twitter, I think, on Blue Sky. It's ominous the way Trump put that

is a forward-looking thing for Tulsi. Yeah. I mean, Tulsi wants election interference. I think you can just say bluntly. That's pretty alarming to have somebody that wants foreign election interference, being a point person looking into these absurd 2020 claims. We'll see. Anything more we learn about this whistleblower complaint, obviously we'll be following it. This is probably unrelated, but again, it's hard to keep track of all the different corruptions and ways that there's foreign influence in our politics right now.

Another Wall Street Journal story, they're doing a great job over on the news side at the Wall Street Journal. Well, worth pointing that out. Not as high marks on the opinion side, but the news side they're doing real reporting over there. Shake to noon, the spy shake, they call him. He bought a secret stake in Trump's crypto company. It was a $500 million investment for 49% of it, World Liberty Financial.

That came a few months before a UAE won access to American AI chips, these tightly guarded AI chips, who weren't selling to foreign governments. this is so unprecedented and crazy. This is something that would be in another time, like wall to wall, the only thing that any news organization would be covering. Like the sitting president of the United States sold a secret stake in his company to a United Arab Emirates spy.

And like now we're doing a bunch simultaneously to doing a bunch of deals that matter to our national security, matter to our economic security. Trump and his family is literally in financial bed with the UAE's spy chic. And the deals, I guess, benefit China, right, these AI deals

through the UAE. It's become so routine, of course. We barely, I got to admit, I barely read the story, but it's like, oh my God, another, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars from one of these governments for Trump, you know, but it's amazing. And should the United States president really be for sale to

like a bunch of of Arab mullahs. I shouldn't the Christian conservatives be concerned about this? I'm like, we have a bunch of guys that are doing Tariah law countries that have various back-end deals with terror organizations as well. Like, are we not financially secure enough as a country? We need to accept bribes from Arab shakes.

It's totally insane. I mean, it's turning me into Rand Paul and Thomas Massey, like, taking me one of your fucking libertarian. Like, what? Like, how, how is, that acceptable? Or like in any way something that, you know, kind of serious folks on the right who are concerned about national security, like, don't have problems with? Can you imagine the Tom Cotton press release of Hunter Biden did a $500 million investment with the UAE and we sold them

AI chips that also went to China? Like, I mean, there would be total hair on fire. And rightly, by the way, it should be. I haven't noticed a lot of press releases from hawkish Republican senators and members of Congress or hawkish editorial boards, hawkish think tanks, FDD, and all our friends there are very upset, I'm sure, by all this. It's so stupid to even say it, it's so obvious. But the degree to which they haven't been able to, they've just totally capitulated.

I mean, there was a while there, maybe this was more of the first term, I guess. I have to go back and think about this. They were able to hold sort of for a while the, I don't really approve of A, B, or C, but I think he's doing a good job on D.E. And he's better than those horrible liberals. and then Hillary Clinton or Biden, that was like a tenable position for a while, I guess.

It is utterly and completely vanished, right? And the Hillary Clinton thing is a good example, right? Like, just for context. So there's a big, I think, legit scandal related to the Clinton's and the Clinton Global Initiative. This happened, like, well, actually, when she's in Secretary of State, kind of, and then after she leaves, right, where Bill and Hillary and their staffs are flying around the world. You know, they're having these conferences and they're taking money from, foreign interests, right? Now, that money wasn't going to them, wasn't going in their pocket.

I mean, a lot of it ended up doing some good work. Like, they were doing, buying mosquito nets for Africa and stuff like this, right? But just like the notion of having your nonprofit be funded by all these foreign interests was something that, like, it's like, it's a bad look, right? Like, if you want to be the president, if you want to be the secretary of state, like, you can't, you know, have this kind of influenceability. Like, you don't want to be, you don't want to kind of, you know, tilt the scales a little bit. because somebody has been a big donor to your nonprofit, right? Like, you just need separation from this.

That's part of public service. The amount of ink that was spilled, going back to our friends, the Wall Street Journal, on the Wall Street Journal Edboard over this, or at Fox, the amount of talking head times, like talking about this horrible corruption. And here's Trump, taking money for himself from UAE spies. It's not going into a nonprofit.

That's going to mosquito nets in Africa. It's going to, you know, Don Jr.'s, you know, new club in Washington, D.C. And, like, their new hunting ranch that they're buying or the new, you know, whatever, the new golf course that they're building somewhere. Like, they're pocketing it. Like, they're pocketing money from foreign interests. It is a totally different category from what Hillary was doing.

And, you know, anyway, well, you know how the story ends. Nobody even pretends to be upset about it. It's fucking outrageous. Let's talk about the arts. That was a good segue there. I just going to be so fucking that. It mostly makes me mad that nobody else is mad about it. And then that just makes you wonder, I guess, people are just basically happy.

Like, it's fine. If I, there is like a trains run on time element to this. Like, do you want to become a banana republic? Like, am I supposed to be upset that my leaders, you know, are doing backroom deals with foreign shakes? You know, I guess, I guess most people don't care. They're happy to live in a ban in a republic until they start getting gun down in the street until the economy takes a turn. Our inflation gets a little too high.

Back to the arts. The Kennedy Center is going on a two-year hiatus. Our friend, Rick Runell, your friend and mine, was given this important role, something he'd always dreamed of his whole life, is Trump's top gay. He was going to be in charge of the Kennedy Center and charge of the arts portfolio.

They were going to do all of these non-woke events and, you know, bring back traditional values to the sound and stage, and nobody actually wants to go to the Trump Kennedy Center when he puts his name on the fucking building, it turns out. and Rick Grinnell is not capable of managing a theater, it turns out. And so rather than just continuing to have like half-empty events and like random balls

on behalf of Trump family members, they've decided to solve this problem by taking it on a two-year hiatus. They're shutting down the Kennedy Center for two years. It's really kind of a piece of Trump's life. I mean, Trump puts his name on something and then it fails. It's like it's something that's been a lot of buildings with Trump. name on them that have ended up failing, casinos, et cetera. So he puts his name on the building, it immediately fails two-year hiatus. He says they're going to renovate it. You're more of a Kennedy

center man than me, so I'll just kind of let you take it from here. I mean, we went to the opera. It's one of the few places you can go to the opera in D.C. They have done it that many. They have a few of the Western National Opera. Good, though, in November, saw Figuero and Aida. And then didn't really like going there because Trump already had taken it over, head of the board. But it wasn't, his name wasn't out of yet. So I thought, look, you're not going to penalize the hardworking people there at the office. right, and the orchestra and the ticket takers and so forth. So we went.

But then he put his name on, and so we decided we wouldn't go to the two or three things we had tickets for in the spring. But so, yeah, I guess we're one of those who contributed to the fact that maybe it's not going to be doing too well with Trump's name on it. And so now they're closing it for two years. Allegedly, though, he's redoing it all.

It's going to be the best ever. It's going to be a monument to America and stuff. It's also grotesque. Someone made a good point over there. I hadn't really focused on, which is also disgusting. It's hard to know which part of it, which disgusting part to be most obsessed with.

I mean, the Kennedy said it was a tribute to Kennedy. There's that big stature of him when you come in to the lobby. I mean, it's not the Lincoln Memorial. It's not the Washington monument, but it was a tribute to John Kennedy. Putting his name on it is much more grotesque in a way than, I mean, it was grotesque always, but the supplanting Kennedy, putting his name over Kennedy. It's the John F. Kennedy Memorial, if I'm not sure, you know,

Center for the Arch or something, right? I mean, and Kennedy was assassinated and so forth. And Trump just sticks his name on it because, it's a big thing in Washington that he wants to have his name on. As you say, he sticks his name on everything, and then half of these are more that half fail. Trump University, you and I were obsessed about that in 2016. I remember this is dripping off.

For good reason, because he fucked over regular people again. Totally. Total. It's a long story of him doing that. You know, which you paid no price. I was like that. I guess what you're trying to say is there's something meaningfully different about the grotesquery of like the arc to Trump that he wants to build. What about that one?

Building a new thing and putting his name on it versus like co-opting the legacy of John of Kennedy for himself. They do redo parts of the Kennedy Center. I think the opera was closed 10, 15 years ago. We wrote for a year at a constitutional call or something to watch it because they were redoing the stage or something or the sounds, the acoustics or whatever. That's not why he's doing it.

That's not why he's doing it. But he is going to build this unbelievably massive or wants to build it. I hope they can stop that. Vulgar, you know, triumphal arch. I mean, I don't know. The whole thing, the fact that he gets to ruin Washington as well as ruin the country,

It's more important that he's running the country than we're in Washington. I agree that those of us who shouldn't be pampered feel, you know, rich person problems feel. I live here in the Washington suburb. They go, I don't like the look of that or something, or I can't go to the Kennedy Center. Having said that, it is somehow indicative of just the utter disregard he has for anything beyond his own personal vanity and well-being.

It's also an American. It's just not what any other president has done. Nobody else has done this for good reason, because it's vulgar and gross. Here's a thought. I can't tell if this is a dark thought or a funny thought, maybe a little both. So he makes this announcement. He says in two years,

there's going to be a grand reopening. You know, because he'll still be president in two years. Is that right? Let me just look at my calendar here. Yeah, great. He'll still be president in two years. I'll fucking have gray hair and a stroke by then,

but he'll still be president. Imagine how fucked the country is going to be in two years. You just think about the damage that has done in the last year. And think about this notion that two years forward. Think about all of the other additional. damage that all the other wreckage that he will have wrought and the notion that then in february of 28 he will reopen the kennedy center to some like grand celebration of you know the trump redecoration of the building you get really quick into you know kind of hunger games-esque imagery

there when you project out two years so that's an little nice thought for people on a monday morning I want to talk about the Grammys else a little bit too. I kind of hate the Grammys, so I don't want to talk about it too much, but a couple of things happen there of interest. One is that Trevor Noah told like a kind of not, that funny joke about how Trump wants Greenland because he can't go to Little St. Jeff's Island anymore. It's a fine joke because nothing, you know, nothing special.

That's not going to be in the joke books for history, but wasn't horrible, wasn't great. Trump lost his mind, though, over, over. it because despite the fact that he'd been on Epstein's plane many, many, many more times than he said, including a time when he was on with just Maxwell and a victim of Maxwell's, and fact that him and Epstein were very, very good pals for a long time, it does seem like he never did go to the island. And so he posts that Trevor Noah, a total loser,

looks like I'll be sending my lawyers to sue this poor, pathetic, talentless dope. I'm suing him for plenty of money. Ask George Slopidopoulos is the fucking president of the United States. And others, how all that worked out. Get ready, Noah. I'm going to have some fun with you. Yeah, my two initial thoughts are, that is a totally deranged thing for any human to write. For that to be the president of the United States is pretty concerning.

Another thought is like there's a whole category of comedians, like podcast or comedian, bro comedians who were unhappy that they were canceled. none of them actually got canceled as best I could tell, but that they were criticized and that free speech was in threat because they were criticized. And I guess it feels like they missed the mark, I guess. If they're real concern was that, you know, the free speech rights of comedians were in threat,

getting on board with Donald Trump, who is trying to sue and bully a comedian from the White House because he didn't like the joke, it's the second time they're trying to punish a comedian because they didn't like their jokes. Obviously, he did it with Jimmy Kimmel and kind of failed to successfully bully him. But it would seem like those free speech absolutists,

First Amendment absolute as people who care about legalizing comedy would be upset about this. I'm not holding my breath. I'll go look at Axis and see if Elon Musk and all of his minions are really defending free speech. Also, it's the free press. I assume I don't look at the free press usually, but I assume the home page is just four or five articles

defending free speech against Donald Trump's attacks on it. Nothing yet. And CBS News, probably. Their main story is about a 16-year-old who got a mastectomy. So, anyway, you know, that's what's happening for now. We'll see. You never know. Maybe something will pop up this afternoon.

So that is Trevor Noah. The other thing that happened that was good at the Grammys, let's leave people with something good. I know you're a huge bad bunny man. Big fan. Which of his records, did you say, is your favorite? Adrian to, Adrian, I defer all bad bunny matters to our colleague, Adrian Carraske.

He's much war up on bad bunny. I've noticed. And you, you of course, because of your deep connection. I see as kind of an unvarano Sinti, man. But, you know, we'll see. He's going to be the Super Bowl next week. And people are mad. Mag and folks from Mac. So he sings in Spanish. And so they added an English-speaking act, Green Day, which has like multiple songs dedicated to, you know, right-wing Americans, essentially. And they changed one of their old songs that was like a Bush protest to make it a Trump protest. So I'm not sure that that That's really going to achieve what the MAGIFOx want by adding Green Day to it. But Bad Bunny will be at the Super Bowl next week. And so it's pretty notable that a week out or a week before that,

he won a Grammy last night. And this was his message. I'm going to say, eyes out. We're not savage. We're not animals. We're not aliens. We are humans. And we are Americans.

Went on for a little while longer, but that was the gist of it. You know, pretty powerful, pretty clear. not ducking it, you know, leaning straight in right before a Super Bowl performance. Hard to know exactly what the potential impact of that will be, but not nothing, better than nothing. I should bring them to the Hill and have them talk to the Democratic senators

and House members about how to deliver an effective message, you know, I thought that was powerful. The voters of Tarrant County understand this, I've got to say, incidentally, more than, you know, all these elites in Washington who are still cowering before Trump. They do not like what's happening, and Bad Bunny doesn't like what's happening,

and if only it would be good of some of the business leaders and corporate types and big shots caught up with them. But maybe they will. Maybe they are gradually. What do you think? We're a little. I'm a little hopeful. I'm a little hopeful.

Are you? Not too. Not too much. I got to tell you, I was pretty surprised. I was talking to some folks over the weekend who are not nearly as Trump TDS riddled as us, right? Like not happy about it, not happy about it, but like in general. you know, just a little bit more at Remove, more familiar

kind of business world types. And I was struck by the fact that they also were kind of surprised by just like how wimpy the CEOs have been. You know, the CEO class has been. And I do think that it's starting to crack a little bit. And the fact that a number of them put out statements after the preddy killing, none of the statements were up to my standards. But the fact that they were put out at all,

was pretty noteworthy. And so hopefully that there's a little crack. And that's the thing with bad money. Look, I saw some right-winger saying, like, oh, it's so brave to go in front of a room of liberals and say ice out. But it's like, Trump is actually threatening people. Like, Trump is like real, like they're threatening using the government power to go after people. They jailed Don Lemon last week. Don Lemon was in jail overnight that it is still extremely meaningful for people to be speaking out in this moment.

and hopefully there'll be more. And hopefully Bad Bunny will do some stuff next Sunday, too, that makes people upset. So it makes the right people upset. I never, ever watch the Super Bowl. I will say halftime shows. Well, never ever. But I don't go out of my way to watch the Super Bowl. Half-time shows, I guess if it's on the background, it's out of the background.

But I don't really care about the Super Bowl, honestly, but I am going to watch Bad Bunny. One of the biggest excuses people use not to speak out, this is true of many of our friends from the Bush administration, Republican foreign policy world, and from Democratic administrations too. Well, they'll discount. It won't matter because, you know, they just, they know what I think and they know, I'm just speaking to a friendly audience. They'll just say I'm speaking to my own little liberal bubble, blah, blah, blah. You know what? Concerners aren't going to speak out if liberals don't speak out. And other entertainers aren't going to speak out if entertainers like this gentleman who seems to sincerely care a lot about it doesn't speak out first.

And then the ones who are a little more just go along, get along, speak out. I also found the Bruce, I'm going to say the Bruce Springsteen, getting back to my generation here for a second. Yeah, sure. I found the Bruce Springsteen song. kind of moving. I actually, that, I mean, I don't know if it's his best song ever

or whatever, it's great music, but I give him credit for going out of his way to do it. He didn't have to do it. He's sitting around wherever he is in his very nice house somewhere, you know,

and doesn't need to do this in his mid-70s, and he went out of his way to do it. So I can, you do have to give him credit, actually, and same with Bad Bunny, I think. I agree. We'll leave people with Little Bruce. We'll be playing Bad Bunny later in the week.

So we'll leave people with that Bruce song. It was nice. And Bill Crystal, happy Groundhog Day. Hey, it's going to be Groundhog Day all over again next Monday. So we'll see you there. See you then. Everybody else, we'll be back here tomorrow for another edition of the podcast.

Peace.