The Bulwark Podcast - Bill Kristol: This Is Not Democratic Government

Episode Date: December 8, 2025

ICE and Border Patrol are kidnapping people in the suburbs near New Orleans based on racial profiling—it’s like the South of 70 years ago. Mini Greg Bovino cares far more about his video team capturing him menacing and harassing people going about their lives than he does about due process and the Fourth Amendment. But despite her own pinup-style social media spreads, Trump may be readying to dump Kristi Noem from DHS. Meanwhile, the administration keeps creating new excuses for why it killed the two shipwrecked men near Venezuela, while also withholding key information. Plus, Trump is handing out more welfare checks to farmers, MTG says MAGA is not America First, the Dems get another shot this week on the affordability issue, Colin Allred may have been unwisely pushed out of the Texas Senate race, and Tim and Bill share a rare ‘you gotta hand it to Ted Cruz’ moment. Bill Kristol joins Tim Miller. show notes Adrian's scoop on how Trump may be moving on from Noem Tim's 'Bulwark Take' on the protests and raids in greater NOLA Bill's "Bulwark on Sunday" with Sen. Warner on the boat strikes Monday's "Morning Shots" Cruz's good tweet 

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It is Monday. So we're here with Editor at-Large, Bill Crystal. Bill was good to see you and everybody in person last week in D.C. We all got together. Things are bad for the country, but doing pretty good in Bullwark Land, you know, which is a tension internally. It is a problem. It is a problem.

We have to be proud of what we're doing and cheerful to see new friends and colleagues and such a nice group of people, honestly. So on the one hand, one's cheerful. On the other hand, one doesn't want to be too cheerful, if you know what I mean. Yeah. Well, I returned to New Orleans to some less cheerful updates. And in the meantime, while we were on D.C. last week, the little fellow, Greg Vivino, had invaded the city.

He did this kind of like fraudulent. marching tour around the French quarter, but has spent most of the time up in Kenner, which is the area out by the airport, basically if you've ever flown into New Orleans. You know, it's kind of like not the near suburb, but the next kind of suburb out. And it's a big immigrant community. And yesterday there was a protest out in the kind of parking lot where they'd been staging stuff. And it's just, it's brutal.

But I don't know, Bill, what have you been kind of seeing from afar? on the immigration stuff, and I'll tell folks about New Orleans. Yeah, I'd like to hear what it's like on the ground, because, yeah, I've seen a few clips, and they seem relentless and just going to city after city. They started in cities, I just pointed out, I guess there was some plausible local grounds for complaint. Well, there weren't really because they were no one in L.A.,

wanted them in, and no one in Chicago wanted them in. It was at least conceivable that things are out of control. We need these federal troops in, or federal, we need more ISIS and border patrol people. Is that at all been the case in New Orleans? Is anyone? No. Yeah, it's ridiculous. They don't even have a rationale, and the only rationale that they have put forth that I've seen for coming to New Orleans beyond just like the fact that the governor asked them to come because little, you know, Bovino and Landry about the same height, little mini guys.

Besides that, the only rationale I've seen came actually over the weekend was after they'd already started from the vice president who tweeted this TikTok of a guy, it's a white guy in Louisiana in a truck, you know, should the vice president be tweeting out random videos of people? what they haven't feted, probably not, right? But just let's even take it at face value. It's a guy that does construction down here. He's a contractor talking about how what we've seen the last week with the ICE and CBP coming to New Orleans is that like it is true that a lot of Americans are being displaced from jobs because a lot of folks aren't showing up to job sites. And he has got had more calls in the last week for work than he has in years is what he's saying in the same. thing. And he's like, and said one day I had like 20, 20 calls. And so like that is I guess their rationale, right, which is changing. Sometimes it's their violent criminals. Sometimes it's

they're dangerous. It's an emergency. And now, you know, vice president's saying, well, look, it's these through mass migration, you know, they're displacing Americans like this gentleman who need work. And I'm like looking at it going, well, the guy doesn't seem to be able to handle all the work that he's getting. They're calling him. And he said, I've gotten 20 calls in a I don't think he's doing all of those construction projects of a friend who's a contractor in town, you know, who's like, they can't finish projects. And like some of the people that aren't showing up actually are citizens, but they are scared or they don't want to be harassed.

They have family members that have mixed status, right? Like, it's complicated. And a lot of those businesses are run by, are you ready? Americans. Americans and even Trump voters, a lot of those businesses that aren't getting their you know, work, but aren't having their employees show up and aren't able to finish the projects at the end of the year where they can get money, you know, ahead of the holidays. So, I mean, like that is essentially their rationale at this point.

It's completely dubious. And even taking it at face value, it's like, well, does that explain them, you know, having masked guys show up to apartments and just start harassing people that are, that don't look American, you know? Ridiculous. I mean, certainly here in Northern Virginia, it's, it's unequivocally the opposite. opposite. The crackdown in immigrants, or even the hasn't that much of a crackdown here locally, but the fear of a crackdown on undocumented immigrants, but of course it spills

over to documented immigrants and it spills over to citizens who don't want to be harassed or who are related, as you say to others and so forth, is unequivocally made labor scarce and made it harder for contractors, for the bosses, so to speak, to get the people they need to do the jobs they promise to do. I don't even believe, I mean, with all due respect to whoever this guy is on the video, I'm deeply dubious about this. What is the unemployment rate among American citizen construction workers in New Orleans? Plummer or plumbers, craftsman, you know, impairment, whatever, you know, version you want. I would guess it is close to zero of those who want to work.

I think it's pretty low. I definitely think the demand is higher than the supply on that front for the most part. So anyway, the other thing I got talking to folks there, well, A, just, I mean, this is obvious, but it's just worth stating. like, yeah, I mean, there are masked guys. They're going out and menacing people just solely based on racial profiling. So thanks to Brett Kavanaugh, you know, for deciding that that is legal because, you know, there's the one video I got, which I put up on my bulwark takes feed about that. So people should watch if they want it.

You can scroll to the end is this guy who's Filipino friend sent it to me who's getting, you know, getting his ask for ID, you know, getting a paper, please, treatment, and a parking lot. And he's a citizen. And he just starts going off on these guys. Like, suck my brown dick. Like, show me your papers. Let me see your papers. Show me your face. You know, and so, like, is that what kind of country we want to live in?

You know, where people are being harassed, who are citizens, and they're having confrontations in a parking lot. That's what you want. I guess to answer my rhetorical question, the answer is yes for the administration. And this is one little item that I wanted to add, which I didn't, I hadn't had to the time I taped yesterday, which is this image of Bovino texting. Like, one of the activists took a picture of his phone, and he's texting. saying, I can't understand why DHS is hiding us.

We're handing them a strategy on a silver platter. We're a massive wrecking crew. The idiots can't do anything to us. This is Bovino texting people basically saying, I want attention. The DHS should be focusing us and centering us. And that's what this is. When I talk to the activists of that protest, that's what they all were like, it's crazy. You know, they'll follow around the ice guys.

And like Bovino was supposedly in charge, like it looks like the little Nazi from and glorious bastards, like, jumps out of the black SUV at the end to get himself in front of the camera, you know, as they go and hassle, like, two random people at Home Depot. It's the only rationale for that is if you look at his text, it's like, these guys just want attention. They want to menace people. They want to harass people. You know, they want people to be scared.

And they want, and they think that it's a PR win for them. I guess I disagree on the last point, but I think the rest of it's working. Yeah. I mean, the scaring part is worried some people will. Some people will leave, I suppose, self-deport. others will not show up at work and that's not good for anyone and uh or worry about sudden having their kids go to school or picking up their kids at school or i mean the degree to which they're going after people in sort of vulnerable situations like that is also disgusting you know

one thing you mentioned just in passing these masked ice or i guess border patrol agents it seems like three four months ago when they were wearing the masks people like us were complaining and screaming about it debating it i think i was on tv with some trump defender i let's show i've not gotten on sense, actually, because it's so annoying. And, you know, it's, oh, no, they're under great threat, these people. They have to be masked because, you know, otherwise they'll be docks or something. First of all, the political guys at the top want the publicity. Secondly, of course, no, policemen do not wear masks.

It's all ridiculous. And they're not under any threat. At a time, I thought, well, maybe they'll back off that. It's so un-American. It's so creepy and people really don't like it, I think. And all the gear and the kit and the whole, you know, military aspect of it here. Yeah, at home depot parking lots. But they haven't backed off that at all.

It's just, they're so all in on every aspect of the militarization, the nativism, the bigotry. And they're not back, you know, they're paying some price politically, I think. I don't know. But they haven't backed off. I agree with that. Just really quick. The other just practical problem, you know, which is why federal agents shouldn't be masked and should be identifying themselves.

The other viral video going around for Norlands was of a young. woman. She's like 23 coming up at the grocery store. And she literally, she thinks she's been kidnapped. She's like, starts running, right? Because it's like these guys and masks jump out of a car and go after her. And she hasn't done anything. There's no, you know, due process. There's no like, ma'am. Like, we're here. You know, like none of that. She just starts like running to her house because she thinks she's been kidnapped. I mean, this is, it's East Germany. I guess one thing I want to say that's positive. We'll give this a little bit into the gnome two, which I was trying to communicate to a couple of people I was talking to our approach.

testing is I do think a lot of folks are beaten down by this for good reason. I think there's legitimate fear, particularly in certain communities like out in Kenner that are being targeted. But this is not going on how these guys want it. Like the pushback to the ice stuff has been like maybe, and you list in your newsletter this morning like all of the successful over the past two months, all the ways that the Democrats have successfully pushed back on them. This is why one thing that wasn't mentioned because it's been kind of happening gradually that hasn't really been an inflection point. But like they wanted this to go. differently. You know, and they got run out of Chicago, and, you know, now they're down,

try to find cities where the local politicians are going to be more welcoming. There's not been as many as the criminals as they expected. It's not been as easy. You know, they're losing in courts. The El Salvador plan has, you know, been thrown in the trash. And I think that that's at least worth noting. No, totally. Just two quick footnotes, actually, on the public reaction, it's the public that gets credit for this. They have been very, I'm impressed by this. They're not getting that much encouragement, honestly, from Democratic office holders who remain pretty nervous about this issue.

They're certainly not getting the kind of sport. They should be getting from prominent local business types. I don't know if in New Orleans, the Chamber of Commerce is weighed in or those types. I get the most cities, not much, right? There's some exception. I think local politicians have been pretty good. Pritzker was good. Chicago, like our local New Orleans politicians.

The public is organizing itself. You see these people, the whistles and the attempts to just show up and make life difficult for them in a good way, difficult, and to also offer support and help for people who are under threat. Someone told me this morning that somewhere else in the country, they did a little know-your-rights program, and it wasn't just the 400 people who wanted to know their rights showed up to be tutored on what you do and don't have to do

when you're accosted by some masked men, but also the number of volunteers of people who weren't personally a threat to help teach them, to help be available, to be happy on their speed dial if something starts to happen, you know, is really been impressive. And I do think it's, in a way, a civic reaction against what's happening as much as a political one. I think if someone said to be, well, Bill, you don't like this, but, you know, Bloomberg, you phrase Bloomberg as mayor. And he did these stops of people that were stopping for us.

They stopped people who were black, basically, in black neighborhoods where they thought there was a lot of black crime. But that was bad, and the court actually ended up throwing that out. But whatever that was, it was racially motivated to stop. The police didn't wear masks. Right. The police said, you know, sir, we're stopping you. We want to see your ID and so forth and check who you are. Okay, that's bad if it's done racially, I would say.

But still, there's still due process. There's still a Fourth Amendment. There's still a policeman who's got a name tag and this recourse if something goes wrong. So this is so much worse. I mean, I guess I come back to that. This is so much worse than stuff we have seen in the last 20, 30, 40 year. I mean, it is more like, I guess, the south of 70 years ago or something. Yeah, for sure.

No. I mean, again, like to Bloomberg, this is not to defend it. I was not a big stop and frisk guy, but it's a municipal decision. Like, it's one thing if, like, you have a mayor that's like in our city, crimes out of control in certain neighborhoods. We're trying to deal with this. It's not to excuse it. But, like, that still is a very different prospect than the feds, saying we're going

to a city over the objections of the local politicians, not coordinate with them. Like the local city council, I heard from over the weekend, like said, we're not, we even heard anything. We don't know where they're going. They're not telling us, they're not coordinating with us. This was supposedly an effort to support our law enforcement efforts. you'd think that they'd want to coordinate better with our law enforcement. They're not doing it.

On the national politics side of this, our colleague Adrian Kishkeo had a little scoop over the weekend in his newsletter that said that there are, there's a lot of scuttlebutt among the career types of DHS that Nome is on the way out. The feeling is that the White House, Stephen Miller, Holman, et cetera, are not happy with Nome and her shadow secretary and maybe a little more than that, Corey Lewandowski. And with a story like this, it's always kind of like the Trump world is, you know, it's not a traditional HR process over at the Trump world. It's like kind of who knows whether like this is the type of thing that blows over or that, you know, really, you know, she has gotten on the wrong side of, you know, powerful people in the White House and it's inevitable. But I do think that would be a noteworthy move to get rid of no. There's been no sign, like on some of the other issues, which we'll get to the economy, et cetera, we've seen them kind of acknowledge a little bit some political. weakness. We haven't seen that at all on this stuff. And I think that'd be interesting if that comes to pass as Adrian is reporting. Yeah, and one couldn't help to be cheered up to get back to our

original discussion for, at least for half a day at her departure. I mean, she's been so repulsive and so many ways. Doing the pin-up shot at Sikot in El Salvador in front of the prisoners. I'm just disgusting. Discussed. But, I mean, Steve Miller, I do think they're all in on this policy. For sure. Not because of no. She's a fact. Not a a cause of this policy or byproduct or whatever you want to say, cheerleader. And therefore, one shouldn't relax, you know, after the few hours of cheerfulness, we're entitled to if she gets dumped. Someone that's being floated as Yonkin, I just can't imagine that that's going to happen.

No, that would be crazy. Yeah, he would never do that, I think. That's not the image he wants, right? If you would do it, that would be certainly a sign and we're going to get to this a little bit. I told Sam last week, I'm only allowing myself 15 minutes of 2028 hot stove a week. You know, we don't want to do too much. I might waste a couple minutes at the end.

But if he wasn't even consider that, I think that would be a signal about how he's trying to butch himself up for a potential 2028 run. But anyway, TBD, we'll get to that more at the end. There's a lot of uncertainty out there in the economy. You're probably not getting a $12 billion bailout from the president like the farmers are. And we're just not sure exactly how things are going to turn. turn next year. And so this might be an opportunity to take control of something you can control

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Save more than 50% on term life insurance at selectquote.com slash bulwark today to get started. That's selectquote.com slash bulwark. The farmer bailout is the big news of today I want to get to this afternoon. The White House is going to unveil a farm aid package, which is going to be $12 billion in assistance for farmers. $11 billion will be one-time payments. So, the straight welfare, one-time payments. We're not like creating a price. program that will serve farmers in the future.

We're just going to hand out $11 billion in cash. And Trump is going to announce the package during the event with corn, cotton, soybean, rice, cattle, wheat, and potato farmers at the White House alongside Scott Bessent and Brooke Rollins. These fucking welfare queens have some dignity. The farmers showing up to this White House to take yet another welfare check from the president. It's hard to imagine, like, in another situation. And they've taken so much money.

These guys that did the doged and have cut programs. I've cut health care for poor people. I saw there was a viral picture going around of the food bank line in Kentucky, like cutting funding for food banks, you know, obviously cutting USAD like across the board. All normal people are cutting. The farmers, you know, are getting a handout. They're getting their personal EBT cards,

which is going to allow them to, you know, live very comfortably. in farm country, and they're going to the White House to get their big check from the president. It's crazy to me. This is now the second time this has happened that Trump has totally screwed over these people who are part of his core base with his stupid tariff policy. In order to deal with it, all the rest of them are paying to bail them out again. Right. Of course, we're not helping people with the Obamacare subsidies, which the Democrats are going to propose an extension of this week. And I guess the Republican in the Senate and presumably the House are going to, if they got to the House, are going to

vote down and Trump's not going to do anything to try to help make happen. So, yeah, I mean, farmers are hurting because of Trump's tariffs and there are individual ones who might be hurting a lot and facing real danger of bankruptcy or something. A lot of them are on the other head of probably pretty well-off people who, you know, I'm not for them being hurt by the tariffs. That's idiotic. But, yeah, I mean, it would be worth someone doing a little reporting on who exactly these people at the White House are, what their total income and net worth is compared to the people who work in some small business have to purchase the Obamacare subsidies on the exchange and are seeing a 60% hike in the price of that. And they're making, you know, $42,000 a year or

something like that. So, yeah. Well, compared to the people in the food bank line, like your quid pro quo. I mean, it's very, it's borderline sex work. I mean, like, you have to show up to the White House to say, Mr. Trump, you're so great. Thank you. In order to get money, you would think that people, the old conservative tradition of appreciating hard work that you would want to say, hey, you know, I'd rather just do the farming and sell my products to our customers overseas rather than you screwing us with your stupid policy and me having to now come to the White House to beg and compliment you and rub your belly and tell you how beautiful and orange you look in order to get my check. And it's pretty, it's pretty sick stuff. Well, they make them,

do you think, actually have secretly praised Trump. As opposed, just standing there as props. Will it be like a cabinet one of the cabinet meetings you know i will see we'll see well maybe they will just stand there at props with like a piece of wheat in their mouth like that's a stereotypical farmer picture you know farmer hat anyway the good news is the treasury secretary's got this under control because he understands the business better than any of us do and he was he was on the sunday shows over the weekend i want to play a little bit of him talking about this margaret i'm involved in the agriculture industry. I run a soybean farm. And I can tell you. You own one. You invest in it. Sorry? You own or invest. And people in my family go out and work on it. I actually just divest it

this week as part of my ethics agreement. So I'm out of that business. But I probably know more about any Treasury Secretary than about agriculture since the 1800s. And I can tell you that what farmers need is certainty. I'm sure the best kids are out there detasseling. You know, they're walking the rows, they're getting their hands dirty. Why does he keep doing this to himself? It's like masochism. He's going to keep going on and trying to claim that he's a farmer. So I like the fact that he's divesting because the ethics people told him to 10 months into his tenure, first of all.

It seems like when I was in government, it seems to me, you sort of had to like, you had a week or two to get, I had almost nothing. So it was like transferring white $8,000 from stocks to a mutual fund. Yeah, so I'm glad the best of it's taken 10 months to do this. to comply with the ethics rules. But yeah, I'm mostly for leaving people's families alone, but since he raised it, I would actually like some investigative reporting. Who in the Besson family is out there on a soybean farm,

doing whatever you do? And I'm not going to pretend to have a foggiest idea what you do to a soybean. You know, what's the verb? Do you pick a soybean? Do you do something to a soybean? I don't know. I'm going to get in trouble with my husband. I don't know.

I don't know. Who knows? And also, it's best at the most oleogenes of the most. I mean, he's not the most dangerous or damaging of the cabinet secretaries. I mean, I don't think compared to Hagseth or no, he's not, you know, doing quite as much damage to the country. But he's, I find his manner so off-putting. Maybe that's just my new social Democrat, anti-New York, wealthy people mode. But as you say, if he just said, look, you know, we whatever, I'm defending the policies of the Trump administration, fine.

But yes, the need to pretend that he's in touch with the soybean farmers of America is so laughable, you know. Maybe there's one soybean farm out in the Hamptons, do you think? I don't know, near his house out there. You can't even spit it out. It's like you're paying people to work the land. I hate to be like this, but I was curious. In addition to fact-checking whether Bessent is actually a soybean farmer and whether his family's work in the land and getting up at dawn to, you know, get out there.

Also, the claim that he knows more about agriculture than any Secretary of the Treasury since the 1800s. That sounded dubious to me as well. And so I did pull up Wikipedia, our friend at Wikipedia, and we had John Connolly, was Secretary of the Treasury, to Richard Nixon. He was born to a dairy and tenant farmer in Texas. So my guess is that he's actually done a little bit more farm work than Scott Besson in his Barbie house.

That's just me. I'm just guessing that John Connolly probably knew a little bit more than Scott Bessent. Fortunately, I think John Connolly's dead, so we can't have a quiz. but I would like to challenge Scott Besson to a quiz. You mentioned the health care subsidies a minute ago, but also in your newsletter, talking about the opportunities that Democrats have in the next couple weeks to kind of continue to damage Trump's political standing. This is one of them.

On Thursday, the Senate is set to vote on the Democratic proposal to extend the enhanced subsidies for three years. I wonder in what you think about that and kind of just the other point you're making in the newsletter. Yeah, I mean, the government shut down, which the Democrats, went along with or caused, you could say, to be honest, they didn't like that term because they were, well, it's Republicans' fault. They wouldn't extend the subsidies, but, you know, the number of guys could have accepted the Republican CR. They didn't. It was a gamble. It worked

out well politically, I think, and they probably worked out pretty well that they ended it when they did, too. And the one thing they got out of it was this commitment to a vote on the Obamacare subsidies. And I think, you know, it's helped them politically. I mean, they did get the health care issue front and center. So they should spend all week screaming and yelling about it, and then scream and yell when the Republicans stop people from getting the help they deserve. They can use Trump's farm subsidies, which are necessary because of the tariffs, as an example of, you know, why he won't help actual people who deserve help in this case and have been getting it for two or three years and with no ill effect that I know of.

I mean, they're getting health insurance, which is a good thing. So they should emphasize that. And then I do think the week after, there's quite a lot of economic data that comes out that kind of last four week before Christmas could well show that inflation isn't going down, as Trump promised. And so it's not just health costs that are going up. It's a lot of other costs. And for all we know, the economy may be slowing.

I think they have a good two-week window here to do health care and the economy together. And I do think just December is a good time to make some points. You know, and people do have a sort of end-of-the-year attitude. They go on vacation maybe the week of Christmas itself. They chat with their friends and families and so forth. What do you think that first year of the Trump presidency? Pretty good if the Democrats can get people also to say pretty crazy. And also, you know, my people's health insurance is going up.

The prices haven't come down. There are a couple other issues. Epstein comes up at the end of that second week, too. Then there's the drug boats and stuff. So I think it's a pretty good moment for these next two weeks. They really should try to bring home the fact that the first year of Trump's presidency has not done what he said it would do on the economy and in other areas. The enhanced Obamacare health care subsidies from the COVID era is like not the way long term

to deal with our health care unaffordability crisis, as we should just say. But, like, this is a bed of their own banking, right? Like, they came in, said that they were going to deal with costs. That was what was the Trump priority and what they stated, both during the campaign during the transition. And a lot of people are receiving those subsidies are their own voters. And we're in month 11 now, you know, getting to it of the administration, plenty of time to have come up with an alternative.

They haven't. And I just, I really think that they have made this their mess. And I think that it's perfectly fine for the Democrats to rail on it. And not only perfectly fine, absolutely should rail on it, you know, despite the fact that maybe, you know, if you're brought in the health care policy, wonks, you know, the center right and left that might, this might not be the proposed policy. It's just like, okay, well, whatever. Republicans won everything. It's incumbent upon them to deal with this. They haven't.

Their own people are going to suffer. It's going to be something very tangible to people notice on top of the fact that the tariff news. And we'll see if they back off on that in the next couple of weeks. You're hearing already from a lot of companies that they've, you know, who have been eating some of the additional costs of the tariffs, that they're not going to be able to do that next year if they continue. No, I like that. I hadn't quite thought about the way just pairing the tariffs and the healthy,

I mean, he's had plenty of time. I think that's another thing people need to say in the next two weeks. He's been president for almost a year. The idea that, well, we're going to get around to health. They're thinking hard. A lot of Republican senators are consulting, and they have a couple of ideas and concepts of how they might begin to fix health care. They're cutting out the insurance companies, allegedly, and all nonsense.

But, I mean, really, it's 11 months. You know what? They meant now on tariffs, something he believes in, apparently. They've done a lot. It's been destructive. But it's not like they can't put into practice policies. It's not like they can't propose things to Congress. They got that stupid reconciliation bill through Congress.

They could have done stuff. They chose not to do anything on health care. They chose to impose tariffs. I think they need to really pair those two in a way. I agree. They found the time to cut taxes for the richest people. You found time to start a war with Venezuela. They found time to end USAID.

They could have found time to come up with a plan to deal with people's rising health care premiums. They didn't. All right, you know, at the end of the year, just December always comes quick to me. What is it today? It's December 8th. How is that possible?

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That's 20% off at trust and will.com slash bulwark. On the foreign policy side as well, you had Mark Warner, center from Virginia, on the Sunday bulwark once you're laboring on every Sunday and we appreciate, you know, while the rest of us are sleeping in. At the very end, you kind of got into some interesting stuff on the national security strategy that I want to talk to you about. But just before that, he was in the briefing on the bombings in the Caribbean and our double-tap strike that killed the two people who had survived the initial strike and were

swimming around the Caribbean. Then Tom Cotton says that they're trying to roll the boat over and get back on and come attack us again. Warner has seen the video. We talk about this a little bit on Friday. I'm just wondering if from your conversation, anything, struck you from what he had observed. Yeah, I think, I mean, I hadn't really focused on the fact that I think six or seven members of Congress have seen the video, the ranking and chairs of the key committees, intelligence, armed services. But that's it. There are many people in Congress who deserve to see that, I hope, I assume, insists this week that it be shown more made available to all members. I'd like, you know, Jason Crow and Seth Moulton and a lot of veterans and people who've served

in the Navy and others who know quite a lot of special operations, know quite a lot about this to see this video. And I gather it's pretty shattering. Mark Warner is a very judicious, moderate guy really values, and I don't, I say this respectfully. I mean, his reputation is as having run the Intelligence Committee in the Senate and now he's vice chair in a very very important. very bipartisan way. He is not a showboat on this stuff. And he genuinely was appalled. I mean, I think both talking a little off the air and then on air about what he saw and also appalled by the changing stories of the administration. He didn't want to criticize the military directly, but I think he feels like they've been putting it just an impossible position and haven't been

candid from the beginning, all of them. And I was struck by how alarmed he is by both the particular incident, and then by the whole strain of things that's happening, and how much he is vice chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. He's one of this group of eight that's supposed to get all the briefings. They don't know anything. They don't know. They've been given one document, finally, the legal, obviously legal counsel opinion, justifying allegedly these strikes. But all the normal stuff they get, the kind of briefings on what happened, access to documentation, access to the other. Incidentally, they should make this video public, but the other videos, they've released 20 seconds of them as a snuff film,

but we don't get to see, they don't get to see the whole account of, you know, what happened, who these people are. In this case, it's come out now, only now, that the boat was not heading to the U.S. This boat was heading to maybe meet up with another boat that was going to Suriname to go to Europe, apparently, to deliver cocaine there. So Trump said definitively, coming to the U.S., the day of the hit, and they never walked that back until a week or two ago. The whole thing has been covered up.

I mean, I guess I was struck talking to Mark Warner how much. He is one of six, seven, eight people in the United States Congress who should, who, in the normal procedure of things, would know a lot about what has happened. And he knows, as he was the first to say, he knows very little. And this is not democratic government. I mean, this is the president of the United States, just doing things as he wishes and then not briefing, not telling us about it, the public, but not telling the United States Congress about it. The other thing that was noted is that this was a prize, I didn't really catch this. I thought they all were briefed together. I didn't realize until I watched your interview.

No, there was a sequence, and there was a scheduling issue, and he happened to be the last one. So he got quite a lot of time with General Kane and Admiral Bradley. In private. To me, that's the other element of this, which is like, it doesn't seem like he feels at all compelled that we can be certain that we're even killing the people that they say we're killing. I don't know.

They floated so many different excuses. What excuse you have the weekend was, well, everyone who was killed was on a list to people who were, okay to be killed. But as Brian Goodman, our friend, teaches, worked on this, works on this stuff full time in NYU law school and said, what is that? You can't just make up lists of people who deserve to be killed.

Where's the list? Yeah, where's the list? What are the criteria for putting people on the list? They were obviously in... Can Mark Warner see it at least? Iraq. When we were finding ISIS, let's just say in 2015, 16, in Syria and Iraq, there were lists of people.

We went through a lot of trouble to try to make sure they were accurate. I'm sure there were one or two mistakes, but of genuine ISIS operators, who they, special operations, forces that went out and tried to either seize or if need be killed. That's not a bunch of, you know, mules who were, you know, paid $20 to go take a boat somewhere to drink some cocaine. They were not, first of all, the equivalent of those people were not on the list, typically, unless they directly killed Americans or something. Yeah, so saying they're on a list gets you nowhere in terms of international law or American law, incidentally, to justify what had happened.

Yeah, one other interesting thing in your Convo, because just like, a lot of times, if you just feel like it's useful when they are making these ridiculous rationalizations to just like, actually take what they're saying at face value and like walk through it, like how that would work, right? Because it reveals other absurdities. I'm like one of those in your conversation was this claim that Cotton said that, that, you know, A, they're trying to turn over the boat and B,

that there's another boat that was coming to pick them up that was also maybe coming to target Americans. And it's like, well, okay, you and Senator Warner we're discussing, like, if that's true, wouldn't the right strategic move have been to wait for the boat, right? Like, this is stupid, this is not a war. Like, we shouldn't be buying people at all. But if you're taking their argument at face value, which is that this is a grave threat to the country, like, why would you want to kill the two people swimming around in the water? Wouldn't you want to see who's on the boat coming to get them? Wouldn't you want to interdict those people or bomb those? The whole rationale is just stupid.

And you'd want to interdict them, and we do have Coast Guard and Navy ships that can go do that. Someone did it just off the coast of Florida. Didn't they Thursday or Friday? They took a zillion pounds of cocaine or whatever off some ship and captured the people. And you'd want to take the people and then see what information you could get from them. If you were serious about narco-terrorists and we need to get up the chain to the really big shots like the President of Honduras and Trump just pardoned. But anyway, right, I mean, we did do that a lot with the terrorists. Again, we got into big fights about proper interrogation.

techniques, God knows, but I mean, it wasn't crazy to think we need to interrogate these people to see what the rest of the organization is up to and who the big shots are. That's what's so infuriating. There's not even a pretense that this is a serious war on terrorism, that this is a serious effort to deal with dangerous narco-terrorists who have this huge organization that we need to penetrate. We know how we try to penetrate terrorist organizations and we do it sometimes well, sometimes not so well, but this is a shooting gallery. A shooting gallery for snuff films. I guess I came out of the Warner conversation. He was very sober

and he doesn't get as excited as I do, I guess, but it's disgusting really. We're shooting up these things and putting it up on social media. That's it. There's no serious effort to curb the flow of drugs or to find out what the real relationships within Trendy, Ragua,

are, or anything like that. And they've put out all the snuff videos except for the one where they killed the two people apparently swimming around in the water with a boat on fire next to them. Just one of the thing on the I come about the very end and you maybe have some longer conversations later this week with foreign policy folks on this. But it is interesting they have this national security strategy that the administration's

put out. And it's noteworthy that this administration like barely talks about China at all. Like they've got some like China hawks allegedly like waltz and such in the administration, but they don't they don't talk about that at all. Like for years we talked about that on the right it was that Obama and Biden didn't care about this. They were too soft. There's this great threat of China. And we had cotton, speaking of Cotton and Gallagher and all these people are like, these Democrats are too weak. We need to be tougher on China and decouple. There's nothing like about China and any of this. But there's

significant amount about like whether the Europeans are, you know, cracking down too hard on speech. Like that is the real threat facing the country to our national security. When you kind of put it like that. It is pretty crazy. Yeah, we have to be tough on Venezuelan speedboats and on European liberals who haven't signed on to our version of the culture war or of white replacement theory or of basically bigotry, you know, is something, some of Europe has a quarter. They're doing their best to encourage those people in Europe, incidentally, supporting the AFD and all that, but they're annoyed that some of Europe is a little more resistant to this kind of culture war stuff than

they wish. So, yeah, no, it's not as, obviously it's not a serious national security strategy. But I think on China, well, it would be nice of someone who's been sort of Trump acquiesive because, you know, Bill, I mean, they're not great. But on China, they're really going to be serious. It would be nice of one of them acknowledge that they've been utterly unserious, utterly unsurrier. And in fact, he's going to, he's eager to cut deals with Xi, and he's going to sell out Taiwan. And he's letting them have all the advanced AI stuff through whoever it is, the UAE or something, you know, cutter and all this. And she's running circles around them. She's running circles around them.

Totally. But they're going to be tough here in the West and having. Tim. We're going to really be top dog here. And we've got the Canadians. We're beating them up. And we're blowing up some fishing boats. And we're Panama Canal. Watch out. I mean, it's pathetic. It's really embarrassing, honestly. We're just a bully. We're just a atmospheric bully. Not even a very good one, probably, honestly. But at this point, I mean, yeah. And it ties to the farmer bail out. It's like she that they had this deal. And they promised that they're going to buy all the soybeans, but they haven't yet. So in the meantime, we've got to bail out the farmers, you know, while. While she slow rolls us, it's truly pathetic. All right, I want to do a little politics talk. We get some Texas Senate news that I'm not too excited about. So I don't know if you're going to cheer me up or not. But Colin Al-Read has announced this morning that he's dropping out of the Texas Senate race.

That seems to be a prelude to Jasmine Crockett getting in. I expect potentially by the time this podcast is Al Talstein, seeing that she is going to get into this race. Terry Verz, who was the astronaut, had also dropped out of the Senate race in favor of fronting for the House. He's more of a moderate-type candidate. James Tala Rico is still in. And so it's kind of looking like this will turn into a Tala Rico versus Crockett primary. I guess I was going to my opinion first, Bill, and then you can kind of give yours.

But, like, I feel like Colin Al-Read got a real short shrift down there, and he ran really far ahead of Kamala Harris last time. And he got crushed, but he ran above the top of the ticket. And if you project that out to a midterm, let's say that Trump's popularity in Texas is at like 46 and so wherever it was last time in the mid-50s, you know, somebody like Conroll Red, a, you know, somebody that runs a, you know, safe, some multi-conservative race that's appealing, you know, across the board, but former football player, maybe that's the right thing to do, right, you know, in Texas. I don't know. Maybe you can get a primary. I'm not sure. but the idea that he's getting pushed out of the race because he doesn't have like this social media juice of Crockett or Tala Rico, I think just seems like a big mistake. And I think that the Democrats, like, in some way is like learning some wrong lessons from Trump and being like, oh, we need people that are more like Trump.

And it's like maybe true, actually, in 28. Like I think I'd have a different view of a presidential race. Like maybe there's some view that are controlling the narrative. And having a really dynamic candidate is, like, the most important thing in a presidential race. Maybe it's really important in certain governor's races or, like, maybe there are other certain examples. Like, in a red state Senate races, I don't know that, like, having a fire and anti-Trump firebrand that is going to increase the partisan variance, like, in the hopes that it turns, juices turnout. Again, maybe it'll work. I'm not like a total 0% on it, but I don't know that it's a smart idea for the Democrats

to be kind of circling the wagons around like very partisan social media firebrands in red states. I don't know that there's a ton of evidence that that's a model for success. Yeah, I think especially in red states. I mean, I talked to someone from Tennessee over the weekend who said he thought, I mean, a more moderate candidate in Tennessee 7 would have lost also probably. It just is R-plus-22 district. But he did think the Democrats lost three, four points because she was just such a left-win candidate. I mean, and now the wave is still strong enough to get her from minus 22 to minus nine, so that's not nothing. But again, that's exactly the margin of difference in a place like Texas where you could be winning, as opposed to getting

to 46, 47 percent. And so I do think it matters what kind of candidates you have, especially in these purple and red states. I mean, there was a huge wave here in Virginia, but I think which is purple-ish, you know. But I think Spanberger won by more because she was, you know, X-CIA and a moderate. So I was texting with Michael Wood, our friend, casual billwork contributor, a veteran, a small business owner

in the Dallas suburbs and telling him he needs to rethink this thing. Tala Rico, I don't know quite, he's not quite left-wing, I wouldn't say, but he is kind of young and a social media-ish. And maybe someone who owns a business and served very admirably in the military.

would be pretty seriously and came back to Texas and then has done well and someone who would look is more of a moderate temperate. So we should use this podcast to make Michael Wood's life miserable now for the next three weeks

so he'll have to answer a lot of questions about whether he's running or not. I don't think he, I mean, he's sort of decided not to be busy with his family and his life. But nonetheless, I got a little depressed when I saw that, I don't know, that all right felt he couldn't make it.

Maybe it's just a personal decision. I don't know. I didn't want to do it again. I'm talking about being smart, right? Like, having a candidate like Crockett and a certain race might make total sense. I think Democrats and blue states decide that the base is depressed and they don't want candidates like Ed Markey representing blue states. They want people that are younger and more dynamic and maybe more lefty. Okay, okay.

It's a big country, right? And Democrats should be able to run different types of candidates in different places. And so I'm for that. I just like, you know, look at the Texas Center. race. And I feel like sometimes Democrats, like, they take the lesson from Trump and are like, we need to be more to turn out the base. Look how well Trump's done it. But look how poorly that works for Republicans in the midterms. Right. Like the Trump's success in two elections has like really papered over Republicans failures in a lot of these midterm races. And not to come, I don't want to

compare Jasmine Crackett until I Kirsch Walker or Carrie Lake or whatever. You know, obviously they're liars and gross people. But like Republicans have blown. a lot of races that they could have run by running Trumpy, firebrandy, two-partisan-type candidates at the Senate level. And Democrats should learn from that just as much as they learned from the way Trump has succeeded at the presidential level. Just to make this point even more real-time, in 2024, Alyssa Slok and won in Michigan, a state that Trump carried, and she would not have if she were a more left-wing Democratic nominee, in my opinion. And David McCormick, your close friend there in Pennsylvania,

as a Republican, as in a Republican, run in Pennsylvania, because though he pretended to be Trumpy and was Trumpy in the primary and so forth, there were enough voters who were sort of reassured that deep doubt he's not crazy and he's not really like Churchill Walker, which he isn't, I guess, as a business guy and all this, that he managed to squeak through in Pennsylvania.

So we have quite a lot of evidence that at the level of Senate races in purple states, either way for the Democrats and the Republicans, or reddish districts and states for the Democrats, the kind of candidate matters. But I'm also not, I got beat up by so many people for saying I was kind of okay with Mom Donnie back in October. It's New York, you know, whatever.

And I also have said this a million times. I'll say it again right now. If the left part of the party wants to go into a red state and say, hey, what we're going to try to do is run somebody on a Bernie-ish economic platform, but who's more center on social issues, that's at least a theory of the case. Okay, like that's at least something. I don't know that that's going to work, but why not try it? I'm on board for trying new shit.

We've got to figure out how Democrats can win in red states. So Ken Baxter is not a U.S. senator. That's not what Jasmine Crockett is. Like, Jasmine Crockett is a just down-the-line progressive left firebrand. Like, that's what she is. I mean, maybe Donald Trump will fuck up the economy so bad and Donald Trump will face plant so bad that she'll win by accident. That happens.

People win by accident all the time. Katie Hobbs won by accident in Arizona because Carrie Lake was such terrible candidate. It wasn't because she ran a great race. God love her. So that could happen sometimes, but anyway. I want to do some politics on the other side with the Republicans. My final section here of my headline is, do we have to hand it to him? And it's Marjorie Taylor Green and Ted Cruz.

Marjorie Taylor Green was on 60 minutes last night. Do we have to hand it to Marjorie Taylor Green? Here she is going after Trump for now being the establishment. Are you saying that the president now is siding with those establishment powerful people and against MAGA? He passed a crypto bill that helped out all the crypto donors. He has served Israel's interest, even attacking Iran. He has served big pharma.

He didn't take away the COVID vaccines that we want to see taken away. So those are the areas that are still getting everything they want while the people, we're still out here saying we want to see action on on areas for the American people, not for the major industries, and the big donors. Bill. A little cross-freshment on this one, you know. It's a little crazy. The things she wants to see are a couple of the cases where Trump has been slightly

less irresponsible than he might otherwise have been. But on the other hand, the fact that he is selling out to all the big donors is also an empirically true fact. So, yeah, we need a better expression. I don't want to hand anything to her much. But, you know, if she says a true thing, it's a true thing, right? Truth is truth, regardless who says it. So we're allowed to say that she's saying the truth.

And I think we're allowed to say, honestly, that it doesn't, it's good that the MAGA coalition is coming apart a little bit. I love that. I'm a little cross-pressured on Marjorie Taylor Green, wanting Trump to be, you know, more anti-Israel and also being in the pockets of the rich people. Here's the thing. Trump is vulnerable on that, which she just laid out. And is that because there is like some part of the MAGA base that's anti-Semitic, of course? Is it also because it is true that he has said that he was going to be America first? And this was another clip that I didn't play where she said, I don't identify as MAGA anymore.

I'm America first because he, MAGA isn't America first. I think that's a useful frame for people to attack him from all parts of, you know, no matter what your ideology is, if you're Jewish space lasers or if you're just a normie neoliberal. Like he hasn't been America first. and he has been corrupt and he's given handouts to the big tech guys he's given handouts to his crypto buddies and he hasn't like gone after the established interest groups

like he said he was going to and instead he's building a big fancy ballroom for himself there's a lot of crazy in there I think that going after him on the vaccine is not what I would choose to go after him on but we should let a thousand followers bloom and I think that that's the frame that Donald Trump has not been American first

He's not drained the swamp. He's been acting on behalf of himself, his own financial interests, and, you know, the big rich guys who he wants to love him. I think that's a good frame. And maybe other people can take a little bit of a different tack on the details than Marjorie did. How does that sound about her distinction. I think you make interesting word about her distinction between America First and MAGA.

I mean, essentially, she wants to be America First. And I take it whatever she thinks. I mean, she sort of sincerely thinks that's what she's thinking, you know. But I think it's a vulnerability, right? was America first, I mean, much as I deplore it and think its historical associations are very bad and so forth, has a certain resonance probably out there. It seems like common-sensical in a certain way, America first. And MAGA has now accumulated so much stuff that I wonder what how, it's an interesting test. I've only seen that done recently, how that term is doing.

I kind of think it, Trump loves it. He talks about it all the time. It's, you know, on his stupid, you know, make America. I mean, it's everywhere, right? But I wonder how that slogan is really fairing politically. Something to think about it. All right, last thing. Ted Cruz. When you go back in history, one of the things that I, I'm sure people could find it if they want to go ahead and search for it because I'm not ashamed.

I don't love it. It's not something I feel great about when I look back on, but there was a brief moment of maybe two months where I was unofficially part of the Cruz crew in 2016 because it was the only way to stop Donald Trump. And I stand by that. that we would have been a much better place if Ted Cruz would have been the nominee that Donald Trump, mostly because Hillary probably would have won. But even if Ted Cruz has become president, we'd been a better place.

There's nobody storming the Capitol waving Ted Cruz flags. Okay. That was just where we were at. Ever since then, I found Ted Cruz to just be utterly disgusting and deplorable inside and out in every basically utterance that he's made. And then in the last couple weeks, Ted Cruz is going after Tucker really hard. Ted Cruz is plotting a 2028 to go after J.D. Vance. He doesn't like, you know, the way that they have basically taken this kind of MAGA nationalism and it does not think it's representative of where the country should be.

Tucker and Don Jr. were in Qatar over the weekend, sucking up to the cutteries who are like giving us this plane and there's all this corruption and obviously they're going after Israel, et cetera. And Ted Cruz tweets, quote tweets to Tucker panel in Qatar with, I thought fallatio was illegal in Qatar. And I'm sorry to say, Ted Cruz did a good tweet. And could we find ourselves in a situation where it is Ted Cruz that is holding the mantle in a fight in 2027 against J.D. Vance and the Trump family and Tucker Carlson. And are you ready for that? Are you ready for liking some of Ted Cruz's tweets again, I guess is my question? Yeah, I guess so. It's funny.

Was it two months that we were off of the Cruz for your arena ticket? Could I, in my own mind, be written that as two weeks or maybe two days? You know, I'm sure it really was two months, but I've, like, I've compressed that. I think it was two months. I've compressed that in my own account of history there. So, but he was so horrible for the next few years. But, I mean, he does believe in certain things, and he's not an idiot. And he knows that some of these policies are very destructive, terrorists being one of them, I assume.

He was always a kind of free trade guy. I'm going after NATO. It's not all about Israel. Yeah, the NATO stuff. You know, absolutely. He should, like, get rid of all of our allies and coddle up to the dictators. He's not for that. Like, he's not for the coddling up to Putin and, you know, so that's not nothing.

Some of the nativism has got to put him off. I mean, I would think just, I would think, you know. He's got some daughters that are lips. The daughters are libs. Yes, that's a good sign. And that matters. That matters. JD's kids are still young, and so he doesn't have the guilt yet.

He's going to convince himself that his kids aren't going to hate him. That's going to come back to bite him in a few years, I suspect. Maybe not. Maybe he'll end up with children like Nailen Haley, who's. who is like a MAGA nationalist for some reason. But I suspect a lot of these guys, and you see those with Marjorie. I think one connection between Marjorie and Cruz is they have to have Thanksgiving dinner with their late teen, early 20s daughters.

And that demo, college educated late teen early 20s women, are very, very, very unhappy with the current Republican Party. And maybe that, maybe that nudges them a little bit. And okay. I'm not saying I'm going to be like, you know, putting a Ted Cruz yard sign up. But someone will have to carry the flag against the MAGA nationalists. And maybe it'll be Ted Cruz again. We've ended up.

We'll leave it there. Tim Miller, got to give it to Ted Cruz. Reminiscences fondly about his days in the cruise sphere arena, you know, super PAC or whatever you do. Cruz, crew. Oh, my God. Come on to the podcast. Ted. We'd have a good time. Anyway, that's Bill Crystal. We'll be back tomorrow with another edition of the show. If you guys can stomach it. We'll see y'all then. Peace.

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