The Bulwark Podcast - Bill Kristol: Trump Is in Way over His Head

Episode Date: March 23, 2026

The man in charge is bluffing, blustering, and trying to manipulate the markets by claiming that the administration is in negotiations with Iran and was holding off on further military strikes. Israel's reaction was to drop more bombs on Iran, and the regime itself used Trump's own lines against him in its response. In any event, Iran has shown it can close the Strait of Hormuz, which is much more of a power move than the degradation of Tehran's missile capacity. With the war hitting Americans financially in their daily lives—and Trump now refusing a deal to fund TSA—the Dems have to hammer home that it's POTUS who has delivered higher gas prices and long lines at the airport. Plus, JD is in a job bind, the head of FEMA has a teleporting issue, and Trump showed utter depravity over the passing of Bob Mueller. Bill Kristol joins Tim Miller.show notes Monday's "Morning Shots" "Bulwark on Sunday" with Bill and Catherine Tim's and Bill's 'Bulwark Take' on Trump's reaction to Mueller's death Yeats' poem, "To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing" The real "Baghdad Bob" 

Hello and welcome to the Bullwark podcast. I'm your host Tim Miller. It is Monday. So we are here with editor at large, Bill Crystal. Bill, I want to start with you with what I have titled Stupid War Update. Is that okay? Can we just go through the stupid war update? There's a lot to update. Yeah, I think we should just dispense with the pleasantries this week and go to the stupid war update. So since we are last together, me and the podcast audience, Friday Trump lifted the oil sanctions on a Iranian oil that's currently at sea, giving them a multi-billion dollar windfall while we bombed them. And then Iran fired a couple missiles unsuccessfully at the island of Diego Garcia, great name for an island, which is far beyond the range that we'd previously known they're capable of sending missiles. So that missiles, they didn't succeed. They were intercepted. It was kind of an interesting data point.

Then Trump threatened to hit and obliterate their power plants within 48 hours from this exact point of time if they don't open the straight that was yesterday. Iran replied threatening to hit energy assets across the Middle East. You know, the worst case scenario here could have been just a global energy crisis like we haven't seen had both sides gone through with that. Then this morning Trump blinked and called off the threat. He bleated this. I'm pleased to report the United States of America and the country of Iran have had over the last two days very good and productive conversations regarding a complete and total resolution of our hostilities in the Middle East, et cetera, et cetera.

And then he goes on to say that they're going to postpone all military strikes against Iran and power plants and energy infrastructure for five days, which you might notice would be like right after the markets close again on Friday. Iran denies that these talks occurred at all. Israel news outlets are reporting that this is basically just market manipulation, that nothing has happened, that they're pressing forward. The Israeli Air Force has begun a new wave of. strikes targeting Iranian infrastructure sites this morning while Trump bleated that out.

And then Trump was on the tarmac after the bleat this morning and said that if negotiations go well, we'll end up settling this. Otherwise, we'll just keep bombing our little hearts out. So that's the state of affairs on the Iran war. Response? Thoughts. Well, I guess I've always been slightly of the view that Trump would taco himself out of this, that he was sufficiently worried about boots on the ground in the Middle East and certainly worried about gas prices, that he would find a way to have a negotiation or a fake negotiation

or just orders his fire, kind of stop the war, and assume that Iran would have to open the strait pretty soon afterwards anyway because of pressure from other nations. And I think that's where he ended up. I mean, it is convenient, as Andrew Eger pointed out this morning and morning shots, that he launched his really big bluff, I guess it turned out to be at least for now. And these are all just at least for now, who knows where this could go.

But at least for now, the big bluff was launched late Saturday afternoon and called off early Monday morning. So it was while the markets were closed, Trump was bluff. And now, hey, relief. It was only the market. God knows how much market manipulation there's been by various people in and close to the Trump administration. You know, the threats were pretty jaw-dropping on Sunday to Israeli radio.

He pledged the total decimation of Iran. If they didn't pledge to be open the straight right away, and they haven't done so, they've simply said, well, they haven't said anything. Trump has said we're talking to them, and they've said, actually, we haven't talked to the U.S. at all. But, I mean, they could have talked to Oman or to Qatar or to Japan or U.K. or, again, possible interlocutors or have indirect contacts with some people there and not others. Anyway, I was, this morning, I was busy writing morning shots and there at 7 a.m., and I just finished basically saying that I did think Trump would still talk out even. even though, despite all the bluffing, that I took his Friday afternoon post about how we're winding down, with a whole bunch of objectives he laid out, all of which were a huge retreat from his early objectives, and all of which were either doable, had been done, like, you know, decimating their missile capacity and weakening them,

or they could say they had been done, or were vague enough that you could sort of claim to have done them. So I was just finishing writing that when I saw there on our slack that Trump had, in fact, takos. that requires some frantic rewriting. I would like to publicly urge here, the White House, not to have big announcements at 7 a.m. Monday morning. It's a little bit, you know, we're just kind of getting the thing, you know, doing some of the other parts of the morning shots

and kind of relaxing a little bit after that initial spurt there. And it's very disconcerting. The newsletter writer's lament. Yeah, it's tough. I guess this kind of goes without saying, given that we just ran all that through, but they don't know what they're doing.

Like, they have no plan. They don't have a plan to get out. Like, that's just the fundamental fact here. They have no plan to get out of here. They're just throwing shit against the wall. And it's like escalatory threats in the hopes that Iran folds, you know, followed by other things. The Israel part of this is, you know, a wild card here and all of it too, you know, because as I mentioned, that Israeli Air Force is striking to Iran this morning.

If you're, you know, in Iran shoes right now, Trump could taco and that would not necessarily resolve their problems, right? Trump has to deal with the entire region as well. Like this is very different than the Venezuela situation, I guess is my point. There's no other players. And it's very different from tariffs, the source of the origin of the taco formulation, where Trump can pretty much unilaterally change them back and reassure the markets. As you say, he's got to deal with Israel. He's got to deal with the region.

He's got to deal with the Iranian regime, which is a little unclear who's running it. And anyway, they may feel they got Trump over a barrel. Having said all that, I think Trump can stop and make Israel stop. I think if he sees that that's the obstacle to him being able to declare victory or even quasi-victory, we set them back badly and now we're getting out of it. And I know not only how to start wars, but I know how to end wars unlike previous presidents. And the markets get reassured. I think he will lean on Israel hard and probably be able to muscle enough other people in the

area in the region to kind of accept this, you know, kind of uneasy ceasefire, which isn't really a deal, but is sort of a quasi-deal and does basically reduce the violence for now, not that it might entirely go away overnight, but this is a big retreat. Let us not kid us. It's one thing to have a theory, a strategy where you're going to bomb for X amount of time

and then get a good deal out of it. That wasn't his plan. His plan was to bomb for three days and stop it, basically. His plan was to be Venezuela. He's way it over his head. He's throwing stuff with the wall. He's bluffing. He's blustering.

What's been, I think, most worrisome just from the point of view of actually the U.S. and the world, like the real world, not Trump's psyche, is that he would stumble into a truly insane escalation that would cause genuine economic crisis and all kinds of other second and third order effects. And I think in that respect, it's good that his inclination is to back off. His inclination is to chicken out. For sure. I mean, no, last night when we went to bed, like the possible of a completely catastrophic energy crisis, royal in the way. the entire world leading to, you know, untold kind of damage and, you know, refugee.

Like, you know, and if Trump really had tried to take out the Iranian energy infrastructure, and then the Iranians fired at energy assets across the region, and there was no plan to opening the straight, you know, you end up in a situation that, you know, that affects everybody around the globe. I do think that your point is this is a big backdown. And, you know, we don't want them to escalate. The Iranians, though, more so. So then in Venezuela, like have some impact on what is happening here and have a vote, so to speak. You know, I mentioned earlier, they said that they're not even having talks. Gerard Baker at the Wall Street Journal was intended to be friendly towards Trump in the past.

It writes this, the unsettling realities that with this president, Americans in wartime are an unprecedented position of having to suspect that the enemy's version of events is more likely to be true than our own. We have become the Baghdad, Bob's. And then we had this from the spokesperson from the Iranian Armed Forces. I swear this is not from Wayne's world or a spoof movie. This is the real life that we're in. Let's listen. Hey, Taram, you are fired. You are familiar with this sentence.

Thank you for your attention to this matter. The central headquarter of Qatam, Olympia. That's not Saturday Night Live. Isn't that amazing? Yeah, yeah. The Iranian spokesperson to Trump, you're fired. Thank you for the attention to this matter. They don't really seem like they've been obliterated.

No, no, no. Not at all. I mean, and that also, one thing we should be grateful for, if this now moves in this direction, and it will. If it does, it'll be fits and starts and be messy. But let's assume from it, it does move in the Trump backing down and a cessation or reduction in hostilities. It does save us from foots on the ground, which I think Trump was stumbling towards. I mean, there were actual thousands of Marines going to the region. So it wasn't just stumbling towards, I suppose. And doing that in the kind of half-assed way he was going to do it and not really having prepared it. and were very unclear what the goals would be. That really could have been a recipe for disaster. So I hope we've avoided that at least. Some of this is like you can't really report on this because it's like the whims of a madman, right? So there are no real inside sources except for the voices in Trump's head

and like whoever he literally last spoke to who can speak to his thinking within that a discrete timeframe. That said, the Israeli sources to Israeli news outlets are basically did say that like, no, troops are still on the way and where he's buying time and the plan is, you know, pressing forward as it has been. So, you know, I just, with that caveat to the idea that he's avoided troops on the ground. I think that's an important caveat. There are really two ways that could play out, right? One, we do end up with troops on the ground and the escalation has just been

delayed and he's buying time, which is possible. Or two, Trump isn't really interested in boots on the ground and is trying to kind of back out of the whole thing, which, case, we're heading towards a bit of something of a showdown with Israel. I mean, Israel clearly is trying to push Trump in the direction that they wanted to go in and they pushed them pretty well for the last three and a half weeks. But I wonder how big a showdown it would be between Trump and BB. That will be an interesting question. Yeah, and maybe BB decides we'll let him go home for a little while and then we'll just do it

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He was out on Sunday shows over the weekend, but his remit seems to have expanded into military strategy. And so I want to play Scott Bessent talking to Kristen Welker about what the strategy is at this point. Every day we are taking out their missiles, their missile systems, and the factories that build those missiles. And now are the General Kane, Secretary Hagsit, are leading a campaign to destroy all the fortifications along the straits of Formos. Just to put a fine point on this, though, is the president in the process of winding down this war or escrow? Again, they're not mutually exclusive. Sometimes you have to escalate to de-escalate, Chris. Sometimes you have to escalate to de-escalate.

I mean, I guess, technically. The problem with that is Trump, in each press conference he's giving, is escalating and de-escalating simultaneously, sentence by sentence. How bad is Scott Besson? I mean, he is the worst. I mean, he's not the worst because excess so horrible and some of the others are pretty bad, are very bad also. But I mean, this patronizing, if you watch some other clips of the interview, too,

to Kristen Welker, who's asking totally straightforward, honestly, and sensible questions. I mean, not very, not gotcha questions, you know. And he's patronizing, if that's the incorrect framing, Kristen, I think it's, isn't he say that? It's such a, you know, it's like kind of comma christening her after every question, like, oh, you're too dumb to understand the brilliant strategy that we're employing, Kristen, that has skyrocketed energy prices. and worse into the economic situation.

He also, there was a, there's kind of like a 50 days to bend the curve, you know, 50 days to stop the spread element of his remarks also this weekend. Like, you know, this is, we have a limited period and stuff to shirt. Very stuffed shirt. You know, the one thing I was thinking about writing, I didn't write this this morning, maybe, is that Trump is so incompetent and unsuited, let's just say, in the nicest way of putting it to be an actual president at a serious time, like a war, right? I mean, it's one thing he can squirp a lot of other things domestically, and God knows he has,

and he's a real threat to our liberties and leaving all that aside. He should not be in charge of a war, but also the people around him, is there ever, I mean, what a group of clowns and bozos, as David Frum said to you on Friday. I mean, it's scary. It's really scary. I mean, Nixon went a little crazy. People, I say, I think it's probably true in those last few months. he had Kissinger and Schlesinger and, you know,

Gerald Ford is Vice President and Al Haig and, you know, his chief of staff and Dick Cheney was there. I mean, there were people preventing, and literally they did try to make sure that he couldn't give orders over around Schlesinger as Secretary of Defense in terms of nuclear weapons and so. And there were some crises, and people were genuinely scared.

There was the Young Kipper War and stuff. But hoped at least that Trump, since he seems to be vaguely averse to foreign adventures or said he was, until he fell in love with him after June and then Venezuela and decided of foreign excursions were great. One thought the least with Trump,

maybe we wouldn't be risking actual, like, massive death, massive destruction, massive economic catastrophe in that way. We just be risking a whole ton of other things. And now it turns out with this love, he's at least falling in love for a while with foreign adventures.

Maybe this will cure him of that. I don't know, do you think? Or is he has no, he has the memory of a goldfish, right? He has the memory of a goldfish, right? Yeah. Yeah. And he thinks that,

He can get out of everything. And, you know, this is an area where he has power rather than doing with Congress when he gets a Congress in a second. One more thing on the economic part. So, like, oil remains about over 100 bucks a barrel. Prices to go down a little bit this morning after Trump, you know, indicated he wasn't going to do mass bombing campaigns on Iranian oil energy infrastructure. But, you know, you talked to Catherine Rappell about this yesterday. You know, people can go listen to that. But every day that this goes on, like the potentially unattended consequences and ramifications of screwing with the supply chain, you know, become harder and harder to unwind.

And like that is the other kind of element of this that he has sort of lost the rope on, in my view. And that is going to impact obviously people here and him politically, but it has global ramifications. And like they're trying to do these little things right now, like taking off the sanctions on Russia and Iran while we're in wars with them. and releasing some of the reserve. But like it's not sufficient to the scale of the disruption. No, and let's say that I don't know, the odds are 70, 30, that he's going to actually taco his way and this thing will die down. But it could start up again.

And the uncertainty now, once you've seen this level of recklessness and incompetence combined by Trump in taking us to war and his ability to do that, one man taking this country to war, you've got to think hard about a whole bunch of other investment decisions you're making and whether you want to hold U.S. treasuries. And I mean, I just think, yeah, I very much agree that the economic consequences, both because of the actual destruction that's happened, because of the actual damage that's been done to energy markets,

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On the economic thing, I had a conversation over the weekend that really struck me, I think reflects the scale of their political problem right now. You know, I have a friend here that doesn't pay that close to attention to the news. It's in the service industry. I saw him over the weekend an event. And he is having real economic hardship right now. Like a lot of Americans are in this boat. And he's got a car payment he can't afford working hard.

And he wakes up one morning last week. And it's like, oh, wait. Now, you know, gas to get to work is 20 bucks more a week than it was last week. Next week, the grocery bill is going to go up. Like the real ramifications of this for people who aren't paying that close of attention to the news and are wondering, like, why is this happening? There has been no rationale provided. anybody who doesn't follow geopolitical news closely, it's like, oh, the Iranians have been funding proxies to go after us for 47 years. And so now we randomly out of the blue decided we were going

to bomb them. And like the result is just this immediate economic hardship in your life, you know, that is like affecting your ability to pay bills and do what you need to do. I think that it's going to take a little bit of time for that to sink in with people, right? You know, like paying more in gas one week is different than having to pay more every week for six weeks, you know. But I do think just, I'm not sure it is set in for among the conventional wisdom for people, like just the amount of anger there's going to be at the administration over this and the scale of the backlash.

Like I think that it is a crisis, both like an economic crisis, but then also a political crisis that has gotten out of control for them. Yeah, that's interesting. and I think you're right. And again, it's not like the pandemic. You know, the pandemic affected everyone in the world. Trump handled it particularly badly and childishly in many ways and finally paid some price, but not as much as people kind of thought, look, at the end of the day, everyone's

having a rough time. This is something- People can process that. Yeah. And it's like even after 9-11, you and Catherine are talking about this guest prices didn't go out that much. But like, you know, they flew planes into our building so we had to do something, right? We ended up deciding that's stupid or the particulars or the strategy isn't well, but like,

at least initially there's like this, okay, I understand why this is happening. There's this global pandemic. I understand why things are costing more. Right now it's like you just wake up one morning and your gas prices and your grocery prices have skyrocketed. And it's like, why? Because we bombed the Ayatollah for question mark reasons. Yeah, because he launched a war with no imminent threat,

with no public debate or congressional authorization. And for no articulated reason, which he then backed off of, let's see if he does, but so far maybe backing off of three and a half weeks in without having done the things he said he wanted to do anyway. but just having inflicted this damage. I very much agree that the politics of this at home maybe have been a little bit underrated, if anything.

It's just like, okay, well, at the end of it, even if he tacos, right? Like, even if he quits tomorrow. Right. Then it's like, okay, well, there's still going to be months of disruption. People's prices are going to be higher, noticeably higher, not kind of like,

I was saying someone like this guy, like, you know, living paycheck to paycheck. Like, it is a noticeable difference when, you know, what you have to do every week goes up this much. So that has to be. happens and then the message is, oh, well, we degraded the Iranian missile capacity and the number of ships. Who cares? Who cares? Like, honestly, who cares? Like, I understand what you care. If you live in Israel, I understand they have different calculations. I understand why you care if you are a foreign

policy nerd in Washington or New York that has been following the Iranian proxy threat for decades, right? But as a regular person, you're like, wait a minute. There's this tangible negative impact on my life. We're telling me we did it in order to degrade the ship capacity of Iran. So? And even from the foreign policy nerd point of view, the tradeoff's not good. That is to say, you've degraded some of their missiles. We've degraded on our own. But in what price also, they have shown they can close the straight.

That is more of a power going forward than the extra, I'm making this up, you know, a thousand missiles that we blew off, or missile factories we blew up, or Scott Besson's, you know, deep understanding of the fortific. locations along the street. I don't even know anything that we may have blown up a few of. I don't know. They show they could close the straight. That's bad going forward.

I do think it builds in all kinds of uncertainty. What if they decide they have some other reason for, you know, causing trouble for their neighbors or for us six months or now, right? You have to factor that into your calculation. So I very much agree that both on the sort of popular reaction to gas price level and on the more, you know, sophisticated investor, you know, Wall Street energy market level. This is bad. I still think tacoing is better than escalating.

Sure. But it's a bad, not no, but it's a genuinely bad outcome in the real world, the less bad of too bad outcomes. And it's related to the regime change part of it, right? Because that's your point. Like, especially if there's no, if you were unsuccessful in destabilizing the regime, which remember, that was the original stated reason for this that we backed off on after two days. But, you know, so if they do end up with whatever, a Hominy Jr.

still in charge or some equivalent version of that, and they now have this demonstrated this control over the straight. Yeah, you're right. They have even more power to and influence to screw with things going forward. All right. Speaking of stupid stuff, next, stupid DHS update. The Department of Homeland Security is shut down. I have some on-the-ground reports from the New Orleans airport this morning. I had multiple friends taking flights out. Here's what I can tell you. There are ICE agents in the airports now. Trump has deployed ICE agents to the airports. They don't have anything to do because they don't like, know how to use the equipment at the security checkpoints. So they're just milling about annoying

people, you know, increasing people's blood pressure as they look at the ICE agents that are just standing there doing nothing with our tax dollars. I guess it's better that they're doing that than menacing people on the streets based on their skin color, but even still not a great use of our money. The lines were like three to four hours to get through at the New Orleans airport. This was last night and this morning, both people missing flights. This is happening at other airports. I just, this is my one actual, you know, firsthand reporting or secondhand reporting that I can offer.

And the report from Punchbowl this morning is that the Senate Republicans and Democrats basically came to a deal to back off of this. It's not too far from what you had proposed a couple weeks ago, Bill. And this is this. Thune told Trump that Senate Republicans would support funding all of DHS except ICE. Ice funding would be handled later in a party line reconciliation. bill. So the Democrats will accept that offer. Basically, the contours of the offer would be Republicans would not have to make the concessions on ICE and CBP because they would end up jamming

it through on a 50 vote thing going forward. But the Democrats would have delayed and installed that and successfully isolated ICE out from the rest of the budget. And who knows, I don't remember we would vote on that, but I guess Thune believes you could get 60 votes for that, funding the rest of DHS. Oh, for the funding of the rest of DHS. Yeah, that's the Democratic position. But Democrats would never have to vote for funding ICE. That would be the key. Yeah, exactly. And so Thune took this to Trump, and Trump said, no, it doesn't want to do it.

He wants Republicans to stay in D.C. and keep fighting with the Democrats over DHS and the Save America Act, you know, his voting crackdown bill. Trump also warned Thune and Senate Republicans that he would publicly attack them if they left town for the upcoming recess. Trump said he'd invite all the senators of the families over to Easter. dinner. Some Republicans took that as a threat, not a reward. It's a direct quote from Punchball. Yeah, who leaked at the Punchball, do you think? I don't know. Is that a yes, I'm going to guess. I'm going with that. Thune, I hadn't really thought about how they got that until you started to read it. It's kind of detailed. And yeah, so Thune's trying to say, hey, I did my best to get us out of this. Here we are. And yeah, it's good. So Democrats need to just scream and yell that Trump is basically, you know, preventing a deal that.

they could have accepted that was really their proposal almost to fund the rest of DHS without ICE. They can't control what Thune does later on a party line reconciliation vote. Let them be responsible for funding ICE. And ICE has money anyway now. So it's functioning, obviously, from the last year's reconciliation bill. So they really need to attack Trump. I feel like Democrats should really go to the wall. Don't you think against Trump this week? Absolutely. On both the war and ICE, I mean, total fiasco. Absolutely. And some of them have been good. Gagga's been good. Murphy's been good. Murphy is out this weekend. There have been others. But I was going to come on this morning. I was thinking about this last night and say, I feel like that the Democrats were starting to lose

the messaging battle on this DHS shutdown, mostly just because of volume. Like they had not been out there. Like there hadn't been a clear message. Like you watch Jeffries talk about this and one of interviews he did this weekend. And it's a little bit, you know, winding of a road, explaining what is happening and what their demands are and all this. And then Trump just like hands in this gift on the silver platter, which is basically that, like, Trump doesn't want a deal. They often, there was a deal. Like, the Republicans and Democrats had a deal to resolve the airport problem. And Trump doesn't want it. He wants the chaos. On last week's pod, I think it was, people enjoyed the headline was Bill Crystal, colon, end the war. You know, it was like,

that's the Democratic message. End the war. Stop it. Stop. It's not helping. Like, you're causing more problems every day it goes on. And that's the message with this. Like, end the shutdown. Trump. Like, we want to fund FEMA. We want to fund HSI. We want to fund other homeland security elements besides, you know, your internal secret police. The Republicans agree with that. They're ready to do it. But you want to cause harm to Americans and have real security risks by keeping the government shut down in order to like try to game the midterms. I just think that a very blunt, straightforward, they should be out and everywhere this week on offense, pushing on pushing the pressure.

Totally agree. Higher gas prices, lines at the airports, Trump's responsible for both, period. And he is. Trump's fault. I mean, it's actually, has the advantage of being true. It has the advantage of being true. Stop it. Now, we want to stop it right now, but he won't sign a bill.

I'm not the Hill, you know, parliamentary procedure machinations man. but it also feels like they could force this to the floor too. And this is the other thing that they should be doing, right? Like now they have enough people. The Republican House advantage is so small now. Anyway, I guess all the Republicans who would be for it in one situation would maybe not be for it if it felt like it was a rebuke to Trump. But anyway, I don't know. Trump announced this morning one more thing on this, that he didn't announce.

He bleated. He bleated this morning. that he supports masks, big supporter of masks, not COVID masks, but the ICE agents wearing masks, but he respectfully requests that the ICE agents don't wear masks at airports. I don't quite understand that, why that works, I guess, that you understand why people don't like seeing the masks if you want them to not wear them at the airports. So why would you like it when they're going to the streets of our cities? I had thought about the mask question, and I actually was sort of going to interrupt and ask you

what you, if you'd heard about whether they were wearing a mask or not at the New Orleans airport, but I hadn't seen that reported in terms of just this morning physically at the airports, are they wearing a mask or not? But now you say Trump's bleated this, which is, of course, very revealing, isn't it, right? Yeah. The upper-middle-class Americans who are, let's just over-generalize, middle-class Americans, who are flying around the country, and probably slightly disproportionately Republican-ish voters, I guess,

maybe air travelers might be. They don't want to see those masks, you know, very distasteful, right? You know, the four people in the Walmart parking lots who are trying to, you know, get their day jobs and so forth, it's tough on them. They got to see the masks, you know, with people in Minneapolis. Now, very revealing. I think very hard instantly there for them to now continue to wear them. Well, maybe I'm overstating it. Is it hard for them to continue to wear them in the streets?

Like, what's the rationale now? I mean. Because also the other, the stated rationale is the doxing. Right. Right. You know, that ICE agents were being identified and that the crazy Antifa left. was targeting them in their homes, et cetera, to once they could see their faces.

But, okay, well, now once we've sent them to the airport, everyone could see their faces, what that doesn't compute, right? Like, if the point was to protect their identities, they needed to hide their identities because the threats to them were so great, well, why wouldn't they need to hide their identities at the airport? More people aren't to see them at the airport

than we would have saw them on the streets. My impression, to be going through airports recently is it's full of travelers maniacally taking photos of everything. I don't even know why airports are interesting, but you know what I mean? You're sitting there. your little five guys burger and people are taking photos all around you. Hey, I'm showing the kids that I'm on my way home or something.

So, yes, this would be very easy to take photos of all of these ice agents at the airports. And the people are to have nothing else to do. Well, they wait very, very, very long lines. Except look at the ice agents and have their resentment built and try to decide who they are. So anyway, no masks at the airports. I should have done this during Iran, but I want to throw one other kind of political fallout from the war is what's happening with the vice president. He's not tweeting anymore.

That was his job for year one, was posting, shit posting. That's, you know, quote tweeting people, making fun of people, being very condescending on the internet. Like, that was his job. And then obviously after Renee Good was murdered by an agent of the state,

he was out the next day publicly fighting with people about that on the internet and doing press conferences. Not as much from that anymore. I haven't really seen him posting on the internet lately. He did get another job. He has been sent to Hungary. Victor Orban's re-election is up next month. I want to do more on that here in the coming weeks here on the show. But the JD is being sent to Hungary to support Orban, one of our only allies left. He's in a pickle. It's hard to do the condescending hall monitor thing, you know, about how everybody's stupid and you're smart when everything's going to

shit and privately you think that what you did was stupid makes a little more challenging to do his shtick now let's say soon the to totoing persists and he gets you know the hostilities or the bulk of hostilities you know wind down over the next week or two does he get out there and say see if trump knew what he was doing all along and we're stayed out of these endless wars not like iraq thank god it's trump god knows if kamala harris were there would be still bombing them of course if tomah harris were there we never would have gotten into this horrible mess at oil prices would be much lower than they are. But anyway, it's kind of a funny thing. Absolutely. This is why he's stopped posting. Like, this is what he wants. He's praying that Trump

will just quit the war so that he can do the thing where he's like, see, we didn't get into the endless wars like these other stupid presidents. He was smart. He got us out of there. Right. It's unclear to me the efficacy of that, you know, especially given the potential long-tail economic consequences from it. But I do think that's what he's hoping. And he's really hoping that it's that the consequences are manageable. Americans have already died not to minimize that. But I think he's hoping that it's something that can be spinnable and manageable so that he doesn't have to come out against us or because like he isn't able to. Like he did Trump doesn't give him any ability in 28. God willing, let's say Trump steps aside and we have a normal campaign.

Like JD can't be like, you know, I was against him on the war. Like you can't do that because, you know, Trump will post all over and maybe he could try that. But Trump would make. it very challenging. So anyway, we'll keep monitoring, JD. I do just want to touch briefly on the depravity of our president and how just grotesque he is at a personal level, in addition to how terrible the policy choices have been over the last week or two. He posted on his social media. He's been posting a lot, unlike JD, who's gone silent on social media, Trump's been bleeding quite a lot. There are two posts over the weekend that we should definitely not ignore. One was, now with the death of Iran, the greatest enemy America has is the radical left, highly incompetent Democrat Party.

Thank you for your attention to this matter. I mean, at some level, we're kind of used to this from Trump, this type of stuff, the enemy of the people talk, et cetera. But I just think that that, whatever that is, that 20 words, like encapsulates how disturbing his worldview is in a lot of ways. I mean, it begins with just a blatant lie and conspiracy theory about the success of their effort in Iran. Iran is not dead, quite the opposite. And then he compares his domestic political foes to the people that he's literally bombing. You know, who he says, they're such a great threat. They require us decimating and obliterating them.

It's saying that the next target, essentially, is his domestic political foes, the Democrats. Right. And God, you know, they'll try to claim that there are all these plots, terrorist plots, to disrupt the election by the Democrats, and that's why they have to have troops in September and October, polling places. I mean, I think this is, it could be. I mean, it was mostly just Trump being Trump, I will stipulate, but there's some notion here of laying the predicate. If you combine it with sort of that order they had about domestic terrorists and all that, not calling protesters, domestic terrorists, some predicate being laid for going after the 2026 elections, it seems to be. No, it's ominous on that front.

And also, I don't know. I think it's important to talk about us. Part of it is like, okay, this is Trump being Trump. You ignore it. But I do want to Joe Rogans of the world to have to sit with us and like see this tweet, right? That it's like, this is what the person that you ran cover for is posting. Like he's gotten us into a war that you said you didn't want. It's really stupid war.

Americans have died. People have died in Iran also in all over the world. You're being negatively impacted economically. And, you know, he is overseeing just chaos domestically and abroad. And what he's telling people is that the greatest enemy he sees is his fellow Americans. Like, that's the greatest enemy he sees right now is people in this country who disagree with them. And it's deeply, deeply sick. And I don't know.

I understand how it plays with the red hat people. But I do think that, I don't know. It's sad that somebody might have to have a wake-up call, year 11 or whatever we are. of Trump, but I don't know, I would think it'd be a wake-up call for people. There's other bleat. We talked about this on Saturday. We hopped on YouTube and make sure you're subscribed to the board takes feed on YouTube if you're a total sicko.

And the one hour a day of the parade of horribles is not enough for you and you need more. Bill and I talked about this at greater length, but I do want to just cover it here briefly as well. Bob Mueller died after a lengthy battle with Parkinson's age 81. Trump's response to that. Robert Mueller just died good. I'm glad he's dead.

That's what Trump tweeted about it. Disgusting, really disgusting. And most people have said, well, a lot of people have said it's really disgusting and almost a new low in a parade of lows. I haven't seen a lot of Republicans. I guess Scott Besson, your friend Scott Besson got asked about this. And he had some three times had to say that you have to understand Trump's Trump and his family. His family very effective. Trump and his family have been through a lot.

You know, really. Oh, yeah. They're stealing money. Stealing billions of dollars. Not indicted. Trump actually to pull his punches at the very end, you might say, and decided he couldn't because he was a sitting president and therefore couldn't recommend even that he, that he'd be impeached instead of being indicted. But they were very, very tough on Trump and Melania and Ivanka and Jared

and it's just really, that's where the sympathy goes when, when Robert Mueller at age 81 dies after suffering from Parkinson's, having served really heroically in Vietnam and been a really admirable public servant for his entire life. Yeah, it's important to note. He did serve in Vietnam, volunteered. Well, Donald Trump ran from that, said, lied about his health conditions when you think about patriotism. Yeah, I'm hoping that Trump's family has a lot more to go through. I mean, they're stealing money hand over fist right now with their corruption.

Undgodly amounts of money is from foreign entities. And God knows who else is going through the Trump family, cryptocurrency, et cetera. And Hunter Biden had to see eventually he gets pardoned by his. dad, but Hunter Biden had to see a courtroom. I suspect that the Trump children might have to see a courtroom that he can try to part of them, but I imagine they've committed some state crimes. We'll see. And I do think that we should go through, be going through their taxes and their financial interest with a fine tooth comb for years to come. So hopefully they can continue to suffer. I'm sure, I'm sure Pam Bondi will be. Yeah, I don't think they're currently.

One of the Trump kids, just the way Merrick Garland actually went ahead and let his Justice Department authorized the indictment. It had a special counsel that authorized the indictment of Hunter Biden and went to trial and he was convicted. So the pardon, I don't approve of that necessarily, and that was after the election and all at the end of it. But he was, yes, it's kind of amazing, right? I mean, one can't even say it was straight face that the Trump Justice Department would prosecute any Trump relative or any Trump crotty or any Trump administration officials,

so far as one can tell. Well, Joe Kent, they're going to go after. Yeah, anybody who quits the administration gets to get the arm of the law targeting them. That's pretty grotesque. I should just mention about the Mueller report because, you know, this stuff gets, people's memories get fuzzy. He indicted 26 Russians and eight Americans for working together to interfere with the election. And then about five of the Americans ended up getting pardoned by Trump. But, you know, that was real work that they did about a real threat to our elections.

And he did so very modestly and, you know, by the book. And it's nothing like the picture that people painted of him. You used it over the weekend, but I think it's worth chewing over one more time because you offered a very depressing Yates quote to honor Bob Mueller's death and kind of hit me like a ton of bricks when you read it because it's pretty dark. I was impressed. I was impressed that you were impressed by that. Well, I like, I'm impressed that you just pulled that. Like the most depressing possible reflection on Mueller's life and career came from a poem and you just pulled it immediately. So I would like to do it one more time for people that miss that.

So that poem, I would say, it was always a favorite of Susan's of my wife. And when we met in college, she was a big fan of Yates. I knew a tiny bit about him as Susan's more educated and more literary than I at the time as since. And so, of course, when you meet someone, you know, you want to get along, you have to pretend, oh, we Yates. I like Yates too. Yeah. So I had to read a little Yates to kind of keep up with Susan there in college and my relationship on a good path. That is so cute.

And this was her favorite, I believe, yeah, and this was her favorite poem. Anyway, I love to read the poem. It's very short. To a friend whose work has come to nothing. Now, all the truth is out, be secret and take defeat from any brazen throat. For how can you compete being honor bred with one who were approved he lies, where neither shamed in his own nor hid his neighbor's eyes. That's the first half of the poem about that.

And that's the key part. Yeah, I mean, he was honor bred Mueller. And this is what's so insightful, I think, about Yates, where it prudity lies, were neither shamed in his own nor in his neighbor's eyes. That's been the key to Trump's success, right? He has no shame. But unfortunately, many of his neighbors and associates and some of the American public seem to have no shame either. Yeah. It has been a superpower, shamelessness.

And shamelessness gives you an advantage against people that are on our bread, hopefully not permanently, I guess. I was like stretched to find some glimmer of hope in that poem. And, you know, I guess it's part, as we discussed on Saturday, the idea that, you know, at least, you know, Bob Mueller's, you know, children, his progeny, the folks who read about him in the history books will know that he was honor bred. And there is, you know, there's something to be said for that, of course. But I do think you kind of see this a lot of how the Democrats and the Democratic base is

processing the Trump era, that there is a big. pull for people to decide. Maybe it's time to be a little bit more shameless and a little less honor bred ourselves. And it's hard not to understand the draw of that in the moment. Maybe the middle ground is to not be shameless exactly, but not let be, don't let being honor bred make you pull your punches. And you could argue while they did a little bit because he was so, felt so constrained by this previous Justice Robert opinion, you couldn't indict a president, and therefore you couldn't even recommend the indictment of a president. And all you could do is the double negative of we're not saying here that he didn't commit a crime. And so Mueller may have been

too much, honestly, a product of an honorable peer era where one did pull one's punches to some degree. And what does JVille, I like to put it? That so much of our politics turns out to depend on the honor system and you can't have one party on the honor system and the other not. It doesn't mean you have to be shameless. But it does mean you have to be aggressive. And this is your recommendation. You can be responsible and aggressive, right? It is. It is my recommendation. Okay. I want to end on a little bit of a lighter note, to Palac Cleanzer for the podcast, if you will. Andrew Kaczynski over at CNN was going through some old podcast interviews of Greg Phillips.

It was a very important role at FEMA, which is an agency that does things. It's not kind of like Commerce Department where it would be a deputy to Howard Lutnik. It's like he is in charge of emergency response, something very important for people all across the country, acutely here in New Orleans. Here is Greg Phillips talking about, an interesting life experience.

We had a teleport an incident, two of them, and I end up at a waffle house like 50 miles away from where I was. That man who is, yes, talking about teleporting to a waffle house, is Greg Phillips, and he now holds one of the most important jobs

at FEMA overseeing the Office of Response and Recovery. It was an incredibly frightening moment to experience yourself in your car, flying through the air. But I tell you, teleporting is no fun. You know, I would say in college, a couple of times I kind of came to at a Waffle House. I wouldn't say that it was teleporting.

But that experience, I think, is one that others have, you know, could relate to until you get to the part where he's in his car, I guess. I'm a little bit concerned about the driving, the quality of the driving that was happening in that car that teleported 50 miles to a Waffle House. I think his car was, you know, was good, like a Jetsons. It was not on the highway.

It was going up in the air and then landing at the Waffle House. That's my interpretation of what Mr. Phillips went there. Yeah, it is kind of terrifying. I couldn't quite tell whether he was most terrified by the teleporting side or the Waffle House or ending up at a Waffle House. But I guess it was the teleporting side. Where do they find these people? What is some believable, isn't it?

Right? I mean, it's like, you know, you think they're venal, they're corrupt, They're authoritarian, they're semi-fascists, they're bigoted, they're horrible in so many personal ways. And then it turns out some of them are just crazy. It's the biggest, like, cheat code for jumping to the front of the line in your career in history, the Donald Trump era. Any clown or Joker could just put on a magnet and start pretending to be an expert on a topic. And they would immediately get a job that, like, they're in a Democratic administration, they're like 10 strivers from Princeton competing over the job, you know,

been working their whole career to go up the ladder. And these guys just catapulted in front of the line by being shameless Donald Trump supporters. And now we have somebody who believes that he teleported to a lawful house running emergency response for the country. So I hope you can sleep well at night thinking about that one, everybody. It's speechless. I'm still speechless. Okay. We'll leave it there.

We have a big week coming. I had so many guests I wanted to get to that we've got, pray for Jason and Katie and Katie and the editing team because we have some doubleheaders coming. There are going to be some marathon pods coming, lots of content for your ears and eyes this week. So do stick around for that. And on top of that, I'm going back to the live streaming thing tomorrow night, Tuesday evening. Not sure what time yet, but keep an eye on your YouTube feed.

Press a little alert bell. and I will be I'll be live streaming with a glass of her ozai or orange wine or something tomorrow night. And so much, much, much to come. And, you know, check out Bill Crystal on his morning shots newsletter. I appreciate you, Bill. Thank you. We'll see you next week. Everybody else, we'll see you tomorrow for a big show.

Peace. The Borg podcast is brought to you. Thanks to the work of lead producer Katie Cooper, Associate producer Ansley Skipper, And with video editing by Katie Lutz and audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.