The Bulwark Podcast - Bret Stephens: Pray Kamala Wins

Episode Date: October 25, 2024

Trump is corrosive to the soul of our democracy. He's a bigot, an ogre, and an isolationist. And for all the Reagan Republicans on the fence: If Trump gets back in, America won't have a healthy conservative movement again for generations. Plus, Kamala on Israel, and Elon's private foreign policy with Putin—he's working against our national security while helping himself to the treasury of the United States. Bret Stephens joins Tim Miller for the weekend pod. show notes: Tim's playlist Bret's 2018 piece on Musk being the Trump of Silicon Valley

Hello and welcome to the Bulldog podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. In a couple of minutes, I'm going to have Brett Stevens for you. We're going to have an exchange about why he's voting for Kamala Harris, kicking and screaming and we'll talk about Elon Musk having phone calls with Putin, apparently, and coordinating with Xi. That's not at all concerning. But before we do that, as I mentioned yesterday, I want to revise and extend maybe the remarks

that Ezra Klein made on his podcast earlier this week. He had this monologue that I thought was an important attempt to, one, explain why the age issue isn't sticking with Trump, and two, come up with an alternative, more precise explanation that might help wavering people understand what makes him so uniquely dangerous. So I'm about to sum up what he said here, but if you want to go listen to it, his podcast is What's Wrong with Trump? And then you can come right on back. But to distill it down, Ezra explains that it is an age or cognitive decline in a

vacuum that people notice with Trump, like people were noticing with Biden. It's a specific character trait, which he calls disinhibition. And that disinhibition is both his great strength and his fatal flaw. For shorthand, you know, for us armchair psychologists, there are those big five personality traits, and disinhibition is basically the inverse of conscientiousness. Now, as I was listening to this podcast, and Ezra was describing how disinhibition manifests itself in Trump, you know, the way that he vamps on stage and the way that he makes fun

of people and the way that he was willing to say things that other more typical politicians won't say, I began to have a little bit of an identity crisis of my own because in some ways that describes, well, me and most of my closest friends. He's talking about boldness, a willingness to push boundaries, risk taking, high extraversion, domineering at times. I'd be lying to you if I said a gag about Arnold Palmer's graphite shaft would be out of place at happy hour with my buddies down here in New Orleans. But we're not like Trump, right?

I mean, sure, he's certainly disinhibited too, yeah. But there must be more to it than that or else, well, I'm going to have to go find a new therapist. So before I get to my dissent and the reasons that I think there is more to it than what Ezra laid out, I want to highlight the part of his insight that I really agreed with and the implications of that for the last 11 days of this campaign and God forbid for a Trump 2.0. In landing on disinhibition, Ezra was trying to solve a puzzle.

How do you explain the threat of Trump to people who listen to Dan Crenshaw when he argues that Trump can't be that scary since the first administration turned out okay. Now one way to go at that would be to remind them that the year 2020 and January 2021 existed, but that has seemed to have limited efficacy with people. So instead, Ezra proposes that we can explain how the threat of Trump 2.0 is greater through this prism, Trump's disinhibition. Because even Trump's most stalwart fans will grant that he lacks restraint. And nearly all of them would concede that in the first term, Trump had people around

him who were much more conscientious and inhibited, and that prevented some of his ideas from being implemented. Now, MAGAs might call that the deep state, but the rest of us would recognize these inhibitors as the traditional politicians and bureaucrats that have staffed administrations our entire lives. We got some fresh examples of this from the latest John Kelly reveals, the most tangible of which he expanded on with the Washington Post last night. Talking about how during the Floyd protests, Trump wanted a Tiananmen square 2.0.

He wanted to shoot the protesters, the peaceful protesters who'd gathered outside the White House and in cities around the country. His team, the generals around him had to talk him off the ledge. They had to inhibit him. And so that's where we get to the one thing about Trump that everybody agrees with Trump and his team, Kamala and her team, Ezra, me, anyone that covers Trump, all of you, there were these inhibitors that existed in the first term and that they had some impact.

We can maybe disagree on the scale of how much impact, but they had some impact in preventing Trump's worst ideas from being implemented. Or I guess if you're a MAGA person, they had some impact in preventing Trump's worst ideas from being implemented. Or I guess if you're a MAGA person, they had some impact in preventing his best ideas from getting implemented. Now these people are largely gone. Jared and Ivanka are out, Don Jr. and Lara Trump are in. Pence is out, JD Vance is in, etc. etc. Ezra argues once people understand this, the nature of the threat comes into focus. If we agree that it's Trump's disinhibition that at times leads to bad outcomes, it's scary to think of what a second term looks like when there isn't anyone to check them.

And here's where the age issue really comes in. That notion is even scarier when you contemplate an 82-year-old Trump suffering from one side effect of aging, the mind's ability to control itself starts to weaken, making disinhibition worse. I'm on board with that analysis. It's obviously true, but the point here is to be semantic about it. Like what, what is at the root of the threat of Trump? And I think it's worse than just disinhibition. The negative examples of that trait, rudeness, tactlessness,

impulsive actions, are all speech. This is mostly a person not caring about how other people feel. In short, it's kind of mean tweets. And I concur that not caring about how other people feel is a bad trait, particularly in a president. It's childish. It describes me and my buddies' own failings much less at 40 than it did at 21. But it's also not exactly the trait that comes to mind when you think of Mussolini. That's because Trump's disinhibition is about more than not caring about people's feelings. It's about not caring what happens to others, not caring whether they live or die. If you doubt me, send your regards to Herman Cain at the big pizza box in the sky,

or to the January 6 rioters toiling their life away in prison thanks to Trump's lies. But even more than just not caring what happens to others, at times it seems as if Trump actually revels in other people's pain. To borrow from Adam Searwer, being cruel and causing the suffering of foes is not just a side effect of his disinhibition. It's something he intentionally engages in. Purposeful cruelty. Total disinterest in the well-being of anyone but himself. I'm not a psychiatrist like my friend George Conway, but I think that there's another clinical diagnosis for that. So, maybe sadism is too pejorative to be effective politically. Accusing Trump of enjoying other's suffering is surely not something that will land with his supporters, but that doesn't make it untrue.

And when you add that layer onto Ezra's case, things become really ominous. And when you add that layer onto Ezra's case, things become really ominous. A disinhibited and reckless Trump surrounded by people unable to control him. That's very bad. A disinhibited and reckless Trump who wants revenge and actively intends to cause harm to others is a nightmare that I can only pray we don't have to live through. On that uplifting note, up next, Brett Stevens. All right, welcome back. I'm here with an opinion columnist at the New York Times.

He's the winner of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for commentary for his work as a foreign affairs columnist. He's also former editor and chief of the Jerusalem Post and the government of Russia has barred him for life. It's Brett Stevens. How you doing, Brett? Good to see you, Tim. Welcome to the Bollard podcast.

I want to get into increasingly contentious material, you know, as we go to the end. So let's start on a few agreements, huh? Okay. There's Wall Street Journal story, your former colleagues out this morning about how Elon Musk has been talking to Putin. One of the sentences here was Putin asked Elon Musk to avoid activating his Starlink satellite internet service over Taiwan as a favor to Xi Jinping. What's our concern level about this, about rogue Elon at this point? You know, if I may boast, I didn't like Elon Musk when he was cool.

I wrote a poem, I think in 2018, I called Elon Musk the Donald Trump of Silicon Valley. That may be even truer than I realize given his foreign policy inclinations. I think we're reaching a point where a guy like Musk has power not over say the everyday lives of our children in the way that Mark Zuckerberg and other social media entrepreneurs have had, but power in foreign policy. And I think this also came up with Ukraine in the early stages of the war. That's simply frightening. The idea that an American citizen, a private citizen,

would undercut the foreign policy of the United States just strikes me as absolutely bonkers, and all the more so for an immigrant who owes his entire fortune to what the United States has given to him. Yeah, I mean, there are two kind of angles to this that are both pretty alarming. One is sort of the how we got here angle. I interviewed Walter Isaacson for his book on Elon, and we spent a decent amount of time on that. So it was just like, it was just a pretty disastrous failing of the U S federal government that we're in this situation where we're kind of beholden to this, even if it was a more stable person besides Elon, that Elon has this

kind of dominance with Starlink. And we are where we are at this point, but this is not usually the nationalized and industry podcast. But like what, I mean, doesn't the government have to start thinking about either creating a competitor to Elon or creating new strictures around him? I mean, he's the top government contractor, like at this point with serious national security implications.

Well, and look, and I have to say in some ways to the good, given the failures of some of the competition to do what he's been able to achieve. I think particularly of the failures of bowling when it comes to, say, bringing passengers back from the International Space Station, but also so much of our aerospace industry. I don't know. I mean, I have to assume I'm not a lawyer, but there are legal authorities to prevent a private American citizen from interfering in a way that materially damages the foreign policy interests of the United States, certainly in periods of conflict or

potential conflict. But I'm speaking outside of my lane, I just don't know. Pete I guess my point is, even in a democratic administration, even with Joe Biden as president or with Kamala Harris as president, it's already concerning enough that like we have the top government contractor kind of engaging in this foreign policy and where he has essentially, I guess not a monopoly, but a quasi-monopoly on critical national security infrastructure. And then you project out to that same person then being the biggest donor to Donald Trump acting outside the law.

We don't have an FEC basically, but acting outside the law, I think pretty clearly in how his super PACs are acting both with the million dollar giveaways that now the DOJ is investing and it's clear coordination with the Trump campaign. And then Trump gets in there. That would be kind of an unprecedented, ominous situation. I just, I think about all the Republican pure-hungering about Soros and the Soros control over the Democrats. Like there's really no parallel to the kind of

malign influence that he could have if Trump wins. Well, you know, it's funny how time and experience begins to shape your views differently. I mean, I was, I used to be of the view, look, you know, if you're wealthy, you want to contribute to politics, that's an expression of free speech. Money is a form of speech. I've begun to rethink that, particularly the influence that extremely rich, somewhat strange dudes with limitless cash can have on the shape of American politics.

By the way, I say that also with respect to George Soros because I'm no fan of the kinds of progressive DAs that he is openly and proudly supported. But in the case of the ability of a single individual to potentially invite aggression by dictatorial foreign powers against American allies, it has a particularly fearsome aspect. I guess the last must point, which you're actually invite aggression by dictatorial foreign powers against American allies. It has a particularly fearsome aspect. I guess the last must point, which you're ahead of the game on, but the anti-Semitism side of this, and he's running the most overtly anti-Semitic ad I've seen. I don't know if you've seen this, but it's targeting the Muslim community in Michigan

where it's like, Kamala's husband, Doug, is a Jew and Kamala listens to Doug. It's like an insanely anti-Semitic ad and the proliferation of anti-Semitism on Twitter. I just kind of wonder. Even I'm surprised. I have to say, every Blue Moon will look at references to be on Twitter. I try to stay away from it because I basically think that it's like crack cocaine. It's free basing actually. I think it's free basing. I wouldn't even know the difference. But what strikes me most is just how much antisemitism in various directions attaches to my name, like right-wing antisemites, left-wing people,

Muslim antisemites, the whole gamut. Pete This takes us to kind of what I want to spend a lot of time on. So, I wrote this morning about kind of the case to Nikki Haley, Republicans who might be wavering. It's kind of like the case to Brett. I didn't need to make the case to Brett Stevens since you said on Monday that you were kicking and screaming. Steven Two days ago, I was at the University of Michigan and some guy stands up and he says he's head of the Nikki Haley for Kamala Club. So apparently I'm now, although I'm not a voter in Michigan, I guess I'm part of that club now.

All right, great. Yeah. So I was making the case not to those who have already come to the decision for Kamala, but for those who are still wavering. And I want to go through that. But like one subsect of that, like I have a close friend who deeply cares about Israel, whose mother lives in Israel, who has concerns about campus antisemitism, those concerns about the Biden-Harris policy there. I've tried to push back by offering that the campus antisemitism is a problem, but you

have this far right antisemitism that is increasing, particularly on the website of Donald Trump's biggest supporter and that icon balanced the Biden-Harris administration, they rhetorically has been kind of limiting in BB, but has been working with Israel. So as somebody that I think would fit that bill, like what's your message to people who have Israel and antisemitism as a prime concern and has that, has them wavering? I don't think there's any and has that, has them wavering. I don't think there's any wisdom in trying to debate what's worse, the River to the Sea crowd

in Morningside Heights at Columbia, the, you know, I want to murder Zionists coalition up there or the Tucker Carlson people platforming Hitler apologists. I think the lesson of Jewish history is you can't pretend that you have more friends on one side than the other, anti-Semitism is a bipartisan phenomenon. That's always been the case. I gotta tell you, Tim, I have real concerns

about a Harris presidency with respect to Israel. I worry about answers like a ceasefire now type answer that spares Hamas, that spares Hezbollah, that doesn't allow Israel to emerge from the war with the sort of the reputation of having established deterrence against its enemies. It's actually one of the reasons why I agonized for as long as I did with respect to endorsing her. I was never gonna vote for Trump, I made that clear, but it was one of my real misgivings. And I also worry that she seems,

this came up in her town hall conversation in Pennsylvania the other day, she seems acutely aware of courting the votes of the ceasefire now crowd, whether it's college students or traditional Arab American areas of Michigan, and that that is a big part of her political thinking. And for all kinds of reasons, most of all my concern for Israel's security, that that's distressing. So that's what made part of this decision so difficult to me. And I still worry about it. I still feel like I'm taking my chances with her. I just think that in a binary

choice with Trump at the end of the day, he's unthinkable. Just onto the Kamala side of this, and then we'll get into Trump. Is that right, though, that you think that she is like spending a ton of effort reaching out to the ceasefire now crowd? I mean, she was campaigning with Liz Cheney this week. Look, she answered a question from a voter who expressed her, made it clear that, you know,

where she stood on the Israel thing. And in all the ways that she could have answered the question, it didn't give me a lot of comfort. I mean, I could have seen her answering the question by saying, you know, the road to a two-state solution lies through the defeat of Hamas. That was the answer the administration was giving a year ago, nine months ago, and she's shifted away from that. So I hope she surrounds herself with advisors who see the point.

I don't feel certain that she will. Yeah. I mean, I guess if we had on somebody, maybe we should have done left, right, and center, if we had on somebody that was, you know, if we had Maddie Hassan on, I think they would say, well, she didn't even have a pro-Palestine person speak at the convention, right? Like that she refused to meet with them. She's not really put like any sort of arms limitation

on the table. The Biden Harris administration has worked with Israel, right? I mean, given the like complex nature of the coalition, I don't know. And I guess, couldn't you see that she's kind of balancing it in a way that is actually like decently supportive of the pro-Israel side of the equation? I'll keep my fingers crossed.

I guess that's the best answer. I don't think we really know. And what worries me a little bit is I'm not sure she really knows. I don't see a real conviction politician. I see a politician who's trying to place herself in the center of whatever the political moment demands. And there will come a time in America's relationship with Israel, and I think in the next four years on a whole number of fronts, where you're really going to need a conviction politician.

It's one of the reasons why there's a side of me that regrets Joe Biden's departure, because when it came to Taiwan, when it came to Ukraine, and when it, in the wake of October 7th, you saw a guy with real convictions. I think the execution leaves something to be desired in places, but the basic instincts were generally right. I guess I don't have anything to disagree with there.

I do wonder if you look at Harris, and again, considering just being practical about things, right, like putting the ideal or the perfect aside, I wonder if you look at Harris and again, considering just being practical about things, right? Like putting the ideal or the perfect aside. Like having a politician that's not particularly a conviction politician on most issues who has pivoted to the center on a lot of issues, who talked at the convention in a way that was not kind of the identitarian left, right? That was talking about the importance of America's role in the world, the importance of entrepreneurship.

I mean, like, I don't know, at times she sounded like a 90s Republican at the convention. You know what I mean? Isn't that good? Yeah, that was- Wouldn't you rather have that than like it could have been the other way, right? Yes. I mean, she could have taken over and tried to rally the base and pivoted to the left. You're asking me to be enthusiastic about- Not asking you to be enthusiastic.

I'm not requesting enthusiasm. Just practically speaking, isn't that good though? My point is you were saying it was a critique that she's going to look to move to the center. And I'm saying in a divided country, in a divided Washington, shouldn't those of us in the center take that as a win? Shouldn't we be like, great, she's going to try to find the center, the consensus. Yeah. I mean, I basically, my hope for Kamala is that she is essentially an opportunistic politician

who understands that the advantages accrue to people who bend towards the center and the kind of the traditional American consensus. My fear is that that consensus is going to be dramatically challenged over the next four or eight years. And I don't know where her instincts lie. So we'll have to see. I mean, as I said in my conversation with Gail the other day, for me, this is a 99.9% vote against Trump and a 0.1% vote for Kamala. If you want to convince me that it should be- 90-10?

Yeah, 90-10, 80-20 something. I want to be enthusiastic. I love my country. I hope for the best. I'll get you 80-20. Let's do it right now. Then we'll talk about the 80. A, I think it would be good for the country to have the first woman president. Her brother-in-law works for Uber. She, like they say, you can call her a California progressive, but she's really Silicon Valley, like corporate center left liberal. She has time and again been given the opportunity to do the Hillary thing

and make this campaign being like, I'm with her and making it about identity politics, she's rejected that. She would have a mandate if she were to win. Having campaigned with Liz Cheney, having campaigned on the importance of the US role in the world to follow through on that. I've only had one private conversation, but my one private conversation with her, I thought she seemed very passionate about her trips to the Munich security conference and working with our allies abroad and how important that was

So I don't know Doug is a corporate lawyer. Well, as we've are in social I'm just getting you to 20. I'm not trying to get you to 50-50. I totally hope you're right, but I Just got to tell you what I see. Okay. Okay. Great. For instance the other night again in the town hall because it was a kind of a More unpredictable forum, right? I assumed she didn't know the questions in advance I see a person who sticks to memorize talking lines and then struggles when she's outside Those lines I see someone who? has a vision about the economy which is

who has a vision about the economy, which is deeply flawed. If you think that the reason we've had higher prices over the last few years is price gouging by greedy corporations, you are just economically completely illiterate. I'm sorry. That's just, I'm just describing reality. It is a foolish, laughable thing to say. And by the way, it's even more laughable because she had an easy, there was a potentially easy answer.

I don't know why her advisors didn't say that. She said, well, you know, most of inflation is a function of monetary policy, which is set by the Federal Reserve. And the Federal Reserve is run by a guy who was appointed by Donald Trump. Easy A answer, right? Why did no one think to say that to her?

Because she wasn't trying to win Brecht Stevens' vote and because the country is economically illiterate. I don't know. I had Carville on a month ago and he was like, and Carville is basically like, yeah, obviously it's economically wrong, but we want to win. We want to beat Trump and it's a winning issue. Biden talked about price gouging too. He didn't actually do anything. It's not like she's going to do price controls. There's, you can't have any legitimate concern that she like wants to install Venezuelan price controls.

That's what she was talking about. You have to, at some level, take her at her word. Right. Otherwise, you know, it's all just kind of like some kind of political kabuki dance signaling, all of it meeting lists like well then in that case I don't know you know I was just trying to get you to 20% though seems like that's still gettable that's still there you know something I

actually think when I answered Gail and I answered her really sincerely okay I think that for that portion of voters like me who hate Trump Yeah, but really have doubts about Harris. I'm meeting them where they are. This is why you're on right now I agree. I'm not trying to sell them a lemon as a Ferrari Although I've heard sometimes Ferraris candy lemons, but that's that's another story, right? I'm just trying to say January 6 is an unforgivable crime in American history. And the moment we start rewarding violent attacks on the sanctity of the electoral process, the moment we get to that place where that becomes normal, we're going to lose everything.

Presidents come and go, except the president who doesn't want to go. And that's it. That's the whole argument. But to me, it's just decisive, right? And that's why I was able to overcome all of these misgivings. If I go out there and start writing comms saying, you know, I talked to Tim Miller and, you know, he kind of convinced me that, you know, Kamala is actually going to be a centrist. She's a kind of a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, etc, etc I don't think I would actually first of all, I don't believe it which is why I wouldn't say it But I don't think I'd win it over any Wavering voter. I think the only wavering voter I could have went over someone who's like, yeah, she's really not great

I so wish it were another Democrat But you have to draw a line in the sand against certain crimes against the United States. I agree with like 90% of that. I do. I do. My entrepreneur case was a little bit, you know, I was just trying to, I'm trying to win you over, you know, it was a little bit persuasion.

I'm a hundred percent sincere, by the way, about my views about her, her view of America's role in the world. It shocked me actually. The one time I saw her off of Talking Points and so I heard her talking about this. I was actually shocked by just how genuine she was in this and I was encouraged and I told people about it in real time back and it was this was in March back when she was VP. It was not it was before she was nominee. Can I tell you one thing so I've met with someone who knows her pretty well I've never met her. Yeah. And one of the things this person said to me, which actually gave me comfort is he said,

she knows what she doesn't know. Yeah. Now that actually is a sign of great wisdom. I always respect people who know what they don't know and are willing to say it. And one of the things I've been urging her to do, and something actually Barack Obama sort of did in 08, when there were doubts about his experience, is to sort of give a

list of the people she's listening to and maybe hint at who could be in her cabinet. There is a long list of outstanding Americans whose party affiliation we don't know, who could serve with honor and distinction in key roles of a Harris administration in the way that I think a lot of Americans found comfort in the Truman administration when he staffed up with people like George Marshall or James Forrestal as his senior advisors. I think that would be very smart. I think that would move a number of voters to say, you know what, we're going to be

okay under her presidency. These are serious people who aren't going to screw up the country on the march to turning us into Oakland, California. I moved out of Oakland, down to New Orleans. So I hear that. There are some great things about Oakland. First Fridays is really nice, but it has some problems from a, from a management standpoint, that is a proactive point that I totally agree with my last thing on this

in the case I made, because I totally agree with you by the way. And I said this to Liz and to all of the never Trumpers who've gone out to sport her. I was like, talk about the ways that you disagree with her or that you have reservations, I think that makes your endorsement more powerful. So I'm totally on board with that. The more negative version of naming a cabinet is that she will be checked. Like this is the other thing I just like to people that see the threat of Trump, the argument I was making this morning is like she'll have a six, three Supreme Court against her. She's going to have a 51, 49 Republican Senate at best. And so we have a Chevron ruling. If you're just making a simple

risk reward calculation and you look at the elderly man on the other side who tried to coup already, and you look at her with hopefully named some cabinet people around her and a 51 Senate and a 6-3 Supreme Court, like what is, like, I don't actually understand why that's a close call. When you look at it in the context from which we've came. That's another point I was making to Gail. If she wins, I hope Republicans retain one House of Congress. I'm not even sure which I prefer. Maybe the Senate, which seems likely.

I mean, my prognostication is the House will flip to the Democrats and the Senate will flip to Republicans. But I know the Nebraska race looks close and interesting. Let me ask you this question. Would you want Republicans to keep one of the houses of Congress? I mean, if we're just in magic world where I get to pick my future,

I would like for her to be able to do policy. And I think having a 50-50 Senate where Dan Osborne or John Tester are the 50th vote, they're not going to pass anything that is too far outside of what I would wish for. And I think that it becomes very challenging for her. I mean, look, on the list of bad options, her with a 51-49 Senate is again, also totally fine. One of my underlying premises is like, I think things are basically fine. Like we have some policies that I don't like and things are obviously not fine in Ukraine,

if you're living in Ukraine or Israel, Gaza, Beirut. But like if you're an American, like right now, like things are basically stable and basically fine. And the idea that we would blow everything up with Donald Trump is absolutely insane. It's like, uh, it's like watching a friend who has a good life and has a wife and kids and is having a midlife crisis. And it's like, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to start doing blow and marry the stripper. And you're like, what?

Like, why, why you, your life is fine. You know, that's like where I see things. And so I would be okay with whatever. I get 51, a mixed Senate, like a close Senate. I'm not concerned that socialism is coming if John Tester is the 50th vote for Kamala Harris's agenda. I'm just not concerned about that. So this is, I think you're kind of putting your finger on really the fundamental question

about this election because I, you know, I talked to my democratic friends and that's sort of their view too. Like, okay, there, you know, there's the usual turbulence. When has there not been? And yeah, we did have this unfortunate bout of inflation seems to be brought under control. Crime is coming down. Isn't that true? Well, yes and no. Certain categories of crime are coming down. Others are going way up. And the ones that are going way up are quality of life, crimes, or things like auto thefts, shoplifting that make people feel scared about everyday life. And if you live in New York City, you just have conversations with normal people. You know, 10 years ago, I mean, I never thought twice about letting my kids ride the subway. I just assumed the subway was safe.

Doesn't feel that way anymore. I don't think I'm reflecting some kind of New York Post whacked out, you know, extremist view. I think this is the feeling of a lot of Americans, at least until fairly recently, the explosion of homelessness in every city in the West was, makes you feel unsafe. I got to say, you know, I do well economically and I cannot believe what I pay in my everyday life of picking up a bag of groceries and never

spending, and I'm not buying foie gras and you know, the finest smoked salmon. Come on, Brett. All right. You're at the New York Times now. All right. You don't have to, you don't have to. I live more simply than you probably think, but I'm thinking to myself, gosh, if I'm noticing the price of these everyday goods, what is a normal American family making, let's say 60, 70, $80,000 a year feeling about this? I just think that the idea that things are fine is a comforting illusion of what my buddy Peggy Noonan called the protected class. And that is what liberals have missed.

Here's the thing though. There's always discomfort and life is what liberals have missed. Here's the thing though. There's always discomfort in life is suffering. There's always discomfort in life. I mean, sure. Yeah. Is the crime in New York as low as it was during the Halcyon days of the, you know, early aughts? No.

Is it better than it was in the 1980s? Were we thinking about putting in a down market Mussolini in the White House in the 80s? In New York? No, nobody's doing that. Was inflation painful? Absolutely. Is our economy doing better than every other economy in the world? Yeah. Are people out there struggling? Is it hard? Is life hard? Is life annoying? Does everybody wish they could go on a better vacation? Like, yeah, like, yeah, all of this. Yes. I think, no, I think, I think this is a real mistake. I think this is a real blind spot that those of us who've kind of gone through the Biden-Harris years and said, yeah, you know, okay, so it's a little bit worse, but, but not dramatically worse. I think we're

really, when we say that, I think we're really missing the way in which a lot of Americans are experiencing their lives. When you're first hit with giant permanent increases in the price of many staples, and then you're hit with higher financing costs on account of higher interest rates, mortgage rates, it is infuriating. It happened fairly quickly. We can have a perfectly legitimate debate as to the causes of it and say the role that the pandemic played, but people look at the

administration that constantly said, there's no crisis at the border, inflation is transitory, America is now respected in the world and what they see is something very different. By the way, on the international front I think we're reliving the 1930s and I can't think of anything good about the 1930s Except for a handful of movies. So that worries me. Hopefully we don't elect Lindbergh. That's why I don't want to vote for Lindbergh I want to go back to the domestic though for a second. I hear what you're saying. I'm not trying to diminish anybody's individual concerns. What I'm trying to do is treat everybody like a grownup.

You say that it's kind of condescending or whatever to treat people like their problems aren't legitimate. I think it's condescending to baby people. If you look at the polling cross tabs, Trump does the best among people making six figures plus still. I know the party has put on this working class sheen and the Trump super fans, a lot of them are more working class, but Trump does the best among people that are in the protected class you're talking about.

White, six figure making, ex-urban Americans with big houses and boats. When you see the big Trump flags on houses, it's not in the Ninth Ward in New Orleans, where the Trump flags are going up. I don't think that that's right. I mean, I don't think that the suffering is so great that it rationalizes like, oh, okay, well let's burn it all down. It just doesn't, those things don't make sense to me. I think you're babying people with their rationalizations a little bit. You know, I used to I used to actually take exactly the view

that that you did. And I don't anymore in part because first of all, Trump support. Yes, he has outside support among people making six figures. All of my liberal friends in New York and Boston and Chicago and LA, making six figures or more who are voting for Harris, she also polls well among actually higher income people. I just think that this idea that the hoi polloi are just cranky and willing to flush their democracy down the toilet for the sake of the illusion of control or authority or better times. I think that's objectively wrong and I think it's also bad politics.

By the way, you got to meet people where they are, just telling you, don't worry about it, grow up, man up, do better. It's not going to win you a lot of votes. Well, it might be bad politics. I don't disagree with that though. I don't think that's what Kamala Harris is saying. That's what I'm saying. I don't think though that it's, that it is objectively wrong to me.

I, I go to the New York post site. You kind of alluded to it. I've just fallen the other side of this equation. Like, why are people angry? Why are people turning to Trump? Why are people upset? Because they're in an information environment where people are lying to them. In a column earlier this week that you wrote that, you know, if Kamala Harris loses, that

it will be partly the Democrats' fault because they participate in the politics of name-calling and condescension, Pollyanna, this part we've been talking about. I mean, I get maybe the Democrats should do better on all that, but like most of the people that are voting for Trump aren't even consuming that. They're consuming it through the prism of what Fox or Newsmax or their TikTok feed or Ben Shapiro or whatever tells them. You know, like I think that what explains their anger is their consumption. Well, I think the liberal side is also feeding itself a highly strained version of the news and misinformation exists among liberals as well. You can just see my comment feed after the Joe Biden debate. Of course, the liberals are getting it too, but I mean the anger part.

I guess this is my point. Are most Trump supporters aggrieved because they're experiencing suffering and crime is a big problem in their community and inflation has crushed them? Or most of them aggrieved because they are living in a stew of anger and hate that is being fed to them and they're being told that like trans prisoners are the biggest problem that faces them and that, you know, their kids are going to go into school as James and come out as Jane.

What is it? Which is the real reason why they're upset? I think it's the second. I think that's the wrong question. I think it's an amalgam of things. First of all, on a good night, Laura Ingraham is reaching what? One, two million people, usually the same people every single goddamn night. I think you're overstating the extent to which right wing media feeds this. I think people

are responding to their own experience of life and events. I think there's a lot of anger and bigotry and misinformation. And I also think there are, in my view, rational responses to major policy failures, which my corner of the media—I'm not meaning the New York Times in particular, but sort of my side of, quote, elite media—misses or plays down or doesn't pay the kind of attention that it requires. It's very hard to say. I mean, I just want to resist the overgeneralization. Well, these Trump voters are just living, as you put it, in the stew of, you know, rage

and misinformation. I just don't see it that way. I think we're all living, to some extent, in a stew of rage and misinformation, and we make sense of it in different ways. I wrote this column, was it this week, last week? Written so much, I can't even, the one that you were just referring to. I wrote this earnestly because I think that the way

in which a lot of liberals, prominent liberals conduct politics is self-defeating. You know, one of the things, one of the reasons why I thought Bill Clinton was such an extraordinarily successful politician is he really worked hard to make people feel that their concerns matter deeply to them. And right now I hear a lot of prominent liberals working hard to make people feel like they are,

their concerns are essentially fictitious. And that's, that's just, I think a terrible way of winning people over into a broad coalition. Yeah. I don't know. I feel like I'm going to need some receipts on that. Cause I think that that is a complaint about like pundits. I don't think that that's what Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are doing.

I mean, I think that would maybe be a fair complaint about Donald Trump. I mean, like Donald Trump calls people- Kamala Harris gave an interview in front of Chuck Tau two years ago. Couldn't believe it. Couldn't believe it. The political inethness. She said, I think I'm quoting this directly,

we have a secure border. The border is secure. OK, that was just total, either she didn't know what she was talking about or just total gaslighting. We did not have a secure border. We had a historic wave of migration. We can have a perfectly legitimate debate about why that's happening and whose fault that is. But to just say, right now we have a secure border was a preposterous

comment. It's not just the Joe Scarborough's of the world talking to the morning faithful here. Yeah. Okay. Sure. I agree with that, But that is not exactly what your criticism was. Your criticism was you're saying that she doesn't make people feel like their concerns are valid. That's not what I hear. She talks about her middle class upbringing. She talks about economic concerns all the time. She talks about people's worries about their families. She's as good as Bill Clinton, no. But I feel like that there is this, we are in this world where, and I guess me and you,

since we're on the never Trumper edge of liberal world right now, there's always this self-reflection of like rending of garments and saying, well, did we do this right? Did this candidate, the Democratic candidate do this exactly right? And like Donald Trump is out there saying that,

if you don't like him, you're an enemy of the people. Donald Trump is out there saying that the country is a garbage can and that we are the world's garbage can. It's just like, if you want to talk about somebody who does not give a fuck about concerns about, of people that are not him or his own supporters, like he's the poster boy for that, right? I mean, so I just don't get it. You and I could have hours of happy agreement about the utter...

That'd be boring. Let this conversation not erase the fact that I'm voting against this guy for a reason. I called him the Hugo Chavez of American politics back in 2015. I don't think I've ever wavered from that view. We're not erasing. Unfortunately, you're like a stand-in. When we booked this, you hadn't decided yet. So unfortunately you're a stand-in for like the person that's like one tick over from you, who's just like, I just can't decide, I just can't decide

between Harris and Trump right now. So I'm going to write, I'm going to do like vote for neither of them. Um, but no, it's, I'm not trying to erase it, but I just mean the degree of difference, so like your criticism that you're offering of Harris is like, Trump does that times a hundred. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's, Trump is worse. How many times can I say that? Trump is worse. That's why you should vote for Harris because it's a binary choice. Trump is worse. He's a, he's a danger to our institutions. He is corrosive to the soul of our democracy. He's a bigot, an ogre, an isolationist.

And the worst part about Trump for me, well, all of those things are terrible. I don't know if this is the worst, but okay. As an old fashioned Reagan Republican, whose first memory of an election was Reagan winning in 1980, and who believed in the architecture of the liberal world order and believed in the benefits of immigration, believed in a growth economy open to competition from around the world, a Trump victory assures us that we will not have a healthy conservative movement in the United States, mainstream movement

for generations. And I think that puts us on a path to long-term decline. Pete We're going to clip that. I should have included that in my article to Nikki Haley voters this morning, because that's another good argument. There's so many good arguments. Pete That's the best one. Pete I guess this is the frustrating part for me. And this is why sometimes my frustration shows on the 99-1 element, because it's like, to me, it's the easiest call I've ever had. I voted for Kamala yesterday and I said that I worked for Jeb Bush.

I love Jeb. I was very proud to vote for him in the hopeless primary. I was like, I worked for a number of candidates I liked. I was proud to vote for them. I've never had an easier call. It's never been an easier call to me. And that's why sometimes I just, I get frustrated with this, okay, we're going to micro analyze the concerns that we have when everything you just said about Trump is just so obviously

true. And that's the thing that frustrates me with people in that, in the Wall Street Journal Ed Board world, in the Bret Baier, all these people who are my friends, I just get so frustrated. It's the narcissism of small differences. I get so frustrated because it's so obvious to me. Do you not share that frustration? It doesn't feel that obvious to you, I guess. This is to me a much tougher choice than Hillary Trump or Joe Trump was.

We're post January 6th now though. Yeah. Because you assumed January 6th happening eventually was baked in in your assumptions of Trump, I guess, in 2016. Yeah, kind of. I mean, given when I look back at what I wrote about him, I think it was actually kind of predictable that it would... Not that specifically, but something like that. But I'm just talking about on policy, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden were centrist, had a long history of being essentially centrist, mainstream liberals. Kamala has flirted with the

left at different times, certainly in her 2019 run, which is when I first sort of started taking notice of her. And she has not distinguished herself as a particularly nimble candidate in the few months that she's had. But, you know, to me, it's still when I finally realized I got to make a choice, Giel is right, it's binary, I can't just sit it out. It wasn't hard to make. Pete All right, final thing, putting back your foreign affairs hat on, we kind of got waylaid by Israel in the context of the domestic discussion. But as you look to the next administration and the threat from Iran, I guess it maybe looks a little different than it did six months ago given to Israel's recent successes, what's

happening with Putin, what's happening with Xi in China, how do you assess the threats? You've kind of alluded to this a couple of times in the podcast that you think this, that we're going to face big challenges on this front in the next five to 10 years. I'm just open-ended kind of closer to assess the threats that face us abroad. I think we are going to see four years of very severe challenges, not just to our allies, but to the United States itself on multiple fronts. The introduction of North Korean troops into Russia,

possibly Ukraine, is gonna be remembered as a historic moment. There is a new tripartite or quadripartite agreement to go back to the terminology of that era between China and Russia and their no limits friendship between North Korea and Russia, between Russia and Iran. Possibly a quintuple with Elon and Trump as the fifth monster given the private phone calls,

but who knows, at least a quad. That is really scary. And that's why I really pray that Kamala wins, that she surrounds herself with advisors who believe in the necessity of defending the free world against all of its enemies, foreign and domestic, and that she is capable of rising to what will be, I think, early crises because the Xi's and the Putin's are going to try to test her very early on in her presidency. Where do you see the test coming most likely?

Well, 153 planes last week, Chinese planes surrounding Taiwan, a blockade of Taiwan, let's say, or a rapid effort by Iran to go for a bomb. It could come on any number of fronts. Russia supplying a targeting coordinates for the Houthis. I mean, that's aiding and abetting piracy. So it can happen in any number of ways, by the way, not least of which is a small Russian incursion, quote unquote, incursion into, say, Estonia, some kind of probing effort to just see what

she does. All right. On that happy note. Yeah, that's a good, that's a wonderful, this is why we brought you on, Brett Stevens. This is the Weekend Podcast. This is the weekend podcast. It's Friday. Everyone listening was stressed about the New York Times Sienna poll showing Trump leading by one.

And so rather than do deep dives on that and obsess over that, I was like, we're going to bring on Brett Stevens and we're going to talk about the potential incursions from our four greatest threats abroad. So I appreciate the time and coming back to him. But I just have to tell you, so- Are we going to end us on a happy note or what do you have to tell them? Is this a compliment? Yes, yes. I'm going to tell you, it is. I just don't listen to podcasts. I'm just not

a podcast person. I have a dear friend, my oldest friend from University of Chicago days, Beard Schwartz, and he's very difficult to define politically. I guess he's on the left, but he is such a fan of your podcast. And he's like, my friend Beach, he's like, have you been on the Bulwark podcast? It's like the best podcast. And he was saying this for a while and then you contacted me. And so I was like, okay, I'd better do this podcast. And he's right.

Thank you. Shout out to you. We'll be sending you a personalized gift. We'll see what do we got on the site? Never Trump from the Jump. We'll come up with something fun and very much appreciate it. Thanks so much to Brett Stevens, to the professor, to Beach. We'll see you guys all on Monday.

It's Monday, so we'll have Bill Kristol. Peace. See ya. I crossed the sea to an island While the bridges brightly burned So far away from my land The valley of the unconcerned I was walking down the road, man Just looking at my shoes When God sent me an angel just to chase away my blues. I saw a hundred

thousand black birds just flying through the sky. They seemed to form a teardrop from a The Everything's okay. The Bullork podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with Audio Engineering and Editing by Jason Brown.