The Bulwark Podcast - Michael Weiss and Thomas Zimmer: Competent and Radical

Episode Date: December 3, 2024

Russ Vought, Trump's nominee to run the Office of Management and Budget—and a Project 2025 author—believes we are living in a post-constitutional America and that any check on Trump's power would be illegitimate. And what's really scary is that Vought knows how the government works. Meanwhile, jihadi technocrats effortlessly took over Syria's second-largest city because Assad's protectors—Russia and Iran—are a bit distracted. Plus, Ukraine prepares for Trump.  Michael Weiss and Georgetown's Thomas Zimmer join Tim Miller. show notes Zimmer's piece on Russ Vought Michael's piece on the fall of Aleppo Cathy Young's latest regarding Russia's war on Ukraine

Hey guys, we had a few technical and logistical difficulties on this show, but the show ends up turning out great. I think you're going to love it. You're going to learn a lot. We've got two very smart guests. As I mentioned yesterday, we were going to have Mark Hurtling on to talk foreign policy. We had a scheduling snafu, so we switched that out. He'll be on again soon. And we've got Michael Weiss on to talk about foreign policy. And then we added to that Thomas Zimmer, who is a historian who looks at democracy around the world. And he wrote this great post on Substack about Russell Vogt and kind of about the evolution of right-wing thought towards this more post-constitutional

moment and why that is particularly scary and how that's evolved from the Tea Party days. Both guys are super smart. Then as a bonus, on top of that, on top of the scheduling staff who the power went out here in New Orleans during the podcast at one point. We have very, very strong, the best infrastructure here in these red states. You take the good with the bad when you go to New Orleans. So you might hear a little difference in the audio quality between this and the interview, and then after the power goes out, the audio might change again. So, apologies. We did the best we could. The content, though, the content is A+.

So, stick around for the content and appreciate you. We'll be seeing you on the other side with Thomas Zimmer. Hello and welcome to the Bullard Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. I'm delighted to be here today with a new guest, visiting professor at Georgetown. He teaches 20th century US and international history with a focus on transatlantic history of democracy and its discontents. We have many discontents right now. He writes Democracy Americana on Substack and the cohost of our podcast Is This Democracy? It's Thomas Zimmer. How you doing, man?

Welcome to the pod. I'm doing well. Thank you so much for having me. As people might notice, you're German. Yes. That is not a Kansas accent. So I welcome you to our great country, land of the free and our late constitutional republic. Welcome.

As of yet, still, I guess, right? Still barely. Hanging on by a thread. I had reached out because you wrote a piece for your substack about Russ' vote called Meet the Idealogue of the Post-Constitutional Right. And in it, you had an insight that I think some people, particularly on the left, miss. It's kind of like this distinction of kind of this evolution of the right and the change of how they kind of see the world now versus maybe how the Tea Party right did or how, you know, the religious right may have in the 80s. So I kind of want to talk about that in an academic way.

But first, you're also going to get into Vought's background. So for people who aren't familiar with him, let's talk about Russ Vogt, this super nerd, and why, why, why, you might not think that the Office of Management of Budget Director would be the person to be most concerned about, but you make a strong case for it. So talk to us about Vogt. Yeah, I mean, he is, in many ways, I think he's had a fairly normal, if you want to call that career path as sort of a career operative. We had positions almost at almost every level inside and around the Republican Party in Washington, D.C. over the course of almost two decades.

I think he's in his late 40s now, I believe. And he went from low level staffer to high level person who is sort of pulling the strings in the background. He was a congressional aide, a part of the think tank and the lobbying machine, a campaigner, and then a member of the Trump administration. I think in terms of where he comes from, people used to see him as kind of a fiscal hawk, that sort of small government conservative who's looking for ways to cut the budget and maybe cut departments or whatever. Cut red tape, yeah, singing my language.

Yeah, no, absolutely. So that's what he was known for. And then to me, he's interesting because he is, I think, very much emblematic of the trajectory of these kinds of people who very much talked about themselves as small government conservatives to people who now, whatever you want to call him now, that's not what he's talking about now. He now wants to mobilize government and use of the coercive powers of government to impose a certain vision on American society. These are the same kinds of circles who, when Barack Obama was thinking about using an executive order, called him a tyrant.

This guy, he himself will gladly tell you that he has drafted dozens, maybe hundreds of executive orders. There's a trajectory there, and I think that is really worth getting into and sort of trying to understand what's going on there. I think that's right. And so this kind of radical constitutionalism that he gets in and he is emblematic of this trajectory, right? Because he was on the, it's not like, you know, I came from kind of the Rhino moderate squishy Republican background. Yeah. That was never him, right? He worked for the tea party types

in the more radical part of Congress. And so he was in some ways always on that trajectory. But the way that they talk about their political project has changed dramatically. The tea party rate was, and obviously there was a racial element of it with Obama, and there were cultural elements to it, but they really were focused on kind of cutting the government, dismantling the government.

Some of the language that you do still hear from like Elon and Vivek about Doge, right, that we got to find efficiencies and all this. So that was really what it was focused on. It has evolved from there and they admit that it's evolved, right? Like it is the stated thing, there's a stated vision that they see the world differently now. So talk about that and what's changed. Yeah, I think what's interesting is that this leg, he himself calls it radical constitutionalism. That's what he wants. That's what he says what is needed now. And it's really quite interesting how someone like Russell Vogt, he will not even

talk about himself and his own political project in the idiom of conservatism anymore. These people will tell you conservatism is no longer enough. That is the rallying cry of these kinds of circles. He calls it what is now needed as radical constitutionalism because he says there is just nothing left to conserve. He would probably tell you, okay, 20 years ago, there's traditional small government conservatism. That's what was needed if you were a

constitutional conservative. But because in their understanding, the left, the progressives, the socialist, honestly, he uses all those terms interchangeably, it's all kind of the same. They have in this understanding completely taken over. They've taken over government. They've taken over all the major institutions of American life. They are in charge. Now, there is nothing left to conserve. This kind of a conservatism of limits, a conservatism of preserving and conserving, that's just not good enough anymore. What you need now is counterrevolution.

They talk about this constantly. They call themselves counterrevolutionaries. Again, not at all in the idiom of conservatism. What he will say is, basically, look, what we did 20 years ago was the right thing to do at that point, but because this leftist revolution has already happened and it has succeeded, now what we're left with, nothing short of a proper counterrevolution will now suffice to save the nation and save real America and whatever they talk about. And I think that is how they make sense

of their own trajectory and how they would tell you, this is not just hypocrisy or it's not just, there is no tension, it's just a reaction to the fact that the leftist revolution has succeeded. And so now they have adapted to that. There's nothing left to conserve is really the key line there, right? And that the, I think you wrote that, but they believe that the natural order, the Lockheed

View, the natural order itself has been destroyed, right? And so if you put yourself in that view, right, where then you are the counter-revolutionary that needs to tear everything down. And in a weird way, they've positioned kind of the democratic establishment as the small C conservatives in the traditional sense, not of like, you know, pro life or whatever, but in the sense of like conserving the existing institutions conserving, conserving, you know, the American Republic, right? And like that they no longer see that as an important goal. And it's not just a Democratic it's the Republican establishment as well.

Even Vought will tell you that he thinks what the Federalist society is doing is completely misleading. That's just not good enough because they also, that type of originalism is also not good enough because it pretends we still have a constitutional order that you can preserve, but you can't. I think it's really important when he says, he constantly says we're in a post-constitutional regime now, he doesn't just mean a kind of formalistic view of how, say, the different constitutional actors relate to each other.

It's this idea of a natural, a conchord natural order or divinely ordained order that was supposedly enshrined in the constitutional order, supposedly enshrined in the nation's founding documents. That has been destroyed. It's a much more fundamental, a much more... The stakes are so high, so existential for these people, right? Because it's not just, oh, hey, should the administrative state do this or that? No.

For them, this is just a manifestation of fundamentally the natural order has been undermined by the radical left. If you really believe this, if those are the stakes, if the constitutional order was the only thing that made America good and noble and kept the evil forces of modernism and all that kind of stuff at bay, and if that has been destroyed, then yeah, it totally makes sense to say, we can't just sit here and do like small government conservatism. We need to do something more, right?

We need to mobilize the coercive powers of the state against, you know, this unnatural leftist enemy. And that's where this guy has sort of arrived. Yes. If your brain has been so broken that you believe that the entire American project was threatened by the existence of a black president, then yes, it does make sense that you need to tear it all down rather than go back to classical liberalism or the sunny Reagan optimism. A couple of quotes from him, and then I want to get into kind of what that means for what their agenda might look like. He wrote this, this is after I think one of the

Trump indictments, do not tell me we are living under the Constitution. Do not tell me that these are mere political disagreements of Americans with different worldviews. This is only the most recent example of a post-constitutional America furthered by a corrupt Marxist vanguard. And then his other favorite line, and the favorite line of all these radicals

is the hour is late. To justify their actions, it means the collapse of America is imminent. This idea that there's so little time left is just pervasive in these circles. I think they will constantly say this, this is our last chance. This is the one chance we got now with, you know, Trump coming back to power. If we can sort of reverse course now and make this counter-revolution happen, it's not going to happen. I think the fact that he says Marxist,

I think this was a post on silver lengthy post on ex Twitter or something, what you just quoted. That is so revealing. He really doesn't make any difference between socialism, Marxism, communism, liberalism, progressivism. It's all the same. It's all this kind of subversion of the quote unquote natural order. You can't come to an agreement with those people.

This is not someone who thinks about the political conflict in like democratic, small D democratic terms, right? Oh, you have a political opponent, you disagree with them, and you kind of work it out. No, this is a fundamentally illegitimate, fundamentally anti-American project that he sees on the quote unquote left that doesn't need to be like bargained with, it needs to be destroyed. I want to play a clip from that kind of secret video. The video of these undercover journalists, they're at the Center for Climate Reporting where he talks about some of his plans and then get into that.

So let's listen to this is Roosevelt talking to some undercover journalists. 80% of my time is working on the plans of what's necessary to take control of these bureaucracies. And we are working doggedly on that, whether it's destroying their agency's notion of independence, they're independent from the president. VOTE has also been preparing documents based on fringe legal theories, arguing the president has the power to use the military against protesters. George Floyd obviously was not about race.

It was about destabilizing the Trump administration. We put out, for instance, a 50-page paper designed for lawyers to know that the president has the ability both along the border and elsewhere to maintain law and order with the military. That's something that it's going to be important for him to remember and his lawyers to affirm, but we've given them the case for that. So there are two important points in that bet that I want to focus on. One is where he talks about taking control of agencies that see themselves as independent, DOJ, FBI, et cetera, who the hell knows, maybe even the Fed. And then that last bit where he talks about how all the time that he's been spending on

these memos that are designed for lawyers, like that they've been thinking about this and they've been thinking about the ways that they can use the current legal structure to advance their extra legal or post constitutional plans. Again, this is not dismantling the state, right? They want to do that. They want to get rid of the Department of Education, whatever. But what you heard there was, no, we're going to take over a government and we're going to do it by purging the government, purging the state of the leftist, the bureaucrats. By the way, he sees all of these career bureaucrats experts as just part of the leftist takeover

of government. He was even in the first Trump administration, the biggest proponent of Schedule F, this presidential executive order that would convert thousands, maybe tens of thousands of career civil servants into political appointees and then make them fireable. That's what that is about, right? And so that's what they want to do again, purge government, purge all these agencies, departments, every part of the administrative state of what they see as the enemy within and replace them with loyalists. That was very much part of all the big right-wing planning project 2025 being one of the big

planning operations on the right is of this idea we need to get rid of these people and we need to find our people to replace them with. That's one part of it. The second part is they're very clear that their project is fundamentally not popular. If you tell the American people what they actually want to do, people will say, that sounds not great. They know this will lead to protests or they are expecting protests. When you hear Russell Vought talk about his biggest regret from the first Trump administration

is precisely that in the summer of 2020, during the George Floyd protests, they did not invoke the Insurrection Act to use the military to suppress those protests. They're 100% clear this will not happen again. Next time we'll be ready. They think they had too many of those Federalist society, Rhino lawyers in and around the White House who talked them out of this. Trump wanted to do this in the summer of 2020, but they didn't. They were talked out of it by lawyers, legal counsel, whatever.

They're 100% clear this must not happen to us again. Next time we will absolutely use the military, we will invoke the Insurrection Act. And so that is what they've been preparing. One of his biggest frustration is precisely this. We were much too lenient, we allowed protests, we shouldn't do this. I think it's interesting that's one of his biggest frustrations because again, when people try to wrap your mind around this, it's like, okay, this nerdy guy with glasses, he's in charge of the budget department.

It's like, does it matter if he has some kind of fringe beliefs about turning the military against American citizens? And the answer is kind of yes, right? Like the OMB, like the management, the M part of OMB is important. And working with Stephen Miller and other people within the executive branch, it's kind of taking control of all of these agencies in ways that would give him some purview over cracking down on protesters. Yeah, he himself calls OMB the nerve center of the federal government.

And I think he's kind of right about this, or at least you can use it that way. It's always a question of what do you want to do with these institutions and agencies. For him, and I think you saw this again in the first Trump administration, he became director of OMB in 2019. Some of his greatest hits were he held up military aid to Ukraine because Trump wanted to pressure the Ukrainian government into delivering dirt on Joe Biden. He directed billions of dollars from the Pentagon to Trump's border wall fever dream. He was the most aggressive proponent of Schedule F. This is a powerful position if you want

to use it that way. He absolutely sees it as a kind of position where you can bend the entire machinery to the will of Donald Trump. To be clear, he really sees Donald Trump as a gift from God. That's how he describes him, literally a gift from God, someone who is precisely the right kind of radical figure to lead this counterrevolution. He's entirely devoted to, again, bending the entire machine to Trump's will. Yeah.

And it's important to add to that, you know, because he also is a radical on cultural issues. Like you said, from God, like he specifically says, I think in another clip from that interview, which I didn't play, about, I agree, invigorating Christian nationalism and infusing the administration with Christian nationalist views. And I think the budget will also have views on that. And this ties to your point about how they know it's unpopular. Like there are ways that they, you know, kind they might be able to reduce access to contraception and change

rules via HHS in ways that advance their religious and cultural agenda without having to pass unpopular bills through Congress. This is another reason why vote is important or interesting because he is competent. He knows how government works. I think in the first Trump administration, there was this saying, oh, malevolence of tempered by incompetence. As we're once again looking at what we're in for with the second Trump administration, and we see a lot of fundamentally incompetent people because Trump insists on nominating them. But then on the other end of the spectrum, there is people like Russell Vogt who he is,

he knows how government works and he knows how to make it work. I mean, I think people tend to think that the extremists, the Nadi Maga people are also sort of incompetent. And conversely, when you go up on the competence scale, you tend to go down on the Nadi ideology scale. But that's again, if you look at someone like this, this is a truly committed ideologue. He really means this kind of stuff. He's fundamentally not on board with any kind of pluralistic vision of a democracy in which people have disagreements and they kind of try to come to some sort of, I don't know,

consensus or understanding. No, he's not on board with that. He's a truly committed ideologue, but he's also very competent. And so these are the more, in that sense, I think these are the more dangerous people that we need to worry about. It is tough to find people

that are both competent and radical. That's what makes them so noteworthy. You had one other post on your website that I just wanted to talk about a little bit. It was from about a week or so ago now. And so the news has changed a little bit, but it was partially in response to President Biden's kind of smiling first day of school picture fest with incoming president-elect Trump and kind of tying it to Joe and Mika going to Mar-a-Lago, and Bezos and Zuckerberg went to Mar-a-Lago, and all of this people who are presumably,

at least small-l liberal, that had opposed Trump, that are participating in this anticipatory obedience already. So talk about that and why we're seeing that and why you have concerns about that, particularly in the context of your work looking at authoritarianism around the world? I'm concerned about this, also honestly frustrated, because I think modern society and complex modern societies and modern states are difficult for any authoritarian regime to bring in line,

even if they're fully competent. But since the election, I think ostensibly anti-MAGA political leaders and liberal institutions have kind of really assisted the Trumpists in kind of bringing the machinery in line. I'm not saying Biden should completely sabotage the transition. That's not the position, right? You have to worry about state capacity and you have to worry to some extent about norms

and precedents. Fine, but why didn't you do a photo op with the first lady on the premises of the White House? This sort of signals normalcy to people. It signals to people it can't be that bad if Trump really was, I don't know, a fascist, whatever, or a fundamental acute threat to American democracy. Joe Biden and Jill Biden wouldn't be doing that, would they? This is signaling normalcy.

It signals a kind of accommodation to power, a kind of acquiescence. The best example, honestly, is the way the kind of Musk-Ramaswami joint, the so-called Department of Government Deficiency has been treated, where you have democratic governors go on Fox News to say, oh, this is really interesting. We really need to do something about government waste or whatever, as if this was kind of a good faith effort at government reform. Come on, it's like, it's not, right?

It's not. And I think- A real organization or something without a pop patrol logo. Yes. Or you have like Bernie Sanders just a few days ago praising Musk for supposedly like pushing back against the military industrial complex. What are we doing here? This is the kind of legitimization and normalization of these people that we know we shouldn't do this, right? We should be very clear that this is not a department,

first of all, it has no legal or constitutional authority. And these people are not good faith actors actually concerned about, you know, government efficiency. So we shouldn't be sort of normalizing it in that way, because we will at some point, I believe, things could get potentially really bad in the second Trump administration. At that point, we will need people, the American public, to actually not look at Trump as a totally normal president, a totally normal administration. We will need them to be clear about, no, these are dangerous fundamentally anti-democratic forces that are in charge of American government right now.

And we need to think sort of clearly and grapple seriously with how do you deal with that? And I don't think the right way to deal with that is just signal normalcy and pretend oh, we're in a normal transition. Yeah, and particularly for no gain, I guess what it comes down to for me. It's one thing if, you know, who the hell knows what the future holds. You get into the fall and they really do want to cut government waste.

And so like there's some of the program that Bernie and Eli, they agree on and you work together on a bill that goes through the normal process. Like, okay, but to just do it for a press release, like, to give them legitimacy and to just do a smiley photo op to give them legitimacy for no gain for yourself. You know, I mean, like, I think that probably the best way back for power for the Democrats is a failed Trump administration, not working with the Trump administration on stuff. This doesn't mean that there won't be moments to work with them and there won't be times where you have responsibility to the public.

But to do it now for no political gain seems rather misguided. I agree with that. Okay, Thomas Zimmer, thank you so much, man. He's visiting professor at Georgetown. It's Democracy Americana on Substack. The podcast is This Democracy. Let's stay in touch as our democracy teeters or is restored. Who knows? Who knows, right? Who knows? Thank you so much for having me on. Thank you.

Thanks so much to Thomas Zimmer. Up next, friend of the pod, Michael Weiss. I have to tell you about this game-changing product I used before a night out with drinks. It's called pre-alcohol. Let's face it, after a night with drinks, I don't bounce back the next day like I used to. You're telling me. So I have to make a choice. I can either have a great night or a great next day. That's until I found Ze Z-Biotics pre-alcohol

Z-Biotics pre-alcohol probiotic drink is the world's first genetically engineered probiotic It was invented by PhD scientists to tackle rough mornings after drinking. Here's how it works When you drink alcohol gets converted into a toxic byproduct in the gut. It's this byproduct not dehydration That's to blame for your rough next deck. Pre-alcohol produces an enzyme to break this byproduct down. Just remember to make pre-alcohol your first drink of the night. Drink responsibly and you'll feel your best tomorrow. During the pre-Thanksgiving episode, I gave someone characteristic advice, which was that maybe less is more with alcohol around the holidays. You know, especially if there's any tense feelings, political or otherwise, in the family.

In those instances, you know, I think the best to only have one drink. I received a couple of emails from people who took that advice and said it worked out for them. So there you go, T. Totler, Tim. There's, you know, we can turn over a new page in life. That said, once the holidays were over, I was back home in New Orleans, I felt like it might be time to give a little bit of different advice on your own on the home front.

And so I've got a couple concerts on my end, want to go out with a couple buddies, have some Christmas parties. And when I do that, it's important to turn to Z-Biotics before I go out and start drinking so that I can be nice and fresh for the podcast. So with the holiday season upon us, with all of those holiday parties, I'm guessing some of you are going to be consuming a bit more alcohol than usual. With pre-alcohol, you can stay on track and not let the season throw you off course. So go to zbiotics.com slash The Bullwork to learn more and get 15% off your first order

when you use The Bullwork at checkout. ZBiotics is backed with 100% money back guarantee. So if you're unsatisfied for any reason, they'll refund your money, no questions asked. Remember to head to zbiotics.com slash The Bullwork and use code TheBullwork at checkout for 15% off. All right. And we're back with kind of ad hoc foreign policy correspondent, Michael Weiss, editor of the Insider, a Russia-focused independent media outlet.

He's also the host of the Foreign Office podcast, former investigative reporter for CNN. How you doing, man? Good, man. How are you? So much happening in the world. Apparently, we have a coup in South Carolina. South Carolina. We might have a coup in South Carolina.

We have a coup in South Korea as we Carolina. South Carolina. We might have a coup in South Carolina. We have a coup in South Korea as we're taping. Things are happening in Syria. You've been doing a lot of reporting on Syria. I want to get to that, the protests in Georgia, Russia, and Ukraine, but foreign policy starts at home. I need to pick your brain a little bit on some of Donald Trump's appointments first. We've got a friend, Cash Patel, who's been nominated to be the head of the FBI, even

though we have an FBI director whose term doesn't expire till 2027. You posted this on the X platform. The FBI arrested more than 1,200 January 6 insurrectionists who falsely claimed the 2020 election was stolen. Now the Bureau is about to be headed by a man who agrees with them. Morale will be the first thing to disappear at this law enforcement agency, but not the last. Talk about that a little more. Yeah, look, I mean, the FBI traditionally

is a culturally conservative institution. A lot of Republicans are FBI agents. There were a lot of Republicans who... You don't say. ...support Donald Trump and who thought that the investigation into Russia's attempt to sway the 2016 election wasn't a righteous one. So there's divisions within the bureau about a lot of stuff.

But when you have somebody who's avowed remit as the incoming director is to dismantle the so-called deep state, to hollow out basically our first line of defense, not just for counterterrorism, but counterintelligence, the infiltration of hostile foreign actors. Just today, the FBI released the indictment of a woman who turns out was an FSB officer or agent rather, who had infiltrated the DC think tank circuit. We have a lot of problems in this country. Let's tear it up and start all over again is not a good starting point for somebody

who's going to be heading one of the, not just a law enforcement bureau, but one of the key constituents of the intelligence community. And yeah, Cash Patel is a conspiracy theorist. And even more than that, I think he is such a slavish, loyalist to the president and willing to do whatever Donald Trump wants. John Bolton, a guy I'm not super fond of quoting, I think had a fairly good line, which is,

this is going to be Trump's barria, which is Joseph Stalin's head of state security and then rather famously overthrown himself when Stalin died. I don't think Bolton is using those words lightly. I think that there is a great deal of fear and mistrust in terms of morale at the Bureau. I mean, a lot will depend on what he actually does on day one. A lot is also going to depend, frankly, on, you know, this is a sprawling government agency like any other. It has bureaucratic mechanisms in place. It has people who are professional law enforcement

officers, but also civil servants who know how to stop radical change from happening, at least overnight. Whether or not those bulwarks and sort of institutional obstacles remain in place, I don't know. I'm hearing that they were very much in place during the first Trump administration. So a lot is going to depend on that. A lot also, frankly, is going to depend on the president's own feelings about the FBI.

So prior to this appointment, I was hearing scuttlebutt and take this with a pinch of salt but that actually his relationship with the Bureau has improved somewhat because of the assassination attempts on him. And I would add to that also because there is not, so far as we know, an active counterintelligence investigation into his activities with various and sundry foreign governments. So he may decide that actually now the bureau is doing a good job. That Egypt money, that Egypt bag investigation is over. And also look, I mean, keep in mind, the Iranians are still gunning for Donald Trump.

It's the FBI that's stopping the IRGC from killing him. And Iran, he has no love for us, as we well know, right? Russia is a different story, perhaps. But it's just a terrible appointment for so many reasons. And again, I mean, I've yet to see the impact day of, but right now I'm getting a real sense of foreboding from people both working in the FBI, but also who have left the FBI

and are certainly aware of the culture. Two thoughts on what you said there. One about the Patel being a conspiracy theorist. We covered this pretty thoroughly with Melina Pott-Colabro yesterday, but there was this one nugget that I had missed that I think it was sharing with everybody. When Patel was promoting his children's book about King Donald, who was persecuted by his political foes, he offered 10 copies

in which he signed the books and added a special message. WWG1WGA, where we go one, we go all, which is the QAnon slogan. So he's like signing children's books for people with the QAnon slogan. I mean, like, he's not exactly, it's not like he's like a casual conspiracy theorist. He's one of the main promoters of the right-wing conspiracy theories that led to Pizzagate and January 6th and on and on. And QAnon is absolutely the subject of investigation by the FBI, right? So I mean, this is the problem when you're big upping, when you're amplifying the very

enemies of the United States that the agency you are now meant to head is meant to be keeping tabs on and arresting when they commit crimes. I'd say that's a big problem, wouldn't you? I'd say that's perhaps even a national security breach. And this is what I mean. And also, look, there's a list of people that the enemies list that Trump and his Confederates, including Patel, have compiled, which include former FBI officers and directors. And again, G-men don't like it when you start going after their own kind. You know, there is a camaraderie that obtains here, even if there is, as I mentioned earlier,

disputes about protocol and practice. And look, I'll give you one data point, which I think is kind of revealing. So because of the aftermath of the crossfire hurricane investigation, the Mueller report, and then Trump's attempts to not just relitigate this, but dismantle it, dismantle the very premise and raise on debt for these things, which was rooted in legitimate counterintelligence concerns. Morale took a beating at the Bureau, such that, I mean, I was told that agents who should be applying for 302s and doing surveillance and going through all of the paperwork and bureaucratic protocols to do their job and surveil subjects or persons of interest, decided,

you know what? Juice ain't worth the squeeze because I don't want to be hauled before Congress or have my name outed in the New York Times and then start to have my family swatted by MAGA and QAnon crazies, right? So imagine what's gonna happen now when you have to answer to a guy like Kash Patel. Correct, that happened already. I mean, I don't know if it's-

And it's happening currently. It's happening, and yeah, there's gonna be a lot of early retirements, I would expect. A lot of people who just don't, they're not gonna wanna have to put up with this. And they're gonna be fearful for not just their livelihoods, but as I say, being doxed and exposed as perfidious agents of the American stasi or whatever the hell these people

are portraying them as. I know. I've already been talking to some agents that are experiencing that type of targeting during this transition. But just broadening it out beyond cash. And you have Tulsi at DNI and He and Hague Seth, potentially a DOD. It's a little bit of a mixed message you get with having then Waltz and Marco in other positions.

Like the broad view. It's a veritable team of rivals. I don't think it was intentionally a team of rivals. It was a team of rivals if the, if you're thinking about it as like the panel on the five, you know? You want to make sure you have all of the points of view represented from a Fox News panel. It's Infowars and WikiLeaks team of rivals, yeah.

But the same issue with Patel, I think it has to be a question like with your sources across all the national security posts, across the intelligence agencies, across the law enforcement agencies. And I just wonder what people are thinking, how people are processing this, what they're expecting, what concerns are at the broadest sense about this team that Trump's bringing in. Well, look, a lot of people, first and foremost, are concerned for, am I going to receive a paycheck?

What's going to happen to my pension? You don't want a president coming in and saying, I'm going to fire everybody. Even if legally there's no grounds for this, it's the harassment, it's the concomitant effects of declaring somebody an enemy of the state. I have in my reporting on the GRU, on Russian intelligence, on Havana Syndrome, gotten close to a number of former CIA officers, one of whom is Mark Palmaropoulos, who I'm not afraid to say has become a very good friend of mine. Mark doesn't know if he is going to be here on January 20th, meaning should he stay in

the United States, because lawyers are telling him and telling others who signed that letter, questioning the veracity of the Hunter Biden laptop story, maybe you should cool your heels abroad somewhere for the foreseeable future. Just because Trump and his team have made it very clear that these guys are in their sights. Now that is a pretty terrifying prospect that people who worked for the CIA the FBI or other government intelligence law enforcement bodies who guard us while we sleep who have done things on

behalf of this country They cannot talk about but should it ever come to light and it always does down the line when the history books are written Are decorated heroes for a reason suddenly they become targets of their own government. I mean, the sense of betrayal, the sense of treachery that they must feel, and also the deterrent effect that this will have on people volunteering to go to work for these services, right, you know, and even more to the point.

And this is something that comes up constantly. And that is like an Adam Smith effect. There's the deterrent, but also who draws in. Who draws in as well. The types of people are drawn. And also the ability to recruit and run assets in the field. You know, I mean, if you're, you know, let's say you're a GRU. This is a really great point with Tulsi.

These Tulsi is an example and if you're an asset, how you might be processing that right now. Right. So, you know, Tulsi Gabbard, who has made no mystery about her feelings about Bashar al-Assad, Russia's gruesome intervention in Syria, and other things, which should raise the eyebrow of the IC, is now going to be the head of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. So MAGA-apologists who, or I should say MAGA-adjacent Republicans who don't particularly like the cut of her jib are trying to persuade people Well, it's just a coordinator role. It's kind of like a sinecure. Don't worry. She's not gonna make policy

Bullshit she prepares the presidential daily briefings So what the president sees on a day-to-day basis in terms of here are all the national security threats in the world She will have purview over she has the ability to declassify intelligence which she can do rather selectively to in the world, she will have purview over. She has the ability to declassify intelligence, which she can do rather selectively to advance an agenda. And this is somebody who has gone to Damascus, taken tea with Assad, a genocidal dictator who's used chemical weapons against his own people, come back and said, he's our friend, we should support him. Now, if you're the CIA and you're trying to recruit Syrians, which I know you want to get into the discussion of what happened in Aleppo, it might be a good time.

It might be a good time to start doing that. Are you going to think twice, three times, four times about whether or not this Assadist, who's now sort of the wrangler of 18 different intelligence services, might declassify intelligence that could expose you, out you, and put you in harm's way Very real harm's way in a country like syria I should say you probably are going to think two three four times so same with russia same with russia Let's say you're a gru colonel in moscow and you want to become what's called a defector in place Which is to say you don't actually

Skedaddle to the west and get resettled, but you stay in your job in Russian intelligence, but you're an informant, you're an agent of the CIA. You've seen what Putin will do when the US government is not working against their own assets. I mean, look at what he's attempted to do on US soil with respect to defectors here. Look at what he did to Sergey Skripal, who was an MI6 agent. After he had him in custody in a Russian prison for many years, pardoned him, released him in a prisoner trade, he still dispatched agents, officers rather, to go and poison him with

a military grade nerve agent years later, right? So you already have that kind of damper on going to work for the other side. Now all of a sudden, you have a credible suspicion that people who are working at very high levels of the American intelligence community aren't exactly kosher and might be secretly or not so secretly sympathetic to the government you're trying to betray. This is going to have an impact. It probably already has done, you know. And what about the intelligence sharing with our allies? I think it's a potential issue, right? Look, there is no closer intelligence relationship in the world than that between the United States and the United Kingdom, right? I mean, the Anglo-American

special relationship, I would say, starts there at the intelligence level. It's almost like we are one country in that respect. I have heard from people who, former but not so former, on the British side, we are probably not going to be giving everything knowing some of the people who are coming in now. That is, I mean, I wish you had somebody who's worked in say, the CIA or the NSA on the podcast next to me, because I'd love to hear their reaction to that. That is a staggering development.

And that's just the UK, which as I say, I mean, other countries that don't have as close of a relationship with the United States are also going to feel very much the same way. I mean, I've been hearing from people in NATO intelligence services, particularly after the Gabbard appointment, you know, what the fuck is happening? Well, let's do that in January. Before Mark flees the country, maybe we'll have him or somebody on with you in January. Let's make that a date.

Longtime listeners of the pod are familiar with kind of my love-hate affair with the neighborhood cat Aretha that we have quasi adopted and that we definitely feed, which ended up working out with the new sponsor of our podcast, Smalls. Smalls cat food is protein packed recipes made with preservative free ingredients.

You find in your fridge and it's delivered right to your door. That's why cats.com named Smalls their best overall cat food. Smalls was started back in 2017 by a couple of guys home cooking cat food in small batches for their friends. A few short years later, they've served millions of meals to cats across the United States, including Aretha. It's a boy named Aretha, which I might've mentioned before.

It came upon to the porch originally. We were playing some Aretha Franklin. I don't know why we assumed it was a girl, you know, loving girls, girls being cooler maybe was why. Learned later from folks who've been in the neighborhood a little bit longer that Aretha was in fact a boy, but you know, this is kind of the boy named Sue vibes with that cat, so we stuck with the name.

The cat is now just like coming up to the house to get fed every day. So we've created a mutual relationship between Aretha and Smalls and us and my child. It's nice for me actually, I don't have to get her a cat for Christmas. Don't tell Tullus. All right, at this point you might be wondering,

why can't I just feed my cat Kibble? Believe it or not, your cute kitty descended from ferocious desert cats who hunted live prey for food. And your cat isn't any different. They still need fresh protein packed meals to be at their best. So give your cat the gift of great cat food this holiday season. Head to Smalls.com slash The Bullwork and use promo code The Bullwork at checkout for 50

off your first order plus free shipping. That's the best offer you'll find, but you have to use my code The Bullwork for 50% off your first order. One last time. That's promo code The Bullwork for 50% off your first order plus free ship. I want to get back to the Syria developments because this is the part of the podcast where almost this whole podcast is you educating me, but like, you know, I've at least have ideas of things in these other spaces. Like the, the Syria rebel attack on Aleppo happens over the weekend. I'm seeing this in the news and I know literally nothing. So, um, we're, we're going for remedial,

what is happening in Syria lessons from Michael Weiss right now. So let's start that. Okay. So let's put it this way. This did not happen out of nothing. This is a very opportunistic set of events, which I think I wrote a piece with my ISIS book co-author author Hassan Hassan, we call it a unique concatenation of circumstances. So let's start there. Number one, what's happened in the region over the last year? Well, Iran has fallen

apart, it's it's regional strategic project, the so called Ring of Fire around Israel, the projection of its power in the form of paramilitary organizations and militias, most important of which is prize asset Hezbollah, utterly decimate. Senior leadership of Hezbollah has been wiped out, including Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah. If you believe the Israelis, they've taken out 80% of Hezbollah's arsenal of short and mid-range rockets. Hamas has been destroyed in Gaza, although that's more limited.

But by and large, the IRGC has taken a pounding. The IRGC was largely responsible as the ground army for Assad's recapture of so much territory in the last decade. I mean, there was a point at which it looked fairly credible that Damascus could fall to a consortium of different rebel groups, including those backed by the CIA, backed by some Gulf Arab states, backed by Turkey, and even backed by Jordan. CIA ended its program several years ago under the first Trump administration. We have no assets in place here except in one base in southern Syria, Al-Tamf. So former Free

Syrian Army rebels we recruited and are stationed there. And mostly they're there to kind of monitor Iranian shenanigans in that part of Syria. But we have no skin in the game except in eastern Syria, where we are there strictly in a counterterrorism capacity to fight ISIS. So we have this group called the Syrian Democratic Forces. They are led by Syrian Kurds that are aligned with the PKK, which is a designated terror organization, but we like to pretend that it's not because they're really good at fighting ISIS. What has happened now is a former al-Qaeda franchise, and I'll get into why we know it's former, which has spent

the last several years creating a state apparatus in northwest Syria, Idlib province, and a state apparatus that does things like controls the traffic, electricity grids, had a COVID relief plan, jihadis who do sort of technocratic governance, believe it or not. They have been champing at the bit to go on the offensive against Assad because they realize he has never been weaker than he is now. As I mentioned, his, not his strategic partner, his patron, the Iranians, are a busted flush, more or less. The Russians are, as you may have noticed, preoccupied elsewhere.

And so they have been asking their patron, the Turks. The Turks control the border crossings in northern Syria, at least in this part of the country. They pay the salaries of HTS, the group I alluded to. They give them weapons. They have garrisons in Idlib, including with artillery, that are there to protect HTS from Russian and Syrian onslaught. The Turks have kept them at bay for several months saying, no, we don't want to go on the offensive.

Can you talk to us about why the Turks are sponsoring them? Can we get just a brief aside on the Turkish perspective here? So the Turks have absolutely no problem lying down with Sunni Islamist radicals, particularly those who will advance. Turkey has one overriding national security concern in Syria, and that is the aforementioned PKK. For many years since our counter-ISIS mission got underway in 2014, Turkey has been pissed off at the United States for partnering with, as I say, a designated Kurdish terrorist group,

designated by the US, not just by Turkey, by the way, which Turkey has been on and off at war with for 40 years. This started as a separatist movement inside Turkey. These guys, their headquarters is the Kandil Mountains, but the Syrian branch or affiliate of it is now our eyes and ears on the ground in Eastern Syria to contain and ensure that ISIS does not come back and rebuild the caliphate. So the Turks have maintained this is ludicrous, this is contradictory and also insulting. We are a NATO ally.

And it's like if Turkey had come to Mexico and started building an al-Qaeda franchise, that's how they compare it. All right, Michael. So right as you're explaining to me all the different geopolitics, all the different sides here, the power goes out in New Orleans because we have Idlib level infrastructure here down here in our beautiful... No, Idlib level infrastructure is better than you have in New Orleans, apparently. So anyway, my question was, though I was trying to get the answer, you're talking about the

Turks and their role here in supporting the rebels. Yeah. And what I'm trying to understand is, so on the one hand, the Turks main security concern is the PKK and the Kurds, which are US backed, right? And so A, why aren't the US more concerned with the groups that the Turks are backing? And B, what is the strategic imperative for the Turks then in going after Assad and the Shia and the Iranian backed groups?

Well, the answer to your first question is the US is deeply concerned about the groups that Turkey has sort of given patronage to. So I need to be a little bit more specific here. I'm trying to keep it broad. So Turkey has its own consortium of slash ex-Free Syrian Army members and frankly just mercenaries that they have built over time known as the Syrian National Army. I refer to them in the piece as their new Janissaries, if you know your Ottoman history.

They've dispatched these guys abroad to foreign conflicts, including Libya, where the SNA has fought General Khalifa Haftar's army there, which is backed by Russia too. So Turkey has been sort of projecting its power using proxies that it's recruited and built up over time as part of a, I think frankly, their own regional hegemonic designs, right? Erdogan in many ways fashions himself as a new sultan. He wants a, not a recreation of the Ottoman Empire, but definitely he wants to make Turkey great again, and this is part of that project. HTS in Idlib is headed by Jolani.

Jolani was sent into Syria in 2011 by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who at the time was the head of what was known as the Islamic State of Iraq. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi wanted Jalani to start creating the ISI franchise in Syria, which as we know became ISIS. Jalani though had his own grand designs. He's megalomaniacal. He is a native Syrian, unlike Baghdadi who's Iraqi.

Over time, he decided not only would he break with ISIS and create his own show in Syria, which was known as Jabhat al-Nusra. But when Jabhat al-Nusra became an al-Qaeda franchise, he played similar games with Ayman al-Zawahiri, the head of al-Qaeda after bin Laden's death. And what had started as a kind of public relations gambit, I'm breaking with al-Qaeda, actually

became a legitimate rupture with al-Qaeda. Now the US sanctioned HTS and Jalani, there's a bounty on his head because they don't trust him and they think that this guy is a terrorist. But it gets complicated because HTS has fought the actual al-Qaeda franchise in Syria known as Hurs al-Din and he has gone to war with ISIS many times. So there's this weird thing where a jihadist is fighting transnational terrorists that we're more concerned about than some, you know, scruffy little Syrian national jihadist organization, which perhaps is not so scruffy anymore. Thanks to many years of indulgence by Turkey and the fact that, you know,

Jilani has evolved in the sense that he understands the way to win hearts and minds in Syria and to do the kind of state-building enterprise that bin Laden and Baghdadi could never achieve because they were too brutal or backward requires a softer touch. So I would say that what HTS is like is the Taliban. They are an authoritarian, Salafist organization, but they legitimately want to govern and they want to have an administrative capacity. So Jolani has seen Assad's hollow shell of a regime over the last several years and been

champing at the bit to go on the offensive and to take him on. Because of events in the Levant, particularly, as I mentioned earlier, the weakening of Iran's strategic project, because of Russia being distracted. They still have plenty of military assets in place in Syria, but Putin isn't all in in Syria anymore because he's got bigger fish to fry in Ukraine. Jelani sensed an opportunity. Turkey, for several months, kept him at bay. Don't go on the offensive. Why? In the midst of all of this, Turkey and Syria have been engaged in a kind of patidue of reconciliation talks. Turkey wants to make a deal with Assad, whereby Assad and Turkey jointly, but really Turkey leading the charge, eliminate the PKK as a threat to the Turkish border region, right? And for several months, actually several years, since about 2017,

the Russians have brokered negotiations. The Russians would love nothing better than to see Turkey welcome Assad in from the cold because that's a preliminary for sanctions relief and also the international recognition of Assad. He's made deals, he's been normalized with all of the Gulf Arab states, but Turkey is the holdout. And again, it all comes down to the Kurdish question with the Turks. Finally, in the last month, MBS, the Saudi crown prince, tried to organize a face-to-face meeting between Erdogan and Assad, and Assad snubbed him. So Assad, who is this petulant pygmy in Damascus, who has mortgaged his country to Iran and

Russia, who one-third of the country is an American protectorate and the northern half of the country is a Turkish protectorate, completely at cross purposes with one another. He thinks that he is an equal player to Putin and Erdogan. He thinks that this is a peer contest. And Erdogan and Putin disagree on many things, but they have this kind of bromance, right? They're strategic rivals. Going back to, for historical reasons, I mean, the Crimean War, the Black Sea region, Turks don't want the Russians there and vice versa.

As I mentioned, Turkey sent the SNA to Libya to clean a Russian proxy's clock. Turkey has helped the Azerbaijanis in Nagorno-Karabakh, which that was meant, that's where Russian peacekeepers, right,'re on the ground there. And yet, every time Erdogan and Putin punch each other in the face, their respect for each other only increases. They have several things in common. Number one is a deep abiding contempt for the United States and the West, which they see as culturally bankrupt. Number two, they love to make their Assad bend the knee, and they love to show him who's boss. So Turkey finally threw its toys out of the pram and said,

screw it. They let HTS off the leash. The SNA, their Janissaries, are also part of this offensive. And here's what nobody, I think even Jolani, the head of HTS, reckoned with, how easily it would be to take Syria's second city. Another comparison to the Taliban. The rebels before this, yes, from 2012, but really up until the end of the mid teens of

the last decade, it took them years to... I was in Aleppo in 2012 when it began to fall to the rebels. I was in the Bab al-Hadid quarter, which I think a week or two earlier before I got there, it was Ramadan, had fallen to a consortium of different rebel groups. These guys basically just waltzed in. The regime evaporated. It crumbled. They ran away. And now HTS finds itself the keeper of not just, I think, all of Idlib province is now theirs, but most, 90 plus percent of Aleppo province. And now they're going on the march in Hama, where if they really do make a play for Hama city, that's going to be very difficult for Assad and his backers, because that poses

a strategic threat to the hold on power. And it certainly poses a threat to Russia's main interests, which are their two coastal bases. Latakia, they have an air base there, and Tartus, it's their only warm water port, and also there's a naval base there. So that could actually tilt the scales against HTS and, I guess, this broader Turkish project. But they're doing incredibly well for an insurgency, albeit one with the supervision and the kind of invisible hand of a major state power, a NATO power. And the United States is sort of nowhere to be seen here.

I want to get to the Russia part of this to close the pod. But just on the US, it seems like we're nowhere to be seen here because we don't have like who are we rooting for that to put this into sports terms, but I doesn't seem to be like a clear benefit on either side of this to the US interest. Right. So the National Security Council put out a statement, sort of mild delight at the fact that Assad's sort of getting buffeted because, you know, as they said in the statement, this is what you get from relying on Iran and Russia. Happy in a way to see Iran's clock

further cleaned by HTS, but there is no love for this organization, right? They're a designated terror group. A lot of people in the IC believe everything that I've just told you about Jelani state building, that's all just a fig leaf for Al-Qaeda light or Al-Qaeda curious, as I think Mark Polymeropoulos put it on MSNBC. So it remains to be seen.

If Jelani, what he is angling to do, because he has also become a student of geopolitics and recent international events. I mentioned he's sort of modeling himself on the Taliban. Well, since we withdrew from Afghanistan, the Taliban is the de facto ruler of the country. The United States is still engaged with it to implement the Doha Accords and also, frankly, to keep tabs on ISIS-K's franchise in Afghanistan. Taliban is at war with ISIS-K's franchise in Afghanistan, on Taliban's at war with ISIS-K.

Russia is basically on the cusp of recognizing the Taliban diplomatically, lifting sanctions. I mean, Putin is on the record saying these guys are the de facto rulers and they're our ally in counterterrorism. So Jelani is saying, oh, I want some of that. Get me some of that Taliban. Yeah, Putin might just switch sides. Exactly. He's like, I am your ally in counterterrorism.

I fight ISIS. I fight Al-Qaeda. I have no quarrel with Iraq. I mean, it's kind of extraordinary because ISIS is a genocidal organization that thinks all Shia, the Rafida, they are only meant to be put to the sword. Jelani is saying to Shia-led Iraq and the militias, which are built by Iran, stay out of my country and I'll leave you alone. That's heresy to ISIS. And yet this is

part of his kind of pragmatic approach. Now, whether he's successful or not, I have no idea. I mean, you want to lose a bet, try to predict what's going to happen in Syria, right. But a lot of people did not see this coming. least of all, I think the American government and now we're kind of like, Hey, my name is Paul and this shit's between y'all like, let's get in the game. That's the other place. Yeah, except to protect again, the SDF in the east and ensure that ISIS remains down

and out there. The time to Russia here as you've alluded to a couple times, obviously that Russia being distracted, shall we say in Ukraine, but also weakened, I think relates to the Assad weakening. So I'm curious your view just on the other news out of Russia recently is the crashing of the ruble and kind of their economic stability teetering. And so I'm curious your view on just that, the domestic status in Russia, as well as the status and the latest in the war in Ukraine.

Look, everybody I ask, how long can Russia sustain this war? Let's start with their losses in manpower and material. British intelligence estimate that over 700,000 Russian forces have been taken off the chess board. This is unbelievable, extraordinary. It dwarfs what they lost in Afghanistan, which of course, helped precipitate the collapse of the Soviet Union. And yet Russia has this sort of, we had this conception of it like Mary Poppins handbag, you just keep pulling stuff out, you know,

it's just at a disproportionate level to the actual- They're new Russians. Is it true? I saw some, I saw the, you can never trust what's on the Chinese planet, but I saw some TikTok videos of the Russians conscripting people at clubs. Was this, was this happening? I have no doubt that's true. I mean, and also they're offering them ever greater incentives in terms of salaries. You could live like a king on the money that you would get, except for the fact you're going to be sent to a front and turned into hamburger, right?

They're also though, I mean, to, to, to underscore their manpower problem. I mean, you don't go recruiting North Koreans if you're doing well and winning a war, right? So 10,000 plus North Koreans now in Kursk, possibly already deployed to Ukraine. They're tricking Indians into becoming mercenaries for them. They've recruited Cubans. They've recruited now Houthis, according to the Wall Street Journal. They're trying to throw as much into this meat grinder as possible. And their losses are staggering at the equipment level too.

I mean, I've lost track. There are people who study this stuff on an hourly basis, but it's again, you would think that this is not sustainable. And yet, and yet, Putin doesn't care. They are pressing ahead in Donbas, making more gains in the last month, maybe two months than they have since the start of the full scale invasion in 2022. The Ukrainians are beginning to see the writing on the wall that, okay, look, Trump is coming in.

We might not have unlimited security assistance. Everyone wants to cut a deal, but what kind of deal? We need to have leverage over the Russians. Then there's this kind of fingers crossed hope that the economy in Russia Simply collapses and that's going to have some immediate impact on the battlefield. No doubt. It'll have an impact on the battlefield I'm a little bit skeptical and wary of people who tell me though that it's it's gonna be game over for Putin because I've heard That for many many years I mean it used to be if the price of oil drops below $100 a barrel. That's it His regime is is toast that was like 15 years ago, you know

Yeah, right. So I I would take kind of these projections with a pinch of salt. But, you know, look, the Ukrainians are absolutely, you know, ecstatic at developments in Syria, because that's weakening their strategic adversary, and they're hopeful that it's going to redeploy or sap even further attention away from what's happening on their soil. There's also a weird kind of like resignation about Trump in Ukraine. I mean, I have to tell you, in the last few weeks, what I'm hearing from inside the Biden administration about how the Biden administration really didn't want to win this war. It wanted to sort of manage the conflict. How an overriding fear of Russia's loss of the war in Ukraine and also collapse of Putin's regime is what's guided

everything. Kathy Young wrote about this in the Bullwork today. I'll put it in the show notes. And this is going to come out. I mean, knives have been sharpened over the last several years, and I think they're being unsheathed now. And I, I tell you, Jake Sullivan, who gets better press than anybody I've ever seen as a government official, it's like you can't write about him without saying, lantern-jawed Jake Sullivan, who on Monday masters the topography of Inner Mongolia and on Tuesday can tell you the trading value of the yen. I think that that sort of hagiographic style is going out of fashion real quick.

Yeah, we've got to run and I think your dog is sending a message to us that she or he has heard enough always, I was saying it's a guard dog worried about Mark and worried about those having to flee that had a warning. He's a puppy. So he's always going off about something. My final thing is just a quick follow up on that, the Ukrainian acceptance, I guess, or coming to terms with Trump coming. What does that look like? What does that mean? You think, just acceptance that there's going to have to be a negotiation or acceptance that they're going alone or what do you... Acceptance of what? It's driven by several things. Number one, they think they know Trump because they've had to deal with him before.

There's an element in Ukraine that says, well, you know, remember this guy gave us javelin anti-tank missiles when Obama wouldn't. He sanctioned Nord Stream 2. There are actors in place. I mean, you mentioned Rubio and Waltz. Kellogg is an interesting character too. The Ukrainians respect him. They see him as sort of a Cold War hawk. He's crazy MAGA, but also pro-Ukraine. Also pro-Ukraine, and he understands the Russian. Good news for Ukraine, maybe bad news for protesters in America. Right. I mean, there is a great deal of wariness about people like Gabbard. Patel doesn't factor in for them. But JD Vance though is the problem.

And you'll notice when Zelensky gave an interview to the New Yorker several weeks ago, it's unfathomable for Zelensky to say anything untoward about any American official, but he said that Vance was quote, too radical. And what that means really is he knows that the people who Vance has surrounded himself with would love nothing better than to just forfeit Ukraine

to Russia. Yeah, pull the plug. Right. But then there's a sense that, well, okay, Trump is going to come in with these high falutin expectations for some masterful, beautiful peace deal with Putin, and Putin's going to do what he does with everybody, which is rat-fuck him. And Trump is going to get angry, and then Trump is going to sort of release the hounds. That's how the Ukrainians do it. That's the hope. That's the hope. And also this is driven though,

and again, I would love to live in that world. That's sweet though. I love that optimism. Yes, but it's driven by a great deal of frustration bordering on contempt for the Biden administration. Biden was great with the optics and solidarity, rallying allies and security assistance has come, right? I mean, we're now giving Ukraine weapon systems that we said would have precipitated World War Three in February of 2022. But the Ukrainians say, not only did World War Three not happen, and now you know it, we should have had those weapons before the full scale invasion.

Bill Kristol gave the bulwarkian pessimistic view of that potential outlook, which is that Putin rap fucks him and continues to press forward with his conscripted soldiers, and while the US abandons them. He has really no intention of stopping the war, and his overriding... Well, the US abandons Ukraine, I meant. Like, rather than that making Trump mad and unleashing the dogs, it leads Trump to just say, fuck it. The only thing, I mean,

let's just be very kind of realistic here. So Ukrainian sentiment has shifted. There's a huge morale problem now, whereas there wasn't before. There's desertion in the ranks, whereas there wasn't before. Incoming recru in the ranks. Whereas there wasn't before Incoming recruits for the Ukrainian army are old. They don't want to fight They cannot fight as well as younger men a lot of the best most battle-tested soldiers were killed in places like Bakmut and so on Ukrainians will not and Zelensky cannot afford politically to do a deal with the Russians unless there is

politically to do a deal with the Russians unless there is real security guarantees, not like a Budapest memorandum kind of thing where we pledge to consider maybe one day bringing Ukraine into NATO. So the term he's using is now the umbrella of NATO security. Well, what does that mean? Realistically, what it means is boots on the ground. British, French, Polish, Scandinavian, Estonian soldiers basically guarding a ceasefire line, ensuring that another attack on Kiev cannot happen. In Europe, people are beginning to seriously discuss this. Kaya Kalas, who is now a Eurocrat and in a very sensitive position in Brussels, a high powered one at that, is talking openly about this. So the Europeans, I think, sense that, okay, they were more expecting of a Trump victory

than I think a lot of people in the United States were. So they've actually kind of resigned themselves to what's going to happen in this country, and that means more of the onus shifts to them, both in terms of support, material support for Ukraine, diplomatic support, and support and then yes putting their money where Their mouth is and you know telling the Russians thus far and no farther on the on the battlefield So we'll see how it plays out. There will be many more I think Unfortunately for us and for the Ukrainians for the world opportunities for us to get reports from you Michael Weiss So thanks for coming on in a pinch at the last second here.

Really appreciate you and the puppy. And I do believe it's the first mention of the Janna series on the Bulwark podcast. And they got several shout outs today. So appreciate you. The way things are going, it won't be the last. All right, my friend, we'll talk to you soon. And thanks also to Thomas Zimmer.

We'll be up tomorrow, another edition of the Bulwark podcast. See you all then, peace. Why does the sun go on shining? Zimmer. We'll be up tomorrow's the end of the world Cause you don't love me anymore Why do the stars go above? Don't they know it's the end of the world? It ended when you said goodbye And goodbye

Why does my heart go on beating? Why do these eyes of mine cry? Don't they know it's the end of the world? It ended when you said goodbye