The Bulwark Podcast - Sarah Longwell and Bill Kristol: We're Governed by Broken Men

Episode Date: July 20, 2026

Trump tried to steal the limelight and the valor of Spain at the World Cup, even as more troops died overseas; Stephen Miller regularly encourages ICE to be violent while Pete Hegseth pushes soldiers to be macho bullies. The leaders in this country are men with no center and no core. Now with the arrest of the Tate brothers in Miami, Trump gets a chance to extend his record of standing by sex pests and assaulters. Plus: Iran and the U.S. are dangerously escalating the war, ICE is going even more rogue, Maine Dems have a replacement for Platner, and generic ballot polling suggests voters aren't necessarily gravitating to Democrats—and the noisy DSA may have a lot to do with that.Bill Kristol joins special guest host Sarah Longwell.Show notes: Monday's "Morning Shots" Sam and Mark Hertling on the Iran strikes on an air base in Jordan Umberto Eco's "Ur-Fascism" piece Upgrade your wallet today! Get 10% Off @Ridge with code THEBULWARK at https://www.Ridge.com/THEBULWARK #Ridgepod

Hey, did you hear? Watermelon is back at booster juice all summer long. Nice. I love the watermelon explosion. And the watermelon wave. Yep. They even got a new watermelon assaye bowl this year. The one in a melon bowl. And what does that sound like? Mmm. Like that. Booster juice. Canadian born, blending since 1999. everyone and welcome to the Bull Work podcast. I'm Sarah Longwell, sitting in for the one and only Tim Miller, because he is on summer vacation, which he deserves. Don't you worry, even though Tim is not here, Bill Crystal is. So we're going to do a regular Monday show where we spin through the news. Bill, I want to start first by saying, if it looks like I am sweaty, it is not because I'm so nervous to sit in Tim's chair. It's because I'm on a fitness journey now with Coach Robbie. And I just worked.

worked out, so everybody's just going to have to put up with a little schfitzing for a second. I didn't even notice, but it's an honor to be on with the one and only Sarah Longwell. I mean, Tim Miller's every week for Sarah Longwell, this is something, you know. It's a big upgrade. This is. This is a big deal. Did you watch the game last night, the World Cup game, the final? I did.

I did. Who were you rooting for? I was sort of, you know, ambivalent going in, but I ended up rooting for Spain because Argentina is a pretty dirty team, I've got to say. And Spain, it does play kind of beautiful. soccer in its own careful and precise, but pretty impressive way. So I was happy to explain one. And what about you? I was rooting for Argentina. The only way, as I was thinking about how Americans choose who they're going to root for in a game like this, and I've been asking people and everybody's

got their own, like, my wife was rooting for Spain because she studied abroad there. I was rooting for Argentina because Evita is my third favorite musical. And, you know, that's all I had. But it led me to get very intense about it. But I bring up the World Cup because there's some intersection with the news today because we're going to have to talk about Iran. You know, three service members were killed, possibly four over the weekend. At least two were killed in an Iranian attack on a U.S. air base in Jordan, which has been like that is our key hub for Air Force strikes against Iran and other soldiers missing. And there's a set of unidentified remains. We're in a new phase now in terms of the tensions with.

the run. And I saw somebody mentioned this, and it struck me as interesting, which is that now that the World Cup is over, that the World Cup is actually this moment where tensions tend to ease, and that the end of the World Cup might signal sort of a flaring of tensions, again, because the international community is kind of not doing a kumbaya thing. Is that a crazy thing, or does that sound right? Yeah, I don't know. I didn't really thought of it that way. I was just, struck, and I read about this in running shots by the intersection of world politics in Iran, that Trump played golf Saturday, and then I think it was at his club in Northern Jersey, and then went to the game and sat in his air-conditioned box, and then came down, and it was amazing.

The photo that Sarah Rogers pulled from warning shots is fantastic. Trump butts into the ceremony where the head of FIFA, it was kind of a showboat himself, incidentally, but anyway, Trump out showboats in by budding in and being part of the metal presenting ceremony, which I don't recall is the normal practice of these kinds of events, the president of the host country just invites himself down there. But he's in there putting medals on people, and then he's trying to be in the photos. And then finally, the FIFA president, the FIFA head says, okay, basically time to go, let them have their celebration. And that's what people want to see, is them being rambunctious. And so he heads off stage right. And Trump sort of follows him for a bit,

but then stops and sort of lurks there awkwardly trying to stay in the photo. And actually the FIFA guy tries to comes back and tries to kind of, we should probably get off and he stays there. And there's that fantastic photo of him kind of awkwardly standing on the side as the Spanish players ignore him and have a well-deserved celebration. So very Trump-like, right? And then, you know, that he, anyway, just, I mean, not that he shouldn't go to the World Cup just because we're at war,

though other presidents, I would say, might have made that calculation or that decision. especially on a weekend where American service members are killed. But then just the kind of unbelievable pathetic, really pathetic. You had an excellent tweet this weekend about how pathetic the strong men are, that they're so weak. And I mean, you really saw that with Trump, right? He's literally the most famous man in the world. He's president of the United States.

He's doing all kinds of bad things, but he's doing them as president. He can get any attention he wants any time, but he can't resist budding into the World Cup celebrations of the champions. it's not like the U.S. team won or it. It's not like it was the U.S. team or anything, isn't Ellie, right? Well, Ramos, this is Spain state. This was, it was crazy watching him try to horn in. It's not like Cash Patel chugging beers with at least what is the American, the USA team, you know, at the Olympics. Trump is just like, no, I'm going to try to do stolen valor, literally anywhere I can find it, including Spain's, just because I happen to be here.

And actually, I'm going to spend just one second on this, this tweet about the fact that we are currently governed by broken men, you can see it everywhere, right? You can see it in Stephen Miller. You can see it in Elon Musk. You can even see it in sort of, you know, Mark Zuckerberg or like any of these guys, they're billionaires. But Elon Musk has to both be like infinitely racist going after immigrants, of which he is one. By the way, just every time he can't stop. with his anti-immigrant tirades.

I'm just like, you, too, my friend, came here. By the way, like, dubiously legally for a period of time. He has children by how many different women? I mean, I think it's like, I don't know, four or five. It's like a very high number of women. What is that about, right? What is that need by all of these guys or like Bezos now, you know, with the young wife and the huge muscles and, like,

everybody seems to be going through. It's like our country has to live. live with the midlife crises of men whose fathers didn't love them enough or who, you know, are so deeply insecure that they have to take it out in these bullying cruel ways. And it really does feel like a moment of watching a failure of leadership from men who have no center, no core. What are the hollow-chested men? And I just feel like I see it everywhere. But maybe I'm overreacting to something. No, not at all. The only thing I'd add is I do think it does think it spills over from the elites who are that way and really can do huge damage because of their psychological disorders down to sort of quote to regular people. There's one clip I saw over the weekend of some guy bullying a Hispanic neighbor who seems to have done nothing to him except be Hispanic. I think he's an American citizen for all what could tell living in a kind of suburban area with his family. And this guy is kind of

turning his sprinkler on the lawn over into them and sort of harassing them a little. I don't if you saw this one. I didn't. And the other gentleman is using his phone to record this. So I'm a Trump person and Trump lets me do this kind of thing. I've got to, it's something like that. But he literally mentions Trump and literally sort of invokes Trump as a kind of justification. And you'll be out of here soon.

You're going to be back in Mexico. As I say, this guy seems to be here permanently and legally, so far as one can tell. But anyway, obviously these things are out there. And that's what allows someone like Trump to exploit the insecurities. and the anxieties and the satisfaction people get from bullying. But the degree to which it then encourages other people to do things that they once would have impressed. I guess I come back to that, right?

It's like the, I think this was a pretty common trope a few years ago, but it's worth recalling that, you know, people always said certain things at 1130 at night in a bar to their buddies, you know, that they wouldn't say publicly, racial things or. Things about women, yeah. Things about women, very much so, right? But it was important that they thought they, okay, they can say them. It was important that they thought they couldn't say them publicly, right? That's part of what being a civilized society means.

People are going to have certain things that they have to get off their chest somewhere or other. But you know what? In the corner of a bar, the three buddies is one thing. And now it's all out there, right? And they feel legitimized to act on it. This is where the ICE, the people who work for ICE, you know, they're being encouraged, literally encouraged in their case. I mean, by actual superiors and by the secretary of DHS and by the head of ICE and by Trump himself to behave in this really terrible way. But it does show how, you know, there's such a cliche, you know, we concern.

Everybody used to say this 25 years ago. The veneer of civilization can be thin and it's more vulnerable than you think, but you really see it, don't you? You do. And before we jump off this, just because this is like a thing I don't talk about that much, but I feel it all the time, which is, as a lesbian, I just want to say that I think men are extremely important. I like, and I've always loved a good man. And by good, I actually don't mean perfect in some way. I mean somebody who shows up to take care of somebody else, somebody who demonstrates, I think, a positive vision of masculinity.

I've got two boys now, you know, who are 10 and 8. And so I think about it a lot in terms of who are the men sort of setting the tone for society. And, you know, obviously, you know, I feel very warmly toward you and think you are a wonderful person. but I met Mark Hurtling in person the other day. He was just in the office, and I hadn't seen him before. By the way, if you have not watched it, they did a great live this weekend on what's happening in Iran, which is the actual conversation we're supposed to be having.

But anyway, he comes in all tall and tan and, you know, this former military, like, you know, stance or whatever. And he's this lovely person who thinks deeply about the harm of war to American young people, but also thinks a lot about leadership, about inspiration, about how you take care of soldiers, about how, what it means to have to sacrifice. And I've always really gravitated to this idea of men and leadership who tried to both be, on one hand, like very strong and tough and don't, you know, get your pants up and, you know, tidy up your room and make your bed and that, but also kind.

And I think this is another one sort of like you know it when you see it. But like there used to be, and I would maybe put John McCain in this category, but there used to be like a category of men in leadership that were much closer to that. They were aspirational, right? They were trying to do the right thing. They were trying to reflect the best of both America themselves, men in general. And it just feels like that's gone. Like Donald Trump has just decided, no, we're all going to be like degenerate.

sex pests who make fun of women, who, you know, beat up on people who are weaker than we are, who use whatever power we can, who steal other people's sacrifice, other people's service, other people's hard work and winning. Because that's it, right? Spain trains all that time, and they're at the pinnacle of what they have worked for for years and years to achieve. And Donald Trump's standing there being like, no, I'm going to take some of this. It's not his. And he only does it because he feels so broken inside that he needs it. I think this is a big part of what's going on, and I'm eager to see, this is why I don't like it when I see people mimic Donald Trump. I understand why people like what Newsom's doing and that kind of performance art holding up a mirror to Trump.

But I'm looking for somebody to show up that understands like that sense of restraint a little bit, that sense of judgment. Maybe I'm just, maybe I'm just off on one. But this is how I feel. No, no, this is interesting. And it's really important. And I thought your tweet put it so well. And I think this has been a good discussion. I mean, Mark Hurtling, I have known for a while.

He's an admirable man. And he's what the U.S. military, I think, strives to produce, if I can put it that way, or shape, or reward some of those character virtues, not obviously traits. Not everyone shows them or not as well as he does. That's one reason I so loathe Pete Hex-Seth. He is taking this thing that has been kind of built up in America and produced an awful lot of admirable people, Jim Mattis. I mean, there's just so many of them when you think of that generation that Mark is part of. And instead, Hagseth is this, you know, ridiculous, but also

disgusting, really, kind of, you know, wishes to be a bully and a tough guy and the whole macho thing in a very stupid and fake way in a way, but I mean, but more importantly, just offensive way, bullying way. Umberto Echow, I cite this piece all the time, is or fascism essay from 1995, he really has a brilliant, just a paragraph or two, about the machismo side of fascism or of quasi-fascism. And the idea that our institutions are degenerating and they could be corrupted so that that becomes the model, the way to get ahead, as opposed to being like Mark Hurtling or Stan Bacrystal or Jim Mattis, that is depressing. I hope it's not the case. And there's plenty of other people who are going, you know, fighting back, I'd say, and going in the other

direction. So that's a true culture war. I can take a stupid phrase, you know, phrase, right? That's a real war about character, not a war. It's a real competition about what kind of character do we want to produce in this country and do we want to admire? This bulwark podcast is sponsored by soul. So I just mentioned to Bill that I've been on a fitness journey, which means I just, I can't drink as much because it makes me feel kind of crappy the next day and I can't work out. And so as I become more mindful, of how I feel when socializing, winding down, just living life. Instead of defaulting to drinking, I've been choosing Soul's new mood gummies.

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off your entire order. Go to getsold.com and use the code the bulwark. That's getsold.com promo code the bullwork for 30% off. All right. So let's go back to Iran now that we've delved into that. Not on the sheet. Sorry, Tim. I just. I'm here to take us wherever on all kinds of places. So there were even more attacks this morning. The New York Times says that mediators are looking to prevent a full-blown war in the Middle East. It was only a week ago that Trump declared that the U.S. was charging tolls in the Strait of Hormuz, that we were in charge.

But of course, he later backed off the tolls. But like, things are getting blown up right now. Like there was news this morning of some people came across some of the Iranian minds that were planted. Tell me just what has been going through your head. this weekend, because you wrote this morning in morning shots, nothing about the last nine days of war has anything to do with Iran's ability or inability to get a nuclear weapon. CENTCOM, on the other hand, said last night that the latest wave of U.S. strikes was intended to further diminish Iran's ability to attack commercial vessels and civilian mariners transiting

the Strait of Hormuz, but there is no reason to think even more bombing will prevent Iran from making the straight impassable. So Trump's war is now a pointless war. That is Bill Crystal in today's morning shot. Are we going into a full-scale war? What is happening right now? Or at least in a pointless escalation, and a dangerous escalation, obviously, with real lives being lost and who knows what's on the immediate horizon here. Iran is partly responsible for this, but, you know, there's no reason to assume that Iran would behave well,

and they haven't behaved particularly well. And then Trump signed an agreement that sort of seemed to legitimate Iran's control of the straight at least for 60 days and their ability to seek to insist on certain conditions for going through. And once he signed it, Iran, saying, okay, we're holding you to it, and Trump's trying to back off. I mean, the degree to which every boast that Trump and Hexeth made was just false, the degree to which they've all lied to us. And I hope the uniformed military hasn't. I think even they, though, have been a little bit, but under a ton of pressure, obviously, to do so.

So their lies and moralize of a mission. CETCOM tells you what they've done. Leave a vague impression that it's all going well. But then it turns out, you know what? Their missiles program wasn't decimated. Their ability to shoot all kinds of mortars, weapons, drones at U.S. spaces in the region hadn't gone away. And they're actually being more ambitious. You know, Jordan's a little further, right, than some of the places they were hitting right next door in the UAE and stuff.

So, again, they were lying about their early success. And now Trump can't accept the fact that Iran has the better of us and that the thing to do is cut our losses and basically get out. It's going to be on Fort Bad, that the straight isn't really open the way it should be. It's an international waterway. But that's something that could be at least, you know, we could bargain and try to work it out and other countries could try to work it out and maybe it wouldn't be too disastrous. And instead he's getting us in deeper. The reason I quoted both Trump and CENTCOM is they're giving totally different reasons for why we're doing what we're doing.

But neither has anything to do with what we're doing. I mean, you know, we're just bombing up various parts, various parts of Iran's infrastructure. Some of them are vaguely, militarily related. Some of them aren't. We were doing it for a week. And look what happened this weekend with the bases in Jordan and stuff. And now Trump himself said, didn't he, it's retribution. So pay them back for what they did to our soldiers.

that's really a reason to run this kind of risk, this kind of dangerous escalation. So it further weakens us. Ultimately, it's going to further weaken us. The rest of the world looks at this and thinks, really. I mean, A, it's not going to work. So it's not like it shows our strength. And B, it just looks like it's driven by,

to get back. So earlier conversation, insecurity and wish that people not say that Iran outsmarted him, really. And it was, at a final point, it's his war. I'd say in the piece a few times, I just try to use the phrase Trump's war. And I capitalize W, You had a little argument with our friend Ben Parker about this because he said, yeah, you shouldn't

capitalize war. It's not really. But I try to sort of get the idea out there. It really is his war. This is not a war that anyone else was demanding. Congress, of course, never authorized or voted on it. There's no appropriation for it. He did Venezuela.

And now he's going to do Iran. And it's been going for five months. It's a big problem that Congress has not stopped it, but they should stop it now. Yeah. And I'll just note, just as a political matter, something I might talk about with JVL is the fact that, you in the first sort of six weeks of summer here, Trump's approval rating, it didn't, it's not really going up, but it is like drifted back slightly from 39, like he had been on a trajectory of, of dropping, and then it kind of now it's just gone from like 39% to 40%, which is obviously still not a good

approval rating. But I think that the Iran war kind of being off again, on again, Americans not really being sure. And then Trump doing a big 250, I'm going to announce that the war is over. I actually do think it takes Americans a while to realize, oh, no, it's not over. Oh, we're still in it. But I do think the gas price is jumping back up to four bucks here for the last, you know, stretch of summer going into it.

People are going to notice that again. I was going to ask you about that since you've been following this so closely in the focus groups and otherwise, too. I mean, yeah, they're up already like 13 points this past week and I think going to go up another 15 points this coming week just because that's already baked into the wholesale prices. and that comes, as you say, after the 2050 anniversary stuff ends, after the World Cup ends, it's clearly an escalation.

So the war is more front burner. The gas prices are rising. That's bad for Trump, right? That's right. And obviously summers are sort of like this, where people aren't always processing in real time. What's happening is people are checked out, right? Lots of people are off doing other things. They're not focused on the headlines.

But people notice gas prices when they're traveling. And when the price of everything jumps up, that is when you see people bail. I know people don't like this. It's sort of like you can't get people to be really mad about the slush fund or Blanche or whatever. But like the only thing that matters to them is the cost of gas. But it is true. And Trump is doing a wild thing here going into the midterms choosing to continue this war.

But it's also part of it is that it's just getting away for him. We've got places like Kuwait and other. It's getting destabilized. Yeah, no, absolutely. And I would say just if you look at the past midterm, of elections, usually Labor Day is kind of key in the sense that things start to, you know where it's going away at the time of Labor Day. Things very rarely reverse in the last two months. Often the momentum picks up a little bit in the direction is already going, especially in these,

that's why people call wave elections, wave elections. It kind of moves gradually in that direction that it becomes a bit of a wave. It's amazing how much of the summer's over, I could just say, personally, it's already July 20th. So what are we, six weeks, seven weeks to Labor Day? I mean, If he goes into Labor Day drifting down back 39, 38, 37, as opposed to going back up to 42-ish, that's a huge difference. You and I have done, we've talked to a lot of, we've talked to ourselves about this. We've talked to other people who study this a lot, around Browns, Dean, and others. Trump at 42, 43, it's not great for the Republicans, but maybe salvage.

What was that means in a lot of red states, he'll be 49, 50, 51. Right. Those red states are going to be eight points better or so 10 points better than the national average. If Trump's at 37, 38, then the red states are underwater. I mean, then you're asking the Republican Senate candidate in those states to run ahead of Trump's approval. And the history does show that Trump's approval correlates pretty closely with House and Senate candidates. So I think it's important politically, if you now pay a price for this for the next six weeks. This show is sponsored by Avin.

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Over the weekend, we also learned in a New York Times report that federal agents around the country were told in recent days that the FBI would no longer engage. investigate confrontations with immigration agents, cases that sometimes yield evidence that could be used to prosecute Department of Homeland Security agents implicated in violent encounters, according to people briefed by the decision. Okay, so they're basically saying if the DHS, one of these ICE agents, does something terrible, we're not going to investigate it, which doesn't seem possible. It doesn't seem possible they would just stop investigating these ICE agents. Well, they're going to say there could be internal investigation. That's what they've been saying.

the Inspector General of THS has a little team that investigates. The Inspector General, I remember this when I was in government, the Inspector General looks at things like whether someone has claimed expense accounts they shouldn't claim, or other things, other kind of ethical violations, so forth, they're not set up to actually investigate actions on the streets of major cities. And plus, it's part of DHS and ICE. You can imagine what the incentives are there. So, yeah, the notion that the federal government is not going to enforce

at least minimal standards of decent and lawful behavior on federal agents who have now killed people. I mean, it's not like theoretically, you know, we're very alarmed if the FBI isn't doing a lot of investigating of, I don't know, EPA inspectors. I mean, they probably should, if one of them is corrupt, but, you know, they're not going around killing too many people. So in a normal world, if a particular agency,

ICE, a particular division of DHS, has killed, what, four people who manifestly were just innocent on the streets of major cities, obviously two in Minneapolis, and then recently in Houston and in Maine, I guess three major cities in one small town. You know, any normal administration said, we have to look into this. We're going to have to review the practices of ICE. We're going to have maybe some external commission, blue ribbon commission, even take a look.

We're bringing some former people who work there to see what's going on. I mean, this isn't acceptable. The Trump administration's attitude is very revealing. It's the opposite. Well, killings, brutality, violence, stop investigating. It's really terrible. And so the same investigation by the New York Times found that the Trump administration, had filed charges against more than 550 people for assaulting federal officers.

Of the more than 400 cases that had been resolved, nearly half had unraveled, with charges being thrown out or withdrawn or the defendants being acquitted, which means that ICE is saying people did things that don't hold up in court, right? They're saying, like, oh, they looked at me weird. And so I had to do something about it, or they were protesting. And so that's a terrible record for ICE behavior that the things that they're claiming aren't standing up in court. And there's shocking examples of just lying, lying to judges by ICE agents and by lawyers on behalf of ICE agents and Border Patrol agents. No, it's a rogue agency that feels entirely, this has been encouraged to be violent and now feels there's never really felt there'd be much penalty for it, didn't pay a penalty for it.

There are people dead. Is anyone paying a penalty for kill? Rene Good or Alex Freddie or now people in Houston or Maine. I don't believe so. No, I think it's like in the Catholic Church at the height of their, you know, bad stuff. They're just like shuffling people around, putting them in different precincts and just moving them. Yeah. No, it's terrible.

And it really does bring home how major chunks of DHS, especially ICE and Border Patrol, how rotten they've become. That's why I keep saying abolish ICE, not because everything ice does. No, man. This is a real woke-field crystal stuff, yeah. No, I know. Not because everything ICE does, some of it has to be done by somewhat, obviously, in government. It will be done. And there's the administrative things and other things,

coordinating with local police departments to deport people who serve jail terms and should be deported and so forth. But I do think it's an actual, like, organizational matter, putting on my sort of old, you know, what I studied decades ago with James Kewilson about organizational behavior. If I became president of January 29, I'd look at it, I think, and you can't fix it. Start over.

Obviously, there's certain things you can put in DOJ, certain things you can put elsewhere in DHS, certain things you can put in other agencies to do, you know, to do those functions that need to be done. But it sounds like the whole organization or whatever. Enough of the organization is rotten to its core that you couldn't sort of take it over and just fix it with a couple of band-aids. And sort of the obvious reason why it's different is that they're putting so much money into it. They've hired so many new people that have been, let's say, trained with air quotes, by this administration with the values of this administration. And I use values as a negative term in this case. And so I am always resistant to sort of maximalist things like abolish ice.

But your point about this is going to end up having to be a root and branch operation because of how much they have delegitimized it. I mean, every time I see an ice agent and they're. still rolling around with their faces covered. Like, we cannot have a secret police. And this is, I cannot believe people are tolerating it. I mean, I guess we're not technically, but so strange, Mark Wayne Mullen hasn't made things better over there at DHS. Going back to the political implications, I don't know if it was the World Cup, if it was

250, if it was a sense of all of us checking out for a bit in the summer, because you're like, who can take all this? I do think people are going to roll back into September with the ICE agents back with their masks, shooting people, and a war that is spinning out of control, gas prices that are high. I do think when the American people look up from their summer vacation,

they're going to find a world that has not improved over the summer. No, very much. So just on the ice thing, I mean, they did a pretty good job from their point of view of, they fired Chrissy Knoem, they got rid of that Bovino creep, Mullen came in, Homan was more prominent, they talked about, we're lower profile, we're stopping some of this.

They didn't really say they were changing anything really, but they gave the impression that they were changing. And they did pull back in terms of the most visible stuff. So people could tell themselves if you wanted to be sort of okay with Trump that, you know, well, I think he's fixed it. It's unfortunate it went as far as it did. And now you can't say that. It does fit, as you say, with the other issues in a funny way.

It's like Iran. They had a bit of a reprieve there in April, May, June, maybe. of seeming to be not doing the really grotesque things they were doing. I think you could still see they were doing a fair amount of bad, very bad stuff. But you had to be like looking on Twitter and stuff for that, I suppose, or maybe in the city where it was happening. But after these recent killings, you can't tell yourself that anymore. And after their reaction to it, which is nothing.

The other thing is the Democrats did hold up the funding. It was kind of a big issue there for a while. What would that be January, February, March? Then Republicans jammed through the money on reconciliation. and it kind of just faded from the headlines. So I think for all these reasons, it's sort of like the war and like the gas prices too.

Kind of a lull. But the storm has reemerged, hasn't it? Yeah. This show is sponsored by Ridge Wallet. Losing your wallet is the worst. I'm the kind of person who puts my cards in like the sleeve of my phone to try to keep from losing them.

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We at the bulwark. Go get your Ridge wallet. Thanks, Ridge. All right, Bill. So over the weekend, there are these two brothers. Well, tell me first, Bill. Do you know who the Tate brothers are? I know who those degenerates are.

I don't know much about them, I've got to say. They seem to be sex criminals. And Trump and Maca like them for some reason. Yes, this is one of those. I now yield the floor to you. It's your generation, really, you know? I don't want to own this. Because this is one of these phenomena that I cannot fathom.

But there's these two brothers for our listeners who might not know, Andrew and Tristan Tate, you might know Andrew Tate because he's like a key figure in the Manosphere and they were arrested on Saturday in Miami on British charges of rape and sex trafficking. And they were taken into custody by U.S. Marshals for extradition to the United Kingdom. Now, here's the thing. These guys, this is what I want to remind people of, they had been in Romania and they'd already been accused of sex trafficking, of rape. This is one of those stories I try to avoid. I don't want to know. It's like too dark for me. But at some point, I did go down the rabbit hole to really learn about

Andrew Tate. And it's just videos of this guy talking about beating women, about trafficking women, about how you suppress and control women, like just the dirtbaggiest, disgusting. And of course, because Trump has never met a sex past he doesn't like. He doesn't like. He's never met somebody who assaults women that he won't defend. Tim and I did a whole video recently reminding people about how he jumped into the defense of Mike Tyson after his rape charges for which he went to prison. I mean, obviously he has a lot of sexual assaulters in his ranks or people who've been accused of sexual assault like Pete Hague, Seth.

And they're just always all around Trump. But this like goes back like decades. Bill Clinton. He defended Bill Clinton. back in the day. There was a long thing about how much he liked his kids playing with Michael Jackson. Anyway, point is, Trump has never met a bad guy who's mistreated women, I mean, Jeffrey Epstein, that he doesn't want to hang out with. And so it shouldn't surprise anybody that Andrew Tate's empire of abuse includes lots of relationships with the Trump family so much so that because they

offered electoral support as influencers with young men, they were allowed to come. leave their sort of exile in Romania, where they were under house arrest, again, rape and human trafficking. But in 2025 in February, they suddenly left Romania for Florida, where they were welcomed because of the Trump administration. They were basically allowed to come here in 2016. Andrew Tate visited Trump Jr. in Trump Tower and was posting sort of pro-Maga tweets. He also has gotten close to baron Trump and is like, you know, giving him advice about tailors and things like, and God knows what else. So the thing that I'm interested in seeing here is whether or not Trump tries to stand in the way of their extradition because he loves to intervene on behalf of it

could be Diddy. He supports Diddy. You know, like anybody accused of these kinds of crimes, Trump will come to their aid. And they're appealing to Trump. The Daily Mail reported yesterday that the Tate's lawyer said the president hates political persecution and communism. And this was an example of both. What do you think? Do you think the White House might fight their extradition? I mean, I don't know, but they or try to subvert it maybe a little behind the scenes. But Trump's pretty willing to go out there on this stuff, right?

I mean, he's pardoning sex offenders among many other criminals and fraudsters and stuff, if they pay enough. It does get back to the, if I could just say our earlier conversation, too, the degree to which the whole thing is full of people who are really terrible. I'm just terrible behavior, you know. I mean, I'm old enough to remember when really this was kind of condemned and genuinely, you know, when judged administrations by how effectively they prosecuted people like this, not whether they let them go or welcomed them to the country. And didn't we intervene, in fact, didn't Trump send people to help get them out of Romania?

I mean, there was actually, yeah, yeah. No, I think thematically, you know, I've been sitting here saying to myself, Sarah, you're sitting in for Tim and you do this whole thing about men and you go off on this whole thing. We're supposed to be talking about the Iran War. But no, I've decided this is the correct thing for us to have been discussing because it is the core of so much of what we are seeing right now. And I think that these guys make content about how you treat women terribly. And I think that this is part of the brokenness, right? Is that it used to be that sort of, the desperate brokenness of men like this could be confined to the world that they inhabited.

But now in the creator economy, there are whole audiences of young men that listen to these guys talk about like, this is how you treat women. And they see it from the president of the United States, the richest man in the world, to the guy who's leading our wars, you know, Pete Higgseth and the military. Like, at some point, it is everybody that people, and then you've got these influencers. And so I do think it speaks to something that is deeply broken. All right, Bill, as we close, I want to talk about some election popery because there's a bunch of things happening right now. So first, I just want to do a little polling because the Washington Post Ipsop poll late last week finds registered voters favoring Democrats by only 3%.

So this is really the generic ballot where, you know, if you go back five months or four months, the generic ballot gap was like getting between seven and nine. Like it was a big spread between people who were saying, I would like a generic Democrat over a generic Republican by quite a wide margin. And, you know, while Trump's approval has only crept up ever so slightly as we were discussing before, the generic ballot gap has been shrinking. And I don't know if you have a theory on that, but the Post said, Republicans are not losing by a wide margin among the broadest electorate, despite President Donald Trump's deep unpopularity and broad concerns about the economy,

the war with Iran, and immigration issues. You know, I did tweet this weekend, this is a phenomenon I've been tracking for a long time, where even as Trump, is unpopular and I think Trump's popularity is really important for elections. I think it's important for a ton of reasons. I can go into all my Bush line theories and why we want Trump down to 32% or below. But I do think that Democrats are going to have to grapple with the fact that as unpopular as Trump is right now, and he's still too popular based on what we are dealing with. Like a high inflation, these should be just destroyers of an administrative.

his administration's popularity. He's gotten into a war, which he's lied and blundered his way into. They have been shooting Americans in the streets. The headlines have been relentlessly negative. Costs are still high for people. He's done nothing to lower prices. Gas prices are high. This should be ending him. And I think the reason that it's not is that if you look issue by issue by issue, Republicans still edge out Democrats on most of the issues that Americans care the most about. The economy, inflation, who do you trust to handle foreign policy? Who do you trust to handle immigration? Like, broadly, Republicans keep having an edge. That shows that people are just not running to Democrats in the face of Trump's just total unpopularity. What do you think is

going on here? Do you have a theory? Yeah, a couple. I mean, I think actually Trump's unpopularity will end up trumping the people's doubts about the Democrats for this election, for this election, because it is so much about do you want a Congress that helps Trump or Congress that checks Trump? And I think that's a voters will default to that, which is the most important thing. No individual Democratic senator or a House member is going to make policy in much of any area. The Democrats as a whole aren't going to make much policy of Trump's president. So I don't feel quite as worried as some about 2026. I think the generic It's closed a little, but it has correlated, as you say, with Trump having a slight uptick,

assuming he goes back to a slight downtick. And even if he doesn't, I think the natural momentum will be generic to open up a little bit here in the last few months. It's often the way it goes. And in terms of Trump, I slightly disagree with your formulation that he should be, you know, really in worse shape. I mean, Trump got 50% of the vote. He's now getting, let's just say, 40 to be, you know, he's lost one and five of his voters are now disapproved of him.

His approval was about identical to his vote right after Election Day. who's gone from 50 to 40, which is 10% of the electorate, 20% of his voters, that's a pretty big move by the public. And I will say to the public's credit, should be bigger. I wish it were bigger. It's bigger than it is among elites. So I think we have two problems. One is the Democrat problem, which should be addressed.

They've had some primaries. They've had some people who weren't so great, get a lot of press. And I think that's probably had a marginal effect. So all at all, it's but a little bit of a not negative summer for them exactly, but I'd say a slightly uninspiring lull summer with some negative aspects for them. But, for me, I mean, the economy continues to be growing. Inflation is high, but it's not as high as it was with Biden. The war maybe now really will come home, but he did get a lull from that.

So I think among sort of regular voters, it's understandable that he's, I think it would have been unreasonable to ask for that much more of a desertion rate than one in five, especially because the elites remain so horrible. That's what strikes me the most. You're a regular voter. you look up and you think, I don't really like some of this stuff. Could it get worse and stuff? Well, business leaders seem fine with Trump.

There's no rebellion among big shot law firms, the universities, kind of quiet. Republican members of Congress, Republican governors, know for whom most, by definition, most of these swingish-ish-Republican-ish voters have voted, right? That's why they're the ones who are in play, you know. And they do prefer the Republicans on some issues. They're all on board with Trump. I do think the failure of the elites has just been appalled. I wish the public were a little more upset.

And I wish Democrats would get their act together. I think it's getting kind of late, honestly, in 26. We got what did you think we must have 90% of the candidates we're going to get? We could use a good Senate nominee in Michigan. I think that would, I think we're going to get a better one in May. And then we looked like we're going to get three weeks ago. I think at the Senate races then have pretty good nominees, actually, on the whole, both sensible and a lot of younger ones.

I'm not as worried about 26, but I very much think Democrats have to get their act together. 27, 28, wouldn't hurt to start a little bit now. A lot of opposing Trump fervently, and as you and Tim and I always try to point out, you can be centrist or modern in various policies and still be fiercely anti-Trump, you know. That would help a lot. And then if some elites would ever behave like responsible leaders as opposed to pathetic, you know, supplicants to Trump, that would be nice. It would be nice.

I do think that being able to focus on just like the eye of Soron, of the press and everybody else focused on Graham Platner, focused on the DSA candidates that won in New York, has not been good versus sort of brand Democrats, because that stuff gets independent voters nervous. And I don't think that Democrats want to grapple always with the fact that I think we live in a center, center, right country and a lot of the states that really have big races, with the exception of Maine, actually.

but places like Wisconsin, places like Pennsylvania, they are nowhere near as left as the average New York city voter. And so these are just very different places. My good news, silver lining for Democrats, is that they are 10 points more likely to show up to the polls than Republicans. Like there is an enthusiasm gap. And this is what gets, I think, to, that sometimes this polling can miss about voters.

where right now there's like this factional fight on the left around centris and and being more progressive. But like the voters just really want Democrats to be more aggressive. And sometimes the lower support for Dems that you see in polls are actually a lot of Democrats mad at Democrats for not being aggressive enough. And so those voters are still going to turn out and vote for Democrats. They're the reason that John Ossoff and James Taureko and a lot of the good candidates running the cycle on the Demp side are drowning in money because those voters are still enthusiastic about those individual candidates, if not the party as a whole. Okay. Last thing where I do want to just touch on Maine briefly, Troy Jackson became the presumptive Democratic nominee

for Senate over the weekend. And I guess the best way that I would describe Jackson as Graham Platner's politics with a lot less baggage. He finished third in the primary for governor, but he was endorsed by Bernie Sanders and campaigned with both Sanders and Platner. He's an electoral overperformer. He got reelected by five points in a district that voted 59-39 for Trump in 2024. And while he is not a lobsterman, he is a loggar from Alighash, which is pretty much like the most far-flung town in Maine and has a beer named after it. So what do you think?

Do you think that this is the guy to beat Susan Collins? Yeah. I mean, I would have been fine with the others who were thinking of running to. It might have been slightly closer to them on policy stuff. But as you say, he outperformed in a very Trumpy district in his state Senate races. Now they knew him there already. But that gets it known well statewide. He was president of the state senate.

It's not like he's some kind of guy from nowhere who has no track record. And when the Maine Democrats did okay when he was president of the state Senate. So I think, yeah, I feel pretty good about Maine. I mean, that's a state where Trump is now with 38%. and Collins can outperform, will outperform Trump, but you're asking a lot for her to outperform it this much in an election, which is so much about do you want a Senate that will check Trump, Collins helps make the increased additional ICE funding possible.

There are lots of issues to use against her. So I feel pretty good about Maine, and North Carolina, those two look like pretty quite likely pickups. Michigan's the one that one Senate seats the Democrats hold. It's at risk, though I think less so if Haley Stevens wins, which I think she will in a couple of weeks. And then they have to pick up two or three, if you want to, you know, to be a little on the safe side of the Ohio, Iowa, Texas, Alaska, four.

And then there were two others that are actually possible to Kansas, I'd say. Yeah, I actually think Democrats will win the House and the Senate. Okay. That's some optimism from Bill. I'm tempted to ask you about Haley Stevens because I know you love a, like, plucky young woman striver. Like, that's your jam a little bit. I thought McMorrow might be a better candidate at one point. I think Haley-Sadens is kind of establishment and sort of, I know her something.

She's an impressive paul in the sense that she's just, she's been through tough races. She knows her way around. I've always thought she was a little underestimated in that way. I mean, for all that we like, everyone likes new and different and doesn't like old, you know, people who've been around a bit. But on the other hand, there is something about having been through some races, you know, and it's a tough state like Michigan. and having some sense of what the voters want. I don't know.

We'll see if she wins the primary, but I think she'd be a strong good candidate, certainly in the general. Yeah, I do think it's funny. Sometimes in nationalized races, nationalized primaries like this one, between Stevens and El-Said, people tend to, like, take this national lens on things, and, you know, they see videos of Haley Stevens

kind of being a goofball, like with this deep accent and, you know, let's go get them. And people sort of think it's cringe politics without understanding that actually locally, that's playing just fine. That actually they find the, oh, somebody who's going to work hard, head down, who, you know, I don't want to call it Tracy Flick energy because that has a lot of negatives to it too. But, you know, I think the voters, there's plenty of voters who are there for that. But it's also, you know, it's also a time for change.

anti-establishment mood. So I'm not, I'm not as certain as you are, but I do think that now that McMorow's out of the race, she was also my preference, you will see Haley just getting like a lot more of a look and that that will probably help her because what comes out is a bunch of like, I did this and I did this and I did this. It's like real work, real action that Michiganers like. All right, Bill, this was fun. Thank you for doing this with me on Monday. Guys, Sam Stein will be sitting in chair tomorrow so don't miss that go subscribe to the show at apple podcast subscribe to the bulwark on youtube become a bulwark plus member at the bulwark.com see you tomorrow a flame harmless man is not a good man no good man is a dangerous man that practices self-discipline

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