The Bulwark Podcast - Will Saletan and McKay Coppins: Fear and Loathing

Episode Date: June 5, 2024

Trump and MAGA, with all their banana republic claims, are not being America First—they're being anti-American, and renouncing the country they live in. Meanwhile, the WSJ goes dog bites man on Biden, Europeans are fixated on our election and terrified Trump will win, and the GOP's new Hunter-inspired concern about enforcing gun laws. Plus, will Mitt endorse Joe? McKay Coppins and Will Saletan join Tim Miller. show notes: McKay's piece, "What Europe Fears" JVL's response to Romney Clip from Seinfeld's first Izzy Mandelbaum episode

hello and welcome to the bullard podcast i'm your host tim miller uh he's back today with his pink pony will samatan uh happy to have him later we got mckay coppins who has a pretty alarming piece in the atlantic this week will how you doing, brother? Good, good. Technically orange pony, but pink is close enough. Okay, well, it's pink in my mind's eye. I want to start with the Hunter Biden trial. I gotta tell you, I'm just, I am so encouraged by the just overwhelming support among Republican politicians for very stringent enforcement of firearm application law. I think this is a great sign for where the party's moving. Don't you, Will? Isn't there a pony in here?

The party is ready to start enforcing firearms laws. And if you don't cross one T on an application for a gun, then we might put you away. We might put you away. That's the first step towards cracking down on guns. Is that what's happening in the Hunter Biden case, you think? Yeah, no, this is a really, really serious crime. So this is at the time that Hunter Biden was filing his application to get the gun. He had to fill out something that said he was not an

unlawful user of drugs, right? And so, I think he checked a box or something like that. And, you know, I got to tell you, Tim, only Donald Trump would be prosecuted for this crime, right? You, me, Hunter Biden, nobody else would be prosecuted, just so we're clear about the two-tiered system of justice. I noticed that people sometimes don't pick up my sarcasm. Like, two dozen of you thought I didn't know who Ezra Klein was earlier this week based on my inbox. So, sometimes it's sarcasm, guys. If you're wondering, is Tim being serious? Probably not.

No, I don't think that this is a sign of the two-tiered system of justice. I don't think that this is a sign that Republicans are now very excited about strict enforcement of gun laws. I think that maybe they're just being hypocrites. Will, I don't know. What do you think? We just had to listen to every Republican under the sun complaining that only Donald Trump would be prosecuted for these unimportant business violations in New York, all that blah, blah, blah. So what we have here is a parallel case. And Tim, it's totally amazing to me how Republicans find ways to ignore every obvious reputation of their lie about the

two-tiered system of justice. So remember like the classified documents, like, oh, they're prosecuting Trump, but they're not prosecuting Biden for the classified documents. Meanwhile, we have the Mike Pence case, where Mike Pence, like Joe Biden, returned the documents when the government asked for them. Republicans just ignored that and said, it's unfair because you're prosecuting Trump and not Biden. Same thing here. It's like, okay, there's a technical violation of the law. Donald Trump is being prosecuted for it. And they're like, they don't do this to Democrats. Meanwhile, you literally have the Hunter Biden case going on at the same time, a technical violation. He's being prosecuted and they just

won't acknowledge that this totally falsifies their lie about the two tiers. There's like a handful of Republicans left with shame. I think it was Igor Bobich, my friend. If it was somebody else, I apologize. It was running around the hill asking about this yesterday to Republican senators. And you did have people like John Cornyn out there going like, you know, I guess it is probably time to just relook at everything that's happening in the justice system.

They couldn't bring themselves to admit that all of their nonsense attacks on the justice system in the Donald Trump situation was total political expediency bullshit. And so they start doing some hand-waving about, I don't know, maybe it is unfair to him. Who knows? The whole thing is preposterous. You wrote this morning, from election denialism to jury denialism, you've been listening to these guys talk about the case. Talk about that evolution. Well, so this was much worse than I expected. I sat down after the verdict came down in New York, and I'm just looking at everything Republicans have said, everything on their Twitter accounts, all their interviews on right-wing TV,

on mainstream TV. And it was totally shocking to me how many of them were just attacking the jury and dismissing the verdict. And it wasn't just they were like, well, Manhattan's liberal. It was like, they're just lying about the jury. And they're saying, oh, no, no sensible jury could have come up with that. It's too suspicious that he got convicted on all the accounts that has to be, you know, the fixes in that kind of thing. And so what we basically had is a party that was willing to reject election results because Donald Trump didn't win is now basically doing the same thing to the courts. They're saying, you know, any jury verdict against Trump has got to be wrong and illegitimate. So they're attacking the rule of law, not just as it applies to elections or the Constitution. But like, this is just a basic criminal case.

I mean, 12 citizens sat and watched the case, listened to all the evidence, and they came to a conclusion. We used to have this thing, Tim, about respecting juries. You can argue with the case, but to say, as many Republicans have, I literally don't care what the jury said. It doesn't matter. This is just a level of rejection of norms that I don't know how we can survive this as a country. I mean, if people don't accept the result of courts or elections. It's just like blatant bullshit. There's Dan Bishop, who's a Republican from North Carolina, who's now running for AGs in the House. He was this week saying it's as bad as it was in Alabama

in 1950 if a person happened to be black in order to get justice. I think we all know which side of that Dan Bishop would have been on if it was 1950. But like, let's put that aside. I don't even know what to say. what do you say to shit like this it's just so preposterous so dangerous and yet it continues and as you point out this is this is what passes for republican outreach to black voters it's like you know you got discriminated against based on the color of your skin we're getting discriminated against based on having committed crimes maybe it. Maybe it's orange skinned. Donald Trump is also getting discriminated against based on the orange skin.

And so we're going to attack the system and say that the whole law enforcement system is illegitimate because they're coming after us because we're conservative or something. Again, remember, Mike Pence, conservative. They didn't go after him because he didn't commit crimes. Donald Trump did. So it's not about being conservative. It's about just being a plain old criminal. And it's pretty disgusting. I think Wes Moore said this on TV this weekend. It was that it's offensive.

Yeah, Governor Moore, that it's offensive to tell black people that your way of empathizing with them is that you've been prosecuted and convicted of crimes. That's just about being a plain old criminal. I got a meme sent to me. I'm worried I'm turning into a boomer that I'm going to share a meme on this podcast, but here it is by a friend, David. It's the man in the town hall meme where he's standing up and giving an unproven thought or maybe an unapproved thought to everyone that says, there should be more charges brought against people who lie on gun purchase applications i do agree i agree with this let's do it can we bait the republicans out of hatred of hunter biden and the laptop from hell into supporting stricter gun application enforcement that could be your pony if that

was ever to happen can i pull out one fun fact from the hunter biden case yeah so for folks who remember the bill clinton years remember the meaning of is? Bill Clinton said, there is no, you know, sexual whatever with Monica Lewinsky. The defense was that that was technically true because at the time Clinton said it, it was true. He wasn't literally having sex with her at that moment. That is part of the defense of Hunter Biden and the gun case. His lawyer, Abby Lowe, literally, you know, got up and said, at the moment when he's filling out the gun application and says he's not on, at that moment, he was not high. So, come on, guys. At that very second, not high, TBD on that. Yeah, the Clinton one, he said, there's nothing going on

between us. I always thought there's a lot of words there that are kind of weasel words they focused in on the is there is is nothing going on between us but between also potentially could be an opportunity going on or did i what do we mean by going on good old bill clinton he's kind of to blame for while we're here all right the wall street journal thinks biden is old we've been covering this story on the podcast i don't know if you've kept up with it. Biden is one day older than he was yesterday. They quote nobody on the record except for Kevin McCarthy, very reliable source. He says that Biden's not the same person as he was when he was VP. Mike Johnson, excuse me, they quote two people on the record, the former speaker and the current Republican

speaker. Mike Johnson said that in a meeting with Biden, he didn't, the administration had stopped some energy projects. Biden said that they were still studying that. Actually, that was a true, they had actually stopped them, which I'm opposed to. And Johnson said that was maybe a sign that he was losing it, that he didn't remember the details of every policy happening across the government. You know, the nuts of this article, I don't want to spend too much time on this because the nuts of this article to me were two things. One was a quote from Jim Risch, a Republican senator from Idaho. What you see on TV is what you get. And then the other was from a voice of God sentence from the journal reporters themselves. They wrote most of those who said Biden performed poorly were Republicans, but some Democrats said he showed signs of age in several

of the occasions. Is this not the most dog bites man story in history? Yeah, Republicans say Biden has dementia. Some Democrats are willing to admit they're a little worried he's getting old. Like, isn't that what everybody says in public? Like, what's the story? Yeah, no, I mean, it's, most of it's obvious. So, I don't know if you've covered this before, but this was one of my favorite examples for people reading newspaper stories about how to decipher what happened in the story. So the first three paragraphs of this thing are the first line of the first paragraph, when President Biden met with congressional leaders in the West Wing in January, right?

Second one was in a February one-on-one chat in the Oval Office with House Speaker Mike Johnson. And then the third paragraph starts, last year when Biden was negotiating with House Republicans to lift the debt ceiling. So we got three stories here. And for those of you who didn't figure it out already, every one of those is with Republicans. And so we have multiple sources, but yeah, they're all like, this is the Republican spin on Biden. And Tim, what is the Republican spin? Apparently, Joe Biden sometimes closes his eyes. And he speaks so softly that he's hard to hear. He appears to sort of like collect himself. Like, I'm sorry, like, there's nothing here that was revealed to me that I haven't literally seen watching him on C-SPAN or at the White House. Also, apparently he has good days

and bad days. I'm not going to say this is nothing because we've seen this with old people. Old people tend to have more bad days than middle-aged people or young people, right? So that is an issue. But at no point in this story, in my opinion, do they show that Biden made a bad decision, did something unwise from a standpoint, based on his inability to sort of like collect himself in a particular moment, which just goes to the larger point that Joe Biden, he does have bad moments. And like, if you're rooting for him to beat Donald Trump, as I am, you're wishing don't close your eyes at this moment, Joe, don't like mumble, don't lose track of your sentence. But in terms of running the country, I don't see anything in the story that makes me think he's not doing a good job of running the country or can't do a good job. I do wish he didn't whisper. You know, there was a longtime magazine interview with him yesterday, which was very Biden-y, you know, there didn't seem like there's any new news in it. He was sort of

repeating what he said on a range of issues, you know for a long time now he did it seems like maybe challenge the reporter to a fight when the age was brought up i don't know if that's i don't know if that's exactly the right play here what was that what's that oh man my mind's going blank now i'm the old one what was the seinfeld episode where the old man like tries to challenge jerry to a weightlifting contest and then he falls over? Oh, I forgot. The name of that old man. You don't want to be that old guy challenging people to a push-up match-up, really.

But he spoke on wide-ranging issues of time. He's too old. I wish he wasn't as old as he is. But if you're going to have a news story about it, the new is important in the word news, the new part. You need to give me something that's not just Republicans say that he's old. Right. And let me just flag one thing that isn't in this story that is actually, to my mind,

the worst moment I've seen from Joe Biden in a while. And it isn't about necessarily dementia. It's the moment when he's walking away and the reporter's asking him about the Trump trial, the Trump verdict. And he does that smile. It looks diabolical, right? He didn't need to do that, right? And I think a more composed younger president wouldn't have done that, would have just had the discipline to not put an expression on his face. That kind of stuff is

costly. And I don't know where you are on this, Tim, but I'm not worried about Joe Biden being president, running the country. I'm worried, increasingly worried about him as the candidate, as the messenger, doing stuff like that, that loses votes that could put Donald Trump back in the White House. I thought that moment looked bad live, actually. And then kind of, I thought it looked funny on social media. So I think it could cut both ways a little bit. But yeah, I hear you. Graham Wood at The Atlantic, I think, put this well. This is not going to be a Baghdad Bob podcast if Joeiden starts to like fall over and forget things and starts to deteriorate in a very obvious way like we need

to be honest about what's happening but i think graham would put this well in stories about biden or trump cognitive decline take care to distinguish two different claims one not the man he was 10 years ago very normal and two not the man he was 10 months ago, very normal. And two, not the man he was 10 months ago, very, very alarming. And I think that's right. Like, if you come to me with a new story that's like, hey, man, I was with Joe Biden and after the midterms and he was, you know, he was Joe Biden, he was sharp, he was, you know, he's kind of doing his thing where sometimes he did the whisper voice and, you know, sometimes he loses train of thought, but he was mostly with it.

He was mostly sharp. We were talking about a wide range of issues. And then I was with him last week and it was like the guy was drooling. OK, yeah, that story come to me with that story. This Wall Street Journal story seemed like they wanted to have the goods, but they they really didn't. One more thing on this journal story, to your point about the 10 months, they literally have a story from 10 months.

They literally have a story in here about Biden meeting with Kevin McCarthy when McCarthy was speaker, right? What they're describing here is not a trajectory since last year. It includes last year. Things from last year. Very good point. Jason's come through. It's Izzy Mandelbaum. Mandelbaum, Mandelbaum, Mandelbaum. It's a great Seinfeld episode. Even though Jerry's been a little weird lately. Did see the thing jerry did where he was like i liked men when they were men and he did this interview with barry weiss he's like i liked it in the 60s when we had joe nameth and men that were met and i was like i'm like okay man i mean we got men who are men now i don't know the mma guys are out there the rocks out there are softy men that can also be men i i just put me in a home

will put me in a home if 30, put me in a home. If 30 years from now, I'm doing a podcast interview and I'm like, I really liked the 90s. You know, let me tell you, I wish things were more like it was in the 90s. Anyway, sorry, Jerry Seinfeld. I like the show, but that interview was pretty rough. Speaking of being up for the rigors of the presidency, let's check in with Donald Trump. I am the political prisoner of a failing nation, but I will soon be free on November 5th, the most important day in the history of our country, and we will together make America great again. Thank you. Let's just listen to NTG2. I want to listen to both of these together before I get your reaction. Our country is gone. We are post-constitution. And that's because the Democrats in New York,

the state of New York, convicted President Trump for 34 felony counts that are fake charges and nothing but a political attack and lies. And Steve, I'm done. I came to Washington this week hoping and praying that I would see a new Republican conference, a Republican conference that understands the war that has happened in this party, a war where not a single shot has been fired, but this is a literal war. No more MTG. What the fuck? He's not in prison. He's golfed literally five days in a row.

Ron Filipkowski on the Friday podcast is on the golf watch. He's golfed every five days in a row. Ron Filipkowski on the Friday podcast is on the golf watch. He's golfed every day since he's gotten convicted. What? Okay. So, Tim, you're doing what is the healthier, lighthearted take on this, which is this is ridiculous, right? He's out golfing. Let me go hyperbolic on you, because this just drives me crazy. When you say you are the political prisoner of this country, it is a failing country. Marjorie Taylor Greene says we're at war. It's a banana republic. This phrase banana republic is going all over it. All the republics in Congress have united on this.

You're talking about the United States. You're saying we reject the votes of the people of the United States. They voted us out. We didn't accept that result. There was a trial conducted in the United States on a jury of Americans found me guilty. I reject that. I'm a political prisoner. The January 6th perpetrators who obviously committed crimes, it's all on video, right? They're prosecuted. They're political prisoners too. You're renouncing America. This is anti-American. This is, what did she say? This is our country is gone. Yeah, our country is gone. The country that you and I live in, Tim, this America, the one that, you know, voted against Donald Trump, that prosecuted and found Donald Trump guilty, this is not our country. Well, at that point,

you're not America first. You're just plain old anti-American, right? They're rejecting our country, aren't they? Yeah, no, this is like 1980s communist, you know, beatnik shit is what this is. It's indistinguishable from that. We talked with Crystal on Monday about the upside down American flag. I mean, it's all at peace with all of that. How can we live in a place where it's like, okay, we're going to all analyze every utterance of Joe Biden and decide that he's all there. And then meanwhile, on the other side of the split screen, this guy is like just offering out hallucinatory bullshit about how he is indistinguishable for Navalny. And he's some like political prisoner and that Joe Biden is running a fascistic regime, imprisoning his political rivals. When, by the way, his son is on trial. The whole thing is just a total hallucination, a total delusion.

It's QAnon. It's where we go one, where we go all. There's some percentage of people that are bought in with this. And I guess there's another percentage of people that are just Trump people that are like, that's just Trump. And I get it. Like, oh, the mean tweets. We don't care about the mean tweets. But that's where they're landing on this. Oh, that's another percentage of people that are just trump people that are like we just that's just trump and i get it like oh the mean tweets we don't care about the mean tweets but that's where they're landing on this oh that's just going to be trump he's going to talk about how the country's over eventually doesn't his rhetoric have to at least somewhat overlap with people's to use a liberal term lived experiences like or like or doesn't the house of cards fall down at some point here's what i I really want, Tim. I'm

totally freaked out about this. I feel like I want you to talk me down from it. I'm seriously alarmed that all this civil war stuff, when Trump says this stuff about political prisoner, I'm afraid that there's political violence coming. All this talk about civil war, the regime, we reject our government. This is the kind of shit that that just it's going to lead to an explosion i think but what i'm hearing from you is like a more like let's step back it's ridiculous it's a hallucination we're not actually headed there i think that's your view is that right yeah i'm worried about one-off violence and we're going to talk in the next thing with the mckay coppins i think that european leaders are very worried about violence i don't know i'm very worried about lone wolf violence radicalized people people who are um anti-social that are

getting a lot of this stuff on truth social or whatever going out and acting alone or with a small group of people when comey was on the pod you know i think he and others have made this case made a pretty compelling case like the way that doj for all of my criticisms of DOJ and the way they slow walked the Trump investigation the way that they cracked down on the January 6th protesters has really had a chilling effect the Trump guilty verdict and you could have imagined a world where there was a real kind of a violent mob outside of that and like there wasn't and a lot of these guys are scared don't want to go to jail some of the worst players are off the field because they're in jail. You know, that calms me down a little bit on the mass violence side of things. But that is a form of taking it seriously. That kind of prosecution is that they're not

blowing it off and they're sending a message of deterrence, which is something like an old fashion conservative would have said, right? You got to enforce the law. You got to send a message that this behavior won't be tolerated or it will grow. Speaking of delusions, Trump's delusions, I've been wanting to get to this climate clip all week. This was him on Fox & Friends earlier in this week. We discussed some of the other gross parts of the interview with Crystal. But I want to just dig in on what he said about climate change a little bit. When they say that the seas will rise over the next 400 years, one-eighth of an inch, you know,

which means basically you have a little more beachfront property. OK, think of it. The seas are going to rise. Who knows? Ha ha ha. This is the big threat. I watched Biden the other night. It's the greatest existential. He loves that word because it's a big word. And he thinks, you know, he thinks he doesn't even know what the hell the word means. He goes, it's the greatest existential threat to our country, global warming. There's always been climate deniers on the right. There's no doubt about that.

But when people are like, Tim, did the party leave you or did you leave them? Like John McCain's platform in 2008 was we should have cap and trade. So it was like on the John McCain agenda had he been elected president in 2008. So we've had a little bit of a change here. The young voters, you know, there's all this talk about concern about young voters on Gaza. I do wonder if that lands or any other thoughts you have on Donald Trump's lack of concern about climate change. Can we start with the Moore Beachfront property for just a second? Just do a little math on this.

For those of you at home, you can try this in your own home with a little experiment. Put a rock in a container, a bowl or something, and pour some water on it. And then pour more water. Now, as the water increases, as the water goes up, the surface area of the rock declines and the circumference of the rock declines. So, you don't actually get more beachfront property. You get less. Just to be super clear about that. I needed Will for that. That was very important. I know this is hard. You just get new, different beachfront property, not more. Great. That's a great clarification. While we're being pedantic, on the projection side of things, I do think it was like Donald Trump who's learned the word existential, and then he's projecting

that onto Joe Biden. Joe Biden was very excited about this word existential that I don't, you know, anyway, continue, please more on the climate. Okay, so also the eighth of an inch is not is not on the spectrum. That's the that's below the low end of the projection of the water going up. I was just in Iceland for a week. And literally, like, okay, you know, glaciers come down, they have the chunks of ice come off. But they're telling me the guys who are on the lagoon,

every two hours, a new chunk is coming off. And that what's coming in from the top of the glacier is not replacing that. They're telling me what I'm seeing in Iceland, these glaciers, in 50 years, this one will be gone. In 30 years, this one will be gone. In five years, this one will be gone. Okay. A lot of it's already gone. There's no denying what's happening. If you go and see the glaciers, that's going on. This is happening with sea level rise. Tim, the thing that worries me about this issue, you asked about young people. Climate change is slow. It's slow. And what really scares me about this issue is there's other issues where if you screw up, you feel it right away. Economics, immigration, whatever. This is not

one of those. But what really worries me about Tim is they're not going to pay a price. By the time the damage is so great that we can't rectify it, these guys will all be gone. And what Trump is doing is exploiting that gap where he's getting the advantage of the, you know, appealing to the fossil fuel industry, and he's not paying the political price you would pay for seeing the harm of climate change in its full extent. Let's get some other good news this week from the fossil fuel industry, which was rare. OPEC is releasing more barrels, which I distrust MBS and them so much. I'm like, is there a game that's happening here? Because they want the prices to go down and then go up right again, right before the election. I don't know. On the Iceland thingeland thing before i move on i was always told that iceland was green and greenland was icy i've never been to either is

that that's incorrect there were glaciers the greenland half of it's true greenland is icier than than iceland got it but uh you know there's there's plenty of ice and plenty of ice for now for now i recommend you go while you can because i you know, go before the one that's going to be gone in five years is gone. It's just such a depressing change. It's really the next topic is abortion. And it's related. Like, look, I was always a center right person. You know, people get mad at me when I say this.

Liberals and particularly, you know, some of our very, my very friendly progressive women fans send me mean messages when I talk about abortion, because I do think there should be some limits on abortion. And I think that we should be encouraging energy exploration. But like, there was a space in the Republican Party for a while where you could have those views and not be just like, oh, climate change isn't real. And who cares if there's more beach on property or oh, isn't a big deal or oh there should be abortion limits but like also like we should have reasonable laws you know so that's that women aren't fucking bleeding out on the floor of their bathroom as happened in texas this week for people who missed this story ryan hamilton and his wife is remaining anonymous r Ryan speaking for the family. They had wanted a second child to be named Drake or Dre. She had a miscarriage, but it wasn't complete.

Two medical centers denied the woman a surgical abortion because her case wasn't considered emergent enough, which is in the law in Texas, it's got to be emergent to have these sorts of treatments, these sorts of surgeries. He said this happened despite the fact that her fetus's heartbeat had stopped. Instead, they gave her a misoprostol to empty the uterus at home. The doctor said, you're only supposed to be worried if the blood is red. It's supposed to be a rusty brown. That's a correction. I wanted to say that because on Twitter, I got that backwards. In this case, the woman's blood was bright red. She went back to the hospital to get this procedure again. It's called a D&C procedure. They denied it again and gave her another dose of the drug.

She went home and the blood was so great that she passed out on the bathroom floor and included coming out of her was feces in addition to blood. I say that because it's important to have the just grotesque reality of the situation. The Dallas Morning News and CBS both kind of verified all the details of the story. I should say John McCormick over at the Dispatch is an honest pro-life reporter, kind of has objected to the characterization a little bit saying that the abortion law in Texas actually does allow for procedures to remove a dead unborn child. The problem with that, Will, is this was all predictable. The downstream effect of such a draconian law that offers no exceptions, that allows people to sue and allows for a bounty on women who attempt to get these sorts of procedures, like doctors and lawyers, certain places are going to do CYA, right? And this is a horrific downstream example of this.

And this is not the only case in Texas. So it's awful. It's awful. I believe the law in Texas is one of those laws that's called a heartbeat law, right? Once the heartbeat is there, we ban it. Here, the heartbeat had literally stopped. Okay. Now, I accept what McCormick is saying that the law technically, you know, if you read

the law carefully, you're not going to be sued as the doctor. You're not going to be prosecuted. Right. They'd be prosecuted. The problem is if you set up a law like this and you're, quote, erring on the side of life, then all those doctors are going to err on the side of not intervening. And you're not erring on the side of life. You're erring on the side of technically fetal life, which is already gone in this case. The fetus is dead. And you're erring against the life of the woman. Now, I understand there's an exception there. My understanding is this guy and

this wife, they went to like three different places to get this eventually. And all these doctors are refusing to intervene because they're afraid of being prosecuted. And this is my pitch. Tim, I'm going to work on you on. Tim, I'm going to work on you on this issue. I'm going to work on you on this issue because there's a difference between being morally pro-life and believing that banning abortion is the way to express that or achieve that in society. When you ban abortion and you use these criminal statutes, this is what you get. It's a very ugly process. The doctors often don't know the details of the case. In this case, they're going to a clinic where, you know, it takes them four hours to run the tests.

You are going to get these cases where a woman desperately needs a procedure and they're afraid to intervene. And the law is not being a moral teacher here, as the Catholics like to say. The law is applying the blunt instrument of the threat of criminal prosecution, and it is deterring the doctors and is endangering the lives of these women. If you want to do something to prevent abortions, promote contraception for women who get pregnant, help them choose life, if that's what you believe in. But don't use the criminal law, because when you do, this is the kind of dangerous situation that will happen well we can have a long continue to have a longer conversation about whether there's any

place for law because i think that i do think there's some place for law that's not nearly as expansive as what has happened in texas and other places but i'll say this even conservatives libertarian minded conservatives used to get this and this is the crux of my disagreement with mccormick is that when the state comes in and puts in these onerous laws, and the threat of the state is being wielded against people, and then on top of that, in Texas and other places, the threat of legal action, of lawsuits, of frivolous litigious action is being wielded against people, then that's going to affect people's behavior, even if the words are exactly right, like that, you know, those threats, the use of the law, you know, to punish is going to have an impact on people's behavior. And in a case such as this,

in life or death cases, in very serious medical cases, it is incumbent on the state to demonstrate that they're going to side on the side of that life of the actual person still alive, in this case, the mother. And they're not doing that. Like there've been lawsuits, several of them. It's not the only case. The Hamilton case isn't the only one. And Abbott and the rest of the jabronis in Texas are doing the other thing.

They're not doing anything to indicate that the government will side on know, side on the side of people that are going through tough choices in gray areas here. So anyway, we've already seen a Biden ad here. I think that these Biden ads can be very powerful, especially in these cases where the mothers, like these are wanted babies and these mothers' lives are being put in risk for no reason. And then Biden's already ran an ad on that. And I think it'll continue to be politically potent. I don't know. Any final words on the political side of this, Will? No, I think you just expressed it beautifully. And I agree with you on what the states need to do. But the one thing that I would add is this was not real until Roe v. Wade

was overturned. Until Dobbs, this was all pro-life people could go out and talk about these laws, they could say we need to protect the babies. Now we're seeing what happens when you actually ban the abortions and you enforce them. It's cases like this. And I think all pro-life people need to step back and ask, is this what I really want? Is this what I want my country to look like? Well said. I wanted to get to the Biden immigration shift, but we have a Texas man coming on tomorrow's podcast, so we'll do it with him. Thank you, Will Salatin. We'll be seeing you again soon. Up next, McK cobbins of the atlanta all right we are back with my old tormentor mckay comp and staff writer at the atlantic he has a new piece what europe fears we're going to talk about his most recent book romney a reckoning is a

biography of mitt romney we're going to do some mitt romney psychoanalysis at the very end so you're not going to want to miss that uh what has happened to mckay hey tim i miss uh exchanging terse annoyed emails with each other on the campaign trail. Those are better days, simpler times. They were simpler times. I was kind of a dick as a comm staffer, I will say. We both were. I was a young BuzzFeed reporter trying to, you know, come up.

I'm over here going, hey, my candidate, John Huntsman, we're in last place. Will you get off my ass? We're in last place, McKay. Will you write a hit piece on somebody else, please? Anyway, let's discuss some more serious matters. Alas, this was a great pitch. I don't know how you got this through Jeffrey Goldberg, but you got to spend the spring in Europe, Belgium, Poland, Estonia, France, Germany, maybe I'm forgetting one, and you discovered an undercurrent of dread about our upcoming elections. A NATO official said that we are in a precarious place because of the upcoming elections. So talk about the palpable concern of Trump 2.0 at the top level

from your travels across Europe. It was interesting because the two things that stood out to me traveling through Europe, talking to all these, you know, officials, diplomats, was that a they're following our presidential election incredibly closely. Like, I did love this, like to the point where they could cite like granular polling data. And, you know, have you seen the new Susquehanna numbers out of Pennsylvania? Like, I literally I felt like I was I was like, trapped at the worst bar in DC, you know, like, you know, so that was surprising to me. And then the other thing that was surprising is that almost everyone was convinced that Trump was going to win. Like, in Germany and Poland, they didn't want to believe it, because the prospect terrifies them, but they all believed Trump was going to win. And that was kind of shaping their calculus in terms of how they view the transatlantic alliance, right? Like, what I heard again and again was, you know, Europe made it through the first Trump term barely, right? The transatlantic

relationship took real damage. But, you know, we survived and the Biden administration has been kind of restabilizing relationships. But if Trump were to return in this context with Russia waging war in Ukraine, with Trump saying that, you know, he's ready to abandon NATO countries that don't pay enough for collective defense, like that could actually be the end of the relationship. And it was pretty stark. Let's put a little meat on the bones there, because I know at least some percentage of our listeners will be of the former Republican variety. That's like, OK, the French never liked the Republicans. OK, there was never a lot of excitement in Europe whenever a Republican got elected.

Right. Let's talk about the category difference between just general, you know, European distaste with the more rugged, individualist America and like the tangible fears that they have about a Trump 2.0. Yeah, I think it's an important point, because there is kind of a free floating contempt for America that you can find in some urban capitals across Europe, especially among young people. Western Europe in particular, yeah. Yes, but I'd make this point. So I spent a lot of time in Warsaw in Poland, where Poland is actually pretty different from some of those Western European countries. Like its relationship with the US is different. Its history is different. Polls actually show Poland is the most consistently pro-America country in Europe. And it's one of the few countries where attitudes toward the U.S. don't change that much, depending on who's in the White House. In Warsaw, I heard repeatedly

praise for Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Those guys are heroes in Poland because they won the Cold War. They tore down the Iron Curtain. That is how America is perceived there. But it was interesting talking to young people in Poland, especially, who grew up with this really idealistic notion about America as a city on a hill and a defender of democracy and, you know, the aspirational country that they wanted to follow. And the Trump era has kind of punctured that image of the U.S., right? And it's not because he's a Republican and it's not because he's right wing. You know, there are a lot of conservatives in Poland.

It's that, you know, his kind of hostility toward democratic values and the transatlantic alliance that they always took for granted as being kind of a bipartisan bedrock of American foreign policy has caused them to really question what's going on in the United States, right? Like Poland is coming out of its own kind of period of domestic political turmoil. The right-wing Law and Justice Party was in power for eight years, and they were defeated by a cross-partisan coalition that ranged from center-left to center-right. And a lot of people are kind of idealistically engaged in rebuilding democracy in Poland right now. And I spoke to one young woman who was working on that project. She works in the government.

She's a grad student. And I asked her, which countries are you looking to as an example as you're trying to rebuild your country. And she mentioned like Estonia and Finland. And she was like, you know, maybe there's something about the maturity of French democracy. And I was like, what about America? And she kind of hesitated and said, I don't know if most people my age would look at America as an ideal way to build a democratic society. And what heard about it was that she doesn't have that contempt for America. She almost seemed apologetic when she was saying it. She felt bad that she felt this way. Is this the same young woman that you quoted saying, what the fuck is happening in the

United States? And then immediately was startled by her outburst and apologized you know but that that is how a lot of people feel watching american politics right now i feel like she should be like the bulwark mascot you know like i love the united states like what happened to the cold war united states what's going on what the fuck is happening over there she really is you guys should you should start translating your articles into polish and sending them to her she uh she's probably a big fan okay we're gonna work on that i will say we should give credit the estonians are do have a great young democracy and on two months ilva's former uh president is a bulwark man jeb went and visited with him um

they got some great stuff in estonia and they're at risk you talked about it was in estonia right where you um went to the actual border with russia talk about that. Yeah. So I went to the city of Narva, which is right on the border of Russia, separated just by a river and one kind of very heavily guarded road bridge. And I spent some time with this guy who works at the border checkpoint. And he talked about how Narva is in this unique situation because most of the population is ethnically Russian. A lot of security experts believe that if Russia was to provoke NATO, it might be there. They call it the Narva scenario because Putin could kind of follow the same playbook he used in Crimea, using Russian separatists in Narva to kind of seed division and unrest and using that as a pretense to come into Estonia.

Let's just pause there real quick before you go in there. So the Narva scenario is essentially the theory of the case here among NATO folks is it's right on the Russian border. You're about to talk about this bridge you go over. They cross over the bridge, try to occupy it. There are some Russian speakers there. And then it's almost like a dare to NATO. It's like, are you really going to go to war with us over Narva? That's exactly right.

First of all, there are a lot of people in Narva who are sympathetic to Russia, who are consuming Russian media. They're in the kind of Russian propaganda bubble. And so, you know, Putin would be able to find allies there. But yeah, that would be the calculus. You know, we've heard people like Tucker Carlson actually say, like, I'm not sending my kids

to die for Estonia, like, you know. And so like the dare would be, are you going to defend this tiny Estonian city or watch the credibility of your vaunted alliance collapse, right? And what was kind of affecting for me was going out to that bridge. I asked this border guard, like, can you take me as close to the border as I can go? And so we walked out to the border and, you know, his Russian counterpart on the other side kind of came out and was like suspiciously sizing us up from the other side of the border. And you just feel the vulnerability there. Like,

this is a tiny country the size of Vermont. They rely completely on NATO and really America's support for NATO for their sovereignty and security. And, you know, for a guy like this, who's just kind of like, standing at the border, hoping that Russia doesn't ever send tanks across the bridge, the stakes are real. You know, this isn't like an abstract debate, the stakes are very real and kind of alarming, given the current political context. Yeah, that was affecting for me as well. And I didn't didn't you know get to stand on the bridge with you i want to talk about the long-term shift in the alliance it's kind of already happening no matter what happens in the election um i believe it was a french official you quoted

that said we can't just flip a coin and hope michigan voters vote the right direction every four years as a way of talking about how you know europe's got to think more about how Europe defends itself if the United States is going to be unreliable. So talk about those conversations and maybe a shift that's already occurring just because of the specter of Trump. Yeah, it's pretty common these days to hear from European officials who think that Europe needs to develop its own strategic autonomy or defense autonomy, basically that with American support no longer seen as kind of an unwavering thing they can count

on, Europe needs to figure out how it can defend itself. And so there are a bunch of different proposals, right? There's like, maybe the European Union should build its own army, or maybe it should divert resources from NATO to the European Defense Alliance. But like the problem is that with almost everyone who started to go down this road with me, when you really press them on the specifics and the timeline, the idea kind of collapses, you know, like Wolfgang Ischinger, who's the former German ambassador to the US and kind of an elder statesman in German foreign policy, he said basically, look, European autonomy is a great idea for 50 years from now, but it's going to take a long time to get to the point where Europe can

replace everything that America provides, right? The nuclear umbrella, the ballistic air defense, the intelligence gathering. And the problem is that right now, the situation is so fraught that they need America more than ever. This really isn't that realistic. Even if every European country quadrupled their defense spending, it would still take many, many years before they could rely on themselves to defend themselves without the US. The other thing on all this is, you know, as they're looking at it, you just consider how fraught it is, the weight of it, of the threat. You know, I'm just thinking about Trump's been putting these videos out about Evan Gershkowitz, the Wall Street Journal reporter.

We're like, it basically seems like Trump is holding him hostage at this point. He's like, look, this guy's never going to get out as long as biden's president and if i get to become president then putin will release him in the next few days what gets me about that by the way is how specific the timing is you know he's like it'll be before i take office but after i win like something a little suspicious about how specific the timing is for when gershkvich is going to be released supposedly like but yeah no i i take your point so they're back to you so if you're the europeans you're sitting there you're going okay is this just bullshit bluster from you know a snake oil salesman maybe is there a back channel with putin maybe is this just an informed guess by Donald Trump that Russia wants him to win and will help him?

And you figure that Donald Trump will do whatever Russia wants? Maybe. Right. But like all of those doors are terrible if you're given what we've seen from Russia last year. Right. Yeah. I mean, it's such a good point because like I was talking to actually a Republican strategist recently who was saying that the way you have to think about this election is in investment terms. You call it protecting your downside. Right. Like you might not like either option, but you have to game out the worst case scenario for either person getting another term.

And like with Biden, if you're a Republican, you're conservative. There are a lot of bad things, right? This is, this is the strategist talking. There are a lot of things that you might not like, but with Trump, the potential downside is so like potentially catastrophic and unknowable that, that like that has to factor into decision-making. And I think with Europe, that's part of the thinking here, right? Like, I report about on how the German foreign ministry is making contingency plans for the outcome of the American election. And like, their planning for Trump is basically to come up with a list of important issue sets that will be completely destabilized by Trump being reelected from Ukraine to NATO to climate change to tariffs, and then figuring out how to respond. And the problem is that just nobody knows, like you said, every option is

kind of bad. If you're a, you're one of these European elected officials or diplomats, and, and there's not a lot of kind of solace being offered by the American government at this point. Yeah, I take it that that Republican strategist you were talking to was not a Nikki Haley advisor. I can confirm it was not a Nikki Haley advisor. I'll say that. Yeah, based on her behavior. Okay.

All right. You had a kind of one story within the story. Almost like you should have been two stories, I wonder, because like we're about halfway this way. It's like, hey, let's take a little detour down rick grinnell avenue here and do like a mini profile on this insane person i think listeners the podcast familiar with rick grinnell but if you're not he's the gay maga strategist that ended up being a temporary uh head of dni under trump has had many screaming matches with me over the years so this part of the story you're interviewing

various german officials and i was reminded of the scene in mean girls where uh tina fey asked the school assembly to please raise their hand if they've ever been personally victimized by regina george and everybody stands up in the auditorium it kind of they kind of felt like that in your conversations where everybody was like this fucking guy yeah i mean it was it was honestly got to the point where it was funny to me not to them but like every time i would even just mention rick grinnell's name in an interview with a german official they would like sigh heavily and like or like there would be like mirthless chuckles or like frozen stares into the middle distance it was honestly i write that

it was like they were they were processing unresolved trauma or something like this is four years later and everybody still just like can't believe what his ambassadorship was like you know i do think though that the reason that i put it in there and i you're not wrong that it is basically like a story within a story but like i felt like it was such a perfect microcosm for kind of Trump's, quote unquote, America first elbow throwing and what his style of diplomacy does to U.S. relationships. Because the reality of Grinnell, and I talked to some of his defenders, too, is that like he did get some short-term policy concessions in Germany, right? Like his kind of belligerent bullying style did, you know, produce some results, right? Some people responded to that, yeah. It came at a cost that, you know, I think you could argue is much more serious than

any of the short-term policy concessions, which is like by the end of that ambassadorship, a lot of Germans were openly grappling with their relationship with the US, right? Like, I want to make this point between Western Europe and the US. But they always assumed that the on like the core questions, the US was unshakable, right on the transatlantic alliance on commitment to democratic values, kind of resistance to autocrats, like on that stuff, you could trust America, regardless of who was in the White House. And now they just have no idea. The way that they're now thinking about the U.S. is as kind of another ruthlessly transactional superpower, like China or Russia, right? And that doesn't mean that all of our European allies are going to jump ship as soon as Trump

is back in the White House. But there are trickle down effects to thinking about the US that way. If Europe starts to think about America as like, you know, basically similar to another kind of autocratic foreign power. This was the quote, I thought this was the best quote in the piece where it was like somebody, I forget who it was, compared Grinnell to being like a representative from a hostile power. Yeah, exactly. In the country, right? And and like it's like you treat them differently the chinese ambassador is going to get treated differently you treat them differently you take their kind

of edicts differently the way that they think about the u.s they plan for the u.s like it's just different than if you you assume that there is kind of a special relationship that's based on something deeper than just like economic transactionalism. Right. Let's do a little MIT. Let's close with a little MIT talk. In MIT's fan podcast over here, we have the fans had a little there's a little unrest recently on the MIT fan podcast. You know, it's like when I'm listening to my Nuggets podcast and the coach isn't putting in the favorite player that everybody likes. It's like, what are you doing, Malone?

What are you doing, Mitt? I haven't been thrilled about his comments about the Bragg case. You sent out a post. You're kind of just trying to contextualize Mitt's view on Bragg and why he's been more negative towards the conviction than one might have thought. Maybe I'll just kind of let you explain what you think his perspective is on it. Yeah, I mean, I should say up front, like, I think sometimes people assume that I'm like a spokesman for Mitt Romney. I'm not trying to do that. I don't feel like I have to defend everything he says. And I don't agree with everything he does. He doesn't agree with me. I do think I can offer some perspective

on where he's coming from, just based on having spoken to him so much. I'll tell you, I guess, two things. First is that I actually spoke to him like a day or two after Trump's arraignment in Manhattan last year. And I remember even then Romney was pretty skeptical of this case. He's not skeptical in general of the criminal charges. You know, he was like the Georgia case he was keeping an eye on and certainly the Justice Department case, like that stuff he was open to and wanted to like learn more about. But part of the thing with Mitt Romney, and I think this is kind of the plague of the thoroughgoing institutionalist, never Trump Republican in this era is that like, a lot of what alarms him about Trump is his obliteration of democratic precedents and norms.

And I think that like, Romney gets queasy when he feels like the opposition to Trump is doing unprecedented things like indicting or convicting a former president. Now, that said, I think the other thing at play here, and maybe even more influential on some of the comments he's made, you know, he gave me that statement criticizing Bragg. He also, I think, a couple weeks ago in an interview on MSNBC said that if he were Biden, he would have, yeah, if he were Biden, he would have pardoned Trump. And that made a lot of people angry. But that was not received well in the fan podcast. The fan podcast didn't take that one well.

I mean, but I think the missing context here is that he's not like concerned for Trump's like legal well-being. The main thing that Romney cares about when it comes to Trump is that he not get back to the White House. And in his mind, this criminal process specifically is more likely to help him than hurt him. And he thinks that Democrats could have handled it better in a way that would have allowed Trump to actually be politically damaged by all this. You know, he said to me that in that statement that like, Bragg should have tried to settle or come up with some kind of plea deal. I think he must know that Trump never would have taken a plea deal. But the idea would have been like, if Trump refused to deal, then Bragg could have said, well, he forced my hand and like,

now we have to, you know, convict him. So I don't know that he's right about the politics, but I think that's where he's coming from. He's trying to figure out how the Democrats can, can use this to their advantage to beat Trump. Not like he's not worried about like Trump being treated unfairly. Yeah. A big part of, I think my frustration with it is he's kind of buys into this notion that this is like part of some democratic strategy when it's kind of like, I't if the democrats were in charge of this this would definitely not have been the case that that starts right like it just kind of happened like this way and it's just the nature of the system anyway jvl gives a much more thorough refutation if you will to that on the triad if you're not doing that you can sign up for the triad on the blog.com

i do want to ask you one last thing about mitt though you said somewhere in there something along the lines of that his main concern is that Trump not get back in the White House again. There is one thing he could do that would help with that conceivably on the margins, and that would be support his opponent, maybe even speak on behalf of his opponent coming up here. There's going to be a couple of big opportunities to do that this summer. Doesn't seem like he's on that trajectory but how do you think he's thinking about that yeah this is where i'm gonna fully shift into like pundit speculation

here i'm not speculation mode not not based on anything this is you've read the man's diary i'm not asking to be a spokesman you've read the man's diaries i'm wondering how you think he thinks about whether he can fully you know know, jump both feet in and do. I'm trying to think whoever, like nobody, like Meg Whitman or whatever, whoever spoke at the last Biden convention or, you know. I'll give some context here. He likes Joe Biden. They have a relationship. I write about this in the book, like, you know, on a personal level that they actually get along really well.

He respects Biden as a person. He thinks he's a good guy. And he thinks that he's generally well-intentioned. His policies drive Mitt crazy. And I think that's a big thing that's keeping him from going all in. But I will also say, I feel like there's an assumption that because he hasn't endorsed Biden,

there's no possibility that he will do it. Like, I actually don't know. My speculative but educated guess is that the door is more open to that than people might think. Like, he certainly will never endorse Trump. He's not going to vote for Trump. And I could see him at some point

deciding that he does want to do it. I don't know, but I think if it happened, it would probably be later in the year. Like, I doubt he'll, like you said, speak at the Democratic Convention. But you know, you could see all kinds of surprise Republican endorsements in like October of this year. And will Romney's name be among them? I don't know. But I wouldn't rule it out necessarily. Well, just in case Pierre Delecto fast forwards to the end of this podcast to listen to his favorite journalist talk about europe and and stumbles on some commentary on himself i will say this i i think like a flaw of the mitt type people a lot of people in this world

that i speak to obviously they call me what should i do what do you think is like i don't want to endorse the whole democratic platform i'm not a democrat i don't like a lot of things he did and i like i say to anybody to mitt if's listening, to anyone else that is thinking about doing this, it would be more powerful politically for Mitt to say, I actually think Joe Biden fucked up A, B, C, D, E, and F. And I still am going to vote for him. You know what I mean? And I do think sometimes there's this feeling that's like, oh, if I endorse...

Because historically, that is how it's been. If you endorse somebody, it's because you basically agree with them right stuff and so it's hard to or you have to pretend to agree you have to pretend to it's like it's hard to get your mind in this place we're like no i can't endorse them and actually also it might help for me to say no i think he's wrong and a bunch of things so anyway i don't know if that'll happen pierre if you're out there that'd be my advice to you but you know since when did anybody listen to my advice? It's been a while.

And as we discussed at the beginning of this interview, it didn't turn out that well to the last couple of guys that did listen to my advice. So, you know, take it with a grain of salt. McKay, any final thoughts or words of wisdom for everybody? Go subscribe to The Atlantic and read all my colleagues' great work. It's going to be a very busy few months here. 100% endorse that. McKay Coppins, thank you so much for being on the Bullard Podcast.

Come back again soon. Everybody else will be back tomorrow with your pal, Adam Kinzinger. See you all then. Peace. I want you to be yourself It feels so good that Don't you, baby, don't you Stop, don't stop, don't stop Baby, don't you Don't stand there waiting

All of your life For the night to come and find you The clock is ticking, baby, now is the time For someone to come and hold you You are a name, I know, but extraordinary Cause don't you hide under cover, baby Free yourself. I'm holding up that mountain top.

Why don't you please bring your heart back? It feels so good to go to sleep. Free yourself. I'm holding up that mountain top. Why don't you please bring your heart back? The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.