The Bulwark Podcast - Will Saletan: The Weekend of the UFOs

Episode Date: February 13, 2023

What is flying above us? Is it more than sky garbage? Meanwhile, the House GOP radar is against whatever Joe Biden does. Plus, Trump's opinions about women's clothing, and the former first family feeding at the teat of MBS. Will Saletan's back with Charlie Sykes for Charlie and Will Monday. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

landlord telling you to just put on another sweater when your apartment is below 21 degrees? Are they suggesting you can just put a bucket under a leak in your ceiling? That's not good enough. Your Toronto apartment should be safe and well-maintained. If it isn't and your landlord isn't responding to maintenance requests, RentSafeTO can help. Learn more at toronto.ca slash rentsafeTO. Welcome to the Bowl of Work podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. It is Monday, February 13th, 2013. And just a warning that if I say anything particularly or fundamentally stupid or I just get something wrong, I'm just going to write it off the COVID brain. Could you just keep an eye on me?

Will Salatan, of course, is going to be writing Shotgun today. So just kind of give me a side eye a little bit if it gets a little weird. All right, Charlie. I'm actually feeling pretty good. A little lower energy than usual, but nothing I cannot handle. But can we start with just the stupid stuff? Yeah. We can work up to the really interesting stuff. Did you watch the Super Bowl, first of all?

I did. I thought it was a great game. What about you? It was a great game. I mean, I remember that, you know, there was a long period of time when the Super Bowls were all blahs. There were these overhyped pieces and it was, you know, 43 to 17 and everything. They have been much more entertaining, but yesterday I thought it was a great matchup. It was a great game. You had to come behind. You really had the future of the NFL. But I want to talk about the halftime show just for a moment. Do you know that I didn't feel any need to tweet out or comment on Rihanna's performance because nobody cares what I think about Rihanna's performance, which I thought was pretty good. I just want to say this, okay? But I didn't feel

the need to comment. Do you know who did not have that feeling? Who, Charlie? The former president of the United States sitting down in Mar-a-Lago is firing off attacks on his failing social media site, he felt the need. Okay, this is the former president of the United States, an announced candidate for president of the United States. And in the category of like, shit, you can't make up. He's sitting down there and he writes, let me just take my glasses off here. Epic fail. Rihanna gave without question the single worst halftime show in super bowl history this after insulting far more than half of our nation which is already in serious decline um all in caps with her foul and insulting language also so much for her quote unquote stylist which i'm not gonna even get into he He's upset. He has to comment on it. First of all,

everybody seemed to have liked it. She's pregnant. She's performing on this massive platform. And don't you think that if you want to be the leader of the free world, you know, on your list of things that I really want to get myself worked up about. And yet he's kind of been obsessed. This guy's mind continues to be, it doesn't reveal anything new, but it is fascinating. about her stylist and, you know, criticizing her clothing. He's like half Neanderthal, and then he's like half RuPaul's Drag Race judge. I've never seen a straight man with such strong aesthetic opinions about women's clothing. I think that's an interesting observation, because he does have strong opinions. Apparently, she's posed in front of something that basically says F from, so he just can't let it go. I did feel, Charlie, I know there was a very controversial call during the game,

and everybody had their own view of it. At our house, we had to play it back just to be sure, but we were pretty certain that Rihanna was pregnant. Rihanna's definitely pregnant. There's no question about it. Okay, so since we're on the mind of the former president, because it continues to just be amazing. There's a big New York Times story today about how, you know, Ron DeSantis is still struggling with how and when to respond to the various insults from the president who's, you know, had been throwing out implications that he was a pedophile and everything. And apparently, and this is kind of buried in the story, that Trump has insulted Mr. DeSantis in casual conversation, describing him as

Meatball Ron, an apparent dig at his appearance, or Shut Down Ron, a reference to restrictions the governor put in place at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. I have a couple of quick takes on this. I mean, both are better than Ron DeSanctimonious, but I mean, they are still pretty weak stuff from the GOP's apex predator. I mean, if he's still on Meatball Ron, I mean, really? The problem is having discussions about a man whose brain is stuck in the sixth grade. I mean, this is part of what we wrestle with, right, is that we're trying to parse something out, and it's like it's that dumb kid on the playground in sixth grade. Just to another point, of all the people who shouldn't be focusing on mocking other people's appearance, you wouldn't think that he would have the self-awareness to know that probably he shouldn't be mocking someone's appearance, the meatball stuff. Just plain. Yeah. So Trump, you know, he did this from the beginning, right? When he started running for president in 2015, he at that time was a new

face to a lot of people. He certainly was new in politics. I don't think this whole sixth grader insult thing is going to wear well as the former president who lost an election. A lot of Republicans think he should have won. I mean, if he's going to try to counter a real governor who has done things with this sort of schoolyard bullying stuff, I don't think it's going to work the way that it did work for him when he was a candidate in a 16-man field. I'm not seeing that it's getting much pickup. And the fact is that one of the things that DeSantis is doing is DeSantis has moved so hard right. I know that JVL has talked about this. He's actually, you know, picking off the various MAGA activists and grifters, and he's sort of

going down a list. I'm going to make Christopher Ruffo one of my guys. Hey, Claremont Institute. I mean, they're all in on, you know, election denial and sedition, but I'm going to brace them as hard as possible. So you are getting a lot of blowback from people like, come on, are we going to do this again? Well, you know, as Tim wrote, you've swallowed an awful lot. You've gone through all of the other insults. And now suddenly you're upset because it's aimed at one of your own guys. But this is what you signed up for, people. Right.

You know, and Charlie, you and I have discussed before, cults are dangerous, and there's been a cult of Donald Trump. But one of the solutions to cults is fatigue. People get tired of stuff over time. So I think fatigue has already worn down the Trump cult. That and defeat have worn down the Trump cult to the point where he won't get away with just bullying people out of the race. Or Charlie, I'm having a really tough time bracing myself for the implication of what we're talking about, which is the idea that Ron DeSantis will be the adult in the room in that Republican race. I can't wrap my mind around that. Yeah, I am not completely there yet. Okay, so let's switch to the other really interesting story that nobody actually understands.

We're shooting balloons or something out of the air. We have now shot four things out of the air. We don't know whether they are all Chinese spy balloons, whether they are weather balloons, or whether they are alien spacecraft. This was the weekend of the UFOs. It's almost as if the scriptwriters of 2023 are going, okay, things are getting a little quiet. Now let's throw in the UFOs. Oh, come on. Come on, Herb. We can't just throw in a UFO. Come on. Let's just try it. They'll accept everything. So we're blowing these things out of the air. And I must say there's a little bit of pride that some of the F-16s that blew the, whatever it was,

the hexagon out of the air over Lake Huron. It was an octagon. Octagon, I'm sorry, were dispatched from Madison, Wisconsin. So this was a cheesehead operation. So, Will, what the F is flying above us? What's going on? Has it just been that somebody turned a dial and we're starting to see all kinds of stuff floating that wasn't there?

I mean, is something new happened or are we just basically saying this is stuff that's been there that we ignored or missed? And maybe we ignored it for a good reason. So what are we shooting down? Do we know? We don't know because we have to go retrieve some of the wreckage that we just shot down, right? But we will know relatively soon about these, but there will be more. There will be more because Charlie, I'm sorry, but I am with the most boring theory about this, which is the one you just described. We know that after the Chinese spy balloon came through, we adjusted our radars and we're trying to capture slower moving stuff, right? We were looking for missiles. We were looking for, you know, dangerous stuff.

Now it's like, oh, my God, slow moving balloons. What else is out there that's slow and we don't want to be embarrassed again? So now we're just finding stuff. And we already have the example, Charlie, of the so-called radar anomaly over Montana, right? Where we send up the F-22s or whatever and we find nothing. There's nothing there, but we're just on alert for it. And one of the theories that's been out there is that there's a lot of stuff floating at

different elevations that we just haven't been looking for. So it's not the UFOs. It's not even the Chinese. And can I just say one thing about the theory that the Chinese are bombarding us with stuff? I have been seeing people saying that after the first balloon and we shot down their balloon, now they're sending more stuff to bombard us. People, there wasn't time. It takes a while for this stuff to float over from China. It's not like China then launched a bunch of more stuff at us, right?

This is just stuff that's up there floating and has been for some time, and now we're seeing it. That's my theory. Maybe. Or they launched all kinds of stuff earlier that we didn't see. Okay, so we have the great minds of Congress who were weighing in on this yesterday morning. Here is Congressman Jim Hines on Meet the Press talking about all of the stuff that's up there. Let's see what Congressman Hines had to say. You said on Friday you speculated, you admitted you were speculating,

that, hey, you know, there's a lot of stuff up in the air these days. Private companies put up issues, you know, things up there to deal with Wi-Fi. There's other foreign objects from other countries up there, including weather balloons. Just how cluttered is it up there? Well, yeah, and that's still where my head is. And I should be clear, as I was on Friday, that I haven't been briefed on the other two shoot downs. But I look back a year ago to when we had this both open hearing and classified hearing on what most people called UFOs, you're supposed to call unidentified aerial phenomenon. And what we learned in that hearing is that there is a lot of garbage up there. It's really not that hard. Certainly countries can do it. Companies can do it and do to it. Individuals

with resources can put balloons up there. And so there is a lot of garbage up there. And my, again, speculative guess as why we're seeing these things happen in quick succession is that now we're really attuned to looking for them, right? Okay. I believe him. I also believe that Himes is trying to disguise the fact that he's actually citing stuff he got from one of these classified briefings. Notice how careful he is to say, I haven't been briefed on this, but from stuff I've read in the press or from some public hearing, blah, blah, blah. I think his degree of confidence is because this is what the military thinks. This is what the intelligence analysts think. This is what's called sky garbage, sky trash. Charlie,

we know that this stuff is in orbit, right? We know there's all kinds of stuff floating that's at a higher altitude. So now we're just finding that there's more of this stuff at lower altitudes. I mean, if you're some telecom company and you put up something that's floating and I mean, nobody who's tracking what you what you left up there. Are you going to go clean it up? That's not easy. So I just think this stuff is left out there and we have essentially debris floating around. OK.

All right. Although I have to say, it did occur to me over the weekend that he's talking about anybody with resources. There have got to be some hobbyists out there with big balloons who got to be looking at each other going, what do you think? You think maybe we could maybe we could float something up there and how cool would it be if they scrambled jets and they shot down our balloon? Is that a crime? Here's the thing is, have you done something wrong? Let's say you inflate some giant mylar balloon and you let it out over Lake Michigan.

And then you just sort of sit back, light your cigar, and wait for Top Gun to come along. So, wait, Charlie, if one of these floats over Wisconsin, are you to blame? No, no, no, no, no. But I'm thinking about, look, we've seen how people get into drone war. I mean, balloons are not really obscure technology, okay? Now, I understand that it takes a lot to get a balloon that far up, 20,000, 30,000, 40,000 feet up. So I'm not saying that people can run off to the party store and get a bunch of balloons. But there are some people who have balloons. Have you committed a crime if you launch a balloon over Lake Michigan right now

that goes up to 20,000 feet? Have you done something illegal? I don't know. Somebody should do a PSA on this because I'm telling you, if it occurs to me, it's occurred to somebody else. Okay. So just the PS psa please don't do this do not don't do it don't do it and and by the way just to be clear about the plausibility of this the original chinese balloon was what like 200 feet tall like that's just enormous you know so you need to be a major world power to do something like that but these other ones that we've just shot down one of them was described to be the size you know you have a balloon the size of a car that's not that hard to get together that You can get that on Amazon. Yeah,

yeah. You can get that stuff up there. But wait, one thing, one thing about this, the altitudes that these things are at is the serious stuff. Okay. The original Chinese balloon was like at 60,000 feet. No problem. That's above commercial air traffic. These other ones, they're at 40,000, they're at 20,000. That's dangerous. Don't do it because you can cause an air accident. You can cause a civilian airliner to have an accident. So don't do it. Well, it's that we get sucked into the engine and bad things can happen. Right. All right. So Mike Turner, who is the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and you've talked about him before he was on, and it's kind of interesting how he's adjusted his attitude towards whether or not we should be shooting these things down.

Let's play Mike Turner from yesterday. What can you tell us? What were the second and third objects that the military shot down and where'd they come from? Yeah, well, I certainly don't know, as the administration is saying they don't know. They do appear somewhat trigger-happy, although this is certainly preferable to the permissive environment that they showed when the Chinese spy balloon was coming over some of our most sensitive sites. Okay, so there he is yesterday saying that we are trigger-happy. He kind of wants it both ways, right? I mean, yeah, but this is preferable to what happened. Now, that's kind of interesting that he would use the term trigger happy because here's Mike Turner on Meet the Press from last weekend. In this instance, this president should have taken this as an urgency and so should have our military. This should have been taken down before it entered the U.S. airspace when it was over Alaska.

Hmm. So a little bit of a flip-flop there, Will? Totally a flip-flop, right? It was like we should have shot the other one down before I came in, and now it's like they're trigger happy. And he goes on in the CNN interview, the one yesterday, to say that the military, they took this action without a real understanding of what they were going after. So obviously it's a flip-flop. And we were just talking about how maybe the military has set its radar to find everything. So the Republican political radar, the radar of the House Republicans is clearly set to whatever Joe Biden did, we're against that. It's that he neglected to shoot down a balloon when he let it go across the United States. And then it's they're trigger happy. They're firing without any real understanding of what they're looking at.

I just can't take these guys seriously because they plainly are looking for a political hit first, and then they're trying to rationalize it later with some theory about what is good or not for the national security of the United States. I think that's fair. Although I suppose the one piece of good news and maybe even a little surprising was that the House passed a resolution condemning the Chinese balloon and they passed it unanimously. It was bipartisan. And this came just a couple of days after there was some speculation that they were going to take just a political cheap shot at the administration. So that didn't happen. That was a little bit off brand for this Congress, wasn't it? Right. And, you know, look, there has been a, you and I are pretty cynical about this current version of the Republican Party, but there has been a version of what they've done that is

bipartisan. And that is, you know, was supposed to be in the form of the Committee to Investigate China. And there, Kevin McCarthy has bragged about the bipartisanship, that the Democrats voted for it, that the Democrats are working with them, and that they're going to make it about targeting China, not about targeting Joe Biden. So that is a proposition that will be tested over the next couple of years. But in this case, as you point out, in the case of this resolution, it's borne out. They could have targeted Biden and they didn't. Let's go back to Ron DeSantis, because you were mentioning, you know, how weird it is that Ron DeSantis might be the adult in the room. Although what is interesting is, you know, DeSantis'

branding is not subtle whatsoever. I mean, he is moving as hard right as he can. He's giving as much candy to his base as he can. He's attacking the media. He's cozying up to the Claremont Institute. And I have a couple links in my newsletter about that. The Claremont Institute is really the fever swamp's most prominent think tank. And apparently they're so enamored of Ron DeSantis that they're moving some of their operation to Florida because they think that DeSantis is providing the first template for any red state in America through his leadership.

And you have to understand the Claremont Institute is way, way out there. He's also continuing to move ahead on his efforts to punish the Walt Disney Company for speaking out, for actually saying some, engaging in political speech about his policies involving gays and education and stripping them of some of their status, taking over their tax district, which is interesting because there hasn't been a lot of pushback, has there, from fellow Republicans about a governor using the full power of the state, of the government, to punish a private company for engaging in pure political speech. I mean, there was a time, Will, when that would have crossed a lot of red lines, but not anymore. It's a division here. It's a choice in the

Republican Party between principles that the party claimed to stand for. Remember, there used to be a Republican platform with ideas in it. One of those was limited government, right? And free markets, right? Those are procedural. And then you have this new Republican Party that's built around not so much ideas, but sentiments, resentments. You can see it in the Sarah Huckabee Sanders response to the State of the Union. It's about, you know, it's a culture war, right? And in this culture war, this new Republican Party basically suspends all of the old principles. Anything procedural, anything about, you know, whether the government should be doing it or the market should be doing it, that's all set aside in this full-throated embrace of DeSantisism, which is basically the use of state power, once you have it,

to fight culture wars against the left. And interestingly enough, with all of the usual juvenilia, you know, the former president coming up with nicknames for Ron DeSantis, there actually was an outbreak of actual substantive criticism yesterday. I don't know where New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu thinks his presidential bid is going to go. I don't know. But he's on Face the Nation, and he's talking about Ron DeSantis, and he's specifically talking about this politics of retaliation and using government to go after private companies. So Sununu talked about a lot

and he had his feet held to his fire about wokeness. He didn't handle that particularly well. But I thought this answer was interesting. Let's play Sununu on DeSantis and big government. There's a lot of leadership that says, you know what, when we're not getting that result out of a private business or locality, we'll just impose from the top down our conservative will. You're not talking about the Florida governor and Disney, for example. That's a bad example. Yeah, that's that's an example. One of the many. Ron DeSantis may be running for president. Sure. Look, Ron's a very good governor. He is. But I'm just trying to remind folks what we are

at our core. And if we're trying to beat the Democrats at being big government authoritarians, remember what's going to happen. Eventually, they'll have power in a state or in a position, and then they'll start penalizing conservative businesses and conservative nonprofits and conservative ideas. That is the worst precedent in the world. That's exactly what the founding fathers tried to avoid. So, Will, this seems like a pretty fundamental question. Right. It certainly is. And, okay, we've been talking about the schoolyard bully stuff and the silly insults. This is a real ideological, substantive debate that could be had in the 2024 Republican race. And I am with you. I don't see Chris Sununu going anywhere in that race because he represents an old version of the Republican Party that's Trump voters and the new Republican voters don't care about. But he is making a very good point. I mean, and that is a very bold way of

putting it. When he describes DeSantis, he didn't describe him specifically this way, but he used the phrase big government authoritarians. That is what DeSantis is. And it would be very interesting to see somebody, it can be Sununu, it can be Liz Cheney, it can be Larry Hogan, somebody in the Republican field raising this in a way that at least makes traditional Republicans reflect on how far they have drifted from the party's original principles. Yes. On the other hand, there is the very real possibility that this is precisely what the Republican voting base wants, that this appeals to that MAGA base, that what they're looking for is not some set of principles.

They're looking for somebody who is going to punch the right people in the nose, who will hurt their enemies, who will take the fight to the elites who dominate everything and are trying to destroy. So maybe, in fact, yes, you know, they're going to make this critique, assuming that there's still a residual sense of libertarianism or belief in small government. But maybe that's just eyewash, that what people really like is the fact that,

you know, the governor meatball is going to step up and he's going to punch Disney in the face. Right. I think that's what is likely to happen. It would at least be clarifying to have them, you know, firmly reject what the party used to stand for. about DeSantis. One of the responses I got back from a lot of conservatives on Twitter was they're just incredulous at Sununu saying that liberals will start punishing conservatives for their opinions because the argument is they've been doing this the whole time, pal. Democrats have been using government to hurt us. And the implicit conclusion of that is that these conservatives are saying, screw our old principles, screw all that stuff we said about the free market. They hurt us. Now that we have power,

we're going to hurt them. No, that is exactly right. And in fact, that would be the almost universal go-to argument that, look, they've been coming after private companies for a long time. I mean, they went after Hobby Lobby. They went after Chick-fil-A. Look what they have done. And there's some truth to it, although it's never been quite as naked as what DeSantis is doing. On the other hand, look, this is what happens when you get into this cycle of payback. And I do think that there are progressives who have become very, very comfortable, much more comfortable over a long period of time in saying that if we believe that a company is doing or saying something that we find to be deplorable, that we're going to take action against them. And that's been internalized.

So this is a new idea on the right, but it's perhaps not that new on – am I going to get blowback for the both sides? Charlie's right, people. Look, the absence of principle is kind of a default in politics both sides is in here. Charlie's right, people. Look, the absence of principle is kind of a default in politics. Politics is about power. It should be about ideas. It should be about values. It should be about principles. But in fact, when people get power, whether they are on the right or the left, it's awfully tempting to just use that power to directly achieve what you want. So that is what DeSantis is doing. That's why Governor Meatballs has such strong support on the right. And Charlie, this ties right back to the Twitter hearings, right? The social media stuff, where the right is very, very upset that there was

backstage lobbying by the left, by Democrats, to suppress stories that Democrats thought were false. And meanwhile, there's absolutely no concern about efforts that were made by the Trump administration, by Donald Trump, by people on the right to manipulate Twitter, including a guy buying Twitter, Elon Musk, and then basically trying to skew it back in a direction that serves the interests of the right. We haven't talked about Elon Musk in a while, mainly because I just find it completely exhausting. But the fact that he has now decided to cut off Starlink to the Ukrainians at a crucial point in the war, for anyone who thinks that, yes, Elon Musk is trying to be even-handed, Elon Musk is not being an overt pro-Russian shill,

that he is not betraying the Ukrainians. The thing about Elon Musk is that Elon Musk is one of those guys that is so deeply damaged and hypocritical and vicious that it's hard to keep up with it and therefore exhausting. And this is a disadvantage because I find myself to sort of dropping the ball and going, I can't deal with this anymore. How many days in a row do I want to talk about how Elon Musk is effing up Twitter? Elon Musk now engaging in kind of a weird kind of appeasement of Vladimir Putin at the time when he is ratcheting up the genocide, the rape, the murder, the wanton assault on civilians. And what is Elon Musk, who had posed for holy pictures as a guy who was helping out Ukraine with Starling, basically just completely screws them over? Well, okay, I'm actually going to have to defend Musk here, or at least...

At least. So, all right, so anyone who sees what Elon Musk is doing on Twitter can see that he's an egomaniac and a narcissist, right? So that's what's driving his behavior on Twitter and probably the purchase of Twitter, which makes no sense financially. He's demanding engagement and firing people and all that stuff. But in the case of Starlink, I think this is straight up corrupt. It is the behavior of an international businessman, right? He allowed them to use the Starlinks, but he doesn't't want the Starlings to be used for what, drones? Because that could escalate things and that would get Elon Musk in trouble with who?

I assume with Russia. It's not really Russia that is the ultimate problem here in terms of Elon Musk's behavior. It is China. It is that this guy, because he has financial interests around the world, does not want to piss off authoritarian regimes. Okay, this is your defense? This is your defense of Elon Musk? He's not just Putin's bitch. He's actually also China's bitch. And this is your defense? I got to start somewhere. So my defense of Elon Musk, yes, you have me nailed here. My defense is he's not trying to screw Ukraine. He's just trying to protect himself from pissing off one authoritarian regime, which is the Russians. But he's also afraid to confront the other authoritarian regime, China, to which

he is deeply, deeply in hock. And that over the long term is going to be a bigger problem. But I cannot deny that in Ukraine, he is practicing financial cowardice. Did you see that at the Super Bowl yesterday, he was there with Rupert Murdoch? Elon Musk. And it's like, if you wanted like just a little snapshot of, you know, what do we mean by the oligarchy in the United States, you know, in the West, you know, deplorable billionaires sitting together. What was their conversation like? I don't know. George Orwell once said, to see what's in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle. It's the way I felt as I was reading the piece in the Washington Post over the weekend by Michael, is it pronounced Michael Kranish, Michael Kranish, about the incredibly sleazy grift between the Trumps and the Kushners and the Saudi Arabians.

You know, the Atlantic's Ann Applebaum has seen a lot. I mean, Ann Applebaum is one of those folks who's been watching what's been happening with democracy and authoritarianism all over the planet. I mean, she knows corruption. She knows the various kinds of corruption. And I mean, she has seen an awful lot. She tweeted out yesterday that this new reporting on the Trump-Kushner Saudi deals looks like the most blatant example of high-level corruption in American history. Cannot think of a precedent. You know, this is the story. So, you know, Kushner, who's a terrible businessman, needed a billion dollar bailout in his last deal. Let me just read the paragraph here, just from the Washington Post. The day after leaving the White House, the day after leaving

the White House, Jared Kushner created a company that he transformed months later into a private equity firm with $2 billion from a sovereign wealth fund chaired by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Kushner's firm structured those funds in such a way that it did not have to disclose the source. A year after his presidency, Trump's golf courses began hosting tournaments for the Saudi-funded-backed LIV Golf. Separately, the former president's family company, the Trump Organization, secured an agreement with a Saudi real estate company that plans to build a Trump Hotel as part of a $4 billion golf resort in Oman. The substantial investments by the Saudis in enterprises that benefited both men personally came after they cultivated close ties with Mohammed while Trump was president of the United States in office,

helping the crown prince's standing by scheduling Trump's first presidential trip to Saudi Arabia, backing him amid numerous international crises, and meeting with him repeatedly in D.C. and the kingdom, including on a final trip Kushner took to Saudi Arabia on the eve of the January 6, 2021 attack on the capital. This is one of those cases where it's so big, it's so blatant, it is in plain sight. I don't want to engage in what about, but the juxtaposition of the obsession about Hunter's laptop versus what about Kushner and Ivanka and Trump, who are just feeding at the teat of one of the worst monsters on the international stage. just point out what Donald Trump did for Mohammed bin Salman. I don't know how to avoid saying this in exchange for these billions of dollars that his son-in-law and that Trump himself pick up after they leave office, right? So the first trip that Donald Trump made was to Saudi Arabia. He goes over there. He has a parade of U.S. arms manufacturers walking in front of, on a carpet to receive contracts

from the Saudi government. The Saudis are like literally handing over money here. Here's a contract for you and for you. It's all lucrative. He then has some round table where he's got these guys all, it's all about the money. And it's explicit that it's all about the money. And then Mohammed bin Salman orchestrates the murder of a journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, an American resident, by the way. The CIA says that Mohammed bin Salman did this. And Donald Trump, the president of the United States, refuses to accept the CIA's conclusion. He rejects it. And in fact, he said he, quote, saved Mohammed bin Salman, right? That's Trump's own words. He covered up a murder,

and then he gets billions of dollars, and his son-in-law gets billions of dollars. And Applebaum is exactly right. There is no parallel for this level of corruption. No, and it is the quid pro quo, but it also is very, very on brand that Donald Trump admires foreign thugs who commit atrocities. I mean, you know, when he was asked about Vladimir Putin, he says, well, we're not so innocent. We have lots of killers, too. When the Chinese ran over the demonstrators in Tiananmen, you know, he talked about their strength.

He was, you know, overtly enthusiastic about Philippine President Duterte's extrajudicial murders of drug dealers. I mean, you just run down the list. And I wrote that piece, The Brutality is the Point. This guy has a real kink. He likes the use of force. It's not just that he's willing to tolerate and look the other way. There's something about him that is wired in to say, you know, you get away with this.

You do this. This is strength. This is what the strong man does. It's one of the scarier aspects of a very scary guy. It is. And just as a reminder to people, it's how long ago was it? A couple of months ago that Donald Trump announced his presidential campaign for 2024. And in the speech announcing his campaign, he calls for one-day trials of accused

drug dealers and immediate executions. And he explicitly, explicitly cites Xi Jinping as his model for this kind of stuff. So it's not subtle. It's right out there that Donald Trump wants to turn the United States into just another authoritarian, autocratic country that violates human rights. You're reporting on that is what inspired my column about the brutality that he made that a centerpiece. And his fascination with bloody bullets goes way back. Remember in 2016, he kept telling that story over and over again, completely made up story about General Blackjack Pershing putting down a Muslim revolt in the Philippines. They would line up 50 Muslim insurgents, and he would shoot 49 of them in the head

with bullets dipped in pig blood. And then he would, you know, give the bullet dipped in pig blood to the 50th and say, go and tell everybody what we're doing here. Yeah. Basically bragging about an atrocity that he made up, but it was the atrocity that attracted him. So, I mean, there we are. So what do we make of the debate over the weekend about Social Security and Medicare? Interesting that the Republicans continue to scurry away

as far and fast as they can. And yet, you know, Rick Scott is still out there. Ron Johnson still calling Social Security a Ponzi scheme. There are, you know, actual fiscal conservatives who are going, wait, are you guys abandoning any idea of reforming these entitlement programs? And don't email me about whether it's an entitlement program. This is shorthand. So this continues to be a real problem for Republicans. The Democrats have decided, not surprisingly, just to wrap it around their neck and pull. Let me just start with a general view I have about the Republican Party. And unlike you and unlike a lot of other folks

at the board, I do not come from this background, but my view coming from a democratic background, I do believe that we need a conservative party in this country, but it needs to stand for conservative ideas and it needs to stand for them even when they're politically unpopular. So some of the most politically unpopular conservative ideas are let the market do its thing even when we all want a result, right? That's in the case of Ron DeSantis. Another is fiscal responsibility. Look, people love tax cuts and people love spending. Anything that gets my money back to me or somebody else's money to me, it's good for me, right? And to be a true conservative party, to be an honorable conservative party, you need to be willing to say no to that stuff. You need to be willing to say no to spending. You know, one of Trump's

innovations was to basically toss that aside and say, we're going to ignore that. And now, in the case of Social Security and Medicare, honestly, Charlie, it's so much of federal spending at this point that if we're going to get, you know, the national debt under control, if we're going to get, we are going to need to address these programs somehow. And if Republicans are going to set this stuff off the table at the beginning, which is the Kevin McCarthy position, then they're not serious, and nobody will do it, because the left will not do it, right? The right has to do it. And they've just decided, the right has just decided to abdicate that responsibility,

and that's a shame. So I hope there are a few folks who are willing to raise this. Mike Rounds, a senator from South Dakota, is one of them, who was on TV this weekend, gingerly suggesting ways of getting, you know, these programs under control. Because right now, we're not going to be able to sustain the level of spending that we have for them over the next several decades. But there are fixes that don't strike me as deal breakers. Actually cutting benefits, that is a deal breaker. There have been adjustments in the past that have not touched the third rail. We have gradually raised the retirement age.

I don't think that's particularly desirable. But the biggest reform, and I could see this coming from the Democrats, is to raise the cap on the payroll tax. I mean, right now, if you're an upper income person, sometime in the middle of the year, you stop paying Social Security taxes because they only tax the first and they can't. And they've raised this without creating an outcry. I mean, it used to be like around $100,000. What is it now for the first $160,000? So accelerating or eliminating the cap on income that is taxed for Social Security seems like a pretty easy lift, and particularly for the Democrats who don't mind raising taxes on upper income people, right? Well, yes, that's exactly right.

They would just be translating that principle over into the Social Security system. Look, the reason why Democrats say they don't want to do this kind of thing, they like social security and Medicare to be these, you pay in, you get out, right? And insurance. Right. It's supposed to not be a welfare program, what they call a welfare program, right? So it's not transfers from the rich to the poor. That feels rhetorical. It is. It is. And I will just say, this is where I am basically a progressive. Why is it that we are setting aside money and paying it out to the rich? We should definitely do what you suggested, right? We should raise the cap so that you continue to pay the tax

above a certain threshold. I think, Charlie, we should also mean-test the benefits. There are a lot of wealthy people collecting Social Security who do not need it. I just think we should suspend the fiction of social insurance and make it a welfare program. Okay, so I'm with you half the way there. I think the danger of means testing would be very, very messy. I think that the fundamental thing behind the Social Security system is that it is a promise, that people pay into it with the expectation they're going to get out. Anytime you break a promise like that, I think it's very, very dangerous. On the other hand, the taxing system that we have accepted in this country, I think generally a progressive income tax. I wonder how many Americans actually understand that there's a large number of

people in this country that just do not pay social security taxes after, say, August. I actually remember learning about this as a young journalist when the editor of the paper walked through the newsroom and for some reason, what an idiot he was, started commenting on the fact that, oh, it's May 1st. Shouldn't my Social Security tax have disappeared by then? Because at his income level back then, in May, he hit the limit. And from May through the rest of the year, he paid nothing in Social Security taxes. Okay, so what principle was being upheld there? Everybody else in the newsroom was paying the Social Security tax and paid it all 12 months.

The fact that a very large portion of wage earners don't do it, that strikes me as the lowest of the lowest hanging fruits. Going after benefits, part of the problem though, is those calculations and that people might get caught in it. You know, people who have played by the rules, who've saved, who've really done a good job of putting money aside in their 401ks and who work hard. For them to be penalized, I think that's dangerous politically, but raising the taxes, you know, making it, you know, year long strikes me as much easier. But Charlie, once you've taken that step, once you've raised the cap, you are at that point departing from the idea of this as social insurance, because that boss had paid in enough to get out the check that was coming at the end,

right? I mean, that principle has no regard for your level of income. So I think once you're saying to raise the cap beyond what is needed to pay out your benefits, then at that point, you are transferring from the wealthier to the less wealthy, which I think is fine. Which we are anyway. Okay, so just take a deep breath and go, okay, yeah, we're doing that. This is a program. This is a social safety net, and this is the way we're going to pay for it. And my guess is the number of Americans that actually understand the distinction you just made or who have internalized it is probably around 5%. So, I mean, moving on. All right. Not asking for a prediction here, but last week I was getting rather grumpy about the pace of the Department of Justice and noting that the clock was really, really running

on all of this and that we were 25 months past January 6th without a single major indictment of one of the architects of the insurrection. And that I was becoming increasingly concerned that Merrick Garland's foot dragging was going to go into the presidential campaign and make it much, much more difficult. Within 24 hours of my griping about that, you had the stories that Jack Smith is in fact moving ahead rather aggressively. He is subpoenaing Vice President Mike Pence. They're still going after documents down in Mar-a-Lago. We're getting reports that the grand jury in Fulton County, at least some of the recommendations are going to be released this week. Fannie Willis, who's the DA, keeps saying the charges are imminent, keeps saying it. So what

is your sense? Because I have been thinking spring of 2023, absolute drop dead, must happen by then. Give me your sense. It certainly seemed as if Jack Smith was putting an exclamation point on his investigation by subpoenaing the former vice president. That strikes me as a BFD. Your thoughts? It is. It is.

But first of all, let's just say, as evidenced by your gripe and the results, note to advertisers, Charlie Sykes gets results. I'm going for a coincidence here. All right. So we'll go with the coincidence theory. I'm always a fan of coincidence. Look, inherently, things are going to move forward. There is an investigation going on, even if it's not going to end up where you want or I want, there will be more subpoenas. There will be more grand jury action. So I wouldn't assume that this is going to end up in an indictment. I wouldn't assume this is going to end up in a prosecution. I would much rather that the system function properly than that it achieves some result

that I want. I don't think it's necessary. Wait. I don't think it's necessary to indict Donald Trump. I think it is much more important that we reestablish faith in America's institutions, including the rule of law. So I want Merrick Garland and I want Jack Smith to go buy the book. Will, come, let us reason together. I need to pull you back from that completely incoherent answer that you had there, which was wrong on so many

different levels. I wish I had it in front of me so that I could do one of those little charts. Yes, we need to restore faith in the rule of law. And the only way to do that is to hold the lawbreakers accountable by establishing the principle that no one is above the law. And the only way to do that is not by issuing a report, not by having a press conference, but by having the rule of law applied to the people who are the worst miscreants, the worst felons in this attempt to overthrow the government. There is no way for the system to work if it does not work in holding the architects of the insurrection accountable. This seems to me to be very clear. The system does not work if Donald Trump and company walks. the historic red line marker when the institutions, when the guardrails failed to hold them accountable at a moment of absolute constitutional necessity.

Okay. We were just talking earlier about Trump importing Chinese justice or lack thereof, right, of violating the rule of law to get results, which is like execute drug dealers. It is very important, Charlie, you use the phrase, hold lawbreakers accountable. Yes, we must hold lawbreakers accountable. But first, we must prove that people broke the law in a way that merits prosecution. And I'm fine if Jack Smith proves that. I'm fine if Merrick Garland proves that. And God knows Donald Trump, to the extent he did that, should be held accountable. But I would much rather be very careful about that. It will be a scandal. It will be an outrage. And it will undermine the rule of law. If Donald Trump gets away with breaking the law leading up to and on January 6th, because he is a politically powerful

figure, and if the law is afraid to prosecute him for that reason, and meanwhile, the people under him, the people who went into the Capitol go to jail, that will be a scandal and that will undermine the rule of law. But if the distinction is that the crimes can be proven, if prosecutors sit around a table and decide they can prove the case against the people who are in the Capitol, but that it is difficult to prove elements of the crimes charged to Donald Trump, then in that case, I'm for them drawing that distinction and honoring it. Well, if that is the decision, however, just having watched the absolute avalanche of evidence that we've seen from the January 6th committee, I think the case has been made. I think it's been made compelling. And I think that the federal grand jury, the federal prosecutors have much more

robust tools in order to compel the testimony and to fill in the gaps. And, you know, the willingness to subpoena Mike Pence tells me that they're not playing. They're not playing games. They understand that they need him. They need him under oath. And they're sending a signal to everybody else. It was one thing for these folks to play games with the congressional committee and not go in and testify or ignore the subpoenas. No one is going to treat the federal grand jury in the same way. So I would be extremely disappointed, given everything that we know that they made that decision. But we're going to find out relatively shortly, aren't we, Will? Yeah.

I mean, the clock is running. Right. I'm glad. I'm glad we finally have an agency in the form of these subpoenas from the special counsel. We finally have something that Mike Pence and others have to honor. You know, Mark Meadows can't escape this. Mike Pence can't escape this. And we will find out the truth, and it will go one way or the other, And I'm happy to go with the truth. Will Salatin, thank you so much for joining me once again on this Monday, this very strange post-Super Bowl, post-UFO, post-Rihanna halftime show Monday. So we'll do this again next week, okay? All right, Charlie, the truth is out there. Maybe. I keep hoping that it is. And thank you all for listening to today's Bul there. Maybe. I keep hoping that it is. And thank you all for listening to today's Bulwark Podcast.

I'm Charlie Sykes. We'll be back tomorrow, and we'll do this all over again. The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper and engineered and edited by Jason Brown.