Bill Kristol: Trump Has Lost the Plot

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Please try Ayonos, your digital partner at Ayonos.co.uk Hello and welcome to the Bulwark podcast. I'm your host Tim Miller. We are back post Christmas break. Bill Crystal, I saw you notice that our department of Homeland Security wished everyone a Merry Christmas and said we are blessed to share a nation and a savior, which isn't quite right, I don't think, but the Merry Christmas part was okay. Yeah, that's insane. Well now we can say that again. We couldn't say that during Friday, so it's nice to be able to wish my non-Jewish neighbors, most of whom are non-Jewish, you know, Merry Christmas. And even some of the Jews wish each other Merry Christmas sometimes. Is that right? Why shouldn't we enjoy it? Well, as someone wrote on the good piece on the Bulwark website, it's kind of an American holiday at this point. Almost a secular holiday as well as a religious one, right? So that's fine. That's fine. I felt that way. Santa, for example, not in the Bible, right? Shocking. Really? Yeah, I was talking to Sam Stein about this and Santa does not come to the Stein household. I was like, why not? Yeah, we don't do that either. I don't know. Different people have different customs, but yeah. Okay. We're exhausted giving them the, unfortunately, or fortunately, Hanukkah, which is a minor Jewish holiday, of course, but it's become bigger because of its parliaments, its proximity to Christmas. It's eight days. So we're exhausted, the science and the crystals from giving the kids eight days of presents. So it's like the last thing we need is Santa coming. But of course, the 12 days of Christmas, people don't really observe that, right? That's a thing from the, I mean, it's a wonderful song performed by the Bulwark choir there. People should take a look at that, organized by Catherine Rampel. I don't think I was that impressed. I was there to make everyone else look good. And, and of course, Edgar was there to be, to show that there is a genuine star on the Bulwark. Yeah, Andrew Edgar can sing. We'll put that in the show notes. Apparently he was in the Hillsdale Abraham Lincoln choir. We learned over the break. Speaking of Edgar, he has a nice newsletter. It looks like you were off this morning. Yeah. Despite, you know, I don't know, you could have worked. I contributed behind the scenes. There's a lot of subtle editing that people aren't catching up on. Well, Andrew Edgar wrote the morning shots this morning. And thank goodness, because it was wonderful. And he wrote about going home for Christmas and he's going back to Iowa and his family is more conservative and has some Trump voters in there. And he writes about how like, isn't contentious. I was surprised to learn about him a couple of months ago. We were talking about this. He's like, they have a family text chain where they text about politics. Seems very healthy actually. Yeah, I know you made that face, but I don't know. It seemed to take it too personal, which is, I think good in a way. Anyway, he's telling me he's writing about just kind of the deterioration of everything and how you, what's the old line about how, you know, movement becomes a starts off as an idea becomes a movement. So like that. And then ends up as a grift. It's not quite the word that's used in the line. Yeah, something like that. Something like that. We'll find it. It's like the degree of the scamming us of Trump world is pretty disillusioning and depressing. And he talks about how, you know, there was this a guy, Jake Elsie, who you might remember, you were in a little drama related to him. He was like the more normie guy running in a, in a big primary in Texas for a house seat. Our friend Michael Wood was kind of a never Trump or candidate back when those existed. And then Elsie was more like the establishment person. And then there were some more MAGA people. And Elsie apparently was sending his texts to his grandmother, like asking for 10 bucks so that they can get their Trump tariff checks, which is a scam. Obviously, Jake Elsie's pack has no purview there. And, and he's from Texas and she's in Iowa. And so, you know, he's kind of trying to help his, his grandparents understand what was happening on the scam. And then he has an uncle talking to him about Nick Fuentes. Yeah. And it's just, you know, it's not one of these stories about how we have a family food fight over the holidays, but just about how it's kind of sad the way things are deteriorating. No, it's really a lovely piece. People should read. Yeah. It's also his grandma sent $10 and then it didn't realize she was, I think, signing up for $10 a month recurring thing, which is one way these scams really do work. Elsie was a kind of normie Republican. He wasn't as normal as Michael Wood and my judgment. But I think maybe the reason I got dragged into this, I'd give it Elsie, 250 bucks or something. The previous cycle, maybe because he was running as the one. I go to the morning to refresh my memory. Yeah, you had already done it in 2018. When there were still a few people one hoped would be normie Republicans who could get elected and stand up a bit to Trump. And that was kind of his posture in the primary, which he of course lost, right? Yes. And then he ran again as a more Trumpy candidate three years later and then his opponent used your donation against him. You know, like never Trump or Bill Kristol support. You know, the puppeteer. I am to be used in Republican, inter-Republican primary fights. But then now, Elsie, who I'm sure if I talk to in private, I'm sure he's okay on things. It isn't crazy, but I mean, the fundraising is the worst of it. They all go for these generic fundraisers and MAGA fundraisers the way to go, I guess. So it's a nice little, not a nice, it's a kind of horrible glimpse of how everything has been normalized in a Trumpy, grifty, scammy direction, right? Yeah. I mean, even in a world where there's always been grift and scams, don't get me wrong, but... For sure. And then I thought the other thing is Andrew, as you say, the family's got a lot. They talk about politics politely and stuff, and they still did apparently at this Christmas dinner. But I think the degree to which Andrew, who's such a nice guy, was kind of horrified is, just so disheartened by the deception and the sort of damage that's being done to his family members really by Trumpism. I mean, that was... And the way that tentacles get in, it's like kind of more less engaged family members asking about younger nephews or whatever, cousins that are like into Nicaragua now and are into white nationalism. It's just, you can just see the way that things are disintegrating. I don't know. So one thing, we enjoy watching the MAGA Food Fight, the TPUSA, the Ben Shapiro versus Tucker. I get there's a little bit of a popcorn element to it. But also, there's not a lot of evidence out there that even in the best case scenario, a post-Trump right is something where things pivot back. I just like there are all these incentives through, just look at this example, like the fundraising through the influencers and content creators, through how you get attention, like all these incentives are towards exacerbating the problems rather than resolving them. And certainly the dynamic we have a year now of experience of Trump being the nominee, the president-elect and then the president, and everything has gotten so much worse. That is the position that we now are sort of semi-rooting for because it's not entirely crazy, anti-Semitic and bigoted and insanely conspiracist. It's still pretty bad by traditional standards and is being held down by people who've got along with pretty terrible policies and other conspiracies and other bigotries, but they're a little less, they're a little better than Nick Fuentes. It wouldn't have been crazy to say that as president, the thing will get moderated a little, he has to govern. And I suppose one could have even argued in 2017-18 there was a little bit of that, right? I mean, it is very striking how much everything has gone in the other direction, I think, in the last two years. Well, I was going to end with that. Let's just do it at the start then we get to the news. Where are you at, like just like thinking about the last year? Because I am kind of of two minds about it. Like on the one hand, I'm feeling better than I was about the ability to beat back Trump, I think, than I was probably when we sat here at New Year's last year. And a pretty, pretty dark, dark time to put your head back into. I think there's like crying on the podcast at that, the New Year's podcast last year. So on the one hand, he looks weaker. First, I think his movement looks weaker. On the other hand, you know, like the perniciousness of what is happening on the right does not seem to be abating in any way, right? And AI is just coming, right? Like these sort of scams and griffs that are happening right now are happening kind of using more traditional methods, right? Like the ability to do that on supercharged ways is coming right around the corner. He's got three more years left where he's going to be deteriorating. They've done a lot of damage already, particularly kind of on the immigration front and the role in the world institutionally. So I don't know. I kind of have two minds about what I think about where we sit now versus a year ago, but I'm wondering what you think. I'm in the same place. I think it's not really two minds. It's just two realities, which is he's weaker than he was. The public has been resistant, maybe a little more than one might have expected to a lot of what he's both the policies and the way he's done things. And that's good. I mean, it makes it makes it less likely that ultimately he and the movement succeed and more likely they lose water both houses of Congress, etc. More likely even if they lose in 2028, I guess if we have something like free and fair elections. And the other hand, the damage that he's done is greater than we expected, I think. And the radicalization, what we were talking about a minute ago is maybe greater than we expected. And so these two trends are kind of both correct. I mean, they're both happening. They're just they cut in different directions. At some point they hit each other and they can be they can go along together in a way in parallel. You might almost say for a while he doesn't have to. He can keep radicalizing and the damage can get keep getting bigger if Congress doesn't choose to check him. At least for the next year, I guess for me, the swing voters that were between the his decreasing popularity and the increasing damage is maybe the elites. That is the public, I think is in the right direction. I wouldn't be surprised if his numbers go down a little further. If he's gone from what 50 to 40, think 41, 42, maybe he was never going to lose in one year that much more than eight out of 15, 15% of his support. That's kind of a lot, you know, and great if he could lose another five or 8% of his 50 percent. Next year. So I think that part has been sort of encouraging. I feel like the elites in a way of the swing vote, I mean, are they going to start to leave him that that's where the three years is such a big problem. The executive is so powerful. There's such incentives to get along with him to the degree that he keeps radicalizing. The elites are more inclined to go along not less because hey, I've got to run this company for three years and what am I going to do? And you can tell me he's only 41%. But has that changed the fact that I'm not going to get these contracts if I don't do X or. I don't know if I can't opportunistically capitalize on this grift for quite a while here and they'll be pardons at the end for everyone. So I don't know. I feel like the elites, some of the elites need to stand up. The spring court will be interesting on this front on the elites and then Trump himself, like does he have the, let's see if it in him to fight, you know, like does he have the will and the desire to want to fight in the same way as he has. Right. Like wanting to stay in power. Like the January 6th, like that whole element was was driven by, you know, the fact that he couldn't accept losing and he had to stay in power and he couldn't take this indignity and the fact that he's aging and does he feel like he doesn't need to go. Obviously he's challenging the courts in the norms in a million ways, but like the degree to which he decides he wants to use those bruised hands to grasp on to power, I think is also, you know, what is an unknown at this point. Yeah, no, I agree. Among others too, there's somebody surprises that could come and stuff. But I would say I'm just on that point, such an important one. But I mean, he's now got a movement though that desperately wants to hold not to power. I mean, he's got hundreds of people who benefited so much from this administration, both benefited just in terms of their careers and they love being in high office, but also obviously the more direct grift and so forth. And do they think they could afford to lose? That's what gets me most worried. In January 6th, it was him, some of the true believers, but there were a heck of a lot of people in there who were like, come on, this is ridiculous. We can't do this, including the vice president, the United States, for example, and other important figures. I don't know. I think now their attitude would be much more, we cannot afford to be out of power here for the next two or four years even. So that's worrisome. Maybe. It doesn't work without him though. It doesn't work without him. I was noticed the pictures from the weekend, I just, from the Zleczki thing, which one we get to. Next is the bruise has expanded to the left hand. So if you, yeah, the bruise has expanded to the left hand. He's gotten out of the makeup on both hands. So the hand shaking excuse, which I don't think any of us really put it in the first place, but I do think it bears mentioning that the idea that you just shake so many hands that his hand gets bruised, that seems to be not what's happening actually, unless he's doing left handed shakes. What is the bruise? Have you looked into this? I haven't really at all. I mean, it could be some medication he's taking, I don't know if intravenously is the right word even, but you know what I mean, through an injection every week or something like that, which is, could be for all kinds of things, some of them non-dramatic, so to speak, and others more dramatic. I don't know. I just haven't followed up. I mean, I'm not a doctor. I have a lot of doctors in my life and you know, it's not good about your circulation. I do notice that Queen Elizabeth had the same bruises right before she passed. So I don't know. It's not a sign of health. I'll tell you that much, Bill. One more thing on the year. Semaphore does this thing where they ask you what they're wrong about over the last year and you hate to hand it to Steve Bannon ever, but there's an interesting answer from Bannon that ties into their deteriorating popularity and how the damage that they've done and the deteriorating popularity are intertwined. And he pointed to Doge and he's basically like, look, the fact that nobody saw this at the top, right? And what he pointed out was that like we wasted all this time under this fake notion they're going to save $2 trillion, which they never were going to do. And instead, like we wasted all this political capital on doing that. And what you and I would describe as the damage caused by Doge, probably different than what Bannon would describe as the damage caused by Doge, right? But there was like direct damage caused to people, various communities, people lost jobs. Obviously, there's an international element to it and they did it and got nothing. That's also something that I think December 29th of last year we wouldn't have expected was coming. Like the damage done by Doge exceeded what we expected. That was like on our predictions list that they were going to let Elon Musk run rough shot over Doe and like put 22 year old like Gropers in charge of USAID or whatever. Like that wasn't on our list. And the fact that they did that, I do think it ends up being very harmful and retrospective. No, I agree with that. And I think maybe for two reasons. I mean, one, it wasn't on their list either. And I do think I learned this a bit in 2005, looking at Bush with that memory decided not having spoken about it at all in the election in January 2005. His big priority in the second term was going to be social security before private accounts and social security, which they hadn't laid the groundwork for at all, which people didn't expect. They didn't quite see the urgency of. Suddenly it emerges as the priority for a second term. There are a lot of other things that were important. And I remember time talking to people in the administration and close to it and Republican, political types. And they, I mean, they told me and I think I think they were right. It's both that it wasn't a very popular idea and they lost the debate over pretty quickly and it collapsed by three, four months, even though they had a Republican Congress. But also that people don't remember that much, you know, but they don't really think if they just if they elect you or reelect you and Trump's kind of a reelection, they kind of think you should. I don't know, do what you said you would do somewhat. I mean, of course, if you're a conservative true believer and cutting the federal government, Grover and Orkowitz, blah, blah, blah, this is great. We're getting this in addition to all the Trump stuff, you know, we get a cultural war and we get a massive assault on the government. So I think it's partly the actual real world effects were unpleasant. Partly the surprise of it was just what's going on. And the surprise would fit into something that I think Sarah's found through increasingly during the year for focus groups, which is a kind of wait, he was supposed to be watching out for us. And it's I think the sort of normal liberal critique of don't the Trump voters understand that he's not helping them. That's sort of half true. But that's less the it's more the sense that at least he reached maybe forgiveness if you were trying to help them or seem to be trying to help them or faking trying to help them. And it just hadn't happened yet. You can get by some time and people will give you some benefit of the doubt these policies are hard and so forth. But the fact that it's all about him and he liked muscle, he let Musk run rampant for four months that he decided he wanted to rename everything. So he's doing that for the next four months. You know, I think I feel like it sort of fits in with the notion that he's forgotten what the point of this was from the point of view of a semi normal Trump voter. And especially if you're somebody like that that did feel real damage, which I think some did with those, whether that would be health care and like, you know, the hospital issue in rural areas are being struck at the time just being in Louisiana like not random people that would have like, you know, that were contractors for a program. You know, I just think that a lot of like the image of it just being, you know, people with master's degrees that live next to you and McLean and Bethesda that were harmed by this was not, is not right. And I think once that kind of touched people, combining that with his disinterest that did make a difference again on the margins like it's not taking down to 0%. But did make a difference. Of course, every president, certainly every elected president seems to drift out in his first year back in office. Somehow people just want to be disappointed these days. It's an interesting thought experiment. One is what if he hadn't done Doge? The second is what if he had been fairly normal as far as he could be normal in his first year? He still wouldn't have got up, right? I mean, he'd be at 40. What do you think? I'm just really curious what you think. Would he be at 46 instead of 42? I mean, is that sort of the difference with we're talking about here? I mean, you know, I was trying to think about the positives of him losing power. The one negative to your point, since you mentioned it was, I saw some analysis. Now, I think it was real clear politics, just kind of right wing and so like the makeup of polls they use is a little bit skewed. They had put out a thing that was like the approval rating of Obama Bush at the end of the first year of the second term. And it was like the same. It's Trump like they both had dropped to the low 40s basically. And Biden first term is very similar looking actually remember because of Afghanistan. Yeah. So, you know, there is some of that that is just kind of like whatever a reversion to the mean or, you know, this kind of thermostatic element of political support. I think you didn't have to be as low as he is though. I'm like the amount of own goals like the tariffs, the dough. I like there is a second of this to Tom and Nichols on Friday. I re listened to our podcast after the last election last year and we had Tom and the thing that we were both lamenting was like the economy was getting better slowly. Like now prices weren't ever going to come down. Like people who are very sensitive to price increases of the grocery store fixed incomes or whatever, we're still going to maybe like not get what they had imagined they would get out of Trump. Right. But like the economy was getting better when he came in and the in between Doge and the immigration crackdown and the tariffs, like a bunch of stuff they just chose to do. They made the economy worse. And so at that level, you have to figure that that made the difference at some amount, you know, in his favorability. And the Trump factor, the style of governance, if you want to call it that, it's got to matter. Because I think if you had given us more importantly, real political scientists, the current economic data, you know, and said, well, where would Trump be? I think you would have people would have said, well, probably some drift down, but not that much. It's not like we're in some recession. It's not like inflation is going up. It just hasn't come down as much unemployment's up a bit. But yeah, I think the chaos, the neediness, just the combination of the willfulness. Yeah, that's probably cost him some. So that's that's encouraging that it's cost him some could cost him more, if I could say not to be greedy, but it's encouraging. Could have prevented him getting back in there. Okay, that's another for another day. One again, changing way to watch college basketball with the one day pass from sling, get instant access to the men's and women's tournament starting at just 499. You can catch all the action on TNT, TBS, ESPN and ESPN too. One even more hoops than add an extra pack to your subscription for just $1. No overpaying, no overcommitting, just tournament so crazy, maybe crazy to miss. Visit sling.com to learn more. Sling lets you do that. Okay, one judgment. Anyway, give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch. Oh, talking about what's actually been happening yesterday. Zelensky visited Mar-a-Lago for a press conference where he was showing. A very Christian patience during the holiday season for Donald Trump. As he popped off on, you know, kind of doing the whole, it's a real Groundhog Day element with this, but I want to, I want to just play one clip in particular. So in your conversation with President Putin, did you discuss what responsibility Russia will have for any kind of reconstruction of Ukraine post-concrete agreement? I did. I did. They're going to be helping. Russia is going to be helping. Russia wants to see Ukraine succeed. Once it sounds a little strange, but I was explaining to the President, President Putin was very generous in his feeling toward Ukraine succeeding, including supplying energy, electricity and other things at very low prices. So a lot of good things came out of that call today, but they were in the works for two weeks. Generosity of spirits. You did use something you think about when you think about Vladimir Putin. Just a little backdrop on that. So Saturday night, Russia was dropping ballistic missiles and drones on Kyiv. At least one person died in that attack. And then Sunday before the meeting, as Trump mentioned, he had this call with Putin before he met with Zelensky, where apparently he expressed a real deep generosity for Ukraine and a concern for Ukraine's success going forward. I mean, it's the farcicalness of Trump always. Focusing on it risks the one doesn't see how grotesque it is and the kind of… I know. I mean, it is both farcical and just so horrifying. Hitler really isn't getting… He really wants the Sudetenland to do well. And the rest of Czechoslovakia too, if that comes along. And it's so horrible that I'm an American President, say that. Whatever our past sins of accommodating some dictators a little too much and so forth, I mean, to have that, it's a good reminder. Honestly, though, that for all the Ziegs and Zags of Trump's policy on Ukraine and towards Putin, and he gets exasperated electorally sometimes, and this and that, and people hope, well, maybe he'll do the right thing, and he does sort of do it for a month or two or three. How fundamentally he's on the wrong side of the deep struggle that's going on in the world. Yeah. I mean, or in the same place, I guess that's a point in my groundhog day. It's just this whole, just kind of rigmarole that happens over and over again where it's like Trump gets sympathetic towards Putin, and then he's upset that Putin doesn't give him what he wants. He gets in his Pete's prize, and he has got a handful of people around on the wanting to be more supportive of Ukraine. So he meets with Zelensky again, and then it's like, oh, wait, but, but I also need to get Putin on board to get my peace prize. Like it's just the same circle over and over again, but you're like the grotesquerie underneath it. And the Russians, I have kidnapped tens of thousands of Ukrainian children. I've stolen children from Ukrainian parents and given them a way to Russian families and brainwash them into thinking that they're Russian. And that's what he did. And supposedly his wife was like negotiating, talking to Putin about this. And, you know, at a time earlier this year, people were saying, well, Malania might be a good influence here because she's really concerned about the children. Well, Russia has not given these children back. Like the whole notion that like the person that is bombing and murdering and killing people and kidnapping children also cares deeply about Ukraine is just so insulting and grotesque. How like Zelensky doesn't spit on him. I don't know. Yeah, it's impressive self-discipline on Zelensky's part. He's got to do what he's got to do to try to save his country. Malania also can't really speak English. I do wonder how that is, you know, kind of meshing with the new nativist of the group, you know? I mean, they're all out there over the past week tweeting about how people coming from third world countries is not assimilating or hurting America. Like the first lady can barely speak English and is like supposedly her point job was here. There's nothing. She doesn't do anything. But I guess the one thing that she's spoken out on is the stolen children. She doesn't seem to be making a lot of progress on that. She's white. Maybe that helps, you know? The third world countries is a way of excusing, I suppose. And that's some Western Europeans. Well, no, I mean, this is what we got into this thing with Miller. I had the insane thing over the weekend about, you know, only with all these great accomplishments over 50, 60 years, and that's the America we can still have. We kept out this infinite number of third world immigrants and every intelligent person on Twitter said, you know, these great things you're pointing to, the nuclear bomb and first flight and what else was it? Space program, landing on the moon. They were not accomplished entirely or in some cases primarily by native born Americans. Yeah. So that's a fair point, very important point to make in my view. But then other people said, you know what? He doesn't care about. It's okay if some of these immigrants are from Europe, I guess. You know, white South Africans. Oh, yeah, that is a very big tip off the white South Africans. That really, we didn't, you know, it's a tiny number. Someone doesn't think it's so insane. It doesn't get it so ludicrous in a way. You don't think much about it. But of course, it is an interesting tip off, right? Yeah, no, it tells you all you need to know, really. Hey, I'm Josh Spiegel, host of the podcast Lunatic in the newsroom. If you enjoy journalism that drifts into mild panic, wild overthinking and a guaranteed nervous breakdown, Lunatic is a great way to get your brain and mind to think about what you're doing. And if you're a big fan of the newsroom, you can get a lot of information about the newsroom. You can get a lot of information about the newsroom, but if you enjoy journalism that drifts into mild panic, wild overthinking and a guaranteed nervous breakdown, Lunatic in the newsroom is for you. It's news like you've never heard before. The only newsroom with a panic button. You'll laugh, you'll cry and gasp in horror as the show spirals completely out of control. It's not just news. It's emotionally unstable. Lunatic in the newsroom. Listen today. Now that we're down at Mar-a-Lago, most places at Jeffrey Epstein hanging out at a lot, we're going to be doing almost entirely Epstein tomorrow. I suspect on the pod. So I want to kind of go brief on this, but you did talk to Ryan Goodman yesterday. Folks can go watch that if they want on a YouTube or sub-stack, just kind of about what we've learned so far from the releases and just from more of a legal perspective. I'm just wondering what your takeaways were from that conversation. I think Ryan really gave an excellent sort of snapshot of where we are and where we might be going. I mean, one big point is we can focus on the redactions, which are inappropriate and illegal actually in many cases and clearly intentional. Clinton's in a photo with Maxwell. That's fine. Put that out. Trump apparently is in a photo on Ben and his phone with Maxwell. It kind of mentions when that comes from and see what the photo is of, or is it a photo of a photo of Epstein's desk or who knows. That's redacted. Why is it redacted? It's Trump and Maxwell. It's not so far as we know any victim or survivor. If there were such a person in the photo in addition, that person could be, of course, blocked out. So that shows a lot, I think, about what justice is doing. The withholding is more important than the redactions. I guess that would be the point that Ryan made and that I would emphasize that we have seen almost nothing of what we know exists and that everyone expected that we would see, including the victims, the big charging documents, the prosecution memos, the draft indictments from 2007, 2008, similar things from 2019 after Epstein's death. There's internal DOJ documents and then, of course, the victim statements, which I think the 302s, they call them the FBI, which the victims themselves, they've seen some of their own, but they haven't seen all of them and they want them out there properly redacted in terms of their own personal information. But that's what they want people to understand what Epstein was doing and Maxwell was doing. None of that's come out. None of it. And again, we've sort of, I don't know, not we, but I feel like some have given the Justice Department a little too much of a break and, well, maybe it'll come out, maybe some of it will come out, necessarily. But the degree to which their behavior is so consistent with wanting as little as possible to come out and delaying as long as possible is a little underestimated. And I think it goes way back. I mean, we just have to, you know, July 6th, the Stonewall memo that didn't hold up and therefore they had to start gradually trying to build secondary stonewalls as it were, but Maxwell, Blanche goes to see her, they move her to the cushy prison. And then we get the fight still, the release, you know, people take it for granted. Well, of course we're getting it. I read somewhere someone said the other day, they should have put all this out earlier and gotten rid of, gotten through it. Ludacris, there's a reason they didn't put it out earlier and they didn't want to. And incidentally, we shouldn't take for granted that it was all going to come out. It's due to Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert, right? I mean, we forget how that was not like inevitable that that discharge petition was going to get 218 signatures. Well, most people didn't think it would. And even when it did, I remember there was like three days there when people went off the Senate, we'll go along. I mean, it all collapsed quickly, which is good. But their behavior is so consistent with a continued cover-up. Maybe that's for me the most important point to take away from the conversation with Ryan. Can they succeed in continuing the cover-up? That's the drama of the next month or two. It could lead in all kinds of directions. We're in the middle of the story, almost still maybe the first part of the story. It's not like we're about to have the conclusion of it. Yeah, you mentioned the Maxwell example of him getting blacked out. There was another statement that had been that the DOJ released, but it had also been released in another case a couple of years ago. So the version that had been released already by a judge like three years ago, I concluded some accusations about Donald Trump and Nipples. I don't think we want to get into any more details for our listeners' benefit, not wanting to throw up. His name is randomly redacted from that same section that had already been released and unredacted in the past. So that's just the type of thing. And again, the explicitly the Epstein legislation says you cannot redact victims and survivors. You cannot redact when it's simply to spare a public figure embarrassment. So that's exactly what they tried to prevent and what Congress voted for and which Trump signed that legislation. And they're going ahead and doing it. Oh, well, that's complicated. That's a very disorganized justice and all. Well, maybe to some degree, but I feel like we have enough data points out that we can say they're doing their best. It's not always successful, luckily, to obscure and to help Trump. Yeah. I bring on big technology. I bring on key actors from companies building AI tech and outsiders trying to influence it. Asking where this is all going. They come from places like Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon and plenty more. So if you want to be smart with your wallet, your career choices and meetings with your colleagues and at dinner parties, listen to Big Technology Podcast, wherever you get your podcasts. And the guaranteed nervous breakdown lunatic in the newsroom is for you. It's news like you've never heard before the only newsroom with a panic button. You'll laugh, you'll cry and gasp in horror as the show spirals completely out of control. It's not just news. It's emotionally unstable. Lunatic in the newsroom. Listen today. Bondi was claiming that they're going to continue to go after the people that perpetrated the alleged January 6 hoax. It's just hard to put your head in their space here, like, because you almost have to accept the premises of Earth 2 in order to understand what's going on here. So just kind of bear with me. Obviously, there was no January 6 hoax, but they believe that there was some hoax that was perpetrated on Trump that, you know, the feds were the ones that really weren't instigating the riot, etc. The DOJ is apparently investigating that hallucination. They made an announcement because there's some complaints, I guess, on the right that they have not moved fast enough to uncover the people that perpetrated the hoax on January 6 or maybe even the people who stole the election who knows what they could find out. And so Bondi says basically, don't worry at the statute of limitations. We're not going to be limited by the statute of limitations on this, which has some problems in its own right. That did not make someone the right happy. They continued to complain about Bondi. Bondi's assistant attorney general, Harmeet Dillon, then late last night, not going to speculate on what she was doing, but it was very late last night and she was posting the following on X. Conservative influencers, if you think you're keeping the pressure on by spreading bullshit attacks on Donald Trump's cabinet, you are not. You are earning money to spread misinformation. You are hoes. Learn an honest profession. She went on and she posted a picture of her doing like a crocheted hat and says, this hat is an hour behind schedule thanks to the influencer retards. So that's what's happening, I guess. They're extending the statute of limitations to go after a made up crime. People are upset that they're not going after the made up crime harder. The assistant attorney general is calling those people hoes. That's what's happening inside the government this weekend. Right. And I think she thinks it's her way, presumably in the future, to maybe becoming deputy attorney general or attorney general. No, seriously, because this is the way up in Trump world to show total loyalty to Trump above all, obviously. And then maybe secondarily to your temporary boss just to kind of make sure that you move up the ladder. That's a great point. And to, of course, be unbelievably insulting to anyone out there who might have said something after you. Yeah. Our meat on the shortlist for future attorney general. That's really, so she was also, I should just say, what we're talking about her meat Dylan. I've mentioned her a couple of weeks ago, but for people who aren't as quite as familiar with all the characters was one of the ones that I think she tweeted sus or fishy or something related to the brown killer. Like they're spreading around that idea that there was like a trans Palestinian student who did the shooting at Brown and she tweeted like there was some evidence presented. Somebody tweeted some evidence of that. That was obviously wrong since we have found the actual person that did the killing and she like quote, tweeted with sus. So this is, you know, this is just what you're doing. This is the assistant attorney general now, like wildly speculating on social media wrongly about mass murders and also, you know, attacking random conservative bloggers, calling them hoes. That's what the assistant attorney general is up to. And she is the assistant attorney general, right? She's not acting. She's not being voted to confirm by the Senate, I guess, as they all were Bondi and Dylan. I mean, but it's nice, you know, that those Republican senators, the constitutionalists, the ones who care about that stuff, they're very deep concerned. Some of them even clerked at the Supreme Court, I believe. They feel bad about having voted to confirm Bondi and Blanche and Patel. They're deeply concerned. I've noticed that in their public statements. No, it's unbelievable. I mean, this is right. I just keep referring to this as a stupid to be to even do so because it's so obvious. The degree of complicity here by the Republican Party and all the normie ones who are still treated in private by a lot of the media and by, you know, certainly by a respectable think taxes. Well, they're okay. We could have them at our conference there. You know, they're not like Trump. They're not like crazy, you know, they are enabling, totally enabling this craziness. Yeah. 5245 was her confirmation vote. So, so there you go. I think she got all the Republicans except Markowski. I'm quickly scrolling through this right now. So maybe I missed one, but it looks like she got everybody except Markowski. One other DOJ item. Here's the one thing. If we're just going to call balls and strikes around here, Bill, you know, we're straight shooters. I don't know who did it at the FBI, the former podcaster that now quit the FBI, but they did find the pipe bomber, which was something. It seems like maybe they were motivated by that because they thought that the pipe bomber was part of the inside job to frame Trump or whatever. Or was it Antifa or something? I don't know. There was a conspiracy theory going around about the pipe bomber as maybe being one of the Capitol police even. The blaze floated that idea based on the gate analysis, but turned out they did find a guy and he confessed. His name is Brian Cole, Jr. We talked about this a couple of weeks ago, but we have some more information now. He told the DOJ, or he told investigators that something as important as voting in the federal elections was being tampered with. Somebody needed to speak up. Cole told the FBI that the people up top, including people on both sides, should not ignore the grievances of ordinary citizens are called them conspiracy theorists, bad people, Nazis or fascists. It seems like a pretty typical Trump-er to me. I was unhappy about the 2020 election. Thought it was fraudulent. I was unhappy that people were belittling those who held that conspiracy theory of a view. And so he planted two pipe bombs. The thing that's notable about this is how quickly these guys just move on from conspiracy to conspiracy. It's like, okay, so this one didn't work out. So now we're going to go just talk about something else. You're not seeing a lot of this on Fox over the weekend, the last week. God forbid anyone point out, which would be, I believe, analytically correct, that, I don't know, he seems to have maybe been inspired to this act of violence. It didn't, thank God, result in actual damage or death, but could have by Donald Trump. I mean, just as an actual matter of apparent causality. Well, if Donald Trump had just conceded after he lost the election, it seems pretty clear he wouldn't have planted the pipe bombs. I think the guy seems unstable. Maybe it's something else, but yeah, but there's a pretty direct causality between Donald Trump's lies and this planting of the pipe bombs. That is important to note. Thank you. I feel like I want to keep a list. I'm going to talk to Will Summer about this. I want to keep a list of all the wrong conspiracy theories because they have this thing that they do where they're like, you know, oh, they called us conspiracy theories theorists until they turned out to be right. And they have like a list of things that like was against conventional wisdom that, you know, turned out to have, you know, like maybe some value, like the thing that jumps to mind is like the COVID origin at the lab. Like, and, you know, it went from that was anyone who said that was a conspiracy theorist and now I got expert think, ah, maybe probably it was the lab. We don't really, we're not 100% sure, but seems like it was the lab. Right. And then, you know, if you're one of those people, you have like a list of eight of those. I do feel like it would be compelling for us just to gather the counter list. Like, no, the shooter of Brown was not a trans Muslim student. Actually, you guys all thought it was and then they were not like, no, Charlie Kirk was not killed by the French lesionaires. You guys all thought he was like, no, the Pipe Bomber was not inside jobs and the Capitol police. It was actually a Trump supporter. I do think that'd be valuable. I'm going to get Will Summer on that. Good. I don't know if we'll change any of their minds, but maybe it will change other people's minds. That's what makes me feel good. Look, it's important for the record, God knows, but it is a may, and this is, I think, part of conspiracy theories. I think this was, people sort of studied this in history. All kinds of things get wildly disproved, right, in the midst of some conspiracy theory. And it has surprisingly little effect on the overall conspiracy theorizing. Yes. You know, it is a little unnerving that once people, this is gets back to the way Andrew Eggers thing we were talking about earlier. Once you drift into that world, it's, you can get hooked and it's not, it's not like one piece of data liberates you from it, unfortunately, or you did several pieces of data. Having said that, we should, you should have Will Summer do this. I should, yeah. There's one thing that the right is talking about a lot this past week. There's not a conspiracy theory that I want to talk about for one second, and that is this fraud story in Minnesota. It's just like pretty shocking, like the scale of it. You know, essentially it's like a Medicaid fraud, like fake daycares, all this kind of fake groups, it's being run in particular in the Somali community in Minnesota. The result of this has been, predictably, like JD Vance and Stephen Miller, et cetera, like using the most noxious rhetoric imaginable to target Somalis and, you know, talking about how they, you know, in particular Somalis can't assimilate and all this kind of shit that people said about both of their ancestors 100 years ago. And that's bad. But there's just something that I'm noticing that has stuck in my craw a little bit on this. I'm wondering if I could just rant for a second to what you think about this bill. Is it like the Democrats who are talking about this? I've seen, maybe there's an exception. Please somebody send me. So there's an exception. All like, you know, their rhetoric around this is entirely like, you know, this fraud is bad and we should look into it, but the racism is really the bad part here. And like, I really need to condemn, like I looked at one of Amy Klobuchar's tweets about this. She's a senator from Minnesota, like searched her tweets for fraud and Somalia. And like, the only real tweet was kind of about how like the bad people are the vice president for being racist, actually. And like the fraud is also a problem. Like we're going to look into it and it's going through the process. And I just think that is a matter of like doing politics that would benefit the Democrats to be actually mad at the fraud or to have at least a couple of people who like really bang the drum on this and like talk about it a lot and talk about how we need to investigate this. We need to take it seriously. And if we want to be the side that defends Medicaid, we got to make sure that there's not a hundred million dollars or whatever billions. That wasn't a hundred million is more way more like, you know, that we don't have like some significant percentage of the Minnesota state budget being defrauded when it comes to Medicaid. Like that's real. Like that's money that should have gone to people who have real medical issues in this country. It came from people that did real work. And I don't know. I think that there's like a fear of being like thought that you will be thrown in with the racists or something. If you say this and it's like, it has nothing to do. You can you can disentangle it from that and just talk about this. I think that a Democrat that did this and like really made the circuit and like talked about this a lot and talked about how bad it is and also talked about how JD Vance is a racist. We should be able to assimilate immigrants would do themselves and the party quite well because people are looking for somebody that is looking for politicians that are willing to do that. I don't know. It's just there's a little bit of a caution around this that I don't like or like a instinct to be like, well, Fox News is talking about that. That's not a real problem. It's kind of reminiscent of the immigration stuff to me a little bit at the border. It's like, we can't talk about this. And it's like, no, this is a bad problem. And someone should actually act like it's a bad problem rather than doing like a perfunctory tweet about it and then pivoting to JD Vance being bad. What do you think about that? Maybe that's wrong, by the way. Maybe the right thing to do is to demagogue against JD Vance. I'm not so politically speaking, but I'm not so sure. You can do both and you can point out that doesn't see his allegations against the Haitians in Ohio. I wasn't based on so far as to know any particular Medicaid fraud conspiracy there. But no, I totally agree. And incidentally, I would say even maybe go once I have said you apply this, which didn't quite say this. I mean, not just talk about it. If you're a Democrat, there's an actual, I don't know, I think these will be state crimes, not just federal crime, maybe primarily state crimes or local crimes. They're Democratic mayors and Democratic governors in Minnesota. And they are, I assume they're prosecuting this. They're looking into it. Yeah, they're prosecuting it. The prosecuting is happening. But like, you know, there isn't happening with enough, umph and enough, you know, vigor and shouldn't they be saying, Shouldn't you have a committee looking into how we could reform the process to make sure that this doesn't happen again? Yeah, it's embarrassing. On our watch, this is bad that this happened. It turns out the system wasn't well set up and we're fixing it right now. And there's a task force of 13 extremely distinguished Minnesotans, you know, of different political backgrounds and they have experts in how to do how to get on top of fraud. And we're going to fix this pronto and I want to report in 30 days. I don't want this thing to be dilatory. I don't know. There are ways that executive know how to both do things, but also convey that they're doing things and taking something seriously. And my sense, and this may be a lot of favors. They just haven't followed the intra Minnesota side of it much. My sense is that's not the, that's not the vibes one's getting from the state government and state authorities. No, there's, there are just to be fair, like their investigation, they've been investigations into this going back to 2022. So like the, the justice system is, I haven't found this close enough to be able to say like if it's working per se, but like the justice system is, is that process is ongoing. The political side of it is what I'm talking about. And just like, yeah, trying to, I demonstrate that I just pulled this up just so I had it right. Cause I pulled a number out of my ass and I was like a hundred million right now. They're saying that it's potentially exceeding nine billion. I can, the federal budget, like if there was nine billion of Medicaid, I'm not four, nine billion in fraud and the total Medicaid budget, but that's like, okay. In Minnesota alone, like that is extremely significant. And I don't know. I just think that, that like outrage about a, the people that defrauded Minnesota and also about a system that's obviously broken that could allow for the scale of fraud would benefit Democrats who like, for whom there are a lot of people out there that they don't have a ton of trust that they're looking out for them. So that's just me. I don't know. You could go on Fox and talk about it. And these are, these are just ideas. Feel free to tell me I'm an idiot. Last thing I want to do a little cultural exchange. Brigitte Bardot died. Apparently. I know nothing about this person. I did read Lamonde this morning. Apparently she openly defended the far right and she married an advisor to Jean-Marie Le Pen, founder of the far right front national. So Lamonde was, was kind of putting a damper on the odes to Brigitte Bardot that they were seeing out there in the media. So I don't know, Bill, did you have a poster of her in your, in your dorm room or anything? I don't, I don't believe so, but she was the type who might have been a little earlier in the kind of poster side of things that we were more like Catherine Deneuve, maybe a generation of French sex spots. Deneuve, do you remember her shoes in some movie like around where I was in high school or college, but Bardot was more maybe early, I don't know, late 50s, early 60s. But yeah, it's a very famous French actress and a attractive woman of her time. I didn't really follow her politics. Subsequently, it is. Apparently she went, she went full, you know, far right. She went full Stephen Miller. I think she was the Katie Miller of France. It seems like Brigitte Bardot. It's anyway, seeing that name did bring back big memories of my youth. And if, you know, she was one of those who won, I think who the American equivalent would have been with Jane Mansfield. And there were these, you know, people of the prior gender, I mean, she's 20 years old now. So I mean, people of generation ahead of me, but of course, what I knew was of what is 18, then they're 38 and they're sort of at the height of their career, maybe, you know, we're super famous five years earlier in some, in some movie or something. And the French movies were more risque at that time than the American movies. So, you know, being French was good. I will say, okay, Brigitte Bardot. Okay, I learned a little bit. There we go. Anything else that I forgot, Phil? Anything else you want to leave us with besides Brigitte Bardot? Yeah, I know it's good that you always, Susan's always envious, by the way, you subtly introduce something to emphasize how, how, how, how aged I am and how a young person like you can't be expected to have ever heard of any of these figures from God forbid. The mid or late mid 20th century, I think you're, I don't know, I think it's a little bit of an act. I think that's a bit of an act on your part. I think you know a little more, you know a little more about Casablanca and Brigitte Bardot and Mickey Mantle and I don't know all these characters that I knew about then you let on. That's my, that's my. I can tell you about Mickey Mantle. I can tell you about Mickey Mantle. It's damn mutual. That's for sure. I just wanted to hear, I just wanted Susan to be able to watch you respond to my questions about how sexy Brigitte Bardot was. That's really the only reason I brought it up. Okay. Everybody, as I mentioned, I will be back tomorrow. We'll have another pod. It's going to be good. And then we'll have a year end pod, a year and review. It won't be like a clip show though. We're doing it live this week on Wednesday. I'll take a couple of days off then we'll be back to the normal schedule next week. So I appreciate you all very much. Bill Crystal. Enjoy the relatively quieter week. And we'll see you back here next month. We'll see everybody. Peace. She was a playboy Brigitte Bardot. She showed me things I didn't know. She did it right there out on the deck. Put her canine teeth in the side of my neck. The Bullark podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown. Hi, this is Alex Cantruids. I'm the host of Big Technology podcast, a longtime reporter and an on-air contributor to CNBC. And if you're like me, you're trying to figure out how artificial intelligence is changing the business world and our lives. So each week on Big Technology, I bring on key actors from companies building AI tech and outsiders trying to influence it. Asking where this is all going. They come from places like Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon and plenty more. So if you want to be smart with your wallet, your career choices and meetings with your colleagues and at dinner parties, listen to Big Technology podcast wherever you get your podcasts.