S6 Ep20: Playing Stupid Games, Winning Stupid Prizes (with Bill Kristol)

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And now there's a criminal investigation into the Fed chair, Jerome Powell, which looks a lot more like lawfare against anyone who crosses this administration or just doesn't do what Donald Trump wants. I think what we're going to find today is that it's really hard for any of these stories, which should all be really big deals, and back on Earth One would be dominating news cycles, but it's hard for them to make a dent, which I guess is like a hat tip to Steve Bannon, because the zone has been flooded with the stuff he wanted it flooded with. My guest today is Bill Kristol, editor-at-large at The Bulwark. Bill, thanks for being here. Great to be with you, Sarah. I think I might just go back to Earth-1. Oh, yeah, is that possible? Is that possible? I don't know. Why not? You know, everything else these days. All the impossible happens every day these days, you know? Sure. Okay, well, if you discover how that time machine works, let me know. I'm coming, too. All right, man. So we're 10 years into the Trump thing at this point. like 10 years since you and I like even like came together. It's not quite actually. It was more like 2017 when you and I linked up, but a lot's happened in this last decade. And the best part of it was the friends we made along the way. I can't say the country's really in better shape since we met. You know, we were living happy, happy, those slightly separate lives until we'd met once or twice. I don't think we really knew each other until 2017. And then we got to know each other well and work together and look where the country is now. Yeah, you're right. Luckily, causality is not, what do they say is that correlation is not causality or something. Yeah. Correlation is not causation. I would like, it's like when people think that they, you know, if they don't wear their Bears sweatshirts during the game, the team will do better. I don't know that our friendship has actually impacted the world for the worse, but you know, your mileage may vary on that point. Okay. So 10 years in, what do you think you have changed your mind about the most? You and I haven't just sat down for a good old-fashioned look back in a while. So let's do it now, because you've changed a lot. Actually, you know what? I should take that back. Do you feel like you've changed, or do you think that the world has changed, and so your reactions to it make people think you've changed, but really you haven't that much? So some of both, and I think the world changing was kind of what precipitated whatever changes I've made. But I would say it would be a little weird for the world to change as radically as it has. And for, to get more specific, a conservative movement that you and I were very much part of to have gone in the direction it's gone in, it's got to cause you some rethinking. It doesn't mean you've repudiated everything about the past, not at all. And I was just on Mark Hurtling talking and, you know, I'm still a Reaganite in foreign policy and still for free markets and whatever, but it'd be kind of crazy to just obstinately say, well, the world has changed, but I was exactly right where I was because there were some things going on that people like me probably didn't want to look at closely enough or think through seriously enough way back even in 2014, 15. Having said that, I would still defend the Bush, McCain, Romney, Republican Party as a very, very, very different thing from Trump. So I think that change is much more radical than whatever changes I've come to think about in response to that change. If that made any sense, you know what I mean? Okay. No, that made sense. That's completely fair. because I know for me, part of what happens when you get something like Trump and you see a lot of people that you know and once respected, or at least read, were interested in their ideas, go along with it. What happens is that the people who are in your coalition, whose judgment you used to trust, you no longer trust it. You don't look to them anymore for responsible analysis or thought leadership, did any of that cause you then to rethink some policy things that you distinctly think, okay, today I feel differently about this policy than I used to? I'll just say two very simple things. I mean, I think race and gender, on both of those, I underestimated the stickiness of the old prejudices and indeed not just stickiness, but their ability to be flamed up once again or incited once again. And I'd say that more broadly, nativism. I mean, all these things that I kind of thought the country was beyond, that the Republican Party was beyond, and I think was beyond in many ways. The Republican Party, Reagan and Bush and McCain, was not a nativist party after all. That tinder was drier and more susceptible to go up very quickly when an effective demagogue like Trump put a match to it. Maybe that's why they call you woke Bill Kristol now? Because you're out there being like, I stand for, I'm with the feminists. I'm with the, is that? Yes, woke Bill Kristol. I would also make a tactical point, which I think people sometimes lose, which is you can be a moderate, and you and I have discussed this, and Tim is obsessed with this too. You can be a moderate or fairly conservative on a lot of policy issues. That doesn't mean that in the tactical situation of the moment, you might not agree on fairly radical, let's call it, but within constitutional bounds, obviously, but fairly radical or aggressive policies in certain areas. That is, being a centrist on policy doesn't mean you should always be a centrist on tactics. And it doesn't mean that in the world you're living in right now, you might end up in alliance with some of the progressives, for example, on how to fight a particular issue or what stance to take on a particular issue. And I do think people conflate these two. They think, well, how can you be for being aggressive on the immigration issue? You're a centrist and centrist is supposed to think that immigration hurt five years ago. probably did with Biden one year ago, even on the border, or defund the police hurt and so forth. But you do have to think in a fresh way. The situation is so different. You do have to think in a fresh way, somewhat about policy, but a lot about strategy and tactics, right? I mean, just because it's kind of crazy to say we're in a whole new world, but whatever I thought was the right tactics in 2013 are still the right ones today. It'd be like, I don't know, football game is 7-7 in the first quarter. You're going to have different tactics in the third quarter if you're down 28 to 10, you know? Is what you're saying something like, I did not like the abolish ICE chants. I've never liked the defund the police stuff. And yet in this moment, watching how this ICE is being deployed, watching how they're building a paramilitary force. Like I understand because there are a lot of sort of centrist types that we are friends with right now being like, don't abolish ICE, reform ICE. And I'm like, I believed that in Trump 1.0, that you shouldn't just run around being like, no, there should be no border security. I was like, no, you do need that. This time around though, masked agents walking through American streets, inflaming these instances where then people are getting killed, dragging people out of their kids' elementary school, whatever. You're like, now I am going to evaluate whether or not I think the Democrats should be controlling the purse strings in such a way to say, no, we are not going to fund ICE more. We're not going to just let you build this paramilitary force roaming the streets. And I think that is a way to say that the world has changed and therefore the reaction to it has changed. I think it's a good example. I agree. So basically there's a number of things I think I've, I wouldn't say like changed entirely, but I would say like have shifted somewhat. One of them is on sort of policing guns, you know, things that I was kind of always reflexively, cops are really important. I think they have hard jobs. I think you should be respectful of police officers. That is actively in tension with the instincts that I've had my whole life, that part of what made me a conservative, which is that I don't like the state having too much power. And so the way that ICE, not professional, not treating citizens respectfully, even non-citizens, like we are supposed to be respectful. We are supposed to take care with human life. And so I feel differently than I did because of who's in charge about those things because Trump is telling them to behave badly. Like they are not acting professionally. other things that i would say i've changed my mind is taxing billionaires like i used to be in kind of a like yes we should all pay taxes but i like low taxes but like the extent to which the trillion hairs like elon musk or whatever are just able to throw their money into politics now is different from i think the kind of influence that everybody could have on the margins versus people who have so much money that could just go ahead and drop their own ads, do all this stuff. And so I think billionaires and trillionaires should pay more in taxes. Those are some of mine. Woke, woke, woke, Sarah Longwell. We should stay on this. You can take a little more of the grief. But I just put one tiny footnote on your point. I think it's just said it very, very well, is whatever one thought of, it turns out there's a little more police brutality than you and I probably wanted to acknowledge 20 years ago and so forth, maybe even a fair amount more. But ICE is doing qualitatively different things than what was happening then. And in fact, a lot of our criticism of ICE is the police are actually professional. The police are not doing what ICE is doing. You could be pro-police and anti-ICE. This is where I got consistently annoyed in our centrist friends is because defund the police was unpopular, and let's stipulate that it was, at a time when people thought, gee, I don't know, the cops are in a tough situation. They've done a few things wrong. But, you know, it does not mean that defund ICE would now be unpopular. I mean, the situation is different. The government we're facing in the United States of America is different from the governments we were dealing with for most of our adult life. And it would be kind of crazy not to have a somewhat different attitude towards some of these, for example, to the funding of something like ICE. It's different than saying, I don't think we should have like a border enforcement capacity versus a paramilitary, Trump's paramilitary in the streets who are just shooting people because they're mad. All right. We've exhausted that. Although we could probably keep talking about it. All right. I want to start with last week's killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis by an ICE officer, which we're talking about. We talked to a group of Biden to Trump voters. So these are kind of our swing voters about that event. And I want to play how they talked about it. It is very unfortunate that it happened. But it's also unfortunate that the ICE is being blamed for, like, just murdering somebody who was just so innocent, which isn't the case whatsoever. A, they were provoked. B, he got ran over. And, you know, it just it's hard to tell what's real and what's not anymore because, you know, there's AI involved and people just are putting their own rhetoric and feeding us all of this information. You don't want to be that woman that's with their car, cutting them off, making a whole thing, a whole scene. And then, you know, apparently she ran over the guy's foot or something and that's what made him shoot her. It's just it's a mess. The whole thing is a freaking mess. But like, don't get involved in that. You know, it's kind of one of those fuck around and find out things. And then this incident happens. And again, it's an entire country, 50 50 down the middle of social unrest. People are pro ice. People are anti ice. It's just a mess. I don't have an opinion on it other than I try to stay out of it and observe from far away. And I feel bad for her that she got killed because there were so many officers there. and because this is more of a controlled situation, there was a way to get it back in control in another way. Like when someone's driving away from a cop, the cop doesn't just roll up and pop them just because they drove off from a police officer on a traffic stop. So to me, because there was a way to get back in control, I do feel like some force was necessary, but I don't know if he needed to immediately just shoot her. The situation, I didn't see the events that lead it before. my parents always told me you you know you play stupid games you win stupid prizes I also know that he has a job to do I don't know what he was doing prior to that you know I saw the other video that was posted of like her wife's video and like you could simply see that he was on the other side of the car and he had his camera on his left hand and then he switched it to his right hand and had his hand on his holster before the car even moved but like is that a real video like you don't know so it's like and then you see his body cam and then at the end he says something that's very unremorseful after he kills like after he shot her so like her wife was saying like derogatory things to him like to make him feel less masculine so I don know how those things can make someone feel and probably if you being insulted I sure anyone in a confrontational thing they you know get angry And when you're angry, you say things or do things that you don't mean. So like I said, I wasn't there. I don't know the situation. But all of those things, emotion plays a big role in a lot of those things. Okay. So there's been a bunch of polling that has come out in the aftermath of that ICE shooting. And I would say it's not very good for the ICE agent. Like it's only like 30% of people who think it was appropriate for him to shoot her and more like 50 and change that think it was absolutely wrong and he shouldn't have done it. And then there's like people who don't know. But it's interesting listening to the focus groups where people are kind of like, I don't know what to believe. I don't know with AI and everything. You could hear the doubt creeping in of the why with my line. Like, what are my eyes actually seeing? You know, there's all these videos floating around. I think we watched the videos and took it for face value, although then all these different angles come out, and some of them are doctored. Some of them you can hear him saying effing bitch to her after he shoots her, which is one of the most damning things about it, because as that woman was saying in there, she's saying, you know, the guy was emotional. and got angry. I always get taken aback a little bit when people can be, they understand sort of the chaos of the situation and the fact that it's not all clear cut, but they are like, the idea that him being angry would be justification for her being shot is the thing that I hear that has made me sicker, more sick than anything in a while. And a lot of it has to do with seeing people justify that level of use of force based on the circumstances on the ground where he was clearly facing no real threat. There's no real self-defense thing. But anyway, what did you make of some of what they had to say? No, I think that's really well said. Yeah. I mean, for me, just listening to some of it is painful really a little bit. I mean, he shot her in the face three times. And people didn't actually want to say that in the focus group in a funny way, I think they don't want to confront the fact that, and now these were Trump voters. They were Biden to Trump voter, Biden voters to Trump voters, to be fair, but still they were Trump voters. And I suppose, I mean, to be honest, if there's a bit of a psychological mechanism here, don't you think there is? I mean, if you voted for the guy and this is the centerpiece of what he ran on partly, I mean, to be fair, not killing people, but, you know, mass deportation and being real tough about it. And then suddenly it leads to incentive structure and ICE, the rhetoric from Stephen Miller down through various characters, the ICE and Border Patrol people themselves, the kind of recruitment that's going on. He wasn't a recent recruit, I understand, this fellow. But so you have a certain psychological incentive to make it much murkier than it even is. And to be fair, people aren't following this 24-7. I have a right to be skeptical about AI and uncertain about the truth. And so I think there's a bunch of incentives, both political but almost psychological, to not quite confront what happened. And I really, look, it's painful. I feel this personally. I'm sure you do, too. The idea that agents of the federal government of the United States of America did what we just saw. People have committed all kinds of made mistakes or committed crimes. We're agents of governments. But what we're used to in our adult lifetime, at least, is at least an attempt to say, oh, we're going to look into this. And often people have been disciplined. It's not like people haven't been tried, whether it's for war crimes abroad or police officers here, for doing things that really turned out to be wrong. And even if they were a bit flustered and emotional and someone was yelling at them, if it was really wrong and illegal, it was wrong and illegal. And it's hard to come to grips with the fact that we now have an administration elected, put in power, legally in power, running the government, which has zero interest in any even pretense of a fair investigation, accountability. It wouldn't be that hard to say, look, we have a lot of ICE agents. They're all under a huge amount of pressure. They're doing a great job, 95% of them. Instances do happen. We're going to look at this case. Police departments do this all the time, right? And the fact that they won't go there, I don't know that that was really discussed in the focus group, but the lying and the gaslighting is not worse than the killing, don't get me wrong, but it's in a way more, it's more of an indictment, I guess you could say, couldn't you, of the government that is now in office and people who voted to put that government in office, that administration in office, maybe don't quite want to come to grips with that? Look, I have said this on a lot of other podcasts, so I don't know how much to go through it now. But the thing that is scary, frightening about what happened, there's a whole bunch of things. One is that the administration lied about it out of the gate. Like, Kristi Noem, right away, Donald Trump, right away, she was going to ram him with her car. And Trump, he's so hurt, I can't believe he survived that. And you're like, no, no. Anyone watching this, you could make some different arguments. You cannot make those arguments. They are lies out of the gate. And then also the way that they other, the people who defend it, make it clear. They want you to know that she's a lesbian. The reason that they released their own footage of her wife sort of giving the ICE agent a hard time, mocking him a little bit, hey, big boy, go get some lunch, was to say, see what he had to put up with from that mouthy lesbian. And what's interesting to me, chilling to me, is that people can look at that and not say, hey, people shouldn't do that, but also no one should be shot in the face for doing that. That they can't seem to say like, okay, I'm watching Blue Lights right now. Have you seen Blue Lights on BritBox? I know what it is, but I haven't seen it yet. All right, so just really quickly indulge me in this. but I'm watching this police show. It's actually in Northern Ireland. It's set in Northern Ireland after the Troubles, which I had not really known about, but there's real disdain for cops. It's a show about cops who are like kind of doing their best, but everywhere they go, they are met with people like throwing things at them, mocking them, yelling at them. Like every situation they go into is kind of fraught with the fact that they represent a government that the people feel is illegitimate. And the whole show, you watch them like the cautiousness with which they draw their weapons. They are all talking to each other in a constant way of being polite, not hurting people. And you're just like, yeah, right. Your tax dollars pay for these forces. You want them there to protect you. You want them there to be professional. That doesn't mean you can't make mistakes. But watching this guy shoot her three times in the face and then flee the scene, call her an effing bitch, and then they won't work with local police. They're not doing the normal protocols. They are whitewashing it. The federal government is lying about it. It is one of the scariest things that I think I have seen in the Trump era because it brings together a bunch of things. Trump having this sort of personal army, them not being particularly well-trained, them going in and ratcheting up tensions immediately like they're supposed to be de-escalatory. You watch the video and it's clear that they're the ones escalating things. The quickness with which they were willing to take human life and then kind of like spit on them after they did it makes me pretty sick to my stomach. Yeah, no, I agree. I need to watch Blue Lights. I've watched so many of the British crime shows and everyone keeps recommending Blue Lights and somehow Susan and I haven't quite gotten around to it. Too many other things to watch. And also maybe some sense that might be it's a little dark and a little tough and I sort of like to get a little more of a break these days from the current world we live in from TV. But, you know, just one last point on the situation. Also, there have been many cases, obviously, where cops have done things they shouldn't, where soldiers have. It's not defensible to kill someone, obviously, when unjustified homicide or manslaughter or whatever. There are times when you're alone, you're a cop, maybe there are five people, you know, coming for you, you're the dark street late at night. One understands a little bit, right? You You panic. You really think it's me or them, kind of. That's what's so inconceivable in this situation. He's surrounded by his colleagues. There are ICE people in the gear all over the place. It's ludicrous, right? Honestly, if it were midnight and there were 15 people in five cars who looked like, quote, gang members, whatever, but let's just say young males who were being extremely aggressive and there were only three of the ICE people, one would think, oh my, I could see why they really were not as cautious as they should be. But this is so much the opposite. That's why I do think it's all been so sickening for all of us watching, right? It's so gratuitous. It's so obviously unnecessary. And then, as you say, for that to be the standard now where the administration rallies to him, and not just to sort of be understanding of him, but 100% defensive of him, you have total immunity to telling people, don't worry. You don't have to be careful. You don't have to do what any normal police department would do, which is maybe we need to take a fresh look at the training for some of these people. Maybe we need to do some simulations. We need to actually be careful. This is good to get out of hand. Quite the opposite here. I do think that's why it's so unnerving that it could become a precedent for what we'll see more of. I hope not. God does. And this is one of those cases where public opinion can matter a great deal in what happens next. These focus groups were done, you know, like right after. And so people are a little, whatever. We're going to do more of them on this because I suspect, I don't know this for sure, but I suspect that as this story hardens and as there's more scrutiny, because I do think that's one of the byproducts of this is there will be more scrutiny from the press and other people on ICE, more attention being paid. This happened with Black Lives Matter, right? It's like one cop does something that it catches, right? It catches the public's imagination. And I saw one of the polls that showed about 75% of Americans had watched this video. Like they had actively seen the video, which means that it is broken through in ways that the vast majority of stories do not, that there will be a steady drumbeat of sort of ice behaving badly and that Americans will become increasingly less tolerant of what's happening. Yeah. It's already starting to happen. You saw seven ice agents grabbing a 17-year-old at a Target. This episode of the Focus Group podcast is brought to you by Wild Grain. Wild Grain is the first bake from Frozen subscription box for sourdough breads, artisanal pastries and fresh pastas. Plus, all items conveniently bake in 25 minutes or less. Unlike many store-bought options, Wild Grain uses simple ingredients you can pronounce and a slow fermentation process that can be easier on your belly and richer in nutrients and antioxidants. 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Speaking of things that are illegal, immoral, and disgusting, I want to get into some sound about Epstein, Jeffrey Epstein. Since last summer, the lack of transparency on the Epstein files has been a sore subject, including for a lot of people who voted for Trump, sometimes even from his base. We've done some episodes on this. I'll link to those in the show notes. In the sound we're going to play today, we tried to get at why people either are or are not following this story. Like, what is their level of interest in the Epstein story? And in our recent focus groups of 2024 Trump voters who disapprove of Trump, we have both of those points of view thrown into stark relief, people who are following it and people who are not following it. So again, these are Trump voters, but people who now rate him as doing a bad job in the presidency. So let's listen first to these Trump disapprovers. I'm not following it closely because I think we all know what's in those files and what our leaders have been up to. And I don't think anybody needs to see the files to prove that. I mean, it's just basic human behavior and it's sort of you know so what so there are a bunch of you know male chauvinistic dude it's confirmed already what we already know and sort of a so what to me well responses like that are the problem in this country no disrespect personally but again as a woman i think that's the same type of attitude that trump and the leaders that could be doing something are taking right now. And look, when Trump said grab women by the hoo-ha or whatever, their little back room adult male talk, that maybe would be more of like, okay, that's male behavior, whatever. We don't care about what guys in the locker room are saying, but what happened on the Epstein Island is not that at all Trafficking 15 and 16 year old girls to 40 and 50 and 60 year old men that have money and power at the highest height of you know our leadership is not just boy behavior or like normal Okay. We all know and threats. People have turned up dead. Virginia Dufri is dead. She said she was harassed. Other women have said that they have been followed and harassed. And I mean, these people, our men, our rich, our impositions of power, have the means to make these women's lives miserable. So I believe that many of them are still afraid to name names. So that's why they're not. But no, I believe the files have been looked through, redacted. It's been too much time, too many redactions. And why are we only seeing blank pages? It should be as simple. You just release the files. It just seems ridiculous that this is going on for as long as it is. We all know women, girls are brought to the island and taken advantage of. We just want to know the names. It doesn't seem that complicated to say, all right, here are the names that we have on the file. Why is it such a, well, I don't want to indict my friends. Well, you shouldn't have friends that are like that then. It should be pretty cut and dry. So until I see like files actually come out to have some substance, I just won't be, you know, I won't be happy. And every day or however often you see things come up on the news, oh, we released more files, but it's redacted. What does that do for anybody? In the files, too, they've been saying, well, we want to do it to protect the victims. You know, you can see some of the victims' names. They've leaked some of them already. When Trump, when I saw him saying about what he said about the Epstein files, like, why are we still talking about that? That makes you then think about other things that he's saying. What else is he gaslighting us on? It makes you hard to trust other things he's going to say now in the future because of that one incident. That was a platform for a lot of people. Cash Patel, Pam Bondi, Trump, they all said, oh, we're going to release the abstain files day one. Never happened. And then there was the big social media stunt where a bunch of influencers got binders and came out and did a photo op. It was so embarrassing. It was such a slap in the face for everybody that that was a big issue for a lot of people. They wanted some justice. And I'm assuming obviously pedophilia is not taken lightly in this country from anybody, whether you're left or right. And so I think that from that moment moving on, they lost everybody in my personal opinion. I think everybody just knows that whatever they're going to try to say or bring out is just going to be total BS because I think it involves both parties and they're never going to go down. They're going to cover everything up. they possibly can. And I don't think the full truth will ever be known by anybody. So, Bill, you've said that the Epstein survivors are underrated by the political media as a moral force. And I think you and I are of a similar mind on this. But when I listen to these voters, there's the first guy who kind of says, and this was the dynamic in the group was funny when this happened, because the first guy was kind of like, eh, what are you going to do, guys? And everybody else was like, I'm sorry, no. When we ask about Epstein, which we do pretty consistently, people know the Epstein stuff. They want to see the files. They want to know what's going on. They are aware. That woman was able to name one of the victims who had killed herself. They're following the story, a lot of them. And yet the political media just seems to have only an intermediate appetite. It's like, it's not that many people that pursue this like a dog with a bone. And I don't understand because I see in voters that this really bothers them. Do you think as a political matter, people should be pushing this harder or that the press should be on it more? Trump clearly freaks out every time someone talks about it. I mean, Trump really does freak out, doesn't he? That worker at the Ford plant in Michigan yelled that two words, really, three words from 60 feet away. Trump protects pedophiles. Yeah. Or he said, protect pedophiles. I don't you said the word Trump. Anyway, he was obviously at Trump. Yeah, and Trump, you know, loses it and screams at him and gives him the finger and stuff. Flips him off. Yeah, he's a little bit thin-skinned there on this issue. I wonder why that would be. I mean, I think the survivors are not going to let this go. There is a cover-up. If this had never come out in the first place, that is, if they had sort of never addressed it, if there hadn't been that ridiculous show in February of the Binders, if Trump hadn't promised to do stuff and Bondi and Patel, and then Blanche has to go see Maxwell, Cover-ups don't work when you're sort of partway, you know, down the cover-up, right? There are files. Honestly, if they had just said at the beginning, it's done, it's finished, the Biden people had four years to look through it, we're not even going to begin, terrible things happened, it's a dead letter. I think they would have taken a lot of grief for a while, but I'm not sure they couldn't have just sustained that. Once they opened the door partway, it's like, okay, well, fine, this is what a couple of people said on the focus group, okay, well, just put the stuff out. That's a pretty easy argument to make, put the stuff out. What's the answer? or we're spending the next six months redacting it. And now they've been, what, December 23rd, 4th, I think was the last stuff we saw. They've got hundreds of lawyers working on it, but they can't release anymore. I don't think it goes away. And I don't think the political press is interested in a lot of things. And it's understandable. They've got to cover the day-to-day stuff. There's no new news. So there's nothing much to report, you might say. But the survivors and their advocates and some members of Congress are serious about it. And I think it's very widespread. I think when the political press got a little bit into the narrative early on of this is very bad for Trump because the Trump base is upset about it. And there's some truth to that. And obviously Massey and Marsha Shale agreed and Boba were big players in terms of getting to the discharge petition. But I think it's way beyond the Trump base. There's no logical argument now at this point for like, well, we've seen some of it, but we're not going to see the rest of it. What is that? You know, we don't have enough resources at the Justice Department to get some of this stuff out further. And so I think this story does not go away. Yeah. I would like to see more looking into it for reasons of, hey, some really terrible things happened and clearly people are being protected. And like the second they started covering up, you think every political reporter in the country would be like trying to unearth these things. I continue to believe it has unleveraged political utility. It is underappreciated how big a difference it could make. And I think people do dismiss it because they're like, oh, well, nobody's ever going to abandon Trump over that. And I'm like, some of them won't. But I do hear from these swingier voters that when they think about it, they're like, this is insane. It makes me doubt other things he's saying. The thing that I'm always trying to say is people are like, but we don't want to talk about Epstein, we want to talk about kitchen table issues. And I'm like, you can do the same thing, okay? Everything that Trump does is about protecting himself, protecting elites, while your life gets no better, right? This is the story of elite protection, the story of Trump doing things that are corrupt and help himself while your grocery prices don't go down and while your life continues to be harder. That's a story you can tell together. Just they don't have to be separate things. I totally agree. And also, you know, people are talking about Epstein at their kitchen table, especially if the kids aren't there, you know. It's a terrible story, but it's a human interest story and a horrible thing. And enough has come out that it's a little hard to believe Trump didn't know what was going on. But, okay, let's find out more, you know. That's on the Trump side. I'm curious what your judgment is on what Ro Khanna sort of discovered. Some voters said to him, the voter used the term to Ro, to Congressman Khanna, the Epstein class, you know, that there's this elite class that just got away with unbelievable stuff and continues to be watching out for themselves or each other. But leaving aside the Trump side of it, do you think that it lays the predicate for 2026, but especially 2028, for a kind of much more populist attitude towards the elites that have been watching out for each other over the last couple of decades? Yeah. I mean, I think that I don't want them to let Trump get away with this because as you and I talk about a lot. It is very important for the future of nudging the Republican Party towards something healthier that this version of the Republican Party be deeply unsuccessful. And so when I talk about, you know, the Bush line of 32%, you want Trump to leave office deeply unpopular, that obviously hurts J.D. Vance. It hurts Marco Rubio. It hurts all the people who were involved in this. But one of the things I know from voters is that they believe that there is a like deep state or like elite cabal, an international elite cabal who control things and who keep things a secret from average Joes. And they saw Trump as a disruptor of that, right? Somebody who wasn't part of the establishment in that way, that wasn't part of the uniparty, globalist conspiracy types. And I think that him actually being part of it is a key dagger to that narrative and that makes it harder for the Republican Party to act like it was somehow like a left-wing elite cabal. I think that Jeffrey Epstein and the friends that he had knew no political party. He liked anyone that he could get to. Jeffrey Epstein was able to move between both political parties. is he had friends across the aisle because he was just a power type, right? And wanted everybody kind of in his pocket. I think it's also just an important story from like a truth standpoint. Yeah, totally. Let's get to the truth about this. This was happening and a lot of people knew. It's a lot like the ICE thing. We are a country of what we will tolerate. What we will tolerate is what our values are. And so we shouldn't tolerate this. That first guy was like, I don't care. That's the danger. The danger is when people say like, well, he shot her three times in the face because she was, you know, mouthing off. It's like, no, we can't be like that. That is not what we can allow to happen. Starting a business can be overwhelming. You're juggling multiple roles, designer, marketer, logistics manager, all while bringing your vision to life. Shopify helps millions of business sell online. Build fast with templates and AI descriptions and photos, inventory and shipping. Sign up for your one euro per month trial and start selling today at Shopify.nl. That's Shopify.nl. It's time to see what you can accomplish with Shopify by your side. You asked me at the very beginning what we've rethought a little bit from the past. I mean, I feel like I was not sensitive enough to this outrage. I mean, I knew about Epstein. I loathed it. It sounded horrible. To the degree I followed it in 2007, 2008, I thought he was getting a sweetheart. a deal, but I didn't spend a whole lot of time on it, honestly, and I didn't think about it that much for the next several years, and then while he's continuing to abuse people, and then Julie Brown comes along and writes the pieces in 2018 and really forces his indictment again in 2019, and then Maxwell after that in 2020. But I feel bad. I mean, I guess I feel this as someone who's older than you, who knew some people who were mentioned in those documents, apparently, and generally was a defender of the ruling class of America is probably doing its best, doing a decent job, all things considered. And the degree of corruption was greater than I thought. Yeah. That is, you know, I got to say when Epstein killed himself and everybody's like, Epstein didn't kill himself, all that stuff, I was kind of like, okay. I think partly because I often assume more positive intent of people and didn't really dig in on the story thinking like, there's not some elite cabal. And like, yes, there was. Because here's the thing. It's like not proven yet how many people were going to the island or whatever. Here's what I do know. They all knew. Like Trump knew, it's clear. Look, I don't know what Bill Clinton knew or whatever, but the people who were hanging out with Epstein, they knew what he was doing. Everybody joked about it. It was like some big, funny thing. It is a bunch of people who thought that the world could never touch them. And it is, again, quite despicable. All right. Continuing on the Epstein thing just a little bit. Most of the GOP caucus has been like twisting themselves into knots to defend this administration throughout the Epstein saga, or they're just staying silent, right, hoping that this will pass. That is except for Marjorie Taylor Greene, who just left Congress, and Thomas Massey, who is facing a Trump-backed primary challenge. We asked a group of MAGA-first Republicans last month, and by MAGA-first, I mean we sometimes ask people like, are you a Republican first or are you MAGA first? Like, how do you identify? And so these are MAGA first Republicans. And we asked them which people in the GOP they didn't like. And it was striking that those two came up and then who they got compared to. Let's listen. McConnell. Of course, Cheney's out of the government now. She was a backstabber to everybody. Massey, those kind of people. I'd like Rand Paul. He's like up, down. You never know where he's at. Those kind of people hurt the Republican Party. Chip Roy, I think, hurts the Republican Party. Ralph Norman, that—I'm conservative, but that conservative caucus gets so wound up in their own beliefs, I think they hurt, you know, the party. And the party has gone to the middle America. And I think sometimes they hurt it by trying, you know, to be like—I don't know what they're trying to be—constitutionalist or something. Again, it's, where do you stand, son? I mean, you're like, one day you're with us, one day you they pull out a version of the Constitution and they stand on it and they get on TV and rant the Constitution the Constitution And I like where are you going with all this And he doesn't seem to support like he should. I'm glad Marjorie Taylor Greene's leaving. I like what she stood for at the beginning. But then all of a sudden she just whacks out. And I'm like, OK, you're leaving. Fine. Bye bye. don't let the door hit you in the butt on the way out you know bye-bye now i don't want to see all apple polishers either i like to see open dialogue discussion but let's come together she was a force to be reckoned with and then i don't know what happened i really don't i think last night's 60 minute interview and i didn't watch it i just heard the bits and pieces about To me, what it is, is these people, similar to Jasmine Crockett, similar to Nancy Mace, these people seem to think it's all a social media gig instead of the politician that you're supposed to be. And I think that's where a lot of these problems are coming from, because it's not only these female reps, it's also the male reps. I mean, it's not a social media gig. You're a politician, and you should be acting like it. That's how I see this. This is one of my favorite Republican paradoxes. They hate politicians, but they do want leaders to be visible. But then they do want them to act more or less like adults while doing it, which means they kind of do want regular politicians. Like, they don't really know what they want. But at the end of the day, basically what I'm hearing is people are like, be on Trump's side. And if you're not on Trump's side, I'm done with you. Yeah, these Trump first Republicans want their Republicans to support Trump. I mean, behind all this talk about whatever, you know, on TV to watch or what's the stuff about the Constitution? The party comes above the Constitution. Everyone knows that. I mean, I don't know. I feel like – but it's not the party, of course, to be fair. It's Trump. It's like the Communist Party 80 years ago. That was a thing, you know, you believed in. It was the vehicle of history. They don't believe that. The degree of the cult of personality, I think I saw his strength, but the degree to which it's purely about supporting him. I mean, that is remarkable. I mean, I came to Washington to work for Reagan. and there was a pretty big cult of personality there. And I actually was a little put off by it, even as a young Reagan. I was like, it's a little too much. There was this birthday celebration where all the political appointees went to once a year. It was so mild compared to everything today. You know, it was a few speeches by some cabinet officials. You couldn't use government time, you know, to go to this political event. So you had to like clock in that you were taking two hours off. You know, you couldn't take a government car if you were even the, you know, chief of staff or anything like that. You had to, you know, go get a cab in those days. Anyways, even I found that a little off-putting, a little too much. personal adulation to Reagan that was like one one thousandth of where we are with Trump though and it's not healthy obviously. Starting a business can be overwhelming you're juggling multiple roles designer marketer logistics manager all while bringing your vision to life. Shopify helps millions of business sell online. Build fast with templates and AI descriptions and photos inventory and shipping. Sign up for your one euro per month trial and start selling today at shopify.nl. That's shopify.nl. It's time to see what you can accomplish with Shopify by your side. Let me ask you this, because this is one of my burgeoning theories for the future of Republican politics, which is that the cult of personality around Trump has been good for Trump specifically, but is not good for the Republican Party going forward. Because without him, other people just don't have this same connection, right? Other people aren't going to just be like, whatever J.D. Vance says is exactly what I believe. I don't know if you and I have talked about this. Where do you think the Republican Party is headed? We know it's not going back, but where do you think it's going forward? Yeah, I don't know. It could crack up some in fights between less effective demagogues who want to be Trump supporters or people who glob on to part of the Trump coalition, I think a huge amount depends on what happens over the next few years. What scares me so much from the moment, obviously, is that you have a super authoritarian movement now. It's become that way with the vehement and, you know, anti-liberal, illiberal authoritarians and key positions of power at the height of the federal government. Trump thinks they're the ones who are loyal to him, and I guess they are. And so he seems much more than is in his own political interest, I think, on board with all this stuff, whether it's ICE or a million other kind of semi-crazy and really authoritarian things. It's not that he has any moral problems with any of it, but I think it is just, he's outrunning his support, so to speak, his supply lines. But the amount of damage that can be done over these next three years is really scary. Having said that, I totally agree with what you said earlier. The 32% thing is important for the midterms. That's usually the way people talk about it, not you, but, you know, they've got to get his numbers down. It's so important that he leaves office an unpopular and discredited president. It means much less likely that a Trump supporter gets reelected, gets elected to succeed him, which in turn makes it much more likely that there's some rethinking. I wouldn't overstate it, but some rethinking in the Republican Party about where to go from here and some openness to something that's not just picking up parts of Trumpism and running with those even further, which is also somewhat possible. That could happen a little bit, right? So that's why people say, oh, we should do more than just be against Trump. You know, this positive agenda here and I have to be careful there. I'm all for those things also, obviously. But it's so important that Trump be knocked down, that he be made as unpopular as possible, become as unpopular as possible. And really the Trumpism be discredited as much as possible, you know? Yeah. Yep. Totally agree. Okay, finally, we learned this week that there's a criminal investigation into Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, which seems like a pretty obviously pretextual move by the Trump administration. I also wondered if this had broken through at all. People had heard about it. Let's listen to how the Biden to Trump voters talked about it. I'm just not surprised, really. Like, Trump and Powell have been going at it for a while. This was kind of, in my opinion, going to happen eventually. I'm not shocked. I didn't read too much about it. I just follow the market a lot. So I heard about it kind of in passing. I'm just not surprised. I figured something was bound to happen, just kind of the way things have been working in politics. There's a lot of kind of an eye for an eye type stuff or whatever that may be. So I, you know, fugitive justice kind of stuff. I'm not really sure how legitimate it is. I don't know if it's pressure or if it's a whatever conflict between him and the president to continue cutting rates. For what it's worth, I don't think he's been doing a – like Jerome Powell, I mean, I don't think he's been doing a bad job. I do know that job is extremely complex, extremely difficult, and I don't know enough about macroeconomics or the state of the economy to really be able to, like, sharpshoot this guy. If you had to write down a position, I'm kind of abstaining judgment, at least for now. This is kind of interesting to me because on one hand, people seem to understand the motivations behind this, like that it's politically motivated. On the other hand, they don't seem to know that it being politically motivated is like uniquely bad, like that that is a bad thing for us to do. So like, how are we supposed to feel about this? No, I think that's a very good point. I mean, this is a way in which Trump has corrupted a lot of his own supporters and beyond his own support, just the political culture as a whole. people seem incapable of saying, look, I happen to be a dove on interest rates or something like that, or I think Powell should have cut rates earlier. But you cannot have politically motivated investigations of your enemies. You can't have a Justice Department doing that, whether it's Powell or Comey or a million other people. It's very unhealthy for the system. I know that's process. That's the rule of law. Voters don't understand that allegedly. I kind of think they did understand this sort of in some general way, not in detail, but you really don't want a government where the president says, I don't like that guy, that guy, and that guy. And also, I want to pressure this guy to get along, to give me a policy I want, even though it's supposed to be independent. I want to pressure these 25 people to give money to my relatives and friends. And I want to, you know, give other pressure another 50 people to suck up to my administration and to cut deals and so forth. And all this can be done by using the Justice Department, in effect, to threaten them. I think Trump has corrupted us in some sense to, we skip over the process side to get to the, well, I kind of don't know what I think about the macroeconomics, you know. You don't have to get to that issue to think that this is really illegitimate. Starting a business can be overwhelming. You're juggling multiple roles, designer, marketer, logistics manager, all while bringing your vision to life. Shopify helps millions of business sell online. Build fast with templates and AI descriptions and photos, inventory and shipping. Sign up for your one euro per month trial and start selling today at shopify.nl. That's shopify.nl. It's time to see what you can accomplish with Shopify by your side. I'm amazed they actually know as much about Powell, these people, as they seem to, or that it was on their radar screen at all. I've sort of assumed that Powell was important not because it would affect the public, but because it would affect elites. And the elites that would affect are business elites, and those business elites do have some clout with Republican members of Congress and indirectly with the Trump administration to some degree, and that that might erode some of their willingness to simply acquiesce in and apologize for and kowtow to and enable Trump. So I think it could have political importance, even if out in the big public, it's not an issue at the level of Epstein or ICE. Yeah. I actually, I was a little surprised people even had heard as much as they had about it because I know that the Powell issue is not one to move the public. You can see that immediately. However, and I always try to make this case often to JBL when we're talking about it, is like, but those elites, like if they were panicking about this, if they were screaming and yelling, it would send a signal to people who don't know as much about how bad this is. you know, how we get our vibes is often derived from the people who are closer to a policy that might not affect an average person, or they might not know how it's going to affect them, because of course it does affect them when it affects our central bank. But like, they don't really see the downstream consequences for themselves immediately. But like, they get signals from people who know a lot more than them. And so the extent to which Trump has, even among the elites who like don't want Jerome Powell fired, do want an independent federal bank, but also won't scream and yell, won't display a sense of urgency and emergency over what is happening, then like average people who don't follow it don't really know what to make of it. It's how political opinions get formed in the vibes era is by people making a big deal out of something. Yeah. And also they do take cues from elites. Actually, what's amazing to me, the public has partly, to some non-trivial degree, deserted Trump. He got 50% of the vote. Yes. Is it 41, 42% now, let's just say? From 15 to 42% means 8% of that 50 have left him, which is about 15%. One of six or one of seven of his voters don't approve of him now. You had that whole focus group of Trump voters who now disapprove. I mean, that's not nothing. One out of seven in one year? I mean, what if that continues even at half that rate for another for another year. That really is a terrible return for Trump. And it gets down to the 32, incidentally, that we would love to see him at the end of four years. So the public is more slowly than one would like and more confusedly than one might wish getting there, if I could put it this way. The elites are not. For me, this is just the massive fact. They've gone the other direction. Partly it's their interest, their accommodation, the pressure that Trump has cleverly been able to exercise on them, the inducements as well as the pressure. But the degree to which the public has managed to sort of see its way to being pretty critical of Trump with zero elite help, honestly. Yes. I mean, the elites that would speak to that public is kind of impressive, actually. It gives me a little more faith in the public. But I'm really, I've got to say the elites are just, ugh. They poison people with their silence when their voices are needed and when they voice acquiescence instead of alarm. They think it doesn't matter, but it matters a great deal to the public. And you know me, the cowardly elites are a big thing that get me up in the morning as I bounce out of bed filled with rage. Bill Kristol. Thank you so much for joining us on the Focus Group podcast and thanks to all of you for listening to another episode. We will be back next week. Don't forget to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. Subscribe to The Bulwark on YouTube and become a Bulwark Plus member at thebulwark.com. Bill, you're the best. You are the best. I was going to say that even before you said that, you know. Starting a business can be overwhelming. You're juggling multiple roles, designer, marketer, logistics manager, all while bringing your vision to life. Shopify helps millions of business sell online. Build fast with templates and AI descriptions and photos, inventory and shipping. Sign up for your 1 euro per month trial and start selling today at shopify.nl. That's shopify.nl. It's time to see what you can accomplish with Shopify by your side. Thank you.