Bill Kristol: A Pro-Putin America First
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Hello and welcome to the Bullwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. Happy Veterans Day, especially to those who served and their families. I'm here today. It's Monday with Bill Kristol. Bill, how are you?

Bill, how did you survive the weekend? Okay. Okay. You know, a little bit of rage, a little bit of resignation, a little bit of annoyance, a little bit of drinking. It was fine. Okay. Yeah. I did a lot of drinking on Saturday. That's for another podcast though. Bill, you wrote this morning, stop hand-wringing, start fighting. You're done with the recriminations. You don't want to look back at what happened with the Hispanic vote or the Liz Cheney town hall. And, um,

I plan on having much more hand-wringing to come, actually, over the next six weeks, but I think that we take a day with your wisdom and focus instead on what's actually happening and going forward. So, I guess we'll start with what inspired your Monday missive to dispense with the hand-wringing. Yeah, and I'm not against hand-wringing at all, and certainly not against recriminations and

Learning lessons is actually important. I just feel like everyone's learning premature lessons based on partial, in some cases, actually incorrect analyses of exit polls and vote casts and so forth, and others kind of second-guessing things that they didn't second-guess in real time. And it's not clear to me we're particularly incorrect.

mistakes in terms of some of the campaign tactics. Other people are going fatalistic, incumbents never went anymore, and it was hopeless anyway, which I'm not quite sure is right either. So I just, I don't know, I let everyone argue about this for a while. And meanwhile, let's try to stop Trump from doing too much damage to the country.

Okay, that's a good mindset. And I do at the end, I want to get into some of the false information that's out there because there is some, some of our friends are grasping on some of the data in ways that are not true. And so I do just want to close by kind of getting a little fact check out there. But in the meantime, this is a good mindset.

This was you over the weekend on what we've learned thus far, I guess, for what is coming from the Trump administration. You wrote, why no Cotton or Pompeo? Because they aren't election deniers and they are pro-Ukraine. The plan, Susie Wiles as White House Chief of Staff to run operations and establishment types on the head, while Vance, Don Jr., Tucker, Stephen Miller staff up on a full America First Project 2025 administration.

I mean, it looks that way to me. You know, there was Susie Wiles was Trump's campaign manager and sort of an established Republican, I think one could say, was appointed chief of staff. There was a half a day of, oh, see, Trump's, it's not going to be so bad that I suspect, a little to respect to Susie Wiles, who I know slightly, Trump thinks of her as, you know, making sure the appointments get scheduled correctly and everything.

And, you know, the right people have access to the White House mess and so forth. And meanwhile, on the substantive side, it's pretty clear they were all in on the America first stuff in foreign policy and all that on Project 2025. And we're going to know whether it's the

Mass deportation, they seem serious about that. Selling out Ukraine, they seem serious about that. Cotton took himself out of the running like Wednesday. I assume he did that because he knew he wasn't going to get something. He wasn't going to get something because he was a McConnell guy on January 6, 2021 and voted to certify the elections, the electors. And

And because he's been pro-Ukraine. Pompeo actually, to his credit, spent a fair amount of time working to get Republicans to support the Ukraine aid package. J.D. Vance was against it. We know where Musk is on these things. We know where Don Jr. is on Ukraine. And we know where Tucker Carlson is on Putin and Ukraine. And I think the degree to which they are all in on that version of America First, which is a pro-Putin version, and they're all in on some of the key parts of Project 2025, I

We shouldn't be surprised. I mean, I'm not surprised. But I just think, don't you think we've seen sort of confirmation of that? Pretty good confirmation of that in the first few days. Yeah, I think so. And Nikki Haley, we should also mention, Trump said was not going to be getting a role, which is also not surprising, seeing as they hadn't spoken since June for Nikki Haley. But I'm not surprised about that. I mean, look, I guess this is what I sense, and we're going to know more.

in a month than we do today. But the immigration regime is going to be extremely draconian. And they actually know there's an analogy that people kept using. If Trump gets back in, like the velociraptors have learned how to, how to work the door handles this time. Like they didn't know what to do. Immigration was the one place where they knew how to work the door handles the first time. Right. So they're very well prepared to start day one.

And there's already been a leak that he might do an executive order ending birthright citizenship, which is probably unconstitutional, but is meant as an early challenge to the court to dare the courts to stop him, essentially. So that will just be one vector across many draconian anti-immigrant policies that will come into place. I think on foreign policy, you're exactly right. And this is what we've seen early. Foreign policy is one area where there's a question like, does he do the thing he did last time where...

you know, there's some people who look the part that he brings in, you know, that aren't fully American first. Maybe he hasn't made any appointments yet, but I think it seems unlikely on foreign policy. I think the tariffs is kind of where the rubber meets the road on this. I do think the domestic policy stuff we'll see. I mean, he's, he, Trump loves to have, you know,

to bring people to heal, you know, that he felt like he was jealous of his whole life. So will there be some Manhattan finance guys who were always on the A list while he was on the C list to get to be treasury secretary and call him, sir, who aren't fully in on the tariffs,

And the House, you know, if the Republicans have full Congress, which it looks like they will now, you know, will they focus more on the tax increase? Anyway, so I think the domestic stuff is maybe where some of the agenda gets softened a little bit. But I think immigration and foreign policy.

points towards full-on Trumpism. How does that strike you? No, I think that's right. I mean, he cares about the stock market going up. And if someone persuades him that too much tariff talk would hurt that project or hurt him domestically, or some of the business guys can get to him, to him, he has some debts or wants to keep them on side, he'll harumph, he'll do some things with China, and he'll announce things, and then he'll, as in the first term, conceivably

claim victory and end up not doing some of the real terror stuff and have a fake deal on a bunch of things. It still could do some damage to the economy, but that's the one place where reality might constrain them. But in foreign policy, it doesn't look that way. Incidentally, just to be clear, so Cotton and Pompeo were presumably possibilities for the Defense Department, maybe in Cotton's case for CIA as well. State Department, I saw, I don't know how reliable this is, but there was what looked like a fairly authoritative leak of the four names he's considering.

Marco Rubio, your close friend there, and Bill Hagerty from Tennessee, who had been ambassador to Japan in the first couple of years of the first Trump term. Romney guy from before that. So like Rubio, a former establishment internationalist type. And who else? It was Vivek Ramaswamy. Yep, Vivek and Rick Grinnell. And Rick Grinnell, who is the kind of pure, you might say, Trump, you know, type. And Vivek, who's pretty pure Trump type, I guess. So one of them is actually, it's funny, so I looked up Hagerty and Rubio, both of whom are

I knew back in the day, I looked up and thought, well, they probably were in the majority on Ukraine aid. Remember, if I've got the numbers right, something like 33 Republicans voted for it and 15 against. It was, Vance was one of us, less than a third, as I recall, who voted against the Ukraine aid. And so I thought, you know, I wonder if that will block them. Sure enough,

Rubio and I hadn't remembered this. Rubio and Hagerty voted against Ukraine aid in that. I remember Rubio did because I went off on it. It's shocking. That really is like the aid was for Ukraine and Israel. So they're not against the Israel aid, I'm going to assume. So it's purely not helping Ukraine when it's being, you know, after the invasion, brutal invasion and by Putin. So they they were already, I guess, positioning themselves for for Trump's party and.

And incidentally, in the leadership race, Rick Scott voted against Ukraine aid. Thune and Cornyn voted for it with McConnell, kind of the old-fashioned types.

I wonder if that's what, it's not the reason, but that correlates with the Trump world's preference for Rick Scott over the two establishment Republicans, right? Certainly. Look, Trump Jr. posted on social media, which I guess you got to take these missives as official government policy now. There's a picture of Zelensky with you are 38 days away from losing your allowance.

I don't know. There's something there that feels like a psychological thing that Trump Jr. is dealing with using the word allowance there. That's like his entire life is an allowance. Right.

Back to your point about the Senate leadership race, for people that have not been paying attention to this, you know, essentially the two Johns, John Cornyn and John Thune, were kind of the stated successors to Mitch McConnell, both in pre-Trump Republican types that went along to go along. Is that how you do it? And Thune more quietly, Cornyn a little bit more ostentatiously at times. So he did buck Trump also a few times.

And Rick Scott has kind of emerged as like the Trumpist choice here.

on social media from, you know, Elon has said it, and you could just go down the list of the usual MAGA suspects. Trump has not decided to weigh in. I do think that Ukraine has a lot to do with that. I do also just think the kind of control that the MAGA people feel wanting just to, you know, fully demonstrate control over the party is driving a lot of this as well. Though, I don't know, Trump has not weighed in TBD and whether he does the votes later this week. At some level,

you know, he likes excuses and outs. I don't know if you, if you actually weigh in because it's kind of like, well, if he can blame stuff on John Thune, that might serve his purposes actually a little bit more. And also he might not want to waste political capital on something that, that he doesn't really have control over. It's a 53 Senate election.

secret ballot vote, you know, so he can't browbeat them the way he would in a public vote. I looked at the list this morning. There's like a shocking number. This just pisses me off, actually. There's a shockingly number of like pretty normal, actually, Republicans in the Senate that you just forget about because they've gone into total hiding.

And you assume that a lot of them will go for Thune or Cornyn. But, you know, Shelley Moore Capito. Do you remember Mike Rounds is still in the Senate? He is. John Hoeven, Hoosman from Arkansas, Dan Sullivan from Alaska. You literally forget that most of these people are senators because they just don't weigh in on anything controversial and just kind of tuck their tail and say, yes, sir, Mr. Trump, when they need to, or just don't say anything. Right.

Anyway, that's kind of the state of play. I don't know how you assess what's happening in that race. No, I think that's a good – I think it'll be an interesting vote because it is a secret ballot. So in some ways, if one wants to maintain the position, which so many people have maintained for nine years now, which I think we've been skeptical of, but just deep down, they really don't want Trump and Trumpism. It's just their little –

to say anything publicly. This is literally a secret ballot. There's nothing public, right? So they can cast their ballot and John Thune can get 31 votes and win and that's it. And no one knows who voted how. I mean, they could try to deduce it, I suppose. But so...

You'd think that given that the Trump people would have just backed off and given that they're all capitulating to Trump anyway to show how loyal they are on this issue of recess appointments and, you know, kind of giving up. I didn't mention the recess appointment thing. Why don't you explain what you're talking about? Giving up all set of prerogatives. So they seem to be willing to concede that Trump could just make recess appointments and

Right and left for cabinet and sub-cabinet positions. They've been used at times in the past. They've been limited at times in the past. They've been used, though, when an original appointment didn't go through or there was a reason to go to a recess appointment. There were then quarrels about how much latitude presidents should have in that. Here, Trump just wants to do it right away. Elon Musk has tweeted, you know, it takes too long to get all these people through. It's, of course, ludicrous. It doesn't take that long to get cabinet officials through. When you have a 53-seat majority, they could all get through by January, most probably by January 20th.

But recess appointment makes it a little easier and you have no debate, no nothing, right? I mean, literally, this is literally in the Constitution as one of the checks and balances that we all learn about in 10th grade, of how the American government's supposed to work, separation of powers. And the Senate candidates for Senate majority leader are giving it away. The Federalist Paper says, you know, if one reason these checks and balances will be sustained is people will want to defend the interests of their place or whatever the phrase is. Senators will defend the prerogatives of the Senate.

they didn't think about, I guess, current party government and especially about party government that is utterly and totally dominated by one man in this case. I wonder if Trump will stay out of it or not. I mean, he's, I don't know, you never know how much coordination there is in the MAGA world. They're all in on, for Scott. And, you know, I think it will be a defeat for Trump at this point, even if he doesn't personally get involved, if Scott loses, but maybe he thinks that's still different from Don Jr. and Elon Musk.

weighing in. I wonder how much they're lobbying privately and really trying to get commitments of votes and then figure out who voted how sort of afterwards. You know, I just don't know how serious they are. These guys don't seem big on that, lobbying privately. Yeah, I know. I think, yeah, you know, this seems like people that like to send tweets. Well, no, that could be. But anyway, so Scott, was it 2022 or 2020? I guess it was the last time 2022, wasn't it? Ran against McConnell for leader. Yeah. And I think he got 10 votes. He was the insurrectionist against McConnell. Yeah.

And that means that the large majority of Republican senators have voted for McConnell and against Scott. And if you voted for McConnell against Scott, you probably would want to vote for Thune or maybe Cornyn against Scott. But let's see how many of them change even their secret ballot because, you know, got to go along with Trump. We don't want to start off on a bad relationship with him. I mean, the Cornyn and Thune conversation.

capitulation on the recessive ordinance thing is really shameful. And I can't really quite. To that point, if they're going to totally capitulate, then it isn't really a loss for Trump, right? Like it's like only loss of John Thune plans to act like Mitch McConnell, which is extremely cowardly and to do what Trump wants 96% of the time, but like on matters of controlling Senate power, preserving Senate power and on matters of national security and

Those are the times that Mitch McConnell would step out, right, to put a moat around his power. If John Thune or Cornyn aren't going to do that and they're just going to say, hey, all right, whatever, we'll do just the practical implication of recess appointments for people. It's like there are 53 Republican senators. Right. So any four could prevent recess.

RFK Jr. from becoming HHS secretary or whatever, Kash Patel running the Defense Department, whatever the worst possible appointments you could imagine, you could have at least John Curtis who replaced Romney and Utah's relatively moderate, we know, Collins and Murkowski,

yet several Republican senators didn't vote for him. Todd Young in Indiana, who you mentioned, Cassidy voted to impeach him, right? Like, anyway, I'm not hoping for courage from a lot of these people, but in like the worst possible, you know, for these outlier bad appointments for Republican senators could stop it. If Thune says, no, I'm going to just take that power away, even in those extreme cases, and Trump can just recess appoint whoever he wants, well then,

there's really no functional difference between him and Scott. Which shows how effective, I mean, already we're only, what are we, six days after the election? The intimidation has been. I mean, it wasn't, when they originally started with the Scott thing, I thought this is kind of foolish. His colleagues don't like Scott much, I don't think. And sort of, I assume, they'll all capitulate anyway, so what are you doing this for? But, you know, part of the intimidation is to be for Scott, which probably helps, quote,

Cornyn and Thune can't afford to have them splitting with Scott if this becomes the issue on which people vote. So now they've gone over to the dark side. So then, yeah, this is a very classic authoritarian intimidation move, the combination of the recess appointments, which may not be necessary, as you say, 53 senators, but still important to make the point.

that I'm going to do it and screw you. And then to make the point that I'm also going to be for Scott or at least be for Scott until the other guys capitulate enough that there's no need to be for Scott, screw you. So first six days show a lot of purposeful,

and authoritarianism, I would say, from Mar-a-Lago. And not stupid from their point of view. So far, no backlash. Have I missed all the complaints from the Wall Street Journal and the American Enterprise Institute and from the constitutionalists at National Review about all the stuff that's happening? Are they defending the old-fashioned prerogatives of the Senate? I guess I don't read all these people anymore, but somehow I haven't heard much about that. No, I haven't heard much either. Yeah.

I think that that's safe to say there's been nothing. You've been beating this drum for a while, but it's just also worth mentioning again, like that six days now, the difference between this and 2017 is already very stark. You know, just like the difference between like a total capitulation from Thune and Cornyn versus targeted capitulation from McConnell and Ryan in 2017.

It seems like my former colleague, Elise Stefanik, is going to be named ambassador to the United Nations. I put this in a category. I'm going to spend some time on tomorrow's podcast is going to be a feelings podcast. So if you're interested in feelings, we're going to get there tomorrow. So I'm going to spend a little bit more time talking about bad people getting rewarded and how distressing that is. So Elise is certainly getting rewarded for her pretty shameful actions.

And that is upsetting. On the other hand, I don't know. Literally, this seems just like that they wanted somebody to go to the United Nations who's going to be able to get on their high horse and finger wag and

the bad countries for, you know, supporting anti-Semitism, which is like, fine, I guess. I don't know. I don't know. I guess as we, as I rank my list of problems and concerns, I think that at least going to New York to shout down the mullahs and to shout down the UN security council for their cowardice, uh, that,

I don't know. That seems fine to me. Whatever. I think that there's going to be a lot more offensive appointments coming, but I don't know if you have any thoughts on that. No, I tend to agree with that, though. I would say, let's not forget how Elise Stefanik became Elise Stefanik, the moderate Elise Stefanik. She went crazy about the Ukraine impeachment and became the great defender of Trump. And then when the rubber hit the road on January 6th, 2021, or right before January 6th, she became an election denier.

something she couldn't possibly have believed, something that's, you know, she didn't have to go there. Not all of, I guess, two thirds of the House did, but not all the House did, and only a fifth of the senators did. Without doing that, she wouldn't be in leadership and she wouldn't have gotten this appointment. So the degree to which election denial is core, I think still, to being okay in Trump world.

which has all kinds of implications going forward, right? I mean, it's not trivially important in terms of what kind of elections we're going to have over the next four years and how those are to be conducted and, of course, 2028 and stuff. So that's the only point I'd add about it. Yeah, I agree that in practice she'll be a kind of good, you know, she can beat up opponents of the U.S. and say some things that people like us will agree with some of the time. But still, the reason she's there is that she was willing to be an election denier. Yeah, it's the ante.

It was like to be at the table in these conversations. It was the anti-election denial. Obviously, at least Stefanik did not believe that the Dominion voting machines had been hacked. It's amazing how easily that got fixed this time, though. You know, no issues. I don't know. All the hordes of illegal immigrant votes. Where did they go?

Yeah, with Democratic governors running all these states, incidentally, presumably having a huge interest in doing all this stuff. Somehow it just wasn't an issue. Isn't that amazing? Yeah, I haven't heard from Elise about that, but she gets the promotion. So that's great. We're really thrilled for her. And I hope that, you know, there is no hell. I would hope that would work out in her benefit.

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Elon Musk, I want to talk about. He's been seen at Mar-a-Lago every day since Donald Trump won. He's been dining with him on the patio at times, weighing in on staffing decisions and making clear his preference for certain roles. That's a CNN report.

I guess maybe it's without precedent. I don't know if it's without precedent. I guess maybe if we go back to the age of the industrialists, certainly would not be without precedent. So it's certainly without modern precedent, like in post-World War II times where there would be a

oligarch, rich person that would have this type of influence both over the information system, the political system, government contracting, and now direct influence over the president and who he appoints. And publicly so. In the old days, some of this might have happened quietly. A phone call to the White House chief of staff from a big shot industrialist who also was giving a lot of money to the president saying, I'd really love to see this person in that job. But we're

We're way so far beyond that. And Musk is so much more extreme, honestly. Again, it sort of matters here whether the types weighing in are weighing in in a kind of establishment way so their buddy John Smith gets the job instead of

joe jones but they're basically identical you know wall street finance types it's just that one of them is a friend of someone as opposed to what elon musk is weighing in for elon musk on the phone with putin apparently several times during the campaign joins the phone call with slansky but just doesn't needless i hate to even sound so old-fashioned it's like stupid to even say all this but individuals who have no government position are suddenly on phone calls with other heads of government i mean it's so jaw-dropping you can't even you know

Yeah, it's like, hey, Baltimore, here's Elon. Good luck. Negotiate it out. It is worth noting that simultaneously, Russia has upgraded their drone attacks. They have added additional troops. I mean, I think that the Russians see this right now as an opportunity to maximize their position before the coming war.

whatever they just try to call it, negotiation over land and territory. And so while Zelensky is forced to like, whatever, try to suck up to Donald Trump's oligarch bestie, like, you know, Putin is, you know, moving full steam ahead.

And I'm not sure there are going to be negotiations over land and territory. Putin may just have decided, I'm going to just brutally go ahead and try to win this thing without U.S. support and European support. Ukraine will crack in six months or 12 and 18 months.

and I'll be in Kiev. I'm not so sure he's even willing to accept what would be a terrible deal from the point of view of international politics and the people of Ukraine that Trump would impose. Maybe he will accept that. It depends on some calculations, how much the war is costing him in Russia, et cetera. But no, it's very, very bad. I mean, those indications, I don't think there was ever much question what the implications of Trump winning would be for Putin and Ukraine. But I think

Whatever questions there might have been are pretty much being resolved in one direction only. That's interesting. I'm just doing this live here. I haven't spent that much time thinking about it. But our colleague Kathy Young is a monitor of Russia State TV and kind of following her, but also others on social media. The response was different than 2017 on Russia State TV. Like, remember, in 2017, it was...

Like, we're putting on our tuxes and popping champagne and etc. And this time, it was more mixed. There was some mocking of Trump. There was a segment I saw that was very insulting to Melania where they're posting all of like the naked pictures of Melania that she did 20-30 years ago.

And that can be something that can be nothing. I, you know, I'm not a criminologist, right. But it does raise the prospect of like, it might not be as straightforward as it may have seemed right. That there is like,

Elon and Putin have been back-channeling. Trump and Putin have been back-channeling. Trump is saying that he's going to wind this down. There's some plan to wind it down. That's the straightforward interpretation of what we see in the public sphere. It's interesting. Your theory that Putin might not go along with that combined with what we're seeing on Russia State TV, I guess, leaves open the possibility that it's actually worse than that. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, not to get all Hitler and 38, 39 analogy to overly obsess, but you might have said from a certain point of view, Hitler should have accepted Chamberlain's incredible concessions in Munich. He should have gradually would have been able to absorb a lot more of Czechoslovakia and do a lot more damage elsewhere. And instead he...

off the rest of Czechoslovakia in, I think, February or March of 1939, which leaves it pretty impossible to say that, oh, well, it just was a problem with the German-speaking, you know, Czechs in the Sudetenland and then, of course, the invades Poland in September 1st. I mean, I don't think Putin's quite there, but there is some history of dictators, you

not accept, you know, when they see the weakness, they take advantage of it, of course, in the short term. But that's not ultimately the point. So much depends on what you think Putin wants. Does Putin want a quarter of Ukraine or does he want to crush Ukraine? Does he want ultimately to have Zelensky fleeing Kiev, 10 million Ukrainian refugees and the Russian flag, you know, flying in Kiev? From his point of view,

that would be a pretty big victory, right? I want to close talking about the election numbers and doing some debunking, but just circling back to the beginning of the conversation. What does fighting look like right now? There is an ongoing conversation about this happening. I mean, at some level, I think it's totally reasonable to say that fighting is...

Like, let's let them fuck up and wait and pick battles in the future based on that and try to, you know, create a backlash in the midterms. And in the meantime, you know, kind of let them do their deal. There's other perspectives. It's like, no, you know, pressuring those four senators we talked about, Collins and Murkowski and Curtis, right?

There's legal, you know, the ways to gum up the works legally to slow him down. He's ostensibly limited to a term. Where do you kind of fall on that? If the theme of the missive was less hand-wringing, more fighting, what does smart fighting look like to you? Yeah, so it's a fair question.

and it's probably too easy for me to sit here and say, they should fight. I mean, they need to be somewhat selective. Obviously, there are important fights. So some of these personnel appointments, I wouldn't necessarily make. I'd find the worst one and make a huge fight about that if you could. So what really is...

manifestly unqualified or has a background that shows he shouldn't be entrusted with he or she with serious position others yeah i don't they should vote against it but they don't need to make a huge issue the democrats i guess i do think though i don't quite agree with you just let him do his thing i mean you can't let him just deport 10 million or 15 million immigrants from this country and round them up and i would prefer not to let him sell out ukraine i

Whether you can stop these things, I don't know. But I think you want to be on record and not just on record giving a speech, but on record doing your best. Lawsuits, state governments doing things, other civil society type efforts to really say certain lines, certain things are just unacceptable and we're all in to try to stop it.

Doesn't mean they'll succeed in stopping it. I was talking to Bob Kagan about this over the weekend, quite a lot of other people. I do think being hardheaded about it is important. This isn't a matter of press releases. Where are the levers of power? Well, 47 senators and 212, if that's what it is, ends up being House members. It's not nothing. You can get a few Republicans, or at least you can pressure some Republicans on some of these issues.

23 governors is nothing. States really do have authority in some of these areas. It's hard for the federal government to carry out some of these things. The red states understood that and caused various troubles for Biden and Texas at the border. I'm for doing things legally, but I think there are things you can do to make life tougher. The courts aren't going to be as great as they were in 2017 after they've had four years of Trump appointments, then four years of Biden, but now we're going to get more Trump appointments.

I do think the Biden administration, I spoke with someone from the Biden administration over the weekend, they need to do what's legally appropriate and possible to make it harder for Trump to do these things. And that might mean regulations that Trump has to go to the trouble of repealing, which sort of can take 30 or 60 or 90 days.

That can mean appointments in the civil service, again, done legally, that it'll make life a little harder for Trump. The Schedule F stuff, thinking about how to stop that, that's very dangerous, I think. The Schedule F just for people being, their plan to do some mass firing to change the rules to make it easier to fire. Make the top tier almost entirely political appointees and easier to fire and so forth. As you can tell, I'm not going to filibuster here. I don't have an easy answer and a lot of it is case by case. But look, this is, there are plenty of

experts and think tanks and people who serve in government and people who know these issue areas who would have thoughts about things to be done. And all I'm saying in the little piece in warning shots is people should be getting together to think about this and plan this, not simply to sort of have big think discussions about, you know, why aren't we in better touch with Trump voters? I'm hearing that. I'm thinking about it.

it. And I will render my verdict later on how much fighting I feel like is appropriate over the next two years. Monitoring, for sure. Raising alarm flags, for sure. Bill Crystal, I'm going to stick around. I want to go through the numbers with people. I've been hearing some people concerned about whether there's funny business with the numbers. I want to debunk that, but I'll do it on my own. Will Crystal, we'll let you go and we'll see you back here next Monday. Great. Good to see you, Tim.

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Thank you.

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Get up to 60% off at babbel.com slash bulwark spelled B-A-B-B-E-L dot com slash bulwark rules and restrictions apply. All right, gang, I want to start here. Obviously, Democratic elected officials and leaders have acted just unbelievably responsibly in

In the wake of the Trump victory last week, Kamala Harris conceded. Donald Trump will be going to the White House this week. Joe Biden's team is working with his team on the transition. I had a friend inside the White House who had a call with a person for the Trump team. That's not fun. They sucked it up, though, and did it. This is not something that the crybabies on the other side did last time. That is honorable and noteworthy, and it should be noted and regarded. Obviously, it's a low bar.

I wish we weren't in a time where doing your duty as a public servant was something that required getting a badge of merit. But thanks to the way the Trump team behaved last time and Donald Trump himself behaved last time, it is. And so full acknowledgement to the Harris team and Democratic elected officials and leaders all across the country.

That said, there also have been some Democratic lefty pundits and regular people that have been questioning the results. I was stopped at a playground this weekend by somebody who they thought that the numbers didn't add up and were asking me about that. I'm happy to be stopped at playgrounds by listeners to say hey, but that was a jarring request for me. I've seen a few mentions of it in the comments here at the Bulwark. I saw some

prominent grifters on Twitter on the left pushing this. And so I felt like it was worth just clearly demonstrating for you, if you have any questions, why there were no actual issues with the count in this campaign. So you can have this data. So if anyone in your life brings it up,

you can calmly debunk it with them. I'm stealing some of this. So with credit to Charles Gaba, I'll put his ex account here in the comments if you want to give him a follow. So here we go. He breaks it down as such. He says basically there are three main things

conspiracy is whatever you want to call them out there. The first is people asking how there could be 20 million fewer votes than in 2020. The next was how could there be 15 million fewer votes for Harris than for Biden? And the third was how could there be so many swing state voters going for the Dem for Senate, but not for Harris for POTUS?

So just take these one at a time. That graph that you're seeing about how there are 20 million fewer votes that's been going around on social media, that graph was made on Wednesday morning. I should also mention, by the way, that there are both MAGA and lefty accounts I see pushing this because the MAGA accounts want this chart to prove that.

that 2020 was fraudulent. And they're like, see, look at all these fake votes that happened in 2020. The number, they all went away in 2024. That is not true. These people are basing this over the fact that on early morning on Wednesday, many, many votes haven't been counted yet. It takes California forever to count, which by the way, is something California should fix. But it takes other states a long time to count as well. If you look at kind of expert assessments,

When all votes are counted, we're going to end up with about 1.5 million fewer votes in 2024 than in 2020. To me, this makes a lot of sense. There were changes in pandemic voting rules that made it a little bit harder to vote, particularly in certain red states.

Also, people had less availability. If you were just sitting around on lockdown, you aren't a likely voter. All you had to do is drop your ballot off at a drop box. The friction there is a lot less than going to wait in line to vote. So going down 1.5 million total votes from 2020 is totally reasonable. And there's I don't think anything there that should drive you to think that there's funny business. Number two, the claim that there are 15 million fewer voters for Harris.

That number is going to end up being closer to about 5 million fewer for Harris than Biden had. There will be more votes than Hillary had in 2016. Biden had a record number of votes, most presidential votes in history in 2020. That will still be the case after 2024. Trump is not going to pass his number of 81 million votes.

So Harris lost ground in every demographic, as we've brought up, besides college-educated white women. So it's not hard to understand why she would have 5 million fewer votes than Biden. Just a slight drop in turnout mixed with a greater switch in voters from Biden to Trump than from Trump to Harris, though there were some in both categories. Yeah.

All right. Lastly, this Dem Senate candidates. Thank goodness, by the way, that the Dem Senate candidates did better than Harris in a number of these states. As we mentioned earlier, having 53 senators could conceivably create some friction for Trump in a way that having 53.

six senators would not have also would have made a much, much harder for the Democrats to recontrol the Senate in the midterms. So these ended up being very important races. But the most interesting part of the analysis that Charles did that I want to point to is that if you look at the numbers, it was not really the case where there are a ton of people voting for Trump and the Democrat, though there were some.

It was mostly the case of MAGA people going into the ballot box, voting for Trump, and then nothing else. Just checking the box for Trump and leaving the rest of the ballot blank. So thank you to those MAGA voters for their service, because they played a key role in helping the Democratic senators get elected. There's one state where this was not really the case, and that is Arizona, where Ruben Gallego got a bunch of crossover Trump-Gallego voters elected.

This is something that I predicted every time this came up over the course of the last year. So there's no conspiracy here, nothing hard to understand. This was working class Latino voters and people that were just really turned off by Carrie Lake combining to vote for Ruben Gallego. And so Arizona was the only place where the Democratic Senate nominee ended up getting a lot more votes than Kamala Harris did. And all these other states...

the Harris and Dem Senate nominee vote share was vote total rather was basically the same. And it's just that the Trump number went down to the Republican senators because of those Trump voters that were not voting for Republicans down ballot. So there you go. I

Hopefully that clears it up for folks. Obviously, it doesn't make anybody feel any better, but it's important to know what actually happened. And I find this exercise kind of funny because I did another podcast last week called Pablo Torre Finds Out. It's kind of his sports and culture podcast. You can go check that out if you're interested. It was a little bit of a different conversation that I have here, a little less in the weeds on politics.

And one of the things we discussed was this notion that the left feels like there needs to be a liberal Joe Rogan. There needs to be a liberal Joe Rogan. And I was making the point that I don't think there can be a liberal Joe Rogan in part because of what we just did here. Like a big part of the Joe Rogan appeal is that he's willing to kind of embrace and think about and work through these conspiracy theories or different false views. People like that. People are drawn to that. And that's kind of...

in some ways, anathema to, right now, the worldview, the dominant worldview of people on the left. Maybe that's a bad thing. I don't know. One of my friends emailed and said, maybe you could be the liberal Joe Rogan. I don't know that that's true. I appreciate it. I have no muscles, for starters. But I think that there's some value in being more accessible to people, working through it, responding to people's concerns and conspiracies and thoughts that are counter whatever the conventional wisdom is. I'm open to doing more of that.

In this case, though, it just ain't it. The numbers are the numbers and the numbers resulted in a victory for Donald Trump. So much more this week to come on how we're processing all this, how we're thinking about all of it. And we'll do that tomorrow with my longtime frenemy turned friend, John Lovett. We'll see you all then. Peace.

I am just a poor boy, though my story's seldom told. I have squandered my resistance for a pocket full of mumble, such are promises. All lies in chess, still the man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest. Mmm, mmm, mmm, mmm, mmm, mmm.

When I left my home and my family I was no more than a boy in the company of strangers In the quiet of the railway station when I'm scared Laying low, seeking out the poor quarters Where the ragged people go Looking for the places only they would know Bye-la-bye, bye-la-bye-bye

La la la la la la la la la la la la In the clearing stands a boxer and a fighter by his trade And he carries the reminders of every glove that laid him down Or cut him till he cried out in his anger and his shame I am leaving and the fighter still remains

The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.