Bill Kristol and Michael Weiss: It's Showtime
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Sign up at WorkMoney. Get money-saving tips. Skip the rent. Get more rich. Sign up at WorkMoney.org slash MoreRichContest for your chance to win $50,000. Hey, everybody. Big doubleheader show today. I know it's convention week, but I've been totally remiss in covering what's been going on in Ukraine and their inclusion into Russia. So we've got Michael Weiss in segment two with a very informative update on that. Up first, Bill Kristol. And all week,

Make sure you're checking us out on YouTube because we'll have additional bonus content over there. We just hit half a million subscribers on YouTube. So we appreciate you all for listening and watching. And we'll be just giving you unlimited coconut content this week from Chicago. Up next, your friend of mine, Bill Kristol. ♪

Hello and welcome to the Bullard Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. It's Monday, August 19th. The political world is headed back to Chicago, the host of more nominating conventions than any other city in America, most famously that conflagration of 1968. To discuss it, Bill Kristol, who is already middle-aged in 1968, editor-in-large of the Bullard, co-author of Morning Shot's newsletter. How are you doing, Bill? I'm doing fine. Just in response to that...

Cruel, cruel comment. I'm just going to point out that more famous than 1968 probably was 1860. Your first convention that nominated Abraham Lincoln in 1932, the Democratic Convention that nominated FDR. So two major both on fourth ballot, one case six than the other, I think. So both things that did not have to happen that happened and probably influenced history quite a lot.

And we might have that again this time. Well, before I want to do a deep dive on the convention, but before we get there, it's Monday. I was by the pool yesterday, so we need a little palate cleanser. You might have seen there was a cutesy video that Kamala Harris and Tim Walls put out where they joke about what kind of tacos he likes. He likes white guy tacos, and she didn't understand what that meant. Well, Ben Shapiro and Megyn Kelly and other right-wingers lost their mind over this little joke, and I just want to listen to a little bit of it.

By the way, not racist at all when the black vice president and presidential candidate is talking about the lack of flavor palette for white people because white people have no flavor palette. Apparently, white people hate spices. Apparently, a white people taco...

is tuna and mayonnaise. That's because white people don't like spicy food at all, which is presumably why between the 15th and 17th centuries, multiple European countries fought a series of wars over the spice route and the spice trade because they hate spices so darn much. You know, Tim Walls says that he makes white guy tacos and Kamala says, what is that, mayonnaise and tuna? Like, that is anti-white racism.

That is anti-white racism. Who was the first one, Tim? That was Ben Shapiro and then Matt Walsh, both of the Daily Wire. I like this difference between the two. The pseudo-intellectualism of Ben Shapiro is so wonderful. Between the 15th and 17th centuries, I mean, how ludicrous can you get, right? Yeah, the spice trade. In defense of white people, Ben Shapiro, you know, acknowledges the imperialist efforts of white folks to travel the globe, co-opting spices from other parts of the world. It's

You know, I don't know how these guys wake up every morning to just get upset about this. Megan Kelly attacked the bulwark over this on Twitter, saying that Tim Walz is not a man's man, like Mona Charon wrote. A real man's man wouldn't make a self-deprecating joke about his palate.

I mean, what can you say, right? I've rendered Bill Kristol speechless on Monday morning. I mean, palate jokes are all out of the question. It's an awful lot of humor is going down the tubes here, you know. This is racism. This is racism. Anti-white racism. It is pernicious, and we're going to be seeing a lot of it in Chicago this week, according to Ben Shapiro. It was Harris' joke, right, in response to Wall Street. Well, he was like, I like white guy tacos. And she's like, what is that, like tuna? Yeah.

Tuna and mayonnaise. I thought that was quite a good... As someone who hates mayonnaise, first of all, I think that was an excellent line. Just for me, there's excellent spicy tacos and then very bad tuna fish and mayonnaise. So I'm on the... I think I take it that was kind of Kamala's point, so I'm with her on that. Same. I'm not taking offense. And if even non-white people want to like tuna fish and mayonnaise, it's really... You know what's great about...

Being a liberal these days, it's a free country. People can like whatever they want. Yeah. Well, brown people can like tuna and mayonnaise if they want. I hear some of them do. I don't know. Yeah. Teach their own. But you've got to get mad about something when nothing's going your way campaign-wise.

And that's been the case for the Ben Shapiro crowd over the past month or so. Let's just actually, let's do that. Let's start with the polls first, then we get into the DNC. We had over the weekend, New York Times did a Sunbelt poll that had Harris plus five in Arizona, plus two in North Carolina, minus one in Nevada, minus one in New York.

And then minus four in Georgia, semaphore out this morning with a whole battery of swing state polls. Harris plus seven in Michigan, plus six in Wisconsin, plus six in Nevada. So Nevada kind of all over the map there. Plus one in North Carolina and PA, minus one in Arizona.

minus four in Georgia. So the main consistency there is Georgia is Trump's best state. And, you know, the southwest states a little bit noisy with Harris doing better in the upper Midwest and kind of surprisingly well in North Carolina. What how do you how do you take the state of play?

yeah i think you know these especially state level polls especially nevada which is a very hard state to poll a lot of transients and stuff uh culinary workers aren't sitting around answering their cell phones you know they kind of work hard and they're you know at strange hours and casinos and probably a little hard to get in touch with if you average the polls she's what do you think a little bit ahead i would say honestly election today she probably pulls it out with the midwestern states at least two of the three and one or two sunbathe south states i mean if

But close, I mean, 60-40, not 80-20, maybe 55-45 actually in her favor if you add it all up. Kind of consistent with what I think we said last week that Biden was down about three nationally. She's now up about three nationally. That translates to up one or two in most of these swing states. And that's kind of where the race is. So it remains close. She's ahead. And that's why the convention either increases that lead or doesn't. And that's why I think it's actually a little more important than your typical convention.

Yeah, that's a tipping point in both these. If you looked at the New York Times, it'd be North Carolina plus two and Semaphore would be North Carolina and Pennsylvania plus one. So not a landslide, not the landslide we'd be hoping for. Still close in both of those, but a complete flip. I do think the North Carolina thing is interesting.

because it had been dismissed, basically. We made silver on a week and a half ago, and he said he thought that it was being underestimated as a sleeper. And the Democrats did better in North Carolina than Georgia and Arizona in

08 and 12, definitely better than Georgia in 16, maybe Arizona. You know, it's not crazy to think that, you know, a state that over-indexes a little more on college-educated white suburban voters because of the research triangle in Charlotte might end up doing a little bit better than people, you know, might have anticipated going into the year.

Now, I'll say in my defense that, I mean, I was on a conversation with Elaine Kamar, who does this stuff very well, Democratic operative and strategist and commentator. In May, March, Biden was, I think, just clinched the nomination. Different era, right? And we actually discussing just the numbers. And I said at the time, and we both said, North Carolina is shoddy.

shouldn't be considered that different from Georgia and Arizona. Biden lost North Carolina by 80,000 votes last time. He won those other two states by 10,000. He won Michigan by like 140,000, right? I mean, everyone understands Michigan's a swing state, but the margin there was actually greater than the margin in North Carolina. And as you say, it's been trending in that direction in any case.

So I've always thought it should be considered more like Georgia and Arizona than not. And they have that terrible Republican gubernatorial candidate, the lieutenant governor, who probably reminds North Carolina voters that, gee, this party's got a little crazy.

Whereas actually in Georgia, it's the opposite, right? Brian Kemp sort of reminds Republican suburban voters that, well, there's a sane Republican Party and Kemp thinks Trump's okay, even though he's a jackass, so we should all vote for Trump. So yeah, I think North Carolina is in play. And so that expands the field a little bit. And it's a frustrating state for the Democrats the last couple of cycles, but...

These states are all frustrating and then you break through, right? That damn Cal Cunningham with those sects cost that Senate seat. That was a history-breaking sext. Somebody that's pro-sects message, you should do whatever you want out there. Not if you are in the tipping point state for the Senate. You're running for Senate. I forgot about that. Cal Cunningham, that definitely cost the Democrats. Let's look ahead to the DNC.

I kind of look at this week as like the end of the beginning of the Harris campaign a bit. It's capstone to a month-long sprint where they've been able to control the narrative completely, almost. I mean, shocking how well it's gone, and now they get to have this four-day set piece. I assume that we're just going to see much of the same of what we've seen the last three weeks. But what are you looking out for?

Yes, I agree with that, though. I would say it's also the bridge to the next three-week stretch, which culminates in the September 10th debate, assuming that happens, which it looks like it will. So if you think about it as a kind of one big thing, she's had a very good four weeks, got from, let's just say, minus three to plus three-ish with momentum, with no drama particularly, maybe some demonstrations in Chicago, but basically a pretty smooth field ahead, it looks like, for this convention.

And so I do think it would really help her to come out of it, this is just to say the obvious, but, you know, plus six-ish to go into those two weeks before the debate, which will be huge, I'll come back to that in a minute, rather than plus two-ish or three-ish.

I do think history suggests, and my experience personally suggests, that presidential speech is 80% of what matters at these conventions. There are four nights, but one night is different from the other three nights. And that night is Thursday night because it's the presidential, especially when it's someone who's not as well known like Harris. I mean, people have seen clips of her, but I bet a very small percentage of voters have ever seen her give a speech.

speech, which is certainly not true of Trump. I mean, the one reason the Republican convention didn't move things, even though we all analyzed it dutifully, that, well, it was pretty well done and this element was pretty good. But then Trump sort of screwed it up on the last night. People all know about Trump. They weren't going to change their mind radically because there was some decent nominating speech by some decent or second tier speech by someone on Wednesday night. In fairness, it was a stabilizing thing. I think the analysis at the time when Biden's still in the race is that he didn't blow himself up.

which for Trump is always like a win. He gets graded on this curve. Totally. Over the course of that four days, they were relatively static, and static was good enough for them then, but not now. It was, though I think they blew in retrospect. Maybe at the time we said this, the Vance nomination, which was Monday, another very different thing from this convention, which won't have the normal VP nomination drama, which is often the weekend before or the first day of, means that that's done. So what's the drama of this convention? It's just the Harris speech. But I think the Vance pick actually hurt more than –

I realized at the time, if you think back, he had the assassination attempt Saturday night. They set up a pretty good convention, really, in terms of some of the second secondary acts. And then the Vance pick became a focus for the first two or three days and really, I think, hurt the momentum. And then Trump sort of was OK, but not great on Thursday night. And he came out of the whole thing before Biden pulled out. So let's just say on Saturday, Saturday to Saturday assassination attempt to the day before Biden pulled out.

I don't have the impression Trump picked up much, maybe a point, but I mean, he could have done more, I think, though harder because everyone knows him already. Anyway, Harris, less well known. People haven't seen her give a full speech. There will be pretty big viewership, I should think, on Thursday night. And so I think it's a pretty big moment for her.

All the other stuff, I think, secondary, President Obama, President Clinton, Secretary Clinton. I do think the Biden handoff, Frank Lavin has a good piece on this at the Bulwark this morning, is those things are tricky. Reagan did a good job with Bush in 88, but Reagan was also a very popular president, so it was easier. Biden is, I think, somewhat bitter about what happened. He's got a really strong...

shove that aside. And I think, you know, let Harris take the baton. Don't look at all grudging. Don't look like you're giving her instructions as you hand it off to her. Just give her the baton tonight. The Vance thing is just a good point. Just one thought on that very briefly is you do just run a counterfactual of going back and you pick somebody, a non-entity like Burgum or whatever, or Tim Scott, uh,

and you do kind of carry that post-assassination attempt momenta. Who knows? Obviously, then the race shakes up completely with Harris, but I think that they definitely cost themselves there. The Biden thing tonight is interesting. I mean, it's scripted. We're not just gossip-mongering. Reports indicate that Biden is a little bit bitter about what has happened. It still has some resentment, but I don't think it's towards Harris. There's been no indicates that it's towards her in any way, and their event that they had last week

I thought they, you know, I mean, this is armchair relationship, psychologizing, but like they, they looked like they had affection for each other. There's been, there's a whole gambit of white house reporters that would love to write the story about how he is upset at her. Right. And we haven't seen any of that. So I assume that that will be relatively clean tonight. The thing that worries me more is just the, I almost feel like,

It'll be a nice night for the people in the room. Like it'll be a valedictory thing for Biden for democratic political obsessives. It will be a nice memorable thing where people might get some goosebumps and

But you're kind of chalking up night one, right? If the campaign is about how we're not going back and we have Hillary and Joe Biden speaking tonight and Joe Biden is like somewhat defending the record and all that, there's not a lot to be gained out of tonight. But that's okay. I mean, a lot of conventions have a night or two where there's nothing to be gained out of. And so I think that's kind of what we have happening tonight a little bit.

I think it's a slight risk if, you know, again, I think this is pretty marginal, all these considerations, as you say, and there's no evidence of Biden personally feeling any resentful of Harris, except in the very broadest sense that he would like to have been president for another four years or have run for president again. Second night is Obama, who is a good speaker, obviously, but

It's also the past. So I think it is a slightly past heavy first two days for a convention of a campaign that's premised entirely on turning the page and looking forward and don't look back. Isn't that literally the slogan they were using? We're not going back. We're not going back. We're not going back. We're not going back.

Now go back. Here's Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama to start off our convention. So that's OK as long as the pivot happens. Starting them off and then we're not going back. We're going to go back. We're going back for 36 hours and then we're not going back ever again. All right. The other thing I'd say, it's a very democratic. It sounds stupid. It's of course, it's a democratic convention, but these are all democratic presidents and candidates.

I think Adam Kinzinger will speak maybe Thursday night, but I think getting some of the Republican or Republican-ish or nonpartisan types a little more featured, again, probably the last two nights, will be helpful to kind of broaden the tent a little bit for the independents and never-Trump Republican types who she's won over some of, but clearly from those poll numbers, there's a

two or three or four more percent to win there, which were important. It's hard to believe at this point there are any Democrats who are still resisting Harris, honestly. So if you think she's at plus two and plus three and needs to get to five or six, those are probably the, you know, independents and Republican-ish types, right? Yeah, no, that's the camp we're not voters. Our friend Akil Ganel is going to speak, who was one of the Capitol Police officers. So I think that there'll be some other folks in that vein.

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Dan Pfeiffer over Crooked Media is out this morning for Obama communications director. I thought his newsletter about the convention was interesting. He wrote for the first time in a long time, Kamala Harris has made politics more than about Donald Trump. This convention will be different from the version planned for Biden.

in 2024 or his 2016 and 2020 conventions. While we can never lose sight of the existential threat Trump poses to democracy, a convention that spends more time on Kamala Harris than Donald Trump is a welcome change in smart politics. A.B. Stoddard in the Bullock this morning sort of was on the same wavelength of that, writing that this week will be gutting for Trump. He's about to face something he's never had in his nine years. The Democrats convention will cement that he's no longer the main character.

So I think both of those are true to an extent, but the balance is interesting. How are you going to be looking for that? How much Kamala Wall's intro and how much reminding people how insane Donald Trump is?

I think more Kamala Wall's intro and development, not just intro, but also a little bit of forward-looking policy in a broad sweep of things. A little bit of centrism, I hope, in terms of the policy on some issues at least. I think this is a case where, as they say, you have to hold two different things in mind that are slightly intentional to one another. One is

This election is about Donald Trump. I mean, the actual existential issue is that Donald Trump cannot be president again. Having said that, as a tactical and even strategic matter, I think it's the case that the key thing to accomplish is the continuing and finishing, as it were, the introduction of Kamala Harris and making her as favorable to as many voters as possible, as acceptable to voters who aren't quite going to be favorable as possible to as many as possible. And she's the kind of un-

unknown, undefined element of this. People have already made up their minds about Trump. It's a little confusing. I find this internally. It's like, Trump is the issue. We've got to just remind people. It's terrible. We can't afford to. He cannot be elected again after January 6th and after everything else. And here's his latest outrage on the Medal of Honor winners. And I, myself, am busy bragging about it and warning shots and tweeting about it, which is fine. I mean, I guess what people like us can and should do, obviously. But I do think she's been very good, I think, so far in not obsessing about Trump. If she can make people

friendly to and comfortable with her and with Wallace, in a way the Trump side takes care of it by itself, maybe. And also, as AV pointed out, he gets a little crazed and therefore makes it remind he will on his own remind people, enough people, I think why he shouldn't be president again, as long as people are okay, with Kamala Harris as the alternative. Do you agree with that? Or do you think I do? And maybe it's a job for Obama tomorrow is something I've been thinking about. And he's very good.

at delivering a political attack. And he's good at multiple things when it comes to speechifying. That's his core competency. So he's going to obviously have to talk about Kamala and talk about her strengths, but maybe more value there with some one-liners for TikTok from Obama tomorrow night. You know, that's really a good point, I think, because

and he doesn't really i mean it's not to get too pedantic of course you can speak and can i should speak about combo he doesn't know her that well i mean he he can't really personally testify to her strains the way that biden could obviously in a way it's more appropriate for him to say look i i mean i put it this way but you know in effect i've been president i know what it means here's what a second term of trump is president would mean i mean he can explain some of the project 2025 so some of the stuff is a little bit of the weeds sometimes

but that also has more resonance than I expected. He can explain that in a pretty compelling way, I should think. Maybe a job for Obama tomorrow. We'll be watching a ton of board coverage at the convention. I'm not, we're not there. Me and Bill aren't, but Sarah's there. Mark Caputo, Sam Stein, Joe Perticone. So we'll have a bunch here on this podcast. Also on our YouTube feed, make sure to check that out all week.

I'll be up in New York later this week doing late night on MSNBC. If you just haven't had enough of me and you just need the 1 a.m. Tim as well, then that'll be your opportunity. As you pointed out, Bill,

Trump might just be doing the job for us as far as reminding people that he's crazy. He had a rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania this weekend. There are a million clips I could play from it. It was not a focused speech by any stretch of the imagination, but I think here was maybe the low watermark for Donald Trump. Let's listen to him talk about Kamala Harris's looks. But she said one thing that got me. She said Kamala has one big advantage. She's a very beautiful woman. She's a beautiful woman.

So I decided to go back and reread the clause. I'm not saying he's... But I say that I am much better looking than her. I think I'm... Much better. Much better. I'm a better looking person than Kamala. No, I couldn't believe it. She said, you know, I had never heard that one. They said, no, her biggest advantage is that she's a beautiful woman. I'm going, huh. I never thought of that. I'm better looking than she is.

He's wrapped around the axle there about a Peggy Noonan column. That's who's referencing there. I mean, can the gender gap get any wider? What the fuck? I don't want to speak for every man. A lot of men think Kamala Harris is attractive. Middle-aged woman, young, little more attractive. So you're saying you find Kamala more attractive than Trump? I mean, I don't know. That's just, men could agree with women on that. I assume women believe that too. I mean,

It shows how much she's gotten in his head, right? Don't you think? I mean, he just can't stand it. She's beating him. People like her more. Her favorable numbers are better. She's getting better press. He just can't deal with it, apparently, right? No, he's obsessed. I mean, I've suffered through every Trump public remark since, like, the Wall's pick because I just wanted to kind of see –

for myself, you know, cause sometimes it's hard to tell Trump is, we'll speak for two hours and then you'll watch two 42nd clips and you'll be like, Oh, he's, he's crazed. But then if you watch the two hours, you're like, Oh, well, I mean for Trump, actually it wasn't, no, he's pissed. He is aggrieved. He's grumpy and he's obsessed. Like he's mentioned how, how pretty she is. And I think every public remark since the time cover that came out, like he's talked about how pretty, how the time made her too pretty and,

And he's resentful and he's upset that, you know, the people in his stories aren't complimenting him anymore. And they're talking about her instead. It goes back to the main character thing that maybe wrote about this morning. You kind of referenced earlier the Medal of Honor recipient thing from last week. I think it's also just worth mentioning again. We talked about it on Friday with Brian Boitler, and you wrote about it for the newsletter Friday. But like, as that ties to the convention stuff this week,

I do think that is another area for contrast, right? Where Harris and Walsh can kind of take the mantle of patriotism being on the side of the troops. And he's really throwing them some softballs on this front. Yeah, I think it's really set up for this Democratic convention to be the

the patriotic convention in a kind of healthy way if i can put it that way pro us but pro diversity in the u.s pro military but not pro the military of 80 years ago but pro today's military i mean it's it's a pro the medal of honor winners who incidentally are quite a diverse bunch i have i looked a lot of them up friday i was curious morning when i was writing the morning shots

Yeah, I think it's a pretty good opportunity for the Democrats to regain some of that ground that they they sort of did under Clinton and Obama, but not quite. Kerry tried, but then it blew up because of the Swift vote. So they've never quite gotten back to being the the if I can put it simple, the pro-American party. You had Jinker Patrick did a lot of damage to them in 1984. Blame America first.

It's utterly clear that the Republicans under Trump are now the blame America first party. I mean, that's literally what Trump does for much of his speeches. And didn't he say something also? You follow this stuff more closely. He really loves it. It's a beautiful phrase to say that America is a failing nation or something like that. I miss the word whether that was the word beautiful is in there. But it was something it was a wonderful. He really like he embraced that. He's proud of having, as he thinks, thought up the notion that this is a failed country or something like that.

I mean, of course, there's a big wrong track number. So it's not crazy to think politically you're better off being on the side of things aren't going well than they are going well. But it's one thing to be on the side of things aren't going well or as well as they could be going. It's something to say that America is a failed country. And that is their position. And I think

I think Harris and Wallace should and will embrace the other side of that equation. Yeah, absolutely. And you saw a little bit of this at the earlier Trump conventions with Khazir Khan's speech, for example. You remember from the Democratic Convention about how Trump sacrificed nothing and no one. It's on a tee for them to hit it this week. And I think that Trump...

Did himself some good, actually, just by lying about the John Kelly thing and saying that he never said the suckers and losers remark and then got away with that at the debate, you know, because of Biden's inability to parry him and then to go out.

and essentially say the same thing right uh to miriam adelson saying that you know your medal is actually better than theirs because you're not a sucker and loser like them with injuries i just think re-ups that whole bag of worms for him in a way that i think that the democrats hopefully should be able to take advantage of it should i mean he deserves all the criticism in the world for that and uh

it's so appalling. Miriam, I mean, the Medal of Freedom is a fine thing. My father, as I wrote in the Morning Shots, my father received one, was honored to in 2002, and it was wonderful to be there. And he was there with other, Mr. Rogers got one, and Hank Aaron, whom both my father and I were kind of thrilled to meet, actually. And so there was a nice group of people. Irving, Hank, and Fred. What a crew. Yeah, and others too were there, obviously. But, um,

So that's fine. It's a nice thing. And the Medal of Freedom, I have no problem with it. John Kennedy invented that Medal of Freedom in 63 to kind of give civilians, so the president could give civilians an award too. But the idea that it's in any way comparable to the Medal of Honor is so jaw-dropping and appalling and so deeply revealing that

that Trump said it and deeply revealing that he's got people, his own people are defending it. I saw your friend Corey Lewandowski was saying, well, you know, the civilians deserve battles too, not just the military. It's like, really? Yeah, he wants a medal for the stab victims that he claims that he, people that he claims to be killed in a stabbing while he was flirting with the married woman at the Addiction Awareness Fundraiser. Okay, we're gonna get to Michael Weiss with some serious business about Ukraine next, but I have to...

It's Monday. So we need to give people a little bit of humor on the way out before we get to Michael. If you want a sense for just how bad Donald Trump is unraveling and where his head is at about the state of the race, here is a song that he posted. Ron Philip Kausi has been monitoring his Truth Social feed recently.

Over the past day, he's posted about 30 times on True Social. He compared himself to Lincoln. He posted AI pics of people that are Taylor Swift fans saying that they're for Trump. That's fake. But this video is the one that really caught my eye the most. Let's just take a quick listen. No free ride, she will incarcerate. She wasn't charged, just out of our fate. And she never took a go.

She just giggles. Fake ballots. Voting doesn't matter. She's going to give it a combo. Spent her whole life down on her knees. That's how she got to be commander-in-chief. Willie Brown is pictured there. Isn't it moronic? Don't you think? Yeah, I really can't think.

It's very presidential there. Blowjob jokes and talking about how votes aren't going to matter. That's what the Republican nominee for president was posting on social media over the weekend. Bill, is that reminiscent of anything that George H.W. did when you were in there? Yeah, right. What can one say? It's good that Ron Felipkowski monitors the truth social account there, but I don't know. Of course, we've said a million times, oh, that's truly unbelievable that they're doing this, and he keeps on

Yeah, I think he's a little more disturbed than he was, though, and he's a little older than he was, especially the thing with Harris. He was really... He had...

the Biden race figured out in his head and for quite a long time, you think, I mean, he knew he was, he figured he would dispatch to DeSantis and stuff. So he figured he was running against Biden for two years and he had that pretty well worked out. And I think lots of Vita and Susie Wallace had it pretty well worked out about how they're, they had Trump on board of how they were going to do that. In that respect, I mean, anyone would be disrupted by looking up and discovering you have a different opponent in the presidential race, you know, in, in mid July, but to be fair, but I think in this case, the disruption is so much greater because of,

Trump and he's old and he's not that adaptable. And then the psychology of losing to Kamala Harris. And that's really, let's hope that continues to really bother him. And this is the lash out. The beginning of that video was about how Joe left. And so I think he's very sad to lose Joe. And now he's really struggling to deal with the Kamala thing. And in order to cope with it, to grapple with it, he needs to fall back on his old binkies of, well, it must be

Must be just women sleeping to the top and election thievery. It's the only thing that could explain my total face plant over the last month. Apologies to our Gen X listeners for that Alanis Morissette parody. But I felt like if I had to listen to it, you had to listen to it. Bill Kristol, we'll be seeing you later this week with convention coverage. Enjoy the beach with your family. That's a beautiful beach backdrop you've got there. No books, no Hume, no Thucydides. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

You think I should have brought books out here to keep the brand? If I were Trump, I would have the fake book, you know, lined up wherever I went. I should think about that in the future. You should think about that. Bill Kristol, thank you so much. Up next, Michael Weiss with an update on Ukraine.

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We are back with Michael Weiss, editor of The Insider, which is a Russia-focused independent media outlet. He's also the host of the Foreign Office podcast, former investigative reporter for CNN. He's got an upcoming book about the GRU next year, 2026. We don't know, but it's going to be good. How are you doing, Michael? I'm good. Thanks for having me on, Tim. Hey, man. Thanks for coming by. I monitor your stuff closely, and I've felt extremely remiss to

since, I don't know, just picking a date out of the hat, June 27th. And to my efforts on this podcast to cover things other than the 2024 presidential campaign and with all that's been going on in Ukraine, I thought the folks would appreciate an update. So biggest picture, talk to me like I just haven't been reading your media outlet. Like Ukraine has made an incursion into Russia. Like what is the latest state of play on the ground?

Yeah, so against all expectations and by complete surprise, Ukraine launched this midsummer offensive not to retake territory in its own sovereign borders, but to essentially create a buffer zone, as President Zelensky has now described it, in southern Russia in the region of Kursk. And

Initially, this looked to be another cross-border raid of the kind that we've seen innumerable times in the last 18 months. Usually what the Ukrainians have done is they've recruited a group of Russian fighters, proxies, flying under the mantle of an independent, free, anti-Putin Russia. And they just do PR ops, right? They go across the border, they shoot some stuff up, they take selfies with their flags, and they go home. And so it looked like this could be the start of another one of those. And it's true, they use those proxies.

proxies as kind of the vanguard or the tip of the spear for this incursion. But this has turned out to be a major operation.

with as many as four perhaps not full Ukrainian brigades committed to it, including two very elite units, the airborne assault units. And this shows no indications of them packing up and going home. Quite the opposite. It looks like they're fortifying their lines, digging in. I've seen evidence of excavators, so presumably they're going to start to build trenches the way the Russians are now doing farther back along the line to keep the Ukrainians from advancing farther.

best estimate that i've seen from very clever map makers and military analysts is that the ukrainians are now in control of something like 1200 square kilometers of territory which

If this is true, it means that they've captured in the space of two weeks more territory than Russia has been able to capture in Ukraine in the space of eight months to a year. So that's pretty significant accomplishment. Now, there are pitfalls or hazards ahead, namely what happens when the Russians really come in and try to boot them out.

A lot of people thought this would have happened already. Some of the stuff we're tracking at the Insider suggests that the level of discombobulation and utter chaos and incompetence on the Russian side is, you know, it's sort of beggar's belief, even for those of us who go in, assuming there's going to be levels of discombobulation, incompetence and chaos. Low expectations are not even being met. Yes, exactly. And funnily enough, we published yesterday an intercepted conversation with a municipal official in Kursk.

who just kind of lambaste everybody at all levels, the regional government, the military. He said they're sending in conscripts, these unwashed 18-year-olds who had two magazines apiece, never seen combat before. And instead of protecting the civilians, the civilians had to evacuate the troops when they were being pulled back. He said wherever we would turn up,

the next village over, the Ukrainians were already there. That's how quick, that's how much of a lightning advance this was. There's still a lot of fog of war here, and there's still a lot I can't speak with any authority about. It's like, is Ukraine holding the territory that they have cast? So far, they are, yeah. But as they keep moving forward, they're keeping some of the units back? Yeah, I mean, it's sort of extraordinary. CNN had one of their correspondents actually in bed with the Ukrainians as they seamlessly just rolled across

the border from Sumy, which is the Ukrainian oblast to the south of Kursk, right into Kursk. It's the first time CNN's embedded with Ukraine going into Russia, right? Which is a deep humiliation for Putin. Now, to what extent he gives a shit, I don't know. It seems that he's sort of shrugging around this, right? The Wall Street Journal did a good piece about what is the Kremlin response to Kursk and really they kind of see it as no big deal. It's couched now, their attempt to wreak

captured their territory as an anti-terrorist operation. And that's for very specific reasons, because if they were to declare all out war against Ukraine, which by the way, up until this point, two and a half years into a war, they still have not done, that calls in sort of strategic doctrine, which means possible use of nuclear weapons and all the rest of it. So if it's an anti-terror operation, that means it's ceded to our old friends in the FSB, who, speaking of discombobulation and competence and corruption, are

That is possibly very good news for the Ukrainian side because they have managed to get the better of that service time and time again. How this thing ends, I have no idea. I don't think anybody does. I've seen a lot of people get ahead of their skis on this saying this is going to be a calamity. This is going to backfire. Why are they doing this? They're taking badly needed resources from the Eastern Front in Donbass, particularly in the Povkros direction where the Russians are advancing steadily and have been for several months. However, there's...

The alternate theory here, which is and certainly Ukrainians have conveyed this to us when we've interviewed them. They are hopeful that the Russians will begin to deploy some of their critical resources from other points along the contact line into Kursk because, again, they simply cannot sustain or sustain.

withstand this using 18-year-old conscripts who basically were assured they're going to get to sit out the war and just do their mandatory military service, right? Now, in fact, they're going to have to enter into a hot war zone where, I should add, the Ukrainians are using American, British, Lithuanian, Polish, German armor,

They are using HIMARS and the rockets provided with the HIMARS, the Gimlers. They're not using ATAKAMs because we won't let them do that in Russian territory. And they're using a swarm of first person view drones, which have become a really lethal, modernized piece of technology.

hardware on the battlefield. I mean, these things, you know, you can actually see as they chase Russian soldiers, and then suddenly the camera goes dark because they've impacted. I mean, Russians are terrified of these FPVs. To some extent, they've actually been committing suicide before allowing an FPV to strike them because it's a horrible way to die. So yeah, I mean, they're in it to win it, it seems. So then their theory of the case here is that this is not

Just an effort to humiliate Putin, right? That it's a strategic move to hopefully force Russia to change their, you know, where they're distributing their forces, etc. I think it's a combination of things. Number one, there is a PR or propaganda element involved in this. We're talking about Ukraine invading Russia, right? That alone.

unfathomable in January of 2022, or even in March of 2022, when they started to push the Russians out of Kiev. So this is a deep humiliation. They're exploiting it for all it's worth. They're showing footage of, I mean, they've got Ukrainian correspondents in Kursk interviewing civilians who say, oh, the Ukrainians are treating us great. You know, they tell us, go about your business and we're here to protect you and, you know, welcome to the People's Republic of Kursk and all this kind of thing. So they've turned

Flipped the script incredibly well. It's a much needed shot in the arm, too, for Ukrainian morale. So one of the problems that they've been facing in terms of manpower in the last year, especially since their failed summer counteroffensive of

last summer is a lot of people don't want to fight because they saw this as kind of a you know a wasted effort why am i going to go sit in a trench get killed and then my comrades can't even take my my corpse from the battlefield because there's not enough suppressive fire right there was a shortfall of ammunition their drones were being hit with electronic warfare from the russian side so for the first time in in the war we began to see a flagging morale on the ukrainian side

Well, this operation, which, by the way, is also fielding freshly mobilized Ukrainian troops who've been trained and sent into battle for the first time inside Russia and are now doing incredibly well there. This is this is going to bolster. And I think there's some indications that already has bolstered morale on the Ukrainian side.

There's this other argument that, hey, territory for territory. If Donald Trump should be elected in November and there's pressure put on Kiev to do some kind of deal that they don't want to do, they'd much rather do it from an advantageous position of saying, we'll give you back a slice of sovereign Russia if you give us back a slice of sovereign Ukraine.

Ukraine. I mentioned the redeployment of resources, hoping that they're going to stretch Russian lines and supply lines, logistics and all the rest of it. There's that. Right now, we're looking at a situation where Ukraine has destroyed three bridges across a river in Kursk, and the Russians have one pontoon bridge left. If they lose that bridge, they have no way of rescuing something like 700 of their troops who will be in a pocket, basically trapped.

So this is another thing the Ukrainians have said. They are capturing POW after POW, upwards of 1,000 as of now. Imagine they get those 700 guys, 1,700 Russian POWs. Those are good assets to be traded for Ukrainian POWs. Yeah.

So this is kind of a there's a series of arguments to be made, I think, of different motivating factors behind this. But so far, it's working. The question is, how long will it work? And, you know, if the Ukrainians are eventually pushed out, what are they going to lose in terms of kit and manpower, et cetera? But it's also interesting, too, I think.

This fear of escalation, which has been kind of a predominant theme of this conflict since even before the actual invasion in February of 2022. I think anybody who's arguing fear of escalation at this point really needs to have their head examined. Well, this was going to be my next question. We're still holding them back, right? I guess there was news last week or maybe over the weekend that, you know, Ukraine wanted to use some British weapons to fire into Russia. And we're blocking them from that. Like, what's the story with that?

The American government, the Biden administration, I should say, does not want to see American missiles impacting Russian strategic air bases inside Russian territory. Right. They don't want to see missiles being used against Russian military installations inside Russia. I understand that. I understand it from a political standpoint.

I understand it from the level of, well, hey, this is still a nuclear power. We don't want to upset them unduly. But you have to proceed from evidence, right? Not from sort of grand IR theory, much of which I have to say. I give a lot of credit to the Ukrainians, not just for...

besting supposedly the greatest army in Europe and humiliating them again and again. I give them credit for debunking a lot of received wisdom and myths that have been built up since during the Cold War, but certainly that have obtained beyond the Cold War into the post-Soviet era. If you punch the Russians in the face and you bloody their nose, it does not lead to World War III. I mean, I started noticing this in August of 2022, the first summer of the full-scale invasion, and

The Ukrainians somehow destroyed upwards of 50% of the Black Sea Fleet's naval aviation group with some strike on Saki Air Base. There's footage of this where you have a bunch of Russian beachgoers, all of a sudden this plume of smoke behind them, and they're all run scattering. Before this attack, Dmitry Medvedev, who was the former president of Russia, now he's the deputy chairman of their National Security Council, alcoholic and big time drunk. Good drunk tweeter. Good drunk tweeter. He had put up on Telegram some

rant saying that if the Ukrainians think of doing anything to Crimea, it'll be Armageddon. Saki Air Base goes boom. The Russian government official response was, oh, it was a smoking accident. Somebody lit up a cig next to an oil tanker and that's what happened. It's the only thing they've denied the Ukrainians have done, by the way, which is interesting. What did Medvedev do? He deleted his telegram post.

right that's a critical piece of data right there you know they talk a big game of threatening to reduce the west to radioactive ash and they're gonna you know invade nato countries and tanks will roll into berlin well no actually german tanks are rolling into russia right now and the response is well it's a counter-terrorism operation we'll get it sorted in due course but we have other things to to worry about okay so you you've shown your cards

You really can take it and it's not going to be the end of the world. And I think we need to sort of alter our perception of security assistance and act accordingly. I mean, yeah, absolutely. They should be allowed to use storm shadow against Russian planes sitting on the tarmac planes that should they take off are going to do what? They're going to rain fire on Ukrainian cities and kill loads of civilians. I mean, we would not fight a war this way with one hand tied behind our back.

You know, if the U.S. government position, which I think is very good and moral, is, well, it's fine for Ukraine to invade Russia. This is their part of their defense. They're the victim here. Russia is the aggressor. You have to take the fight to the aggressor on its own soil. Well, then it stands to reason they should be allowed to do that with Ukraine.

full panoply of kit they've been provided. And again, I fail to see the distinction. Putin and his regime couch this as they're not fighting Ukraine. And they do this for very understandable psychological reasons. They consider the Ukrainians to be inferior. They're almost a subspecies. They're not real people. They don't really have a culture and a nation. There's nothing there. They're just Russians who haven't realized it yet. So they say we're fighting NATO.

Okay, so then if you're fighting NATO already, it doesn't matter if a storm shadow slams into one of your airfields, right? Because you've been doing this for two and a half years. So I think we have to kind of learn how to call the bluff a little bit better. Okay, so let's just set aside the dystopia of Donald Trump winning and what an endgame might look like there and think instead of kind of the current trajectory we're on, let's say that Harris wins re-election. I'm curious, first, like your thoughts about

okay, that would obviously be a key inflection point. Clearly, the Russians are waiting and hoping for their man in Mar-a-Lago. So how might that change? What's the balance of power? How would that look then? And then after that, I want to talk a little bit more about Kamala's foreign policy. But just in the Ukraine-Russia side of things, what do you think would be a potential step to endgame if Kamala is elected? Well, okay, let me just start by saying

When Biden was still in the race and it looked like this was going to be a walk for Trump back into the White House, the most optimistic appraisal I heard from the Ukrainian side, but also from

I think, understandably traumatized and let's put some lipstick on a pig type, you know, analysts in the West, including in the United States, including from Democrats, by the way, who were very worried about where this was headed, is, well, yeah, he'll try to do a deal. But then, you know, Putin will rat fuck him as Putin always does. And then Trump will get upset and he'll just give all the weapons except nukes to the Ukrainians. I found this to be very, very naively optimistic about Trump. I don't think Trump...

anything about this conflict. I mean, he couldn't tell you what piece of territory is under whose control. He doesn't care about Donbass. Which country Kursk is in. He doesn't know where Kursk is. He probably thinks it's somewhere in Nebraska and it's ruled by a communist cadre led by Tim Walz. You know, whatever. Like, this is not somebody I want to

barter with the fate of nations and a lot of people who are living under occupation, which if you know what's happening in the occupied territories of Ukraine, it's barbaric. Women and children are being tortured and raped. Children are being disappeared and stolen and brought into Russia to be essentially auctioned off as orphans to adoptive parents told that their parents don't exist in Ukraine. I mean, it's really horrific.

This is not somebody I want trying to sort this out. Now, the question you ask is, if it's Kamala Harris, how to think? I think it's mostly going to be a continuation of the Biden administration policy. Her national security advisor, or I forget the term of art that's used if you're vice president. Phil Gordon. Phil Gordon.

So Phil Gordon, I have mixed feelings about because I remember quite well his view on Syria, which I spent 10 years covering. And the book I wrote on ISIS was, I'd really set out to write a book about the Syrian revolution and that civil war. And it became a book about jihad because unfortunately this conflict evolved into a jihadist. He was dovish on Syria, right? Well, more than dovish. I mean, he basically thought we shouldn't do anything. He thought Obama even

articulating the so-called red line on chemical weapons was folly. He then gave an interview with Jeff Goldberg in the Atlantic saying, well, if you're going to make a red line and it gets violated, you have to uphold it. So he said we should have done those strikes, whatever. He didn't want to help Syrian rebels. That's a fair point. Yeah, no, that is a fair point. We should have either done it or not, shatter, get off the pot. Yes, but my bigger point is if it were up to Phil Gordon, they wouldn't have even made that sort of criteria.

for intervention. So anyway, on the Middle East, you know, he's anti-intervention. He wrote a book about the folly of regimes. I mean, I wrote a book. My ISIS book is as much about the catastrophe of Iraq and what led to, you know, AQI's essentially the advent of AQI and so much unpleasantness from there. But Syria was always different because it was bottom up and there was a genuine groundswell. Anyway, I don't want to relitigate this, but I will say in Phil Gordon's defense, you

What's interesting is he was one of the first democratic policymakers, advisor types, who I think in 2018 co-wrote a piece in Foreign Affairs where he called for sending higher grade military equipment to Ukraine, including, I think, armored personnel carriers and other things. So Phil Gordon, he's a Francophile. He's a West European guy. And that's kind of his bailiwick. And insofar as now, I think the major...

that any president is going to inherit is still in Europe, this is not altogether a bad thing. And I think he would be perhaps even more forward-leaning on Ukraine than some elements within the Biden administration. The Biden administration is not monolithic, by the way. You know, you can do a Kremlinology of who is...

of nuclear war versus who wants to. Well, we should all be terrified of nuclear war, but I mean, like who thinks an attack comes hit inside Russia will lead to world war three versus who thinks essentially what I was saying, which is no, I mean, they can take it and they've shown that they can take it. Yeah.

You know, it remains to be seen. I always query. We have this Estonian military analyst called Karl. I can't say who he is because he chooses to remain anonymous. And he's developed a mystique even within Estonia such that the prime minister wants to know where is Karl and what does he think? But you can tell us that it's not Tomas Ilves. It's not Tomas Ilves. He doesn't have a secret alternate named Karl.

If you follow Tomas on Twitter, you know that he is uncorked and does not need any kind of veil of anonymity whatsoever. But no, Carl seems to think actually that

Kamala Harris, shall we say, will be unburdened by all that has been with respect to Ukraine. It might actually be, you know, there'll be fresh blood in the administration, people who will say, come on, like, you know, let's take the gloves off a little bit. Let's let's hit the Russians. I don't know. Let's dream with me for a second. Let's say that's true. Right. What is the Ukrainian pitch for how to get this to, you know, some kind of closure? Right. Like if even if they even if you gave them everything they wanted, like then what?

okay well the brochure answer in Ukraine is all 1991 borders

I was there in January of 2022 with a simple journalistic ask of myself. Why is it that nobody in this country is panicking and everybody elsewhere is saying war is imminent? And the answer I got was, I mean, Russia, they're not that crazy. They know that if they invade us full scale, I mean, we'll bleed them to death. Well, they turned out to be right about that. So they were wrong about the war happening, but for the right reason. But the other thing that they would say kind of sotto voce is, well,

Listen, between you and me, Michael, the Russians sort of did us a favor in 2014 by invading and taking over the two parts of our country that are the most predominant with Russia.

ethnic Russians and people who tend to lean toward Moscow rather than toward the West. So in other words, Putin kind of pent up all the fifth colonists such that it allowed a decade for Ukraine to politically kind of develop this level of cohesion and integration, which is one of the reasons that I think they're going to be within the European Union much sooner than they will be in NATO. Now, that's not to say that they don't want their terrain back.

Donbass they see as this sort of blighted black hole. Most of the cities and towns and settlements are in utter ruins. It's a pocked moonscape. There's no infrastructure there. To rebuild will take years, if not decades. And they sort of acknowledge like this should not be our priority. We don't want the Russians to take more of our territory, but recapturing Donbass and then also creeping up that much closer to the Russian border so that they'll constantly reinvade us. Maybe that's not in the offing. Crimea, however,

they see as a big, viable, juicy target. And even before the summer counteroffensive, I was hearing...

look south, young man, because that's where we're going. And that's indeed, I mean, the main axis was to sever the line of communication between mainland Russia and Crimea, chip away at Russian positions and logistics in Kherson, Zaporizhia region, and then ultimately with the aim of recapturing Crimea. And if you notice, and unfortunately, this has not got as much news attention as it deserved in the last year. It's been eclipsed by a lot of

and pessimism about Ukraine's prospects. In the last year, Ukraine has done something kind of extraordinary. They have all but neutralized the Black Sea Fleet, most of which has now repaired to Novorossiysk in Russia, to another port in mainland Russia. So they're out of Sevastopol. They have been destroying systematically, using, by the way, attack them as in storm shadows in their own home-brewed fleet of seaborne drones and aerial drones, and

advanced Russian air defense systems like the S-300, the S-400 platform in Crimea. They've been conducting these sort of stealth raids in Crimea. These are shaping exercises for what I think will be the next big battle or the next big play, which is let's recapture the peninsula, which strategically, economically for them, is much more valuable than parts of Donetsk and Lugansk. Now, they're not going to say that publicly.

And I'm sure I'm going to get a lot of flack for saying it publicly, but it's sort of kind of the not so secret thing.

goal, I think. Or at least it was. Maybe it's changed now that they have cursed. Maybe they want to take Moscow next. All right. Now we're talking. Welcome to the Neocon podcast. We're marching on Moscow. All right, Michael Weiss. Hopefully, we'll be in the Coconut Grove come winter. And I can have you back more and we can nerd out more rather than having to care so much about the Alanis Morissette videos that Donald Trump is bleeding on his social media feed. And I would appreciate having you back.

I'm just waiting for Ryan Reynolds to come out and tweet that that version of the song is not about him either. It was not me. Me and Atlanta's never had a thing. I was great to her. All right, Michael Weiss, thank you so much. Come back soon. Everybody go check out The Insider if you want to nerd out on what is happening in Russia. We'll be back tomorrow with convention coverage, review of the Biden speech, and the dreamiest man in Democratic politics. We'll see you all then. Peace. Just one more thing to say before

When things aren't back in the 24 Back in Chicago I see it Another version of I was in it Right to the end beginning The song has started now and you'll just find A major sack Clueless at Caroline Just trust me you'll find

Back in Chicago, I feel it Another version of me I was in it till the end, beginning I sent a man out of Yachtaman You take out a

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