Bill Kristol: Fanning the Flames
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Thanks again to Hyundai's amazing EV lineup. Learn more at HyundaiUSA.com or call 562-314-4603. Hello and welcome to the Bored Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. If it's Monday, we are worldwide with Bill Kristol. How are you doing, Bill? I'm fine, Tim. How are you? I'm doing pretty good. What a world we're in. We've got to do this again. There's another assassination attempt, apparently, against the former president of the United States.

Yesterday, Trump was playing a round of golf when a Secret Service agent spotted a rifle at the scope in the bushes outside the course. The Secret Service opened fire on the man who was able to get away. It's still unclear whether the alleged assassin was able to take a shot at the agents or if all the shots were going his direction. His name is Ryan Ralph. What the fuck is happening, Bill?

I guess is my question for you. He has a criminal record. He seems to be a disturbed individual. It's good that nothing...

came of it and no one was hurt. And Secret Service seems to have moved with speed. Of course, it was the immediate attempts to take political advantage of it. But it's a little clear what his politics are. They seem extremely confused. But he was for Vivek. He wasn't for Trump. He was for the Ramaswamy-Haley ticket. I don't know. But before that, he was for Sanders. He was 2016 Trump voter. He was 2016 Trump voter. In 2019, he got very into Tulsi.

Then he hoped Bernie would beat Biden in 2020. Then when Biden won, he was for Biden. And then in 2024, yeah, as you mentioned, he was for a Vivek Haley unity ticket. But mostly he's, I think, a disturbed person. The one thing that interests me a little bit is, so he sort of pretended or maybe really thought he was trying to help Ukraine. It's very unclear. But the Ukrainians saw he was a kook and rejected him, actually. He never had anything to do with Ukraine. I guess went there once, but nothing came of it.

The Russians are now trying to take advantage of this and say that this whole assassination attempt on Trump might have been a Ukrainian operation. This guy clearly was a Ukrainian operative or something, which is ludicrous. But it shows how much the Russians are into taking advantage of anything that happens here to subdivision, to help Trump, actually, and to use disinformation very aggressively. So a friend of mine had tweeted me last night saying,

who follows this stuff very closely, a disinformation expert, saying the Russians are going to take advantage of this. And I thought, oh, come on, this guy's so obviously just a kook. You know, can they really promote this narrative? And will it work? And he texted back, they will promote it. And about an hour later, Medvedev, the former prime minister, promoted it. And then the question is, will it work? And one would normally say, well, of course not. It's ridiculous. But I don't know. It'd be interesting to see how much MAGA picks that up, right?

Yeah, I mean, I think that their kind of first order response is just more as like kind of more in the machismo sense. Trump put out a bleat that was like, oh, and two, you know, for two tries to get them that failed. And so I think that there's going to be a lot of that. And then you get into the.

I can't even tolerate this time. Like the discourse about Trump's campaign manager, Las Vida talked to Mark Caputo about this, our colleague, but also was publicly posting about this, about how like, this is the responsibility of people that say Donald Trump is a threat to democracy as if like just stating observable facts is a problem. Now, like clearly I don't, I don't think that discourse is the problem here. You have a man and Ralph, who, as you mentioned, is disturbed also has a,

somebody put it this way, a rap sheet the size of a CVS receipt. A lot of it was traffic tickets, but also included theft, included a 2002 arrest for carrying a fully automatic machine gun. Well, I guess at this point, we don't know how he got the AK-47 with the scope that I guess that he had on the golf course. But to your point, I mean, it's like, this is a disturbed man who has access to firearms. I think really one fair open question, Biden

This is typical for him. Acted responsibly, said, thank God the president is okay regarding Trump, and then said, clearly the Secret Service needs help. Yeah, I mean, maybe there's some Secret Service potential criticisms here. And I guess they did do their job, but I don't know. I mean, Trump's been golfing at this golf course for nine years. Is there not a more secure way to, you know, kind of handle the perimeter? That seems like a fair thing to look into.

I worked in the Secret Service when I was in government so many years ago, and I had a high regard for them. They seem to have screwed up in other respects in the subsequent 25, 30 years. On the other hand, I mean, they're pretty impressive when you actually see them up close. And I don't know if you can secure the perimeter of an entire golf course. What are we talking about then? I mean, building a wall, really. Or we have agents at every hole, or five at every hole, or 10 in the fairway. And then it's not that massive an organization. So...

I'm not blaming anyone. It's good that it didn't happen. The idea is you say that the MAGA talk, we can both say that Trump is a real threat to American democracy and that people shouldn't shoot at Donald Trump. They shouldn't try to kill Donald Trump and they shouldn't use violence and no one should encourage violence of any sort. And we can further say that in fact, the encouragement of violence is lopsidedly on one side. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris do not routinely encourage violence and Donald Trump does.

Correct. Yeah. I mean, Donald Jr. was complaining about various people, you know, sending tweets that he felt were not appropriate about his diet. And it's like, it's the guy that was posting a Paul Pelosi Halloween costume, which was like a hammer and underwear.

And Trump was still, even after the first attempted assassination against him, was still making fun of Nancy and Paul Pelosi at his rallies weeks later. So I just, I will not abide any kind of conversation about the rhetoric being at issue here. I do think the Secret Service thing, you make a fair point about the course of

I think it's fair. We had a lengthy interview with Carol Lennig a couple weeks back. We'll put in the show notes if anybody missed that. And I think she's very good on this, has been covering this for decades. And I think that's good to follow her reporting on this as it goes forward, because I think that clearly there's going to need to be some changes at the Secret Service.

All right. Now we had J.D. Vance. This was before the attempted assassination. We had J.D. Vance doing the rounds on the Sunday shows. He did three interviews, mostly dedicated to his lies about Haitian immigrants eating pets and abducting pets. And I could play a million clips from it, but I just picked one that was my favorite slash the low light of his tour this weekend. Let's listen.

And if we're going to take the firsthand accounts of people who are on the ground in Springfield, why don't you bring on some of the people on your program who say that the migrants are eating their pets? You're applying a double standard here. You're saying if one person accuses J.D. Vance, I'm going to take that person's word as the gospel truth, even if you misrepresent it.

If you have another person who's saying they're eating the cats, you're going to completely ignore them, attack them, silence them, and harass them. That double standard is why people don't trust the media and why we're not talking about public policy 51 days out from a presidential election.

Why are you not interviewing the imaginary racists that I made up? Dana, why aren't you having them on your show? Why are you harassing the people that are advancing lies and smears? It's so unfair. The media is so unfair, Bill.

I mean, as I understand it, the woman whose original Facebook post got blown up has said she didn't have any firsthand knowledge and she very much regrets having been used in this way. So I don't even know who they would go interview there in Springfield. It's really a disgrace. And there's an elected city manager in Springfield and there are plenty of local

business types and pastors, all of whom say, this is all rubbish. And leave aside the eating of the pets. I mean, who knows if one pet somewhere in America has been eaten in the last, you know, year or two or three by immigrants or by natives, right? The whole thing's a lie. You know, the Haitians weren't dumped there as Trump keeps saying, they're not illegal as Trump keeps saying, they were sort of asked to come by several business leaders as they opened up some new plants and there were not enough people to fill these jobs.

The data, if you look at crime in public school and other kinds of data for Springfield, a very normal kind of average what's going on in Ohio. The whole idea that it's been a disaster is wrong. But fine, we can have a public policy debate, I suppose, about temporary protected status and whether that's a good thing that is –

that Haitians have it and so forth. But that's not what J.D. Vance has tried to have. I miss J.D. Vance's long speech about temporary protected status and how many people have it and how he would choose to administer it and what the laws are about that. I miss that. It seems to me that the whole thing began with him

repeating false rumors, and he knew they were false. Can we just be honest about this? He wasn't taken in by anything. He was lying, and he knew he was lying. He said, if I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, I don't know who's suffering here, then that's what I'm going to do. I have to create stories. He said that yesterday. So yeah, he slipped. He showed up. Creating stories about

minority groups feel different to the people who are already there, that really has a wonderful history in the 20th century, right? That never goes off the rails and could lead to violence or anything terrible. I mean, it's so mind-bogglingly irresponsible, the combination of fanning the flames of hatred with the

lying in order to fan the flames of hatred. You know, it's one thing to take a crime, an actual terrible crime committed by an immigrant who came across the border, let's say, and that those happen, obviously, as terrible crimes happen in other ways, too. It's demagogic, it's irresponsible, but I mean, presumably, it's at least a factual thing that the crime happened. This is another step, really, isn't it, of just inventing the problem and then lying about

the people whom you're demonizing. Your newsletter this morning, I think hits it right. The folks haven't got it. You can sign up at the bulwark.com, but it's Vance Trump and the politics of hate. And you cited this interview he did with James Pogue. It was really good. I don't know why they were publishing James Pogue and the American conservative, but don't judge the writer based on the outlet in this case. But in his interview with JD Vance, JD said to him, I think our people hate the right people.

At the time, JD is, of course, talking about childless cat ladies and, you know, whatever coastal elites and people that went to Oberlin or whatever. But this is where that kind of mindset ends, right? That we hate the right people, but it's not, it's not really, we're not really just talking about CNN here. Really, when we talk about hating the right people, we're talking about these immigrants that are coming to Springfield to work and to, you know, live the American dream. That's who that, that's who he wants to hate.

Yeah, totally. I mean, using hate is pretty striking about other Americans. You could say we dislike them or we disagree with them. Our people disagree with the other, with the right people. Our people, I guess, is the Trump supporters. He was trying to get to vote for him in the Republican Senate primary in Ohio in 2022. They became his people and Trump supported him and he won. But yeah, the conceit is that the right people are the liberal, horrible liberal elites. But that, you know, when you peel that back after one second, it turns out

Yeah.

brought the Haitians to Springfield, Ohio, right? It began, obviously, during the Trump administration in 2018 when the Haitians started to move into Springfield to work on some of these jobs, like the whole thing. Yeah. Liberal elites are not sort of morally relativistic about eating cats. You know, that's not what...

They are. On some other issues, you could say that they're destroying traditional norms, but I don't think animal eating. I think, if anything, the liberal elites are slightly nicer animals than Donald Trump Jr., who's slaughtering a million of them as he goes on his hunting expedition. So the whole thing is fake. I mean, that's, I guess, what strikes me. And I say this as someone who participated in criticisms of liberal elites for decades and at the Weekly Standard and when I was in politics with Dan Coyle and so forth. I think...

I think we were sincere. I think we thought the liberal elites were doing some damage. I don't think we used...

Who knows what our deep motives are, and I now regret some of those attacks because they could be taken this way. But I don't think we thought we were using that just as an excuse to demonize, you know, certainly minorities of different kinds, whether cultural or racial or ethnic. And I think we were sometimes pretty careful to try not to, actually. But here, I don't think the mask is pretty much off. This is not about, as you say, his dislike for –

I don't know what even that is. Criticism of any actual elites. Criticism for the people that criticized his Netflix movie, I think. Yeah, yeah. I think those are the people that he's really mad at, the people that gave bad reviews. Trump's a billionaire, says he is. And Vance is a Yale Law School graduate who went to Silicon Valley and did quite well in the two or three years he sort of worked there with Peter Thiel and so forth before coming back to Ohio to get...

tens of millions of dollars of funding from his buddies to help him win a Senate seat. So, like, who are the elites here? Trump and Vance? Compared to Harris and Walsh? Yeah. The story dramatized by Ron Howard. What are you doing? What are you fucking talking about? Just to your point about how

There are ways to talk about the policy questions here that are reasonable and fair. And, you know, the Ohio has a Republican governor. Ohio is run by Republicans. So, again, like the whole conceit that we need the media to care about this so the liberals will take this seriously makes no sense in the context of this conversation.

issue because Ohio is run entirely by Republicans. But I want to play kind of a lengthy clip, but I think it's important just to listen to what a normal, what a Republican politician would have sounded like in 2011. Here's Mike DeWine talking about this on the Sunday shows. And here's a question I never thought I would have to ask, but do you see any evidence as governor of the state that Haitian immigrants are eating pets?

No, absolutely not. That's what the mayor said. That's what the chief of police has said. I think it's unfortunate that this came up. Let me tell you what we do know, though. What we know is that the Haitians who are in Springfield are legal.

They came to Springfield to work. Ohio is on the move and Springfield has really made a great resurgence with a lot of companies coming in. These Haitians came in to work for these companies. What the companies tell us is that they are very good workers. They're very happy to have them there. And frankly, that's helped

the economy. Now, are there problems connected? Well, sure. When you go from a population of 58,000 and add 15,000 people onto that,

you're going to have some challenges and some problems and we're addressing those. We're working on those every single day. Primary care is essential. The other thing we're working a lot on is driving. We have Haitians who frankly many times have not driven before. We need to do a get more drivers training and we're working on that. So these are things that we

are working on. Springfield is moving forward. I've always felt that as the governor of the state of Ohio, you know, we want people who want to come here who are legal, where they come from another state or another country, want to work.

It's a normal pro-growth, pro-business Republican. That's who's running the state, and that's what J.D. Vance is trying to elide. What did you think about Mike DeWine? No, I thought he was excellent. I mean, he's a 77-year—I've known him a long time, actually. He's 77 years old, and the bad news is he's the past of the Republican Party. And J.D. Vance, at age 39, having won a big primary in 2022, is probably—we can get back to this, but I fear—

very much the future. I was in Ohio, I was in Cincinnati, so it happens giving a talk there, so he talked to a bunch of people. And I just asked as a sort of thought experiment, if there's a primary in 2026 for DeWine's governorship, he ends his two terms, do you think a J.D. Vance type wins or a Mike DeWine type wins? And we don't know, we'll see, obviously depends how Trump does and what happens in a million ways, but they were not optimistic about the Mike DeWine type future.

I mean, the favorite would obviously be Vivek. Right. I think he'd be a favorite. So I'd say, A. B., I wish DeWine would just say, incidentally, I can't support Trump in advance for president and vice president while he's at them. He's still nominally supporting them, which I find slightly annoying. But he was good on TV Sunday, so I give him a bit of a pass, I guess. Don't give him a pass. You don't need to give him a pass. I didn't give him a pass, actually. I've criticized him three times for it, but I'm giving him more of a pass than I'm giving the others. Yeah.

Also, where are the other, as you say, the state's full of Republicans. They have super majorities in state legislature. That district is represented by a very conservative election denying Republican. He hasn't called on outsiders to stay out and called, you know, let's have comedy and let's work on these problems, nor have other statewide Republican officials that I know of, Republican Speaker of the House, the state Senate leader and stuff. They're all hiding in a corner because they don't want to offend Trump or Vance or their supporters.

Nationally, Andrew Eggerman at this point this morning, almost all Republican members of Congress have spoken up. You know, he was really good on immigration in the sense both of having liberal policies, which I agreed with, but also very decent in his rhetoric about it in recent times. He was kind of a prominent Republican.

Guy named George W. Bush. You might remember him. And, you know, God forbid he should say anything because, I mean, he can't get involved, I guess, in any actual issue that's affecting this country that he does care a lot about. Isn't this a moment for Bush to speak up? He can fundraise for Dave McCormick. And that's allowed. It's a private fundraiser. He can fundraise for Dave McCormick. I'm sure he'll say something oblique.

And criticism there. The difference also is just so striking. I rewatched the Palin Couric interview a couple months ago. Sarah Palin, for all her problems, I'll treat her to relitigate now about preparedness, etc. Like her actual words in these interviews about immigration, about some of these divisive issues are orders of magnitude more responsible than what J.D. Vance is saying. And I just I think that that fact alone is pretty telling.

What do you think JBL is writing today about how Trump is winning? What's this? Like, here we go. We're 20 minutes into the podcast. We're talking about immigration. If anytime you're talking about immigration, that's a win for Trump. What do you say to that?

Yeah, and I think that Trump, I mean, Marco Puto suggested, reported in the vote work that some of the Trump people believe this or say they believe this. I'm dubious about it. I think it's a little too facile to you. Anytime they're talking about X, we're winning. Well, yeah, sort of. I mean, we've been in campaigns and you want the debate to be on friendly turf. But if the debate is on friendly turf, your guy is making such extreme points that people are dropping off from supporting him. And it's not

being framed in the way you want, I'm not so sure he's winning. A border, if we were debating the border, I think Trump probably would be winning. Every poll shows he's winning that issue. He's managed to get us off from the border onto Haitians in Springfield, which I'm not so sure he

he wins that debate. So I'm a little less confident or worried, I guess, that Trump's winning this debate politically. And I think the Harris campaign has been smart, a couple of words. The Harris campaign has been smart not to engage it. They don't need to do this. People like us, if I can say, need to push back and say what the truth is and push back against Trump. I wish other Republicans would do it. I wish George W. Bush would do it, et cetera. But I think the Harris campaign has been pretty smart.

The other thing is we do tend, you and I have discussed this before, you see wherever we are and we're watching earned media and so forth. We assume that's kind of what voters are seeing. Voters in the swing states are seeing, I mean, an unbelievable volume of ads, both on TV and digitally. Now, those hit diminishing returns, and I've always been more on the side that earned media matters than paid media of it.

I wonder what's happening in paid media. I bet the Trump people, I think, are up with border ads. They were at least last week when I spoke to someone in Pittsburgh. And I don't know exactly what Harris is up with. Maybe more positive ads. Those could be doing some damage. Harris's ads are really gauzy right now. Very positive and gauzy. I'm more worried about Trump's ads on the border.

and on crime, sort of the more traditional demagogic Republican message, as opposed to the extreme Springfield, Ohio, Trump message. I'm worried those could be doing some damage. But I also think Harris is up with a lot of stuff on abortion rights that was extremely strong for her to debate. Other people are echoing that. So I don't think the Harris people are falling into a trap here. And so I guess I feel, again, I think empirically, I don't know what you think. I looked at some polls over the weekend, some state polls,

Harris is doing pretty well, and the Democrats are doing pretty well. I'm struck at some of the state-level stuff, including the down-ballot stuff. Democrats are doing awfully well, and Harris is not going to lose if the Democrats hold some of those margins in some of those state races.

Yeah, I want to get to the polls. Just one last thing on this. I mean, I understand the argument that like all things being equal would be better for Harris to be talking about abortion. And, you know, there's a, you know, it's funny, there's a horror story out of Georgia where somebody was, a woman was not getting abortion services because the doctors were worried and kind of stalling about, you know, whether like this situation was illegal under a new Georgia law. Like that would on balance probably be a better thing for the media to be talking about. That said, like,

The people Trump is losing... There's always this focus on the people Trump gained, like the working class whites, I

essentially, and now some working class black younger men of color. The people that Trump lost, he didn't lose on policy. The people in the Atlanta, Charlotte suburbs, they are grossed out by this. And they're not interested in having a just unapologetic racist saying that immigrants are dog eaters as the president. They aren't. They don't like it. And so I do think it cuts both ways.

I just had to share this one last thing on this. You know, Jan Harold Brunovant, Brunvant, you know who that is? Can't say I do. He was best known for popularizing the concept of an urban legend. Here he is in 1987. Have you seen the bumper sticker that proclaims save a dog, eat a refugee or heard the joke about Vietnamese cookbook called 101 ways to walk your dog?

Neither of them would make much sense if you've missed the rumors that Oriental immigrants are taking their neighbors' pet cats and dogs and using them for food. The refugees are said to have stolen the pets from cars outside parking malls. These stories have surfaced all over the U.S., especially where immigrants have resettled. So it's a 1987 urban legend, 50 years later, being advanced by a guy from Yale.

It's about all you need to know. It is all we need to know. It brings home to me that we talked about the Vance pick at the time, and I think I was very much of the view, and I think you were too, that it was important. It was a sign of where Trump wanted to go in this campaign and where he thought the party should go in the future and maybe where the party would go in the future because being the vice presidential nominee, even if they lose, gives him a real standing he wouldn't otherwise have had as a second-year president.

Senator. And clearly he's very close to Don Jr. and Tucker Carlson. So there's a whole network there and Vivek and Peter Thiel. This has really brought home to me how, if Harris beats Trump by Biden type margin or whatever in November, I mean, how difficult any kind of coming back to DeWine normalcy for the Republican Party will be. It's been a depressing weekend just to see the demagoguery and the racism and the nativism, but also thinking about the fact that

And again, to see the lack of pushback by anyone. No one out there is thinking, I can make my name in the Republican Party by being the 45-year-old version of Mike DeWine. I could stand up against this. And a year from now, I'll be regarded as the guy who had the courage to do the right thing. I mean, Liz Cheney has done the right thing. Others have done the right thing. Adam Kinzinger has done the right thing. But their future is probably not in the Republican Party. So in that respect,

It's a depressing sign for the future. I think that's true. I'll give you, here's my silver lining on that. One other thing that both of us were on at the time was that I JD Vance, I could be a rare instance where the VP pick was damaging. And I do just think that it has solidified this impression among people that like, this is a very extreme situation.

ticket. And, you know, if you had Doug Burgum as the VP pick, he wouldn't be creating four-day news cycles about racist hallucinations about immigrants stealing your little German shepherd. No, that's really a good point. I mean, it was the case, I think, that Vance was the one who started it and Trump jumped on, right? So, I mean, Vance is really affecting the race in a way that a VP candidate doesn't normally. Yeah.

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All right, let's look at the polls. So there's an ABC episode yesterday that has Harris up six, 52-46 nationally. It's pretty good. ABC has been a pretty good poll for her. There's been kind of a battery of polls going since the debate and national that have mostly showed Harris up about four on average. There was one poll that went the other direction that had Trump up actually, which could be an outlier, but bears mentioning. The most interesting poll to me that came out over the weekend was in Iowa.

which isn't a swing state per se, but Ann Seltzer's joint register poll has been very good. And kind of this canary in a coal mine in a lot of ways in past cycles about like what way the political winds are blowing. And it showed Harris down four, 47, 43. Trump won Iowa by eight. Trump was winning in her last poll over Biden by 18.

I thought that was pretty significant. You said you were looking at some other down ballot polls as well. What have you seen out there? No, I think Iowa is significant. And, you know, the white voters, if I can put it that way, in Iowa, put it that way, I'm just going to say it analytically, the white voters in Iowa. It's Iowa. It's Iowa. The people are white. No, but they're also, they're also socioeconomically and in terms of education, not that unlike the white voters of Wisconsin and even Michigan. In Wisconsin, they're actually quite, you know, like in the sense they're close.

pretty close by. And there's some data that show they go the same way. So if Harris is running four points ahead in Iowa, that's not because of increased turnout among young blacks or anything. So that would suggest that maybe that's the case also in Wisconsin, where she is actually running a little bit ahead of what it looks like of where Biden was. And generally, I think is a good sign for Harris. And Ann Stelzer is a very good pollster. So

Being four points better than Biden is strong. The other things I would cite are some scattered races. Well, in the Senate races, the Democrats are just clobbering the Republicans, and

And maybe that's because they're incumbents in some cases, and the Republican candidates are particularly weak. But the numbers, the margins are great enough that it's just hard to believe that in Nevada, in Wisconsin, in Pennsylvania, actually, that Trump's going to run that much ahead of David McCormick if David McCormick's really losing by six plus points, and some of them are double digits.

I don't know. I mean, it's hard to say. North Carolina, the Republican gubernatorial candidates losing by in double digits. Trump's a much stronger candidate. Obviously, people are capable of splitting their ticket. But to that degree, I'm not sure. So I think there's a fair amount of evidence that sort of beneath the surface,

And this is also true of some of the favorability ratings and so forth. The ballot test is Harris plus three or four nationally, I'd say at this point. Feels to me like underneath it's a little stronger for Harris, maybe. Yeah. We've got Amy Walter on tomorrow, so we're going to do a real deep dive, get nerdy on the numbers. Another good indicator, gas prices down seven straight weeks.

I just sort of these sort of more economic kind of soft indicators. I mean, the soft landing of the economy, we are going to have a rate cut coming. We're driving through New Orleans yesterday. My husband was like, ooh, we're under three bucks on gases now. Just kind of those sorts of things that down enough for people to notice. I think that's not nothing.

Harris, I think, should really leap on this. And again, without going to the mistaken Biden direction of defending all the policies of the last three and a half years, I think she now has a chance to carve on me at this point in the conversation to sort of make people worry that Trump will disrupt what is a decent progression in the economy. She should actually give a speech. It'll be boring. People won't watch the speech itself to the Detroit Economic Club or something like that. But it will get some stuff out there, some real data, not just in an interview with local news, but really lay it out

of what Trump's economic plan might do to threaten what is now pretty obviously less inflation, increasing wages, a good stock market. People get a little worried. I mean, they're not happy with the economy, so you can't be in the position of being complacent, defending mourning in America, but you can be in the position of warning about what Trump could do. Yeah, and talk about moving in the right direction going forward. I think that's right. We'll put, by the way, a link to the Carville interview in the show notes.

So it was classic, James. It was very good and worth people's time. If they're looking for some bonus audio content this week, I do have to add the one element that has me wearing my adult diaper this morning in the data. The Nate Silver model shows now a 23% chance of a popular vote electoral college split. That has me worried. That's all. I don't have any deeper thoughts than that. That just has me worried.

People should remain worried. I mean, even if I'm right to be a little optimistic, I'm like 60-40 optimistic. I'm not 90-10 optimistic or 80-20. Things that have a 40% chance of happening happen a lot, you know, and we have seven weeks left. Is it seven weeks left? I think six, seven, seven weeks left.

And Trump has closed pretty well in the past, helped by James Comey, obviously. He's outperformed the polls in the past. That could be different for all kinds of reasons. Amy Walter, I'd be curious to know what she thinks about that. But there's an argument that this year he won't outperform the polls, but absolutely no complacency or not even any confidence, really. I just think a little bit of Harris stalled out.

for two weeks after the convention bump, such as it was. Then there was the debate. She did extremely well. There was, I'd say, a fair amount of nervousness the first day or two after the debate. Well, maybe it's not going to translate into vote share, into actual ballot test. And I think there's some evidence that it is, and it's translated into higher approval for her. And

And then on the voter registration numbers, Tom Bonior stresses this. It's a little dicey to know how to interpret all these things, but they seem to be disproportionately younger Democrats, that last wave of new registrations. And they're pretty big numbers in some of these states.

The one flag is they're disproportionately younger unregistered, actually. Fair enough. And so they're not registered with the party. Yeah, which he models as Democrats. Which he models as Democrats, which I hope is correct. But, you know, I don't know. Maybe I've been spending too much time looking at the...

SEC College Game Day audience among the Georgia boys that are going to the Georgia game. And so I don't know, that had me a little worried. But yes, I think it's probably, probably a good sign on the voter registration. But it is a modeling question.

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I want to do a couple of build a provocateur items here before we leave. I've been, you know, modding your Twitter over the weekend and you're one to give a contrarian view from time to time against the conventional wisdom. Here was one. You suggested that after the J.D. Vance interview rounds that maybe Tim Walz doesn't debate him. Why debate him? Donald Trump is going to be ducking Harris. Why should Tim Walz let J.D. Vance win?

spread his lies to a bigger audience. Was that a tongue-in-cheek suggestion, or do you really believe that? Mostly tongue-in-cheek in the sense that I think it's just practically hard for Walsh to get out of the debate now that they've agreed to it. But the idea of treating Vance as if this is a legitimate policy debate and allowing him to repeat these lies to what would be a bigger audience than he said? He can go on all the Face the Nation and CNN's State of the Union, he was, but he's getting to two, three million people there, even with some people showing it again on Twitter and stuff, a few more million more.

the debate would have a very, very big audience. And you hate to see him spreading these lies and possibly inciting violence and the like. So I do think there's an actual reason that Walsh would have to say, I won't do this. But I suspect it may be impossible to pull that off.

Yeah, I agree. I was intrigued by the suggestion. I was less intrigued on the count of not giving Vance this audience, which I wish he didn't have, but I feel like it's just the unfortunate reality of our increasingly debased society. But on the point of pressuring Trump, like on the side of pressuring Trump, it does feel like Trump is, I think maybe because it was this switch in candidates. I don't know. I feel like if it was

If there had only been one debate and Harris had been the keynote the whole time, then he was like, I'm not going to debate again. I feel like there would be a lot more negative attention on that than there's been on Trump so far. I don't know. Maybe this is, again, as Jeffrey Goldberg called it, the hard bigotry of no expectations for Donald Trump, that he gets away with this sort of stuff. But I don't know. If Harris was saying that she wasn't going to do the second debate, I feel like that would be much more...

discussion and concern about that than there has been about Trump ducking it. No, that's a good point. That's a good point. Okay. Your other build a provocateur comment is going contrary to the media, the elite media pearl clutching about Kamala Harris's lack of interviews. She did do one additional sit down interview with a local Philly reporter that was pretty uneventful over the weekend. But

It seems like the consensus, even here at the Bulwark, among most of your colleagues, is that she should be out there more. She should be doing more. She should be more visible. And Bill, you were saying why, kind of. I don't know. Why not just let J.D. Vance go out there and get all of the attention for his mendacity? I think she's pretty visible. I think she should give a speech every day, which she's doing basically in swing states. I would say like a couple of policy speeches today.

It just is a way to fill in some blanks, to get the policies out there so people don't complain that she's vague on it. And so people can do serious analyses, which will show, incidentally, that her economic policies are better than Trump's, that she increases the budget deficit much less and is much less inflationary because of tariffs and stuff. I think she could do the same in a couple of other areas. The Supreme Court's going to come in October 7th for a new term, give a speech on Dobbs and

other related issues in terms of the next president will make a ton of federal court appointments. I prefer speeches. She's not great at these interviews and I don't blame her. They're not so easy. And I think when you're, she's probably being counseled to be cautious and not make news. But I don't know. My experience in politics is when people do things for the sake of get out there because people tell you you're not out there enough.

But you don't really have a sharp point to make. Now, if she had each day a point she really wanted to make, I mean, if it's an interview that was appropriate to make that point, I have no problem with that. She should get out there when the Fed cuts rates. But again, is it better to give a speech or do maybe an interview with a financial journal? But you never know, right? I just think-

She's been excellent in the speech, conventional speech, excellent in the debate. Give a couple more speeches. I'm not so crazy about random interviews where there's a pretty big MAGA world out there that will seize on any hesitation, any slight self-contradiction. I don't know. I don't think it's needed, honestly.

Yeah, I basically agree with you. I guess my caveat is I think that she should do more soft interviews, like, you know, more culture interviews. Like, why not? And I think Walls should do. Walls is pretty good. I think maybe they've been holding him back a little bit because it would seem weird maybe for Walls to be like doing wall to wall, pun unintended there, interviews while she was not.

But I'd like to see him more in like sports interview world and like doing the kinds of things that Trump's been doing. Trump has been doing a lot of nonconventional interviews. So I don't think there's anything, you know, you could not credibly criticize her for doing that when that's mostly what Trump is doing. So anyway, I guess that would be my one suggestion.

No, I think that's a good emendation. And we'll also add, when we talk about the sports thing, he's an actual former football coach. I mean, assistant coach, as Trump likes to insist. Defensive coordinator? That's not nothing. Yeah, totally. I mean, and I think, didn't they win a state championship one of his years? They did. So, I don't know. Wouldn't he be good on this? Shouldn't he walk over to game day sometime when it's up in the Big Ten and do something there? And, you know, an awful lot of people watch football, especially football.

and a lot of college football, which is only one step away from high school. And so he has players who probably went on to play in college and he can certainly talk about. Anyway, I kind of like the idea of him doing a lot of sports. And then maybe Vice President Harris, I think should be good at the more the broader cultural stuff. But why not? Right. More Harris cooking shows, black media music. I don't know, maybe Taylor ideologically aligned podcasts.

for instance maybe i don't know uh if any any come to mind those are just some ideas i have you're a sports fan years even though you're an sec person you're you could have a you'll study up on the big 10 won't you for a few minutes and you can do a good discussion with walls me and walls can talk about the way wisconsin got their ass beat by alabama over the weekend that's a big sec supremacy we can talk about that i have to do this just one more item on the craziness of the republicans is a sense for where things are going

Because this stuff just gets to disappear in the ether. And so I feel like if anyone is going to talk about it, it has to be us at the bulwark. I don't know if you saw this. So following the debate, there were these dual arguments in MAGA world. The people close to Trump, right, had to pretend like Trump won. You know, Trump actually won, right? You can't harm his ego by saying that he lost. Right.

But then as you got further out into kind of MAGA conspiracy world away from the Mar-a-Lago headquarters, they felt more comfortable acknowledging that he lost but blaming it on a conspiracy, naturally. And one of their conspiracies was that there was a whistleblower at ABC, gave all the questions to Kamala. They had another conspiracy that there was maybe an earpiece she was wearing. It's unclear what exactly tips they could have given her when the questions were like, okay.

Immigration. The economy. I mean, it was like there were a lot of very rare questions out there, unsuspecting questions. But anyhow, Marjorie Taylor Greene over the weekend tweeted this. The ABC whistleblower who said Kamala Harris was given debate questions ahead of the debate has died in

in a car crash, according to news reports. That was a tweet by a sitting member of Congress. Let's see how many hours it was later. A few hours later, she replied, this story appears to be false, and I'm glad to hear it. So I just...

like i i guess i'm sitting members of congress like advancing conspiracy theories about the deep state offing people just constantly and that's just like part of the cult soup that they're swimming in over there in the mega media and it's just like i don't know had mikey cheryl like tweeted out about something like this you know i mean there you would just be dog democrats would be dog constantly but mtg just gets to kind of throw out assassination conspiracies without without

without any reprimand, I guess, except for here with us.

Well, it's Donald Trump and J.D. Vance's party, and they get to throw out. Vance gets to say they've tried to kill him, talking about Trump, right? They. And Trump gets to speculate on whether the earrings did contain, you know, like an earpiece for people to tell Kamala Harris what to say. So I guess, you know, the rot begins from the top, right? I mean, it's, and it is, it's a little hard to get indignant. I mean, it's not hard to, you should, but it's hard to get indignant about Marjorie Taylor Greene when Trump and Vance are,

sailing along with three or four or five points behind, as JBL likes to always say. How can this be even a competitive race, really? How can this even be a competitive race? It's really fucking flummoxing, I do have to say. All right, final topic. I don't know if you watched the Emmys last night, but The Bear is not a comedy. This is more of a statement than a question. The Bear gets nominated in all the comedy sections. It is this cooking show that is... There are no laughs. It's deeply...

depressing and it's on we and anxiety riddled and meanwhile hacks is the best comedy that's been on tv since office space or 30 rock it's brilliantly done if you've not watched hacks you must watch hacks thank god justice for hacks hacks won the best comedy emmy which they were denied last year but even still the actors on the show he and einbinder were denied it because they

The bear, which is just kind of hard to watch, actually. It's just very boring. The prestige bear actors got it instead. So I'm offended by that. I don't know if you had any deep thoughts on the Emmys, but I did feel the need to get that off my chest before the show ended. I was eloquently said, no, I didn't see them, and I don't know any of the shows. Slow Horses, does that qualify? That's a very excellent non-comedy show. I think that got some nominations. I don't know what that is, but I saw that mentioned. No, no, it's an excellent British spy kind of show.

series. We're giving each other self-homework. I can Slow Horses, my British Spy series. No, you should. Slow Horses, you're like. Mac Heron, the novels are really terrific. And he's writing them. They're current. Mac Heron. And then the bit has been turned into an excellent TV series, too. When I'm looking for a thriller, I look into Slow Horses. Hacks are working on season four. It sounds like good for them. It is. It's really funny. If you just want to. Okay, I should watch that. I'll tell Susan. Okay. Yeah, take a gummy. And if you need a laugh. We'll do Hacks. You do Slow Horses. And we're broadening each other's cultural references here.

We'll report back. Thank you to Bill Crystal, as always. We'll see you next Monday. Tomorrow, we will be back with Amy Walter. Thanks, y'all, for listening. And we'll see you again soon. Peace.

Charming in the heights of history Guns can't kill, soldiers can't see In the forest we are hiding Unlocked graves and flowers, here the soldiers end In the river we will go

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