Bill Kristol: We Were Right To Be Alarmed
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Hello and welcome to the Borg Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. It's Thanksgiving week and it's Monday, so we've got our publications editor-at-large, Bill Kristol. How are you doing, Bill? Fine, Tim. How are you? Happy Thanksgiving. And to you, are you staying in Virginia for Thanksgiving? We are staying in Virginia. We're going to one of our daughter's houses. She's having the whole family, plus various friends.

sort of in-laws and cousins. So I think 27 people for Thanksgiving should be nice, of whom I think, what? That should be big. Seven or eight will be less than 11 years old. So it should be pleasantly chaotic. Gotcha. Well, I'll be in West Virginia. Whoa. In the home of the union.

But the town has a Confederate statue. Is that true in West Virginia? Are they familiar with that? The state exists because of the union, right? I know. And I'm telling you, but you have to honor your dead. You got to honor your war dead on the other side. You got to honor the people that you killed. All right. We have a lot of cabinet news on Friday. I did a little YouTube video over the weekend, but we can go deeper. Basically, the rest of the cabinet, Trump picked. Over the weekend, we also heard from some Republican senators showing some

maybe some signs of spine, which you wrote about in the morning newsletter. I wanted to begin just with some big picture thoughts about how the Senate should review these nominees, and we'll take them one at a time. And I think there are two different perspectives on how to do it. One, you posted on X over the weekend from Federalist 76.

And it went as follows.

upon a spirit of favoritism in the president and would tend greatly to prevent the appointment of unfit characters. So that's one view, Federalist 76. We have a counter view from Marjorie Taylor Greene on Steve Bannon's podcast. Let's take a listen to how Marjorie sounds compared to Federalist 76.

We support Donald Trump and his agenda. That's it. That's it. They didn't go, we support Republicans. That is not what they said. They said, we support Donald Trump and his agenda. Therefore, the mandate and the order from the American people is...

Whoever he nominates and appoints, you better pass them through the Senate. That is your job. You say yes, sir, and you get it done. Whatever his agenda set out to do, we find a way to do it, and we do it as quickly as possible.

Entropy really has taken hold in American democracy. So what say you there? Yeah, the decline from Alexander Hamilton to Marjorie Taylor Greene is jaw-dropping. I would say it's a choice, but it's just so amazing, right?

But Hamilton knew there would always be demagogues and there would always be problematic members of Congress and even problematic presidents, which is why we have checks and balances and the like. And one of the big checks and balances in the Constitution is obviously advice and consent of the Senate. So yes, the Senate should take its job seriously. There's some signs that a few Republican senators are planning to, I think especially in the very sensitive posts of Director of National Intelligence and Secretary of Defense and

And with Gates, they have weighed in sort of, at least privately, to Trump and caused him to withdraw Gates' nomination as attorney general. So in the power ministries, I think, I hope we can avert the worst. I'd say my general big picture view is with possible exception of Treasury, which maybe we can talk about for a second, where I think there's a pretty serious nominee who might have his own standing. The best case is we avoid...

Well, not the best case. A reasonable case is that we avoid the crazy people and the really just unbelievably unfit people and sexual, you know, virtual sexual criminals alike. But the ones we're getting are very, I mean, John Bolton said over the weekend, I think on CNN, it's not right to say that they have loyalty to Trump. They have fealty to Trump.

I would say they're pliant or compliant to Trump. So the Pam Bondys of the world, the substitute for Gates as Attorney General, never worked, I don't believe, in the Federal Justice Department. She was Attorney General of Florida, so, you know, minimally qualified, I guess you'd say. But no independent standing, no loyalty that one knows of to any independent party.

features of the rule of law or the institution or preserving, you know, defending civil servants against persecution through her. No evidence she believes the Department of Justice should be independent. Right. Didn't she endorse about a year ago that we should prosecute the prosecutors? Not even a sort of nod to the notion that, well, of course, we have to preserve certain, you know, standards. And so I think that's generally the case. I would say that the danger is less the craziness of most of these appointees than

maybe accepting Ross Vaught at OMB, a real true fanatical ideologue in another power ministry, though, and more than just utter compliance of them to whatever Trump wants, I guess, and whatever the White House wants, which means whatever Steve Miller wants and whatever Ross Vaught wants. So it's compliant cabinet secretaries,

being compliant to either Trump's personal desire for retribution and his, you know, whatever whim he has on the one hand, and also to the kind of crazed ideological fervor of a Russ Vought or a Stephen Miller. I think that's right. I want to get into Russ Vought in detail here, but just at just kind of looking at the trend of all the choices, I think that Bolton's observation there is correct. Just the fealty to Trump, uh,

The other through line that you have to observe is presence on television. Yeah.

Like literally everybody that was picked for every position has been either a Fox News host, a Fox News guest host, or a frequent Fox News guest. And up to and including Besant, a treasury, who seems to me as part of his audition started going on TV a bunch to kind of demonstrate that he could do that. So there is more consistency in the choices when it comes to presence on television than any ideological choice.

And you kind of have this sort of ridiculous, frankly, analysis among the traditional D.C. types as they've looked at this. Like I've seen – I think Axios wrote Trump's liberal cabinet because you have RFK Jr. that is pro-choice and you have the labor secretary who does seem to be more pro-labor. But it's like liberal and almost liberal.

The word is meaningless in this context, but it's non-doctrinaire conservative, right? So you could look at it that way. You could look at it in a way that it's like a super MAGA cabinet by choosing particular positions, Noam, Miller. You could note that in several positions it was kind of

Almost tradition, the new mega establishment types, the traditional Republicans that came along, Rubio, Waltz. You cannot make sense of it ideologically. The only way to make sense of the cabinet as a whole is presence on television, looking the part, so to speak, and feedback.

BLT to Trump. Those are the ways in which the picks tie together. Totally. And the liberal conservative thing is particularly idiotic. There has been a fair amount of silly media commentary trying to put this as if we're analyzing a Bush cabinet or an Obama cabinet, which is— Team of rivals. Like Trump wanted a nationalist and a neocon and a paleocon, and they're all going to argue. Balancing off the centrist wing of the GOP.

You know, it's better to have non-Orthodox doctrinaire conservatives from Trump's point of view, right? They might actually object to something a la Mike Pence, but you know, they're right. They're not going to just turn a blind eye to violating pro-life promises and so forth. It's in a way you're better off. And I think this is true of authoritarian regimes throughout history. You're better off with a mishmash of people. The key is that they're loyal and that they're weak, really, I think. I mean, this is the

the inside of Robert Krasinski about a week ago. You think authoritarianists want strong government, and of course, in a way, they want oppressive government sometimes and intrusive government sometimes.

They don't want strong government in the sense of the strong cabinet secretaries or strong institutions of government. They want compliant subordinates, and they want that to go down through the government. And there's no evidence that Pambadhi is ever going to say no when the White House calls, and there's not much evidence that any of these people really will say no. Even Bess at the Treasury, who I guess –

one takes to be the most sort of grown up and serious of these people with some reputation on the outside he might want to defend. As you say, spent the last several months going on Fox and semi-defending ridiculous positions of Trump that he doesn't actually agree with.

Yeah, the market has responded positively to it because it's like this continuing view of like, it's not only Trump that doesn't plan to act on the things that he said he's going to say, in this case, tariffs. It's like the Treasury Secretary nominee also is a serious person who everyone just kind of assumes won't go along with the craziest tariff plans, even though he's been auditioned for the job full-throated in defense of

the idea that tariffs are going to be necessary. But there's just kind of this assumption that because he's smart and savvy and because Trump cares about the markets, that when push comes to shove, their tariff moves will be

kind of small ball in reality with big pomp and circumstance around them. And I think that's like what the market is assuming. And maybe that's true, but this guy has been out there defending the tariffs as Trump pushes them, which are, you know, very extreme and at least what his stated plans are. Yeah, the market wants to believe that Besant will be like Gary Cohn, Trump's first treasury secretary, who famously pulled some memos off Trump's desk so he couldn't sign some tariffs for South Korea and so forth.

But that's not how he's pitching himself. Yeah, but Cohen did a fair amount of good, I'm willing to stipulate, in the first term, I think. But it's also the case that he had a lot of help in the White House. When Kelly was chief of staff, apparently he worked pretty closely with Cohen. Bolton told me this, that he worked when he was national security advisor, worked with Cohen. Mike Pence was helpful. None of those equivalents will be there, right? People with some standing and some ability to help

Carl in and contain Trump. So I think even Besant, who's the, I suppose, the most hopeful of the picks, a much weaker version of a guardrail than Cohen was in the first term, I think. Sure.

Let's go to the person that there will be no guard whales around, and that's Russ Vought. Russ is one of these that fits in that new MAGA establishment category. What's it called? We've lived a lifetime. Reformacon. Remember the Reformacons? He was a pretty conservative guy. Did he work for Pence before he went to Heritage Action? I can't remember. I think I knew him maybe when he was a Pence staffer on the Hill, and then he ended up at Heritage Action. Yeah.

And I think he was sort of in sympathy with some of the reformer cons. I've forgotten about the reformer cons, what happened to them. But he was a pretty doctrinaire, you know, small government conservative, let's say. It seemed like it. You're correct. He was a House Republican staffer and was the executive director of the Republican Study Committee. I think what Pence might have been ahead of it, or a Pence ally or something. I associate, I think I met him in Pence world, I'm going to say around 2010 or whatever that was. Yeah.

But the Republican Study Committee was one of those things where at the time, these were the real conservatives, right? Like, they're really in the Tea Party mold that is deconstructing the administrative state, being very aggressive on fiscal and budget issues. And then Trump gets in in 2016, and all of a sudden, you know, like, kind of the plates shift underneath everybody's feet on, like, what it means to be a true, you know, a far-right extreme conservative. But because these guys were more in the policy arena. But Vaught,

has been full-throated in kind of adopting the MAGA worldview root and branch, right? And to the point that he gets praised widely on Bannon's war room. I've heard Bannon name-check him several times as somebody that he thinks he's aligned with ideologically. In the first administration, was one of the kind of competent people that Trump could turn to, though even, as you'll hear in some of this video, he felt stymied, you know, at times by,

the more traditional conservatives and the career officials during the Trump first administration. And so he has been the point person on the kind of schedule F element of the Project 2025 effort on the outside about how they need to kind of reorganize the government so that Trump's plans can get through. Our friends at the Republican Accountability Project have a little video out this morning with some of the video of Vought in his own words. Let's listen to that. Meet Russ Vogt.

Russell Vogt, the former director of the Office of Management and Budget. He's been called the most dangerous MAGA diehard you've never heard of. Vogt is one of the key authors of the blueprint for a second Trump administration. I think you have to rehabilitate Christian nationalism, give the largest deportation in history, block funding for Planned Parenthood, block funding for fetal tissue research, and maintain law and order with the military. There's no think tank, no policy organization, no battle plan creator

other than us for the worldview that I think Donald Trump has and that J.D. has. I should say for transparency, both of us are on the board of the group to put that out. So, Russ, this is real. And he's an OMB, as you said. There's a lot of power there. And he has one of the other clips in the same video, the longer version of that video, is him talking about how he spent 80% of his time since the end of the first Trump administration on

working on plans for...

dealing with the administrative straight problems that flummoxed them in the first term. I've got a couple of quick points about Vought or Vote. I'm not sure how to pronounce it, but I think Vought. Vought, I think. I've been mispronouncing it, but not intentionally. It looks like, it feels like Vought, but it's Vought. Is it Vought? Okay. Whichever it is. Bolton reminded me, actually we were just talking about various things this weekend, that Russ was the guy who came up with the idea of withholding the funds for Ukraine to put pressure on them to cooperate with Giuliani. That was his baby idea.

And that's what Bolton at the time told Fiona Hill and stuff. This is a drug deal. This is illegal. You should go see White House counsel before cooperating with this. And Bolton is not a shrinking violet. And if he thought this was pushing the edge of illegality, it was probably. But he was very aggressive as head of OMB in carrying out Trump's wishes. I guess he's a true believer in some of the America First, Project 2025 stuff. Secondly, OMB is a very powerful agency. I mean, if you

If you haven't been in the government, it's a little hard to see that sometimes on the outside, but it pulls all the strings in terms of management, as its name is, Office of Management and Budget, but especially on the budget side. So when I was at the education department ages ago, I was stunned. I thought, hey, we're the...

I work for the education secretary. We get to make education policy, right? And budget recommendations. Nope. We get to negotiate with OMB and they had the stronger hand with the White House behind them in terms of what programs would get increases and what programs would be cut and so forth. And third, he is, I think, a true believer on the Christian nationalism stuff.

I mean, that's, I don't know, maybe that was always there, maybe not, but that's clearly, and he's discussed that quite a lot, actually, and he's friendly with some more extreme Christian nationalists who don't even pretend to sort of respect basic principles of tolerance and liberal democracy and equal treatment of people, whatever their religious views or not having religious views and so forth. So Vought's a real extremist, not a competent one in the sense that he knows how the government works, knows how the Hill works, knows how OMB works, but

Right there at the heart of the executive branch, at the heart of the White House, really. Yeah, and in some ways, I look at him and Miller, and I kind of pair them together as both having learned from the first administration in areas where they were stymied, areas where they had failed, and both...

are kind of nerds who do like the attention and the media spotlight. So it's not like they're just totally behind the scenes doing machinations, but they're serious about their machinations in addition to enjoying the spotlight. And I think if you pair this to this broader conversation we were having about the cabinet, right, where you picked a lot of people who are

inclined to be more loyal to Trump, who are maybe not the most serious people that have the most strongly held views on what exactly should happen in their agency. Like, do you think Kristi Noem has deeply held views on what the Department of Homeland Security should do? Obviously not. Linda McMahon has deeply held views on what the Department of Education should do. Obviously not. So maybe the RFK is potentially the exception here.

I think that just using your example of the Department of Ed and these sort of negotiations, I don't think there's going to be very many negotiations. I think that what comes out of OMB is going to be what is happening. And if they're calling for draconian cuts or...

you know, rules to limit access to contraception. You could, you, you name it. They're going to be the power center. Yeah. I mean, I'm thinking back to when I was at the education department, I mean, that was a long time ago. There was actually a big fight between Bill, but it's not even worth getting into needless to say. So, so much in this tiny, tiny footnote, sub footnote in, in, in, in history books of the Reagan administration, between Bill Bennett and Jim Miller, who was the head of OMB about this, about the budget.

And where I'd say unusually, even then, because OMB was so powerful, we fought it and we appealed OMB's directive to Howard Baker, then White House Chief of Staff. And there was a meeting. I was White House Chief of Staff. I got to go to it. It was in the Chief of Staff's office.

with Howard Baker. It was one of those, if we can't work this out here, we're going to have to go right to the, all the way to the president. And everyone was like, you don't really want to bother President Reagan with this. Like Iran-Contra is blowing up and everything. So maybe we can work this out. But we actually won. But yeah, the idea that there's going to be any negotiation here is ludicrous. And of course, Steve Miller and Vote,

they will have a huge amount of power. And they're not shy about exercising it, either one, including I've talked to people now who've been a little bit and that were in the first term. They exercised it even then in the first term where they didn't know quite as well how to. And now they've got their own operatives in some of these agencies below the cabinet level who will report directly basically to Miller. The idea that Miller is going to know more about what's going on at DHS than Kristi Noem, who will be nominally the secretary. Right.

And people there will be reporting to Miller in effect. And I think the same is true in lots of parts of the government. Even someone like Besant, I'd worry a little about what's going on at the second and third tier of Treasury. I'm curious to see whether any of these cabinet secretaries get to appoint their own cronies like in the old days or whether they just appoint people selected by White House personnel.

which basically would mean selected by Miller and vote. And is that guy, that ridiculous 32-year-old creep, is he running White House personnel? Have we heard that yet? I don't think so. We've not heard what is happening with Johnny McEntee. What happened to that guy? Yeah, that was your friend there, right? Yeah, we'll keep an eye on Johnny McEntee. I do want to bring back the right stuff segment. So we'll see how that turns out. No, the person that is in the McEntee job now of White House personnel is –

A former Rand Paul staffer who I knew, his name is Sergio Gore, who is like one of these, I don't know how to describe it, like a barfly of MAGA world. I knew him back in D.C. 15 years ago. And he's always like in the picture, you know, from Mar-a-Lago. It's like, is that Sergio back there? And I'll be, you know, in the random story, a Michael Wolff book, they'll be mentioned like, we had a dinner in D.C. and it was so Rudy and so-and-so and Sergio Gore.

So he's just been this hanger on of MAGA world who will certainly be pliant to whatever the higher ups want in these various positions. I want to talk a little bit about Tulsi too. The betting markets, which I find interesting in the nomination cases, more so in elections, just because

The betting markets have become very kind of MAGA, Elon Musk, crypto-ish. And so the people that are participating in these markets are self-selecting to be relatively, I would say, like on the side of Trump and these nominees. And so I was interested to see that Tulsi's likelihood of nomination on the betting markets, or likelihood of getting through rather, has dropped below 50% now over the weekend. Wow.

So they think that it's less likely. I think part of that is you kind of alluded to this in the top. We've heard some buzz from some of the senators, some of the more traditional national security senators, Jim Risch out of Idaho, and some others that they're looking at this closely, and that the Tulsi math might get tough if you have...

McConnell, Collins, Murkowski going against her, then you just need one more of those more national security-oriented Republicans. So I don't know. I'm interested in what you think about the Tulsi situation and the lay of the land. Yeah, Rish, who I think is the incoming chairman of Center for Foreign Relations, I guess Tulsi's hearing would be for intelligence, but he said we can't prejudge either

Tulsi or Hegseth, we're going to have serious hearings. We have a serious responsibility to do advice and consent. He certainly didn't go out of his way to give them any kind of green light or even I'd say a friendly yellow light. It was more like a caution yellow light. And then Lankford, Senator Lankford from Oklahoma, who's on intelligence, said,

in an interview yesterday was very also Federalist 76 sounding about the importance of advice and consent of the Senate. So they're not in the normal lists of people who will oppose nominations, but it does remind, we talked about this a bit last week, each of these will have different sets of characters

in the Senate dealing with them. That's literally true in terms of the committees, first of all. And they may not get out of committee. Now they can get reported out with a negative recommendation, but that's a pretty easy excuse then, I think, for the McConnells and Collinses of the world to say, or even Thune to say, well, we're not going to overrule the committee's judgment. So

Obviously, the Democrats will vote against, and then it just takes usually in these committees maybe two Republicans to flip. So I do think Ridge and Lankford matter, and I do think the national security establishment Republicans are particularly horrified by those two, Gabbard and Hexeth, and then if you care about the rule of law, by Gates. And so maybe they won't make it. I think it's quite possible.

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I need to flex my old libertarian muscles, Bill. You and I agree on so much, so it's nice when I find something I think we might disagree on. I have to come to Tulsi's defense on one minor item here today. I would obviously vote Tulsi down, and I find her appalling at almost every level. That said, there was a leak to CNN over the weekend.

that Tulsi was briefly put on this Quiet Skies program, which meant that she was getting additional surveillance at the airport. She was getting patted down every time she went to the airport. She had to get secondary screenings. And so I was doing a little research on this. The Quiet Skies algorithm looks at travel patterns, foreign connections, and other data

And if triggered, leads to additional security screening at the airport by air marshals. It's not associated with the FBI's terrorist watch list. Security officials from multiple agencies told CNN the program is known inside the government for having far laxer standards for inclusion.

This is insane. Like leaking that this happened to her, I think is crazy. And the fact that it exists is crazy. So I don't know. Do you have any 9-11 American greatness, conservatism pushback to me on this? The fact that it was leaked is ridiculous. I mean, it was famously the case 10 years ago when I knew a little about this.

Steve Hayes, my colleague now at the Weekly Standard, was put on this list and had – I mean, it didn't – it wasn't horrible. He had an extra 15 minutes of interrogation, so to speak. I thought it was from a TSA person, but who knows if it's an air marshal or not TSA.

because he had flown to Turkey to get on a weekly standard cruise, I think, or not, but we didn't go to Turkey. So he'd been, anyway, he'd been doing some reporting in Iraq and gone back to Turkey, joined a weekly standard cruise somewhere, did not have your standard round-trip ticket to Paris or even to the other places.

And so that triggers having the one-way ticket to a place like Turkey, which was kind of a hub of, you know, terrorism export at the time from Syria and elsewhere. If people are coming out of Syria. So, I mean, if you're triggering 10 minutes of extra interrogation, that's okay. I think it was, though, also very, you know, this was, of course, they didn't review each one personally. So the algorithm got all kinds of things wrong. If someone's name was misspelled, it could trigger stuff. My friend Gary Schmidt was once held up.

for two hours this was israel not us uh the by ed at israel's airport uh because there was a gary schmidt from who had been like associated with some german terrorist gang we should laugh about it but i mean in 19 literally in 1979 you know and it was like you know so there's a lot of that going on too so i i but the leaking of it is silly and it's no reason to make a judgment one way or the other god knows there's enough on the record about tulsi that

Yes, plenty of reasons to vote Tulsi down besides the fact that she was put on this ridiculous security state watch list based on an algorithm and civil libertarian Tim, who had a very brief flirtation with Rand Paul for like three weeks before I realized he was crazy, is outraged about this. So that's all. I just wanted to get that on the record. Mike Rounds on the other side of this.

I got to tell you, listeners, quick quiz before I play this audio. Is Mike Brown still in the Senate, yes or no?

Was Mike Rounds ever in the Senate? My guess is at least half of our audience does not know the answer to that question. Possibly three quarters of the audience, possibly more. And this is an issue that we have that on the one hand, maybe some of these people rise to the occasion right now with Rich in Idaho, who we've mentioned, and now Rounds. I think when you look at the list of senators...

I don't think people realize there are like 12 Republican senators who are from the pre-Trump era who have just disappeared and just don't go on the news, go on cable news, don't weigh in on any Trump outrages.

do local news in their state talking about the farm bill or whatever. That's it. They have no footprint. I saw this Mike Rounds clip. I did have a second one. I was like, he's still in the Senate, right? I had to double check just to make sure I was right, that he was still in the Senate. He is. I want to explain why that's important after we listen to this clip. It's a little long, but it's worth it because I think it is the most stirring defense of Ukraine that we've heard from a Republican in quite some time.

as I listen to what's happening in Ukraine, and this is my opinion, it's not the opinion of the administration, it's not the opinion of the next administration coming in, but for those folks in Ukraine that are fighting against a Russian aggression that we can all see,

I just feel so frustrated that we have not been able to provide them all of the equipment that they need and all of the weapon systems that they need in order to respond to absolute tyranny coming from Russia, a neighbor who has absolutely unjustly invaded their country.

And it's been done after a time in which Russia was one of the guarantors of their safety from 1994 when they gave up the nuclear weapons that they had. And they did it because they thought that all of us would defend them in that decision. And now here we are, this many years later, with Putin, the aggressor, looking at us as literally hundreds of thousands of his own people die on the front line as cannon fodder, and as he inflicts

huge, huge amounts of damage and destruction in a neighbor, an innocent neighbor, who wanted peace. And I wonder why we haven't done more and more quickly than what we have. All of us. So Bill, that's pretty good. From current Senator Mike Reynolds, just to be clear, current Senator. But, you know, it's hard to square that. A, it's kind of hard to square that with being for Donald Trump for president, but we'll set that aside because we've lost that battle. It's hard to square that with confirming

the Trump National Security Cabinet. No? I think so, but I mean, yes. So I wouldn't overdo how important this is, but it is impressive that Rounds went out of his way to say this. He didn't have to. He hasn't been a leader in any way prominent, has he, in the questioning of Trump? Like Lankford has negotiated that immigration bill and then criticized Trump for blowing it up. I don't even think Rounds has been at that level of power.

or disagreement or anything, or any, showing any, what was the word I'm looking for, any gap, any space between Trump and himself. And here he is. So I guess he believes it. Maybe there are more Republican senators. They did vote about three to one, I think, for the Ukraine aid package back in the spring. Um,

Maybe he believes it. Maybe more believe it than we realize. Maybe they actually understand it's really important, not like a lot of this other performative stuff or other stuff that you and I would think is important, that they just don't like deporting millions of people and so forth, immigrants. And maybe that does mean that it's not quite as easy to

as one might have thought, for Trump to simply pull the plug on Ukraine. He still has so much power as president that it's a little hard to know what Rouse is going to do or the others are going to do. But it was striking that he went out of his way to say this at this national security international conference that's focused on foreign policy in Halifax this past weekend. So I took it as a slight

Good omen. I also took it as a slight good omen. And as a result, we've invited Mike Rounds onto the Borg podcast to discuss it at greater length. I'm not holding my breath. I was about to say, that would be impressive. That would really be crossing the bridge. Face-to-face with Tim Miller. That would get Bannon and Gorka's and Miller's and votes' attention. I mean... There's some establishment Republicanism left in the Senate. And it's... They've been such a disappointment so many times, I'm going to...

not let myself go too far down the path of, hey, these guys might step up. Maybe I want to do things that are really important, like Tulsi Gabbard not destroying the intelligence capacities of the United States of America or selling out Ukraine in the most important foreign policy issue, perhaps in decades. Maybe on those, they'll do a little more. Yeah. I mean, Rounds was elected governor of South Dakota in 2002, put into the Senate in 2014. So this was all pre-Trump. Hmm.

Now he'll be up in 26. So it's like, is he scared that Kristi Noem's going to primary him? I don't know. But listen to that guy on that audio. He didn't let it rip, I guess is all I'm saying. Mike Grounds, come on the podcast or don't, but let it rip, you know, just follow up those words with the necessary actions. We'll be rooting for you. One such potential action

It's related to Matt Whitaker. We talked about this at great length on the next level last week, but just briefly, I wanted to get your two cents on it. Matt Whitaker was nominated to be NATO ambassador. It is a preposterous choice across any possible metric.

I would not be surprised if Matt Whitaker's only passport stamp is to Cancun. I can't imagine that Matt Whitaker could have named all of the NATO member countries before he received this nomination. He was a football guy who then ran for office in Iowa.

He ran an AstraTurf group that I did some work with back in the bad old days. And this is not an impressive person. Not somebody with any foreign policy experience that I can identify based on either the press release they put out about him or my knowledge of him or a Google search of him. Clearly, he is there to do Trump's bidding when it comes to NATO, which is going to be hostile, right?

I guess it's too much to hope that Mike Rounds or others would choose this to be a place where they could put their foot down, but...

I mean, if it was not for the situation where a TV host was nominated for the leading of Secretary of Defense and somebody that's like actively opposed to America's role in the world being named DNI, like this would be, I think, get a lot more attention as a ridiculous nomination. But probably too much to hope for. Bears mentioning. I don't know if you have any, Matt Whitaker.

Yeah, I mean, I assume it's a consolation prize for him because he was the guy who sort of fluked into being acting attorney general for a few months there at some point in between Sessions and Barr, I guess. I can't remember anymore before Barr got confirmed. And to appoint someone as acting in those circumstances, you need someone who's already in the department or is already at a certain level in the U.S. government. And Whitaker was doing – he's a lawyer – was doing something in justice, God knows what. Yeah.

and got sort of moved into that. Then he was a candidate, I think, for Attorney General, but picked this time, but Trump picked Gates and then Pam Bondi. So there he is. Yeah, NATO, he'll do whatever Trump wants, obviously, and doesn't seem to

to know anything at all. I mean, one thing I'd say about the confirmation hearings, this is again, in earth one, in a real world, one purpose of confirmation hearings, when you weren't going to block someone was to get someone on record, making some commitments. And in earth one, whether you said it and that Congress actually exercised leverage and power,

they would hold people to those commitments sometimes, sometimes not. People just said things like, you know, famously, I'm open-minded about Roe v. Wade or whatever, you know, Alito and those guys all said, whatever. But sometimes they would sort of hold them to it, or at least afterwards they could criticize someone. I assume that people like Rounds, if he's on the relevant committee, I think he is, will ask, you know, Whitaker, well, what about NATO? And will you commit to not doing anything, you know, that will destroy NATO and blah, blah, blah, maybe gets him a little more cautious and just being a total,

stooge of whatever the America First anti-NATO types want, whatever J.D. Vance wants, but I don't know. We should have mentioned, we're talking about vote and Miller. I think Vance is maybe the third part of that triangle in terms of enforcing from within the White House the real America First and Project 2025 agenda. So I'm skeptical that Matt Whitaker will stand up to any of those three, to say the least. To say the least. Good point on Vance.

You've been posting a decent amount on the kerfuffle between Nancy Mace and Sarah McBride. Nancy Mace, who seems to be going through

deep personal crisis, which I would be more sympathetic to if she wasn't being so mean about it. This had another divorce or broke up with her partner and is doing selfie videos and like sending insane manic level tweets about, you know, defending women and women's restrooms and misgendering Sarah McBride, et cetera, et cetera. And Sarah McBride has been

quite modest in her response to that, to say the least, and did one interview over the weekend on MSNBC. I'm just open-ended wondering your thoughts on that exchange. So I didn't realize Nancy Mace had broken up with her. This is the famous fiancé whom she described at the

prayer breakfast at the prayer breakfast their sex yeah yeah i don't say that's why i said i don't know divorce i'd be wrong they might not have ever gotten married it doesn't i forget if they ever got married it doesn't really matter um but yes yeah the famous gentleman um that she uh references sexual prowess at a prayer breakfast um yeah they've broken up and she's she did a selfie video about how she's moving and kind of alleged that like that that she might have had a

Like even some concerns about her safety or some assault. I mean, it was like she was very vulnerable in this video, which again, on the one hand, you'd be sympathetic to if it wasn't for the fact that like the other part of the video is like just extremely demeaning, nasty comments about her new colleague, Sarah McBride, who people haven't followed this for whatever reason, is a transgender woman who's now representing Delaware in Congress.

And forcing, you know, forcing, but getting the Speaker of the House to endorse legislation to prevent her from, I guess, using the women's bathrooms anywhere in the House. Actually preventing anyone, I think, who's transgender from using bathrooms anywhere in the complex, in the Capitol complex. And now the bullying, the meanness, is grotesque on the part of Mace and the

so that will stipulate that she's terrible. I didn't know anything about Sarah McBride. And she's really behaved with great, I gotta say grace and dignity. I hadn't realized before, I think maybe before being a,

state senator in Delaware. She was a spokesman for the human rights campaign. So she's obviously a little more experienced than I guess I assume. Wow, Delaware state senator, member of Congress elect. It's just really fantastic performance. But it's worth watching the video because it's very impressive. She's very calm. And I got to wonder, I say this in Morning Shots based on actual no knowledge, I will admit,

that isn't there some reaction among her colleagues and among Republican voters even against Nancy Mace? Is that really what they're – bullying a woman who she even says didn't intend to use the women's room, but whatever, who's been incredibly reserved in her self-presentation and has emphasized she wants to work for all Delawareans and she's not there to advance particularly any details of the transgender agenda, if there is such an agenda. I don't know. I feel like she's such a superior person.

model of what a not just what a representative should be but what an adult human being should be to nancy mays that maybe it's having some of maybe that's having some effect maybe that's wishful thinking on my part i don't know if it's having effect or not um i think that sometimes that's enough

being a superior model of a representative should be enough in itself without needing to yield broader political gains. Look, I think we've had a lot of this. I'd obviously Sam Harris on this last week. We on the secret podcast, I was there in JVL. We spent a long time talking about the kind of the backlash against transgender Americans and the ads that Trump was running and kind of what

how the Democrats need to think about that politically. People can go listen to that if they are interested, if they haven't already. In this instance,

What I keep coming back to is no matter where your views are on that issue, it does seem to me that there should be a plurality majority of Americans that just like want people to be treated decently. Even people that might believe that there should be restrictions on bathrooms. Like the way that Nancy Mace is handling this is just absurd. It would be unacceptable in any workplace. Yeah.

besides Donald Trump's Washington, like frankly. And I do think that there is potential for backlash there, but even if there isn't, um,

I think sometimes doing the right thing is enough. Do you have any additional thoughts on that? I have one other thing I want to pick your brain about. I agree with that. I got an email. I've been getting a bunch of emails. One caught my eye. Actually, when I say that, I'm going to do a little mailbag tomorrow. If you have mailbag questions, the mailbag email is bulwarkpodcasts at thebulwark.com. I'm going to do a mailbag tomorrow where I talk about mixed politics Thanksgiving and how to handle that.

So, you know, tune in for the end of tomorrow's podcast for that. I got an email that I wanted to pick your brain on, Bill. It's something I've been thinking about as well. And people at The Bulwark and other Never Trumpers and many Democrats, including themselves and people in the media, had spent the last few years talking about the existential threat to democracy that Donald Trump is.

But since the election, many of these same folks have been out there commenting about how the Democrats should think about 2028 and how we've been talking on this podcast about how Republicans should handle Trump and maybe be a bulwark.

pun intended, against Trump in Congress. And that is leaving some Trumpers to say that we're all full of crap about this democracy stuff. And this writer said he's finding that to be a hard argument to rebut. And so I'm hearing that as well from some people. And so I think that this is something you've written about and talked about, that there is a little bit of this Trumpism

the boy who cries wolf challenge with people that are raising the alarm while also trying to exist in our society. So I'm kind of wondering how you are thinking about that. Not to be defensive of myself or of us, but I would say I have actually literally written every morning shot since election day about confronting Trump and especially his nominees once that began to be an issue, which it was that very first week, as opposed to participating in all the

talk, which I'm, of course, interested in, but don't know that I have much to contribute to. And I think it's too early, honestly, for a lot of that. Re-casting the Democratic Party, which issues hurt them the most? How do you rethink, how do you reconcile the different parts? And I have some thoughts on that. Maybe at some point I'll write a little about it. But I think, A, my experience has been you need things to settle down a little bit. There's no rush. No one's nominating anyone for anything right now. No one's in charge. There's no Biden's president for two more months. I mean, whereas confronting Trump is important. And there, I think,

I remain very alarmed by Trump's second term. As I say in the newsletter, there are a few swallows that may give one some hope, a few green shoots, whatever metaphor you want. And I think that's been true of the bulwark generally. If you look at our website, if you look at the videos and podcasts and your work, certainly, it's mostly about Trump, as it should continue to be. Now, finding the balance between being

and in some cases, really, really alarmed. And on the other cases, acknowledging that maybe Mike Brown said something good or maybe Jim Lankford is going to vote against Tussie Gabbard. We all obviously should try to find the right balance and the right balance is driven by what events are. But I mean, at the end of the day,

I think the first, what are we now in, three weeks almost since the election of Trump has vindicated those of us who were very alarmed about Trump. Because we're looking at Vogt and Miller and Vance as the key centers of power. We're looking at the power ministries, if he had had his way, being held by Gates and Hegseth and Gabbard, and maybe still Hegseth and Gabbard. And it's not like Pam Bond is going to stand up to anything, and she wants to persecute him.

What did she say? Prosecute the prosecutors, including career attorneys and so forth. So I think we are right to be alarmed. We should also call it as it is. And there are some things to be more alarmed about than others. I think maybe Treasury will be less alarming than DHS and mass deportation and so forth. But I'm sticking with the highly alarmed position here. Yeah, I guess I agree with everything you said. So I'll extend those remarks to also

People don't do well with nuance, right? And political campaigns aren't really a place for nuance. And Donald Trump succeeded overwhelmingly being the biggest blunt force instrument in history. And it's not like he was using very nuanced rhetoric talking about the threat from Democrats being communists and American carnage in the country ending and all that. And I don't think that Trumpers would do any reflection about Donald Trump's inappropriate rhetoric because they've already excused it all. They've already been like, you don't have to believe what he says.

you don't take it literally. So that's just a carte blanche excuse for them. So if you're looking to rebut Trumpers in your life who are saying that, I would maybe start there. But on the merits of what the pro-democracy groups have said, certainly there are people somewhere we could pull up the tape who maybe went a little bit overboard various times, and that's just the nature of these things. But to me, the challenge has always been

Living in the gray area and talking about the gray area where I've never have been like if Donald Trump wins, I'm

our elections are over. Like my, my point always, and I asked many, many guests about this was like, do you think that there's a chance that that's true? Like, is it a 2% chance, a 5% chance, 20% chance? People have trouble processing things that are 5% chances, right? And, and, you know, like it is a threat to democracy. If even there's only a 5% chance that democracy could collapse, that's still a threat. That's too high of a threat.

So I think that's one element of it. And the other element, which I think Sam Harris was pretty eloquent on at the end of that podcast, if you turned it off because you didn't like the trans stuff, you can make it go back to listen to the end where he was talking about how from his vantage point, the democratic threats were already seeing.

It's just this erosion of democratic institutions. It never meant to him that we weren't going to vote again. It's these erosions of democratic institutions the way we've seen them in Hungary and elsewhere. And you're already seeing that in this first couple weeks of the transition. So by nature, that was just a three-minute answer to a pithy attack. I do think it's going to be challenging to argue on social media with Trumpers about this, about democracy dying in darkness. But

When it comes to the very real risks that we'll see how they kind of pass, and then the very real erosions that we've already seen of our institutions, I think both of those are legitimate things to be learned about, to continue to talk about. And I think that we have been pretty on the mark on all that. Plenty of things I've been not on the mark on. I don't think this is one of them. One question for you, actually. Chris Truax, who's written for us, an attorney in California, made this point to me.

last week that if they go to all this trouble of centralizing personalizing power and creating a more authoritarian administrative state let's call which i think is what will happen if they have any success in their plans

Do you just give that up in 2028? Just like, okay, let's have a free and fair election. Doesn't mean there won't be an election. Doesn't mean there'll be literally a kind of, I don't know, you know, fraudulent election like Venezuela. But do we have confidence that they just think, you know, okay, fair playing field. We're not going to do anything during the election year. The things you go to all that trouble to create what you want.

Project 2025, America First, you just walk away from it when Vance is the candidate. So I think it's fair to be concerned about 2028, but there's plenty to be concerned about before we get to 2028. My question for you, this is a tactical one, but I think it's related to what you were just saying and what the questioner was saying. Where's Trump been? What do you make tactically of Trump's

I guess, was to be silent, really, for what? I think it's almost two weeks now, right? He's basically not visible. Maybe that's true, incidentally, but I don't know. Do you have any thoughts about that? I think he's tired. I think he's tired of golfing. I mean, he's an old man that was...

Working hard. I mean, there was a period of the campaign where he was not working hard. But the end of the campaign, he was traveling a lot. So I think he's probably tired. And, you know, he did show up to the White House and kind of behaved. I mean, I spoke in an earlier podcast. He was with Amanda. I was ranting about how annoying it was, actually. How they threw out the welcome mat for him and acted like everything was normal and Trump was wrong. And I was like, ah!

why are you why are we participating this why are we helping him like this but um i i think that part of it is that the and i think it would just be interesting to see um you know suzy weill said an interview like we've not seen the last trump rally like eventually he will want to go do that again um and that's what i think brings him joy more than the rest of the stuff so um

I think it remains to be seen, but I think probably some of being tired, some of getting all these picks through. I mean, they got these picks out at a record pace. It's not usually before Thanksgiving that you have all the picks. And I think that that will be a more interesting question if he is similarly behind the scenes in two weeks' time. I think that that will be more eye-barreling.

Yeah, and in a month's time, six weeks' time, when there's an actual Republican Congress sworn in, and let's say Gabbard's running into trouble, does he just quietly pull Gabbard? Or do we have a real, I'm going to do a rally in, I don't know, in Idaho to beat up Jim Risch or in Oklahoma to beat up Jim Lankford? I don't know. That's an interesting, I don't know, tactical question for Trump, I guess. Because I don't know that he can give that many more away without starting the same week.

I mean, to me, he seems very weak. The Gates thing seemed weak to me, to pull it so quickly. It'd be one thing if they would have pulled it in January, but to pull it without really a lot of effort being put forth on Trump's part...

I don't know. I, to me, that's kind of like the, uh, the monster has been cut. I don't know that there isn't a connection between that Gates withdrawal and hearing from Rish and Langford and rounds. That's very, you know? Um, and so in that sense, um,

Maybe he doesn't have the juice for it or doesn't want, you know, maybe, I don't know. I think that there, there will come a point where it will become interesting to see whether he's going to actually fight for this stuff or whether he's going to just appreciate the fact that he's not going to jail and kind of let everything, let everything shake out as it shakes out. I think you've raised very interesting questions. Yeah, I agree. If he just lets another couple of them go down without chastising of his enemies and trying to punish his enemies, I,

He does look weaker. The Gates thing, which everyone took as kind of clever move, he's cutting his losses very early, but Trump's not dumb in that way. You don't, cutting your losses is not really a, that's what normal democratic politicians do. You know, that is not necessarily a big part of the authoritarian playbook, you know, not cutting them without making people pay some price, right? And the Gates, no one paid, maybe he just never thought better of it. Gates was a ludicrous appointment and

But these other, you can't say three of them to the big agencies are just whimsical appointments, right? Yeah. Bill Kristol, have a wonderful Thanksgiving. My love to the family. And we'll see you back here next Monday. Everybody else, we'll see you tomorrow for another edition of the Bulwark Podcast. Peace. Day one, chip on your dresser. Get loaded out your heart.

I ask if you remember you say I don't know what you're talking about Swallow the truth, force the charcoal down my throat Finally come to, maybe I'll have something to show It's the first day of the new year, so I'm home

I swear off all the things I thought that

I'll come back again