Robert Kagan and Bill Kristol: It's Already Happening Before our Eyes
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Hello and welcome to the Bullard Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. It's Monday, so it's Bill Kristol, but we have an added guest, a friend of Bill Kristol, a friend of the pod, Robert Kagan. He is at the Brookings Institute. He was a member of the Washington Post editorial board until last Friday, right after we finished taping. The Washington Post decided that they were not going to endorse in this presidential election, despite endorsing in many other political races.

And Bob Kagan took that opportunity to resign from his position at the Washington Post. And we're delighted to have him here with us today. What's going on? I don't know. Lots, I guess. Thanks. Good to be here. Good to be with you. Okay. I want to start here because there may be some listeners that are with me on this. I think that there's some righteous outrage, of course, at Bezos. And we're going to talk about why.

But like, should newspapers even be endorsing president? Should we even be doing this? Is it why is it important at all the newspaper engages in endorsements? I kind of wonder if that's maybe an outdated practice anyway. Okay, well, I don't think the discussion as to whether we should have endorsements or not is important at this point. I mean, that's a very interesting theory of question. I'm sure the Colombian Journalism Review can take it up and we can all discuss that sometime. But that would be unfortunate a

distraction from what's actually going on, which is the takeover of institutions by a would-be dictator. And I think the journalists, I get the sense that the media loves having discussions about the media. There's nothing more exciting for them about that. But I think the result of that is, and I'm not accusing you of this, obviously, but I think the result of that is to lose sight of what's really important about this, which is if people wanted a sort of

model of how a free press winds up getting dismantled in a democracy that is becoming a dictatorship. This is how it happens. It isn't sending jackboots into the Washington Post and destroying their presses. It's someone like Jeff Bezos deciding that his business interests require him to basically deprioritize the Washington Post in his overall business empire. And that's what he's done. I would say the Washington Post, he placed the

behind the protection of Amazon and behind the protection of Blue Origin. And that's the consequence of having, unfortunately, you know, big moguls running media organizations. But, you know, the television networks are also huge corporations and huge conglomerates, and they're also vulnerable to this. So if people want to see how the free press is going to be dismantled, one of the so-called guardrails or institutions, it's happening right before our eyes.

Yeah, so the two of you have, you both edited a book together. I've listened to many of your conversations. I believe, I just pulled this up, I believe it was five years ago, was your conversation that you two had that I'd recommend we'll put in the show notes about authoritarianism and the threat to the liberal world order. I feel like, Bob, you've been at the forefront of kind of going there as far as using the words fascistic, authoritarian, whatever, with regards to Trump, where maybe some other commentators were a little bit

shy to do that. After what we've heard from John Kelly and Mattis recently, and Millie, people are feeling much more comfortable talking about that. But explain, you know, at the kind of biggest level, what you think is happening with the Trump movement and why you think it's important to just call it what it is.

I called it fascism because it's so clearly fascism. I don't think that, you know, I don't want to make a big, get into a big semantic argument. We can sit down with Robert Paxton and like, you know, parse this stuff out over the years. But first of all, fascism is the malady of democracies in particular, and it's a malady of the popular age. You know, there was no fascism when you had monarchies. This is a, this is a purely a function of having popular government or at least,

you know, governments that need to have some kind of popular legitimacy. And so if a democracy goes bad, it's likely to go bad toward fascism because fascism appeals to people. I mean, it appeals to a broad number of people. And in fact,

Trump would be nothing without his followers. It's his followers that give him power. It's his followers that initially cowed the Republican Party to turn over all its power to Donald Trump. And it's his followers that have, I would say, even these corporate titans afraid because, after all, these are their customers, among other things, in addition to they're not wanting to get on the wrong side of Trump.

And so, you know, what we saw in Madison Square Garden, I watched the news coverage of it and I thought that there was a certain amount of continuing surprise that Trump would say these horrible things or people on stage would say horrible things and the audience was lapping it up. But of course,

Trump, in many respects, has been playing directly to this populist mob, if you will, throughout the campaign. And really, the only thing that I find shocking is not that there are millions and millions of Americans who don't in any way believe in our democratic system. They don't believe in the principles of the founders. That has always been true, as I have gone through in some detail in a book I published this past spring. But, you know, the real question is, why are Republicans

people who like write for the Wall Street Journal going along with that? Why are so many people who were not necessarily, I mean, look, what we're looking at mostly is the John Birch Society, the McCarthy movement, the Klan, all those groups wrapped up together and sort of grown. But where are all the people who used to say that they were against all that kind of stuff on the Republican conservative side?

That's the part of this that I find rather amazing. It's both the conservative elites, if you will, as well as the business elites. It takes us back to the post thing. I'd like to hear from just both of you on that Bezos question of, and many historians have written about this, Tim Snyder wrote about this, we had him on, but how people adjust their behavior in the face of authoritarianism. I think that, to me, is

is the biggest takeaway from what was happening at the post. But anyway, Bob, you go first, then Bill, I want to hear what you think about that. No, no, that's right. And Jonathan last wrote a great piece, which exactly spells out what's going on here. And by the way, this was predictable. I don't want to, I'm not trying to pat myself on the back because who cares, but I also predict that it was predictable that eventually corporate interests would have to find some way to accommodate themselves to whatever the government was going to be. And it's

It's not about Republican and Democrat. I mean, it's about Democratic or non-Democratic. And we saw this with Jamie Dimon back in at the beginning of this year when he made those friendly comments about Donald Trump, which he's been, you know, interestingly, he's been beaten up a lot about it. I know that his wife is very unhappy about it, but he's never really retracted any of it. And he is not endorsed Kamala. And what that's about is that was Jamie Dimon himself.

head of whatever vast Morgan, I can't keep track of what all these conglomerates are, but basically saying to Donald Trump, hey, I'm good. You know, you're not going to get any trouble out of me when you get elected. So, and also saying to, I would say, you know, maybe his stockholders that, you know, don't worry, we're going to get along with this next guy, regardless of what he is. And I think we're seeing corporate America very rapidly move in that direction. And it's just happens to be that the most glaring and sort of

shocking example of this is what Jeff Bezos has just done. Bill, I want your take on that, but since he invoked JVL, I want to read from his column this weekend for anybody that has not seen it already. He was cribbing also from a piece that Christopher Harrison wrote. And he writes, America's oligarch moment makes us more like 1990s Russia than we want to believe. Russian democracy died because their institutions and politicians were not strong enough to enforce the law. Sound familiar? I could identify half a dozen laws that Elon Musk

has already broken without enforcement. Bezos censored the post because he knows that nobody will enforce the law and keep Trump from seeking political retribution. Where are you down the, where are we on the 1990s Boris Yeltsin Russia trajectory? Yeah.

I mean, Bob was in Russia for some of those early, I believe, just before, well, right around there, just before then, right? So you should talk about that too. No, I mean, the capitulation of elites, of institutions is one of the marks of the descent into authoritarianism. It's an important mark. It follows the rise of the authoritarian and his movement, and then different institutions collapse at different times. But I guess what I would say is that it can

It can happen faster than people think, and it can happen – people doing it are people who five years ago certainly wouldn't have thought of doing this and thought they were – I don't know what they really thought about themselves, but they were treated respectably. And here's the most striking thing, though. They're still going to be treated respectably. Jeff Bezos is going to pay no serious price for this.

Jamie Dimon paid no price. I mean, yes, he was a little bit, a little tongue-clucking. I bet Jamie Dimon was not disinvited to one single, you know, Davos-type event or elite-type event in, you know, Wyoming or wherever those things are, and, you know, in Aspen over the last six, eight, nine months. And I bet actually a lot of people quietly told him, yeah, that was probably, you may be right about that. I guess the last point I'll make, but I really want to hear Bob on the kind of the analogy with Russia, but also Turkey and many other places, incidentally, Hungary.

you know, they're not the U S we're stronger than they are, I suppose, and have stronger guardrails, but we don't have super strong guardrails, but anyway, getting back to diamond, they paid no price and they think they're, I don't think they're doing the right thing. They're savvy thing. I think they're being savvy. Yeah. They don't think as much regret on their part about what they're doing. Bob, where are you on the Yeltsin scale for America? How Yeltsin are we feeling?

Let's stop blaming Yeltsin. There was a complicated situation there. I don't think I've really put it under on Yeltsin. I'm always a little wary to some extent of analogies with other countries. Let's not lose sight of the fact that all this is being driven ultimately. It's not the only issue, but I do believe it is very much a central issue by race, by the question of race. And that is a particularly American problem because of our history of slavery and our history of hostility to immigrants and

You know, that's what immigration is really about, which is something also the media hasn't really been able to figure out. They keep talking about immigration and the Democratic Party, by the way, has given away tremendous ground on this. But the immigration issue is a race issue, as Trump has pointed out.

It's about poisoning the blood. And so race is at the root of all this. Anyway, that's why I just want to say I don't like to go too far with comparisons. But it is important to remember how why communism was so popular after World War Two, because, of course, people saw these corporations in Germany obviously line up with Hitler. And it's very clear that.

that even though capitalism may depend on liberalism, capitalists do not, and certainly don't feel that they do. They know that they can do absolutely fine in a Trump administration, and they will know how to deal with Trump, by the way, which is to pay him off. I mean, they'll find ways to pay off him or the family or whatever, and they'll do fine. And the

By the way, they have billions of dollars, so they're well protected, et cetera. The only way it's interesting, I mean, not the only way, but it's interesting to talk about other countries, but what we're really talking about are human beings. This is the behavior of human beings under certain circumstances. And the circumstance here is one driven by fear of an all-powerful dictator, which then has a logical consequence in the behavior of human beings, including even people who like to think of themselves as powerful,

Standing up for principle, all of a sudden they're thinking about their jobs. You know, they're thinking about their careers. They're thinking about their families. And this leads to all kinds of behavior, both, you know, openly craven behavior like Jeff Bezos, but also rationalizations for why people,

You should never resign from the job that you're in. You know what I mean? All those Trumpy people who worked for Trump and knew he was terrible but never resigned. They all had to be fired, as far as I could tell. Not a single one of them resigned. And I think we're seeing that playing out now in other areas. And we're going to continue to see that. You can count on the fundamental people.

selfishness of human beings, you know? You can see how, by the way, that hurt their credibility. We all were saying this in real time, but like the John Kelly stuff, it would be much more credible now if that interview was taken in 2018 or whatever. Yeah, after his resignation, which never happened, right? Right, exactly. Just as far as human beings, one more thing. So have you gotten any pushback? Are any of the flunkies calling you, Bob, and saying, oh, it's not like you think? Are they providing any spin besides the obvious for why

the lack of endorsement? I'm getting radio silence from the post in all directions. I haven't heard a word. That's telling, I think. I haven't heard a word. Well, look, I wasn't, you know, I'm not

I was with the Post in this capacity for about 25 years, but I was never like, you know, I'm not like some of those people who like their whole identity is wrapped up of being at the Washington Post. That's their whole life in some respects. And so, by the way, I mean, you know, my resignation was relatively easy. Other people have much harder choices to make, and I respect that. But I also can see the rationalizations that people come up with why it's really better to stay.

I want to just also, while we have you, lend your authoritarian expertise with a little bit more on the MSG rally and your reference to how race underlines a lot of it. I just want to play one clip from the rally. This was Stephen Miller, who will be, I guess, in charge of the Donald Trump immigration regime if he is to be elected again. Let's listen to Stephen Miller yesterday at Madison Square Garden. The cartels are gone. The criminal migrants are gone. The gangs are gone. America is for Americans and Americans only.

One man. And that man, ladies and gentlemen, that man took a bullet for you. He took a bullet for democracy. America is for Americans and Americans only. Only our cult leader can save us. What do you think about that? And maybe the context, the historical context of that rally, Bob? Well, yeah, I mean, that...

That has been a constant theme throughout American history. By the way, if you go back and read, as I had to for the research I did on one of my more recent books, read back the statements of the Grand Wizard of the Klan in the 1920s, when the Klan was a, you know,

really big national institution. It was fairly respectable. Politicians thought nothing of going to Klan rallies and speaking, et cetera. And he said all this, you know, the country's being taken away from us by, you know, make your list, Jews, obviously Blacks and others. And this is a constant theme, but it's always been, you know, when I say, when I mentioned the Klan, that that

the membership of the Klan was something between 3 million and 6 million people. If you listen to the language of the John Birch Society, this is the language of the John Birch Society. It's just that we never expected these people to take over an entire political party. These people have always been there, but now they've risen to the forefront. They've taken over the political party because the party has allowed itself to be taken over. So now we have effectively people who are using Klan-like rhetoric in open, in the public,

And we're all very ho-hum about it, it seems to me.

Yeah. The ho-hum thing was the most striking thing to me, Bill. I'm interested in your thoughts as well. I tried to get in last night, and Madison Square Garden did sell out. There were a couple thousand people outside that were left out, including me, after spending two and a half hours waiting with the very fine people who went to attend this event and chatting with them. But the thing that struck me the most was just how ho-hum it was. The people waiting in line were very... It was not like rabid...

you know, types of people outside. Like, you know, it wasn't like some of the Trump rallies that you see, like a very working class. Like, it was a lot of people that have office jobs that were standing out there with me, people that had money and fancy scarves that had flown in from other parts of the country to be there. The protests outside were pretty, we appreciate everybody that went out and had their voice heard, but it was pretty meek, and it was maybe an 80, 90-person protest. To me, the thing that was the most striking was how perfunctory it was.

So anyway, I don't know, Bill, what your kind of observations are on that or, you know, kind of how it relates to the 1939 of it all. Yeah, or the 1920s of it all. I mean, we still read about that history and even I know a little bit about it, but it didn't really come home to me until actually I read some other stuff and then Bob's book, The Spring. You know, it's just how deep that is in American history, how prominent it was in the 1920s. The story of the American South, we talk a lot about these other countries and I think there are things to be learned from them, but there is a

long story of the American South post-Civil War, which is very much this pattern, incidentally, of a total normalization of terrible behavior within a kind of elite

putting a nice gloss over it. You have the gentleman Bourbons of the South ruling sort of in collusion with the populist mobs and making it a little more respectable. Good reference. J.D. Vance recently said that he sees MAGA as the inheritors of the Bourbons, the Southern Bourbons, in their fight against the Yankees. Anyway, Bob, you go. No, I mean, this is the thing. I

I would say it looks to me like basically over the last few weeks, the movement and culminating in the Madison Square Garden thing. And I hadn't heard the Stephen Miller thing. Well, he he's right out of central casting. But the movement is and Trump and everybody there, it's baring its teeth. It's showing its claws now.

in a way that I think it, you know, it hadn't been quite so clear. It was like, let's talk about the economy, you know, a terrible economy. But now they've gotten to the essence of what this campaign is about, which is white supremacy and white Christian supremacy in America. The fact that there are Jews going along with this, in addition to some blacks, is really quite extraordinary to me. But they're baring their teeth and this is having no effect

on places like the Wall Street Journal. You know, I mean, here we are descending, I think, very rapidly into, by the way, what is likely to be a violent situation, because I think the violence on the right is really growing. The FBI is clearly worried about the militias. The militias, you know, really were quite active in North Carolina, you know, driving FEMA away. And all this is just getting as ugly as it can possibly be

And the Wall Street Journal editorial page is writing about how Kamala Harris is this and Kamala Harris is that. And I just think, you know, do they not see what's going on or do they not care? That is, of course, at the heart of this whole question. And I'm afraid I have to go with they don't care. They are also perfectly willing to live in this world that Trump is about to create. And

History will not forgive them. I'm sorry. Whatever Trump is about to lead us into, we will eventually find our way out of, I believe. Even after democracy fell in Athens, it was resurrected.

by one of my father's favorite figures, Thrasybulus. And that will happen again in America. And people will remember who sided with the dictator at this critical juncture. Well, Bob Kagan, thank you for being the one to care and speak out. And we needed the Thrasybulus reference to get us through our Monday. Bill Kristol is going to stick around. We're going to do a little bit more politics, politics, polls and ads and such. But I felt like in this moment, it was important to have Bob give us

an inside look I was having at the post and also the wider picture of the threats ahead. So thanks so much for coming on the Bullard podcast. Hope to see you again soon. Thanks guys. Thanks a lot.

All right, we're back with Bill Kristol. I want to talk more about MSG and some of the recent polls, but man, much to chew on there. I thought JVL was dark. That's a pretty ominous report about the state of the level of alarm from Bob Kagan. But what were your reactions to what he had to say? I mean, Bob is usually not, has not been, I've known him a long time, an alarmist because he's a historian and he always takes a somewhat longer view. And if you do that, you often say, well, we'll get past this. So at times when I've been

Can you believe our foreign policy, how bad it is? Bob has been a little bit of the, you know, look, America always takes its time to react, unfortunately, and we pay a price for it, but eventually we kind of come around. That's one lesson he takes from a lot of our history. But the fact that he's so alarmed is alarming. He's not an alarmist by nature. He's been right about this from the beginning. He wrote that piece in 2016 in the Post, and he used the word fascism. He said it was an American style of fascism. It's not going to look exactly like Italy or anything like that.

but he saw it early. The degree to which it has progressed is obviously startling nine years later. Nothing derailed it. The loss in 2020 didn't derail it. January 6th didn't derail it. The indictments, God knows that didn't derail it. But the wildly increasingly evident authoritarianism and radicalization of the movement hasn't derailed it. Now we see in these last days of the 24 campaign,

the respectable institutions capitulating more quickly as the movement gets more radical and more distasteful and more contrary to

tradition, right? I mean, that is very straight, you know, so that it's bad. I think he's right about that. You would think if someone had told you what's going to go in this direction and this and this and these are the kind of speakers you're going to have at the actual closing rally of the presidential candidate of one of the two major parties in the United States, and we're going to have Stephen Miller, arguably Trump's top policy aide in general, not just on immigration, saying that, you know, what was it? America is... America is for Americans and Americans only. I mean...

sort of statement, and I say this as a matter of personal privilege almost for a Jew to say such a thing, I find just so sickening. But, you know, it's fine. Let them keep out the Jews in 1941. There's nothing wrong with that. It's only for us Americans who are already here. Which ones, when they were already here? When Stephen Miller's great-grandparents wanted to come over? Should they have just been left wherever they were in Eastern Europe? I mean, the whole thing is sickening. And the fact that there isn't more of a reaction is...

striking, not only that, more of a reaction against, I don't know, was anyone jumping ship? Has there been a single statement? Except for a couple of Republicans nervous that they might lose some Latino votes in their states or districts. So there was one of the other clips I was playing, I'm not going to play it because it's just not even worth playing, but there was a comedian

People can hear my air quotes if you're just on audio that made some joke about how Puerto Rico is an island of trash in the ocean and made a watermelon joke about black people. I mean, it was just horrific. And there were a couple of statements, Rick Scott, a couple other people like tisking that because they know the political vulnerability of this, just like trashing Puerto Ricans and their 400,000 Puerto Ricans in Pennsylvania and not even doing the tongue-in-cheek type things

racist, joking stuff that Trump and Vance like to do. You know, it's just like flat, like straight at it. Puerto Ricans are trash. So they did put out some statements on that. But to me, the interesting thing about the speakers at the rally, this was ties to what Bob was talking about too, about the Wall Street Journal is like,

Mike Johnson was really the only one who you could call something like recognizably a traditional Republican, right? There are things about Mike Johnson that are weird as well, but like his remarks, the types of issues that he focused on, the final eight speakers were like Elon, Tulsi, and RFK Jr., who were all Democrats two minutes ago. It was JD and his populist demagogy.

It was the Trump family members, speaking of like a third world authoritarian oligarchy. It was like another business leader who...

who was just totally off his rocker, and then a couple of wrestling celebrities, Hulk Hogan. And there's no traditional. And then in Trump's remarks, I wrote about this in the article Friday about my pitch to Nikki Haley voters, to traditional Republicans to vote for Kamala this one time. And if people haven't read that yet and shared that with your friend or uncle or whatever who might fit this bill, please go do that.

Even the message of Trump doesn't have any of that anymore. Like in 2016, he mixed the Trumpy stuff with the old school Republican stuff. Like his message now is basically,

tariffing people, mass deportations now, targeting foes, domestic oil production, which is your one traditional plank, I guess, for the oil men out there. And grievances, cultural grievances. That's it. That is his stated message, his on-message message right now. And so to have that be the core message and have it be surrounded by this kind of parade of freaks is,

I think it's startling, as Bob said, that the Wall Street Journal types are going along with it. And it's also very telling about what the administration will look like, like who will be in the room. And it's these people.

And the other thing that Miller said, I guess almost all of them said, actually, Vance said, was, and incidentally, they wanted him dead. Right? There was this huge, you know, they. What is that? A third person plural without an antecedent, since they can't specify it. Since it's perfectly evident the assassination attempts was by some guy who was not part of any democratic or deep state they. But nonetheless, they, all the Trump, almost really, almost all the speakers said that.

And so they're willing to stir up, you know, genuine anger, obviously, and hatred and with just a flat out lie. And also one that would imply a massive conspiracy into the deep state and so forth. And the enemies of the people, the Democrats and the enemies within. And it's all laying the groundwork for

I don't know. I'm with Bob. The kinds of authoritarian actions we could see, maybe not on January 21st, 2025, but six months in, 18 months in, if there's some, quote, provocations that give them an excuse to do things, I think are much different from anything we saw in the first term, certainly, and probably different from things we've really even been thinking about.

Yeah. And the other thing that you have also is all of the election fraud stuff. And one of the striking things to me standing outside with, with the Volk was just like how many casual overheard convos I had, you know, I wasn't like quizzing people. Like I was just kind of like moving around and like, I'd talk a little bit to some people or I just stand there and like overhear conversations. It's just like matter of fact, like,

it was stolen from us in 2020. They're not going to, we're not going to let them do this again. And again, not the crazy people like people that also had, you know, their Charles Schwab app on their phone, like people that were dressed and talking about work. I was over here in conversation between like a younger guy and I couldn't, it wasn't like a father son is maybe an uncle situation or something.

And, you know, he's giving him work advice and business advice. And then that was seamlessly transitioning into concerns about election fraud and how it was taken in 2020. Right. Like matter of fact. And that to me, even a loss for Trump, we have this acute danger for a few months, at least the Kagan was talking about, about violence. And I want to play one other clip from the rally from Tucker Carlson on this point. It's going to be pretty tough for them.

10 days from now to look in the eye to America with a straight face, it's going to be pretty hard to look at us and say, you know what? Kamala Harris, she's just, she got 85 million votes because she's just so impressive. As the first Samoan Malaysian low IQ former California prosecutor ever to be elected president, it was just a groundswell of popular support. And anyone who thinks otherwise is just a freak or a criminal.

At this stage of the game, after nine years of listening to their lies and finding every single one of them totally false, no, it's not safe and effective, and no, she's not impressive. It's very hard for me to believe the rest of us are going to say, you know what, Joe Scarborough, you're right. You're right. She won fair and square because she's just so impressive. I don't think so. And to me, that is liberation.

It's the freedom to say what's obviously true as a free man and not a slave. And I just want to say thank you, Donald Trump, for that.

It's like a triple layer cake of awful there. You've got the racism, you have just like the Trump culty praise from somebody that you know privately said he despises Trump in text messages and that Fox deposition. And then you have just this laying the groundwork for January 6th, 2.0. I think that last point's really important and just for people who are focusing. Where does that $85 million come from? Right.

Well, Biden got 81 million votes, I believe, in 2020. If Harris were to win or even not win, but runs kind of where it looks like she's running at 48, 49 percent, at least to the popular vote, she'll probably be a little bit higher turnout. She'll probably get a few, maybe quite doesn't get Biden's percentage. She'll probably get in the ballpark of 85 million votes. She could well get more votes than Biden got just because of turnout, even if she doesn't do better as a percentage. Yeah.

And so Carson's pretty carefully laying the groundwork to say it's incredible. It can't be the case. It can't be true that Kamala Harris got 85 million votes, which is probably what she's going to get. So it is just flat out laying the groundwork for denying the election results whatsoever.

and leading to what? Violence or coup, I suppose, or getting Republican legislators to, there may not be enough Republican legislators in the key states to overturn these results. And if there aren't, if they're Democratic legislators and Democratic governors, as there are in some of these states, then you're talking about civil unrest there, or you're talking about going to the Republican, the House in some complicated way and trying to get them to refuse to accept these results. I mean, on the one hand, they're all such buffoons. And so, yeah,

you know, it's so childish in some way. It was like Hulk Hogan can't even rip off his shirt anymore. It's like Hulk is like limping up there on the stage doing just this, this, this campy down market imitation of his former self. And he's like trying to rip his shirt and he can't even do it anymore. It took him like three tries. I, the whole, it's just, it is really obscene. I got served. Like the scene is absurd. I mean, you know, Kamala Harris had the line at the convention that was so,

accurate, I think. I think she's something like, in many ways, Donald Trump is an unserious man, but the consequences of putting him in the White House are very serious. And it's a little hard to get your head around that for a minute. I mean, and I think he gets away with a lot because he's so unserious and went away, you know, the whole shtick and the routine and all that, but the consequences are serious.

As our friend Charlie Sykes used to say, a clown with a flamethrower still has a flamethrower. And in this case, the flamethrower is the key thing to focus on, not the clownishness, I think. And at some level, I actually think the clownishness is important because...

And I talked about this on Friday in the monologue about Trump and respond to what Ezra Klein had said about how the dangerous part of him is he has this disinhibition and that he had people around him that were more inhibited, that prevented some things the first time. None of those people are around. It's important to realize that the crazies and the clowns and the extremists will be in the inner circle this time. Yeah.

I mean, and they were at times last time, too, you know, but it was like a mix. I think it was more of this just mix of like you had Reince Priebus and these traditional Republicans and you had these generals and he brought in a couple of business guys like Rex Tillerson and then you had Bannon and, you know, like you had this like there's no mix left this time. It's just the crazies and the clowns.

And for those respectable types who they might suck in, they will have had to have bent the knee and made clear they're not going to do what Mattis and John Bolton and Gary Cohn did or tried to do sometimes, or even Jeff Sessions. I mean, the degree to which we just take it for granted. Of course, he's going to fire the special counsel. Of course, he's going to have an attorney general who's going to turn the whole Justice Department to his private litigation. I mean, Jeff Sessions in the Trump first term –

accused himself because he was told by the career attorneys at Justice that he had to do that. It was the right thing to do. And then Rosenstein appointed Mueller and so forth. I mean, that is such a different universe from the one we'll be living in if Trump wins. And that is something that the Wall Street Journalists of the world simply refuse to even confront. It's evidently true. And they pretend that, no, no, it'll be kind of like the first term, some distasteful stuff, but basically it'll be fine. Okay.

I've got a counter view. This is just across the transom here. So you get to react to it live. It's from our friends at No Labels. No Labels writes this. Calm down, America. Our founders put in a system of checks and balances that will be guardrails for whomever gets elected, whether you like it or not. There are no communists or fascists being elected. We live in an emotional social media world where everything is exaggerated.

Our founders were very worried about demagogues taking over, and they did try to put in guardrails as much as possible. And they say several times in the Federalist Papers, at the end of the day, you know, you do depend on the public to have some basic common sense or, and virtue, to use a word they use, to resist demagogues. They also, they didn't, some of these institutions and guardrails have been very badly eroded over the years. So that's just disingenuous, don't you think? Do they believe that, or are they just saying that as a way of, I don't know what, I mean-

I mean, it's my who knows, Mark Penn could be writing it is clearly for Trump. Yeah, I mean, no, I think that I think you can never go wrong with questioning the motives of the folks over at no labels. But it gives every all these business types. I was in New York last week. Very nice business people, actually, and responsible. Nothing like actually Elon Musk or even Bezos or anything like that.

But look, they're living there in their own world. They've got to run their corporations. And they're thinking, what if Trump wins? And so we talked a little bit about that in terms of some of the policies, tariffs and stuff. But it's also very clear they're not going to fight now. And not sure they should. I mean, what does it even mean for them to fight if you're running some big financial services firms?

They're going to hire people to lobby the Trump administration. They're going to be an unbelievable amount of money sloshing around, even more than for the last several years in MAGA world. Think about how much money is going to be sloshing around. And his whole economic plan is just going to be arbitrary tariffs. And it'll be a crony capitalism palooza. Yeah, Edgar makes this point well, and Andrew makes this point well in Morning Shots, that the tariffs thing is very bad economic policy, but it's also just an invitation to

it's a grift and graft and, you know, payoffs and sucking up. And as you say, it's a kind of a corporatism that it was one reason why people reacted against tariffs. And so, you know what, let's just have people pay taxes. All right. I want to talk, move to the political side of this. Kamala is giving a speech at the Ellipse on Tuesday. I have some thoughts about that as a strategic move. I'm wondering what yours are. I'm sort of uncertain. What do you think? I think that they're doing it for attention. Yeah.

And so I'm for it for this reason. Kamala gives a pretty standard stump speech when she's out there. It's a good stump speech, but that's what she gives. So it's hard to make news, right? If you're her. And this was, I think the point for the rally in Texas, you wanted to get abortion into the news. You wanted to get Beyonce into the news. You have an event in Texas with Beyonce, right? So I think that like the tactic is,

side of this is pretty obvious. It's the comms team trying to say, okay, how can we get ourselves some share of attention here as we head into the final stretch? The strategy side, I think it will depend more on what she does, how she talks about all of this. I continue to think that her job for the last week or so that we have here is, one, continuing to do everything possible to highlight why Trump is unacceptable to the

Nikki Haley voter types who still are wavering. Before they go in, you want the last thing that they remember to be the thing that they hate about Trump. And so I think this is a useful tool in that. I think there's a second goal that is continuing to kind of introduce new... She just has this challenge that Trump doesn't still, which is to people that aren't paying attention to

she's still trying to introduce herself to some small segment of the electorate. And I think that is related to the third thing, which is turning out the core constituencies, which is where the celeb stuff comes in. So that's her job in the ground game. So to me, that speech is aimed at that first category. And I'm sure she'll have some other things that she's going to do that aims at the other two. I basically agree. She needs to read and speech writers need to read your excellent piece from Friday, and I'm sure they will, on how to

went over what to say to the sort of doubting Haley voters out there. And, you know, there's a bit of a

I think, and disingenuous sometimes backlash against, you know, don't focus on Trump. I mean, you know, you should be still selling your, I don't know, healthcare plan or something like this. I don't know, a week out, they've spent hundreds of millions of dollars on their own, on her middle-class agenda and on her own middle-class roots, which is good. And they raised her from, you know, she took over down three or four because of Biden and she went to about maybe plus three, maybe now it slaps down to about plus,

Plus one, because they kind of ran, that sort of ran its course, I would say. At the end of the day, you do need to alarm people about Trump, maybe not using terms like fascist, if people don't think those, you know, Americans quite get that, just explain concretely what he will do in terms of our liberties and freedoms.

And that's, God knows, should be enough. And just quote some of the things he said about using the military and about deporting 15 million people and about how proud he is of the Supreme Court that gave us Dobbs and he'll have a chance to make more Supreme Court appointments. I don't think it's very, this doesn't need to be rocket science. And I don't even have a strong view on which of the many, the list of things you could cite would be most effective. They can test that. But I am struck that there are some on the Democratic side, this one super PAC,

forward, busy telling the New York Times that they're not really certain about this attack on Trump. And if only they could go, what tests best is really helping people more with their senior care. You know, so that does test well, because you know what? Everyone likes that. Of course it tests well, but Trump himself could just say, I'm for that too, which is what he said incidentally at the rally. And it's not a real test. And

And the degree of, to which, if I could just complain about some of our new Democratic friends, could they, you know, if they're running the $700 million super PAC that Biden blessed, and then Harris, to her credit, didn't shake up, took it over, kept the same people there, put a deed of done on the payroll there from the Biden White House. They've gone ahead and spent hundreds of millions of dollars on ads. They've been treated respectfully, left alone, so far as I can tell by the Harris campaign. You know,

Good they've done, honestly. And they can't shut up for the week before the election and whatever little stupid internal disputes they're having or whatever Biden resentments they're still nursing months later. They can't just keep to themselves. I really find it kind of astonishing.

We're going to put out this memo from the PAC. The PAC whose ads aren't that good, by the way. We've mentioned this several times. They're just kind of boring. I don't know who they're for. To me, I'm going to sound like this is when Charles Barkley goes on NBA and TNT after the basketball games. He's like, I'm not so sure about this analytics. Sometimes I talk about that. But the thing is, testing basketball and testing television advertisements is a different ball of wax.

because you're basing your message testing on these ads just to show up behind the curtain with people for a little bit. It's like you have people that are watching the ads. A lot of times it's like people that are playing some sort of game online, like you're playing a video game or something and to get to the next level, you've got to watch an ad and tell the person whether you like it or not. And it's like,

you're assuming a number of things, right? One, that people know what actually persuades them, right? Number two, that people are really paying attention that closely, right? And it's out of context. You can't run a real experiment. You know, it's not like, again, it's not like a basketball game where you just played a basketball game and now we've had an experiment. You can't run 100 elections and do ads with fascism ads and then ads with middle class ads and see which time she does better, right? So a lot of this is a little bit

A little bit of pseudoscience. So they have the little pseudoscience and they're going to the media to complain about what the campaign is doing. I agree. It's stupid and wrong. And I think that there's certain things you can learn from testing. And I've got friends that do message testing. I've been asking them about what it's showing. And one of them says to me that if you put the word Nazi in there,

it just tanks and that makes sense to me like intellectually like people like they're like okay really he's a nazi you know what i mean and also anybody that thinks that he might be a nazi is already voting against him or is a nazi themselves and is already for him right so it's kind of like is that that persuasive a message so i like there are things you can learn from this but yeah i'm with you this notion that like okay well nine out of ten voters liked the very generic ad about

about how they would pay lots for health care. And only eight of the 10 voters liked the ad that mentioned that Trump might be a fascist. So we should just do the boring ad about health care. I don't know. I'm not sure it's as clear cut as that. And I think that with their $700 million, they should run what they think is right and let the campaign do some stuff. And I think a mix of messages is really probably right. Which is what they've done, what the campaign has done. And they've spent all in there much, much more on the

and healthcare messages than on the Trump dictatorship message, let's call it. And John Kelly, there's a very modest buy apparently promoting him, even though there is data that we've seen it, that having Republican messengers and people who work for Trump as the messengers of Trump's danger does work better than a generic statement. If you have an ad with some voiceless, nameless narrator just saying Donald Trump is very dangerous, people are like, what's that?

If it's John Kelly, who was Donald Trump's chief of staff, he's a retired four-star Marine general. Here are his words. That does seem to have an effect. But anyway, they test this. The Harris people make up their own mind. I've got to say, all in, though, I just want to say this as we approach the end. She's not a perfect candidate. There are some things in the campaign I would have done differently. She's run a good campaign, and it's been a good campaign. And the campaign has been a good campaign. They hit the key things they had to do, the launch, the convention speech, the debate.

very impressively, I'd say in all three cases, incidentally. Not every campaign pulls that off. Certainly not a campaign that had to get organized after Biden dragged his feet on whatever it was, January, July 20th, I guess, when they finally got out. So the campaign has done a good job. The candidate has done a good job. The super PAC

I don't know. You can't prove the opposite of what would the world be if they hadn't spent the $700 million they raised. But it's not so obvious to me that the Super PAC has done such a great job. And there's a Super PAC in the New York Times whining and complaining and covering their ass ahead of time in case Harris might lose. So I'm just annoyed at them. Maybe you noticed that. I agree. No, that's great. That's a good rant. That reminds me of the rants I used to do about the Jeff Rowe-run DeSantis Super PAC. The media also loves talking to...

fancy strategists at these things and like treating them like they're really Svengali's and I'm like Jeff Rose spent nine figures to watch run his candidate lose half his vote share from when he started like how great could their ad test message testing have really been anyway um final thing I want to talk just briefly about the senate

as our two New York Times polls out. And, you know, the state of play is essentially this, that it would take something very surprising, I think, for the Democrats to win the Montana Senate race right now, even though Jon Tester is a good candidate. It's just the nature of our polarized times. And so if that is the case and the Republicans win in Montana and West Virginia, that puts them at 51 senators. To get back to 50-50, the Democrats would need to win either Texas or Nebraska. The Times, CNN has a poll out

this morning that has Trump up 10 in Texas, but Cruz only up four. And then in the Nebraska Senate race, I've been trying to get this guy on. So we'll see if we can make it work for the election, but he's an independent Democrat.

candidate running against the Republican Deb Fischer. Deb Fischer is only up by two. And this guy's kind of like a working class, kind of populist independent type, you know, a little bit, a little bit mansion-y, a little bit tester-ish, kind of like a union guy that's running, but is more moderate on cultural issues.

and Dan Osborne. And he's run a very good race. And that race looks very close and might be a potential out, not for Democrats, since he would be an independent. He said he wouldn't caucus with Democrats, but it would be a way to keep the Republican number down to 50. So anyway, I don't know if you have any final thoughts on the Senate races, but just wanted to bring that up.

These things sometimes do surprise, and I think they're a little less baked in than presidential numbers for obvious reasons. People don't know the challengers well, and the case is certainly of Osborne and Nebraska, to some degree, but all right in Texas.

So I'm a little more open to the notion that we could have surprises in both those races, actually. And even Tester, incidentally. Tester's closing, it looks to me like, and she's got problems. And Tester's a very impressive candidate who, you know, is it out of the question that he pulls even and wins? I don't think so. So I would say just in general, I don't know why I feel this now. I talked to too many people late last week, and they were all down in the dumps. So I guess I got slightly down in the dumps. But since this is our next-to-last discussion on politics,

before the election. I'm actually slightly optimistic. I don't know. I just feel like there will be some revulsion among some voters against Trump and Trumpism. And at the end of the day, if you look at the actual polls and the actual swing states, they're even basically. They're really almost totally even. But Harris is as much ahead by one point in some states as Trump is ahead by one point in other states.

And I see no reason why the late break shouldn't be even tiny bit to Harris, even or a tiny bit to Harris. And she could, I think she could well win. I actually do think she's going to win. That's a great place to leave it. I'm with you. I'm an emotional rollercoaster. I said this on the post game that we did last night.

after the Madison Square Garden event for members. If you're not a member, this is your moment. TheBorg.com slash subscribe. We had Bob Kagan on at the top. I guess some people might have some extra walking around money after they've canceled their Amazon Prime and Washington Post subscription. So you could come join us for some of these members-only events that we have. But I am an emotional rollercoaster because that's just my nature. And I'm also...

upset just about the fact that we even are here at all right and like so even if she does win narrowly i'm going to be happy for a minute but i also i'm going to be filled with rage at the fact that we even had to do this that had to sweat this out that said as pluff has said the race hasn't moved in a month just hasn't you can look at micro adjustments or whatever but she's had a narrow lead with a narrow path through the blue wall maybe with north carolina and

And that's been how the races looked like essentially since after the debate. And it felt differently then because, you know, it felt like the momentum might've been going up and right. Like, and then maybe the sky was the limit or whatever, but like, just because it felt differently then doesn't mean that the race was different. Like the, the race is what it is. It's very close. It's narrow. She has a clear path.

God willing, she holds on in the states that she needs for the clear path. But I think that's what the state of play is going to be like until next Tuesday or maybe next Thursday or Friday. So buckle up. Stick around with us for that, Bill. Thank you for your uplifting final note. We'll be back. This is not our last. We'll have one more repartee before Election Day. And we'll be back here tomorrow with another edition of the Bulldog Podcast. We'll see you all then. Peace.

♪ So gather at Times Square ♪ ♪ Let's all say a prayer ♪ ♪ From Walter Disney and Mike Tyson ♪ ♪ At Madison Square Garden ♪

And the lights came on in the middle of the night What I should do with my life, how I should spend my time I'll be a star, poker and I'll give you a white I have the diamonds, I have the diamonds

And Jesus said, they're a girl's best friend, and hell, they'll last forever. And Jesus said, now take her hand and raise this heartless bastard son.

And then the lights came on in the middle of the night What I should do with my life, how I should spend my time I'll be strong, I'll burn, they'll give me a ride Have the diamonds, God, have the diamonds, please

Oh, what a pity the world's not white. Oh, what a shame I don't have new eyes. I must have been a kind of guy. And I made the world it would be all right.

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