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- [00:02]
Andrew Egger
This July 4th at Lowe's get up to 45% off select major appliances plus save $80 on a select Char Broil Performance series gas Grill. Now $299. Our best lineup is here at Lowe's. Lowe's we help you save valid through 78 while supplies last selection varies by location. See Lowes.com for more details.
- [00:25]
Bill Kristol
Visit your nearby Lowe's Foreign
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Donald Trump
I'm Jake
- [00:31]
Bill Kristol
Stauch, co founder and CEO of Cervel. We built Servl to automate the IT work that slows companies down. Onboarding password resets, access to applications. My laptop stopped working. While employees wait for help, their real work is put on hold. It desperately wants to automate this work and that's why they need Serval. You just tell Servil what you want to automate in plain English and it's built. No drag and drop workflows, no expensive consultants. Employees get unblocked and IT teams go from drowning in tickets to building what actually matters. With Cerbal, it becomes the AI engine powering the entire company. This is a new way to run it. We guarantee you'll automate 50% of all tickets and we'll prove it to you in a free four week pilot. Go to cervel.com tickets that's S-E-R-V-A-L.com tickets. Hello everybody. Welcome to Morning Shots Live. I am Andrew Egger. This is Bill Kristol. We write the Morning Shots newsletter for the Bulwark. Come to you live every Tuesday morning to talk about it, to talk about other stuff in the news. We have a lot to talk about today. There's a lot of news out of Iran. Of course there's a lot of news about the reflecting pool. More than we are probably gonna get to talk about. We're doing so much reflecting po but we wanted to start off with with two quick things here, quick but significant. One of which is the we are seeing a weird bubble in the stock market today. The opposite of a bubble in the stock market today. I guess stocks are down this morning. Not for any directly Iran related reason, but rather having more to do with the thing that's been underpinning the economy all along that we probably don't talk enough about which is this giant AI and tech boom that we have seen for the past couple of years that have been really juicing stock markets coming out of Asian markets. Last night we saw quite a sell off for some of these tech stocks. Dipping quite a bit over there. Already dipping a couple of points here. In the United States futures this morning. So we're going to be monitoring that today. Could just be, you know, a little correction. But if, if there were to be a change in direction for tech stocks more broadly, that would be gigantic economic news. It would reset a lot of our assumptions about what, what's happening in the US Economy right now would be another story that we would spend a lot of time talking about. So just to say that right off the top, that's something that's happening today that we're monitoring. But what we really wanted to talk about off the top today is, Bill, what you wrote about in today's Morning Shots newsletter, which is Bill Pulte, the acting director of National Intelligence, who we have been talking about for a number of weeks as the incoming acting director, but is now doing the acting. The acting has begun. CNN reported yesterday that he's in the building, that the deep state firings that he has that are basically his one and only named task for this brief period of time when he's in there as the weird sort of McKenzie consultant hatchet man for the president to come in and fire a bunch of intelligence officials. That's beginning. Starting. So, Bill, you wrote about this this morning. Can you kind of just give us a sense of, of where we are with this and what this signals about, about the current and future plans for the administration?
- [03:53]
Andrew Egger
Yeah, sure. I mean, one thing I hadn't noticed till I went over stuff earlier this morning, went over the timeline is how quickly this has all happened. I mean, Tulsi Gabbard announced a resignation. Maybe it was a forced resignation, maybe it was voluntary, whatever In, I think, May 22nd. So exactly a month ago, Pulte was announced by Trump as the person who was going to appoint to be acting director of national intelligence on June 2nd. So that's exactly three weeks ago, if I've got my math correct. And then all this whole sequence of events Pulte announced. It's a bit of an uproar. Oh, he's only going to be acting. Don't worry too much about it. And Gabbard originally was going to stay till the 30th, till a week from now. Then suddenly on June 9, I think it was Gabbard's leaving earlier. Pulte will take over on the 19th. Ooh. People get even more alarmed up you got him nominated a real person, Mr. President. So we can confirm and prevent PT. Even the Republicans are saying that at that point, Republican senators. So on the 11th, Jay Clayton from New York is nominated president says he's going to nominate them. The paperwork goes up to the Hill. They have a hearing scheduled on the 17th. And then. And you wrote about this a little bit at the time, just a week ago on the 17th, Trump pulls, while he's over in Europe at the G7, pulls the plug on the Pulte nomination. It's a little unclear to me whether he formally withdraws the nomination or somehow pauses it. I don't know. Can presidents pause nominations? What's the sense on the Clayton.
- [05:18]
Bill Kristol
On the Clayton nomination?
- [05:19]
Andrew Egger
Yeah, Clayton. I'm a little murky on the sort of legality of exactly where Clayton now stands. Is he a pending nominee? Is he been pulled back and then will be renominated, so to speak, or resubmitted the paperwork by Trump anyway, it doesn't really matter because the point is the Republican senators there was like talk for 10 minutes about, well, we just go ahead and have a hearing because he's the nominee. Trump can't just tell us our hearing schedule. But Trump did enough to either persuade them or maybe force them by withdrawing the papers to not be able to have a hearing on Clayton. So that's all. This is all happening a week ago. And then two days after that, after all the complaining about Pulte, he's in there on Friday the 19th and yesterday, Monday the 22nd, according to CNN and others from that reported this, too. He's already firing a whole bunch of people. And much to Trump's pleasure. Trump had asked him to do this ahead of time and said he would want Pulte to do this ahead of time. So, I mean, pretty amazing. He's mentioned three weeks ago, he's announced horror that he could be there even for a day. Now he's there and firing people right and left and no particular evidence that he's going anywhere. I mean, Clayton hasn't been resubmitted. They have this ludicrous excuse about the Clayton has to say, as the U.S. attorney for the Southern District until the next one is confirmed and that. So that's not going to happen for a while. If it does happen, and Trump's very Trump, I mean, in the very short term, at least you got to say Trump has won this little tactical game of, I don't know what you want to call it, musical chairs kind of thing. He's got the person he wants in there, true henchmen, totally unqualified, will do what but will really do the political work that Trump wants done at National Intelligence. And you know, it's funny, last point. I mean, when Trump Pulled the plug on the hearing. That was insanely early in the morning. On the 17th, he was in Europe, so he was ahead of us by a few hours. And that was a true social post. As I recall, at 3:45am There was a lot of hubbub that morning about Republican senators caught by surprise. Whoa. Trump, he's so erratic. He doesn't know what he's doing. He's got Thune angry at him and maybe even Cotton, who's chairman of the committee that would confirm it, confirms the dni. And there's a little bit of all this. I'm sure they were annoyed, some of these Republican senators. But you know what? A week later, and I think you made this point actually that day, though, I think that Trump knows what he's doing in his own kind of wacky way. And now he's got Bill Pulte there firing people.
- [07:44]
Bill Kristol
Yeah, it does seem as though he has accurately taken the measure of this Republican resistance in the Senate that we've talked about. There's been a lot of chatter about, and it is, you know, it's worth talking about because it's new. For the longest time, many of these senators were unbelievably supine and just completely, you know, one. One went. Went with one at one thing after another from the president just completely willing to do anything he wanted. And now the fact that there is at least this nominal resistance to some of his crazier whims is notable. But it does seem as though Trump has accurately assessed that a lot of this, all he has to do is sort of one more silly procedural move to dodge around a point of resistance. And it's like for these senators, just mustering up that, that courage and that willingness to say no one time is still about all they can do. And then when, when Trump, you know, dodges around them, does a little juke, move around whatever procedural thing they have put up in his path, they. They are not going to continue to match him step for step to keep the thing blocked that they want to keep blocked, because that would require constant sort of re aggravations of this, of this transgression that they are, that they are carrying out against Trump and by extension, against Trump's voters. I think we almost didn't dwell enough on, on the Jay Clayton stuff when it happened last week. I appreciate that you kind of walked us through it just now because it really was astonishing in almost any other universe that the rapidity with which the Senate was moving to get Trump's guy through Trump's purported guy, Jay Clayton, the guy Trump had nominated for this job, would be seen as really helpful for the President. I mean, none of the President's nominees ever get this sort of accelerated timetable. And it was only because of the threat of Bill Pulte hanging over that Republicans and Democrats seemed to be gearing up to get, to move him from nomination to confirmation within about, what, 72 hours. I don't remember exactly the specifics, but they were going to waive all kinds of different procedural moves. They were going to move forward on unanimous consent, which any single senator could have, you know, capsized. And just the, the degree to which the unfitness of Bill Pulte was demonstrated by all of that was remarkable. That, that, that even seemingly the entire Democratic conference was ready to just waive this other somewhat more respectable guy with plenty of his own sort of Trump baggage, by the way, but, but a million miles better than Bill Pulte. They were ready to wave him through. And, and then it was like Trump was like, well, not like that. I don't want to do it like that. I want Bill Pulte in there for a couple of minutes. And so he slams the brakes on his own nominee, as you mentioned, lays out this completely ludicrous excuse. It's not that the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York is an unimportant job, but they can get along. I mean, they'd be fine, right? The idea that, the idea that you have to screech sort of our national intelligence capabilities to a halt and not get the guy in there that you want for that job for that, you know, intel synthesis job, you know, it beggars belief. It's not serious. It doesn't make any sense. Even when Trump tweeted it out, he, he threw that in along with like three other sort of nonsensical half rationalizations, because none of these were the real rationalization. The real, the real reason that Trump wanted to slam the brakes is because he didn't know that they were going to move so fast to not to confirm Jay Clayton. And he wanted Pulte in there to do what he's doing right now. So that was all a crazy story that we glossed over last week, honestly, among all this other stuff that's happening, although we did write about it in the newsletter, as you mentioned. But let's talk a little bit now about the actual job. Obviously, we have been concerned about hatchet man Bill Pulte, whose entire resume up until now has been a matter of rifling through documents. He probably shouldn't be rifling through that he has access to because of his current federal job, his current top federal housing job to get dirt on Trump's enemies. Of course, we have been concerned that acting DNI gives him a lot more ability to do that. Specifically. It also potentially gives him the ability to do a lot of what Tulsi Gabbard has been doing while she's been dni, which is rifling through these same files to dig up dirt on the 2020 election to potentially give pretexts for future election meddling should Trump choose to do that in 26 and 28. But it seems like the first thing that they've got going out of the gate, at least in public, maybe these things are going on in private, but the first thing publicly that they are doing and talking about doing is this sort of intel community purge this July
- [12:18]
Andrew Egger
4th at Lowe's get up to 45% off select major AppLian plus save $80 on a select Char Broil performance series gas Grill. Now $299. Our best lineup is here at Lowe's. Lowe's. We help you save valid through 78 while supplies last selection varies by location. See lowe's.com for more details.
- [12:41]
Bill Kristol
Visit your nearby Lowe's. I don't know if people really have a sense of what these people do. And I don't know if people really have a sense of how bad it already is there in terms of, you know, doge related cuts and people quitting and morale being low. But I mean, Bill, what's the difference just in, in broad strokes between an intelligence community that functions and an intelligence community that has been twisted into this retribution arm that the president seems to want just in terms of, you know, average Americans, like, why should they care that this is happening to the intelligence community?
- [13:19]
Andrew Egger
No, that's a good way of asking the question. I mean, it is striking that Tulsi Gavin already reduced the size of the home office, the center off central office, let's call it, of the Director of National Intelligence. And they're reasonable people and I actually am sort of on this side. Who would prefer to have more of these guys go back to their home agencies, the National Security agency or the CIA or DIA, all these different 18 components of the intelligence community as opposed to being in sort of headquarters. So in a way, and this is being presented to the media by some sort of Trump apologist, not by Trump himself. I wouldn't say really as kind of just a rational kind of reallocation of resources, you know, and getting people back into the field and out of headquarters. I don't know. There could be a tiny bit of that going on, which wouldn't be harmful, I suppose. But at the end of the day, how does Bill Pulte know who to fire? Has he evaluated the intelligence work of these people? I don't think so. Maybe there are deputies that Gabbard left behind who've done so. Those are all political appointees, I'm going to bet. And I don't trust Bill Pulte. I didn't would have trusted Tulsi Gabbard to be making these decisions based just on, you know, kind of an analytical look at where the better. Maybe this person should be over at Langley and not here at the headquarters and this person should be sent out into the field somewhere else. That's not. Maybe there's some of that going on, but that's not the heart of it. I don't think the heart of it is the heart of all the other firings that have happened. Hagseth at Defense, Bondi and Blanchard, Justice Patel at the FBI. Getting rid of people who you don't trust to be totally loyal and then you can replace them with people who will be totally loyal. And this has been an underappreciated, I think part of what Trump's henchmen have been doing for 18 months and pretty successfully, it seems like. Right. I mean, I mean, we can say all my friends who are lawyers, the quality of the people of justice is way below what it once was. And they are losing some cases probably because they don't have the best lawyering and so forth. But at the end of the day, he's got hundreds, I guess, thousands of people now at justice, hundreds, maybe thousands of people in the Defense Department in the case of Hegseth. Same with the FBI, following orders, doing what the political masters want them to do, and their political masters are doing what Trump wants them to do. So the degree of politicization of these national security agencies, of the government is a serious thing. And I've been struck to talk about this a little bit. I think some of these orders. You think, I know. Shouldn't there be a little more resistance to some of them? Maybe there is. We're not seeing it, of course, you know, whether it's blowing up the drug boats, you know, with the military or some of the stuff that justice is doing. How are they getting people to even bring some of these insane cases and anti First Amendment cases and so forth. But it turns out that they have that part of their overall authoritarian effort, I think has gone pretty well for them. And they've also changed the rules and made it much easier to fire people. They've had some help from, from the courts. The courts are less willing to get involved in this, I would say, than some of the other cases where they've been protecting people in the private sector, so to speak. And they and Russ fought at omb, knows how to manipulate the government rules. And Steve Miller has been in government now a long time and he knows it too. Those two are really pulling a lot of those strings. Anyway, so I put it all together as we should be pretty worried about the authoritarian threat here broadly of which Pulte and DNI is a part.
- [16:35]
Bill Kristol
Yeah, yeah. And it seems to me, and maybe, maybe I, maybe I overshoot this in my own analysis, but it seems to me you're laying out sort of the case for the positive damage that these guys can do when they're in there in terms of just really weaponizing and politicizing these pretty broad surveillance and intelligence tools. Obviously, we don't really know yet to what extent they'll try. It seems pretty clear they will try, but we don't know what it's going to look like. We don't know what kind of resistance they will run into. A lot of that's a black box so far. I think there is another side of this which is sort of the, the sins of omission, the, the negative space damage that happens when you take, you know, they're not just standing up a spy on our enemy's agency out of whole cloth here. Right. They are taking an institution that already exists for a specific purpose. They are stripping away a lot of what it is doing for that purpose. I mean, they've already lost, for instance, their ability to do FISA 702 surveillance abroad, period. Based on all of this insanity. They've apparently considered that a worthwhile trade to, to hamper our own intelligence gathering capabilities abroad rather than pull the plug on Bill Pulte here. But that's just one kind of small example, example of the much broader way in which they just really are not prioritizing the normal work of the intelligence community here at all. They are willing to let the normal work of the intelligence community go by the wayside in order to accomplish these secondary political aims. These, these weaponization aims. And the weaponization aims are bad on their own, like you've just laid out. But so is leaving aside the other work. And I just keep going back to, I mean, like I came up At a time when it seemed like one of the main things that Republicans were hitting Democrats on all the time was just that they just were not fundamentally serious about the threats that were out there. Right. That, that, you know, you, you had to proactively be looking all the time for the next Al Qaeda, the next Osama bin Laden, the next isis. And like, there are people out there who mean Americans harm. They're going to try to get here and hurt Americans. We should know about that before they do. And, and just to see this level of apathy toward, toward the normal tools that we have in order to combat all of that. And not just that, but when you pair that with what's going on in Iran right now, where, you know, a big enormous criticism of the JCPOA a decade ago was you're, you are cozying up to Iran, you are treating them as though they are responsible, reliable narrators in a lot of this stuff. You're letting them get their hands on more money, that they are going to immediately plow right back into all these various efforts to hit at the United States. And so to see, I mean, it's like, it's like a Twilight Zone thing out there right now, to see a Republican administration completely apathetic toward the normal intelligence gathering work of the intelligence community taking those and pointing them back internally at their own enemies instead, at the same time that they are now the ones who are giving, you know, money hand over fist to this regime in Iran. It's, I don't know. You have worked in this stuff a long time, Bill. Is this, is this a crazy way of looking at it? I mean, like, what do you see as the actual, like, intelligence damage that could be done here?
- [20:00]
Andrew Egger
So it's of course, hard to know, but that's also kind of black box. We don't know what plots have been thwarted, what plots haven't been thwarted, how much bad intelligence contributed to a not good outcome in Iran, how much intelligence was fine. It's just that they didn't have an intelligence strategy overall. Some of that both are probably true. No, but I think you make, it's an important point. And I would say just generally, if you step back and look at one sense from what we can get from public outside data of how the FBI has been working, how the intelligence worked in Iran, for example, how the FBI's been working in general in some of these cases, how the Justice Department to go over there, has been working, one does not have the sense these are under Trump's people's, Trump's Henchmen's leadership, wonderfully well functioning agencies. So how much of a price we're paying? Are they 20% less effective or less accurate or 60%? I really don't know. And it is hard to tell. It's even hard to tell a little bit when you're in government because you don't quite know what. You don't know what intelligence was wrong until later and so forth. And unfortunately, you don't always know what plots you didn't stop until they happen. Right. But no. And people I've talked to who are in or close to these different parts of the government are closer to where. I'm glad you made your point because I'm more interested, more sort of obsessed with the politicization, weaponization side of it, which, of course, is what Trump's most obsessed about. It's not accepted. He doesn't understand that there might be a trade off. He doesn't care. He much cares. Cares a lot more about his opponents at home than the enemies abroad. But I do also think that it's good that you emphasize this because people I've spoken to who are close to it are close to where you are. I mean, that's to say that I'm where I am, too, but I just haven't expressed it much. They're pretty freaked out. I mean, they're not total. You know, we have a big multi layered, you know, intelligence community with some redundancy and so forth. So, you know, one part can go astray. Awry. But up at Fort Meade, they're still collecting unbelievable amounts of data. 702 program sort of can go on for a while, but kind of grandfathered, you know, I mean, it's hard to know, right? But there are a lot of professionals who care a lot about this country and presumably you're doing their best. But I'd say people I know who know much more than I do, who've been involved much more recently than I was, than I've been, are worried. Are worried.
- [22:14]
Bill Kristol
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think it. The Justice Department is a pretty good analogy because a lot of what the Justice Department does plays out in public. And you can see it happen, right, where there still are tons of really competent career lawyers there who are doing the best they can. But you also have these, you know, the Alina Habas and the Lindsay Halligan of the world who have been, you know, stuffed in to run the show here and there and who have been very publicly failing and flailing around and just falling on their faces in many of These cases that they've been given and the, the batting average of the organism as a whole, the apparatus as a whole has grown worse. And you can just see that happening in real time. And we have no, we have no similar insight into what's going on in the intelligence community. But it does seem plausible that we are seeing the same kinds of stuff happening in there for the same kinds of reasons and it's just not visible to the public. So that's sort of a disquieting thought.
- [23:09]
Andrew Egger
One more analogy. You mentioned the Reflecting pool before and I always like to come back to that briefly, since we especially you've done such good reporting on that. But that's a good case. I mean, there's corruption, that's bad. There's no bid contracts which offer to corrupt, that's bad. But also, it turns out the actual work product is usually not as good. Not 100%. Right. That's probably in the old days there was, I don't know, Richard Daly gave his cronies contracts in Chicago. But for all we know, they did an excellent job of building whatever housing they were building that they didn't have a, you know, that they got a no bid contract down. They took a little more off the top. Maybe that if it had been competitive, but the actual housing, I'm just making this up, you know what I mean? Stood up fine for 40 years or something. On the whole, though, one would assume that the work product is less good from these kinds of crony no bid contracts. I think we've seen that with the reflecting pool. And I would sort of say this analogously. I think this is also true of what we're seeing in, as you say, the Justice Department with the lawyers and probably unfortunately the intelligence community. And that stuff's important. I mean, and both if you're fighting wars, but also just in terms of protecting Americans here at home and abroad. Now, maybe they're doing fine, maybe they've done a good job in the world so far. I thank God the World Cup's been very smooth, you know, in terms of security and maybe they've done a lot of good things that we don't know about, but yeah, it's worrisome.
- [24:30]
Bill Kristol
Yeah. Yeah. Well, we, we may get around to a bit more of reflecting pool stuff if we have time at the end because Trump said some truly insane things yesterday that it would be nice to chew over a little bit. The reflecting pool stuff, it's hard not to keep going back to. It's a little bit empty calories, a Little bit junk food. It's one of these things that just sort of, you just watch it and it kind of makes our case for us. There's nothing really for us to add necessarily, but we may get around to a little bit more of that at the end. Before we do that, we should eat our, our vegetables a little bit more with regard to Iran, because there has been some news coming out of Iran. Actually, before I even do that, let me just say one more time. I'm Andrew Egger with the Bulwark, Bill Kristol with the Bulwark, editor at large of the Bulwark over there. We write the Morning Shots newsletter. Come come to you live on Tuesdays. That's what this is. Today is Tuesday. So we're here. We're glad you're here, too. Let's talk about Iran a little bit because we have had some developments. Most of what we have seen so far has just been agreement to continue agreeing on the stuff that's already been agreed to, different apparatuses and mechanisms apparently set up, per the vice president yesterday, in order to continue to have a way to stop, for instance, ongoing fighting in Lebanon from spiraling further and have mechanisms to figure out how to keep the Strait of Hormuz open and so on and so on, the stuff that was already agreed to in the memorandum of understanding. But it has been interesting to watch these guys continue to, to try out all these different strategies to basically get the Iran hawks off their back, right? The Iran hawks who correctly assess that Trump is basically giving away the farm under duress to Iran in these negotiations, giving them everything that they want, not getting very much back in return. And they, they keep trying different things. Last week at the G7, it was Trump just basically getting pretty petulant and saying, hey, look, I had to make a deal because the economy was going to crash and I was going to be Herbert Hoover otherwise. And nobody wanted to see that, least of all me. And yesterday we got kind of a new wacky rejoinder from Vice President Vance on the idea that, that we're giving Iran all this money that, as we mentioned before, they in theory could just plow right back into Hezbollah and back into other regional proxies and back into other entities who just really directly want to do the US And Israel direct, immediate harm. And so here's what the vice president had to say about one idea. They were, they were batting around for combating that.
- [26:49]
Andrew Egger
Jared Kushner actually came up with a, with a very interesting solution with the Qataris, where basically, again, if there Is any frozen Iranian assets that are unfrozen, then we have approval over that process. The Qataris have approval over that process. And then the money would actually go to buy American soy, American corn and American wheat for the benefit of the Iranian people. And
- [27:18]
Bill Kristol
Bill sounds like a pretty good, pretty good deal. Pretty good deal for the Iranian people, pretty good deal for the American farmer. What do you think?
- [27:24]
Andrew Egger
Didn't Vance say it's a, it's a classic Trump deal. You know, everything's worked out great. Everyone win, win, win. That's Trump, you know, because that's been his business career. Everyone wins. The people who pay sent all the money in for Trump University. And, and the people who, contractors, who me, whom he didn't pay, they, they did great out of it. So the degree to which I think this is a real, it's, I can say it's a real negotiation. It's sort of a real negotiation for them. It's all spin though, right? I mean, and they, and they're willing to lie really, but, or at least let's just say give very one sided account of the negotiation. You know, kind of comes back. I was thinking about it. It's also analogous to our earlier conversation in this way. There's been a sort of criticism of Trump, world of Trump foreign policy, State Department diplomacy. In the professional foreign policy community, they're not professional. Don't they understand that this is how negotiations have to happen? There are people with 30 years experience that just got, you know, young kids doing this or bands who doesn't have done this and says he doesn't like it much actually, and his aides. It was pretty striking if you're bid in government. You look at the delegation Vance brought with him. The official delegation is what it's called. You know, there's staff under that, but it doesn't have the kind of people you would expect for a serious negotiation about sanctions, about nuclear weapons. You know, sanctions is like a Treasury Department thing. You would have a deputy Assistant Secretary of the treasury who does sanctions for a living. You know what I mean? You'd have. And that's, and that is what Trump did with jcpoa. Whatever one thinks of the deal, there were many, many professional people there and they ended up with 162 page document which held for three years until Trump got us out of it. And it sort of was what it was. So there's this sort of element of it that they've also given up on that and again could in theory a bunch of amateurs come up with a Better deal than a bunch of professionals whose ideas aren't very good. Sure. I mean, being Wendy Sherman and a very experienced Deputy Secretary of State doesn't get you a great deal necessarily. But the odds are probably that the amateurs are not going to be, you know, that Jared Kushner and Witkoff don't understand quite as well how to, you know, dot the I's and cross the T's in ways that the Iranians aren't going to find a million loopholes and do what they want. But again, it's not that they don't care. I guess they just want some kind of face saving thing to get out of there. But on the way out, they are nervous about the criticisms of them. Right. So they have to sort of say, actually, this is great, it's all working out well. I, I kind of wonder, what do you think? Is it better? Wouldn't they always be better off just taking the hit and getting out of it? You know what I mean? And forgetting about it. Almost send some low level people over there to work out every detail. They can't resist wanting to spin it, you know, The Lincoln pool too. Right. The foxing pool too. I mean, it's sort of like they can't let it go and take the L. And so they kind of keep endlessly litigating it. I don't know, feels to me like there, but, but it's not. Anyway, but you can't take anything Vance says literally or seriously.
- [30:11]
Bill Kristol
Yeah, Yeah. I mean, it really does feel as though they, they continue to message this stuff with, with their, their one go to strategy targeted at their one go to audience, which is just throw in everything at the wall that might please their base from one angle or another and just sort of trusting that the various algorithms of social media are gonna, it's gonna trickle down through that and land in the mouths of the people who, you know, are already their supporters. It doesn't add up to any cohesive whole. But it's like different things may trickle through. You know, like I thought I heard that maybe it was, they were gonna buy some stuff from farmers. And I like that. That seems good. And so maybe it's not all as bad as the, the lying live media would have you believe. I mean, it's not a strategy that adds up to anything, like I said, in terms of a real argument or a real negotiating strategy. But if all you're trying to do, and it does seem like all they are trying to do right now is to placate Republican critics and voters who might be listening to those Republican critics. I can see sort of dimly how it might be useful in that way. But just to drill down on the substance of this a little bit, I mean, it really is amazing how much this is. Like these freelancers who have already hammered out this, this memorandum, memorandum of understanding now coming back to the table and, like, just trying to throw things at the wall that are completely not in keeping with even the very few things they already agreed to in that MOU. Let me throw the MOU text up there real quick. This is paragraph 11. This is where they negotiated the very bare bones of this stuff. The United States undertakes to make fully available for use the frozen or restricted funds and assets of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Upon the implementation of this mou, they're going to agree on the procedures and the release. But here's one thing they've already agreed to. Such funds, whether retained in the original account or transferred, shall be made fully usable for payment to any ultimate beneficiary designated by the Central bank of the Islamic Republic of Iran. That's something that America has already agreed to. One of the very few things in this several page document is, we're going to let you guys pick what you do with this money. And as you know, Jared Kushner and JD Vance now bring up this talking point to try to assuage a specific domestic criticism, like, hey, if Iran is able to do whatever they want with this money, what is to stop them from plowing it back into Hezbollah or the Houthis or any of these proxies or anything that. That might be against America? Which is a good question coming out of this mou. Of course, when they bring this up, Iran immediately will say, well, no, we're not going to do that. You already agreed to this other thing, which, in fact, they have done. Let's put up this Iranian response from. From the Hormuz letter here. This is just early this morning. First of all, Iran is contradicting J.D. vance's assertion that no money has yet been released or is going to be released until we have firm commitments. They are saying that the United States has agreed now to release $12 billion in frozen assets. And then in that second paragraph, Iran also refused to use the unfrozen funds, also refused to use the unfrozen funds to buy U.S. agricultural products, saying Iran has, quote, no obligation to buy agricultural products from the United States under the existing agreement, rejecting Vance and Kushner's framework requiring. Requiring Iran to do so. Yes, correct. The US has already agreed in this MoU that Iran will have freedom to use these assets. And there's nothing, there's nothing conditioning that on any particular use, particularly this Silly bank shot one for. For U.S. farmers.
- [33:36]
Andrew Egger
I mean, it's interesting. Iran hawks like me always had our doubts about the sanctions regime in general as a ultimately, did it really stop them from getting dukes? Did it weaken the regime that much? I don't know what the right answer there was. It certainly weakened them and certainly defied them an awful lot of assets and access to banking systems and stuff. But one thing you got to say, if you're going to run a sanctions regime, it's complicated. You're not going to sanction every single thing. You're going to let them get medicines, presumably. And so what's a medicine or what's food or what's. You can imagine it gets extremely banks and it has to be multilateral because sanctions regime just for the US is very, very limited effect. So you get the Europeans, then you get international banking rules and regulations. Anyway, it was. I quickly got beyond my level of understanding when I tried to follow it in the way back in the Bush years and the Obama years. But it is, if you want to go down the sanctions route, that's important. What I see here though, this is the tip of the iceberg. And since that whole regime is collapsing, there's not going to be the German bank going to spend a lot of time worrying about enforcing sanctions on Iran when we're out, kind of not clearly not interested in it, where we're busy hoping we could sell them all kinds of stuff that was sanctioned yesterday. I mean, it's like, you know, the whole thing is going to come apart and Iran is going to be, you know, much more integrated. If they wish to be into the world economy much more, I think they'll get a lot of benefits out of the end of the sanctions regime. And so this is yet another way in which Iran really, it's not just that Iran gets back to the status quo ante or the war didn't work as well as we hoped. They're going to come out of this much better off. I mean, that was a fairly robust sanctions regime, UN backing, you had to get the snack back. All the stuff that we all vaguely remember hearing about over those years and not sure any of us quite understood, but it was important talk important in the arguments about the Iran deal. I think all that's going to collapse. So Vance and Koshku can pretend they're making all these good deals, but it masks a Real collapse of what was some constraint, some restraint on Iran. I also, like, Vance went out of his way to mention Jared. Right. Kushner. And so this is. Jared did a great job negotiating this. Don't you think? That was Vance trying to get back, you know, recover from having been basically thrown under the bus by Trump and Trump World and Lindsey Graham and everyone. And sort of like, I'm here with Jared, we're all working it out. You know, Trump's son. Maybe you're not aware of Jared, it's Trump's son in law. I feel like Vance was tempted probably to actually put that, you know, that phrase in what he was saying as well, just to kind of bring home the point that he's just lieutenant here, you know.
- [36:07]
Bill Kristol
Yeah, yeah. And that, that, that classic Trump deal line that you mentioned earlier was, was just so funny. I feel like there's, there is this pressure on these guys not just to go out and like negotiate well, but to be seen as making really clever sort of off the wall negotiating moves that are like, again, it's not just a win for the United States. It's like, oh, look at that deal, that President deal struck. Look at that classic Trump deal. And I've been obsessed with these sorts of things and they just keep popping up. Let me just run through a couple of them real quick of the kinds of pitches that I have in mind and hopefully you will agree that they like add up to basically a weird sort of personally aggrandizing way of looking at negotiation. But, but let me just throw up this, this Trump tweet from 2019 all the way back during the trade war. And it obviously has a lot of similarities with what we're talking about right now, because it's also about farmers. This is when China has just stopped buying tons and tons and tons of soybeans because of the trade war that Trump had picked. Then Trump says, we are right where we want to be with China. Remember, they broke the deal with us and tried to negotiate. We'll be taking in tens of billions of dollars in tariffs from China. Buyers of product can make it themselves in the USA ideal or buy it from non tariff countries. And this is the good part. We will then spend match or better the money that China may no longer be spending with our great patriot farmers, agriculture, which is a small percentage of total tariffs received and distribute the food to starving people in nations around the world. Great maga. I mean, this is just the exact same impulse to it to a degree, right? It's, it's a two it's one of these wacky midwit, two birds with one stone hashtag deals ideas that we're just going to scoop up all of the excess soybean production that China was buying to feed their domestic hog industry, to literally feed the pigs. And we're going to send these soybeans abroad, I guess, to be ground into soy meal and distributed in war torn and impoverished areas around the world. And that's, that's a long ago example. But let me just give you one more here because this is just from a New Yorker piece this week about Greenland, which apparently we all still need to be talking about and thinking about because it's still going on. But here is Tom Danz, who is one of Trump's main Greenland guys, who meets with this reporter and he has this remarkable thing to say. My view is that the United States could take all the seafood Greenland could produce and cut out the middleman and keep it from China and you could bring back all you can eat shrimp at Red Lobster. I mean, it's just, just two, two good things. And you, and you draw some random connective tissue between them and you pitch it as an idea and you pray it all works out. I, this is not the way to do anything. It's not the way, it's, it's elevator pitch stuff, right? I mean, it's, it's front end, try to woo an investor type stuff, but it's not the way that you actually sit down and strike any of these deals with anybody. It's never worked out for any of these guys in any of these negotiations.
- [39:00]
Andrew Egger
I hadn't thought. Until you read it. I hadn't read it all carefully. That little quote from Dan's. Yeah, I like the way he throws China in there. It was like China's saying you're fighting China is still good in Trump world. Not the, Trump's doing any fighting in China based on the media regime. But you know, they think that's a good. So you know what, when we get that shrimp, Red Lobster, whatever, whatever he's talking about, it'll, it won't go to China. And was Greenland sending a lot of fish to China? I'm a little doubtful about that. You know, it's kind of a long, wouldn't that be kind of a long way to ship, to ship whatever fish. Does Greenland even have much fish? I don't know.
- [39:35]
Bill Kristol
My understanding, based on 15 seconds of Googling, which is not sufficient for if I were to write about it in morning shots, but I guess is sufficient for me to Bring it up here is, is that Greenland supplies most of its seafood to Europe. It's a higher end market for more expensive seafood. We buy most of our, of our cheaper seafood from further south, which is what you would get for instance, in all you can eat. Deal.
- [39:58]
Andrew Egger
Yeah, but that lobster, the idea that Greenland sending whatever seafood they have to China just struck me as being kind of a lot of closer oceans to China, you know.
- [40:06]
Bill Kristol
Right.
- [40:06]
Andrew Egger
Trading partners to China. But anyway, the. No, it is. I like your very much. You wrote this up, I think a few years ago I had this critique of the two birds with one stone sort of pseudo cleverness or you know, like self. I don't know what it is. Or self confidence. Like I've figured out something that no one else has thought. I hadn't really thought about it much before. Whenever people claim they're killing two birds with one stone, they're normally killing no birds with one stone.
- [40:29]
Bill Kristol
It's hard enough to kill one stone.
- [40:31]
Andrew Egger
Other people would have thought of it if you get.
- [40:33]
Donald Trump
You know what I mean?
- [40:33]
Andrew Egger
Right. Other people. There's a reason people are killing one bird with one stone because it's pretty hard. And the idea that let's just two at once, that's when you're really a Trump level cleverness, that just comes naturally. You know, they all want to sort of imitate Trump in a way in doing it, I guess flatter Trump by kind of giving the credit to him a little bit as they're doing it or I don't know, impress Trump. I don't know. God knows what they're doing.
- [40:56]
Bill Kristol
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's probably enough on that. I mean, it's ridiculous. It's amazing that this is the way we are. The way the United States of America is carrying the United States of America on the world stage is with these clowns doing this stuff. But that's all we need to say about that for now. Obviously we will have so much more to say about Iran in the days and weeks ahead. Should we do like four minutes on the reflecting pool? It's just we have this stuff here. Trump was talking to reporters yesterday about this stuff and his grasp of every relevant fact involved is so remarkably absent. There's just nothing, nothing that he's saying corresponds to reality in any way about this pretty simple, straightforward story of this renovation of this reflecting pool on the National Mall. So let's just hit a couple real quick clips here from the President. Yesterday you showed us pictures of what
- [41:50]
Donald Trump
you were going to do. Yeah.
- [41:51]
Andrew Egger
When you said you had a Guy
- [41:52]
Donald Trump
who was going to do it in
- [41:53]
Andrew Egger
a week for about a million dollars.
- [41:55]
Donald Trump
Well, it's been two months. Sixteen and a half million. Yeah. Okay, ready? Barack Hussein Obama. Have you ever heard of him?
- [42:01]
Andrew Egger
Yeah.
- [42:01]
Donald Trump
He spent two years and over $100 million on trying to fix it. You know what happened to. It never even opened. He took the water for the river. You know about that. Right, Right. It turned out to be putrid and it destroyed the whole thing. Spent over 100 million. Him and Biden together spent $147 million. You know what happened? Never opened. You don't mention that. Right. I spent. We spent about 10 years.
- [42:28]
Bill Kristol
The first of all, that he took the water from the river thing is amazing because the reflecting pool has always been filled from the Potomac. It still is right this minute. It's. That's where the water is coming from. There's no other place to get it. I guess you could pull from city water if you redid the whole thing. Probably would be a bad idea for a lot of other reasons, but it comes from the Potomac. Like Barack Obama, he took in the water from the river that was putrid. It destroyed the whole thing. What an idiot. What an idiot. My predecessor was. Because he filled the reflecting pool from the Potomac. I mean, you can't even talk about it. You can't even analyze it. There's nothing to say. It's just his lips flapping. Right. Just saying any old thing.
- [43:07]
Andrew Egger
What is the meaning of. And it never even opened. I mean, I don't know. I've been on the. I mean, I'm serious. Like, what does he even think he's saying there? Because I've been on the. I mean, it's a pool. It's open all the time. All the time. I've walked by it many times in the last 10 years. It's not fenced or it hasn't been fenced or anything. We can see that from all the videos we've seen in the last few weeks. It's. It's functioning. I mean, sometimes it's a little dirty, sometimes it's cleaner, whatever. So I don't. Yeah. What does he even think he's saying when it never even opened? I honestly don't even. It's not like a ball room that's closed and then it opens or something.
- [43:38]
Donald Trump
Yeah, yeah.
- [43:39]
Bill Kristol
The other amazing thing about that, that he keeps saying is that it's reflecting better than it used to do, which is just like, okay, look, the algae is one thing. I get why people don't want it to be Dirty. But a green pool also reflects the monuments. The light still reflects off of the surface of that, you know, greener, dirtier pool. You can still get the effect. I mean, it's just. He's just inventing all of this stuff. We could, we could do this same. I don't remember if it's the same clip or a different clip, but, but if we have anything about the, about the, the vandals and the knife, we should hit that real fast. I'm throwing, throwing Matt a little bit of a curveball here.
- [44:12]
Donald Trump
That's for at least 50 years and you'll never have a leak. It's very strong. You couldn't if you had a knife. I don't want to give anybody ideas. If you had a knife, you can't even cut it. So strong, so powerful, like, powerful rubber.
- [44:25]
Bill Kristol
Are the contractors who did the initial work for the reflecting pool, are they. Are they to blame for the current condition or is it.
- [44:31]
Donald Trump
No, we had vandalism. You know, we have a hundred and we have a, I think 290, 300 foot slit right through it. Probably a box cutter or a knife of some kind.
- [44:43]
Bill Kristol
National Guard and police have been all over the mall.
- [44:46]
Andrew Egger
How would these vandals have gotten so
- [44:48]
Bill Kristol
close to do something like that?
- [44:50]
Andrew Egger
Do you have any proof of this?
- [44:51]
Donald Trump
I mean, we didn't have, we didn't have a lot of them then. Who would think that somebody would go into a pool and take a knife and start cutting it?
- [44:57]
Andrew Egger
But do you have proof of that?
- [44:59]
Donald Trump
Yeah.
- [45:00]
Andrew Egger
Photos or videos?
- [45:00]
Donald Trump
Well, let's put it this way. When you have a 350, I think it's 350, not 250. A 350 foot slit from one end to the other. You think that's proof?
- [45:12]
Andrew Egger
Boys have been down there today looking for that slit that you mentioned.
- [45:16]
Donald Trump
Well, all you'd have to do is see the parks department, they'll show it to you, see the secretary. But I saw it. They cut it. They cut it very violently.
- [45:28]
Bill Kristol
I mean, what, what do you say? What do you. I mean that. That would be funny even if the slit existed, right? It would be funny that he said, you can't even cut this stuff with a knife, it's so powerful. And then someone had gone and cut that with a knife. I guess that would, I guess that would kind of be funny. It also is funny to imagine a person cutting a 350foot slit in anything with a knife ever. Like, that's not really the tool. You need like a plow at that point to do that. Kind of damage over that kind of space, but it doesn't exist. There is no slit. It's the reflecting pool. It's out there in public. People can look down. It's a little murky, as we've discussed, but you can see the bottom. It doesn't exist. It's flaking off naturally. Like it's. There are bits of it that are coming up. But he's just hallucinated this entire thing, or he's just making it up and he doesn't think anyone will call him on it. I don't get it. I don't get what you're supposed to say about it, because it's just, just nuts. Do you have anything, Bill? What? What, what? How does this stuff bounce off your synapses?
- [46:20]
Donald Trump
No, I agree.
- [46:20]
Andrew Egger
I guess I haven't looked at it, you know, because it could be a, you know, because they did a crummy job laying down the stuff and various other reasons. You know, it may be breaking off and maybe 20ft, if it looks like a, quote, slit, I guess.
- [46:34]
Bill Kristol
Right.
- [46:34]
Andrew Egger
If a big trunk breaks off, it would look that way. Yeah. The idea that some guy or a bunch of people are walking the length of a football field with a box cutter cutting the bottom of a swimming pool, which is kind of hard to. As Trump said correctly, actually, it's not so easy just for a human to kind of go and cut. You need like a big, you know, machine or something. It's. It's farcical. There's literally no evidence of, quote, vandalism. I mean, it's just ridiculous.
- [47:01]
Bill Kristol
So in full view, in full view of the 24 hour publicly available live stream from the top of the Washington Monument. I mean, I don't know. Words sort of fail me.
- [47:11]
Andrew Egger
Yeah, no, it is. I mean, I guess. Why are we surprised? On the other hand, he's made up this. Everything about the elections. He's made up everything about everything for so many. His crowds at the inauguration, all this stuff. But it is kind. This one does seem particularly. Oh, I know, they were all farcical. I don't know if one's more farcical than enough. This one's more farcical, but it's in a way less serious. I mean, it's not like the election denial which leads to, you know, January 6th or something. It's just. And so he. But he can't. Yeah. And I, incidentally, I noticed the lawyers are saying now that, well, now that he said there's a vandal, the. He's, he's protected the contractors from the attempt by the federal government to get their money back for the crummy job. Because he wants to protect them as there's cronies. But they got no big contracts. He doesn't want any of that explored to. He doesn't want some court case where someone's saying, well, how exactly did you get that contract? Well, I'm the pool guy from. From some Trump country club. And they. And the guy at the country club who runs the pool called me up and said, hey, you want a job in the mall? You know, and you can get a good profit margin, too, and president will be happy, you know. Sure, absolutely. You know, God knows how that all went, how all that happened, but you're right, it is unbelievable. This is the US government and they're dealing with serious matters of foreign policy in Iran and dealing with, you know, kind of important parts of our public lands, public, you know, spaces. 10 days, you know, just a month before the. The 1050th anniversary that they're dealing with it in that way, too. Right? It is all of a piece in that sense.
- [48:34]
Bill Kristol
Yeah. Yeah. Well, at least it's a little bit funny. I guess that's one thing. It would be worse if it were this bad and there was nothing to laugh at. I guess. Maybe not. Maybe we'll get there someday and we'll be like, actually, we like this more. Who knows? But I think we can leave it there. Thanks, Bill. We hit a lot today. We will be back here next Tuesday. And thanks to you all out there who watched. Thanks to all you who will someday watch in the future when this goes archival to YouTube. We hope you will subscribe to the YouTube channel or to the substack wherever you are hitting this content from. We hope you will also head to the bulwark.com and sign up for morning shots. It's a free newsletter Monday through Friday. Bill and I write it. It's good. We think. We think we like it. If people don't like it, they are mostly keeping that opinion politely to themselves, which is nice of them. And. And the people who do like it sometimes let us know, which we appreciate as well. So, you know, go get it. It's free. What do you have to lose@the bulwark.com? we'll leave it there. We'll see you all next Tuesday. Thanks for tuning in so long.