← Bulwark Takes
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- [00:00]
A
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- [00:42]
B
Learn more at post. Edu Hi everybody. Crazy morning out here. Tuesday morning. This is Morning Chaser. I'm Andreger with the Bulwark, joined by my morning shots co author and Bulwark editor at large Bill Kristol. We're going live on Tuesday morning like we do every Tuesday morning. We've been getting some big news drops right before. We've been going live a number of times it seems like over the past few weeks. Today is I guess the biggest, or I mean arguably the biggest, just in terms of the wildest things the President is saying. Today is his deadline, his self imposed deadline for Iran to basically acquiesce to his demands to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, to act more favorably toward the United States in a bunch of different ways. He has postponed this deadline a couple of times, but he has said a lot in recent days. He has postponed it for the last time and tonight is the final ultimate deadline before what happens before. We don't know exactly what happens before some sort of new catastrophic escalation in the American hostile approach, military approach to Iran, which the President has been describing in more and more lurid and elaborate Technicolor terms, culminating this morning in one of the most staggering truth social posts I've read in a decade of following this guy and I guess let's just do the truth social post. This is the President this morning. A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don't want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have complete and total regime change where different, smarter and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen. Who knows? We will find out tonight. One of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the world. 47 years of extortion, corruption and death will finally end. God bless the great people of Iran. Bill, why don't you just take a crack at this? I mean this, we've seen a lot from the President. We read this this morning. What's going on over at the White
- [02:47]
C
House today well, who knows as Donald Trump said. Except what we do know is that the President of the United States is threatening has escalated his already as you said, lurid and sort of crazed and war criminal threats from we're going to decimate, obliterate the country or the electric plants and the bridges. That was the earlier post, right. Was that Sunday morning, I can't remember. We're going to destroy the country, there'll be nothing left and then the whole civilization is going to be destroyed. This morning you pointed out, I think in our slack that this is sort of a threat of genocide. I mean if one takes literally. And who with Trump, of course, you know, maybe one shouldn't. But yeah, I mean this is what the term genocide was kind of invented for. Right. They attempt to destroy a whole people, a genus or whole civilization and that's what Trump's threatening. I may what hopes it's his. He thinks this is clever negotiating art of the deal bluster. On the other, the Iranians don't seem in much of a mood to give him even a fig leaf. I don't know, it's really, I mean I'm struck how many people correctly just think he's getting crazier and crazier. The insanity is escalating. I think that is characteristic sometimes of crazy people, sadly that they get crazier and especially if they're Trump's type of maybe narcissistic psychopath who's not getting what he wants. In fact, I mean he said a week ago JBL had a very good piece yesterday that he didn't care about the Strait of Hormone. We didn't need the Strait of Hormuz. The Europeans should open it. We don't care about the Strait of Hormuz. And now if they won't open it, we're going to obliterate their civilization. So it's really horrendous. And my final point here, I guess would be just I don't think the US Military should or I hope would obey orders that are genuinely an attempt to destroy a country or destroy a civilization.
- [04:38]
B
Yeah, yeah. I mean we were kind of talking about this before the show started. I mean we are at one of these moments where words almost fail you in terms of like doing analysis of the facts as they sort of exist in a bare fashion. I mean this is, and we were talking when we were putting the newsletter together this morning, like did the president really just threaten a genocide against an entire people? And it's like, well, it sounds kind of astonishing to say that that is what he did. But, but that's the plain text. I mean, he put it up on Truth Social. We didn't put it up on Truth Social. For him, a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. He's not saying that's necessarily going to happen, but that's the threat. That's the threat that he's putting on the table. I mean, I think I, and I hope I am not immediately to be proven wrong in this. I feel pretty safe in saying that this is not what's going to happen. Right. I do not think that Donald Trump actually has, even if he had the desire to sort of genocide the Iranian people, which even in this single tweet, he immediately backs away from. God bless the great people of Iran. Even if he did have an actual genocidal desire here, I am extremely confident he does not have the political will or sort of like the appetite for political pain that would be required to actually do anything like this. Right. I mean, it would require an actual mass ground invasion, bombing, the likes, which we've never seen, or a nuke. Maybe I shouldn't even say that out loud, but I do not think we are going to wake up tomorrow morning or stay up sort of in a state of anxiety tonight and discover that the US has actually launched a campaign of genocide against Iran. But what we're seeing here is, first of all, there are a lot of. I made this point on the stream yesterday. There are a lot of intermediary steps between what's acceptable and genocide, all of which would be horrible, horrible, horrible, unprecedented sorts of steps for America to take. Even if it's just, even if it's just what he was describing yesterday or over the weekend, I mean, on Sunday. And these escalating steps, every step has escalated farther on Sunday morning with what up until that point had really seemed like maybe one of his craziest posts to date. His Easter morning post was essentially saying, we're going to go back after the energy infrastructure and we're going to go back after the bridges and the transportation infrastructure and they will be living in hell to. He said, praise be to Allah. And that was like, whoa. And you kind of saw some of his defenders rally around that, like, well, you know, when you really think about it, some of these bridges are legitimate targets and some of these power plants are legitimate targets. And maybe that's all he's saying. But then yesterday he gets up and he says, no, no, no, that's not what I'm saying. I am actually literally saying, read my lips. Watch the words come out of my mouth. We're going to hit every power plant and every bridge in Iran permanently. So they will be irreparably destroyed. I mean, that's, again, that's just what the President was saying. And now this morning, again, it's not us, it's him saying, a whole civilization will die tonight. And I really think, I mean, this is. We've had a couple of these moments in Trump 2.0 where it really has felt like sort of an unstoppable force meets an immovable object in terms of, like, just these forces grinding together. And I think about, like, Liberation Day last year, right, where it was Trump's sort of, like, bottomless confidence and bedrock belief in the economic power of tariffs to just unleash this gusher of economic prosperity for America, slamming headlong into hard economic facts about how bad those tariffs were going to spike the entire global economy. And him watching the stock market and the bond market walk off a cliff, and it was like, well, this is a bedrock belief of his. What's it going to be? And in the end, at that time, he blinked, right? He blinked and that was great. The problem was he wasn't negotiating with anybody there. He was just the stock market was always going to bounce back. And now we're in a situation where all he knows how to do is escalate, right? It's. Well, the last threat apparently wasn't big and ostentatious enough. So I guess I'll make a bigger, more ostentatious threat and maybe that will shake them loose. Well, that's not going to work. I guess I better make another bigger, more ostentatious threat. Maybe that will shake them loose. But now he has gone so far, there's nowhere really left for him to go other than actually start dropping the bombs. And Iran has not caved. It does not seem like they might, like they're going to cave. They have been escalating, you know, on their side of things. They have been expanding their own military campaign in terms of hitting more energy infrastructure in the region and things like that, even as recently as yesterday. And so I guess we're just kind of stuck. We're just sort of in wait and see mode for who blinks first.
- [09:14]
C
I mean, do you.
- [09:14]
B
Is there any tea leaves type stuff we can even be doing right now? Or are we all just kind of sitting here like, crazy world guess? Let's guess. We'll see what happens tonight.
- [09:23]
C
I mean, there are allegedly indirect negotiations going on, and Trump alludes to them and Maybe again, it's all bluster and we end up with a deal that gives him enough fig leaf and maybe we end up with him bombing, but very big and unwise, in my opinion. And maybe one that involves a military Obama campaign, that involves war crimes. I think it's interesting. I think the ground troops actually is the one thing he's kind of stuck with not doing. There's not much talk about that, but massive bombing. The Pentagon allegedly was looking yesterday at these bridges. They are supposed to look at each electric plant and see is that one dual use plant is the part of it that's dual use. Does that outweigh the civilian harm that would be done? That's literal. What you're supposed to do when you decide and what the military has to. What the US Military has done decades in deciding on various bombing and other kinds of campaigns. They have jags who do this. I've talked to one recently who did it with ISIS in Iraq and Syria in 2015, 16, 17. And some civilians get killed. And sometimes that happens, obviously, and sometimes you can't. You've got to. If the military target's important enough, you run that risk. But anyway, there's a way in which the Pentagon might be able to satisfy Trump's desire for a big, made for tv, super huge bombing campaign. And then I guess. But then what if Iran doesn't? Maybe then he just declares victory, basically, and assumes the strait will open pretty soon. But he's making that harder. But he's put the Pentagon. I just want to come back to them for a second in a very difficult position. I mean, if I were Admiral Cooper, who's the CENTCOM commander, who's actually in the chain of military authority on this, or the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who actually, in a funny way, in the US Military isn't quite, as I understand in the chain of authority in terms of the commands, but is of course, extremely important to the president's military advisor or the various chiefs of staff of the different services. Put them all in the position of any kind of bombing we do is going to have followed 12 hours later, presumably upon this civilizational destruction. Tweet of Trump. They have to explain that that's not what they're doing. I mean, otherwise they really are complicit in what's unquestionable war crime. And they shouldn't do it. And I hope they wouldn't do it. And I hope, incidentally, I hope they wouldn't do it. And I wouldn't ask their subordinates to do it. I hope their subordinates, if asked, wouldn't do it. So the degree of damage he's doing to just any, to the military, to the military chain of command, to their ability to carry out, let's stipulate there is a very aggressive bombing campaign that would be arguably at least legitimate. The war is unauthorized and undeclared. There are a million reasons why it would be bad to do it, in my opinion. But still, let's stipulate that that's a, you know, a possibility to defy such a campaign. Trump has made that much, much harder and has almost put the military command in the position of having to say, we're not doing what President Trump said we were going to do 12 hours before.
- [12:27]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because I'm a total sicko and I can't keep myself off of these things. I mean, like, I continue to sort of mainline the sort of cope that comes off of the sort of like, MAGA intelligentsia about a lot of this stuff. And it has just been staggering to me to see so many people, not everybody. We're going to get to this in just a minute. There is actually sort of a real split developing here, but so many people just falling back on the same sort of tired. Oh, don't you understand? He's just negotiating. Don't you understand? It's just the art of the deal. He's doing madman theory. He's just putting pressure on them. There's a plan. Don't you know there's a plan? This is all going according to plan. I'm sorry, there's no plan. This is a guy who's pushing the same button harder and harder and harder and harder and harder because he is just confident that if he pushes it hard enough, good things will sort of happen. It'll be just like these inputs, you know, question mark, question mark, question mark. We're not quite sure exactly how it's going to happen, but they're going to collapse and we're going to profit. And I'm sorry, like, it's, it's, there's this completely untenable mental model where it's like, well, we all know that Trump would never commit a real war crime. We all know that, but maybe Iran doesn't know that. Like, maybe, maybe Iran, and I'm, I'm sorry, maybe Iran has a better measure of the guy than you guys all apparently do, given what's already been happening in, in the region.
- [13:48]
C
Well, even I just. But I mean, now you've made that point so. Well, I mean, even if Iran's figured it out, so to speak. And even if he doesn't do it, it is unacceptable for an American president to threaten genocide, period, whether we do it or not. It is not something an American president should do. It's not something certainly he needs to do. I mean, I got a squabble, an email last 24, 48 hours with an old acquaintance who was a defender of the war, thinks that the Iranian regime must be destroyed no matter what. And he honestly just won't face the fact that. But he makes it seem as if we have a rational commander in chief running an aggressive military campaign. Right. But we're so far beyond that now. And again, what is this doing to the US to have an American president make these threats? And I guess the whole. So far, the entire US Government, the civilian side, the military side, is, I guess, just sort of on board with this. And Congress is off, you know, coming back into session to do anything. I don't know. I feel like the damage is so great to the fabric of our government and really of our society, almost. Not to. Not to seem as overstated. I wrote that little thing in warning shots yesterday about it really is time to put impeachment on the table. It's a serious thing. This is unacceptable. And I really, sadly, I feel like this, what happened this morning confirms, even if he doesn't go through it, obviously it's much better if he doesn't go through with it than if he does. But even if he doesn't go through with it, this is a real stain on the United States and a real. And a terrible, as I say, kind of sets terrible precedents and just a terrible thing for the President to have done. And again, I think of the military guys especially, I mean, what are they supposed to do now? And I'm sure they're talking about it. It's hard. And they don't, you know, they have their obligations. It's civilian control of the military. But honestly, I think it's unacceptable for General Kaine and Admiral Cooper to just pretend the President of the United States hasn't said that they are going to engage conceivably or threatening, that their troops will engage in a kind of genocidal campaign 12 hours from now.
- [15:49]
B
Yeah, yeah. And I mean, you alluded to this a second ago, but what an unbelievable, damning indictment of Congress as well, just to continue to put their heads in the sand, to continue to pretend this is just this little military operation. Why would anybody go so far as to describe it as a war? Well, the president seems to be describing it not only as a war, but as basically total war, at least from the part of you, of Iran. I mean, it's, you know, it's not total, like, mobilization on our end or anything like that, but we are, we are essentially saying we are going to pummel another state into extinction, into complete submission, if not extinction. It's a war. It's a war. Trump knows it's a war. He's no longer even barely bothering to keep the word out of his own mouth. And yet it's not like you have not seen anybody in Congress. Pretty much, you haven't seen anybody in Congress, any Republicans in Congress who were not already clanging this bell from the beginning. A couple libertarian types here and there, but nobody's saying, oh, you know, when we first started out, I was sort of comfortable with this being like a couple limited strikes sort of thing. Maybe not great, but sort of like the sort of thing presidents have done in the past. We're waging a war at this point, and nobody seems to have the scales falling from their eyes, calling for Congress to at least involve themselves in the decision chain. Right. At least sort of like, show up and start participating. Instead, we've had them completely abdicate, completely sign away any, any semblance of, of, of authority here that they have under the Constitution. It's their decision. They are the ones who get to say whether or not this sort of, this sort of thing flies. And they've completely, not only like, abandoned it, but, but, like, they treat it as, like, silly that you would even suggest that they participate, that they, that they sort of grasp their own powers here. And it's just, I mean, it's. They, they, they deserve all of this. And unfortunately, I guess we all kind of deserve it because we put ourselves here. But it's still. I mean, it didn't have to get this bad. And I kind of wish it hadn't
- [17:45]
C
agreed. No, you're absolutely right about Congress. Total disgrace six weeks in. Okay, the first week, maybe it was there was immediate threat. There really wasn't, but Rubio said there was. Maybe there was going to be a short operation. That's sort of what Trump indicated. No need to go to the war, you know, to invoke war powers or to authorize action or to, or to prohibit action or put a time limit on action or prohibit certain types of action. Nothing. Republican Congress has done nothing.
- [18:12]
B
Yeah, yeah. All right, let's. I want to talk a little bit about some of the sort of MAGA digestion of all of this. Before I do that, I should say a couple other things, one of which is that I should say I said at the top. I'm Andrew Egger with the Bulwark. This is Bill Kristol, editor at large of the Bulwark. We write the Morning Shots newsletter. We come live on Tuesdays. Thanks for joining us. I should also do a quick ad read here while I'm breaking this up, so let me do that real quick. During the week, my schedule is nonstop meetings, errands, late nights. Whoops, I lost my ad read. Hang on. Let's do that again. Meetings, errands, late nights, and healthy eating is usually the first thing to slip. Tempo keeps me grounded with real meals I can heat in two minutes, so I don't default to snacks or takeout. Tempo delivers fresh, chef crafted dietitian approved meals right to your door. Each meal is perfectly portioned for lunch or dinner, ready in just two minutes. That means real food, real fast, without the sad desk lunch or drive through regret. It's convenient, but also flexible enough to fit the way you want to eat for a limited time. Tempo is offering our listeners 60% off our viewers as well, I'd imagine. 60% off your first box. Go to Tempo Meals.com BulwarkTakes that's Tempo Meals.com bulwarktakes for 60% off your first box Tempomeals.com Bulwark takes rules and restrictions may apply. Okay, let's hit MAGA. I mean, this is like, let's have a little fun with it, right? I mean, everything's horrible. The whole universe is going to shit. Or maybe it's not. Maybe we're going to back off and declare victory. But there's been some craziness in terms of, you know, the more, I don't know, sincere, the more sincere anti war Republicans of Trump's coalition who have been kind of looking askance at all of this stuff, one of whom you might remember we've, you know, our strange new respect for former Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. Let's throw her tweet up on the screen here. 25th amendment, not a single bomb has dropped on America. We cannot kill an entire civilization. This is evil and madness. That's pretty astonishing that. I mean, during Trump's first term, the 25th Amendment stuff, which obviously would involve his Cabinet coming together to basically declare him unfit. And then the House and Senate would have to do that too. I mean, this was sort of like fever dream, resist, lib speculative type stuff to say, forget impeachment, his Cabinet should Get rid of the guy. Marjorie Taylor Greene is not the only person saying this. Let's go to a couple other people and these are more like sort of heterodox maga, but the big podcast names. Let's do Alex Jones. This is from his show how do we 25th amendment is asked.
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D
The problem is to get. The 25th amendment is harder than impeachment. You have to get 2/3 of the house and 2/3 of the.
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B
So what do we do?
- [20:55]
D
Tackle Trump and pretend. Let him pretend he's president and publicly report that he's going through a health issue. Advance takeover. It literally needs to be something like that. It's that bad. The I've known you a long time.
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B
You've never called for a internal coup
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D
before, ever, ever, ever. But that's how dangerous this is.
- [21:16]
B
There's that. Let's do just one more. Alex Jones is sort of like the old senior statesman of sort of the conspiracy right over at Infowars. His star has declined a little bit, so you could maybe see that as a little bit less important. But you know who's sort of taken over for him is Candace Owens, formerly of tpusa. Really, really, really. The sort of like du jour conspiracy brained lunatic on the sort of isolationist wing of MAGA has been very opposed to this war. She said basically the same thing today. Let's throw her tweet up. This is just, you know, just five minutes ago. I guess the 25th Amendment needs to be invoked. He is a genocidal lunatic. Our Congress and military need to intervene. We are beyond madness. Yeah, I mean, sorry, Candace is correct about this. Candace is a lunatic on a lot of stuff, but she can see, I guess, more clearly or at least is a little bit more freed up to just read the words on the page that the President of the United States is threatening a genocide, maybe for some oblique art of the deal reason, but that's what he's doing. He's threatening a genocide. I mean, I don't know. This is more slippage than we have seen in the past. It's new. And I know that a lot of people have talked themselves into this being like sort of a pure online phenomenon. And the MAGA base has been more behind the strikes in Iran than some of these podcasters who are more isolationists would have liked. But I don't know, it seems substantial that there are these people who are saying this guy's awful and he's done and he's cooked and he is about to do incalculable Damage and he's got to go. I mean, is this just like a day before the deadline, like blip that's that people are going to sort of smooth over later, or is this, do you see this as more of an actual rupture bill?
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C
Yeah, I don't think it's just a day before the deadline slip because again, this thing doesn't go away. The threat doesn't go away. The willingness to make the threat, the willingness to endorse kind of genocide and contaminate, as it were, everything the military now does if they end up doing something tonight or thereafter, and makes it sound like it's the pursuit of this war criminal aim. So, no, I think it's meaningful. Look, I think it's also important for this reason. In the past there's something. There's been the hope that MAGA would fracture because Trump did things that particularly the aspects, parts of MAGA world didn't like. The rest of the country was chugging along and Trump was at his normal, presumably 40, 60, 42, 58, whatever, approval, disapproval. But now there's such erosion, I think in general among the public, A and B, particular disapproval of the war. I mean, those numbers are really out lopsided. Right? So that maga's been the last. You said MAGA Republicans are the one group that still, I think has majority support for the war, basically. I'm not even sure, quote, normal, non MAGA Republicans, that's eroded a lot. And obviously pretty much everyone else is just against the war, at least as it's being conducted by Trump. So it's sort of, in that respect, this is sort of a big deal, right? It's one thing if you have some fractures in maga, but your overall political situation is adequate. It's another thing to have fractures in maga. And that's your last pillar. And it's starting to fracture now how much these particular individuals matter to MAGA voters. But there's been a fair amount of anecdotal evidence of, you know, veterans, some of whom voted for Trump. I think it was on one of the networks the other night. Get in some. I take it it seemed pretty authentic in some VFW hall in Florida. And they said they voted for Trump and saying, you know, this is just crazy. What's he doing? And this is before the tweet this morning, maybe even before yesterday morning, Easter, the Easter Sunday morning tweet. So pretty. You know, I think it is, it is striking.
- [24:52]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, just just to kind of rattle off another group or Two, we've reported a lot on sort of young men, right, and the way that they were so instrumental to Trump's 2024 win, the way that they kind of voted for him in stronger than expected numbers. And a lot of that was, and we know this from the data, a lot of that was because they resonated specifically with his anti war pitch, specifically with the fact that this was an argument that he made in so many words during the campaign. Kamala Harris is the Endless wars candidate and I'm the peace candidate. She is going to get you in a shooting war in Iran and I am going to bring wars to an end or she's going to ship you off to Ukraine to fight against Russia. And I'm not going to let that happen. And people resonated with that. It was dumb. It was crazy. Even in the moment. There were good reasons to believe that those were crazy promises, but they were promises that he made and they won him some voters. And we had already seen by the end of last year, young men. I mean, I mentioned scales falling off of the eyes earlier. That actually has happened quite a bit for that demographic. I mean, the whole manosphere group, all those podcasters, you know, the Joe Rogans of the world, very much not in favor of even the kinds of strikes we were doing last year when we hit Iran's nuclear program or when we took out Maduro in Venezuela. I mean, much, much more limited, much less open ended in obvious conflicts. And then of course, this is just that times a million. And when we say that MAGA has stuck with Trump for this, I think we should be a little bit clear about what that means too, because it's not like they have. It's not like everybody who considers themselves maga, even if, you know, a worryingly large percentage maybe are like this, it's not like everybody is like ride or die, you know, tonight we dine in hell. Like we're riding the bomb down with you, you know, out of the airplane. Like Dr. Strange, love. They're not like that. They just think they're just buying his spin about the fact that there's going to be an off ramp soon, that we actually will just succeed and everybody's just dooming when they say that the economic pain that we've created for ourselves is long lasting and will be difficult to disentangle and that the geopolitical stability that we have unleashed is not. You can't put the genie back in the bottle there. And there's just all these problems and that it's Hard to get out of these conflicts. They just aren't buying those arguments yet. They think, no, the President is basically saying things are gonna be okay, but they too are under an enormous amount of political, of, like, continual pressure on that narrative because of the prices, just because of the economic damage, because of the price of gas. Every time they're at the store, every time they're filling up their car, it's like a little cognitive dissonance of, gosh, I thought this was gonna be over by now. So even that Trump cannot rely on, I don't think, in the long term, which is why he so clearly wants a deal and wants to get out of there, but he can't get one. And therefore we're just in this. The gears are just grinding in his own mind and in the White House and in the world right now where the President can't find a way out of this thing. And so he apparently, rather than searching for, like, the least disruptive way to finally sort of let go of the tail of this tiger, he just keeps doubling down and tripling down and quadrupling down until. I mean, look, I've been reporting on this guy for a decade, and I. You would be hard pressed to find a thing that he could say that. I would be like, wow, that really astonishes me. He called for a genocide this morning. I mean, that's where we are on, on, on all of this. So, I don't know. Now you talk. I don't, I don't know what to do with any of this stuff.
- [28:26]
C
Well, we should, we should probably let people go because I think we've said what we have to say. But no, I think you're. I mean, the only thing I would say is I'm worried that, in fact, he had, I've thought he would look for a deal from the beginning, that he would back out, that he would find a taco way out or try to. Iran's making it harder on him, but he's made Iran make it harder on him in a sense. But I don't know, I worry that it's gone to his head. I mean, that there's a kind. Someone was quoted on background, I guess, somewhere that he's the most hawkish guy now in the White House. He's got a kind of bloodlust. I'm not sure they use that word, but that was the implication. I'd say he loves the threats, and I worry that he loves the killing at this point, and that's obviously horribly dangerous, and that all the more strengthens the case for impeachment probably better than the 25th Amendment and strengthens the case for the military telling and we're not doing this. But I guess they could tell them privately before they put out a statement saying but they need to tell them that. They really do need to tell them. I guess I come back to that and Congress needs to. Okay, they're out of town. But you know what, they have access to the media. There's a Republican speaker of the House, he's the number three person in the chain of command of chain of succession in the government. There's a Republican majority leader who's been around and is a serious guy. They're not going to say anything. They're not going to signal that if you go ahead with this, we're not going to stop you from being necessarily impeached and convicted. We're not going to support this war any further. It's not a war to reopen the strait. It's not a war to destroy Iran's nuclear program. Whatever happened to that? That's actually has been the serious sort of issue for decades with Iran the most serious. And so it's not a war for regime change which is the companion of the fear of this regime getting nuclear weapons. So it's really. Yeah, these people have no excuse for their silence. And I mean now you know, the speaker, the majority leader, all the members of Congress, certainly the chair, the chairs of the relevant committees and I would say people in the administration as well. And it's pathetic that Candace Jones and Candace Owens and Alex Jones more clear eyed and more willing to say what they think. I suppose these other people sort of think that. More willing to say what they think than these senior elected and appointed officials in the United States government.
- [30:43]
B
Yeah. What a time to be alive. Let's do one last clip here just to kind of talk us off. Maybe the Vice President. We got him weighing in on some of this stuff. I guess this was just this morning. I gather he's in Hungary. I did not actually they, they put this down, they put this and he's speaking, you know, isn't that amazing? Just like we're maintaining the really important relationships right at this moment.
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C
Well, he's there to help Orban and the election is in 10 days, less than 10 days. And so he's.
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B
Yeah, really, really, really, really important to keep the, keep the, you know, the anti globalist coalition hanging together in these trying times. But Anyway, here's, here's J.D. vance weighing in on some of this stuff from this confident that we can
- [31:22]
E
get a response, whether it's positive or negative. We're going to get a response from the Iran Iranians by 8 o' clock tonight. I hope they make the right response, because what we really want is we want a world where oil and gas is flowing freely, where people can afford to heat their homes and cool their homes, where people can afford to transport themselves to work. That's not going to happen if the Iranians are engaged in acts of economic terrorism. So they've got to know we've got tools in our toolkit that we so far haven't decided to use. The President of the United States can decide to use them, and he will decide to use them if the Iranians don't change their course of conduct.
- [31:59]
B
So, I don't know. You could go a couple of ways on this. And, Bill, I'm curious what you think, but let me just maybe give a kind of contrarian take here, which maybe it's not contrarian, I don't know. Which is that. Look, I think J.D. vance is a total snake. I think he's lower than low. I think he's slime. I do not like J.D. vance. He's awful. He's despicable. He's so bad, I would turn cartwheels. If we did a 25th amendment thing, if we did impeachment tomorrow, America under President J.D. vance would have innumerable problems and we would talk about them ad infinitum. I am sure it would not be great. I don't think President J.D. vance would be threatening genocide in sort of like early morning lunatic hour tweets, and I think we'd be in better shape.
- [32:44]
C
No, I agree. I mean, having tools at your disposal is a way of putting Trump's insane threats into, you know, real threats, and I think unwise threats and conceivably war crime threats, depending on what the tools are and how they're used. He's pretty careful to avoid any specifics there, but he doesn't sound like Trump. And he didn't. And he didn't. To be fair to France, he didn't endorse Trump, except he didn't want to repeat the same words. I assume that was a choice on his part. So I think this was Vance auditioning for impeachment and the 25th Amendment. I'll go that far. I think he knows what he's doing. He's very clever in his own way, if not very attractive guy. And he's signaling Mike Johnson and Thune and all these people and a lot of people out in the country that you can get what you like about Trump's macho, aggressive, taking on Iran type foreign policy. I don't think Vance even quite believes in that. But anyway, he's pretending for now to be sort of on board with that side of Trump's maga, that part of maga, that part of Trump's foreign policy. But you don't have to take the insanity. So, yeah, I think this is Vance quietly, not so quietly signaling that he, you know, people should think hard about that 25th amendment and impeachment stuff.
- [33:56]
B
Yeah, yeah. I mean, from your lips to God's ears, the Lord has a sense of humor. Here we are, we are representing to you the official position of the Bulwark, endorsing in the immediate term the tenure of would be President J.D. vance. Go get him, J.D. you know, talk Marco into it. We're behind you all the way. I don't know, I guess we can leave it there, Bill. What else is there to say? Hopefully this time next week we will be talking about Trump having backed off of this threat in some way that is not too ultimately catastrophic to either America's interests or the world. And you never know, anything could happen. So thanks everybody for coming along with us, watching us pull our hair out on livestream over all this stuff. You can't say it's not an interesting time to follow and comment on the news news. So I guess we got that going for us. But thanks to you guys out there. Thanks Bill, for the stream and, and we'll see you all next week. You know, go, go subscribe to the channel, go get our newsletter, do all those good things. Yeah, we'll see you all next week.
- [35:02]
A
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F
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- [36:03]
B
Hey, it's Tyler Edick and Bubba Wallace from 2311 Racing. So who decided what we do when the helmets come off? Same committee as always.
- [36:11]
C
Which is you?
- [36:12]
B
Unanimous vote. Off the track. We keep things competitive. Yeah, just without the caution. That's why we're on Chumba Casino. Fast Fun games, daily rewards and bragging rights still apply. Join the fun@chumbacasino.com. let's Chumba. Sponsored by Chumba Casino. No purchase necessary. VGW Group Boardwear prohibited by law. 21 terms and conditions apply.