Andrew Egger (4:55)

Yeah. Especially after the first one didn't turn out. So now that was part of their original, their last attack shortly after Charlie Kirk, too.

Bill Kristol (5:01)

Right.

Andrew Egger (5:01)

So they are sort of into using Kimmel and maybe look, maybe it's one of many, many lines. And Kimmel's sort of famous and it's good to attack liberal celebrities, Trump has learned over the years. So I don't quite discount it as like, this is their main line of attack. But having Melania come out gave it a lot more visibility. I mean, just one, the most obvious point to make is you made the most. The key point, which is it's not an incitement to violence. The main point is he said this Thursday night. I gather I do not watch regularly Jimmy Kimmel or almost ever, really. Honestly, not that I have anything against him. I'm just not awake then. But he said it Thursday night. You and I follow social media pretty carefully. We read Trump administration responses. We follow what Caroline Levitt says on in her briefings and all this. It was nothing. Friday was a news day. People were talking. Saturday prior to the correspondence dinner was a news day. No one thought to even mention it. Am I wrong? Maybe literally one person did. I mean, I don't, I literally think I've done this. But one could search through, you know, Truth, Social or X and search the big 50 MAGA accounts. No one thought, oh my God, outrage. It was just okay, as you say, a Jimmy Kimmel routine and not a, not the most offensive joke he's ever told, incidentally, you know, and nor the most original, as you suggest. And so it's totally invented. And, and you're right to focus in the newsletter this morning on the fact that of all the things to, to kind of invent to be offended about and invent to make one of your lines of criticism, you might say, or you know, public relations lines for how horrible the left is after this assassination attempts is it's not the most obvious one. So I don't think it's going to go anywhere. I assume ABC is not going to do anything, but I don't know, you know, he's gotten on the eye. We've dismissed other attacks on the media, especially on TV in the past. Stephanopoulos, I want a ridiculous lawsuit. Actually, they sell for 15 million. CBS actually it gets bought and then they waive them. They're about to okay the merger and we're going to have a very different CBS than we had before. Bezos for the Post. Oh, come on. He's not going to buckle to Trump. So I don't know. I mean, there's Trump is pretty good at just experimenting, you know, I'm going to try to bully people wherever I can. If it works 65% of the time, that's good. If it works 30% of the time, maybe it's still good, you know. So I guess I don't entirely discount it as a not crazy tactic. Made a little more visible, though, by Melania's entrance into the fray.

Bill Kristol (7:22)

Yeah, I think we do have a little bit of audio specifically of Kimmel responding to some of these attacks last night. So let's let him. We don't have to put it in our words. Let's let him talk about it for a minute.

Andrew Egger (7:32)

A call to fire me from our first lady, Melania Trump, saying I should be fired because of a joke I made again five nights ago. It was a pretend roast. I said, our first lady Melania is here. Look at her, so beautiful. Mrs. Trump, you have a glow like an expectant widow. Which obviously was a joke about their age difference and the look of joy we see on her face every time they're together. It was a very light roast joke about the fact that he's almost 80 and she's younger than I am. It was not by any stretch of the definition a call to assassination.

Bill Kristol (8:12)

You gotta appreciate the willingness of the studio audience to laugh at the joke, even though they definitely have read about. They're not really surprised by the punchline there. Very agreeable studio audience for Jimmy Kimmel, which I'm sure he appreciates. But yes, I mean, that's the main point There it's faintly ridiculous. It's quite ridiculous. And we'll talk a little bit more about in some ways it's good that this is the sort of ridiculous response from, from the White House as opposed to other things they've tried to roll out in the past supposed to other things they could still try to roll out. But we should not lose sight of like, I mean, this, this truly is just the White House, the president and the first lady and the entire messaging apparatus of the White House leaning on a public broadcaster to fire a comic over a silly joke that they are lying about the content of and basically just saying, you know, he, he called for violence when he didn't. So that's, that's the main thing for kill anything else on Camel before we turn to the other.

Andrew Egger (9:01)

That was well said. We shouldn't lose sight of that kind of. Yeah. In the course of. I totally agree that last point. I mean, we take it for granted now that of course, you know, they're just going to this is their thing they're seizing on. There was once a time when you really didn't have presidents at first. Ladies routinely call for the firing of call on networks to fire people for saying something that they found slightly off putting, you know, but yeah.

Bill Kristol (9:23)

Yeah. So we should turn to the second element of all this because it wasn't this was not the whole, it was not a whole of government anti Jimmy Kimmel response yesterday. There was one other big talking point slash project that sort of the entire political right and even Congress got involved with this one consolidated around yesterday. And that was the need to finish the President's ballroom, you know, the ballroom for which he knocked down the current East Wing, on which construction is ongoing, but which is also sort of snarled up in various lawsuits in court. It hasn't actually been maybe you can correct me if I'm wrong on this bill. I don't think it's been enjoined. I think they're allowed to keep building for the time being. But there is this ongoing lawsuit that would seek to prevent this from happening. So we got a couple things from government yesterday. We got a lot of rhetoric just about the about how silly this lawsuit is about how important it is to get this ballroom. And we got some sort of surprising comments from Congress. So let's maybe start with the Congress side of things because this was actually sort of astonishing. I did not expect this to pop up, but there is actually now a coalition of Republican lawmakers who despite months of one of the basic Trump promises about this ballroom Being that it's just going to be a privately funded thing, he's been sort of shaking people down for donations for it. Now it's, now there's a budgetary ask. So let's, let's, let's look at that a little bit. Here's Lindsey Graham going over this yesterday.

Lindsey Graham (10:51)

We're going to introduce legislation that would

Bill Kristol (10:55)

authorize $400 million to be spent to

Andrew Egger (10:59)

secure the, to build the Presidential Ballroom.

Lindsey Graham (11:03)

We are going to make and build a ballroom which they've wanted for probably 100 years at the White House. And it'll be a world class beautiful ballroom. And they'll use the meeting rooms already existing. And we're going to get that started over the next few months and it's going to be beautiful and it'll be done properly and I will fund it.

Bill Kristol (11:24)

Will you bring, you will fund it?

Lindsey Graham (11:26)

Yeah. I'm not going to ask the government for money. I'll fund it and I'm sure we'll have some donations to it. I'm going to get a ballroom built and we're putting up our own money with the government just paying for nothing. I thought I'd bring this out because this is going to be probably the finest ballroom ever built. And we're doing it. No cost to the country. It's being put, the money is being put in by me and donors, very great patriots, actually the most beautiful ballroom anywhere in the world. So we did this. No charge to the taxpayer whatsoever. This was all donations made by friends of mine and people that are, that love our country, they love the White House.

Bill Kristol (12:08)

That's good stuff from Matt there. I did not know we had that much of a montage in coming. And in fact, I had forgotten that early until I watched that just now live with all you people. I had actually forgotten that at first Trump was saying, I personally am gonna put up the money for this. And even that had sort of changed and evolved over time to be more and more of, you know, donors, my friends, you know, all these people. But I don't know what. Were you surprised by this development from Lindsey Graham and some other Republicans yesterday? I mean, it kind of took, I genuinely thought that like the private donations thing was just kind of going to be the lay of the land for this. So what do you make of this new, this new energy on the Hill to throw the President a bone here?

Andrew Egger (12:48)

I mean, just, I guess two points. One, I mean, Trump himself obsessed about the raise the ballroom an hour after the incident on Saturday night, I believe on Truth Social. And then Certainly in his press conference around 10:30 that night and then Sunday also in his interview. So Trump, this is the thing, Trump, it's the main takeaway. Trump has had nothing about anything whether the social Secret Service should have done different things. Nothing about gun control, God knows, you know, nothing about, I don't know, other questions that can obviously be raised. And not even, as you say, as you say, even the more generic attack that much on left wing incitement to violence. Others have picked that up in a very big way. But he's obsessed with the ballroom and now he has a new justification, somewhat new justification for it, which is the sort of safety and security justification, as you can see from those clips. The previous justification was that it was going to be grand, beautiful, what we deserve here in the United States, the greatest ballroom ever. It was a little more on the aesthetic side, you might say, or on the grandiosity, you know, imperial presidency side, not on the Secret Service safety and security side. So that's. So he's been obsessed with the ballroom. And I suppose these days, if you're a Republican who for many other reasons wants to be super on Trump's good side. And Lindsey Graham has various issues he's trying to advance, I suppose in the Trump administration and the others in general, generically, they all wanna suck up to Trump all the time anyway, this is it. This is his favorite issue. And why not introduce it? I don't know that Lindsey Graham thinks this is actually gonna get put in an appropriations bill. But how better to show your loyalty to Trump than to ask the government to fund the thing he cares about the most?

Bill Kristol (14:20)

Yeah, that point you make about this being a really kind of easy, low calorie way for some of these guys who are kind of on the bubble in terms of their MAGA credentials to suck up. I had not quite thought of it in those terms, but I think you're totally right about that. That does a good job to lead into and recontextualize. Another thing I wanted to talk about, about the ballroom, which is this filing that the new acting Attorney general, Todd Blanche, former deputy Attorney General under Pam Bondi, who is very much in the running to get the permanent nod, but has some, you know, there are some factions in MAGA who don't think he's a true enough believer, who think he's a little bit of a possible rhino, who's sort of play acting in there. He made a filing last night

Andrew Egger (15:07)

in

Bill Kristol (15:07)

the ongoing legal dispute involving the ballroom. Basically this court case where there's this group that's trying to prevent its ongoing construction. And this was a fascinating legal document. We're just throwing up kind of the first page of this. Again, this was filed overnight. It's written like a truth social post. This is Todd Blanche. The National Trust for Historic Preservation is a beautiful name, but even their name is fake because when they add the words in the United States to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, it makes it sound like a governmental agency, which it is not. In fact, the United States refused to continue funding it in 2005 because they strongly disagreed with their mission and objectives. They are very bad for our country. They stopped many projects that are worthy and hurt many others. In this case, they are trying to stop one that is vital to our national security and the safety of all presidents, the United States, both current and future, their family, staff and cabinet members, yada yada yada. They were asked by the United States military not to bring this suit because of the top secret nature of the important facility being built. They were shown detailed plans and specifications of this. Honestly, it's too small for me even to read. My scheme. Knitted, knotted, unified and cohesive structure by top officers and leaders in both the military and secret Service. But this did not deter them because they suffer from Trump derangement syndrome, commonly referred to as tds, as noted by Democrat Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania. Such a great, such a rich text. And are represented by the lawyer for Barack Hussein Obama, Gregory Craig. You can go on and on. I mean, it's a lengthy filing. Basically just asking the judge to sort of sweep aside his own sort of partial rulings in favor of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. I mean, this is a blatant attempt to just sort of curry favor with the President by another one of these guys who, like Lindsey Graham, as you say, is sort of on the bubble with Trump. I mean, what do you make of the of Blanche, as far as all this stuff is concerned?

Andrew Egger (16:57)

Yeah, no, I think you got it totally right. It's like it's not a serious. I mean, they may win the lawsuit because it's a little unclear how much discretion the President has to knock down parts of the White House and then build other parts without getting certain sign offs. But this is a well established organization. It's it. A lot of people in Washington know about a lot of buildings that have had to comply with the historic trusts, you know, kind of requirements, or at least thought it was wise to comply because they have real standing and sort of trying to maintain these old buildings and parts of old structures and so forth. Anyway, it's not worth getting into. It's a routine lawsuit. The government a reasonable chance of winning. This will not affect the chances of winning at all. If anything, I should think the judge might think, what, Are you kidding me? But if you're top, Blanche, and you really want to be the Attorney General of the United States, not acting Attorney General of the United States. Yeah. This is what you do.

Bill Kristol (17:52)

Yeah. I mean, it's really striking. We have a few more things to say about all of this aftermath of Saturday night's shooting, but let's take just a second here to first of all, I should say again, off the top. I'm Andrew Egger. I'm the White House correspondent for the Bulwark. I said it off the top, but more people join halfway through. This is Bill Kristol. He is the editor at large of the Bulwark. We write morning shots. We come to you live on Tuesday mornings, which is what we're doing right now. And here you are watching it. Or maybe later. Let's do a quick ad insert here. I am not having to say it myself. People don't like to hear me say these things. They like to hear Sam Stein say these things. So let's, let's, let's let Sam do that and we'll get back to this.

Sam Stein (18:28)

Borg takes a Sponsored by Aura Frames. Look, Mother's Day is coming up and this is the last holiday where you want to get caught flat footed. Trust me, I've been there. It got ugly. Thankfully, Aura Frames digital picture frames are a complete layup of a gift because you can give your mom more of her favorite thing. And what is that? It's you and your grandkids in pixel form. Whether you're reliving that trip to Disney or you're just reliving moments from your childhood. I love my Aura frame. I gave it to my mother in law last year. We put up all the pictures of her grandkids and her she loves it. She displays it right out there in her living room. These digital frames allow you to share your photos and videos effortlessly. Download the free Aura app or text photos straight to your frame and with free unlimited storage, you can add as many photos and videos as you want. You can even preload photos before it ships and then you can keep adding them at any time or anywhere. Every frame comes packaged in a premium gift box with no price tag. Their top rated App reached number one in the App Store on Christmas Day in 2025. Named number one by Wirecutter, you can save on the gifts moms love by visiting auraframes.com for a limited time. Listeners can get 25 off their best selling Carver matte frame with code Bulwark takes that's a U R A frames.com promo code bulwarktakes. Support the show by mentioning us at checkout and terms and conditions do apply.

Bill Kristol (19:55)

I was very convicted by that. We actually got one of those frames. I don't remember if it was an aura frame or a different one, but we got one of those for my mom for last year's Mother's Day. I haven't loaded new pictures on it in a long time. So now I'm feeling spurred to go and update what we've got on that. Thanks, Sam. Thanks, Sam. Okay, the one thing that still is to say about this and then we'll turn to a couple other matters. I was shocked yesterday and maybe there's some other stuff coming, maybe there's other shoes to drop in terms of how the White House is going to politically message on this Saturday shooting and respond. But I was shocked by the difference in the stuff we've all talked about versus a lot of the ways that the president and the president's people responded last year after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, which I think was in September of last year. And I wrote about some of this for morning shots this morning. But the White House had a different point person then and it was Stephen Miller. Stephen Miller, obviously one of the president's top advisers. He was everywhere right after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, really laying out this kind of maximalist we need to take the fight to the left case in astonishingly broad and kind of over the top terms that we haven't really seen so much from the White House. So let me just quote from what I wrote this morning, which is cribbing from what I wrote about what Stephen Miller was saying last September, last Thursday morning, which this is from the point of view of last September, less than 24 hours after the shooting, after the Charlie Kirk shooting, Miller tweeted out a thesis statement. There is an ideology that has steadily been growing in this country, he wrote, which hates everything that is good, righteous and beautiful and celebrates everything that is warped, twisted and depraved. This ideology has one unifying thread he added the insatiable thirst for destruction. And then here he was a little bit later, I think this was talking to Sean Hannity. And he made many he did a lot of Fox News appearances to make a similar case. The last message that Charlie Kirk gave me before he Joined his creator in heaven was he said that we have to dismantle and take on the radical left organizations in this country that are fomenting violence. And we are going to do that under President Trump's leadership. I don't care how. It could be a RICO charge, a conspiracy charge, conspiracy against the United States insurrection, but we are going to do what it takes to dismantle the organizations and the entities that are fomenting riots, that are doxxing, that are trying to inspire terrorism, that are committing acts of wanton violence. The power of law enforcement under President Trump's leadership. This is still Miller will be used to find you will be used to take away your money, take away your power, and if you've broken the law, to take away your freedom. So that is a lot, right? That is not just ballroom talk. That is not just, you know, Jimmy Kimmel made a mean joke and he should probably get fired. That is like maximum political lawfare against sort of the left in this country because they're domestic terrorists and they need to be rooted out. We haven't seen any of Miller after this attempted attack. We haven't seen much of Miller lately, period. I mean, he has just kind of gone to ground since Minneapolis, since. Since he kind of since the Trump administration was like, we kind of need to do a pivot on his pet issue of immigration. He still shows up here and there. You know, he's on TV every once in a while, but he has not been the point person for this shooting in the slightest. And I guess we had a little bit maybe of a disagreement on this. Bill, I kind of think it's a good thing, right? I mean, I kind of think that the administration is actually less effective and less sort of dangerous when Miller's not out there. Kind of like marshaling the troops and marshaling the messaging. And it's just sort of Trump and his sort of idiosyncrasies, and he cares a lot about the ballroom, and he cares a lot about Jimmy Kimmel. And so it goes in these sort of sillier directions, these sorts of responses. But obviously, he still is a very powerful guy behind the scenes, and you're still enormously influential in setting White House policy. So how do you kind of tease through all of this stuff as far as Miller's involvement is concerned?

Andrew Egger (23:38)

Bill, I think your last point's important. I mean, we'll see how much the administration isn't forging ahead on all the fronts that Miller laid out very publicly last September. And really through the end of last year, whether they're now whether having laid it out publicly. Well, two points. It didn't work so well when Miller was out there so visibly. Right. I mean, they, they laid out these broad documents, the National Security Presidential memorandum and others. They got a lot of hoopla. The base was all excited to have Miller screaming and yelling. But at the end of the day, they didn't, if it could be political about it. They didn't exploit the Charlie Kirk assassination in the way they hoped in terms of polling, in terms of the November elections, in terms of getting favorable court opinions, in terms of getting, getting Congress really to move in their direction on DHS funding and other issues. So, I mean, I think they may have some of this is really just, as you say, going to ground, especially after Minneapolis. Some of it may be a bit of a calculation that these things are better done a little more quietly. Some of it may be a calculation that they've laid out some of the legal framework and now it's a matter of implementing it. So my only, you know, qualification. And, but I also agree that, yes, generally it's a good thing that it didn't work back in September and October. It doesn't seem to have yet. On the other hand, they do have that National Security memorandum out there. Todd Blanche at doj, I'd say, is being as aggressive as Bondi ever was in terms of going after political enemies, in terms of seeming to go after going after organizations like the Southern Poverty Law center, you know, for, for what they've done in a kind of maybe they should or shouldn't have had informants. But I mean, it's not a very strong legal case, I don't think. But they want to intimidate liberal and left wing organizations. Hegseth has gone ahead with firing people at the Defense Department and, you know, promoting Christian nationalism over there in pretty explicit ways. So I guess I, and I don't know, I think we just will have to see how much follow up there is both behind the scenes but also more in the, as you sort of suggested, in the nooks and crannies of government. So I see just this morning, the last 20 minutes or so, there's a report that the FCC is going to look at Disney's renewals of licenses. So Disney owns abc. So that's a good example of how, yeah, the Kimmel thing is a little silly. On the other hand, you know, no one really wants to mess with the FCC too much if you've got a whole bunch of license renewals. So maybe the pressure is a little worse. So I'm uncertain whether they made a tactical adjustment, whether it's an actual retreat. And I think we'll see what DOJ does, what DHS does, what. What DOD does. Really. Those are the big. And, and, and we don't know. I talked to someone who knew Blanche back when he was SDNY and then a kind of corporate lawyer and got along with him and thought he was a kind of serious lawyer. And I said, it's kind of amazing how far he's gone, isn't it? And he said, yeah, kind of amazing. But, you know, ambitions. Ambition and maybe whatever. But also he said he had the impression that we didn't know how much Steve Miller, and this was about a week ago, so who had, as you say, already gone to ground to some degree how much Miller was involved in all these agencies.

Bill Kristol (26:38)

Right.

Andrew Egger (26:39)

You think? I think of him as a DHS kind of guy. Right. But that he knows a lot about the legal stuff and he's talking to Blanche and he's talking to Hegseth. And so it's a very. It's an interesting question that you pose in the newsletter. How much certainly Miller is not the public face he was. How much is he still in charge? And he may not, incidentally, he may have genuinely lost influence, but Trump may. Isn't an idiot, you know, on some things. And therefore Trump may have decided, I don't know, this stuff's got a little far, you know. And so DHS both wanted to look as if it was pulling back and did pull back some on the kinds of enforcement it was doing, no question. Now, again, ultimately, they've given up on the mass deportation agenda anyway. I think you raise a very important question of sort of how do different aspects of the authoritarian project. How are they doing in the Trump administration? And I think it's a little harder, a little hard to tell now. It's not quite. Doesn't feel. I agree with you, like September and October where they were just all in on brazenly proclaiming all of it.

Bill Kristol (27:35)

Yeah, Yeah. I think that last point is. I 100%, I agree with most of what you're saying, but I 100% agree with that very last thing about. I just think, like, the lines have gotten kind of muddier in terms of it being quite easy to perceive kind of where specific ideas are bubbling up from. And some of that is just, I mean, the fact that we're getting real personnel change for the first time. I mean, we don't really have a great sense yet of what Mark Wayne Mullen's Department of Homeland Security looks like we had a better grasp of what sort of the Gnome Lewandowski DHS with Stephen Miller peeking over the shoulder. Kind of how that worked and why it worked the way that it did. Obviously, the Justice Department functioned a specific way under Pam Bondi, and we don't know who's going to permanently replace her yet. Obviously, the through line for all of these things is that they are very subservient to Trump anytime Trump wants them to be very subservient to him. But obviously he is that. That's a spottier prospect or proposition than it used to be because his attention span is shrinking and he is more and more preoccupied by more and more crises on more and more fronts. He did not have to spend all of last year sort of like thinking, oh my gosh, how do I figure out this, how to fix this crisis that I've sparked in the Strait of Hormuz and in the Middle east, for instance, which we're going to talk a little bit more about just in a minute. But the specific, specific ways that these specific Trump flunkies kind of came to specific accommodations with how they worked for him or how they saw their role as sort of furthering his will in their departments. We're at a moment where it's not necessarily so obvious how the various first of all, who is actually calling the shots under Trump, and then second of all, how these sort of secondary players are putting that into effect. I did want a real quick bring up. I want to pivot to Iran, but I wanted to bring up one other piece. This is from last July. It's the journalist Garrett Graff who had what I think is a really, really insightful piece at that time. And the title of it was I will scroll up and find out who actually is the president of the United States right now. Kind of a provocative piece, basically posturing or positing that you could sort of imagine Trump as the head of state, but these various other Trump figures as the actual head of government, because they were the ones who were kind of putting, putting the rubber to the road in terms of these policy agendas. And this is again him from last July. In fact, looking back now, we can recognize that even just by early July, we're actually living in the third geologic era of Trump's acting presidents episodes where Trump has been willing to let others drive his agenda until he tires of them. For the period from roughly inauguration in late January through mid March, Elon Musk was the primary acting president as Doge ran rampant. Then beginning in April, as Musk's attention and energy waned and tensions grew with him inside government, Peter Navarro sees the controls. And we were treated to the rollercoaster ride of the April Liberation Day tariffs and an intense globally destabilizing period of focus on trade. Then, in late May, with the world roiled by trade tariffs, Stephen Miller visited ICE headquarters to demand ICE supercharge its detentions and removals. Now, we're clearly in the third epoch where ICE and mass deportations are the main focus and the driver of the country's headlines. We are in the Miller age of the Trump administration, and that absolutely lasted at least through Minneapolis. Right. In theory, we could still be in there. Maybe you could make the argument we're now in the Pete Hegseth era with the war in Iran, but I mean, it's gotten murkier, it's gotten muddier at the very least.

Andrew Egger (30:59)

Yeah, well, or as you say, as Graff said, we go through these different prime ministers, if you want to think of it that way, depending on sort of what issue set Trump wants to focus on or just what catches his attention or what catches the world's attention. I do think on the. Maybe one other point, way to categorize this might be this, though, that certainly Trump in general felt he had the wind at his back in the latter half, I would say, of 2015, of 2025. You know, the. He did the. He tackled on terrorists, which sort of took the edge off that and made it less disastrous to the world economy, at least for a while. And another thing is they were all in on, you know, ICE and all in on the prosecutions and as you say, after the Charlie Kirk assassination, all in on generally demonizing the left and the national security memorandum. And that was kind of weird. And Hegseth was firing people and it all looked great. And then they, they had success with the one day bombing of Iran, it seemed, and that led to Venice and then a lot of that, then the boats in the Caribbean. Not much pushback. And so that probably led to the Venezuela thing, which really went to Trump's head. So I think you could argue that whatever the sequence of prime ministers and of issue areas, he was more. Getting more and more aggressive and megalomaniacal. I might, you know, I might also have had a short attention, as managers say, but. But sort of combined together. I do wonder how much so that I. And that that led to Iran. I think in that respect. Yeah, that's a HECSEF thing, not a Miller Thing. But I think A, Miller was probably for it, and B, it certainly made Trump willing to take that risk, which I'm not sure he would have actually a year before. What. And this does transition to a discussion of Iran, which I know you wanted to get to anyway. But I mean, how much, two months into that war are we seeing? Both a little bit of a, Of a sense of yikes, maybe we got a little too far. Maybe he hasn't even internalized that. Maybe it's just. But he can't help but sense it, maybe. And that leads to a little more focus on things like the ballroom and a little less willingness to push on each of these issues, or not incidentally, or it could lead to. I'm gonna have to pull back a little on this Iran thing, but I got to double down on these other areas. That's where I think it's hard to know because Blanche seems very aggressive, for example, at Justice. But yeah, I do think when Graff does this periodization, you've got to say February, don't you think February 28th was the beginning of a new period, epoch in the Trump second term presidency. It was kind of amazing to have, what, four or five epochs in 16 months.

Bill Kristol (33:26)

Yeah. And Epic's not what it used to be.

Andrew Egger (33:30)

No.

Bill Kristol (33:31)

But, yes, I think you're absolutely right. And it's not only in foreign policy, but also in domestic policy, just because it has so sort of fragmented him. And I mean, obviously, obviously there's all the economic stuff that's happening here at home, too, in terms of the price of energy, in terms of the price of fertilizer, all of that stuff. But also just in terms of the President's attention span. And I think the point you make is good, that it's almost like he's. First of all, we know he's getting tired of it because, I mean, that's just plain. When he talks about it, he hits all the same notes he's been hitting all along in terms of, you know, there's, there's never any new information about the negotiating. It's also, it's always just, well, we've put them in a position where we're pretty sure they're going to crack any minute and we'll go back to bombing them if they don't and our allies should get involved. But, but, you know, we're already mad at them because they haven't gotten involved until now, and it's not our problem, it's the world's problem and all these sorts of things. And it's almost like the fact that it is so easy for him to pivot back to like Kimmel, you know, like while the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, he's going to do a bunch of Kimmel content. It is weird. It's weird that we are two months into this and our attention is not his attention. And our attention, because we have to key off of what he does to a certain extent is not growing on it. Even though the crisis is growing, the energy shock is growing. But it's almost like the President considers it old news. I know you wanted to talk a little bit about one guy who doesn't necessarily consider it old news, who is in fact seems to be keenly aware of at least the political danger here. And that's the vice president. That's J.D. vance, who has been sort of an unwilling dance partner in Iran all along. But has he or his advisors or his advisors at his behest have really gotten quite leaky in recent weeks and especially in this Atlantic piece yesterday titled the Pentagon May Not Be Telling Trump the Full Picture about the War. I just want to go real quick through a couple excerpts of this because it is really astonishing. I mean, it is. I can't remember for instance, at any point in Biden when like Kamala Harris's team was like being this explicit about anything that was going on that she considered a bad idea and wanted people to know she considered it a bad idea. So let's just read this real quick. In closed door meetings, JD Vance has repeatedly questioned the Defense of Department's depiction of the war in Iran and whether the Pentagon has understated what appears to be the drastic depletion of US Missile stockpiles. Two senior administration officials told us that the Vice President has queried the accuracy of the information the Pentagon has provided about the war. He has also expressed his concerns about the availability of certain missile systems. In discussions with President Trump, several people familiar with the situation told us the consequences of a dramatic drawdown in munitions reserves are potentially dire. Obviously, there are a lot of other theaters we might need to have weapons for as well. And we'll go on to the second screenshot. Vance is trying, the advisor suggested, to avoid making this personal or to create divisions in Trump's war cabinet. Some Advance's confidants, however, believe that Hegseth's portrayal has been so positive as to be misleading. In a statement, Vance said that the Pentagon chief is doing a great job incited Hegseth's work with Trump to ensure a warrior ethos in the military's top ranks. A White House official told us that Vance asks a lot of probing questions about our strategic planning, as do all of the members of the, of the president's national security team. I mean, this is, it's kind of plain, right? I mean, he thinks it's going badly and he wants people to know that he thinks it's going badly to minimize the blowback on him later. Is there more to it than that, Bill? I mean, what do you see the vice president up to here?

Andrew Egger (36:58)

No, no, you've described it well. I mean, look, as someone who was in the White House, was in the executive ranch, and occasionally talked on background to different reporters and stuff. Yeah, it's very interesting. So the, to make the piece a real peace, you have to have actual administration officials, probably people in the White House to some degree telling you what happened. You can't just depend on somebody advances. Right. So that the first quote is from senior administration officials. When I was in the White House and you didn't want to, you were worried the quote or the information might come too close to you. You always said, I'll be a senior administration official, not a senior White House official. But it could be anyone, right? It could be someone. But on the other hand, who's going to know about what Vance said to Trump? Who's going to know about what Vance said in the, in the Sit Room? I mean, that's a. Probably a Vance someone advance. Someone advances office or someone at the National Security Council who's advanced loyalist, I would say. So those are. But then the piece does broaden the aperture a little bit and then it starts talking about, I think people familiar with Vance's thinking or confidants, I think, of Vance. Right. And that, of course, could be people outside the government whom Vance is speaking to. And again, I think it's, I don't mean it's legitimate reporting. You're, if you're a reporter, you can get someone Vance has spoken to three days ago on the phone to tell you a little bit about what Vance thinks. That's totally legit to report that and important and useful. But it's interesting. It's sort of a classic piece of that sort. But it does mean the advanced world in the government and outside the government was very happy to cooperate. You know, if you get a call from the Atlantic and you're J.D. vance's buddy from X, Y, or Z, you first, you call Vance's press guy or chief of staff, say, hey, do you want me to take this call? And you want me to talk to them a little bit and yeah, that's okay. You can communicate the Vice President's general, you don't should give up anything, of course, it's so confidential or awkward. But you know, you can communicate the general, Vice President's general views. I mean, that's how this kind of piece gets written. It's a good piece and very good reporting and interesting. So yes, advance is distancing himself from it and I think the reason, just to get back to what you let in then, which is the straight of horrors. Trump. It's a kind of amazing. Trump never talks about it, but maybe it's not so amazing. It's the worst thing. It's the worst outcome of the war so far for him. And he's not talking about it because he wants to pretend war is kind of going okay. You know, we got a lot of pressure on them. We destroyed a huge number of things, unbelievable number of things. We destroyed. Oh my God. The destruction is just out of control. And never mentioned the actual card, the Iranian. We have all the cards. We have all the cards. Never mentioned the actual card. The Iranians played quite effectively which was closing the straight and keeping it closed. And then Trump had this kind of bizarre compensation. Oh, you know what, we're going to close the straight too. You know, it's like there's not much. I mean there's a tiny strategic rationale. If you're pressuring the Iranians, which will cause them to break. I mean, it's possible it will happen. But mostly our goal has been opening the strait. As Trump explicitly said three, four weeks ago, the Iranians goal has been closing the strait and the strait's closed. And I think what's happening, and it's hard to tell, but I think we've all been struck how little attention there's been to that in the media, among the public, among people in Congress. It's sort of let's pretend we're having a war here and that one of the main arteries of global commerce, especially for energy, hasn't closed. And I think that's about to change. I mean, I feel like it's just having too much effect now. It's been closed too long. Everyone thought, okay, a week or two, we can live with it a month dicey. We're now again over a month and we're two months into the war and there's no obvious way to open it except basically for Trump to accept the Iranian version of the Iranian deal or pummel them with bombing for a few More days and then accept a deal like this. I suppose he wants to look tougher or maybe get lucky and the Iranians decide to, they can't hold on. Or the, the more accommodationist types within Iran prevail over the irgc, which doesn't look like it's happening anyway, I think. But gas prices I think today or tomorrow are about to hit a multi year high. I see the Brent oil price which we've all become familiar with, has gone now to back up to the heights that it reached.

Bill Kristol (40:49)

Yes.

Andrew Egger (40:49)

You know, two weeks ago. And I just feel like the, you know, the economic stuff is getting serious enough here and globally that you can't quite ignore. Trump has, it's been in his interest to ignore it. It's not just that he doesn't like, you know, doesn't have a long attention span, but I think it's going to be harder to ignore, which I do think means we come to something of a inflection point perhaps on the war. He's been treading water really for what, two weeks, wouldn't you say? I guess, yeah, I gotta think we'll hit come to that in the next days or at least week or two plus. Final point, the end of this week is the 60 days. We're 60 days into the use of force and that the way the War Powers act works, I mean he's, he's claimed it was an emergency that required him to use force as an immediate threat. Dubious. But anyway, even if you buy that, even if it's a super immediate threat, you do are supposed to get congressional authorization within 60 days to continue using force. And that 60 days is Friday, I think. So again, there'll be a, more of a, there'll be a renewed congressional debate and people will point this out. And some Republican members of Congress have used that as a bit of a crutch to vote against having a congressional debate or to refuse to have a congressional debate because, you know, it's still within the 60 days, you don't have to do it, but they can't really do that after Friday. So all in all, I guess all this, for me this means Iran comes back a little, very front and center after a little bit of treading water, as I said, for the last couple of weeks.

Bill Kristol (42:13)

Yeah, yeah. I mean, one thing that I have kind of struggled to wrap my head around as the President has sort of like publicly posted through all of this stuff, is to what degree his sort of waving off the Strait of Hormuz is sort of happy talk. It's designed to just sort of like reassure people and to what degree it actually is in keeping with his own sort of truly cockamamie economic ideas about sort of like the, you know, the silver lining to a lot of this stuff because, I mean, this is a thing we have seen over and over again, is that the president just zeroes in on one economic indicator, like the trade deficit or like foreign investment in America or something like that, and just sees that as like the entire economic picture, like, no matter what else goes haywire or wrong, he's like, what are you talking about? The economy's doing great because of this reason. And he has actually taken that approach to the straight as well. He's saying, you know, it's only Iran that's really being hurt. You know, like, we're doing great. All these tankers are coming, you know, they're sailing over to America to get our gas and get our oil and our oil companies are making a killing. And so it's really only out of the goodness of our hearts that we even care about the Strait of Hormuz at all. Completely setting aside the fact that this new sort of orientation of global energy markets where everybody's suddenly clamoring for American oil and gas is enormously impactful on American consumers because there's so much more competition for the stuff we want to put in our cars and in our.

Andrew Egger (43:33)

Well, that's the key point. I mean, the deflection that you described very well that he normally does. Well, I trade balance here, you know, it's is, could work if it's abstract economic statistics and people aren't sure which ones they should care about. Or maybe, you know, he's, maybe we're doing better on some and worse than others. Gas prices are gas prices. I mean, it's a little hard to as you, you know that. So what you just said is really crucial. I don't know. Don't you think it's going to get a little harder to say, you know, look here, not there. If people are driving to, you know, fil up their car and it's back up higher than it's been at any point during this war. And it's not obvious that it's coming down very soon. If anything, it continues to trend up again. And this is one of these things where it's not a one off, okay, this is the price, you know, we paid. And, and, and it's built in, so to speak, at this point. And now we're going to figure out how to work around it. There'll be A little bit of that. But as long as the straits close, it's hard to see that oil prices don't go up for at least quite a while. And so gas prices aren't going to, you know, they're going to go up. It's not just that they're at a high. So I think the gas price thing is what changes from the normal, you know, now you see it, now you don't kind of trump economic, you know, theorizing. But I think it'll be an interesting week or two for that reason. And on that front, yeah, and to

Bill Kristol (44:49)

be clear, I don't think it's going to get hard for him to make this case. I think it's been hard. I mean, like, I think he is. He is plumbing new depths to his approval rating every day.

Andrew Egger (44:56)

Fair enough.

Bill Kristol (44:57)

An enormous amount of. Amount of this is enormously to blame or to credit for that. His handling or mishandling of the war in Iran and just sort of the affordability crisis that has been sort of exploded by all this, that preexisted all of this, but now has become. Has so much more teeth now that there's a specific thing he's done that people can point to a specific harm that they have suffered in their lives in addition to kind of all of their just sort of overall malaise and just sense of economic mismanagement that sort of is hovering over the whole economy. And I think you're absolutely right that this is starting to come to a head. I mean, two weeks ago we got the ceasefire, everybody let out this giant sigh of relief in terms of the energy markets. The price of oil re collapsed. It was much higher still than before the war. But there was just this sense, okay, finally, maybe we're coming out the other side of this. And now all of that collapse has been lost. And yet it doesn't seem like the President is at this moment feeling that pressure. It doesn't seem like he is quite yet caught up with the degree to which everybody really, really, really needs him to find a solution to this, like immediately, if not sooner. And. And so we're going to have to see what happens. Obviously, we'll talk a lot more about this in the days and weeks to come, but I think that's an okay place to leave it for now. Bill, anything to add before we split?

Andrew Egger (46:18)

No, just that, I mean, he may. It may be that there'll be more and more pressure on. There will be more and more pressure on him to find a solution. It's not obvious what the solution is so right.

Bill Kristol (46:26)

Yes. I mean, it's a real mess. It's a real mess. We will leave it there. I'm Andrew Egger. That's Bill Kristol. Thanks to you guys all for tuning in and watching. I have one programming note that I need to read before we split one important note before we wrap up. Sam, Tim and Sarah will be in California very soon and they want to hang out with you. The Bulwark is doing two stage shows, one in San Diego at the Balboa Theater. That's happening on May 20th, and then the next night they'll be in LA at the Novo. If you're in or around Southern California or have been thinking of going, go buy your ticket today, reach out to your friends and get a night out planned with the Bulwark. Go to the bulwark.com events one more time. That is thebullwerk.com events and we'll update the show notes to make sure. We've got a link for you there too. All right, that's all we got. Thanks, Bill. Thanks to everybody out there. We hope you will subscribe on whatever platform you're watching on. Subscribe to the Bulwark on YouTube or on Substack. We'll be here again next Tuesday and we look forward to seeing you then. Whether it's slots or live dealers, Spinquest.com has the fun and action you're looking for with Spin Quest exclusives. Blackjack, roulette, baccarat and even live dice with craps and bubble craps. The games never stop so you don't have to. And right now, new users get $30 coin packs for just 10 bucks. Play now@Spinquest.com SpinQuest is a free to play social casino void where prohibited. Visit spinquest.com for more details.