← Bulwark Takes
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- [00:00]
A
Hey, everybody, it's Andrew Eggert with the Bulwark. Welcome to Morning Shots. I am here as always with my colleague Bill Kristol, editor at large of the Bulwark. We come live every Tuesday morning to talk about what we've been writing about in our newsletter and what else is going on in the news. Kind of a big day in Washington. We have a lot of stories, but we're going to start with something that's happening right now, which is the committee vote to confirm Donald Trump's nominee for Attorney General, Todd Blanche. There have been a lot of holdups to this vote, a lot of behind the scenes jockeying with Trump and his Republican senators over whether or not Blanche is going to be allowed through. They've worked all that out. So it looks like Blanche is going to get out of this hearing with a positive vote and then go to the Senate for a full confirmation vote. Let's listen in on Senator John Cornyn, who was one of the last holdouts for Blanche, talking about that vote in committee this morning. Assertion on behalf of the United States
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of America that weaponization fund is dead.
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And of course, I expect them to
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live up to that in any future litigation.
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Given this agreement with Mr. Blanch, I
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C
expect the department to live up to
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to this in future litigation and I will vote to advance him out of the committee today.
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A
So Cornyn, as he said twice, expects the Justice Department to live up to its commitment to keep this anti weaponization fund dead. And for that reason, he's going to be a yes on Blanche and so will Senator Thom Tillis. Bill, what do you think about where this has all landed? We've talked about this story a lot in the past. It does seem like they did manage to squeeze a couple of spots, small concessions out of the White House here. And yet what we're left with is Attorney General Todd Blanch, of all people.
- [01:54]
B
Yeah, and pretty fake concessions when you look at the details. But for some reason, coroner focused on this one aspect of what Blanche has done at Justice. He's also done the political prosecutions that we all know about. He's done a million other things honestly, that have turned the Department of Justice into Trump's personal law firm. They chose not to take a cast, put a blind cast, a blind eye to all those, to say nothing of his really central role in the Epstein cover up. One just forgets how much that was his thing, including flying down to see Maxwell, obviously. And then she, a week later ends up at a much nicer facility, which somehow Blanche now claims he didn't know about, even though the Bureau of Prisons reports to the deputy attorney general, which was his job at the time. So they want to confirm Blanche. They're going to confirm Blanche. We've seen this movie before with Hexath and Patel and all the other controversial nominees who made it through this Republican Senate. The Senate will go out at the end of this week. And I do think Democrats can say, if you want any check on Trump, you need to vote for a Democratic Senate, because this Republican Senate, after a little bit of squawking and squealing, ends up bending the knee.
- [03:03]
A
Yeah. It is really remarkable when you just kind of stack up all the factors. Right. When you look at how, on the one hand, Donald Trump's popularity is lower than it has ever been before, he's at, as our fearless leader Sarah Longwell likes to say, he's at the Bush line. He's at the point of. The point where past presidents, even when they have seen strong loyalty from their parties up until that point, as the political pressures mount and as actual midterm accountability grows nearer, a lot of times you have seen Congress find it useful, find it auspicious to create more distance even with an unpopular president in their own party, to be seen as pushing back strongly. Obviously, it's a little bit of a different case with Cornyn and Tillis. They are not fighting for their own political lives anymore. Their careers are already over, but they're over because Donald Trump, Trump brought an end to them. Donald Trump has, has decreed them insufficiently MAGA and has endorsed other people and kicked them out of the party. And so you would think there would be even more freedom, even more incentive for these guys to actually draw some lines in the sand and say, you know, we would actually prefer to hold out for an attorney general pick who is not a former defense lawyer of yours who continues to act like a. A current defense lawyer of yours in all of his official duties. But it just seems like these guys have so internalized and imbibed the, I don't know, the rules of the road of Trump America as they have allowed them to develop up around them over all of these years that even just getting these tiny little concessions like the anti weaponization fund being canceled are really all that they can muster in terms of showing an independent streak here.
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B
Yeah, I mean, most of the Republican conference likes what Trump is doing. I gather there are a few people who have qualms, but they seem to suppress those qualms pretty easily.
- [04:56]
A
Yeah, I don't know. It's really Amazing. I mean, do you foresee now that they have gotten this vote through, or they are in the process of getting this vote through the committee? I guess it's possible that we could still see this fall apart on the Senate floor. Obviously, there are a number of more centrist senators, Republican senators who are up for reelection, Susan Collins, for instance, who aren't on this committee, but who in theory could put a wrench in the gears when it comes to the whole Senate voting. What's your read on that? Do you think there's any reason to think that Blanche could run into trouble later, or was this the primary roadblock he needed to get through?
- [05:34]
B
Yeah, not much reason to think so. Murkowski has already signaled that she's probably going to go along if Cornyn does. Collins, I think, too, and I don't the others. I mean, I will say one thing. It's easy to sit here and say, oh, gee, they should distance themselves from Trump. It's not clear that would work politically. At the end of the day, there's so much they've already gotten along with that. If you're John Husted in Ohio OR Dan Sullivan, A.K. sullivan's on Armed services. He's voted to confirm Hegseth. He's not said a word about. Of criticism, to my knowledge, maybe a word, but certainly has done nothing to check the unbelievable misconduct of the Iran war, something he knows quite a lot about as a former Marine senior Marine officer. So these guys are so are they in so deep they figure, what's the point now? And I'm not sure they're wrong politically. I mean, the best thing for them is for Trump to rise a little bit from 35% to 38 or 40%. Not for them to try to persuade a few swing voters that they're really independent of Trump. It's awfully late in the day of that. So I've always thought the electoral appeal that for Republican, quote, moderates. And how many are there instead of they were talking about four or five. I mean, you know, to break was always a little oversold. Their own pollsters are telling them that won't work and so they should break on grounds of actual good government or conscience or something. But I think we're beyond that, too.
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A
Yeah. Yeah. That's such an interesting point. I don't think I've thought about it in quite those terms before. I mean, obviously it is like a decade old now to talk about Trumpism as a political force being a kind of cult. Right. And usually people mean that in sort of the psychological sense that people have this deep, sort of inexplicable, parasocial affinity for the guy and they behave toward him the way that people do when they are really deeply hoodwinked and brought in on something like this. But what you just gestured at is another way in which the cult thing really applies, which is just. You've burned all your bridges. You have deprived yourself if you're a Republican office holder, except in a vanishingly small number of cases. And in fact, I really can't think of any in terms of people who are left today. You've deprived yourself of off ramps, you've missed all of the possible exits, and now even if you'd like one, it doesn't really appear that there are a lot. And so your options are to just sort of self immolate and sacrifice yourself by going out and telling the truth and putting up roadblocks to this guy's agenda, or to just keep riding or dying and just hoping it's riding and not dying. And even as the odds of that get worse and worse because he gets less and less popular, that doesn't, that doesn't create new, attractive options for you politically just because the president you've attached yourself to is so unpopular. I had not thought of it like that before.
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Right. And to be fair, I mean, just even if they hadn't attached themselves that much to Trump, which God knows they have, the history of 1994, 2010, the big two big off year wave elections for Republicans that I was pretty closely involved in in the case of 94 and followed closely in 2010, it didn't help those Democrats who hadn't voted, didn't help them much. In rare cases, it helped them at all, actually, if they didn't vote for the most controversial Democratic bills under Clinton or under Obama. I mean, it just, if it's a midterm election, if the president's party has control of both houses of Congress, it's a referendum on the president and his governance. And breaking on one or two things just doesn't do you that much good. And I remember in 94, there was all this talk about, oh, smart Southern, and they were smart Southern Democrats who didn't agree with Clinton on some of the stuff. And they were, they had voted not with him or made clear their problem, their reservations, much, much, much more so than anyone has with Trump. You know, they got swept away, too. So if it's a wave, it's a wave. And they probably just, you know, to mix the metaphor to adapt yours, I mean, you're better off just buckling yourself into the boat and hoping it makes it through the tsunami. You know, at this point, I don't defend this judgment, but I think people are a little too quick to assume they're being foolish. They're not being foolish. They just, they are where they are, you know.
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A
Yeah. Yeah. No, that's a good point. I think that's psychologically useful when it comes to assessing why these people are doing the things they're doing. Still wish they wouldn't though. Still wish they planche to go pound sand. Right. Wouldn't that be nice? But it doesn't look like that's gonna happen. So we're gonna see. Let's play one more clip from Senator Sheldon Whitehouse here just because I think this does really underscore that this is a vulnerability that Democrats are going to push on and should push on going into the midterms. So let's hear from White House.
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B
Today I think is a sad and embarrassing day for this committee as it looks like on a party line vote we are going to advance out of this committee probably the most discreditable person ever to seek the office of Attorney General of the United States. The reasons to vote against him number in the hundreds, but let's just focus on a few where my Republican colleagues purport to have great concern. Let's start with the Epstein files where Todd Blanche participated in the COVID up, continues to participate in the COVID up and is responsible for a massive screw
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up
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of the release of the documents. Yeah.
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And he goes on from there. But yeah, that did happen. That's true. That's factual. I guess I have to quibble a little bit with White House most discreditable person ever to be advanced for the nomination. I'm sorry, that's still Matt Gaetz. In my particular opinion. Gates never actually got the opportunity to do the work that would have shown him to be just as discreditable as Blanche has shown himself to be. But I will die on that particular hill. But yeah, I mean, anything to add on Blanche before we move on to other stuff? Bill?
- [11:27]
B
No, I will see if the Democrats put up a fight and do echo what White House has said in committee and others are saying today in committee, this morning in committee and try to make the issue just keep it alive. I mean it does make some difference how much talk there is about it over the next four or five days. Democrats can make the vote put off, can, you know, use their time on the floor and make the vote, make the thing stretch out through the week rather than be good colleagues and look forward to their five week recess or six weeks, I can't keep track and desperately get out of town Thursday night or something. So we're just gonna see if the Democrats, Democratic senators at least, are in a fighting mode, even if they are very likely to lose.
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A
Yeah, put the screws on them. Come on. Okay, that's enough about Blanche, who is the acting Attorney general and is likely to lose that acting bit here pretty soon. Soon he is gonna be President Trump's Attorney general, barring some crazy, unforeseen eventuality. So we'll keep covering that, of course, but we got actually like a million more stories today. So let's move on from this to the story that I am personally obsessed with. And I have started to feel like I need to apologize for this one in advance, but it's the reflecting pool people. We're still crazy about the reflecting pool over here.
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No apologies. No apologies necessary.
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A
You see people out here, the Nate Silvers of the world. I hope I'm not misattributing that because I didn't look it up. But it's just, you see things from people where they're like, ah, you know, the resistance media is so obsessed with these little, these frivolities, these stories that don't matter at all. Like the reflecting pool. And look, the reflecting pool does not matter at all. This is true, this is factual. Doesn't really matter what state this little strip of water is in on the grand scale, factually speaking. But that fact just makes it all the more crazy that Donald Trump and his Justice Department tried to put a bunch of people in prison for years just to cover up how, how badly they had done a little resurfacing project, which also didn't matter. Like, none of this stuff mattered at all, except that it was important to the President's ego and so he tried to ruin people's lives over it. We have new headlines on this. We have new news of this overnight. A couple more people. There are a number of additional cases, additional criminal charges that were filed against the supposed reflecting pool vandals. That Olympian, the Olympian canoeist who, who, who had his case dropped a couple of days ago has now led. Some of these other people are like, well, you dropped the charges against him. How about you drop the charges against us? Jeanine Pirro has now done this. So the whole thing is falling apart. They have less than a leg to stand on. Everybody's known this all along. But the crazy thing has been how Donald Trump has responded throughout all of this, he has been extremely unhappy with his prosecutors for admitting in court the true fact that none of these people committed any crimes that they should be sent to prison. Prison for. So let's just hear the president talking about Jeanine Pirro and these cases yesterday. Have you spoken to Jeanine Pirro about her decision to drop criminal.
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B
Jeanine Pirro made a mistake. There was vandalism. I just told you. We did, I think 78. One of the things was the reflecting pool hasn't worked since 1922 because it always leaked. It always leaked from 1920. You know, it's the largest, longest pool ever. All that.
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A
Let's go on to that next clip, too. Real quick here. Just with Pirro.
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Then it got carried away because the judge was extremely unfriendly to Jeanine. And frankly, I think she choked because the judge was really vicious. Instead of going after the people that did it, the judge went after her and went after her department.
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A
It has to be so interesting psychologically to be Donald Trump right now because you have this totally insane view of the world in your mind and you really do get high on your own supply and convince yourselves of these things like vandals destroyed my beautiful reflecting pool. And unlike in your first term where you had normal lawyers around who were running these things down for you, when these things fall apart, you can no longer just say, deep state. You can no longer say, you know, even my own people are trying to subvert my agenda. Because now it's not normal people in there. It's Fox News personalities like Jeanine Pirro who you put in there for no other reason other than that you knew they would be enthusiastic to prosecute your enemies for you. But they're not doing it. They're not going and getting your enemies the way you want them to. And like, the way that that must just boggle the guy's mind is amazing to me, unless you just think he's lying, which is also possible. But I really do think that this is one where he's high on his own supply. What do you think, Bill? Are we going to keep Jeanine? Is she going to stick around? Those comments, by the way, were before she dropped these additional charges overnight.
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B
Yeah, I don't know whether he'll keep her or not, but I do want to just say it's not just like she gave a press conference and slandered David Hearn or the others who were indicted for mismatch, she went to a grand jury. I mean, I watch these British crime histories and I Don't know anything actually about British law. But there's something they're always telling these witnesses who are not cooperating or telling lies that we could get you for perverting the course of justice. That seems to be a phrase that they use over there. And they are perverting the course of justice pretty seriously. Going to a grand jury and misrepresenting facts to a grand jury is something that gets people has gotten other prosecutors in other jurisdictions and disparate, I gather, and is certainly frowned upon to say the least. And again, the degree to which this is not just one person. Right. She has subordinates doing work there. The Department of Interior was very much involved. Now they're blaming each other. But again, that's a whole nother federal department. The Park Service test they with FBI were out there and some of them may have testified to the grand jury. The degree to which the perversion of justice is running through the breadth and depth of the Trump administration is the ominous thing. And what's mostly, I agree, a ridiculous instance it turned out. Also the final part, just this 67 year old former Olympian canoeist had good representation. I know I'm a little involved in it. I know a little bit about the group. A couple of the groups that helped represent him, they do pro bono work. They raise money to do that. So again, someone else in some other city who's arrested equally bogus charges for getting in the way of an ICE agent or God knows what. Right. And the million things they could do, they don't necessarily have quite the same publicity. They may not have the same access. The money isn't infinite. The Justice Department has, as it were, infinite amounts of money go after these people. The, the world of the pro boater defense bar has to go out and raise money for these to help other people get intimidated. Maybe they take a plea deal. Maybe they decide not worth risking getting too close to this particular situation. So I do think that the there is an ominous side to it as well as a ridiculous side.
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Yeah, and the ominous side is heightened by the ridiculous side. I mean just the, the lengths to which these guys have been willing to pervert the justice system in order to just again do nothing except win some silly little PR fight in the eyes of their base. Only because nobody else finds this stuff compelling at all about whose fault it is that the liner they put down is peeling up off the bottom of the reflecting pool that is the cause of all of this. I mean there's no fight too petty as long as it matters to the president. Personally. And as soon as it matters to the president personally, it doesn't matter how petty it was, it's his word. And the whole apparatus of the government lurches into motion and pushes as far as it can possibly push before it becomes personally intolerable for any of the small people who are doing the work in a selfish capacity, before they start to be like, wow, I could actually lose my livelihood if I pursue this one step further. And maybe, as you say, some of them even took a few steps down that path before they got cold feet and chickened out. So that's that. We're not going to spend the whole rest of our lives talking about the reflecting pool, one assumes. But who knows? I guess they're going to resurface it again. And there could be more funny stuff down the line, but it's just, I mean, what a little vignette and what an amazing thing to have been. Sort of like the fifth most significant story of Donald Trump's second term in office. For good reasons. As we, as we've laid out here, let's, we have a few more stories to hit, but before we do that, let's throw to a quick ad and then, then we'll have some other, some other stuff to chew over with. Yeah.
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C
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all right Sam, I think they get it. Buy one get one fifty off three day blinds. That was, that was one of my favorite alt rock 90s bands growing up a few years ago. Little, little joke. For the real heads out there, let's talk about Max Miller. Can we talk about Max Miller? This, this, this has been a ludicrous scandal. We've been talking about it a lot since this weekend. We've had some developments. If you have not been following along with the sordid, sad saga of this Ohio Congressman in Ohio 7th district, Max Miller has been going through a very acrimonious divorce proceeding. He has been accused by his ex wife and by other women of domestic abuse. There are allegations that have swirled around his behavior toward his own kids. And we have seen a lot of shocking developments in this story over the last couple of days, especially since Miller went live online on Sunday morning to dispute a lot of these allegations. He released a bunch of stuff that just made people more confused by the whole thing because he doesn't look very good in a lot of the stuff that he himself released in terms of audio recordings of various fights with his wife about possible drug use and whether he whether the water that he threw on her was boiling hot or merely extremely hot. I mean just weird, weird stuff. His ex wife's his father is Ohio Senator Bernie Moreno who released a crazy statement. Not a crazy statement, but a statement that was remarkable in how strongly it denounced Max Miller and said that he should not be serving in Congress, that he is not to be trusted around his own kids. And all of this stuff, I mean, it's remarkable stuff. His own kid, I should say one kid, singular. We have had a couple more developments just in the last 24 hours with this President Trump. There was a certain amount of reporting coming out that Trump was unhappy with the story that he called Miller and sort of suggested that none of this stuff reflects well on him. But here's a tweet from just this morning from reporter CNN reporter Sarah Farris. Rep. Max Miller tells Manu Raju that Trump did call him yesterday, but the president, quote, never asked me to drop out. He said nothing's changed when asked if he's running for reelection. So it appears that we're keeping Max Miller. Max Miller is sticking around. He will be the Republican nominee in this pretty red, but not that red district. It's an R&5 district. He has an interesting Democratic challenger. His name is Brian Poindexter, who is, I understand, an iron worker. He's sort of one of these blue collar guys that Democrats have been running and trying to find. So it's going to be an interesting race. And what do you make of Max Miller? Brazen in and out here, Bill.
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B
So tomorrow, I think it's the last day he could drop out and there would be time for a sort of crash primary to fight, put someone else on the ballot. Otherwise they're stuck with him on the ballot. So that's why the kind of urgency late this week. I mean, on Senator Moreno, I'm sure it's been very difficult obviously for his daughter and to go through this. He's the divorce has been very acrimonious and they're worried about custody of the two year old and stuff. On the other hand, it's, I don't know, a little much to wait till Sunday after Miller makes this. I mean, Miller's been saying he's innocent all along and Moreno's presumably known he's lying and he didn't seem to think that was important to inform the rest of us. Maybe there were issues of privacy, though there hasn't been that much privacy in this case for quite a while. So not really impressed by his. Could have stepped up a little earlier, I do think. But perhaps more striking when Trump called him, the reporting of Trump's call Monday night was that he was worried that Miller would lose the district. There's not a word of concern. There's no evidence that Trump expressed any concern or has any concern about Moreno's actual behavior. And that seems to be the concern of the Republicans in General. Yeeks is plus 6 or whatever it is. Republican district is now running. It looks even in the polls. Polls. Miller's saying, no, no, my polls are okay. It's all about whether he can win. It's not about that. Like maybe he shouldn't be in Congress. This behavior maybe should be disqualifying. Maybe you should not run. Maybe you should not run for reelection. Maybe you should even leave the Congress as others have in somewhat analogous circumstances, I would say, when it was pretty obvious they were guilty of this kind of thing. So, yeah, there's an awful lot of tolerance for, I would say, abusive women in this Republican Party. There are other Republican sitting members who've been very credibly charged and there's even in this evidence of their misbehavior. I can't remember the game of the guy who in that apartment in Washington was that? Mill? Mill? I don't know. Bill's from Florida. I can't remember remember. He, you know, his, the person he was with called the police and then they put pressure on her and oh, I don't really want to press charges. So, yeah, very. It's a very. It's a, it's not exactly a pro sex abuse party. But you combine it with the happy, apparently confirmation of Blanche who coordinated the Epstein cover up. It's not really in a strongly anti, I would say abuse party.
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A
Maybe it's maybe not as anti as you might like. How about that?
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B
Yes, that is one could wish, or as it should be, given the actual world we live in out there where these things are happening and have been happening and more than one, they should be. And a lot of the reason, a lot of the way you stop them from happening is making them utterly and totally unacceptable. Final point. I mean, Trump also, this is very true of Epstein. Trump has empathy for the people who are doing the. He says something about Miller. This is maybe late last week when he was asked about it by the media. Something about it. It's tough to go through a thing like this or whatever. Meaning tough for Miller.
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A
Yes.
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B
Not for his former wife, Emily Moreno. And his memory said similar thing about Epstein or about, I guess it was about Maxwell in 2020. You know, he knew her some and it's, it's tough to go through this kind of thing. You know, he's never said something, anything about that. It was tough for the hundreds of women who, many of them very young, whom Epstein abused and helped abuse. And so it's. Yeah, the empathy is for the abusers, not for the abuse. Those who are abused.
- [27:37]
A
Yeah. Yeah, just, just a couple things to add. I'm of two minds, honestly, about, about Bernie Moreno and his, his role in all this. I obviously I've seen a lot of people making a similar case to what you're making that, that it was irresponsible for him to wait as long as he did. And maybe that's true. There's also been a good amount of reporting that he had basically bit his tongue on all of this at the request of his daughter for all of this time. And just in kind of a vain attempt as it has turned out, a vain attempt to just keep some semblance of privacy and some, even if you can't keep it private, at least keep it out of the page one headlines. At least keep it off of this live stream that you and I are talking about right now. I mean, like it has become in large part because he weighed in, it has become one of the biggest stories in America and you can see just from a family point of view why certainly his daughter and even he would have, would have preferred this never happen. I mean, it's just a horrible story front to back. Obviously he's a, it's not like there's a lot of love lost between the bulwark and Bernie Moreno. On a normal day, he's extraordinarily Trumpy, like basically the entire Republican Senate. But on a human level, I do see why this was a hard decision for him. And really, I mean, he kind of had to be prompted by Miller going out so aggressively on Sunday and calling his daughter a lunatic and saying that's where all this stuff was coming from. So it's a horrible story. It has been interesting. Also, we have seen zero defection among House Republicans as far as I have seen so far, that has not been so much the case in the Senate. There have been a number of Senate Republicans, not a lot, but a few, few who have come out to sort of back up Moreno and his stance on all of this. We got Roger Marshall from Kansas, Shelley Moore Capito from West Virginia, Rick Scott from Florida. The other Ohio Senator John Husted has been playing a little bit coy. Let's just listen in on him being asked about this yesterday. Before we move on from troubling story
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B
there from your home state, Axios, I know reporting President Trump called Republican Ohio Congressman Maximum Miller, who faces abuse allegations
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A
by his ex wife and the daughter
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B
of your Senate colleague Bernie Moreno.
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A
The president reportedly told Miller that his election is in trouble. Meanwhile, Politico reporting multiple Republican senators, including Senator Moreno, Shelley Moore Capito Roger Marshall, Lisa Murkowski calling upon Miller to step down from his reelection. And it should be noted Congressman Miller denies all of these allegations. And of course, Democrats, Democrats are targeting that race. I did want to know, though, whether you think Congressman Miller should seek reelection or withdrawal before next week's deadline. Well, look, I'm very saddened by the whole situation for everyone I know, all the families involved, and let's, let's focus on letting them sort through this at a family level. The political ramifications, I think, will work themselves. But I just personally am sad about the situation, and I hope that the president's intervention can help move things along. So there you go, Profiles and courage from John Hustead. What a weird way to end it, though. I hope the president's intervention can kind of move things along. Like for half of that clip, I thought the let's let the political ramifications sort themselves out. I had thought that that was basically saying let the voters decide and he just shouldn't drop. But there at the end, it almost seems like he's saying the opposite, like, let's let Trump do our dirty work. And because he's the only guy who really has the moral standing within our party to demand that people accused of abusing women not hang out any longer.
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B
Only if they're in competitive races where now they might lose a seat, though, you know, I mean, if you were a plus 30, we'd be saying, which is the case in that Florida Congress, man. I think in his district, no one's saying anything and I think Trump would say nothing. So, yeah, I also like Hustead's evenhandedness. It's very sad for everyone. Isn't it sadder for the person who's been abused?
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A
Very fine people on both sides of this case. Yeah, it's
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B
right.
- [31:45]
A
I don't know anything else on Max Miller. I think we have one more story here. We were going to talk a little bit about some of the interesting elections that are happening now. Actually, let's just do that real fast before we move on to the final thing, which is, is the Strait of Hormuz. But obviously it's Tuesday. There are some primaries happening. Bill, can you just kind of walk us through what, what you're watching tonight and what's, what's interesting that's happening out there in the wide world of sports?
- [32:10]
B
I mean, the big winner is Michigan Senate, where there's a, it's been a very competitive race and a sort of classic establishment moderate versus A, I wouldn't say classic progressive Really a fairly extreme one. Maybe if, if Abdullah Sayed wins this race and then would get elected to the Senate, wins the primary, which looks likely, and then get elected to the Senate, which would be a big question mark against Mike Rogers in a very competitive swing state. You know, I guess he'd be probably the most left wing senator, I don't know. But you know, certainly up there in the very, very top tier. So it's a little bit, it's become a marquee race. And how unhappy are voters with the establishment? How resistant are they to, as I say, pretty left wing, Democratic, Socialist. We'll see also a couple of congressional races there that have the same kind of dynamic and one in Missouri where Cori Bush lost in 2024 to a more moderate candidate, Bell, I think was his name Wesley Bell, who's now a member of Congress, but she's challenging him again. So I think we'll have at both the Senate level and the congressional level some read on the relative balance of power, so to speak, between the progressives and the centrists. And then there's just a couple more days, I think next Tuesday, a week from now is Wisconsin, the end of the month. There's the Massachusetts, I guess September 1st actually is the Massachusetts Senate primary. Seth Molten against Markey, which is sort of the opposite dynamic. A younger candidate who's probably more centrist is more centrist than the 78 year old Markey. That race has become very competitive. That'll be interesting. So we're at the tail end of the primaries and Michigan will be exhaustively, you know, studied and it's an important one. It also probably wants to step back and look at the whole field of candidates, which is much. Which do not look like Abdul El Sayed who are running in the Democratic in the pickups, possible pickup seats for Democrats. Kansas also has a Democratic primary for Senate today and that race could be competitive against Roger Marshall. So yeah, we're near the end of the primaries and then we get to the final, the home stretch of the general election.
- [34:13]
A
Yeah, yeah. There are colleagues that we have who are better equipped to talk about some of these like intra Republic or intra Democratic squabbles. Lauren Egan, obviously that's her whole job, she covers this stuff all the time. Then I am the only thing that I will say, just as I've been watching these races, it really does seem like the progressives and the lefty types in a lot of these primaries have done a really good job of capturing the idea that there's all this rage and there's all this sense that Trump's out there screwing everything up. And Democrats haven't been fighting hard enough. And they have made this sale to voters that it is they, the progressives, who are going to be the ones who will actually take the fight to the Trump in a way that the more moderate, the more centristy types won't or haven't or haven't been able to. I don't know how true that actually is. I think that, like, you know, willingness to fight Trump on the stuff that he's trying to do is sort of a separate axis from where you fall in any of these intra Democratic fights. And I also think that we've kind of been down this road before where, you know, in 2018 and in 2020, the Democratic Party, in large part out of anger against the president, lurched to the left on a bunch of stuff that ended up coming back to bite them later on on the very matter of fighting the president. When Kamala Harris was running in 2024 and had to run away from a bunch of crazy stuff she had said during the Democratic primary of 2020, because that was the mood at the time. And so I do worry about seeing a repeat of this. I don't know if it is actually true that things like Medicare for all are going to end up in electoral liability for Democrats. I think I'm not gonna handicap that one bit. I think it's possible that that ends up being very popular. But when it comes to some of the other cultural stuff, the fact that we have a likely Wisconsin Democratic governor candidate who comes out of the whole defund the police and cancel Thanksgiving mood that was so prevalent online a few years ago. The fact that we're recapitulating a bunch of this stuff seems a little iffy to me personally. I guess we're gonna find out. That's what's good about primaries, is you get to find out. And none of us live there, so we're not voting in Michigan.
- [36:20]
B
Except we'll also find out. Just we'll find out in the general election. And this is, as you say, if I did Hurt Harris a little. 24. On the other hand, in 20, Biden was the nominee, obviously, so the party rebelled against it in real time. But we will find out just how much what you said six years ago, and especially if you're not willing to entirely repudiate it, how much it hurts you. And I'm not making a judgment on this. I mean, it's not unreasonable for voters to take it seriously and take it into account. It is what you said six years ago. And if you're not willing to fully repudiate it, they can't be fully confident. You've sort of moved on from, from that view. And if you don't like that view, you want a governor who doesn't have that view, presumably all things equal. On the other hand, they also might Decide there are 18 other issues that matter more in the governors of Wisconsin than what you said about Thanksgiving six years ago. And so we're going to, you know, we're going to sort of look past that. I mean, and we've seen both things happen. Right. In modern American politics, voters sometimes hold past statements against candidates and sometimes seem surprisingly willing to just say, that was then, this is now. So it'll be interesting to see in November.
- [37:18]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, last story here. New York Times reporting on the details of a deal that are shaping up between Iran and Oman, two countries that are on opposite sides of the Strait of Hormuz looking like they're going to be cool with splitting carries on tolling this waterway going forward. We don't know all the details of this, but we only bring this up to say, not really moving in the direction of the pre war status quo as far as this being a free, open international waterway that anybody could pass through unmolested. Instead, we are moving at least toward a status quo that's better, toward a new setup that's better than what we have now. Right now you can't really go through without being worried somebody's going to shoot a missile at you from the coast of Iran. It's caused a lot of problems globally. We've been talking about it for months. You'll be able to move through apparently, but only with the say so. And potentially by greasing the palms a little bit of our new joint tolling commission of Iran and Oman. Obviously, this is not set yet. There are negotiations that are ongoing right now to make this happen. But it really does just underscore how lost we are in terms of we're so far off of driving the relevant negotiation. We're not even participating in the crucial negotiations that are taking place over what this really important waterway is going to look like once all of the dust from this war has settled.
- [38:48]
B
Right. And I give the time's a little slow, in my opinion, in getting to reporting the obvious fact that Iran is going to have a lot of control over what happens in the Strait, including not just greasing the bombs, but at every moment threat to do what They've been doing occasionally to remind people that they have that threat of blowing up ships or attacking them or saying, oops, there are mines here and can't go through for a while. So they have, yes, we have lost the war and we're picking a pay. And the world sadly, is going to pay a price for that. This negotiation, it's nice to call it that, between Iran and Amad. It is, I guess, but Iran is much the senior player, the bigger player in that negotiation. And I suspect they're going to pretty much be able to get what they want. And it's very striking how much their neighbors are now intimidated by them because Iran's been lobbing missiles and drones their way without our being able to stop it. And so it's a new balance of power and not a good one in the Middle East.
- [39:39]
A
Yeah. And the cherry on top has just been the unbelievably embarrassing way that the President has continued to comport himself in all of this. I mean, he has been rendered so ineffectual and so impotent and it's just so obvious. I mean, it was about two weeks ago he got on Truth Social and he said, you know, from, from this day forward, anytime Iran hits a vessel in the Strait of Hormuz, we will blow up one corresponding bridge or power plant in Iran. So beyond notice you mullahs. And they've kept hitting vessels ever since. We haven't done any of that. So why'd you make the threat in the first place? Or just a couple days ago, you know, like, we saw the President saying, you know, I was just about to unleash terror and fury from the skies, like, has never been seen since World War II on Iran. But fortunately, they've agreed to the contours of a new deal. And we're going to have a free and open Strait of Hormuz and they're going to give up their nuclear program and we're going to meet to talk about all that on Monday. And then nobody met to talk about it on Monday. And then on Monday, Trump sent out another tweet where he's mad at Iran for saying that they're not going to meet to talk on Monday. But they're not. But there's no attack. I mean, like, it's weird because obviously we're not calling for the President to do the war crimes. We're not calling for the President to do World War II style bombing against Iran. We would prefer for the President not to say these things in the first place. And certainly not to say these things if there's no intent to follow through because he just looks like a crazy guy who's just posting through it without supposedly on behalf of the United States of America. He does wield a lot of control, but everybody else has learned by now that you actually can just ignore him in some of this stuff and they're getting away with it, which is crazy. Anything else? I don't know anything else, Bill.
- [41:21]
B
No, it's not good. The real world consequences of Trump's, you know, egomania and buffoonery are bad. That's why the obvious point to make and made worse, sort of like you're saying about the reflecting made worse by the egomania and the buffoonery and the boasting. If he were just sort of quietly getting us out of this and taking the L and the loss and, you know, kind of just, okay, this one didn't work out, you know, then we can manage the alliances and manage some of the consequences. The more he blustered. He has blustered for the last few weeks and really three months, three or four months now. It's been a long time. Right. And with some bombing, I mean, it was also killed people, some of them, you know, military targets, some maybe not so much. So, yeah, the whole combination is kind of the worst of all worlds at this point, I think.
- [42:10]
A
Yeah, yeah. There have been a lot of ways in which Trump's wins have reshaped America and the world. Obviously he has gotten a bunch of people on the Supreme Court and he's passed some legislation and he's closed the southern border. A lot of other, I think much more impactful have been exactly what you're talking about right now. The ways in which the world has been shaped by the President's inability to ever take the L, whether that's the 2020 election or this insane sort of semi on, semi off tariff regime that we've now had for a year and change, or this, this war that has been lost, but which we cannot seem to cut our losses from in any real way and we're just stuck. So I don't know, it's a mess. We're going to see how long it will remain a mess. At some point, presumably they will finally cut bait and take the L, but never really seen the President do that before. The bitter, bitter, bitter end. Rock bottom. You really have to a moment before. So we'll see. That's plenty. That's plenty from all of us. We want to keep the people fresh so they'll come back and hear us yak again next week, too. I should tease one other thing that I meant to mention when we were talking about the primaries, but we're going to be live tonight. There'll be more Bulwark Live stuff as the results come in to chew all that over. So come back to YouTube or Substack, if that interests you, to hang out with us while we figure out what's going on in some of these primaries. Thanks Bill for coming on and talking about all this. Thanks to you all out there for watching. Hope you will subscribe to the Bulwark on YouTube and to our Morning Shots newsletter over at the bulwark.com on substack. Thanks and we will see you all next time.