← Bulwark Takes
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- [00:00]
Andrew Egger
If the world were like a Sleep
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Bill Kristol
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Andrew Egger
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Bill Kristol
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Andrew Egger
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Bill Kristol
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- [00:26]
Andrew Egger
go to sleepnumber.com sleep number to a good life sleep. Hey, guys. Welcome to Morning Shots Live. I am Andrew Egger, White House correspondent for the Bulwark, joined as always by Bill Kristol, our editor at large. We write the Morning Shots newsletter every Tuesday or. Sorry. We write the Morning Shots newsletter every day. We come to you live every Tuesday. I have not been coming to you live every Tuesday for a couple of Tuesdays. I've been on vacation for a couple of weeks. This is the first video I've done in weeks. I'm. I'm terrified. It's live. We're going to see if I remembered how to do any of this at all, which we have put out a couple newsletters so that part of my brain at least is limbered back up. Bill, you are in front of a great backdrop today. You always are. You have some books and things usually, but where are you? Is this just a different part of your home or are you someplace else?
- [01:12]
Bill Kristol
Yeah, no, I'm in the sort of kitchen table as opposed to the study for various reasons I won't bore you with, but. Yeah, you like it? It's okay. I can do this more often.
- [01:19]
Andrew Egger
You look good. I have one little leaf kind of poking into my shot from the right in the way we have this set up now. And I like the foliage you've got going on.
- [01:28]
Bill Kristol
It's in nature as opposed to studious library. Look, it's the, you know, communing with nature look. It's not really who I am, but it's. It's a good. It's a good look occasionally, you know.
- [01:38]
Andrew Egger
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, the communing with nature stuff, this is. This is. This doesn't make any sense at all, but I'll just do it. Maybe that is the better backdrop for what our first thing that we have to talk about today is given. Given the fact it's out there. It's science. It's nature. It is cyclosporiasis. It is the parasite, the foodborne parasite, leading to all kinds of gastrointestinal problems for a bunch of people all around the country over the Past couple of weeks, it has really blossomed into a big story. And even though I was on vacation up in Northern Michigan, this seemed to be a thing everybody was talking about up there too. So I actually was a little bit more read up on this than on things like the war in Iran, which we will get to in a little bit as well. But this is, we wrote about this in, in morning shots today. I wrote about this How Elon ruins salad. That's a little tangent tendentious. You know, it's, I, it's, it's a little, it's a little maybe overselling to, to a certain extent. But here's the thing with this. I mean we, we, we've been tracking this outbreak. The weird thing about this story is, and, and so many of these stories right now is how many different things keep ending up coming back like there's some bad thing going on in the world. It's, it's, you know, the kind of thing that, that previously would not have really been a political story at all except that it happens to have some nexus, some connection to some cut that Doge made when Doge went rampaging through the federal government last year. So, so, so I was talking in this piece a little bit about this report we got from CNN just yesterday, which we can, which we can throw up here. Trump's funding cuts created the perfect storm that slowed the government's cyclosporiasis response. The they report there they talked to a guy, Dr. Joel Barrett, who formerly ran a task force within a specific CDC lab on specifically parasite prevention in the United States. He talked to them. He says by the time his 11 person team was reduced to three in September, Barrett said he had had enough and resigned. But before leaving, he said he sent emails to higher ups at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about the risks of losing staff and how it could hurt the response to future outbreaks. Now those warnings have become reality, with the employees working to rein in a growing cyclospora outbreak in the Midwest. Forced to do more with less, their response is being hampered by the loss of specialized staff and the loss of hands on deck needed to identify the source of the outbreaks, he said. And CNN goes on to talk about how it's not just personnel, it's funding also nearly $30 million in funding that had previously, previously gone toward a division like that that happened to be partially funded by usaid, which might seem a little strange until you remember that a lot of what USAID was up to was international disease surveillance and Control, especially things like malaria. And this is a guy they were talking to who was in charge of such efforts here. Bill, I don't know how much you have followed this cyclospora story. Obviously you have been doing yeoman's work while I've been gone, keeping everybody abreast on everything else that's going on in the news. I have been a little surprised by how much. And again, maybe it's because I was in Michigan, which has been sort of the epicenter of at least the reporting on this, although maybe not the epicenter of the outbreak, as we've learned. But is this a thing that has been breaking through nationally as much as it has seemed or seemed to be when I was out there a little west of here?
- [04:59]
Bill Kristol
Oh, I think so. Just judging from family and friends, text chains and stuff. Look, people buy lettuce, they buy iceberg lettuce. They buy sometimes the bags where it's already broken up for you, and sometimes they buy the whole heads. And then you sort of read that a particular provider is. And then there's the Taco Bell side of it, which is a pretty big company, and a lot of people, you know, drop by there occasionally. And. And then the whole. So you just, you know, what can we eat? What can we buy? People look at. You look at your sandwich, you know, you get a BLT in a restaurant and you look at it, you think, maybe I'll have it without the L, you know, So I. I know we've had a lot of conversations about it in various circles. I've been also just at a couple of get social gatherings, people joking or half joking about it, or looking at the little orders, you know, and thinking this is good because there's no lettuce on this one. So, yeah, it's a little bad pad for the lettuce growers, I suppose, in general. But no, it's a big thing. And look on the broader point, which you should elaborate on a little more. I mean, I do think the degree to which the Doge cuts did real damage, Doge is in the rearview mirror. People don't talk about it much now. It ended, but the damage was done. A lot of it remains. Some of it's been fixed a little. But I would say I'm struck. I talked to some people about a totally different issue the other day who were talking about the damage Doge did in a different area of government. And it's not fully fixed, even if it's sort of been you know, corrected or rolled back some. And then of course, the rest of the Trump administration has chugged ahead for a year with further cuts and further, in the case of hhs, further ignoring science and so forth. So it's, it Doge was sort of the, the entry wedge, which, but then if anything that you think the thing is kind of the momentum has continued a little bit, or at least certainly hasn't been turned around.
- [06:42]
Andrew Egger
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And, and I mean, I think this is, this story kind of illustrates one of those sort of knock on effects of what we've seen from Doge. Because this is not a guy, this guy they interviewed, this is not a guy who was fired by Doge. This is a guy who saw Doge go through, lost a bunch of people on his team. Maybe some of them took buyouts, maybe some of them were fired outright, saw a bunch of the funding for his lab dry up as they go on to elaborate in this story, saw a bunch of the people not right on his team, but the kind of people who would have been pulled in at a moment when cyclosporiasis is suddenly not just one of a million different things that they're tracking, but is suddenly actually the story of like, you know, a lot of the other resources that would have been suddenly, you know, rushed to, that are now lacking. And this is a guy who saw all that and was like, well, look, I can't do this job with, under the conditions that you have, that you have created for me. And I just quit. He quit back in September. And we have a government right now that doesn't really see that as a problem. I mean, if you remember going back to the beginning of Doge, this was a big part of the plan, as they hoped it would proceed, right? They would fire anybody that they could fire. But they also wanted to make the conditions so bad for everybody that was left that a bunch of them would just quit and not be backfilled. And I, and I, so I have struggled a little bit to know quite how hard to twist this particular knife. Right. Because on the one hand you could see outbreaks like this at any time. And they are, I mean, there's been a lot of reporting on this. Jonathan Cohn had a great video for us, I think last week, maybe already now, the week before, again, I was on vacation. But you know, kind of getting into some of the specifics of this, some of the difficulties of why it is just hard to track a thing like this when, when, when you have an outbreak of this particular parasite. You're talking about people who were infected weeks and weeks before they ever started showing symptoms. You're talking about, you know, first of all, making them go in for a bunch of undignified tests, you know, basically stool samples. Nobody likes that. And also trying to reconstruct what they were eating, you know, weeks before, and then trying to sift through that data, maybe barely remember data, and try to reconstruct, you know, possible common points of infection for all these different people. So it's hard. It's hard work at the same time. This is the kind of thing. And what I mean when I say it's hard work is that like, it could have happened under anybody. And we don't really know to what extent it's worse now than it would have been prior to these cuts. But when you talk about it as a political story, all of that complicated stuff can sort of be set to one side. When you just talk about anything that touches Doge, because Doge is such a compelling story on its own. Right. Doge is just, it was so shoddy, it was so slapdash. It was just these kids who didn't know anything and weren't really allowed to be there or shouldn't have been allowed to be there. They that were just allowed to go through and pull whatever wiring out of the walls that they wanted to throughout the whole federal government. And then it just stayed that way. And so when it comes to stories like this, yeah, you can kind of dice it very fine and try to be like, well, we don't really know how much worse or how much better it could be in a different world, but it's not at all hard to make the sale that some things are somewhat worse and that we know who's responsible. And it is interesting to see Democrats jumping more and more on this particular thing. We saw, for instance, John Ossoff, Senator from Georgia, sent a letter to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Last week, basically talking about a whole different thing that was cut, this different food monitoring, parasite monitoring program that was cut under HHS specifically for cyclospora. So I don't know. I just think it seems like this is a thing we're going to keep seeing, right? I mean, we have not run through all of the possible things that could go wrong under doge that, you know, whatever, whatever momentary thing might crop up next week or next month or next year in terms of a small scandal or a small bad thing happening, small scale disaster here or there that previously would not have been a political story that gets to now be a political story because it has some connection to the remarkably widespread cutting they were doing at Doge.
- [10:58]
Bill Kristol
And I think this is not an administration that looks terribly eager to highlight things like this. I think previous administrations, some of us on the kind of conservative side, 10, 20 years ago, when I was in government, 30 years ago, little concerned that FDA, CDC, those kinds of organizations, were too conservative with a small C in terms of, you know, not understanding what we were saying. You were saying before these things happen in any world, you know, nothing's perfect. And, and, but, and maybe we should be a little more relaxed than some of the, you know, some of what some of the government inspection programs and so forth, while preserving obviously basic safety standards and all this. But this administration's gone to the other extreme, both in terms of the regulatory side and in being so pro business and apparently, well, not apparently, certainly giving breaks to businesses they like now, hopefully not on core safety issues. But we don't know. And there are plenty of reporting that suggests that in a whole range of areas there's a kind of, hey, we love oil and gas and coal and don't worry so much about some of these safety or regulatory or clean air provisions. And we love agriculture, as Trump keeps saying over and over again, so we're going to actually damage you with terrorists. But on the other hand, we're not going to enforce certain things. Now, ultimately it comes back to bite them, obviously, like here if you talk to lettuce growers, I'm sure. But so, yeah, so I think it's perfectly fair really politically to say you guys have chosen to go way over onto one side of the spectrum of kind of, you know, government regulation versus non regulation. And so it's reasonable to at least for everyone to raise questions when something like this happens. Would it have happened in the past? Would it have been addressed more earlier in the past? Would it have been addressed more vociferously and candidly perhaps, and as opposed to being very reluctant to name someone. And so anyway, I think, yeah, I think it's all, it's fair enough, you know, and it's look, it is what it is. It's a, it's an outbreak. We'll see how now how well it gets under control and we'll see what happens at other areas. Ebola has been in the news a bit lately and it made me really think back to 2014, where I've got to say we at the Weekly Standard then this is while you were in college, I guess were pretty, were alarmed. I mean, JVL knows a fair amount about some of the scientific and medical stuff. And he really thought this thing could be terrible. And a lot of people did, incidentally, and it probably could have been terrible. And the Obama administration, for all of its faults, brought Ron Klain in specially, who had a lot of government experience, not a scientist or a medical guy, but had worked with on those kinds of issues. Some in government brought him in, put him in the White House, gave him a huge amount of authority and they did grapple it to a reasonable outcome. Right. And I give them credit for it, and I think we gave them credit at the time for that. And maybe they needed a little pressure for our side. That pressure was healthy. You sort of can't imagine Trump doing that. Right. You can't imagine Trump bringing in a respected senior former government official and say, you got the power to really get this thing, you know, get this thing under control and override Robert F. Kennedy Jr. And some of the like slightly crazy people he's put in at hhs or override Russell Vaught and his concern about getting rid of every regulation that any business anywhere has ever thought was burdensome and so forth.
- [14:05]
Andrew Egger
Yeah, yeah. I mean, to me, the thing that just keeps being really alarming is that anytime you have one of these stories, one of these things that's going wrong in some way and the spotlight is suddenly shown on some new piece of the sort of administrative apparatus or the scientific apparatus that has not had cause to be in the news, you are not typically seeing these days these stories of, all right, we're all ready. You know, we have everything set up and ready to go. We've been waiting for this moment. You know, we've been, we've been funded for this. We, this is what we are here to do, is to step up in a moment like this. Instead of, again, you just keep getting these stories of, you know, you shine a spotlight on some new part of the government that nobody's been paying attention to before and you find out they are still reeling from all of this stuff that's been happening over the last year. And again, it's not specific, it's not even like specific matters of political leadership, although that sort of stuff is bad enough, as you say. And we have seen a lot of alarming instances of these specific, you know, cabinet level leaders or just other political appointees who have been gumming up the works. But it's just sort of baseline, you know, office morale and functionality stuff that has just really been under threat and under siege. I mean, I still remember from last year, obviously the science stuff tends to be the worst, because that's some of the parts of the government that got shafted the most under Doge. But it's not just like science stuff. It's not just, you know, epidemiologists and people who track parasites. I've been trying to think, is there a word for like a corresponding word for epidemiologists for people who track parasitic outbreaks?
- [15:45]
Bill Kristol
I don't know.
- [15:45]
Andrew Egger
I've just been saying people who track parasites, parasite chasers. But, but, but it's not just that kind of stuff. I mean, I remember reporting last year on the, the way that Doge had run through very early, the National Nuclear Safety Administration and, and just really fired a bunch of people who absolutely should not have been fired, who are like some of our nation's top people in terms of handling and disposing nuclear waste and all of these sorts of things, and supervising various parts of the construction process for nuclear arms, nuclear weapons, nuclear warheads. And that they had kind of very quickly after there was a lot of reporting, including hours about what had happened there, they had kind of very quickly reversed some of those firings and put some of those people back in place. But just the way that you can't really just glue a vase back together in a lot of these times and a lot of these places where like, a bunch of people who had quit were not going to come back. A bunch of people who had, who were fired and then brought back were still really shell shocked by the whole thing. And we're thinking, well, do I need to look for another job somewhere else? And we're still actively kind of pursuing that. And then we all moved on to something else. But that story's still there, right? And like, God knows, I hope the National Nuclear Safety Administration is not making headlines again in a year or so for some reason that's related to this sort of thing. But if you were to shine the spotlight back on, seems perfectly reasonable to fear that this is the kind of thing you'd see that they're just under the surface, outside the news, all across the government, there are these teams who are there for a reason, but have been monkeyed with and are just not quite able to do the job to the same extent that they were before. And I don't think that's, to a certain extent that's speculative, but it is also the sort of thing that we have seen actually borne out because it's what they said they wanted, it's what they, they said from the outset of Doge is we're going to fire A bunch of people and we hope more quit and then the government will be smaller and that will be good. So. So I don't know anything else on. On Cyclist Floor and all this?
- [17:45]
Bill Kristol
Well, sort of. One point I was looking at the Federalist Papers for, just to find a quotation that I have remembered the other day, sort of reminded by this obvious fact. When you look at them and if you've read them as you have studied them, the latter half of the Federalist Papers really is all about can Republican government be good government, Both good in the sense of preserving liberty. And that's the most famous part, balance the separation of powers, constraints on the different powers, but also good government, just in the more commonsensical sense, meaning of competent policies that are designed to do something, actually do accomplish what they're designed to do. And it sounds dorky to talk about good government or sound policy and a little bit expertise. Ish. And I don't know, not fashionable these days, but it is actually important. It was always thought to be important. It was always thought to be one of the questions about Republican government that it could be so susceptible to demagogues and popular moods and sentiments and a distrust of expertise in a sense that it would not produce just good results. And Hamilton and Addison say if you don't produce good results, ultimately the faith in popular government is going to dwindle. It's not going to be a success Republican. Republican experiment anyway. It's always been balancing that with obviously popular accountability and stuff is a big challenge. And we've done a decent job of that over a couple. Couple of centuries, I think. But yeah, I do think there's. We need to have a little more respect just for competence and results, sound results in good government. It was such a key part of the conservative critique when I was younger of liberal failures of good intentions and, you know, and not understanding how. How a complex system works. And we spent a lot of. And the conservatives made some very useful changes to the kind of liberal way of doing it in the 80s and 90s, I would say, and 2000s even Clinton, Gore was sort of conserv. Some of those changes in government reform. And just to throw it out, though, is very. It's both dangerous in terms of you get bad results and people get sick. Obviously that's the main thing. But also ultimately it corrodes confidence in the government and it makes you more susceptible to even other. To different demagogues. Right. I mean, it's sort of a vicious cycle of demagoguery once the government seems unable to do anything that it says it's going to do.
- [19:57]
Andrew Egger
Yeah, yeah. And you could. I don't know how any of this stuff is going to go because you could see it cutting one of two ways, right? I mean, you could see Doge as. And specifically the cuts to science and epidemiology and these sorts of things. You could see it as the sort of decadent move where everybody who just assumes that you get to take all of the sort of proper functioning of the scientific apparatus for granted and that you can just sort of yank a bunch of people out of there without doing real harm and all these sorts of things, you could see it as a learning experience. You could see a world where we sort of thermostatically rebalance back and say, well, actually it does really matter to have these sorts of things. And we have now sort of learned how important some of this stuff is in its absence or in its poor functioning. But I also do worry that maybe we don't get that sort of response. And maybe, as you mentioned, it just, it triggers further rounds of demagoguery and further rounds of sort of recrimination toward public health and toward, you know, the poor people who are left trying to hold all this stuff together with scotch tape and chewing gum. And it leads to even more sort of populist, rabble rousing and even more know nothing type rhetoric and policy and politicians getting in there who are hostile to the whole thing. And I guess we'll have to see. But it doesn't feel very good. I'm not very excited about having to find out which direction we go. I would have preferred sort of never, never having to stress test this particular question. I think we can. I think we can leave that story there for now. Let's talk a little. We have some other stuff to talk about, but before we do that, let's. Let's kick to one quick ad from Sam Stein. Here you go.
- [21:39]
Sam Stein
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- [22:56]
Andrew Egger
Okay, so Bill, like I said, I have been, I've been out of town. I've been following some stories more closely than others. One thing that you don't really realize until you actually get out of the daily grind of it is just how easy it is to miss gigantic things that are happening in the country. I mean, I still get all the same emails and all the same push notifications and stuff that I've been getting all along, but it was not really until I got back from vacation that I was like, oh no, we are really back at war. I mean, it's just, it is actually happening. The United States is engaged in this conflict and I guess people are just, they haven't been following it very closely, so they just assume that we've sort of always been at war or I don't know what it is exactly, but the fact that we are back at war in Iran, unlike, you know, a parasitic outbreak, unlike, you know, the wildfire smoke that was descending down upon us in Northern Michigan, which we may talk about a little bit more in a bit. But you know, this giant geopolitical story of the return to war in Iran further down, further down our feeds, less evident in conversations with people I talk to and things like this. What the heck's going on, man? I mean, we're just back at war. Is this the permanent new state of affairs? Has this become, in the words of Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth, the thing they promised it would never become, which is yet another one of these forever wars. What's going on in Iran?
- [24:14]
Bill Kristol
Yeah, forever war. That's a pointless war. It's kind of the worst kind of war. So I'd say as Sarah and I discussed this some on Sarah was principing for Tim on the Bulwark podcast yesterday. And and Sarah made the point I think is correct that I mean, well, first of all, obviously, it was a big the war had a big effect, I think, when it was launched and people didn't like it. And Trump had to make the and Hexath were trying very hard to make the case for it. I don't think they did a very good job. And people were very dubious that it was the right thing to have done. But then Trump saw that and you've reported on this at the time also freaked out about the economic consequences which were increasingly evident and ahead of us seemed increasingly foreboding. And so then he did negotiate this sort of this memorandum of understanding. And then there was a lot of bickering about it. And we tried to reinterpret it to make it a less abject concession of failure than it really was, honestly. And Iran decided to really push its advantage. And so the war gradually began again, then it lapsed a little, and then it really began in a serious way about 10 days ago. So it wasn't irrational for the public to kind of push it into the back burner in their minds for about two months there, because it really was on the back burner. We were doing less fight. There was just less fighting and there was less bombing. And there were, thank God, no American casualties for quite a while there really. Or no, no deaths at least, and was spending less money because we weren't shooting as many or shooting down as many missiles, et cetera, et cetera. So I do think it was a genuine lull. Didn't really change the fundamental questions about what the war was it wasn't accomplishing. And the strait being not really open and all that. But then it really picked up again. And I do think it's come home to people this past weekend with the deaths, unfortunately, of the Americans, the casualties we're now learning about that the Defense Department didn't tell us about over the last week, the considerable number of soldiers who were wounded in attacks on bases, the considerable success of Iran in attacking bases not just right nearby but in Jordan, which is a bit of a ways, you know, contrary to all of Hegseth and Trump claiming that everything was destroyed, all of Iran's capabilities and capacities were destroyed. So, yeah, so I think it's back sort of at the front burner, as it should be. The strait is basically closed. There were 12 ships, I think they went through yesterday. It was like 120 back before the war. And so it's back on people's consciousness, and it's unclear what the way out is. I think that's another thing that has people spooked. Trump seems unwilling to do what I guess I had assumed he would do, which is basically accept defeat, paper it over, never acknowledge it, of course, but basically decide to make the best of a bad situation and get out of it. It's very bad, then, to have Iran still exerting control over the strait de facto, but some of that could be mitigated, I suppose. You know, in the real world, you just bribe them and pay them off, and they still have some leverage over them, obviously. And so. But the threat of real serious renewal of force. So that was sort of a wish, maybe that was a little wishful that that would end to be sustainable, but it would be kind of a new normal. There'd be a lot of jockeying and some occasional violence, but this new normal is a worse normal than it seemed like two weeks ago. I mean, I don't think it's just that people that foolishly lost sight of it, as it were. You know, it was really. This is really now dangerous. Mark Hurtling made this point on the conversation he did over the weekend with Sam Stein. He said, I'm very worried. This escalation stuff, it can be kept under control, of course, but it can also spin out of control. Yeah. And that's where we are now, I think.
- [27:41]
Andrew Egger
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think maybe the better analog than even just a couple of weeks ago, or like right before the Memorandum of Understanding was signed. I mean, how long? I lose track of these things a little bit, but I guess maybe it was April or early May, where they were, where it was really starting to look like it might become a larger regional conflict with more strikes on energy infrastructure from Iran and obviously more threats of that sort of thing from Donald Trump. And it really did seem like our Gulf allies got so freaked out by that possibility that they talked Trump off of a ledge. Or maybe that was just his disposition all along, was that that was too rich for his blood. And from that point on, he was pulling back and really trying to keep things locked down, leaning very hard on Israel to. To wrap up its hostilities and trying to get Iran back to the negotiating table. But in terms of the geopolitics of it all, it seems like we're right back there. I mean, it's more and more targets further and further afield in terms of just the momentum of the thing with no end in sight yet. But then I also wanted to talk about the economics of it, because there is something that's new now that's even worse than that, which is that there is this one large ameliorating effect that we have had on energy prices up until now in the war, and that's that we've been pulling down our strategic reserves like crazy. And so have everybody else all around the world. The various Strategic Petroleum reserves.
- [29:11]
Bill Kristol
I mean,
- [29:13]
Andrew Egger
it's crazy because a month ago, Donald Trump was in France at the G7 and he had just signed this memorandum of understanding and he was really steamed at all of his Iran Hawk copy critics who were like, whoa, we just surrendered to Iran. That doesn't seem great. And he was mad and he was working out that anger in public. And one of the things he kept talking about was how we were about to run out of these Strategic Petroleum reserves and see real economic crisis of the sort that we hadn't yet seen even in this war. So let's just play one quick clip down memory lane of Trump at the G7 talking about that.
- [29:48]
Bill Kristol
You know, I've studied presidents. Some good, some bad, some great. Not too many are great, and some really bad. We had one just recently, and the one president I did not want to be was the late, great Herbert Hoover. I didn't want that. And who knows what would have happened, but bad things happened.
- [30:11]
Sam Stein
So,
- [30:14]
Andrew Egger
yeah, this is a theme he returned to a couple of times in that speech. And at one point he explicitly connected it to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and basically said, yeah, we were three or four weeks away from bedlam. Bedlam was the word that he used. And, and I don't know, I mean, I just. The thing that they are talking about right now, like, if you, if you just read the statements that CENTCOM is putting out and the way they're messaging, this is now we're really focused on degrading Iran's capabilities of keeping the Strait of Hormuz closed. Right? So, so in theory, that's now the mission is to make. We can't get Iran to open it at the negotiating table. So now we're going to try to degrade their military capabilities further until that's no longer possible. But the problem with this is something the President has also said out in public many times since the beginning of this war, which is that you can do a really good job of intercepting everything that Iran might want to throw at commercial shipping, but it's pretty cheap for Iran to target commercial shipping. All they need is some drones that Blow up or speedboats that they can put explosives on and ram them into the side of ships. And you could intercept a whole bunch of those and feel like you're, you know, you're doing a good job protecting shipping. But if Iran keeps throwing stuff at them, the risk will still be too high for any of these ships to move through the Strait. So it just seems like we're there. We're not trying anything we haven't tried before. There isn't anything that we could try other than like a full ground invasion of Iran left to try or deeper capitulations yet at the negotiating table. But we are running out of time, really running out of time in terms of real economic calamity over the right, over the horizon. You don't need to take our word for it. That was just the President talking about that. And we don't agree with him on all that much. But I guess here's one thing. And yet, I don't know, it just seems like we're right back. We're right back in this same horrible bind we've been all along, only worse in all of these ways. I feel like I'm losing my mind.
- [32:04]
Bill Kristol
No, you're not. Yeah, right. No, not quite. And no, CENTCOM is sort of putting out these very, almost identical statements every night saying what you just said. They said we're degrading their capacity. It's not clear we're degrading their capacity. They're busy shooting. You know, some ships got blown up, seem to have gotten on fire somehow over the last, what, 48 hours? Even in the Strait itself, as I say, passes, passage through the straight has dried down to a trickle. So we're not, so far, 10 days of it hasn't worked. With another 10 days, I'm pretty dubious the amount of money we're spending now, each day, incidentally, for. This is not trivial. Right? I mean, this is. We're back at a war footing and using munitions, which we already had, drawn down a lot. And that's another thing reporting has shown. The Defense Department has not been candid. Maybe they shouldn't be. They shouldn't tell our opponents how, you know, how many weapons we have left and all that. But still, they certainly haven't been candid about the amount we have spent or the percentage, in a sense, of our. Of some of our sophisticated weapons that have been expended foolishly, in my view, you know, so in those first two months, to do what? To just pummel Iran and then to deal with drones that cost, you know, 1/100th of what our weapons cost. I mean, it's been a foolishly fought war as well as a foolishly conceived war. But Senko's being sort of honest about what they're trying to do, but not honest, I think, about its fact that it's very unlikely to succeed. Trump sort of senses that that's not a good talking point for him because some. Everyone will say, well, hey, wait a second, wasn't the strait open on February 27? Like, what are we. This whole thing was just to get it back to the status quo ante, but not quite as good a version of the status quoante. And so Trump is hanging his hat on the nuclear thing. He's that if you study centcom talks about the strait. Trump talks about, oh, very important to have gotten rid of their nuclear program. We're not quite. Or we have to keep doing it because we have to. Our goal is to make sure they can never build nuclear weapons again. That's totally disconnected from anything we're doing. I mean, you know, these. I mean, that's why I said God doesn't even pretend, you know. So, yeah, that would mean ground troops, that would mean regime change. That would mean a much more massive effort or diplomacy, conceivably, if you think that could perform as Obama did, prevent the nuclear program. But it would require a whole different kind of efforts than anything we're really doing. So, yeah, it's. And I think people have the sense increasingly that these, both the centcom and the Trump explanations are disconnected from reality. Hexeth and General King will testify before the Senate Appropriations Committee this afternoon, chaired by Susan Collins. Someone else who's in the news for various reasons, you know, as a key vote on Blanche and a key Republican senator at risk this November and who's voted, I think, both ways now on the war powers resolutions and stuff. So interesting to see whether how she conducts the hearing to see what if Republican senators are in automatic defending the military. I mean, they're going to just be a huge amount of patriotic rhetoric and praise for the military and make it seem, I suppose, like criticisms are criticisms of our soldiers who are being, you know, shelled and aren't taking risks every day over there. Interesting to see how tough Democratic senators are. I think there'll be a lot of the Democrats so far have been much more in the you're not telling us everything mode as opposed to stop this war, you know, I mean, but the degree to which they're not saying anything. And here I do think General Kaine deserves Honestly, a little tougher questioning, too. It's not like the military has been very candid about stuff. I blame the civilian leadership ultimately, of course, but I wouldn't say they've been outspoken about what maybe the truth about what's been happening over there either. So, yeah, that hearing might be mildly interesting, but more broadly, the hearing is not going to solve anything. Interesting to see what happens with this request for tens of billions of dollars. Do we trust I'm a hawk. I am for more defense spending over the next five, 10 years, quite a lot more even I've been for defense saying, do I trust, do I trust PETE hexs, PENTAGON to spend this money intelligently? I really don't. So maybe some very targeted spending to really replace things that need to be replaced to make sure our soldiers are protected. But I am against just a blank check replenishment personally of what our Department of Defense, or as he says, Department of War has, has been doing. So I do think, but I think the issue is front and center politically again and, and also obvious point that you've made before, gas prices, which have been coming down, and that was important during that lull and it wasn't again, unreasonable for them to come down. People thought, okay, I guess the worst kind of over, basically. And so gradually we'll get back to normal or something like normal, a little bit of risk premium for the strait, but get down to $80, $75, 70 maybe instead now they're going back up here with a lag from where they're going up on wholesale, so to speak. And it looks like that's baked in that they're going to go up another 15 cents, maybe a gallon this week after going up about that last week. So. Yeah. So the political pressure will presumably increase on Trump in that respect, too.
- [36:50]
Andrew Egger
Yeah.
- [36:50]
Sam Stein
Yeah.
- [36:51]
Andrew Egger
I mean, I am very far from a defense policy expert. My own thinking on the stuff you're talking about is, is sort of muddled and maybe not muddled, but at least, you know, pulled different directions because on the one hand, you know, a lot of this stuff in terms of, you know, replenishing our, our, our weapons and our missiles and our warheads and all these sorts of things is, it's, it's Long Horizon stuff. Right. I mean, you have to, you have to spend now in order to have all this stuff ready in three or five years. Right. And so it's on, on the one hand, it does seem like you don't want to get too deep into thinking about like, you know, can I trust this Commander or that commander or this secretary or that secretary. On the other hand, it is a perfectly normal human response to see these guys coming with this budget request right now for all of this money and say, well, I don't know, how'd you spend the last stuff? What'd you get for that? You know, so it's.
- [37:39]
Bill Kristol
It.
- [37:39]
Andrew Egger
It's hard. It's. It's.
- [37:40]
Bill Kristol
Or have you. Or have you transitioned to a drone world, as Ukraine has shown us and others, you know, as a. From a let's build Trump battleships world? I really don't know any defense people who think that's really a sensible expenditure. And that's just. Trump's, like, he saw movies about them in 1963 or something, and he thinks that's a cool thing to build, so they're legitimate. In a normal world, there would be defense experts in Congress on Senate Armed Services and Appropriations, the Appropriations, the Defense Appropriation subcommittee, who would be sort of having that debate with people at the Pentagon, and we would end up with whatever, some kind of resolution. We're in such an abnormal world in Trump. Trump times. But also, the Defense Department's just not made it easy to have that debate because, again, I have the sense from talking to people in and around Congress that they know very little more than we do, honestly. And so it actually gets back to our earlier conversation, really, in a funny way, that just in terms of sensible policy, leave aside the mega questions of whether we should be fighting Iran and stuff. It's harder to have sensible policy decisions when it's all enveloped in this cloak of Trump Hegseth bullshit, but also actions which people don't, I think, correctly, don't approve of.
- [38:53]
Andrew Egger
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's a mess. The last point I'll make, and then we can get out of here. But the last thing I'll say about just this broader conflict and the way that it does seem like Trump does not have any good options, really. I mean, it's not like he has things he hasn't yet tried. He kind of tried pummeling them until he hoped they'd submit, and they didn't, and it didn't work. And the pain became too high for him to continue to pursue that. But then he tried going the other direction. He tried giving him a ton of concessions. I mean, lots and lots of concessions. But then that didn't work either because they were always pushing for more, and he felt like the temperature got too hot on him in terms of his hawkish flank, and he started trying to win that argument with them and get more concessions snuck in in a hawkish direction that weren't really in the terms of the memorandum of understanding and got Iran all bothered about that. And like, ultimately, you would think he would have to commit to one of these two strategies, right? He would have to commit to far greater military intervention than we have yet seen and be willing to deal with the blowback from that. Or he would have to commit to perhaps even greater humiliation and surrender toward Iran than we have yet seen, and he would take some blowback from that. And I think what we have seen from Trump so far is that maybe there is even a worst third option where he just keeps ping ponging back and forth between these two things and keeps, you know, bumping into another piece of domestic criticism that gets him hot and bothered, and then he then pivots back away from that like he's, he's not, he has never really shown that he is willing to actually sort of pin his ears back and move toward an actual solution for a problem that involves political pain. Of course there's a lot of political pain in just staying stuck in the middle too. But like, this is sort of what we've seen from tariffs, right? I mean, if you look back at Liberation Day last year and, and the way that this was like his signature initiative that he thought was going to go great, that immediately tanked the stock market. He didn't get rid of them all. He, like, he started like, staring at the stock market and like turn in this dial that says tariffs. And you just did that for months for like the rest of the year. And then the Supreme Court basically said, you actually can't do this at all, and sort of short circuited the whole thing. But, like, that could happen with Iran. It's been happening with Iran. He just keeps kind of moving back and forth between these two channels and, and neither of them are good for him. Neither outcome would be good, but at least one of them might move toward, toward a genuine end of the conflict. And instead he is trapped, and we're all trapped in here with him in this totally painful situation where nothing's happening. The strait stays closed, Iran has all the leverage. And again, we don't know how far out we really are from the real economic calamity, the bedlam, as the President would put it, of not being able to paper this stuff over with drawdowns from these strategic reserves. But we got to be getting close by now. So it's a, it's a bad situation. I don't know. That's all I'VE got, Bill. Anything else?
- [41:56]
Bill Kristol
No, that's really well said. I would just add that in addition to the economic bedlam that seems to be this lurking out there, there's a kind of political equivalent of it, a political bedlam, which is the degree to which, as the longer this goes on, there's a loss of trust in us by our allies. There's a sense that we don't know what we're doing. There's a sense that we're screwing it all up. And whether you're a Middle east ally or European ally or an Asian ally, you start to think we can't count on the US at all. That's already pretty far along and pretty hard to fix. But the longer this goes on and the way it's going on, the more obvious it gets and the harder it's going to be, even just domestically, for these countries to sustain the argument that they should be not even counting on the US but just cooperating with the US Almost. That's sort of like the tariffs. One side effect of the tariffs has been that, too. Right. It's not just an internal US Issue. Other countries get a vote, too, so to speak. And so, yeah, I think it's bad. I think the degree to which this thing is getting worse, just in the sense of Americans being killed and in the sense that we're spending a lot of money and resources and sort of pointlessly and killing. Killing Iranians, including civilians, it's worse in that sense, but it's just worse in the kind of geopolitical side, too. So not good. Welcome back, Andrew. Welcome back to our nation's capital, man.
- [43:12]
Andrew Egger
I tell you, like, I'm sitting here thinking. I'm like, what a cheerful show. Like, are they all. Like, am I just remembering? Am I. Maybe I'll be by next week. I'll be more sort of immersed in it all. And it's just like, yeah, we just. We just talk about this stuff. We talk about, you know, how bad everything's going, and that's just kind of what we do for a living and. And you kind of get used to it. I feel. I feel pretty grim about all this stuff right this minute, and maybe I'll get used to it again, but. But I don't know. Thanks, Bill. Thanks, Bill, for coming and being grim with me. Misery loves company. Misery loves all of you guys out there. Hopefully, at least there's some catharsis in being here with us while we hack through it all, slog through it all. There's a lot more to come. We're what, a year and a half into this second term, we're going to get some midterms and maybe that'll be some kind of handbrake, but, man, it's not looking good out there. But we'll be here. We're going to find out what's going on. We'll watch this hearing today. We'll talk about that in the newsletter tomorrow, I am sure. And we'll be back on YouTube and substack live again next Tuesday. Hope you'll come hang out with us again. Thanks for watching. Right now, please subscribe to the Bulwark. If you don't, if you feel extra enthusiastic, go over to Substack and get our newsletter. It's free. You can get it every morning. It's a good newsletter if I do say so myself. Thanks for watching. Thanks, Bill, for being on here. And we'll see you all next time.