← Bulwark Takes
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- [00:00]
A
Hey, guys. Welcome to Morning Shots Live. I am Andrew Egger with the Bulwark. This is Bill Kristol, editor at large of the Bulwark. We write the Morning Shots newsletter every Monday through Friday morning. Come to you live on Tuesdays to talk about what we've got in our newsletter today and what else is going on with the news. There is a lot to discuss. We covered this part of the G7 that's going on this morning. A lot of what's going on in the aftermath of the war in Iran, a lot of what's going on sort of just in Trump's domestic agenda more broadly. In the newsletter this morning, we're gonna talk about all of that. But before we do that, we have one kind of fun. I don't know if it's fun, exactly. It's stupid. It's embarrassing. I don't know. I guess it's fun. We can say it's fun, right, Bill? I mean, it's the reflecting pool. I have, I have not. I don't know about you. Out of all of the stories that have kind of become minor controversies over the last few weeks and months with this president, the reflecting pool is not high on the list of ones that I have paid a lot of attention to. You know, Donald Trump has been beating his chest a lot about his renovation of it, his, his draining it, his, his repainting the bottom. I think there were a lot of concerns early on that he was going to basically swimming pool eyes the thing and get it like, you know, like this electric cobalt blue, looking like your municipal pool out there or the pool at Mar a Lago or something. None of that necessarily really materialized. Painted it kind of a dark blue, looks kind of gray. But the funnier thing about it has been the, all of the talk about the water of the thing. Like, let's just throw up this post from from Trump back in April of, yeah, this is AI Obviously, you know, the ducks and the clouds are all in the same place, but you get the idea under President Hussein Obama, that guy we had a decade ago, that, that sort of dodgy character, the water in the reflecting pool was allowed to become very choked with algae. It was, it was ugly. It was unsightly. It wasn't clean. It wasn't clean like you'd want a. Our great reflecting pool to be in the Capitol. There was a lot of this stuff. They finished the renovation. They get it all refilled. Last week, there's this big round of sort of like conservative media applause about the reflecting pool here's. A Breitbart headline just from last week, 8th of June. Thank you, President Trump reflecting pool in D.C. wows after Trump Renovations. First of all, let me just say what's going on in this particular screenshot. It's not even done there. It's not even refilled. There's still all these, like, trucks and things set sitting around on the bed of the, of the reflecting pool. And apparently we're supposed to be wowed by that. But I digress, because they refill it and wouldn't you know it, immediately, instantly, the whole thing turns bright green again. Let's go to some tweets from yesterday. This is what the, this is what the reflected reflecting pool looked like yesterday in D.C. we had our guy. Was it, Was it Brendan who went out there? Our guy Brendan went out there, took a sample of the water, did, did some ph testing on it. For some reason, this is the sort of stuff our crazy video youths get up to for you, for you, the American people who watch and consume our content out there. But it's woes. It's not great. You can see in that fourth screenshot, they got some pool cleaner guys out there. And then just this morning, we got some more video footage, which we will play now of what else they're up to with it. So here you see workers pouring what we understand to be 12% hydrogen peroxide solution out of these little gallon jugs into the reflecting pool to battle our. That pesky recurring intransigent algae problem. I don't know, Bill. There's not a lot to say about this, and some of what I'm going to say about it I'm going to save for the newsletter tomorrow. But it is kind of funny. What do you. What, what do you make of our. Of our continual battle against this apparently, apparently completely indestructible reflecting pool algae?
- [03:42]
B
Yeah. No, I look forward to your addressing it tomorrow in the newsletter. It'll be a nice break from sort of heavy issues of Iran and election theft and so forth and. But it is. I mean, he's kind of failing at a lot of things, isn't he? I mean, the ballroom is twice as expensive as contrary to his statements, it turns out. We mentioned this in the newsletter this morning. Washington Post reports it's much more expensive than he said and we're already spending taxpayer money on it. That was one of his great claims. No taxpayer money on the ball. That it was, well, one billion doll. But that's only for the security, though they spent already tens of millions. I Think on this ballroom, which isn't built yet and may not get built since their court case is pending. All their other wonderful schemes, the children $50 bill, the triumphal arch, thank God, not being built yet. So, yeah, it's nice to see some failures, especially on the. Well, in the policy areas. Obviously, it's unfortunate when it hurts the United States, but he is president so hard to avoid that to some degree. But certainly in these things that are pure megalomaniacal grandiosity and on his part, to see them sort of failing and in somewhat amusing fashion is a good thing. Yeah, yeah.
- [04:55]
A
We don't need to dwell on this Washington Post report, but let's spend one more second on it because it really was pretty astonishing. And this is again, a report the Washington Post put up just this morning, basically alleging that not only did Trump ask for that billion dollars in security improvements, which he ultimately did not get, in the spending bill that the House and Senate just passed, that was obviously its own whole controversy. A lot of senators were put on the spot about that. That would have been a billion dollars in taxpayer money for this project that he had claimed all along would not be funded by taxpayers, would be privately funded, all money for it routed through this, you know, these separate channels for private donations. And a lot of his own money, as he said. Come to find out, that was all complete nonsense from the very beginning, per the Washington Post's reporting. It is not only that the cost is way, way higher than expected, but already already for the work that has been done to date, while the. While the thing is still just a hole in the ground. There have already been tens of millions of dollars in taxpayer grants going to the construction company that they have working on that project. It's already money out the door. And by the way, it was already money out the door months ago while Donald Trump was still saying with a straight face, this is all not a dime of taxpayer money. This is gonna be privately funded. It's this great generous thing that I and my friends are doing for the country. Complete bunk. Complete lie was estimated. The Post reports from the very beginning of this project that it would require quite a bit of taxpayer money to do that. So just, I mean, we're not breaking any news here. The man's a liar. He lies all the time. But here's a lie we didn't know about before. Kind of a staggering one. Anything else on that one before we turn the page, Bill?
- [06:33]
B
Nope. I'm personally. You're obsessed with the reflecting pool. I'm obsessed with the triumphal arch. And I really think that thing can be stopped. And I'm going to spend a lot of time over the next. I'm going to bore people in the newsletters by going on about various efforts to stop it and why it has to be stopped and why it would be such a desecration to have it looming over Arlington Cemetery in the Lincoln Memorial. But with.
- [06:52]
A
Don't you think it might be.
- [06:53]
B
We'll get back to that in the future.
- [06:54]
A
I think it might be more cathartic to let him build it and then knock it down later. One of these sort of like pulling down the statues of Saddam type.
- [07:01]
C
Yeah.
- [07:01]
B
No. Well, certainly if he does build it, we need to have a. What's, what's the. It's a Latin phrase, damnatio memoriae, I guess, which I've come across. Other people have used. It turns out it was. It's one of these Latin phrases that is not from antiquity. It was invented in the 16th century. I mean, it's correct Latin. It just didn't. They didn't use exact. They used the concept in antiquity where they would erase very bad emperors faces from, you know, monuments and so forth. And here, this is extended. And it was extended. So let's just get rid of anything that reminds us of these people. So, yeah, the project of getting rid of things that Trump put up that shouldn't be up, that remind us of Trump, that we're vanity projects of Trump, that's going to be a bit. Not the most important thing the new, the new administration does in 2029. But, but, but, but something worth attending to.
- [07:43]
A
Yeah. Yeah. I had never known, I had not known that that phrase was not, was not legit. It was not actually, you know, who, who says Latin's a dead language? Still seeing a lot of innovations in the forum all the time. Okay, well, we're gonna turn to. The G7 is where Trump is right now. They're discussing a lot of stuff that we're not hardly gonna talk about. We're just talking about him being there and making some comments on the war in Iran and on the relationship with Israel. Talk a little bit about that deal. But one other fun thing. Just we're only flesh and blood. Here is one picture of Donald Trump and Marco Rubio at the G7 this morning, which we will throw up. And then let's do a little bit of computer enhanced about this picture because, you know, the shoes. Marco's still wearing those goddamn shoes. This is crazy to me. I mean, like, you remember this story, right? Trump Trump given. Given the Florsheim shoes to everybody in his orbit. All these pictures of poor Marco Rubio flopping around in these shoes that are way too big for him. Apparently, they are what he packed for his trip because as you can see there, his pant leg is falling in between his foot and the heel of his shoe on the left foot there. That can't be a comfortable way to conduct high stakes international diplomacy. But whatever, if it works for Marco, that's fine. Let's head over to Trump's, too. And this is even sort of stranger because the President buys his own shoes, right? But these ones appear to be struggling to contain his heel in general. Also, the lower leg swelling that we have seen. We don't need to continue to belabor this. Just thought I'd throw that up there. Let's talk about real stuff now. We've done nine minutes of schlock. Hopefully fun schlock for the people out there, but kind of schlock. You know, we'd admit it's a little bit of schlock. Bill, you wrote a bit today about Iran. You wrote yesterday about Iran. It's a little hard to talk about this deal to end this war because we still don't have it, and obviously nobody has the actual deal. But we don't even have access to the text of the Memorandum of Understanding that hopefully is the forerunner for a deal a couple of months down the line. So we're all flying a little bit blind here, but we have gotten, I was gonna say some alarming signals of what's in it, maybe a lot of alarming signals. Can you just kind of walk us through where we are, what we know about what the Trump administration is apparently willing to swallow in order to finally bring this war of their choice to a close?
- [09:59]
B
Yeah, it's a war of their choice. We lost the war. And so guess what? It's a bad deal. You know, a lot of the professional diplomats are analyzing carefully this point and that point, and maybe they didn't negotiate properly with this side, but it's not really about the deal. It's about the war. And this is an appropriately bad deal to a failed war. It's murky right now because they don't want to release the text, and they're probably not clear there really is quite yet a definitive text. The text is only a page and a half Memorandum of Understanding, which mostly kicks everything down the road, but we do both. We don't actually know the details, and we actually do know exactly, pretty much the outlines of this deal. Right. I mean, Iran's going to get money, Iran's going to get sanctions relief. We're going to leave pretty much. Iran says they will reopen the strait and presumably will for some time, but is not committing to the straight as international waters. It's not a return to the status quo ante. They could well have fee. The New York Times had a wonderful headline yesterday. Trump says there won't be any tolls on the strait. But Iran says, well, there could be fees and they can always of course close it or put conditions on it or increase fees either privately or publicly at their discretion. Now that they've established the princip of closing it, the new the nuke that they can close it and pay not much of a price or no price, hurt the world economy. And the nuclear thing seems entirely just kicked down the road. So basically, yeah, I mean, we kind of know where this is going. I'm curious to see how much the Iranians kind of jerk Trump around some more. I'm not 100% certain that they'll. Maybe they'll find some reason not to sign the jail on Friday. Maybe they'll complain that Trump is misrepresenting what's in the memorandum of understanding. This whole idea of a memorandum of understanding is itself a little weird. You know, we have plenty, we've negotiated plenty of deals and treaties over time. I don't know, do we have this 1 1/2 page MOU first to then have 60 days of negotiations? I mean, what's the point of that? But anyway, this is the way they've constructed it. It's all a big. Trump's engaged now in a PR campaign to make it look like a less bad outcome than it is. I'm sort of struck, I'm curious what you think about this. I've been struck in the last 34 hours that his PR campaign has not worked very well. I mean, including among some of his allies and just the public generally. Even the kind of mainstream media which is somewhat credulous in my experience about these kinds of things. Well, he says he's gotten this or that is like really this is. This is not a good outcome. But as I say, some of the analysis then goes in slightly, I think, I don't know what. Misleading. Not misleading, but sort of technocratic direction. Oh, they didn't negotiate a good deal. But say if you lose a war, you don't get a good deal.
- [12:33]
A
Yeah, I agree. I mean, by and large about the, the talking points, not really landing. And I think part of the Problem is they're basically negotiating right back to the same status quo that all these Iran hawks in the Republican Party hated before and hated when it was explicitly hated and explicitly spent a lot of time denouncing when it was President Obama a decade ago who was setting a lot of these same terms in his Iran nuclear deal and the jcpoa where it's like, what, we're just going to take Iran's word on a lot of this nuclear stuff? We're going to allow them to get these infusions of money back into their economy? Let's throw up, up the White House talking points document that's been disseminated, because I think this gets to a lot of this stuff. I mean, these are their top five message points. This is what they want to be driving the discussion. And it's Iran's never going to have a nuclear weapon. Okay, well, but that part has not. That part's not in the mou. That part is a thing that they are agreeing to negotiate on further. So that one's not real. President Trump ended the fighting on every front, including Lebanon. Well, we'll see. I mean, that's the whole question right now. I mean, Trump and Israel are not at all on the same page with any of this stuff. Israel has not been participating in these negotiations at all. We're going to talk about that a little bit more in a minute. The Strait of Hormuz is open again, free of charge. Well, not really. Not based on all the actual reporting that we are getting that says that. Like you just mentioned, Bill, Donald Trump is allergic to the word tolls, but Iran seems perfectly happy to use some other word to talk about the charging that they seem to be gearing up to do in, in the Strait of Hormuz in perpetuity going forward. Iran's rewards come from its own unfrozen money, not from American taxpayers. Well, okay, sure, but that was also the case with the jcpoa, right? I mean, that was the exact arrangement that got all of these people so jazzed up and mad a decade ago. Wasn't that like, it wasn't Iran's money, it was just that we were giving it back at all. And then this fifth one, Obama never even got assigned to document. I don't know. Do you have any idea what's going on with that? I looked at that and I ran out of time to follow up on it. I genuinely. It's like they needed a fifth talking point and they couldn't, they couldn't think of another one. That's funny on the list.
- [14:35]
B
Yeah. I mean, because what everyone thinks The JCPO is 160 page document that was attested to, that was ratified by, I believe, the UN Security Council. I mean, that was an actual deal. And Iran seems to have kept to it until we got out of it and we abrogated it in 2018. Wasn't a great deal. But you know, there are other parties to the deal, European nations. That was an actual thing. We are not anywhere close to that with the Trump deal. And the only couple of additional very minor points I'd make to your excellent presentation, there is two things, I guess, on the nuke front. Iran. We don't know that Iran is Iran. We don't know that Iran won't get a nuke. We, we know that Iran is willing to say, as they said, have said for 25 years. And as they said, I believe in the first sentence of the jcpo, jcpoa, they don't intend to or they don't want to or something like that. They don't plan to get nuclear weapons, but they have to have the enrichment program. So we'll see what happens on that. But that's a total, you know, fake kind of thing that Iran's made any commitment they haven't made before on the nuclear front. They literally haven't. And secondly, it's not only that. It's back to the jcpoa, Iran's, Obama's deal, which as you say, they, everyone's hated. It's. Why is this any better than February 27, 2026, when they cut off the discussions about the nuclear program and launched the war, when Trump did launch the war? I mean, I mean, literally, I'm not even being, you know, like rhetorical. I mean, what has improved in terms of our position and a lot of damage has been done obviously to the world economy. We've lost soldiers, we spent $100 billion. We did, you know, reduce Iran's military capabilities and killed some Iranian leaders. No question about that. But we didn't seem to reduce their military capabilities as much as we hoped. And indeed we, they've sort of shown the world that they can take our best hits for 36 days, whatever it was, and keep on chugging along and shut down a helicopter just a week ago and so forth. So, yeah, I mean, it's really, it's not better than Obama's deal and it's not better than this status quo before the war began three and a half months ago. So I, but I hadn't actually looked at the talking points document until you put it up there. And it is actually revealing how this is their talking points, right?
- [16:43]
A
Yeah, that's the five best things they can do.
- [16:45]
B
It's revealing how weak it is.
- [16:46]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, and here's something. I did not pull this, pull this element. So I can't throw the, I can't have Matt throw the video up on the screen. But, but both Trump and Vance have spent the last day or so really leaning in rhetorically. I mean, it's become a load bearing pillar of their, their football spiking here that these new guys who are in power after we killed the old guys, they're just way more reasonable, they're way more pro west, they're way more pro America. I mean, you have J.D. vance saying with a straight face, it's amazing. You know, we're developing personal, personal relationships with these guys and they're ready to turn the page on, you know, 47 years of antagonism toward the United States. And look, I don't, I'm not an Iran policy expert. I have not spent decades studying this stuff. That's not my understanding of the clerical regime in Iran, which views America as the Great Satan and views sort of getting us out of the Middle east as a prerequisite to the, to the apocalypse coming, coming down on, coming down on the world in a way that they are hoping to accelerate. But like, certainly, certainly it is not an argument that Trump's, again, Trump's Iran hawk base and the people in conservative media who have backed him for so long and were so happy to see him launch this war in the first place, like these are like the most psychotic and like horrifying things they could possibly hear the president and Vice President say because they're a whole critique of all along of Obama era Iran policy. And basically anytime Democrats are in power, Iran policy is, you can't trust these guys. They hate America, they want America destroyed. And no matter what they're going to tell you at the negotiating table, that's not going to change. And so we have actually seen quite a lot of sort of horrified reactions from a lot of these commentators who are basically saying, this is not the deal that we were promised when Trump got us into this war. We cannot believe this is ending without more assurances, without us having strong armed Iran. We've decimated their military, but we can't get more diplomatic concessions like make that make sense. Now let me be clear. These commentators, these Iran hawks are way out to the right of the bulk of the American people on all of this stuff, America was ready for this war to wrap up. It is hard to fault the president's political instincts for saying, you know, more nuclear Iran problems later. Much to be preferred for me personally to ongoing giant hikes in the price of gas right now. But it's a problem. It's a coalitional problem in his base. And it's real. It's out there. They're making these. They are rabidly critiquing this deal.
- [19:20]
B
Yeah. And the administration's response, I agree with you that the public wasn't. I'm not in favor of continuing the war through these talks. Allegedly were or are, I guess easy thing to say rhetorically, a little harder to do it know, when you're actually in power. But yeah, but I mean, the weakness of the talking points I think does show how hard it is to make the case that this was all in a worthwhile thing to have done. And in fact, it's pretty easy to make the case that this was all in a very. A bad thing to have done. A lot of damage to US Credibility, a lot of damage to just US Assets. Obviously people died and we lost. We spent a ton of money. But also just the sense of reliability in the Middle east and elsewhere in the world and all kinds of bad secondary effects, the strait not really being open again. So I think that they are having a difficult time selling something that is very hard, should be very hard to sell. And I really, this is what I can't quite tell is how Trump will try to move on, certainly. So this is the whole point of this, is just to get past all this and maybe he will succeed in doing so. People have short memories of gas prices drift down. It's like, oh, that was an unfortunate little thing there. But I don't know, it was a pretty big war and it was headlines for basically three months. And losing a war usually has real political consequences. And also I do think it's not going to go away right away because, you know, there'll all be this back and forth on the negotiations, 60 more days. Mou. What about this? What about that? You know, I kind of feel like it'll stay in the news enough that it will be hard for Trump to just put it behind him.
- [20:44]
A
Yeah, yeah. I mean, it is always so hard to know how to analyze these things. Supposedly voters don't care about foreign policy. That is received wisdom that you hear a lot. And yet these things can break through. You know, wars tend to move things more than abstract questions of sort of foreign policy intent. If you look back at Joe Biden. The moment when his popularity really started to dive and he never really recovered was the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan. So you never know. We're going to see how these things go. We're going to talk a little bit more about the US Israel relationship and some crazy comments we're getting from the President about this in just a second. But before that, hey, we're not running a charity here. Let's throw to an ad.
- [21:22]
C
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- [22:54]
A
okay, when this Iran war started, the US and the Israel could not have been more on the same page. Very famously so. There was a lot of controversy in those opening days about guys like Marco Rubio getting out there and saying, look, Israel was going to strike no matter what Israel came. And we later learned Israel had come and pitched the US on getting involved with this. Donald Trump loved it. He's like, sign me up. We're going to absolutely go hit Iran with Israel. That doesn't really feel like the case anymore at all. There's been Some reporting out of Israel today that Israel has asked to see this memorandum of understanding between the US And Iran and have been denied. They're being frozen out, just like the general public is being frozen out of what's actually been agreed to be agreed to later, I guess, is the way you would put it. And not only that, I mean, we have had a lot of reporting about Donald Trump really going after Benjamin Netanyahu in private. He's gone after him in public. I mean, there has been a real breakdown of the relationship here with the end of the war, which Israel wants to continue to pursue. Let's go real quick to this clip of the president talking about this this morning at the G7.
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B
If it weren't for the United States
- [24:00]
A
of America with me, because Obama was
- [24:03]
B
the opposite, Israel would not exist right now. Israel would have been blown off the face of the earth 100%.
- [24:10]
A
And every smart person in Israel knows that.
- [24:13]
B
Okay, thank you very much, everybody. Thank you,
- [24:18]
A
Bill. Does every smart person in Israel know that?
- [24:21]
B
I mean, it's literally crazy. You know, I'm the last person honestly, to minimize threats to Israel and past threats to Israel and present and possibly future existential threats to Israel. But it was not the case on February 27, 2026, that Israel was at risk of being blown off the face of the earth. And it wasn't due to Donald Trump that Israel hasn't been in the last year and a half. So it's. It's just crazy. I mean, and it's so megalom. It's both crazy and, of course, distasteful and unseemly and megalomaniacal and. Well, and to say it at the same time that you're criticizing Netanyahu, which Trump's entitled to do, but also distancing yourself from Israel. Yeah, it's really. And I feel like on this whole G7, I expected it to be kind of a nothing burger. And I think it has been in some of the public meetings because they are in the business still of accommodating being nice to Trump to buy time to readjust their entire foreign policy and military capabilities because they don't trust the US Anymore, and because Trump has so ruined the alliance structure and US Credibility. But they don't want it to happen overnight. So they're still in the business of, you know, you saw Chancellor Mertz of Germany, who's been very outspoken and very good, I would say, very honest in terms of the new world we're in. There's been a rupture. It can't be fixed giving Trump the soccer jersey. Right. With the German soccer jersey for the from the World Cup. Just kind of trying to make up to him, flatter him. So that I've assumed that would be the general thing that would happen, the general tone of this G7 and it has been mostly except when Trump then takes questions like now he seems unhinged. Honestly, I'm not sure which Middle Eastern leader that was sitting next to him. Just like there were two of them and some four guys like you know, the bilateral meeting with the president of the United States. And I don't know what they discussed privately in their little meeting, but most of it seems to be Trump having a little press conference in which he says crazy things. But I think it fits with your piece this morning, which we should probably get to, which is how I mean he's both his agenda stalled. You should talk about that. You wrote about that. But also how, I don't know, he's always been sort of unhinged and of course Michael maniacal and narcissistic and all this. But it is getting worse. Isn't sure.
- [26:27]
A
Seems that way. Right. I mean we have had a weird moment for the past six months or so, basically since the end of Minneapolis, right, where Trump has been taking all of that ID that he was previously pouring into this domestic agenda of like gigantic sea change, rupture of the status quo across a whole bunch of these policy fields in America, in American policy and particularly immigration, but a bunch of different stuff. And he has been taking a giant step back from that in a lot of ways it feels weird to say that, but he genuinely has stopped pushing as hard for a number of these things and he has been channeling it one toward Iran, where it's like he can still do the macho posturing stuff and the saber rattling and the you better shape up or else kind of stuff that he apparently needs to do psycholog. And then beyond that when he's doing stuff back at home. So much of it has been smaller ball stuff. It's not to say it's not bad. It has been bad. It's been a lot of political retribution stuff against specific political enemies. And it's been then a lot of his weird passion projects. It's been stuff like the Reflecting Pool. It's been stuff like this insane fight on the Trump Kennedy Center. Can we talk I want to talk about the piece more broadly, but can we do five seconds on the Kennedy Center? Cuz I have just been astonished by how petty he has been able to get about this one where he puts his name up on the building, and then a judge orders him to take his name down, and they fight that tooth and nail in court, and they change some bylaws, change some bylaws for the center such that if they ever take the name Trump off the center, they'll have to return a bunch of private donations that the center had gotten. They used that new bylaw to argue in court that it would be a financial catastrophe for the Kennedy center to take the name Trump off of it. The courts come back and they say, sorry, you still have to change the law if you want to change the name of the center. It's, it's established as a matter of federal law. So then they put up these tarps to do the construction work to take the name down, and apparently they're just never going to take these tarps down. I think we have that picture. Look at this. This is, this is the stuff they put up before they took Trump's name off of the building. Now they have been gussying it up. They've been, you know, they carved out those, those openings so people can still get in and out. Kind of looks like we're just going to get the John Farming Arts center from now on. Right? I mean, like, it's astonishing the degree to which this guy will go not to lose one of these ego cases of his. And by the way, the one other thing is that the board, as sort of a consolation prize to him, they just established a new Donald J. Trump Endowment for the, for the Kennedy center that's gonna sort of supersede a lot of the existing endowments. So he will still get his name on the center in that way. But, but what I wrote this morning, and I was pointing back to this piece that came out yesterday from Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan at the New York Times, was this really remarkable piece sort of pulling back the curtain on this fight from April of last year, April of 2025, where Stephen Miller, the kind of policy lunacy czar at the White House, had been pushing very hard for the White House to suspend habeas corpus, habeas corpus for migrants, for people they wanted to deport. Not let them get a day in court at all. Not let them, not even acknowledge that they had the right to request an appearance before a judge before the Trump administration would whisk them off to parts unknown. This is the sort of thing we were dealing with a year ago. And a million things besides Doge and getting rid of USAID and winnowing the sort of entire federal government and all of federal law enforcement of people who were seen as insufficiently supplicant to the president and bringing law firms to their knees and going after the endowments of major universities. I mean, like just thing after thing after thing after thing after thing. We're still fighting a lot. There's still a lot of controversies. There's still a lot of things that are making the president mad or making the president's critics mad, I should say. But it's just small ball stuff, a lot of it. I mean, it's like the UFC fight on the national lawn, which is a giant eyesore and a incredible affront against good taste. But it doesn't, I mean, it's not the same stuff. He is, he is flailing, he's stalled out domestically. Am I, am I wrong to have this, this, this frame on this, or do you think, do you think there's something here? He's just kind of lost any forward momentum when it comes to the domestic policy agenda?
- [30:44]
B
Yeah, I mean, the question would be how much of it's still happening A little bit, you know, at three quarter speed, slightly beneath the radar, like in the immigration, the mass deportation agenda, the going after his enemies, but also not just his personal enemies, but going after the infrastructure that supports liberal organizations. I mean, this. And then, of course, the election denial stuff, I'd be a little more worried maybe that it's going 3/4 speed under the radar. Maybe that's ultimately just as dangerous. And it's still directionally, of course, the same. But. Yeah, and also, you got the 75 billion additional dollars for ICE and the Border Patrol just a week or two ago. So. But yes, it's not like it was in that first year. And I think you point to Minneapolis. I mean, you mentioned that earlier, you mentioned in your piece. I stressed that a little bit in my shorter contribution to the morning shots this morning. The, the, the second meeting that they described, the first one, the big one on habeas corpus, was what, spring, I guess, summer of 2025. There's a late January meeting in 2026 where Miller and Vance apparently are now calling on making the case for invoking the Insurrection Act. And everyone else sounds like in the White House in this very senior staff meeting is like, can't really do that. There's too much opposition, which really shows that the opposition in Minneapolis was a key moment. I now think if you write the history of the first year and a half and maybe ultimately the four years of the Trump administration, January 26th, is a very important moment. Obviously, the killing of Alex Priddy and Renee Goode. But then more broadly, the amazing kind of rallying against Trump and against ICE in Minneapolis, which captured national attention and certainly national support, support of Senate Democrats, that had its own implications in stopping the funding, at least for several months, changed the political momentum, I think. So interesting. It wasn't. It was less. There's more that I think, than any particular. The elections in November helped, I think the repudiation of Virginia and New Jersey, the subsequent special elections that were happening throughout. But Minneapolis, I think, was a big moment.
- [32:39]
A
Yeah, Yeah. I mean, I cannot agree with that enough. And I think I. Reading through this piece yesterday, reading through your stuff today, you almost forget, or at least I have sometimes found myself sort of forgetting about how much of a hinge moment that was and also just how you couldn't necessarily have predicted that going in. Right. I mean, we really had come off of a year of the White House really moving with impunity. They had slowed down some. I had been writing in November about how some parts of the domestic agenda were starting to stall out. The courts were starting to really throw up some roadblocks here and there. They were not completely moving at will anymore, but they were still very, very willing and even eager to throw. Throw the force of the state against what they perceived to be their enemies. You know, anybody. Anybody protesting against their administration sort of, by definition was some sort of insurgent or leftist or terrorist or insurrectionist, any of these things. And that was the environment in which they went in with this shock and awe into Minneapolis. And it would have been very easy for people there to just be kind of cowed and oppose it, but be afraid to do anything about it. And instead, what we saw was really genuinely a. An inflection point of this one city kind of standing up and. And saying, you're not going to do this here over our dead bodies, kind of. And I mean, I'm not trying to be coarse about this, but that's kind of what happened. I mean, you had these people, a lot of these people, not just Renee Good and Alex Preddy, but lots of people who were willing to put their bodies on the line in order to stand up against this stuff. And it created so large of a political problem that the White House felt the need to pull way back on a lot of this stuff. And while you are correct that it's all still directionally bad, and it's not like they've stopped doing some of this stuff behind the scenes, I think that that meeting that you describe is a really good example of the fact that a chastened, insecure White House that is unsure how much it can get away with and physically has to fight over these things internally. They are, they are just not trying nearly as much as the White House of last year, which was confident that it had this mass popular mandate and that it could get away with this stuff, and that all, all the stuff that it really cared about was 80, 20 issues in the country. They have learned that's not true. They are not quite sure how to get away with some of this stuff. And it has slowed them down.
- [35:00]
B
Just, I think the war, the loss in Iran will slow them down further. Or you're seeing it has been slowing them down as they've gotten through the first two or three weeks of all the boasting in braggadocio and then realized, oh, my God, here we are stuck there and how do we get out? You know, it's interesting, I was thinking about this. The Minneapolis stuff happened right after Venezuela. And so I think, just to emphasize the point, you were just making, even reinforce it, I guess, I mean, that they had a lot of momentum then, actually, the White House, it wasn't as if the people of Minneapolis stood up already, seeing that the White House was in a lot of trouble. Trump had lost some points in approval, obviously, as you say, it slowed down a little bit in November, December. But Venezuela was a pretty big success for him and seemed like one at least. And and so Minneapolis really was a kind of a hinge moment. It could have gone the other way and then. But I do wonder now that post Iran war, and we'll be in the post Iran war situation for quite a while, I think because of all these discussions about the deal and also just practical things that could happen in the region and Israel might do things and so forth. Yeah, I think that also puts more of a burden on their shoulders.
- [36:04]
A
Yeah. Yeah. So that is a question that I do not have the answer to. And I'm interested to see how this goes, because I can imagine it now proceeding one of two ways. One, that they are sort of even more chastened and even more restrained by force. They feel obligated to be more careful about the way they move because they have continued to create cracks in their own base of political support with all this stuff in Iran. The other possibility, and again, I don't know which is. Which is likely, but the other possibility is that we are coming to the end of a chapter where Trump was channeling. Like I said before, most of his break things ID into this conflict with Iran that's coming to an end. It has not brought him any closure. It's not a good deal. He can't be very happy about it. So now he is given that up as a bad job, returning home, back to having his sights set on the homeland. We're going to be through America 250. We're going to be through a lot of his party planning committee commitments and we are going to be going back into a fall and into an election season where he still has his hands on all these levers of power, where he still has demonstrated this interest in this willingness in meddling in American elections. He's done it before. There is zero reason to believe he feels chastened by any of that. He seems very enthusiastic to potentially do it again. And so the question is, will he feel restrained or will he now be like, all right, I'm done over there. It's time to really go hard here again. And I guess, I mean, do you have any thoughts on that or is this just kind of a wait and see thing?
- [37:34]
B
No, I think you put the issue very well. I would think that on the elections though, he's going to, could well go hard, maybe combine that with a little Cuba Greenland type, you know, foreign policy adventurism. That would be the two things he both cares a lot about and has a lot of other people in the administration willing to help him with and probably. And neither does he run into quite as direct a congressional roadblock. Right. Some of these other things. Congress can weigh it or even has to weigh it if it's appropriations and stuff. Whereas those two, he has quite a lot of freedom of action if he gets Todd Blanche confirmed to justice, which looks, I guess you'd have to say, likely. Now he's got other people in key positions. I think that. Yeah. I think you suddenly have Clayton maybe at dni. You have a pretty interesting. Pretty. So that's, that'll be plenty for us to worry about over the next six, four or five months. But a little different, I agree, than in both spirit and, and focus maybe than the first year.
- [38:28]
A
Yeah. Yeah. Well, we will keep following along with all of it, but I think we can leave it there for now. I made it to 38 minutes. Let's keep this one under 40 for a change. Bill, we're sort of yakers. We go a bit little along. But we appreciate all of you sticking with us, listening to us yap, following along with all this stuff. We appreciate you reading the newsletter if you do if you don't. We hope you'll head over to the bulwark.com and sign right up for it. It is free. Like most of the stuff that we send out. You can get it in your inbox every morning. We talk about this stuff. We talk about a lot of other stuff, but thanks for watching. Subscribe to the channel if you have not and we will see you all next time.