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- [00:00]
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- [00:57]
Bill Kristol
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- [01:03]
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche
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Bill Kristol
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- [01:28]
Andrew Egger
Okay, I believe we're live. Hi everybody out there. Welcome to Morning Shots Live coming to you on Tuesday morning as we do every Tuesday morning. For the Bulwark, I'm Andrew Egger. That's Bill Kristol. We write the Bulwarks Morning Shots newsletter every Monday through Friday. Comes out at 9ish, 9:30ish. Somewhere in there in your inboxes. And on Tuesdays we come here live to talk about the news. Thanks for joining us. There is a lot to talk about today. As usual, most of it has to do with the precedent that we can't seem to get away from even if we'd like to even no matter how much we might want to talk about other stuff. But before we do that, before we talk about the president's polling and his institutional support in the party and how this all relates to this really extraordinary settlement fund that we're gonna talk a lot about. We've been talking a lot about. We're gonna talk a lot about. We wanted to first really quick talk about the other kind of horrible headline out of yesterday, which was this mass shooting at a mosque in San Diego, apparently carried out by a couple of young people, a 17 year old and an 18 year old, Bill can you just talk a little bit about what happened and what we know about it so far?
- [02:33]
Bill Kristol
I mean, we know there was this terrible attack. And, you know, all attacks are terrible and all murders, obviously are terrible, but there's something about an attack on a religious institution, especially one perhaps that has a school on its premises. And so you have those video. That video of the little kids, you know, being shepherded off campus. And it's terrible. So it seems like three people have died. Security guard seems to behave really admirably. Someone who's been apparently had the position for 10 years himself a Muslim who volunteered to be a security guard to help protect his community and did apparently protect it and perhaps avert many more deaths. So a terrible thing. And I trust. I don't want to be political about it, but I will say this. I was pleased to see. I just was googling around a bit this morning. The official Jewish community organization of California. I can't remember proper name, but it's the kind of umbrella association of the Jewish groups of California. Obviously been plenty of tension between Jews and Muslims in the world and in this country to some degree over the last years, last decades last forever. Express a very strong statement of solidarity and sympathy, which is appropriate, I think. I hope that will come from all religious groups. And so a terrible thing and hope. Well, we've seen it, and we've seen attacks on Christian churches received attacks on synagogues, obviously. We've seen attacks on mosques. It would be n. If it all stopped.
- [03:56]
Andrew Egger
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I hesitate a little bit to weigh in too much about it because I haven't written about it in our newsletter or anything. I don't want to get over my skis or anything. The one thing that stood out to me about this attack, and I guess it's just kind of a grim thought. I guess maybe in some ways it's a good thought, but it's just strange that we've been in this era of everybody grappling with these mass shootings for so long that everybody's got kind of policies in place for this sort of thing now. And this is an instance where, you know, the policies that. That this. That this institution put in place exactly to, you know, limit the damage if something like this, God forbid, were ever to happen, seem to have done some good. And I guess that's. I guess in some ways that's a good thing. And some, like you said, the security guard acted. Acted heroically. And in some ways it's a pretty bleak thing just because, you know, you'd prefer to get out the other side of the era. So. So, well, we'll turn off from that. But obviously we're thinking about everybody affected by that. We're praying for everybody affected by that. And that's all we'll say about that shooting right now. I'm not gonna say turning to more cheerful stuff. None of this stuff is cheerful. Less immediately tragic stuff. It may be stuff more to get mad about than to be specifically more sorrowful about.
- [05:10]
Bill Kristol
I don't know.
- [05:10]
Andrew Egger
You can be mad about a mass shooting too. It's all so bad. All the news is so bad. We're sorry you all have to deal with it all the time. We don't really like dealing with it all the time. I guess it's nice that we're all sort of together to, to deal with a lot of bad news. But let's turn to some different bad stuff. Let's turn to first. I guess we'll get to the polling in a little bit here. But let's talk about what we've all been talking about for a few days now. Cuz there's more new stuff in the President's settlement fund. This, this all stuff. This all first broke on Friday when ABC News was reporting, or maybe, maybe actually Thursday, Thursday afternoon, ABC News was reporting that, that this was coming, that Donald Trump was going to drop his lawsuit against the IRS, his very silly $10 billion lawsuit over the leaking of his tax returns a few years back by an outside contractor for the IRS who had access to them. Trump was gonna drop that lawsuit in exchange for his people at the Treasury Department and the IRS agreeing to set up this $1.776 billion, quote, unquote anti weaponization fund to basically give out grievance payments to anybody who can plausibly claim they were targeted by lawfare or weaponization of government during the Biden administration. Basically to a lot of Trump allies who got in legal trouble or even just sort of political trouble during the Biden years. That was reported. ABC reported it was coming. Even I'm curious what you think about this bill, because even when it was reported by abc, it just seemed so shocking, so completely shameless and ridiculous. And obviously it's Trump we're talking about. You don't want to be surprised by the guy. But I did sort of wonder maybe, maybe there's like internal disagreement about this. Maybe somebody's leaking this to ABC ahead of it being finalized in order to spark the kind of blowback that will make them reassess, make them take a step back when it was first reported and we wrote about it in morning shots on Friday. Did you think, no, this is, this is just what's going to happen, or were you maybe a little more Pollyanna ish like me, that, that, that maybe they would sort of step back away from this one?
- [07:14]
Bill Kristol
I thought it would happen because in the second term we can talk more about this. The degree to which Trump every shameless idea they have, they execute, apparently, no matter how much it would have been viewed as not just improper, inappropriate, but illegal and really terrible to do a real violation of law and norms. They seem to do that in the second term. Actually, I was surprised that the general counsel of treasury resigned, and he seems to have resigned over this yesterday, which is nice. Now he hasn't said anything. So again, we'll have this principle we see or practice we've seen in the Trump second term where decent people do leave. We've seen quite a lot of that in the Defense Department, for example. They also seem to feel weirdly constrained about saying anything about why they left. And this person is a political appointee at treasury, been confirmed by the Republican Senate and been there seven months so far as we know, carrying out all kinds of other policies that are pretty dubious, honestly, at Treasury. But this was a bridge too far. So I think you were right to think this is a bridge further than some of the very bad bridges we've already crossed. But as you point out, and you should talk more about it in warning shots this morning, excellent piece. I mean, the degree to which this is a slush fund for Trump, it doesn't even have to go. You almost were too nice in describing. Now it doesn't have to go to anyone who's, we don't even know who it's. I mean, Trump could find people who aren't aggrieved and just to say they're aggrieved and give them the money and there's no appeal, there's no guidance, there's no oversight by the courts. And then, of course, we'll see if Congress steps up to actually reassert its control over federal funds. But so far, Republicans may make that difficult. No Republican that I know of on the Hill has objected to this yet. So it's really, you're right to be appalled that it's a bridge further than the previous bridges. But maybe I was right to think that the whole point of the Trump second term was to keep going across the next bridge, the next bridge down the road to even further lawlessness, you know?
- [09:02]
Andrew Egger
Yeah, yeah. As luck would have it my understanding, and you can correct me if I'm wrong here, because Matt was our producer, was talking about this a little bit. I think Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, is talking about some of this stuff in congressional testimony right now. And Matt was saying he has a bit of a clip of Senator Van Hollen grilling him a little bit over this. So Matt, if you want to play this, I mean, this is really just happening as we're talking about it, and then we'll get in a little bit more to some of the details of the, of the settlement here.
- [09:30]
Bill Kristol
Chairman, Mr. Attorney General, this is an outrageous, unprecedented slush fund that you set up. Simple question. Will eligible individuals who assaulted Capitol Hill police officers be eligible for this fund? Well, as it makes plain. Any ladies just let me know if they're eligible for the fund.
- [09:50]
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche
As, as, as was made plain yesterday, anybody in this country is eligible to apply if they believe they're a victim.
- [09:58]
Bill Kristol
Weapons. Mr. Trinity, let me ask you this. Are there going to be rules that say that if you've assaulted a Capitol Hill police officer or committed a violent crime, you will not be eligible? Why not make that a rule?
- [10:11]
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche
I expect that. Well, because I'm not one of the commissioners setting up the rules.
- [10:14]
Bill Kristol
I expect four of the five members. Aren't you, Mr. Attorney General? Pardon me? You're appointing four of the five members.
- [10:20]
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche
I am appointing.
- [10:22]
Bill Kristol
Set up the rules. I would hope you would make a rule that anyone convicted of assaulting a police officer of violent crime is simply not eligible. They should not apply.
- [10:30]
Andrew Egger
Well, so what, what Van Hollen is getting at there, and it's a really good line of argument because it's totally true, this is what we have learned that's new since yesterday. So yesterday morning we got basically, it's official, this is really true. ABC's reporting was correct. There's going to be this fund. But last night we got, I guess some of it was yesterday in a statement from the attorney general. And then last night, the actual terms of the settlement fund were released. And what was made extraordinarily clear over and over again is it's genuinely worse even than even than people had anticipated in terms of how astonishingly sealed off and unaccountable and non transparent all of the mechanisms involved are. So what Van Hollen is drilling down on right there, and this is part of the settlement agreement, is that these commissioners who Acting Attorney General Blanche is going to appoint and who can be fired, by the way, at the President's sole discretion, without cause at any time at which Point Blanche could appoint more. So they truly are just under the thumb of the president and his MOOCs. They are going to have complete carte blanche, no pun intended, I guess, to set all of the terms of the disbursement, all the rules, all the procedures, who's eligible, who's not, all that stuff. None of that is in the settlement. It's all 100% determined by the commissioners of this fund. And they don't have to tell anybody about it. The settlement fund says they may or they may not, at their sole discretion, sort of release those procedures and make them public even who is going to be applying, who is going to be getting money dispersed, all of these things. They are applying directly to that commission. The commission deals with them according to the Commission's own procedures. And, and they don't have to make that public either. Again, this is part of. I don't know what we have. Let's just go through a couple of these screenshots that we have. So here's one thing. This is from the DOJ's enforcement memo. Once the funds are deposited into the designated account, which means this $1.76 billion fund, no longer part of the treasury, but in this fund, the United States has no liability whatsoever for the protection or safeguarding of those funds, regardless of bank failure, fraudulent transfers or, or any other fraud or misuse of the funds. So that's handy. Let's move along. This is basically, let's skip the applying for money, but that's, that's a little bit less important. The, onto the appeals thing. This settlement agreement is enforceable and challengeable solely by plaintiffs, defendants and the United States, which means specifically the two parties in this case, which are Trump in his personal capacity and Trump's personal own MOOCs at the Treasury Department and the IRS and, and then by the United States government. So really it's Trump. Trump is the one who could challenge this, this arrangement. It's possible other people will find standing, but. But they are asserting the right that nobody has the right to challenge this but them. And then just to kind of put a finer point on that, because the claims process is voluntary, there shall be no appeal, arbitration or judicial review of claims offers or, or other determinations made by the Anti Weaponization Fund. So again, just complete black box. And the thing I started to gesture at before is that the only person who needs any notification about disbursements made for any reason is the Attorney General. The fund has to tell the Attorney General confidentially who they've given money to. And how much they've given, they have to send that to him quarterly and again, it's confidential. He, in theory, I guess could choose to release that. The President could choose to release that. But he's under no obligation in the terms of the settlement agreement to do so. Am I missing anything here, Bill? I mean, it just seems like it's one outrage piled on top of another.
- [14:11]
Bill Kristol
Yeah, totally. I hadn't even focused on the sentence you read earlier about no appeals for fraud or anything like that. I think about this. This is disbursement of funds that the federal government has. It's this settlement fund that they have as an open ended fund just to actually pay people. So when the US government gets sued and has done something wrong, they took your land and didn't pay you for it or whatever, they defrauded you, some US government agenc mistreated you and fraud, there's money there for the government to pay you just like there would be in a corporation to pay you. That's what this is for. It's not for this kind of thing. But anyway, the fact that you can't sue for fraud or you can't be penalized for fraud apparently is unbelievable. I mean, if you defraud Medicare, you can, the government can go to court to both get its money back and to punish you. And that is true of every government program. If you lie in a government contract, if you defer the Defense Department, if you claim to be X and you're not, if you claim to be a disabled veteran and you're not a disabled veteran and you get VA money, I mean, right? That is kind of part of running a government where the rule of law obtains and fraud is not permitted either by the government or against the government. In this case, an explicit, an explicit rejection of any such claims. So I suppose you could show up, lie, say you were a January 6th protester, say you went to jail, if they didn't do very good diligence on your criminal records, you got the money, nothing can be done about it. So I mean, the degree, as you say, of unaccountability, the degree of arbitrariness is really astonishing. They don't, it's not even really for victims. I mean, leave aside whether it's appropriate type of fund, which is ridiculous for victims of Biden's Justice Department, if they're real victims, they can sue in court like every other victim of the federal government. But they already could. But no, this is a special fund for them. But it's not even limited to Them.
- [15:52]
Andrew Egger
Right.
- [15:52]
Bill Kristol
It can just be other people Trump decides he likes. You know, every member of the Proud Boys just could be given money and no one could appeal. No one can challenge it. And as Senator Van Hollen pointed out, it doesn't matter if you've been convicted of a violent crime. So it's really worth the outrage that you heap upon it in warning shots. And it's worth saying that Congress can stop this. I mean, Congress can and does often restrict the expenditure of federal funds in all kinds of programs. And just one point on that. There's been a certain amount of disingenuous stuff. Well, this isn't an appropriation. This is a standing fund. Well, Medicare isn't an appropriation. It's an entitlement. Right. I mean, a million, many programs are not annually appropriated. There's rules are set up and then the money goes out the door. And if it's more one year, it's more one year. That's why it's called entitlement. That's why they grow, you know, sort of unregulated by Congress. But they have rules, they have limitations. And indeed Congress often imposes limitations. Very famous things, the Hyde Amendment. Certain funds, Medicaid funds can't be spent for, on abortion. But I mean, there are many, many such things, obviously. Right. Perfectly legitimate for Congress to say we're happy the Justice Department has a settlement fund, has to be able to pay off what it's found to have done something wrong in court. But no monies in any, in the settlement fund or any other monies in the federal FISC can go to these kinds of, to this purpose. And they could specify it pretty concretely. I guess. Trump would veto. I mean, I don't know if the Republican, I mean, the Democrats really need to make a huge ruckus about this and make Republicans as much as they can vote on, make them vote for this, you know, $1.77 billion billion dollars slash fund.
- [17:31]
Andrew Egger
It's a lot of money, Bill.
- [17:33]
Bill Kristol
I know.
- [17:34]
Andrew Egger
Billion dollars. I mean, yeah, I, this point you're bringing up is really good and I want to highlight it because I think like the corruption, the corruption angle and the fact that it is going to allies in this unaccountable way, all of that is so staggering that obviously, you know, we're going to spend a lot of time and energy talking about that and condemning that. But even if, for the sake of argument, this were like a really actually noble cause, that, that, that this was all going to, there was some genuine grievance, some real thing, all the conflict of interest stuff, you could set all that aside. We should note how astonishing of a short circuiting and circumvention of the Congressional power of the purse this would still be, Even, even setting aside all the corruption and everything like this. And I talked to a guy, Matt Plackin, who's the former Attorney General of New Jersey. There were 93 Democrats who, who filed an amicus brief in this suit, basically pointing out how, how bad this is from a separation of power standpoint. But this is what he said to me yesterday. It is Congress who appropriates money. It is the Executive who spends it. Put aside all of the potential corruption with this case. If the President can just sue himself and then settle with himself and then spend huge amounts of money outside of that appropriations process, why would any president ever go to Congress for money ever again? And that is a great point. It's just, it's just obviously true. The settlement fund that's being set up here has so little to do, zero to do with the actual lawsuit that's being claimed or that, that that was filed in the first place. Trump sued his own government over this tax return thing. He's the plaintiff in that case. Right? He's the one who was supposedly harmed. And then, because, and then he now drops this in order to set up this completely unrelated settlement fund to, to give cash payments out to friends and allies. I mean, he could have asked Congress to appropriate money to, to, to, to go to these friends and allies in particular, if it was such a political priority for him. But, but he doesn't think he needs to do this because he has such tight control over his own Treasury Department, over his own irs, that he knows that, that these guys will be willing to play ball according to this bizarre, unprecedented, really corrupt mechanism. And what we are learning about that mechanism is, again, it's yet another of these things that we learn under Trump. Certain parts of the government turn out under current law to just kind of run on the honor system that, that you will never actually see a president go through this mechanism because the judge does not seem, at least right now, it does not appear as though this judge is going to be able to challenge this settlement. She does not believe she has the authority to do this because this settlement was never docketed, it was never filed in her court. Ordinarily, again, in an ordinary adversarial process where you have the government on one side and somebody suing the government on the other side and both of them actually sticking up for their relevant interests, this would Never happen. You would have the settlement take place over a long period of time, get hashed out in court. A judge would need to approve it and okay it. But in this instance, it turns out maybe not so much. Was just another one of these loopholes that Trump has pried open just by being his normal shameless sort of rule, scoffing at unaccountable self.
- [20:43]
Bill Kristol
Yeah, it's even more than a loophole. He just driven right through any normal barrier. It's interesting. Most of the settlement fund, obviously, is used for resolving, as you say, lawsuits where a judge has presided and there's been an adversarial process and so forth, and a decision about how much and to whom and who's a part of what, other plaintiffs. Maybe there's a class action, in which case the whole class of people get money. There have been times, and this I knew I haven't looked at in a while, but the habitats of the federal government has decided to compensate a whole group of people who aren't necessarily litigants, I believe, in a court case, but who have been treated badly. There was Japanese reparations for those who were locked up During World War II, Japanese Americans put in the detention camps of World War II, and that, I think Congress passed that, I don't know, maybe two decades ago. I was sort of interested at the time because a lot of conservatives were against it, but I thought it was kind of reasonable anyway. So I knew I haven't looked at this in a long time, but there was still a mechanism set up for who would get the money and how much. Right. And there was. You had to show, I believe, that you were descendant of, you know, had been locked up or had been a descendant of someone who had been treated unjustly in this way, and that there was a certain guidelines for how much people would get and, and, and so forth. And you couldn't, you know, fraudulently claim money, and the government couldn't arbitrarily give money to people who hadn't been victims of this. So there are times when it's not even the federal funds are expended, not as a result of a actual lawsuit, though that's the majority of the cases, of course. But even there, there are guidelines, and there's also transparency and there's a chance to go to court and say, wait, they said no to me and I should have gotten the money, or the opposite. You know, the government can go to court and say this person made up, you know, things and shouldn't get the money. Right. So it's the. Yeah, the degree of this is just arbitrary rule. I mean, this is just Trump has his money, Trump claims the money, this general counsel, treasury sees what's happening and resigns. And I think really thinking this is basically criminal. I mean, this is, you know, behavior going up to the president. But so far, at least he's, he's going to try to do it and we'll see if Congress really steps up on this or not. And even if Congress steps up, Trump, of course, could veto Congress. And even if Trump doesn't and said, I have no confidence that Trump would even follow the law. If Congress says you can't do it, you know, I mean, it's like one of these, you know, good, good luck, Congress. Who's going to enforce this exactly? The Justice Department? I don't think so. They're part of the, they're part of the criminal scheme, you know, so anyway, but this is, it's a good, I mean, it's not good. It's a, it's a very useful illustration of how far Trump is willing to go. And maybe we could talk about this now where I think you had originally thought we took it later in the program. I think it's such an important point, the degree to which Trump is just barreling through every norm and laws, for that matter, here in the second term. Also the degree to which he's indulging all of his private kind of grievances, whether it's about the 2020 election or his private wishes to have ballrooms and so forth. It is really astounding, isn't it? I mean, it, I just, it's, it's not kind of goes beyond, I think a whole qualitatively goes beyond all the particular, almost all the particular things he did during the first term until January 6th, actually, which were more like. More like actually finding loopholes here. We're just barreling through everything, you know.
- [24:00]
Andrew Egger
Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, it really is astonishing. I guess the one sort of grim comfort in all of this is that this shit sucks. But it's not popular. I mean, it genuinely is. He loses more and more ground all the time. We're going to talk about that more in a minute before, before we do, before we turn to that, let me just say one more time real quick. I'm Andrew Egger. That's Bill Kristol.
- [24:20]
Bill Kristol
We're with the Bulwark.
- [24:21]
Andrew Egger
We write the Morning Shots newsletter every morning, Monday through Friday, free in your inbox. We come live on Tuesdays for the Bulwarks. Channels to talk through what's going on in the news. We've been talking about Trump's terrible, horrible, no good, very bad, extremely corrupt. You know, pick your mad libs adjective settlement fund that's going to go to pay out apparently a bunch of January sixers and who knows who else. We're going to talk a little bit more about how this all fits within the broader picture of his collapsing popularity in a minute. Let me kick real quick first to an ad from, from our good buddy Sam Stein. So let's, let's do that quick and we'll see you in a second.
- [24:59]
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche
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- [26:13]
Andrew Egger
Yeah, however many soul gummies Sam is taking. My, my sort of professional opinion is he could take a few more, I think, you know, get, get Sam Stein all sold up in the office, all of us underlings of his. That seems like a good deal. Anyway, we can move on past that. You wrote today, Bill, about what we were just talking about a second ago about the way that, I mean, the narrative of Trump having a floor that has seemed to hold steady for like a decade now. The bottom has fallen out of that narrative because the bottom continues to fall out of his popularity. And you, you pulled out a Couple of really interesting things about the ages of various people in the party and things like that. Who is abandoning Trump, who's sort of sticking with him. Can you just kind of talk us through where we're at right at this moment in terms of the president's approval?
- [27:05]
Bill Kristol
Trump's approval was sticky and he dropped in his first few months when Doge and the sense that, my God, he's a little crazier than he was in the first term. He went from his 49% on election day to basically down to the low mid-40s. Well, mid low-40s. But he stuck there for most of the last half of 2025. So that was pretty, you know, that was frustrating to people. Right. How come Trump has this floor? He doesn't seem to go beyond the big story of 2026 is he has steadily decreased. Not quite that the bottom is falling out because it's not quite been that abrupt in the polls that we've cbs, I highlighted this yesterday. He goes down one point. I think we could probably remove this thing from the screen here since I don't intent to read it. And not that I just want to make sure I can see you better. You've gone down one point a month in the CBS poll, kind of very steadily. New York Times poll, which they do less often, looks a little more abrupt. But even there, it averages out to about a point a month. Now, a point a month is not as fast as some of us might have hoped. The American public would kind of come to its senses. On the other hand, a point a month adds up, right? We've been, what are we five months into in 2026, and if you go from 40% to, well, 41 or 2% to 37% in some other polls, from 40% to 35%, that's a big difference. If you're at 35, 37% Trump approval, you're a president, your party controls Congress, you're going to a midterm election. History shows there are really no contrary indications that your party is going to get thumped in November and that I think Ron Brownstein has looked at this very carefully. 90% of disapprovers usually vote for the other party. 90% of presidential disapprovers vote for the other party. In an off year election, that would get you, if you have 60, 63% disapproval, it gets you to 54, 55%, 56% possible vote against the Republicans, which if you do the math, gets you to a generic ballot. It's about plus 10 or 11, which is actually the New York Times generic ballot. Yes. In the new poll they put out yesterday. So it actually sort of coheres, you know, the different polling and shows the Republicans are in very bad shape for this November, really, due to Trump and due to the fact that the party is so tied to Trump. It's not as if you can really distinguish Republican candidates or Republican members of Congress from Trump very much so. That's, I think, the big news. The only other point I'd make is there's a pretty striking age gap among, well, a two quick points, one very quick, which is the Republicans are hanging with Trump infinitely more than the general public. The public is, you know, As I said, 37, 63. In the CBS poll against Trump, Republicans are still 80% for Trump. So that's a huge gap, I think I read somewhere the largest gap between the party loyalists and the rest of the public that we've ever seen. So that's pretty striking. And again, so Trump has a loyal party, but some losses even within that party and a bit of a shrinking party in terms of support. But also the losses within that party come predominantly from younger Republicans or Republican leaders, people who have voted Republican in the last few cycles. And there the gap is pretty striking. If you're 45 and over, especially if you're 55 and over, especially, especially if you're 65 and over, you're sticking with Trump. There's almost no erosion, actually, among 65 and over that I could see in the polling, in the breakdowns. If you're young, you're really, this is not what you thought you were getting when you took a, took a kind of gamble on Trump and you're, you're off the reservation. Now, if you're young, you also can get back on the reservation, I suppose, because young voters are more volatile and less, many of them paying less attention, less set in their ways in terms of voting than older voters, obviously, by definition, almost, but, but still, it's a pretty striking development. Some of the polling in the race, in the Thomas Massie race in Kentucky, four, that's happening as we speak and that we'll get results from tonight, had this gap that I think a lot of people commented they've never actually seen in a primary kind of, you know, where Massey's Massey, who Trump has obviously gone after in a big way, is up by 30, 40 points among voters under 45, under 55 even, and Trump's up by 40, 50 points among voters, you know, 55, 65 and over. And that's within the Republican Party. That's not this, that's not, you know, liberal kids who are Democrats. Right. So that's pretty. So that does suggest to me that, that certainly younger Republicans are beginning to desert Trump and the public as a whole is beginning to is deserting Trump. And that's both important, I think for 2026, the latter, the public as a whole, maybe the younger Republicans deserting is important for 27, 28 and belong and beyond. They're not, you know, they're not deserting fast enough to really, really suggests a post Trump or certainly not an anti Trump Republican Party, maybe not even a post Trump Republican Party, but maybe a little less tightly tied to Trump Republican Party, you know, two years from now than we see today.
- [31:53]
Andrew Egger
Yeah. Yeah. I'm a little bit of two minds about this and I'm curious, I'm curious to get your thoughts here because. Well, I'm a little of two minds because there's, it kind of seems to me that there's sort of two groups of young Republican voters who are sort of moving off of Trump for two different reasons, some of which are a lot better than others. And I think about kind of the young people who made up that 2024 coalition that won him the presidency. And there were a lot of kind of like Normie ish young men, disaffected, anti establishment, angry at the status quo, but not really necessarily bought in on these various ideological projects who went along with Trump in much greater numbers than we had seen before in 2024. And a lot of them are abandoning Trump Trump for these obvious reasons. He got us into a war in Iran. He did not fix the economy. He made us, he made it worse. He seems to be corrupt and self dealing in a way that was sort of unexpected. All of that is to the good. There is another category of more kind of plugged in and professionalized and networked young Republican types who I think are getting off of Trump for sort of different reasons and like more insane reasons. I mean, these are like the young reactionaries who spend way too much time doing political stuff online. They don't just sort of tune in vaguely every once in a while and happen to like Trump or happen to not like Trump. I mean, these are the people who have been mainlining what, what passes for Republican youth culture now for quite some time. All of the sort of like shameless conspiracizing and racism and all this nonsense. And I think about things races like the governor's race in Florida right now where Byron Donalds who's a Trump ally, Congressman, just very maga. He's running away with the nomination, but he has this sort of gadfly insurgent challenger in this guy named James Fishback who is basically running as a griper. He's running on a ton of basically winking anti Semitic jokes and stuff like that and anti black jokes against Byron Donald Trump, who's black. I mean, just like this campaign of just sort of naked political transgression even for the Trump era and just channeling the gross ID of the online right. And like I said, he's not gonna get a ton of votes Fishback, but his support is wildly, disproportionately from young Republicans. It's from these under 30 people who again, who have come up in this environment. We're always getting this barrage of news stories of, of these group chats of young Republican groups that are just, you know, chock a block with the grossest rhetoric. I mean, this is just how these young people talk to each other and how they come to think about the world and all these things. And so I don't know, I am reassured that the, that Trump's coal, I mean any, any vote that leaves Trump for any reason. It's hard to argue that that's a bad thing. We want his support to be fragmented. We want it to go in bad directions. We don't want him to have the, this power to continue to abuse the country in the way that he's been doing. But I do have this worry that what's coming up after him on the Republican side might not be a lot better in a lot of different ways. I don't know. What do you make of that, Bill?
- [35:03]
Bill Kristol
No, I think that's well said. I think both, let's say two points. I mean, first of all, I think both things are happening. Clearly there's normie Republican disaffection with Trump. There's extreme reactionary, extremist, whatever you want to call it, bigoted. Trump's not, hasn't gone far enough. He's portraying the worst parts of mega by being, you know, not, not by, not by not being as crazed as the coipers wanted to be on various reprehensible and various reprehensible ways. So both things are happening at once. I think if historians might say that's sort of what happens when these kinds of demagogic, somewhat autocratic coalitions that are led by a charismatic person tend to fall apart. They, some people leave them and say this was kind of crazy. I'm going back to normality and other people say this was. This guy betrayed us. You know, we need a truly, we need Stalin, not Lenin. Right. So you get, you get both. Right.
- [35:53]
Andrew Egger
True MAGA has never been tried.
- [35:54]
Bill Kristol
Totally. We're going to get that. No question. So I think a, that's a, I think that's just going to happen. And you know, obviously when one has to deal with the fact there'll be some young people there, a lot depends on numbers. Then though, this is, you're sort of indicating that you said in passing Donald's is way ahead of Fishback, which I think is true. Right. At one poll I saw Donald's almost at 50 and then Fishback, is that his name?
- [36:16]
Andrew Egger
Way, way ahead. Yeah, yeah.
- [36:19]
Bill Kristol
Think it matters. So let's even assume he gets 10% of the vote. Let's assume he gets 15% of the vote in the primary. Let's assume that he does twice as well with young people. That would be 25 or 30%. That's not great. On the other hand, 25 or 30% is a lot more manageable than 50% or certainly 60 or 70% of young people. I'm talking about here 10% or 15% of the overall Republican electorate in Florida, which is, you know, 5 to 10% of the whole electorate is also pretty small at that point that you're kind of in Papuan and Ron Paul protest land. Right. That actually got bigger at times. So I think it really, the numbers matter and how, in terms of how manageable this is just as a phenomenon for the country. And I, I don't know. I mean we see a lot more as we follow things online and we follow people who have take the trouble to join and then take over young Republican groups in different cities and sometimes college Republicans on campus. That's a very disproportionate obviously and it matters. The, you know, the, the, the, the activists matter. Right. We've politics in the last 50 years in both parties. Small groups of activists can really change the character of a party by convincing others. Maybe these can't. You know, the McCarthy activists convinced others that the war was a bad idea. They became ultimately kind of a majority, you might say of the Democratic Party. But that, I don't know. Are these activists going to convince their peers that, that various things, you know, of much of anything. I don't know. It's a lot would depend on, I suppose, what happens in the world. World. Anyway, long way of saying that. I think you're absolutely right to point to both things happening at once. I think so Far there's some reassurance to be taken in the limited appeal of the true MAGA crazy faction, Trump not crazy enough faction, but it exists. And I do worry. We have a bad recession, things really go bad in the world. And then there's suddenly more ability to recruit for the crazies and the extremists to recruit among those who haven't been part of that yet. But it'll be interesting to see what happens in Florida because it is kind of a nice test case, both the overall primary results. But how strong is this guy actually among young Republicans? I have a friend who teaches in one of the Florida universities and he's. On the one hand, it's just what you're saying. On the one hand, most of the students are interested in politics, honestly, but they're fine. They're rooting for Florida football teams and so forth. I mean, fine in the sense they're not crazy. At least maybe not the greatest students in the world, some of them. He's got some concerns about that and getting all the AI written papers. But that's the topic for another day. That's a topic for another day. I'm not carefully not trying not to say where he teaches, where he teaches. But he says he's also alarmed that there is a subset of students at his university who are very excited about the extreme goiperism, who go to the rallies for the Skyfishback and so forth. And again, hard to know if it's a. So I think the numbers. The numbers do matter there. But it's something to really keep an eye on. And we should. You should keep. You're good at following these young Republican types and they're closer in age to you. God does. So you should. Among the many things you should be following over that you will be following, I'm sure over the next months. Years, I guess, will be this. Yeah.
- [39:21]
Andrew Egger
Well, relatively closer, unfortunately. And to my. To my growing anxiety, not as close in age as I used to be. But that's okay. That's fine. I. This is all a little bit grim. Let's end on a comparatively. Returning to a comparatively happy note that you were gesturing at earlier, which is. I just want to quantify a little bit more the slow sag in popularity that we have seen again throughout this year in 2026. Let me just run through a couple of these, Matt, a couple of these. Silver Bulletin, Nate Silver. He's got a great rolling basically average of polls for the president's approval. He updates that every day. I check it a lot. Let's go through a couple of these. So Donald Trump's decline in the polls, this is from today, doesn't seem to be slowing down. Net approval of 20 -22% according to the New York Times, -20% according to Atlas Intel, -26% according to CBS News YouGov. And this is the most astonishing thing because they keep saying this. Trump hit a new second term net approval low of minus 20.1% on Sunday. One week ago net approval was minus 19.1% which was a new low. One week before that it was minus 18.6%. So we are seeing this real. I mean it's not a collapse like you said. It's not really the bottom falling out, but it is, the SAG is, if anything it's getting faster. Let's go on to one other slide. We can probably skip over to the. Yeah, I mean this is that same thing. You can just see that the line actually does start to really point down after that long period of stabilization in late 2025. All through 2026, it's just been getting worse. And let me jump then to this other thing, the generic ballot, because this was the other narrative that has sort of turned around a little bit, is okay, Trump keeps getting less and less popular, but does that actually translate into new, into better electoral outcomes for Democrats in Congress? Cuz that's what matters this midterm, right Full stop. Democrats have to be able to win some of these races if they're going to be able to exert some actual control over the president in the second half of his second term. And that is again something where we saw stasis for quite some time. They were hovering at this +4, +4 and a half in the generic congressional ballot. And just in about the last month, that too has now started, that gap has started to widen. So there's something new that's being shaken loose here in terms of not just Trump supporters getting less enthusiastic about him, but actual, actual voter appetite to turn some kind of corner and really start to rein him in. And I'll just end on a point that I've made a bunch of times on this live stream and in different places in the past, that all of this is in an environment where Trump last November lost everywhere in all of these off cycle elections. He and the Republicans did and his Republicans did extraordinarily badly and Democrats over performed across the board. And we were writing and saying then Trump has one year to turn this around. He's halfway there now. Halfway. It's Late May and these elections are in November. He has lost half the time. He had to make up whatever gap he could. Now they've done some things to make up that gap in terms of gerrymandering, in terms of making the map more productive for them. But that's really the only thing that has gone in Republicans direction, period, in that entire intervening time. And what have we seen besides that? One disaster after another. Right. We saw the Minneapolis occupation with the deaths of Renee Goode and Alex Preddy. We saw the launching of this war in Iran and all of the stuff that has metastasized from that. We saw Trump getting more and more obsessed with the sort of Napoleonic pageantry of his second term in office and himself as this sort of emperor figure with the ballroom being the most obvious example of that. People care about the ballroom. I was actually a little surprised how much people care about the ballroom. People are going to care about this settlement fund. I mean, this is just out in the open insane stuff. He is not pulling away from doing it. He continues to, you know, put more and more pressure on his people to do unpopular things in service of these aims. He just asked John Thune, the Senate Majority leader, I think it was reported today that he is asking Thune to fire the Senate parliamentarian because the parliamentarian doesn't think has ruled out putting that billion dollars of public ballroom funding in a budget reconciliation bill for these procedural reasons. I mean, he wants these guys to leave nothing on the table in pursuit of all these vanity aims of his. And it's making him less popular. He's running out of time to course correct. He's running out of options to course correct in some of these cases. It's not like even if he wanted to course correct in the straight of horror moose, it would be obvious for him to be able to do that. He's unpopular. His project is failing. He's going to do badly in November. It becomes increasingly obvious. So those are all good things. Not too bad. Anything, I think, I think probably we are close to wanting to peel out of this. Oh, actually, Matt has a clip. Sorry, let me, let me. On the, on the ballroom thing, specifically, let's, let's just do a quick live bit from the president right now.
- [44:25]
Bill Kristol
Is all my money and donors money. This is tax free. That's how everyone's talking about. They're going to give money.
- [44:31]
Andrew Egger
They're going to give money.
- [44:33]
Bill Kristol
The money they're going to give is really for the security of that and the whole White House premises. And I guess you probably need that nowadays.
- [44:43]
Andrew Egger
So there you go. You don't need to worry about that billion dollars in ballroom funding because why it doesn't really make sense. No, you don't understand. We're paying for the ballroom. The billion dollars is just for the other improvements that we need for and for the rest of the White House. I don't know. What do you think, Bill, talk us about.
- [45:00]
Bill Kristol
No, I think, I thought you're just close. I think your summary of what's been happening is excellent. And the only just one point on the kind of chronology of the time is very much the case. Yes. You say the first half almost now of 2026 has been pretty disastrous for Trump. He's got five, six months, I guess five months is that five and a half months to fix it by election Day. But really things start to settle in at Labor Day or very soon thereafter. I would say pretty lot of evidence that you don't get much change except a little more erosion usually of the party in power, a little more of the intensification of a trend that's already going in September and October, which means the summer is actually very important. The summer's fun. People take summer off, school ends, people go on vacation. They sort of assume that the world stops. But actually politically, in elections, especially off your elections, for some reason, the summers when things either gel and solidify or maybe could could reverse, you know, but I certainly, I've been through this a few times in 94 and 2010, the summer was, was important. I remember, you know, being involved in things right before now, before Memorial Day, weren't sure what was going to happen. A lot of I remember this in 94 so well, when Republicans won both houses for the first time in 40 years, Democrats had a lot of structural advantages. They were been through this a million times. That always pulled it out. You know, they were going to use let their they had the presidency in Congress. They could pass popular legislation. A lot of some good indications for Republicans in 94. And I was then on that side, obviously, but, you know, very unclear. I remember by Labor Day I thought they're going to win both houses. Wasn't quite the conventional view yet, incidentally, but it was happening, it was moving. So I think the summer is going to be very important, which is why stick with us all summer. We'll be up. We're not taking much of a break, are we, this summer? I don't think so. And maybe not, I don't know, but a little bit of maybe one or two days off here.
- [46:45]
Andrew Egger
But we're locked in the basement. We're laboring for bathroom breaks every once in a while. Laboring away.
- [46:51]
Bill Kristol
Yeah. Anyway, the summer will be will be interesting, honestly though, and important legislatively on the Hill in terms of who actually wins some of these Republican primaries in terms of the themes that are gel and don't gel in terms of the over the next two, three months really worth paying close attention.
- [47:05]
Andrew Egger
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think that's a good place to leave it because again, we will be following this very closely. We'll be back here next Tuesday. No Morning Shots in your inboxes. Next Monday, I believe, because I think that's Memorial Day. But by Tuesday we'll be back in the saddle breaking down everything that happened over the weekend and beyond. Thanks Bill. Again, I'll say. I'm Andrew Egger. That's Bill Kristol. We write the Morning Shots newsletter for the Bulwark. Thanks Bill. And thanks to you all out there for watching, for subscribing. We hope you will subscribe to our YouTube feed if you are not already. Head over to thebullwerk.com get our free newsletter in your inbox. It's a good newsletter. We have a good time with it. People. More and more people are saying that Morning Shots is appointment reading by mid morning. By mid morning you're not gonna rise and read us because that's not how we do it around here. But thanks to everybody out there and we will see you all next time.
- [47:55]
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