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- [00:00]
JVL
Hello, everyone. This is JVL here with the bulwarks. Bill Kristol. A lot of stuff is happening. All of it's bad. Before we get started, hit, like hit. Subscribe, Follow the feed, because if you're going to be on a rocket sled to hell, you might as well be there with friends. Bill, our president, our favorite president who has been doing all the deals, just said that he was going to do something very tough to the Iranians, but he decided not to because they have a very strong friend, an advocate and a friend that will never abandon them, the Qataris. And you know, for some reason, who could say why, he's really listening to what the people from Qatar have to say.
- [00:49]
Bill Kristol
Our relationship now is very strong with Saudi Arabia. Nobody's coming. Nobody's going to be bothering that relationship. Nobody would be able to break that relationship because of my relationship with the crown prince and the family. Who could say whether he's really made up his mind or changed his mind or whatever on the topic of Iran? But of course, saying the quiet part out loud, people often say it's kind of crazy for him to do that. Doesn't he understand that it's hurting him and is a PR price to be paid? And I think you and I have both discussed this a few times, but it's really worth making the point. I think it helps. It's, of course it helps him to say the quiet part out loud. Right? This is what he said about Iran. If people think they can influence Donald Trump by giving him a gift of a few hundred million dollars, how many more gifts like that is he going to get? If you are out, if you are out for bribes, you need to let it be known that you're out for bribes. You need to let it be known that the bribes could be successful at least for a while. Maybe there needs to be a new one down the road. You need to be known. You need to let it be known that if you don't bribe the man, you might pay a price. So if you're going to be a kleptocrat, you need the publicity. You don't need too much publicity. Well, let me back off. If you're a mob boss, therefore, you need to let it be known that, you know, if you don't pay the protection money, the restaurant's going to be have an unfortunate fire. And maybe there should be an occasional unfortunate fire, but that spares the other restaurants in the neighborhood. That sends the message. Now, the mob bosses are a little careful about letting it all be known that they're running a protection racket because the cops might, you know, they can't pay off enough cops and the cops might shut it down. But you know what, the great thing about Donald Trump's current position, he controls the cops, he controls the Justice Department. So he can be. He's really figured this out. I do think over the course of the last two, three, four months, he can be totally brazen because Pam Bondi and Keshe Patel are not the cops and therefore totally to his advantage to be public about the corruption and the fact that. And the bribery.
- [02:43]
JVL
Well, and the other thing that he has is that he has a cult behind him which isn't going to leave him. And this is again, the. I feel like I was onto this early. I think you were onto it reasonably early. The cult like nature of his support is a qualitative difference and it allows him to do things that, that other people can't. And maybe this is how it is in all authoritarian systems. I don't know. Right.
- [03:10]
Bill Kristol
Well, I think what you're saying, I mean, what you're saying is cut like, which I agree with, is also another way of saying he's an authoritarian leader, not a normal political leader whose people might leave him if they disagree with a decision he's made on an issue that's important to them. He's not pro life anymore. I can't, I'm a pro life voter. I can't be for the pro life politician. He's, he's left our fold. When you're an authoritarian leader, the cult sticks with you. And then the authoritarian thing really compounds the kleptocratic side of it. Because if you're an authoritarian, you also want to, of course, intimidate people. And again, to do that, you need public examples. You need a demonstration effect. You need people to pay a price for opposing you. And conversely, you need to have people who are capitulating seem to be rewarded or at least not criticized or attacked or having their life made miserable. And so again, people are saying, well, he's doing awful, this stuff very publicly. But of course, he wants the demonstration effect of going after the law firms and the universities and individuals, Chris Krebs and Miles Taylor and all that. And could he lose in court? Sure, the court courts might still be the last remnant of the old regime upholding some tradition, you know, standards of kind of law and order, but he's willing to pay that price. He doesn't care. Because how many people want to go through that?
- [04:27]
JVL
Yeah, the court case, the universe of people who have the resources to do that is reasonably smart.
- [04:32]
Bill Kristol
He's behaving in a classic authoritarian way. The demonstration effect. You can intimidate a lot of people by going after only a few. It's pretty efficient. That's what he's doing. And people are being intimidated, incidentally. And so the combination of the kleptocracy and the autocracy is just proceeding faster and more dangerously than maybe even I expected.
- [04:54]
JVL
Again, we're, we're less than 150 days in the. So another thing he has learned and figured out pretty quickly is that the real money is not at the level of rich people or even oligarchs. The real money to be made is at the level, the level of sovereign wealth and nation states.
- [05:17]
Bill Kristol
Right.
- [05:18]
JVL
And that, you know, I mean, we're, we think of like, wow. I mean, Elon Musk wrote a check for $250 million to get this guy elected.
- [05:27]
Bill Kristol
Right.
- [05:27]
JVL
Well, the Qataris just handed him 400 million.
- [05:30]
Bill Kristol
Yeah.
- [05:30]
JVL
Like, without even thinking about it. Right. I mean, that's where the real money is. It's. I forget which country is doing a, a deal with him. I think maybe it's Abu Abu Dubai or Abu Dhabi. And they're going to use his World Liberty Financial crypto to, to consummate the transaction, which of course gives him a taste of $2 billion. So he's figured that out as well, that at the nation's day level. And this is actually in another, this is another sort of grand unified theory of Trump. So why does he dislike our traditional allies, but like our, our traditional enemies? And it's because our traditional allies tend to be liberal democracies where corruption is reasonably held in check. And they, the governments can't pay him off. Right. In order to pay him off, they would have to do stuff which is illegal, that would create political risk for the people within government, whereas other autocracies and monarchies, they can just do whatever they want. They can just write him checks and hand him bags of cash. And so that is another reason why he sees those people as his natural allies.
- [06:44]
Bill Kristol
Totally. I mean, Putin obviously has done this at home and has done the equivalent of the threats and the payoffs abroad and paying for parties a little less publicly because he's got slightly different incentives and constraints maybe, but not that much less public. I was thinking about Putin. I think I took this out of the morning Shots piece this morning that I seemed little over the top and hysterical. But if people want to read it, they can see how over the Top and hysterical it is anyway. But I said, you know, Putin, the poison. A lot of people say, why is it he make it so obvious? Why does Putin make it so obvious that he's poisoned someone? They could poison people, probably, and not have the whole world basically know that, A, it's a poison that's from Russia, B, there's a Russian operative who's like, you know, with a guy 10 minutes before he got sick and so forth. It's clear that Putin wants people to know he did it. That's the intimidation. If someone mysteriously has a sickness, there's no intimidation effect. And I think people have. Again, I even feel this personally underestimated the degree to which the publicity is a feature, not a bug, of not just the corruption, but the authoritarianism. And the authoritarianism, as you say at home and abroad, goes together. Someone else said, I saw yesterday, why is he having. Elon Musk was kind of drifting away from politics, little out of favor, a little popular in the U.S. why does he have to be Elon Musk with him on this trip? Here's why is he signaling to every oligarch in the U.S. every plutocrat in the U.S. you know what? He remembers that Elon was with him for the 250mil when a lot of them weren't with him. And he's giving him the payoff of being front and center with the Saudis, with the Qataris, with all the people who will pay big, big money and cut very profitable deal. Now, the other business types have gone along. They got quite a lot of. They're getting quite a lot out of this trip, too. I mean, the degree of it. And it's sickening character, if you're familiar, if you think of America as a somewhat different country from all these, you know, Middle east plutocracies and oligarchies no more.
- [08:35]
JVL
We ain't.
- [08:36]
Bill Kristol
Yeah, that was not where we are. But I mean, all these business people going along, thrilled to be there, cutting deals. Trump's announcing their deals. This notion that the business people are really going to turn on Trump. You know what, they've kind of got over that initial that they see it's dangerous. You don't. You don't succeed if you, if you just suck up to Trump. I've always thought that was a stupid liberal talking point, honestly. Or wishful one, let's say, you know, they're gonna. He's gonna come for you eventually. Maybe he will eventually come from. Go for Schwarzman, who was number two on his carefully ranked list of business followers who are with him. But for now he's sitting fine and for all we know he's getting a bunch of deals and some other people from the other companies. Again, the degree to which we are just in a different world and therefore. Final point I'll make, and I do say this in morning shots, it's not, you know, Nixon cut corners was tricky Dick. He accepted that he was living in a rule of law regime, if I could put it that way, and then wanted to break a few laws and wanted to cover up thing. Trump covers up nothing. Why does Trump not involved in cover ups? Why is Richard Nixon's nickname Tricky Dick? No one thinks Trump is tricky. He doesn't want to cover it up because he is the first impeachment. He is transitioning us to an authoritarian regime. He's not trying to cut corners in a liberal democratic regime.
- [09:49]
JVL
So I want to, I want to talk about two other constituencies here. I want to talk about the business community and I want to talk about the people. We'll start with the business community. Somebody, somebody said this to me the other day and it was such a fantastic phrase and it crystallized something that I've long sort of thought about but, but hadn't put it this way, that the, the goal of every capitalist is to achieve escape velocity from capitalism and to get to a, a point in the world where they can use the government to, to create a command economy that benefits them. And we're really seeing that with our business class, I think. And I. There is nothing to be done about it now. Should the day ever come when the opposition party has control of government, it does seem like something should be done to the business class to try to lessen their power to collaborate with any future authoritarians. Is that wrong?
- [10:59]
Bill Kristol
Totally correct. I think Peter Thiel, I never really read honestly very carefully his book From Zero to One, but I think that's kind of explicitly what Thiel says. The point of business is not to be in a free market or competition.
- [11:10]
JVL
To be a monopolist.
- [11:11]
Bill Kristol
To be a monopolist, which is another way, in a sense of saying what you just said. I think at least it's a cousin of what you just said. I like the escape velocity formulation because that's correct. Yeah, you want to be free of the constraints of fair and. Free and fair competition in markets. Trump of course has internalized that very well. He never was interested in free and fair competition, was always for him a combination of grift and sort of vaguely semi criminal activities and so forth. So he has no, he doesn't have the attitude that a normal, if you will, CEO would have of. Well, I guess there are these rules and we, of course, might cut a few corners, you know, but we're basically in that system. No, they want to be freed from the system. I very much agree with that. I think it's a very good, It's a good formulation. It is a good for. And incidentally, it makes. I just saw someone, an old acquaintance who's a little Trumpier than we are, but not really Trumpy, more Trump acquiescent or adjacent and so forth, and he was talking about, he thought it could be okay. And ultimately it was clear he expects there to be a reversion to the mean. He expects, you know, people to show up, like in the first term. It's, they're going to cut some deals with the universities and not really strip billions of dollars from them. They're going to, the business community is going to kind of come back to normal. And that's not, it's not impossible. I mean, you know, who knows what balance of forces might drive Trump in that direction and drive enough Republicans in that direction that Trump feels he has to go in that direction. But it, I think it's, I think that's sort of wasn't, I mean, it was kind of crazy to think even back in November, but it wasn't totally crazy to think before the appointments of Hagseth and Bondi and Patel and Tulsi Gabbard before they all got through. That was a huge, in my, in retrospect, if I can interrupt myself for a second green light for Trump to go ahead, you know, if they defeated a couple of those people, could have been a little bit of a yellow light of, oof, they are going to balk if you try to go too far, gets them all through. Then he browbeats, of course, the business, the oligarchs and the tech guys, and they're all totally on board and they're at the inauguration and that all goes well. And then Elon Musk, I mean, the degree to which he's been just getting away with it over and over and getting away with beginning a transformation of the system and succeeding in doing so without much backlash, some little bit of erosion in popular support. So we shouldn't ignore that, but not nothing yet from the elites. That's serious.
- [13:31]
JVL
I would, I would ask your friend, who in the business world is incentivized to go back to normal, right? Because it certainly isn't the people with the most power. Those people have now, unlike in the first term when they kind of resisted Trump and, you know, like Tim Apple went and pretended to do a groundbreaking, but he was really, it was barely going along to get along, they've all now figured out that this is the world and they know how to maneuver in it. And by doing it, they're actually advantaging themselves. Well, that's better off, right? Why would they want to go back now?
- [14:09]
Bill Kristol
One friend of mine said, you know, some of the law firms are having trouble getting younger people once you capitulated. So maybe the signal there is they won't be better off in a year. I'll believe it when I believe that people are. Some young people are resisting. I believe that. But I believe it in a year that they're. If Scadden's profits are higher than they've ever been, you know, and conversely, I'll believe it if a couple of the firms that have resisted aren't paying a real price. So I continue. Yeah, but I'm with you. I think the only thing that will change, it has to be real world effects. Maybe some of the stuff's just crazy enough. Tariffs and everything else. And these deals don't actually work come out well, because guess what, the Saudis and Qataris aren't very reliable partners and Trump himself isn't a very reliable guy. And maybe some these people six months from now are thinking, well, that that's just, none of that's come through from the sovereign wealth funds and so forth. You know, it's possible that there's dis, there is disillusionment with authoritarians. You know, they don't always win. Right. And they make mistakes. But I agree with you that the degree to which we're now in a transition to authoritarianism or in an early stage authoritarianism, and not in a kind of breaking some rules of a healthy liberal democracy. That for me is the fundamental thing that's underappreciated.
- [15:17]
JVL
Well, I mean, let's put it this way. You appreciate if this were, if this were a normal liberal democracy and Trump was, what is he approval rating right now? Minus 8, then you would, we're staring down the barrel of midterms. You would see some Republicans beginning to position themselves to run for president in 2028, and you would certainly by the time we get close to the midterms, you would have at least three or four people who are your obvious top tier contenders. That isn't going to happen. That's not going to happen. None of them are going to position themselves to run for president.
- [16:00]
Bill Kristol
No, that's a nice.
- [16:02]
JVL
They're all going to sit and pretend that Donald Trump might run for president.
- [16:08]
Bill Kristol
That's a nice way. Nice thought experiment to bring the point home. I mean another one that just occurs to me as you're talking and Mitchell Nixon earlier, we know what happens in a normal liberal democracy if people try to get away with stuff. That incidentally is like 1/10 or 1/100 of what Trump's doing. But leaving that aside, but John Mitchell at Justice was a little bit Pam Bondi like and you know, there were elements of it, Haldeman, Ehrlichman and so forth. We know what happens. What happens is what happened in 1973 and 74, which is it didn't work. You know what, he fired Elliot Richardson and Archibald Cox and everyone went crazy and the Republicans on the Hill even and the judicial system was tough enough to deal with those with him and deal with it quickly with Justice Sirica and a million other things. I mean the media was more anyway the business world did not rise up in Nixon's defense, though he'd been friendly with them and so forth. Yeah. So it is, it is a good. Yes, I agree with you. We're not in, I hope we can get back to being in a normal liberal Democratic world, but that isn't really the political world we're living in. I'm afraid so.
- [17:06]
JVL
And this, this brings me to the our final point. I'm going to enlist you in my decade long running conversation with Sarah our, our friend Sarah Longwell, the bulwark. You noted that Trump is transitioning from being a political leader to an authoritarian leader. I propose that for some significant position portion of his supporters, not all Trump voters. But if you're looking at the pie chart of Trump voters, a, a very large slice, maybe it's half, maybe it's more than half. They are no longer attracted to him for the political reasons. They are now attracted to him for, for the authoritarian reasons that it isn't about like, oh well, he's doing what I like on life issues or he's doing what I like on trade. It's now, oh, he's doing the authoritarian stuff. And I like that. What are your, I mean is this a yes, no, maybe I'm not, I'm proposing this. I'm not, I'm not stating it as fact.
- [18:16]
Bill Kristol
I'm counter propose this sort of thought experiment but this question which I think is a genuine question and the right question. So let's just say it's 50% and that makes, let's make it easy and let's say that half the country voted for Trump, which is basically right. So 25% of the country is just loves, likes or loves the authoritarianism and different flavors and for different reasons, probably different bigotries. I like different parts of it, but they're totally on board. I guess my only question would be sort of on this is so on one hand that's terrible and that 25% is 50%, probably because of enthusiasm, is 60% in the Republican Party and because they're much more tough minded and much tougher minded and much more intransigent than the other 40 or 50%. They win primaries and they throw their muscle around and so for now they dominate. One could, if one wanted to go in a slightly Sarah like direction, say on the other hand, that's still only 25% of the country. And at the end of the day, you know, one could imagine the Republican Party deciding to be the other 25% of the Republican Party deciding they have a better shot at winning in the future if they're a little more acceptable to the other 50% of the country. So which way does the pie chart cut? If I can put it that way.
- [19:24]
JVL
Right.
- [19:24]
Bill Kristol
Mixing many metaphors there. And I think that's. But I think it's. But, but I would say the history of authoritarianism is that they do start off with 25%. I mean literally, that's like the vote for the authoritarian parties often in these transitions to authoritarianism. But that 25% is more ruthless, is more unified, is more willing to play hardball and that therefore the business leaders, who many of whom probably personally are a little more than that other 25%, get sucked into that 25%. And then young people see what's the way up in the law firm or in the business world or certainly in politics. Someone I know, again one of the rather few people I know who deals with the Trump White House a little said, you know, and the administration, he said this person privately is kind of sympathetic to where my friend is. But you know, he's 32 years old, he's in an agency at a pretty high level, much higher than he would be, you might say, a normal time when they're in more competition for some of these jobs. He knows that Steve Miller wants to do a, B or C. It's a four years, he has a chance to really move up pretty high. You could be, you know, very high at three or four years. Now he's going to cross Steve Miller. Maybe he'll rationalize it, you know, so again, all the dynamics are, what worries me the most is the dynamics are in favor of the bad 25%, not the good 25%. If, if the coalition of Trump is 50%.
- [20:38]
JVL
Yeah, yeah, it does. And I'll, you know, I said last thing, but I'll do one more thing. I am persistently, I was reading, I don't know, one of the substacks that I follow who, I think it was Noah Smith, who wrote like 4,000 words about how Trump has turned America into a laughingstock and terrible governments. And, and then like the last three sentences, he's like, and of course, the Democrats have just been feckless and haven't, you know, haven't, haven't presented a credible opposition. And I, I'm a little bit tired of this because I think the reason people do this, and by this I mean blame Democrats, especially elected Democrats, is because it's to avoid having to confront that the real blame lies with voters. Because I'm happy to stipulate the Democratic Party has not been perfect, maybe not even good. You know, I, I criticize them for fecklessness as well. I would love it if they could play perfect baseball and only have leaders who are incredibly charismatic, smart and effective, and if they could only make the right choices at every decision point. But that's not real life, and that's not how any politics ever works. You know, every, every political figure is imperfect. Every political party is imperfect. The, the blame here really isn't on, honestly, not even on Republicans as much as, you know, as it is on voters. It's the voters who choose this stuff. Like, I, I am sorry, but it is not like, you know, oh, if only Democrats could craft the perfect candidate with the perfect set of proposals, and then they could simply muzzle everybody who's on social media so that no progressive anywhere says anything stupid or offensive. And they, you know, and the economy is per. Then in that case scenario, then they could really, you know, put a stop to this. And I'm sorry, that's not how things work in a liberal democracy. It's on the citizen ring.
- [22:51]
Bill Kristol
I mean, my version of what you're saying, if I can take it to the elites, though, and I don't disagree with what you said, is the, but the Democrats argument, which is an argument made by elites, right, who want to justify going along with Trump. When you think about it, these same elites, and some of them are friends or ex friends or acquaintances of mine, have been involved in the Republican Party for 203040 years. They know the Republican Party has been when they were in the middle of it, when they were the most enthusiastic for George W. Bush or for Ritt Romney or for Luke Gingrich in 94, they knew it was an extremely imperfect combination of imperfect types. So the idea that and what they think that the Democrats would, you know, if you gave them truth serum, they would say, yeah, well, they, like some of the Dems are okay, some of them aren't. Some are kind of Robis. Some are a little crazy on these Elizabeth Warrenside from their point of view, some are pro Israel, some are not great on Israel. But again, all of that was true of the Republicans. Right. I mean, and there they they.