← Bulwark Takes
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- [00:00]
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- [01:31]
Bill Kristol
Hi, Bill Kristol here, editor at large with the Bulwark, joined by my Bulwark colleague and if I could say, even more importantly, my morning shots colleague, Andrew Egger. And we were just talking before the show. Andrew, thank you first of all for taking some time Sunday to join me. We were talking before the show that we've been going almost two years with. Morning shots. Hard to believe, huh?
- [01:51]
Andrew Egger
Yeah. The team within the team. Yeah, that's. Yeah. Where does the time go? Lots of collaboration on morning shots. But I have never even sat down and watched Sunday bull work because usually it's like I'm at church in the morning and then in the afternoon I'm like, Monday's morning shots. Here we go. Like, let's rock. So this is hopefully, hopefully will not be a train wreck. Will be a pleasant experience for everybody involved. Here we go.
- [02:11]
Bill Kristol
This shows the kind of a collaboration we have. Andrew Dickinson Ifan right at the beginning of our show here in a nice gentle way, kind. I just don't quite have time to watch it. NFL football, church, you know yeah. Who's really watching a Sunday?
- [02:24]
Andrew Egger
Who's really watching us, to be honest? NFL football. Yes.
- [02:27]
Bill Kristol
I sometimes need morning shots. Not everyone, I think.
- [02:29]
Andrew Egger
I think the Monday morning shots will go up in quality a lot when the NFL season is over. Actually, I think that will. That will have a real noticeable impact for a lot of people. We'll see. We'll see.
- [02:38]
Bill Kristol
It's getting. So. Do you have a. I can't remember. You don't have a team in this.
- [02:42]
Andrew Egger
I'm a. I'm a Chiefs fan. I like the. I grew up in St. Louis, so I like the Chiefs now, but I still have, like, sort of residual, confusing feelings about the Rams. Went to college in Michigan. Michigan. So I like Matt Stafford a lot. Kind of hope they can. They can go all the way. I like Josh Allen. I was sad to see him get crushed last night. Also sad to see Bo Nix leave. So. Yeah, there's a lot of really good games leading to a lot of really lame outcomes so far as far as I've been concerned. Although I was happy that the Eagles lost.
- [03:06]
Bill Kristol
Yeah, that's good. Yeah, the eagles. I remember 40 years ago I lived in Philadelphia, and the Eagle fans have not improved. I've got to say that's one of the few constants in life. Other things change in our life. Okay. We had a lot to talk about. I thought we could go over a couple of issues that we've written about a lot in morning shots. Honestly, the. Both foreign. I summarize them as Greenland on the one hand and Ice on the other. You know, kind of bullying abroad and authoritarianism at home, which I think are sort of related. But they would begin with that new CNN poll from Friday that I think came out just that morning. We didn't really discuss, did we? I don't think in morning shots.
- [03:39]
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No.
- [03:40]
Bill Kristol
No. Pretty striking though, don't you think? I mean. Go ahead.
- [03:44]
Andrew Egger
I mean, the big thing to me about this one, and it is sort of of a piece with polling we've been seeing. I mean, he's. He is stable and really low. Like, like we have just. We have hit this kind of new plateau for him where he's in the high 30s or the very low 40s pretty much across the board in most polls. It's not moving around a lot, but it's also, you know, we're at this moment where he is losing a lot. I mean, the, the. That was the story of the off year elections in November. Like, something needs to change for, for this MAGA project to become like electorally Viable again. But all of the sort of flailing around that they're doing in terms of, it's not like they're not trying new things. They're certainly trying new things. They're trying never before seen things in terms of like, oh, what if we just went and got Greenland, or what if we parachuted these paramilitary forces down into the Twin Cities in Minnesota and see how that works. But the problem is that none of the things are popular across the board. They have kind of no issue to turn to. That's like a safe space for them or like, you know, comfy territory where if they could just get this to be the thing that's in the news right now, that would really help. That would really kind of like remind the American people of this deep reservoir of affection that they actually have for Donald Trump and his presidency. There is no such thing. And meanwhile, one thing after another that they try, that's new is, is less popular than the last. And it's all against the backdrop of this really, really, really, really bad economic sentiment kind of across the board, where not only do people feel like things aren't going well now, I think, I believe it was about 3 in 10 say that they think the economy's in good shape now, but only four in 10, which is down from six in 10, say they think it'll be good a year from now, down from 6 in 10 when Donald Trump was about to take office. So 20% of the country that was feeling pretty good about our economic prospects when Trump first came to power has since been disabused of that fact. And that is kind of driving, I think, the real nosedive that his popularity has taken. Even more so than all of the other outrages that we talk about day in and day out.
- [05:55]
Bill Kristol
No, I agree with that. And I mean, the good news is he's lost basically 8, 9, 10 points of approval in a year. We're almost exactly at the one year mark of his presidency. He keeps losing. He's not going to lose at that rate for the next 10 months because presumably he lost the ones that were easier to lose, so to speak, you know, off the top. Right. So now he's, we're getting into more, his, more core support, but he could lose at half the, I think he could go down at half the rate that gets him down to 36ish, 37%. And if you look at standard off year election metrics and go into it with the president at 36, 37%, that is very rough for the incumbent party. If that Party controls Congress, and people therefore want to check the guy who's at 37% approval. And I think it puts the Senate in place. On the one hand, I think the public is doing, from my point of view, the right thing is moving in the right direction. Could be moving a little faster. I mean, you said plummeting or whatever, but it's also down, like, two points in the last four months. Feels like, I don't know, if you're picking aggressive, fighting aggressive wars against NATO allies and deploying ICE troops in a really terrible way to major American cities, maybe you should lose more than 2 or 3% of your support. But that's just me. And we know his support is very. Is very sticky. So that's the good news. The bad news, though, and you and I have discussed this a lot in morning shots in different ways, and you had some terrific stuff this past week. I mean, is the authoritarian project continues and even accelerates. And I suppose the question is, does Trump care at some point? How much does he care about the popularity? I mean, does he think he can turn it around in 27, 28 if he needs to? The Fed will goose the economy or something once he controls it? Does he think it doesn't matter because he can put his thumb on the scale for the elections in such a, you know, strong way and there's some indications of that, or it doesn't matter because he's just going to, you know, push everything as far as he can for the next three years and. And then he doesn't much care what happens. At that. He'll be 80 after that. He'll be 82, 83 years old. I don't know. It's really, it's a hard thing, but certainly the authority, it is kind of unusual. We have the popularity going down and the authoritarianism going up. Right.
- [07:53]
Andrew Egger
Yeah, I have, I have. I have wondered about this myself, and I don't know if I have, like, a satisfaction answer to, like, how much is Trump, like, performing this, this sort of, like, oh, you know, relief is just around the corner thing, and how much does he actually think that that is true? Like, how much is he. Not to rile people up, but how much is he, like Joe Biden circa 2022, late 2022, early 2023, where he's like, yeah, you know, everybody's mad about the economy now, but, like, just wait, Just wait around. You know, we've got this thing pointing in the right direction, and they'll see, they'll come around by the time the election the election rolls around and, like, he might have been right, Biden might have been right to think that there would have been good reasons for people to feel better about the economy by 2024. But that isn't what happened. Right? I mean, everyone was still very, very sour on his handling of that stuff by the time that election rolled around, and he paid for it. Now, Trump, you know, he talks as though we are in a golden age right now. And he also frequently talks as though the polls that show that economic anxiety is still high and stuff like those are invented and cooked up by his enem, actually an accurate barometer of the sentiment of the country. And so, like, in some respects, he is, like, completely just sleepwalking toward a real rude awakening come this November, if these things continue. The one weird possible swerve here is we still don't know whether the Supreme Court is going to save him from himself and knock down all of his tariffs and inject a couple hundred billion dollars or $100 billion in change back into the economy in terms of these trade duties that have already been collected from all and, like, actually give us some real economic stimulus that could improve his economic prospects in particular. And I think, like, to me, it is really hard to overstate how much hinges on that, because the thing with all this other stuff is, like, the lesson from Trump's first term in terms of just the crazy American mind, is I think a lot of people came out of that first term, like, yeah, all that stuff that was in the news all the time was crazy and bad, but I could just stop paying attention to it most of the time if I wanted to. And meanwhile, I feel like the economy did really well. So, like, that was great. That was, that was in the last analysis. I would take that trade set a lot of voters. It wasn't enough to win him the election in 2020, but that was the way a lot of people felt. Now it kind of works the opposite way because. Because the economic sentiment is so bad and because people actually feel like, you know, there's. There is not a steady hand at the wheel in terms of. In terms of just normal prosperity stuff. It's not like they didn't care about all that other stuff before and they don't care about it now. The other stuff, the stuff that we pay so much attention to, the authoritarianism and the bullying and the norm breaking, all that stuff, it serves as sort of a similar function, but it's stuff that they see him paying attention to instead of making the economy better. Right. They're like, well, what's he doing? Like, spending all this time, you know, like, trying to get Jim Comey thrown in prison when he should in fact be concentrating on, you know, making the economy better. And like before, if the economy were, you know, just humming along, maybe they'd be saying to themselves, well, yeah, you know, he wants to throw Jim Comey in prison, but at least my 401k is doing great. And so it's a force multiplier in the negative direction. Of course. You know, the other thing is that we actually shouldn't really want him to be paying more attention to the economy because all of his economic instincts are insane, just like all of his other instincts. But I think that that is the way that, like, I mean, the other really striking finding from that poll is just a very, very widespread voter sentiment that Trump is not focusing on the issues that they think he should be focusing on. And that's kind of the thing that glues these two things together.
- [11:35]
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- [12:35]
Andrew Egger
Forget everything.
- [12:36]
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- [12:58]
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- [13:05]
Bill Kristol
No, I think that is striking in the poll and you explained that well and I would say on tariffs, I do think I actually am a little less convinced than some other people that the actual effect of a terrorist decision either way is going to make a huge difference. I mean, 100, $200 billion sounds like a lot, but we have a very, very large economy. And I don't know that it's going to make a huge amount of difference compared to Fed actions or other independent variables, as they say in social science. I also think that Trump can restore a lot of these tariffs using other authorities pretty quickly. And so even if they pay back the 100 billion to some companies, I don't know how big a deal it is. And going forward, which is what, in a way, the markets follow, you know, the terrorists are there, and now we have a new terrorist threat. We should get to that in a minute. On major, major trading partners, not Brazil and coffee, which is a major partner, but, you know, at the end of the day, coffee prices went up a little for Brazil, and we're talking the Europe, you know, major European Union nations from which we import a lot, and of course, Canada. So I do, I think the tariffs thing is. But I think the one significant thing about the tariffs is he's made such a big deal about it that people are more willing to make him responsible for what they don't like about the economy. Don't you think it's sort of like it's a political thing as much as an economic thing? In 2017, they passed the Republican tax bill. It was pretty considered kind of standard. That's what Republicans do. People sort of believe that that probably helps the economy on that. Maybe it's a little unfair to some poor people. It's a little lopsided the way it helps, but it helps nonetheless. Time it was reasonably okay and people thought okay. Well, Trump's economic policies are, quote, working. I feel like now to the degree they're dissatisfied with his failure to get inflation under control or just worried about the job market, which they probably should be. You know, the tariffs gives people a peg to make it easier to blame Trump. It's not just life in the modern world is complicated, you know, so I agree that the tariffs decision will be a big deal. People sort of stop talking about, keep waiting for it to happen. It doesn't happen. It's going to happen one time soon and we. Either way, I think it highlights the issue. I guess I put it that way, that it's one of the things. Trump's got a few issues that he's put a lot of chips on the table. On where it's pretty clear that public opinion is pretty strongly against them. And I don't think easily moved because these are issues that people have sort of thought about a fair amount. And one of them is tariffs, I would say. I think immigration is one where people have moved because it's been so dramatic what's happened, sadly. And so I think tariffs will come roaring back, actually. And I do think this, this thing about Europe with Greenland and tying the Europe tariffs to Greenland now means that his adventure adventurous foreign Siddeley's foreign policy, which people don't like much, is now tied to a domestic policy tariffs that they don't like much either, I think.
- [15:45]
Andrew Egger
Yeah, yeah. There's, there's so much we can say about like, sort of the politics of all of this before, before we get to that. Is it. Okay, can I just make one really quick point because I'm so steamed about. About just sort of the actual merits.
- [15:54]
Bill Kristol
Well, you're the guest. This is. You haven't seen this on Dave work. I actually let the guests talk. It's not like the typical, the typical Bulwark show where, you know, you. Sam sign steamrolls whoever the nominal guest is here. I'm happy to have you talk. Andrew.
- [16:07]
Andrew Egger
Yeah, I'm going to, I'm going to make, I'm going to try to make some point and Sam is going to pull up to my house in his car. He's going to run up here. He's going to take the mic away. Now, I have just been really steamed about that. I mean, like, it's every, every week is something stupid, right? I mean, we write about it, we live in it. Like, you get kind of numb at a certain level. But this whole idea that, like, the game here is that we really have to do this whole Greenland thing to beat China, right? Like, we have to. You know, the Arctic is so important. You know, we, we. We're going to be fighting over it with, with China and with Russia. And like, this is, this is the move that we take to, to limit China. We already have perfect access to Greenland because Greenland is in NATO, which is on our side. I would remind the president, we have our bases there. We can do what we want militarily up there. The idea that we are going to hurt China, limit China by putting, by starting another new trade war with Europe and with Canada over this. Over. Over, like, what? Over our ability to, like, have those guys call themselves Americans who live around our military bases up there. Like, the idea that that is what. Is what is going to Curtail, curtail China, when meanwhile, by starting this trade war, by going after Europe, by going after Canada, we, we are pushing them completely into the arms of China because China is doing pretty well, you know, like, trading wise. They are increasingly an economic force to be reckoned with. One of the nice arguments that we had going for us for a long time was, yeah, you know, you can make a lot of money over there, but also they're total bullies, they're authoritarians, they push their capitalists around. Wouldn't you rather, like, play in the free market of America and do your trading with us? We are also extremely wealthy. You can make a lot of money here. All that stuff is completely out the window. You know, we, we, we are pushing around our capitalists just like they do over there now. There's no moral argument, argument to be made. And just at the moment that we're getting rid of the moral argument, we are also making it way less convenient for anybody to do business with us at all. So, like, over the weekend, we just saw this big new, big new economic, sort of like pledge of cooperation between Canada and China. China's going to be able to sell a bunch of, you know, their electric vehicles in Canada now, which is something that the US has been trying very hard to avoid because that's horrible for our auto industry. And that's just one little example of this entire thing, which is like, we're going to blow up our credibility. We may ruin NATO over Greenland because supposedly that's necessary to help us against China, when in reality it actually makes even that thing worse. It just makes everything worse. It just sucks. It's bad across the board. So that's my whole rant. No, that was politics.
- [18:41]
Bill Kristol
I'll now follow up with a rant of my own since I think it's a very important rant and a really true one. I was just. Well, incidentally, it's also supposed to stop Russia, but of course we're not helping Ukraine. The actual way to punish Putin and to stop him is to help Ukraine when they're actually fighting a huge war. And Trump is doing nothing really to speak of to help Ukraine, and the Europeans are doing a little more, but that's now a risky proposition I think dwarfs Greenland, obviously. I was at a conference in honor of my friend Aaron Friedberg, who's written for the Bulwark and who teaches, taught at Princeton in his last term. So this was in honoring him as he retires from teaching. Luckily, he's going to continue writing and working on. And China has been the main focus of his work for the last 20, 30 to 25 years. And he's been totally. He was a hawk on China when it was not popular to be one. Everyone believed in liberalization and they're going to be coming around. There'll be a stakeholder in the world order. He was. I'm not so sure they're going to liberalize. The political liberalization may not last. The economic liberalization is okay, except it turns out it also involves stealing a huge amount of intellectual property and establishing relationships that they benefit from much more than the other people. So he was very much vindicated. A lot of praise for him. But as they should have been at this little series of panels and symposium and so forth. But what struck me was there are people there who know a lot about China and they said what you said. I mean, just to really emphasize it, we had worked hard. Aaron personally had been to five conferences, I'm going to say, in Europe in the last seven years, pleading with the Europeans to get tough on China, to be more serious about curtailing their ability to steal technology and so forth. And the Europeans were coming around. It's funny, I mean this is partly a post Ukraine thing, partly just a kind of recognition of some of the atrocities in China with the Uyghurs and other groups, partly their own self interest. But there was the Biden administration. Whatever criticisms can and should be made of them were pretty. They were friendly to Europe. So Europe felt they would have no problem working with the US and that's a preferred partner. Was a preferred partner. So there was a real, real progress in kind of getting a bit of a more of an alliance against, against China. And what struck some of Aaron's friends who do China policy go to these conferences, talk to Chinese diplomats and European diplomats was that that is on the verge of collapsing. And I think we started this conversation. I was in Princeton before the announcement of the Canada trade deal, which is a big deal. They even use the term strategic partnership, I think with China. But also someone I know who knows a lot, I don't know much mattered about the electricity, electric vehicles market was saying, the Europeans are on the verge of saying, look, if the ch in general, they're on the verge of saying avert what you said. I mean we, we don't like China. But you know what? They're not raising and lowering tariffs like every two months. I mean they're a fairly stable sort of trading partner. They're 10,000 miles away. They're not going to evade us. They're not going to mess with us too much. They'll sell us their cheap stuff. They'll, they'll try to take advantage of certain things. We'll have our guard up, but we can work with that. Whereas these guys are threatening to evade a NATO ally and, you know, raise, and then when we do, we say, we don't want you to do that, they raise the tariffs, which is the better trading partner. And, and, and people at this conference were sort of very struck how quickly that dynamic is moving in the direction you just outlined. And that the Canada deal is really one very important instance of that. But there are a lot of things happening beneath the surface, including with electric vehicles, incidentally, where if we're not careful, they'll have the European market and then they'll, you know, be way ahead of us. And that is probably the future to a large degree about, of autos and stuff. So, I mean, the degree of disaster that the Greenland thing is, is, is courting, if I can put it that way, is really striking. People at this conference, which, this was not the focus of the conference at all, but people were just talking about it as a kind of radically new development over the last few months.
- [22:22]
Andrew Egger
Yeah, yeah. Can I say one more thing on this? Because this is, this is just another thing that really sticks in my craw is that back in the first term when Trump's protectionist tendencies were much more strongly focused on China, right? I mean, China was the country he picked the big trade war with at that time. It was not this like a tariff for every country on earth situation. He did, you know, he made some feints in that direction, but, you know, he was, for instance, ended up being satisfied to renegotiate NAFTA basically the way it already existed, and then leave North American trade alone. And there was a lot of stuff like that, but China, there was the real trade war. And at that time you had so many MAGA voices who, who just made the case that this was like a righteous fight, like we actually had to do this and like, maybe economically it was, it was bad for America in the short term, but like, as a national security matter, this was actually like a really pressing thing for all the reasons you just laid out. And at the time I was kind of like, well, you know, there is something to that, right? I mean, like there, for all the reasons you just laid out, like it is actually true that like, maybe a thing that is in our immediate short term interest in terms of more and more trade with China without trying to curb all these other things, is Actually bad in the long run. That could be, that could be possible. So like I was, I was sort of like, you know, like, try, try to readjust my own sort of like priors on this. And now we're in the exact opposite situation where, where not only, not only are we not like putting that kind of particular pressure on China, but we are helping them. Like just, just, just, just by pure clownishness and idiocy and short sightedness and by being madder at Denmark than we are at them and being madder at Canada than we are at them. Like we are just actively helping them. Like, like not just, not just this, like you scratch my back, I scratch yours and they get away with some stuff situation like predated the first Trump term. But, but, but like no, like please take all of our trading partners and the same voices who were like so scoldy about how bad the pre existing sort of neoliberal China consensus was and how we had to, had to, had to get smart about them immediately or we would lose the future to them. Where are those people? Like, they're just, they're posting about how Renee Goode was a domestic terrorist. Like that's what they're doing with their time right now. So that has been sort of a black pill for me as well as we kind of chew through this stuff.
- [24:51]
Bill Kristol
No, I think the alleged China hawks will be willing to say that Trump has not been a China hawk here in his first year. And if anything, and I'd say the other way to put what you're talking about is both clownishness but also sort of an implicit sense that, well, he and G and Putin can sort of divide the world up into three spheres. And you know, he can sort of fake that he wants Greenland because it's checking Russia and China because those are the two other big countries that he has in his head. I think he wants Greenland because he just thinks that, you know, you get to be on Mount Rushmore if you expand the size of the US that's one reason you got to be on it in the 19th century. Or it wasn't built in the 20th century, but that's the presidents who are on it did that in the 19th century. And Greenland, you know, that's just like great to have that as part of the U.S. there's no, I mean, I discussed this more currently on one of the podcasts. I mean there's just, there's no serious foreign policy rationale and national security rationale. It's not mentioned. I went back and looked at this to remind myself, make sure this is true. It's not mentioned in the authoritative National Security strategy document. They put out with a little bit of hoopla right at the very end of November, I think it was not that long ago, six weeks ago. And this is 30. It's not the longest, excuse me, national security document ever issued. And these things are often just issued and not forgotten and forgotten. But this is 35 pages, something like that. And it mentions different parts of the world. It's the one that focuses on the Western hemisphere and all that. It does not mention Greenland. I mean, not. The word is not in there. You have to do the, you know, the search function for Denmark or Greenland. You can't find them. So it was not all nonsense. It was not part of their theory of the world or of the global order or of national security. So it is vanity and whatever else it is. And maybe a little later, JD Vance wanted to bust up NATO in Europe. And Steve Miller, just thinking that it's good to be a bully and throw your weight around abroad, but somehow it also goes hand in hand with throwing your weight around a terrible way at home.
- [26:38]
Andrew Egger
So he wants more immigration, he wants more Americans from white countries. And the further north you go, the wider they get. And that's about as far north as you can get. So they're really, really high value Americans to add if we could get them. No, I mean, look, like a year ago, like, like a year ago, before Trump had even taken office, that was when he had kicked up this whole Greenland obsession again. And it was a recapitulation of a similar thing he'd had during his first term. And there was this weird energy that you, you would see from like a lot of well meaning liberal commentators around that time. Like, no, don't get distracted. Like, don't, don't take the bait. This is just one of those shiny objects that he dangles before he does the real, before he like really sticks in the knife and like, you know, ends the Department of Education or something. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know what he was supposed to be distracting from at that time. But like that was, that's always the argument. Like these are distractions. But like, no, I mean, like, maybe in some sense, like, like he, he likes to yank the news cycle around and he likes to, you know, make these big flashy declarations. But like, it doesn't mean, he doesn't mean it. He's, he's really trying to do it. And I think like this Is this. Is what we have absolutely seen right now is that, you know, this is by far the furthest he's gone in terms of policy to, to make this happen, to. To blow up our trade relationship with Europe over this very. Over this place that we already have all our bases, all the bases we could ever possibly want, it's all already there. And, And I think what, what we wrote about it, not to pat ourselves on the back too much, but like a year ago, like, the, The. We wrote something like, take Green, take Trump's obsession with Greenland seriously, because it's just all of a piece with the way he does everything. It's like all of these sorts of little, like, strategic objectives and the things that are, like, attached onto it in a post hoc way to sort of, like, rationalize. Trump's just sort of, like, grasping, max, I should get more control than I currently have. The amount I have. The amount I had yesterday was. Was okay. And the amount I have today, which is more than that, is nice, but wouldn't it be good to have even a little bit more tomorrow? And that's just everywhere. That's just everywhere. Like, it's just. It's just, who can I dominate? Who's going to stop me? And he and his appetites land different places on different days. You know, maybe Minneapolis will blow up enough and he'll. He'll get excited enough about dominating them. They're dominating Tim Walls and Jacob Frey and, you know, random liberal protesters in Minnesota, and that will, like, satisfy his lust for the next several weeks. So much so that Greenland will blow over again, and that'll be the end of that. But I don't know. Maybe not. Maybe that won't happen. Maybe. Maybe he. Maybe he will not be so easily sated, and maybe we'll have to keep doing all this. Obviously, he's got the policy in place now, so that's something for him to keep coming back to. So, I don't know, it's all just. It's all real, like he's the president.
- [29:25]
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- [30:26]
Andrew Egger
I'm here.
- [30:26]
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- [30:56]
Bill Kristol
It is, it's not as we can say, it's performative and of course it is in certain ways and but it's also very real. Minneapolis really shows that I think you and I, but either of us wrote something on. One of us wrote something on Minneapolis every day this, this past week and we were pretty upset and outraged by the whole thing. And certainly I think that's a good instance where it's hard to. It doesn't seem like he gets satisfied and relaxes. Right. It seems it's the opposite if anything the authoritarianism self radicalizes in a sense or one step leads to another. It can be. Some of it could be silly and you know, not as important. It's the Trump Kennedy Center. But there's always something you can't. There's something either psychological or maybe it's political in a way also that you can't sort of just let, let off the gas pedal for, for a while and so which makes it even more dangerous. But say a word about Minneapolis, you've written very powerfully on it and I. Do you think. I think people know where we are in the substance but I don't know. I feel like on the one hand I would say I have run into more quote regular people in the last week or two who are like geez, that's bad. What is Trump doing? That's just chaotic. And I'm not. These aren't people who are looking at every freeze Frame of the Renee Good killing and so forth. But it would just think this is kind of, this is not good for the country. Do you feel like there is some reaction? Do you feel like, on the other hand, I can't say elites are really rebelling Hamas against Trump and cutting severing ties and saying they won't do business with them anymore and so forth. So I don't know. Where do you think this goes?
- [32:26]
Andrew Egger
Yeah, I think that we maybe shoot ourselves in the foot a little bit when we always analyze everything, like in terms of will this now make the bottom fall out for farther. Right. Because I just think, like, until proven otherwise, we should assume that nothing will crack. We should allow ourselves to be actually taken by surprise if anything ever does crack, like the psychological hold he has over the core mega base or the financial grip he has over these titans of industry who know that he can just ruin them at this moment in time. And I think that if all that is the case, then the first real moment to actually break his power is the midterms, right. Which are, which are coming right up and will actually stand a chance of really hurting his grip on these various actual sort of strangleholds on power. And if that's the case, then the question is not how can Trump be made to go from 39% to 34% in the immediate term, because it's probably just not going to happen. But the question is, is there a world in which he recovers? Is there a world in which he sort of manages to stabilize and then. And then woo back some of these people who, who he needed to win in 2024, but who have since abandoned him. And I think that, that the. One of the things that, that this whole Minneapolis ordeal has shown is that he is not doing that at all, at least in the present moment. That, that this is a story that really did break through. I mean, the staggering polling in terms of like just the number of Americans who say they, they themselves have seen the video, like 75% of poll respondents, like, yeah, I actually watched her. Her die. I watched this ICE agent, you know, pull a gun and shoot her. And they do not have the narrative at all. They have their, their pretext for going into Minneapolis is, has not landed with the American people. It is small minorities who, who buy their case. And that this is sort of like the. This rather than, by the way, rather than the fraud, which was the original pretext. Right? That was, that's why they, that this giant fraud scandal in Minnesota was the sort of thing that, like they actually had stood a chance of having majority support on as like a pretext for, for doing this sort of thing that was like a gift wrapped story for them. But because the bloodlust is just there now and because it's because they cannot, they have completely lost any ability to like tap the brakes on this stuff at all. Even like a perfect gift wrapped pretext like that immediately disintegrates into just this sort of naked fist of the state brutality and authoritarianism. And it is the kind of thing, I think, that, that a lot of normal people who even haven't been paying attention to a lot of this stuff, they see it and they recoil from it and it recontextualizes a lot of the other things that maybe they like sort of half heard over the last year about what Donald Trump and his MOOCs are up to. And it's the kind of thing that again, you know, it's not, it's not, it's not de. Radicalizing the main kind of like cultish MAGA base, but it is creating this like iron wall of opposition to what's going on around like 60% of the country who are not going to get wooed back necessarily if the economy improves, if the unemployment rate ticks down a percentage point or something like that. So I think in that way, if the question is the midterms, if that's like the main big next thing, then I do think all of this stuff in Minnesota and just all these other actions, the Greenland and everything like that, they really do amount to Trump shooting himself in the foot in terms of getting back to any kind of stability for electoral politics.
- [36:14]
Bill Kristol
No, that's an interesting way of putting it. And even before the midterms, I mean, you could say if he had done Venezuela and said, you know what, and even if he had then betrayed the democratic opposition and was going to work with the same regime without Maduro and stuff, you know, we could imagine sort of, but it's better. He's really cutting down on the job. He could make a lot of claims, whether they're true or not, who knows? But you could imagine a sort of, okay, I think he maybe did the right thing there. He pulled it off. No American deaths and so forth. You know, got rid of a horrible dictator who was judged horrible by the Biden administration as well and by the Europeans. Then if so if he's left Venezuela, if he hadn't done Greenland right on top of Venezuela, and to make use of just your point, if he had investigated the fraud of, with all These childcare and welfare programs in Minneapolis. And it's. Some of it's centered in the Somali community there. So you get to play a little bit of your racially tinged nativist politics with that. But send in, I'm making this up 500 inspectors to really do the job that the Minnesota government's not doing. Instead, he sends ICE and license has nothing to do with welfare fraud. ICE is supposed to be about immigration enforcement. And in fact, that's what they're doing. And so they've totally disconnected the two, which, I mean, because he's so obsessed and Miller so obsessed with obviously the.
- [37:29]
Andrew Egger
Immigration side and the Border Patrol is there is Cam Avino on the ground and.
- [37:34]
Bill Kristol
Yes. And really grotesque. Mike Murphy called it Fry Corps, sort of, you know, with his security detail of 25 parading, prancing through the streets. It really is like this is not America, as he was a stupid cliche, but in this case, probably one that is apartment so. Yeah, I very much agree with your. That's a very true point. And I don't. Yeah. And then we'll see. He hasn't stated the union in a month. There are all kinds of other moments that will be before the midterms where we'll see if he has a chance to reset if he wishes to. On the other hand, the degree at which he's also using the Justice Department to monkey with the midterms, that's another topic that we'll have to write about more in Morning Shots. We should let people go. We should let you go to watch NFL football. Very important. I know. And then if it's that, oh, I want you, then you got to get to work on tomorrow's warning shots. So anyway, I hope this wasn't too unpleasant an experience for you, Andrew. Too challenging to come on the Sunday bulwark on Sunday, as opposed to your normal bulwark takes.
- [38:29]
Andrew Egger
It was my white whale. And now here we are. Look at this.
- [38:32]
Bill Kristol
Unlike the original white whale, this is one that you've harpooned and without great misadventure to yourself, I guess. Andrew, we'll see.
- [38:42]
Andrew Egger
We'll see. Maybe something that will come up and will be the beginning of the end for me. I'll be canceled. Who knows?
- [38:47]
Bill Kristol
Sarah Longwell on line one. Sort of. Andrew, that was not acceptable. Yeah, that'd be good. Thanks for doing this, Andrew, and thank you all for joining us. And we'll see you next Sunday. And meanwhile, take a look at Morning Shots tomorrow, if you wish. Thanks.
- [39:01]
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- [39:25]
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- [39:41]
Bill Kristol
Sukar and coxambienosa.
- [39:45]
Andrew Egger
Portrait.