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- [00:00]
A
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B
we're lost. I'm going to pull over and ask that man for directions. Hi there. We're looking to get to the campground.
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A
Well, you're going to take a left at the old oak tree end of this here road. I'm just kidding. Let me get my phone out.
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B
How are you getting a signal out here?
- [01:14]
A
T Mobile and US Cellular decided to merge so the network out here is huge. We're getting the same great signal as the city and saving a boatload with all the benefits. Oh, and a five year price guarantee. Okay, here's those directions.
- [01:26]
B
Actually, can you point us in the direction of a T Mobile store?
- [01:29]
A
America's best network just got bigger. Switch to T Mobile today and get built in benefits the other guys leave out. Plus our five year price guarantee. And now T Mobile is available in US Cellular stores. Best Mobile network Based on analysis by Oogle of Speedtest Intelligence data 2H2025 bigger network the combination of T Mobile's and US Cellular's network footprints will enhance the T Mobile network's coverage price guarantee on talk text and data exclusions like taxes and fees apply. CT T mobile.com for details hey everybody,
- [02:01]
B
I think we are live. Welcome to another one, the second of many morning chasers with me, Andrew Egger, White House correspondent for the Bulwark and co author of the Morning Shots newsletter. With the guy to my right. I assume he is also to my right where you're seeing him. Bill Crystal, our editor at large. You know, fearless Elder statesman of the bulwark. We're the Morning Shots Team. We come here to talk to you on Tuesdays after we get our newsletter out. It's a new thing that we're trying. We hope you like it. Not just any Tuesday. Today, however, it's a big fat important Tuesday, because tonight, Donald Trump will be heading to the Congress to get up in front of everybody and tell the Congress and the American public what a great job he has been doing as president over the last year in his State of the Union address. These tend to be slobber knockers for the president. He likes to yap. You may have noticed over the years, he has not actually technically broken the record for the longest State of the Union address, which is still held, I believe, by Bill Clinton, who went for an hour and almost an hour and a half once in the past. But he has talked longer than that. On one occasion last year, Trump went for like an hour 40. But it was not technically a State of the Union due to insane regulations around how that term is used. The first one you do in your presidency doesn't count. So that one doesn't count. We'll see if he can break the record tonight. He has said it's gonna be a long speech. He said he's got a lot to say. This morning, Bill wrote our Morning Shots Top on just the political environment that Trump is in. I knew that Trump's polls were bad. They have been bad for a while. It seems like anytime you check them, they're getting a little worse, which is a little different than his first term. It doesn't seem like we've actually plumbed the bottom of the floor of Trump's popularity yet. But until I read your item this morning, Bill, I was not quite aware of just how dire things are getting for the president as he prepares to make this case to the public. So can you maybe just set us up a little bit with some of the stuff that you wrote this morning about where the public's at as Trump prepares to go before them to make this case tonight? Sure.
- [04:08]
C
Happy to. I mean, it's depressing that he's giving the State of the Union. Let me just stipulate that he shouldn't bad that he's president and it's bad that he's going to give two or three more State of the Unions. I've lost track. How do we count them? Yeah, at least two more, right? I guess so. That's a little unfortunate. The good news is, when he spoke almost a year ago, I think it was March 4, 2025, his address to the Joint session. That wasn't technically, as you said, a State of the Union. His approval was right where it had been on Election Day. So we'd had four months since Election Day. He had done his, the, he'd been, you know, he'd made his appointments to the Cabinet, nominations to the Cabinet. He'd begun the Doge stuff and all that. And, and he was in the New York Times average of the polls, which I think is a good average, I mean, very sensible what if. And rather conservative ish in the sense that it includes a lot of polls, some of which I think are probably a little bit maybe too pro Trump, who knows? But anyway, it tends to also lag a little bit the latest polls just because it incorporates earlier ones. Anyway, it's a good average, cautious average. Trump was at 49, 48, which is exactly on March 4, which is where he was on Election Day, obviously, against Kamala Harris. 49 approval, 48 disapproval. Now he's at 41 approval in the average, 56 disapproval. It's not 41 still sounds not such a dramatic drop, but it means he's lost 8 of his 49, if you want to think of it this way. They flipped over to the disapproval side, which has gone up by eight. If you lose eight of your 49, you're losing what, 15, 16% of one in six, basically, of your supporters. That's kind of a lot, actually, if you think about it. Yeah, in a year. Right. I mean, now, doesn't mean he'll. It'll keep going down that way, but it is, it's a fairly striking erosion. And particularly so, I think, because it's not as if there's like a Hurricane Katrina or an Iraq war or a recession, the kind of hugely dramatic thing that usually did, really, voters hate Afghanistan withdrawal. Think of the other presidents who've had rough times in their first years. He's done a lot of things you and I very much disapprove of, and I think a lot of things that deserve condemnation. Anyway, no recession as of yet. No, no, no war in which American soldiers have been deployed, really, and still down from 49 to 41. So that's the New York Times. And then just quickly, the very two very recent polls, reputable polls CNN has, which had Trump at 48 also on, I think the day he gave the address to Congress a year ago has him all the way down to 36. And again, it's the same poll, so it's apples to apples. 48 to 36. That's losing 12 of your 48%. So that's losing one in four of your supporters. That's a pretty. That's the most dramatic, I think that poll shows the most dramatic loss of support by Trump. And then G. Eliot Morris, a good pollster, used to be the economist, has his own substack now, which people should take a look at if they want. That's good. Has Trump at 37 approval, 59 disapproval, almost exactly where CNN is. So, you know, there really is mounting evidence that he's at 40ish, maybe even a tad below. And then the question becomes, you know, how easy will this be for him to reverse or how easy will it be for the opposition to continue pushing it down or just for the public to continue getting more disillusioned? And where is he obviously on election day in 2026?
- [07:35]
B
Yeah, yeah, let me just hang on this G. Eliot Morris poll. If we could get that visual element back just for a minute. Cuz there are a couple of things in this that are just so eye popping to me. Again, it's just one poll, but some of this stuff is somewhat buttressed by the CNN poll by other polls. That second bullet point there, presidential approval, Trump's approval among political independents is just 20% in our data. CNN had him a touch higher than that, I think 23. That's astonishing. That's astonishing for the President. I mean, that's a total collapse among basically every really gettable swing voter when it comes to, you know, the midterms, when it comes to the next election. And again, that's just in one year, the other. And then along those same lines, that top bullet point, generic ballot, Democrats lead Republicans 52% to 42% among registered voters, a 10 point margin and the widest lead since we started this tracking poll. That is also really significant because even as Trump's approval has collapsed, or maybe collapse is not the right word, as it is slowly seen the air go out of it like a sad balloon over the course of the past year. It has not necessarily been a totally closed question that voters didn't hate Democrats just as much. Right? I mean, some of these generic polls, generic ballot polls that you have seen, or just approval rating for congressional Democrats or whatever, they have been just on awful footing as well. So when it comes to the specific question of these upcoming midterms, I found that generic ballot number to be among the more striking ones of any polls that I have seen recently. But I mean, the bottom line here, we've all settled, we Both said a lot about just. There's not a lot of bright spots. Right? I mean, for a long time, Trump had a couple places he could kind of hang his hat. You know, the economic numbers were looking really bad, or people hated Doge or whatever. But immigration, maybe like immigration enforcement, he got a lot of. A lot of polling support out of the fact that border crossings were way, way, way down. They remain way, way down. That's one thing that he has actually achieved, but at what cost? But even on the broad issue of sort of immigration enforcement, now, you very rarely see that being an actual positive for Trump. At best, it's a wash. It was a wash in this G. Elliot Morris poll. So that's, you know, he's kind of running out of places where he can redirect away from a bad issue to a good issue or. Which brings us to this State of the Union, where kind of the task for the president tonight is not to say, well, you might not like the economy, but here immigration's going well, or maybe, well, you don't like what's going on with immigration, but check out my crypto policy or whatever. There are just very few things he can pivot toward. And so what you're left with is a president who has to actually try to win back voters who are abandoning him on these issues, on each of these issues. And that is what he's expected to do tonight. So let's just talk a little bit about what we're expecting out of the State of the Union. Let's just start. I don't know, I guess we can start with what's in the news right now, which is the economic policies. We're just a few days removed now from the Supreme Court, dealing Trump the biggest sort of blow, policy blow, that they have given him so far in this second term. I guess you could say that them declining to hear his Stop the steal, let me have the presidency back. Cases in 2020 and 2021 were a little bit worse for Trump than this one. But for policy stuff in this, in this second term, Trump or the Supreme Court throwing out the IEPA tariffs, the Liberation Day tariffs, most of the tariffs has been a big blow, and Trump is coming right out of that. He's trying to impose a lot of new tariffs to kind of make up the shortage. He's warning countries left and right, don't think just because the Supreme Court threw out my most sort of flexible and, you know, at will tariff power, the one I can roll out sort of by snapping my fingers, and suddenly there's a bunch of new tariffs. Just because the Supreme Court got rid of that one doesn't mean I'm not going to come after you if you try to wriggle out of these deals we've been striking or if I just want to, you know, from, from I'm going to, I'm going to have these other authorities. So he's, he's making that case publicly. Nobody knows what the tariff regime is really going to look like. He's put a new 15% global tariff in place, place, and now he needs to kind of come and make this case to the American people, not just that the tariffs are doing well and that what the Supreme Court did actually isn't that much of a blow to his agenda, but also just more broadly to reassure them about the economy, which is slowing, I mean, which has had a hard time, especially in the jobs market, all through his first year amid all of this tariff chaos, amid growing voter dissatisfaction about prices. I mean, does he have any cards that he can play on the economy tonight? What are you expecting to see here from the president?
- [12:22]
C
You know, I think the discussion of the economy is sometimes a little silly, especially from Democrat Crats. You know, we could talk about the economy and convince people of things. The economy is like real people know what they, what they're seeing out there, what they've seen under Trump. I think the really bad news for Trump is almost, it's partly what you're saying and partly the flip side of what you're saying, which is the economy hasn't been terrible. It slowed from about 2.8% in 2024 to 2.2% growth. I think in 2025, inflation did tick down a tad, 2.9 to 2.7. The stock market's up, not as much as foreign stock markets are up. But if you came out from Mars and you were a social scientist and someone gave you these numbers, you'd think, well, maybe he's lose a couple of points on the economy. It's not quite what people hoped, but it's not been disastrous. And yet here his numbers are going down. So I think it proves, A, that everything is not the economy, as you and I have discussed many times, B, that it isn't great and people sort of had these expectations that somehow Biden didn't know anything about economics and Trump is a successful business guy and all that stuff. But C, you're right to focus on tariffs in this sense. This polling decline was before the Supreme Court decision, right? Almost entirely. And therefore people do not like Terrorists, I mean, you know, this is something they had made their mind up about. I think over many years. They weren't very popular when Trump put them in. They've gotten less popular. There's no the Supreme Court saying, incidentally they were kind of illegal too, isn't going to help Trump. And so he still wants to monkey with tariffs. And every time, I just think at this point, voters are looking at the headlines and they don't know obviously much about the details of whether they should be at, across the board, 15% tariff or 10% for this, or is this going to hurt the trade deal with EE, with England, which assumed a 10% tariff. And they just think Trump is still doing tariffs. I mean, we don't really want more. You know, if he just did it once and they were on, people would have adjusted. The fact that he has to monkey with him so much actually, I think hurts him and it may hurt the real economy too, in the sense that it just creates more uncertainty, as you suggested. So I think the economic prospects for Trump, I mean, maybe will be booming, you know, at the end of, by November, it'll be growing 6%. And if they are, you know what, it doesn't matter what anyone, what you and I and any Democrat says or what Trump says today, you know, and if unemployment starts to tick down instead of slightly ticking up. But I think if it's just dragging along for me, that's the big lesson. He's not done terribly on the economy. The Democrats have no particular economic message, if we can be honest, which they don't need because it's off year elections, a referendum on Trump. But nonetheless, he's still drifted down to 40% with an adequate economy. What if it really does slow? I mean, that would be interesting, right? I mean, then you're really looking at a very bad scenario for Trump.
- [14:58]
B
Yeah, yeah. I think a lot of this, and this is just me putting on my guesswork analysis hat, but I do think that a lot of this ultimately comes down to sort of the psychology of the past year. I mean, we had a pretty strong economy coming out of the Biden era, with the one glaring exception of high prices. And Trump turned those high prices into a very potent political weapon against Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. And he basically painted that as, and he sold the American public the idea that in fact this was a very bad economy, a horrible economy because of high prices once. And they bid on it. Right? I mean, they helped, they reelected him in large part because of that messaging. Once you have that set as sort of like the voter baseline for what a terrible economy looks like in the back of their mind. Well, they're expecting you to come in and make things noticeably better across all of these different margins. And I think that, that the fact that he has not only sort of not been able to reign. I mean, nobody can snap their fingers and make inflation go away, but the fact that he has not been able to dramatically slow the growth of prices or dramatically just usher in this golden age, the golden age that he talks about, the fact that he has not tripled everybody's standard of living is a failure when measured by the rhetoric of the campaign. And then when you compare that with. And I'll swerve on Jared a little bit here, but if we could go real quick back to that cnn, Right. Priorities Slug, I think that this is sort of some of the connective tissue here is that when you see voters have this gap in their mind of like, wait a minute, what I was promised by Trump on the campaign trail and what I see out there in reality do not align. Like, there's a gap. Maybe it's not like a collapse. I'm glad it's not a collapse. I'm glad we're not in a recession, but there's a gap there. And then you look at polls like this that are like, okay, I see that Trump is doing all kinds of crazy stuff out there with the economy. He's doing tariffs, he's putting them on, he's taking them off, he's doing all this other insane stuff. And meanwhile, that gap continues to persist. And so maybe they're not saying, you know, Trump has failed on the economy, but maybe they're saying what we see in this poll, just 32% of Americans now say that Trump has had the right priorities, while 68% say he hasn't paid enough attention to the country's most important problems. And that's kind of like what you're saying here, right? Like, they don't necessarily have. Have all of the economic wherewithal to specifically say these tariffs led to these bad outcomes which are manifesting now in my life in these ways. But what they are seeing is Trump's doing a lot of insane stuff all the time. That gap between what he promised me and what I'm feeling has not closed. So my economic anxiety has not really gone away. And therefore, you know, there's some. He's, he's falling short in some way, even if I can't. And maybe it's just he's not focusing on the Right. Things or whatever. But, but there's sort of like a I'm not 100% sure why I'm unhapp, but I sure am unhappy element to that particular polling question. Yeah.
- [17:49]
C
And the one thing I'd add is, I mean, I was thinking back to Reagan in 82, before you were born, obviously, when the economy wasn't great. We were coming out of a bad recession. Reagan was and Volcker were really crushing inflation down, but at real price and unemployment and stuff. And Reagan had a bad midterm in 82, but not disastrous, actually, given what it could have been. They held the Senate and, and I think one reason for that was, I mean, he said stay the course. He said explicitly, it's going to be rough. It's going to take a while to bring out the inflation. And here's my theory. I have a new theory of economics, supply side economics. We passed this tax package. It's going to take a while to kick in. I mean, Reagan was good at trying to buy time. He still paid some price for the bad economy in 82, but there was a sort of theory of the case at least, and that it came through in 83, 84, and obviously he won reelection massively. But there was at least a theory of the case in 82 to give a doubting Reagan supporter. And I was a Reagan supporter, maybe not as doubting as some, but there were, I knew many doubting Reagan supporters to give them a sense of, okay, let's hold on, you know, let's, let's. Carter was in people's memories having been quite bad on the economy. Whereas now what if you're a doubting Trump supporter, what exactly do you hold on to? They passed the big beautiful bill. Trump said it was the greatest bill ever. It's passed, it's in effect, I mean, in real time. It's not like we're waiting for something to be introduced later on. The tariffs have been in effect, they're now thrown out and we'll have some different tariffs. I don't know what's gonna exactly, you know, what's the sort of. That's the psychological part of it. Right. What's the prospective gain that's gonna happen that we haven't seen yet? I think it's a little hard to tell yourself that Trump's got some stuff in reserve that's gonna really help the economy over the next couple of years.
- [19:30]
B
Yeah, yeah. And when it comes to just the way he has previewed this messaging, you know, in his posts since the Supreme Court decision and so on. It has been less about, you know, here's how we're going to deal with this blow and still push forward into the golden age. And it's been more just about shifting blame. Right. I mean, if he, perhaps he gets up there tonight and basically says, look, we could have had the golden age, but unfortunately, you know, Chief Justice John Roberts didn't have the courage and so go blame him and not me. I don't think you'll say that in so many words, but I imagine there will be a certain amount of sort of finger wagging at SCOTUS during this speech because that is his main sort of political economic message right now. The problem is, yeah, I mean, it is SCOTUS that threw out the tariffs. That's not great if you're Trump. Trump probably should have known they were going to because it was an insane assertion of presidential power from the very beginning. But at a basic political level, the buck is going to stop at the President no matter what. You can't be the president up there in your State of the Union basically saying, don't blame me for the way things are, blame other people instead. That's just not going to fly in any political environment on basically any issue, but especially when it comes to, like you said, the economy where the fundamentally people are making their decisions based on what they are feeling in their lives rather than anybody's arguments that anybody's making. So that'll be interesting to see how he threads that needle. And I obviously were expecting him to spend a lot of time.
- [20:45]
A
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- [21:45]
B
We're lost. I'm going to pull over and ask that man for directions. Hi there. We're looking to get to the campground.
- [21:52]
A
Well, you're going to take a left at the old oak tree end of this here road. No, I'm just kidding. Let me get my phone out.
- [21:58]
B
How are you getting a signal out here?
- [21:59]
A
T Mobile and US Cellular decided to merge. So the network out here is huge. We're getting the same great signal as the city and saving a boatload with all the benefits. Oh, and a five year price guarantee. Okay, here's those directions.
- [22:11]
B
Actually, can you point us in the direction of a T Mobile store?
- [22:14]
A
America's best network just got bigger. Switch to T Mobile today and get built in benefits. The other guys leave. Plus our five year price guarantee. And now T Mobile is available in US Cellular stores. Best mobile network based on analysis by Ookle of speed test intelligence data 2H 2025 bigger network. The combination of T Mobile's and US cellular network footprints will enhance the T Mobile network's coverage price guarantee on talk text and data exclusions like taxes and fees apply. See t mobile.com for details on it.
- [22:46]
B
The other thing that he will be hitting is extremely hard, or at least that everybody's expectation is he'll be hitting it extremely hard is immigration, right? We are in the middle of what has been billed as a sort of immigration pivot from the White House. There are a lot of reasons to believe that might not be as real as as they have suggested it is. But there is at least sort of like a messaging pivot that has come out where after sort of months, especially as we saw in Minneapolis, after months of just sort of ludicrously over the top. We love our jackbooted ICE agents type messaging and type multimedia sort of sizzle reel stuff where they were leading with these enforcement operations and basically saying isn't it awesome how there are ICE agents and border patrol agents in American streets roughing up protesters, snatching people up to check their papers. Don't you love that, America? They are now, at least from a messaging point of view, sort of trying to pull the reins back on that. I do not know what to expect from Trump himself when it comes to this tonight. He is not above. He is not reluctant to slow his role when he thinks a particular message is really hurting him politically. But at the same time a lot of these sort of open cruelty stuff is downstream of his own view of how law enforcement, and particularly immigration enforcement ought to work. It's the, you know, you spit, we hit sort of stuff that he loves to talk about. So what are you thinking we're likely to see from the president tonight when it comes to the immigration issue?
- [24:23]
C
I mean, I think he's pivoted a little bit, but he's all in still on mass deportation. And until he's willing to walk away from that a little bit, he's stuck with having to go into a lot of places and sees an awful lot of. Not stuck with. He's chosen to have to go to a lot of places and sees a lot of people. Maybe it won't be as brutal as it was has been in Minneapolis, but I was just there and, you know, there's still a heck of a lot of stuff going on, and there's still a lot of stuff you can see on social media and read about of people being seized and, and, and in smaller groups and they're lurking outside of people's homes and schools and workplaces instead of, you know, looking for street confrontations the way that guy Bovino was. But, so I, I think it's. Unless he's really willing to pivot away from mass deportation, which he's not, I think, I don't think. I think he's cast his die on this one. And it's interesting somewhere else in G. Elliot Morris's poll, maybe this was reported separately, but they actually tried to penetrate. He's got 14% of Trump supporters now not being happy with Trump's performance. We had like 16%. And just from my analysis at the time, so it's consistent, I think, and a lot of them were disappointed in the economy, but the second thing they were most disappointed in was, was immigration. And it turned out, as I think you and I have been saying for a year, and I think actually Elliot Morris has been saying for a year, too, you can be tough on the border and not like a mass deportation regime. And that turns out to be where the public is. And the more they've seen of ice, the more they disapprove. And I think it would take a pretty. If you're in that kind of situation. My experience in politics is you've got to make a fairly dramatic change. It can't just be that Bovino is reassigned somewhere and Homan goes to Minneapolis for a week and a few things are cut back a little bit. It has to really be a kind of a big symbol, symbolic change of how you're going about things. I don't think we're going to get that. So I think he's going to continue to pay a price for ICE and Border Patrol, and I don't think he's going to walk away from that. So I actually think, I, I didn't say this in morning shots, but this is more, I mean, I actually think it's so much outrage. Maybe I'm just more personally outraged having been in Minneapolis. But if he starts to praise, I don't think people should go. Democrats should really go to the State of the Union, honestly, I think they should just leave, let Trump make it, give his speech. But why should they sort of honor him by being there, so to speak, or even respect him by being there? Maybe that's too extreme. But also if he starts to praise ice, they should walk out. I mean, these are people who have really been doing unconscionable things, obviously culminating in the deaths of Renee Goode and Alex Preddy. And I think it would be a dramatic moment, actually, if they did that, but we'll see if that happens. But no, maybe he's a little more willing to, to throw Stephen Miller a little bit more under the bus than I think, but I'm doubtful. What do you think? You think you could do that?
- [27:10]
B
Well, I mean, he could do anything. He has shown a tendency to zag every once in a while. But I think there are a lot of good reasons to think that for the most part, they're staying the course. And one thing, I mean, we should talk about in the context of all of this, which is, as far as I'm concerned, as good an indicator as any that they really do not want to see any real change in direction of ICE policy. Is the fight that they're having in the Senate right now over dhs. This is, I mean, he's going to talk about immigration tonight at a moment when the Department of Homeland Security is not funded. The rest of the federal government is operating right now. DHS is partially shut down because the Senate declined to reauthorize its funding a few weeks ago. At this point, and this is the week that the Senate is coming back to resume negotiations about, about under what circumstances Democrats will permit funding to again flow to DHS and all of their demands. We can put those up on the screen right now what they're looking for out of dhs. They are not like, defund ice, get rid of the agency type asks. In fact, Chuck Schumer and Democrats have gotten some flack from their left wing over the sort of relative smallness of Some of these demands, I don't, I don't agree with those critiques. I think these are actually really good sort of ways to hold ice's feet to the fire. But let's just walk through them real quick. No sort of blanket sweeps, which would include racial profiling. They want ICE agents to know who they are trying to arrest before they arrest them. They don't want them masked, they want them wearing id. They don't want them going into churches and polling places and schools. There's a, we can go to the next slide. It's all basic stuff, use of force standards, ensure that they're working with state and local authorities, make sure that there are actual investigations into misconduct, make sure that they, they're wearing body cams, but that those body cams are not being used to sort of like compile databases of protesters and things and then make them wear uniforms. I mean, this is all just like, make ICE operate according to basic law enforcement standards and you'll get your money back at dhs. And the idea that the President is in some ways trying to do this messaging pivot and saying, well, look, you know, like things might have gotten a little crazy, but, but the professionals are back in charge and everything's going to be fine. But they would rather see DHS go without funding than to, than to kowtow or than to, you know, allow these very reasonable, normal, rule of law, society type regulations to go into place around ice. I think that is pretty telling for where their minds are at as we push further into the shutdown fight.
- [30:00]
C
Yeah, no, I agree with that. I agree with that. If you wanted to pivot beyond a minor amount of messaging. Yeah, this would be the way to do it would be to accept some version of what the Democrats are doing. I myself am a little more on the left on this. I would like to see some more push for the defunding, which I think is ultimately the most important. But this is what the Democrats have said they want. And you're right, it wouldn't be hard to accept it or accept the bulk of it and get a deal just to go back to Reagan. In 82, he accepted a tax bill that clawed back some of the tax cuts that were in his 81 reconciliation bill. That was the big Reagan tax cut bill. A lot of conservatives grumbled at the time. I don't know what effect it all had economically. I think a lot of people think we ended up in a more reasonable place because of that, but I can't judge that. But I would say politically I do Remember, it gave the impression that, okay, look, Reagan has very strong beliefs. He really believes his supply side stuff, which was totally untested. How do we know if it's going to work? But then Congress said, no, we want to at least make these modifications. And Reagan accepted it. I think it gave a sense to people that he's in touch with. He's not battling reality, so to speak. He's not just mindlessly holding to something. Even if people, including Republicans, wanted to go back in this direction here you've got a Republican Party that's so complacent to Trump, that's so terrified of Trump. Maybe they believe also in the wonderful behavior of ICE and that, as you say, these common sense rule of law stipulation shouldn't be accepted. Maybe they now believe that it's a different Republican Party, but it's doing Trump no favor. Ironically, his total control of the party is preventing him from having a situation where he could sort of yield to the party and to the Democrats a little bit and maybe end up in a better place politically and substantively.
- [31:42]
B
Yeah, yeah. I mean, again, just to dwell on this point that we mentioned earlier. 20% approval rating among independents right now, and yet we are still operating in this environment as though he has the mandate of heaven in their kind of internal gaming out of all these things, as though he has the mandate of heaven, as though he has the broad will of the American people behind him for anything he might want to do. And so the idea that you would ever kind of show weakness by sort of letting Democrats get a win on this and tweaking your policies because they have this actual political leverage and the approval of the American people behind them, it almost doesn't enter into their rubric for consideration. And so we'll see. I mean, it really does seem like we are perhaps barreling toward another pretty lengthy, obviously much smaller scale because it's only dhs, but a decent sized shutdown here. I mean, the White House has not even made a public counteroffer to Democrats who have had these demands on the table. Now, again, the entire time that the government has been shut down or that DHS has been shut down, I think that they are just assuming that Democrats are going to blink like they ultimately did after the last shutdown. You peeled Republicans ended up peeling away, I think, eight moderate Democratic senators in order to get a funding bill passed and sort of to stop many of those pain points of food stamps running out and air traffic controllers going unpaid this time around, not only are there are not gonna be as many of those pain points. I mean, because again, just a much smaller point of the government is being shut down. Obviously TSA agents is a pretty big problem. If they go unpaid for a long time, that could cause issues. But that's one thing, right? And meanwhile, Democrats feel like they really, really, really have Republicans in a bind on this one. They think that public support is broadly on their side for all of these things. They are correct. Let me just pull up one statement here from Senator Jackie Rosen who is one of the Nevada senator who is one of the eight who who ended up letting the government get refunded last time. This is her sort of volunteering this information. I mean, she is publicly stating that she is behind the fight to get this increased accountability in place. We need increased accountability for ICE to stop these abuses of power. But Washington Republicans would rather have the entire Department of Homeland Security shut down than put guardrails on ice. It's up to Republicans in Congress to decide whether they'll work with us to rein in ice's out of control behavior or continue their DHS shutdown to block any reforms. That's kind of where we are, right? I mean, Democrats seem like we're going to be holding in lockstep on this one.
- [34:28]
C
Well, yeah, but what Rosen is saying there, if you just read it a little carefully and I think the Democrats in my view should make this more clearer. They would vote for a separate bill that opened that funded tsa, that funded fema, that funded the other parts of DHS and didn't fund ICE and Border Patrol. Now the Republicans won't do that because they think then they do lose, they lose all leverage. Democrats, I think should make more of a fuss about that and make clear that it's maybe they'll do this in a week or later this week that they're willing to vote and they should actually, maybe they even have legislation, I haven't looked that would do this. They need Republican votes obviously in both houses. But when Rosen says that Republicans are keeping DHS shut down in order to save ICE and Border Patrol from these reforms, that's what she's saying and what she's implying in terms of a forward looking statement legislative agenda, I think it's a pretty strong rhetorical position for Democrats. We're willing to open FEMA fund, FEMA fund, TSA fund other parts of the Department of Homeland Security. We are just unwilling to give new money, additional money to ICE and the Border Patrol unless they make these reforms. That's a pretty easy message I think for the Democrats to hold.
- [35:36]
B
Yeah, yeah. And they would even fund those things if they could get these very, very modest. I mean, like, like truly, like, get the masks off of the people, have them wear uniforms and badges and have a reason to arrest you before they arrest you. Like, that's the ask. And I get, I do get why some Democrats look at that and they're like this. We see all this in the streets and that's all you're asking for. But I do think, like, this is a pain point for Republicans. This is where they're putting them. Like, you won't even vote for this. You would rather keep it shut down than even say that the masks are bad. And I mean, that is an incredibly potent political argument, again, to, like, 70% of the country, maybe not to everybody, but people who take a look at this, people who see the ICE agents out in the street, you know, again, sort of the jackboot, masked thugs in the unmarked cars and no uniforms and no badges behaving the way that they are. This is the whole issue. Right. I mean, Americans, broadly speaking, we can talk about sort of ICE and what ought to happen to it in the long term. Obviously, it is a enormous problem that Trump has spent a year stuffing every kind of, like, MAGA MOOC he can find into that body and having them go through basically zero good training and then getting them out on the streets like that has horrible consequences for the quality of the agency's work long term. But broadly speaking, Americans are not anti immigration enforcement. Right. They don't think our immigration laws shouldn't be enforced. They don't like what's happening out there right now. And I think it's good that Democrats are, at least for this moment to say, like, whatever policy fights are going to happen later, they have their eye on the ball of what's going on out there right now. Even if you like immigration enforcement, even if you broadly think people who are in the country illegally shouldn't be here in the country illegally, that stuff shouldn't be happening. And we are trying to pull some policy levers to stop it.
- [37:23]
C
Yeah. Anyway, we could quibble in the sense that, I mean, a lot of the people they're seasoning, came here, are here legally, and since they have work permits, they have other pending court cases and asylum pleas, they have temporary protected status. Now, it is true that they are undocumented and they, they at some point overstayed a visa or were here, are not here fully legally, if you will. So people do think that people have been here 20 years and who've been paying taxes and registering and showing up. These are literally people showing. I just want to make this point because I do find some of the talk is a little, the Americans still sort of don't quite understand how law abiding an awful lot of these people who are being snatched are. And I think that's one thing that gets them. It's not just, I don't agree that it's, it's not just the images of the jackbooted thugs. It's also the stories about the person who's been here 20 years and their kids are born here, so they're citizens and they've been showing up every year to re register and to hopefully finally get maybe the citizenship thing going. But, but in any case, they're, they're, they've re registered their, for their work visa, they're paying taxes and so forth and these people are suddenly disappearing. That wasn't sort of what they thought they were getting. Maybe some of Americans thought they were getting that. So anyway, I agree with you though. The whole thing, the whole ICE enforcement thing, the whole mass deportation regime, people are not happy with now. And Trump's paying a big price for that.
- [38:44]
B
Yeah, yeah. Well, just to put a bow on it, we will see, we'll see how Trump decides to message all of this tonight. I mean, it's exactly the same as the economy and I'm sure, I'm sure we're on the same page where he's kind of boxed in. There's not a lot of popular things he can say that are in keeping with the agenda he has laid out so far. But we'll see which unpopular door he decides to open in the course of his 6 hour and 45 minutes. State of the Union speech tonight. We've gone for 35 minutes. Let's just do one more quick thing on another thing that he could talk about tonight because it's been in the news maybe weirdly less in the news than it ought to have been, but there is, to be fair, a lot of stuff going on. But we might be getting into a shooting war with Iran at some point in the very near future that has been bandied around. The President keeps saying, yeah, maybe we're going to do it, and he keeps sending more American personnel and material over there. What's going on? Like how, how is it that we might in theory be on sort of on the doorstep of war in the Middle east again? Or not the Middle east exactly, but more over there. And, and, and yet it's like a thing we get to 35 minutes into, into the bulwark State of the Union preview live stream. Instead of like this big thing on everybody's mind, what's going on?
- [39:54]
C
One reason is because he hasn't gone to Congress to seek authorization to go to war with Iran. And that is what has happened in the past. And having been involved in some of those debates that then, that is part of a much broader debate. Usually that involves international debates, UN Security Council type stuff, but also obviously a million, you know, political and op ed and think tank type debates. The whole Iran thing, I mean the original attack in Iran was a, you know, one day thing, you know, sort of finishing up, allegedly finishing up a job that Israel had been doing for about 12 days and didn't quite finish it as much as they claimed at the time. So now we're back again, but this time we're back with a, an armada that is comparable to the forces we had in the region before Iraq. And that's what we showed six months ago. You don't need to have all those ships there, right? You don't need to have all those forces nearby to bomb a nuclear site. And we did it without having all those. So the reason you want them all by maybe it's all just intimidation. Maybe still thinks they'll get a deal from Khamenei and his regime. But he's certainly talking as if we're going to maybe do an initial strike or two, but then it will be followed up by much more. It's mind boggling to me that you don't think, you think you can go to war in a situation like this without congressional authorization, when you're not responding to an attack, when you're not doing an individual thing that arguably is part of a, you know, authorized by the general war on terror and so forth. Soleimani had American blood on his hand and so forth. We're just going to go after the regime. It's a horrible regime. And I'm not sure you couldn't get congressional authorization incidentally. It's not like there's a lot of support for Iran in the US Congress. But he'd have to go make a case and be like Bush did with Iraq. And first Bush did with Iraq when it did invade Kuwait. Took a while and it was difficult and it was major, as you say. It was the major topic of discussion. But you know what, the public, again, this is another issue where I think he's kind of boxed himself in. Can he really just not do anything now and leave the regime Sort of complacently in power. Maybe he could accept some face saving deal for both of them, I don't know. And the public does not want it. I mean, the public, more incidentally than I probably would like, is not in favor of foreign interventions, period. He really thought, it's very striking to me, this drift down in the polls which the CNN and Gle Morris one we discussed continue, real continued drift down. Even the New York Times shows a continued movement downward that's happened after the great success of Venezuela. Trump clearly internally thinks that that was just a huge success, that A was going to help him A ton politically and B lays is sort of the predicate for all the other bullying he wants to do around the world. Turns out, I don't think it's a real predicate for anything. It was a very limited operation. It was done extremely well by our military, but it didn't change things that much in Venezuela. A and B, it's not, Iran's not going to be like Venezuela and Greenland's not going to be like Venezuela and so forth. So it gave Trump, you know, sort of a. I think the Trump people are high in their own supply in the sense of we can do whatever we want anywhere in the world, which is wrong. They're also high in their supply. And this gets to your point very much about the economy and about immigration and thinking that they can really move public opinion with this. And it is striking.
- [42:59]
B
Right.
- [42:59]
C
If you had told us if maybe a month, you know, after the Venezuela thing, you can't find it, you can't find it in the public opinion charge.
- [43:06]
B
Right?
- [43:06]
C
Public was like, okay, I guess I hope he knows what he's doing. And it went, thank God it went cleanly. We didn't lose American servicemen and women, but it wasn't like, that's great, you know, and so there's not much appetite for intervention. And so I think the Iran thing is also, I mean, very dubious on the merits and very doubtful that it's going to help them politically.
- [43:26]
B
Yeah, yeah. I always, obviously I am not a foreign policy head. I'm like the 11th best Bulwark staffer to ever talk about any of these things after you and mark.
- [43:38]
C
Often the 11th best is better many other people.
- [43:41]
B
But I mean, the whole thing is just amazing, right? I mean especially you look at sort of like the debates that are going on in sort of broadly right wing foreign policy right now about what the geostrategic positioning of America should be. And it's a lot of like, oh, you know, America needs to pivot toward a policy of primarily of restraint toward China and like getting ready to defend Taiwan or oh, no, it's just as important that we constrain Russia and help Ukraine defend against that war. And there's then obviously the sort of isolationists who are like, we shouldn't be doing any of this stuff. We should be dealing with our problems at home. And then you have basically Trump alone who's like, well, what I want to do is a really muscular policy specifically towards South America and various different conflicts in the Middle east and in Iran. So that's been an interesting thing to watch. We will see if he talks about it tonight. But, but that's been on his mind lately. I would be a little surprised if he did not at least get into it briefly. But we'll see. That'll be interesting to see tonight. We've gone for 40 minutes. We've talked through a lot of what might might happen at tonight's studio and we've talked about a lot of other things. We can probably think about wrapping it up there. Again, I should have said this halfway in between. They want you to do the little interstitials for people who didn't tune in right at the beginning who want to know why you're here, what's going on. I forgot to do that today. But if you, if you waited around to this point now I'll tell you that I'm Andrew Egger and that's Bill Kristol and that we write the Morning Shots newsletter. This is a thing we're doing on Tuesdays now at 10am Eastern at the morning Chaser to sort of tee up the week ahead, talk about our newsletters, everything that we're doing. Thanks to you all for tuning in. And this is not, I will remind you, this is not the last thing, even the last live thing that we are doing on YouTube today because we will be right back here. Tim and Sam will be headlining our State of the Union coverage tonight. I believe that they will be going live, actually, I'll be going live with them right at the beginning at 8:50 Eastern tonight, just shortly before Trump is scheduled to go on. Could be a long time before he actually goes on. Who knows, Maybe we'll have a lot to talk about. Maybe he'll push us off the screen right away, but we'll be you can watch that whole stream on our channels tonight if you wish to do so. Tim will be popping in and out as he goes to offer his little tidbits of commentary. What have you and Then after the State of the Union, we will have a whole slate of programming. We'll have a lot of different of our beat reporters popping in to talk about the different things that Trump has discussed. We're going to have some special guests too. That'll be kind of fun. I don't think I'm supposed to talk about who they are yet, so I won't. But that will all be live here on YouTube or on Substack, wherever you like to get your bulwark content. Tonight at 8:50 Eastern. 8:52. Who knows? Who knows how late we'll go? We'll keep hanging out as long as you guys want to. Want us to. Probably thanks to you all for tuning in this morning. And we'll see you tonight. We're lost. I'm gonna pull over and ask that man for directions. Hi there. We're looking to get to the campground.
- [46:34]
A
Well, you're gonna take a left at the old oak tree end of this here road. No, I'm just kidding. Let me get my phone out.
- [46:40]
B
How are you getting a signal out here?
- [46:41]
A
T Mobile and US Cellular decided to merge. So the network out here is huge. We're getting the same great signal as the city and saving a boatload with all the benefits. Oh, and a five year price guarantee. Okay, here's those directions.
- [46:53]
B
Actually, can you point us in the direction of a T Mobile store?
- [46:56]
A
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