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- [00:00]
Bill Kristol
Foreign.
- [00:07]
Tim Miller
Welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. It is Monday. He is back. Editor at large of the Bulwark Fourth of July, content creator extraordinaire, Bill Kristol. You were working this weekend, Bill, A
- [00:20]
Bill Kristol
little bit in between World cup games, obviously, but it was too hot to go outside, and I was kind of avoiding watching Trump and his attempt to hijack the 250th. So it was World cup and a little bit of work.
- [00:31]
Tim Miller
Yeah, we'll get to the World cup at the end. I also miss Trump. You said you were trying to watch Trump or trying to avoid Trump.
- [00:39]
Bill Kristol
Trying to avoid. Yes, trying and succeeding in avoiding Trump. Then I had to discuss it a bit with Sam Stein on Sunday, but luckily Sam had watched it, so I was able to just play off him.
- [00:49]
Tim Miller
Okay, well, you're ahead of me because I just decided I'm going dark. I know this is my job and I'm paid by you people and entrusted by you people to watch this sort of thing. But. But it's midnight, so whatever. 11 o' clock on the 4th of July, I took my daughter and a neighbor kid. We went up to the roof of a hospital parking garage, maybe against the rules to watch all the fireworks around town. I came home, I was like, I'm not gonna turn this on. Why would I do this to myself? And the next morning I woke up and I was like, I'm not gonna rewatch it. Why would I do that to myself? So I don't know how it was. And there was much to have been said about it in the lead up. And it is sad and unfortunate that our 250th anniversary could not have been more of a unifying celebration. But I do, to your point about the World Cup, I do think that it's been kind of just replaced by. There was a vacuum and it was filled mostly. We'll get to that at the end. Mostly by the World cup team. So that's all. Do you have any deep thoughts for people who are desperate for observations about his speech?
- [02:00]
Bill Kristol
I mean, just that I think Trump's attempt to hijack it basically failed. I think, you know, 98% of Americans were ignoring what was happening in Washington or. And, you know, enjoying July 4th in a pretty traditional way in their neighborhoods and their backyards and their local high schools, you know, watching fireworks or like you and the roofs of semi. Legally on the roofs of garages watching fireworks. Seriously, that's what people do on July 4th, and they go to swimming pools and it was hot. Here we went to our Little neighborhood on July 4th. It's usually a little parade, little kids in their tricycles kind of thing. It was too hot, actually. So they just assembled in one area where there was some shade and mixed and mingled and provided, you know, red, white and blue popsicles. But it was charming and it was nice. And I was there about 45 minutes. Several bulwark readers and viewers, I'm happy to say, no talk of Trump, actually, except for the implicitly, I'd say, in the praise for the Bulwark. But, you know, just chatting about what was people's lives and what was going on and how their kids were and so forth. So that reassured me that the huge bulk of America was able to tune out Trump, I think.
- [03:05]
Tim Miller
Yeah. A federalist, a small D. Democratic. Yeah. Fourth of July, US and our communities. That feels right. Well, the President is back this morning, up early, ringing the bell in the Oval Office. This all just all feels so gauche and inappropriate. And it was the first joint opening of the Nasdaq and Dow to announce the Trump accounts. He has put his name on them. In his remarks. He mentions Michael Dell, who contributed to those accounts, and he urged people to buy the Dell stock and said that Dell was going to be repaid for his donation. The Dell stock surged this morning after he said that last week we heard right before the weekend that some investment accounts owned by Trump engaged in 300 previously undisclosed stock purchases one day ahead of his surprise announcement that he would pause his Liberation Day tariffs. There'd been a 45 day deadline to report those transactions. He doesn't abide by deadlines. You replied to that story with just a brief tweet that said impeach and convict. That stirred me. I want to talk about the merits of impeachment, but first, just the degree of grotesquery around this. It's hard to even kind of wrap your arms around.
- [04:29]
Bill Kristol
No, it really is. I remember a year and a half ago, it was like, well, Orban, of course we can't. You know, people, the Trump and the Trumpists admired Orban, but we can't. It's America. We're not going to go that far down that path. And people met partly the authoritarian path, but partly the kleptocracy path, the corruption path. And I don't know what, I don't know Orban's regime in detail, but I feel like we've probably gone further than Orban, or at least equivalently far, kind of in Putin territory, almost with this level of Corruption, aren't we? And it's really. Well, it's appalling. And the reason I just couldn't resist, I just tweeted impeach and convict because, and I'm curious on your thoughts on this though, but is that, you know, some of the other stuff's a little more complicated. I'm proving that Trump is being lawless or misusing the Justice Department or you shouldn't go to war without authorization. I mean, these are all pretty obvious, obviously bad things that Trump has done, in my opinion. But there are people around who will say, oh no, it's more complicated. The stealing is just classic. It's just classic corruption. It's sort of what I mean, no one's ever doubted that you can be impeached to that, right? I mean, that's in a way, it's in a way the most straightforward, it's the least grave of his offenses, you might say, in terms of the future of America as a liberal democracy and a constitutional republic. But it's also the most glaring and obvious, I guess, I think, I guess
- [05:49]
Tim Miller
I even quibble with least grave just because, you know, it is the path towards just being just total banana republic territory, right? And like that is, this is just how things work from Putin in, you know, great powers or once great powers, former great powers that behave like this, that decline to just like kind of random, you know, tin pot third world countries. Like this is what happens, you know, like the president gets paid off by the, you know, the corporation that runs, you know, whatever agricultural products they have or, you know, they pay off the TV station owner. Like this is just how things work in countries where there is no rule of law and we have kind of declined fully into that level of, you know, I don't even mean this like as a pejorative to those countries, but like third worldism and the third world way. That's just like a lot of times what you need to get kind of third world economies up and going. And the successful ones are the institute rule of law. The leader of the country no longer can be paid off and cannot pay off his children and doesn't have his son in law running things. That's how you build trust in the system and then that's how you get business and money into the system. This is just kind of basic stuff and we're going the other way. And you know, like he said last week at the end of the week, or I guess this was maybe on Sunday about his kids, almost anything they do, they have inside information and he kind of starts rambling and he's like, if they buy a cupcake company, then the cupcake company, you know, has a contract with somebody. And he's just like, so I don't. We don't have to care about it. We don't care about it. Like, that was like the upshot of this. Like, they're gonna have inside information about everything. And I agree with you. Like, I just, I think that the. And who knows exactly what's happening? This is why you have to have an investigation when it comes to who is doing the invest. Like, we don't know, like who is doing these investments. Did they have inside information? That sure seems like it. I don't know. I didn't buy a bunch of stocks the day before he did the pause on the tariffs. So maybe it's luck. But. And I do think that, like just going in on the pure, like financial corruption is something that, you know, is, to your point, I think both easy to explain to people as a political matter that I also, I think it's just important and like safeguarding the future of the Republic just to be like, hey, like this, we can't do this anymore. Like, this isn't going to be allowed next time. Like he's. They're going to be held to account for this. I don't know. I mean, I think that's just on that level, I think that obviously investigating is important and holding them accountable based on what is found, but that's, I think, a pretty compelling impeachment case for.