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- [00:03]
A
Hey, guys. Welcome to Morning Shots Live. I am Andrew Egger with the Bulwark. This is Bill Kristol, editor at large of the Bulwark. We write the Morning Shots newsletter every Monday through Friday morning. Come to you live on Tuesdays to talk about what we've got in our newsletter today and what else is going on with the news. There is a lot to discuss. We covered this part of the G7 that's going on this morning. A lot of what's going on in the aftermath of the war in Iran, last of what's going on sort of just in Trump's domestic agenda more broadly. In the newsletter this morning, we're gonna talk about all of that. But before we do that, we have one kind of fun. I don't know if it's fun, exactly. It's stupid. It's embarrassing. I don't know. I guess it's fun. We can say it's fun, right, Bill? I mean, it's the reflecting pool. I have, I have not. I don't know about you. Out of all of the stories that have kind of become minor controversies over the last few weeks and months with this president, the reflecting pool is not high on the list of ones that I have paid a lot of attention to. You know, Donald Trump has been beating his chest a lot about his renovation of it, his, his draining it, his, his repainting the bottom. I think there were a lot of concerns early on that he was going to basically swimming pool eyes the thing and get it like, you know, like this electric cobalt blue, looking like your municipal pool out there or the pool at Mar a Lago or something. None of that necessarily really materialized. Painted it kind of a dark blue, looks kind of gray. But the funnier thing about it has been the, all of the talk about the water of the thing. Like, let's just throw up this post from, from Trump back in April of, of, yeah, this is his AI Obviously, you know, the ducks and the clouds are all in the same place. But you get the idea under President Hussein Obama, that guy we had a decade ago, that that sort of dodgy character, the water in the reflecting pool was allowed to become very choked with algae. It was, it was ugly. It was unsightly. It wasn't clean. Wasn't clean like you'd want our great reflecting pool to be in the Capitol. There was a lot of this stuff. They finished the renovation. They get it all refilled. Last week, there's this big round of sort of like conservative media applause about the reflecting pool. Here's a Breitbart headline just from last week, 8th of June. Thank you, President Trump reflecting pool in D.C. wows after Trump Renovations. First of all, let me just say what's going on in this particular screenshot. It's not even done there. It's not even refilled. There's still all these, like, trucks and things sign sitting around on the bed of the, of the reflecting pool. And apparently we're supposed to be wowed by that. But I digress because they refill it and wouldn't you know it, immediately, instantly, the whole thing turns bright green again. Let's go to some tweets from yesterday. This is what the, this is what the reflective reflecting pool looked like yesterday in D.C. we had our guy. Was it, was it Brendan who went out there? Our guy Brendan went out there, took a sample of the water, did, did some ph testing on it. For some reason. This is the sort of stuff our crazy video youths get up to for you, for you, the American people who watch and consume our content out there. But it's woes. It's not great. You can see in that fourth screenshot, they got some pool cleaner guys out there. And then just this morning we got some more video footage which we will play now of what else they're up to with it. So here you see workers pouring what we understand to be 12% hydrogen peroxide solution out of these little gallon jugs into the reflecting pool to battle our. That pesky recurring intransigent algae problem. I don't know, Bill. There's not a lot to say about this, and some of what I'm going to say about it I'm going to save for the newsletter tomorrow. But it is kind of funny. What do you make of our continual battle against this apparent, apparently, apparently completely indestructible reflecting pool algae?
- [03:45]
B
Yeah, no, I look forward to your addressing it tomorrow in the newsletter will be a nice break from sort of heavy issues of Iran and election theft and so forth and. But it is. I mean, he's kind of failing at a lot of things, isn't he? I mean, the ballroom is twice as expensive, contrary to his statements. It turns out we mentioned this in the newsletter this morning. Washington Post reports. It's, it's, it's much more expensive than he said and we're already spending taxpayer money on it. That was one of his great claims. No, taxpayer money on the boat, that it was, well, $1 billion. But that's only for the security. Nope. They spent already tens of millions, I think, on, on this ballroom, which isn't built yet and may not get built since their court case is pending. All their other wonderful schemes, the children $50 bill, the triumphal arch, thank God, not being built yet. So, yeah, it's, it's nice to see some failures, especially on the, well, it all, it all in the policy areas. Obviously, it's unfortunate when it hurts the United States, but he is president so hard to avoid that to some degree, but certainly in these things that are pure megalomaniacal grandiosity and on his part, to see them sort of, you know, failing and in somewhat amusing fashion is a good thing. Yeah, yeah.
- [04:57]
A
We don't need to dwell on this Washington Post report, but let's spend one more second on it because it really was pretty astonishing. And this is again a report the Washington Post put up just this morning, basically alleging that not only did Trump ask for that billion dollars in security improvements, which he ultimately did not get in the spending bill that the House and Senate just passed, that was obviously its own whole controversy. A lot of senators were put on the spot about that. That would have been a billion dollars in taxpayer money for this project that he had claimed all along would not be funded by taxpayers, would be privately funded, all money for it routed through this, you know, these separate channels for private donations. And a lot of his own money, as he said. Come to find out, that was all complete nonsense from the very beginning, per the Washington Post's reporting. It is not only that, that the cost is way, way higher than expected, but already, already for the work that has been done to date, while the, while the thing is still just a hole in the ground. There have already been tens of millions of dollars in, in taxpayer grants going to the construction company that they have working on that project. It's already money out the door. And by the way, it was already money out the door months ago while Donald Trump was still saying with a straight face, this is all not a dime of taxpayer money, this is gonna be privately funded. Is this great generous thing that I and my friends are doing for the country. Complete bunk. Complete lie was estimated. The Post reports from the very beginning of this project that it would require quite a bit of taxpayer money to do that. So just, I mean, we're not breaking any news here. The man's a liar. He lies all the time. But, but here's a lie we didn't know about before. Kind of a staggering one. Anything else on that one before we turn the page, Bill?
- [06:36]
B
Nope. I'm, I'm personally more. You're Obsessed with the Reflecting pool. I'm obsessed with the. The Triumphal Arch. And I. I really think that thing can be stopped. And I'm going to spend a lot of time over the next. I'm going to bore people in the newsletters by going on about various efforts to stop it and why it has to be stopped and why it would be such a desecration to have it looming over Arlington Cemetery in the Lincoln Memorial.
- [06:55]
A
But don't you think it might be.
- [06:56]
B
We'll get back to that in the future.
- [06:57]
A
I think it might be more cathartic to let him build it and then knock it down later. One of these sort of like pulling down the statues of Saddam type.
- [07:04]
B
Yeah. No. Well, certainly if he does build it, we need to have a. What's. What's the. It's a Latin phrase, damnatio memoria, I guess, which I've come across. Other people have used. It turns out it was. It's one of these Latin phrases that is not from antiquity. It was invented in the 16th century. I mean, it's correct Latin. It's just. They didn't use. They used the concept in antiquity where they would erase very bad emperors faces from, you know, monuments and so forth. And here this has been extended. And it was extended to also. Let's just get rid of anything that reminds us of these people. So, yeah, the project of getting rid of things that Trump put up that shouldn't be up, that remind us of Trump, that were vanity projects of Trump, that's going to be a bit. Not the most important thing the new administration does in 2029. But. But something worth attending to.
- [07:46]
A
Yeah. Yeah. I had never known. I had not known that that phrase was not legit. It was not, actually. Who says Latin's a dead language? Still seeing a lot of innovations in the forum all the time. Okay, we're gonna turn to the G7 is where Trump is right now. They're discussing a lot of stuff that we're not hardly gonna talk about. We're just talking about him being there and making some comments on the war in Iran and on the relationship with Israel. Talk a little bit about that deal. But one other fun thing. Just, just. We're only flesh and blood. Here is one picture of Donald Trump and Marco Rubio at the G7 this morning, which we will throw up. And then let's do a little bit of computer enhance about this picture. Because, you know, the shoes. Marco's still wearing those goddamn shoes. This is crazy to me. I mean, like, you remember this story, right? Trump given the Florsheim shoes to everybody in his orbit. All these pictures of poor Marco Rubio flopping around in these shoes that are way too big for him. Apparently, they are what he packed for his trip. And because, as you can see there, his pant leg is falling in between his foot and the heel of his shoe on the left foot there. That can't be a comfortable way to conduct high stakes international diplomacy. But whatever, if it works for Marco, that's fine. Let's head over to Trump's, too. And this is even sort of stranger because the President buys his own shoes, right? But these ones appear to be struggling to contain his heel in general. Also, you know, the lower leg swelling that we have seen, we don't need to continue to belabor this. Just thought I'd throw that up there. Let's talk about real stuff now. We've done nine minutes of schlock. Hopefully fun schlock for the people out there, but kind of schlock. You know, we'd admit it's a little bit of schlock. Bill, you wrote a bit today about Iran. You wrote yesterday about Iran. It's a little hard to talk about this deal to end this war because we still don't have it, and obviously nobody has the actual deal. But we don't even have access to the text of the Memorandum of Understanding that hopefully is the forerunner for a deal a couple of months down the line. So we're all flying a little bit blind here, but we have gotten, I was gonna say some alarming signals of what's in it, maybe a lot of alarming signals. Can you just kind of walk us through where we are, what we know about what the Trump administration is apparently willing to swallow in order to finally bring this war of their choice to a close?
- [10:02]
B
Yeah, it's a war of their choice. We lost the war. And so, guess what? It's a bad deal. You know, a lot of the professional diplomats are analyzing carefully this point at that point, and maybe they didn't negotiate properly with this side, but it's not really about the deal. It's about the war. And this is an appropriately bad deal to a failed war. It's murky right now because they don't want to release the text, and they're probably not clear there really is quite yet a definitive text. The text is only a page and a half Memorandum of Understanding, which mostly kicks everything down the road, but we do both. We don't actually know the details, and we actually do know exactly, pretty much the outlines of this deal. Right. I mean, Iran's going to get money. Iran's going to get sanctions relief. We're going to leave pretty much. Iran says they will reopen the Strait and presumably will for some time, but is not committing to the Strait of International waters. It's not a return to the status quo ante. They could well have fee. The New York Times had a wonderful headline yesterday. Trump says there won't be any tolls on the Strait. But, but Iran says, well, it could be fees, you know, so, so. And they can always, of course, close it or put conditions on it or increase fees, both either privately or publicly at their discretion now that they've established the principle of closing it. The new. The nuke, that they can't close it and pay not, not much of a price or no price, hurt the world economy. And the nuclear thing seems entirely. Just kicked down the road. So basically, yeah, I mean, it's, It's. We kind of know where this is going. I'm curious to see how much the Iranians kind of jerk Trump around some more. I'm not 100% certain that they'll. Maybe they'll find some reason not to sign the jail on Friday. Maybe they'll complain that Trump is misrepresenting what's in the memorandum of understanding. This whole idea of a memorandum understanding is itself a little weird. I mean, we've negotiated plenty of deals and treaties over time. I don't know, do we have this 1 1/2 page MOU first to then have 60 days of negotiations? I mean, what's the point of that? But anyway, this is the way they've constructed it. It's all big. Trump's engaged now in a PR campaign to make it look like a less bad outcome than it is. I'm sort of struck. I'm curious what you think about this. I've been struck in the last 34 hours that his PR campaign is not working very well. I mean, including among some of his allies and just the public generally. Even the kind of mainstream media which is somewhat credulous, in my experience, about these kinds of things. Well, he says he's gotten this and that is like really, this is, this is not a good outcome. But as I say, some of the analysis then goes in slightly, I think, I don't know what. Misleading. Not misleading, but sort of technocratic direction. Oh, they didn't negotiate a good deal, but says, hey, if you lose a war, you don't get a good deal.
- [12:36]
A
Yeah, I agree. I mean, by and large, about the talking Points not really landing. And I think part of the problem is they're basically negotiating right back to the same status quo that all these Iran hawks in the Republican Party hated before and hated when it was, you know, explicitly hated and explicitly spent a lot of time denouncing when it was President Obama a decade ago who was, you know, setting a lot of these same terms in his Iran nuclear deal and the JCPOA where it's like, what, we're just going to take Iran's word on a lot of this nuclear stuff? We're going to allow them to get these infusions of money back into their economy? Let's throw up the White House talking points document that's been disseminated, because I think this gets to a lot of this stuff. I mean, these are their top five message points. This is what they want to be driving the discussion. And it's Iran's never going to have a nuclear weapon. Okay, well, but that part has not, that part's not in the mou. That part is the thing that they are agreeing to negotiate on further. So that one's not real. President Trump ended the fighting on every front, including Lebanon. Well, we'll see. I mean, that's the whole question right now. I mean, Trump and Israel are not at all on the same page with, with any of this stuff. Israel has not been participating in these negotiations at all. We're going to talk about that a little bit more in a minute. The Strait of Hormuz is open again, free of charge. Well, not really. Not based on all the actual reporting that we are getting that says that. Like you just mentioned, Bill, Donald Trump is allergic to the word tolls, but Iran seems perfectly happy to use some other word to talk about the charging that they seem to be gearing up to do in the Strait of Hormuz in perpetuity going forward. Iran's rewards come from its own unfrozen money, not from American taxpayers. Well, okay, sure, but that was also the case with the jcpoa, right? I mean, that was the exact arrangement that got all of these people so jazzed up and mad a decade ago. Wasn't. Wasn't that like, it wasn't Iran's money, it was just that we were giving it back at all. And then this fifth one Obama never even got assigned to document. I don't know. Do you, do you have any idea what's, what's going on with that? I looked at that and I ran out of time to follow up on it. I genuinely, it's like they needed a fifth talking point and they couldn't, they couldn't think of another.
- [14:36]
B
That's funny.
- [14:37]
A
On the list.
- [14:38]
B
Yeah. I mean, because what everyone thinks The JCPO is 160 page document that was attested to that was ratified by, I believe, the UN Security Council. I mean, was it, that was an actual deal. And Iran seems to have kept to it till we got out of it and we abrogated it in 2018. Wasn't a great deal. But you know, there are other parties to the deal, European nations. That was an actual thing. We are not anywhere close to that with the Trump deal. And the only couple of additional very minor points I'd make to your excellent presentation, there is two things, I guess, on the nuke front. Iran. We don't know that Iran is, we don't know that Iran won't get a new nuke. We, we know that Iran is willing to say, as they say, have said for 25 years and as they said, I believe in the first sentence of the jcpo, jcpoa. They don't intend to or they don't want to or something like that. They don't plan to get nuclear weapons, but they have to have the enrichment program. So we'll see what happens on that. But that's a total, you know, fake kind of thing that Iran's made any commitment they haven't made before the nuclear front. They literally haven't. And secondly, it's not only that it's back to the jcpoa, Iran's Obama's deal, which as you say, they, everyone's hated. It's. Why is this any better than February 27, 2026, when they cut off the discussions about the nuclear program and launched the war? When Trump did launch the war. I mean, I mean, literally, I'm not even being like rhetorical. I mean, what has improved in terms of our position and a lot of damage has been done, obviously to the world economy. We've lost soldiers, we spent $100 billion, you know, reduce Iran's military capabilities and killed some Iranian leaders, no question about that. But we didn't seem to reduce their military capabilities as much as we hoped. And indeed, they've sort of shown the world that they can take our best hits for 36 days, whatever it was, and keep on chugging along and shut down a helicopter just a week ago and so forth. So, yeah, I mean, it's really, it's not better than Obama's deal and it's not better than this status quo before the war began, three and a half months ago. So I, I, but I hadn't actually looked at the talking points document till you put it up there. And it is actually revealing how weak this is. Their talking points, right?
- [16:46]
A
Yeah. That's the five best things they can do.
- [16:48]
B
It's revealing how weak it is. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [16:51]
A
I mean, and here's something. I did not pull this, pull this element. So I can't throw the, I can't have Matt throw the video up on the screen. But, but both Trump and Vance have spent the last day or so really leaning in rhetorically. I mean, it's become a load bearing pillar of their, their football spiking here that these new guys who are in power after we killed the old guys, they're just way more reasonable, they're way more pro west, they're way more pro America. I mean, you have J.D. vance saying with a straight face, it's amazing. You know, we're developing personal, personal relationships with these guys and they're ready to turn the page on, you know, 47 years of antagonism toward the United States. And look, I don't, I'm not an Iran policy expert. I have not spent decades studying this stuff. That's not my understanding of the clerical regime in Iran, which views America as the Great Satan and views sort of getting us out of the Middle east as a prerequisite to the apocalypse coming down on the world in a way that they are hoping to accelerate. But like, certainly, certainly it is not an argument that Trump's, again, Trump's Iran hawk base and the peace.