S2 Ep1039: Bill Kristol: A Golden 747 from Hamas's Sugar Daddy
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Hello and welcome to the Bullard Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. A quick shout out, we do have that Nashville event coming up May 29th. Got some tickets available for that. Chicago sold out. I decided to make a little family weekend out of it. So that might be something for you to consider as well. Come hang out with us in Nashville. Go to thebullard.com slash events today.

Huh. We've got a lot to discuss. The liberation of the American economy is on a 90-day pause. We're borrowing a new Hamas Force One from Qatar. Socialist price controls are good now. American hostage is free. Russian propaganda about a Keir Starmer cocaine bender.

A tenuous India-Pakistan ceasefire? The zone has been flooded with shit, and we're here to wade through it. It's Monday with Bulwark Editor-at-Large Bill Kristol. What's up, Bill? How are you, Tim? Busy weekend, you know? Busy morning today even, right? Terrorist Air Force One, drug prices magically going down. It's really something here in Trump's America.

I know. It's brutal, you know? Today was the first day where I was like, in a while, I was like, oh, okay, I guess I got to wake up and care about this shit. But here we go. And I wonder if someone was saying to me over the weekend, I feel like we're overwhelmed. But of course, they have the whole federal government like doing stuff for them, you know, and we have like the board.

Fine team that we are, that will work as staff. And Congress has its small staffs trying to fight back. It is a big advantage being president of the United States. And for all their clownishness and incompetence, you know, having some people who know what they're doing and loyalists who are willing to do everything Trump wants and foreign leaders who want in some ways to fight.

work with Trump or, you know, use Trump, let's put it that way, you know, and give him some token victories occasionally or not rub his face in it. It is a big advantage being president. If you think of your four years in office as, you know, just defeating your enemies and rewarding your friends, not doing something good for the country, it does feel like they're constantly coming at us with a lot of forces. Yeah.

Yeah, plenty of opportunity for that. And one other thing, I mean, this is a little bit, you know, kind of an obvious at this point observation, but it just feels particularly cute today. It's just like the reality show element of it. It's preternatural. I don't even know if it's actually strategic. I just think that he is a reality show figure. And you just have all this stuff that we're about to get into that like...

Wouldn't have even been news in other administrations, right? Or like wouldn't be anything that regular people would have to care about, you know, because it would be there'd be negotiations happening behind the scenes in Switzerland between the trade representatives. It's like only super nerds would care about it because you aren't doing like it's 150 percent. It's 12 percent. Like this whole the show of it all, I think, is really is wearying.

It's a good point. And, you know, I don't watch many reality shows, I'll be honest, but I get the impression they keep everyone interested and excited based on ludicrous little things, right? Oh, the couple broke up, I don't know, and some like married, you know, whatever the thing is, married at first sight. Oh, they didn't break up. They're having a fight. You know, it is like that. I mean, Trump obviously has internalized what you keep people interested with what are, if you step back for two seconds, are trivial or, you know, not important things. But hey, there's drama. Yeah.

All right. So let's go through it. We'll go through today's reality show because it is our burden. It's our rock that we have to push up the hill. So Liberation Day has come and gone. The U.S., after some negotiations in Switzerland over the weekend, has decided to reduce the China tariff to 30%. China's reduced the U.S. tariff to 10% for context.

This means there's an additional 20% tariff over the pre-Trump status quo for products coming into the U.S. The China State TV summed it up this way. The outcome of the trade talks with Trump team shows China's firm countermeasures and resolute stance have been highly effective. China gets nearly all tariffs off for doing very little other than agreeing to talk, which

The markets, though, are happy this morning. They soared. You guys wrote in the Morning Shots newsletter that that was a result of Trump, at least for a little while, deciding to stop holding a pillow over the face of global trade. So I've got a few other reacts from people this morning. But what are your other top takes from the fact that we're back down to 30 percent? I mean, it's marginally good for the world economy and for our economy. It's still marginally bad compared to where we might have been if we just continued to

Biden's policies at this point or more traditional low tariff policies. But yeah, I mean, Liberation Day, that was such hoopla just over a month ago. It turns out the markets like it whenever there's a relief from Liberation Day, when we're like unliberated, liberated from Liberation Day. And I mean, Trump is just shrewd enough student of public opinion of the markets to maybe keep following that. But he's also,

Once you launch the tariffs, it's not quite so easy to unwind them. And so we're seeing that with China. And the other point I'm so struck by is it's all so lawless. He decides he's had some meeting in Geneva and suddenly tariffs are down to this for 90 days. Because, of course, if it became a permanent thing, someone might say, hey, don't we have like Congress that ratifies these things? Like,

I seem to, I'm old enough to remember a huge fight over NAFTA. What was NAFTA about? It was about the tariffs between us, Mexico and Canada. And then Trump changed it in 2017, 18. And I went back to Congress, if I'm not mistaken, that whatever they called it, then U S Mexico, something, you know, Canada, USMCA took me. It's Monday morning. But it went to Congress. So we're just like having the whole U S economy, global economy, uh,

chugging along at the whim of this guy and his kooky advisors in some cases. Just a few other things. I was kind of collecting some of the reacts today to kind of contextualize this for people who

we've had so many different tariff rates with china over the past four months it's been a little hard to follow uh justin wolfers summed it up like this there's two ways to frame the news u.s trade policy and our macroeconomic prospects are much better today than they were yesterday that's number one or number two u.s trade policy and our macroeconomic prospects are much worse today than on inauguration day both of those things are true joe weisenthal who i had on the pod a

asks, his followers, has China made any concessions in a way that's superior to the pre-April 2 status quo? Nobody has a good answer to that. Weisenthal says the biggest losers here are people hoping for a Trump-led economic catastrophe. So that might have been some of you. I'm not going to accuse anybody. And number two, the people of the Trump is part of a big chess game party. They thought the tariff announcement was some brilliant strategic plan that would

reshape the global economy in a way that's beneficial to us. Fox Business guy Charlie Gasparino points out that remember the notion that tariffs would pay down the deficit or the tax cuts or free childcare for everybody? I guess that's all off the table. So again, that's like the propositoriousness of all of this, right? Which is, it's marginally worse. I guess it's good news because we are staring down the barrel of a potential crisis

crippling recession for the economy, which isn't, I guess, off the table, but the chance of that has now decreased. And so it's like, I guess Trump has people in this world where we are not guaranteed to have a self-imposed recession is, I guess, good news for the Wall Street guys. It is for the Wall Street guys. And I don't know about the public. I think he's hurt badly, though, actually, by the whole back and forth stuff. At some point, it's like, what is he doing? And I think in that respect, I'm not so...

I know we all think, and it's obviously correct in some way, that the real effects on real voters is what matters ultimately. But also, I think this perception of just relatively stable and competent and non-idiotic governance matters to people. And they do have the sense that maybe short term, we've stumbled into an adequate place. So it's not clear, incidentally. We could still have a recession in three months. This depends on Trump's whims and

I think people got in some sense to think that's not, that can't be healthy. And also, what do you do? Incidentally, fine, they're down a little lower. What do you do if you're a corporation? Do you now out still try to get your stuff out of China? Do you decide everything's fine to import stuff from China? Do you place orders for six months from now when it's a 90 day window here? I mean, I think a lot of the uncertainty argument, which people like Larry Summers, and I think we discussed this last week a bit, and others have been emphasizing remains front and center. Yeah.

Yeah. In certain niches, like people are still going to be impacted, like real impact. Like it won't be across the board like it was potentially going to be where everybody felt real economic pain. But, you know, in the tariff area, and you still have some small businesses, like I've referred several times to the woman that I was talking to here in New Orleans that sells the tchotchkes, the tourist tchotchkes. Like 30% is still a lot. Like that's still a lot.

big number, right? If you're selling Mardi Gras beads or what, you know, like cheap stuff that was made in China. And so it's still going to hurt some of those

businesses for sure. We still are going to have a period of shortages. We might end up having a supply chain issue now as a bunch of people try to get stuff in for China really fast in case the negotiations go south and Trump has a bad day or some Chinese person says something mean about him. So he decides to put it back up to 140%. So there's some discussions of that. I like a big rush. And then I do feel like sometimes I've given a little short shrift just because there hasn't been a lot of news items on it to the federal government cuts.

Those things are still happening. I was talking to somebody over the weekend that was, you know, just graduating, you know, from getting their doctorate. And it's like the job market is horrible right now. If you are somebody that is wanting to do a research job or, you know, a government job, right? Like one of these types of things, you know, there is a huge chill going.

for hiring from universities, research institutions, as all the Doge stuff and the lawsuits carry out. So like you combine all of that with like a halt, you know, a slowing of federal government hiring and a bunch of firing, you know, with the tariff uncertainties. Back to Wolfer's point, I mean, it still is like it still is a significantly worse economic environment than it was five months ago.

In a worse political environment in the geopolitical sense, I mean, we all know, we all say this, that one objection to all this tariff manipulation is that it empowers one person, Trump, instead of having a more of a rule of law predictable situation. It also empowers Xi Jinping.

If Trump internalizes that, ooh, that was good that we were able to hit this deal to go down to 30, it means Xi just has to, if we send an extra aircraft carrier near Taiwan to try to deter something, Xi says, you know what, you want to go back up to where we were? We can have that trade war going again. As I say, the terror stuff empowers Trump internally vis-a-vis Congress, vis-a-vis predictability and the rule of law, but it empowers bad guys externally to also manipulate us.

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It's kind of unimaginable corruption and potential national security risks all wrapped up in one, which is what is, I guess, going to be the new Air Force One. It's going to come from Qatar, a palace in the sky. Jonathan Karl broke the news over the weekend that this would be the most valuable gift ever extended to the U.S. from a foreign government. It's a super luxury Boeing 747 jumbo jet from the royal family of Qatar.

The gift will be available for use by Trump as the new Air Force One until shortly before he leaves office, at which time ownership of the plane will be transferred to the Trump Presidential Library Foundation. Trump had previously toured the plane when it was parked at the West Palm Beach International Airport in February, apparently. There was some discussion that this was maybe a premature report, but then Trump pleaded guilty.

Last night, in defense of the plan, he read this. So the fact that the Defense Department is getting a gift free of charge of a 747 aircraft to replace the 40-year-old Air Force One temporarily in a very public and transparent transaction so bothers the crooked Democrats. They insist that we pay top dollar for the plane.

Democrats are world-class losers. So that's his spin. The Qataris, who I think it should bear mentioning, because I want to get into some of the geopolitical sides of this. They've sent over $1.8 billion to Hamas over the past decades. They also are funding the student for justice protests that we are jailing people from organizing. So it's intriguing that the funders of the group that the administration is targeting is now also the funders of

of the new presidential airplane. So where do you want to go with that? Plenty of elements to it. So many elements, maybe just two. I mean, when I first heard the news, I didn't realize it was going to end up being Trump's, that I thought it was a government-to-government thing that we were buying or the Qataris were being nice and selling us at a discount or giving us.

government to government, a plane. It's still grotesque. I mean, we should be at the United States of America. We can build and maintain and design our own Air Force One. And it's still a Boeing plane, if I'm not mistaken. So, you know, it's still kind of an American thing. So then I thought it was just grotesque. And I think the palace in the sky thing is what struck me, right? This is a republic,

We're not supposed to have palaces. We're not supposed to have palaces on the ground. We're not supposed to have palaces in the sky. And it was nice. The White House, it's always been a thing in America. Now it's much more guarded than it used to be, and it's a little harder to get that close. But still, you can walk pretty close to the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue, and there are still public tours, and you can – more limited than they used to be. And Congress is very accessible. It's supposed to be a democratic republic.

We're not supposed to have a president flying around in palaces. And I always liked the slightly beaten down aspect of Air Force One and Air Force Two. I was much more in Air Force Two than Air Force One when I was the vice president's chief of staff. You know, it wasn't the greatest plan in the world, but maybe that's more appropriate for a republic not to replace it every four years with the most up-to-date, fancy, palatial thing. So that's just my own kind of personal republican preference with a little r.

Yeah, no kings. This has always been a hobby of mine. There's a reason that he's called Mr. President.

You know, it was an American tradition, right? That there's a public servant. It's our plane, not his. Well, it's his because they've structured this deal so that it's a gift to him. And he gets to then. Right. But then it's obviously illegal. It's an emolument unless Congress approves it. We'll get back to that in a second. But then it's going to go to the presidential library, not to him afterwards. So it's not really a gift to him as if there's any distinction between his presidential library in terms of his ability to use it and so forth. And even finances, God knows the way Trump runs things.

and his personal wealth. So it is a gift to him. So then you say, well, the Constitution is very clear on this. I mean, no emoluments, no presence, as they put it, for anyone in a position of trust or an office of trust in the United States of America. That's why when I was in government as a Bureau of Vice President, Chief of Staff, a couple

A couple of times foreign governments would give us – we were on the delegation, obviously, with the vice president – would give us nice gifts, and it was rude to say no, so you would say thank you. And then you would go back even to the hotel and hand them over to one of the security officers. They would go to the State Department. The State Department would figure out whether to give it back to the other host country or maybe more likely give it to a museum or something like that. You don't get to keep a gift from a foreign government. Now there is one exception.

Congress can – the framers were pretty hard-headed. They were Republican with a little r. But there are times where maybe you do want some official for some reason to be able to accept a gift. So they have an exception in Article 1, Section 9, I think it is, of the Constitution. That's if Congress consents, an individual can accept a gift. I think the Democrats in Congress should just say, we get to vote on this.

and they should dare the Republicans. Republicans, fine. You're fine with this? You just jam this through with your 53 to 47 majority and 220 to 250, whatever it is. But we want to debate on this and whether this is the right thing for the United States, whether we consent to this gift from a foreign government to an officer of the U.S. I mean, if a soldier in Qatar – we have a big base in Qatar, the largest U.S. base in the Middle East – if a soldier or airman in Qatar –

got a gift from the Qatari government, a gift from a wealthy individual in Qatar. Totally unacceptable. He'd have to return it. If he didn't return it, he'd be court-martialed or whatever, right? The commander-in-chief can take a gift, but the commander of some platoon can't. I mean, it's all...

beyond corrupt and beyond unseemly, really, for the president. It's a great suggestion. Democrats absolutely should pressure them to take a vote on this and force Republicans to vote on this if they're going to jam it through. Because you have seen some pushback from Republicans

Republican circles, not from actual candidates, right? They're all cowards, but you know, crazy Laura Loomer's even against this. Ari Fleischer. I know. I mean, here we are with, we're on board with Ari Fleischer's ideas against this. There's an editorial in the Free Press today, some of those folks who've been Trump friendly. And part of our

the argument from the free press is related to the Israel side of this, which I think is worth at least bringing up, right? I mean, look, the corruption, the Trump corruption, which is astonishing. And maybe this is the type of thing that could break through in a way that the meme coin doesn't like, I'm going to keep talking about the meme coin, but it's, it's hard to understand. It's hard for people to understand.

This is not that hard for people to understand, right? Like a foreign government and Islamic government is giving Trump a plane that he's going to fly on a government that does business with Iran. That was funding Hamas. It was essentially the Hamas sugar daddy in Qatar. They are going to pay for our air force one.

That's absolutely insane. And Larry Summers was talking over the weekend that there are very serious rules for colleges to take money from countries like this, from Qatar, because we don't want –

foreign governments, especially those that are quasi-hostile, at least in certain elements of foreign policy, to be overly influencing the country. And so, again, this would be a horrible, corrupt Trumpian deal if the plane was coming from, well, I guess I was about to say Denmark, but I guess Denmark isn't our friend anymore. If the plane is coming from Norway, it would still be horribly corrupt. But

We could conceivably be on the opposite side of Qatar and various military-related foreign policy issues over the coming years. And Rumeysa Ozturk, who, thank God, got out of jail, who we shackled and we put into a prison because she was the co-author of an op-ed that was critical of Israel's actions in Gaza. So we jailed her for that position.

Now, simultaneously, we are taking the biggest gift in the history of the American government from a country that was absolutely

actively supportive of the Hamas terrorist attack in Israel, that was actively supportive of Hamas, that was harboring the Hamas terrorists that committed the atrocities. It's like when Trump does a gaggle on the plane and somebody asks him about their policy of jailing Ozturk, of jailing the leaders of these campus protests, he's going to be doing it on a plane that is funded by the people that funded the campus protests.

It's preposterous. It is totally inappropriate on a straight corruption level.

But also, it just reveals the emptiness of their position on this, that they're willing to challenge the free speech rights of people and jail people and go after this for a political purpose domestically, but on foreign policy, like whatever. When it comes to bribes, maybe if Ozturk could have afforded giving Trump a plane, she wouldn't have had to be shackled and jailed. The whole thing is...

It's deeply offensive, no matter what your view is on that, on the particulars of the dispute. Yeah, the political leaders of Hamas are in Qatar, I believe. When Trump lands there, they'll be living in luxury five or ten miles away, provided safety and security by Qatar, obviously there. And Qatar is also a close ally of Iran, with whom we have real issues, to say the least, and whom Trump allegedly is supposed to be tough on. They share a gas field and stuff. So they've been a big player in trying to, you know,

stop conflict with Iran and sort of normalize relations with Iran. They did it themselves, and they brokered that for other countries in the region. Anyway, the geopolitics is slightly complicated. We have a big base there, too. So I can – that one, what could I – I'm pretty anti-Qatar personally, but I think I can see that people will say, I've got to get along with them. It's like the Saudis, you know, whatever. That's one thing. But as you say, that the bribery is coming from that –

government, not from some, I don't know, whatever, just, you know, kleptocratic government with whom we have that isn't harping horrible terrorists and isn't a good friend of Iran. It'd still be bad, but this does make it even more shocking, really.

And we'll see if any of these Republicans, I mean, it seems like a lot of my fellow Jews who are much too Trump curious and Trump adjacent were telling me for fellow pro-Israel people, many of whom happen to be Jews, that, oh, no, Trump's going to be great on Israel. He's the one who's going to be tough on Iran, you know.

I don't know. I went to a demonstration sponsored by one of the, how do I think about it, the Jewish Council here in Washington, you know, Jewish Community Relations Organization, in front of the Qatar embassy. I actually spoke for five minutes. I mean, you know, here, because they, this is after October 7th, because they were harboring Hamas and ISIS.

They're supposed to be a non-NATO ally of ours, and we were not doing much to put pressure on Qatar to put pressure on Hamas to get back the hostages, to stop the war, basically. And so, you know, Qatar in the pro-Israel community was an object of, I think correctly, really, of not just dislike, but real, you know, hostility. I'm curious to see whether the pro-Israel types who told me how great Trump was going to be for Israel, I'm curious to see what their reaction is going to be to this.

I mean, they funded Students for Justice. And Rubio was out there saying, we're going to take the student visa away from people who were organizing Students for Justice. So we're going to strip those people's visas while we're riding around on the fancy plane that paid for the course. I just knocked my microphone down as I'm waving my hands wildly. It's totally ridiculous. And I do remember, I go back to that MSNBC panel. I was sitting on the panel with this Haley donor.

The guy who is like, I don't like Trump and there's a lot I don't like about Trump that I just feel no, I have no choice but to be for Trump because of these student protesters. And I'm like, the student protesters were protesting Biden. Right. For starters. Okay. Secondly, like now you are now in league with the person that is just like taking a bribe from the funders of the student protest. So who knows what actually happens.

Shake out on all this. And obviously, Trump and Bibi have a close relationship in ways that I'm not supportive of. So the whole thing is complicated. But in a region with all of the serious security issues and complicated relationships, the country shouldn't be taking a bribe.

from one of the players, like either of the players. They shouldn't be taking a $400 million bribe from Israel. Well, that gets to this point. I mean, if you want to signal that you'd like to get more bribes, what's the best way to do that? Take one bribe. Because then everyone else thinks, oh my God, I mean, if I want to have my equities in here, maybe I need to do, I don't have a $400 million plane, but I have a $250 million concessionary contract on a Trump hotel, a golf course. I mean, the whole world starts thinking, and again, you sort of almost can't blame the other leaders. They've got

Real realpolitik things to deal with. I better bribe Trump, too. So he's in his own cunning way, of course, has opened the door to just unimaginable amounts of corruption, really. There will certainly be more bribes coming behind. I also should just note one more thing is that Pam Bondi, the attorney general who who made the ruling that this was legal.

Let's do that. Some kind of one page document giving a legal blessing from the Department of Justice to this bribe. She was a lobbyist for Qatar before she got before she got the job. So in addition to the body thing, Eric Trump was in Qatar recently and they just inked a new deal on a luxury golf resort worth five point five billion. So like.

In addition to the government to government or government to Trump library, however you want to take it, bribe of the plane, the Trump family is also personally enriching themselves. And this is a direct violation of the emoluments, no doubt about this. And B, you can't tell me that this is not going to impact the foreign policy of the country.

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One good news in this situation is it does sound like, and who knows, maybe it's thanks to the bribe. Hamas said Sunday they're going to release the last living American hostage, Eden Alexander, who's been held for over 550 days as Trump heads to the region, which is, again, good news. This is the nature, though, of these sorts of situations. When you go to corrupt real politique in the extreme, you know, you get, obviously there are,

some positives when you start getting bribes. So this is a good positive. Genuinely happy, though, for Eden Alexander and his family in saying that he was taken for so long. And hopefully the health will be good. I think we'll be seeing here maybe by the time the podcast is out, learning more about his physical status. I want to move on to the pharma stuff. Are you feeling like this is a reality show rollercoaster yet? This is all happens. It's the last podcast on Friday. Trump did another bleat.

Prescription drug and pharmaceutical prices will be reduced almost immediately by 30 to 80%. They will rise throughout the world in order to equalize. And for the first time in many years, bring fairness to America, I'll be instituting a most favored nations policy whereby the United States will pay the same price as the nation that pays the lowest price anywhere in the world. This is going to be an executive order today. So we're setting price controls via executive order. Trump pleaded back in August, Kamala will implement Soviet-style price controls and

So I guess we're keen on Soviet-style price controls now. If you want to have a take on the policy of this, I'd be happy to hear it. For me, though, it's just...

America is supposed to be a constitutional republic with different branches of power. This Congress so far has passed five bills, the lowest in generations. They've done nothing essentially since the Lake and Riley Act in January. Everything else since then has been very modest. It's hard to even say everything else. It's been four things that have been very random niche issues. They've passed nothing. And

This is not how the American government is supposed to work, where the autocrat issues a diktat from on high about what the price of medicine is going to be, traditionally.

Maybe the presidential administration would have a policy paper, have proposed legislation. They'd have an announcement. Maybe they'd have in the White House, have some people from the Hill that are going to be the lead sponsors on it. They would roll it out, right? Like that's how you do things in the country. So, I mean, I think obviously there'd be legal challenges like this to everything else, but...

I don't know what you make of our new, to quote Trump, Soviet-style price control regime. Legislation was passed when Biden was president as part of the big Democratic, you know, Build Back Better or one of those pieces of legislation. I can't remember which one. To authorize the president to negotiate with the drug companies to reduce prices that the government would pay for.

for Medicare, basically, for maybe Medicaid, I suppose. And that's how, when they talk about getting drug prices down, it's never really been, almost never been direct price controls on the private sector. It would be what price the government would pay, and the government's such a major purchaser.

And Biden did negotiate some prices down, and that was touted by Harris in 2024 and so forth. But it was done according to congressional legislation, and it was done according to certain specifications of making clear what the criteria were and procedures and so forth. So as you say, it was a law. I mean, it was a legal way. They had to pay some price. The government has to pay some price. And they got a law allowing them to push prices down. Trump is now just inventing that he's going to

personally, put caps, I guess, price controls on, and also not even at a number, but at equal to the lowest anywhere in the world.

So if Luxembourg has – I'm making this up, but for all I know, they do incidentally have like cost-free drugs for their citizens or for that matter, one of the tiny oil states in the Middle East like the UAE or Qatar or something. What, are we going to have cost-free drugs? I mean, the whole thing is nuts, basically. That is not policy. It's not going to happen. It's not going to happen. We're not going to be paying the same price as whatever the lowest price is somewhere in the world for these drugs, I shouldn't think. And so it's all bullshit. It's going to get struck down or held up in court.

It is a reality show. And also, if I'm not mistaken, Trump repealed Trump

the Biden executive orders that were implementing the negotiated settlements that he had pursued according to law on Trump's first day in office. So it's all nonsense. But you know what? He's getting beat up a little bit. The economy's slowing. He's got this huge tax bill with massive tax cuts for the wealthy. And so his political advisors said, hey, getting drug costs down for the middle class and the working class, that's popular. Just do a fake executive order making it happen.

The tie to the reconciliation bill is really important, right? This is getting out in front of the details are going to be coming out about how they're going to pay for the tax cuts, and it will include health care cuts. So it's like if you have this fig leaf over here that's like, well, but we're cutting drug prices by 80%. Just don't this talking point for people. It is an intentional talking point to offset drugs.

like the reality of the cuts that are likely coming to Medicaid, TBD. We'll see if they can actually pass this bill via the reconciliation bill. Doing the whole like, oh, we're the Republicans thing. I know that's our job. Like we get tired of it. It's noteworthy that the

We're going through a moment where the president is trying to set price controls over prescription drugs, that the president is trying to set the price of the cost of everything. It's a department store via the tariffs that we're taking a free plane from the people that were funding Hamas. All of these things that would go against traditional Republican views.

and that you see essentially nothing, essentially no pushback from the Republicans. The one anti-Republican thing that Trump pushed was potentially maybe raising tax rates on the very highest income bracket. They did get a little pushback from that, so that was in the one area. So it is noteworthy and pathetic, frankly, that all the Republicans are just going to kind of go along with this and pretend like this is conservatism. But

you know, we've been seeing that for so long. The thing to me, that's the most striking. And I think it's related to kind of what you were saying earlier about how the foreign countries want to give Trump some wins. Cause they know that this is the way to deal with him is the way the business community deals with Trump. If there was a democratic president, uh,

that was doing adding 30% tariffs and a 10% tariff across the board and everybody throughout the world and also putting price controls on prescription drugs, like the pharma, the Chamber of Commerce, the team of lobbyists, all of their surrogates that go out on the news, the Wall Street Journal, Ed Board. And there would be a hair on fire reaction to all of this.

You know, you'd get tired of hearing the term communist being thrown around about the Democratic president. The Democratic president's a communist. He's a socialist, doesn't believe in the free market, doesn't believe in the capitalist system. And there'd be an overwhelming response from the business community.

And it is pretty noteworthy that we're not seeing that, that like pharma is just going to take this and, you know, figure and fight it back in court and Wall Street Journal and CBC, right? Like that element of it, I think is noteworthy because we've, we've come to expect the cowardice from the Hill Republicans.

But it's pretty striking that we're also seeing it more broadly from the whatever business community and the free market advocacy community. And it's related because obviously if business leaders all over were going crazy about this, some hill Republicans would say, yeah, they who get huge support from these business leaders.

would be responsive to that. In this respect, the cowardice of the Hill Republicans and the cowardice of the external groups, including but not only business leaders, reinforces each other, right? Neither wants to go first. And I guess the business groups think they'll take care of this behind the scenes, just like they lobbied to get the China tariffs down to a more reasonable level. They'll go to court or they'll... The self-fulfilling spiral of

And abdication and cowardice is very bad, actually, among the elites. You and I have discussed this before, too. I come back. When is the public going to get upset? Well, you know what? The public's not going to get upset if they get no signal from any elites whom they do respect. I don't care what people say about it. Everyone hates all these institutions. They voted for these members of Congress, the senators, they respect, they think business leaders know something about their businesses.

and the economy, if they hear nothing from senators and members of the House, if they hear nothing from the relevant business leaders or trade union leaders for that matter, or civic leaders or public interest group leaders, if they hear nothing or little from them,

They think, oh, I guess maybe it's okay. You know, the people who should be most upset aren't upset, who I'm just, you know, I don't know as much as the head of Pfizer about whether this is a good idea or not. Right? I mean, it is, it's a very dangerous, the spiral of abdication.

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Here's a name that just came into my head. Just want to throw out there. It was a flash in the past. Grover Norquist. Remember him? He used to have the media. And when Obama was president and, you know, the Obamacare proposals, you know, were going around or would be modest compared to what the price controls that Trump just proposed, you know, where there's a tax break.

you know, a new tax regime that would have, you know, modestly increased the corporate tax rate, right? Like these just very small incremental concerns. And Grover Norquist is everywhere. He's organizing meetings, wall-to-wall Fox times. I mean, like casual Americans knew the name Grover Norquist, right?

Is he alive? Is Grover still alive? I don't know. You might see him in McLean at some time. I don't see him, but I think he, I think I read somewhere that he, that he is another just obvious point that we've made already, but Obamacare was a piece of legislation. It was submitted to Congress. It was amended in Congress. It was debated in Congress. There was markup. There were actually huge fights about what would be included and whatnot. That is how it is supposed to work here for all the ones doubts about it and nitpicking and, and,

What Trump has done is, of course, just – I don't even know if it's executive order at this point. It's a tweet, but it allegedly could be translated into an executive order, though it's totally unmanageable, so I'm not sure if it will be. The one thing that's putting pressure on him is that we still seem to believe enough in –

actual legislation that he sort of does have to get authorization to continue the current tax regime to pass the stop taxes and go back up to where they would be if the temporary taxes expire at the end of this year. That still has to be a reconciliation bill, which still we'll see if they obey this rule, sort of has to be paid for

which still therefore means, as Jonathan Cohn explains well in the bulwark, which means actual cuts in Medicaid. So there's still like one tiny, one area, not tiny, one significant area where actual legislations exist.

still seems to get passed. Now, they're also monkeying with those rules, and they're going to try to, I think, not really pay for them, and they're going to try to overrule the parliamentarian and all this kind of stuff. But it's unbelievable that the area of congressional action has been so constrained, right? The total sum of congressional action, as you say, so far was nothing, that the original act on immigration was

enough pressure to get him to withdraw Ed Martin for D.C. attorney, though not, of course, Hegseth or Bondi or Patel or any of those people. And then there's one big piece of legislation that's coming down where they're going to desperately try to make it, come on, you got to give us this one vote. This is the one vote we need and put huge pressure on the Republican senators and members of the House.

I assumed that there was like a 95% chance that they would jam through whatever the reconciliation bill was that they came up with just because they had to, because it's to your point, right? It's like the one thing that they're actually doing. I've downgraded that just a little bit because as you've started to hear from folks, like the tension between the cuts that would be required to make this even plausibly possible

in the ballpark of where you could even imagine to try to sell it to people as not a deficit buster like are very severe and you know you have holly in the new york times today talking about how there shouldn't be any medicaid cuts i think there's 32 republicans on a letter about how you know this bill can't add anything to the deficit now like there's no chance of that like just the just the extension of the tax cuts is going to add four or five trillion and so you

you know, they'll have to come up with some fake math to even make that defensible, but like you got to do something to get it to a place where you can create fake math. Right. And then you have this, the blue state moderates who, you know, never actually show any courage. I don't expect them to kill the bill, but you know, they've got real concerns about the salt deduction. It's interesting. If you're like a upper middle class, New York or California resident, um,

just letting the tax cuts expire would actually help you tax wise because of the salt deduction. So if you're Mike Lawler, like there's a lot of people in your district, like extending the tax cuts actually makes their tax rate higher than letting them expire in a weird way. So I think that there's like some chance that that becomes like a little bit trickier than, than they'd anticipated, but we'll see.

Yeah, no, I agree. I mean, the one big beautiful bill is it's a little like shock and awe, like Doge. It's both, it's effective as opposed to having to win seven or eight different victories or win them in slower motion. But it's also risky because you're putting all the chips on the table. And if it falls apart, as some of the Doge stuff has actually, though it's such huge damage, it's falling apart in the courts more. But if this falls apart in Congress, that will be a very dramatic outcome.

Wouldn't it? I mean, and don't you think Trump, I see why he did this. I think actually he's kind of shrewd and sort of, I don't know. I'm okay with raising taxes a couple of percent on the wealthiest, you know, and maybe carried interest. I mean, he's always had that slight Steve Bannon influenced side.

It's not authentic, but I mean, politically, why are we falling on this sword exactly? No one Trump knows pays taxes anyway, right? Or pays them at 38% or 40%. They pay them at 7% of that. So he figures, what the heck? I can give him this. Somebody said that raising taxes on the very top are creating a super top tax bracket. Yeah, for millions.

It's basically like a professional athlete's tax because the only person that makes $20 million a year in salary is like most of the other people making $20 plus million are doing it in capital gains and doing other ways. Right. I mean, you could, of course, increase that too, but they don't want to even do that. I agree. And then there's the carried interest thing for the hedge fund guys. So-

I agree it's all sort of fake on Trump's part, but it shows a certain political instinct. I wonder if just opening that door rhetorically weakens that Republican ability to just be mindlessly, unbelievably uniformly obstinate in being against any tax hike, any time. We all made fun of him when they all raised their hand on the stage. What year was that? 2015, I guess? Yeah.

I think it was 11. Which campaign was that? 11 when, yeah, maybe it was 11 when they wouldn't raise, no one would ever raise any tax for any reason on any single human being in America yet.

allegedly, except indirectly on some poor people because they would make the pay more in copayments and deductibles and stuff, but no actual tax increase, God forbid. That was a kind of insane version of dogmatism in the service of what? I mean, it's a practical question what the tax rate should be. But there was a certain political sense to that, right? Once you open the door to debate, well, then, I don't know, there's a lot of empirical data that maybe the current tax rate

you know, regime isn't perfect and some rates should go up, maybe some should go down. And I do think Trump in a way has, I don't know, maybe I'm overstating this, has sort of made it a little harder to kind of take that absolutist. We're not even talking about considering, mentioning, acknowledging the remote possibility of any hike in rates anywhere, anytime, you know. Let's go to the E block. Trump's probably most influential advisor suggests that the administration is looking at ending habeas corpus. Let's listen.

Well, the Constitution is clear, and that, of course, is the supreme law of the land, that the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus can be suspended in a time of invasion. So I would say that's an option we're actively looking at. Look, a lot of it depends on whether the courts do the right thing or not.

actively looking at suspending habeas corpus if they get mad at the judges. The Constitution, the supreme law of the land, as Hare Miller referenced, also says that this is a job for Congress if Congress is in session. Barrasso was asked about that on Meet the Press this weekend, sent her from Wyoming, and he refused to say what his opinion would be on this. He was asked three times by Kristen Welker. So, Bill, what do you make of this?

I mean, the fake justification for this is that it's a time of invasion, which it's not. So that should be out of the question, therefore, to suspend habeas corpus. It's been done, I don't know, two times, sort of, in American history. Once by Lincoln, clearly, then approved by Congress at the beginning of the Civil War, and then by Roosevelt, but I think in a limited way in 1941, 42. And that's, I think, that's it, basically. We're not under invasion. We're not at war.

as Steve Miller can say we are, I actually think this increases the chances of the courts throwing out the Alien Enemies Act, which is going to get to the court reasonably soon, maybe. Because that also, the predicate of that, remember, in the actual legislation is, I think, very similar language. Maybe it's a copy from the Constitution about invasion or war that permits us to just detain these people and ship them, in this case, ship them to El Salvador and so forth. So maybe the courts will stand up a little more in this case. And again, for me, though,

He says suspend habeas corpus. That is the key, arguably, I don't know, the single most important, one of the two or three single most important guarantors of civil liberty, of living in a free country where the government can't just snatch you off the street and keep you forever in some dungeon or ship you abroad to some dungeon. You have the right to say no. Your lawyer has a right to show up and say, no, I want to know what the charges are. And you have to justify keeping him there or release him on bail or whatever. The idea that they're going after that

I would have thought that, you know, 40 Republican senators would say, no, no, no. I support President Trump. I support closing the border. I support all this tough stuff. But we cannot talk about suspending habeas corpus. But no, as you say, Senator Barrasso, once upon a time, a relatively normie conventional Republican, he didn't quite want to endorse it. Even he knows like that is really, you know, too far. But he certainly didn't want to criticize it or rule it out. No, that's pathetic, honestly.

Sometimes there's this convention where a journalist asks a Republican, would you support Trump if he does this crazy thing? And they just don't want to give the question the credibility of a response because there's a follow-up story that then comes. It's like, oh, so-and-so senator says that they wouldn't support. And so you kind of teach the candidate to not answer the question. It's like a media training thing. But like,

That's not what was happening here. And there's a direct audio of, again, I think the most influential advisor to the president, the guy that overruled the vice president on the leaked signal chat, Stephen Miller, the person who is instituting the immigration policy, talking about how they're actively considering this as part of the immigration policy. And by the way, they kind of did suspend habeas corpus already, at least for the Venezuelans that they have sent to Secote.

And are in that fucking jail where they have no access to lawyers, no access to family. I mean, I think we're at 58 days or so where since anybody's heard from the people that were sent to El Salvador. So it is a legit question. And the fact that like in the context of that, where the administration has already

in select cases, taking away people's right to do processes and suggesting that they're actively planning to go further. It's more than a legit question. And for somebody like John Barrasso just to be like, well, I don't know. Who knows? Mr. Trump is going to secure the border. Chairman Trump has set a very good rate for the wheat harvest this year. It's pretty astonishing.

Edward Peraza says, and Mr. President Trump has always said he will follow the law. I think that's really wonderful. Comrade Stalin has always said he will follow the Constitution of the Soviet Union. We've got Comrade Bondi over at the Attorney General's office. They'll create a document to say, we'll just type something up here that says that it's legal to take a bribe from the Qataris. It's legal to send Vietnamese immigrants to Libya because we just want to dump them in a war-torn country that will take them

One last thing on the immigration thing, just because this continues to happen. I was looking at this thread from Mark Chiasano, who writes for, he's a freelance writer, writes for New York Mag and others, but was talking, you know, about a case. There are a lot of these like random immigration cases that aren't getting as much attention anymore that are still ongoing with ICE.

The one he writes about where these two brothers in New York who are 19 and 20, they were brought to America by their mother from El Salvador when they were 10 or 11. They speak English. They've committed no crimes. They have had no discipline at school. They have graduated high school.

They go to their standard check-in. You know, they're trying to go through the process, the normal process for getting legal status here. They go in for their check-in and they end up being shackled and detained, like shackled in a very intense way so that they, when they were talking to, I guess, their lawyer or their mother, they were saying that they were still like feeling phantom pains from all the chains that they were in. They're currently in.

in a detention center here in Louisiana. And they said, the lawyer said that one of the ICE guys was talking to them and said, stop thinking about going back to school. Don't worry about any of that stuff. Just put your mind to El Salvador. You're not from here anymore. Now, there were raids here in D.C. at restaurants. I mean, think about it. They're not going after criminals. They're not going after even nonviolent criminals, of course, one could tell or, you know,

people who are problematic, but maybe the charges aren't proven against them or, or people who've been listed as gang members. These are literally people working in restaurants, uh,

in Northwest D.C. I mean, they're probably not a great danger to the community if they're going to the trouble of actually working and the restaurant owners, maybe they have a fake social security number or maybe they don't, sadly. But in any case, they're paying taxes, presumably, and working hard or the restaurant would fire them, you know. I mean, so they're like this case as you were discussing and they're going after them for what?

For what? Who's unhappy that they're working in this restaurant? You know, I mean, that's what's so infuriating. I mean, so much is so infuriating. And I don't, the most infuriating is the most unnerving.

unjust and really harsh treatments and family separations and some of the things we've been reading about. But it's happening all over the country. And obviously, they can't find enough criminals. And they have quotas. And they are really out of control, in my opinion. And again, I mean, God forbid Congress should ever take a look at what they're doing, have the guy testify, have Homan up there. I guess he's a White House employee. Maybe they can't force him up there. But there's Kristi Noem is...

supposed to be in charge of that department. DHS, I think the degree to which DHS is a genuine threat to our securities, I joked three or four weeks ago, I'm sort of rethinking my, you know, like Abolish ICE was like a little bit overstated, but maybe, I don't know, maybe they were onto something. It is terrible, really, you know? I mean, it's hard to imagine, like...

going to work for ICE right now and being able to feel good about that. It's not like police, I mean, police departments do bad things as we've learned increasingly over the last 10 years and there's police brutality and they're bad, but police departments do a lot of good things too. I don't mean to be too harsh. I guess there might be, there are some, I guess some things that ICE does that are necessary. It's becoming increasingly clear to see what they are. And certainly they're now being driven by these quotas to just go after the

basically innocent people. All right. I wanted to get to this Russian propaganda that has Alex Jones tweeted. It has 24 billion views on X. I'm glad we've replatformed him about how Macron and Keir Starmer and MERS from Germany were supposedly doing a big fat bag of cocaine on the flight back from hanging out with Zelensky. But we're out of time. And so this feels more appropriate for the

The Gen Z pod, you know, bringing the expertise of the youth on whether the supposed bag of cocaine was that or a dirty napkin, which is what it obviously was for anybody with eyes. So if you want more on that, tune in to FY pod. Go check it out. Go subscribe over there. And Bill Kristol.

I'll relieve you from having to reveal whether or not you can identify the difference between a bag of cocaine and a dirty napkin. You know, I'm just going to guess that Friedrich Merz can't identify that difference either. Anyway, Bill Crystal, thank you so much. Everybody else, we'll be back here tomorrow for another edition of the Bulwark Podcast, and we'll see you all then. Peace. Roll up to the club In my 1964 Caddy straight Ready to stomp Get a quarter to one

♪♪♪

Come on, let's get it going, only you can keep me at a quarter to three. You know what I need. Well, I'll twist for you, baby, hit a rip for you, baby. Take another shot, get lit for you, baby. It's a quarter to four.

Do we have any more? The Board Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.