Bill Kristol: It Always Comes Back to Trump/Russia

[MUSIC] >> Hello and welcome to the Bullwark Daily. I'm your host Tim Miller. It is Monday, so of course we have Adder at large Bill Crystal. A couple of notes, Bill will be joining us in Dayton for the Springfield fundraiser we're doing. I think we now do have the direct link if you can't make it to Springfield to support the organizations there that are helping the Haitian community. We've had a huge response for tickets, which is great. We've added some new seats. If you ended up on the wait list, there is going to be room. So go to the Bullwark.com/events, come hang out with us in Dayton September 25th. I feel like what do I do in Dayton for a weekend? A ton of Dayton stands replied to that question last week in the comments. You can go read. There's so much to do in Dayton. Danes great, apparently. We'll see. I'll be able to report back. Also, we have Merch. I'm right now in my capitalist wing of Antifa T-Shirt, which I've been wanting for a while. I did not get the early access to the woke Bill Crystal Merch like JVL did, but I don't know how did you feel about the design, Bill? Very limited access to him. Only the most elit if you leak at that one, too. I stayed out of the whole process, so I could have taken the ability. I think it's OK. I don't know what to write off. As Susan said to me in her kind way, it's not going to be the best seller among the Merch Bill. I don't know if that's true. You kind of look like a South American Codillo a little bit in the Merch. I like it. I couldn't be happier. And I think people go get woke Bill Crystal Merch. It's fun. Halloween's coming up. I don't exactly know what the costume is, but you'll come up with something. News. Let's get to news. Just I'm really-- I guess in some ways a bombshell story. And in other ways, a dog bites man's story out of ProPublica this morning, which is the Trump family's close ties to the Russians and close financial ties to the Russians. We have a new data point on that. Russian oligarch Umar Kremlev footed the bill for Donald Trump Jr's second wedding. I was just kind of crazy. I mean, they're robbing people with their crypto coin. You think they could pay for their own wedding? But no, a Russian oligarch paid for it. Six figures rented out a private island, paid for the firework show. Kremlev was the head of the boxing organization. They're a scandal-plagged boxing organization. He's also a close ally of Putin. Only 50 people showed up to the wedding. Remember famously, Donald Trump's senior didn't. I don't know if there's anything related there. Eric wouldn't ask about this. And he has no clue who this person is and has never heard his name, which is pretty strange. It's not only 50 people at the wedding. You think Eric would have met all of them. Kushner was also there. Also noteworthy. I'm Bill. This is like pretty astonishing, no? Yeah, well, as you say, it's both astonishing and routine in the era of Trump just yet another grift, Putin-associated, Russia-associated grift, which is slightly more appalling than all the regular grift, but still. Yeah, and this goes hand-in-hand, of course, with Trump chastising Zelensky for not being nicer to Russia, really. Yeah, and this guy, Kremlin, this was kind of deep in the pro-public destroy shot to those guys doing excellent reporting. I was like, whoa, this isn't an interesting thing to tuck in here. Kremlin 43 is also heavily involved in an organization called Healthy Fatherland, run by his 23-year-old wife's twin sister. The group which promotes healthy eating and youth sports is under Ukrainian sanction for its alleged role in a program of abducting Ukrainian children and relocating them under the guise of rehabilitation. I mean, and this is like one of those things that's both horrifying and deep, right? And it's just like, it's like, oh, healthy, the healthy fatherland organization we want kids to get involved in ice hockey and eat their vegetables, but it is like a cover organization for abducting Ukrainian kids. I hadn't gotten that far in the article. I guess I've seen that. I know, I know. I was so sick and by the whole thing, but that is very, as you say, interesting and revealed. I mean, it's all such a, I guess sometimes it's inclined to say, okay, it's a gift. They're getting rich. They're creepy, corrupt people. But it's not like old-fashioned corruption where people got rich, right? It is all with, so much of it is with dictators and really horrific dictators and with the horrific enterprises, horrific dictators, right? It's not sort of, let's call it innocent corruption where you're just stealing some money from the taxpayers of your own city, state or country, which is kind of what we're used to, right? I mean, or even just kind of like the Trumps powing around with these guys, which was bad enough. It's pretty horrifying, frankly, just for someone that's allegedly involved in the abducting of Ukrainian children to be one of the 50 people at Donald Trump's juniors wedding. I mean, like that itself would be a scandal. He's paying for the wedding. Yeah. You know, it's what he says in the article. It's like the Russians, when they're paid for something, want something on the back end. This largest has not come out of the good of this man's heart to Donald Trump's juniors. It's hard to imagine this guy did some background reading and this guy grew up in rough background, trying like a biker gang in Russia. It's hard to imagine this guy looks at Donald Trump's juniors, the pampered child of Donald Trump's senior who is mentally, not at the top of his game. And this is like, I really just love this guy. I just met this guy a couple years ago and I just think we're gonna be great friends. He's such a good, hey, they want to get something. What do they want to get? Well, I don't know. We have some evidence, as you mentioned earlier, Bill. Jared Kushner, again, who is at the wedding, our chief negotiator in this war, at the wedding funded by the Russian side, this weekend explains what he thinks the state of play is in the Russia, Ukraine, war on an interview. Let's listen to that. - Look, I think right now, from the Ukraine perspective, I mean, President Putin slayed out his line of what he wants to achieve. If Ukraine wanted to withdraw to that line, then obviously we have the rest of the deal set up and put together Ukraine right now. There's not want to do that and obviously our job is the mediators to figure out how can we come up with a creative solution that doesn't violate their desires and that helps them achieve their objective and doesn't the way that we can get Russia to end the conflict in a way that hopefully allows both parties to move forward in their framework that where this doesn't happen again. - If Ukraine would withdraw to the Russian lines, we have a deal ready. We have a great deal. We have a win-win kind of as we say in the business world, as long as Ukraine would withdraw. Why is Ukraine the talk? They're kidnapping the kids. The kid kidnapper is funding Don Gideon's wedding and Jared's like, well, you know, the Ukrainians are being a little demanding here by not just kind of giving Russia their territory. - Well, by withdrawing further, I guess, is what he's saying, right? The Russia would do better for the negotiations than they've done on the battlefield. Now it's all sickening in that whole idiotic, as you say, sort of fake business negotiator, mode of speaking, and tone of voice. And, you know, we're just trying to help out both sides here as if they're equally guilty or innocent. I mean, it's really appalling. It really is. I mean, every time I think, okay, you know, look, they happen to have this much damage as they might have, which is a way true to Ukraine, but Ukraine has been so incredibly resourceful and tough and the Europeans have stepped up some. Every time I think, okay, so maybe that part of the Trump administration isn't as reprehensible as I kind of expected it to be. It turns out they want to be that reprehensible. It's just that Zelensky and the Europeans haven't let them be, you know? And it's a professional. He's not in government, right? He's got God knows what business interests, as you said. That whole thing makes me wonder about, we've discussed this before, about the degree of which the Trump family is at the heart of the grift. And can they afford to just give this over to someone they don't fully trust? Do they trust Vance, Rubio, Hegseth, all these guys? It's fully, fully beyond board. I mean, there's a reason most of the, a lot of authoritarian dictatorships become family enterprises, right? And this is JVL's point. You know, there's some element of it that could feel a little alarming. I mean, JD is pretty mobbed up with the Trump family at this point, but, yeah, I don't. Jared there, just for people who are just on audio only, if I had to bet who in the world is most likely to be a lizard person, you would think that you would be one of my top draft picks. He looks very uncomfortable. Like you're saying, this whole tone is just like this. Oh, hey, we're doing this real estate deal. It's like, that's not what this is. Like this is a different category. Like there's a different clip where he talks about how war can be a no sum. And we're trying to get to a win, win. And it's like, I don't know, his skin looks inverted. The whole thing is very creepy. Trump also spoke out this weekend. Like maybe this is all just a big one today. But he does have a complaint about somebody in the conflict. And as you mentioned, Bill Zolinski. Mr. Zolinski has to do one thing, Trump said. He has to stop knocking out diesel fuel in Russia, let him go after targets, but not diesel fuel, because he's causing a shortage of diesel fuel. He's like a stim there. This isn't done by the Middle East. This is done by what's happening in Russia and Ukraine. For the video, I just will just pull out this chart here. If you can look at the link, if they want. The diesel price chart does go up after Russian paid Ukraine. So it was Russia's fault, not Ukraine's fault for bombing the Russians. And then it goes up more again, right after Trump starts the war in Iran. That's what's happening here. But Trump is now trying to blame the exorbitantly high price of diesel that's really impacting a lot of people on Zolinski's fault for defending himself. And all this sucking up to Putin is happening as Putin is intensifying the attacks on civilians in Ukraine. And, is a lot of reporting about how he's been helping Iran, responsible for eating Iran in various attacks, even in terms of the missile capabilities, and therefore some of the damage, some of the killing of America service members. So it's really, it's grotesque. It really, I mean, yeah, you're right. It's good that you did that. I had not picked sufficiently close attention to this latest outrage. When discounts out, as you say, it's manned by doubt by this man. It's not all outrageous. But this war, the Trump is so proud of that he's were fighting in such a manly way in Iran. We're sucking up to Putin and to China, if I might just, if I might add, yeah, let's go to China next. We're just really quick to put a button on this, right? Again, it was Trump's war of choice in Iran that has caused like the increase in energy prices, like that's what it is in their other factors. Of course, it's a complex global economy, but like that's what happened. It's like, at least if you were going to lie to me, like at least lie by being on the right side, right? To your point, if you wanted, he could blame Russia and China, right? He could say that like, you know, look, we had this thing would have been easy to resolve. We got rid of the Itola day one, but it's like, now the Russians and the Chinese have been helping them, you know, and like, that's a, it's a, it's a great power conflict. I mean, that would also have to benefit at least to be kind of true. I don't know. Like, maybe, you know, you could say, the Iranians would not be able to close the strait if it wasn't for the targeting help and the other resources being provided by Russia and China. Like, you could do that, but that's not what he's doing. He's saying it's the landscape's fault. It's sickening. It's total front. But to your point about China, let's talk about that just for a second, because she's going to be here in what, two weeks, I think, something like that. Yeah, two weeks ago. And Trump has asked about this also in the same, you know, kind of gaggle, where he blamed Lansky for diesel prices. And people were like, hey, we have evidence now, the Wall Street Journal report that China helped with the targeting of an Iranian attack that killed three American service members. And what do you think about that? You know, she's, she's coming to the US. Are you going to confront her about this? And Trump is basically like, well, we both do it. They did the same thing we do. I don't think it's that big of a deal. Like, that's literally what he said about their help in killing three American service members. No, it's unbelievable, really, isn't it? And they'll be sucking up to G in two weeks. He, of course, rolled out the right carpet for Putin. What was that a year ago now already? And broke the, broke the embargo on him. It had been held until then. So, and now he's inviting into the G20. No, I mean, he likes the dictators. Obviously, he's a little bit in awe of them. And so he personally sort of loves the kind of man-to-man dealing with them. That's pretty clear. Oh god. Yeah, I mean, we didn't talk about AI stuff at the end. But I do think that the only coherent story, I guess, is the oligarchy and the corruption, right? Because again, it's like, you can imagine a coherent anti-China story or a China threat story that ties AI, you know, and why we need to do chip restrictions to China's involvement in this Iran war and how it's important that we asserted ourselves in Iran as a way to weaken China. Like, you could imagine that story. Like, they're not, he's not doing that at all. Like, I mean, this is his actions. He's trying to whether it be selling the chips, whether it be not caring that China's helping calling our own troops. You know, this is like always kind of a silly exercise. But like, if this was Obama, I mean, Fox red scare stuff would be in full, full act of mode. I'm like, would have some points or, frankly, you know, I mean, if it's talking about how weak this is and it's just, Trump is, is totally uninterested in challenging China at all. It's a total weakness. Yeah. China's also probably helping Iran to search for this trade and navigating through this, you know. So anyway, it's all, it is kind of unbelievable to see it in the middle of a war where American service members are fighting and some unfortunately sadly dying and unnecessary war he chose. And even then, as pro Putin is ever, as pro G is ever, when they are, they are helping Iran. There's not even a close, not even like a question mark, right? I mean, it's a question mark about exactly how far they're going on some of these missile issues and all this, but there's no question that they're on or on side diplomatically and in many important ways. How you been thinking that you should be doing something to protect yourself from stalkers, scammers and hackers, but you're not sure what, particularly, so we've been discussing all this, advancement in AI. One thing that AI has advanced on quickly is their ability to try to scam you. Well, here's something you can do to protect yourself. Go to www.JoinDeleteMe.com/Bowork and enter code Bowork. You'll get 20% off, my friends, at DeleteMe. In the age of AI, we're all especially vulnerable to scammers using your personal data that's floating around on the internet. Have you ever Googled yourself and found your home address, phone number? You have a family member? Other weird stuff. It's unsettling. But the good news is DeleteMe can help. DeleteMe was named the Top Pick for Data Removal Services by Wirecutter and they do all the hard work for you. Had a wiped your personal information from data broker websites, it's super easy to sign up as somebody who has a very active online presence. It's obviously something that I'm concerned about, talking about it before. I got targeted with one of these email spam bots where they try to spam you with emails so you don't notice that they stole your login to a website. On top of that, AI stuff is creepy. I was recommended this AI text product. I tried it out and then started texting these shuttles. You shouldn't know this. Unsubscribe. DeleteMe. So to speak. DeleteMe makes it very easy. They do the updates for you. Easy to sign up. I don't like things that require a lot of paperwork. Go for it. Take control of your data and keep your private life private by signing up for DeleteMe. Now at a special discount for our listeners, get 20% off your DeleteMe plan and you go to joindeleteMe.com/Bullwork and use promo code Bullwork at checkout. The only way to get 20% off is to go to www.JoinDeleteMe.com/Bullwork and enter code Bullwork at checkout. That's www.JoinDeleteMe.com/BullworkCodeBullwork. The other thing in the war that we've seen, which I was a little bit on Friday, is continued expansion to the regional element of the hoodies attacking Saudi. So he has shut down at least a little while, the pipeline, which is impacting gas prices further. The potential level of risk there is that the hoodies also potentially could shut down like the other waterway with which oil gets out of the golf, I don't know whether you have thoughts on that. Yeah, remember Hexeth? That was one of our first little military engagements that Hexeth was pounding his chest about. We spent a couple of several billion dollars of extremely expensive weapons to fire at various hoody little speedboats or something and we had demolished them. They were finished. They were done. This was just another wonderful exercise for American power. The degree to which Hexeth damaged the military and wasted resources that lied to us of course. But I've been alarmed all along about God knows about what Trump and Hexeth would do in foreign policy and national security policy. But to the military itself, I'm so curious, you follow these people a little more than I do. I don't have the summit for it. Are the Trump apologists, the acquiescers, the sort of sophisticated defenders of the foreign policy? They wouldn't do quite this way. But he's intentionally going the right way. Are they still pretending this war in Iran? It's kind of okay. We just have to stick in there and tighten the screws some more. There are basically two groups happening. There's one group that is now kind of talking about how the Iran war has maybe been the one misstep, but everything else is going great and people need to just kind of get on board. And this was the vice president's little stated case at the convention, quote-unquote convention. The like T-Syns of the world, like what I'm seeing now, a lot is kind of like, well, the conventional wisdom, you know, everybody is jumping on board of this is already lost, but like that's not really true. You know, like the ball is still in the air here and if we squeeze Iran more, you know, the momentum could change on this. So it's not like chest thumping more, but it's kind of like the critique of the critics, right? And Trump's already playing the ground board now. It's like after the midterms maybe escalate to finish. And I think that's probably where T-Syn and those guys will be. I don't know if Trump will have the stomach for it, but I think that they'll be a big push after the midterms for him to try to escalate to get a better outcome. And I need to say I'm not that optimistic about that. You brought up the signal. I just wanted to circle back to that because I had kind of forgotten that that was about the Houthis bombing. You know, like the leaked signal chats to Jeffrey Goldberg, you know, with the emojis, fist pounding, American flag, fire emoji. What's what we're sending around to each other, Secretary of War and the National Security Advisor at the time. I'd just this kind of chest thumping, back patting. Meanwhile, it's like getting leaked to a mainstream journalist and achieved nothing, right? I achieved nothing. Now here we are a year and a half later and the Houthis are doing more damage, you know, at a time when we're our military is more exposed. I just think it is important to kind of pin that all together as like that's also a failed operation actually. The whatever it was that they were trying to achieve in Yemen didn't work. Right. So add it to the list. The Houthis who are an ally of Iran, maybe really a proxie. Most of Iran are stronger and Iran is stronger. So really that's that's It's bad for the world, bad for us, but a great victory for Trump and Hexeth and those guys, you know? Unreal. Well, this is trickling down to the campaigns, I want to do some Senate race updates. Over the weekend, I did a video over in the board, takes me looking at Alaska and Texas, if you want to check that out. But I wanted to save the Kansas State Fair debate for you, in part because Bill Crystal called me in March, February, and it's like, are you monitoring the Kansas Senate race? It's like, I have to admit, I'm not. So you were ahead of me on the Kansas Senate races, potentially being in play. And so I know you've been monitoring it. And so I wanted to grab a couple of videos at the Kansas State Fair. So on the one hand, it's a state fair, so it's, you know, it's the masses in Kansas. So you would think that that would be, you know, a decent representation. It was in Johnson County, which is a more the blue part of the state. So that's not where they, when you hear the crowd reaction here, but, you know, it's not the hoidy, toidy crowd out there at the state fair, if you look at it. And there was a debate between Adam Hamilton and Roger Marshall and boy, I mean, it was a thumping. And I want to play a couple of the clips, but the first one, I think that Hamilton has given what I've seen so far is the sharpest attack on his opponent over the war and its impacts. Let's watch some of that. Eisenhower would have never supported this war. Never supported this war. Ronald Reagan did not do this. Neither of the bushes did this. If you love $6 a gallon diesel fuel, you can thank Roger Marshall. He supported this. He told us to tighten our belts because this was the cost of being safe in America. We were supposed to be out of this war after four weeks, maybe six weeks, we're six months in, we still can't figure out how to get out and the cost of everything has gone up as a result. Talk to farmers, phosphate, double of price. This is costing all of us at the grocery store. We should not be in the war. This man's support of the war. I want to get us out of the war. Pretty blunt. Well said. Yeah. For a pastor, he's a pretty, he's willing to be a little bit aggressive. That was good. Yeah, he is. And I think there was a paltola hit on this, obviously in the Alaska race, she was focusing, she can bring everything back to fish, sometimes I'm not even following. So I got the fishermen, their costs and that heating oil costs coming in Alaska. That's going to be more expensive as you get to the winter. But I don't know. I feel like the tide is turning a little bit. I think because of the gas prices, sometimes Democrats, we did a retrospective to 94 last week. Democrats, I think, do get a little bit nervous about being seen as the anti-war, anti-military party. The less things are going really bad, right? Like if you look back to what the year I did, which was '06, Democrats really struggled in '04 to make the case against the Iraq war, it was just a little bit of a wishy-washing that's been biosex. It was kind of a more blunt. I kind of felt that way in a micro this summer, where there's a little bit where the gas prices kind of came back down and it was just like this was happening over there and Democrats were critiquing it. But it was a little bit of, oh, I don't want to say anything that makes it seem like I'm undermining the military or I don't want to make funding for this, the key fight of the fall we've talked about. And I do think that with this recent spike in gas prices, the tide is turning on that. We've seen some pretty aggressive messaging from the Democrats on this. And the reason the Democrats in '04 were nervous about it is that they voted for it. I mean, Kerry in Edward said, Kerry famously had been on what? I voted for it. But I voted against it. I voted against it. I voted for it. I mean, he was not in a good position to reaffirm that he gave this against Bush. And they took advantage of him really the other way, I'd say, Kerry's weak and decisive and Bush is, whereas here, this is the price they're paying for Trump going alone, no congressional authorization or support. And the Democrats, too, their credit, did force those war power votes. I'm not even sure if leadership was really for that, but I think Murphy and some of the others just said, we've got to do this, Warner, I think it was good on this. And Tim Cain, and they forced those, which allows Hamilton to say now, when he's debating Marshall, you voted 10 times for this war. It's absolutely correct. You know? Absolutely correct. Okay. I think this is interesting also, because Warren Kansas, you noticed at the beginning of that clip, Hamilton's doing his best, right, to try to talk to Republicans. Even the Bushes didn't get into a war that's stupid, you know, which is okay, it's a good effort. But so this is one area where I think it shows you how low Trump standing is and why it's important where the Bush line is, because Hamilton and other parts of the debate really is working hard to kind of appeal to Republican voters. But here, I think you show how Trump is a little bit of an anchor. He talks about the manner in which Marshall has been treating Trump as Senator. Here's the problem. Senators are elected by the people to be their champion in Washington, D.C., not hired by the White House to be their spokesperson to the people in the state. Currently, our sitting Senator has a very hard time speaking up to the President. Has a very difficult time saying, Mr. President, this is corrupt. This is not okay. I didn't hear it after Wednesday. In fact, I think you were there for the speech. Didn't hear it that night, but we have got to have somebody who's willing to do what the Senator is supposed to do, and that is speak up against power to be a check on executive power. Roger Marshall struggles to do that. It's an interesting line in Kansas. I like the spokesperson for the President-Light. It kind of makes him weak, and it is also correct, right? And it's like, even if you're a party guy, you're not supposed to be spinning for him. Yeah. I think that's really, well said. I had this formulation, it's a rubber stamp congress instead of being a congress to check the President, but that's like a national message, you know, from my point of view. But actually, it's much more effective, of course, to make it personal and say spokesman for the President to the people of Kansas, as opposed to speaking for the people of Kansas to the President. The only thing I say about just that race and the others, I mean, I do think the reason I got interested in it early on was someone in Kansas called me and said, "The tariffs, you guys back east don't understand what they're doing here." A lot of other companies are going to play with Marshall talking about tariffs. Let's just go right into that. Do you think the President's terror policies have worked and are you concerned about long-term ramifications to America's global standing and agriculture? Yeah, Dave. Thank you. And maybe someone can give us a case-date update here in a second, great. But look, look, these tariffs were meant to be manufacturing jobs home and to prove our exports. And guess what? It's working. Let me give you an example. Boom. It's not happy. He goes on to a long example about some manufacturing plant that's been built in Kansas, but it's like, you can hear in the response, like the tariffs, it's kind of like, I started about this with Biden on inflation, when JVL was talking about why it wasn't a big video. And I was like, it is. It's annoying to everybody, right? Inflation, even if it wasn't mass unemployment recession, everybody noticed it all the time. And I think that that is happening, right, that the tariffs particularly in place, I think it's sort of people are very in tune to commodity prices and things like this, you see, it's in across the board either at minimum annoyance or for some people at maximum, like real hardship. And then Marshall saying, well, on the other side of this, there were the 10 jobs, and the got built at this plant that may have ran out of anything to do with it, but it's not a compelling counter. You know, right. And also, I think the Chinese retaliation cost them and soybeans and all this. So now I suppose that maybe Xi will do a favor for his buddy Trump and give some fake, you know, concession in two weeks, and they'll, they'll, they'll, they'll tout that. This is why I do think those planes, the planes, I think we're calling it the planes. I think Kansas and Nebraska were Osborne loss by only eight points last time. I don't know. Can't you write eight points better than they did? Uh, in the last time your emphasis and I don't think it's as an independent, I don't even some of these other South Dakota. I really wonder what those states could be very interesting, I think. I think Democrats have been, you know, thwarted or disappointed so many times in these, in these center races and red states, but, you know, this could be a, and these red states are a little different from the southern red states where they do tend to fall short. Yeah. They're not fully evangelical voters mostly. They're fair number in Iowa, but, but not many, these are more your kind of old fashioned if I can say conservative Republicans, you know, right? You know, what a method of, you know, they don't like big government and they like, it's very, very smart of Hamilton. Did you think to, to appeals Eisenhower, so is there from Kansas? Am I making this up? Isn't he? Yeah. Eisenhower. No, I was not from Kansas. Yeah. I think so. Eisenhower Bush. I mean, I feel like that would resonate out there in a way that maybe not so much. And, I don't know, Louisiana or Mississippi or South Carolina or in these seven states where Democrats are trying to, you know, to throw a Hail Mary. You've never been to the Dwight D. Eisenhower presidential library in Abelene? Abelene Kansas. I thought I had that. Yeah. I've never been. No, that is, I will look at that. I have. It's one of the four places that you can stop between Denver and St. Louis on your drive, which I made that drive along I-70 a lot of times as a child. And so I think I've been to the Dwight D. Eisenhower presidential library more than any other library. Well, you're in touch with the spirit of Eisenhower too. Yeah. I think of all the bullwork people I regard you as the Eisenhower representative, you know? But I think I'll take that as high praise. I might be a little high on my own supply and Hamilton, I like a lot is doing all the right things, I think, as a candidate, I just think him in Peltola, then the strongest candidates by kind of a wide margin, really, of the potential pickups I've made Cooper, I guess. I don't mean to impure and rocky. and John Ossoff who are going doing so well that they're not even spending money in those states. Of the other pickups, I think that the halos has been so good. There's just something about that race that I wouldn't be surprised if he does better than Turk, actually. I think that Kansas and Iowa, as you've mentioned a couple times, we're darn close in the presidential number. It was like this is huge gap. People think about Iowa more of a swing state because Democrats have won there at the presidential level, but they were really close. There's something psychological, I think, for Republicans, where it's hard to go into the booth and vote for sand and Turk. It was just my focus group of five former Republican friends I have in Iowa when I was there for the Pete interview. I went around the table and it was like four sand, one lane, and then it was an inverse on the other one. There's something about a governor's race and sand is running even notably more moderate, I think, than Turk. It's kind of an easier vote. I'm not sure. I think that Iowa's gotten all the attention, but I think Kansas could certainly end up that Democrats could do better there than some of these other states. We will see. You know Marshall's in trouble when at the beginning of the answer, he's like, "Can we get an update on the K-State football game?" I'm like, "Somebody saved me. Can we hold the score?" Anyway, Ohio is another race that we've given a little bit of short trip to. You said you wanted to talk about Sheridan's running a good campaign, there too. Frankly, the Democrats' rooting at the Senate level has been really good, which is funny, given all the consternation about a couple candidates. What were your thoughts about the Ohio Senate race? Just that the Republican candidate who said it seems to have various scandals popping up. I thought it was just some obscure aid when I saw the headline, aid of who stood, resigned, submitted, and neo-Nazi. You know, revelations about his neo-Nazi activities online. Yeah. And then it turns out he's his political director. He was not like, I thought he was like some, you know, kid who was driving one of the staff around or something like that. And so, yeah, that's really wonderful that the Ohio Republican Party's penetrated the top by a bunch of people who dressed up in Nazi regalia and say in post-anti-Semitic things online. It was perfect, you know. It was a really good book about this. It's going to come to me about the people that dressed up in Confederate regalia and like they go and re-enact. There's like these re-enactments. I have to say, I'd never heard of the Nazi re-enactment until the story where people get dressed up in the Nazi uniforms and go around in a field somewhere and pretend like they're the Germans at World War II. And that's pretty eye-gun-a-matchable really. It's very sick. This guy that's doing that as a political director. I don't know what more information, the, you know, whatever, Republican Jewish committee type folks need to start to get really alarmed here. And for whatever, like some people have legitimate criticisms of Abdul, you know, and his positions on Israel, etc. But like, I just feel like there's this imbalance and focus on where the threat is coming from when you have the political director for Ohio Senate candidate, literally dressing up in Nazi regalia. Yeah. So anyway, I think that race is, I mean, it's always, it was already in play and I think Brown's actually ahead and more polls than not. But so I think that one's probably closer to the top of the list, the conventional list of Democratic possible pickups and Brown obviously is a very experienced and successful politician in Ohio. But yeah, I just feel like a lot of those states are breaking more or less. I mean, you and I discussed this last week. There are these underlying factors. There's national waves. That's a very big deal in a wave election. The wave lifts everyone up some. And then there are these state, these individualized things that happen in different states and in different campaigns, right? In '06, we talked about the Foley scandal near the end and that had national effect. Most of these have a statewide effect, obviously, Hamilton, you know, the fact that Marshall's such a buffoon or the fact that instead has all these problems that is one of his main backers is the Epstein guy and all this kind of stuff. But it also can add up a little bit nationally, I think voters vaguely look up and sort of, well, what's up with us for that Republican party? Anyway, you know, it's like Trump's at 37% and then these other guys were supposed to be a little better than Trump because that, you know, that's why you're justifying voting for them. They have all these, and then the Marshall's history is a doctor suing patients out whom, whom it sounds like he did a crummy job and then they come back. That is such a crazy story. They have to have a second surgery. I don't even let you get into it. It's some kind of stomach turning, but they have to have a second surgery and then he soothes them to make them pay more for the second one. I mean, it's the corruption thing isn't, and the adjacency to fascism thing isn't limited to Trump. I guess what I'm saying, or the Trump family, or people serving at high, at high parts of the Trump administration. It seems to permeate through the party. Obviously, we have Max Miller, our friend Max Miller, they're at Ohio, and you know, it's just a lot of that kind of stuff. Someone else Mike Johnson's asked about this week. I can't even keep talking. Yeah, he's asked about Brandon Herrera. I thought about playing it. But anyway, but he's another candidate. Yeah. I just like the party is full. We covered him on the trio. It's really more trio-appropriate. It's easy to say. But let's just say a Republican candidate said some very disgusting things about women when he was a podcaster. And Mike Johnson's asked about this by Jake Taperon, CNN. And he's just like, well, that was when he was, it was when he was a podcaster that he was doing this disgusting misogynistic stuff like two minutes ago. Not like it all when he was a kid. It was his college podcast. But it was like, oh, yeah, he left the podcast to run like that was his previous job. Now, really disgusting stuff that we should get into it. And also come to the district that is a Republican district now that's like an incumbent who left something or it's at least a competitive district. It's not like, yeah, sometimes you get these candidates to a total lunatic's obviously in throwaway seats where you're down 30. And the party doesn't care. And someone runs and gets 2,632 votes in a primary against someone else who gets 2,248 votes. And it's just doesn't, you can't really make the part that stick on the party. But this is a guy they're backing. Mike Johnson, the speaker of the house would not walk away. Mr. Christian, if I could just say, would not walk away from this guy with these repulsive statements that were like what two years ago. I mean, they were not talking about, yes, you say. Yeah, no, this is the district Tony Gonzalez was the one that had held the seat. And he had his scandal of his own, which was he had the affair with staffer than killed herself. This is one of those seats where the redistricting might end up being a dummy manor. Like, they felt like it was going to be a safe seat, but it's a lot of it's a big part of the Hispanic community on the border. Trump, the bottom has fallen out among Trump's numbers. There are Kati Padea Stout is the Democratic candidate. She's an attorney in San Antonio. And so that's definitely a winnable race against rarer. But yeah, no, they're staying behind all these guys. I don't want to move over the Roger Marshall story like where when he was a doctor, this is like rural health care, like this is such a big issue. And kids like poor people don't have access, you know, that's not like they have the big hospital systems, you know, if you're out there in Western Kansas, as part of the Kansas, you know, that I'd have to drive across to get from Colorado to to Bica or whatever, Kansas City, like out in Western Kansas, you don't have access to the same type of care. So you have a local doctor like Roger Marshall, who would do, you know, OBGYN. So he was doing, you know, C sections are hysterectomy, things with the nature. And and if they couldn't pay, he would send a bounty hunters after that. Like the lawyers would send it for bills. Like in some of these cases, the bills are like a hundred bucks or something. It's like a 101 bucks. You know, there was another case where a woman said that she offered to pay on a payment plan, but they said no. And they sent these people to jail. They did debtors prison, you know, and it wasn't like, oh, they went to find them, and they also had a warrant out for their rest for, you know, whatever method you like. That's not what it was. It was like they, they just didn't, they didn't pay and they didn't show up to court for their debt. And so they put them in jail. And there was one story in the New York Times story, where it was, it was an elderly couple, and it was like, it was Easter. They're having an Easter egg hunt, like the cops show up at their house over the over medical debt to Roger Marshall. It's kind of wants to be the senator, or he's the senator. And it's just compared to a pastor. He's completely sick. I lost track where we were that we got really kind of just once we start rambling about all of the terrible Republican candidates. There's just, there's no ending to it. I remember when I was going to say Confederates in the attic, Tony Horowitz. He's a good guy. I was a really fun book. Yeah. About Confederate reenactments. I read that during COVID. AI. Well, more on this later this week, it's really was the big story of the weekend, which is just kind of the fears about the worst case outcomes from AI really kind of broke narrative containment over the weekend because of a couple stories. There was Jacob Cox. And I think we mentioned this last week is a 27 year old researcher that worked for both anthropic and open AI, open at first and anthropic. He said he quit. He was doing pre-training research on the AI. He said these both these companies are racing to self-improving superintelligence that gambles with our lives. So he quit and kind of tried to put up this warning flare. The head of anthropic, then Dario Amade, put out a letter, which I was about pacing the frontier of these Silicon Valley terms. Make me roll my eyes. I'm happy I moved out of the bay. But when he's talking about kind of like the outer edge of AI research, you may we should slow that part down a little bit. He proposed a three point proposal independent watch dogs inside the AI labs, industry-wide speed limits and coordination with other countries, eventually China. Altman and Elon Musk agreed with his statement which is kind of interesting since they're both well at least Altman's position was more reckless and aggressive. Elon is erratic on this as he is on everything. Trump then gets asked about this. He's going full laissez-faire. Nothing to worry about. I'm going to be dead by the time the killer robots come so Trump doesn't care. Trump just won Once he's got to keep building, it's the only part of the economy that's going well. Besides private prisons, New York Times, over the weekend, talks about how Washington is slumber as these tech companies talk about these fears. Like I said, later in the week, we'll get into more of the technical side about what the fears are. But I'm wondering your thoughts on kind of the politics of all of it. I also need to educate myself much more on the sort of actual, substance aside, technical side, but I mean, I've talked now personally, even talked to enough people who are in and around that world. It's real. I mean, it's a real, these people are not being hysterical. Now whether whatever the motives of Altman or Amadei in terms of trying to, you know, calm people down and it's pretty vague what he wants to do, but I think it has escaped confinement. And I think the politics of it, there's a poll out from University of Massachusetts. Emerson, I think this morning, that has approval, disapproval of Trump on AI. It's like 2357. In data centers, it's like unbelievably 70 to 20 or something like, do you want one built in your local community? And that's just the data centers. That was really an electricity bill, water supply, maybe jobs kind of issue. It wasn't this stuff, right? And Trump is indifferent to it. So I think Democrats will, and should say this, we need serious responsible governance. Government has to be part of the solution. Government regulates every other thing that's dangerous, less than the dangers of all kinds of technologies, and the Trump administration is doing nothing and then let Trump explain how complicated it all is and how difficult it is. I mean, there is, when once said, the actual substance of it is going to be very difficult. You know, we do need China's doing it and if we stop China, it doesn't stop. I compare it in the newsletter with nuclear weapons in 1945 from '45 to, I don't know, the early '60s, I guess I would say, we managed to both regulate nuclear weapons, regulate nuclear waste mostly, stop the spread of nuclear weapons, make it all a livable, people at the time thought. I mean, think of the movie. You know, it was the end of the world, it could have been the end of the world, and we made it kind of a livable thing for the next decades, which is not nothing incidentally, the achievement of that generation of Truman and Eisenhower, the aforementioned Eisenhower and so forth. Fullying that office would be hard in the best of times, we do not have obviously an administration that's at all up to it. And I, you know, I'm not sure we have a political system right now that's up to it. So it's a huge challenge. It really is a big challenge. I mean, even if they're wrong about the capabilities, right, it's kind of like, okay, well, I know there are a lot of other risks associated with AI, and we're going to say it's 10%, or that when this thing, it's okay. Well, that's a 10% chance that, you know, whatever AI swarms, you know, get into biological weapons. It's like, well, it's kind of how, I always feel, it's hard sometimes to talk about these tail risks things, you know, because I saw this guy, this is what if you'd, I hate talking about how, oh, why should I be alarmist about this, because you guys were all alarmist about democracy and alarmist about climate and alarmist, and I'm like, all these things are getting worse for starters. And it's like, sure, like the point I kept making about Trump 2.0 is like the worst case scenario might only be 2% that he tries to become a dictator. Like that's too high. Or like we never had a 2% risk that one of the two major party candidates wanted to become a dictator in our lifetimes until now. And so 10% is too high. I don't, my thing on the, on the Democrats on the politics of this thing that I worry about is if Trump is going to go full laissez-faire, whatever, he's going to have a ton of money behind him, already does have a ton of money behind him. Like the VC guys and Dresons of the world and the David Ball sex, like all these guys, like they, they, they have a ton of money on the line. And they're putting huge amounts on behalf of Republican candidates. We're already seeing this, right. So if the Democrats become critics, that could incentivize them to want to give more money. And so what I worry about is the Democrats get in the sour spot where they like, they don't take the political advantage of being hard critics, but they assume the political risk, you know, right? Where the insiders really know that the Democrats are going to be less friendly to them on regulation, that the public gets hard for them to, you know, to tell, like the difference between the parties. And so I do think that if the Democrats, unless I think the right political move are going to go hard against AI and the AI tech oligarchs in particular, like they should do it ostentatiously. I agree. I very much agree with that. I agree with that. Yeah. And I don't know enough to know exactly how they should formulate it because it's, of course, the million AI is not going anywhere. And it's a million things. It's an act of stopping. The kinds of things that they're talking about, and they are examples. And nowadays, 3,800 words, as they did, are horrifying, you know, possible making bioweapons basically stop, you know, the work on the stuff that is dangerous. I mean, I don't know how you have to put that in a more sophisticated way and a more compelling way and so forth. But it has to be a pause or a stop there. Do you think it can't just be, you know, we want a little more oversight of all this? It has stopped punishment. I don't know. Stop for now, you know, doing this stuff. And look, and then we can go just like a nuclear stuff. You can go back and look at it. You've got to get a control of what's happening here. My eyebrows raised at one element of the Bernie plan. And he's like supporting a full pause, which I don't, you know, I think that's complicated. There's one little element tucked in there, which was, I don't have it right in front of me, but it was like a 20 year prison sentence for AI developers that do X, Y, and C, right? And I kind of do like that, which is like, these guys like, you know, without going into the details, like this kind of AI bot swarm, I talked about, you know, a while ago on the show. Like, if those were humans, like somebody would be arrested, right? You went into another company, obviously, if it was a physical break in, there'd be an arrest. But even before, if it was, you know, digital, like there are laws that govern all this. And just because it's not a human that broke the law, like, like these companies need to be responsible for their bots. And if you can't control them, then we're going to hold you responsible in criminal court, not just in civil court. And I, I don't know. There was something about that. That's just one idea that like felt very tangible for people that, you know, even if they don't understand exactly what's happening with the swarms, it's like, okay, I like this, right? This is something that I can get. Like, if these guys get out of control, we're going to hold them accountable, kind of like the laws that hold the parents accountable for the 13-year-olds, you know? Well, companies are responsible for their machines if they go crazy. I mean, it's not, yeah. It can be, it can be criminally, you know, the person who was in charge, who was negligent. Now, I think that's a very good idea. And I would say on the pause, which I think all sophisticated people were all, come on. That's not a real solution. And, you know, that's just a blunt instrument. I don't know. I don't know enough about this, so I'm going to hazard this opinion without the ability of asking for the right to modify my opinion a little bit later, but I don't know. I would not vote against the pause for two or three or four months on all that kind of stuff. Now, how you define that that kind of stuff is a little, is honest, but, but just is trying to make such huge advances in three or four months that we won't be able to catch up. I kind of doubt it. So, I mean, when you get this level of genuine fear, I think, from people who know a heck of a lot, you should stop it. As we would, incidentally, stop something else that was even something that was beneficial to us. So, if we were discussing diseases, we would stop, you know, the production of it, right, for a while. So, I'm sort of-- Sure. Well, here's the other, the China part. Here's the other thing. We weren't selling them chips. Well, we weren't selling them. There were certain types of chips. We weren't selling them until the Trump administration for the, because of this reason. Right. There were unknown, there are no unknown. This is what I'm going to say. And I was like, this is too, the risk is too high. And so, some of this was about the competition with China, but some of it was about the risk, right? And that was another tangible thing that I think Democrats could offer, you know, in addition to the criminal penalties is saying, no, I'm going to go back to what the rules were under Biden. And this is a good moment to do this with G coming to Vizzo, which is like, let's, again, we're going to put a ban on these exports. And if NVIDIA and, you know, Jensen, these guys want to complain and, okay, like, you know, sorry, like whatever, you know, you guys don't get, like, free laissez-faire economy on this stuff. And I think it's a good way also to highlight the correct kind of cowardice of Trump in the face of a G. So that's another tangible thing. Totally agree to you on that. They should make a fuss of this in the G. Vizzo, this is mostly a 2028 kind of issue. I mean, this is something that there are only two months left in the campaign. And most of it's going to happen anyway with, despite whatever the discourse is on AI. But yeah, there's, I mean, I just think this thing is now big enough, though, that people will, they don't want us to look pathetic if they don't have anything to say. So they need to quickly work out a few things, like you were saying, that are clear, defensible, sound policies. And yeah, taking advantage of G. Vizzo certainly would be one thing. We've got listeners who know more about this stuff than me. So email, if there's anything that I said stupid, email bullock podcast to the bullock.com. I like, I like hearing from smart listeners on topics where they know more than I do. Final topic. Mitch McConnell might be, who knows, supposedly, that there's pressure in the House oversight, Jamie Comer has said, I want to see McConnell back today. I'm unclear what his purview is there, but drama inside the tent. Have you heard anything? Are there any rumblings in McLean about whether Mitch McConnell is with us? Whether there'll be a weekend, Bernie's in the Senate. Do you have any expectations about Mitch McConnell? I picked up nothing here in McLean or it's kind of crazy that we've heard nothing, right? Yeah. That in itself is crazy. Yeah. Yeah. Voice, I just speak for over two months, Mitch, but no, also just saying, hey, here's the latest. Right. You know, I mean, he is a senator. He has people that he represents that the vote and they're like, the people of Kentucky don't get to know like, it's mentally fine, but his voice, you know, is in a coma. I don't know. Who the hell knows? Like, we haven't heard from him in months. Right. So who knows? Today could be the day. We'll keep an eye on it. Yeah. Yeah. Our Republican Senator work, you know, it's either either right from Marshall Types or sadly, Mitch McConnell Types who are not well, you know, I might send Brandon to camp outside this house, just kind of, you can get any signs of life. All right. That's Bill Crystal. Appreciate him. We've got it easy for you tomorrow, so look forward to that. Again, the board.com/events, come hang out with us in Dayton or Columbia, Charlotte and Atlanta. Hope to see you all there. Bill will be in Atlanta and Dayton. And everybody else will see you back here tomorrow. Peace. [MUSIC PLAYING] ♪ I was here in the world, the world that you gave me time ♪ ♪ You can see it, you're running ♪ ♪ It's like I'm gonna bid on a street ♪ ♪ I've been here when we thought it was gonna take it ♪ ♪ And I've been here when we thought it was gonna take it ♪ ♪ I've been here when we thought it was gonna take it ♪ The Bullwork Daily is brought to you thanks for the work of lead producer Katie Cooper, associate producer Anzali Skipper, and with video editing by Dante DeCicco and audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.