Andrew Egger: Donald, You’re Rattled

Tim Miller (0:12)

Hello, and welcome to The Bulwark Daily. I'm your host, Tim Miller. It is Monday. It is Yom Kippur. So Bill Kristol is off. We have his younger, handsomer Christian Gentile replacement on the Morning Shots newsletter in this morning.

Andrew Egger (0:27)

The great replacement.

Tim Miller (0:28)

It's happening all over. Also, quasi-White House correspondent, but most importantly, author of the Morning Shots newsletter, it's Andrew Egger. What's up, buddy?

Andrew Egger (0:37)

Hey, Tim. I'm doing well. How are you?

Tim Miller (0:40)

I'm doing pretty good. I'm gonna talk about my weekend on tomorrow's podcast. So we're doing as good as we can.

Andrew Egger (0:46)

Something about the Chiefs playing overtime game on Sunday night football into Yom Kippur, where I'm the Bill Kristol replacement and getting morning shots by myself coming on the pod with you.

It's a lot. It's a lot. It is definitely a Monday.

Tim Miller (1:00)

Okay, here we go. Let's get into news of war and peace in the state and the economy. We've got so much to talk about today.

I was mostly struck by the spin coming out of the White House this weekend. I feel like there's been a little bit of a shift as we get into the home stretch here of the midterms about how to handle the rising prices, particularly at the pump. Kevin Hassett is the gift that keeps on giving, the White House economic advisor. He was on Fox. You wouldn't think that you'd struggle with your talking points on Fox with Peter Ducey. But I think it shows you how dire of straits they're in that Hassett couldn't handle that. Let's watch him and Peter together.

SPEAKER_3 (1:40)

Prices down like a rocket ship in reverse. When?

Well, one of the things you've seen, first of all, is that how, I guess, out of control the Iranians and now the Houthis are. Again, this whole thing started because the Iranians told us, like, we don't have to talk to you anymore because we're two weeks from having a nuclear weapon. You see that they're shooting ships like crazy in the straits and everything, the president had to act.

Tim Miller (2:08)

We don't play Trump's voice on here, but the lead in was Peter playing Trump over the weekend talking about how, you know, we have to pay a little bit higher prices because what we're doing with Iran, it's totally worth it. But as soon as we resolve this, they're going to go down like a rocket ship. He also bleed over the weekend gas prices were higher under Biden than under Trump, all caps. So we're almost all other prices. And Hassan's going, what are we going to do with these crazy Iranians, the crazy Houthis? What are we going to do?

How do you feel that's going to land?

Andrew Egger (2:36)

I think that first and foremost, we need to revisit this image of a rocket ship in reverse. Typically, a rocket ship that is like pointing downward is not something that anybody actually wants. It's not going to go well for anyone. But I do think that, I do think that...

Tim Miller (2:49)

Like Apollo 13 vibe.

Andrew Egger (2:51)

Yeah, exactly. Or one of one of Elon's sort of like misfires, right? We have seen so much hopium for so long among these guys that like some way somehow, Donald Trump is going to land this plane of the Iran war such that even if prices have not recovered, at the very least, they'll be able to spike the football on that. They'll be able to say, mission accomplished, and we're heading in the right direction, and you just need to have a little bit more patience until we get back on the economic trajectory we were on before, which was not that good of an economic trajectory either, by the way. But that is the argument they have wanted to make, and they've been dying to make for months and months. I think what we are seeing right now is that they are finally waking up to the fact that they are out of time. There's no more room for this to happen. In fact, the conflict is moving the opposite direction, right? I mean, the conflict is metastasizing, getting worse. The supply shock, the energy shock with the Red Sea now also being a hot combat zone that the president is trying to figure out whether or not to get involved with. You know, no arrows are pointing in the right direction. No arrows seem likely to be pointing in the right direction ahead of the midterms. And so they're just kind of stuck.

Instead of getting this pivot that they have desperately wanted, that the president has desperately wanted, the only card that they have left to play is this. Well, you know, if you squint, you got to trust that the president's doing these things for the right reasons.