Bill Kristol: Stop the Stupid Infighting, Dems

**Tim Miller** (0:13)
Hello, and welcome to The Bulwark Daily.
We'll get to that. I'm Tim Miller. Thanks so much to everybody who sat in while I was away. We brought fever dreams back. Sarah did multiple heads. Bill is everywhere. Bill Kristol doing multiple podcasts for me. So I appreciate that. I appreciate the pod production team for working while I was getting tanned. We'll do a little vacation talk, explain the new pod logo and name. And I got some thoughts on the Michigan elections. We'll do all that at the end, but first it's Monday. And so he's back again. It's Bill Kristol. Hey Bill.

**Bill Kristol** (0:44)
Good to be with you, Tim. We missed you. The audience missed you. Everyone was still, anyone could talk about. The two main topics here. Where's Tim Miller and The Odyssey?
They're closed.

**Tim Miller** (0:53)
I don't believe that's true. I really tried to bubble myself as much as possible while I was gone. And so thanks to the producers here, thanks to Ansley. I really pulled together a list of the things that happened since I bubbled myself. And I just kind of want to go through them with you. And then we can pick whichever topic you want to start with. You feel like it's most pressing. Two weeks I was gone. More US casualties in the Iran War, which was supposed to be over very quick as I recall.
A number of service members killed and the war is now up to 18
The regional war is expanding. Trump is pretending like we're close to a deal again. But I guess last week had promised the biggest attack since World War II. So that's kind of a little bit same as it ever was with what's going on with the Iran War. Brent Crude did get back over $100 a barrel while I was gone. There were cyber attacks on our water supply that experts say point to Iran. But Trump said it was Minnesota that did it.
So that's concerning. The Saudis, we have a deal at the Saudis to go nuclear. That doesn't seem great. They're still imprisoning foes of the regime. I don't really know if we want them having a nuclear weapon. We're bailing out Japan for some reason. Jay Clayton, a man with no experience for the job and no integrity was tap to lead DNI. The GOC centers all went along with it because he was better than the other person that they had previously put up with less experience and less integrity. Todd Blanche was on the ropes for a second. The Secret Service illegally surveilled Jim Comey over the seashells, we found out. Trump's social media company is now giving early access to his market, moving tweets to banking clients. So otherwise known as taking bribes. The Trump family is taking bribes to give financiers early access to his announcements. The DOJ admits that the reflecting pool problems were caused by shoddy work, not vandalism. So they dropped the case against an innocent man they were going to put in jail for 10 years for going after the reflecting pool. Even after they dropped the case, Trump administration officials are still pretending like the vandalism was happening and doubling down against the people that they had falsely accused. Federal agents around the country were told that the FBI would no longer investigate confrontations with immigration agents. The Trump administration has launched plans to channel more asylum seekers into deportation proceedings without hearings. The Haitians are going to be deported. Their plans for that, putting them on deportation flights back to crisis-stricken Haiti. That's coming. The executive director of the Office of Homeland Security Statistics resigned, saying that there is a war on immigrants and they're using the statistics for ill. Trump sort of hit the bush line.
Socialism is coming back to the upper Midwest, and I didn't even want to know what's happening at the DNC. I tried to brief me and I want to continue bubbled from whatever's happening there. So that's a summary.
Where do you want to start? Does that cover everything? Was there something you felt like I missed?

**Bill Kristol** (3:41)
I think those are the high points or maybe we should say the low points, right?

**Tim Miller** (3:44)
Yeah, low and lower.

**Bill Kristol** (3:45)
A lot of corruption, a lot of lying, a lot of bad government.
And you know what's good about that list actually, which I hadn't really thought of since I have been kind of following it stupidly, you know, getting too involved day to day is it does give you a sense of the magnitude and the breadth and depth, I guess, is the way I put it, of what's happening in the Trump administration. You know, the lying, the corruption, it's not one little place. It's not just the White House. It's not one department, Department of Interior, who thought about them at all? It turns out, Doug Burgum is also, you know, lying or his people are lying to the Justice Department, and they're all together lying to the court, and then the Secret Service is calling the Air Force One to report on Jim Coley. I mean, the degree of, it's bad. It's bad. That's my conclusion.