Bill Kristol: The Weak Bully Keeps Flailing

**Tim Miller** (0:13)
Hello, and welcome to The Bulwark Daily. I'm your host, Tim Miller. It is Monday, so we'll get to Bill Kristol in just one second. A couple of updates on the favors I asked you for last week. There was some mixed reports on Freddys and Edgarianny, who are stuck in a Dillian tournament camp. Thanks in large part, probably entirely, frankly, to your phone calls and tweets and emails. Katie Britt was forced to respond to their pleas. She gave a very Susan Collinesque statement, but we at least now have this story on the radar of the powers that be, which is something. The result of that was that Edgarianny did get a sonogram, and we got to see that her baby was healthy, and so that is a small positive step. On the other side of the ledger though, they just heard this morning that they are not going to be able to get on a flight back to Venezuela this week. They're stuck in the camp for at least another week.
If you feel like following up on an email that you sent last week, I guess it probably couldn't hurt at this point. I appreciate everybody's advocacy on this.
Just the other thing, it does make a difference when you send a podcast you like to your friends. I did see an uptick over the weekend, pretty significant, in downloads and views for the Julia Curley interview.
I really appreciate that because I was so moved by that conversation and I think it's a good opportunity to try and engage people in the work that we're trying to do here. I appreciate you guys for sharing that around. All right. It is Monday. He's the editor at large at The Bulwark. He was on a brief vacation, well-deserved, Bill Kristol, and he's going to keep traveling because he's going to be with us at the Bulwark live event in Atlanta coming up in October. You go to the bulwark.com/events to get tickets for Columbia, Charlotte and Atlanta. We had a good surprise guest in Charlotte too coming, but Bill is going to be there in Atlanta. Come hang out. Bill, are you excited to get down to what's the famous strip club in Atlanta? What's that called?

**William Kristol** (2:15)
You know, I leave that to you and JVL to really, you know, JVL?

**Tim Miller** (2:19)
You think JVL has ever been to a strip club?

**William Kristol** (2:23)
You know, we could discuss that on the stage there in Atlanta, you know?

**Tim Miller** (2:26)
Magic City is what it's called. That was my quiz for you.

**William Kristol** (2:29)
Magic City. I'm looking forward to it. I think it will be fun. I guess the last one we did was Minneapolis, right? Was there, I guess I didn't do it. We were in California. You were in California. I wasn't there. Yeah. Minneapolis was so unbelievable right after obviously the killings, and they got an incredible civic mobilization there in response to ice. Can I say, I'm glad you got people mobilized on the ice thing. I was at the beach last week and didn't do morning shots, and didn't do your podcast, but did follow things somewhat. The ice thing is just horrible, and people are not upset enough about it. If I could just preach for 20 seconds here, and I'm really glad that you have been so on top of it since the beginning, and the audience here seems to be very moved by it. I think politicians are wrong to think that it couldn't be a huge issue. I mean, I don't know.

**Tim Miller** (3:13)
I obviously agree, and at minimum, at least in Democratic primaries, it's been like one of my on-going beefs, with the two sides fighting with each other. And it's like, I think that you'd win plaudits with every faction in the Democratic primary if you just were maximalist in your attack on ICE, which is the right thing to be doing, incidentally, both politically and morally and policy-wise. These horror stories keep coming out. I mean, I keep getting sent them, and we're trying to vet them as we do more coverage. So there'll be more this week. But there's just one story. I was just reading in NBC this morning about a guy who's on the USS Lincoln, whose dad gets detained, and this is combining all of the horrors of the Trump administration into one story.
So more on that stuff as the week goes on. I want to start with you on the news out of Canada. Our friends in Canada, we had a great live show up in Canada a couple of months ago. Mark Carney, now the leader of the free world, the leader of the resistance standing up to Donald Trump. Trade talks Friday after we taped. This was late on Friday, fell apart between the US and Canada, which means that steep tariffs are now going to go into effect from our side, putting tariffs on Canada, 50 percent tariffs on a bunch of stuff. Carney now says that retaliatory of tariffs will go into effect on September 8th. It's going to target dairy appliances, agriculture equipment, pulp and paper, and electronics. I think they're already terrifying the hell out of Jim Beam. Carney pointed to tensions between Howard Nutlick and James Sengrier. Seems like Nutlick came in late and scuttled the deal. Trump put out an insane statement about Canada.