Sarah Longwell and Bill Kristol: We're Governed by Broken Men

**Sarah Longwell** (0:12)
Hello, everyone, and welcome to The Bulwark Podcast. I'm Sarah Longwell, sitting in for the one and only Tim Miller, because he is on summer vacation, which he deserves. Don't you worry, even though Tim is not here, Bill Kristol is, so we're gonna do a regular Monday show where we spin through the news. Bill, I wanna start first by saying, if it looks like I am sweaty, it is not because I'm so nervous to sit in Tim's chair. It's because I'm on a fitness journey now with Coach Robbie, and I just worked out, everybody's just gonna have to put up with a little schvitzing for a second.

**Bill Kristol** (0:46)
I didn't even notice, but that's an honor to be on with the one and only Sarah Longwell. I mean, Tim Miller's every week, but Sarah Longwell, this is something, you know? It's a big upgrade.

**Sarah Longwell** (0:54)
This is, this is a big deal. Did you watch the game last night, the World Cup game, the final?

**Bill Kristol** (0:59)
I did, I did.

**Sarah Longwell** (1:00)
Who were you rooting for?

**Bill Kristol** (1:02)
I was sort of ambivalent going in, but I ended up rooting for Spain, because Argentina is a pretty dirty team, I've gotta say, and Spain does play kind of beautiful soccer in its own careful and precise, but pretty impressive way. So I was happy that Spain won. And what about you?

**Sarah Longwell** (1:20)
I was rooting for Argentina.
The only way, I was thinking about how Americans choose who they're gonna root for in a game like this.
And I was, I've been asking people and everybody's got their own, like my wife was rooting for Spain because she studied abroad there. I was rooting for Argentina because Evita is my third favorite musical. And that's all I had, but it led me to get very intense about it. But I bring up the World Cup because there's some intersection with the news today because we're gonna have to talk about Iran. Three service members were killed, possibly four over the weekend. At least two were killed in an Iranian attack on a US airbase in Jordan, which has been like that is our key hub for air force strikes against Iran. Another soldiers missing and there's a set of unidentified remains. We're in a new phase now, in terms of the tensions with Iran. And I saw somebody mention this and it struck me as interesting, which is that now that the World Cup is over, that the World Cup is actually this moment where tensions tend to ease and that the end of the World Cup might signal sort of a flaring of tensions again, because the international community is kind of not doing a kumbaya thing. Is that a crazy thing, or does that sound right?

**Bill Kristol** (2:37)
Yeah, I don't know.
I hadn't really thought of it that way. I was just struck, and I wrote about this in Morning Shots, by the intersection of world politics in Iran, that Trump played golf Saturday, and then I think was at his club in Northern Jersey, and then went to the game and sat in his air-conditioned box and then came down. And it was amazing.
The photo that Sarah Rogers pulled from Morning Shots is fantastic. Trump butts into the ceremony where the head of FIFA, who's kind of a showboat himself incidentally. But anyway, Trump out-showboats him by butting in and being part of the medal presenting ceremony, which I don't recall is the normal practice of these kinds of events. The president of the host country just invites himself down there. But he's in there putting medals on people and then he's trying to be in the photos. And then finally, the FIFA president, the FIFA head says, okay, basically, time to go, let them have their celebration. And that's what people want to see is them being rambunctious.
And so he heads off stage right, and Trump sort of follows him for a bit, but then stops and sort of lurks there, awkwardly trying to stay in the photo.
And actually, the FIFA guy tries to comes back and tries to kind of, we should probably get off and he stays there. And there's that fantastic photo of him kind of awkwardly standing on the side as the Spanish players ignore him and have a well-deserved celebration. So very Trump-like, right? I mean, and then, you know, that he, anyway, just, I mean, not that he shouldn't go to the World Cup just because we're at war, though other presidents, I would say, might have made that calculation or that decision, especially on a weekend where American service members are killed. But then just the kind of unbelievable pathetic, really pathetic, you had an excellent tweet this weekend about how pathetic the strong men are, you know, that they're so weak. And you really saw that with Trump, right? He's literally the most famous man in the world, he's president of the United States, he's whatever, he's doing all kinds of bad things, but he's doing them as president. He can get any attention he wants anytime, but he can't resist butting into the World Cup celebrations of the champions. It's not like the US team won or it's not like it was the US team or anything, incidentally, right?