Bill Kristol: A Power Play for Autocracy

Hello and welcome to the Bullwork Podcast. I'm your host Tim Miller. It is Monday, so I'm here with someone who did not go tomorrow ago over the weekend to reopen communications with Donald Trump. It's editor at large of the Bullwork Bill Crystal. Hey, Bill. And you didn't go either, Tim. You know, I know we both got the invitations and it was tough, right? I mean, had to juggle other commitments I had here, you know.

I'm not really sure about that idea of opening communications with Trump and the value there, but hey. So what happened? Yeah, I was to Joe and Mika went, they opened morning Joe this morning. People can look at it online and link the explanation for why they went the value of opening communications back up with Trump. They became so much a part of the resistance over those, I guess the last seven or eight years. But in 2015-16, they were pretty on the side of normalizing Trump. But pretty, I'd say, important, maybe too strong, somewhat important in

and normalizing Trump. I'm like a certain set of people in New York and sort of business types who watch Morning Joe. We got a very testy exchange. I used to be pretty regular guest on there in September, October 2016, where I said something like this. And there's that point, I think it were against Trump for president, but you know, I said something about what you guys certainly spent a lot of time with him and made him seem like respectable. And Joe really didn't like that. And we had, for TV, I'd say it fairly.

What do they call that? And diplomacy, Frank and Canada exchange there for 10 or 15 minutes. So anyway, it might be a fun one for the archives to go revisit morning, Bill Crystal admonishing morning talk hosts. You know, you got to consider the importance of morning talk hosts now that that's a key qualification for becoming the head of the United States military. There's so much to do. I do these little outlines for the show. And like usually it's like six or seven

I have eleven points, so I don't have to learn to get to everything today. A lot happening, no shortage to discuss, but I just want to start at the biggest picture. You opened the newsletter this morning with a little bit of a meditation on something our friend Robert Trisinski wrote over at The Unpopulist about these nominations broadly.

And Robert wrote that every appointee is selected as a deliberate negation, even a mockery of the function of government. He or she will be in charge of these individuals who are not merely unqualified for their offices. They're disqualified. They're anti-qualified. The antithesis of what the offices call for. So, I mean, it's been a week since we last got together. And the picks have just gotten worse and worse. And so I'd like to just start with the biggest picture, then we'll take each of them individually.

Dr. Sinski's point that was so useful was looking at them together, seeing the forest, not just the trees, and that there's a pattern, and the pattern is one of not just not caring much about good government, the good administration of government, the government well administered, very important to the Federalist said, but actually, scorning it and mocking it, and almost discrediting it. And one thing that happens when you do that, of course, is you open it up

all the rules and standards and processes all go away. So if you're an authoritarian, sometimes you think, and this is the point Robert makes, you think you'd want competent people to execute your authoritarian plans. And you do sometimes. And so that's one side of the ledger. But you also want sort of people who are just going to destroy the normal norms and processes so you can arbitrarily do what you want, order what you want.

range things for pay offs for you and your friends for doing what you want so i think it's a trump power play a power play for centralized personalized autocratic government, sort of massed by the craziness and wackiness of the pics yeah and just going to beat people down right i can some levels we go through each of these it's like.

Even where do you pick the fight and I guess maybe some of them will probably settle on gates because of personal feelings, right? But there's flooding the zone of the shit element. It's flooding the nominees to this effect, right? Because there's only going to be so much appetite on the hell for resistance. So I guess I do wonder how you think about balancing that at the broadest level. I saw you had a little

dig at John Federman over the weekend. The Pennsylvania Senator who was on with Jake Tapper saying that Democrats can't freak out over every tweet or every appointment. It's still not even Thanksgiving yet. It's going to be a long four years. And so there is kind of that sense of, okay, well, you got to be calm and pick battles or maybe the contrary view of just going headfirst and trying to stop each one of these. So I think Trump wants to destroy the internal barriers in the executive branch in which there have been many, the Department of Justice doesn't take orders from the White House, under the prosecutor, et cetera, et cetera.

He also wants to destroy the barriers to executive power, of which advice and consent by the Senate is the actual constitutional barrier. It's not even just a legislative or customary barrier.

And that's, thus, the talk about the recess appointments. And the recess appointments would be the real destruction of the barrier, but using the threat of recess appointments to get them just to confirm everyone is almost as good, right? That it just makes the barrier kind of, uh, advice and consent becomes entirely nominal. So, no, I think they should oppose, in my view, the four that are most obviously unfit and inappropriate, exit that defense, gabbard it, directive national intelligence,

Kennedy at HHS, Gates is the Attorney General. If I were a Democrat, I'd vote against a lot of the others. I don't think they're good appointments. I think their policies will be pretty awful. They're not really distinguished appointments, but, you know, we'll be excellent after Secretary of DHS, making sure no dogs get across the border or something, you know, alive and stuff. But that's a different level, I would say. That's, you know, okay, Governor gets appointed to some.

cabinet position that he or she isn't really great at, but whatever, you know, and same with Stefanik at the UN and so forth. So I think that's, I guess I'd make that distinction. But among the four, I don't like the argument that, you know, I mean, it may be that Trump vaguely thinks that, well, if I lose one, it makes it easier to get the other three. I think that right position to take is those four are unqualified. And, you know, if one goes down first, the attitude should be good three more to go. Yeah.

The Hill put out an analysis of the nine possible senators they see as creating trouble. I'm just going to give the nine names here. Murkowski Collins, Curtis Cassidy. Curtis is a new senator from Utah replacing Mitt Romney. Todd Young of Indiana, Tom Tillis, North Carolina, Mitch McConnell. Joni Ernst in Iowa and John Cornyn in Texas. I don't really buy the last two. I don't really buy any of them, to be honest, except for Murkowski. But I particularly don't buy the last two. How do you assess that landscape?

I mean, I think there could be different coalitions for different appointees, but there is, I mean, maybe there still is some sense that the Senate should work according to some procedures and organization. And one of the organization ways in which the Senate is organized is by committees. And so there could be people who would focus on the candidate who comes up through their committee or in an area which they have some claim to

expertise and special competence. So I'll give you one example who's not on the list. Tom Cotton of Arkansas. He's not an election tonight. I already voted with McConnell on that, which incidentally, and he's also pro Ukraine, which are two reasons. He's not in the Trump cabinet, in my opinion, but he's been a pretty gone along with Trump on almost everything. Also, no signs of sexual assault. But he will be chair, assuming Rubio gets confirmed, which he will at stake, which is one where it's fine to confirm him, I think. He will be chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

I do think people should put pressure on him or just ask him. He does not get a pass in my view. I mean, the other is fine. He's not going to vote against somebody Robert Kennedy. He doesn't care about those issues and know about them, I suppose. I mean, he should still vote against them to mind you. But on intelligence, he's chair of that committee. Is he really saying his chair of Senate intelligence that it's fine for Chelsea Gabbard, Jimmy Director of National Intelligence? Is he saying happy to spend the next four years working with her?

in improving the intelligence capacities and defending the intelligence capacities of the United States government. So I think you can sort of separate some of these. There are some, like Collins and Rieckowski, who are more generally available in opposition because they're not pure rubber stamps for Trump, but they're also a particular senator's particular roles whom one could imagine opposing some of these nominees.

I concur that people should ask Tom Cotton about that. I'm not exactly optimistic. You should have him on the show tomorrow, you know? He'll be happy to come on, because he'll know we talked about him and stuff.

Yeah, formal invite to Senator Cotton, come on and we'll rearrange the schedule for you and we'd happy to talk about Tulsi Gabbardis, head of a DNI. Another big picture way to look at this that I think is worth considering. Segar and Jettie is another podcast, breaking points. You wrote this, I saw this morning. I just realized we haven't talked enough about how big a part of the male shift to the right over the last decade is a backlash to me too.

He seemed to be saying that in a positive way. And I guess there is some insight there in the sense that we have gotten, as a result, a MeToo cabinet. We had over the weekend Pete Haggseth nominated to run the Defense Department, watched him post-story about how he paid a woman who accused him of sexual assault as part of a non-disclosure agreement, though he maintains their encounter was consensual by Haggsus telling he was drunk, she was sober, he got taken advantage of.

Take that for what you will. He also published a column in college that claimed that rape required both the failure of consent and duress, and as such, women who are really drunk and are passed out cannot experience duress, and so that cannot be a rape.

That was a take that he had back in 2002. So there is some concern according to reporting that there are other potential things that might be coming out on this. I don't know. At this point, it seems more like a positive for Trump appointees to have these kinds of accusations that are negative. But what do you think? I mean, it is astounding that three of the four most controversial picks on other controversial, I would say, on other grounds, which is manifest on fitness

for the position also are what's the right generic term for them. Let's say sexual credibly accused of being sexual abusers and at the very least adventurous, what's that?

adventure. I mean, honestly, they could all be criminals. I mean, if we can just be honest here, and of course, like Trump himself. So I mean, it is Gates, Hexeth, and Kennedy. I mean, Kennedy stuff. People are focused, I guess, correctly, maybe on his unbelievably reckless responsibility about vaccines and other things. But that story about his

Sadly, the wife who killed herself in the diary with 27 and cast sexual encounters that year would, I don't know, the year before or something like that, and his relishing that, and talking about it with his late wife and so forth. I mean, it's so horrible. Zoomed her body. That was a funeral plot that she didn't want to be in, and Zoomed her body put it somewhere else that she didn't want to be against her wishes. I mean, interesting choices. What is that? Yeah, it's not a, it's not a, as I guess I tweeted, it's not a bug. It's a feature, apparently, that you have really

And it's not just attitudes or slightly old-fashioned or back when you, you know, stuff in the workplace that was slightly inappropriate. In each case, we're talking not just credible allegations, but honestly, just evidence, truthfulness of really appalling behavior. I mean, don't you think it's really, I mean, we're at a level with Gates and Kennedy, probably, Hagg Seth, that I don't know.

I do think so, but none of it sounds as bad as what Donald Trump has done. I know. And so that is what makes this challenging. I mean, many people on the Hill have demonstrated that they have just no, and they're happy to be hypocrites. So I guess maybe your explanation is based on hypocrisy or based on post facto whatever. You come up with some rationalization. They've become experts on that, the Republicans on the Hill.

It is hard to then kind of explain in long form like why that, you know, this thing, this regulation with HEGS would be disqualifying whereas making Donald Trump the commander-in-chief is not. I agree with that, but I mean, this is their constitutional due to they have to vote unless there's a recessive way better, unless it's voice voted through, I guess. So it's a little different. I mean, Donald Trump is president.

Some of them didn't vote for him, honestly, I guess. I mean, I think it didn't. Collins, what kind of others said? Collins, Murkowski. So to be fair, I mean, they were, from our point of view, 12,000 current, not standing up to in certain ways, but they didn't, they said they didn't vote for him, or... Cassidy voted to convict him once? This is an actual vote they cast as the United States Senator, honored individual, fulfilling their constitutional duty.

And the hexa thing is just worth mentioning the searches because it's like, in a world where gates in Kennedy and Gabbard aren't nominated, all of the focus is on this. And it's an insane choice. He has no relevant experience to run of your accuracy such as this, in addition to his personal behavior.

For me, the other thing about Higgs Seth, and this is not a puritanical podcast. I support everybody's choices, whatever they do in a consensual manner. But I do think it's also interesting, just when you're looking at the type of person you want to be in charge of the military, Higgs Seth, I don't know, this was married three times by age 39. He was divorced twice in 11 years.

I know a lot of 39 year olds now since it's around my age and it's hard for me to think of one that is already on marriage three. I know some older people, life is long. Even in those cases though, I can't think of anybody that impregnated someone that worked for them ending their second marriage of the three, even if the story is true that he's telling about this in this non-disclosure agreement. It's like, I got so drunk,

Like I got so bombed with this chick girl took advantage of me and like I had to pay a non-disclosure agreement. And maybe if you had the relevant subject matter experience, but you go for somebody who has no experience running big organizations, no experience leading the military and then on their personal life, they're just a disaster.

But even if he didn't rape her, like he's a disaster in his personal life. And it seems to me that like most of the buzz on the hill is he's gonna get through it. That's all the ones that they're worried about. And I think that's pretty telling. They seem to think he's the most likely to get through the fourth. I'm a little doubtful because I mean, I haven't studied the timeline if he takes us.

personal life closely, but I think this encounter with the woman who did charge and went to the police three or four days later to complain about assault. It wasn't like she just decided 20 years later to bring this thing up. This was in 2017. It was at some California Republican women maybe event, I believe, and she was there as a staff or something as a delegate. I don't even know.

By the way, he's access out there and taking advantage of it. I guess he's speaking of his fame and all this, I assume. But this, I think, takes place if I have the time to learn right while he's still technically married to the second wife, but has already had the baby with the third wife, you know, or it's about to, but I think maybe already has. I don't know. I mean, the third to be wife to be to come. I'm going to have to get out the corkboard to get to the corkboard. Yeah, no, we need a whole white board.

You can do that tomorrow with some guests, maybe who knows more about how these things work. I'm sure Jen Psaki will be very excited to do that with me. Yeah, that would be amusing. Very high ratings. It would get more ratings. Jen Psaki with the whiteboard with HEC Seth and that would be something.

Anyway, I guess we shouldn't prejudge who's the most likely to be shot down as more stuff could come out, I guess, about Hagg Seth. Just to put it bluntly, the only reason why the conventional wisdom in DC is that Matt Gaetz is going to be tough to get through, and Hagg Seth is going to be easy to get through, has nothing to do with their qualifications for the job, because they're equally unqualified. If anything, Gaetz might be more qualified, frankly.

Um, the only reason that that's the conventional wisdom is that Gates is mean to his colleagues and they don't like him personally. And Hagg Seth sucked up to them on Fox and Friends. Totally. I mean, show like that's literally the only difference. Totally. I mean, I, the last thing I want to do is say a word that seems to be defending Gates, but he is a member of Congress. And he, you know, so it's like not totally, if he didn't have the personal life he'd had, and if he wasn't loathed by his colleagues, it would be a very weird appointment. That's such a young.

a person who practiced law for two years and has been a member of Congress for one of the House for six to become Attorney General, but it wouldn't be quite as crazy as Pete Haggseth, who served, I think, honorably in the military 20 years ago as a junior officer. And since that has run nothing. And in fact, the little groups he ran kind of didn't go very well. And that's for freedom way back in the 2007 to 2008 area. I was kind of involved with that. So I know a little about that.

and then other things. And then he comes a Fox host and he, and you can just see his comments on the record. He's sort of the foolish about the military and stuff. Anyway, you know, it's funny, someone I know to speak to some people about ex-ath, who's someone of the national security world, some senior kind of guy. And one general said to him, I mean, this is, he asked the general, what do you think of this? And the guy said, it's ludicrous. I mean, the guy's not just unqualified. It's a slap in the face, really, to everyone who spent 35 years

You know, in the military or in the civilian side of national security world building up the reputation the standing and the experience and that you need to have to be Bob Gates or Leon Panetta or Bill Cohen or whoever you want. I mean Chuck Hagel I kind of opposed in 2013, but I mean how many leap years is he ahead of?

He's not a member of Congress. He's not never read anything. He's of no of no stature in intellectually or, you know, in terms of. So I did write a bestseller about what about what point, you know, yeah. Anyway, but I was interested in this, but this person also told my friend, I don't really think I should say anything publicly because I, you know, like,

So have relationships and stuff like that. So I really interesting to see whether do how many x-generals and x-sects come out and say this is just Ridiculous, you know, not hold my breath How many people in the world would you guess have been forced to flee their homes one million five ten? What if I told you the number was a hundred and twenty two point six million? If that were a country it would be the sixth largest in the world every day people

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Moving on through the YouTube cabinet. So the Matt Gaetz story, which I appreciated in the news of this one, it was a trigger warning for people. So I will give people as well a trigger warning. I guess coming forward this week is the lawyer for the two accusers.

young women that work using Matt Gaetz of having sex with at least one of them while she was 17. The story is that when he was a freshman in Congress, they were having a lot of sex parties, including Matt Gaetz having sex with one of these women on a game table, on a poker table of some kind, many witnesses.

So that will be, I guess, coming out this week. And to my point earlier, the pushback against Gates seems to be much stronger right now based on interpersonal relationships. I want to play one little bit of audio from Congressman Max Miller of Ohio, who's not very great in his own right. But he had some thoughts about Matt Gates. He shared with Manu Raju on CNA. A member of Congress and the job that he has done here

And it has been important, I'm not the only one who thinks this way. I just say the quiet part out loud. And I wish other my colleagues would have the same courage to do so. But him as a member of Congress should not be the most powerful law enforcement individual in our country. And everyone knows it. And he's not going to get confirmed. And so this is solely based off of his job as a member of Congress within this body.

that has caused more harm, made us spend more money, has put us in more paralyzation than any other member. It's a couple of things there, but all before I get to you, when I analyze, the mega Congress is not sending their best either. Max Miller doesn't sound like he's putting any atoms there, I think paralysis is the word that he was looking for. And I also want to note that he was very specific. He wanted to be very clear with Manu.

that he's not basing his opposition to Gates based on the stories with the young women. It's solely on his behavior in Congress. So this is not, don't get Max Miller wrong. He doesn't have any issues with Gates' private behavior. But I guess if you got to hand it to Max Miller, which I don't want to do, the rumors out there that half of the Senate are saying privately that they won't support him, but to me it's like, I'll believe it when I see it, put up or shut up. So at least we have one person out there

in the house and then the Senate's not relevant, but it's telling, I guess, that he's willing to say it on CNN. Totally. I mean, it was taken seriously enough that the charges against him that the Republican House went through with this ethics committee investigation, which apparently has produced a big fat report, which he quit two days ago from the House to get ahead of, because I guess they don't issue reports if you no longer remember if the House, the big controversy about whether it'll become public or at least sent over to the senators on the Judiciary Committee to read,

Pretty amazing not to if an actual body of congress run by indeed his own party has produced this report you think you might it's kind of relevant to the decision the senators have to make they need to insist on that in my opinion, but the gates defense you realize is yes as a 37 year old or something like that.

member of Congress. He went to these sex parties with drugs and had sex presumably in some various forms of various, well, I think we can take out the presumably. I think that it's pretty clear that during his freshman year in Congress, he was having sex with younger women, but younger women, his defenses.

It's not true that they were 17. They just crossed. They're just 18. They were 18 years old. I mean, so what are we talking about here? That's sorry for partying though. That's Gates's defense because legally there's a difference obviously and he needs to try to stay out of literally out of criminal prosecution. But I mean, how disgusting is that?

I don't know, man. It does seem like you're cutting a fine line there. There are a lot of options you have as a 37-year-old wealthy son of somebody that's very successful. You can party. You can go out there and have a good time. Nobody's begrudging you. Being on the 1718 line, it's cutting it a little close, to say the least. If a woman was 18 and if there was no actual assault or something like that, or drugging women to get sex and stuff like that,

I'm not sure that he should be expelled from Congress for this. I'm not sure he should be prohibited from ever having any kind of job anywhere. But again, if you're nominated to be Attorney General in the United States, presumably there's a little bit of a higher bar, and you can vote against people to be Attorney General or Secretary of Defense or Secretary of HHS without taking these people should be put in jail tomorrow. Some of them probably should be. That's another story.

So you make a good point. The confirmation thing is not a kind of, you know, the equivalent of, I don't know, disbarring him, let's say, as far as a lawyer. I'm not sure whether that's justified or not, but that's a whole different story. And they have to affirmatively vote. This is why I think it's a little more likely that these people go down than other people think, I think, because it's not just you kind of look the other way. And they're next thing you know, they're in the cabinet. And that would be the way it would work with the recess appointments, obviously.

But they are going to have to cast stand up and say yes, you know, in the four of the United States Senate to Matt Gaetz as a charity general. Well, they might have to do that if they don't do the recess point. Very good lengthy explainer on the recess thinking from Phillip Rottner in the board this morning. People want to go read that.

One reason is tempting an additional, all the just obvious reasons of making it easier for Trump at all. That's why some of the senators would like it. Some of the senators would get to say, oh, I'm not sure I would have been able to vote for him, but I'd take it out of my hands. What can I do? Right. Yeah, we were forced by this recess appointment. Yeah, you make a good point. You know, like even for the more liberty among us, it's like, hey, you know, it's just one of those things where it's like, you want to go out and go to sex parties and bang on card tables and like do blow? Okay. But that might limit your ability to be the top

law enforcement official in the country. Unfortunately, if you want to be the top law enforcement official in the country, it does seem like a minimum bar that you are law abiding. Those are the sacrifices that you have to make when you decide how hard you want to go, you think.

be the sacrifice you have to make, but maybe not anymore, I guess. You know, Donald Trump gets to be the commander in chief. We'll see. I'm intrigued by how the gates thing plays out because these people hate them. What becomes the stronger pull for them? They're loathing of Matt Gaetz personally, or their desire to make daddy Trump happy.

to think that that desire to make daddy Trump happy might win out. But we'll see. I wanted to play this audio because there's a lot of chatter on the right in the MAGA world and Scott Jennings I saw this morning. It's like, you're calling him Hitler and now you want to work with him. And it's like,

Okay. Yeah. I mean, we did say some mean things about Donald Trump, but it's just always worth remembering what the people who worked for Donald Trump said about him and what the people who want to work for him said about him. And I want to play this video of Tulsi Gabbard just a few years ago talking about Donald Trump's foreign policy.

I call upon all Americans to stand side by side, including those who've been supporting Trump, no matter what he says or does, to recognize he is simply unfit to be commander in chief of our patriotic men and women serving our country in uniform. He's essentially treating our troops as mercenaries, acting as if he is Napoleon or a king.

unfit to be commander-in-chief acting as if he's Napoleon or a king that is she wants to be the head of the DNI I mean that's as bad as anything anybody else to set around here on the ball work I don't think some people will be like well you know politicians say that all the times about the people that oppose them I don't know I don't remember like in 2012 anybody on the Romney or Obama side saying of the other person that they're unfit to be the commander-in-chief

It's a pretty extreme statement, but she also went on in a tweet. I would mention that being Saudi Arabia's bitch is not America first. I liked that Tulsi a little bit better, but she also is like flying under the radar right now. And to me is maybe the most insane choice. We're going to get to our rankings at the end, but like when you mentioned cotton at the top, is there any sign that any of the national security Republicans like have any issues with this? She's a son, a politician and Putin, a politician.

Putin's stooge, I think it's fair to say, and God knows how much explicit connection and coordination has been. She went to see Assad, I think when there were sanctions and so forth, and didn't tell a colleague she was going to do it. Well, she was a member of Congress. I mean, pretty astonishing, which was a Democrat, I think. And so, I don't know. You could imagine, I'm not in any way defending, I hope they all go down, obviously. You could imagine the defense of Robert running adequately with Hexeth as a kind of nominal

Secretary of Defense going around giving idiotic speeches and showing off his tattoos. You can imagine, I guess, the Justice Department working adequately if Gates doesn't do anything and he has decent Deputy Attorney General, though that's tougher and that's a more real, even more for real problem.

HHS, you can just imagine Kennedy again being bloviating and not actually trying to destroy the National Institutes for Health or something like that. And Congress might stop him from doing so, you know. The one place I don't think it's tenable is intelligence.

What do you do if you're a senior intelligence official and you get a request from the DNI's office for a briefing on Syria and the Syrian opposition forces? Or you create what's happening in the fight in the House, Ukraine using their new missiles or whatever against Russia. You can't have any confidence that information is not going right to Assad or to Putin or to their people. So I think the intelligence community almost becomes impossible to even understand how it's going to work. Maybe Ratcliffe has had a CIA cuts Tulsi out somehow, but you're now at a level of

real government dysfunction in an important area of sterilization, you might even say. Yeah, that is just almost unimaginable. And that's why I do wonder where even Tom Cotton thinks to himself, I'm not going to say that publicly. I'm going to send private emissaries to Trump. I'm going to find some excuse. We'll send her off somewhere else. I can't be chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee charged with oversight of our intelligence when she's the director of national intelligence.

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This holiday season, give the gift of soul. Head to get soul.com and use code the Bullwork for 35% off your order. Now until December 3rd, that's 35% off your order using code the Bullwork. One last time, get soul.com and code the Bullwork for 35% off. You deserve it. I want to move on to RFK. We were talking over the weekend and again, just thinking about this through the prism of these people confirmable.

The RFK element has something that these others don't, which is like there will be a

powerful lobbying interest group in pharma that is going to try to stop it. What do you think about that? Do you think that there's any appetite for stopping RFK through people who have more concerns about vaccines or other issues? I mean, I was talking to someone this weekend and being more of an average security person was more going on about the others or in a world of law person. And he made the point to me that he's more of the business side of things. And he said, I guess Kennedy could make it. And he said, no, no.

This is real. I mean, with all due respect to your national security friends, they're doing their best. They can get organized. They can write a letter. They have some associations that kind of represent them. There's only veterans for foreign wars or something. Maybe they would come out veterans of foreign wars. Maybe they come out.

But this is real politics. I mean, pharma is a really big player, especially in Republican circles. And not just pharma, the doctors, the hospitals, I mean, and others in various worlds that RFK has said terrible things about.

Can they accept RFK as Secretary of HHS? Maybe they get private assurances that they'll have no power. But I think you're looking at real lobbying by powerful groups who will privately tell these senators, this is key for us. This is key for us, if you want to. Now, maybe they won't have the nerve to. Maybe they'll back off to. Maybe Trump's people can go to them and say, you don't want to do this because you're going to lose contracts. And this is the trouble with having an autocratic leader. He has leveraged the other way as well.

But I guess that changed my mind a little bit about Kennedy being

maybe the more likely one to get through because I think, you know, this is a serious lobbying effort. I gather, these my friend expects there to be one that should be underway very soon. Maybe it's underway privately even now. Now they'll want to keep it private. They want to find an out. Maybe just goes to the White House. Trump says in a week, look, it's, I don't want to go through all this mess. He'll be sitting in the White House at my right hand and we'll have a quote normal HHS secretary. I guess that will be one way out.

I'll take the other side of that bet if your friend wants to have a friendly wager. I think that there's a lot of false confidence among the traditional DC class, the old interests about what their power is. And I think that at this point, you know, they do have a ton of influence. I think they're even more influenced in the old days on some elements of the legislative process, right? Because just

You have a lot younger people, frankly, working in the hill. There's a lot fewer, and there's been a lot of turnover, so there's a lot of fewer people with institutional legislative knowledge. And so there's a lot of writing and legislation happening from interest groups. And so getting little things plucked into bills and stuff, I think they have a lot of influence over. But these sorts of fights.

I don't know. I don't see it. It's a good point. I mean, I'm just thinking, you know, going through the scenarios here. So, farmer hires, I mean, they're not idiots. They're going to hire every single Trump-related firm they can. And everyone, you know, suits a wild old firm, Kelly and Conway, Scott Jennings, $30,000 a month, you know, or a week. God knows what these rates are these days. Kelly and it's going to make bangs for years. They're all going to make it for years. I assume Jennings still does this kind of stuff, even, you know, additionally being a CNN.

So they all got to try to go to the guys. Here are the two questions. I think you're right. One is, they might tell them, look, we're going to work with you quietly to make sure your reimbursement rates are good and they're not putting price caps on your drugs and 19 other things. That's different. But we can't take on Trump frontally on an extremely high profile.

nomination. I think that is possible. I'm not sure. Well, here's a question. Well, those people work for farmer. I mean, in this moment, on this issue, some of them will our boy, Brian Ballard will, and you know, the big firm. But I mean, maybe they'll work after, you know, later to mitigate the damage. So I think you make a good point. And this is sort of old Washington.

You've got pharma going after you. It's pretty hard to get confirmed to say to just Secretary. New Washington, Trump's Washington. Maybe that doesn't matter as much. They still will be powerful, as I say, in the actual legislative process. And this administration will be more corrupt than any of the other ones. Right. So that it'll be, yeah. They'll put in their former pharma.

head as assistant secretary for drug reimbursement, and it was great. Kennedy won't know what's going on, because he'll be out giving speeches about how many chemicals are in McDonald's, French fries or something. Hosting meetings about how we're going to stop research into drugs and gathering people together, feeling important. If we go into UFC fights, being on the plane with Trump, there's just going to be a lot to keep him busy as Secretary of HHS.

I want to move to the domestic side and talk about Treasury first. And Mark Caputo was writing about this for us over the weekend that this guy, Howard Lutnik was in line to be head of Treasury. You might have remembered his insane speech at the Madison Square Garden rally. He's a finance executive and apparently is also running the transition.

was going to have to do a Cheney type situation where he appointed himself. And apparently he's been annoying Trump. So I guess that's that's one thing you can't do, right? You don't hear about a lot about this usually in confirmation processes. The person is bugging the Napoleon, but in this case, Howard Lutnik has been getting under Trump's nerves.

So he's going back to the drawing board, looking for other people. And it's one interesting situation for me where Trump seems to be acting a little bit more pragmatically because of one thing. He cares about the market. He doesn't want to spook the market. He knows the market isn't getting spooked by Tulsi or Matt Gaetz, so maybe they should be. But they might get spooked by a crazy person, a treasury. And so he's trying to balance somebody that will do the insane tariffs, but also won't spook

Wall Street, and he's trying to kind of get the Goldilocks there. Yeah, I think and maybe someone who won't really do the tariffs, but will pretend to enough the Trump can declare victory sort of like what he's doing the first term a little bit with China and stuff. I was struck with that. I was on some of these finance TV shows for eight minutes on Friday. And I've been on these kinds of shows of some and they're pretty pro-Trump because this is, you know, the CNBC Yahoo finance world as you cut in red tape. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. The deregulation and the markets has gone up when Trump was elected quite a lot.

And I remember, I was struck that they were a little more open to the notion that this stuff is double edged. I mean, you got to be, this is the just total arbitrariness of the way you'll run things combined with a couple of the actual policies of which terrorists is probably the biggest. And I guess the markets have given back most of their gains from the first few days after his election, and I have not followed that closely.

And so I do wonder how much Trump, if he's following this stuff closely, if he does follow this stuff closely, is worried that someone who's going to just not be reassuring to the markets is not a Gary Cohn. He's not going to go all the way to Gary Cohn, but maybe there's an in-between place he can go and sort of semi reassure the markets and lay the groundwork for not.

totally spooking the business world. And then the business guys do have some clout. The donors, though, I don't know. I mean, are they even, they're so intimidated. That also strikes me in the old days for better or worse. And maybe you can say for worse. And so, you know, if you appointed someone who all your donors are against, you would hear about it, right? Or thought about appointing such a person. I don't know. Do they even have the nerve to call up Mar-a-Laco now and say, you know, I raised $40 million for you. And I would just appreciate it if you take a look at someone else. And there's a Trump documentary, some of the clips have been going around.

And the one that's been viral on social media is dictating the tweets for some reason people find that interesting. The one that jumped out at me is it's a short clip, maybe about a minute after the debate with Harris. And the documentary crew is with them backstage. And Trump talks to Rubio and then Vance.

And the camera is kind of behind at a distance. It doesn't seem like it's for show. It seems like he got off stage. It's their first conversation. It's like, what do you think? What do you think? And Rubio and Vance both tell him how great he did. I don't know. It wasn't cabbie-odded. It wasn't like, well, these guys are going to get you on this one by Ike.

I was just like, no. And then Trump said, without going, no, I thought it was maybe the best I've ever done. And anyway, I'll find the clip and put it in the notes for people. But I don't think that people give them bad news anymore. I just don't think that there's a lot of evidence that people do. No, I'm sure you're right. I mean, as you know, I haven't been there in after debates and try to get bad news sometimes. It's hard. We'll be awarded to Secretary of State. He was not going to give me any bad news. Vance, VP Pick, West Jr.,

That's a little tricky and awkward. I would say you'd be kind of, I mean, I think the normal person in such circumstance would sort of say, I think it was fine. You were excellent in many so many ways. I do think we have this one issue. We probably should clean up. You know what I mean? The staff and all the people who give the semi bad news. I mean, you know, it's even after a little having it on.

I don't know, it does not have them even, I guess, I don't know, I don't know. It's like the Suzy one else, like people like Suzy's normal, we're gonna put her in there and it's like, I think that Suzy will probably be pretty good at like preventing Nick Fuentes from getting an oval office meeting, you know, whereas some of the other people might not have even gone that far, but there's no intervening.

You know, there's been no breaks on the Matt Gates appointment or any of these appointments we've been discussing. So I don't think there's any evidence that nobody's reporting is like, well, a lot of people internally were saying saying, sir, you should be a little more careful. I don't know. They're going to come at you on this Gates pick. None of that has leaked out.

No, I think that's really a good point. Caputo's reporting has been excellent on this for the Bo-Work, but Mark Caputo. But the, just two points, I'm going to just, Susie Wallace, I think, yes, will be Chief of Staff who keeps the trains running and so forth, but I can't believe she's going to have much, that much substantive effect and maybe a little bit of warning. This one could be controversial, sir, but who's the top policy guy in the White House, Steve Miller, and who I think behind the scenes is having a lot of influence, JD Vance, especially on the issues he cares about. He's the one who said, if you voted for Ukraine, you're not in.

You're not cotton, Pompeii, I went up to the hill to argue for it. No, you got to have voted against it as Rubio did and Walts did, as Stefanik did, even though they had all been supporters of Ukraine before. You need to bend the knee on these issues that Vance cares about. I think that would also be true. I wonder on Treasury, you'd think you'd have less influence. It's not his area, so to speak.

Someone told me this is sort of third hand kind of thing that advances influence, and it will continue. It's definitely Davis, and you know, knows that personnel matters. So he'll be interested in the second and third level appointments to deputy secretary of this, you know, assistant secretary. Yeah. So I think Vance and Miller, and they're working together with Tucker Carlson on the outside and Elon.

That's a powerful cadre of people close to Trump. And again, it probably trumps, so to speak, the kind of people we're talking about weighing in and saying, oops, this is a little risky, right? For sure. And the only thing that takes me to the other point I wanted to get to about the domestic appointments is it's not a cabinet thing, right? So it's a little bit of a category difference. But Nikkei Kabans in the Atlantic today was talking to some folks of our allies in Europe. And it was interesting that some of the people he talked to were actually pointing to the domestic

elements is almost more concerning than the foreign policy stuff, which they kind of expected. The Portugal's Europe minister said to McKay about the Musk influence. I don't know. If you saw this in another country, you would see it as an acute sign of political decay when billionaires and oligarchy are taking over political policy.

, and

At some level, from the farthest remove, you look at it and you're like, if this was happening in a third world country, it would just be evidence of a total loss of credibility of democratic institutions. I think that's a key point.

A lot of people are saying, we'll look at the corruption, the amount of corruption will be unbelievable if it gets true. But also, it's beyond corruption. I mean, that's okay, maybe that's a price you pay, whatever. You can tolerate that, the system can tolerate that. But it is the kind of merging of aspects of the private and public sector, the oligarchs and the government becoming one and the need to, therefore, if you just want to survive as a business, to be on good terms with the government types and the government types being pressured to do favors for the oligarchs.

feels like Putin in the 2000s or Obama actually quite a lot in the last 10 years, you know, and so they can't quite do in the U.S., what you, or if I succeeded in doing it, I agree, I guess. But the degree which we could get down that path, I just, I would say one last point. I mean, the people are still under estimate is now it's like it's shocking off. So, oh my God, it's a real look at these people. Can you believe it?

People need to also think, what's it going to look like three, six, nine, 12 months from now? And when they do get more people in the government at second and third and fourth years, do change schedule, do the schedule F thing to, you know, make so many more of the civil service avoidance political. So it's a real governance crisis.

of democracy. It's not just a unpleasant four years of corruption. I think the first term is a little more like that. Jared gets a $2 billion from the Saudis. But the government mostly sort of still worked, you might say, in the way it should. We cannot count on that this term. So now we get to our alarmism rankings. It's a tough little exercise to think about which of these things alarms you the most if you had to rank them. So Bill Crystal. You want to go first?

Sure, I'm happy to go first. Me and Sam signed did this last week on YouTube, because check out our YouTube feed if you haven't subscribed yet. And our rankings were opposite, which shows you kind of like how it's in the eye of the beholder. But for me, Tulsi is one for the reasons that you laid out. At some level, we might have somebody that is actively rooting against US interests in charge of intelligence.

I like the downstream effects of that are hard to really calculate and we just might be out of the intelligence business actually for four years and how malign actors will be able to take advantage of that over the next four years. I think it's tough to calculate. She's one for me. I accept this too.

just because the absurdity of the choice and the broad remit that he has. And so number three for me, this is where it gets tough because I think that Elon's role and RFK and Gates, you can make a case for any of them. I think that RFK though, I'm going to have third just because we're already seeing declining vaccination rates

And I mean, the potential impact of that, the potential of my buddies and infectious disease doctor. And he said that he wants to freeze all infectious disease research for four years. I just think it's hard to kind of calculate what that damage could be. So I put that third and then Gates fourth and Musk fifth. I just, the Gates thing, I think it's an absurd pick, but the legal system quasi held in the first term.

And the idea of targeting foes and all that, you're still gonna need to get prosecutors to do it and gather evidence and go in front of juries. And I just think there are a lot of potential checks there to limit the worst behavior, though there will be some bad behavior. And so in some level, I almost think Musk might be worse than him. I might switch those last two. So anyway, that's my list.

We're including musk, and musk is very bad, I think. He's not getting a government job. He's getting this fake government job, and they've been very careful to specify it's not a government job, this fake office of government, whatever the hell it is, something, those, or whatever. Because, of course, if you've got a government job, there still are regulations about conflict of interest and disclosure, which he, of course, doesn't want to do for a second.

That's the degree of corruption with the Mustang. He goes around. He's got Trump's imprimatur. He can find out anything he wants anywhere in the federal government. Who's going to say, no, I'm sorry, I'm not giving you this information. It's proprietary. It's not something we're supposed to share outside of the government about bidding on contracts. I'm in the degree of advantage he has now in terms of his businesses and the unwillingness that anyone's going to have outside or inside, inside or outside of the government to take him on. So I think the Mustang is actually very

bad, but a slight different category. Tallestay number one for the reason you said I agree with. The others are a little hard. I guess I would make the slightly different argument that Kennedy is probably more checked because he can't actually, he can't personally change the way NIH works. He can't change the appropriations there. I don't know that he can even change the drug review process. A lot of that is congressional.

or could be congressional. And there would be this, as we were saying earlier, and that's the case where pharma can weigh in and say, well, wait a second. And every state gets billions of dollars, and each budget is 40 billions, not every state, but states get hundreds of millions of billions of dollars of NIH grants to their own medical schools and hospitals and research organizations. And their senators are going to be aware of this. So I kind of think you could imagine most of that stuff going on.

Despite Kennedy, I agree that the effect, though, of him just denigrating vaccines and what that does to parents and their willingness to get their kids vaccinated. And then when you have, you don't have a critical mass of people vaccinated and so forth, that's dangerous. Gates and Higgs stuff is, I guess also, I would say,

Kind of think defense probably runs on its own a little more than justice. I can argue that one either way You you you made a good case that a lot of the legal stuff of course you still have to get juries To convict and all but I don't know they have quite a lot of discretion of justice and they can decide to investigate a lot of things and

And they get to including people like you and me and organizations that we are part of and so forth. And I don't know if he can penetrate justice down to the second, third, fourth levels. I mean, you could have a lot of abuse of power. And instead of a final point, both justice and intelligence security, I've personally not talked to people and I'm not out there looking to talk to them. And I don't know that many people, but people have gotten in touch who are looking to leave career people. And not even particularly left wing or anything, just career people. They can't operate.

uh, sincerely and honestly in this environment. So I think again, a little more there. If you're an NIH, maybe you figure, you know, at the end of the day, Congress will protect me. So slight differences with you, but, um, not much difference. Yeah. Steve Bannon will be clipping this like crystal RFK, least, least bad Miller Gates, least bad appointees endorsement from the never trampers. No, they're all bad. All the appointments are bad. You know, risk assessment is, is a valuable exercise. And then I take your points on, on justice. All right. Well, I didn't get to, um,

The Russia-Ukraine war is escalating. We talked about that a bunch last week and so I refer people back to our conversation then and I think you're very insightful points about how you see Putin now moving into Ukraine further and maybe we'll decide that he doesn't actually need to deal with Trump on this. We'll continue pushing forward with TBD on that. I wanted to also mention at 4.03 a.m. this morning, Trump sent a elite confirming he plans to declare national emergency and use military assets to engage in a mass deportation campaign.

I thought it was interesting he did a 4 a.m. and also more to discuss on that later this week. So Bill Crystal, any other final thoughts for me? I didn't even know about that 4 a.m. thing, but yeah, that's a whole other thing we should talk about. You'll talk with other people about it. We should talk about that mass importation remains one of the biggest

Don't you think sort of top of my list? Terrible things, but also potential backfire things it feels like for Trump. Yeah, top of my list. OK, we'll make sure mass deportation conversation. Unfortunately, I will have many Mondays, I think, to discuss that. But we'll do our best to get to it next week. Thank you, Bill Crystal. Everybody else, as I mentioned, we got Jen Psaki tomorrow. And so come hang with us then. We appreciate you tuning in, and we'll see you all tomorrow. Peace.

that the choice was up to you and you told me they always pay for lunch they believe in what I do and I wonder will you miss your old friends once you've proven what you're worth

Big star, will you miss the Earth? And I knew you'd always, always want more I knew you'd never help me

Or you rather be wasn't willing I said I used to make pretty good leaven But you must make a killing