This D-Day is a good reminder that the growing nationalist movement across the globe aims to undermine the alliance between free and democratic countries. Meanwhile, Trump gets two stooges on the House Intelligence Committee who will have access to top national defense secrets. Plus, his New York conviction is the Big Lie 2.0, and Biden's executive order on immigration. Adam Kinzinger joins Tim Miller.
show notes:
Piece on Jared's anti-NATO memorial
The Allahpundit piece Tim mentioned
New Republic story on Tucker and Erik Prince
Send your mailbag questions here: BulwarkPodcast@TheBulwark.com
You can see how these seniors sending their social security checks to Trump get radicalized. They wake up and turn on Fox and Friends, then they have talk radio on in the background all day while doing chores, then they put on The Five, maybe get a little straight news from Bret Baier, and then watch the Fox primetime opinion shows. Rinse, wash, repeat: every day. And it's all designed to make them angry. As Adam said, it's a sad way to spend one's retirement.
I would love to see a Kinzinger vs. Buttigieg Presidential race. What a world away this would be from where we are now...!
I hate to sound self important but that sounds better than winning the power ball jackpot.
Is that because they would be two good choices ?
Great conversation- judging by content, Biden has the right tone and did well representing us for the anniversary.
I was confused when Tim and Adam brought up Elian Gonzalez. I recalled it had nothing to do with deportation and illegal immigration. It was that Gonzalez’s mom died during their trip from Cuba, and the Clinton Admin was sending him to his father in Cuba. Believe the kid’s family wanted to keep him in FL and was really upset Janet Reno ordered law enforcement to take him back.
I think the point was irony: In the case of Elian Gonzalez, the right wanted the orphaned minor to be granted asylum in the US, but today they want to end DACA and deport unaccompanied minors. It's just another example of how Trump has turned the meaning of conservatism upside down.
Since Gonzalez is from Cuba, I wonder if he would have qualified for wet feet dry feet policy and did not need asylum had his mom not perished at sea. But Republicans rarely believe in what they sell.
Can we make Kinzinger the regular Monday guest? Sorry, Bill Kristol.
Keep Bill !
Better yet: Give Adam Kinzinger his own weekly podcast!
The comments by both Tim and Adam about the willing acceptance of any lie about Trump reminded me of a quote I read this week:
“I began to comprehend it did not matter so much what he said, but how he said it. In such an atmosphere, every lie pronounced is accepted as high truth itself.”
William Shirer on Adolf Hitler.
I’m sorry. But the idolization of Ronald Reagan is part of the problem that we have now. It makes me roll my eyes.
YESSS! I hear you Adam! You described my elderly father. I hadn't thought of it that way but you're right- it is a type of elder abuse.
We'll never know how much my Alzheimer's-ridden mother sent Trump before my sister took away the checkbook.
I need a sad emoji.
Love me some Adam K. I am with Adam, Tim and Nick Catoggio that Biden is better than Trump even if Biden's policies are (quite) sub optimal. Here is to hoping the Dems get smarter quicker.
80-100 year cycles. People who saw the horrors of fascism first hand are all gone and we did a piss poor job of teaching people about it.
If Trump’s guys leak some info there’s a chance they are committing treason right? But ya know, doesn’t matter if they control the right levers of power…these people aren’t in it for the money - the true believers are autocrats and like most fascists are immature shits playing make believe - except a lot of people get killed or harmed in the process :/
In spite of my disagreement with Tim and Adam re Reagan, I agreed with most of their comments. I always find Adam to be sincere, thoughtful, and thought-provoking. I’m very glad he’s onboard at The Bulwark!
Would love to see Kinzinger in CO!!!!
Kinzinger with his observation of tearing families apart, this is so true, My Vietnam veteran father and his wife are angrier than they have ever been and our family distances themselves, they should be spending their golden years with family, but express hatred if we do not agree with their views and support republicans. My father taught us to love this country and is proud of his service, it is so discouraging to see his American Legion play Fox News constantly, his friend group is all radicalized, it is very depressing. I know him and know he would support Ukraine if he had accurate news, he respected and loved my husband who is a Desert Storm combat veteran but now has lost this relationship due to the misinformation. There is a great Substack written “Daddy died a MAGA” so many families are going through this, heartbreaking on a personal level and catastrophic for democracy.
I think this is the reality of the GOP today. Most Republicans are not white nationalist racist authoritarians. They are just badly informed people whose minds have been taken over by disinformation designed to play on their fears.
A family member stated they figured our child’s HIGH SCHOOL graduation was going to be cancelled because of protests. We live in a very MAGA area and she lives down the street. She knows there are no protests in our small town. They poisoned our loved ones minds from wanting to participate in monumental life moments.
I’ve given up talking to my dad about politics. I make a mistake every 5 years and I’m like “why did I do that.”
It's disastrous.
It's darkly humorous that you start with praise of Reagan since he was the progenitor of Trump.
Trump is the anti-Reagan. He is literally the opposite of Reagan in every way. Policy-wise, Trump has more in common with Obama and Biden than with Reagan.
They rode waves of white resentment into the white house, denied climate, ignored a pandemic, did arms deals in contravention of congress, appointed (well in Reagan's case tried to) whackjobs to SCOTUS, were famously hands off about policy, had dementia...
Did Adam Kinzinger move to Texas? Tim keeps referring to Texas as "his" state all of a sudden.
Yes he announced that months ago…….. hope he stays safe there
I wondered why…
Hope he can do some good there!
Too hot for me. And their government is truly awful.
There’s Red Texas(exurban, some suburban, rural) and Blue Texas(urban, some suburban).
💯- that’s why it usually takes an hour drive even from cities of deep blue states to find the most fervent MAGA followers.
Very true
I live in a blue bubble myself in a red state, seems to be the trend
Thanks. Weird. I hope he does, too.
Really weird
On Mike Johnson appointing the two stooges to the Intelligence Committee, I’m wondering if that was Trump’s big “ask” when Johnson met with Trump the weekend before putting the Ukraine funding bill on the floor for a vote.
It was
What is Kinzinger talking about? Nobody is Reagan?
Obama is twice the orator that Reagan ever was...
Come on man, put aside the partisan hat at least once.
Please. Obama was a bad President. His foreign policy an utter disaster, one might even say a disgrace. Reagan had a vision of how to win the Cold War and what do you know, he was exactly right. Obama was wrong on the early pull out of Iraq, wrong on Syria, wrong on Russia and wrong (so so so so wrong) on Iran. Other than that, how did you like the play Mrs. Lincoln.
He should have been held responsible for Iran/Contra. Or the crack epidemic. Or the AIDS epidemic. Or the popular contempt for “the government”. But he was a Republican, so we had to baby him. Great President.
Uh huh. The Soviet union collapsed because it was hollow and Gorbachev believed that he could return to true Leninism to fill it out. Reagan had nothing to do with it.
The Soviet Union would eventually have collapsed under its own weight, but that collapse was not imminent. Reagan sped up the process by at least a decade.
Maybe or they could have selected a hawkish General Secretary that would respond to Reagan with full on Stalinism in '85. I was two at the time and certainly am not familiar enough with the members of the Politburo to say how it would have gone but from what I have read Gorbachev is the key actor.
It has nothing to do with personnel - the Soviet apparatchiks were mostly interchangeable. The problem was that communism was not a workable economic system in the long run - that's why it would have failed eventually. By forcing Moscow to ramp up its military industrial efforts to compete with the US buildup, Reagan exposed and exploited that weakness. The Soviet economy could not handle that added strain. That was why Gorbachev felt he had to institute perestroika, but but his perestroika turned out to be too little too late to save the Soviet Union.
Ok or he was a doddering idiot racist that almost caused a nuclear war. If you want to give credit to anyone from the administration I guess Schultz qualifies.
IIRC, you said you were two years old back then. I was working for the US government as a Soviet economic analyst, so I know about this stuff first hand.
I have a lot of respect for George Shultz. But he was carrying out the policy priorities set by Reagan. Reagan alone formulated the policy that won the Cold War. We were never on the verge of nuclear war. In fact, Reagan negotiated reductions in nuclear arms with the Soviets.
You clearly know nothing about Ronald Reagan. You are uncritically repeating the stupidest criticisms of him. He was neither an idiot nor a racist. According to the people who knew him, he was a closet intellectual who read books and discussed them with his staff. As for doddering, we now know that his last two years were marred by the onset of Alzheimer's, which explains why not much happened in those two years. But we got six good years out of him.
For future reference, the best criticism to level at Reagan, if you are inclined to do that, is Iran-Contra.
Oh so why did he kick off his campaign in Philadelphia MS talking about states' rights?
One of Reagan's initiatives was New Federalism - an attempt to shift power away from DC and back to the states. Federal grants to states had always come with strings attached, and over time that had tended to rob states of actual policymaking authority. Reagan wanted to cut some of those strings to allow states a greater role in administering their own affairs. For conservatives, this was a matter of faithfulness to the Constitution - especially the 10th amendment. Reagan's success with this agenda was mixed - it might have been one of the things that was left incomplete because of his Alzheimer's.
Or he was celebrating the murder of the freedom riders.
What does policy have to do with being an orator?
It's a lot easier to sound like you know what you're talking about when you actually know what you're talking about.
Obama was a better off-the-cuff speaker than Reagan, at least in Reagan's later years, but nobody could put a prepared speech over better than Reagan.
So Reagan has better speech writers? Lol
Also, speaking is all about off the cuff speaking. Prepared speeches are much easier to deliver than off the cuff stuff.
It's not like obama's prepared speeches were chopped liver.
I voted for both of them every time I could, so obviously I liked them both. A lot. But I'm basically a Republican at heart, and you apparently are a Democrat. I can get by that to evaluate them past my personal prejudices. That you apparently can't is your problem. Good luck with it.
It’s hard to compare because of partisanship. The difference in partisanship is huge between the two.
Combine that with one was black but I’m sorry I think we have to give it to Obama. Being a black president in 2010 compared to a white Republican in the 80s leads me to believe it was Obama. Combine that with Regan’s later years (you can’t delete what he was like the last 2 years) definitely Obama
I don't follow. My prejudice is why I think off the cuff speeches are harder?
I never said Reagan was bad at speeches. He was really good. Probably top 3 since we have audio of speeches.
I think Obama is the best overall orator we've had since Teddy.
That sounds better. But "Teddy", as in Roosevelt? He was certainly vigorous if you like that sort of thing, but it's a matter of taste. Between him and Reagan I think that both his cousin FDR and Kennedy were better orators. but again, now we're talking taste, and there's no right or wrong. 😃
Democrat who served in the military during Reagan, Bush and Clinton was in Europe when the wall came down and I can say with clarity WE didn’t hate the United States.
I felt the same. These guys were little kids when Reagan was president. Their understanding of Reagan is about the same as mine is about Eisenhower, which is I remember seeing on tv as a child. They’re reflecting something they’ve been told but didn’t experience. I’m essentially a European-style socialist, but I do not and have never hated America. I’m a proud daughter of a WW1 vet, sister of brothers who were WW2 vets and aunt to guys who served in Viet Nam. So, yeah. I agree.
They did it again in the secret podcast today. Like all democrats in the 80s were communists. Reagan KILLED A LOT of union jobs including in my home state of Massachusetts with his union busting bs. We were in a recession most of his time in office but hey-he talked pretty.
They can’t because then every thing they believed was a lie.
Absolutely! I find myself thinking back to the 80s and wondering what planet they were on. I suppose it tells us something about how we ended up so frigging divided if they thought all Democrats were commie America hating terrorists. I’m from Detroit originally - I can certainly tell you about union busting and job loss!
They’ve used the same slurs on us forever it’s no wonder we ended up here with the magas thinking we are all groomers.
The real sign that a conservative has come to their senses is when they can tell the truth about Reagan. All we can do is help them along the way.
Thank you. That sort of triggered me too. I didn’t serve but I felt that slur directed at me over the years. Whether questioning the arms build up in my 20s (Reagan), or Iraq, or cringing at USA chant, or being OK with Kapernick taking a knee. I never hated America. And hearing the phrase here again in this pod makes me question its use today.
I’ll add that I think part of the reason the Republican has become so singularly focused on defeating Democrats over everything else may be that decades of that shit has resulted in them believing it.
On Ken Paxton's comment about locking up the 15% who do crime -- we could reduce violent crime in this country by 90% if we locked up all males between the ages of 19 and 54. Is that what he is suggesting? It's absurd.
Right?!
But no that would be ridiculous. As is everything that comes out of Paxton’s mouth
Goosebumps following the introduction! I just have to express my respect and admiration for Adam! You are genuine and clear in your convictions.
It’s rare these days that I feel a sense of positivity! Thanks Tim and Adam for being bucket-fillers today.
Can I just say/ask…when are you running for President, Adam!? Adam/Sarah ticket anyone?
I’m agreeing to nothing
Fuck Ronald Reagan
Y’all were on fire today. I’m terrified!
AGREE, the intelligence committee info has me really scared
Putin didn't just attack our elections in 2016; the shared national narrative that we as a society operated under up until that point was the biggest casualty of the disinformation campaign that's part of a larger information war that's been going most of this century.
In the social context, a nation is a group of people with a shared narrative that is implicitly and explicitly agreed upon by the group; e.g. before 2016 (setting aside the political fringe) we all had an implicit faith in our elections, and we explicitly agreed upon the rules of those elections that the transfer of power would continue as it had for 200+ years.
The 2016 election was an attack that shattered our national narrative into two separate realities, but what they share in common is the same susceptibility of manipulation; we have plenty of examples of the right-wing hyperreality, but until the war in Gaza the left-wing didn't experience the degree of manipulation the right has. The two hyperrealities that resulted are not the same in that the flavor of manipulation that works in one likely wouldn't work in the other.
How we as a nation move forward from this isn't clear, but what is clear is that a new national narrative must be created. A narrative that is honest and accepts the bad (from forced migration and genocide of the indigenous peoples of America and 400yrs of slavery) with the good parts (our ability to come together in a crisis despite our different origins and accomplish feats of ingenuity and innovation as a team) of our history and how we are resilient and overcome adversity is what can help weave a new story.
So much truth here. If he actually “hacked” the election it would have been better for our nation
Just for the record
Fuck Ronald Reagan!!!!!!
Please, please do!
You’re a goddamn comedian
I think your better suited for X or whatever they are calling it these days.
We'll agree to disagree.
Sorry, I was agreeing with you!
Adam...not sure if you're reading this or not, but can briefings be denied to Perry and Jackson because they're a threat to national security?
Do they have to be vetted to get their clearance or does it come with the Committee seat? If the latter, that is a big gaping hole that needs closing.
Technically they don’t have clearances. Like POTUS, they can have access to classified material because they were elected to their offices. Unlike POTUS, they don’t automatically get access to anything they want to see.
Ordinarily people have to fill out a SF-86 and undergo a rigorous background investigation to get a clearance. For a top secret clearance, that investigation is quite thorough. I doubt with Jackson’s alcohol issues and Perry’s baggage they could secure those clearances through the normal process. Which is why Johnson appointing them to the intelligence committee is so shameful and a threat to national security. A national security law expert would know whether or not those two could be denied classified information.
Benson is just dressing up the age old “Look what you made me do.” excuse. Except he’s giving the whole country a black eye.
"Meanwhile, Trump gets two stooges on the House Intelligence Committee who will have access to top national defense secrets."
Not yet he doesn't. Since Jan 6, 2021 he's done little but increasingly trumpet his unfitness for office, by any objective measure. He's done nothing to appeal to the principled middle, or to the sane for that matter. He's proudly unrepentant about his "sacred landslide" BS. He has zero guardrails, and thinks that's a good thing, something he's owed. He's completely unmoored from any sense of duty, comity, accountability, or national loyalty. He's a shameless pathological liar. He's divisiveness on steroids. He said he'd goad adversaries of the U.S. to attack the western alliance.
How is Biden in a tie with this guy.? His team needs to wake reachable voters the F up in swing states.
The young activists who staff the Biden administration and the Biden/Harris campaign have focused on appealing to base voters like themselves instead of the swing voters who will decide this election. There is still lots of time to fix this, but the initiative will have to come from Biden himself, who has shown little stomach for taking charge and laying down the law. His recent initiative on the border might be a step in the right direction - as long as he doesn't backtrack like usual.
Desi you have described our fundamental issue. We look at this election and ask ourselves “how the fuck are we here?!?!” And I don’t have an answer other than we were always going to end up here at some point. I am sorry but there is no looking at what Trump has done over the last 8 years and saying “this is ok.” I guarantee that if you asked Trump voters…almost all of them…how they felt about Trump but you were from the future and could describe what he did they would be where these idiot voters are today. You could tell them one of ten things that he had done and they would say “no way if I knew that I would not vote for that man.” However they did, do and will. That’s what is scary.
We could run anyone and maybe we would be a point or two higher or lower. I don’t know. It’s a counterfactual but we would be saying the SAME THING if Biden wasn’t running and it was warnock or big gretch or whoever. We would be saying what if he/she did this or that maybe the race would break for the pro democracy people because where this country is unfathomable.
If this was a popular vote election and not an ec election this shit would be over. Trump would be going to prison. However we have this crazy situation where somehow republicans can win with between 44-46% of the vote and apparently 44-46% of the voters are stupid
While I never underestimate the power of stupid, my sanity demands that I maintain polling is broken, that Biden and Trump are not tied, that Biden will easily win (even by a landslide). Do I really believe that? I don't know, but I hope, hope, really hope that it's right.