The new administration has been routinely breaking the law, including on Friday when it announced it was cutting funding for universities doing medical research, specifically in violation of legislation passed by Congress last year. And over the weekend, Trump, Musk, and Vance signaled a willingness to ignore court orders—a federal judge on Monday declared that the White House was doing just that in response to his order lifting a freeze on grant spending. Meanwhile, Trump designated himself the Supreme Leader over the Kennedy Center, and canned the national archivist perhaps because the agency happened to notice he was hoarding classified documents. Plus, at a time when we could use some decent role models, Jalen Hurts showed what it's like to win without being petty and consumed by grievance. Bill Kristol joins Tim Miller. show notes JVL's Triad newsletter on how the Dems can win the USAID fight
Chapter 1: Who are the guests and hosts of this episode?
Hello and welcome to the Bullard Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. It's the fourth week of Trump 2.0, somehow only the fourth week, and it's Monday. So I'm back with our editor at large, Bill Kristol. How are you doing, Bill? Is it the fourth week? It's unbelievable, actually. Time flies when you're having fun, Tim, you know? Yeah. No doubt.
We need to start with the most important item of the weekend. We're going to get to Super Bowl stuff at the end. And obviously, we have the constitutional crisis to discuss and many other matters. It's tariff week again. It's going to be infrastructure week throughout the late 2010s and tariff week through the mid-2020s, I think.
Chapter 2: What is the controversy involving Elon Musk and Twitter?
But the burning subject on the mind of the shadow president, Elon Musk, over the weekend was whether or not you are white. It was a very fine statement. Twitter reply guys replied to Elon saying that Bill Kristol is Jewish, not white, correcting a tweet that Elon had sent. Elon replied, this idea that Jewish people are not white is ridiculous. Someone like Kristol is peak white, if anything.
That dude barely has any melatonin. Quick aside, melatonin is a hormone that helps regulate your sleep-wake cycle. Heavy MDMA usage creates a depletion of melatonin in the body, so maybe that's why melatonin was on Elon's mind, but melanin, I think, is the word he was looking for. So, Bill, do you want to clear things?
I mean, obviously, very pressing matters for our shadow president this weekend, debating with his racist followers over your whiteness, but I wonder if you have any thoughts.
Yeah, I've been around Washington for 40 years, almost 40 years now, and I've never really discussed my melanin count or whatever. Melanin, is there a melanin count? I don't know, whatever it is. That's the guy I really focused on for some reason. I don't know. Yeah, it's wonderful, Lady Elon Musk. This was in the course of obviously...
remember that white supremacist they fired for like two minutes and on friday that kid yeah who had tweeted that he was he was a racist before being a racist was cool and musk was on the first to say he's got to be reinstated and i said it quite makes sense musk has no problem with white supremacism something like that and that led to him saying i'm white and i'm the stupidest person around i don't care what he said something like that you're a sub-tard i think sometimes that was nice that's also it's good that the way they they take to i mean i don't even know what that's not a word i guess but
But retard is a word and a word that some people find offensive, understandably, in discussing people who have various medical issues. They love using, you know, this is an interesting thing about, I think, MAGA world and Musk world, right? They love using words that are offensive words. to offend people.
I mean, I guess really what's the device signal. I did a YouTube interview this weekend with my, with my guy, Jeremiah Johnson, who writes a really good newsletter on, on Substack. And he was like, no, it's, it's, it's to signal to the supporters, you know, I'm going to be on your side because I'm willing to say bad things. Right. I'm willing to say really mean things. And that's a sign of loyalty.
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Chapter 3: Why is there a constitutional crisis with Trump's administration?
Right.
Anyway. So then I, yeah. So he said, I'm too stupid to be a, I proved that whites aren't Supreme. So I was so stupid. And, uh, And then, yes, and then one of his many, many, I guess, I never look at the follows, but... Susan made the mistake of looking at them for five minutes.
I mean, a very high percentage, you'll be surprised to hear this, Tim, a very high, surprisingly high percentage of Elon Musk's followers on Twitter are racist and anti-Semites. I don't know how that happened. You know, it's just like weird how they found him, you know?
That is surprising. It's similar to how do all the Doge staffers tend to be racist? Like, you know, it's a mystery, you know? Maybe it's just kind of a random dispersion throughout society of racists and it's just kind of bad luck that they all ended up in Doge. That might be one.
Another theory is that he might be a magnet for those types of, you know, kind of volunteers to come join his merry band. Yeah, for people who missed it, that the story is pretty, I mean, it's pretty telling that this 25 year old or whatever, I literally treated I am a racist. I mean, in addition to a bunch of other heinous stuff.
But it's not like woke cancel culture scolds were like looking at his tweets and being like, ooh, that's a little offensive. No, he's like, I am a racist. And it wasn't also like when he was 16. It was like last fall or last winter even. It was like three months ago that he was tweeting, I am a racist.
I think it was, I was a racist before then. Racism was cool or something like that.
So not only am I racist, but racism is cool. He was and is a racist, I think we could say. I was and am a racist, and I think it's cool to be a racist. So he gets fired. I'm clear who he gets fired by because the president, the shadow president, and the vice president all were on the side of keeping him. So I don't know who fired him.
This is where you need our old colleague Mark Caputo to kind of wade through the morass and be like, who did the firing here? Who's in charge? They acted like it was the media that fired him. And it's like, no, you're in charge. You didn't have to fire him in the first place if you didn't want to.
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Chapter 4: How are the courts being challenged by the current administration?
Spent, you know, fired, thought it was a bad idea to have that guy, you know, prominently on staff there for Doge. And her dicta lasted about 10 minutes, right?
Yeah. Yeah. Well, they're mad at the media, but they should probably be mad at the person that works for them that fired him in the first place. So maybe we can find that out. Maybe we can smoke that out and figure out who was the responsible person inside the White House so they can make sure to hold that person accountable for their cancel culture.
We have some more serious matters, unfortunately, to get to with these clowns now that we've cleared this up. Didn't we actually clear it up? Do you identify as white? Only peak. I identify as peak. Just peak person. That's kind of how I identify. All right. Now that we figured that out, we have a constitutional crisis coming.
Many judges have been blocking the illegal actions of Doge and the Treasury Department and elsewhere throughout the government. and J.D. Vance is unhappy with this. He posted on X, if a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal. If a judge tried to command the attorney general and how to use her discretion as a prosecutor, that's also illegal.
Judges aren't allowed to control the executive's legitimate power. Trump, a little less... clear than that about what he intends to do. But he told reporters on Sunday during a gaggle, forget if it was on the way to the Super Bowl on the way home, no judge should frankly be allowed to make that kind of decision. It's a disgrace.
So anybody who is paying attention can see where this is heading, which is that these guys at some point are going to challenge legal rulings. They've been following them to date, we should say. For example, there was the USAID freeze that was enjoined by a judge. There was a memo that went out that said that
people that work for USAID or whatever still have access to their email, et cetera, et cetera. Sam Stein reported that for us. So they've been following judges' orders to date, but it seems like there's a time clock on that.
J.D. Vance is such a disingenuous creep. I mean, I guess he went to Yale Law School where maybe he learned a certain amount of this pseudo-sophisticated disingenuity, if that's a word. But You know, of course, the issue in all these cases is whether it is a legitimate exercise of executive power or not, whether it does follow the law, whether it does violate constitutional rights. J.D.
Vance is very well aware of this. He has supported, I mean, supported in what he has said and
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Chapter 5: What are the implications of the NIH funding cuts?
So I think the degree to which, precisely what you're saying, this legal strategy they're following is going to
I don't know, make it easier, I guess you could say, to purge the Justice Department because who's going to want to work there, especially in any area in which any of this sort of impinges on and put your name and go on briefs that you think are not right or really wrong and almost knowingly wrong, you might say. So, yeah, the general crisis of the rule of law is very great.
Just while we're at DOJ, really quick, one more thing, because I barely had time to get to it. But some of the executive orders and policies have been put out by Bondi since she's been named attorney general. Like pretty alarming. And we'll see how it actually all shakes out. But it has gotten, I think, overshadowed by everything that's happening with Musk.
I mean, like they've basically said they're not going to enforce FARA, which is a foreign agents act. They've said they're not really going to look into foreign interference in elections because of, you know, Trump was mad about the Russia investigation and essentially indicated that they are going to deemphasize all white collar crime prosecutions, right?
I mean, I think that the DOJ is going to completely turn towards immigration enforcement, other crimes that they should be, you know, focusing on maybe fake election fraud stuff. I don't know, but like, It was pretty noteworthy because Bondi, you know, isn't as much of a firebrand as Musk or Gates. I feel like it's been overlooked, but like some pretty stark policy changes coming out of DOJ.
Absolutely. Just one other note on that. I mean, the acting. U.S. Attorney for D.C., which is an important job because so much, obviously, a lot of these cases. Evil Ed Martin. I think you've discussed him on this show. He's way beyond, I think, going in the direction you're describing than Bondi. I don't even think they'll nominate him to be confirmed because he wouldn't be, I suspect.
But there he is acting, you know, U.S. Attorney and firing people. Yeah. and putting out memos and with the ability to order prosecution of people. That's the actual line prosecuting office, right?
How long can you be an acting U.S. attorney?
I don't know. There's complicated Vacancies Act rules, maybe 120 days. I don't know. There are ways to jiggle the rules that he or people like him could be in there for a long time.
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Chapter 6: What political ramifications could arise from recent government actions?
I mean, what I do know is that liberals who've been somewhat bringing their hands somewhat understandably about what can we do and our issues, our messages aren't popular. I'm on so many of these, too many of these text groups, honestly, it's driving me a little crazy. But anyway, especially with lawyers, they're all trying to be PR experts and so forth. But you know what?
This is a pretty easy message. They are cutting biomedical research in the U.S., which is done all across the country. and is saving a lot of lives, has led to a lot of medical progress. And you remember Congress has to stand up and stop it, and stop it now. Maybe the courts will slow it down also. That includes your Republican members of Congress.
I think it's a very easy issue for liberals, for Democrats. And it's one of several like this, where they just need to overcome a little bit of overthinking. And in this case, they also have to overcome, and I talk about this a bit in the morning shots, they're like, oh my God, the government's unpopular. Well, is it really that unpopular?
First of all, there are plenty of polls showing people want government to do all kinds of things like NIH or like bargaining to get the price of prescription drugs down. And this cuts a little bit against our past, but I think it's also worth saying, but you and I know this from our past where this was always a tough sell, cutting government isn't that popular.
I mean, government may not be popular, but taking a sledgehammer to government is even less popular. No one has won a presidential campaign really running against government since Reagan, I would say, in 1980. There have been people who said, we have to reform government. Of course, we have to do this and that.
But basically, the- And Clinton, the era of big government is over, right? There's always targeted, picking on the low-hanging fruit. But massive cuts, like across the board cuts.
And sledgehammer cuts carried out by an unpopular, unelected billionaire. I mean, Trump understood this. He understood this as a candidate, as you said earlier. But also, he didn't do any of this in 2017. He tried like for two minutes in 2017. He realized, oh, this is going nowhere. And he never said a word about this for the next three years that I can recall.
And that's true of a lot of parts of government. He presided over AID. He presided over NIH. And that was actually pretty smart of him. And it kept his numbers at a reasonable – people could tell themselves he's not really damaging much out there, right? I can vote for him because of immigration or the border or wokeness or something.
So this is a very dangerous path for them politically and a very promising, I believe, opportunity for Democrats and liberals.
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