I don't know the last time I saw that.

Yeah, The New York Times Siena poll is a, a good poll, a solid poll.

It, a year ago, it was plus two on the generic, so I think you can...

It then went up, actually, uh, a few months ago, and stayed up, uh, at, at around eight or nine, actually, if you look at the details.

Um, so that's a strong showing for the Dems.

You know, they've been creeping up in the generic.

One of the big questions around Roussin always raises this, is, uh, Trump's at minus 20, 25, you know, 28 in these different polls, his approval.

You don't see that a lot.

But, like, it does feel like there's this imbalance in, in focus on where the threat is coming from when you have the political director for Ohio Senate candidate literally dressing up in Nazi regalia.

Yeah.

So anyway, I th-I think, I think that race is-- I mean, it's always-- it was already in play, and I think Brown's actually ahead in more polls than not.

But, so I think that one's probably closer to the top of the list, of the conventional list of Democratic, uh, possible pickups.

And Brown obviously is a very experienced and successful politician in Ohio.

But yeah, I just feel like a lot of those states are breaking more or less.

I mean, you and I discussed this last week.

But, uh, I'm wondering your thoughts on kind of the po-the politics of all of it.

Is there some unifying idea that you feel that most people should be able to share like through the past, you know, through your lifetime, through our lifetime, through everybody's lifetimes? What does that feel like to you? I guess this is like a kind of a broad question about thinking of recently and the idea of like, what does it mean to be a, you know, a lowercase L liberal and what does it mean to be an American? And yeah.

I mean, I think it's a big question and a good question.

I would say I would have said yes.

The answer for me, just empirically, is yes, in terms of how important thinking about America was for me.

I did my academic work, such as I was on that, and the Federalist Papers, and the founding and all, and came here to be in the education department, where one of our big concerns was civic education and all that, and liberal education.

So yeah, that's always been the American side of things has been very important for me.

I will say, though, that if you look around at my peers, people 65 and over, look at their voting habits and stuff, It doesn't seem to have been that important to them, or to be fair, it's been important to them in a very different way.

I think about, you know, there's the kind of left populist people that are very interested in sort of corporate power they're very interested in redistribution then there's the more um i don't know the sort of technocratic types the more like abundant you know i would say that that's like the abundance type people and then there's the i mean who else i mean who what what makes up the what makes up the democratic three-legged stool or is there is there anything that coheres in that way

How did it go last night?

It was great.

I was at the, uh, First Parish Church in, right outside Har- at Harvard Square, right across the yard.

It's the church that George Washington went to in 1775, though then it was a slightly different location about a block away.

It's, it was the same stage.

This is kind of amazing.

So they moved to this church, the First Unitarian Universalist Church.

All the way

So I don't know that we need to, like, go state by state, but I'm kind of wondering what, Bill, like, your, your big picture thoughts are as we sit here on Labor Day for how the, the November election will go a- and maybe specific states that, that are catching your eye.

I've thought it would be a big Democratic year for quite a while, uh, based on nothing other than just the obvious facts.

The, the main fact being that Donald Trump's approval rating has g- gone down steadily since he was inaugurated, and the approval rating of an incumbent president is a good predictor of what happens in a midterm election, especially when his party controls both houses of Congress.

So it is a referendum on do you approve of what they've been doing for two years, and more, more importantly probably, do you want the Republic-- especially when the Republican Party in Congress is so t- attached to Trump, do you want them to continue rubber-stamping what he's been doing for the next two years, or do you want a party to check him? That was very much my experience in 2018, the last Trump midterm.

And so I, I've always assumed Democrats had a pretty good shot at a pretty good victory.

And then as Trump got into the Iran war and decided to monkey around with tariffs some more, and inflation didn't go down, and he made a -- generally seemed disconnected from people's lives and so forth, and gas prices went up by quite a lot, I thought a good year could become a very good year, and that's kind of -- for the Democrats, and that's kind of where I am.

But no, that was just the congressional accountability point of it, and then a Citizen Legislature Act, which is the term limits that you referenced.

I mean, they were trying to capitalize, and they did, on the anti-incumbent, anti...

Why would we do that? Like, what is the stability here? What happens when Trump's gone? What happens if de-- Rodríguez is gone? Uh, like it is really a crazy deal to have the US, like, be part of a state-run, essentially, oil company in Venezuela.

I mean, I think the odds of anything real happening there are pretty low.

I mean, [chuckles] you know, this is, as you say, it's like Trump's negotiating something that the next US government's not gonna feel that it should go ahead with, and, and the interim government of Venezuela is negotiating something that's not democratically legitimate or any, you know, approved by some as-ca-- assembly there or anything real, so.

But it's undercutting US companies.

Don't you think it's mostly it's a PR stunt? I mean, it might have some effect in, I guess, reassuring markets that there's plenty of oil, so they shouldn't-- None of that oil incidentally can come to the market for years.

I mean, so it won't affect current prices.

Maybe it reassures people that we're not drawing down the oil reserves quite as much as we are, or that they'll be filled up again in two or three or four years with this oil from Venezuela.

Well, I have some thoughts on it, but, but why don't I give you the floor first?

What weakens his leadership?

I mean, I think in particular, the war in Iran, when he went into that, Venezuela had gone well, I think you could say, maybe a superficial victory and not lasting, but still.

And he was throwing his weight around.

People weren't happy about it.

I thought it was very unwise as the leader of a series of alliances.

But people were a little scared of him, really, as well as being unhappy with what he was doing.

Now, I think they're unhappy with what he's doing, very unhappy.

better neighbor.

Um, and so to think that they're gonna go to war with Donald Trump and actually win that war with the US, I think it's foolish on their part.

Wow.

I mean, he doesn't know anything, and he just plays the what he thinks of as the cultural war cards.

He, he has the fake, you know, macho military card.

That's, let's call that the Hegseth card.

And then he has the fake social conservatism euthanasia card.

I mean, it's just the euthanasia.

Obviously.

What did you think about that tension?

I would say, A, just to begin with the obvi- it is a very harsh critique of slavery.

I mean, people shouldn't...

A-and it really is, and written in the 1890s, it's an attempt to remind, at a time when the, uh, the interpretation of the South's noble cause is rising in the South, obviously, historically, it's very, very important.

We're just two years before the 1896 Supreme Court decision.

Jim Crow laws are being passed out the South, monuments put up to the Confederacy, and so forth.

This is, I think, very much cuts the other way.

My favorite one, there were a few, but my favorite one was, "Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits." I love that one.

Yeah

... who served in the Defense Department in the last decade as a JAG, and then yesterday with Pri Fram, who was kicked out of the Defense Department because she had transitioned 10 years before and had, had an honorable and distinguished career, but that's not good for-- In the Trump-Hegseth world, you just go around finding people who literally transitioned 10 years before and have had utterly spotless records, uh, and just purge them, you know, because they're transgender people.

But we talked a little more broadly also about what's going on at the Defense Department.

So she was in till December, so she's in touch with a million-- lots and lots of people, and it's bad.

I mean, I think the degree to-- of just dysfunction, mismanagement, good people leaving, bad people sucking up to the, their political masters to get promoted.

The Defense Department already needed to be reformed.

It's gonna be a huge task in twenty twenty-nine to sort of rebuild it in a good way and reform it at the same time, uh, and get over and restore some culture, whatever the institutional problems, and you're right, the kind of interest group, Lockheed, Raytheon-type problems, pr-procurement problems.

It was just that he thought that his moment was to like totally cave to Donald Trump's corruption of the Justice Department.

[chuckles] Like, what is their point of folding now? What's the point of folding now? And, and I think that these guys are so deep-- Speaking of bubbles, they're so deep in their own bubble that I do think that they've convinced themselves that like Blanche, I gotta go with Blanche 'cause, you know, if it's not him, who the hell knows who it could be? It could be somebody worse.

Yeah, that was the attitude that led them to quickly confirm Clayton, right, for Director of National Intelligence.

So we have just, yeah, to step back, as you say, we have now Blanche at Justice, Clayton at, uh, ODNI, Hegseth at Defense, Mark Wayne Mullen at DHS, and Patel at FBI, key national security agencies all involved in justifying corruption, lawlessness, election subversion, incidentally, um, which Jo- Blanche's Justice Department's been plugging ahead on as much as they can.

They're losing a fair amount in the lower courts, but I was talking with a couple of state secretaries of state last week, and you know, they, they're getting a lot of pressure.

Some of them are resisting, but the pressure has some effect.

Maybe it deters some people from voting too, if you scream and yell enough about how you're gonna get in deep trouble if you make a mistake and vote when you shouldn't, and they don't-- they're not sure if they're correctly registered.

Anyway, the whole thing is, it's very bad.

What hap- What was it?

I-- But I, I've come over time to really appreciate the value of this institution in American life, and to see it degraded the way it's been degraded over the last 16 months is really upsetting.

No, absolutely.

And I mean, I've been a critic of the milit- I am not a veteran, and I don't presume to have great knowledge of military affairs.

But I remember when I was a critic of, uh, Rumsfeld and Casey's original strategy in, in Iraq in 2003, 2004.

I was following John McCain's lead, the late Lindsey Graham, actually, and people who knew a heck of a lot more about it than I did, and actual people who'd served and were serving and quietly were talking to us about the lack of a counterinsurgency strategy and so forth, and it wasn't going as well as Rumsfeld's Pentagon was saying.

Even there, they made mistakes, I think.

But, you know, they're the mistakes that get made in an institution, in a bureaucracy by p- by individuals, by systems, and ultimately they got fixed a little too late, unfortunately, in Iraq.

So why don't you just, uh, you know, p-p- find this on the Bulwark site, talk a little bit about what that conversation was like and what you got out of it.

Are we going into a full-scale war? What is happening right now?

We're at least in a pointless escalation and a dangerous escalation, obviously, with real lives being lost and, and who knows what's on the immediate horizon here.

Iran is partly responsible for this, but you know, there was no reason to assume that Iran would behave well, and they haven't behaved particularly well.

On the other hand, Trump signed an agreement that sort of seemed to legitimate Iran's control of the strait, at least for 60 days, and their ability to seek to insist on certain conditions for going through.

And once he signed it, Iran is saying, "Okay, we're holding you to it," and Trump's, uh, trying to back off.

I mean, the degree to which every boast that Trump and Hegseth made was just false.

The degree to which they've all lied to us, and I, I hope the uniformed military hasn't.

Yeah

A rubber stamp, yeah, probably, yeah.

But if McConnell doesn't come back, it's fifty-two, not fifty-three, which means they can only afford to lose three Republicans.

I think Murkowski will vote against Blanche, and so they have to pick up Collins and one or two others, and I, I don't think that's undoable.

Wrote this morning, and Sarah's argued, argued, uh, on our website, and we argued in our, in our little podcast yesterday too.

Epstein's the one thing that could really break it open against Blanche, I think, and I hope the Democratic senators have enough sense to focus their questioning on that.

He was at the absolute center of the coverup from that Sitroom meeting on July seventeenth to the, him flying a week later down to meet with Maxwell and basically, uh, get her to say nice things, uh, about Trump and then moving her to a cushy place a week later.

Uh, and so they really need to see if they can't get him squirming on that and generate maybe a couple of viral clips on Wednesday.

So, like, this issue is also coming back to the forefront right now.

And it's just worth noting that like that pressure from the White House on media outlets where they have power is still ongoing.

And, you know, Brendan Carr is a good example.

I don't follow it very closely, but I know a tiny bit about what he's doing at the FCC.

There's a term they use, like a stupid term, always all of government.

We have an all of government foreign policy on whatever something, you know, get the Treasury Department and Commerce.

Everyone's involved in some effort.

This was used a lot during the early days of the war in Iraq and the war on terror and then to some degree on Ukraine.

It's similarly to Trump showing up to game four of the Knicks finals is my comparison.

But the point is, what do you remember about when America turned 200?

So I was in grad school, and I was actually in New York for the summer working, uh, on Pat Moynihan's Senate campaign i- in the Democratic primary.

So as, I was a Democrat bef- then before I was a Republican, and now here we are again, you know, full circle.

And, uh, so it was kind of a crazy summer.

And the, there was the big ships.

That was the big thing in New York.

And I remember taking Susan, and I took the subway, we'd been married about six months at that point.

[laughs]

Do you believe they're warranted at this point?

Well, we don't know, do we? We haven't really had any independent look at it.

We haven't seen any, uh, assurances that the, our counterintelligence people got over it and fixed it.

We spent hundreds of millions of dollars on it, I think we know that, the US government has, so it's a gift that we had to pay an awful lot of money to fix up and, uh, establish.

And God knows what private deals have been made with Qatar.

We know about some of them, some of them that have been made in terms of crypto, as you all were saying.

And so it's, the whole thing is honestly a disgrace and an embarrassment that the American president is flying around on a plane that is, quote, gifted to him by a government with whom we have lots of issues, some of them, you know, friendly, some of them not so friendly, incidentally.

Bill, how concerned are you about this mandate that he can declassify whatever he wants?

Was it, and I know you must get asked about this, was it just dumb luck or did he really perceive that, that we can stick it to the system, that I can thumb my noses at the Bushes, the Obamas, all these people alike, the war, just the entire mass of everything you were promised to, and I'm not necessarily going to give you wage gains or healthcare, but kind of the satisfaction of grievance and sticking it to the system?

No, I think there's a lot to that.

I mean, at the deep level, the system had failed in certain ways or had been perceived to have failed, maybe in some areas where I think it wasn't so obvious that it was a failure, or maybe it was a partial failure, or it's slow adapting, in any case.

But certainly there was widespread dissatisfaction, and there was room for an outsider.

I think the proof of that, incidentally, is that what else happened in 2016? Bernie Sanders almost beat Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination.

so think about this it's 2016 it's seven years since the great crash or eight years really uh we'd come back slowly but we were back pretty well by 2016. uh we weren't the wars had been resolved again not entirely successfully but we weren't in some we weren't in little vietnam right we weren't in some terrible war we were fighting in the middle east so in syria and iraq obviously against isis but Obama had been, depending on how you think about it, a successful president, moderately successful president, not so successful, but the country wasn't falling apart.

We weren't in the Great Depression.

come from.

Thank you.

Can I just say, it's weird how even the things that just sound like the driest facts are frequently totally invented or at least, like, completely fudged by this guy.

'Cause again, I just listened to him speak in, uh, Pennsylvania yesterday.

He rolled out that exact same statistic, but yesterday he said the first 11 months had $18 trillion of investment brought in, and then he said, "We just got the latest numbers and, and for 12 months it was $19.1 trillion." But he, he just now said in the first 11 months, $19.1 trillion.

He's just free associating numbers out there all the time.

They're not pegged to anything.

Even when he's on the teleprompter, like, the, he, he just, he just pulls different things together.

We live here, but you know.

What are your takeaways?

Fifth British prime minister to leave in ten years, uh, now go- leaving.

I guess he's gonna stay a month or two for transition.

Yeah, that Brexit thing didn't work out so well, and I don't know.

And I am struck.

I mean, I remember this in twenty sixteen.

I don't know if you felt this, that when Brexit won, it was right at this time of year, it's ten years ago tomorrow, I think, uh, by, by three or four points.

Do you want to close with some World Cup? You said you were feeling, you were feeling the spirit of Scotland.

Yeah

...

Trump says the strait's reopened, and okay, I guess the strait's, it's back to where it was before.

It's not back to where it was before.

At best, it's temporarily opened [chuckles] again.

And Iran, I believe, has not given away its, the option in the future of, of closing it or of imposing various prices and conditions on transit there.

So that's bad.

Do you have any thoughts?

How different is all of this to the Bicentennial? What do you remember from back then?

Yeah, I guess I was sort of just 21, 22, something like that.

I mean, that was a nice, so that was a, it was nice.

I mean, I would say, first of all, America, I think we're probably like you in this respect.

We're not as big on these, I mean, of course, everyone celebrates July 4th and we celebrate other holidays as we should.

Thanksgiving's a big holiday year.

But people aren't obsessed.

Is that because he doesn't think elections matter anymore? What would that tell us? Why would that be?

Warner, yeah.

So Himes was sort of hesitant to sort of...

He thinks it's an important program, which presumably he knows a lot about, and maybe he's right, probably right.

Still, he was hesitant to sort of say no with, with Pulte there.

I'm not willing to necessarily not reauthorize Seven oh two.

I believe he finally, on Friday, he sort of came around on that, and I think it's pretty obvious that you sh- cannot have this guy Pulte running ODNI with everything that we've already seen Tulsi Gabbard do in terms of election interference.

Foreign election interference is the excuse for, for the national intelligence world to get involved in our elections.

Or Spike Lee.

What was it in twenty sixteen that worried you about Trump?

Yeah, no, the reason I was never Trump was that I did-- I will say this is one of the things I might have gotten right.

I mean, among many other things I've gotten wrong.

I think I saw what was coming.

I saw that this is where Trumpism led to.

He wasn't just a celebrity who wasn't, you know, didn't have quite the personality I would like to have, a president to have, or he didn't have, as you said, particular policies that I just happened to disagree with that I thought would do some harm to the country, but, you know, we could live with.

I thought there was a deep tendency there of demagoguery, nativism, bigotry that he was happy to appeal to, and that once you start down that road, it doesn't...

You know, how, how has your outlook changed?

Like maybe he can.

Well, and also just going on week to weekTrump seems to-- says he feels no pressure, he's in no rush.

I, I guess in a way he, he's behaving that way.

But I think the normal understanding, the normal, like, economist or energy expert understanding is every day, every week that the strait is closed or 90% closed, which is kind of what it is, the pressure increases in terms of energy prices, shortages, fertilizer, everything else.

And, and there's some workarounds, but those workarounds almost by definition get less effective the longer one of the main, uh, conduits for energy and, and oil in particular is closed.

I'm sort of amazed the markets are discounting that.

I mean, if you-- I think if you had told us two months ago, three months ago when it all began that, you know, the strait would be closed for, now it's what, two and a half months, I think, basically closed, we would've said, "Oh, oil prices are up.

I, I mean, it allIs extremely fascistic and, and outside of the American tradition and, and concerning.