YouSaid · the spoken record

Bill Kristol

lines on the record: 110
first: 2019-10-28
most recent: 2019-10-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Well, there again, I defer to people who looked at this more closely, but I think they were early on the Facebook thing. They probably illegally had Cambridge Analytical, probably illegally used Facebook stuff. I guess it's a question of how much Facebook cooperated and all that, but the degree to which they were able to get things beneath the radar to voters that were not fact-checked in the way the normal media would fact-check, which God knows wasn't perfect, and a lot of, as I say, there's been a lot of demagoguery in American history. Joe McCarthy, I have here a list, but it's very different. I mean, in fact, like McCarthy is a good...”
2019-10-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bill Kristol · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I don't, I mean, I'm not sure. I think Twitter, that Trump likes Twitter and Twitter's got the kind of comical brevity of the tweets so one picks on Twitter. But Twitter is more straightforward in the sense that, I mean, leaving aside whether you have to use your name, you don't have to use your own name, so that's a bit of a problem. For everyone to see, you don't see a different tweet from me than someone else sees. You might see more tweets from me if you follow me than someone else, but it's more like old-fashioned posting blogging, really. shorter. I think Facebook, but again, I defer to you on this. I mean, I think Facebook is a sort of a different kind of thing almost because of the algorithm and because of the feeding to you of things that you have liked or the kinds of things that you have liked or the kinds of things that your friends have liked. There's a kind of segregation on Facebook that's even greater, I think, than that of Twitter or that of”
2019-10-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bill Kristol · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. And that, I think, is a pretty big change. And I think Fox News compounds it, because I think it was just sent to you and you didn't flip on your TV and have on a major cable news channel that's well-produced and looks very professional and has some respectable parts. That was always kind of important, actually. So then you can say, well, they wouldn't be saying this on Fox News at 8.30 p.m. if this weren't true. And then when the president says it, I think it's really compounded again. So I think the combination of all that has created a bit of a crisis of truth almost in our society.”
2019-10-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bill Kristol · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But they're not actually voting in both places. So the actual amount of fraud is quite small. It's just that it looks kind of messy. Oh, no, no. I know that there are the 3 million voters. I said there really weren't. Well, no, I read it. Someone sent me an email about it. I mean, I was really struck by the degree to which intelligent people, well-educated people were believing things that”
2019-10-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bill Kristol · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Table, and someone said, What about the problem of election fraud, Bill? I mean, there are millions of people voting, and the Democrats control that. And I said, you know, that's been looked into quite a lot. It's not really a big problem. We have a kind of a weird election system because federalism, my kids are probably still on the ballot, still on the rolls in Virginia, as well as in New York if that's where a couple of the men live, one of them lives.”
2019-10-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bill Kristol · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Supplement your deficits since you don't make money with these kinds of enterprises. And I remember the last cruise in 2017, I guess it was. And so you get their panels and you go see some nice places. It's interesting tourism. And you have dinner with your cruisers. So these are people who read the weekly standard. They're intelligent people, if I could say, pretty well off if they're paying for this cruise. You know, a lot of retired 70 year old businessmen, lawyers and such from around the country.”
2019-10-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bill Kristol · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Slavic Standards was a, it started just before the internet took off. So it started as a traditional weekly print magazine in 95 sort of competitor of the New Republic, which was the sort of granddaddy of the liberals, and we were going to be the conservative kind of highbrow of culture and arts as well as politics, but quite a lot of political coverage and reporting. My colleague Fred Barnes and others were real old-fashioned reporters. But then also analysis David Brooks started at the weekly standard and many others like him, David Fromrove for us a lot. So we had, I think, intelligent commentary and so forth. Obviously, the internet came along. The weekly and weekly standard became a little, we kept the name, but it became just, you know, we obviously had posts and were fully internet friendly, so to speak. But I was struck, so we used to do these cruises. A lot of people do this, to try to make some money.”
2019-10-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bill Kristol · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hovel or someone, one of the Soviet era dissidents made this point, and it's been echoed a lot recently, Kasparov likes to say this, that the key for Trump and for people liking him is not to persuade you that he's telling the truth, is to persuade you that there is no real truth. Who's to say? Everyone's got their own thing, you know. And once you win that, then if you're a good demagogue who can appeal to people's emotions, anxieties, discontents, and so forth, you'll do fine. And I really saw that at the end of the weekly standard or one of our reach. We'll talk about that. We started this.”
2019-10-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bill Kristol · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Change their social lives the way they thought about things. And so forth. I do think the phone, Facebook, the phone, social media is on top of everything else, is a pretty major change. And I really underestimated, and I saw this so much in the last two, three, four years, the extent to which then people would start living in their own echo chambers and really start believing things that were just not the whole concept of the truth gets pretty tenuous.”
2019-10-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bill Kristol · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I'd say I generally underestimated the importance of, I don't know what we're going to call it, the internet, the last 25 years of that technological revolution. I remember people would say early on that this is like the Industrial Revolution. I'd say, it's a pretty small part of the economy. Of course, it's going to change communications and speed them up and make them more direct and a lot of that stuff was pretty obvious. But I think the combination of what we had this and I did with the instantaneous communication and availability of everything and social media and then the portability, the handheld device, and I'm sure people put this in a better way than I'm putting it, but all that together. It's one thing to be able to go online and search, you know, Google is just a better encyclopedia. Sure, right. That doesn't really change people's lives. I didn't feel like when my kids were in high school in the late 90s, early 2000s, they would go online to look stuff up instead of going to it. But it didn't fundamentally...”
2019-10-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bill Kristol · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, it seems to be panning out okay for him, I guess in a way. It's not maybe healthy for representative democracy.”
2019-10-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bill Kristol · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, yeah, I do. I tend to agree on that. There's no need of a press conference or a press release or any of that. This is the old ways. And I would not disagree with that being a smart move on his part.”
2019-10-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bill Kristol · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you think the direct access is a big deal. Direct access to 50 million influences or whatever. Yes, yeah, I do. I tend to agree. I mean, it's so different from the world obviously I grew up in Poland. There's no need of a problem.”
2019-10-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bill Kristol · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, thank you. That's a high phrase. High phrase from you. I'm a professional, and I recognize. He is. I mean, it's just a question with Trump, which historians will look at a lot how much Twitter was responsible for success, how much Fox, how much”
2019-10-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bill Kristol · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So when you're in this, one of the things you do a lot is you spend a lot of time talking about this on Twitter, on social media, you're quite good as a tweeter. Oh, thank you. High phrase for me. I'm a professional, and I recognize a fellow professional. But talk about the impact of that on your job. And I do want to get into the weekly standard and publishing and influencing people now. Because obviously Trump is the troller in chief, essentially, and quite good at it too, by the way.”
2019-10-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bill Kristol · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm doing a lot of good behind the scenes. Sometimes they are doing some good, you know, and I have to have access and it's good for my state when I can get stuff done and also on some issues I can change things a little bit. I think that stuff was a little more credible in the first year or two. And now after Syria, this is where I think Syria is a big deal. I mean, it's sort of like we're now seeing real consequences of this, not just things that are con law professors say, well, this is really kind of a bad precedent.”
2019-10-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bill Kristol · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Article 2. I think he loves Article 2. No, that's bad too, and the failure of Congress to stand up. I mean, the Democratic House has obviously stood up more, but used to be, well, Madison's that ambition should counteract ambition, but he didn't quite anticipate the party system in general, but especially hyperpolarized parties with a huge amount of deference to the president and the president willing to use the threat of I'm going to go after you in a primary if you don't go along. Having said all that, I still can't believe these people. They work for years and decades to become congressmen and senators elected by their constituents and their districts and states, and they think their job is to just kowtow to the president. It's really pathetic. I don't really understand it, I guess.”
2019-10-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bill Kristol · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know that Americans will really buy that because Americans are somewhat sophisticated, I'd say, about what happens when you leave the world. I don't know a lot of Americans have kids who've served and businesses that do stuff internationally. You know, it's not like the country's not nearly as parochial as people say, I don't think. But there's always been a market for that kind of demagoguery. And if he gets away with it, he'll do more of it. It's not like he's not going to then think, well, that worked pretty well. We're okay with Syria. Why do I have troops in Korea? Why do I have troops in Europe? Why do I have trade agreements that I still kind of respect with lots of parts of the world? And everything that we've sort of treated as, you know, Trump kind of jabbing at the system a little bit, but not really threatening it. I think in a second term of Trump, the threat, it just gets much more dangerous.”
2019-10-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bill Kristol · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, it's a feature once you lose Mattis, and once you lose McMaster, and once Trump feels liberated to pander to every sort of thing that he wants to pander to in this case, some vague sense that the Middle East war is difficult, and it'd be great to get our troops home, and why are we in the middle of this historic fight? And he's shamelessly using those. Yeah.”
2019-10-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bill Kristol · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, they've remembered what they criticized Obama for, which was precisely ironically, weakness in the exact same part of the world and saying he would do something and then not doing something different circumstances, but not entirely incomparable. We'll see if that's more of it than a temporary thing, whether they just pass a few sanctions and then go right back to defending Trump. But for me, and the reason it might be important even from impeachment indirectly, but certainly it should be important for people, is this is the next year and the next four years after that of Trump's re-elected. Syria's not an exception. It's not a bug. It's a feature.”
2019-10-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bill Kristol · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, where do you imagine we're in the middle of the Ukraine thing, which we talked about, but what happened in Syria? This is sort of anchored Republicans in this finally Lindsay Graham has a spine, although I'm sure it will go away relatively soon.”
2019-10-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bill Kristol · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and we have a lot of experience of turning our back on different parts of the world that seem to be far away and we're far away, whether it's Europe in the 30s or Afghanistan in the 90s. And how does that work out? And I think people have underestimated that side of the danger too. I mean, domestically, we are pretty strong as a country, and we've got a huge economy, we've got civil society, we've got a free media, we've got universities. I mean, I think you could it's hard for one president to really ruin it all. It's not Argentina or something where Brazil one guy gets in and Hungary, and you look up and six years later, half the universities are firing professors who don't agree with them and half the media companies were shut down and so forth, there's some risks that way, but I don't think we're anywhere near that. The liberal world order, though, you know, is more precarious, obviously. And there, I think people are underestimating just how much damage could be done.”
2019-10-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bill Kristol · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I don't know. One could imagine a Trumpy party and then a centrist party perhaps, a Bloomberg kind of, et cetera, party, et cetera. Well, but these days I do find, I mean, I talk to my friends who from the Clinton administration or the Obama administration even, and we had God knows we had our differences. But, you know, difference between a marginal tax rate of 38% and 44% or a difference between this way of arranging health care with Obamacare type exchanges as opposed to tax credits, those do not seem like fundamental differences compared to the basic norms of institutions of liberal democracy at home and a basic commitment to a liberal world order, which I think has been a pretty big accomplishment of the last 70 years. been able to convince people that that's worth nothing incredible. It's not our problem.”
2019-10-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bill Kristol · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that's a possibility. I mean, I say we've focused in defending democracy together. Our particular comparator advantage, I'd say, a lot of people thinking about revitalizing democratic forms and defending democratic norms, has been to try to say, wait, let's not give up on the Republican Party, let's have Republicans for the rule of law. That's one of our groups. Let's have Republicans fighting for American leadership in the world and so forth. And so we've fought that fight. We've done some good on the margins, I think, but we'll see what happens over the next year. We may end up, you know, as I say, I don't have a, I prefer if the Republican Party could be saved, but I'm not sure it can be.”
2019-10-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bill Kristol · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Parties and a reasonable Liberal Party that hasn't gone in the crazy direction to the left. And that's a good thing if you could maintain it, and that's why I've tried to fight the fight for the Republican Party. But I'm intellectual, and I'll fight that for the next year, I think, but I'm intellectually open to the notion that maybe we just need to think about everything in a fresh way and figure out how to have a healthy liberal democracy, a healthy free market system with obviously limitations and qualifications at a welfare state and so forth. They just need to think fresh about that, free from conservatism and liberalism, or even free from the two parties as they've existed.”
2019-10-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bill Kristol · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It wasn't right about some issues. Some not so good things. But anyway, it was a 70 year movement from Buckley and others in the 50s all the way to 2015. We're in a new political moment. Maybe liberalism, one could say the same thing, incidentally, that some of the old doctrines don't really seem to apply to the America of 2019, 2020. And we need to rethink things. And maybe that's true, incidentally, of the two big parties, or at least of the Republican Party. I mean, one reason I've tried to fight within the Republican Party and awful lot of my friends have left and said it's hopeless, and they may turn out to be right, is that it would be bad for the country, I think, for one of the two major parties to go in this nativist, xenophobic, quasi-authoritarian direction. I mean, it's not a little thing.”
2019-10-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bill Kristol · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's a big question, much discussed in my circles. I've sort of given up on, I don't know if conservatism has a future. Maybe we'll end up saying that, you know what, conservatism did some good things for the country, I think, honestly.”
2019-10-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bill Kristol · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It certainly didn't happen. For me, the date that I was obvious to me, oh my God, we're just going to have four years of this. It was the day after the inauguration day was bad enough. It was kind of crazy speech. But the day after when he went to the CIA, and I've been there, you know, and he speaks in the hall in front of the stars representing the CIA agents, they giving up the sacrifice, their lives for the country, and gives some political remarks and complaints about the media reporting on his crowds at the inauguration. I thought, you know, he's not adjusting at all to the fact that he's president. And that's really, he has gotten worse, not better.”
2019-10-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bill Kristol · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I've always been somewhat contrary, I think, rebellious. I was a McCain person in 1999, 2000, and I actually thought the party was too elitist and kind of too unaware of some popular discontent in 2009, 10 and so forth. My foreign policy debates, of course, within the party as a hawk and all this. No, but I got taken by surprise. I don't know. I don't think I changed much. I just said this is unacceptable. Trump's not acceptable. And we need to oppose him in the primaries and try to find a third-party candidate that didn't work in 2016 and then not simply give in to him just because he's president. Like everyone else in November, December, January, not everyone else, but I mean, I think a lot of people in my circumstance, I thought maybe he'll be a little better than I expected. Maybe he will rise sort of to the occasion. I won't like him much, but maybe he'll be, you know, internalize the fact that he's president of the United States. And that really, again, was maybe not inevitable, but...”
2019-10-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bill Kristol · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To our civic well being. And I would say on that we have people underestimated, I think, the damage of having then, for three years a demagogue as president. I mean, whatever you think of our presidents, They have engaged in what we call great times, but. Systematically exacerbate racial and ethnic tensions and anxieties and play on people's sense of victimhood over and over and over, that really is new. And when a president does it, it makes a big difference. It's one thing if people on Fox News do it and the 3 million viewers of Tucker Carlson hear this. It's nothing with the president of the United States says it over and over again.”
2019-10-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bill Kristol · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Had it done, he'd done nothing on immigration for his whole career. I think he is genuinely kind of a protectionist and a sort of an isolationist, but immigration is not an issue. He'd weighed in on it all, and he just was willing to ruthlessly Play that card to exacerbate anxieties and plan prejudices. The prejudice is always there, but there's a big difference in society, in life between latent prejudices that are people are kind of embarrassed to express, except maybe quietly to a few friends. Exalting and exaltation and proclamation of prejudices. I mean, it's the difference between a decent society that has some unpleasant aspects kind of under the surface, which is probably most societies in human history, all societies in human history. And really, I think damage being done to the”
2019-10-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bill Kristol · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But people just were ready for Trump's message. And then he got very lucky, I think, with a bunch of events came together, a terror attacks in Europe, the terror attack here in San Bernardino. He had a kind of genius at playing on people's anxieties. We're really not used to, we're used to demagogues. Senators, representatives, governors, but he was a bigger demagogue on a national stage who really had an ability to, it was more shameless in a funny way. George Wallace is a demagogue, but he actually had a sort of set of views which ultimately constrained his ability, same with Buchanan. I'd say, you know, to go for a bigger audience. It wasn't true of Trump who just saw that immigration was a sore spot.”
2019-10-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bill Kristol · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Element in the Tea Party, for example, but a lot of the Tea Party were decent people trying to outraged about various things. Anyway, I think people went crazy in the Obama second term. Didn't Limbaugh say the day after the election we've lost America? That became the sense. People thought Romney was going to win. They had a somewhat irrational hatred of Barack Obama and couldn't believe that 51% of Americans voted to re-elect him. And I remember saying after the election, well, look, it's hard to beat an incumbent, but he got lower percentage of the vote than he got in 2008. Republicans held the House and were about to win the Senate in 2014. The country hasn't gone that crazy from a conservative point of view. They re-elected Barack Obama, you know, how much damage is he going to do in a second term? He did some damage, I think, in foreign policy.”
2019-10-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bill Kristol · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It caught me somewhat unaware. I mean, one always knows in any major party. Obviously, there are elements that are unseemly and unsavory and somewhat dangerous even. But I would have said in 2014, 15 that we had mostly actually managed, contained, and even in some respects purged those elements. We got Buchanan ran in the Republican Party and IDs with a very, I think, a bad message and at times verging into anti-Semitism and so forth. But he was out of the party by 99, 2000. Ron Paul ran, but he got some votes, but obviously ends up being a fringe figure. We nominate McCain and Romney. And, you know, it feels to me like the party's in reasonable shape. I think I underestimated in the way some of these subterranean moods and sentiments and rivers that were ready to kind of burst out. But they're always there in a way, right? So it's unfair and way to look back and say, well, you should have seen that there was this. Of course, there was this.”
2019-10-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bill Kristol · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For what they would go through. Right, and not standing up. So you've been a leader of the Republican Party. Did this catch you unawares how much, and talk a little about your journey of being a dissident, really? I mean, resistance, the resistance essentially.”
2019-10-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bill Kristol · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's real if you really want a very high probability of getting renominated and perhaps reelected. And it's real if you care a lot about not getting yelled at at a town meeting or attacked on Fox News. And to be fair, if you care about not having some death threats and some genuine harassment perhaps of your family and your supporters, I don't know, is it real by historical standards of what dissidents and minorities have stood up to in the world or in the United States? Is it real compared to what John Lewis and Martin Luther King and others saw in the 50s and 60s in the South or to what gay rights activists saw in the 60s and 70s and 80s? I mean, I think it's lowering the bar in a way to give them a lot of too much sympathy for what they would go through.”
2019-10-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bill Kristol · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, we'll get to that various media for us. Right. We're going to do a holiday with it. So when you think about that, more investigations will continue. Obviously, there's a tax investigations. There's all kinds of investigations going on at the same time. And I think one of the things you're talking about, the exhaustion factor of the persistent, I think works short. Like you said, his bad personality works beautifully because you're like, oh, remember that. Remember the family that he attacked. Remember the whatever the shithole countries. Remember that it exhausts you and you get pulled into sort of an enragement cycle that must be exhausting. But before we get to that, you did mention that people feel the pressure to”
2019-10-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bill Kristol · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Had events like that. So I do think that I'm worried about 2020. I mean, I think people focus on the election and all that and all kinds of other things. But are we confident he's not going to stir up violence in the streets? Are we confident that we're going to not look more like, I don't know, Brazil or Colombia or some third world country having an election? There'll be an election and people will vote. We'll probably be ultimately kind of a fair election. But will it be an American election as opposed to one of those Pakistani election where people, there are mobs and there's intimidation and there's attempts to shut down media outlets, maybe not by the government, but by others on the outside and the disinformation problem incidentally. Right. It's really great.”
2019-10-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bill Kristol · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How confident are we that we will have truly free and fair elections in the United States in 2020 with Donald Trump at the White House? How confident are we going to have a president who's really going to try to prevent disinformation from flooding? Well, we'll get to that various media fora. How confident are we that we can have a president who's going to aggressively secure ballot boxes and ensure that everyone votes and that if something goes haywire, which God knows could happen, right, blackout in 20 cities on election day done by some foreign power wanting to cause huge trouble, that we'll have someone behave responsibly in 9-11. Remember they were scheduled to have a primary in the mayoral election that day as the end of Giuliatti's term. And of course, 9-11 happened. And the system worked. They postponed it. They had the vote two months later. Everyone got, there was no controversy. Are we confident that Donald Trump would behave in a responsible way?”
2019-10-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bill Kristol · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Then we go ahead with 2020 with an election year. But of course, the investigations don't stop. And one thing that's most worrisome, incidentally, about Ukraine, of course, is, and this is why I do think people need to make this argument too for impeachment and conviction, is what was he trying to do with the Biden stuff? It wasn't that he disliked Joe Biden and wanted to discredit him retroactively. He wanted to affect the 2020 election.”
2019-10-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bill Kristol · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Little by little. Yeah, enemy of the people. And, you know, come on. You can't say that. That's terrible. It's going to do real damage to the country. And now it's just routine. And maybe they don't use it themselves, though some of them do. But they certainly don't even blink when Trump does. So anyways, a long way of saying that there's a lot of rationalization going on. But anyway, I suppose if he's acquitted, let's just say before Christmas”
2019-10-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bill Kristol · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“By getting some of these things done, and maybe that's what you got to do to win these days. Because look at the left and look how horrible they are. Look at the media. And I mean, really things that a year ago, certainly two years ago, people would have just said is so beyond the pale in terms of American public discourse and civil rhetoric.”
2019-10-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bill Kristol · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'll preface it this way my generation a little older than you we all learned you know in college and grad school and after that when communism was a thing in the Soviet Union and Nazism had been a thing you know the power what did Eric Hoffer call his book the true believer that people including very intelligent people intellectuals could talk themselves into these kind of totalitarian doctrines kind of utopianism or just kind of getting crazy about a certain set of beliefs And I think I sort of understood that. What I didn't understand is the power of rationalization. How much people can talk themselves into, you know, well, this one, you know, we've got to get some good judges and get some better economic policies so we can go along with this. And then three months later, we'll go along with that. And three months later, you've talked yourself into thinking that this and the that weren't so bad anyway. And the media is being unfair. And three months later, it's, you know, the guy's kind of got a clever genius almost.”
2019-10-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bill Kristol · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Democracy and some of the media stuff fits in here perhaps, but the kind of sense that People just don't want to be alone against the mob, honestly, in this case. And to be fair, they have some convictions and they rationalize it. It would be terrible if the Democrats controlled if we got rid of Trump. It would weaken the Republicans, the Democrats who won everything would have quasi-socialism here in America. The one thing I've learned in the last three, four years.”
2019-10-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bill Kristol · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Down in the history books as the one who stood up. I don't even see why their ambition doesn't lead them to want to be a little more rebellious. So why is that? Somehow we live in an age of”
2019-10-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bill Kristol · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The only caveat I would have for that is we don't know everything yet. And I do think we've said this so many times that one or two worth development, if it turns out Erdogan, the decision on Syria, on Turkey had a personal financial or other kind of political motive as well. I mean, I think we could learn things that might tip over some House Republicans to vote for impeachment and some Senate Republicans, maybe even 20 to vote for conviction. I agree right now, it doesn't look like the votes are there, and I've talked to a couple of Senate Republicans recently, and that seems to be their judgment as of now. The political pressures are very great the other way, and we don't live in an age in which politicians remember that sometimes they can get a lot of glory, really, for standing up to political pressure. I mean, that's what's sort of funny, even from the point of view of their own ambition, the idea that you get one more term as a sort of senator who went along as opposed to going.”
2019-10-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bill Kristol · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, when you look at this, when you look at this moving towards this impeachment, and then it goes to a trial, and presumably he's acquitted, as most people assume is going to happen, even though every now and then you'll have a Washington Post he's saying, what if it is? And I'm like, come on. Like, I already know this story. It's not going to be like succession where that where that suddenly had a twist. But it's going to go in this sort of format. What occurs after that? What happens assuming it's just the election, right? That's really where it goes.”
2019-10-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bill Kristol · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The vulgarity. I mean, that is pretty, he's weirdly, he's helped by being a horrible human being, I would say. This one gets distracted by his horrible human being deeds like the British couple and forget that, okay, look, that is bad, but that's not impeachable. But the things he's done as president, using parts of the U.S. government illegitimately, those are serious.”
2019-10-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bill Kristol · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and I tweeted that this has almost made me a feminist. It's like maybe it just has. I should just come out of the closet. Just be exactly a pelosiist or something. It was pretty impressive, huh? Yeah. So you get all that stuff. And of course, part of his sort of weird cleverness is that if you do a million colorful things, you know, it's hard to figure out what the truly illegal and truly dangerous things are in the midst of the rudeness and the carrying on and the, you know, just the British.”
2019-10-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bill Kristol · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It does, and that's because politics is always somewhat theatrical and even in the most serious moments it was in the past, if you think about it. But yes, now we infinitely, infinitely more than ever. But I would say this, I mean, apart from shift foolishly, I think, you know, dramatizing the reading of the transcript and a couple other little things like that, I think they've run the last three, four, five weeks, I think a sense of a greater sense of seriousness seems to have overtaken at least some of the members of the House, the Democrats in the House. I think the speaker has done a good job of conveying that. And I hope we do get a little more.”
2019-10-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bill Kristol · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT