Trump is taking liberties with our country's role in the world as a land of hope and opportunity by summarily locking up and deporting law-abiding immigrants—including people with legitimate asylum claims, people here on proper visas, and people with minor errors in their paperwork. And it's all being done with intentional cruelty to convey the message: Don't even think of coming to Fortress America. Meanwhile, his tone-deaf billionaire treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, is mocking Americans for wanting cheap TVs. Plus, Schumer postpones his book tour as Democrats look elsewhere for a fighter, and Trump throws a late-night tantrum about Biden's pardons. show notes: White House sizzle reel of immigrants being sent to penal colony in El Salvador Bill's 'Bulwark on Sunday' conversation with Aaron Reichlin-Melnick
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Hello and welcome to the Bullard Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. If it's Monday, it's Bill Kristol. He's back. How are you doing, Bill? I don't know.
What's the right answer to that these days? Have we discussed this already? If you say you're doing fine, then it seems like you're not sufficiently cognizant that everything is falling apart in our great country. And if you dwell on that, you seem not grateful enough that what is fine and what's family is fine and so forth.
I've settled on I'm living. That's good. I'm living. I'm here. That's what I've been telling people. I need something.
I need an all-purpose answer in this case.
I'm living. I'm here. We're here. And there's that. I'd rather be living than dying. We got to start with the pardons that were voided, I guess, allegedly. Can you void via bleat? I guess that will be a question for Amy Coney Barrett to determine at some point.
I think just after midnight in the East, Trump pleaded that Biden's preemptive pardons of his political foes, particularly the members of the House January 6th Committee, are all caps, void, vacant, and of no further force or effect because they were signed with an auto pen.
This is now a emerging conspiracy theory on the right that Joe Biden was weakened at Bernie's at the White House and that there were like random staffers that were signing pardons that he didn't even know about. And they're using an auto pen to do it. There's some pretty obvious flaws in this theory, particularly that these were extremely high profile pardons that received a lot of news.
So it seems pretty unlikely that that happened while Joe Biden was was resting. So this, like many Trump stories, combines the ridiculous with the fascistic. But I'm wondering, what do you make of it?
I mean, it's super ridiculous to think that one president can void a previous president's pardons. Otherwise, we would have had a lot of that over the years, I suppose. They weren't always popular with the other party. Yeah, it's ludicrous.
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