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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. Congrats to all the Knicks fans that are listening and all my friends, the long-suffering Knicks fans, Justin and Jackson and Ben and the others. I hope that none of you, like me... turned the game off when the Knicks were losing by 29 and turned on Pod Save the World to prep for today's podcast.
I would say that the Pod Save the World episode was far less invigorating than the basketball game that I missed. But the highlights looked exciting. Kudos to the Knicks fans. And this podcast is going to be invigorating. I'm excited to welcome back one of our friends, staff writer at The Atlantic. Her most recent books include Twilight of Democracy and Autocracy, Inc. It's Anne Applebaum.
Hey, Anne, how you doing? Fine. How are you?
thunderstorm in poland you were telling me in the green room i'm hoping that does not augur poorly for the podcast but uh we'll see how it goes i can hear it right now and it would be amazing if you couldn't hear it but um because it's very loud but it won't last that long i i hope okay well our podcasts are kind of a rainstorm usually for listeners anyway so it's it's appropriate um
I want to start with Iran. We're just going to kind of hop around the world as usual this morning. Well, I guess last night we should say the U.S. carried out a fresh round of strikes on Iran with Trump claiming it was an effort to force the regime into a deal. He was on Fox and Friends this morning where he said we dropped $250 million of bombs on Iran.
Who knows what is true and what is false coming out of the administration, but it's pretty interesting since nobody in Congress has appropriated anything. Susan Collins is the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee. I think she might care about the quarter billion we spent in Iran last night.
And then this morning, Trump bleats that we are looking in the not-too-distant future into taking Karg Island. So he's back to discussing a ground-trip invasion of Iran. So I'm wondering what you make of the state of play this morning.
In Iran, almost every day something happens. Trump makes a statement. There's another use of weaponry. There's another piece of information. And yet nothing happens. He keeps changing the narrative. He keeps trying one version of events after the other. He says we're going to invade one day. We're not going to invade the next day.
Maybe at one point he'll be telling the truth or he'll be saying something that will actually happen. But I'm not sure – how we will know when that is. In other words, you know, it's not just the boy cried wolf. We're really beyond that now. I mean, he's almost doing the Russian style fire hood of falsehoods.
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Chapter 2: How does Trump's approach to the Iran war mirror Russian propaganda techniques?
Obviously, it was never about democracy. It's not really about peace in the Middle East. It's not about creating something good for Iran or Iranians, rather, so that they get out of the disastrous economic and political situation they're in. It's about making money or making something for me or for my clique.
And so that's always the line that he returns to when he's looking for a kind of baseline explanation for what it is that he wanted. I mean, it was the same in Venezuela. It's the same in almost everywhere.
That's the craziest part to me and why I keep telling the Democrats they need to be going full code pink on this war. It's like he doesn't even know what the war is for anymore. Nobody does. What is the possible justification if you took him at his word for spending $250 million to bomb Iran last night? At least at the beginning of the war, there were pretenses for why we were going to do it.
Chapter 3: What are the implications of Trump's military claims regarding Iran?
There isn't even that anymore. And the whole thing is crazy. You mentioned how we're kind of at the, you know, what was the Russian phrase you called it?
The fire hose of falsehoods. Actually, I think that might have been a Steve Bannon phrase, but it was really a description of what the Russians do. They put out not just one lie, but millions of lies, you know, or not just one explanation, but one after another after the next. And there's so many and there's so much of it all the time that people eventually just tune out and they say nothing.
I don't know what's true. I don't know what's not true. I don't believe anything. I'm just going to stay home. I'm not going to engage in this issue. I'm not going to get angry about it. I just don't want to know anything at all. And it's an actual propaganda technique. You know, you just flood people with massive contradictory stories.
And sooner or later, they won't pay any attention to anything at all. And whether Trump is doing that on purpose in Iran or whether it's Just the result of how his brain works, it's hard for me to say. But it's certainly having that effect. I mean, it's very hard to focus on a war when you don't know what's happening. Is the president telling the truth? Is there a negotiation really happening?
Is it not happening? You know, what are the Iranians really thinking? It makes it a confusing story to follow.
I think Bannon's version of that was a little more crass. But yeah, I'm with you. To that end, do you know, Aaron Blake over at CNN went and counted how many times Trump has claimed an Iran deal is right around the corner or imminent. Do you want to guess how many times? Have you seen that story?
It's like 27 or something.
38.
38, yeah.
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Chapter 4: How does the narrative around the Iran war evolve with Trump's statements?
As President Trump said, they've been tap, tap, tapping. You can see when someone's trying to tap, tap, tap on a deal. Instead, they're going to have tap, tap, tap bombs dropping on key facilities in Iran from the United States of America.
That's the real person in charge of the war right there.
You're right. I can see it's like one fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish. Tap, tap, tap, tap. I'm not even sure what it means.
Yeah, nobody is.
Chapter 5: What is the current state of the war in Ukraine?
He likes little sayings. He's very oriented, I think, towards TikTok. He wants little clips of himself doing cheeky things. Maybe he thinks that's what he can add since he doesn't have any experience managing a war since he's a television host. Maybe it's more just a branding thing for him.
Maybe that would be it would be hard for me to read into his brain and know what he's doing. But, you know, just to go back to where we started, I mean, this is one of the reasons people are having trouble understanding what's going on, because the explanation of the war shifts constantly and it's always being shaped for consumption. You know, it's Trump saying something grandiose.
We're going to steal your oil, you know, or we'll only take complete surrender. And so when they say these things that are designed to create Internet engagement, you It's very hard to know how they relate to reality on the ground. And, you know, there is some reporting for reality on the ground.
Actually, there was a great piece in The Atlantic today about how Iranians are suffering and how bad the economy is and how people are cut off and don't have access to food and all kinds of other goods. There's also a story about the U.S. may have possibly having hit a water disaster.
Yeah, this is Phillips O'Brien. I'll put the link in the show notes. I was about to bring this up. He says that war crimes seem to be the official U.S. policy now. On Tuesday, the U.S. attacked two reservoirs in a water treatment facility in southern Iran. Almost immediately afterwards, the water was cut off to about 20,000 Iranians who live around the town of Surak.
And he kind of goes into whether this was a deliberate attack, but it seems like it was.
Those are real stories. I mean, I actually, when I read about what's happening to Iranians and I read people who are trying to do reporting from Iran and to get information from inside the country, which some people can do, that's stuff I believe.
It's strange how that piece of the war, you know, what the population is feeling is almost of no interest to the people who are running the war, which is very strange given that the original justification for the war was regime change. In other words, we're doing this in order to
change the government of Iran so that Iranians have a better life and so that the protesters who've periodically trying to shift the government can have some success. I mean, that was the first justification. And it's almost as if that just dripped away. We don't even speak about them as real people.
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Chapter 6: How is the U.S. immigration policy perceived in relation to political oppression?
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That's drinkag1.com slash the bulwark. It is a meaningful difference. And I wonder what kind of parallels you see with it. Because when you say that, it reminds me of a thought that I had yesterday reading. Did you read the Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan piece about the Epstein cover-up?
It's this crazy New York Times story about this Situation Room meeting where everybody in the administration, basically, head of the Department of Justice, vice presidents, chief of staff, everybody's discussing how they manage the fallout from the desire for transparency around the Epstein documents. And you read the story and it's just like a clown show of absurdity. J.D.
Vance is like, maybe we should have Tucker interview Ghislaine Maxwell. I mean, like all of these ideas are just preposterous. But the whole conversation, as it's framed in the story, is about the propaganda. You know, and that is a parallel I do see here with the Epstein story and with the Iranians, with many other stories of this administration. Right.
It's like there was no conversation about, oh, hey, maybe we should try to find accountability for the victims. And maybe that will help us with our PR. That topic never seems to come up. They don't care at all about that. And all administrations exaggerate. All administrations spin.
But there is an emptiness to this that puts them in this space where it really is all just propaganda in service of their corruption and authoritarian powers that I think is a meaningful difference from what we've seen in the past.
It's also just the lack of interest in humans. They're not interested in the prosperity and well-being of Americans. Trump keeps saying he doesn't care about inflation. He's not interested in the financial situation of Americans. And I think that's true. I think he isn't interested. They're not interested in what happens to Iran or to Iranians. They're not interested in the Epstein victims.
They are entirely focused on the online world. What can they say or do that creates engagement? What creates a good clip? It's not even really about headlines anymore because they don't care about newspapers. They care about the visuals, the engagement, what the podcasters will say. They're inside the world that they created. That's the stuff they read. That's the stuff they react to.
That's what they care about. And I think that is more real to them than reality. I mean, in that sense, they're already living in, I don't know, the AI generated world where what's online is the only thing that's true. And what's offline is irrelevant or doesn't necessarily penetrate what seems real when you look at your screen.
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