Ben Wittes: Talk About America in Decline
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Sujuu kuin sato. Vuokraa elämäsi koti. Sato.fi. Sujuu kuin sato. Vuokraa elämäsi koti. Sato.fi.
Hello and welcome to the Bullard Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. Delighted to welcome back to the show, Editor-in-Chief of Lawfare, Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at Brookings. That's very serious work. His sub stack is Dog Shirt Daily. It's a little less serious. He is in a what? What shirt are you in? Ben Wittes. Is that a dog?
It is. It's a kind of cubist dog shirt.
A Cubist's dog shirt. Where does one acquire it?
Yeah, it's kind of like Picasso. Okay.
Where does one acquire a shirt like that?
Well, the thing is, if you buy enough dog shirts, then you get advertised to on Instagram whenever somebody releases a dog shirt in the world. Got it. The speed with which I get notified is really impressive.
Okay.
There's a single lady in Bangladesh who just has your number. That's right. If I just print a new dog shirt, this one gentleman in America is sure to buy it. That's correct.
And she's right.
I'm happy about that for you. And for her. We have a lot to discuss. I'm going to start with this because this is a real news story that I think very much encapsulates where we are at. And I think that many people wouldn't have believed, would have said I had TDS if I told you this was happening a couple of years ago. The president of the United States had to take two Air Force Ones to the NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey. That is because the nation of Qatar gifted him his preferred Air Force One, and he wanted to ride on that fancy one. And simultaneous to that, he started a stupid war in Iran that has created some lack of safety in the region. And so he defied the old Air Force One there to get him out of Ankara, Turkey, safely.
And the new Air Force One, and the new Air Force One, I guess, does not have the anti-aircraft safety tools that the president would want.
But it's fancy. It's got, as the president said, it's got luxury like no one has ever seen before.
Really?
Yeah.
That's what he said.
It was a hand-me-down from the nation of Qatar, which is kind of like a minor Sharia law Petra state.
That's right. But it's good on the, you know, bling. And I always thought, I think I wrote a column about this at the time that the plane was accepted, that, you know, I objected to this deal because the president was getting a used secondhand plane. And I thought there was something genuinely weird about that. Look at the hand-me-down plane I got from the Emir of Qatar.
Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, talk about American decline and decline being a choice. And this is what kind of broke deck country we are now. We're taking hand-me-down planes. And then even still, you and me, the taxpayer, had to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to retrofit the hand-me-down plane.
To make it not usable to get the president to and from Ankara.
Correct. And then you and I then also had to pay for both planes to fly. Right. To Turkey. It's a truly preposterous situation. The administration wouldn't admit this is what happened. They said that they brought the two planes because they wanted to show off the new one to our troops stationed in Europe for now. Trump's also threatening to take them out of Europe. That is an obvious lie based on the fact that the president didn't fly on his preferred plane.
Look, I think... You know, this is one of those things. Trump lies about everything all the time, except his emotional state about which he is incapable of being dishonest because he just kind of wears it on his sleeve. And he has been nothing but honest about this plane, which is. They gave me a really cool plane, and I want to use it, and I'm going to keep it. And there's been nothing but transparency about that. And as a result, everybody kind of looks and says, well, there's not that much to see here. And the point that you just made, which is that Air Force One is not usable to get the president to and from safely a NATO summit, somehow gets lost in it. But, you know, that is the reality of modern America.
And by the way, a kind of metaphor.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–7:25
2
Why did the president fly on two Air Force One planes to the NATO summit?
7:25–24:18
3
How did Trump’s NATO appearance affect US alliances and summit dynamics?
24:18–29:23
4
What recent developments are driving Russia-Ukraine battlefield and air-defense concerns?
29:23–53:02
5
Why is giving Ukraine a license to produce Patriot interceptors significant?
53:02–1:02:29
Speakers
6 identifiedMore from The Bulwark Daily
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