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Chapter 1: What are the implications of the Trump administration's response to working-class issues?
Hello, welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. It is Monday. It is Groundhog Day. It doesn't feel like Groundhog Day with Bill Kristol. You know, Bill Kristol's always keeping me fresh. I'm sad to report that Punxsutawney Phil has seen his shadow, so we will have six more weeks of winter, which the people of the South, we know that already.
And I think it's an underappreciated abdication of this administration right now that, like,
red state republicans don't have heat and electricity and their schools aren't open for weeks and like mississippi and tennessee and texas and the administration and dhs is you know they're focused on other matters i don't know not really constituent service oriented we blue state virginians don't have our fairfax county schools are staying closed again today but i don't blame them i mean honestly it's not safe i mean the kids have no place to wait on the sidewalk for the buses and stuff because it's like piles of ice everywhere
But somehow Fairfax County should have – is it impossible for them to have icebreakers as well as normal snowplows? I don't know. I guess it's very unusual, though, to get, honestly, a week of freezing temperature and stuff. Anyway, it's been cold.
Yeah, some local government failures. But I will say just in a normal administration, you would see DHS and FEMA – and the president and vice president even, and the National Guard troops surging towards the places where there have been weather-related deaths and people are out of their home. They don't even talk about it. It's not even a thought, right?
In the old days, it would be like, well, maybe they could deploy some National Guard to help out with some of the tasks to free up more of the SOPA operators. Zero, no. They're busy. They're arresting the worst of the worst, Tim, and deporting them to El Salvador and stuff. It's really making us safer as a country and better off, I think, you know?
And Christy had another nip-tuck appointment last week, so she couldn't be focused on this. All right. Well, we have much bad news to discuss and a little bit of good news, too. We have a little bit of some political good news, which we'll get to. But I want to start with Minnesota. ProPublica got the names of the agents who shot Alex Preddy.
It should be worth saying that the government still has not confirmed this at the time of this taping. You know, the Minnesota Governor Walz's office, the mayor's office can't confirm this. This is, I guess, from a leak to ProPublica. But the agents in question are Border Patrol agents Jesus Ochoa and Raymundo Gutierrez. And both are CBP.
CBP is not releasing any additional information about the deadly incident. I think worth noting that they joined CBP respectively in 2018 and 2014. Yeah. So this is not really a training story of somebody that just joined. Any thoughts on the drip-drip of information about this killing?
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Chapter 2: How has the deployment of CBP agents affected American cities?
That just doesn't sound like the type of behavior of a group of people that have been told, you know, that they need to de-escalate, calm down. And so, you know, we haven't had any killings over the last week, of course, but there isn't a ton of evidence that things are like meaningfully different in Twin Cities or in the other places where these agencies are deployed for that matter.
That's an important point to make too.
It's not as if they're not doing stuff elsewhere. We've seen stuff on videos online that are pretty horrifying. The thing for me that really strikes me is they love breaking windows.
Their first reaction seems to be if someone's in a car and is a little confused about whether he or she is being asked to get out or whether maybe she should pull over first or whether she doesn't have to get out, they bash in the passenger side or the driver's side window. And this is true not just in cars, but it seems to be true in houses. And now it wasn't there at home.
car dealership or some kind of dealership in Utah, of all places, where they just, they love breaking glass. That has not historically been a good predictor of like lawful and respectful and behavior that's respectful to citizens, certainly to minorities, right?
The other part about this, and there'll be more conversations with this over the next couple weeks as we get to funding, is I think that is the key fact. You mentioned what Edgar wrote about, just about how these agencies have a momentum of their own. They have rules of their own. Donald Trump isn't overseeing every action that they take. And so if you have this huge surge in funding to the orgs,
and they're hiring these these people and you're putting border patrol in a place where they shouldn't be and you have all these new ice agents right like this stuff is going to naturally happen even if they do try to rein it in a little bit and so i think as these negotiations go on in the senate like to me it would be great to get some wins on demasking them and to change some of their policies and that i think those negotiations are happening but if they still have this level of funding that's greater than the u.s marine corps
this stuff is going to continue to happen. And I think that's the key point of the funding debate and why it has to be defunded, clawed back. I think that coming to some sort of deal that doesn't claw back the funding in some ways, I think it's going to be pretty misguided.
Yeah, I agree. And they just need to fight the funding thing throughout the year too. Whatever deal happens in the next two weeks or doesn't happen, there's still all that money they got in the bill, in the reconciliation bill a year. But that money, people talk about it as if it's, well, that money is just obligated. It's not obligated.
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Chapter 3: What recent events have highlighted the issues with ICE and Border Patrol?
But also, if you wanted to be a defender of the war, you couldn't be acquiescent in the excesses of the war crimes that happened. You had to be tough on it. And to be fair, the Bush administration was once they found out about these things, mostly, I think. And the military itself was. The military understood this. There's zero of that. I mean, zero of that in ICE and Border Patrol.
No pretense even. Right? I mean, think of the military. Think what the military did when they found out about things. Removing people, trials, court-martials, people Trump, of course, later pardoned, who now have high positions in excess defense department. But still, they did their best to discipline these people. There's not even a pretense of any of that now with Border Patrol and ICE.
So it's really bad. It's bad for civil liberties, as I've been obsessing about for the last week or so. It's very bad for 2026 and the threats it poses to free and fair elections. So very bad. We talked about that. They need to be tough on the Hill. They need to not obsess about every detail, as you were saying, you know, about the masks, this, and the body cameras, that.
Look, they should fight all those fights. But they need to basically curb ICE and Border Patrol as much and as thoroughly as possible.
What are your midterm concerns at this point?
You're on one of the lawyer texts, and I am. Mine is simple, that if you step back and say, if Trump's not going to do well in the midterms, which I don't think he is, the Republicans aren't, what can they do? Well, they can put their thumb on the scale. What's the best institution to put the thumb on the scale? There are a bunch of things they can try, obviously.
But they've got this paramilitary force roving around that can be deployed to cities, to blue cities, including blue cities and red states, which are particularly important places for some House elections and for some key Senate elections if the Democrats are going to pick up. Senate seats, and it can be deployed. The governor won't resist the deployment.
They can do a lot to make the playing field unequal in the month or two before the election.
Speaking of which, there's some limits to that. Here's the positive side of the coin, which is voters will have their own say in this at some level. And how about not talking about a blue city and a red state? How about a red city and a red state? Fort Worth and Tarrant County over the weekend. Taylor Remmitt,
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Chapter 4: How do the recent Texas election results reflect changing political dynamics?
So it does seem to have been de facto a referendum on Trump, Trumpism and the Republican Party. And certainly the Texas Republican Party is a very Trumpy Republican Party. So I think it's pretty meaningful. And again, it's meaningful because it fits into a pattern now, special elections and of the Virginia and New Jersey elections.
Possibly the only district with low oil prices is hurting Trump in the country. Maybe that one in Midland. But, you know, some oil folks down there going, what is happening? Why are we going to Venezuela? The price of barrel is already too low. But... It is absolutely meaningful.
It's another meaningful thing for me, and folks are oftentimes reaching out and being like, where, like, you know, do you have advice? Like, what races matter? Where should you help? I'm getting texts from Democrats all the time. And that district, you know, to me speaks to what you were writing with us a little bit in the newsletter, you mentioned it.
Like, the House, like, the Democrats are going to win the House barring some crazy thing happening. at this point, right? And some crazy thing might happen, whether that's election interference or the hell knows, some like outside force that comes in and changes the dynamics. The Senate is a much different animal. The places where, you know, the Democrats had to compete are very tough.
We've talked about this a bunch. But you look at some of these stretched states now that you mentioned, Iowa, Kansas, Alaska, Taltola, Ohio, Texas, Maybe also Texas, depending on how that primary shakes out. But those states are not any less red than this district was. Again, this is not an apples-to-apples comparison, since it's a special election on a Saturday.
But it does mean that if the political environment keeps getting worse and worse for Trump and the Republicans, that one or two of those might be winnable for the Democrats. And to me... you know, that is where there's going to be less resources. You know, there have been plenty of resources in the North Carolina and Maine center races, right? And in these big house races.
But some of those guys might not have as much. And so I look to that. Just one other thing. We're doing a live show in Texas, in Dallas, March 18th.
and austin march 19th and the tickets go on sale this week and people need to jump on them because the minnesota event sold out in one day that's unbelievable we had no idea big huge venues we appreciate everybody we're looking into other ways that people can can be involved in minnesota because we're we are caught off guard by how excited you guys were to come support minneapolis we appreciate everybody anything else in texas before we talk about uh little st jeff island
The only thing I would say is that it is suburban Fort Worth, mostly suburban, some ex-urban. It's not that different from the suburbs of Wichita or of Des Moines. I mean, it's Texas a little further south, but maybe a little more Republican, but anything close to this degree of movement. going, you put a lot of Senate seats in play.
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Chapter 5: What are the potential consequences of foreign election interference?
Most of them, like Elon Musk, wants to get invited to the most wild party on the island. You can read between the lines what he expected was going to happen at that party. Some other people got maybe kind of wrapped up unnecessarily. Former Broncos quarterback Russell Wilson was in there. There's a big lot of...
discussion about this on social media and then he had to post that he was like talking about rich people problems it was like somebody like a intermediary was I told them to find me a plane and the intermediary went to Epstein on my behalf for the plane and so I don't know maybe we'll let Russell off the hook on that one I'm not you know All these guys are in there. Letnick lied about it.
Musk lied about it. Trump lied about it. Obviously, plenty of Democrats. There's Kathy Rumler, this Obama lawyer, who's now a Goldman Sachs lawyer, who was getting presents from Epstein, and her emails are insane. I'm not really sure what to make of all of it. I feel very gross and yucky about the elite networking set. And I feel like my biggest takeaway is non-political.
It's just that people are so desperate to want to hang out with other rich and famous people that they don't use any judgment or moral rectitude at all in these sort of situations. And then there's kind of like a second, obviously even grosser category of people that seem to be involved with the women category. And girls, to be clear? I don't know.
As a political matter, I'm not sure kind of where this stands. I wonder what you make of it.
I'm not sure either. I very much agree with you on let's call it the sociological, cultural side of things. And I do think, look, all elites have corruptions and problems. And if you pick up the rock, it's not quite what it looks like on the outside. And I'm sure it was true at first sight. It was true, God knows, true of the Gilded Age. But it's bad.
And I do think, yes, I think it tells us something about our country and our society that's not good. It didn't have to be this bad, right? And this permeating everything. And after he's convicted, I mean, this isn't one thing where people kind of knew in 2002. We're talking 2017 and people are hanging out with him cheerfully and stuff. So that part's creepy.
And I do think it'll politically have some effect of pushing people at a... I don't know, left wing or social democratic or anti-rich elite, not just living in bubbles, but being protected from the law. I mean, which gets to the second point. I mean, the second point is the administration's behavior. I do think some of the critics are missing the point $6 million. pages, 3 million pages.
Look, they have done nothing to clarify what actually happened. They have not released the documents that everyone agreed would be the most helpful ones, the 2007, 2008 draft indictments, the charging documents from 2019, the 302s, the FBI inquiries. They have not released what the survivor's order released.
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Chapter 6: How has Bad Bunny's message resonated in the current political climate?
Nationalist populism has never been tried. It's like the communism thing where it's like there's some real communists out there. There's some good communists just waiting around the corner. And it's like supposedly there are good faith nationalist populist people that just have conservative social values and, you know, want the government to be more responsive to the economic needs of the Volk and
and want to go after the corporate elites that are preventing people from being able to achieve their hopes and aspirations. And they all turn out to be frauds. All of them either A, want to be elites, or are really more excited about doing right-wing conspiracy mongering. There's no...
Across the board, this happens time and again, where you would imagine that in theory, maybe what an authentic right-wing populist policy platform would look like, but... None of the leaders of the movement actually care about any of that stuff. And by the way, most of the voters don't want it, like Israel when it comes down to it.
I guess the two leaders that we've seen who do care about it, I guess, would be Thomas Massey and Marjorie Taylor Greene. And they're both out of favor with the movement because they took some part of it seriously.
And I suppose in economics, there might be one or two people who took seriously the notion that he cared about the working class and was going to bring manufacturing jobs back and all this.
I think about like there's that guy, the commentator Oren Kass. He does kind of the white papers, the Winnie the Pooh and the tuxedo MAGA stuff. But it's like there's a reason why he is doing that, like in having symposiums. And Russ Vogt and Stephen Miller and Scott Besant are like running the government. And why J.D. Vance is the person I think who most encapsulates this. Right.
Like you could have imagined after Hilbert Elegy like decided like he saw something about the white working class and working class broadly and how they're being left behind. And he thought that the old free market fundamentalism was wrong and he wants to pivot to focus on them. It's like he never talks about any of that stuff.
All he does is lie and make up stories and do right-wing culture war nonsense. That is what is actually animating him, and it's what animates the voters. Really, all of them, being J.D. Vance and all these guys, just fundamentally wish that they were the elites in charge and that they were the gatekeepers and that they could hang out with fancy elites.
Vance literally becomes well-known by writing a book called Hillbilly Elegy, you know? And it's about this. And now there's not a trace of it left, really. I mean, occasional, tiny rhetorical traces, but very, very few. And now he's hanging out with Peter Thiel.
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Chapter 7: What are the criticisms surrounding the Kennedy Center's future under Trump?
I think you can just say bluntly. That's pretty alarming to have somebody that wants foreign election interference say, being a point person looking into these absurd 2020 claims. We'll see. Anything more we learn about this whistleblower complaint, obviously we'll be following it.
This is probably unrelated, but again, it's hard to keep track of all the different corruptions and ways that there's foreign influence in our politics right now. Another Wall Street Journal story. They're doing a great job over on the news side at the Wall Street Journal. Worth pointing that out. Not as high marks on the opinion side, but the news side, they're doing real reporting over there.
Shake to noon. The spy shake, they call him. He bought a secret stake in Trump's crypto company. It was a $500 million investment for 49% of it, World Liberty Financial. That came a few months before UAE won access to American AI chips, these tightly guarded AI chips we weren't selling to foreign governments. This is so unprecedented and crazy.
Like, this is something that would be, in another time, like, wall-to-wall, the only thing that any news organization would be covering. Like, the sitting president of the United States sold a secret stake in his company to a United Arab Emirates spy. And, like, now we're doing a bunch of – simultaneously doing a bunch of deals –
that matter to our national security, matter to our economic security. Trump and his family is literally in financial bed with the UAE's spy sheik. And the deals, I guess, benefit China, right?
These AI deals through the UAE.
Yeah, they also benefit China, yeah.
It's become so routine, of course. I got to admit, I barely read the story because it's like, oh my God, another hundreds of millions of dollars from one of these governments for Trump. But it's amazing.
And should the United States president really be for sale to a bunch of Arab mullahs? Shouldn't the Christian conservatives be concerned about this? We have a bunch of guys that are doing Sharia law countries that have various back-end deals with terror organizations as well. Like, are we not financially secure enough as a country? We need to accept bribes from Arab sheikhs? It's totally insane.
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Chapter 8: How do Trump's actions reflect on his relationship with foreign powers?
and bring back traditional values to the sound and stage. And nobody actually wants to go to the Trump Kennedy Center when he puts his name on the fucking building, it turns out. And Rick Grinnell is not capable of managing that. A theater, it turns out.
And so rather than just continuing to have like half empty events and like random balls on behalf of Trump family members, they've decided to solve this problem by taking it on a two year hiatus. They're shutting down the Kennedy Center for two years. it's really kind of a piece of Trump's life. I mean, Trump puts his name on something and then it fails.
It's like, it's something that's been a lot of buildings with Trump's name on them that have ended up failing, casinos, et cetera. So he puts his name on the building and immediately fails, two-year hiatus. He says they're going to renovate it. You're more of a Kennedy Center man than me, so I'll just kind of let you take it from here.
I mean, we went to the opera. It's one of the few places you can go to the opera in D.C. They don't have that many. They have a few of the Washington National Opera. They're good, though, in November. So Figueroa and Aida and then Didn't really like going there because Trump already had taken it over, was head of the board. But his name wasn't on it yet.
So I thought, look, we're not going to penalize the hardworking people there at the opera and the orchestra and the ticket takers and so forth. So we went. But then he put his name on. And so we decided we wouldn't go to the two or three things we had tickets for in the spring.
But so, yeah, I guess we're one of those who contributed to the fact that maybe it's not going to be doing too well with Trump's name on it. And so now they're closing it for two years. Allegedly, though, he's redoing it all. It's going to be grand. It's going to be the best ever. It's going to be a monument to America and stuff. It's also grotesque.
You know, someone made a good point over there that I hadn't really focused on, which is it's also disgusting. It's hard to know which part of it, which disgusting part to be most obsessed with. I mean, the Kennedy Center was a tribute to Kennedy. There's that big statue of him when you come in to the lobby. I mean, it's not the Lincoln Memorial. It's not the Washington Monument.
But it was a tribute to John Kennedy. Putting his name on it is much more grotesque in a way than... I mean, it was grotesque always, but the supplanting Kennedy, putting his name over Kennedy. It's the John F. Kennedy Memorial, if I'm not sure, you know, Center for the Arts or something, right? I mean, and Kennedy was assassinated and so forth.
And Trump just sticks his name on it because it's a big thing in Washington that he wants to have his name on. As you say, he sticks his name on everything. And then half of these, more than half. fail. Trump University, you and I were obsessed about that in 2016, I remember.
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