Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hello, and welcome to the Bullard Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. A quick correction on yesterday's show, we received many notes that a 55-year-old is not, in fact, a boomer. And while that is technically true, colloquially on this podcast, anyone who's a single day older than me is actually a boomer. And so it's not Gen X erasure. It is just more about my Peter Pan syndrome.
I'm delighted to welcome to the show today one of our faves, longtime tech and culture and political writer for The Atlantic, but now he's got his own sub-stack. He also has a plain English podcast. His books include Hitmakers and another one that didn't get much attention called Abundance, which he co-wrote with Ezra Klein. It's Derek Thompson. What's up? Hey, how's it going, man?
Am I older than you? Am I a boomer? No. Okay, good. No, we're just, we're millennials. Okay, it's fine. I think so. We're dealing with the linear nature of time differently in different ways, but we're just doing our best to survive it. As typical when you're on, I just have a whole kind of grab bag of various things.
We're going to hop all over the place to various Derek interests and Derek interviews on the Plain English pod, which I'm a frequenter. I don't think I've heard your opinion on this yet, so we'll see if you have one ready. But I associate you with like...
You know, having unified theories of various things, a unified theory of everything or, you know, a theory of how something explains something else. I wonder if you have a unified theory of what we're doing in Iran, because currently we have American soldiers dying, gas prices rising, tariffs going into effect this week. We're arming the Kurds. We have no clear regime transition plan.
Donald Trump, his whole career, and J.D. Vance, like they said they weren't for this sort of thing. Why are they doing it? What are they doing, do you think?
I just had Ruben Gallego on my show, or at least interviewed him yesterday. That show's coming out on Friday. And I said, have you, A, seen any evidence that suggests that an attack from Iran was imminent? B, heard any consistent justification for what we're doing in Iran? C, heard any consistent description of the endgame in Iran? And he said, no, no, and no.
So what's the universal theory of Iran? The universal theory of attacking Iran is that Donald Trump does whatever the hell he wants, whenever the hell he wants, and doesn't ask Congress for permission. And the Republicans in Congress roll over and say, sure, take whatever Article 1 power you want and make it the new prerogative of the executive branch. That's the story of Trump 2.0.
It's the story of the last 14 months. And so to a certain extent, there's no possible unifying theory of foreign policy that explain what we're doing now. And to another extent, like this is just an extension of the president's personality. We don't have a political economy. We have Trump's personality. Right. He says, I'm going to slap a tariff on you.
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Chapter 2: How does the Trump administration justify military actions in Iran?
But what exactly we're doing in so clearly subverting one of the first principles of MAGA in the 2024 election, which is no new wars, wear the peace ticket, no foreign interventions that stay out of the Middle East as far as military engagements are involved. It's surprising. One way that it was explained to me, so I did a show on this with Kareem Sajjadpour, who is an Iranian analyst.
And what he said to me that I thought was kind of interesting is he said, Both Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran, and Trump have been acting from a place of significant hubris. Khamenei, for his part, felt like he was untouchable, that the U.S. wasn't possibly going to come after him directly, and that was clearly wrong. He's dead.
Trump is also a little bit on tilt, you could say, that now that he's seen that he can decapitate the regimes of other countries by, say, abducting the leader of Venezuela. And now we're talking about maybe decapitating the leadership of Cuba. Maybe he felt like, you know what? Regime change isn't as hard as I thought it was. You don't need boots on the ground.
You just need a really well-timed AI-inflected drone or missile operation that takes out one guy at one time. And then when you take out the top guy, democracy will just grow.
It's like he's on a hot craps table. It's like you're on a hot craps table. Sometimes you're making a lot of money. You have a lot of chips that all of a sudden you look down and you're like, I'm betting $800 on this next role. Like I'm used to only betting $40, but I'm just, I'm high at the moment. You know, let's just keep going.
Yeah, there's something to that. I definitely, I don't want to get over my skis and like equating war that's killing hundreds of people with like a hot streak in the craps table. But at some psychological level, what Kareem Sajadpour was saying is there's something similar between those two phenomena. The feeling of, oh, Venezuela was easy. Maybe Iran is easy. Maybe Cuba is easy.
And we're stuck in the middle of some kind of on tilt hot streak that at the moment is just, at least it seems to me, sort of unspooling out of control.
The Trump being a winner is another psychological thing I like. I think that he's pretty impressed with Israel's military capabilities and the Assad's military capabilities. And then coming to him being like, we know where this guy is. And we're like 20 of his top leaders and they're all meeting on Saturday. And And the CIA was involved in that as well.
But Israel has been ā has demonstrated the pager thing. I think Trump thinks all that is cool, right? And he's like, oh, wait, I can ā we can ride shotgun with people that are winning and know what they're doing here. I think there's an element of that to it too.
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Chapter 3: What are the implications of Trump's actions on U.S. foreign policy?
or the Afghanistan war under W. Bush, or even the Iraq war under W. Bush, is that there's an initial approval tacit among the American people or explicated specifically by the Congress. This is one good reason to have Congress vote for wars, not only because it's in the Constitution, but also you get a sense of whether or not the legislature elected by the people are for this particular move.
It's really unusual to have the executive branch, especially one that's as sensitive to public opinion as the Trump executive branch has been, to engage in something that's so demonstrably unpopular within the MAGA coalition.
Even if he stopped today and did the Trump thing and declared victory, you know, and it's like, had you polled two weeks ago and said, hey, we're going to bomb Iran. We're going to take out the Supreme Leader. Six American troops are going to die. Your gas prices are going to go up. We don't know who is going to replace him. I think that that prospect would have pulled it like 30% or 20%.
I mean, it would have been an extremely unpopular prospect. And it seems like it's going to get worse from here.
Yeah, this is put a little bit crudely. But right, we're going to kill someone that most of you have never heard of in a country that most of you never think of. And the cost to the American people is that they're going to pay a dollar more at the gas station for every gallon they put into their car. I mean, that doesn't sound, I think, to a lot of people like a good deal. Right.
I mean, just from a strategic standpoint, it doesn't sound like the kind of America first that I think Trump is on soundest foot articulating. Like, I do believe that one distinguishing quality of his 2015 candidacy, and you're in a good place to tell me if I'm right or wrong here, is that he was willing to say things that were unpopular among elites, but popular among the public.
The distinguishing thing about his 2015 candidacy was that he was willing to be overly aggressive and bigoted towards immigrants and brown people and that he didn't want to go to war. I was like, those are the two things that Trump was saying. There were 16 people on stage. Nobody else was saying it.
He was the one who was being like, no, we should ban all Muslims and we should deport everybody here. And also we shouldn't go to dumb wars. Like no one else was saying either of those things. He did both and the people were with him on both. And so it's like it's a total betrayal of his original case to the voters.
Right. So I don't know what he's doing. And the fact that I don't really understand what he's doing makes me wonder. And this is really a question for you. You study this more closely. How long are we going to do this before Trump just says, look, we won. The war's over. I'm declaring the war over. We did what we wanted to do, which is to assassinate the leader of Iran.
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Chapter 4: How does the legal system enable authoritarianism in the U.S.?
I'd like a little addition to it, but why don't you... So I just think being a parent is really interesting. It's also an incredible cliche. And I try to go directly at that, that there's nothing about parenting that isn't a cliche, which makes it hard to write about in an interesting way.
But one thing that I feel that I don't think is articulated enough by parents is the degree to which you have a baby or...
one's wife has a baby or someone else has a baby that you adopt and the baby comes home and that baby is not the same baby week three and it's not the same baby month six and you know my kids are two years and two months old but it's not the same baby i imagine at five years old at 10 years old at 20 years old and so in a way i think what i said is like in a phenomenological sense it's
you don't raise a singular baby. You raise a series of babies that keep changing, yet retain the basic facial structure of the baby that the woman gave birth to. And there's something really beautiful about this idea that being a parent therefore means falling in love with the sequence of strangers that keep reappearing behind your child's face.
And I think an indelible part of parenthood, an indelible part of enjoying parenthood, is... Making peace with that inevitable change. I think there may be a larger lesson here about if you can make peace with the changes intrinsic to your child, then maybe you can make peace with the changes that are intrinsic to life and to being alive.
But that I think is like probably like the deepest and most true thing about parenting is that your kids are this sort of sequence of strangers that never stop changing. And I think that's kind of beautiful.
My related observation that I've been struggling to put my finger on that you had my neurons firing over was, My child's being adopted was like even more of a literal stranger, right? Because it doesn't share the DNA. And you don't know kind of what she is going to develop into. And my brother had his first kid like six months before we adopted her.
And I remember being in the hospital with him and his wife, my sister-in-law, and seeing that kid when he was born. And he looked like me and my brothers did when we were kids. You could just see it. He was very much strong genes. My brothers, we all look alike, and the baby looked like us. And this baby now kind of reminds me just of me. Now he's like nine, and he's like the first child.
He's very much like me. But at the time, it gave me this fear. that I was like, am I going to love this kid because of the familiarity more? And will I ever be able to overcome that? And that fear dissipated hour three of my daughter's life. I was just like, wait a minute, no. And it's hard to figure out why that is. Is it something about how we're wired with the nurturing?
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