Chapter 1: What events led to the discussion of Trump and the Epstein case?
Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. A couple of things really quick. We have sold out the event in Dallas March 18th. On March 19th, we're in Austin. It is the biggest venue we've ever had an event at. We're gonna have a fun guest. Who needs a guest, actually? I'm going to be there. Sarah's going to be there. JVL. It's South by Southwest that week.
So make a little trip out of it. You know, make a little spring trip. If you live somewhere cold, going down to Austin. Thursday, South by Southwest. Friday, Never Trump podcast. Saturday... Go to La Barbecue, Rainy Street. You know, do something. Come on down to Austin. Tickets at thebullwark.com slash events. Next, I have heard from you.
Tim Robinson is wearing a hot dog suit, not a banana suit. We regret the error. Okay? I get it. All right? I'm talking a lot. I'm doing my best. It's kind of the same shape in my brain. It's the same shape. Cucumber suit? It's a hot dog suit. It's not a cucumber suit. Lastly... I told you we're going to have a new guest today. That was wrong. We had a scheduling snafu.
So instead, despite that noise that you just heard of somebody interrupting, I've decided to do a one-hour monologue today on ethics and decorum in hockey locker room behavior. So prepare for that. Then we're going to get into Eric and Kirk. We're going to do an hour on Eric and Kirk's connection to Global Jewelry.
Now, instead, a friend of the show who came in off the bench, who we appreciate very much, a staff writer at The Atlantic. It's Jonathan Chait. How are you doing?
Thank you. I'm gunning for sixth man of the year in the Bulwark podcast.
Tim Hardaway Jr. People have strong thoughts about hockey. We're not going to talk about that. I want to start here. Who killed Jeffrey Epstein? Any thoughts on that?
Who killed Jeffrey Epstein? If you're trying to get me to confess, I'm not going to do it unless you put me in the stand.
Until we find out who killed Jeffrey Epstein, we're going to keep talking about him on this podcast. Two things that are worth mentioning. I want to get into some of the news of the day. Hillary Clinton is back in the news. She is testifying in a closed-door interview, which will be videotaped.
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Chapter 2: How does the conversation shift towards the Michigan-Canada bridge controversy?
It's a file. It's not criminal proof. But I always thought this was where it was going to go, was that they would find whatever was bad about Donald Trump and not release that to the public. That's what they're going to do.
The interesting thing with the Epstein oven is just the classic cover-up part of it is, I think – a big part of the Trump vulnerability here. Like this is a traditional politician scandal in some ways and various weird tabloid circumstances. It's like, you know, the coverup is what is happening. Right.
And even within the Trump coalition, like there's basic consensus that like Pam Bondi and Kash Patel are clowns. Right. Like, I mean, you have like the people on Fox or whatever who are just regime propagandists. They will not say anything.
But anywhere in the kind of the mega opinion space, you know, ranging from Megyn Kelly to the manosphere, there's essentially unanimity here that these folks are clowns, that they're covering something up. And in that sense, I do think this is not not a real political vulnerability for him as the press is forward.
It is. I mean, sort of zooming out to a higher level. This was their issue, right? This was the rights issue. The Democrats didn't start talking about Epstein. The Republicans did. But what's amazing is that because Donald Trump is so singularly devoid of virtue, is bad in almost every way a human being can be bad, he's also implicated in this, their handpicked issue.
The thing they chose to talk about... Seems to implicate Donald Trump more than any other politician, which is kind of amazing. Right. It's it's as if, you know, like, you know, like Richard Nixon turns out to have been friends with Elder Hiss or. Right. Like this is his thing. This was their issue. But like there's just almost no issue you can pick where Donald Trump is a good guy.
So it turns out this is just like another way in which Donald Trump is bad because he's bad in all the way.
I lied. I will say one more thing about the hockey team. This is why he wants to talk about the fucking hockey team.
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Chapter 3: What ethical concerns arise from the Trump administration's actions?
The record is in tatters. And even on these core issues where you would have thought that the base would have been on his side, whether it be Epstein or immigration, right? Like the things that like their media universe cared about. The Epstein thing is a total catastrophe for him. And on immigration, it's flipped. He's underwater.
I mean, Abigail Spanberger talked more about ICE and CBP than he did.
But the hockey thing is also a problem for him because his FBI director just took a trip to Europe to watch hockey on the taxpayer dime.
Without arresting anyone. Has he arrested anyone? Who have they got?
Right. Right, right. It's a big sting operation. We're going to find out later. No, and he's claiming he was just there for meetings. And while he's there, the hockey game just happened to be going on, except they found a tweet from him last summer congratulating the hockey team and saying, I will be there last summer. I'll be there. You saw this, right?
Kash Patel tweeted, I will be there to watch you guys in the Olympics. So now they're claiming it's just a coincidence that he was there when he was clearly planning it for more than a year.
No more hockey. Joe Sack. Unless we're talking about Joe Sack. I can Peter Forsberg.
Right. Again, it's like all the stories are bad for him, right? It's like he's pivoting to hockey. But like in a normal world, hockey would be the last thing you would want to talk about because his FBI director would be like on the verge of being fired.
All the stories are bad for him to that point. I love this. My friend Lakshya Jain is a pollster and wrote this up for the argument. There's a longitudinal way to verify the people that they're polling what they had said before. They're following the same people along.
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Chapter 4: How do AOC and Mamdani navigate their roles in the DSA?
There was a story in Politico this morning that is like... I just mind boggling. It's a brain fuck for me because I can't decide whether the Trump advisors that are the sources for this story are the stupidest political advisors in recent memory to work at the White House or if it's like a savvy attempt to sabotage the plans inside the White House. It could be either. Here's the story.
Senior advisors to President Trump told Politico they would prefer Israel strike Iran first in the hopes that Iran would retaliate against America or American assets in the Middle East, which would then help muster support for American voters for a full-scale war in Iran. That was two White House sources to Politico.
Yeah. Do you remember before the Iraq – or during the Iraq War – sorry, the Gulf War in 1990, the first Iraq War, going all the way back. This is – you're a pretty young man. I don't remember that. Saddam Hussein launched missiles at Israel hoping to draw Israel into the war so he could rally Arab states to his side after he had invaded Kuwait.
So we're sort of trying the Saddam strategy here. Oh, so we're in the role of Saddam. We're the Saddam. Well, I mean, we've got the two. We've got Uday and Kusei already, you know, doing deals.
The design aesthetic is very Uday and Kusei as well. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there have been some other examples. There's plenty over his history, you know, Gulf of Tonkin or whatever. But, you know, remember the main a lot of times that was a post hoc thing, you know, like this happened and then we're using it as a rationale. Right.
I can't tell if it's a hope or wish casting or baiting, even if this went out, as they said. the advisors think that us getting drug into a middle East war by Israel is going to make it more popular. I truly don't understand. I've been talking about this for like a week now and I'm asking every guest, I'm just, I'm grasping. I don't understand what they're doing.
Like, I don't understand what he, why he's doing it. You know, all of the logical, you know, things people say like, Oh, it's going to distract from Epstein or, Oh, well, Or maybe there's a corrupt deal. I don't know. Jared wants to build something in Tehran. None of it makes sense.
Right. What is the actual motive? Right. Because on the surface, motives are so comically transparent. Right. They claimed to have destroyed the Iranian nuclear program. They claim, in fact, that anyone who said that it wasn't completely destroyed forever was a fake news liar. Right. So now we've got to redistroy the Iranian nuclear program that we had already permanently destroyed.
So we know that they're lying, but what is the actual reason? It's really hard to say other than – so there's post-Venezuela and then Trump deciding he's never going to win a Nobel Peace Prize, so he might as well go for the war prizes.
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Chapter 5: What are the implications of the Democrats' approach to education reform?
It seems so unbelievably haphazard and stupid. And if you think behind the scenes, there's actually some mastermind who's got some clever plan, there probably is.
Can I share with you a wrong thought? Yeah. Even though this is public podcast. Yeah. I mean- Is it bad for me to root for the lose-lose situation here? I don't like the Ayatollah. I don't know. Donald Trump getting himself into an Iran quagmire does seem to be good for me, as I think that both the Ayatollah and Donald Trump would find themselves politically harmed by that. Is that wrong?
My skepticism about regime change is practical. It's not moral, right? So if you told me that we could actually pull off regime change, get the Islamic Republic out and put in some kind of democratic regime in Iran, I'd be all for it. I'm just, you know, I'm skeptical that we could pull it off, but I would love that to happen.
I do think that it would be nice if we could replace all the dictators in the world with democracies. I don't think it's easy to do, and I don't think we should try. But sure, if it worked, that would be great.
Just to be clear, Jonathan, against regime change. Not against set change, though. We had to move because we had some construction happening outside his house. So you're not going crazy if you're eating your weed gummies watching this on YouTube. He has changed locations. But the podcast continues.
I want to talk about a couple of your recent pieces, including a couple of them about corruption in the Trump administration. We've talked a lot about the crypto, so I'll get to that. But there is this other story about the Canada Bridge. And I believe I mentioned it on the podcast kind of in the context of Trump's
stupid bleat about how if canada and china work too closely together i'm going to cancel this bridge and we're going to ban hockey here we are mentioning hockey again but the story ended up being even more corrupt much more just like what we saw in its face so so why don't you talk about that a little bit
So Michigan has a bridge to Canada. It's a key crossing point. For decades, it's been privately owned by the Maroon family, and they've done everything they could to prevent competing bridges from being built so that they can collect these absorbent tools. It's a huge economic sore spot for both Michigan and Canada because it's a key crossing point. And it backs up.
It's the only way for trucks to get across. And so they've just spent millions of dollars basically paying off politicians and just preventing any public bridge. But finally, there was a workaround.
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Chapter 6: How does the podcast address the changing dynamics within the Democratic Party?
Obama has a plan for the ACA. There is a bunch of think tanks behind it doing white papers. There's a bunch of bloggers, your Ezra Klein, et cetera, who are supporting this, a bunch of media commentators who are making the case for it on the merits. Yeah. Trump doesn't have that. I was one of them. Yeah, sure. There you go. Sorry to snub you. Jonathan Chates, the man who says reclines.
Jonathan Cohn.
Yeah, Jonathan Cohn here at the Bulwark. You don't have that for basically anything that Trump is doing, actually, except for immigration. You know, Heritage has like some fake Potemkin support for some of this stuff. But like there isn't like a big substantive apparatus behind all this. It's basically just like Trump gets to do what he wants.
And like we'll talk about what we want and just support him. It's cultish.
Yeah. No, I mean there are traditional conservative policy goals that have been advanced and that tax bill was the main example of it.
But who was like the biggest – like you had Grover Norquist that came out of the Bush and Tea Party era. Like who was the big advocate for the tax bill that was like we really need to –
run up some deficits more and like it's critical right now that we decrease the top rate even a little further like who were the big like ban and i could think of the big like opponents of it in the mega i think if you polled members of congress professional republicans people who were republicans before trump they would say that was their favorite moment of the trump administration
That was the top thing he did. They really believe in that as policy.
The border. They'd say the border, I think.
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Chapter 7: What insights are shared about the relationship between media and politics?
If a Democratic president. pardoned a Chinese national criminal who then proceeded to put a quarter of a billion or a half a billion dollars into the president's family's pocket. President's family's business, at least. And then, as a result of that, the Chinese... end up getting access to American-made AI chips. It's sort of like a geopolitical deal related to the payoff to the president
That was also related to the pardoning of the Chinese national. It is it's insane. Like the Hunter Biden's paintings or whatever. I mean, it's like think about the stuff that on Fox. I thought there's some legitimate critiques of the Clinton global initiative payoffs while Hillary was still in secretary of state. It wasn't even going into their pocket. I was going to a charity to a charity.
And here, like we have money going straight to the Trumps.
There was a Gore fundraising scandal from the second Clinton term. And maybe you're a little too young to remember this, but like the Buddhist monks and he was raising monies, but they had some connection to the Chinese government. It was a gigantic scandal, but it wasn't going into his pocket and he wasn't pardoning criminals. I mean, it was like, you know, 1% as bad as this.
But that was on front pages for months and months.
We took a poll of Brett Baier's viewers and said, are you aware that Donald Trump part into Chinese National, then went into business with him and made hundreds of millions of dollars? And that same business did a deal that resulted in the Chinese getting AI chips that they didn't have access to. Like what percentage of Brett Baier's audience do you think knows that that happened?
I would think less than 10%, I would think.
Agreed.
Great work, Brett. You're just knocking it out of the park over there. Speaking of Fox, you wrote a kind of an interesting column with some counterfactual, you might say, a different timeline where you put me into a different role. You did not ask me for my permission or approval about this. Tim Miller fan fiction. It's a great genre. Yeah, you did some Tim Miller fan fiction.
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Chapter 8: What future challenges do Democrats face in reclaiming public trust?
And I, and my response to that is maybe they are, but like they signed up for a corrupt program. The deal was corrupt. Like getting Barry in there was corrupt. And so everything that happened as a result of that is, is part of that corruption, whether or not like each individual action or each segment on the news, you know, is, is accurate.
That's right. I mean, and that was the Orban playbook, right? That you leverage the high points of business and media and you make sure that your loyalists control all those spots. And they're literally following this step by step. So it's incredibly serious and incredibly concerning. And the fact that CBS isn't Fox News now, that it's still doing real reporting is –
I suppose, slightly reassuring, but that doesn't mean the process by which they've arrived at this is legitimate. And it doesn't mean we shouldn't be afraid about where it's going. I mean, maybe they're just taking it slowly and going step by step and walking us to a place where CBS becomes like Fox News in five or 10 years.
I mean, it went slowly in Hungary, right? It wasn't like overnight that, you know, all of the media outlets became Sputnik.
Exactly.
All right. In that counterfactual, you imagined a president AOC. And so let's talk about that possibility. Obviously, you think it's at least not crazy to throw it out there. What do you think is more crazy, the idea that AOC would become president or the idea that someone would put me in charge of a major network, which seems less likely?
Yeah.
Boy, I can see both those things happening at some point.
I think me being in charge of a network is much less likely. Them trying to bully around and muck around to give me a show, maybe. Putting me in charge of people, I find that very hard to do.
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