Chapter 1: What are Trump's recent challenges regarding affordability?
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Chapter 2: How does the NYC mayor-elect reflect the current political zeitgeist?
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Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. Delighted to welcome back to the show, former political director for Barack Obama. He also was ambassador to South Africa and an informal advisor to New York City's mayor-elect, Zoran Mamdani. It's Patrick Gaspard. How you doing, man?
Chapter 3: What lessons can Democrats learn from Mamdani's approach?
I'm good, man. Thank you for putting out my hit list there. Oh, yeah. Well, the people need to know your resume. All right. People need to know that you're legit. We have news to do, but I need to start with this. We had breakfast a couple months ago when I was in New York, and I learned that your family is a nickname for me.
And I've never felt whiter in my life than hearing your family's nickname. So I do want you to share it with the people. It requires context. You and I were on some MSNBC show with one another, and you were wearing a Christmas sweater. And my daughter looked at it and texted me a text and said, Dad, why are you on with Elf on a Shelf?
And somehow Elf on a Shelf has become shorthand for Tim Miller in my household ever since.
Yeah.
Chapter 4: How can the Democratic Party move beyond its Obama and Bernie factions?
So the context matters. I don't know if it does, actually. I don't know if the context helps me all that much. But whatever. And I wore a sweater. It's not a Christmas sweater, but I wore a sweater for you. I guess I'm not looking that Elvin today, but maybe your daughter would disagree. This morning I told everybody I'm going to be out with Elf on a shelf, and they all got it. Brutal.
That's brutal. Okay. Let's get on to something else brutal. The president of these United States Oval Office address last night. I had to suffer through it for my job. People who didn't.
Chapter 5: What is the significance of Trump's address on foreign leaders' trust?
There's a lot of garland, a lot of garland in the Oval Office now. It kind of felt like a Sarasota mall Santa screaming about Joe Biden. The teleprompter was moving very fast. I think he had limited time because the networks wanted to get to the Survivor season finale. The only policy announcement was that troops are going to get a thousand buck dividend, which is, you know, whatever.
It's a Christmas bonus, I guess. But most of the speech was complaining about Joe Biden. The first minute he complained about how Joe Biden transgendered everybody. I don't know. It was pretty embarrassing, I guess, was my takeaway. I was feeling embarrassed for him, but also for all of us. What was your reaction to our president? Yeah, definitely more embarrassed for all of us than for him.
The guy is absolutely shameless, and I've been... thinking lately that the problem is not Donald Trump, right?
Chapter 6: How does Trump's rhetoric impact his support among voters?
The fault lies not in our stars, but in ourselves. And I keep saying, no, we have to remember that before this guy started beating Democrats, he first beat the institutional Republican Party. And there's something that happened inside of the base of that party that made them susceptible and vulnerable to this vulgar authoritarianism. And now, obviously, his spell has taken hold
across deeper pockets of the country. But there's another interesting thing about last night, Tim. You just said you had to watch this because of your job. Vast majority of folk are not watching this stuff. They're not paying attention the way that you and I are paying attention.
But last night, many were forced to because they were waiting for Survivor or whatever else they wanted to watch at 9 o'clock at night on TV or 6 o'clock on the West Coast. And all of a sudden, this figure, who's kind of sort of in the pop culture all the time, and sometimes they're entertained by him,
He shows up and he's yelling and he's screaming at them without any of the negative charisma that he's had these last 10 years that keeps you watching all the time. It actually felt like a really bad Trump impersonator. It was humorless. And even when he said Merry Christmas and Happy New Year at the very end, it sounded like he was putting a curse on us.
Chapter 7: What role does empathy play in political communication today?
So there's something about how a mask came off last night for people who don't pay as much attention as you and I do on this that I hope is penetrating and has some durability as people have to ask some really important questions of themselves and about the future of this country in 2026. Yeah. Two things you said that strike me.
One is I like that you said it was humorless because sometimes a lot of people on the left, myself included, like I don't really find it funny. Right. It's hard to like process that other people do. Yeah. You know, and a lot of times his presentation, things that might come off as cruel or dumb to me.
College educated progressives like code is kind of funny for regular folks, but he didn't have that. There was none of the kind of Trumpian joie de vivre last night, none of the joking. And it felt like there was a dearth of offering a counter narrative for people.
who are actually going through tough times, you know, I keep saying that, like it was easy for him to convince a bunch of people that the election was stolen because that didn't affect them at all. Right. Like they don't know anything about the voting machines. Like, so you're, you're creating a counter world for people that they can accept.
Chapter 8: How can aid programs like PEPFAR be revitalized in future administrations?
That's right. It's hard to create a counter world for people that like, Oh, the affordability crisis isn't happening when they're experiencing it every week, when they go to the grocery store, you know, and just ranting 11 months in about how Joe Biden was terrible and, doesn't quite feel sufficient.
The speech begins with, I inherited this mess, and then he does another kind of rehearsal of American carnage, right? He goes through the litany of all the things that were screwy in this country before he walked in and launched this new golden era as exemplified by all the gilding that we see behind him. You know, you made a comparison to, you know, to what that room is like.
For me, it's more like the space that Liberace used to roll out his piano into, right? So... He's got all the gilding. He's talking about the golden age that he's launched. He's talking about the American carnage in the rearview mirror.
And not only is he pushing past the concerns that folks have about affordability, he does a horrible thing that Donald Trump in the past, I think, wouldn't have done when speaking to his base, right? He knows that a lot of folks voted for him because they're concerned about the economy. They're concerned about
the crisis at the border, but they were also concerned about America's intervention overseas and the US spending so much more of its time and its resources across its borders than within its borders. And Donald Trump last time looked at the American people and said, pay no attention to what you're feeling at the gas pump, pay no attention to what you're paying at the diner and the supermarket.
Foreign leaders are telling me that America is the hottest that it's ever been. So if MBS comes in here and says, hey, you guys have it really well, you should take his word for it and not the word of your unemployed kids if unemployment is now higher than it was four years ago.
Pay no attention to the fact that healthcare premiums are about to skyrocket and I'm making you some weird promises about money that I'm going to throw at you that will help us overcome the interests of The health insurance markets pay no attention to any of that because MBS says we're doing really fine. That flies in the face of the whole MAGA ethos.
And I think this is exactly why you have figures like Marjorie Taylor Greene who are pushing away from the bar right now. The Middle Eastern fascists in the dress are saying we're the hottest ever. It's so hot right now here. I don't know if people in Iowa are buying that. In some ways, Trump is so abnormal.
A lot of times the problems that he faces are very unique and opportunities to other politicians. It's hard to compare. One of those things will be the Epstein stuff as that comes out tomorrow. It will be relatively unique to Trump. This is a pretty normal politician problem. People aren't happy about the economy and you've got to figure out how to talk about it. Are you telling them
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