Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. It is Thursday, and I'm delighted to be here with my friend, the managing editor of the Bulwark, the man Stephen Miller called repugnant, the interrupter-in-chief at Sam Stein.
Thank you.
Repugnant Stein.
Thank you. I'm not going to interrupt you. I promise.
I don't believe you. I'm going to be interrupting you. We have an insane amount of stuff to cover today. I had a concept of where I was going to do a potpourri of things that I haven't gotten to that are also in the news, but we might not get to those today either. I sent you like five. I know. We'll see. We're going to try to get to them at the end. We'll see how it goes.
But we've got to start with more news out of Minneapolis. Last night around 9 o'clock, Federal agents shot rubber bullets and released gas canisters in North Minneapolis as protesters gathered after a federal agent shot a migrant in the leg. I want to play just a little bit of the audio from the scene.
I got hit in the head really bad.
This is going to be a photographer from Status Coup News. We're going to be playing a couple things from them today. I guess before we get to the DHS's story about what happened, I guess initial thoughts on the escalations last night.
You know, it's getting like, well, it's well past the point of disturbing, but it's getting really like defeating more. You feel defeated watching this stuff because this is a major U.S. city that is under siege by its own government. I mean, there's no other way to really look at it. What they've done is they've sent thousands of ICE agents into a city that doesn't want them.
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Chapter 2: What recent events in Minneapolis are causing unrest?
and there is a psychological element to this there is a policy element to this from stephen miller sure he is just looking for more and more creative ways to try to figure out how he can deport people as fast as possible and menace people and that is like he has an ideological project there are only a couple ideological projects in this administration trump loving tariffs and stephen miller wanting to deport brown people are like the main two
He was bombing drug boats in Venezuela as like a triple bank shot effort to try to get more rationale for deporting Venezuelans. So I don't see why this is any different than that. And I also think that there's a political element to this. This is the part that I'm more skeptical of. I think they think it's a winner. Trump, in one of his press briefings last two days, he was like chipper. Yeah.
You know, like more than we've seen him in the past few days. He's like, we're feeling good. Things are going well. Maybe it was the Tony DeCouple interview that I'm thinking of. And I think that they thought that things were going badly at the end of last year. And the Epstein files and economy and just a wide range of things. And that this has them on offense.
Again, I remain a little skeptical that that's going to work. But I think they think that.
I remain very skeptical. Okay. I'm putting aside the morality of it. Let's just like talk about the politics of it. One, and now fairly convincing amount of polling data to show that this is not working out, right? Like people are turning against Trump on immigration and they're turning against ICE.
And there's like this YouGov economist poll where the majority of the public now wants to abolish ICE. That's just one poll. I'm not thinking it's real or anything like that, but whatever. It shows the trends. Sure. And then two, it's like, Let's say they take it to the logical conclusion where they've called in the military. They've decimated a major American city.
They've ripped apart communities. All the Somali Americans are gone. Businesses are ravaged. Neighborhoods are upended. People are bruised and in the hospital. Some are dead. What do they do? Hey, we won. We did it. Look.
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Chapter 3: How is the Trump administration escalating tensions with federal agents?
I mean, how does that work? I don't really see how that works. What are they going to do when it's all said and done? Hey, we cleaned out your city. You should be grateful for us. No one's going to be grateful for that. I saw the tweet you put up about that dude, and maybe we'll get into it later, who came out and protested.
Dude, one second. I just want to say just really quick about their psychology. Trump's not a long game thinker. Sam Stein is a long game thinker. You know what I mean? I don't think Trump was thinking about what his long term plan was for stealing the election in 2020. You just live in a day at a time, like throwing out whatever random thing Sidney Powell told him.
And I think we're in a similar situation there. He's winning. He sees himself as winning the news cycle. Anyway, let's play this guy. This guy's great. Yeah, and I just think he's so representative of why I agree with you that I think this is a medium-term political loser for them. This is also from Status Coup News, so shout out to those guys who are on the ground in Minnesota.
And this is just a man on the street interview, and it really made my morning. There's going to be some cussing if you've got some kids in the car, so fair warning.
Have you ever gone out to these sort of things before? Never, never. I've never protested in my life. My brother, my brother's here. He does it all the time. I've never. I got, dude, like I said,
I'm far enough away but close enough and I'm sitting my cushy house and look at shit and get mad and I yeah, they're just trying to fucking scare people and you know, but but but why shoot people might know you know, what really pisses me off is the fact that they detain people cuff them and then still beat the shit out of them. Tell you it's immigrants only immigrants. It's fucking anybody.
I have friends that got detained and all they were doing was fucking driving home from work. What the fuck? Sounds like you don't fit the definition of the... I'm not fucking paid to be here like everybody fucking says. What the fuck is that? I gotta work in the goddamn morning just like everybody else. I'm just here trying to stand up for community, dude. We're all human beings here.
I don't give a shit who you are, where you came from, what color you are. It doesn't fucking matter. This is wrong.
I got to work in the goddamn morning, just like everybody else. That's why Rick Santelli, you know, Rick Santelli, the team that supposedly started the tea party. This is my Rick Santelli moment. This guy, we need to track him down.
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Chapter 4: What are the implications of Trump's use of the Insurrection Act?
Sometimes you just got to step back and be like, wait a second. This is not normal. What is actually going on here? What are we living through? This is dystopian. This is authoritarian. And I know it seems so silly to focus on this, but he's like, I don't do protests.
Yeah, no, that's not something, that's the point. That's what's so powerful.
I don't do protests. This is not, I've never done protests. I don't, I look at things on my computer and get mad. I don't go outside. My brother's a protester.
My brother's telling me about protests when I'm drinking a couple beers, okay, at the kid's birthday party.
I will say, you know, you see them sporadically, but my wife and I were out to go, we're going to go adopt a dog. I don't know why we're doing this again, but we drove out two hours into the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia, this small little town, like nobody there. We get off the highway and it's, you know, 35 degrees and raining and no one should be outside.
There was like, you know, a hundred people just, you know, off the highway protesting ice in this small nothing town. It's all anecdotal. I sound like Tom Freeman right now, but whatever.
I was in the Shenandoah wine country.
I was in the Shenandoah wine country and I turned to my Uber driver.
And people are unhappy. So what sparked all of this, you know, just for folks who are trying to get caught up, and we're going to caveat this, that everything that Kristi Noem and Tricia McLaughlin at DHS have said has been a lie basically from the start.
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Chapter 5: How are Democrats responding to Trump's immigration policies?
And this is reminiscent of them kicking out Maureen Comey. It's like, we care about pedophiles, and so we're going to fire the woman who is the top prosecutor in the government for going after child sex trafficking.
So back to your question of what is the play here. Look, I could sit here and make the argument. I'm not saying I believe it. I can make the argument, though. that the play here would be for Tim Walz to make a phone call to Donald Trump. I can make that argument because time and again, you see the best way to ramp down things is just a one-on-one phone call.
Like the Columbia president Petra basically calling Trump and be like, Hey, you know, let's work together. And Trump being like, okay, cool.
Chapter 6: What is the current political landscape regarding ICE?
We got it. I'm not saying that's the way to do it because obviously you can't, you know, part of me is like, you can't give into this shit, but boy, it's bad.
And Walls might be a little bit of a category difference.
Of course.
Because Trump gets certain boogeyman's in his head.
He'll call him Tampon Tim or something on the phone and just descend into chaos. But like, okay, maybe Klobuchar makes the call. I don't know. It's just a... I just don't know. It's like... I want to see this end. Like, I want to see this end. This is heartbreaking to watch a great city and a community that doesn't deserve this have to deal with this shit.
And in normal times, a reasonable president and administration would be doing the exact opposite of this. They'd be trying to tamp down the tensions. But we don't live in that.
Every president we've had in our lifetime.
Yeah, I don't want to say normal times. In any time, it would be that case.
Yeah, and maybe Nixon, Andrew Johnson, a couple others might have been tempted to do something like this. But I should say as the former Republicans on the show, adding to the list of all the principles and arguments that were made my entire life that they've abandoned, the state and local government knows best. We don't need the federal government telling us what to do.
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