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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. Happy Daylight Savings Time. Finally, I'm in my element. Okay, we have light at night and I appreciate that. We've kicked out Bill Kristol this Monday. He was getting a little too excited singing Barbara Ann over the weekend. That's only a joke for people who are paying attention to politics in 2008. It's not true.
That's a John McCain joke. We have a guest for a different reason. She's the publisher of the Bullwark, you know, or she's the host of the Focus Group podcast, The Illegal News, with Sarah Longwell. She's now the best-selling author of a book that isn't going to even be out until September. But... She's a front of the class person and wanted to do even better on the pre-sales.
And so she's here on this podcast. You should pre-order it right now. Link is in the bio. How to Eat an Elephant One Voter at a Time is the name of the book. It's Sarah Longwell. What is up? Hey, do you want to apologize to me for saying I definitely shouldn't write this book? I don't, opposite. And now I kind of feel like you, you want to get first on the New York Times list.
I got second behind Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, and you want to be first. And that was really the main reason behind the book. And I think it was probably about me. Yeah, I was just going to say, I know you think everything in the world is about you and competition with you, but actually, actually I wrote it for the Bulwark community who, by the way, they ride so hard for us.
All I had to tell them was if I sold 20,000 copies, Maybe I'd let JVL moderate a focus group. And boom, they were all over it. Can't thank them enough. I just got to sit this weekend on my birthday weekend and see my book become a bestseller on the strength of pre-orders from the board community. So thanks to all of you for doing that. I do want to be number one.
I am number one right now in all of the political categories just in front of Senator Kennedy. Oh. who has a book, apparently. If you watch the Amazon chart of Sarah going up to Wankings, it was kind of like the gas prices chart. It was just like straight up. It was like the gas prices chart. Straight up. The book is How to Eat an Elephant. We'll talk about it at the end, about why.
And you should get it just because it's Sarah and she's great and you'll love it. It doesn't matter what it's about, but we'll tell you more about why it matters, what's important about it at the end. But we have news to get to. We're in a war. We are. So I guess we're going to spend a lot of time talking about that here at the top. A couple of news items from the weekend.
We had the seventh American killed in action as an army soldier in Saudi Arabia. It also announced another Marine infantryman, 19-year-old Kevin Melendez, died. But it didn't seem like that was in the killed in action category, so we don't exactly know what happened with that. Last night, me and JBL jumped on a live stream. You can follow those on our Substack or YouTube.
When we get riled up about something, now we get on and talk about it live. And this was about the oil prices skyrocketing. It reached a peak of close to $120 a barrel. And it's down to about 100 right now. Sarah, I want to play for you a little audio to kind of contextualize that price per barrel. And then we can talk about that and the other ramifications for the war.
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Chapter 2: How does the U.S. government's trustworthiness affect public perception?
How low do we have to go to get the rest of the Epstein files out? It's something to look at. Just again, about the kind of lack of strategic planning here. And I'll focus on the economic side. We'll get into the military side of it. Last July, for example, Trump said that he was waiting for oil prices to get lower to fill up the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. So that seems like a mistake.
People might remember that Biden expended some of the Strategic Oil Reserve, the last time when Russia invaded Ukraine. just legitimate use for this, you know, the Fox and Trump and the right wingers demagogued against him on it, but it's like, okay, well, prices are going up. It was nothing that didn't have anything to do with us.
So it was this external shock of, you know, something happening with Putin. And that is not the case this time we did it. So, you know, if you knew that we were planning to go to war with Iran, one thing that you could have done, or it was possible, you know, a couple of months ago when the oil prices were lower was refill that, but that didn't hit the checklist, I guess. Yeah.
He's following whatever Netanyahu told him. I don't know how quickly this ultimately happened. Like, obviously, they were having conversations, you know, for a few weeks leading up to this. But it's not clear that it was, like, imminent. Like, I think it's caught all of the American government off guard, which is why you just said, you opened the podcast with, we're at war.
Well, the administration's not saying we're at war. Trump is saying we're at war, but the rest of the administration isn't because to say we're at war has an actual legal meaning. Actual things like, you know, Mike Walsh has to actually go to the UN and say to the French, you know, his French counterpart, like... yes, we are at war or here's why we're doing the bombings, whatever.
They haven't reconciled any of that. Like when he's on television, it's sort of like when Democrats are asked, what is a woman? That's the new question for Republicans is like, are we at war? Because they just sit there and don't say anything because they don't really have an answer. Yeah.
I was listening to the illegal news about this from this weekend about the legal implications from declaring war versus not. One more thing, the Trump spin on the gas prices, I want to read to you. He wrote this. Short-term oil prices, which will drop rapidly when the destruction of the Iran nuclear threat is over, is a very small price to pay for USA and world safety and peace.
Only fools would think differently. All caps. So call me a fool, I guess. A couple of notes there in that point. I thought that the destruction of the Iran nuclear threat had already happened. They promised us that that had happened. I guess not.
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Chapter 3: What recent events have escalated tensions between the U.S. and Iran?
And then the second line, it's a very small price to pay for USA and world safety and peace. Literally the opposite of what he campaigned on. He campaigned that the fools were the people that cared about world peace. Why are we the world's policemen? Who cares what's happening over there? I care about you and your pocketbook. This like this bleat on the gas prices is the exact opposite.
It's like, oh, well, we're, you know, I'm sorry, you got to pay an extra buck a gallon. But we're focusing on world peace over here. Look, we can make the hypocrisy arguments until we're blue in the face. But honestly, and we should and we will. Trump doesn't care. I've been thinking about this a lot.
You know, you and I actually we jumped on right after this happened kind of a couple days in and we were like, why hasn't Trump done an Oval Office address? Why isn't he talking to the American people? But actually, the question does sort of answer itself. It's that he does not care. Just think about Trump's experience right now. Think about what it's like to be him.
All you do is have cabinet meetings where everybody goes around the table to tell you what a beautiful, amazing, brilliant job you've been doing. All you're doing is taking calls from billionaires telling you how amazing you are and they're sending you a million bucks. And could you get their degenerate son-in-law, you know, pardoned?
He's pardoning the January 6th people who are out there committing heinous crimes of sex crimes against children. He doesn't get any blowback for that. All he hears from the people surrounding him in every way is how incredible he is. And so Trump, he doesn't care about making a case to the American people. He doesn't care what we think. He doesn't even care about his poll numbers.
He already won. I think that sometimes when we talk about, isn't this bad for him politically? Of course it's bad for him politically in a normal way. Like in terms of his numbers go down, people think he's a hypocrite. Voters don't like it. People are actually dying. Gas prices are going up. There is inflation. He looks like a fool. He doesn't care. And the second you realize...
Don't let the nihilism infect you. But the second you realize what a nihilist he is and that he, unlike any other American president, does not care about the impact on the American people in any real way, everything starts to make sense. Two thoughts on this. One, I've been saving this one, but waiting for the right opportunity to bring it up.
A friend was in the White House because their boss was meeting with Trump. I've got to kind of anonymize this. And they're like, you won't believe what happened. Trump does this thing where he's taking us around. And they go into Marco's office. And Trump is like, Marco... How are things going with the world or the war or something? And Marco replies, Mr. President, everything is going great.
You're the greatest, most visionary leader of all time. And like things, you know, the world has never respected us more. And he takes him to Scott Besson's office and it's like, Scott, how are things going with the economy? And Scott's like, it's a golden age, sir. It's golden age, Mr. President. And it's like I was listening to the story.
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Chapter 4: How do rising oil prices impact the American economy and public opinion?
I do feel like my Trump derangement syndrome is full and total. So there's not a lot of room for me to sit there and be like, yes, I don't worry about the following things. I do try to maintain perspective. However, I also think that so many people underreact to what he's doing and they continue, again, to do ā too much traditional political analysis.
And they think, well, no president can just watch gas prices go up this high, watch his numbers sink this low, inflict this much pain on the American people, literally do the opposite of what he campaigned for. Like, you can't do that. That's against the political gravity. And I'm just saying there is no political gravity.
He hasn't held an Oval Office address because he doesn't care what we think. To your point about you need to listen to other people that don't think the way you do. Yeah. Well, you should listen to all those pundits who tried to tell us the people rationalizing Trump. I don't listen to what he says. I only listen to what he does. OK, well, let's just look at what he does.
It's the exact opposite, which is why everybody can sort of decide to be for Trump. He's so all over the place. He can give anybody something to tag on to. But if I had told you a year ago, actually, what Trump is going to do is say, OK, Basically, like, I'm in this with Netanyahu. He's going to be led around. And also, his only constraint is his own morality and his own mind. And so that's it.
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Chapter 5: What are the implications of Trump's relationship with Netanyahu?
And Trump was asked about this. And it's like, it was Iran. They're not very accurate with their munitions. I don't know who taught them the word munitions. It's a new word that he learned, I think, this week. In every war, every president, we've made mistakes with our targeting and killed civilians. But the scale of this is notable. Just like the number of children dead.
But then also, just the lies. Like I said, we talked about it last week. Abu Ghraib was horrible. There are whistleblowers from inside the administration. You know, like they had to acknowledge it. They didn't change policy. So it took too long and there are other bad things that happened. Right. But but in this administration, it's just like, no, the Iranians did it. And it's Orwell.
Do you have any like movies or books or things that really shaped your view of the American military or about how Americans do things like morally? Because while you think about that, I'm going to tell you mine. So one of my favorite movies when I was younger and still is great is a movie called Memphis Belle. You should check it out. It's really good. It's about a plane, a crew.
that is flying over a bomber plane and it's their last run. So they have done enough runs and survived it in World War II that they're getting to do their last one. And they are hoping it's going to be a nice like milk run to France or something, but it turns out, no, they're going straight into Germany. And as they're flying over,
there's a bunch of fire and like, they're just really in the, in the thick of it, but they get a little too far. And the guy who, who, who looks down to see where the bombs will hit says, we have to go around again. And they get in a fight in the plane. Some people are like, just drop them, just drop the bomb so we can get out of here alive. This is our last one.
And they're like, next to it's a school next to it is this, but like, this is the munitions factory or whatever it is. They were like, that was the thing they had to hit. So they go around again. And it's this incredibly harrowing moment. But the character of the people is that we will not drop these bombs on innocent civilians.
And instead, we will risk our lives to make sure we hit the proper target. Everybody should go watch this movie. It's really, really a good movie. But a lot of it defined for me, you know, the way these soldiers sort of thought about their obligations. Pride. Pride is attached to that. Yeah, pride of the country, how we do things, how we do things here. That's right.
I've thought about that a lot as we like what in our opening salvo in this war accidentally hit the school. Now, number one, I watched all the right wing influencers, Eric Erickson and these types. They he was coming for Sam Stein when we suggested that it might have been America. And he was like, no, it was a Iranian. But, you know, like they called everybody anti-Semitic that was pushing that.
That's right. Well, yeah, we can. talk about how, okay. I don't think so. No, it wasn't, it wasn't the Iranians. It was us. And so here's the thing that comes with that is to your point, Horrible things happen in a war. This is why you don't go into them cavalierly. Horrible things happen. But what you do as Americans when something like this happens is you accept responsibility.
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Chapter 6: How is public opinion shifting regarding U.S. support for Israel?
Like, you update your priors based on new information that you have. And we're getting a bunch of new inputs that must be brought into consideration when we think about whether or not we should support a regime change war under this administration. And We already talked about the lying that this administration does, which is one of the reasons we should be skeptical.
We can't evaluate the information that's going to come out. But also, we have been told that they are much less interested in America being the version of America that we all thought we had when we were more supportive and more hawkish on these things. Like, if they're not going to follow international law, if they're not going to follow our own domestic law,
Then conservatives, even if they're supportive theoretically of regime change, which, by the way, now we've just got the sun. So just we've got another Khomeini. So there we go. So far. So far. We'll see. We're going to kill a couple more people and see what the next person down the line is. That's right.
But anyway, just you'd have to be brain dead to not be updating your analysis based on the new information we have. I agree with that. Let's let's noodle on that a little bit more, particularly in the context of Israel. You reference this. Trump said yesterday that the decision on when to end the war in Iran will be a mutual decision made with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
America first. That's intriguing. Again, this is on the list of things that used to be anti-Semitic. It was slander to say to somebody that they had a dual interest or dual loyalty with Israel. And sometimes, by the way, that was actually an anti-Semitic slur that people were leveling at folks. But now Trump is just saying, yeah, we have dual interests in this with Israel for some reason.
Witkoff and Kushner were scheduled to go visit. That got canceled. We don't really know why. I was interested in this clip. from Tony Blinken was on another podcast and he was talking about something that Obama confronted during his term related to Iran. I want to listen to that. Look, you know, this has been a long story when it comes to Iran.
And back during the Obama administration, the Israelis were pushing President Obama to take military action against Iran and were warning that they would do it themselves if he didn't. And he wouldn't. That's interesting, just like that exact point, that they were warning they would do it themselves if he didn't, and he wouldn't. And that's basically what Marco Rubio says happened. Yeah.
And we don't know exactly what happened, but all I can do is take the Secretary of State at his word. What he's saying is that the Israelis made the same push with Trump that they had with Obama, which is, hey, we're going to go in and do this together. They might retaliate against you. You can roll with us or not. Obama called the bluff and didn't go in. Trump win it. That's pretty noteworthy.
Yeah. I mean, I think Rubio's thing, he got caught telling the truth. And I think the administration was a little frustrated with that because they know that that plays into fears that many of their base, their America first base holds, which is why they then tried to sort of walk it back. But actually, this leads me to a question or a discussion that you and I should have.
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Chapter 7: What role does anti-Semitism play in the current political climate?
There does have to be, though, I think part of our obligation as big, powerful democracies is our ability to show a certain amount of restraint and proportionality, right? This is how we think about who we are. There's who they are, and there's who we are. And as long as we are behavingā
with and our allies are behaving with the kind of democratic restraint and proportionality that provides maximum safety without things getting out of control. And like, we have faith in that. That is different from what we're experiencing. And we shouldn't be unable to say, no, what I'm seeing with my eyes is too far or too much or making us less safe. And I don't trust the people doing it.
Like we should say that because it's true. It's true. And I said this a year ago, like when I was first starting to grapple with this after October 7th, I forget if it was from or somebody else who's a little more pro-Israel than me. And I was like, Far be it from me to tell the government of Israel to do what they think they need to do for their own safety. OK, so take whatever.
I'm not a military expert. I don't live there. But just as a political analyst and as somebody who kind of sees what's happening around the world, I was saying at the time, I was like, I think this is a mistake. I think Israel is isolating itself from. And I think that the support from the other Western countries, militarily and economically, that they've had, I think is very tenuous right now.
And I think that, you know, they should obviously continue to do what they feel like they need to do to protect their people. But like... that should also be a consideration and they don't seem to care. Like BB doesn't seem to care about that.
He seems to have made a bet that, that whatever, that, that maybe, you know, they can eviscerate all the foes in the middle East during this one period where Trump is in there and this is their moment. And maybe they'll come to some PACs,
middle east akana you know with the uae and and saudi in 2029 and i don't and who the hell i don't have a crystal ball maybe that'll end up being right but like my political analyst is analysis is correct like israel is now underwater in american popularity for the first time ever in history and going down i think and if this war becomes more and more of a shit show like that number is going to continue to get lower and lower and um and that was just a bet that they made
there's two points I want to make here. One is what I don't understand about the people who are so reflexively fine with everything we're doing. And they're so mad at us for not being a hundred percent on board. I'm like, well, which explanation for why we're in there? Are you supporting?
Because I'll tell you, if Donald Trump had come and made a case or Netanyahu did jointly, whatever people were making a case, the president Netanyahu and his VP, Donald Trump had come to the American people and made a statement and said, Iran is uniquely weak right now. Like actually their whole thing about imminent threat, et cetera, et cetera.
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Chapter 8: What strategies does Sarah Longwell suggest for Democrats moving forward?
Key difference. But the sentiment is still there, right? They're like, They don't want this. And Donald Trump and J.D. Vance and the rest of them raised them to not want this. So, yeah, this is young voters. I hear anti-Semitism sometimes, like there's definitely some Nick Fuentes, Groyper stuff in there. But it is the vast majority of it is pretty like.
Why are we doing this and why is Israel have so much influence over us? And like, that's a fair question. Yeah, I guess I'd bookend my thought on that with, I agree that there's antisemitism. There's a problem. I've talked about it a lot on this podcast. I think the war is making that problem worse, not better. You mentioned J.D. Vance. Yeah. Me and J.D.
had a little disagreement about this last night on the live stream. So I just wanted your take on it. I think this is like... Really bad for him politically. J.D. Vance has been very deft at navigating the MAGA establishment divide up until now. Very deft. And he was the one guy that was the TPOSA food fight at America Fest.
And it was like the people on the Tucker side, the people on the Ben Shapiro side, both were like, J.D., thumbs up. So eventually that is going to be a tough coalition to hold together. I think this war is making that more challenging for him. I noticed that there was a CBS town hall. with Barry Weiss and J.D. Vance for next week that was canceled.
I'm fascinated to hear whether that was canceled because Barry only wants unapologetically pro-Iran war people on the network and the vice president wouldn't count or because the vice president couldn't defend the war and didn't want to deal with the hard questions about it. Either way, interesting cancellation, I would say. What do you make of J.D. 's prospects?
So if Donald Trump doesn't care about what the American people think right now because he doesn't have to run for election again, J.D. Vance does care. Like, J.D. Vance and the people who... Want J.D. Vance care.
Like part of the reason why I think you see Megyn Kelly and Tucker and the more isolationist wing of the party speaking out against this isn't actually because they care so much about being consistent. It's that they have a view of politics that goes beyond Donald Trump. Right.
So if your view of politics doesn't go beyond Donald Trump, and especially if you're Donald Trump, it doesn't, then you don't care. You don't care what public opinion says.
But if you're trying to get elected and you're trying to be a political pundit that has a future beyond Trump, you're a mega political pundit the way Tucker and and Megyn Kelly and all these people who've thrived in the Trump era are. then you can't be for this war. You have to stay on the JD Vance side of things.
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