Tom Nichols: Covid Trump 2.0
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Who is Tom Nichols and what are his recent insights?
Hello and welcome to the Bullard Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. It is Friday. We have survived another week, barely, and I am here with one of your faves, Professor Emeritus at the Naval War College. He's a staff writer at The Atlantic. His books include The Death of Expertise, which has an updated and expanded edition. Go get it. It's Tom Nichols and maybe Cat Lilly. We'll see. How's it going, Tom?
Good, Tim. Lily's sitting right here. She's waiting for her. She's waiting for her close up. So we may have a Lily sighting. All right.
So somehow I went back and looked at the archives. Time is a flat circle. I feel like I'm living a lifetime every day. I also feel like I'm hearing from you constantly and all your various platforms. And so I was like, when was Nichols last on the pod? And it was the day after inauguration. Oh, yeah. That was a real upper for people. So it's been six weeks since then. And I wanted to start by just kind of asking you your biggest takeaways from this interminable six weeks. What has surprised you? What has outraged you most?
I think a lot of things have not surprised me because we lived through the first term, but also because he's doing what he said he would do. He's trying to get even and get revenge and troll the country with this bizarre slate of cabinet officials and letting Elon Musk loose on federal workers who were just trying to do their jobs. I think the speed with which He betrayed Ukraine was a little bit surprising. I thought he would sort of ease his way into that with, you know, Kellogg over going overseas and doing something shaky at the negotiating table. I didn't expect him to basically like just reorganize American foreign policy into a de facto alliance with Vladimir Putin.
Yeah, well, that's a good place to start then. There is the frog boiling element of this. It's hard to say what is surprising. I guess I thought that the Elon element has been a little bit more surprising to me, just how much he's run roughshod over everything. And I think the way that he's fucked up the economy was a little quicker than I expected. But I don't know. This is something that Nicole and I talk about a lot. Nicole Laws and I talk about it. We were the only ones that took him seriously, it seems like. There were a lot of people that were his supporters that didn't really expect him to do all the things. And so there hasn't been anything in particular that shocked me. But like you, the speed of some of it is... That surprised me.
I wish I could go back and, you know, the Trump folks that I talked to just before the election and one in particular just swore to me, he's not going to do tariffs. That's, you know, that's just, and I said, he loves tariffs. This is, he is going to rattle the economy. This wasn't hard to see coming, but it was hard to predict both how fast and how completely nutty It is. Actually, a few folks have asked, who's out there who knows what he's about to do? If you have any inside information, it's a day trader's paradise. It's like, okay, there comes the tariff thing. Oh, now he's going to roll it back. Oh, now the market's back up. The one thing I remember you and I talking about, I remember cautioning and saying, well, Elon Musk, he doesn't have that much power yet.
I didn't imagine that Trump would deputize him to do this, that he would be able to pay Doge staffers six figure salaries. which just always proves the point that these folks aren't about getting rid of government waste. They just prefer that it goes to them. And that Congress and the courts would just say, okay, Article I doesn't operate anymore. The Appointments Clause doesn't operate anymore. The president can just pull a guy off the street and say, hey, go fire people. And the Constitution and the law just don't operate. That, I guess, surprised me a little bit.
We'll have to give ourselves a grade. I punish myself a lot with the amount of information that I'm consuming and the various sources I'm consuming them from. I don't re-listen to myself, but maybe I'll punish myself by re-listening to our January 21st one to see how it stacks up. On to the Ukraine news.
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