Chapter 1: What recent events raised concerns about the President's mental health?
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Hey, everybody. Hello and welcome to the Bullard Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. We are doing it live today. We're doing it live. We had an all-hands meeting. Thankfully, it went better than the Iranian all-hands meeting a couple months ago. We're all alive and well, but I could not take the pod in the morning.
And since we're doing it live, I wanted to bring in our resident guest whose temperament most matches Bill O'Reilly. And that is Atlantic writer, Radio Free Tom, Tom Nichols. How you doing, sir?
Oh, that stings, but do it live.
Yeah.
Thank you for those of you with us live on YouTube and Substack. Everybody else will be in your ears a little late today. And then we're back to our normal schedule tomorrow. We've got a great lineup the rest of the week. Tom, we've got a bunch to discuss. We'll do a little music at the end, as is our want. But I kind of wanted to frame up the whole conversation.
Just by taking a look at the bleats that Donald Trump sent on Monday night between 10, 15 p.m. and almost 2 a.m. Luckily, a friend of the show, Harry Sisson, kind of summarized each bleat. There were 45 of them. from our totally insane and sleep-deprived president. And we're just going to go through a few. 1015 accuses Barack Obama of attempting a coup.
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Chapter 2: How does Trump's behavior reflect his paranoia?
1051 reports a fake Charlie Kirk account that claimed Obama blocked Hillary Clinton from being prosecuted. 1128 claims a senior Democrat just testified under oath that Senator Adam Schiff... Leaked classified information, not true. 1.13 a.m. attacks the New York Times for their report on his reflecting pool remodel.
So we're in the middle of a war with Iran, major economic uncertainty, three hours of deranged posting from the President of the United States. You post a lot, but boy.
Yeah, I post a lot, but I'm not actually holding the codes to the nuclear arsenal. And I don't have early morning briefings from the CIA on the condition of the world. And I'm not required to make any major decisions about the fate of billions of human beings. So you'll have to forgive me if I do a little late night posting. But if that were my dad...
uh you know i said and i were watching you know my dad or my grandfather posting like this i i'd want to i'd be out there the next day dad are you okay you sleeping enough um you know because then the next day of course when there's the actual business of government taking place um
You know, he's doing touch and goes, you know, or the military guys, he's called snap rolls, you know, and, you know, he's just not there. I mean, there's something like there's something wrong with the president. I think there's he's having health issues. Which is not unusual for a man who's almost 80.
The neck bruise is kind of – the hand bruises have moved to the neck. I mean he's walking around with makeup on his hands.
I'm pretty sure it's not a hickey. Or we don't know though. Let's be responsible and say he's walking around with what looks like –
makeup slathered on his hands um there's something wrong here uh and i think you know it's a fair question to ask american citizens have a reasonable concern about the mental stability of their commander-in-chief um and but we're not getting those answers because everything in in this white house um you know when you're reading through the reading through those um
uh, tweets, Tim, it's, it's a reminder that no matter how powerful he gets, no matter, you know, he's the president, he's got a second term, he's got complete control of the Republican party, everything that he's ever wanted. And yet he, he just radiates this, this paranoid insecurity that he can't stop thinking about Barack Obama.
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Chapter 3: What implications do Trump's tweets have on national security?
And the stuff Trump is putting on social media is nuttier, is crazier than the stuff that was in a book that 50 years ago, 60 years ago was considered a political thriller that was too outlandish to be made into a movie. So that's where we are. That's I mean, I keep saying this is the guy in the book is President Mark Hollenbeck.
And I keep saying, OK, this is I used to say this is Mark Hollenbeck behavior. This is beyond what's in a book that was written as fiction. And we and I don't I don't know what's happened to this country that people just kind of shrug and go, what are you going to do?
You know, he is impeachment now. I just I want to start there because now we go through some pretty serious matters. And I think that thinking about his mental state is an important way to contextualize it. Jonathan Swan, our guy over at The New York Times, had this story yesterday. Classified military intelligence assessments from early this month.
Iran has regained access to most of its missile sites, launchers, and underground facilities, including the U.S. Intel assesses that Iran has restored operational access to 30 of the 33 missile sites it maintains along the Strait of Hormuz. And 90% of Iran's underground missile sites are partially or fully operational. Um, Relevant for a number of reasons.
Number one, that's another thing that he's either lying to us about or deluded about when he talks about the state of the Iran military. Number two, if that is the intelligence he's getting, that's an extremely relevant fact for thinking about what comes next. Because if they maintain most of their missile sites along the Strait of Hormuz...
Like the idea of going in to open it militarily, and you tell me you were the Naval War College professor, but seems extremely risky.
Yeah, a couple of things occurred to me when I saw that. First, it's interesting that the reaction from the administration is basically, who told you that? Which is not denial. And that's a lot of leaking going on, apparently. But I'm guessing this... You know, that this is coming out of the defense and the intelligence communities because they would be the people who would know.
And that's really alarming. So the other thing that I immediately thought of is, well, we've been bombing the piss out of them for two months, according to, you know, everything we're being told. what are we hitting? What have we been doing for two months if you saw 90%?
And, you know, I mean, we've been told over and over again, you know, they're decimated, that they don't have anything left, that it's all over, that they're scrambling, that they're wandering around in the wreckage, you know, rending their garments in the smoking ruins. Well, apparently not. And that, you know, that's really a serious problem.
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Chapter 4: How does the discussion about Iran reveal Trump's decision-making?
He did it for glory. He thought it was going to be easy. He's looking to put merit badges, you know, on his you know, he wants he's like Brezhnev. He wants to have another row of medals on his coat. And his answer is, well, it's okay that we did this because now Iran will never get a nuclear weapon. Iran was not close to a nuclear weapon. No reputable experts, no intelligence agencies.
Nobody believed that. I mean, he wasn't even being told that from his own people. And they pretty much tell him almost anything he wants to hear. And so, you know, that's going to be his fallbacks. Like, yes, you saw him yesterday, right? I don't think about... the economic situation of the average American. Oh, good to hear, Mr. President. Thank you.
Yeah. Look, Tom, here's the thing. I was on – I basically had the view you did four weeks ago, right, which was like he doesn't have any good outs. He's bored with this. He doesn't really want to be in a hot war in Iran. He thought it was going to be easy like Venezuela and he's just going to declare victory and turn around.
That's really tough right now to do because you end up with just such an obvious strategic defeat with whatever happens in the Strait of Hormuz. And so I'm at least my worry level on the escalation is a little higher. And there was another report yesterday that the U.S. military is considering what the second phase of the more active part of the war would look like. They would rename it.
uh operation sledgehammer sledgehammer oh i guess we know what the song is today peter gabriel although people my age tim have been posting memes of the famous 1980s tv show sledgehammer about a a comedy about a nutball cop who carried a giant gun i think that's even more appropriate and who was in that show is that what i know anyone from that show
Yes, you would.
And I can't, David, his last name escapes me. He was the lawyer in Succession. And you'd recognize him from a lot of other shows. Yeah, it was early in his career. And it was really actually, I recommend it to people. It was a funny 80s show that didn't catch on because it was kind of like Airplane, except like in a cop show kind of thing.
I liked Airplane. David Rash. Maybe I should go check that out.
David Rash. That's right.
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Chapter 5: What criticisms are made about Trump's counterterrorism strategy?
We're talking about a guy who manifests things right. Who says, if I say it. it becomes true. So I never underestimate his ability to say, you know what? Screw it. We won. Let me push back on the pushback. And no matter how many people say we didn't win, he says, you know, he does the Jedi hand wave over MagiWorld and says, these are not the analysts you're looking for. We won.
Let's hash this out because I think in almost every other situation we would be in agreement, you and I, because I do – I fall back on this. I forget. I think I'm stealing it from Lee and Donovan. But like Trump's superpower is always that he can like start a – create a problem and then just declare the problem solved and his cultists will go along with him.
And like we've seen this a million times in the past. Yeah. But let me just – let's just use one example here, the 2020 election, right? So the 2020 election, he creates this new reality. And I've always said it was this uniquely Trumpian thing. Like no matter how much you hate J.D. Vance or Ted Cruz or anybody, like nobody else is psychotic enough to like keep the bit going for that long.
To be like, no, I'm going to pretend like I won and I'm going to keep pretending and go and make up new absurd lies every day. You need to have a certain type of psychosis to be able to do that. But people went along with it, as you're saying. And like, well... I understand why people would go along with that, though, the MAGA people, because they wanted to believe.
You know, he was creating a new world that they wanted. And they didn't suffer any consequences except for the handful of people that got arrested at the Capitol, right? Unless you were one of the people that broke into the Capitol, like, you didn't suffer any consequences for believing this fabrication.
The Strait of Hormuz staying closed and becoming an Italian, excuse me, an Iranian toll bridge, like, and then $6 gas this summer. I mean, Trump is pretty powerful in his ability to create worlds, but that's a pretty tough sell to people that it wasn't him on this one.
I mean, sure, there'll be a handful of cultists that'll believe it, but it becomes a very hard sale to people if the gas prices stay this high all summer.
Well, I don't want to say you're wrong, so I'm just going to say you're right. And I'll just pile on and say this war, I think, is the first time he ever really lost control of something that he couldn't just make go away. Because domestic stuff, tariffs, it's Liberation Day, and somebody comes in and says –
Beef.
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Chapter 6: How does Trump's approval rating impact his political future?
He's bored with it. It would be – You know, complete outrage in MAGA world. So I don't think that's going to happen. On the other hand, you know, I didn't think he would threaten to invade Greenland either. So, you know, I could be wrong.
I want to throw in one more option. The president's been calling it the N-word. But before we get to that, we'll leave a little cliffhanger for everybody on the N-word. I do need to read the ad. I apologize to Bulwark Plus members, because you pay to not have to listen to ads. But we're doing this live, and so it's the only way to do it.
So, you know, I owe you one if you're a Bulwark Plus member listening to this ad. Here it is. And then we'll get back with the N-word. I'm sure that the people at Function Health are really thrilled about that cliffhanger and that transition into their ad. I've been paying more attention to how my body actually feels because I'm getting up into the Tom Nichols age range.
And if I'm being honest, I've been slacking off a little bit at the gym because I just I'm tired. I'm worn down. And my little ladies weights class, it's intimidating to go to the ladies weights class. I'm getting dominated by the other moms in the class. And one thing that I've been working on to improve that is.
is i've learned that your muscles don't just need training they need the right internal conditions to recover and stay strong and those conditions can show up in your blood things like magnesium your iron your hormone levels markers that affect how you feel in each workout when they're off everything feels harder than it should when they're dialed in you actually see the results you're working for that's why i use function 160 lab tests you can see exactly what's going on not guess at all if something's holding me back i want to know
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Join at functionhealth.com slash the Bullwork or use gift code THEBULLWORK25 for a $25 credit towards your membership. If we're being honest, it's really... My husband is looking at the results and comparing it to Claude because he's the one with muscles. All right, that's Tom Nichols. We're back.
The N-word. I just want to say, getting up there in the Tom Nichols age, as my Greek grandmother used to say, you son of my beast.
But yes, the N-word. I've got some grades there. Hold on. Before we go into my catastrophizing where everybody's going to know, I just want to start – I mean you obviously – this has been an area of expertise with yours, nuclear proliferation. And so just the other element of this that like you can tell Trump's looking for what's my out, right? Like what is something –
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Chapter 7: What are the economic consequences of Trump's policies?
He's just so I mean, it's I'm sorry I've been saying it for 10 years, but he's so odd. But, you know, the stuff that's buried, you can't just go in there and say, all right, we're going to be here for two days. Put it all on the plane. We're out of here. I mean, that stuff is buried under rubble. It requires special handling. Let me if I can just take a take a short digression, Tim.
We actually did this in a in a kind of like this in Kazakhstan in the Clinton administration where. true story guy like opens up a shed and and like there's all the you know radiation symbols and goes oh how come nobody knew this was here you know like it was old soviet nuclear stuff And who is we in the we there? We, the United States, got found.
We found out from somebody in Kazakhstan that some guy, you know, like the janitor opened up a closet and went.
yikes and there was all this leftover nuclear stuff okay and so we did this thing called operation i've checked me if i'm wrong folks what i think was operation sapphire and we fly in with a bit like in the dark we don't want to make a big deal of this we don't embarrass their government we're not gonna you know now this was in a permissive not wartime situation
And even this where everything was stacked and we knew exactly where it was and it was all wrapped up and ready to go. And this was a dicey operation where we flew in, put all the stuff on airplanes, flew out, you know, turned all the lights off, flew back out in the dark. It was, you know, credit to the Clinton administration. It was the right thing to do. And they pulled it off and it worked.
You're not going to do that here. This is a country we're at war with. They're not going to just clear out a space and say, all right, come on and bring the C-130s, build a runway, do whatever you need to do. That's not going to happen. Now, if we get to some deal where the ceasefire becomes a peace agreement.
And they say, fine, you can come in over the next, I don't know, six months, whatever it's going to take. But it's not going to happen. We're not going to do a lightning raid and get thousands of pounds of this stuff, hundreds and hundreds of pounds of this stuff, and then fly out.
So I don't know how that would work if that's one of the plans they're cooking up, because they would have to clear all that rubble, have a place to land, have the machinery, have the manpower. I just... It was dicey enough to do it under almost ideal circumstances in Kazakhstan. I don't understand how people think we're gonna do it in Iran.
I don't know what sign the universe is sending me, but I swear to God, in the elevator this morning, going down to the lobby, I walk in, a guy's in there. He's like, hey, you're Tim from the Bulwark, right? And I was like, yeah, hey, what are you doing in town? He said, I'm doing a nuclear deproliferation class here. We're reviewing what we learned from Kazakhstan.
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Chapter 8: How do Trump's actions compare to previous administrations?
They don't get to countermand his offer. They have to authenticate that the person speaking and giving these orders is, in fact, the president. So they're not they're not there to say, yes, I agree. They're there to say, yes, this is the right person you're talking to. Could he do that? Sure. Now, would. You know, would Pete Hegseth agree to it? Yeah, Pete Hegseth will do whatever he's told.
That's why he got the job, because Hegseth will do whatever he's told to do. Will other people do it? I don't know. Could they talk him out of it? Probably. I don't think... Now, let's, you know, get a grip here.
I'm just saying, sitting here today, I'm slightly... I mean, obviously, the Iranian regime is horrible. I'm not trying to compare the Iranian regime to anybody. The Ayatollah is horrible. The way they treat their people are horrible. Caveat, caveat, caveat. I'm just saying, like, as a personal matter today, on the nuclear question... And Trump and Bibi are a little bit higher on my worry list.
Yeah, well, we actually have nuclear weapons.
But I mean, let me just say that, yes, I have a concern, but it is in the very tiny single digits, if that. But it is not zero.
That's higher than it was like, you know, our entire life before. No, not your entire life. Well, not my entire life. Higher than it was for, I think, the 90s, 2000, you know, about 30 years we've gone through where there's not really any way that the U.S. was going to drop a nuke.
I never worried. I mean, the greatest worry I had was during the 1980s because things were so tight. But after that, there's a lot of memoir material that came out, for example, after the first Gulf War and then the second Gulf War, where you just had decision makers, guys like Dick Cheney, who nobody's going to accuse of being, God rest his soul, nobody's going to say the guy was a weak sister.
Cheney and Powell and others saying, we're not even going to talk about it. It's off the table. We're never going to do this. And that's that. Now, the problem is that you have Trump, who has talked about nuking hurricanes for
You know, and make it so frustrated to say, well, for example, I could imagine somebody in this administration, because there are some, you know, crackpots wandering around the White House saying things like, well, let's blow one up in the Persian Gulf as a warning. Exactly.
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