Trump Returns, Will He Follow Through?

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello Buglers and welcome to issue 4327 of the universe's only ever and one remaining audio newspaper for a visual world.

With me, Andy Zoltzman, it is the 13th of January 2025, making this the first bugle of the second quarter of the 21st century.

If you think the 21st century began in 2000, which I can confirm that it definitely f ⁇ ing did.

And we will try to embrace the optimism of a new quarter century, whilst, of course, being aware that the cold, hard, frozen roadkill badger of reality is an inescapable predator of hope.

Joining me for our review of the first 13 days of the second 40th of the third millennium, the first time in fact the bugle is reported on the opening of a 40th of a millennium, exciting times.

I am beyond delighted, ecstatic, even, deliriously enveloped in a euphorical bliss rapture.

Have I laid that on a bit of thick to be joined firstly from here in London by Nish Kumar.

Happy New Year, Nish!

Happy New Year, Andrew.

Happy New Year, Buglers.

What an absolute pleasure to be back.

We had some slight technical hitches at the start of this recording, which meant that on the video call, we couldn't see Andy, but we could just hear him mutter a string of obscenities.

What a fantastic omen for your new year of bugling.

I'm not even being vaguely sarcastic.

There is nothing that signifies the spirit of this podcast more than the sound of an English man swearing.

It's fundamental to the DNA of this show.

And indeed, the DNA of the 21st century.

I think.

We always say here, as you mean to go on.

Also joining us from the other side of the most Atlantic of all the oceans in New York, for the last time under a non-Trump president for at least

the next hundred years.

It's Josh Gondelman.

Hello.

Thank you for having me.

You said Happy New Year earlier.

I'll give you one out of three.

I'll give you a year.

It's certainly a year.

Right.

We'll take that one out as Meatloaf himself famously said, one out of three is quite shit.

The most exciting development of 2025 so far, which if you're watching video clips of this, is the new bugle backdrop that I have in the shed, commissioned by producer Chris.

A glorious field of orange with bugle logos on it.

And perhaps the greatest single bit of fabric ever developed in the entire history.

of humanity.

It's very hard to see where civilisation can go beyond this.

I see the bugle backdrop, which comes down on a special rollerblind from the ceiling of the shed.

I see it really as the

Sistine Chapel ceiling of the third millennium so far for me.

Oh, and it will be once I get in the shed, Andy, because that thing will have dicks drawn all over it.

And it will be once I get in the Sistine Chapel, and I'm going to drive Andy's dicks all over it.

Actually, I mean, there's probably quite a lot of things that look like my face on the Sistine Chapel, bearing that most Renaissance pictures of a baby Jesus look like a 50-year-old born in white guy.

Anyway, you cowards, ultimate, let me in the shed with a sharp pee.

Let me go to work.

I cannot believe.

Again, I'm trying to honor the spirits and roots of this podcast, and drawing penises on things is a huge part of the fabric of this show.

There isn't one single penis on that backdrop.

It's a disgrace.

Well, they are.

They're just orange penises and they blend in with the background.

We are

on

the 13th of January, which is National Make Your Dream Come True Day, apparently.

So, straight after this recording, I will be chased down a poorly lit corridor with disappearing doors by a half-rat, half-pigeon, half-crocodile, half-human duo creature, which barks with the sound of a trombone and is trying to steal a folder of documents relating to the life of the 19th-century cricketer Arthur Shrosby before I finally escape through a special hatch into a waiting Viking longboat, which has also taken 1980s tennis star Mirislav Machia to a veterans tournament where he's due to play a robot version of Kermit the Frog.

Analyze that, Freud.

I'm just here.

You don't actually have to only make the dream you had last night come true.

I wish I'd known that before.

I assume you're both celebrating National Make Your Dream come true day.

Josh, what would be,

what's your dream you're making come true today?

This is so pathetic, but I have so many dreams about doing chores and completing tasks, and then I wake up and realize that I did them all night in my sleep and that had no impact on reality.

So, today, in an effort to live my dreams, I will be doing laundry.

Nish, I'm making my dreams come true by doing this podcast Stark Bollock Naked.

You're making my dreams come true too, Nish.

As always, a section of the bugle is going straight to the

heedless Heavy opening to 2025, hasn't it?

Oh, family show.

Family show.

As always, a section of this podcast is going straight in the bin.

Today is also National Rubber Ducky Day.

So we have a special rubber ducky section.

We tell you the best rubber pancakes, rubber plum sauce, rubber cucumber, and rubber spring onions to accessorize your rubber ducky with.

We also asked, will America ever vote for a rubber duck to be president?

To be honest, we just don't know anymore.

And we tell you some of the great historical figures who might have enjoyed having a rubber duck in the bath with them, including Archimedes, who famously discovered some science whilst in his bath, might have developed even better theories if he'd had a rubber ducky with him.

Although,

also, he would have had a rubber ducky to hold over his junk when he ran naked through the street, celebrating his discovery of the theory of displacement, I believe.

I should have checked that before.

Cleopatra famously

bathed daily in donkey milk.

A rubber ducky would have been really handy to distract Cleo from thinking, why the fk is my pet donkey so cross with me all the time?

And Jean-Paul Maratz, the French revolutionary, assassinated in his bathtub in 1793.

I think a rubber ducky would have really lightened the mood of his final moments of consciousness.

Also, with the Chinese Communist Party, known not to be fans of rubber ducks to the extent that they banned internet searches for big yellow duck in 2013, we ask, who would win a float-a-thon between Chinese leader Xi Jinping and a rubber duck?

Take that, Xi.

You absolutely loser.

That section is in the bin, also in the bin.

A new year, new you section, a free sheep for every bugle listener.

Your new you for the new year.

You do have to acquire the sheep for yourself, though.

As when we ran a trial scheme posting sheep to listeners around the world, there were several serious complications and some very disappointed listeners.

But anyway, do go and help yourself.

That section also in the bin.

My partner and I have one rubber duck in our bath and it is a novelty rubber duck that's dressed up like the Mexican artist Frida Carlo.

And when a friend of mine stayed at our house, he described it as painfully on brand to the point of irritation.

My sister Helen,

who beautiful no doubt be familiar with, she once gave me a rubber duck shaped like a rabbi earlier.

Rabbi ducky

interestingly, when it is you, you say, oi

when you put it on the water in the bath, the water just parts.

Interesting.

He's back.

That's right.

We can

hear him.

Same Saltzman.

Top story.

This quarter of a century so far, America is bracing itself for the onset of Donald Trump Mark II.

I never thought I'd be quite as disappointed, Josh, by hearing the word again so often, but Trump being inaugurated as president.

Disappointing enough the first time round, but almost infinitely more disappointing when you tag the word again on the end.

We are just one week away now from Trump being reinaugurated as president of what passes for the United States of America these days.

How are you bracing yourself for this?

This time next week, basically, it will be happening.

It's been a tough time over here because Trump isn't the president currently, but he's causing all these international incidents already.

Such is the power of Trump that he's f ⁇ ing up a job either a week and a half before he starts doing it, or alternatively, three years and 50 and a half weeks after he's stopped doing it.

It's just chaos already.

I forgot how bad it would be before he started.

Like, last week, he said he wanted to rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, which is completely in keeping with his longtime strategy of slapping a new name on something that already exists that makes him sound responsible for it.

He also suggested that the U.S.

should use military force to take control of the Panama Canal, which seems inadvisable because the canal is, and a lot of people don't know this, in Panama.

There it is.

It's so bad.

I could go on forever, but I want to seed the floor because I'm, it's, he's also, he was sentenced to,

for his crimes, for all the felonies he was convicted of last week.

And he was sentenced to

unconditional discharge, which doesn't sound like much, but you should know that if you're experiencing unconditional discharge for more than four consecutive hours, you should call your guy.

Let's bring him back a joke from the early odds for this.

Family show.

Family show.

But I mean, the good news is he's about to embark on a criminal rehabilitation program through which, in an effort to get his life back on track and out of the world of crime, he's been given a four-year work placement in the White House as president.

progress in the american justice system to see that there is hope that we can rehabilitate offenders so i think that's a that's a good big story i honestly think given america's use of basically slave labor of incarcerated people they should make trump go fight the wildfires in california I feel like that would, it wouldn't justify the program, but it would put a little slap a new coat of paint on it.

Yes, America's favorite sex offender and fraudster has been warming up ahead of getting his clammy paws back on the nuclear football.

That is not a reassuring phrase.

And having four more years to cantankerise his country to smithereens by launching basically verbal wars with numerous non-enemies of America.

I mean, searching for logic in the 21st century is a fool's errand, franchise.

He'd be taking these scattergun verbal pot shots at various places in the region he thinks of as the rest of the world Istan.

Besides the ones you mentioned, he talked about dissolving the border with Canada.

Now, Nish, I know you have

your partner is family from Canada.

I mean, are they excited by this project?

Well, my partner's actually, half her family's from Canada and the other half's from America.

Or to update this for two months' time, my partner's family is from America.

And I think her newly American family welcome the

arrival of Donald Trump as the new president of Canada.

It's, yeah, it's, we're in very much, we're about a week away from what I can only describe as the political equivalent of Alvin and the Chipmunks The Squeakal, in that it is a second installment of a franchise where no one wanted the first one to happen.

So how we've ended up in a situation of Donald Trump the squeakal is simply beyond beyond comprehension.

Last Tuesday, he gave a press conference at Mar-a-Lago, a building whose whose interior decor can only be described as Saddam Sheik.

And he was asked to give assurances that he wouldn't use military force or economic sanctions.

He said, I can't assure you on either of those two, but I can say this: we need them for economic security.

The them in question,

he was referring to both the Panama Canal and also Greenland, the country.

Sometimes there are moments in your life where you just can't believe what you're watching and you're starting to believe that a nightmare you had six months ago has been made real as part of make a dream come true.

But he so this week he said he began his charm offensive by sending Donald Jr.

to Greenland.

And to be fair to Donald Jr., that is a man who is yet to see a mountain of snow he couldn't snore.

Sending it to the Arctic feels

at best dangerous.

His logic behind claiming the Panama Canal is that it was originally for the American military.

He said the Panama Canal was built for our military.

It's being operated by China.

We gave the Panama Canal to Panama.

We didn't give it to China.

His logic seems to be that the Panama Canal was originally American.

And what I would say is that if you are a white American, you don't want to start pulling at the thread of giving things back to the people who originally owned them.

Because

I imagine there's quite a few indigenous tribes in America that might have something to say along similar lines.

There's huge strategic importance to Greenland as a country.

So it's currently technically ruled by Denmark, but it's got its own kind of sovereignty at the core of its legal system.

But it has a huge sort of diplomatic significance.

And one of the key elements to it is that it's going to have some shipping routes opening up within it.

Now, the reason those shipping routes are opening up is because of, you guessed it, global warming.

So,

we're going to deal with the effects of global warming by doing more things to increase global warming.

We are, as a species, about to attempt to shit through diarrhea.

Well, Donald Trump Jr.

took some Make Greenland Great Again hats to Greenland.

I mean, I think looking at the way

the Trump regime works, Make Greenland Green Again might be more achievable, I think, achieving the way

they're going.

I mean, it's good.

Do you know what I think it's good though, Josh?

Because we tend to be quite critical of Donald Trump on this podcast, but let's give him some credit.

You know, he's been elected by the people of America and he's really focusing on the issues that matter to ordinary working class Americans.

Ownership of large, uninhabitable landmasses, antagonizing long-term rival Denmark, finishing off the war of 1812 once and for all, and threatening to call bits of water by a different name.

At last, Josh, you have a leader who is listening to people's everyday concerns.

Kitchen table issues.

The forgotten rust belt blue-collar ordinary, ordinary Americans for too long have suffered under leaders who ignore their basic everyday needs.

Not anymore.

Give Trump time.

He will also claim three million square miles of the Australian Outback, the bottom kilometre of the Marianas Trench, which of course he will rename as the Trench of America, the Ongo Bit of Mongolia.

He'll threaten war against Tahiti because it's basically Hawaii, isn't it?

All of this will put food in the faces of ordinary, hardworking Americans.

So, no criticism from me.

So folksy and heartland appealing is this agenda.

If it rhymed, you would think it was a John Mellon camp song.

This is what's all this stuff is so bananas to me because he continues to propose buying Greenland, which Denmark insists is not for sale, which is not a surprise, right?

Most countries are pretty satisfied with the size they're currently at.

A couple of the more assertive nations, to put it almost too gently, are trying to bulk up a little bit.

And I know it's New Year's resolution season, but no countries are trying to slim down right now.

That's why, even on January 2nd, if you go to your gym or went to your gym, you are unlikely to see the nation of Denmark on the treadmill next to you, trying to shed the dead weight of Greenland.

You can't.

just grab a sovereign country and put it in a headlock until it gives you what you want.

Or you can, There's a name for it.

It's war.

Trump's idle musings would be wars on three different continents, not counting the proxy wars we already have going on.

It's like he's trying to get enough punches on his frequent military conflict card that he gets to bomb Antarctica for free.

But I mean, I've seen a number of experts saying it's unlikely that Trump will use military force.

And I think this to me is one of the rays of hope, Josh, that Trump may be an absolutely incurable bell end, but he is also at heart finging lazy and I think so lazy yes so he likes sort of maybe talking war and threatening war but war is well history shows complicated and difficult and it will cut into his time for complaining about all the lefties who are running America whilst he's running America so I think that's our one hope that he is just too lazy to actually start a war.

Interestingly, bellend etymologically comes from the Latin word belendum, meaning to be fought.

That's a fact.

Pure fact.

Dude, what are you doing?

You've cried wolf too much on this podcast.

Do you know what I mean?

Like,

I don't know why you're looking at us as if we're supposed to go, oh, great fact, Andy.

I'll tell you how we're both looking at you.

We're looking at you like, more horse shit.

More, more, more, more horse shit being sprayed from the human equivalent of a horse's ass.

Right, potato picato, I guess.

I would say that in regards to Panama, the U.S.

sort of wants to be quite careful in terms of its interventions.

In December 1989,

12,000 US military personnel actually engaged in a military operation to overthrow the Panamanian military dictator Manuel Noriega.

That military operation, by the way, was called Operation Just Cause, which...

I mean, in terms of branding is one step away from me starting a company that called We Pay Our Taxes PLC.

But

the interesting thing about US interventions in Panama is that Manuel Noriega had previously been supported both financially and just in terms of support by the American government.

And the more you read about American foreign policy from sort of 1979 through the whole of the 1980s, the more you realize with terms of like Panama, in terms of Iran, in terms of Afghanistan, that US foreign policy in that period of time was like me eating a Chinese meal at 11.30 p.m.

and then the next morning screaming, What Satan has crawled into my chest?

And with God as my witness, I will have revenge in this life or the next, whilst downing Gaviscon by the pint.

Well, I mean, you've mentioned the just cause campaign.

I think the

new

range of measures against Banama will be known as Operation Just Because.

Basically, all it is.

It's just there, isn't it?

It's there.

We'll turn on any government we've supported supported as our government will that's our it doesn't matter it's it's like it's not nothing lasts forever even cold november rain like our uh attitude towards administrations that we've supported is like to go to war with them be like don't cry because it's over smile because it happened

i think were george washington's words in 1776

the panama issue i mean there is an another solution to this when you think of you know what Trump set out to do and failed to do in his first term.

Just build a new canal on the route of Trump's border wall with Mexico.

So don't bother finishing off the wall that isn't built.

Just build a canal, two birds, one stone, 1,951 miles long across the entire...

And that would be the world's longest canal, Josh.

It would beat.

the 1,104 mile-long Grand Canal in China.

And the U.S.-China rivalry, to me, that needs some competitive canal building that will really take it to the next level we're looking at the kind of new cold war and competitive canal building can be the like the the moon landings of the 21st century that 1104 mile long grand canal this is a fact you really need to take on board in america that equals 1776 kilometers 1776 that is a clear and unequivocal improvocation of the united states they are trolling you through the length of their ancient canals

um It did take 2,000 years to build, apparently, which might be a little too long for the Trumpian attention span, which is

about 700 million times too long.

I think 90 seconds is his record for focusing on a single thing.

2,000 years.

He'll only have another decade or two of life after that.

God, he's going to live forever and it's going to make us all miserable until we die.

And in terms of the Gulf of Mexico, look, I'm all in favor of renaming things.

I love sport, but it shouldn't be just named after

a different country that it's near.

It should be put out to the highest bidder, like sports stadiums are.

Just have it as the life ruiner online casinos, golf, or the fritterallaway.com.

Might as well make some money out of it.

I think that I think, listen, I'm not, I've never claimed to be an expert on geopolitics or an expert, in fact, on anything other than specific elements of Bob Dylan's discography 1962 to 1976.

But what I would say is that if Greenland really wants to get involved and really piss Trump off, Canada and Greenland should invade the Panama Canal.

I'm just putting that out there.

I'm just putting it out there.

Just beat him at his own game.

Oh, that's good.

My theory is that Trump is obviously enervated by America's reputation for turning up late to world wars.

And if anything, is over-correcting.

Yeah,

he's trying to get in pop and have one on our terms.

I don't think I've ever heard it framed as America turned up late for World War II.

It's just sort of just an image of an RAF pilot tapping his watch

as the US Air Force arrives and saying something like, when it's about bloody time, you Yanks turned up.

Ah, I knew we had a thing.

America overslept by two years.

Guys, we slept through our alarm clock.

We only woke up when Pearl Harbor exploded.

I'm so sorry.

Now, which way are we shooting?

Both ways.

Just quickly on Donald Trump's sentencing for the 34 felony charges for which he was found guilty last year.

He described himself as being totally innocent, which is fair, apart from being found guilty of those 34 different charges, each of which apparently carries a regular range of one to four years in jail for a normal human being.

But because he's president,

they couldn't sentence him properly.

The judge said that the protections afforded to the office of the president are a factor that overrides all others.

I mean, this is a good message for young Americans, Josh, is it not?

That if you really knuckle down, work hard and obey the law, then one day you may be rich and powerful enough to completely disobey the law and get away with it.

And that's surely in terms of America is an aspirational nation.

That's the kind of example that needs to be set.

I think it's beautiful.

It really is the kind of vibe of like, I'm on bass, you can't touch me.

And as long as you're the president, you're on bass, which is kind of a juvenile way to describe it.

But I think we're describing a fairly juvenile man.

So I don't regret it.

Just because I hadn't seen it in a while, I actually re-watched the film version of Frost Nixon,

which for listeners,

it was a television interview between a British journalist, David Frost, and

the then Cynthia Nixon.

That's the next one.

Jack Frost and Cynthia Nixon.

Cynthia Nixon being interviewed, cross-examined by a snowman,

played by Michael Keaton.

But the interesting,

again, just for full context, Frost Nixon is essentially the rumble in the jungle for white people.

But the entire sort of crux of the

idea is that Frost sort of got some culpability out of Nixon.

And the kind of key phrase in the film is Richard Nixon saying that he felt that crimes could not be committed by the president, right?

He said, I'm saying that when the president does it, that means it's not illegal.

And that was seen as this huge kind of coup for Frost because it essentially suggested that Nixon believed that he was a dictator who was above.

Now,

when the president does it, it's not illegal.

It's now seemingly official US law.

Like the rationale seems to be we would love to send him to jail, but we need him to run the National Park Service and the army.

It sort of beggars belief.

And the level of sort of open corruption, it's sort of unbelievable.

Because it's sort of hours before Trump's lawyers asked the court to delay Friday sentencing hearing, Trump spoke to U.S.

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito on the phone.

Now, the official rationale for the phone call is that one of Alito's former law clerks is

being considered for a position within the Trump administration, and Trump was doing a background check on him.

And if you believe that, I actually have a metric ton of Trump-branded magic beans to sell you.

There is so much about Trumpy in America, Josh, that's hard to understand and the things he said he's going to do.

I mean,

I find it really hard to understand how being trans will bar you from being a member of the armed services, but being a sex offender makes it compulsory for you to join the cabinet.

How do we explain that to

the younger generation?

I think we just got to sit them down and say,

right now, we've progressed to a, we progressed to a point in history, and then we turned around and went backwards.

And it's bad.

I think that's something that it's so affirming to hear, right?

Where you just, it's, it's so bad.

And people go, well, there could be this silver lining.

And you go, don't give me that shit.

Just live with me and it's bad.

Like, just look me in the eyes and let the water rise up to our ankles.

And it's bad.

Moving on now to wistfully gazing out of a window, feeling pangs of nostalgia for the simpler days before global democracy became the playground for the territorial pissings of deranged gazillionaires news now.

And,

well, I mean, another new quarter of a century and

yet more delusion-mongering Pluto crackpot tech warlock nonsense from Elon Musk, the space-bothering human-sized pantomime virus.

Nish, you are the Bugles Elon Musk correspondent.

Trudy is the Egomaniac's Egomaniac,

11-time winner of the Willy Wonka Memorial Trophy for questionable business practices and corporate anti-ethics.

And he's been sticking his radioactive ore directly into the eye sockets of British politics once again.

Yes, that's right.

Elon Musk, who is racist and a truly evil guy.

Not my words, the words of Steve Bannon.

Just let that sink in for a second.

Steve Bannon.

We need to let that sink in for a long time, that.

Yeah, gave an an interview last week and excerpts of it were published in Bright Bar over the weekend.

And Steve Bannon described Elon Musk as racist and a truly evil guy.

What do I say to that?

I say sometimes it takes a thief to catch a thief.

Was that criticism or a compliment, do we think?

Not clear.

Right.

Not

clear.

It's hard to know whether Steve Bannon was saying he's an evil guy.

No, listen, I think, I believe it was critical

because he's also said that he's going to have Elon Musk run out of here by Inauguration Day here, referring to the White House.

He said that he will not have full access to the White House.

He'll be like any other person.

The important thing to sort of seize on here, the one bit of optimism in the kind of alliance between

deregulated capitalist tech bros and socially conservative wannabe wannabe ningo Nazis is that there are so many thin-skinned twats at the center of all of this.

So there's already a tension emerging between Bannon and Musk.

And the tension between Bannon and Musk is sort of emerging because Musk has a really strong support for these things called H-1B visas, which allow tech companies like SpaceX and Tesla to hire skilled professionals and engineers from outside of America.

Steve Bannon, in the process of calling Musk an evil and racist guy, said he should go back to South Africa, which it just shows you that you will never be truly racist enough for hardcore racists.

It is, that's right on that racism bubble, right?

Like when you tell a white person to go back to Africa, it's like, whoa, that is a little,

you're stirring a lot of pots there.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

You know, and I mean, I don't know.

Elon Musk is a white South African, so is his genetic instinct to say respect, game, recognised game?

It's hard to say.

It's hard to say.

But he has been intervening in British politics.

He's been heavily attacking Keir Salma and the Labour government for a national inquiry into grooming gangs.

Now, this is a horrible story that relates to a series of grooming gangs that happen in parts of England.

Now,

the shocking thing about this more than anything else is there has been a full national inquiry and it made a series of recommendations that were not implemented by the Conservative government because they were too busy just trying to drive the country off the edge of a cliff.

And so he's now come after the recently elected Labour government.

He said that Jess Phillips, who's the safeguarding minister, is a rape genocide apologist and falsely claimed that Stalman was deeply complicit in

mass rapes in exchange for votes.

He also said that he would be making an enormous donation to Reform UK, which is the political party that's the sort of

eventual evolution of the Brexit Party and the UK Independence Party that agitated for Britain to leave the European Union and is led by a man who suffers from a condition known as scurvy of the whole face and personality, Nigel Farage.

But

Musk has now called for Farage to step down from his position leading the Reform Party.

And that's over

Farage's refusal to support Tommy Robinson, who has become a sort of hero for the like online internet right.

Now, Tommy Robinson is actually in jail at the moment.

And because he's been,

Tommy Robinson has done a number of things, not limited to fraud, but also Tommy Robinson actually endangered the

conviction of some of these rapists by leaking names onto the internet, which is a felony and can actually capsize an entire trial.

So, Toby Robinson is a figure that, even on the British far right, is pretty disgraced.

So, Farage

is attempting to distance himself from this.

Musk seems to have got, you know, seems to have got the hump about this.

And so now he's got the hump with Farage.

So, this, this, so the kernel of optimism, I would say, for all of us around the world, and obviously, especially in America where the threat of Musk is very clear and present and, you know, a week away,

it's important to remember that they're all

and

like

and as such, all of them believe themselves to be the smartest man in the room.

And as a consequence of that, there is a real possibility of this whole project capsizing itself because of the egos and the vanity of everyone, of everyone involved.

And I know that that doesn't seem like much, but it's all we have to cling to at this point.

I think I have a second thread of hope, which is

we all learned, we all relearned over the Christmas season the lesson that horrible rich people only listen to ghosts, right?

So

Steve Bannon might actually hold sway with Elon Musk because Steve Bannon himself looks like he's been dead for years.

The ghost of racism past yeah that's right

um i mean there's a famous old saying isn't there uh that you should judge a person by the friends they keep but like all sayings it needs updating for the world we now live in and i think that saying should now be judge a person by who they're saying should be released from jail and in

my case the fact that it is the far-right fury monger tommy robinson um yeah not even his real name i mean

if you're going to change your name and behave the way he does why choose tommy robins and why not go with i don't know evil mc face or something i don't know um right if you're going to change your name just to be racist you can go with the tradition of hulk hogan yeah

um

but on the subject of tommy robin elon musk's father um pre-lon musk i assume he's called um he um

from the original latin

he's i mean he said a number of, he said, he said Elon

wants to buy Liverpool Football Club.

He could have said literally anything there.

And basically, you say Elon Musk wants to buy, just say anything in the world,

the Himalayas,

the core of the earth, the concept of hope, all vowels.

He could buy anything, basically.

But he compared Tommy Robinson with...

Strapping Everyone for perhaps the least appropriate comparison of two people in human history.

He compared Tommy Robinson with Nelson Mandela.

That's the Nelson Mandela.

Yes.

I assume, you know, I guess they do that when you think of it.

They do have some things in common.

Both have spent time in jail.

Neither has ever won the World Badminton Championships.

Both have won fewer than 10 Nobel Prizes.

And neither has ever been romantically linked with Queen Victoria, even though Victoria's now been single for, what is it, 160 years now.

So, but in the world of 2020's logic, that makes them peas in a pod.

But Tommy Robinson, Nelson Mandela comparison,

I think it's going to be hard to beat that.

I think I can't see how you could come up with something less appropriate than that.

Steve Bannon said that Elon Musk is specifically too racist to work in government, right?

Which is kind of like the pot calling the kettle black, but really wanting to use a different word for that.

And

in America, he's been meddling specifically in government, right?

He's kind of stirring shit up in the UK, but here he and the Doge, the like chillingly, stupidly named Doge initiative, have been vowing to cut just slash government spending, which is easy for him to do because he doesn't care if the government works at all.

It's easy to cut a budget that doesn't matter to you.

I'll do it right now.

Watch this.

Hey, Steve Gutenberg, if you're listening, you have to start spending half as much on batteries than you're used to.

How about Steve Gutenberg?

Boom.

Battery budget half.

New York Philharmonic, no more sparkling water in your cafeteria.

Who cares?

Not me.

I've never been within 10 feet of a bassoon, so this shit doesn't matter to me at all.

And I can say whatever the f ⁇ I want, even if it ruins other people's lives.

Last week on

my podcast, Pod Save the UK, available wherever you get podcasts from.

I'm sure I should have put a bit more energy into that plug.

Again, on brand,

in a

sort of moment of frustration, I described Elon Musk as being profoundly unfunny and uncharismatic.

And it's interesting to see

people

come out in support of Elon.

It's interesting to be a fan of Elon Musk.

Like, it sort of seems to me to be sort of akin to just being,

like, it just sort of being a, I mean, I don't, I don't know.

Were there like ardent fans of the Rockefellers that went around interrupting conversations where people said mildly critical things about them?

It seems like quite a new phenomenon.

But interestingly, the line that a lot of people seem to have taken is: you know, that Elon Musk is actually neurodivergent.

So maybe that's why he's not able to be funny.

And I've got terrible news for you, okay?

Being neurodivergent and being funny are not mutually exclusive things.

In fact, I'd go as far as to say if you removed the neurodivergent people from comedy, you would remove all of comedy.

You've profoundly misunderstood the traits it takes to work in comedy.

You would be left with the movies where Hemsworths are the comic release.

Oh my God, it's doing fine.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

If you've been listening to this podcast for years and think, what an example of consistent conversation between neurotypical people,

not listening to the amount of cricket statistics that have been mentioned.

Well, Musk asked his followers whether America should liberate the UK from its tyrannical government

last week, and obviously we're pretty concerned about that over here.

In fact,

police have described Musk as armed with an unhealthy grandmother load of money and dangerous to the entire functioning future of democracy and have warned the public not to approach him.

If Elon Musk is coming towards you, the current advice is that you are supposed to run in a zigzag or climb a tree or play dead.

I forget which it is, but the important thing is

don't confront him.

He will almost certainly financially eat you.

He's the world's richest man, financially, let me emphasize that, not spiritually.

He remains in extreme poverty in terms of spiritual wealth.

So, do if you have any spare spiritual wealth, do please send it to Elon Musk.

He's, of course, not the first person in history to have more money than cents.

It's just that his is in an unprecedented ratio.

moving on now from the emperor of the universe to the deputy emperor of the universe mark zuckerberg has announced an end to all truth um it's uh

i mean you know we're not in a position on the bugle to criticize uh criticize someone for removing truth from uh from the world.

We've been doing our best to replace it with something better, I think.

But, you know, it does highlight the difference between lies and bullshit.

One is malevolent, one is benevolent.

But Zuckerberg has basically announced that facts are going to be banned on all social media platforms,

if I may misrepresent the story, which seems in the circumstances entirely appropriate.

Meta that he owns owns Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, which is a newer social media platform in which people post what they would think and feel if a nuclear bomb ever fell on Sheffield.

And that is a niche joke for fans of British 1980s TV disaster films.

I've done quite a lot of niche jokes on this show over the years.

But I might have might have raised the bar with that one.

Niche, you might even be too young to remember.

Did you ever see threads?

I've seen threads.

It's not that I don't understand the joke, Andy.

The sound you're hearing is me laughing at sheer disbelief

that you have made a threads joke on a podcast with, let's face it, quite a large international audience in 2025.

Yeah.

Well, anyway, you know, freedom of speech and all that.

Yes.

So people don't often talk about the First Amendment right to make jokes that are too niche for even most of the people you're currently talking to.

Too niche for niche.

That's your next job.

Yeah, that's my next show.

I mean, in this specific instant, it wasn't too niche.

I'm actually exactly the right audience for that joke, as I often am for many of Andy's jokes.

But I like the idea that you will one day make a joke that's too niche for niche.

And I look forward to Chris commissioning a series of t-shirts as part of the next round of Bugleberg.

So Mark Zuckerberg, in a video that showcased all of the charisma of a cabbage, said that Meta was going to get rid of fact checkers and dramatically reduce the amount of censorship and also recommend more political content on its platforms.

So less fact-checking, more political content.

That's absolutely ideal.

That is akin to putting a bunch of bricks down your toilet and ordering an industrial quantity of chili oil.

You've really created a problem for yourself there.

Zuckerberg saying that Meta's fact checkers have been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than you're creative.

And what I've been saying to you is as I reach the end of my tether with this entire project, and by project, I mean the human race.

Let me just say this.

If you have a political philosophy that

is

compromised by having its fact checked, your political philosophy is a bag of shit and you are.

There's no way around it.

Okay, I'm sorry, but if facts are biased against you, you are simply a wrong.

I mean, it is a bit of a concern because during the years in which the meta Facebook used fact-checking, up to 12 possible facts were found in its content, as many as three of which might have actually been true.

So, I mean, that puts in context

what a concern it is that this is.

And I guess, you know, fair play, Josh, fair play to the likes of Zuckerberg and Musk for finding ways to successfully monetize the death of civilization.

I mean, it's, you know, someone might as well do well out of it.

He's, he's really, it's been a hard pivot the last year or so, right?

He's sticking with that new look that I can only describe as bouncer at a hookah bar where all the hookahs are vapes.

Um, just kidding.

I can also describe it as your sister's worst ex-boyfriend and Mark the Rock Zuckerberg for some reason, is what he's trying to look like.

Uh, he decided to do away with fact-checking, and I think it should be noted, outsourcing that function to community notes because we all saw how well that worked for Twitter, a company that currently technically still exists.

He's really coming out anti-fact, right?

He's this is like an anti-fact set of policies.

And because community notes are only as trustworthy as the community who's noting.

And think about who's on Facebook.

You're entrusting content moderation to a bunch of 80-year-olds who see AI-generated pictures of Jesus Christ bench pressing the U.S.

Capitol building and commenting, is this real?

I also like the fact that Zuckerberg said it was time to get back to our roots around free expression.

Yeah.

I guess, you know, those classic Facebookian roots, you know, those freedoms that we fought all those world wars for, for our sacred right to hurl anonymous misogynistic abuse at people from the privacy of our own sex dungeons.

Those

roots that have made Facebook matter what it is today.

He also said in that vein, he said that companies need to be more masculine, right?

And I don't know what that means because the whole deal of these tech platforms now is just

people and offering them no protection.

And because of their absolute lack of customer service, you never hear back from them afterwards.

So social media companies are basically already frat guys.

Like, what is more masculine than that?

Also, wanting something to be more masculine.

I think, out of all the things that we might learn from the last, I'm going to say, 5,000 years of human history is the fact that maybe a patriarchal system has flaws and it might be worth trying something a bit less masculine.

Listen, if Meta are getting rid of their fact-checking team, then I would encourage all buglers, and even as I say this, I know I'm opening one of the most dangerous cat of worms known to humankind.

I would encourage all buglers to change their Facebook status to various things that they think Mark Zuckerberg does in his recreational time just to test the power of the community note.

Does he receive sexual thrills by sticking his dick in a dolphin's blowhole?

That could be something we put out there and let the community notes decide.

Are most of his dinners fried turds?

These are things the community notes will have to decide.

And they will.

The community will have dots.

Does he have a tattoo of his own face on his ass?

These are things the community notes can decide.

he's got his it is really

change

mark zuckerberg has a tattoo of andy zoltzmann's ass over his own arse

the community notes decide

uh well um i need to go and um uh think about cricket uh so i think we need to wrap up this show um it's uh Anything to plug, Nish?

I have plenty to plug.

If you live in the United States or Canada, or as it will be known in a month, the United States, I am doing a string of tour dates in your respective countries from February the 21st onwards, 2025.

I'm going all over the place.

I'm doing Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal in Canada.

And then I'm doing all manner of cities in the United States of America.

Please buy tickets.

I will say that a lot of these gigs have sold unprecedentedly well.

So I can only assume that it's buglers that have already bought tickets because otherwise, who the f are these people?

Is it an error?

Do they think they bought tickets to see Jason Manzoukas live?

It's hard to say, but

we've added second shows to places where the shows have sold out.

I will say, for the people of Tulsa and San Diego, demand has been proportionate.

Demand has been incredibly precedented.

So if you know 100 people in Tulsa or San Diego that want to spend their evening being mildly disappointed by a comedian, that is available to them.

But yeah, otherwise, the tickets are available.

There are loads of shows in loads of places.

I've covered as much of America as we possibly could.

Obviously, that's about 0.05% of the total country.

But please come to the shows.

The tickets are available right now at nichecommand.co.uk forward slash gigs.

So the shows in Nashville, Atlanta, and Toronto have been moved to larger rooms.

So I would say buy a ticket for those if you can to watch a man be swallowed up by emptiness in a visual metaphor for being destroyed by your own hubris.

Josh?

I am back out on the road a bunch too.

I am going to be in

at Sketchfest in San Francisco on January 25th, running a show with my friend Allison Livey.

It's going to be great.

I'm back in New York February 9th, excuse me, doing a bunch of new material.

I have a special coming out of the stuff I recorded last year at some point, but this is new jokes.

I'm very excited to tell them and have you hear them.

And then, as always, I have a newsletter called

That's Marvelous, joshgondelman.substack.com.

If you subscribe, all my tour dates are in there too, and you can see when I'm coming to your city.

I am going to plug the first book from the Bugle Publishing Empire, A Passion for Passion, written by Alice Fraser and Dancy Lagarde.

What a combination that is.

On sale on the 6th of February, we're doing a launch party at the Bill Murray in Islington in London on the 5th of February.

I will be joining Alice and Dancy

on stage for an evening of, well, satirically horny book readings, I think we can safely say.

You can be there too.

Go to thebuglepodcast.com and find out how you can join us or buy the book via that same website where you can also join the Bugle voluntary subscription scheme

to help keep this show free, flourishing, and independent.

And benefits of joining this subscription scheme include access to the latest issue of Ask Andy, the monthly subscriber-only QA show, where this month we debate the bleeps that piss some of you off.

Also, these bleeps, man.

Zuckerberg's going to take these bleeps out.

Get ready, Chris.

You cuck.

The Zuck's coming for the cucks.

Zuck for 2025.

We're going to get rid of these bleeps.

Also, do come to my tour shows, which are, well, similarly selling unusually well.

There are a few tickets left for some of the show's details at andy'solsom.co.uk.

Thanks to everyone who has come so far.

We will be back next week.

Until then,

enjoy the inauguration.

I don't think enjoy is right.

Just, yeah.

Anyway, goodbye.

Hi, Buglers.

It's producer Chris here.

I just wanted to very quickly tell you about my new podcast Mildly Informed, which is in podcast feeds and YouTube right now.

Quite simply, it's a show where me and my friend Richie review literally anything.

So please come join us wherever you get your podcasts right now.