Tom Nichols: Secrets and Lies

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Hello, and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast.

I'm your host, Tim Miller.

Delighted to welcome back with his gold jacket, Professor Emeritus at the Naval War College.

He's a staff writer at the Atlantic.

His books include the death of expertise.

He is the ageless enigma, Tom Nichols.

How are you doing?

You know, we share, we share many things in common, Tim.

We do.

We do.

We do have a lot in common, and we're going to explore all those.

So, the Wall Street Journal had an article last night that I assume anyone listening to this podcast has already seen.

It included what they described as a body card.

It felt like they really dialed in on that word body.

I felt like there was like a little group chat at the Wall Street Journal.

Like,

what word can we use here

in the newspaper?

And they settled on body.

The letter was for a 50th birthday card to Jeff Epstein.

It was in 2003, so three years before

he was indicted for sex crimes.

Jelaine Maxwell naturally organized this.

It included letters from such eminence

like Alan Dershowitz and the Victoria Secret Man, and also Donald Trump.

And Donald Trump apparently drew a picture of a woman, woman, naked woman with breasts, and his signature was the pubic hair.

I think this is where we need to say, allegedly, as reported by the Wall Street Journal.

Allegedly, as reported by the Wall Street Journal, and according to the Wall Street Journal, as provided to the Department of Justice in 2006 as part of their investigation into Jeffrey Epstein.

And he wrote, I guess you'd call it a script or a little mini screenplay.

It was on a typewriter, was inside the naked woman drawing.

And yeah, as we've mentioned, it says, we have certain things in common, Jeffrey.

Donald, enigmas never age.

Have you noticed that?

It ends with Donald Trump wishing his pal a happy birthday and saying, may every day be another wonderful secret.

Yes.

Secret.

A wonderful secret.

What did you make of all that, Tom Nichols?

I don't know what to make of

anybody who has a close friendship with Jeffrey Epstein and writes little,

I don't even know how to describe it, what little fake screenplays.

Of course, we do have to say this is all, you know, reporting from the Wall Street Journal.

It seems to have panicked Trump.

Panicked, I think is very fair to say.

I mean, you know, I don't have a good synonym for panic like body is for trashy, but I mean, it's just sweaty panic.

And you've been seeing it for the past few days.

So to me, that says, you you know, he wrote it

or signed it or something.

He certainly drew it.

One thing I didn't actually know, I thought I knew everything about this fucking guy.

Way too much of my brain is composed of random facts about one of the stupidest Americans who we've elected president twice.

But one of the facts I did not know or had lost was that he did like to do little sharpie sketches, apparently.

There's a whole catalog of them.

He would sell them for charity.

When he said, I've never drawn anything in my life, well, except for the, what was it, the Empire State Building that sold for $16,000?

I never wrote a picture in my life.

I never wrote a picture.

Yeah, that was the one.

Yeah, there's several.

Someone else sent me a couple of his other ones this morning.

A money tree, naturally, tree with dollars on it.

Some other skylines.

He did like the skyline move.

I haven't seen any other naked pictures.

I don't know what the note means, but it's written in such a way that if,

I mean, it's almost written like to trigger conspiracy theorists, you know, back before this whole thing was this thing, this, you know, waving my arms around thing.

So, I mean, if, you know,

say, let's hope every day is a wonderful secret.

Well, there's a good argument for not releasing any more information.

I mean, it's just, it's almost like, you know,

there's nothing incriminating in it, right?

I mean, it doesn't say, hey, remember when we went criming, you know,

in our stolen Cadillac?

Doesn't say, and may every day be a wonderful secret, like that 17-year-old we flew to your island in the U.S., you know, in the USVI.

Well, the problem is it's written in such a way that your brain is going to start filling in all those blanks.

In a way, the Trump world is already going to start claiming that in a way, right, this is a nothing burger.

This is a little ditty sent, you know, years and years ago.

I don't remember it.

And I suppose if Trump were better at crisis control, he would say, hey, the guy and I were friends.

I didn't know what he was up to.

I wrote him a funny little ditty because he's kind of a weird guy, you know, and instead it's like, I didn't do it.

I don't draw.

It wasn't me.

Everything's fake, which, of course, for most people applying Occam's razor are going to say, well, that sure looks like

you actually wrote it.

And so now the debate will become,

what did it mean?

And I just don't see this going away.

It's not an, it's in itself, you could argue they could, I suppose some of Trump's allies could say this is kind of a nothing burger, but not in this context, not with Trump's reaction to it, not with everything going on around it.

So this is, this is going to keep this alive and it's going to drive people crazy because now he's going to, I mean, he's at war with everybody now.

He's at war with the Wall Street Journal.

He's going to, he says he's going to sue them, but I don't know, Tim, what's the over-under on that?

I, you know.

I want to get to the lawsuit, but just a little bit more on the letter, if we could just, you know, sit on this for a a second.

I assume little Diddy was not a pun.

Was that an intended?

Was that pun intended?

Okay.

Well, you know, we got Diddy out there also doing sex cracks.

Oh, no.

Oh, that didn't even.

Come on.

I'm a 64-year-old, you know, New Englander.

Diddy, P.

Diddy was not the first thing that occurred to me.

God.

I don't know.

You said it twice, and I was like, it's a little diddy.

Again, just...

Looking at the letter one more time.

We have certain things.

You're correct that there's nothing in the letter that's like, hey, you know, remember when, you know, we took Janie, you know,

remember that family we kidnapped in Saskatchewan?

That's not like, oh, Heather, you know, that we had locked up in your sex dungeon.

Like, it doesn't say that.

But we have certain things in common, Jeffrey.

It's like,

I mean, what else could that be?

Maybe they have other things in common.

I assume they both have a few restaurants they like.

Trump says then a year later, like it's important to do the full context here.

Like I mentioned, like I said, it's only three years till Epstein gets indicted.

Doesn't mean that Trump knew about that, but it's like we're in the heat of Epstein's child sex trafficking.

This isn't 25 or 30 or 50 years ago.

This isn't like, you know, something they wrote in high school.

Yeah, right.

So it's three years.

This is three years before he goes to.

And then the next year is when Trump gives that New York magazine quote that everybody's been talking about before this, where he's like, you know, Jeffrey likes him young and they're friends.

And we know that Trump also likes him young.

We know that he dated Gabriella Sabatini when she was age 19 in between one of his marriages.

So, I mean, I think that there's pretty good context clues to say that the certain things they have in common is an appetite for younger women, but it could be something else.

What is the inference that a reasonable person would draw from all this is going to be Trump's problem?

That there is no smoking gun, but people, you know, this isn't a court of law.

People are going to draw conclusions.

I mean, you don't, you could argue that it's just bad luck that you find out later that you're, that your pal is, you know, a convicted sex trafficker and that three years earlier, you probably shouldn't have said, we have a lot of things in common.

Let's have every day be a wonderful secret.

The wonderful secret is the other thing that's like Jeffrey Epstein does have a lot of secrets at this time, all related to the child sex trafficking.

And so,

I mean, I guess maybe you have some other secrets.

Jeffrey was also, you know, trafficking adult women and, you know, having having affairs and all that kind of stuff.

But again, if you have somebody who's known for a specific secret and your wish to them is that every day is a wonderful secret,

it's just such an odd, I mean, it's an odd thing to say.

I mean, I look, I'll pull age rank here and say, I have turned 40, I have turned 50, I have turned 60.

No one has ever said to me, let every day be a wonderful secret.

I've had people say, let every day be a new adventure.

You're only as old as you feel.

It's a new phase in your life.

You know, all the things that you say as the approaching fear of death starts to tap you on the shoulder when you get to middle age.

So it's just, I mean, the whole thing is just

weird.

And I can also say that in all the things I've ever signed, I have never used my signature as

female pivot.

I was trying to be more delicate and say, you know, the Mones Veneris or something, but yes,

I have never done that.

And I think it's just, you know, it's, you could argue that it's bad.

I will say the female pubic hair drawing is the best fact that Trump has here because, you know, at least he was drawing a picture of a woman who is old enough to have pubic hair.

Oh, damn.

Yes.

Okay.

Well, what I was going to say.

I don't know if that's exculpatory or not.

That's right.

I was going, not going to, what I was going to say is.

You could argue this is all just the worst luck in the world.

The problem is that Donald Trump...

Look, here,

let me draw this to a totally different situation.

Why did everybody in the world think that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction?

Because Saddam Hussein was acting like he had weapons of mass destruction.

You know, he was like Bug's bunny, right?

You can come in anywhere, but you can't look here in the closet.

The problem is that Trump is acting like a man who's afraid and guilty and scared.

And that's driving this story because

if you're so panicked that you're literally turning on your most faithful followers, I mean, calling them weaklings and, you know, stupid and idiots and all, I mean, that, that,

you know, again, what is the inference a reasonable person draws here is that Trump has something to hide, that he's scared, that he's, that he's panicked.

You could also add to that inference, not only that he's acting panicked, but that he has a track record of, I mean,

dozens of women have accused him of sexual harassment or assault.

Well, there's also problems.

He's rather women by the pussy against their will on audio tape and said that they let him do it right.

So, like, so there's a lot of people.

He has been found liable for sexual assault and then defaming

and then defaming the woman who accused him.

So, you know, there's a

lot of bad context clues.

There is a lot of context here, exactly.

Also, has no one sat him down and explained the Streisand effect?

I don't think so.

I think Trump is like a human

counter to the Streisand effect.

He feels like if you can just

go even bigger,

more Streisand helps, I think, is his strategy.

See, that's why I had that Bugs Bunny cartoon.

People out there, if they know, they know.

If my friend Rocky was in this stove, would I turn on the gas?

You might, Rabbit.

You might.

It's just like, oh, my God,

this is like a Chuck Jones cartoon of, you know, he's not in here.

Don't look in here.

Well, anyway, as we've said, you know, it does sort of a normal person looks at this and says, I wasn't really interested in this, but now I kind of am.

Exactly.

That happened to Sarah Longwell this week.

You said earlier that I'm sorry to interrupt.

Was that a focus group?

No, no, no, no.

It was just that Sarah Longwell, she said we were on the other podcast.

She was like, I didn't care about this episode thing.

And obviously, she cared about the victims.

And it's just like it wasn't a story that she was following that closely.

And she couldn't follow all the various threads of the conspiracies.

And it's like, who knows what the what?

And then all of a sudden, as Trump Trump's behavior this week has made her say, well, actually, it seems like there might be some there there, right?

Like if anybody's acting this, like, you know, this pan this crazy about it, like, there, there is a reason.

That's why I asked, because I never thought much.

I mean, I, you know, I, I understood Epstein is what he is, but, you know, there's a difference between somebody like you could argue, like somebody who's got Trump's record of boorish, you know, toxic and all that stuff, and somebody like, like Epstein, who's wrote like a whole other, you know,

pedophiles and sex traffickers and all 14 girls class by themselves, right?

And so I was like, ah, there's no client list.

There's no flight logs.

There's none of that.

I never, I didn't think much of that stuff when the Republicans were trying to gin it up years ago.

But watching Trump over the past week, you know, it's like, well, now you have my attention.

I'm sort of, I am, I admit it.

I'm curious too now.

Yeah.

I mean, I've, I've, I've been following the story for a while and have been.

had a lot of curiosities about it.

My interest in the, in the missing minutes from the prison cell, I think has definitely increased in the last week.

And just like I'm starting starting to get increasingly interested in the conspiracies, you mentioned earlier that the letter kind almost begs people to have more conspiracies.

And I do want to say to some listeners, I've received a series of messages about how the word enigmas is an anagram for gametes.

And gametes is also a word for young women.

And I do just want to say to those listeners,

it's good to have a hobby.

All right.

But maybe diversify the hobby.

I hear pickleball is good.

I don't think Donald Trump knows the word gamines.

His

vocabulary is pretty limited or anagram.

So I think there's a lot of incriminating stuff here.

Maybe I'm wrong.

Maybe him and Epstein had a secret anagram hobby.

Maybe that's what they had in common.

I don't know.

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I want to go to his response because you've mentioned panic a couple times, and I think that it's the apt word.

I just want to read a couple of the things he sent.

He's speaking in third person on his social media here.

President Trump has already beaten George Stephanopoulos, ABC, 60 Minutes, CBS, and others.

Look forward to suing and holding accountable the once great Wall Street Journal.

It has truly turned out to be a disgusting and filthy rag.

And writing defamatory lies like this shows their desperation to remain relevant.

If there were any truth at all to the Epstein hoax as it pertains to President Trump, again in the third person, this information would have been revealed by Comey, Brennan, Crooked Hillary, and other radical left lunatics a year ago.

He then did another tweet about how he looks forward to getting Rupert Murdoch in court.

He did another bleat about how now he has, he has, he's changed his mind.

He's asked Attorney General Pam Bondi to produce any and all pertinent grand grand jury testimony subject to court approval this scam should end right now this is a guy that's flailing he's like i'm gonna sue people we are gonna release stuff we don't know what we're gonna release it's gonna be some stuff in the future and like you guys are idiots it's james comey's fault but again what is the inference a reasonable person draws here that if you're that scared and you're gonna sue and you're gonna

here let me bend over backwards to be fair to donald trump which doesn't feel natural it's not usual in the bullock podcast for that

it's always i'm always hoping to try something new but you know this is also steel manning the case, right?

Which is that Donald Trump threatens to sue everybody for everything.

So

all you're seeing here is sort of standard Trump playbook, right?

That Trump always says, I'm going to sue, and then he doesn't.

Because that's why I said to you, what do you figure the over-under is?

Donald Trump may not understand the concept of discovery, but his lawyers do.

And, you know, nobody's going to want to, certainly nobody on his side is going to want to go through that.

So I still argue that the odds of an actual lawsuit producing anything are going to be pretty small.

But, you know, that's just standard Trump.

Now, the problem is to go back, why do you steal man a case?

Because then it, then the, the differences are more obvious when you go back to it, which is, yeah, but this is, he's clearly acting differently this time.

Like, yeah, he's threatening to sue.

But the thing that's different is how many times he's changed his story.

You know, it's all fake.

It was created by the Democrats.

Well, it's a list that Pam Bondi has and she can release it.

I don't have any control over what the DOJ has.

I've never seen it.

I don't know.

But I know it's fake.

And I know Obamacare.

And it's, you know, it wasn't me.

And if it was me,

you know, I didn't use a gun.

And if I did use a gun, it wasn't that gun.

And if it was that gun, it didn't have bullets in it.

And I mean, at some point, again, you know, people that weren't going to pay attention to this, people like me and Sarah, maybe, you know, looking and saying, even by Trump's standards, you know,

again, I sort of washed out or priced in, that's the word I was, I priced in a certain amount of Trumpian outrage of, oh, there's a story and it's about me and I hate it.

And Murdoch's a traitor and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Okay, now, now I'm thinking,

no, this is a bigger bombshell than it looks.

When the story first dropped, I don't know about you, Tim, but when I first saw it, I said, oh, birthday, a body.

We're going to love that word.

This is a body podcast today.

It is.

But, you know, I thought a body

birthday card, that's not much of a bombshell.

Watching Trump's reaction to it, now I'm saying, huh, that seems like a bombshell.

Well, he called the journal and tried to get to shut it down.

I will say one thing about his response is it made me, it reignited my anger at ABC and CBS over capitulating.

Paramount.

Because,

you know,

I'm good on the Wall Street Journal.

Yeah, good on Emma Tucker for push, for publishing this.

But, um, you know, it's just like this, it creates the environment for this, right?

Where like he feels like he can do this, where, you know, people are probably more cautious.

Look, this journal story, the gossip that was coming was going around town for like three days.

Like, I had so many texts about it, and it's because, you know, why did it take so long?

Well, you got to figure that they had lawyers, you know, they were lawyered to the hilt before publishing it.

That's the other reason I don't think there's going to be much of a lawsuit.

Yeah.

Honestly, I mean, if the journal's lawyers, I mean, you say, I happen to think very highly of the Wall Street Journal as a newspaper.

I mean, the opinion page is what it is, you know, but the

actual news organization, you couldn't see them say, I don't know, it's a little shaky.

We could get sued.

Let's take a flyer.

No, that's not,

I don't think anybody at the Wall Street Journal was going to, you know, argue for

taking a, you know, just like, let's, let's get out on a limb and see what happens.

And I think Trump knows that as well.

And so I suspect, you know, that the story of the card itself will probably fade out, but that this is not going to calm the waters for MAGA world.

And they care about it.

I mean, this is just to go back to your point about the press, by the way, about the capitulation.

I think the reason Trump also thinks he can get away with stuff, I was watching a White House briefing yesterday, and someone, I think, quite reasonably brought up.

You know, Donald Trump claims that his uncle knew the Unabomber and when, you know, that whole Unabomber story, right?

Tom, I was saving that one for dessert.

Okay, all right.

I was going to say, we can talk about the story itself, but what really bothered me was Levitt said, I'm so surprised you're asking this.

It's a known fact that his uncle taught an MIT.

Next question.

And I'm like, I'm sorry, that's not actually an answer.

And then nobody followed it.

Nobody said, wait, wait, you know, that's a non-sequitur.

You know, if I said,

hey, I was, you know, I was walking down the street in Rhode Island and I ran into Charles Manson, who apparently is still alive.

And the only answer that you got from my family was, Tom lives in Rhode Island.

What's wrong with you people?

That's not really an answer.

And I think, you know, I think the people around him are thinking if we could just get him to that point, this would go away, but it's not going to go away.

And I'm really surprised at the degree to which this is, I mean, of all the things I would have predicted would have blown up the MAGA alliance, I don't know that I would have picked this.

And it shows you that, you know, I have a hard time.

I still, after years of studying and writing about these folks, I guess I'm a little, I'm still capable of being surprised that, like, of all the things he's ever lied to you about, this is the one that's going to do it.

This is the one that really makes you angry.

Has Bongino showed up for work yet?

Because I was a federal employee.

I think Bongino's back.

It's unclear what he's doing.

I was a federal employee.

I don't remember the anger day

exception to going to work.

Government work was kind of optional.

I do think there'll be a rally around the Trump effect now a little bit against the media on this from some in the Trump base.

But there's a huge group of people out there, you know, A, in like the Manosphere, who don't care about that, who aren't, who aren't rally around the flag type people.

You know, they were, Shane Gillis, who's this comedian, was making fun of Trump over this at the Espy, so that's the ESPN Oscars or whatever, the awards for athletes of the year.

You know, that demonstrates that it's breaking through outside of the bubble.

You know what I mean?

It's escaped the MAGA containment field.

And that really matters because there are things that I keep trying to kind of figure out why this issue, there are a lot of things that MAGA will accept being humiliated on in public.

Like Trump lied to you about tariffs.

I talked to MAGA voters just before they're like, oh, tariffs.

He's not going to do tariffs.

Nobody does tariffs.

Okay.

They can say, all right, fine.

He's got to do tariffs.

I trust the president.

He knows what he's doing.

This publicly humiliating MAGA world over he lied to you about a conspiracy that is very dear to your hearts.

We know you don't care about tariffs.

We We know you don't care about abortion or China or Iran or any of that.

We know that in the end, you really don't care about that stuff.

But lying to you about this is bad.

And then letting everybody in the world humiliate you, like at the SPs about this,

that's, I think that one, that's a punch that lands with a lot of these folks.

And it makes it feel like they're losing.

Like a big part of the Trump is, oh, if he's lying, but the libs are mad.

And you know what I mean?

And he's embarrassing them.

Like, that's okay.

I'll allow it.

whatever we're just it's all but but it's but it's like no it's like we're being mocked now right and the libs and the libs are going that you know they're kind of throwing up there and say we're on your side you know hey release the i mean you know you got hakeem jeffries out there going release the epstein things it's like wow that's got to be a very strange feeling

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Just really quick on the files, because I do think it's important to say,

especially for new people who are just trying to follow this, it has been said that Jelaine Maxwell had like a little black book with a list.

I don't know if that's true or not, but generally speaking, when people are talking about releasing the files, it's like all these different investigations.

He was investigated two times in 06 and then again in 17 or whatever, 18.

And then he was investigated in the U.S.

Virgin Islands too, right?

So the files

include.

all this sort of stuff.

So it's like when Trump is in the files, like maybe he's in Jelaine's book, right?

Probably.

And Jelaine asked him to write this letter for the birthday card.

But like the files also include all of these investigations, right?

And so I thought that was like the interesting fact in the journal story beyond the actual letter was like, supposedly, this birthday book was in the DOJ's files about the 2006 investigation, right?

And so it's kind of a sprawling list of like stuff, which I think makes the situation very hard for Trump.

Because it's not like you could say, all right, well, fuck it.

We'll just release everything.

It's like, no,

it's a huge amount of information over a decade.

Because he doesn't know what's in there, right?

That he can't, I mean, that's part of the part.

You can't can't know what's in there without a systematic and disciplined examination of these files.

And this is not a White House that does anything in that way.

I always thought, Tim, that one of the reasons he stole all that stuff, that he just hijacked all these files from the White House

is that he didn't know what was in them.

And he said, I better take all this stuff with me just in case.

Just in case.

Order.

Order style.

Bance's reply.

I think it's worth just mulling for one second.

JD, the tweeter and the vice tweeter, he writes, Forgive my language.

I'm not going to, actually.

Forgive my language, but this story is complete and utter bullshit.

The WSJ should be ashamed for publishing it.

Where is the letter?

Would you be shocked to learn they never showed it to us before publishing it?

Does anyone honestly believe this sounds like Donald Trump?

Doesn't it violate some rule of journalistic ethics to publish a letter like this without showing it to the victim of this hit piece?

He loves rhetorical questions.

I love that the victim in this case, where there were 14-year-old girls who were raped and young women that were trafficked, is Donald Trump because somebody was mean to him.

That's the victim that J.D.

Vance is worried about, not the actual victims of Jeffrey Epstein.

But do you have any thoughts on

the series of rhetorical questions posed by the vice president?

Does it sound like Donald Trump to sign his name across a woman's genitalia, you know, on a cartoon?

Yeah.

Sure, okay.

I'll take that one.

Yes, it does sound like Donald Trump.

Vance is walking in the same trap that they're all walking to.

If this was all a big nothing burger, then, you know, why did you guys all pump it up and demand the release of these files and all of this stuff and claim that there were all these bombshells in it before you were elected?

And now, you know, the Times had an interesting little kind of Venn diagram.

Vance is way over in the nothing to see here, you know, approach, but there's these overlapping, like, nothing to see here, but Trump should release and, you know, big story.

And I mean, Vance is kind of an outlier here because he has to be.

And I don't think Vance can carry that in the same way that other MAGA figures do.

It's really important to remember that Vance was going to be a has-been almost ran Senate candidate until Trump,

and he was going to lose to a guy that was a real, you know, screwball until Trump saved him.

So it's not like Vance has this big organic level of cred with MAGA World.

So I don't know that it really, that these questions that he's posing matter very much, but it's still a Streisand effect.

Does this sound like Donald Trump to you?

Hmm.

Hanging out with a perv since you're asking.

If you're going to ask.

Sending a pervy message to a per for their 50th birthday in Manhattan kind of does sound like Donald Trump to me a little bit, but we'll see.

We'll see how it turns out, as Donald Trump, like say.

We're going to look at it very strongly.

And I think you should have objected to J.D.

Vance's body language.

There's been another,

well, I guess I was about to say victim.

I don't want to undermine the real victims here, but there's been another person who's had to suffer because of all this, and it is James Comey's daughter was fired from the DOJ yesterday, prosecutor.

There's another move that says, don't worry, nothing to see here.

Yeah, it's wild.

And so, for folks who listened to the Comey interview a couple weeks ago that I did, we talked about his daughter because she was prosecuting the Diddy case, which Tom Nichols was following very closely.

She also prosecuted Maxwell and Epstein for the DOJ.

She had a specialty in sex crimes.

Tough job.

And she was fired yesterday, two days ago, by the DOJ.

No reason given.

It sucks.

You know, it's unclear whether it's because Cash Patel and

Pam Bondi can't have anybody working for them who has any relationship with anyone who's ever said anything critical about Donald Trump, and it's a last name thing.

It might be related to the Maxwell and Epstein investigations.

It's pretty curious timing on that front.

But

what do you think?

Well, once again, leave aside the resistance libs and MAGA world, right?

Sure.

Take the average person saying, hmm, he's been accused of being jungled up with Jeffrey Epstein.

And now this stuff comes out and he doesn't want to release these files.

And oh, by the way, he's going to fire the prosecutor who went after Epstein.

Again, what part of the Streisand effect isn't he understanding?

You know, even I, again, I said, okay, it's probably the last name thing, but boy, she's been there for years.

So why, why now?

You know, it's like, let me try and tamp down some of this conspiracy theorizing by firing the sex crimes prosecutor.

Okay.

Okay.

Here's the other thing about this, just taking it outside of the politics.

I do want to talk about her name

for a second too, but taking the politics outside of it.

It's like

people in the MAGA base for

accurate, you know, maybe they were wrong about this, so maybe it was a conspiracy, but maybe it was not genuine in certain cases.

But many of them expressed that they were very concerned about elite pedophilia, child sex trafficking, sex crimes among elites that are being protected.

Here you have a prosecutor at the DOJ who specializes in getting convictions of sex criminals and has successfully targeted elites

indictments and prosecutions and won convictions of sex criminals.

And so now you're telling me that the Trump DOJ wants to scuttle somebody that has demonstrated that they know how to go after sex criminals.

You know, just on the merits of that part outside of everything else, it's like it underscores the fact that these guys don't care about that at all.

Shows you what their priorities are.

Yeah.

And if you're talking about petty stories, I think we should, this was a Shane Harris story yesterday in The Atlantic.

This thing about Clapper and his dog, did you see this?

I missed this.

You know, Clapper takes this dog, a rescued dog, and,

you know, Clapper's like 80 years old now, right?

And the dog, Susan, becomes a working dog for the CIA.

And they're going to do this kind of dog retirement.

of, you know, Susan

that Clapper had rescued and given to the agency and all that stuff.

And, you know, it's very, it's a heartwarming story.

You know, old guy's going to go see his, this working dog, the dogs, you know, Susan, the dog served her country.

No, Clapper couldn't attend.

No, no, can't let you be at the ceremony because you're, you know, because the president doesn't like you.

I mean, this is the depth, it's both comical and terrifying, the depth of the pettiness that a lot of these folks have about, you know, their perceived political enemies.

And so, you know, I think it dovetails into the Maureen Comey story to say, yeah, no, we could be losing the Super Bowl, but we will bench our best player because he pissed off the coach, just because we just hate him, you know, and we would rather lose the game and be miserable.

Look at me using a sports ball analogy, by the way.

That's a big moment.

Okay, it was kind of a weak, it was kind of a, it was kind of a strained sportsball analogy.

Let me go, let me go to a military analogy.

Okay, great.

We're on the eve of D-Day, and I'm going to, and, you know, Eisenhower pissed me off.

I think I'm just going to replace him.

I don't care if he's good at fighting Nazis.

That's not what this is about.

It's about owning the libs and

getting even with people.

And it's crazy.

I mean, it just, you know, it makes you wonder while they're firing prosecutors and making sure that old men don't go to dog ceremonies, who's running the government?

Who's actually, you know, keeping the lights on around here?

That's a deep concern.

And this is what we were talking about with Mike Feinberg earlier this week because I'll have FBI.

And I'm actually going to get to the Feinberg thing next.

Just one more thing on coming.

It just sucks on a personal level.

Like, so when I had Jim on, he was talking about how

he couldn't go to the Diddy trial to watch, you know, Maureen because she was worried to become a thing, right?

For her dad to be there.

And he was talking about how he was worried when she went to take that job that, like, whatever, some of his baggage would become an issue for her.

And at the time, when we talked not that long ago, he was like so proud that it hadn't.

And he was talking about how the opposite has been true and how she's outshined him actually with the success of these high-profile prosecutions.

And, you know, it just sucks.

It's like these guys are like going to, you know, do that.

This, like you're saying, it's just so, they're so petty and weak and cowardly that they're going to target somebody doing good work in service of the country, going after bad guys just because of their jealousies.

It's so sick.

It's resentment all the way down.

Even since the first time he ran,

it really is the, how come I couldn't get into your club, and so therefore I'll burn down the building.

And this is something I think is worth pointing out, especially in light of the Maureen Comey story.

It's not, we want to be in our own great club,

we want to replace your club with our club because, you know what I mean?

Like, because your club is corrupt and bad, or we need to tear the building down because it's full of rats.

No, no, that's not the problem with them.

The problem is they want to be, they, they want to be in the club they claim to hate.

These These are people who are aspiring elites who are angry about being denied what they think.

You know, the same people that talk about the New York Times and the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal and the Atlantic or whatever, you know, these national publications, we hate them.

Why?

Because,

you know, because we don't work at the New York Times and we want to.

And we weren't invited.

And I think it's, it's, you know, it's, it really is, it sounds like a very simplistic explanation, but it explains the pettiness and the resentment.

It's not people trying to build, I mean, there are, there are serious guys that are, and I always bring up Russ Vaught when we talk about this, right?

You don't ever hear from him.

He's busy doing, burrowing in and doing the things that he wants to do.

The rest of them really are spending their time saying, how come I never got an invitation to this club?

How come I didn't end up at, you know, the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times or wherever?

And that, that is a really, people shouldn't underestimate the degree to which that is a very powerful political force that creates some very warped decisions about government because it means you can't put your personal feelings aside.

You are so consumed with envy and resentment.

By the way, I'm just going to go off subject and say one of the things I loved about the new Superman movie was how they made sure to let you know that Lex Luther was driven by more than anything else, by envy, which I thought was a great little sort of touchstone to our our times.

So there.

No, sorry, let you get back on track.

That's interesting.

My mother always said that she's got a lot of sins and she was happy she never had the green monster.

I agree with that.

I got that from her.

I don't have envy.

I've got a lot of, I've got plenty of flaws, but not that one.

Professional resentment and envy can, you know, I mean, I have watched it consume people.

I mean,

I will not lie, there have been points in my life, you know, I've had a 40-year career where I've like, been like, wow, hey, how come, how did that guy get that job, you know, in academia?

You know, like, how did, how did that guy snag the Stanford job or the court, whatever it was, you know?

But then you, that feeling is supposed to pass.

Right.

You're a normal human being.

You're not supposed to live your life based on that feeling.

You know, it's everybody feels it at some point.

You know, your best friend comes in and says, wow, I just, you know, I just got a huge bonus at work.

And you're like, oh, shit, take me out to dinner then.

You know, and you get over it.

And then you celebrate and you're happy for your friend.

You know, these people have they live their lives you know sort of with that anger needle just stuck into their necks every day and i'm when people are trying to figure out why are they doing these illogical things why are they doing these counterproductive things why are they doing these irrational things go to a simpler explanation than big conspiracies go to you know

that they feel like they were denied their rightful place.

And that's why they're, you know, that's why Dan Bongino wanted to be deputy director of the FBI, because damn it, I should have been, you know, and now they're finding out that it's hard.

Yeah, that's a good transition to the story that you wrote this week about how Tulsi and Cash are training their agencies against their own staff.

And this is, I think, a real, a scary problem, a real problem.

We talked to Mike Feinberg about it on Wednesday, where it's like, why don't they want Mauryan Comey around?

Why don't they want Mike Feinberg around?

Right.

Because they don't want.

qualified China experts around, right?

They want people that are loyal.

They're happy to have other clowns around.

They don't have people that will respect them or at least pretend to respect them and say, oh, yes, Mr.

Director, sir.

You're so great, Mr.

Director, sir, because they have

very handsome men.

Yeah, they have imposter syndrome because for good reason, because they're imposters.

And the results, as you wrote, has been, you know, Tulsi is using AI to, I guess, comb through the emails of our spies to see if any of them are

said any wrong things about Donald Trump.

And Cash is trying to do lie detectors to make guys like Feinberg go up to

HQ and get the meet the parents treatment.

Be like, oh, sir,

did you ever have a bad thought about Donald Trump on a polygraph way?

We'll talk about that.

And this is why I brought up the issue about envy and resentment and these very petty emotions.

FBI personnel are being hooked up to polygraphs to ascertain whether or not they've been snickering about Cash Patel around the water cooler.

Think about that.

Think about it, I mean, I was never polygraphed because of the nature, I had a top secret at the DOD, they didn't do it.

But I've had friends at NSA and CIA and other places who've been polygraphed.

You know, it's a routine thing, right?

Every few years, you got to go in and get your polygraph.

If you, you know, are you a communist drug-dealing, whatever, you know.

But if you're called in, say, hey, there's an issue and we need to polygraph you, that's, as Joe Biden would have said, it's a big fucking deal.

And he's doing it

to ascertain if

people are, you know, basically telling cash patel jokes.

It's an abuse of power that I think is eventually going to backfire throughout the FBI.

You know,

one of the ironies is there were probably plenty of people at the FBI who thought Donald Trump coming back was okay.

I mean, you know, in every law enforcement and intelligence community, I mean, you can find Trump voters everywhere.

But when you start strapping people to chairs and saying, you know, did you say something funny about Cash Patel?

Then I think, you know, the real professionals understand that you're living in a different.

This is KGB level stuff.

It's not even McCarthyism.

I mean, you could argue, I suppose, that what Tulsi is, Gabbard is doing is McCarthyism, right?

As you say, we're rooting out wrongthink and we're finding crypto communists and,

you know, right deviationists and left social revolutionaries, you know, hiding among us.

But when you're saying, have you spoken ill of the leader?

And, you know, we're going to watch the needle jump while you answer,

that's really

repressive third world regime stuff.

And it's embarrassing to even think that it's happened here in the 21st century of America.

Given your background, also, do we want an AI that I assume is some private company's AI

going through the emails and files of our spies?

That feels risky.

This feels like a pretty unnecessary.

As I said in the piece,

what Gabbard is doing is

what the system is designed to prevent someone from doing.

The reason that all these boards and systems are all compartmentalized is so that nobody can just dump them into a big hopper and go looking through them.

And for what?

As you say, to find wrongthink about MAGA policies,

as if you're going to root out somebody saying, hey, I'm not sure bombing Iran was a good idea.

Oh, well, wait a minute, you know,

whoa, you know, let's find the wokes.

We got to root out the wokes.

Yeah.

That's going to backfire.

I mean, it's,

I don't think that they're going to create the kind of compliant intelligence and law because

they're not going in there and saying, you know, as some leaders did after Watergate and the 70s and all the, you know, all the craziness of that.

Say, okay, we've got to get back to being a professional service.

You know, we've got to be a plus.

They're not doing that.

This is a clown show with very delicate egos and people that are, let us just remind, you know, everyone, people who have no business being in these jobs.

People who are there purely because of the cowardice of the Republican Senate.

Tulsi Gabbard has no business being director of national intelligence.

And had she tried to learn the job or, you know, become at all competent at it, you know, there might have been a grace period.

But when you say, when you bring in somebody who's like, I have no idea what I'm doing, this is purely to, you know, own the libs and troll everybody and to, you know, just kind of

because we all thought it would be a gas to make Tulsi Gabbard the DNI.

And then she starts trying to hunt down people in her own organization, then I think you don't get that grace period.

And it means that the United States is being poorly served by its intelligence and law enforcement communities because of the leadership at the top.

Well, good thing that won't have any repercussions.

Having bad intelligence and law enforcement, you know, there's nothing could, no risks there.

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The August Atlantic issue is focused on nuclear and this again relates to all this just kind of

concerns people might have about the clowns being in charge of our nuclear arsenal.

You wrote a couple things about it in your area of expertise.

I'm just wondering, like the things that jump to mind for me as I think about nuclear now and what might be changing or different from 10 years ago is AI threats, one, two,

a belief among other, among countries such as, I don't know, Japan, Europe, Canada, South Korea, that they might need to become nuclear now because the U.S.

is not reliable and they don't feel comfortable in the U.S.'s umbrella.

I don't know.

Those are the things that jump to my mind.

What for you is kind of acute in the nuclear space?

My colleague Ross Anderson has written about AI and also about proliferation in East Asia.

He has a great piece in this month's edition about proliferation.

And I think one bright spot for now is that all of the nuclear powers of the world have kind of seemed to agree that keeping AI far away from nuclear stuff is a good idea.

I mean, do we never learn?

How many Terminators do we have to be

before we don't build Skynet?

I worry about AI being just kind of creeping into other kind of warning systems, you know, that they try to say, well, you know, we can use AI to kind of learn to distinguish between a missile launch and clouds reflecting sunlight.

Okay, fine.

In the end, you still have to have a human being in that loop.

And I really worry that people think AI is a solution to everything.

What I think people need to focus on is that the system that exists now here in the United States of nuclear command and control was built during the Cold War.

It relies on one man, president of the United States.

And the assumption always was that we would elect sane and reasonable people as presidents of the United States, much like the rest of our government.

I mean, you know, James Madison said it, right?

I mean, the whole American experiment, the whole constitutional system is predicated on electing virtuous people.

And if we don't do that, then we're just screwed.

I mean, Madison didn't say we were screwed, but I believe he said we are in a wretched condition.

You know, if there is no virtue among us, we are in a wretched condition.

Okay, that resonates.

Wretched condition.

When people talk about trying to change the architecture of these things, there's a bill in Congress to prevent the first use of nuclear weapons without congressional approval.

I actually think that's a great idea.

But the retaliatory power, you know, if there are incoming missiles, it's still going to have to rest on one person.

And I think it bothers me, and it bothered me when I was writing the piece, that Americans just don't seem to care anymore about an issue that was always a presidential election issue, which is whose finger's on the button?

Who's going to get the 3 a.m.

phone call?

And changing the system isn't going to matter very much if we keep, you know, if you keep electing people like Donald Trump.

I mean, he just doesn't understand any of this.

He has wavered back and forth between nuclear is bad.

He calls it nuclear.

I'm always worried about nuclear, but also has said things like,

if we have them, why can't we use them?

I think too many people vote now based on vibes and fun and TV and image and, you know, all of that stuff.

And, you know, it's all fun and games until there's a nuclear crisis.

And then you can't really, you can't swap these guys out and bring in this, you can't like halt the taping of the reality show and then bring in the real guys.

This is who you're stuck with.

And so I think that's a really worrisome thing.

This system was designed, the command and control system of the United States was designed to empower the president.

There is a bias, and this is not my phrase, and I can't remember who says, there's a bias toward action

in the system because it was created to defend us from an attack.

So the system is actually there.

to make to enable the president to use nuclear weapons, not to stop him.

You mean like the approval system?

That's interesting.

I have no idea.

The whole

thing is designed so that when the president says, I want to use nuclear weapons, it's not stalled, but it happens stuff.

It happens.

It just happens.

There's nobody that can countermand it.

There's supposedly somebody in the room who will verify that, yes, this is the president that you just spoke to.

Sure.

That guy can say, I'm not going to do it.

And the president can say, okay, you're fired.

Next guy.

You know, he can turn to that officer and say, bring me the nuclear football.

Guy said, no, Mr.

President, I'm not going to do that.

He said, okay, you're fired.

You.

You're the new football guy.

I mean, he has complete complete control over that branch of the government.

There's a movie coming out that looks really interesting, by the way, by Catherine Bigelow.

It comes out in October, which is.

She did the Hurt Locker.

She did the Hurt Locker, right?

First woman to win the best director, Oscar.

It's about a missile strike on the United States and the kind of TikTok of what happens there.

So looking forward to seeing that in the fall.

Well, Donald Trump being a coward is something that gives me a little bit of comfort listening to that scary story.

I don't want to interrupt him, but accept that, you know, problem with guys like Trump is that they suddenly decide that they have to look tough.

Yeah.

That's the part.

I don't, if he says, look, you know, we're not going to do the nuclear whatever, fine.

But it's, I mean, you know, why is he at least temporarily changed his tune on Ukraine?

Now, I'll believe it when I see it, when all the weapons finally show up, but okay, right now the president's doing the right thing and saying Putin's not going to listen.

I'm going to have to release these weapons.

Okay, fine.

But not because he made a strategic assessment, but because he's pissed off.

Right.

Because Putin made him look stupid.

So, I don't know.

You know, that's not, I'm glad he's doing it, but that's not really the reason you do stuff like that.

It's not a sign of great judgment.

It's not a sign of prudence or not strategy.

Nothing.

Yeah, I would also, yeah, Ukraine is what I was going to go to next.

I mean, Hertling has a column in the board today about how Putin belongs before a court, not a peace table.

You know, we have this sanctions package that was going to go through.

Now it's on pause.

Trump gave Putin another 50 days, but he's also giving Ukraine the weapons.

And why 50 days?

That's about as many days of campaigning weather as there are left.

That's about as many days of what is there left?

Campaigning weather, military campaigning weather.

50 days.

In other words, basically, I'm going to give you till the fall when you would have been ramping down military operations anyway.

And so game it out for me.

It's hard for me to read what's happening in this situation.

Like, you think that Putin's just going to try to get as much land as possible in the next 50 days and then get him to the negotiating table?

I think Putin hasn't given up at all on conquering all of Ukraine.

And what he's going to do is basically murder and terrorize Ukrainians every day until

the, I suppose the path, if I were sitting there in the Kremlin with him to say,

Grab as much, yes, grab as much territory, hold as much of it as you can.

But the real issue here is to make life in Ukraine so miserable, so ghastly, that somehow you can get rid of Zelensky and get him replaced, maybe during a peace process, maybe

going to the table as a, as a kind of feint

and a respite for a moment, and then hope that you can somehow manipulate things in Kiev to get some kind of government of national salvation, right?

To say, okay, President Zelensky is stepping down or he's, you know, dead or been removed or whatever.

And we need to have a collective leadership that remarkably all believes that we should be in some kind of union with russia and i think that's in the end

i don't think and i i don't you know i've been wrong before so i could be wrong about this i think putin understands that you know driving tank columns through kiev probably is not going to be the triumphal thing he was hoping for but there is a political route to victory for him which is collapsing the government through terrorism and then getting through state terrorism through war crimes i shouldn't even call it terrorism war straight up up war crimes, and then

getting some kind of puppet government or pro-Russian government to say, you know, we should have been in a union with you and let's work this out.

Well, hopefully, I guess hopefully in this one case, Trump's resentments work out in our favor.

I guess that's the best we can hope for in these situations.

If he can maintain it.

I mean, Putin's played him pretty well.

And the fact that he got a 50-day,

you know, kitchen pass here tells you that, you know, I mean, I was reluctant to join the, yay, Trump's changed his mind chorus because this is exactly what I was worried about.

The sanctions are held up.

Putin's got 50 days, you know, of a free pass to create all the mayhem he wants.

Trump, I'm sure, is hoping that after 50 days, nobody,

I mean, 50 days, hey, the Trump standard is two weeks, which in Trump world is forever.

It's noteworthy.

The 50 days was noteworthy.

It's long.

A lot can happen in 50 days.

So I don't know.

I'm glad the weapons are going, but particularly the defensive weapons, but we'll see.

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Just really quick on in your death of expertise hat, the Fed chair and Powell, there's a lot of chatter about this.

The stupidest members of Congress and the Republican side are all agitating Trump to fire Powell, based around mostly concern about interest rates, which is legit, but they just passed a massive debt bomb to the House.

I don't think that they really realize how interest rates work.

There's a fun stat, not fun bad for everybody who is suffering with higher interest rates but this morning that the mortgage rates bottomed at 6.1 in 2024 a week before the fed began cutting today

they're at 6.8 so they've gone up since the fed's cuts because a lot of other you know issues in the economy well and inflation inflation has gone up and i am not usually an inflation bear um you know when i suppose as a child of the 70s you know when someone says you know, we've, we're up at 2.7% inflation, I'm like, well, no, you know, I'm the kid who came of age when, you know, inflation was 10%

and was

pretty much a 10-year, I mean, people forget this, that big run of inflation started under Nixon, it toppled Ford, it ate away a Carter.

You know, I mean, it was a big thing.

So nonetheless,

if inflation, if the target for the Fed is 2% and Trump's bizarre tariff theory has helped to push it back to 2.7, as you point out, do people not understand how interest rates work and how that interacts with the economy?

If inflation is starting to pick up,

you don't actually cut interest rates because then you get

more inflation.

So I don't know whether he's actually going to fire Powell.

I think it's interesting.

The adults in the room problem, those people are gone with regard to everything, right?

The Justice Department, you know, J Sixers, Ukraine, you name it, every adult in the room has been vanquished, except on this,

except on economic stuff, where there are still enough really wealthy guys

who can pick up the phone to him and say, you know, for example, don't fire Powell, or I need an exception on this big immigration thing because I have a lot of maids who work in my hotel.

You know what I mean?

Or on this tariff, right?

You need to cut me a break on my thing.

So I, you know, is he going to do it?

I don't know.

I think he's, in a way, your colleague, Jonathan, you know, JVL has pointed out, you know, it's almost like the markets now just price in the lunacy.

And they, unless something really concrete happens, they don't pay attention to this.

And so when he holds up a letter saying, I'm going to fire Powell, everybody goes, yeah, whatever.

You've written a lot of letters, sir.

You know, I'm interested to listen to Friends of the Pod, Derek Thompson and Justin Wolfers at a pod this one I haven't listened to yet about what the theories are for the

kind of persisting

economic

positive news, at least relatively speaking, modest positive news in the face of all these threats.

And I don't know.

This could be the bad stuff's around the corner, but it might just be the irrational, the JVL, irrational markets theory.

But they're also hoping, I think, that a lot of the worst stuff comes, that the White House is hoping, a lot of the worst stuff comes after the the midterms.

And then they don't care.

All right.

We will close it here.

We need a laugh.

You mentioned it earlier.

The president told a very strange story about the Unibomber.

And we're going to break our rule.

We're going to, just because it's so funny.

It's funny on several levels, like funny, point and laugh funny, not him being funny.

Let's take a listen to Donald Trump talking about his uncle.

When I first heard about AI, you know, it's not my thing.

although my uncle was at MIT, one of the great professors, 51 years, whatever.

He was the longest-serving professor in the history of MIT, three degrees in

nuclear, chemical, and math.

That's a smart man.

Kaczynski was one of his students.

Do you know who Kaczynski was?

There's very little difference between a madman and a genius.

But Kaczynski, I said, what kind of a student was he, Uncle John, Dr.

John Trump?

He said, what kind of a student?

Manny said seriously good he said he'd correct he'd go around correcting everybody but it didn't work out too well for him

turns out it's a totally fabricated story because it's good it's physically impossible it's not even like a slight misremembering of something i mean it is you know whole clock kaczynski didn't go to mit his his uncle died before anybody knew that kaczynski 11 years before kaczynski was even identified as the bomber there is absolutely, you know, there are very few times.

Maybe Trump had a medium.

Maybe Trump spoke to Uncle Dr.

Dr.

John

through an alternate universe.

And, you know, I know

we're yucking it up about it, but this is really one of the few times where you want to say, now,

imagine the books that would be written if Joe Biden had said this.

I mean, Joe Biden talks about one guy named Cornpop who turns out existed.

Real.

Cornpops are the story.

Cornpop on the pod.

Biden told this story and everybody just assumed that it was fake and then it turned out to be true.

Here, Trump, it shows you how much we've lowered the bar where Donald Trump is.

And I think that's, you know, that's really part of the tragedy here.

And I know we were trying to end on a funny note, but, you know, to say,

hey, old man, Donald Trump's 79.

You know, Biden was 81.

Yeah, old guys, listen, I'm 64 and I cycle through names when I'm trying to talk to people.

You know, and my wife is used to these long pauses where I say, hey, you know, we need to pick up some,

and she'll say, you know, chicken?

Yes, chicken.

That's the word I couldn't find.

You know, but that's different than, again, say, you know, so honey, I was picking up the chicken and there I was talking to George Harrison, you know, about Eric Clapton.

I mean, it's like people would like be worried about your mental capacity at that point.

And Trump says this stuff.

And we all go, huh, what are you going to do?

It's Trump.

Biden goes through this.

And we're, you know, there are hearings about whether or not there was criminal intent

involved in the Biden administration.

And Trump says things that are, that if your dad said them, and I know we've, we've said this before, Tim, but if your dad started talking this way you'd have some texts with the siblings which is like

we got to talk about we're gonna have to start playing some things we gotta have a talk you know my father lived to be 94 and didn't get things you know this this wrong and so i i guess it's kind of

the thing that's always strikes me about trump story is that he does it almost in a way to be ingratiating and to show that he's got a command of interesting story.

You know who Kaczynski was?

You know the guy.

And, you know, and my Uncle John, you know, with this three degrees, nuclear, chemical, you know, and he's, he's, there's this whole thing

that is just kind of nuclear chemical in math, the traditional three degrees.

Yeah, yeah.

And, and he says it with this kind of aweshux, folksy approach that says, this really happened.

And, you know, if he's, if he's just making up stories as a politician, okay, that's bad.

But if he actually believes this, and I think the, the level of detail he goes into says that he thinks it happened, then yeah, where are the phone calls that say we got to, you know, we got to have a talk about that?

Ronald Reagan's cabinet met and thought about,

had a discussion about Reagan's mental acuity based on a tiny fraction of this kind of behavior.

Let's put it that way.

What a world.

Good thing he has his finger on the button, his tiny little finger.

Tom Nichols, it's always a pleasure.

Everybody go check out that August August Atlantic Edition.

A lot of good stuff on nuclear, a nuclear, which

is

an extra issue on nuclear.

On nuclear.

And to all of you guys, may this weekend be filled with wonderful secrets.

You never know what could happen.

I'll see you back here Monday with Bill Crystal.

See you, Tom.

See you, Tim.

Thanks.

Open-minded, I'm so blinded.

Mr.

Reman, Woman Phantom, pilot light smears.

The

I'm so scared, but I'm standing here.

Is what I'm seeing real, or is it just a sound?

Is it all just virtue?

We could be lovers,

even just tonight.

We could be everything

you want.

We could be dubbed, right through the daylight.

We could break all of a stigma.

I'll be your enigma.

I'll be your enigma.

I'll be your enigma.

I'll be your enigma.

Can't stop staring, I'm so naked.

Wrapped in shadows, my heart races.

Dragon's eyes watch, thought it's breathing.

Give me something

to believe in.

Is what I'm seeing me, or is it just a sound?

Is it all just virtue?

Wow.

We could be lovers,

even just tonight.

We could be anything you want.

We could be your brothers, right through the daylight.

We could bring all of us in tomorrow.

I'll be your headache.

I'll be your headboard.

I'll be your headache.

I'll be your headboard.

Did you hear what I said?

Did you hear what I said?

Is it all in my head?

Is it all in my head?

Is it all in my head?

We could be lovers,

even just tonight.

We could be everything

you want.

We could be your girls right through the daylight.

We could bring all of us in more.

I'll be your headache.

Even just tonight,

be your headboard.

Right through the daylight,

be your head.

The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

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