Susan Glasser: An Exercise in National Humiliation

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Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast.

I'm your host, Tim Miller.

Delighted to welcome back staff writer at The New Yorker, where she hits her weekly column on life in Washington.

She's also a host of the magazine's political scene podcast, co-author most recently of The Divider, Trump in the White House with her husband Peter Baker.

She was also Moscow Bureau Chief of the Washington Post.

It's Susan Glasser.

How are you doing, Susan?

Hey, Tim, great to be with you.

Too much to talk about, I'm afraid.

Much to discuss.

Where are you coming at us from?

You in D.C.

right now?

No, I'm with my mom up in Massachusetts.

So

escaping the occupied city for a few days.

All right.

Well, we'll have some to discuss about the occupied city and, you know, the troops hanging out outside Krispy Kreme and Georgetown Cupcake, keeping the people safe.

But first, we're going to discuss Lisa Cook.

This was the big news of last night.

Trump has posted a bleat, I guess, that he's going to remove the Federal Reserve Governor, Lisa Cook, effective immediately.

By law, he can only fire her for cause.

He is citing accusations that she has two primary mortgages, I guess, though she's not been charged with any crime.

Cook has a statement out this morning saying that she is refusing to resign.

She's going to take him to court.

She's the first black woman to be a Fed governor, I think, is worth noting.

I think this is of a pace with, you know, your last article about Trump's retribution and the, you know, creeping authoritarian aspirations that he has.

But I was wondering your reaction.

Yeah, I mean, there's so much to unpack there.

I mean, first of all, let's just say that Donald Trump, the first convicted felon to serve as president, his conviction was recently upheld, although the enormous civil fine in a court was struck down.

So it's really quite remarkable when he's accusing people of various crimes who have not been charged of them.

And I know there's so much to be kind of overwhelmed by, we can tend to forget that.

But I Donald Trump has never fudged a mortgage.

I promise.

He has never done a financial filing that was not

100%.

T's crossed, I's dotted.

I think the through line for me of a lot of these really eye-popping developments of August is

this idea of making war on institutions and individuals that challenge Trump in any way and no longer even feeling the need to kind of obscure one's motives at all, right?

The explicit link between

defiance or political opposition or just simply saying stuff that Donald Trump doesn't like on TV and the idea that you're going to use whatever the powers of the federal government are against that opposition.

In this case, it strikes me that his opponent here is not a woman, it's an institution, It's the Federal Reserve.

Donald Trump is seeking to break this idea of its independence, as you know, gone after its chairman, Jay Powell, again and again and again, threatening, but not yet actually

following through on firing him.

And I wonder if this is a sort of a creeping back doorway into finally provoking that full-scale confrontation with the independence of the Fed.

I mean, this is, at some level, a confrontation with independence of the Fed, and she's just one of the governors, but the law is pretty clear, right, that there has to be a for-cause reason to get rid of her.

And this is an extreme stretch on that front, especially since this is just based on an accusation of one guy that we're going to get into in a second.

And so that loss of Fed independence, like we saw an immediate reaction last night with the dollar tanking, rebounded somewhat, has come back down.

I mean, I think that, you know, kind of before we get into just sort of the personnel and the authoritarian way that he's treating, treating, you know, federal civil servants, like the economic impact here is not zero, right?

On the one hand, again, it's just one Fed ward governor.

On the other hand, it's sending a really bad signal globally to the markets about the stability of our institutions in this moment.

Yeah, I mean, it's a classic example of like, you know, the rule of law.

You'll miss it when it's gone.

But a million tiny attacks on it, which is the one that really signals the absolute end of it.

And I think you've seen the Trump administration on a variety of fronts attacking this idea that there are rules of the road in our economy, in our civil society.

And, you know, many businesses, of course, that's part of what has powered the American economic engine over the last,

you know, nearly a century since World War II.

And,

you know, is this the moment?

Is it some other moment?

We can't really say for sure.

Hindsight will give us plenty of opportunity to say we knew when, but maybe we didn't.

But I have to say that it's the basic notion that the president is entitled to be the single decider of everything in this country that is so antithetical to what you and I saw as the vision of an American democracy.

And this idea that you can just take literally a guy tweeting something, right?

So you have an obscure political appointee, you know, tweeting something on a Wednesday.

And, you know, a few days later, the president of the United States is firing you for an investigation that has not yet occurred.

It's really a remarkable sign of the failure of process, institutions, laws, norms, any constraints on the presidency.

That's what all these events have in common.

Yeah.

The subhead of our morning newsletter this morning is a president who doesn't believe in checks and balances is no president at all.

That's that's not how

our system of government is supposed to work right i mean that it was fundamental to you know what was laid out in the federalist papers what has you know been the model for our government and if nobody you know from any of the other branches from any of the independent authorities can can check him well then then we have to have a different name for it you mentioned the um the obscure

government official that tweeted an attack on her.

I just, I do want to mention him briefly here because I think this is a, I don't know what the right word is.

He is a

synecdoe for the entire government, kind of.

He is certainly a very representative example of, I think, where things are going in the Trump gangster government.

A guy's name is Bill Pulte.

There's no reason anybody would have ever heard of him.

He was a private equity executive before this that had gone MAGA.

He was named as the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which like usually just kind of oversees Fannie and Freddie.

This is not a public figure that you would know about in another situation.

But I don't know if he's been given Cash Patel's enemies list or what exactly is happening, but this one guy has now publicly made accusations of mortgage fraud against Adam Schiff,

Tish James, the Attorney General of New York, and now Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook.

He referred all three of these to the Justice Department for criminal investigation.

I mean,

this is crazy.

Like a random bureaucrat that has oversight over one

sort of element of the federal government, like taking upon himself to do, I don't know, like a Minnie McCarthy campaign, like just like singularly targeting the president's political foes on the narrow question of whether they've filled out their housing paperwork correctly.

You know, Tim, I mean, it's a big country, and I think the Trump years are giving us proof that, you know, somebody's going to to find a way to market themselves, you know, into Donald Trump's inner circle.

And essentially, that appears to be what the case is with this official.

There's a very interesting piece in Politico that your team flagged for me that.

talks about how he even got this job in the first place.

Now, of course, there's the usual menu of voluminous contributions to Republican candidates and causes, but he came to Donald Trump's attention by quote-unquote Twitter philanthropy.

Basically, he said, I will give this person, you know, X thousands of dollars if Donald Trump retweets this, you know, or retrospect this or whatever, you know, his social media platform is.

And, you know,

he now has something like 3 million followers on Twitter.

And so he's a classic example of a non-entity, perhaps in the broader spectrum of American politics.

But in this niche world of far-right social media influencers, he's managed to parlay interaction with causes and themes that Trump likes into a large social media following.

And then all of a sudden, he's in charge of overseeing America's mortgage finance agencies.

And by the way, since he got into that post,

What has he done?

He's pulled a full Trump move and fired the entire boards, as I understand it, of both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and appointed himself as the chairman, which really seems literally ripped from Donald Trump's playbook.

Yeah.

Luckily, I only have one home, so I'm not too concerned about the mortgage paperwork, but I might be doing a double check.

I don't know.

If you're in Cash Patel's book, I might do a double check on your mortgage lender this morning.

Faulty posted,

I hear Jay Powell is scrambling this morning.

He can scramble all he wants, but he might as well be scrambling eggs because the party at the Fed is over.

This is so, this is insane.

Like, this is capo-like threats from a random bureaucrat at the housing finance agency.

And

like, I guess it's, it's crazy, it's insane, it's mockable, it's a little scary.

But like the thing that is the most frustrating about it is like, it obviously is going to work, right?

I mean, like, this is the playbook for getting inside Donald Trump's good graces, and it creates this incentive structure around the entire government where, you know, if you want to see yourself on the path towards the cabinet or the inner circle as, you know, we get into 2027 and 2028, act like this guy,

finding whatever little fiefdom you have and using it to go after political foes.

I mean, look, Tim, we're living in a world where the director of the FBI wrote a children's book about Donald Trump as a poor, persecuted king.

And that was enough to get him the job of the FBI director.

So obviously we're living in a kind of crazy alt reality where, you know, individual, let's call them social media entrepreneurs are finding a way to get to the king's attention and you know the more outlandish over the top and you know sort of slavish in defense of trump or carrying out his feuds the more power you may accrue in this warped situation the question for all of this and i last night i really was beside myself because there's so many examples uh in the last few weeks of trump really uh going over the top in terms of challenging norms and rules the question for all of this is

not about the guys like Pulte who exist, but is there any institution left in our society that can check this?

What has happened to our legal system?

What has happened to Congress?

What has happened to rational actors?

And I have to presume that some of them do exist inside the federal government, inside the executive branch.

Like there's a rampage sort of going on here.

And the question, I think, is when it all shakes out, are there going to be any institutions that stand up and check this?

And so, you know, Donald Trump says he's fired this governor of the Fed.

Well, has he?

How long will it take to litigate this in the courts?

Is this a way that he will then use to say,

see, my firing of her stood and therefore I can fire the chairman of the Fed next?

And, you know, it's the events that pile on top of each other.

We're only 200-something days into this administration.

You know, what are we going to look like when we're a year out, 18 months out, two years out?

And the escalation suggests we're going to be in a very different country by then.

Yeah.

No doubt.

The Pulte thing does feel like kind of like a mockumentary version of like a Russia story.

So, you know, kind of like we're some random boob gets into the good graces of the leader by just, you know, going after the people that have annoyed him.

Can you have a mockumentary inside of a mockumentary?

I guess.

I think so.

I don't know.

We'll call Rob Reiner.

We'll have to ask the experts on that.

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To your article on the retribution phase, this is all related to kind of what we're talking about now, obviously, but the Bolton and some of these other situations are more directly, you know, part of Trump's revenge tour.

I won't get into a couple of the details of the Bolton thing, but at the top level, like, what are your big takeaways from what we saw on Friday?

Yeah, I mean, look, Donald Trump isn't hiding it, so

we shouldn't hide it either.

I mean, there's an explicit link between people who speak out against him and the willingness to unleash whatever powers of the federal government to go after them.

And that's certainly the case in Bolton's Bolton's situation.

It's not like random timing.

Remember that John Bolton has been one of the loudest voices out there day in and day out on television, in op-eds, pointing out the lies and false claims behind Trump's summateering with Vladimir Putin.

And that's the explicit connection in terms of timing with this raid on Bolton's home and office that really, I think, should send a chilling effect and is meant to send, it appears, a chilling effect on all of us.

Because, you know, Bolton is one of the people pointing out that, no, not only has Donald Trump not made peace in the war in Ukraine, but most of what he said about his negotiations with Putin have been proven to be not the case.

You know, he's been taken for a ride by Russia.

He's humiliated the country, you could argue in many ways, greeting Putin on a red carpet in Alaska, applauding for him the first time that he's been seen by a leader of the United States since illegally invading his next door neighbor.

And we applaud him and we take him at face value.

Trump adopts his talking points.

He says, oh, a deal is imminent.

He says there's going to be a meeting between Putin and Zelensky.

And surprise, surprise, Putin is not in fact willing to meet with Vladimir Zelensky, never mind to make any concessions of the kind that Trump and his very credulous envoy, Witkoff, have suggested that he would make.

And so for me, it's very much about silencing a critic.

Yeah, no, let's stick on the Putin thing for a second.

We'll get back to Balted because I hear you on the silencing the critic, but I just don't want to let it pass by, the humiliating part.

Because like, in addition to all the things you said, did you see the press conference on, was it on Thursday or Friday, where Trump had the FIFA head in, and he said Putin sent him this picture?

And he's like rifling around in the drawers, looking for the picture that Putin had sent him.

And this press conference is supposed to be about the World Cup.

And he picks it up and he says, I have picked, I have something from a person who I would love to see at the World Cup.

And he takes the Putin picture and shows it around the audience like it's a prized possession.

And then kind of goes on.

It's like, I hope he's going to be here.

It depends on the decisions.

It is so weird.

Like, it is so humiliating to use that word that, like, that is where he's at.

And then he gets asked about whether he's upset that Putin bombed a building that was like an American company in Ukraine, and he can, you know, and he offers like some minor, like, yeah, I'm not thrilled about it, but I'm also not thrilled about this.

Like, it is wild, just like the degree to which in the days after Alaska, there was a little bit of like suspension of disbelief among people that, like, maybe, maybe this was going to happen, like, maybe something was different.

You know, what has happened in the last week and a half, I just think betrays like a total reality, you know, and then to connect it to John Bolton, that he was just out there just explaining to people.

Yeah, I appreciate you saying that, Tim, because this is suspension of disbelief is a very charitable word.

There was a lot of, you know, I don't know, is this a family podcast?

Can I say bullshit?

Yeah, I mean, there was a lot of

bullshit.

And I will tell you that.

I tried to get Ann Applebaum to cuss two weeks ago, and she only did it in the green room.

So I'm happy that you can fill the voids for her.

I'll have a word with Ann about that.

I mean,

it's been a very frustrating time for anyone who has, you know, been observing Russia closely to see the credulousness.

And I think it's more than suspension of disbelief, but outright credulousness from so many commentators, including many critics of Trump, who should know better.

You know, the coverage, in my view, was...

A lot of it was really bad.

It was misleading.

It took at face value statements from Donald Trump that shouldn't be.

I think that, you know, people found perhaps the image of Trump greeting Putin on the red carpet shocking, but even that, I think, was not covered as a signal event in its own right.

And it seems to me that when we look back on this, historically speaking, you know, five years from now, 10 years from now, I mean, that is going to look terrible in history.

That's going to be the moment that we remember from Alaska.

It's not going to be that peace was made.

What it's going to be is that Donald Trump greeted greeted the butcher of Butcha with applause, with literal applause on a red carpet.

And so many people said, Yeah, maybe he's going to make peace now.

Well, first of all, that's not going to happen.

And the last six months have been literally an exercise in national humiliation for the United States.

It's as if we have no one in our country who is familiar with what Vladimir Putin has been doing for the last 25 years.

And we have to send some real estate developer who has no freaking idea by himself without an interpreter to the Kremlin.

I mean, so again, I do think that it's hard.

I understand there's so many different things that could get one's blood pressure boiling.

You know, we can't be on a constant, you know, high boil about every single thing.

But this thing, if you pull back, is worth actually being a lot more clear-eyed about than I have seen from a lot of the coverage.

This is the largest, deadliest war in Europe since the end of World War II.

Trump has blundered about, inserted himself in the middle of it with the very clearly stated goal of personal aggrandizement.

His goal here is personal aggrandizement.

And even that has not produced any results except to reinforce his bizarre public fascination, as you pointed out, with the approval of Vladimir Putin.

And, you know, he seems to want him to be his friend.

All he wants to do is to talk about, you know, how they have this good relationship.

Well, I mean, you and I both watched that 12-minute press event or whatever you want to call it in alaska at the end of their summit where putin spoke for eight minutes and donald trump spoke for four minutes they didn't look like friends to me well it looks kind of like a situation where one person was smitten with the other person kind of um so you know we've all been in those situations before i have to correct you though susan i'm sorry um because the vice president was pushing back on you in a recent interview on fox he said the american media is giving a false image of putin he's actually more soft-spoken than you would necessarily expect.

He's very deliberate, very careful.

That was what he's what he learned.

You know, I've actually met Vladimir Putin, and J.D.

Vance, as he also admitted in that interview, has not met Vladimir Putin, but he's talked to him on the telephone,

is what he said.

He's heard him on the telephone several times.

I've met Vladimir Putin.

In fact, I was in the first group of American journalists, American Bureau chiefs who met with Vladimir Putin in the spring of 2001 at the Kremlin.

And, you know, it was a very revealing episode.

This was a much different leader of Russia, much more insecure, obviously, still making the transition from obscure former KGB official to leader of Russia appointed by Boris Yeltsin and then elected in March of 2000.

And that Putin, you know, was eager to impress Westerners different than this Putin perhaps.

But when I asked him about the war in Chechnya that he was then prosecuting, and remember that war and Putin have gone hand in hand for the entire quarter century that he's been in power in Russia, you know, this man's visage immediately changed.

He was a cold-eyed killer then in the same way that he is now

nearly.

two and a half decades later.

And I think that for J.D.

Vance, who has never supported Ukraine, has always said publicly since he's begun his political career, essentially that there's nothing for us in Ukraine.

It's not our fight.

It's not our issue.

You know, there's a credulousness that's embedded in this sort of fantasy MAGA version of Vladimir Putin that is just not borne out by the reality of him or the Russia that he's led over the last couple of decades.

And right now, he's the most serious threat to European stability.

that there is and europe is our closest allies and partners in the world it's just that there's a vision of American foreign policy that J.D.

Vance has, that Donald Trump has, that doesn't care about that kind of alliance and partnership anymore.

Yeah.

That's interesting.

And you said you felt like when you first got to meet him back in the early 2000s, that he was more insecure.

How did that manifest?

Like, what do you see has evolved in the two decades?

Like, do you observe anything that's notably different or similar?

You know, it's interesting that you asked that.

You know, this is the subject of the next book that my husband, Peter, and I are working on, which is sort of Putin and the five American presidents that he's dealt with.

So from Bill Clinton at the very beginning of his tenure all the way through Trump now a second time.

And, you know, there's an old Russian saying that captures some of it, the appetite grows while eating.

And so, of course, a man who's had essentially unchecked power over 25 years has a very different, you know, kind of point of view about what's possible.

And, you know, the Putin of the spring of 2001, when I first encountered him, was not in a position to invade Ukraine.

He wasn't in a position to work on reassembling parts of the former Soviet Union.

Did he have those kind of Russian nationalistic and imperialistic ideology?

Absolutely.

I think that, you know, his views were not dissimilar.

He's always been a great, a statist, right?

He's someone who believed in restoring the power, the untrammeled power of the centralized authority in Russia.

So that part was obvious from the beginning.

That was his agenda.

It was the subject of our first book together that came out in 2005.

But at the time, I would say what we didn't get was that Putin's kind of ideology of strongmanism at home, eliminating the kind of national democracy, flawed institutions as they were, you know, we could see that clearly.

What we didn't see is that it would soon and eventually and inexorably translate into going after Russia's neighbors and the other parts of the former Russian empire.

And so is that aggressiveness in Georgia, in Ukraine, restoring Russia's role in the Middle East, which he's tried to do at various points?

That's the part that I think is the appetite grows while eating part of Vladimir Putin.

Well, now you've piqued my interest, so I have to ask you one more question since you're working on the book.

And then, you know, we can save the rest of it for when we get to book time.

But

just thinking about it through that arc, through that period, from like Clinton through now, what are your observations that would challenge Putin's claims about the root causes, right?

Like now you get into this root cause of debate, and I see a lot of people,

I guess the word of the podcast is credulous, who are very credulous in this argument on both

both sides of the argument, like even kind of the more lefty, you know, foreign policy, skeptical of U.S.

foreign policy.

Obviously, you see this on the MAGA right, which is kind of accepting at face value that like, you know, Ukraine was wearing their skirt a little too short and like we did do some things that tempted Putin.

So I'm sure even going back through all those remarks from those couple of decades, like how do you assess his claim now about the root causes?

Yeah, I think this is really important.

The real root cause is the breakup of the Soviet Union, which in many ways imploded from within.

But for Vladimir Putin, that is the original sin here.

It's not about NATO.

It's not about anything other than the fact that that he considers the breakup of the Soviet Union to be the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century, which is something that he said in 2005.

And I think it's a core principle of his.

You know, so when it comes to this question of Ukraine and other parts of what was the Russian Empire, and I do say the Russian Empire, by the way, because I think that it's a mistake to view Putin as a sort of neo-Soviet figure.

You know, he is not a believer in the communist ideology that had largely disintegrated into empty slogans by the time he became a KGB official in the later years of the Brezhnev era.

You know, for Putin, it's really much more an ideology that harkens back to the late czarist period.

You know, the slogan of the czars, you know, in the early 20th century, it was orthodoxy, autocracy, nationalism.

And that's a pretty good fit, probably not in that order, with Putin's own personal ideology.

And sure, he defines NATO and the United States in particular, even more than NATO, to be kind of the main enemy, to use a Cold War era term.

But, you know, for Putin, it's about restoration, that Russia essentially cannot be a great state anymore in the future until and unless it's reunited with Ukraine.

And by the way, interestingly enough, this was the view of a big geopolitical expert, the late Spig Brzezinski, who very presciently said in the 1990s after the breakup of the Soviet Union, that Russia without Ukraine could not be a great power.

And so I think a lot of that is what's driving this on Putin's part.

He's very skilled, very skilled, and has people who are skilled around him at creating divisions within the West, creating a narrative in which they are the victims as opposed to the aggressors.

But I would just point out one final thing on this point.

We can talk about this endlessly, but I lived in Russia and covered Russia for the Washington Post during the 2004 election in Ukraine.

So this is years before there was any consideration in a serious way of Ukraine joining NATO.

It was four years before there was the famous Bucharest summit of NATO in 2008, where this kind of

Frankenstein plan to someday admit Georgia and Ukraine was discussed.

So years before the quote, root cause.

And yet it was Vladimir Putin who was very aggressively interfering in Ukraine's presidential election.

He sent his top Kremlin political advisors.

He personally campaigned right before the election for his handpicked candidate, Viktor Yanukovych.

Then when the election was determined to be rigged, and it brought millions of people in Ukraine out in the streets in what we now know as the Orange Revolution caused an incredible.

incredible reaction on Putin's part, blaming the West, you know, increasing his paranoia.

And this had nothing to do with NATO.

Had nothing to do with NATO.

And it had everything to do with Putin's desire to control Ukraine by whatever means necessary, including, by the way, in September of 2004, the mysterious poisoning of the leading pro-Western, pro-democracy candidate.

Yushenko, who ultimately did become the leader of Ukraine.

Okay, that happened before the Orange Revolution.

It happened in the middle of a campaign.

Clearly, the implication is that the Russians poisoned this Democratic candidate for the leadership.

Maybe he just had some bad goulash.

Maybe it was just a bad luck, but coincidence.

I mean, it's an extraordinary thing.

Can you imagine the poisoning by Russian secret services of the leading presidential candidate in Ukraine?

This isn't about NATO.

It's not about the United States.

It's about Putin's long-standing, decades-long desire to keep Ukraine under Russia's control by whatever means necessary.

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All right.

That was a fulfilling diversion for me.

So I'm glad that we did that.

But back to John Bolton.

I hope it was.

I know.

I enjoyed it.

I don't know.

The listeners, we'll see what the listeners say, but

I needed that.

Okay.

Back to Bolton.

I guess I'm just wondering what your thoughts are about, like, this is just so blatantly like political retribution intimidation, right?

I think that the ramifications of that broadly are more important than the narrow details of the Bolton case, which I feel like, unless there's some secret out there that we don't know, which would be very shocking to me, seems like a pretty big nothing burger.

So I just wonder what your thoughts are about that element of the retribution campaign and what the Bolton raid means.

Yeah, I mean, look, you know, Donald Trump and his then Justice Department tried to to stop Bolton from publishing, you know, his inside the room memoir of the first Trump administration and its dysfunction in 2020, and they failed.

They looked into this, they accused him at the time of, you know, doing this and that nefarious releasing of classified information, and it didn't stick at the time.

So is this a do-over in effect for Trump and his people now that there's no one there to stop them?

But I do think, again, you go to the idea that we don't even know if there's a there there to any of this.

And

I keep coming back to this notion that if you're Trump, why have you gone to all the effort to put these extreme loyalists in positions at the Justice Department and at the FBI if not to use it?

Ultimately, that that's where this is headed.

So we haven't seen yet any actual cases brought of this nature, prosecutions, people in jail.

Is that where this is headed?

I mean, if you give someone a hammer, they find nails, right?

They find ways to use it.

We know that the hammer is in their hands right now.

And I think this is one of many potential examples we're about to see.

Yeah, luckily, maybe our institutional bulwark will be the grand juries because you do have to convince a grand jury if you're going to bring it to people.

And there was an interesting time story either today or yesterday about how they've impaneled like three grand juries going after, I think it was a woman that was protesting the ICE raids.

And I don't remember the exact situation where they, but had some kind of confrontation with the ICE officials, and they wanted to charge her.

And they've like literally gone to three grand juries trying to get a felony failed and now are charging her with a misdemeanor.

You know, that will also be the case in these Bolton kind of situations.

And, you know, it takes us to the Bondi of it.

I mean, Bondi's...

tweet on Bolton's arrest was so absurd.

It was America's safety isn't negotiable.

As if these documents in Bolton's house are about America's safety.

But, you know, your colleague Ruth Marcus wrote a big piece on Bondi and the DOJ.

I'm just wondering what you think about all that.

I mean, is there a possibility that this DOJ can be so like ham-handed about all this that the actual wheels of the justice system will prevent them from being successful in their clear endeavor to go after political foes?

Well, I mean, Ruth's piece is a terrific piece.

And one of the points it makes is that Bondi has instilled a culture, a climate of fear inside the Department of Justice with a scale of purges that is really without precedent in the Justice Department of Modern Memory.

So, you know, huge swaths of institutional memory are gone, civil servant career prosecutors gone, whole offices decimated, whole capacities lost.

So they're certainly, you've got to imagine, comes a point at which they're stretched by fighting so many different legal battles on so many different fronts.

But at the same time, this goes then to the question of the courts and ultimately if they're going to stand up or agree with any of these arguments.

And I do find it notable in that respect, Tim, that whatever searches were being carried out of Bolton's home and office, they had been signed off on.

They did have a legal warrant to conduct those searches, which means a federal judge had agreed to those searches.

On what basis, we don't know yet.

And I'm very interested in that.

question.

What was it that proved enough for them to get a warrant to conduct those searches?

What is the allegation or what is the evidence that they had that enabled them to do it?

And again, a federal judge signed off on this.

And so that's a question that I have going forward.

What's remarkable, I think, is that they're getting lawyers to make some of these absurd arguments.

You know, another thing we didn't talk about today is the, you know, the return of the Albrego case.

You know, remember, he was the detained guy whose situation went all the way up to the Supreme Court, who was improperly deported to El Salvador.

And then the administration, even after admitting its mistake, didn't want to bring him back.

Now they're attempting to send the guy to Uganda, to Uganda, all because his case inadvertently became this public brouhaha.

And I just thought, Imagine being the federal prosecutor who has to like wake up in the morning and, you know, look in the mirror and say, yeah, I'm going to send this man to Uganda and I'm going to go into a federal court and argue this.

And I was really actually, before we had this conversation, for whatever reason, that's what I was thinking about.

Like, imagine being that person.

So we have people who are willing to go into court right now and make extraordinary and even absurd arguments on behalf of a very extreme agenda that Pam Bondi and Donald Trump are comfortable carrying out.

Yeah, DHS tweeted yesterday, just Uganda man,

like trolling them.

It's so

the cruelty is the point.

Yeah, even if you oppose the policy, the idea that the federal government, like an official federal government agency, is engaging in social media trolling, mocking somebody that they are like deporting to a third country that has not been convicted of anything that they charged and had to withdraw charges from.

It is a really just grotesque escalation.

And,

you know, the stuff just kind of starts to get washed.

So I'm glad you brought it up.

The firings also at the DOJ,

the sort of scary part of it for me is,

okay, so at DOJ, they're washing out all this institutional memory.

It's horrible for the lawyers, you know, that have been pushed out of there.

You have your Maureen Comeys and people of that nature who do real work for the government and should be in there going after bad guys.

They're replaced with these hacks that are going to

make these absurd arguments in front of courts and get denied by three grand juries and go after the sandwich man.

So you have these hacks that are in there.

But like that same thing is happening at the DOD,

which is a little alarming that there's a real military confrontation that happens with regards to the United States rather than our proxies or allies.

But like

Hagsoth fired the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency last week.

Air Force Chief of Staff got kicked out.

These are the latest.

There's like a ton of institutional memories gotten washed out of DOD as well.

Yeah, that's right.

There's been an extraordinary number of what you would call in any other country purges going on in the senior levels of the Defense Department that seem designed to replace institutionalists with people who are personally more loyal or perceived to be personally more loyal with the Defense Secretary, the President.

It's, in effect, the politicization of our nonpartisan military of everything that's perhaps the most worrisome.

It might get the least attention because it's a more opaque and less transparent, generally, operation, the Pentagon.

But I think it's, if you're looking for something where the red light indicators are really flashing, it would be in what appears to be a very concerted effort to politicize the Defense Department.

Because again, what are you going to then ultimately use that for?

We're seeing what we're going to use it for, which is to turn the military not into an instrument of national security in terms of our international interests, but in terms of against what Trump and Hegseth consider the enemy within.

And I think that's, again, the through line to so many of these developments.

Take just one example.

The head of the Defense Intelligence Agency fired,

apparently, for the sin of his agency having produced an intelligence assessment that Donald Trump didn't like that said that the attack

on Iran's nuclear installations had not, as Trump claimed, obliterated completely the Iranian nuclear program, but had probably only set it back by a matter of some months at some of the facilities.

That was a very initial preliminary assessment, obviously conducted not by the director of the DIA personally, and yet in the same way that Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics within hours, within hours of having an unfavorable economic report produced, he's firing through Hegseth, the head of an intelligence agency, because intelligence analysts produced a report that he didn't like.

And, you know, again, this is so antithetical.

It's the second time this has happened.

I mean, this happened with some intelligence officials that are lower level, but you know, people have put out a report about how

Venezuela wasn't exactly invading America, which is like not even really an intelligence for it.

They just were stating facts.

Like it's just clear that, you know, Venezuela did not have a plot to invade America.

And that was enough to, you have a couple of people pushed out as well.com to find the nearest of our 10 showrooms from Santa Rosa to San Jose.

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I want to talk about your comment there about what the military is planning on doing, which is going after the enemy within and the expanding militarization of our cities.

The National Guard, I Trump said yesterday, and Hag Seth was in the Oval, you know, about how they're looking at Chicago.

He had this conversation with Westmore over the idea of sending folks to Baltimore.

I think it's very obvious that they're going to do this in New York, whether they wait for Zoron to win or try to do it in front of the election to impact it.

I don't know, but there'll be, but that I think is like the writing is on the wall of that.

So I'm wondering, you know, what we can learn.

And I guess you said you're out of D.C.

at the moment, but you've been there, like about what the vibes are in D.C.

right now and like what your sense is for what's happening and what's to come there.

Well, Tim, you mentioned, I think, at the beginning of this conversation, the

National Guard troops standing outside the Krispy Kreme Donuts.

And, you know, if anyone who knows DC, that's right at the DuPont Circle Metro station.

I can assure you that no murders are happening in broad daylight

at the DuPont Circle Metro station.

Maybe if they're there at four o'clock in the morning on a weekend or something, but then the Krispy Kreme Donuts wouldn't be open.

So maybe they don't want to be there at that time.

I mean,

the point, right, is that it appears to be an extremely performative abuse of official resources to make a political point for Donald Trump to his red state constituency that doesn't know or care very much about DC, that has believed years of

sort of propaganda that these democratic-run cities are sort of hellscapes of crime and homelessness and horror.

It's so sad and tragic in a way because, of course, nobody is in favor of crime.

And I keep reading these political analyses from people saying, oh, well, you know, it's just a classic.

This is great for Donald Trump.

And he's just, you know, Democrats have walked right into his trap.

And now they're, you know, he's shown how they actually defend crime and they're in favor of all this terrible things.

And this is just brilliant politics for Donald Trump.

Trump obviously believes that because he wouldn't be trying to do more of it if he didn't think that this wasn't great politics for him.

But it is the height.

of cynicism.

You know, I think it was J.B.

Pritzker, the governor of Illinois.

He's worried, of course, that the next stop is Chicago on Donald Trump's sort of dictator tour, you know, with the National Guards this summer.

But Pritzker pointed out on Monday.

in a press conference that if Donald Trump actually cared about crime in America, then he and Republicans on Capitol Hill wouldn't be cutting hundreds of millions of dollars in public safety funding from the Department of Homeland Security in D.C.'s case, directly cutting funds from DC's budget, which, as you know, has to be approved by Congress because of its unique status.

And, you know, again, it's not about crime fighting.

It's about political point scoring.

And, you know, it's just very tragic, but it's also revenge.

I think it's also part of the Trump revenge tour because DC

probably voted for Donald Trump less than almost any big city in the country.

In his first election, I think it would back in 2016.

I think it was something like 4%.

I could get the number wrong, but in the lowest single digits, voted for Donald Trump in his first election.

And, you know, he sees this as enemy territory.

I know you write a newsletter on life in Washington, but I have to push back.

There's another Washington resident who has a different view about what's happening outside the DuPont Circle Metro, and I'd like to listen to it.

Overflowing with gratitude because for the first time in their lives, they can use the parks, they can walk on the streets.

You have people who can...

walk freely at night without having to worry about being robbed or mugged.

They're wearing their watches again.

They're wearing jewelry again.

They're carrying purses again.

People had changed their whole lives in this city for fear of being murdered, mugged, and carjacked.

It is a literal statement that President Trump has freed

700,000 people in this city who were living under the rule of criminals and thugs.

Do you feel free, Susan?

Have you changed your jewelry?

Well, I'm glad that Stephen Miller is so concerned about all of us.

You know, as I understand it, Stephen Miller is not a resident of Washington, D.C.

And, you know,

not true?

I thought he lived down there at the new place down by Metro.

It's a good question.

We need to fact-check that.

I saw this morning, I don't know that he does actually live in D.C.

now in the second Trump term.

It's kind of irrelevant whether or not he lives in D.C.

I don't want to know where Stephen Miller lives.

It's like a dark cloud.

You just follow the dark cloud over town and know where he is, I think.

Yeah, Tim, it's not irrelevant because he's speaking quite authoritatively about the liberation that he and Donald Trump have accomplished for 700,000 people.

It's interesting that Miller believes that's what he's accomplished here.

And he's speaking

in a way that, you know, like a lot of what he says, it bears little resemblance to reality.

Yeah, I guess you're right.

I mean, I know that he did live at city center, and you know that the thugs have overrun and controlled city center.

When you see that there are places like Arcterix there, Brunello Cuccinelli, Burberry.

Air Maze.

Air Maze.

Air Maze.

There's the Burberry's of Chanel.

It's totally lawless there.

Nobody wants to wear any jewelry.

Actually, if you buy your David Yerman jewelry, they mail it to you from there in kind of a lockbox.

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I have one final question for you about life in D.C., though.

Have you seen the

new portraits of Trump hanging on the labor department?

I have like this memory of being a child and my parents, we went to a country, like Central American country, South American country, and it was like you have the pictures of the leader.

It feels like a very un-American thing right now, but in Washington, D.C., you have these massive portraits of menacing Trump on like the Department of Labor building now.

Yeah, that picture really, really caught my attention.

You know, it reminded me, of course, of Moscow, you know, where the gigantic visage of Vladimir Putin is everywhere and omnipresent.

That's the thing about a strongman type leader.

He wants his picture on everything, wants credit for everything.

You mentioned my colleague Ruth Marcus's excellent piece, The New Yorker, about Pam Bandi.

It begins.

The piece begins with a remarkable scene in January of this year with the Attorney General of the United States personally entering an

in the Justice Department where she had apparently been told, this is like within, you know, hours or days of the inauguration, that the old portraits of the president had not been taken down and the new presidential portraits of Trump had not yet been posted.

And this head of an office in the Justice Department is stunned to find the Attorney General

standing there carrying portraits she's ripped off the walls.

And, you know, not surprisingly, the head of this office office is then fired, you know, immediately afterwards.

This is what strong men care about.

They care about having their picture on the wall in every government office.

They care about putting their name or their signature on government checks.

Remember how Donald Trump did that during the pandemic?

They care about having their gigantic portrait hanging on the walls of government buildings so that people drive around and see them.

You know, how long is it until we have the Donald Trump radio with the word of the leader blaring at us at all times?

And we kind of have that.

I think he had three press conferences in the Oval Office yesterday.

So we're getting close.

Yeah, the live streaming presidency, Tim.

You know, in the first term, right, it was the

constant tweeting presidency.

He was kind of a consumer in the first term.

Like he was watching the news constantly and he's live commenting on it.

But now he's made himself a full-time character in the reality show.

Yeah, he's live streaming the presidency and you don't have the ability to turn it off.

I'm going to try, but you're right, I don't.

I'm stuck.

That makes me feel sad that I don't have the ability to turn it off.

You're right.

I don't.

It's stuck.

The channel, the remote doesn't work.

There's no other channel.

Susan Glasser, what a pleasure having you on the podcast.

Thank you so much.

My love to the fam and we'll be having you back here soon.

All right.

Great to be with you too.

But now I'm going to go have a drink.

Is it too early to have a drink?

Nah, not in Trump 2.0.

You know, it's noon somewhere.

Everybody else, we'll see you back here tomorrow for another edition of the Bullwork podcast.

Peace.

You think you can change my mind?

But

clean out of but

I got a handle on things

I got my prescription on change the channel

I stopped my subscription I got a handle on things

I got my prescription on change the channel

Yeah, I stopped my subscription

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

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