Susan Glasser: An Exercise in National Humiliation

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Speaker 10 Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast.

Speaker 12 I'm your host, Tim Miller.

Speaker 27 Delighted to welcome back staff writer at the New Yorker, where she hits her weekly column on life in Washington.

Speaker 31 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.

Speaker 33 She was also Moscow Bureau Chief of the Washington Post.

Speaker 34 It's Susan Glasser.

Speaker 35 How are you doing, Susan?

Speaker 36 Hey, Tim. Great to be with you.
Too much to talk about, I'm afraid.

Speaker 30 Much to discuss.

Speaker 38 Where are you coming at us from?

Speaker 11 You in D.C. right now?

Speaker 36 No, I'm with my mom up in Massachusetts.

Speaker 40 so okay 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 cream and georgetown cupcake keeping the people safe but uh first we got to discuss uh 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.

Speaker 43 By law, he can only fire her for cause.

Speaker 45 He is citing accusations that she has two primary mortgages, I guess, though she's not been charged with any crime.

Speaker 31 Cook has a statement out this morning saying that she is refusing to resign.

Speaker 44 She's going to take him to court.

Speaker 46 She's the first black woman to be a Fed governor, I think, is worth noting.

Speaker 28 I think this is of a pace with your last article about Trump's retribution and the

Speaker 44 creeping.

Speaker 43 authoritarian aspirations that he has, but I was wondering your reaction.

Speaker 36 Yeah, I mean, there's so much to unpack there.

Speaker 36 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 court was struck down.

Speaker 36 So it's really quite remarkable when he's accusing people of various crimes who have not been charged with them. And I know there's so much to be kind of overwhelmed by, we can tend to forget that.

Speaker 41 But I Donald Trump has never fudged a mortgage.

Speaker 27 I promise. He has never done a financial filing that

Speaker 50 was not 100% T's crossed, I's dotted.

Speaker 36 I think the through line for me of a lot of these really eye-popping developments of August is...

Speaker 36 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

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 In this case, it strikes me that his opponent here is not a woman. It's an institution.
It's the Federal Reserve.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 And I wonder if this is a sort of a creeping backdoor way into finally provoking that full-scale confrontation with the independence of the Fed.

Speaker 52 I mean, this is, at some level, a confrontation with the independence of the Fed, and she's just one of the governors, but the law is pretty clear, right?

Speaker 44 That there has to be a for-cause reason to get rid of her.

Speaker 54 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.

Speaker 52 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.

Speaker 45 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, you know, federal civil servants, like the economic impact here is not zero, right?

Speaker 43 On the one hand, again, it's just one Fed ward governor.

Speaker 56 On the other hand, it's sending a really bad signal globally to the markets about the stability of our institutions in this moment.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 And, you know, many businesses, of course, that's that's part of what has powered the American economic engine over the last,

Speaker 36 you know, nearly a century since since World War II. And,

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 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 a vision of an American democracy.

Speaker 36 And this idea that you can just take literally a guy tweeting something, right? So you have an obscure political appointee

Speaker 36 tweeting something on a Wednesday.

Speaker 36 And a few days later, the President of the United States is firing you for an investigation that has not yet occurred.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 42 Yeah.

Speaker 33 The subhead of our morning newsletter this morning is the president who doesn't believe in checks and balances is no president at all.

Speaker 9 That's not how

Speaker 58 our system of government is supposed to work, right?

Speaker 42 I mean, that was fundamental to

Speaker 48 what was laid out in the Federalist Papers, what has been the model for our government.

Speaker 42 And if nobody from any of the other branches, from any independent authorities, can check him, well, then we have to have a different name for it.

Speaker 43 You mentioned the

Speaker 17 obscure government official to tweeted an attack on her.

Speaker 9 I do want to mention him briefly here because I think this is a, I don't know what the right word is.

Speaker 58 He is

Speaker 27 synecde for the entire government, kind of.

Speaker 64 He is certainly a very representative example of, I think, where things are going in the Trump gangster government.

Speaker 9 The guy's name is Bill Pulte.

Speaker 63 There's no reason anybody would have ever heard of him.

Speaker 34 He's a private equity executive before this that had gone MAGA.

Speaker 65 He was named as the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which usually just kind of oversees Fannie and Freddie.

Speaker 33 This is not a public figure that you would know about in another situation.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 46 He referred all three of these to the Justice Department for criminal investigation.

Speaker 5 I mean,

Speaker 49 this is crazy, like a random bureaucrat that has oversight over one

Speaker 39 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.

Speaker 36 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 find a way to market themselves, you know, into Donald Trump's

Speaker 36 inner circle. And essentially, that appears to be what the case is with this official.

Speaker 36 There's a very interesting piece in Politico that your team flagged flagged for me that talks about how he even got this job in the first place.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 Basically, he said, I will give this person, you know, X thousands of dollars if Donald Trump retweets this, you know, or retroofs this or whatever, you know, his social media platform is.

Speaker 36 And, you know,

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 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?

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 44 Luckily, I only have one home.

Speaker 11 So I'm not too concerned about the mortgage paperwork, but I might be doing a double check.

Speaker 8 I don't know.

Speaker 59 If you're in Cash Patel's book, I might do a double check on, you know, with your mortgage lender this morning.

Speaker 31 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.

Speaker 9 This is so, this is insane.

Speaker 21 Like this is capo-like threats from a random bureaucrat

Speaker 22 at the housing finance agency.

Speaker 51 And

Speaker 21 like, I guess.

Speaker 39 It's, it's crazy. It's insane.

Speaker 52 It's mockable.

Speaker 44 It's a little scary.

Speaker 28 But like the thing that is the most frustrating about it is like it obviously is going to work.

Speaker 44 Right.

Speaker 28 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, like, you know, finding whatever little fiefdom you have and using it to go after political foes.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 And that was enough to get him the job of the FBI director.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 The question for all of this, and last night I really was beside myself because there's so many examples in the last few weeks of Trump really going over the top in terms of challenging norms and rules.

Speaker 36 The question for all of this is

Speaker 36 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?

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 And the question, I think, is when it all shakes out,

Speaker 36 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?

Speaker 36 How long will it take to litigate this in the courts? Is this a way that he will then use to say,

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 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?

Speaker 36 And the escalation suggests we're going to be in a very different country by then.

Speaker 62 Yeah.

Speaker 9 No doubt.

Speaker 52 The pull-tee thing does feel like kind of like a mockumentary version of like a Russia story.

Speaker 61 So, you you know, kind of like where some random boob gets into the good graces of the leader by just, you know, going after the people that have annoyed him.

Speaker 36 Can you have a mockumentary inside of a mockumentary?

Speaker 49 I guess.

Speaker 1 I think so.

Speaker 5 I don't know.

Speaker 11 We'll call Rob Reiner.

Speaker 17 We'll have to ask the experts on that.

Speaker 3 Hey, y'all, I warned you.

Speaker 31 I warned you.

Speaker 10 Our Toronto show has sold out.

Speaker 52 The Canadians love Sam Stein so much that, you know, there are lines around the block to get tickets to it.

Speaker 21 But the good news is we still have tickets left for our live shows in Washington, D.C.

Speaker 43 and in New York coming up in early October.

Speaker 30 So go get those tickets now at thebulwark.com slash events.

Speaker 10 I'm missing LSU for South Carolina for you guys.

Speaker 29 I'm going to be in New York for that.

Speaker 51 And so assuming that's an afternoon game.

Speaker 65 I might have a couple bourbons in me by the time we get on stage on Saturday night.

Speaker 28 So that one could be a rowdy one.

Speaker 46 So if you're looking for an excuse to get to the Big Apple, go see a show Friday night.

Speaker 42 Come see us Saturday night.

Speaker 52 Could be a fun little weekend.

Speaker 10 Go get tickets. Like I said, thebork.com/slash events.
Thebork.com/slash events.

Speaker 61 See y'all soon.

Speaker 59 To your article in 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 part of Trump's revenge tour.

Speaker 44 I want to 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?

Speaker 36 Yeah, I mean, look,

Speaker 36 Donald Trump isn't hiding hiding it, so

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 And that's certainly the case in Bolton's situation. It's not like random timing.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 You know, he's been taken for a ride by Russia.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 And so for me, it's very much about silencing a critic.

Speaker 11 Yeah, no, let's stick on the Putin thing for a second.

Speaker 17 We'll get back to Balta because I hear you on the silencing the critic, but I just don't want to let it pass by, the humiliating part.

Speaker 42 Because like, in addition to all the things you you said, did you see the press conference on, was it on Thursday or Friday, where Trump had the FIFA head in?

Speaker 23 And he said Putin sent him this picture.

Speaker 42 And he's like rifling around in the drawers, looking for the picture that Putin had sent him.

Speaker 44 And this press conference is supposed to be about the World Cup.

Speaker 28 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.

Speaker 39 And he takes the Putin picture and shows it around the audience like it's a prized possession.

Speaker 51 And

Speaker 17 then kind of goes on.

Speaker 28 It's like, I hope he's going to be here. It depends on the decisions.

Speaker 47 It is so weird.

Speaker 5 Like, it is so humiliating to use that word that, like, that is where he's at.

Speaker 13 And then he gets asked about whether he's upset that Putin bombed a building that was like an American company in Ukraine.

Speaker 43 And he, you know, and he offers like some minor, like, yeah, I'm not thrilled about it, but I'm also not thrilled about this.

Speaker 27 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.

Speaker 28 Like, maybe something was different.

Speaker 69 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.

Speaker 36 Yeah, I appreciate you saying that to him because this 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?

Speaker 62 Yeah, I mean, there was a lot of.

Speaker 36 It's a lot of bullshit. And I will tell you that.

Speaker 33 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 void for her.

Speaker 49 I'll have a word with Ann about that.

Speaker 62 I mean,

Speaker 36 it's been a very frustrating time for anyone who has, you know, been observing. Russia closely

Speaker 36 to see the credulousness.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 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

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 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 the butcher of Bucha.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 And the last six months have been literally an exercise in national humiliation for the United States.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 I understand there's so many different things that can get one's blood pressure boiling. You know, we can't be on a constant, you know, high boil about every single thing.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 This is the largest, deadliest war in Europe since the end of World War II.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 They didn't look like friends to me.

Speaker 17 Well, it looks kind of like a situation where one person was smitten with the other person, kind of.

Speaker 12 So, you know, we've all been in those situations before.

Speaker 27 I have to correct you, though, Susan.

Speaker 33 I'm sorry.

Speaker 56 Because the vice president was pushing back on you in a recent interview on Fox.

Speaker 46 He said the American media is giving a false image of Putin.

Speaker 52 He's actually more soft-spoken than you would necessarily expect.

Speaker 56 He's very deliberate, very careful.

Speaker 69 That was what he's

Speaker 36 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,

Speaker 36 is what he said. He's heard him on the telephone several times.
I've met Vladimir Putin.

Speaker 36 In fact, I was in the first group of American journalists, American bureaucra chiefs who met with Vladimir Putin in the spring of 2001 at the Kremlin. And, you know, it was a very revealing episode.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 And that Putin, you know, was eager to impress Westerners, different than this Putin, perhaps.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 He was a cold-eyed killer then, then in the same way that he is now

Speaker 36 nearly two and a half decades later. And I think that for J.D.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 62 Yeah.

Speaker 43 That's interesting.

Speaker 52 And you said you felt like when you first got to meet him back in the early 2000s that he was more insecure.

Speaker 60 How did that manifest?

Speaker 48 Like, what do you see has evolved in the two decades? Like, do you observe anything that's notably different or similar?

Speaker 36 You know, it's interesting that you asked that.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 So from Bill Clinton at the very beginning of his tenure all the way through Trump now a second time.

Speaker 36 And, you know, there's an old Russian saying that captures some of it, the appetite grows while eating.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 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 statist, right?

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 It was the subject of our first book together that came out in 2005.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 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?

Speaker 36 That's the part that I think is the appetite grows while eating part of Vladimir Putin.

Speaker 8 Well, now you've piqued my interest.

Speaker 52 I have to ask you one more question since you're working on the book.

Speaker 69 And then, you know, we can, we can save the rest of it for when we get to book time.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 52 just thinking about it through that arc, through that period from like Clinton through now, what are your observations that would challenge like Putin's like claims about the root causes, right?

Speaker 61 Like now you get into this root cause of debate.

Speaker 39 And I see a lot of people,

Speaker 9 I guess the word of the podcast is credulous, who are very credulous in this argument on kind of like both sides of the argument, like even kind of the more lefty, you know, foreign policy, skeptical of U.S.

Speaker 57 foreign policy.

Speaker 45 Obviously, you see this on the MAGA right, which is kind of accepting at face value that like...

Speaker 68 you know, Ukraine was wearing their skirt a little too short and like we did do some things that tempted Putin.

Speaker 35 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?

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 It's not about NATO, it's not about anything other than the fact 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.

Speaker 36 And I think it's a core principle of his.

Speaker 36 You know, so when it comes to 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.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 You know, for Putin, it's really much more an ideology that harkens back to the late czarist period.

Speaker 36 You know, the slogan of the czars, you know, in the early 20th century, it was orthodoxy, autocracy, nationalism.

Speaker 36 And that's a pretty good fit, probably not in that order, with Putin's own personal ideology.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 And so I think a lot of that is what's driving this on Putin's part.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 So this is years before there was any consideration in a serious way of Ukraine joining NATO.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 He personally campaigned right before the election for his hand-picked candidate, Viktor Yanukovych.

Speaker 36 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,

Speaker 36 incredible reaction on Putin's part, blaming the West, you know, increasing his paranoia.

Speaker 36 And this had nothing to do with NATO.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 56 Maybe just had some bad goulash.

Speaker 48 Maybe it was just a bad luck. coincidence.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 It's about Putin's long-standing decades-long desire to keep Ukraine under Russia's control by whatever means necessary.

Speaker 3 We the people, in order to form a more perfect union, these words are more than just the opening of the Constitution.

Speaker 7 They're a reminder of who this country belongs to and what we can be at our best.

Speaker 8 They're also the cornerstone of MS Now.

Speaker 10 Whether it's breaking news, exclusive reporting, election coverage, or in-depth analysis, MS Now keeps the people at the heart of everything they do.

Speaker 15 Home to the Rachel Maddow Show, Morning Joe, the briefing with Jen Saki, and more voices you know and trust, MS Now is your source for news, opinion, and the world.

Speaker 20 Their name is new, but you'll find the same commitment to justice, progress, and the truth you've relied on for decades.

Speaker 22 They'll continue to cover the day's day's news, ask the tough questions, and explain how it impacts you.

Speaker 23 Same mission, new name, MS Now.

Speaker 24 Learn more at ms.now.

Speaker 70 She'd throw things, wander, and started hoarding. Mom's Alzheimer's was already so hard.

Speaker 70 But then we found out she had something called agitation that may happen with dementia due to Alzheimer's disease. And that was a different kind of difficulty.
So we asked her doctor for more help.

Speaker 26 Seeing symptoms like these in a loved one, it could be time to ask their doctor about Rexulti, Rexpiprazole 2 milligrams, the only FDA-approved treatment proven to reduce the symptoms of this condition.

Speaker 26 Rexulti should not be used as an as-needed treatment. Elderly people with dementia-related psychosis have increased risk of death or stroke.

Speaker 26 Report fever, stiff muscles, and confusion, which can be life-threatening, or uncontrolled muscle movements, which may be permanent. High blood sugar can lead to coma or death.

Speaker 26 Weight gain, increased cholesterol, unusual urges, dizziness on standing, falls, seizures, trouble swallowing, or sleepiness may occur. Learn more about these and other side effects at ricksulty.com.

Speaker 26 Tap Ad for PI.

Speaker 70 I'm glad her doctor recommended Rick Sulti.

Speaker 26 Talk to your loved ones, doctor. Moments matter.

Speaker 59 All right. That was a fulfilling diversion for me.

Speaker 63 So I'm glad that we did that.

Speaker 35 But back to John Bolton.

Speaker 37 I hope it was.

Speaker 11 I enjoyed it. The listeners, we'll see what the listeners say, but

Speaker 53 I needed that.

Speaker 17 Okay.

Speaker 38 Back to Bolton.

Speaker 27 I guess I'm just wondering what your thoughts are about, like, this is just so blatantly like political retribution intimidation, right?

Speaker 35 I think that the ramifications of that broadly are more important than like 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,

Speaker 53 seems like a pretty big nothing burger.

Speaker 45 So I just wonder what your thoughts are about kind of that element of the retribution campaign and what the Bolton raid means.

Speaker 36 Yeah, I mean, look, you know, Donald Trump and his then Justice Department tried 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.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 So is this a do-over in effect for Trump and his people now that there's no one there to stop them?

Speaker 36 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

Speaker 36 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?

Speaker 36 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?

Speaker 36 I mean, if you give someone a hammer, they find nails, nails, right? They find ways to use it. We know that the hammer is in their hands right now.

Speaker 36 And I think this is one of many potential examples we're about to see.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 39 And there was an interesting Times 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.

Speaker 46 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.

Speaker 44 And they've literally gone to three grand juries trying to get a felony, failed, and now are charging her with a misdemeanor.

Speaker 46 You know, that will also be the case in these Bolton kind of situations.

Speaker 43 And, you know, it takes us to the Bondi of it.

Speaker 57 I mean, Bondi's tweet on Bolton's arrest was so absurd.

Speaker 44 It was America's safety isn't negotiable

Speaker 38 as if these documents in Bolton's house are about America's safety.

Speaker 46 But, you know, your colleague Ruth Marcus wrote a big piece on Bondi and the DOJ.

Speaker 40 I'm just wondering what you think about all that.

Speaker 54 I mean, is there a possibility that this DOJ can be so like ham-handed about all this that like the actual wheels of the justice system will prevent them from being successful in their clear endeavor to go after political foes?

Speaker 36 Well, I mean, Ruth's piece is a terrific piece.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 So, you know, huge swaths of institutional memory are gone, civil servant career prosecutors gone, whole offices decimated, whole capacities lost.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 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. question.

Speaker 36 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?

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 And then the administration, even after admitting its mistake, didn't want to bring him back.

Speaker 36 Now they're attempting to send the guy to Uganda, to Uganda, all because his case inadvertently became this public brouhaha.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 42 Yeah, DHS tweeted yesterday, just Uganda man,

Speaker 48 like trolling him.

Speaker 22 I, it's so

Speaker 5 the cruelty is the point.

Speaker 43 Yeah, even if you oppose the policy, the idea that the federal government, like the 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.

Speaker 47 It is a really just grotesque escalation.

Speaker 54 And,

Speaker 68 you know, the stuff just kind of starts to get washed.

Speaker 48 So I'm glad you brought it up.

Speaker 41 The firings also at the DOJ,

Speaker 65 the sort of scary part of it for me is,

Speaker 58 okay, so at DOJ, they're washing out all this institutional memory.

Speaker 59 It's horrible for the lawyers that have been pushed out of there.

Speaker 64 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.

Speaker 55 They're replaced with these hacks that are going to, you know, make these absurd arguments in front of courts and get denied by three grand juries and go after the sandwich man.

Speaker 22 So you have these hacks that are in there.

Speaker 42 But like that same thing is happening to 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.

Speaker 56 But like

Speaker 41 Hagsa fired.

Speaker 8 The director of the Defense Intelligence Agency last week, Air Force Chief of Staff got kicked out.

Speaker 34 These are the latest.

Speaker 59 There's like a ton of institutional memory has gotten washed out of DOD as well.

Speaker 36 Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 It's in effect the politicization of our nonpartisan military of everything that's perhaps the most worrisome.

Speaker 36 It might get the least attention because it's a more opaque and less transparent, generally, operation, the Pentagon.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 Because again, what are you going to then ultimately use that for?

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 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,

Speaker 36 apparently, for the sin of his agency having produced an intelligence assessment that Donald Trump didn't like that said that the attack

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 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 report produced, he's firing through Hegseth, the head of an intelligence agency, because intelligence analysts produced a report that he didn't like.

Speaker 36 And, you know, again, this is so antithetical.

Speaker 11 It's the second time this has happened.

Speaker 44 And this happened with some intelligence officials that were lower level, but people have put out a report about how...

Speaker 69 Venezuela wasn't exactly invading America, which is like not even really an intelligence report.

Speaker 40 They just were stating facts.

Speaker 9 Like it's just clear that Venezuela did not have a plot to invade America.

Speaker 54 And that was enough to have a couple of people pushed out as well.

Speaker 2 We the people, in order to form a more perfect union.

Speaker 4 These words are more than just the opening of the Constitution.

Speaker 6 They're a reminder of who this country belongs to.

Speaker 7 and what we can be at our best.

Speaker 8 They're also the cornerstone of MS Now.

Speaker 10 Whether it's breaking news, exclusive reporting, election coverage, or in-depth analysis, MS Now keeps the people at the heart of everything they do.

Speaker 14 Home to the Rachel Maddow Show, Morning Joe, the briefing with Jen Saki, and more voices you know and trust.

Speaker 17 MS Now is your source for news, opinion, and the world.

Speaker 20 Their name is new, but you'll find the same commitment to justice, progress, and the truth you've relied on for decades.

Speaker 22 They'll continue to cover the day's news, ask the tough questions, and explain how it impacts you.

Speaker 23 Same mission, new name, MS Now.

Speaker 24 Learn more at MS.now.

Speaker 70 She'd throw things, wander, and started hoarding. Mom's Alzheimer's was already so hard.

Speaker 70 But then we we found out she had something called agitation that may happen with dementia due to Alzheimer's disease. And that was a different kind of difficult.
So we asked her doctor for more help.

Speaker 26 Seeing symptoms like these in a loved one, it could be time to ask their doctor about Rexulte, Rexpiprazole 2 milligrams, the only FDA-approved treatment proven to reduce the symptoms of this condition.

Speaker 26 Rexulte should not be used as an as-needed treatment.

Speaker 26 Elderly people with dementia-related psychosis have increased risk of death or stroke, report fever, stiff muscles, and confusion, which can be life-threatening, or uncontrolled muscle movements, which may be permanent.

Speaker 26 High blood sugar can lead to coma or death. Weight gain, increased cholesterol, unusual urges, dizziness on standing, falls, seizures, trouble swallowing, or sleepiness may occur.

Speaker 26 Learn more about these and other side effects at RickSulty.com. Tap ad for PI.

Speaker 70 I'm glad her doctor recommended Rick Sulti.

Speaker 26 Talk to your loved ones, doctor. Moments matter.

Speaker 63 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.

Speaker 57 The National Guard, Trump said yesterday, and Hag Seth was in the Oval, you know, about how they're looking at Chicago.

Speaker 46 He had this conversation with Wes Moore over the idea of sending folks to Baltimore.

Speaker 55 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...

Speaker 53 the writing is on the wall of that.

Speaker 52 So I'm wondering, you know, what we can learn. And I guess you said you're out of D.C.

Speaker 35 at the moment, but you've been been there, like about what the vibes are in D.C.

Speaker 55 right now and like what your sense is for what's happening and what's to come there.

Speaker 36 Well, Tim, you mentioned, I think at the beginning of this conversation, the

Speaker 36 National Guard troops standing outside the Krispy Kreme Donuts. And if anyone knows D.C., that's right at the DuPont Circle Metro station.
I can assure you that

Speaker 36 no murders are happening in broad daylight. And

Speaker 36 at the DuPont Circle Metro station,

Speaker 36 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,

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 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, it's just a classic.

Speaker 36 This is great for Donald Trump. And he's just, you know, Democrats have walked right into his trap.

Speaker 36 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 for Donald Trump.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 Pritzker, the governor of Illinois.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 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 D.C.'s budget, which, as you know, has to be approved by Congress because of its unique status.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 I think it's also part of the Trump revenge tour because DC

Speaker 36 probably voted for Donald Trump less than almost any big city in the country. In his first election, I think it went back in 2016.
I think it was something like 4%.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 52 I know you write a newsletter on life in Washington, but I have to push back.

Speaker 63 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.

Speaker 71 Overflowing with gratitude because, for the first time in their lives, they can use the parks, they can walk on the streets.

Speaker 71 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.

Speaker 71 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

Speaker 71 700,000 people in this city who were living under the rule of criminals and thugs.

Speaker 35 Do you feel free, Susan?

Speaker 52 Have you changed your jewelry?

Speaker 36 Well, I'm glad that Stephen Miller is so concerned about all of us.

Speaker 36 You know, as I understand it, Stephen Miller is not a resident of Washington, D.C.

Speaker 11 And, you know, is that not true?

Speaker 52 I thought he lived down there at the new place down by Metro.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 44 It's kind of irrelevant whether or not he lives in D.C.

Speaker 59 I don't want to know where Stephen Miller lives.

Speaker 27 It's It's like a dark cloud.

Speaker 38 You just follow the dark cloud over town and know where he is, I think.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 It's interesting that Miller believes that's what he's accomplished here. And he's speaking

Speaker 36 in a way that, you know, like a lot of what he says, it bears little resemblance to reality.

Speaker 17 Yeah, I guess you're right.

Speaker 40 I mean, I know that he did live at city center.

Speaker 52 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.

Speaker 37 Airmaise. Airmaze.
Airmaise.

Speaker 28 There's the Burberry's of Chanel.

Speaker 41 It's totally lawless there.

Speaker 59 Nobody wants to wear any jewelry.

Speaker 43 Actually, if you buy your David Yerman jewelry, they mail it to you from there in kind of a lockbox.

Speaker 2 We the people, in order to form a more perfect union, these words are more than just the opening of the Constitution.

Speaker 7 They're a reminder of who this country belongs to and what we can be at our best.

Speaker 8 They're also the cornerstone of MS Now.

Speaker 10 Whether it's breaking news, exclusive reporting, election coverage, or in-depth analysis, MS Now keeps the people at the heart of everything they do.

Speaker 15 Home to the Rachel Maddow Show, Morning Joe, the briefing with Jen Saki, and more voices you know and trust, MS Now is your source for news, opinion, and the world.

Speaker 20 Their name is new, but you'll find the same commitment to justice, progress, and the truth you've relied on for decades.

Speaker 22 They'll continue to cover cover the day's news, ask the tough questions, and explain how it impacts you.

Speaker 23 Same mission, new name, MS Now.

Speaker 24 Learn more at MS.now.

Speaker 70 She'd throw things, wander, and started hoarding. Mom's Alzheimer's was already so hard.

Speaker 70 But then we found out she had something called agitation that may happen with dementia due to Alzheimer's disease. And that was a different kind of difficult.
So we asked her doctor for more help.

Speaker 26 Seeing symptoms like these in a loved one, it could be time to ask their doctor about Rexulti, Rexpiprazole 2 milligrams, the only FDA-approved treatment proven to reduce the symptoms of this condition.

Speaker 26 Rexulte should not be used as an as-needed treatment.

Speaker 26 Elderly people with dementia-related psychosis have increased risk of death or stroke, report fever, stiff muscles, and confusion, which can be life-threatening, or uncontrolled muscle movements, which may be permanent.

Speaker 26 High blood sugar can lead to coma or death. Weight gain, increased cholesterol, unusual urges, dizziness on standing, falls, seizures, trouble swallowing, or sleepiness may occur.

Speaker 26 Learn more about these and other side effects at RickSulty.com. Tap ad for PI.

Speaker 70 I'm glad her doctor recommended Rick Sulte.

Speaker 26 Talk to your loved ones, doctor. Moments matter.

Speaker 65 I have one final question for you about life in D.C., though.

Speaker 51 Have you seen the

Speaker 65 new portraits of Trump hanging on the Labor Department?

Speaker 11 I have like this memory of being a child and my parents.

Speaker 42 We went to a country, like Central American country, South American country, and it was like you have the pictures of the leader.

Speaker 45 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.

Speaker 36 Yeah, that picture really, really caught my attention.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 He wants his picture on everything. He wants credit for everything.
You mentioned my colleague Ruth Marcus's excellent piece in The New Yorker about Pam Bondi.

Speaker 36 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 office.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 And, you know, not surprisingly, the head of this office is then fired, you know, immediately afterwards. This is what Strongmen care about.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 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?

Speaker 38 We kind of have that.

Speaker 17 I think he had three press conferences in the Oval Office yesterday.

Speaker 9 So we're getting close.

Speaker 36 Yeah, the live streaming presidency, Tim. You know, in the first term, right, it was the

Speaker 36 constant tweeting presidency.

Speaker 11 He was kind of a consumer in the first term.

Speaker 29 Like he was watching the news constantly and he's live commenting on it.

Speaker 52 But now he's made himself a full-time character in the reality show.

Speaker 36 Yeah, he's live streaming the presidency and you don't have the ability to turn it off.

Speaker 63 I'm going to try, but you're right.

Speaker 52 I don't. I'm stuck.

Speaker 8 That makes me feel sad that I don't have the ability to turn it off.

Speaker 44 You're right.

Speaker 11 I don't.

Speaker 38 It's stuck.

Speaker 12 The channel, the remote doesn't work.

Speaker 20 There's no other channel.

Speaker 49 Susan Glasser, what a pleasure having you on the podcast.

Speaker 12 Thank you so much.

Speaker 43 My love to the fam, and we'll be having you back here soon.

Speaker 58 All right.

Speaker 36 Great to be with you, too. But now I'm going to go have a drink.
Is it too early to have a drink?

Speaker 38 Nah, not in Trump 2.0.

Speaker 33 You know, it's noon somewhere.

Speaker 3 Everybody else, we'll see you back here tomorrow for another edition of the Bullwork podcast.

Speaker 62 I know you'll smile.

Speaker 62 It's just an evil pain. You've been lying all the while.

Speaker 49 The truth is just sinking in, you left a big mess behind.

Speaker 49 That I'm gonna have to clean up.

Speaker 36 You think you can change my mind?

Speaker 36 But

Speaker 36 clean out the book, but I got a handle on things.

Speaker 36 I got my prescription, I'll change the channel.

Speaker 36 I stop my subscription. I got a handle on things.

Speaker 36 I got my prescription. I'll change the channel.

Speaker 6 The Bullard Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

Speaker 26 There are two types of fishing.

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Speaker 72 And the kind of fishing hackers do online.

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Speaker 73 But here's the thing.

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Speaker 74 This is Matt Rogers from Lost Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang. This is Bowen Yang from Los Culturalistos with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang.

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Speaker 36 Having MG can make cooking difficult, but over the years, I've found some really helpful tools and tips that I'm excited to share.

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