S2 Ep1008: Michael Weiss, Ben Smith, and Annie Karni: Radioactively Stupid

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Speaker 3 Hello, and welcome to the Bullard Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.
We're doing something different today. We three guests, a triple rainbow of guests on the podcast.

Speaker 3 Remember, it's Wednesday, so you can check out me and JVL and Sam Steinen for Sarah Longwell on the next level, where we go long on all of the politics and news of the day.

Speaker 3 But first up, it's our friend Michael Weiss, editor of The Insider, a Russia-focused media outlet, contributing editor to New Lines magazine.

Speaker 3 formerly an investigative reporter for CNN, our unofficial crazy foreign policy correspondent,

Speaker 3 and we wanted to bring him in immediately because we've now officially seen the text. Michael Weiss, are these war plans? The White House is saying this is a hoax.
These are not war plans.

Speaker 3 What do you make of it?

Speaker 40 I mean, you've got the timings of the strikes. You've got the platforms being used.

Speaker 40 There's no way that this was unclassified data, right? I'm talking to former CIA officers, including a former CIA lawyer, who says this is all top secret.

Speaker 40 I I mean, even more critical than the attack plans themselves is the policy discussion, right?

Speaker 40 Like, if you're a foreign adversary, you absolutely want to know what the back and forth is amongst Trump's national security team. So the fact that J.D.

Speaker 40 Vance is a little squeamish about attacking the Houthis, because that gives a freebie to the Europeans, those free-loading welfare queen Europeans that he's always on about, that's useful information.

Speaker 40 Mark Palmeropoulos said to me, if you're a CIA case officer and you obtain this data on an enemy of the United States, you get a medal.

Speaker 40 That's how valuable this stuff is. It certainly looks to me, and again, I've just done some very quick reporting on this, thanks to the Atlantic disclosure.

Speaker 40 It certainly looks to me like some people went ahead and perjured themselves at Congress yesterday by saying this was all unclassified.

Speaker 40 Now, it may be the case that Donald Trump has decided to declassify it after the fact, but the chronology of this, you know,

Speaker 40 what did you know and when kind of thing is going to be key here. So I don't think the story's going away, Tim.

Speaker 3 No, Donald Trump declassified it with his mind, apparently.

Speaker 3 And there's so much here to go over, but just because, you know, the White House is already out this morning saying, you know, these are not war plans. They're still dying on this spin hill.

Speaker 3 As you mentioned yesterday in Congress, both Ratcliffe, that of the CIA, and Tulsi,

Speaker 3 you know, were testifying that this was not classified. Ratcliffe was saying he, it's pretty concerning the poor memory on the director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Speaker 3 He's like, you know, I cannot recall when asked several times. Yeah.
It's all pretty preposterous. And I just put it in this context.

Speaker 3 Imagine if somebody involved in the actual execution of the mission, you know, an actual warfighter, to use Pete Hags' term. Let's imagine this person is a DEI hire.

Speaker 3 Let's imagine this is a black woman and she decides to text the Atlantic

Speaker 3 two hours ahead the exact timing of when we're going to bomb Yemen. All caps.
This is when the first bombs will definitely drop.

Speaker 3 I love that. And then it leaks.
What is Pete Hags saying about this person? I mean, this person is getting court-martialed.

Speaker 40 They're getting fired and they're getting prosecuted, no question. I mean, by the way, I love the

Speaker 40 Waltz sets the timer for deletion to four weeks. I correspond with my dog groomer on Signal, and we have a three-day time window for deletion.

Speaker 40 So, you know, Humphrey getting his hair cut is, I guess, less sensitive or more sensitive than when and where we're bombing the Houthis. The Trump administration line is very clear on this, right?

Speaker 40 Deny, deny, deny, attack, attack, attack. It's kind of the Roy Cohn playbook.
There is no question that everybody has egg on their face.

Speaker 40 There is no question that they realize what a colossal fuck up this is. There is no question, in my mind now, that people ought to be fired or ought to resign, but they're not going to, right?

Speaker 40 Because that's just handing a gift to the media. And, you know, the big bad wolf, Jeffrey Goldberg, who evidently may have hacked his way.

Speaker 40 We got Elon Musk, our best man on the case, to figure out if Jeff Goldberg is.

Speaker 3 Let's actually sit on this. Let's sit on this for a second because I think this is important.

Speaker 3 Since we, you know, we talked to Jeff yesterday, since then last night, and again, if anybody that listened to the pod yesterday, had these guys just said, you know what, this was just a total mistake.

Speaker 3 I meant to put in

Speaker 3 whatever, you know, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and that was JC, and I thought I wrote JG instead. Who knows? I mean, it would be still a huge egg on your face.

Speaker 3 But if they had said that, these details don't come out today.

Speaker 3 And what they did instead was crazy. I just sort of played the audio of Michael Waltz last night on Fox, essentially accusing Jeffrey Goldberg of espionage.
Let's listen.

Speaker 42 How did a Trump-hating editor of The Atlantic end up on your signal chat? You know, Laura, I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but of all the people out there,

Speaker 42 somehow this guy who has lied about the president who has lied to gold star families lied to their attorneys uh and gone to russia hoax gone to just all kinds of lengths to lie and smear the president of the united states and he's the one that somehow gets on somebody's contact and then gets sucked into this group.

Speaker 42 Sucked in. Have you ever had somebody's contact that shows their name and then you have an and then you have somebody else's number? You're going to make those mistakes.
Right.

Speaker 42 You've got somebody else's number on someone else's contact. So of course I didn't see this loser in the group.
It looked like someone else.

Speaker 42 Now, whether he did it deliberately or it happened in some other technical mean is something we're trying to figure out.

Speaker 3 Whether he did it deliberately. And that's the national security advisor.

Speaker 40 He got sucked in to a signal chat that you have to be added to by a member of the chat.

Speaker 3 And then the question is whether he did it deliberately. I mean, Michael, do they think that that is better spin?

Speaker 3 I guess it's because they're so, they hate the media so much and like he can't, you know, he's worried that he's going to be accused of being like a secret deep state neocon inside the administration so that's why he has to do this but like that is worse right if the the idea that it's like oh some boomer magazine editor hacked his way into the chat where we planned our bombing campaign that's their spin right so they're accusing they're accusing him or he is floating a conspiracy theory a slanderous one that jeff goldberg has committed espionage which is a crime.

Speaker 3 Very serious crime. This is their spin, right?

Speaker 40 That Jeff is a criminal. Yeah.
And that's how he obtained this. But you know, look, the critical thing here is nobody is disputing the authenticity of these communications, right?

Speaker 40 So that we have documentary proof, we have screenshots of the signal checks.

Speaker 40 So what will happen now is, I hope these guys will be brought back before Congress, before the Senate, and grilled and told there is no way that this stuff was not classified, right?

Speaker 40 You can FOIA this, by the way, now. And if it turns out that Tulsi Gabbard and Hexeth and Waltz perjured themselves, well, in the long, long ago, Tim, that was a crime punishable

Speaker 40 by prosecution and jail. And I don't think the DOJ in this administration is going to do anything like that, but worried about Tesla vandals.

Speaker 3 I want to get your take on one other, maybe some of the folks you've talked to.

Speaker 3 I don't know if this has bubbled up in any chats you've said, but just me as somebody who's not involved, has never been involved in any like military type conversations like this. The Pete Hegseth

Speaker 3 just kind of tone on this chat really jumps out to me.

Speaker 3 I mean, on the one, just like all caps, this is when the first bombs will definitely drop, followed by we are currently clean on OPSEC when like there's an unknown number on the on the line.

Speaker 3 It's pretty funny as far as incompetence is concerned. But just over and over, you know, calling the Europeans pathetic, all cap, saying he loathes them,

Speaker 3 like sharing maybe more information than he needs to with like the Secretary of Treasury, like all the people on this chain, being very solicitous.

Speaker 40 To me, it reads like somebody that like knows he's in over his head and is trying really hard to demonstrate competence and and it totally backfired but i don't know what's your sense a friend of mine put it well he's a this this sort of reads like he's in a direct-to-video steven segal film where segal is spending 90 percent of the film because he's so obese in a chair like barking orders i mean it's it's it's written in crayon you know it's like cosplay it's like i want to be a military commander and this is what i've seen in movies and on tv so it sounds authoritative right?

Speaker 3 I think everybody is in over their heads in this government.

Speaker 40 Of course. You know, it's sort of a goat rodeo.
First of all, let's take a step back here. There's some other contextual things that need to be discussed.

Speaker 3 Number one,

Speaker 40 you're not supposed to have Signal on your private devices communicating with other members of the national security team. Like, that's just a cardinal rule.

Speaker 40 In fact, former CIA people told me that the CIA messaged out, here's what you need to be aware of with Signal and its vulnerabilities. That's one.

Speaker 40 This idea that Ratcliffe installed Signal on his computer at the agency the day he took the jet.

Speaker 40 No, I mean, this is just insane. Number two, Tulsi Gabbard was abroad when these messages were going back and forth.
I think she was in India. Yes.

Speaker 40 Steve Witkoff, Trump's envoy to, I guess, everything now, was in Russia

Speaker 40 with Signal on his phone in Russia. at the time that these chats were taking place.

Speaker 40 Now, if you use Wi-Fi, if you have Bluetooth turned on in Russia and you're somebody like Steve Witkoff, whom the Russians are very interested in finding out who is he talking to and what is the nature and content of those conversations.

Speaker 3 I mean, sensibly, you'd think the Russians would be interested in that, but since Steve Witkoff is saying everything that Dmitry Peskov would say in all of his interviews, maybe they don't really need to work him, but maybe they got some pretty good insights into how to psychologically manipulate this guy as a result of hacking his phone.

Speaker 40 I mean, everything about this is just radioactively stupid.

Speaker 40 And just the sort of cardinal rules do not do this if you're in a position of authority and you have top secret clearance, which all of these people do.

Speaker 3 Just real quick on the phone thing also, Tulsi, Tulsi's asked about this in the hearing yesterday.

Speaker 3 Just body language, Tim, doctor, like she

Speaker 3 looked nervous to me and she was very uncomfortable. I mean, Ratcliffe was kind of nude thare-boned and kind of had a lying smirk on his face a little bit.
She looks like she was sweating.

Speaker 3 And Jack Reed, the Democratic senator from Rhode Island, was pressing her on whether she was on her personal phone or not, whether she was overseas.

Speaker 3 And she was like, oh, well, we need to wait for a review to look at that. And he's like, what is the review? Like, we're on your phone or not.

Speaker 3 So, and clearly, the director of national intelligence was on her personal phone,

Speaker 3 also overseas, in addition to Wyckoff being in Russia.

Speaker 40 And I don't know how many devices Tulsi Gabbard has had, if she still has the phone that she had before she was DNI, but this is somebody who has traveled to the Vatican, a trip paid for by a foundation headed by a Belgian businessman, Pierre Louvrier, who is a Russian intelligence asset.

Speaker 40 There's literally photographs of him with Igor Girkin, the FSB colonel and war criminal who led the separatist movement in Ukraine during the first invasion in 2014, right?

Speaker 40 And Louvrier is like just a Google search of this guy's social. My partner and colleague Christo Grozev did a deep dive investigation into him.

Speaker 3 Is he in the phone too? He was like her sponsor.

Speaker 40 His foundation paid for the the trip. This is why she was, you know, the New York Times did a story about she was flagged in her international travel.
It's because of that trip.

Speaker 40 I mean, the Russians are doing all kinds of shady things in the Vatican. Don't ask me why.
It's like the new Vienna for them.

Speaker 3 It's probably easy to get compromised inside the Vatican. Maybe why.

Speaker 3 Maybe why.

Speaker 40 Hey, I've seen Conclave, so I get it. So

Speaker 40 does she have him in the contacts? You know, has he had access to her phone?

Speaker 40 These are all kinds of questions that, you know, even before you get into a counterintelligence sort of frame of mind, you have to be asking and wondering.

Speaker 40 And yeah, she looked deeply, deeply uncomfortable.

Speaker 40 Her apologists and defenders, when she was nominated for this position, their kind of fallback on, well, no, no, no, it's total McCarthy is claptrapped that she's a Russian asset and she's this, was that, well, she's just not very bright.

Speaker 40 That's why she's regurgitating RT talking points on Syria and all that. Okay, so she's not terribly bright, but let's put her in a position of oversight of the entire U.S.
intelligence community.

Speaker 3 The chain begins with Waltz asking everybody to add somebody to be a representative for them on the chain.

Speaker 3 She puts on Joe Kent, who's this guy that ran for Congress, who's a total kook, who is like sidling up to white nationalist youth.

Speaker 3 He was like begging for the support of the white nationalist growing verse. He's advanced some pro-Russian views.
He's obviously an election denier. They all are.
So he's her point person.

Speaker 3 So it's not like she has nominated somebody who's who's like an old-hand intelligence person to kind of guide her through this.

Speaker 3 And then you got the VP, you know, when Waltz explains what happens in like a brief summary and the change. He's like, what?

Speaker 3 He's like, what are you talking about? Like, he doesn't understand the basic terminology. It's really the Keystone Cops is like too nice.

Speaker 40 The insights that you get from this, apart from, as I say, the policy back and forth, who, you know, who thinks what, and

Speaker 40 the kind of kit that's being brought to bear. Also, by the way, there was battle battle damage assessment, right?

Speaker 40 When, was it Walter Hexeth says, you know, the building collapsed and we got, you know, the Houthi missile guys going into his girlfriend.

Speaker 40 That's easy to piece together, like, who the target was, right? So that's also valuable intelligence.

Speaker 40 But you just get a sense, if you're a hostile state or a foreign adversary, that these people don't know what they're doing and that they're deeply, deeply insecure.

Speaker 40 Like, in the literal sense of the word, you know, they're easily infiltrated.

Speaker 40 And that's that's also, I mean, a windfall, because then you know, like, I just have to shadow the National Security Advisor or his staff and, you know, get to know these people.

Speaker 40 And, I mean, they've got classified on their personal devices. I mean, that's great insight into how the United States government is being run.

Speaker 40 And then, you know, added to which what Jeff told you yesterday, which is that a CIA officer's name was mentioned in the chat. I mean, Ratcliffe's chief of staff, I think it's now been reported.

Speaker 40 Whether or not that was somebody under cover or

Speaker 40 it doesn't matter. You still don't do that kind of thing.

Speaker 3 We've already accidentally released like the first name and last initial of CIA agents already as part of the Doge effort.

Speaker 40 Doing the Russians work for them.

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Speaker 9 Get ready for Malice, a twisted new drama starring Jack Whitehall, David DeCovney, and Carice Van Houten.

Speaker 14 Jack Whitehall plays Adam, a charming manny infiltrates the wealthy Tanner family with a hidden motive to destroy them.

Speaker 21 This edge-of-your-seat revenge thriller unravels a deliciously dark mystery in a world full of wealth, secrets, and betrayal.

Speaker 26 Malice will constantly keep you on your toes.

Speaker 29 Why is Adam after the Tanner family?

Speaker 31 What lengths will he go to?

Speaker 33 One thing's for sure: the past never stays buried, so keep your enemies close.

Speaker 37 Watch Malice, all episodes now streaming exclusively on Prime Video.

Speaker 3 All right, let's do the talking about the Russians. So Trump has agreed.
I covered with Bill Crystal on Monday, if people missed it, at great length, the Steve Witkoff just,

Speaker 3 you know, useful idiot spin on behalf of Russia just straight down the line. So our man in Amsterdam is like, at best, just extremely gullible.

Speaker 3 It's the best thing that you could say, maybe actively working against our allies. And then we've got this deal here.

Speaker 3 Peter Baker, Trump agrees to start lifting sanctions on Russia even without getting the full 30-day ceasefire he had proposed.

Speaker 3 He accepted a limited halt to strikes in the Black Sea and on power plants and some lengthy then discussion about all of the now access to markets that Russia is going to have and the lifting of certain sanctions.

Speaker 3 Meanwhile, I don't quite get this. I want you to explain it to me.
Military analysts are talking about how it really benefits the Black Sea ceasefire, particularly benefits Russia.

Speaker 3 Phillips O'Brien, a military analyst, has a great Substack post where he's arguing that they basically put Ukraine in a box where Russia is now getting economic relief and a military advantage out of this deal.

Speaker 3 What do you make of it?

Speaker 40 Yeah, so on the sanctions side of the ledger, you know, remember Donald Trump said if Russia doesn't come to the table or abide by a ceasefire, we're just going to sanction the hell out of them.

Speaker 40 That was his tough guy, his

Speaker 40 one or two moments of appearing or posturing as a tough guy in Russia.

Speaker 40 Well, what the Russians are doing, and Putin specifically is doing, is dragging out this process of negotiating a truce, whatever you want to call it, and adding new conditions and caveats to it.

Speaker 40 So now the Russians are saying, well, actually, in order to get us to do a maritime ceasefire, you have to lift some sanctions on our agricultural exports and also, critically, reconnect the Russian agricultural bank to SWIFT, the international banking system.

Speaker 40 Now, the nice thing about that is that that doesn't get done without the European Union's consent. And the EU votes by consensus.
They're not set to vote until the summer, July, August, right?

Speaker 40 Just before coming on your show, the European Commission came out and said, no, the only way we amend or change or lift sanctions is Russia full withdrawal from Ukraine, right?

Speaker 40 So it's a very strong, solid statement. So the Europeans have, to use the metaphor of the hour, cards to play here.

Speaker 3 So if they don't get SWIFT,

Speaker 3 what then do they get access to?

Speaker 40 Well, the U.S. can start to lift sanctions unilaterally, but the EU can do secondary sanctions.
So it doesn't have the full impact.

Speaker 40 I mean, if the EU keeps in place its sanctions on the same institutions, that tends to constrain or limit Russia's ability to do business.

Speaker 40 But to the point that Phillips is raising, and I made this point myself, one of the unsung victories for the Ukrainians in the last couple of years has been to drive drive the bulk of the Black Sea Fleet out of Crimea, their base in Sevastopol, through drone attacks, missile attacks, including with ATACMs that we've provided them with their own homegrown or homemade Neptune cruise missiles.

Speaker 40 They've expended a lot of resources doing this. And it's also allowed them to

Speaker 40 create an alternate route for their own grain. shipments, right?

Speaker 40 I mean, the Black Sea Fleet imposed a blockade, and that completely circumscribed Ukraine's ability to make money by selling its food on the international market.

Speaker 40 So the question is, if this maritime ceasefire does come into effect, and already there's some issues in terms of the readouts on either side and what conditions have been agreed or not, does that mean the Black Sea Fleet is able to return in its entirety to Crimea?

Speaker 40 Because that

Speaker 40 furthers Russia's military occupation of southern Ukraine.

Speaker 40 And if the Russians are allowed to do that, well, where does it say that the Ukrainians are able to move their personnel or their military assets to places where they currently are not on the battlefield?

Speaker 40 So yes, it is very one-sided.

Speaker 40 The Ukrainians will say, well, look, the best thing that we can get out of this is fewer restrictions on our ability to export, assuming that the Russians abide by any agreement and don't open fire on our commercial vessels, and

Speaker 40 a cessation of bombings of the port in Odessa, for instance. So, well, but the Russians being the Russians, they're going to muck about.

Speaker 40 They're probably going to use their own commercial vessels to transport weapons and materiel because they do that anyway.

Speaker 40 And as far as things going, boom, I mean, they can still bomb you and they'll just say, well, that's the Ukrainians bombing themselves, doing false flags and trying to blame it on Moscow.

Speaker 40 And knowing Donald Trump, he'll probably believe Putin's word over his own intelligence community.

Speaker 3 It was interesting. Trump was on Newsmax last night.

Speaker 3 I'm going to spare people the audio of his voice, but he's talking to Greg Kelly, who's maybe the craziest Newsmax anchor, which is competitive category.

Speaker 3 And Kelly had a rare moment of lucidity and asked him about Russia dragging their feet. Trump said, You know, I don't know if they are.

Speaker 3 I mean, I'll let you know at a certain point, but I think that Russia wants to see an end to it. But it could be they're dragging their feet.
I've done it over the years, you know.

Speaker 3 I don't want to sign a contract. I want to sort of stay in the game, but maybe I don't want to do it quite.
I'm not sure.

Speaker 3 And he goes on to say that he's encouraged by the fact that Russia had surrounded the Ukrainian troops and that they didn't kill all of them and that he gets credit for that.

Speaker 40 Yeah, which never happened. The Ukrainian troops were not encircled in Kursk.
The Ukrainian military has been quite clear about this. Our own military has come out and said this is not the case.

Speaker 40 Our own intelligence community has come out and said this is not the case. But he maintains that this is happening.

Speaker 40 And the only people who claim that this is happening are the Russians and Putin in particular, right?

Speaker 40 And, you know, this idea that, oh, well, you know, the way that vladimir is thinking is is just the way i was thinking you know as a real estate developer as a shady real estate developer tough negotiations in in you know in the closing room and all this no

Speaker 40 no you know and this is the problem with steve witkoff you you have these sort of tender-headed outer borough you know goombas who made a lot of money in developing properties in New York and beyond or the Middle East in Witkoff's case.

Speaker 40 And they think that they, you know, they have found their equal in a Russian dictator who was trained as a KGB case officer. And I mean, this is terrifying to me.
Witkoff, you know,

Speaker 40 he sort of reminds me of Armin Hammond, you know, the industrialist, the pharmaceuticals guy in the 1920s who became so besotted with this.

Speaker 3 I thought you were talking about Army Hammer.

Speaker 40 The Army Hammer is related to that family, yeah. But these guys were, I mean, so.

Speaker 3 He was like eating the flesh of the women, though. You know, know,

Speaker 40 before that, his great-grandfather was known as Lenin's favorite capitalist.

Speaker 40 This is the guy who essentially enabled the Soviets and the Cheka, which is the forerunner to the KGB, to do money laundering and to move things into the West when there was no diplomatic recognition.

Speaker 40 This guy does not have any kind of independence of mind anymore.

Speaker 40 He is not curious. He is not skeptical.
He is not critically minded when it comes to what the Russians are telling him. He goes to Moscow.

Speaker 40 Putin releases this American school teacher as a goodwill gesture and dazzles him, charms him, makes him think that this is his best friend he's been waiting for his entire life.

Speaker 40 I mean, he's literally said, we have a great relationship, and I think he's behaving and acting in good faith, all of which is not true, of course, but he has convinced himself. And so, again,

Speaker 40 let's go to what the kind of MAGA fallback position is here. People will say, well, yeah, yeah, it's Russian talking points, but he's just being clever.

Speaker 40 He's flattering Putin to get Putin to do things that we want him to do, right? This is tough negotiation. No, no, he sincerely believes what he's being sold.

Speaker 40 And I mean, on whose behalf is he really negotiating now? He sounds like Russia's special envoy.

Speaker 3 And Putin hasn't given us anything. And this is part of the

Speaker 3 reason why Trump, I think, has to flatter himself with the idea that he saved the surrounded Kursk soldiers. Because it's like, we're not actually making Putin give anything up.

Speaker 3 The Ukrainians haven't gotten anything yet out of this whole deal. So if you create a fake story where you saved a bunch of Ukrainians, like that's how you, I tell you, even the imaginary ledger.

Speaker 3 So just one more thing. There's a kind of a tie between these two stories that the Russians have been supportive of the Houthis.

Speaker 3 And I do think that that adds to kind of the absurdity of it all, that Witkoff was in Russia. So anyway, close us out on either of those.

Speaker 40 Not just supporting the Houthis, but providing them with targeting data to go after commercial vessels in the region, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Speaker 40 So yes, I mean, Russia has a strategic relationship with Iran, which is the patron of the Houthis, which has armed the Houthis and prop them up.

Speaker 40 This is the kind of weird sort of dynamic, I guess, that's taking place in Trump world, which is they're very pro-Israel.

Speaker 40 They want to get tough on Iran, threaten to bomb the hell out of Iran's nuclear program, go after Hamas, go after Hezbollah, go after the Houthis, put the onus on Iran.

Speaker 40 But they don't want to hear that doing that sort of upsets the apple cart with their new best friends, the Russians, Russians, right? Or they've managed to kind of keep these two ledgers separate.

Speaker 40 And, you know, it reminds me, frankly, of term one,

Speaker 40 when that great strategic genius, Michael Flynn, I mean, his grand design was exactly this, to separate, to cleave Tehran away from Moscow and for us to befriend the Russians to do counter-terrorism jointly.

Speaker 40 And we all saw how that worked out. Fundamentally, the Russians don't care that much about their allies and partners.
We've seen this now in Syria, right?

Speaker 40 I mean, Putin kind of shrugged when Bashar al-Assa's regime just,

Speaker 40 it didn't crumble, it just evaporated. And now he's trying to do deals with HTS, the new government in Damascus, to keep the Russian military infrastructure in place there.

Speaker 40 So the Russians have no problem throwing their own friends under the bus. They do this all the time.

Speaker 40 But the biggest strategic objective that they have is to get the United States to do this realignment, right?

Speaker 40 Abandon our allies in Europe, abandon the Ukrainians, and basically be open for business with the Russians and frankly invite their intelligence officers back to American soil, which is what Marco Rubio is more or less saying when he says we're going to start reopening their embassies and consulates here.

Speaker 3 Well, hopefully they're too incompetent to achieve their goals of au rapprochement with Russia. I guess that's the best thing we've got working for us right now.
All right. Thank you, my boys.

Speaker 3 I do need to, I should just say, my friend Jamie Kerchik wrote a very in-depth piece. on the Army Hammer cannibalism accusations, and they were overstated.

Speaker 3 And I don't mean to kink shame on here so i i apologize to army armand hammer seems like was a little credulous his grandfather but army you know i think maybe got the brunt of some bad some bad media well the whole the whole hammer family going back in the 20s and 30s uh just deeply deeply compromised by the soviets uh so yeah army i mean hey i i i thought he was the star in um what was that movie that made call me by your name yeah i thought he was better than than timote but uh okay michael you're not gonna be invited back onto the pod if there's any Timothy slander.

Speaker 3 No, no Shalom A slander on the pod. All right, everybody, that's Michael Weiss.
He'll be back soon. Crazy shit's happening every week.
Up next, Ben Smith.

Speaker 3 Ah,

Speaker 44 greetings for my bath, festive friends.

Speaker 5 The holidays are overwhelming, but I'm tackling this season with PayPal and making the most of my money, getting 5% cash back when I pay in four.

Speaker 46 No fees, no interest.

Speaker 49 I used it to get this portable spa with jets.

Speaker 51 Now the bubbles can cling to my sculpted but pruny body.

Speaker 52 Make the most of your money this holiday with PayPal.

Speaker 3 Save the offer in the app.

Speaker 53 N'1231, see paypal.com/slash promo terms.

Speaker 54 Points can be renewed for cash more paying for subject to terms and approval.

Speaker 43 PayPal Inc. at MLS 910-457.

Speaker 9 Get Ready for Malice, a twisted new drama starring Jack Whitehall, David DeCovney, and Carice Van Houten.

Speaker 14 Jack Whitehall plays Adam, a charming manny infiltrates the wealthy Tanner family with a hidden motive to destroy them.

Speaker 21 This edge-of-your-seat revenge thriller unravels a deliciously dark mystery in a world full of wealth, secrets, and betrayal.

Speaker 26 Malice will constantly keep you on your toes.

Speaker 29 Why is Adam after the Tanner family?

Speaker 31 What lengths will he go to?

Speaker 33 One thing's for sure, the past never stays buried, so keep your enemies close.

Speaker 37 Watch Malice, all episodes now streaming exclusively on Prime Video.

Speaker 3 All right, we are back with my buddy Ben Smith. He is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Semaphore.
He also co-hosts the Mixed Signals podcast. I was probably the best guest on that podcast so far.

Speaker 3 It's had a pretty good slate of guests, though, but, you know, I'm at Good Pod. Ben, what do you think? Am I on the podium?

Speaker 41 You or Anthony Fauci? The listeners are divided.

Speaker 3 Me or Fauci. I mean, Fauci has a lot of skills that I don't have, like, and a lot of experience that I don't have.

Speaker 3 I think in the podcast space might be the one area where I have on podcasting basketball.

Speaker 3 This wasn't really the topic when we had initially planned to talk, but, you know, I had Jeff Goldberg on yesterday, and we were talking about what he should do. I saw.

Speaker 41 You're not his lawyer. It was

Speaker 3 the Houthi Small Group PC chat, but it was worth thinking about.

Speaker 3 And I think think that the fact that he was weighing what to do was evidenced by the fact that he released the text about an hour ago this morning before we're taping.

Speaker 3 And you had kind of a similar kind of quandary where you were dealing with lawyers and national security officials and classified information when you're at BuzzFeed.

Speaker 3 You're running BuzzFeed and you guys had the steel dossier and you ended up publishing it in its entirety.

Speaker 3 And so I'm just, I'm wondering if you have any kind of insight on what Goldberg was going through and how you think they handled it.

Speaker 41 Yeah, I mean, I think Jeffrey, you know, I think Jeffrey has a stronger impulse to take national, to defer to national security concerns than a lot of journalists do, actually.

Speaker 41 I mean, I don't think he had any obligation to keep those secrets, which had been texted to him.

Speaker 41 And he was sort of asking the Trump people, like, hey, are you really sure that you want me to release this? Because they were out there daring him to release it.

Speaker 41 I mean, they were sort of, but they basically put him in a position where they called him a liar and said the stuff wasn't real and wasn't secret.

Speaker 41 So at some point, you got to, I mean, there's not really, they were really basically asking him to release it.

Speaker 41 And I think, you know, the Steel dossier was different in that it was, it was authentic, but we didn't know if it was true.

Speaker 41 And the debate about releasing that was, what do you do with a document like that where everybody's talking about it?

Speaker 41 It's being used by the government as kind of a public document, but it contains a bunch of unverified allegations.

Speaker 3 The call was easier for Jeff, is what you're saying. Because it's verified and true.
We know it happened because the building collapsed in Yemen.

Speaker 41 And actually, I do think there's a reasonable question to ask often when kind of quote-unquote national security secrets are declassified, national security officials warn of dire, dire consequences.

Speaker 41 So you do occasionally see really awful consequences, but more often you don't.

Speaker 41 I mean, I think one of you know, WikiLeaks is a really interesting example where there was a lot of warnings about the terrible things that would happen when these cables leaked.

Speaker 41 And they were very disruptive and probably, I think, damaging to American power and prestige. But I'm not sure

Speaker 41 that there was a physical danger to people that

Speaker 41 a lot of people anticipated. So I don't know.

Speaker 41 In this case, I mean, this is very rare that you get something where had it leaked, obviously the you know the houthi's friends would have told them hey get out of that building and i i think it's not totally clear that didn't happen right i mean the houthi's friends the russians may have done that we just don't know right and and who knows like what anti-aircraft like it could have even been worse than that like getting getting out of that building i guess conceivably what about the legal aspect of this i mean i do you know as

Speaker 3 jeffrey you know was asking me whether you know i was the right person to be giving him legal advice on whether or not that he should be releasing these texts yesterday on the pub yeah the the main legal aspect is that no one should take your legal advice or mine.

Speaker 3 Yeah, no, and I and I agree. Nobody should take our legal advice.
But you dealt with all these guys, all these lawyers.

Speaker 3 I'm just kind of wondering, give us a little insight into what those conversations were like. It is kind of unprecedented.

Speaker 3 Both of these situations, you know, you talk to experts, but they're like, it's a judgment call, partly, right?

Speaker 41 Yeah, I mean, you know, the tradition in the United States, unlike most countries, is that journalists who have obtained this information are, you know, in a legitimate way, have no legal restriction, no prior restraint, no legal restrictions against publishing.

Speaker 41 In Britain, for instance, the government will send out these notices to the press saying, you cannot publish this. They can't do that here.

Speaker 41 And actually, I had an experience that I found very somewhat inspiring back when I was at BuzzFeed, where we had a story that was, you know, where the CIA had a really legitimate concern.

Speaker 41 It was about a Russian defector, really legitimate concern that

Speaker 41 if we reported on a person's whereabouts, that would put them in physical danger.

Speaker 41 And all Mike Pompeo could do was ask me and our investigations editor over for a cup of coffee and make the case to us. And that was it.
And you're like, you know what?

Speaker 41 This is a pretty amazing country. We're the most powerful intelligence official in the world.
All he can do is ask you politely.

Speaker 41 Like, that is a huge prerogative of the press, something that we do, I think, take pretty seriously, that Jeffrey takes, I think, extremely seriously.

Speaker 41 But all that said, I do think there's always been an element of the government that feels that that's insane, that we should have something more like the European model where the government could just step in and censor the press.

Speaker 41 And I think that a lot of journalists anticipate that at some point you'll see a national security prosecution of a journalist.

Speaker 41 You know, usually, I think not over necessarily publishing it per se, but over how they obtained the information in this administration.

Speaker 41 I mean, when you listen to how the Trump folks talk about the press, I think that seems like a reasonable prediction. It's something people are really worried about.

Speaker 3 I mean, as Walter Sobchak said, the Supreme Court has roundly rejected prior restraint, but we've got a new Supreme Court now, you know, so you do never know.

Speaker 3 I think that when you looked at the discussion yesterday at the Senate Intel hearing, that was, boy, horrible timing for Ratcliffe and Tulsi there yesterday.

Speaker 3 The Democratic senators asked them point blank about this. And it was notable that they would not say, no, he would not be prosecuted for this.

Speaker 3 Like there was no defense of the free speech rights of Jeff Coldberg yesterday by the Trump administration, you know, on this point. And so.
I mean, it's an unusual situation, right?

Speaker 41 I mean, where you're handed a bunch of classified documents. And an unusual thing about the United States, where you have no responsibility as a citizen to protect them, to be be honest.

Speaker 41 What a great country.

Speaker 3 You might say fist bump. Yeah, that's what I think.
Flag emoji, fire emoji to the U.S.

Speaker 3 Exactly, exactly.

Speaker 44 Greetings from my bath, festive friends.

Speaker 5 The holidays are overwhelming, but I'm tackling this season with PayPal and making the most of my money, getting 5% cash back when I pay in four.

Speaker 46 No fees, no interest.

Speaker 49 I used it to get this portable spa with jets.

Speaker 51 Now the bubbles can cling to my sculpted but pruny body.

Speaker 52 Make the most of your money this holiday with PayPal.

Speaker 3 Save the offer in the app.

Speaker 53 N'1231, see paypal.com slash promo terms.

Speaker 54 Points can be redeemed for cash and more paying for subject to terms and approval.

Speaker 43 PayPal Inc. at MLS 910-457.

Speaker 9 Get ready for Malice, a twisted new drama starring Jack Whitehall, David DeCovney, and Carice Van Houten.

Speaker 14 Jack Whitehall plays Adam, a charming manny infiltrates the wealthy Tanner family with a hidden motive to destroy them.

Speaker 21 This edge-of-your-seat revenge thriller unravels a deliciously dark mystery in a world full of wealth, secrets, and betrayal.

Speaker 26 Malice will constantly keep you on your toes.

Speaker 29 Why is Adam after the Tanner family?

Speaker 31 What lengths will he go to?

Speaker 33 One thing's for sure, the past never stays buried, so keep your enemies close.

Speaker 37 Watch Malice, all episodes now streaming exclusively on Prime Video.

Speaker 3 I do want to kind of like transition this to what we were actually talking about, which is kind of how the media has changed in Trump 2.0 versus 1.0 and how it's matured.

Speaker 3 I'm wondering what your top kind of insights are on that.

Speaker 41 I mean, you know, honestly, I was thinking about that before coming on this show, and I was listening, as I often do in the morning, to Steve Bannon's War Room, which is where I heard you interview Goldberg.

Speaker 41 He was on Steve Bannon's War Room because I didn't catch the bulwark yesterday.

Speaker 3 Bannon's a mutual fan of both of us. I had a lengthy tribute to your reporter, Dave Weigel, on a podcast like a week or two ago that I was listening to at an airport.

Speaker 3 I told Weigel, Weigel, I was like, you got like a 12-minute ode to Dave Weigel of Semaphore on the Bannon War Room. It's an interesting, it's an interesting show.

Speaker 41 Dave Weigel's a great, a great reporter who saw a lot of this stuff coming. I mean, I think Bannon is alert to who sort of understood that populism was a real thing.

Speaker 41 And he's also, he's very preoccupied with you. You'll be glad to know.
I'm sure he'll pick this up and put it on his show. So we'll complete the circle.

Speaker 41 But I think what that is to say is that there is really, I mean, I think for all the years and years and our whole careers of talking about and being involved in a new media that was rising and changing things, it's here.

Speaker 41 And I think when you look at the conflict between the Trump and the White House press corps, I mean, I do think it's very important that the press sort of retain prerogatives and not hand control of facts over to people in power.

Speaker 41 That said, Trump is not the reason that the White House press corps and the White House Correspondence Association, you know, is in real trouble.

Speaker 41 It's because, you know, so organization has been dominated for nearly a century by these broadcast outlets that are no longer all that relevant and are being replaced by a kind of chaotic new group of digital outlets.

Speaker 41 And there's no, you know, Trump may have sort of pulled the last brick out of the wall, but he's not the reason that there's a crisis there. The reason is this vast, rapid technological shift.

Speaker 41 And it feels like Trump was the thing that broke the dam, but he wasn't really the cause.

Speaker 3 And it really is different than 2019 at this point. I mean, I was...
I've been using this analogy of a 90s movies reference elder millennial now, obviously.

Speaker 3 So Men in Black, you remember how Tommy Lee Jones said the real news was the tabloids? Yeah, like that is kind of like true.

Speaker 3 Like, you know, obviously, our friends Maggie and John Swan and Caputo, like the traditional outlets are getting scoops, but there are times when you're either listening to Bannon or I was watching the Newsmax interview last night, and Greg Kelly would say something about like something that he's hearing.

Speaker 3 And you're like, it's kind of true, right?

Speaker 3 Like at some level, that like there are certain things that are known and covered in like the MAGA media sphere that are a more accurate like view of what is happening in the administration than what you see elsewhere, or at least a more influential one.

Speaker 3 I don't know. What do you make of that?

Speaker 41 Yeah, right, no, I think that's right. That's who they're talking to and that's what they're watching.
I mean, I would say, and that's a source of strength for them.

Speaker 41 I mean, it does, it's also extremely dangerous for them, I think, in a moment.

Speaker 41 You know, when they're in there in this early, they're on this high, they're, you know, in a bubble of self-congratulation. And obviously there's a risk when you do that.

Speaker 41 You don't, you know, you don't take any signal. And I think on this story in particular.

Speaker 3 And the ridiculous Mike Waltz defense that maybe Jeff Goldberg hacked the chain.

Speaker 3 You would probably have a better spin if you felt like you had a more challenging counterparty.

Speaker 41 Yeah. And the coverage in the sort of magazine tends to be like the White House is fighting back against this media campaign in the Democrats.

Speaker 41 And that's all true, but also like what happened factually, what's going on here gets a little swept away.

Speaker 3 Yeah, you were asking Megan Kelly about this. And I recommend people watch your interview.

Speaker 3 It was a semaphore conference? Was it a

Speaker 41 media summit?

Speaker 3 Yeah, you had a media summit with Megan Kelly. And at some level, there were points of the interview where it was, where you seemed a little scared of her, like you were kind of interviewing, like

Speaker 3 you're like on this, like you're walking down the street, and there's somebody that's like drunk and carrying a knife and starts yelling at you.

Speaker 3 And you're just kind of like, whoa, okay, whatever you want, but okay. She was unhinged.

Speaker 41 I don't think she was unhinged. I think she, she,

Speaker 41 she's one of a handful of like people who

Speaker 3 are extremely capable sort of like like broadcasters who are good at owning people who cross them on air and i didn't feel that i was necessarily going to win like a shouting match with megan kelly so i thought it'd be interesting to she was totally she was hinged i agree with you she was not unhinged i want to correct that she was just she was hinged but she was just going to say she could have gone anywhere she could yeah she was going to say what she was going to say and she could have gone anywhere and um you know it was it's not like a typical restrained interview she's unrestrained yeah i mean that's her that's her brand and her strength i would say the interesting thing about the interview, though, is, I mean, she's obviously obsessed with her numbers and all this, but she's like, my show, her show alone is getting CNN level numbers on YouTube.

Speaker 3 Like everything on the CNN network. Combined.
Combined. And so, again, that is a development from Trump 1.0.
And it really was just Fox. You know, it was just Fox.

Speaker 3 And then there are these other little outlets that serve like the MAGA sickos, you know, they're like very online MAGA people, right? But like now it's changed. The power dynamic has changed.

Speaker 41 Yeah, Megan Kelly, Tucker, Bannon's War Room drives like phone calls and book sales, like whatever, like the digital media metrics are all kind of nonsense, notoriously.

Speaker 41 But there are these sort of real metrics, like can you light up the switchboard? Can you sell books?

Speaker 41 You know, and that's, you know, those are that now increasingly shows, I would say, like this one and diminishingly. you know, television, broadcast television, I would say, with the exception of Fox.

Speaker 3 And Nicole. We're selling books on this podcast.
That's why, that's why Andy's going to be on next. Andy's Both of us have gone,

Speaker 3 you know, have gone way back with Breitbart, as you mentioned earlier, with Bannon back when he was at Breitbart.

Speaker 3 You wrote for 7-4 about kind of the challenges about this, like the growing up, the coming into adulthood of mega media, where it's like you can become establishment mega, where you have like responsibilities and you're getting outflanked by the people that are using the tactics that you'd use to succeed.

Speaker 3 Talk about that.

Speaker 41 Yeah, I mean, it's funny because I spent a bunch of time with Matt Boyle, who's Breitbart's Washington Bureau Chief of longstanding, and a bit with John Carney,

Speaker 41 who's their finance writer. Carney was saying to me, you know, I sort of realized if I tweet like tariffs are coming, the market's going to dip to 100 points.

Speaker 41 And so it's like this weight of responsibility that I did not previously have.

Speaker 41 And Boyle, I think, is constantly in a situation where Breitbart's readers and fans are saying, hey, I saw this thing on X that is totally made up. Can you confirm it?

Speaker 41 And then annoyed at them and disappointed when they can't confirm it. I saw them running AP fact checks on USAID the other day, you know, on breitbart.com.

Speaker 41 And I think I would say they are still fundamentally committed to supporting Donald Trump and occasionally perhaps holding him accountable to being the best version of Donald Trump.

Speaker 41 Maybe they're in their adolescence. I think there is some world where these outlets are sort of forced by reality.

Speaker 41 to actually Breitbart, which is kind of an attack machine and, you know, very aggressively partisan, does try to get facts right. And I think that's, you know, getting forced to get facts right.

Speaker 41 Most of the time. I'm like, which is just not true on X.
On X, like the best way to monetize your account is to make things up and get them retweeted. Like, facts do have a certain kind of gravity.

Speaker 41 And you can imagine an evolution toward a kind of partisan, but like British-style partisan media. Don't think that's where we are right now.

Speaker 3 Yeah, no, we're seeing it, and it's the danger. I think this is a big warning sign for the left right now.

Speaker 3 Look, I have a lot of criticisms for you and your pals and the mainstream media's treatment of Trump, normalization, the both sides. I'm sympathetic to all of the criticisms.
It's tough.

Speaker 3 I think it's a big challenge covering him. Like when somebody's like constantly lying, you know, it presents a new challenge from covering politicians that lie occasionally.

Speaker 3 But I think the Democrat, like there's a be careful what you wish for with the Democratic base, which we saw during after the Biden debate, which is like that there is now an emerging kind of left-wing media ecosystem where you also can do pretty well by not telling the truth.

Speaker 3 And that's true in the influencer space and in the YouTube space where it's like, you know, I remember after the Biden debate, remember he does that press conference on foreign policy.

Speaker 3 And I was turning on to one of the fellow, I'll just say it, I was turning on to Midas Touch to see how they were covering it over on YouTube.

Speaker 3 And they were like, this was the greatest demonstration of knowledge and skill that we've ever seen by a president in a foreign policy press conference. And, you know, those guys are succeeding.
And

Speaker 3 that gets us to a danger. Well, I'm not worried about getting out flanked.
I'm saying it takes us to a dangerous place where

Speaker 3 you got to be careful what you wish for on what replaces the existing incumbents. I'm

Speaker 3 seeing it, and I think that on the left you might see it too, I guess is my point.

Speaker 41 Yeah, I mean, I think to put a point on it in a way, and this is, I'm stealing an idea from my colleague Max Tani, but I think that there was a belief among Democrats that, well, like the New York Times was Democrats' partisan outlet.

Speaker 41 Like, you know, you rely on the New York Times. And

Speaker 41 what the New York Times is going to do is expose what Trump is doing and write factually about it with perhaps its heartbeating on the left, but basically with the facts. And that will then,

Speaker 41 people will see that and they'll change their minds and they'll vote him out. And I think there's a sense now on the left, well, that didn't work.

Speaker 41 And so what we need are hyper-partisan shows that create a bubble in the way that the right has created a bubble.

Speaker 41 And I think that's in some way what's driving this growth of this booming new hyper-partisan left-wing sphere that's going to turn you into the New York Times and turn the New York Times into the Wall Street Journal.

Speaker 3 We'll see what Annie has to say about all this up next. Thank you, Ben Smith.
Come back soon. It's good to see you.
All right, brother. Up next, Annie Carney.

Speaker 44 Ah, greetings for my bath, festive friends.

Speaker 5 The holidays are overwhelming, but I'm tackling this season with PayPal and making the most of my money, getting 5% cash back when I pay in four.

Speaker 46 No fees, no interest.

Speaker 49 I used it to get this portable spa with jets.

Speaker 51 Now the bubbles can cling to my sculpted but pruny body.

Speaker 52 Make the most of your money this holiday with PayPal.

Speaker 3 Save the offer in the app.

Speaker 53 Ends 1231, see paypal.com slash promo terms.

Speaker 54 Points can be renewed for cash and more paying for subject to terms and approval.

Speaker 43 PayPal Inc. at MLS 910-457.

Speaker 9 Get ready for Malice, a twisted new drama starring Jack Whitehall, David DeCovney, and Carice Van Houten.

Speaker 14 Jack Whitehall plays Adam, a charming manny infiltrates the the wealthy Tanner family with a hidden motive to destroy them.

Speaker 21 This edge-of-your-seat revenge thriller unravels a deliciously dark mystery in a world full of wealth, secrets, and betrayal.

Speaker 26 Malice will constantly keep you on your toes.

Speaker 29 Why is Adam after the Tanner family?

Speaker 31 What lengths will he go to?

Speaker 33 One thing's for sure: the past never stays buried, so keep your enemies close.

Speaker 37 Watch Malice, all episodes now streaming exclusively on Prime Video.

Speaker 3 All right, we are back. Segment three.

Speaker 3 She's a congressional correspondent for the New York Times and co-author of the brand new book, Madhouse: How Donald Trump, MAGA Mean Girls, a Former Used Car Salesman, a Florida Nepo Baby, and a Man with Wraths in His Walls Broke Congress.

Speaker 3 It's Annie Carney. Is Matt Gates the Nepo baby? Who's the Nepo baby?

Speaker 55 The Nepo baby is Gates. His father was Don Gates, a powerful Florida state senator.
But good job. Most people don't guess that.

Speaker 3 Oh, yeah, no, I know Don. Me and Don go way back, actually.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 boy, if you want to understand how Matt became Matt,

Speaker 3 you should go find some YouTube videos of Don Gates. He is a character.

Speaker 3 I wanted to ask, before we get to the book stuff, and maybe there's nothing here, but so Mike Waltz was in this mad house, and he was kind of a, you know, one of the more normal characters.

Speaker 3 I had Tom Malinowski on, and he was talking about how Waltz,

Speaker 3 about how fucking pissed and disappointed he is with Waltz, you know, because he was like the one that he thought was a responsible one on national security.

Speaker 3 And like, here he is now at the center of this tornado, you know, around the Houthi small group chat.

Speaker 3 And I think part of the reason that he is like advancing the preposterous crazy about how Goldberg might have hacked him, et cetera, is because like he knows that he has to try really hard to fit in.

Speaker 3 And I'm just, I'm wondering if you have any thoughts about Waltz or just broadly, if you kind kind of observed this like kind of trend of the people who are more normal and aren't preternaturally MAGA feeling like they have to, you know, kind of really go overboard to fit in.

Speaker 55 That's a good question. I mean, Waltz, I didn't cover him.
He's not a character in the book, but there's two kinds of Republicans in Congress.

Speaker 55 Like there's those who were kind of the more responsible streak,

Speaker 55 and most of those people left.

Speaker 55 And those who stayed, you know, have made the decision that they want to rise and have power in this tribal party and that means going all in with Trump basically there's not a lot of room for breaking with him so Mike Waltz got chosen to be the national security advisor and now you know I mean has to completely toe the party line so if you're still there you are towing one line which is

Speaker 55 you know, attacking the mainstream media, attacking Jeff Goldber for sneaking onto the chat. And we see them do it in different ways.

Speaker 55 Like there's Elise Stefanik is a character in the book who, you know, has become emblematic to a lot of people of like, she's been the future of the party since it was George W. Bush's party.

Speaker 55 She's still the future of the party. She just completely transformed herself to be the future of the Trump party.

Speaker 55 And then there's like a Nancy Mace who criticized Trump after January 6th in her first floor speech, who, you know, told me in the summer of 2023, if Trump becomes the nominee, I am pulling myself down from the airwaves.

Speaker 55 I will just disappear. That clearly didn't happen.
And who, like, at one point a few years ago, looked like kind of like a unicorn. Like, she beat a Trump-backed challenger.

Speaker 55 She was sort of moderate on social issues.

Speaker 55 And that, like, she talked a lot to us for the book and, like, literally said out, said the quiet part out loud, being like, I have some really tough decisions to make.

Speaker 55 I want to move up, and I can't do that and be anti-Trump.

Speaker 55 So I'd say Mike Waltz is like, yes, he knows he's in the you should know better caucus, but there's only one playbook, which is what he's doing.

Speaker 3 They said that the only Nixon could go to China, right? Because if a liberal did, they would have been, you know, called a communist.

Speaker 3 There is almost like this element of this that the people who are OG MAGA have like a little bit more rope to kind of be responsible. And like the old kind of Republicans have to act crazy to fit in.

Speaker 3 Right.

Speaker 55 It's like the zeal, like the zeal of the converted, right? Like Jim Jordan, he's a made man in MAGA world.

Speaker 55 You don't see Jim Jordan trotting to the courthouse to stand outside the federal courthouse to show Trump how loyal he is. Like, he does not have to prove himself.
Some of the others do.

Speaker 3 Let's talk about Mace a little bit more because I thought this segment of the book was

Speaker 3 the one that gave me a chuckle. So she really did, and we talked about this at the time here at the Bulwark.
It just was kind of obvious that she thought that she could be VP.

Speaker 55 Yeah, which is crazy to me because she had approximately 0% chance of ever being VP. Like, Elise Stefanik, yeah, not likely, but not a zero percent chance.

Speaker 55 Nancy Mays, after she had, you know, criticized Trump after January 6th, like a 0% chance.

Speaker 3 But it shows like how intentional this stuff is, right? Like the pivot of these people.

Speaker 3 Like she, like, she went from saying that, oh, if he's a nominee, I'm going to be out to basically saying, okay, I'm going to completely reorient my media strategy to go on shows in the hopes that Trump sees me in the hopes that, I don't know, he likes my smile and I get to be VP.

Speaker 55 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 55 So, like, I spent a ton of time with her for the book, kind of just embedded with her a little bit. And what happened was it was like the summer of 2023.

Speaker 55 Her name had been floated in a political article about like a short list for Trump's VP. I was in the office with her when she like read this story.

Speaker 55 I could watch like the dollar signs in the eyeballs almost like her mind was off to the races. Like, I could see her picturing possibly like first woman president in the mirror.
So,

Speaker 55 and she was like kind of open and talking it out out loud. And I witnessed like the justification that so many people make, which is like, well,

Speaker 55 adults in the room, it's better if I'm there than I'm not there. And, but it was like a little delusional because,

Speaker 55 as I said, she was not on any actual shortlist for VP ever.

Speaker 3 Did she ever break character when you're in? I mean, it does feel like she has a new character.

Speaker 3 As you read in the book, she's got a bunch of tattoos now.

Speaker 55 Okay, so the Nancy Mace, yes, she became a different person. And I don't fully grasp what happened to her around the speaker's vote and a horrible breakup

Speaker 55 that sounds very traumatic. But

Speaker 55 she got nine tattoos all over her body. And the funny thing about the tattoos is that when I told this anecdote to some other people in Trump World, this just shows you how petty.

Speaker 55 this world is and how it's all about like I told this anecdote to a few people who don't like Mace

Speaker 55 and they're they were so excited to tell Trump because they said Trump hates tattoos I can't wait to tell Trump like it's all about Nancy Mace's tattoos were leverage to use against her standing with Trump because he doesn't like tattoos I mean I that was like fascinating to me and the Democrats that you talked to like

Speaker 3 Have you just noticed, and you've been covering this for a while, just an evolution from, you know, I feel like during the first Trump, there was a lot of like, oh, we can work with these guys behind the scenes.

Speaker 3 They're very rational. Like, they just have to do this and we're going to, et cetera, et cetera.
I feel like that has kind of changed, right?

Speaker 55 It has changed. I mean, look, at the leadership level,

Speaker 55 Johnson, Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, and Hakeem Jeffries, the minority leader, actually came in with a great relationship. They are both men of faith.

Speaker 1 They both... Both kind of corny.

Speaker 55 It's corny, but they found a lot in common and they actually like trusted each other and liked each other. And then that relationship is sort of broken.

Speaker 55 You know, as you recall, in the Congress that we wrote about in the book, Democrats actually saved Mike Johnson's job when Marjorie Taylor Greene was going to oust him because he brought a bill to send money to Ukraine to the House floor.

Speaker 55 So there was

Speaker 55 like actually behind the scenes, they were working together. They felt like they could be honest with each other.

Speaker 55 And that sort of broke down over the Trump's budget resolution, which Jeffries and Johnson negotiated together. and then Trump just

Speaker 55 like it became clear to Jeffries that there's really no point.

Speaker 3 The one from during the lame duck.

Speaker 55 Yes, the lame duck, that there's really no, Johnson can't stand by his word because Trump is in control.

Speaker 55 So, like, there's really no point in negotiating with Johnson when it can, like, it just all fell apart.

Speaker 55 So, there's like the idea that they can work behind the scenes and work together kind of has fallen apart with Trump because it's clear that Johnson doesn't actually have any power or control over his members.

Speaker 55 It's all just related to Trump's control.

Speaker 3 Maybe even a little bit different on the Senate side.

Speaker 3 I guess Chuck Schumer might be the exception to what I'm saying, given that what you've said it, what you've said in your book, you know, about him thinking the Trump fever could break.

Speaker 3 There's in this reporting about Chuck talking about in the gym how I talk to Republicans. Maybe a little different over there.
I don't know. What do you think?

Speaker 55 Yeah, I mean, look, that's a very old school. The Senate is a little more still like that.

Speaker 55 It's collegial. There's only 100 of them.
A lot of them have been around forever and do have these. Like the senators love to do

Speaker 55 funny pairings on legislation, like Elizabeth Warren and J.D. Vance on like clawbacks for banks and Fetterman and Cruz on a building.
Like they do do these, they do like to do bipartisan legislation.

Speaker 55 But Schumer's view, which he articulated to us many times, so it's like a deeply felt view of his, is just that

Speaker 55 Trump is an evil sorcerer. That was his quote,

Speaker 55 who is a quote, turd that the Republican Party will reject and then it will revert to being the old Republican Party.

Speaker 55 And like I was driving around Brooklyn with him at one point and he was like, it was after the border security deal fell through in the Senate.

Speaker 55 That was like the border security and Ukraine funding deal together. that fell apart because Trump killed it.

Speaker 55 Chuck Schumer was like, look, there's 10 senators that actually hate Ukraine and would vote that way anyway.

Speaker 55 And then there's the rest that without Trump they would flip and want to support Ukraine and his hope was that like this flip would happen and I just don't I think that's out of touch with where Democratic voters are and where a lot of his caucus is at this point like most Democrats and voters have come around to the idea that like MAGA

Speaker 55 is bigger than Trump there's no reverting like there's really no evidence that anything is going back.

Speaker 3 Yeah, that's correct, actually. It's out of touch with reality.
You know, I mean, it's also out of touch with where Democratic voters are, but it's just out of touch with

Speaker 3 reality. I mean, just look at what happened in the primary.
Yeah.

Speaker 55 So I don't know. I mean, maybe Schimmer's saying that because that's what he would like to happen.
And it's like wishful thinking, but it's not.

Speaker 55 Yeah, it's out of touch with reality.

Speaker 3 I wonder what you make of the upcoming Congress.

Speaker 3 On the one hand, and the one we're in, the one hand, like they haven't done anything and they've done literally nothing. On the other hand,

Speaker 3 you know, we haven't seen the unruliness, you know, that you write about in this book,

Speaker 3 at least yet.

Speaker 3 You know, again, maybe that's just because

Speaker 3 the rubber hasn't really met the road on anything yet. I mean, like, the Trump is just legislating from the executive branch, like a wannabe king.

Speaker 3 And, like, we haven't, like, there hasn't been any major legislation passed, really. Yeah.
What do you make of that? Like, are the things you observed in the book, you know, there under the surface?

Speaker 3 You think Trump's like kind of holding it together tenuously?

Speaker 3 Or do you think maybe because Trump's in there, you know, you're a man with rats in the walls and all these car salesmen might behave for a couple years? What do you make of it?

Speaker 3 Yeah,

Speaker 55 last Congress was

Speaker 55 a complete shit show, as one person even told, Don Bacon told us we should name our book shit show.

Speaker 55 But you can't really promote a book with a curse word in the title, so we didn't. But it was just completely defined by Republicans feuding with each other.

Speaker 55 And it literally like ground the floor to a halt. This time,

Speaker 55 Trump is sort of uniting them. Like for instance,

Speaker 55 the short-term government funding bill that just passed the House unanimously, one Republican, Tom Smassey, who's like just his own person,

Speaker 55 voted for it. This is literally the same kind of short-term spending bill that they hate so much that they ousted Kevin McCarthy because of it.

Speaker 55 Like, and now Trump told them that he wants it, so they fall in line. So So, they are more united right now because of Trump.
He is holding it together, and no one wants to cross him.

Speaker 55 Like, his power over the party is like near total. So, there's really no room to end.

Speaker 55 So, they are more together. I'd say, like, the top line out of this Congress so far is that they've just ceded their power completely to the White House.

Speaker 55 Like, in this Jeff Goldberg group chat story, like, the Congress has is part of this story. They confirmed Pete Hegseff to be defense secretary.

Speaker 55 Like, they have some responsibility here for what's happening because they have happily just handed over the power to Trump.

Speaker 3 Well, not to be Justin Omash over here, but also we haven't declared war on Yemen. So, Congress also could

Speaker 3 take some power back on that side of things as well. They don't really seem to care about that.

Speaker 3 All right, Annie, it's good to see you. It's been too long.

Speaker 3 Go check out the book, Madhouse: How Donald Trump, Megamin Girls, Nick Gates, Other People Broke Congress.

Speaker 55 Thanks, Tim.

Speaker 3 We'll see you soon, girl. Bye.

Speaker 3 All right. Thanks so much to Michael Weiss, Ben Smith, and Annie Carney.
Let me know in the comments what y'all think about the triple show. We'll be back with one of our faves.

Speaker 3 Maybe there'll be tears tomorrow. Who knows? We're going to go along with a single guest.
I think you'll enjoy it. We'll see you all then.
Peace. She dropped a load on me before they close the door.
I

Speaker 3 I ain't crying for him in time to return solar. We on the ride forward, the reverse not working.
Sometimes we collide, the black sky full of supernovas and stars that die.

Speaker 3 No lie, I'm still rooting for us. Two foots in the sword, rhymes for us to conjoin us to the cosmic.
Spliff burning like crude oil, cool water drip like osmosis.

Speaker 3 I set the mood for you, you know the vibes

Speaker 3 Today I got time for it Run for it, five on me like I'm Bob Hurry for the tribe slime, mama mentality stars Falling out of the sky

Speaker 3 He was a star

Speaker 3 when I got him he was a star

Speaker 3 Sly told you that everybody is a star

Speaker 3 The only problem is some people haven't been put in the dipper and pulled back on the world

Speaker 3 Woke up on the west coast for the first time in my life. Drove cross country, but I remember those flights.
Genu flecked it when I heard the weed price. White boys with the weed pipes.

Speaker 3 Sunny days, sunny nights, mighty clouds and northern lights. I was always bright, so no sooner than we touched down.
I'm seeing how we could get home and be right.

Speaker 3 It's hard to live in the moment, but I guess I had a gift. Hawaii's so potent, zoning off bomb rips.
I paid at houses all summer, they paid by the shift. My boss was an enterprising white kid.

Speaker 3 Eagle-eyed everything you did. Shit, gig, but I didn't quit.
MJG and A Mall spitting out the whip. Spliffs with Keith at the tip.
It felt sleepy at night, but I like that.

Speaker 3 Felt like you could relax, like you could disappear. Like I wasn't surrounded by the past.
Months passed, and we going back. And in the back of my mind, the plan already hatched.

Speaker 3 The door panels already stashed. Illinois State Troopers just waiting for time and space to cross our path.
It's Daybreams that I love, where you might be controlling some of the thoughts.

Speaker 3 The green takes over, things are unraveling. The Bullark podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

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Speaker 1 This is Matt Rogers from Lost Culturalistos with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang.

Speaker 4 This is Bowen Yang from Lost Culturalistos with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang.

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