S2 Ep1007: Jeffrey Goldberg and Peter Wehner: What's Going on with Our National Security?

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Pickup fees may apply. Hello and welcome to the Bullwark podcast i'm your host tim miller we've got an atlantic double bill today first up the head boss editor-in-chief of the atlantic host of washington week on pbs and author of the biggest story in quite a while the trump team accidentally texted me it's war plans it's jeffrey goldberg How you doing, Jeff? I'm good.
Thanks for having me. I guess my first note here on the outline is, holy fuck, I want to know, just talk us through, you do this a little bit in the story, but where were you when the signal message from Mike Waltz, the National Security Advisor, came through? And walk me through how you kind of processed what was happening as he invited the entire national security team onto the group checks with you yeah quite randomly i was in salzburg austria let's put that aside okay 60th anniversary the sound of music that's all i'll say but i was in salzburg he invited me in to chat with him i've met him like i think twice in my life not recently probably of years ago.
But it didn't strike me as a crazy thing. He's the National Security Advisor.
I'm the editor of a magazine. I write about national security.
We probably agree on a lot of stuff, too. At least all of Mike.
Yeah, well, that's the issue. Marco, too, right? You know, I assume that things that come over the transom are fake, but there's no harm in saying to Mike Waltz, yeah, sure, here's my, I accept your message request and I'll find out if it's the real Mike Waltz or not.
That happens. A couple of days later, I'm added to the signal chat Houthi PC small group with a bunch of names, most of which are spelled out.
Some are not. Some are just initials, but including the CIA director, the secretary of defense, et cetera.
And then I'm 100% convinced it's a fake. 100%.
Because that doesn't happen. Somebody's setting me up.
Well, couldn't you just check to see if it was Mike Waltz's phone number? Don't you have his phone? No, I don't want to press any buttons. Right.
You don't want to accidentally leave the chat. Well, no.
I assume that this is a state actor or a non-state actor trying to, you know. I mean, and it's obviously more subtle than, this is UPS.
You have to give us your social security number unless we're not going to give you your packet. You know, this is some sophisticated thing going on.
You know, and Signal signal in the way it's designed, you can't

very easily from my limited skills here, very easily see what's going on. Or if the person in the group is not in your phone book, then you can't see who it is.
So anyway, what I just thought of some weird thing. I get a lot of weird things over the transom as do you every day.
It's like, all right, we're moving on.

And then over the next couple of days, it gets very, very strange. First, there's a, with a high degree of, you know, verisimilitude, there's a discussion about attacking Yemen and whether they should attack Yemen this weekend.
You know, it was, this is already late in the week. And I'm like, well, some AI is very clever at mimicking the policy positions or the ideological proclivities of J.D.
Vance. That's interesting.
Because J.D. was the one that was against in the text chain.
J.D. was the one who articulated it.
And by the way, I find this fascinating, and this is the stuff that interests me the most. I find it fascinating that J.D.
Vance is in the chat, not only saying that he disagrees with the president, but that he doesn't think the president understands the ramifications of the policy. That's interesting.
Well, it's newsworthy. I thought that was interesting too.
Trump doesn't understand it. He says that in a chain with 18 people and the editor of The Atlantic.
This is where it's kind of bold, right? I mean, he says it in a chain that includes half the cabinet. I'm exaggerating, but only slightly, maybe 30% of the cabinet, including, by the way, the senior most cabinet departments, the Secretary of State, Defense, Treasury are in there.
And he's like, I don't think the president really gets what's going on here. And he's making strong arguments that this is just, we're just doing Europe another favor and screw the Europeans.

And it's interesting, a conversation that's ostensibly about whether we start dropping serious bombs on the Houthis becomes more animated on the question of how bad the Europeans are.

Really bad or super bad, you know?

And that's where it goes. That's the Friday.
But on Saturday... Lowe's.
Hegs has said he loathes our Europeans. Yeah, no, and they did it all caps.
Europeans are pathetic, all caps, whatever. I mean, they're all sort of mimicking each other and mimicking the boss in that sense.
Saturday is when it becomes obviously totally bizarre, and I realize that I'm in something that, you know, as much as I enjoy national security investigative reporting, I don't need strike plans two hours before a launch. That's not, that should not be coming into my phone.
I mean, I take this stuff very, very seriously. And I take the, I take the responsibility not to get Americans killed very, very seriously.
And I'm sitting in a Safeway parking lot, and my phone contains now information that really four or five humans should know. Right? Detailed plans.
Who they're going to kill, when, what weapons. When.
Yeah, the when and the where are what's interesting in the weapons packages because what i deduce obviously what i deduced from this is that these are not uncrewed aircraft drones being used or missiles standoff missile platforms that they're talking about all i'm comfortable saying is that they're talking about crude aircraft being used in the coming hours to attack sites that I have to assume are protected by anti-aircraft batteries and other defensive weapons systems that I don't know. But it's like, the thought is, if this is real, why the hell do I have this? And I'm serious.
Like, I know it might go against people's perception of what a reporter wants to know. I want to know the strategy.
I want to know the arguments. I want to know our foreign policy posture.
After action, I want to know if it worked or not, if they killed the right people or if they killed civilians by mistake. I want to know how bad.
I don't want to know what planes are flying when. It's not information I should have.
Sorry, I just, I get very exercised about this because the White House is saying there is no classified information. Classification is a technical term, so put that aside.
But the White House is now saying there's nothing in there that was sensitive. And it's like, yeah, let's get to that, boys, what are you talking about here? Here is what the White House press secretary said just about an hour ago.
Jeffrey Goldberg is well known for his sensationalist spin. Here are the facts about his latest story.
No war plans were discussed. No classified material was sent to the thread.
The White House Counsel's Office has provided guidance on a number of different platforms Trump's top officials can communicate on as safely and efficiently as possible. So what do you make of that? No classified material and no war plans, the White House says.

I've detailed without including particulars or technical issues what was included.

It was a timeline of coming attacks, the weapon systems used in these attacks, some very specific targeting information, who they are trying to kill. Okay? Let me just state that.
Who they are trying to kill in the next two hours. Are we going to split hairs here? To me, that sounds like an attack plan.
That sounds like a war plan. That sounds like this is what we're going to do, and we haven't done it yet.
And literally, they are talking, you know, and I agree with this kind of language, you know, Godspeed to our men. They understand that they're about to send Americans into harm's way in order to achieve this national security goal.
Classification is a very interesting subject. I can't get into it.
I don't, there's national defense information. There's classification.
Look, it's obviously material. There's a covert CIA operative named on the thread, right? So, I mean, that is classified.
Well, I, yes. And I withheld her name from this.
They named somebody who's an active CIA officer in this thread, which is on Signal, again, a commercial app in which I'm watching, And I withheld it. I didn't put it in the story because she's undercover.
But, I mean, the CIA director put it into the chat. But so that's clearly classified information, though, like covert CIA operatives.
By any standard of imagination, I mean, we're talking about, again, these are technical terms, and there's many, many different layers and complexities, and I'm not a national security lawyer. But look, I've been doing this for more than 30 years.
I know what sensitive technical information looks like. Okay? That's all I'm going to say.
So let's go to that national security lawyer question then, because now the Secretary of Defense and the White House Press Secretary have said you're lying, have said there are are no war plans there. They've said there's no classified information.
So the obvious question is, shouldn't you now demonstrate it? Shouldn't you publish the text? No, because they're wrong. They're wrong.
But how can you prove that you're wrong? Maybe should you provide them to the House and Senate Special Committees on Intelligence, maybe? I don't know. Wow.
Well, you want to become my lawyer? I'm just, I'm throwing this out there, Jeff. I don't know.
I mean, look, the White House press secretary an hour ago said you're lying. Look, I feel like, let me just put it this way.
My colleagues and I, and the people who are giving us advice on this, have some interesting conversations to have about this. But just because they're irresponsible with material doesn't mean that I'm going to be irresponsible with this material.
And you know what? You've had a long history, as I have, with dealing with them. And at moments like this, when they're under pressure because they've been caught with their hand in the cookie jar or whatever, they will just literally say anything to get out of the moment, to get out of the jam.
And that's okay. I get it.
I get the defensive reaction. But here's the thing.
My obligation, I feel, is to the idea that we take national security information seriously. Maybe in the coming days, I'll be able to let you know that, okay, I have a plan to have this material vetted publicly, but I'm not going to say that now because there's a lot of conversations that have to happen about that.
All of my inclinations, as you can tell, including withholding the name of the CIA undercover officer, all of my inclinations are, I have a pretty clear standards in my own behavior of information that I consider to be in the public interest, even if it's technically classified or not, information that's in the public interest and information that's not in the public interest. And I'm just going to like, I'm sticking to my principles here.
Understood. To this point, though, about the unauthorized release, the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, just a couple weeks ago posted this, that any unauthorized release of classified information is a violation of the law and will be treated as such.
I mean, it seems like this was an unauthorized release, right? You're not a lawyer, but what do you make of that? I mean, unauthorized release might not be technically the correct term for mistakenly inviting the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic to your signal chat. I don't know what covered there.
It seems like they have standards. Usually, you know, with classified infringement, you have a SCIF, you have, you know, devices that you're supposed to use this stuff on.
I mean, if you couldn't, even if you're using something where you could plausibly invite Jeff Goldberg, it seems like an unauthorized leak. Right.
Although I did, I have seen in some corners of the conversation pro-Trump people saying that, oh, I'm sure he was invited on purpose in order to show that J.D. Vance was strong against Europe.
And it's like, that's one way to show that. The other way is to just look on YouTube at his speech at the Munich Security Conference, in which he was deeply critical of Europe.
I mean, there's some 3D chess kind of thinking going on around this, which I find obviously amusing. Look, you know, here's the thing.
You know, obviously it's a very relatable screw up, right? We've all sent texts to the wrong people. And there is something to be said for a White House just saying, oh, yeah, looks like we screwed that up.
We are going to learn our lesson here and really police up the way we use commercial end-to-end encrypted apps for security communications. I mean, they could just say, yeah, well, that was a doozy.
We're not going to do that again. Sorry.
And then move on. Yeah.
Just I want to blow your mind with one way to look at this, because I was watching in a different interview, you said, what if they accidentally put a Houthi on there? And at some level, that sounds ridiculous until you think about it like this. I mean, the secretary of defense called you a deceitful and highly discredited journalist.
The president's attacked you. And at some level, they kind of did put an adversary on our attack plan.
I mean, they call you the enemy of the people. Like, you are an adversary.
Yeah, but I don't like the Houthis as much as they don't like the Houthis. You know, here's the thing.
They're using an unclassified messaging system to share very sensitive information. They mistakenly invited the editor of The Atlantic onto the thing.
Just say, I guess we screwed up. Trying to learn from it.
We'll do better next time.

I'm all for that.

Everybody makes mistakes.

I mean, most of us don't invite people to Houthi PC small group.

We just sort of invite them to a party that they shouldn't have been to.

I get that.

But just deal with the reality of it, especially since they've taken such strong positions on classification and on the use of unauthorized servers, as a famous example. But this is the part that I just don't understand.
Just deal with it. Well, they're liars, Jeff, and they've had a lot of success lying.
And so that's why they're lying, I think. All right.
I accept your expert judgment. All right.
So here's the last thing I'm just dying to know, just on a human level. So you're sitting there in the safe way.
You want to see if there's bombing that is actually real. Had you told other people? Had you told your wife? Are you carrying this alone? No, I'm not carrying this alone.
I have colleagues and trusted colleagues and advisors who I said, there's this weird thing going. Look, we were all, including my colleague Shane Harris, who's one of the great intelligence reporters, one of the great intel community reporters.
And we were both convinced that this was an elaborate deception campaign, elaborate disinformation campaign. And the reason we thought that is because it's simply because it's too improbable.
It's too improbable. And by the way, it's too improbable.
Given my coverage history of these guys, the suckers and losers piece and other things, how did I get into this group?

Therefore, since it made no sense, it had to be a deception campaign.

Right.

Yeah, I mean, I guess the people are saying that I guess it was Jameson Greer, who's a U.S. trader up as JG.

But then again, like, why is Mike Waltz, like, are you guys on initial relationship, you know, JG, MW?

You know, these are questions for Mike Waltz.

Okay.

We'll try to get him on the pod.

I look forward to that podcast interview.

All right.

Thank you so much, Jeff Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic.

What a week.

What a two weeks for you, I guess. It was March 11th your first put on there.

Appreciate you coming on the pod this morning.

Thank you.

Thanks for having me.

All right.

Up next, Pete Wehner.

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All right, we are back. He's a senior fellow at the Trinity Forum.
He served in the Reagan Bush and Bush administrations. He's a contributing writer at the New York Times and The Atlantic.
His latest piece for The Atlantic is Trump's appetite for revenge is insatiable. It's Pete Wehner.
Welcome back to the pot, Pete. How are you doing? I'm doing great.
Thanks for having me, Tim. It's always a pleasure to be with you.
Well, I just talked to your boss, the big boss at The Atlantic, Jeff Goldberg, about his unbelievable scoop. I'm just kind of wondering what your reaction was as you were seeing that come across the transom yesterday.
Yeah, I'd say stunning, but not shocked in a certain way. This is an incompetent crew.
I think for Trump and his administration, one day it one day it's incompetence. The next day it's maliciousness.
The third day it's a combination of both. And I think yesterday with that story, incompetence was the driving narrative.
But I'd also say that for those of us who worked in the White House, that kind of security breach is probably more remarkable because you know how sensitive this information is. You're told so many different ways about how you can't do a fraction of what they did.
So they were so loose with that information. And it really could and may well have done tremendous damage to national security.
I mean, if Jeff is on these calls, you got to assume that the Russians and the Chinese are probably listening to a lot as well. So it was kind of par for the course.
And my guess is by the end of the week, there will be some new outrage that we'll be focusing on because that's the nature of this wrecking ball administration. Yeah, talk about that, your experience.
And I assume you were a speechwriter in the White House and other roles. I assume you had a security clearance at times and had access to sensitive information.
For people who that's not their world or listening, talk about what the process usually was like if you had to work with the national security team on a speech that potentially had sensitive information or, I don't know, any other example where you had access to classified information? Yeah, well, if there was anything approaching what they were talking about on this unsecure signal chat group, you would have been in the SCIF, which is a sensitive compartmentalized information facility in the White House. If you go into the SCIF, you have to leave your cell phones out.
And it is just tight as a drum because they don't want these kinds of security secrets leaked. And then there are varying degrees of security clearance too.
And if you're at the top of the chain, you're talking about things like war plans and that kind of thing. But what's really driven to you in a White House that has a normal culture is how sensitive you have to be with this stuff, that you're in a position of real responsibility, and you should take that seriously, that people can die, and the national security interests can be injured if you're not.
And you can get in a lot of trouble if you cross the lines. And none of that was sent because the ethos of this administration, this White House, is kind of nihilistic.
And they don't really care. We've seen it in the reaction to the story, right, which is Pete Hegseth going after Jeff, who's a fantastic, one of the sort of great journalists of our era.
And what do they do? It's a kind of Roy going philosophy right which is attack smear go on offense never apologize but yeah an answer to your question if you've been in the White House to see something like this happen it's it's almost unfathomable I mean it is unfathomable I think it's why Jeff didn't like believe it was real until I the bombs dropping. He's just like, this cannot be.
I started to think it was real when the emoji started coming through. He's like, I don't think that the Russians would be doing the muscle prayer emoji.
Anyway, I want to, this is almost too obvious of a hit to do at this point, but it just, it merits covering, which is the 2016 campaign was so focused on OPSEC, if you will, email security. And CNN put together a little package of the people who were on this signal chain talking about Hillary Clinton.
I want to play that for you. If there was anyone other than Hillary Clinton, they would be in jail right now.
Nobody is above the law, not even Hillary Clinton, even though she thinks she is. Mishandling classified information is still a violation of the espionage act.
When you have the Clinton emails, on top of the fact that the sitting president of the United States admitted he had documents in his garage, they didn't prosecute, they didn't go after these folks. I forgot Joe Biden got thrown in there too.
But again, the whole point of the Clinton scandal was that ostensibly because she had this private server, people, foreign governments could have easier access to sensitive information. The second layer of the scandal was that it protected her from FOIA, that people couldn know, that government records were removed, maybe that shouldn't have been.
Both of those things are true in spades here. I mean, this is a commercial app we're discussing a bombing and I didn't get into this with Jeff, but on the signal chain, it says the messages are set to disappear.
So these are not messages that are being preserved. So anyway, talk about that.
Yeah, I mean, it's rank ofocracy. We've seen it for so many years that in a sense, as you were suggesting earlier, you kind of shrug your shoulders because we've gotten used to it.
I will say this, Tim, when I hear that kind of thing, it is to me a kind of CAT scan into who these people are and what drives them. And what a fraud so much of their lives have been, and in a sense, how much of a fraud a lot of Republican politics, a lot of Republican politicians have been.
And I'm saying this to somebody who obviously spent my life, you can tell from my biography, in the Republican Party. I entered politics because I had a pretty high view of politics.
I felt like it was a noble profession. I still do.
But I had usually given the benefit of the doubt to people who got involved. I thought, well, you know, they're getting involved or they're trying to do the right thing.
You know, liberals, conservatives have different views of how to get to the same end. But I think the Trump era has revealed to me a couple of things.
One is that they really don't care about truth. They don't really care about principles.
What they care about is power. And so all of these things become instruments for power.
This is what happens, you know, with a moral character with Bill Clinton. You use a figurative two by four every day to hit him upside the head because he has an affair with an intern.
You get somebody like Donald Trump who makes Clinton look like, you know, a Boy Scout, and all of a sudden it doesn't matter. And you see this over and over and over again.
And you say, oh, this is a window into the soul of these people. They really don't care.
And that's discouraging, it's alarming, but it's the reality. And I think we have to acknowledge the second thing I'll say, and we've seen this in terms of the collapse of a lot of institutions apart from the Republican Party in the Trump era, is how little genuine courage there is in life generally and in politics specifically.
JFK said that there's a reason that profiles and courage is a thin volume, because it is a rare virtue. And the way in which these people, once they get close to power, will bend and then break, especially if they're under threat or under attack.
It is remarkable. There are a few shining lights like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger and others, but they are rare.
Yeah, that takes us well to your article about revenge and just their appetite for revenge. And it's interesting, you get through a lot of the details of the people that Trump is going after.
I want to talk about that.

But the biggest picture related to what you just said, you quote Tocqueville, who says if citizens in a democracy saw that unethical and corrupt behavior led to riches and power,

this would not only normalize such behavior, it would validate and valorize it.

And I do think that we are seeing that broadly, but particularly in this context of being able to use the government to get revenge on your foes or perceived foes. Yeah, I think that's right.
I mean, Tocqueville had such great insights into the American character. This was, I suppose, some of the gifts that people from foreign lands can bring when they come to America because they see things that maybe we don't.
And Tokyo, of course, did that in spades.

But yeah, I have found myself thinking a lot during the Trump era of a domain which conservatives used to care about, which is our civic and political culture. That is the intersection of politics and how it plays out in broader society and how certain cultural norms and beliefs are changed.
And I think what Trump has done is reshape the emotional wiring of a lot of otherwise good and decent people. And that is really, in part, the power of the presidency and the omnipresence of the president, if you will.
And, you know, when I look back at conversations I had with Republicans who were supporting Trump in 2016, I remember those conversations. And there was some skittishness about his moral failures and his moral corruptions.
They decided it was worth it. And the end of the day, they felt like, well, his policies will advance the things we care about.
But his corruptions were viewed as a bug. I think they're now viewed as a feature.
And there's something about what Trump has both tapped into and unleashed in people in terms of the darker parts of their nature. You know, the other day I was thinking of an analogy, you know, let's say you were brought up in a very strict Christian home, homeschooling movement, the purity culture and so forth.
And your parents were trying to shield you from the trappings of the world. And then you graduate from high school and you go to Miami, University of Miami in South Beach, and your parents aren't there anymore.
And all of a sudden it's like, wow, there's an entire world. And I've kind of been contained and constrained.
And then you just let loose. And in a way, I think the Republican Party, which is the party of family values and morality and norms and civic culture, that's what they stood for.
I think they believe they stood for that. And then Trump came along and turned all of that on its head and sort of gave a green light to all of these unchecked emotions and passions and anger.
And it turned out that a lot of Republicans, the last majority of the Republican Party, were thrilled by that. So I think he did that, obviously, to the Republican Party, but I think he's doing it more broadly to a lot of Americans, not all of them by any means, because there's obviously a big opposition to them, but enough that it's really doing injury to America.
It's even a little bit more dramatic than the homeschooler at Miami example, because at some level, I think that most of those homeschoolers at the University of Miami kind of know that they're doing bad, but are just getting excited anyway. It's weird.
Trump has convinced these people actually that acting in vice is actually good. Exactly.
Right? That doing the bad thing is the right thing to do. It's how you gain power.
It's how you advance your objectives. And that the Democrats, these school moms that want to wag their finger at you if you do the bad thing, they are the bad ones, actually.
I mean, I would add to that kind of a psychological insight to it, which is the emotional thrill of it all, right? There's just an awful lot of people who are Trump supporters in which his transgressions and his nihilism and his attacks and his vengeance and all of those things, it's almost life-giving to them. It's vivifying.
It is as if they feel like they're part of a grand and great drama and they're kind of actors within it. So, you know, if I step back from all of the injury that he's doing to America and it's hard to do, just from a psychological standpoint, what's happening is really fascinating.
And it is not unprecedented by any means in world history. It's rare in American history to see it to this degree.
You know, Lincoln warned about it in his Young Men's Lyceum speech in 1830, I think, and Andrew Jackson. You got that Lincoln Lyceum speech pull quote in your head? Yeah, well, it's about what is it? Free men die by suicide, right? Isn't that the main one? But Lincoln understood the dangers, like the founders of mob passions, right? The great concern that they had was demagogues, because they could stoke up these unchecked passions.
And I was just to add, as a person of the Christian faith, a certain painful irony, which is almost to a person, the founders, whether they were believers or not, believe religion was central to the American republic, because they thought that it would promote what they refer to as republican virtues, that religion would create the kind of moral infrastructure that would allow democracy to work. I don't think what they anticipated and what Tocqueville didn't anticipate is when religion does the opposite, which I think is happening in a lot of places right now, the white evangelical movement fundamentalists, which is rather than creating a moral infrastructure for the citizenry, it's doing the opposite.
It's validating and almost baptizing really immoral and unethical behavior. it's interesting you say that i mean mean, at some level, look, there's always been pernicious elements of kind of the Christian right.
There've been some bad actors, you know, throughout, but like the degree to it now and the all-consuming nature of it, right? The fact that you kind of have to be for these Trump's vices, not just go along with them, but like actively approve of them to be a Christian in good standing or whatever. It struck me Kinzinger, who you referenced, you know, Adam Kinzinger sometimes submits to his own vices, which is quote tweeting the trolls, the random people on the internet that come after him, which, you know, maybe you shouldn't do.
I also submit to that from time to time. But this woman who I don't know, tweeted, you love to see it with a picture of this California couple that was deported after living in the US for 35 years.
They lived here 35 years. And Kinzinger retweets this with Christ is King in bio.
You know, she's like this woman that is like rubbing the face of these people that hadn't done anything wrong. They'd been here for 35 years, a family in America.
They're being deported now. She's rubbing their faces in it.
She's dunking on them, criticizing them. And Adam's like, this is Christ.
This is what Christ would want. But the woman is more representative of the evangelical and of the Christian right than Adam at this point.
Yeah. I mean, the way that it has spread and the layers of rationalization that have gone into it, that somehow you've inverted the Sermon on the Mount and the teachings of Jesus and celebrate the cruelty, celebrate the corruption, especially targeted to Jesus referred to as least of these, is really, really remarkable.
You know, not all white evangelicals are in that category, of course.

I will tell you what I think a significant problem is, though. Those that aren't in that category have, for a variety of reasons, not really spoken out.
And the people who are fully involved in MAGA world have. And so what you've created to a watching world is this narrative where they say, look, 82% of white evangelicals vote for Trump.
You've got a whole series of important, prominent figures, Eric Metaxas and Robert Jeffress and Franklin Graham. And you go through the list who are speaking out, promoting it.
And then an awful lot of people who know better, who even feel some measure of shame at this, they're not really talking. So you've got a few people here and there, you know, Russell Moore.
Yeah, I was just going to say, but then they get kind of pushed aside like our friend Russell Moore. Exactly, exactly.
Because institutionally, they're afraid, like a lot of institutions are afraid. And here I'm speaking as a person who is a follower of Jesus, of the Christian faith.
The damage that that's doing to the Christian witness is extraordinary because it's essentially showing to the world, this is a moral freak show. This is a game.
You guys talk it. You don't walk it.
And when that happens, people will turn and walk away from it. And I can't blame them for doing that.
I want to get into some of the specifics you talked about with this revenge and what is alarming you the most. You frame it up.
This is a nice one. Unfortunately, I have way too much of my brain space is used on things that Donald Trump has said and done.
I wish I could remove some of that and replace it with some nutritious information in my brain. But even I had forgotten this one.
In a 92 interview with Charlie Rose, was asked to be any regrets. Among them, he said, I would have wiped the floor with the guys who weren't loyal, which I will do now.
I love getting even with people. What a strange life regret.
But I think that that is a telling way to frame up your article because that is really what he's doing now. It's one of the most revealing interviews that I think Trump had.

So it was an hour on Charlie Rose or whatever, 15 minutes.

And a lot of it was actually focused in on the vengeance.

And that was a time in Trump's career where he had sort of been counted out,

bankruptcies, and he was just coming back.

And that theme of vengeance just came through again and again. and it has been the through line in his life.
You know, I imagine for him it's a combination of factors. One is, I think he's clearly a person with sociopathic tendencies, so that has to be taken into account.
Second is his family of origin, the whole kind of complicated relationship with his parents, mother and his father, and what his father really promoted in him at an early age, right? They sidelined the younger brother because the younger brother wasn't vicious, wasn't a kind of figurative killer in the same way. And then, of course, there was that moment in Trump's life early on where he met Roy Cohen, who was a very kind of nasty piece of work in terms of as a lawyer.
But he really taught Trump at an early age, never apologize, always go on the attack, never settle, countersue. When you understand that history of Donald Trump, you see that this has been part of him from the beginning, and there was no reason to think it would ever change.
And so when you combine that personality, that life experience, those mental disorders, and then give that person the power of the presidency, and then in addition to that, in Trump 2.0, get him surrounded by people who are all acolytes. It's a really dangerous mix, and we're seeing that play out now.

Yeah. You've listed through all the various ways that he's trying to get revenge on people.
The law firms have been the most striking example this week, but plenty of other examples out there. What has been the most alarming to you as you project out what we're looking into for the next three plus years?

Yeah, I mean, in that realm, I would say probably going after the law firms. It's so unprecedented to go after private law firms and then seeing how those law firms have responded.
I'd say, to me, the one that was most unsettling emotionally was just stripping the security details from the people like General Milley, who was a remarkable man of heroism and courage, served his country so well, was under threat from foreign countries. We know that.
And to go through and strip his security clearance as well as John Bolton and Pompeo and Liz Cheney and others. It's an act of, you know, of such pettiness taking down Milley's portrait as a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs or Anthony Fauci's at NIH.
Those kind of acts just underscore for me something I know, but every time you see it, I think it's just upsetting. But it tells you again and again and again, this is who he is.
This is what drives him. You know, I think some things in politics he's indifferent to, especially on a lot of policy issues.
So I think you can flip around. But if he decides that he wants vengeance on somebody, or there's some cause that matters to him, you know, he won't let go.
And the best illustration of that was January 6th. I mean, he took a situation that would have crippled any other political figure and ended up in some remarkable feat of leveraging it to his advantage and turning them into patriots in his own world.
So, you know, there are a lot of other things he's done in the first 65 days, but in the realm of vengeance, those are the things that kind of jump out at him. Rakuten is the smartest way to save money when you shop because members get cash back at over 3,500 stores across every category, including fashion, beauty, electronics, home essentials, travel, dining, and more.
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The other one that we're seeing a lot of this week that I want to talk to you about, which you referenced, is the revenge on behalf of Elon. Now, we're not just doing revenge on behalf of Trump.
We're doing revenge on behalf of the co-president. I will say, I didn't get to this with Goldberg, but there was one silver lining for me of the Signal text chain.
Yeah, what's that? Elon wasn't on it. Oh, that's interesting.
So it's like, okay, well, Elon isn't deciding everything. He's not involved in the bombing decisions.
So that was the only silver lining for me. But they have reoriented a lot around protecting him and going after his foes you know i've heard from people inside the fbi saying that cash and dan bongino are like putting agents that you know that should be focused on real crimes and refocusing them on whatever tesla vandalism not that that's not a real crime but that know, is that really the best use of time for the New York FBI agents? So that is happening.
And we saw from the DOJ,

I want to play you this clip, Tam Bondi, the Attorney General, she was on Hannity demanding

that Jasmine Crockett, a congresswoman from Texas, apologize for some incendiary rhetoric she said

around Elon. And here she is with Maria Bart Romo about Jasmine Crockett's comments about Elon.
And Maria, now you have this Congresswoman Crockett who is calling for attacks on Elon Musk on her birthday. Let's take him out on my birthday, she says.
Yet she turns and says, oh, I'm not calling for violence.

Well, she is an elected public official. And so she needs to tread very carefully.

The attorney general saying you need to tread very carefully if you're criticizing Elon Musk

too harshly. Yeah, well, that's basically her job description right there, right? Which is she is

Trump's instrument, DOJ is his weapon, and that's what they're going to do. And Jon Stewart did a piece yesterday in The Daily Show, which is worth watching.
And it was just on this hypocrisy of the free speech, right? Which is, you heard so much about the anger, some of it legit, you know, in terms of universities and the wokeness and all of that about cancel culture. And of course, they're doing that, you know, 10 times beyond what the left was doing.
But it is an illustration, again, of people, you know, in positions of enormous power, targeting others, either to destroy them or to intimidate them into silence. And so far, it's working probably better than they would have imagined because you see so many people going sort of oce because they're afraid.
Yeah. The DOJ element is interesting to me.
I mean, were you in the White House when the Alberto Gonzalez kerfuffle was happening with the U.S. attorneys?

I think about that story, right? And, you know, without getting into all the details on it, like essentially the scandal there was that there was a politicization of U.S. attorneys and removing some that weren't, you know, meeting the political objectives of Roe and Gonzalez.
And Gonzalez ends up resigning over this. And to me, that is just like such small, when you compare that to now the sitting attorney general going on TV, threatening the political foes for speech, placing Trump's personal attorney as the U.S.
attorney in New Jersey, that happened yesterday, Alina Haba, placing Ed Martin as the attorney general in Washington, D.C., people with no experience as prosecutors who are just political weapons. I just, I wonder what you make of it kind of with that backdrop of the context of living through the supposed very quote-unquote scandal around Alberto Gonzalez.
The kind of things that pre-Trump era would have been considered scandalous and would have dominated the news cycle for weeks would have caused people to resign or apologize to be reined in. I mean, those were like the good old days.
And that really is what happens when you crash through the barriers, the norms, as relentlessly as Trump has done. And,'s not just who he is, but it's his capacity to impart his ethic into the ethic of others.
And in this particular case, it is to target people and to never back up. The shamelessness is a key to understanding Trump.
I think he really is shameless. It doesn't come as naturally to most people who don't have his sociopathy, but they learn by watching.
But yeah, to think about the kind of the norms and scandals that happened in the past. I mean, you think about, for example, you know, Gary Hart, who was forced out of a presidential election in 1988 because of a picture on the monkey business, which was this yacht with with Donna Rice.
And you compare that to Trump's life, Elon Musk's life is a different galaxy. I want to go take us back to the old galaxy for a minute and just have a couple of issues I want to sort of group together as, you know, the good parts of W's legacy and what the current Republicans are doing with that right now.
USAID, PEPFAR, Compassionate Treatment of Immigrants, kind of just want to take through them one at a time. What do you make of what's been happening with USAID? Oh, that has really upset me.
I think of all the things that have happened in the first part of the Trump presidency, the gutting of USAID has really been painful because the number of vulnerable, innocent people who are going to die because of this. I mean, people just don't know really what USAID does.
But then when they're told, they just ignore it or they've adapted this. A lot of these horror stories, which a lot of them actually aren't attributable to USAID in terms of promoting woke programs and so forth.
You're talking about just an entire range from saving kids from malnutrition to different kinds of diseases and Ebola to starvation. And it's just extraordinary, the damage that's being done.
And there are plausible estimates that, you know, between maybe a million and two million people will die as a result of of of this certainly in the hundreds of thousands quite apart from just the human suffering and it's so unnecessary and it's so capricious and it is as if there is no human sympathy not an ounce of it no compassion, even a celebration of like destroying this program.

Yeah.

And, oh, we're trying to maximize our dollars. You know, we don't want to leave people out in the lurch, but you know, there is some fraud there, you know, and some of that would be BS, but you could imagine a way they could talk about this that would express some of that human sympathy.
And there's zero. I think most people who are familiar with what USAID does would say that there are reforms that are needed.
And Samantha Bauer, who was there during the Biden administration, I think, would say so. Others would as well.
It's one thing, though, to say, look, a program needs reform. Virtually every government program does.
But the way that they did it, which is to decimate it, to gut it, and to catalyze all of this human catastrophe, the suffering and the deaths that will emerge from this, and not caring a whit about it, and in fact, celebrating it and using it as a talking point for Doge and what they're doing to destroy the federal government. It's just, it's sick.
And this is getting close to blood on your hands sort of stuff because it was unnecessary. They have to know on some level what's happening and they're doing it anyway.
Talk about PEPFAR in particular. I mean, it's just such a point of pride for Bush administration folks.
And I guess it's the one thing that there's still some conversations potentially that it might be protected. But in the meantime, there are groups on the ground that are doing this work, NGOs, that are having to shutter.
So some of the damage is already done. That's right.
I mean, the PEPFAR was a global age initiative, which was promoted by President Bush in the early 2000s. It was promoted by him, Josh Bolton, and Anthony Fauci, Mike Gerson, and a number of others.
And the latest figures are that it saved somewhere between 25 and 30 million people on the African continent from AIDS. There was also the malaria initiative.
It was a source of pride for President Bush and his administration. It should have been.
It was one of the most remarkable humanitarian achievements in the history of this country. It had complete bipartisan support ever since it was started.
Other presidents, Democratic presidents, Barack Obama embraced it, built on it, and that was fantastic. but even PEPFAR in the end was put in the crosshairs.
It started actually, I think it was a year ago with the Heritage Foundation, which promoted a paper attacking PEPFAR. And that was the signal that we're going after that program.
I think there's some effort to try and save it to keep it from suffering the same fate as USAID, but that's a very open question right now.

But it falls into the same category, which is these are literally life-saving programs. And it is almost all good and no bad, and it's pennies on the dollar.
It's one of the most effective things that you could do, both in terms of saving lives, but also America's image in the world. Yet they go after it and they want to destroy it.
That, I would say, Tim, is the nihilism that is part of this movement. It is destruction for destruction's sake.
It is what I was referring to earlier, which is that the destruction is kind of vivifying and life-giving. So they're taking these wrecking balls to the load-bearing walls of democracy and programs that are saving millions of lives, and they're just having a jolly good time.
I mean, look, I guess it's a complicated calculus because you don't want to trigger them into enjoying the destruction even more. But it does, at least with regards to PEPFAR, and we haven't heard from W, Condi, other types of people from that era.
What do you make of that? Why there's not been a more vigorous defense from Bush-era colleagues of yours? I don't know. I haven't had the conversations.
It wouldn't surprise me, I don't know this for a fact, if they're maybe working behind the scenes to try and salvage it. I hope that's going on.
PEPFAR does seem to be immune in some ways that other programs are not. And I should note, Andy Natsios has spoken out, who was the head of his ID then, but some of the more prominent names.
Yeah, yeah. So that may well be what's going on, but I'm not doing any behind-the-scenes work, so I'm happy publicly to talk about it.
I wrote actually a piece in The Atlantic on it last year when the Heritage Foundation decided to catalyze this movement within the Republican Party to go after it. And that was another straw in the wind.
To the immigration side of it, again, this is just another example on a theme of what we've been discussing. But it's not just the deportations.
It's like the glee at the suffering. They've been putting out these snuff videos.
You can hear the sound of the chains clinking and they're gleefully sharing this, these videos of the immigrants being sent to San Salvador and having their head shaved. They're putting all this out like it's a Michael Bay movie trailer, where they're bragging about the treatment of these people.
And some of them are probably criminals that deserve poor treatment, but we don't know that. They haven't provided any evidence of it.
What do you make of not just the policy shift from, quote-unquote, compassionate conservatism on immigration but just the the manner in which they've dehumanized immigrants yeah that's the key word i'd say is what comes to me which is a dehumanization i mean that that has been going on across the board it's been going on ever since trump really entered the national national stage politically and there's a history of that in world politics, which is the dehumanization of people, which leads to much, much darker and uglier things. And again, it is the joy and the delight and the thrill that people seem to get out of this.
It's a kind of MAGA ethic. It's a kind of hyper-foe masculinity.
I think what it's tied to in part, just in part, is decades of resentment and grievances, which had been building on the right, a feeling of being disrespected. It was interesting.
In 2016, I was at Stanford doing an event just before the election with Arlie hothchild who's a very esteemed historian and i was on a cab ride with her um i think it was to the event yeah exactly yeah right sort of in in the bayou country in louisiana which you know about and the thing that she told me as we were talking about about Trump's takeover of the Republican Party in this 2016, she said, Pete, the thing you have to understand is that these people feel dishonored and they feel disrespected. And that led to a conversation about when people feel those emotions, what it stirs up in them, the anger and the lashing out.
And I think a lot of that is behind is behind this, which is these feelings that we haven't been respected, that we've been patronized. And then there is, and this is particularly true, but not exclusively true of the, of the Christian world, which is this existential struggle.
Like these are unusual times that the country is on the edge of the, of theyss and so we have to use uh means and politics that

are not normal to get to get our way because because you know the survival of the country

depends depends on it so a lot of this roiling anger and resentment and rage has been building

up and trump came in and tapped into it and and accelerated it and then channeled it and so i

think what it's what has happened is that now a lot of people in his movement, people who support him, they look at what's happening. They're controlling the lips.
And so they are delighting in this. Again, this is the psychology of mass movements and politics.
And it turns out that it's a lot trickier than maybe those of us in America who have been spared from this really understood. Where are we now? I think we're in the midst of an authoritarian takeover attempt, and we're going to see how it unfolds.
so I hate to then lower this to kind of rank politics, but I do wonder your thought on this. Is there any potential way, do you think, for Democrats to make inroads into Christian communities based on this? And I think about this from the standpoint of, look, obviously there are going to be some people that have just fully embraced the mega you know ethic um and and that that are going to be unreachable but you think about what trump was has been doing with like working class black voters for example you didn't win that group but you tried hard you make a message to them you peel off certain group of people do you think there's there's anything there that potentially Democrats could make this case to faithful Christians that's just like, this is crazy? Just the obscenity of what they're doing is so extreme that maybe it could win them back? Or do you think the Democratic brand is just so toxic that that's probably wishful thinking.
Toxic in that community,

at least. Yeah, I think right now it's too toxic, but it doesn't mean it can't change.
I think it

can change really two ways. One is as the Trump era unfolds and his policies and his presidency

begins to cut in ways that they begin to feel and reality really begins to take over. And all of a sudden, this person that they've deified turns out to be a person of clay feet.
So I do think it's going to take some time, but that is one thing that may well happen. Continuing these narratives about the human cost, I think is important too.
I think it's right in its own right, but I think it's also important to make that. I do think that the Democrats may have a chance, but they have to get over a kind of an aversion toward Christians and religious faith more generally.
Democratic Party is much more secular in general now than it was a generation or two ago. But even if you go back to Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, I mean, they use from time to time religious language and made it religious.
And Barack Obama sang Amazing Grace in a church. Exactly, which was a moving moment.
The Democratic Party is in a bad place, obviously. I'm sure, I mean, you've talked to a lot of people about that.
So it needs to reform itself. It actually has to, in my estimation, make the decision to change before they're going to change in terms of their policies.
They have to make that conscious decision that we're on the wrong track in some fundamental way, that our problem is not communications problem. But it goes much deeper than that.
And then I would say for Democrats, look to models that you had before, Bill Clinton, DLC in the 90s, Tony Blair and the Labor Party in England in the 90s. And if they can go ahead and use those as models of how to reform, I think that'd be all to the good.
All right. I want to end with one more heavy topic, just because it's been so light so far today.
But you did an interview for The Times that was kind of moving. I just wanted to reference that for people.
It was with Nicholas Walderstorff. He was a professor of philosophical theology at Yale.
He wrote a book about lament for his son who was 25 who died in a climbing accident. And obviously, we have some listeners who have gone through that.
And I've had David Fromm on, and we've talked about this. I'm just wondering if there are any parts of that conversation that struck you, left you with any wisdom for people dealing with grief? Yeah, thanks.
You know, I first got to know Nick because I did an article on him, and I did an article on Lament for a Son, which was essentially a kind of fractured journal of his feelings after his son died in a climbing accident in the 1980s. And that book was so powerful to so many people, because for one thing, he wasn't able to explain what had happened.
He wasn't able to answer the question of theodicy, which is how does a good God allow evil to happen? but when I talked to him, he was able to give voice to why he didn't give up on his faith, but how his faith changed and how deep the wounds went. And he talks about the mystery of God and his ability to give voice to the pain that he went through created an enormous amount of solidarity with other people.
And I know from what Nick has told me that over the years, people would actually travel to him and to talk to him because they felt like there was a solidarity in grief. And so Nick was very honest in that journey.
His faith did change. And he also talked to me about what it means to redeem grief.
And what he means by that is to take that grief and to try and channel it in some kind of constructive way.

He would never for a moment say that he would take the redemption of grief as something that was worth the death of his son.

But his son died.

And so that capacity to take grief and redeem it and not to be completely crushed by it is something that really moved me. And I think it spoke to a lot of other people.
Pete, thanks as always. Always love talking to you.
I appreciate you coming on the podcast. Not the best month for the country, but we soldier on.
We'll try to redeem it.

And we'll be talking to you again sometime soon.

Great.

Thanks.

Thanks for speaking up, Tim.

It matters what you're doing and what your colleagues are doing.

And, you know, we're going to play for the long game here.

And all we can do is be faithful.

Whether it's successful or not, that's on its own time schedule.

But you be faithful and that's what you're trying to do.

And so we're grateful for that.

We appreciate it, brother.

Everybody else will be back here tomorrow for another edition of the Bullwark podcast. We'll see you all then.
Peace.

Deep Fence Moment deep

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Thumb stance

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Once it becomes

Once it becomes

The Bulldog Podcast is produced by

Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown. Fence, nothing left to do, but hang my head and cry.

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