Tom Nichols: Covid Trump 2.0

According to Saltis Wealth, 41% of high net worth individuals report having been victims of financial crime.

Are you next?

High profile individuals like you need more than off the shelf solutions.

You need Concierge Digital Security from Reputation Defender.

It's not just another app.

It's a team of experts using best in class tools to protect you and your family.

Covering virtually every aspect of your digital life.

Visit reputationdefender.com slash success to learn more. That's reputationdefender.com slash success.
Hello and welcome to the Bullard Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.
It is Friday. We have survived another week, barely.
And I am here with one of your faves, Professor Emeritus at the Naval War College. He's a staff writer at The Atlantic.
His books include The Death of Expertise, which has an updated and expanded edition. Go get it.
It's Tom Nichols and maybe Cat Lily. We'll see.
How's it going, Tom? Good, Tim. Lily's sitting right here.
She's waiting for her close-up. So we may have a Lily sighting.

All right.

So somehow I went back and looked at the archives.

Time is a flat circle.

I feel like I'm living a lifetime every day.

I also feel like I'm hearing from you constantly

and all your various platforms.

And so I was like, when was Nichols last on the pod?

And it was the day after inauguration.

Oh, yeah.

That was a real upper for people.

So it's been six weeks since then.

And I wanted to start by just kind of asking you your biggest takeaways from this in terminal six weeks what has surprised you what has outraged you most i think a lot of things have not surprised me because you know we lived through the first term but also because we knew he's doing what he said he would do. He's trying to get even and get revenge and troll the country with this bizarre slate of cabinet officials and, you know, letting Elon Musk loose on, you know, federal workers who were just trying to do their jobs.
I think the speed with which he betrayed Ukraine was a little bit surprising. I thought he would sort of ease his way into that with, you know, Kellogg going overseas and doing something shaky at the negotiating table.
I didn't expect him to basically like just reorganize American foreign policy into a de facto alliance with Vladimir Putin. Yeah.
Well, that's a good place to start then. There is a frog boiling element of this.
It's hard to say what is surprising. I guess I thought that the Elon element has been a little bit more surprising to me, just how much he's run roughshod over everything.
And I think the way that he's fucked up the economy was a little quicker than I expected. But I don't know.
This is like something that Nicole and I talk about a lot. Nicole Lawson and I talk about, which is like, we were the only ones that took him seriously, it seems like.
Like there were a lot of people that were his supporters that didn't really like expect him to do all the things. And so like, there hasn't been anything in particular that shocked me.
But like you, the speed of some of it has surprised me. I wish I could go back and, you know, the Trump folks that I talked to just before the election and one in particular just swore to me, he's not going to do tariffs.
That's, you know, that's just, and I said, he loves tariffs. This is, he is going to rattle the economy.
This wasn't hard to see coming, but it was hard to predict both how fast and how completely nutty it is. You know, it's, it's someone, actually a few folks have asked like, who's out there who, who knows what he's about to do.
Who's like shorting them? Like, this is a day. If you have any inside information, it's a day trader's paradise, right? It's like, okay, here comes the tariff thing.
Oh, now he's going to roll it back.

Oh, now the market's back up.

The one thing I remember you and I talking about, I remember cautioning and saying, well, Elon Musk, he doesn't have that much power yet.

I didn't imagine that Trump would deputize him to do this, that he would be able to pay Doge staffers six-fig, which, you know, just always proves the point that these folks aren't about getting rid of government waste. They just prefer that it goes to them and that Congress and the courts would just say, OK, Article one doesn't operate anymore.
The appointments clause doesn't operate anymore. The president can just pull a guy off the street and say, hey, go fire people.
And the Constitution and the law just don't operate. That, I guess, surprised me a little bit.
I guess we'll have to give ourselves a grade. I punish myself a lot with the amount of information that I'm consuming and the various sources I'm consuming them from.
I don't re-listen to myself, but maybe I'll punish myself by re-listening to our January 21st one to see how it stacks up. On to the Ukraine news.
So over the past 24 hours, Russia has carried out massive strikes across the country using drones and ballistic missiles. At Habit, a day after the US stopped sharing intelligence with Kyiv that had previously given advance warnings of attacks.
Just before we got on, I interviewed a reporter, Kaylin Robertson, who's on the ground in Ukraine. People can check that out either on YouTube or on the Bulwark Takes podcast.
He was reporting from Kyiv and says basically, in the last 24 hours, the amount of air attack material that has gotten through onto the ground has been unlike anything previously. The air raid sirens were going off in Kiev more often than they had been in the previous months.
And all of this is just a direct one-to-one correlation. Trump just decided to flip the switch.
We're no longer going to share intelligence with Ukraine. He told the Brits they can't share our intelligence with Ukraine.
And Putin has taken advantage of it. And there's been deaths and destruction, targeting of energy, infrastructure.
And it is an astonishing, sick betrayal of our ally. And just to make the point that it's not about some sort of strategic calculation, he's also decided to send home Ukrainian refugees.
He wants to take that refugee status away from them. You know, this is basically operating in concert with Vladimir Putin.
My colleague David Frum had a great line, you know, that the Trump-Russia theory is like now one of the most durable theories in political science because you're watching it play out in real time. You know, we're getting confirmation of it every day.
Was there any overwhelming strategic or American interest reason to do this? And the answer, of course, is no. And it's amazing because MAGA world always reacts to this like, well, we have to bring our boys home.
Yeah, right. You know, it's like, what? What boys? What boys? Where are you going? What are you talking about? You you know here's the reason to do it i just just to be blunt i give you is looking at the facts on the ground and you look at what happened in the office we haven't talked since then and the reason to do it is is if you're essentially on putin's side and you're trying to force zelinski to the negotiating table like that is what this is it's're going to force Zelensky to negotiate.
And you see he sent a tweet this morning that was basically thanking France because they still did have some F-16s to protect their air that were French that they had borrowed. And he said basically he wants to go to the negotiating table to try to get a ceasefire for air and sea because he can't protect his country.
And like that is, I guess if you're going to order the deal this and say that it's something besides just, you know, capricious, you know, Trump advanced temper tantrums, it would be that he is in league with Putin and trying to push Zelensky to the table. It's not trying to achieve a just peace so that people stop dying.
It's trying to achieve an unjust peace on Vladimir Putin's terms so that the people who do the dying are going to be mostly ukrainians from here on now the macron press conference i guess it wasn't a press conference it was addressed to the nation earlier this week was just it's just it still is astonishing again like we all saw this coming we all saw the the trump of it coming but like sometimes you just watch a video and you're like how is this the world that we're in we're like the president of france is giving an address to his nation that's like don't worry the french nuclear umbrella will protect the rest of europe from russia if it comes to it like we hope that the americans are on our side but we will go forth to help defend ukraine as if're not. To get across to your listeners just how astonishing this is, I'm going to go into nuclear professor mode for a minute and say, remember that the French created their own nuclear force because they felt cut out of the US-British kind of nuclearate right back in the in the 50s.
And they literally said, one of their leaders said, we can't have our security be at the sufferance of les Anglo-Saxons, you know, like France will have a nuclear force that is not for anybody but France. And they literally did things like they had a couple of ICBMs.
They're gone now, but they had a couple of ICBMs. They put them on the French border so that they could say to the Russians, listen, you know, no matter what you do to the rest of Europe, once you roll in here, you're going to roll over these things and we're going to fire them.
And that's separate from NATO and the Americans and their little cousins, the Brits.

And this has now turned everything on its head where the French, they haven't made a policy decision yet. But for France to say, OK, basically, we'll take over as the nuclear guarantor of NATO.
What? Wow. And considering that the French nuclear force is relatively small, that doesn't mean nuclear war fighting or tit for tit.
I mean, that basically means that if war comes, and I shouldn't say if war comes, if Russia starts another war, that this is going to be the French responding to nuclear force with nuclear force. sudden it's going to be, you know, it's going to be World War three.
And the idea that somehow this will exclude us, that Americans will just say, okay, we're out of it. You know, that's, that's not going to happen.
That's not how it goes in the international. I'm sorry.
Trump told Zelensky, don't tell me how to feel about this. It might not affect us.
I've not read a history book i don't know anything that happened outside of like my field of vision right this second it's boring at this point to do the wither the republicans thing and i'm sick of doing it and yet sometimes you have to and i do think this is a moment where ukrainians are dying ukrainian infrastructure is being attacked for no reason except for i guess us helping putin pressure ukraine to the table and you had these guys roger wicker is is wearing a ukraine pin during the confirmation hearings brian fitzpatrick don bacon the guys i'm supposed to like the republicans i'm supposed to like who are out there saying oh i will go to bat for ukraine no what. John Thune, nothing, nothing, you know,

and we're not hearing anything.

They're not using the power of the purse.

They're not pressuring Trump.

They're not, you know, Don Bacon is like meekly criticizing him,

using no, but not using any of his power.

I mean, it is astonishing. Like these guys are just going to let Ukrainians wither and die because of Trump advances whims.
And they're doing nothing. And because they don't want to get primaried.
And because, you know, I keep thinking about Tom Tillis saying, well, you know, I wasn't going to vote for AgSeth and I got threats. You know, like they're off the record.
You know, you're hearing or unattributed. You're hearing Republicans saying things like, well, you know, I fear for my family and my staff.
And well, you know, I'm sorry, but if you're a senior U.S. senator and you're not going to vote your conscience because you're afraid of Donald Trump and people in your district that go home, don't be a senator anymore.
You know, I'm sorry, you know, if it's that's and I understand. I mean.
I mean, everybody who's ever criticized Trump, including two guys sitting right here, has gotten death threats. It's just part of life in the 21st century with Donald Trump.
But if you're a senior US senator and you're saying, well, I couldn't really vote this way because I'm worried, well, then come on home with the you know, and just get out of that business. But I think the bigger issue is that they really just love being in Washington and they don't want to go home.
I mean, Susan Collins, very concerned, very, very concerned. She's running again next year at 74 years old for another six-year term.
So this kind of incredible amount of political cowardice and careerism and opportunism that says, yeah, in my heart, I know it's wrong to let all these people die under Russian bombardments, but I'm 74 and I got to run next year know, my constituents are mad at me and we're getting ugly phone calls. And so,

you know,

that is not the Republican party that you and I knew 30 years ago.

Yeah. No.
And number one, Tom, tell us, people get,

sometimes people get mad at me when I say this, but like,

I have no sympathy for their fear. Like, are you kidding me?

You're not going to do something about this?

Cause you're scared that you've gotten some empty death threats.

Like that literally people died. Like Ukrainians died yesterday because of what Donald Trump did.
And you're a fucking U.S. senator.
So do something about it. I tweeted a version of this complaint and somebody sent me this tweet by Representative Joe Wilson from South Carolina.
You might remember him from ULIE fame. Simpler times.
It was retweeted by Don Bacon. So when I was like, where is Don Bacon? People don bacon people are like well here's don bacon here's this retweet he sent um here's what joe wilson said war criminal putin launched a ballistic missile at a hotel where american uk and ukrainian aid and health volunteers were staying four dead over 30 injured in his deliberate bombing of children's cancer hospitals maternity wards etc., Putin further confirms his cowardice and contempt for life, including the lives of the Russians he sends to die in his pointless war.
Great tweet, but fucking do something about it. Like the ballistic missile hit a hotel where Americans' aid workers live because your president that you supported stopped giving intelligence aid to Ukraine.
So fucking do something about it. Don't call donald trump mention donald trump in the tweet this is virtue signaling this is the shit that republicans and conservatives make fun of that's all this is this is virtue signaling that's the equivalent of holding up a little paddle it's worse than holding up a paddle actually putin is bad putin is bad like you don't even at least if you held up the paddle when Donald Trump was in the room it would have sent a message that he was speaking about Donald Trump like this is just an empty critique of Putin great these guys just fucking boil my blood so much so anyway I since we haven't talked since Friday before we move on from this any other any other thoughts and you wrote about it called it one of the grimmest days Any other thoughts about that scene? Well, I mean, it was a setup.
I mean, it shows you what J.D. Vance's real role is in this administration, which is sort of chief internet troll.
You know, hey, bring J.D. in and let him rile up Zelensky so that Trump can then say, I couldn't do it.
He said he's disrespectful. But to know that you're just being brought in to be, you know, the kid throwing spitballs from the back row is really, it was just embarrassing.
I felt a little nauseous watching it, but I could feel, I felt like embarrassment by proxy. I was like, just, oh my God, this is so, these are grown men.
You know, I find myself with this administration so often just saying, these are grown men and women acting this way. Like these are, these are adults and it's pathetic.
It's just, it really is pathetic to say, to watch people that are, you know, in middle age acting like they're 15 during study hall, you know, trying to piss off all the other kids. I mean, it's really astonishing.
But I think, you know, once again, I mean, I, you know, I've criticized J.D. Vance comprehensively, but I think it really brought home that, you know, Trump runs the country.
All the lights are plugged into the Oval Office at this point, which means eventually it all breaks down because nobody can manage that way musk is his his number two you know running rampant and jd vance is just brought in to like be you know the guy who is the living embodiment of of snarky tweets petulance yeah petulance of snarky tweets my blood is still boiling from that joe wilson tweet so i'm going to move to someone else that we both hate and try to get you to do it's lent and i'm a christian i don't hate anyone but i do have severe reservations someone else that we have some very severe thoughts about severe christian godly thoughts about david sex i don't want history professor tom again you task me tim that Tim. At least I didn't have you on on Ash Wednesday.

So you don't have to talk about him with the ashes on your,

on your forehead.

Like Marco.

I'm Greek Orthodox.

We don't do that.

You know,

you guys don't do that.

Not like Marco with the biggest ashes I've ever seen on his head,

talking about how Donald Trump has moral authority.

That was significant.

Yeah.

I'm like,

Hey,

I get it.

I did the ashes.

And with big ashes on his forehead, talking about the moral clarity of donald trump luckily we have confession so you know so you can get the ashes lie about donald trump then go back to confession it's a it's a full day here's the ball sacks on uh ukraine and uh you you tweeted about it but i want to i want to get you going a little more he writes interesting historical analogy the korean war

was another three-year war with tremendous losses on both sides it was largely stalemated the american client south korean leader ri wanted to keep fighting eisenhower made him sign the armistice great leadership tom wrote a dumb comparison but naturally attractive to dilettantes so please

please extend

those remarks

I mean

right with

that A dumb comparison, but naturally attractive to diligence. So please, please extend those remarks.
I mean, right with that by unanimous consent, I'd like to revise and extend my remarks. You know, Sachs is just, I mean, Sachs and Vance, and they're all part of this small circle of plutocrats who have convinced themselves that they are deep thinkers, that they are deep geopolitical thinkers.

When in fact, they are, you know, exactly like, you know, again, the kid in your dorm at 2 a.m.

who says, you know, I think or Cliff Clavin at the end of the bar.

Well, let me let me explain to you how Ukraine works here, Diane. That's a good Cliff Clavin.
Thank you. I'm from the area.
It was such a dumb analogy. For one thing, thousands of Americans were fighting and dying in Korea.
Hello. My snarkiness and sarcasm failed me.
So let me go into a more serious, Professor Mug. I also believe, just as one other thing, just throwing it out there, that there was this kind of security guarantee as part of that stalemate.
Something that we weren't going to do. We were going to steal their rare earth minerals and then not give them a security guarantee.
So there were some other differences. Let's count all the ways in which David Sachs was wrong.
For one thing, Stalin and Mao cooked up this war. And again, by the way, this was also a war that became possible.
As we now know from, again, I'm sorry to be professorial guys, but from documentary history, from Cold War documents that were released from the Soviet archives, that the thing that motivated Stalin to say yes, because he had said no to an invasion of the South repeatedly. It's when the Americans left.
When the Americans left the peninsula, exactly everything that Sachs and others want us to do. That's when Stalin said, go for it.
And they almost made it. They get all the way down to the Pusan perimeter.
The North rolls to the very tip of South Korea. And the Americans, at the expenditure of great blood and treasure for two years, not only push them back, but reestablish the status quo ante.
There wasn't like, okay, we're going to have an armistice and the North Koreans are going to keep an extra 200 miles. No, it went back to the 38th parallel.
There was a demilitarized zone and the Americans who had, I mean, South Korea is, you know, full of the bones of American servicemen. We're still there.
Yeah. It's just one of those things where I'm sure it must have, you know, while you were on your way to a meeting somewhere, you thought, hey, I just had a.
I'm like, redosing, whatever they're doing out there these days. I don't, I will not speculate.
but you know that you're walking down the hall and you're saying hey I just had a dosing, whatever they're doing out there. I will not speculate.

But you know, you're walking down the hall and you're saying, hey, I just had a deep thought.

Tweet.

It's one of those things.

It's like, you know, have you read a book?

I think you read one, it seems like, or maybe an article.

I want to stick with David's ball sacks for a little bit because not only, and I was just so excited.

As soon as I saw the Korea tweet, I was like, I want to get Tom Nichols to start talking about Soviet documents. I was like, I just want to get him going on that.
But yesterday he made some more news. There's a strategic Bitcoin reserve now in the country.
I've been hoping for some strategic reserves of some other things, baseball cards, Mardi Gras beads, et cetera. But we've chosen to have a strategic Bitcoin reserve.
David Sachs, in his tweet about this, says it doesn't cost anything. It doesn't cost taxpayers anything.
Now, that's interesting. Why does it not cost taxpayers anything? Well, because it's funded by Bitcoin seized from criminals, which I think raises a few questions about what is cost and why are there so many criminals using this product that we need a strategic reserve of.
But go on to your thoughts on that. Well, again, you know, somewhere somebody's investing and watching all this and having the time of their life.
I have all these like crypto people now send me stuff. But he was like, there's some guy like made 10 million on the announcement.
You can't tell who it is, but they were like 50x long. Again, Trump is going through and he's kind of checking boxes and paying dues.
Yeah, if you help me get in, I'll set up all these schemes. You guys can.
I mean, Trump, in a way, I don't want people to attribute too much purposefulness to this. Because I think what he's really doing is saying, I achieved the thing I needed to achieve.
You and I talked about this after the inauguration. I'm not in jail.
I've defeated all my legal cases. Thank you all.
You may all now indulge yourselves. Just go do what you want.
And I think that's what's happening. Hey, can you give us a crypto us a crypto reserve sure i mean it's a lunacy to have a reserve of crypto i love also love just not to pedantic but like this idea that this doesn't cost anything i mean you know if the u.s government is investing in an fbi and i guess we're probably not going to do this anymore or we'll only investigate foes of the crypto guys that are close to trump and they will investigate them and seize their Bitcoin as part of the corrupt state that we're, you know, now engaging in where, you know, you only investigate political enemies.
Otherwise, I mean, the president himself is on top of a crypto scam, so he's not gonna be investigated. But like this notion that it doesn't cost anything.
It's like, well, no, if the FBI and the the doj put money put taxpayer dollars into investigating criminals and then they seize their assets like we get that money like that's that is something so if instead of using the money for the federal government we're putting it over here in a federal reserve in a strategic reserve like yeah that does cost something actually right we're paying to go get it we could have sold it and like use that money to pay down the debt or used it for whatever like you don't exactly kind of get it we're paying to get it and we're paying to administer holding yes and with all of the you know attendant risk and and you know for what i think this is the part where i'm supposed to say and i hold no crypto so you know i am not in this game It's a solution to a made-up problem that benefits a very, I mean, this could be, you could say this about a lot of Trump economic policies, a solution to a non-existent problem that benefits a very small number of people very handsomely. Among those people, there was somebody put out a graphic of the crypto holdings in Trump's scam company.
And 12% of the holdings were from this guy, Justin Sun, who I've talked about a couple times on the podcast. He runs the Tron Exchange.
He's a Chinese national. He was investigated by the Biden SEC.
The Trump SEC has stopped investigating him. Shocking.
And life's pretty good for him. Yeah.
So, you know, we've got a crypto reserve now and he's not being investigated and he's, you know, about 12% of Trump's holdings he put in there. So not a bad return.
I want to live in that alternate universe where Democrats did all this, where George Soros was brought in to like slash the government or Bill Gates or somebody. And, that they set up a crypto fund with you know shady and uh shadowy you know figures on the left i mean they would be going this would be deep state conspiracies biden has to go i mean it's just the double i know you know we've been doing this for 10 years almost 10 years about the double standard double standard.
But it really is remarkable. We're going to keep moving through the parade of horribles here.
It's time to embrace the horror. Pete Egseth, the Secretary of Defense, the merit-based Secretary of Defense.
No DEI there at all. Just the best qualified person for the job.
He gave the military until Wednesday to remove content that highlighted the diversity efforts in the ranks. There was a little problem though as people started deleting various things through the program.
They got rid of everything with the word gay, including the Enola gay. The plane that dropped the bomb on Japan.
Tom's going to do the hosting job for me. We of the enola gay that is a faggoty plane one gay plane that was that was one they loved dolly parton on that plane and i totally tell you they did a lot of makeup plane flew over japan wearing a fruit basket on its head like carmen miranda oh my God.
After I stopped having fun with you, I got to get off the internet and go write about this. And I don't even know where to start.
I mean, it's like, it's so strangely homophobic. It's a cross between the closeted kernel in American Beauty, which everybody's been kind of crapping on lately and I re-watched it the other day, and I was like, yeah, that's a pretty old homophobic trope, but also an element of truth in it.
I kind of liked American Beauty. I know, bad take.
I know that's an inappropriate take, but I like to give people my full candor, and I don't mind homophobic trope. I was okay with it until that last scene with Mina Suvari, and I'm the dad of a college-age girl, and I just didn't.
I hear that. But I do love the last line of the movie, which is that I loved every moment of my stupid life, which I thought is kind of a nice ending.
But this whole DEI thing at the Defense Department is kind of like a cross between that and Homer Simpson in the John Waters episode where Marge comes home and he says, he didn't give you gay, did he? You know, I mean, there is just this weird kind of like scrubbing of everything that is to be, to be a little more serious about this. It's, it's, it's Stalinist.
Yes. I mean, it's just kind of a Stalinist, you know, throw everything in the memory hole.
And, you know, I say this as, especially as a longtime federal employee to sit through a lot of these, you know, a lot of the training and all the other stuff. I could have been a natural ally about too much DEI stuff.
You know what I mean? Some of these trainings are stupid. I had to take a morning out of my life as a federal employee while a professor came in and tried to explain to people, like, you know, guys, I still remember this, you know, guys like much older than me, you know, sitting there nodding, trying to figure out.
She's like going, okay, so this is what cis hetero means. And I'm like, oh, for Christ's sake, you know, we really have work to do today.

And, you know, okay, I get it.

That's, you could say, look, we're not going to, we're not going to do that. We're not going to spend money on that.
But scrubbing the Defense Department archives to like, make sure that somebody who, you know, was gay in a 1990 story or something gets like, you know, vanished. vanished.
It's panicky. It's like a gay panic almost.
Yeah. What is even the point of deleting? So like, what are they doing? They're just going through their website, the control effing every page, like control F gay control, control F trans control.
I don't know what to control F queer. Like, what are you doing? What is the point of this's just it's it's a weird kind of panic stop during the programs it's fine i yeah i had to sit through one of these things the other day and i was like if you're a guy and a and a new young woman comes in on the staff like you're not are you supposed to say nice knockers babe like yes no maybe it's like no that would be sexual harassment it's just like who, who is this for? That's a red light.
The red, yellow, green. Who is this training for? Like, people that are morons.
Like, anybody that doesn't know this probably shouldn't have had the job in the first place. I guess there should have maybe been a better vetting.
So whatever. Like, yeah, there's stupid shit.
You know, and change some of the stuff. Like, that's fine.
But, like this is ridiculous and Stalinist. That's the thing.
There's a Stalinism to it. I mean, again, I could have, you know, if Hegseth had had a quick press conference and said, listen, these things cost X dollars a year.
We're not bringing any more guest speakers to explain to, you know, old retired colonels what it means to be cis. Fine, fine.
That was a waste of taxpayer money. I mean, I'm not going to support Pete Hegseth, but I would have nodded and said, okay, I guess you can save a few bucks there.
This is different. This is something really different and almost like it's a larger point.
It shows you that MAGA world thinks of itself as this embattled minority. Even though they control everything right now, they still think of themselves as like Christians hiding in the catacombs, you know, drawing fish symbols on doors.
And so while they have the power, they're going to, you know, they're going to set the timeline right. You know what I mean? If only we can go back to 1989, the last time we had a real president, and say, okay, we're going to just scrub the timeline so none of this happened, and all the gay and trans soldiers will go away, and everything will be okay again, and it'll be just like when I was a kid in 1966 two thoughts on that one is just on the serious we can make fun of the stuff like on the serious side i i haven't confirmed this but there's no reason to believe it's not true i received a note from a reader about you know a couple of soldiers that they are aware of that have been kicked out because of gender dysphoria or whatever people that had done nothing else that is fucking outrageous like for a draft dodging makeup wearing bone spurs tv star to like kick people that were voluntarily serving the military out for no reason i it's fucking outrageous and it's maddening and your point on the abattled minority it's funny i was watching the this video this kind of viral video that was going around.
It's a guy in a MAGA hat at Disney World. He's walking around.
He's by himself at Disney World. And he looks, he's kind of a weird looking guy.
He's got his phone up. And he's like videotaping everybody that walks by him.
And like people are giving him a look. And the point of this is this embattled minority thing.
Like look at me. I'm so brave.
I went into the lion's den and wore this hat. And people are giving them a look.
And the point of this is this embattled minority thing. Like, look at me.

I'm so brave.

I went into the lion's den and wore this hat,

and people are giving me weird looks.

And it's kind of like, well, for starters, you guys won.

So you have a majority of the people.

They may not have a majority of the country,

but they may not have a plurality,

a bare plurality of the people.

So there are going to be a lot of people that agree with you.

And number two, maybe these people are fucking looking at you because you're at a children's park by yourself, filming people, filming strangers. Like, I think it might be your behavior, not your hat, or maybe a little bit of both, you know, even though I live in blue, new England, you know, we, this is word divided state, you know, it's like 60, 40.
And there is always this kind of, you know, I dare you to say something. Look, if you know, like, like the guys in the local supermarket here, you know, having these really loud conversations about, and it's like, all right, I guess I have to say something.
Can you move so I can get the butter? Can you just, but is this there's almost this um this thirst for attention and engagement these performative stunts that are almost like pay attention to me engage with me listen to me i mean that's really unhealthy no matter what your politics are you shouldn't be going to the grocery store to exhibit your politics and we you and i when we were concerned, we used to criticize the left about doing this. And rightly so.
Yeah. You know, the people standing and saying, I'm buying the, you know, sustainable stuff that wasn't, you know, that was made by campesinos.
You know, I mean, just buy your fucking coffee and go home, will you, you know? Let's talk about the economy. We had a jobs report this morning.
this morning it was mid you know it's a little short on jobs joe biden's fault yeah things ticked up a little bit wasn't wasn't great wasn't horrible but a lot of bad signs on the economy i mean the you had the stock market has been tanking you know there have been some other signs that there are bad that there's bad jobs news to come ahead we'll see consumer confidence reports very bad atlanta fed projections very bad the treasury secretary yesterday said uh that cheap goods are not part of the american dream i think uh i think that this uh i think it might might be time for uh somebody to meet some real Americans. The rich hedge fund guy.
Maybe some media training. Yeah.
You know, like, wow, Mr. Secretary, cheap goods.
Let me take you to a magical place that you and I will go. It's called Walmart.
Walmart. And that is central to the American dream, actually.
We are going to go over to the TV section, you know, and then we're going to go over to best buy and maybe stop you know at an aldi i mean it was just it was so tone deaf it was exactly the kind of thing a rich guy says on a private jet people don't care about cheap goods no you don't care about people are just looking to pull themselves up in the dude steps and get a good job and i'm poor all that but like hey there's a lot of people out there that actually don't have the ambition or desire to become a rich guy with a house on sullivan's island all right like and they do cheap goods are kind of important for them and they would like a 65 inch tv that's their one thing in life that they're gonna put put in the man cave. It's very American, actually.

Yeah.

But it's Joe Biden's fault.

I heard this was just before we started today.

Kevin Hassett was on and he's like, yeah, these jobs numbers.

No, they're good because they represent. I mean, he Kevin Hassett is really a kind of, you know, that genial smiling ability to just spin anything where he said, well, yeah, there was.

But, you know, these were basically jobs that were created by Joe Biden and their government jobs.

So really, the jobs report is just us.

I mean, I'm not making this up, right?

It's just us correcting the Joe Biden government jobs boom.

Good luck with that.

Again, you know, you're going to have people in a lot of red parts of the country saying, I don't recall Joe Biden giving me this job that I'm losing. And I think with the market going up and down, again, the rationalizations are incredible.
Oh, well, buy the dip. It's a good time to buy.
Okay, but if you're retired, it's not a good time to withdraw and say, I don't know, eat or warm your home with what's in your retirement. It is a remarkable inability to ever criticize Donald Trump or even to say what you just said in a kind of measured way that, you know, the jobs report was kind of meh, but there are some bad signs, but it's not horrible, but there's some clouds on the horizon.
And instead you just get, you know, the leader is good. The leader is great.
We surrender our will as of this date. It's totally incoherent.
So you have the tariffs. So on Monday, they're on.
On Tuesday, they might be off. On Wednesday, they're on.
On Thursday, it's like, well, we're going to take them off for things that are already in the trade deal that some idiot me signed like five years ago. And then it's like, well, but they might be back on in April and they might be lower.
But then I saw a report today where they indicated they might be higher. 25% might be too low.
And you just got it something, Tim, which is all of this is happening. Talk about memory holes and Stalinalinism all of this is happening as if donald

trump had never been president yeah right it's like i'm finally gonna make america great and

end this terrible situation where you look familiar you know weren't you the uh and and

you know uh we've got to do something with this terrible deal with mexico who signed it it's

incoherent who knows who can speculate like how long it'll last or for whatever but like

Thank you. we've got to do something with this terrible deal with Mexico.
Who signed it? It's incoherent.

Who knows who can speculate like how long it'll last or for whatever, but like,

it doesn't feel sustainable.

I mean,

any sentient person has to look at this and just be like,

what are we doing?

You know,

it's like,

you're going to put on tariffs because it's going to bring about a golden

age,

but now the car manufacturers are pissed.

We'll take the cars off.

And then it's like the farmers are pissed.

So it's like,

Oh,

the potash,

the potash, like we're going to do a carve out for the potash. Like what, how do you even, you can't defend it without sounding like an idiot because there's no rationale to it.
It's just random, arbitrary president, the king fiat. And like whatever he says is good.
Right. You can't defend it without finding yourself saying things like americans don't care about cheap goods right as with ukraine as with all the other things we've been talking about you can't defend it without completely sort of staring into the middle distance while your body and your mind where your mind dissociates from your body like an accident victim And you end up having to say things that you know are just bonkers.
I agree with you, but I disagree with you. I agree with you.
This is unsustainable in a, in a normal world. In the first Trump term, we would say these things are unsustainable and sure enough, you know, Tillerson or Mattis or even Mnuchin or whoever will kind of say, all right, all right, you know, we got it.
But this bunch, this is just kind of a sort of, you know, looting the ship of state and pointing out that the masts are breaking and the ship is listing and we're taking on water. They're like, look, we don't care.
We're just going to take as much stuff out of the hold as we can jump into little lifeboats and paddle away. And, you know, all the circuit breakers on this stuff are gone.
And ironically, and I know, you know, people really enjoy the schadenfreude about this, but these are our fellow citizens. You know, like the policies are not, these are our brothers and sisters as American citizens.
The people who are going to really pay the price for this are ordinary Americans, and most of them are going to be Trump voters. It just astonishes me how much he punishes his own voters and convinces them that they like it.
I totally agree with that. And it sounds like you're with me.
And I just, who knows? I don't have a crystal ball. I'm not an economist.
But I just, looking at the tea leaves, like, it seems like we're going to be in a downward spiral here. It seems bad.
I don't have a crystal ball i'm not an economist but i just looking at the tea leaves like i just like it seems like we're in a we're going to be in a downward spiral here i i just it seems bad like i don't i don't know how he gets out of it and i my i guess my guess is the worst it gets the worst he gets like you know just like during copen well normally he pays attention to the markets but in part because he had to pay attention to the markets because he wanted to get reelected.

Right.

Now he doesn't have to care.

I mean, now it's, am I doing good?

Are my enemies yowling?

Remember, you know this, Tim, the one rule in MAGA world that the test of a policy being

good or bad is how loudly someone else yells about it.

That's all they care about.

If David French is mad about it, then that means it's a conservative policy that's the new rules you mentioned about how you know the area where you disagreed with me slightly was just about like there could be constraints if we're in normal times we might not be in normal times and and you wrote for the atlantic this week about how the democrats are acting like things are too normal i agree with that i think it's sometimes hard to figure out exactly what to do i find myself in this situation where i'm like the democrats should be out there more and trying new things and be you know trying to reach people in different ways and then they do stuff and i was like yeah maybe not that so i don't know so maybe normal is better than abnormal. But what do you say?

Normal is better than TikToks of female congressmen in fighting stances, which, you know.

It was a good try.

That one was a good try for me.

No, no, no, no.

I was cringing.

I felt my cheeks get warm and embarrassment.

We don't want that.

It was bad, Tim.

And again, it's bad. It's not just cringey.
It's evidence of a kind of unseriousness. Like, that's the kind of TikTok you put out when a normal Republican president says, I'm going to lower the minimum, the marginal tax rate from 37.9 to 30.
It's like, we're going to fight that. All right.
We're going to fight that. You know, what I said, and I took some static, I took some grief from Democrats.
Look, Senator Slotkin gave a very good speech. It was clear, it was direct, but it was a very 2017 speech.
And when I think about Democrats getting more into fighting trim, they really should ask, always take an opportunity to put it out there to say, we're fighting for working families, don't want to give tax cuts to plutocrats. Did you really vote to have Kash Patel run the FBI? Yes, in MAGA world, we know you did, but the voters we're talking to, did you really vote for that? Did you really vote to have the President of the United States publicly draw the link from autism to vaccines and put Bobby Kennedy in charge of it at HHS.
Really? You have children. He voted for measles.
Yeah, exactly. And I think, you know, instead of saying, well, we have a different vision for jobs for the future, you know, is just, it doesn't move anything.
It does in 1998. It does in 2007.
It does not do it now. So I like to be constructive in these cases.
I hear you. It's easy to nitpick.
What do you want? What do you want from them, the Democratic elected leaders? You know, I am always loathe to give, I'm not a Democrat, so I can't advise the Democratic Party, But no more TikToks and kind of seriousness about both the policy issues.

Part of the problem is that every time you challenge Trump on a policy issue, you realize that Trump doesn't care about policy.

So you end up sounding like a wonk, and he ends up sounding entertaining.

One of the things that I've got on my to-do list is to talk at some point about Trump's missile defense plans, which sound great, right? But if you want to talk about cutting government spending, we're not going to create a golden dome over America. It'll be billions and billions of dollars to defense contractors.
It's not going to go anywhere. I worked for a defense contractor that worked on the original Star Wars plan.
I know something of those days. But I guess it's always a tough thing to tell Democrats that they should have more unified messaging because they're Democrats.
And I don't know what the legislative response is. But to act like an Article One power and to say, no, we're not going to allow, you know, we're going to put in bills, even if they die every time, that they have to keep putting them out there and getting out and talking to the American people about the scary stuff.
And I think they're loath to do that because Trump has been so effective at providing his surrogates with sneering, dismissive talking points. If you say, listen, did you really vote to let Donald Trump leave the Ukrainian people defenseless? And then what they hear on Fox or wherever is Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia.
Oh, it's Russia, Russia, Russia. You know, did you really vote for tariffs? And, you know, then it's, again, this kind of Jedi mind trick of, well, it's not really tariffs.
It's equality. It's fairness.
And I think Democrats have just kind of thrown up their harms. Now, I'll say one last thing about this and get off that soapbox, Tim.
There is a good argument, and I've made it myself. Let him drive the car off the cliff.
Let him fuck everything up. You know, just bring the pain.
Let people experience what tariffs really do. I wrote this in his first term.
I said, if people really want to trade more and they want to touch that hot stove, then let's get on with it and get it over with. The Alyssa Slonkin strategy could work if you're just basing it on him fucking everything up.
And that's not a terrible bet. In the meantime, I just want more righteous anger.
That's just what I keep saying. I just want more righteous anger, like righteous anger, not silliness, not goofiness, but righteous anger.
Cold and clear and sharp as a knife instead of, you knowooky tiktoks and ping pong paddles that's i guess that's the most you can up for i'm gonna leave people with some schadenfreude they'll enjoy elon had a pretty bad day yesterday i just want to go tick through it the tesla stock is down 5.6 on thursday 29 for the month he was demoted trying to have a meeting where he was like you don't get to fire people anymore actually the cabinet secretaries do we'll see if that holds yeah we'll see if that's not really a great sign though that i guess it was the first sign that like maybe that there will be a leash put on here at some point they had a second failure in a row for SpaceX Starship. There was a spectacular shower of debris on a test flight.
And this was kind of a double whammy for him because I think he's also trying to redo the FAA. And the FAA had to halt flights to several Florida airports to avoid the debris.
He's being tweeted at by multiple baby mamas. As I mentioned to James Carville on Tuesday, I was at a parade on Monday where all the cyber trucks were getting pelted with beads.
So, you know, I don't know. And he had a French senator call him a buffoon on ketamine, which was also kind of a put a little charise on the top.
That was the righteous anger I've been looking for. I watched that speech.
That speech was awesome. So, you know, I mean, obviously, he's still the richest guy in the world, like whatever, but there's certainly some signs that maybe he's bit off a little more than he can chew.
And being the richest guy in the world is not what's important to him anymore. I mean, that's the thing, you know, it's like Tesla could crash, SpaceX could and did blow up again.
It doesn't matter to him. He is fine.
I think you see this to go back to him

and Sachs and Teal and the others. It's like, look, we're not the rich nerds anymore.
We're

important. We matter.
We have power. I was watching an interview with Warren Buffett the

other day, which was so reassuringly normal, but unlike somebody like Buffett, for them,

the money was never enough. It's about affirmation and self-actualization.
I don't think

Thank you. But unlike somebody like Buffett, for them, the money was never enough.
It's about affirmation and self-actualization. And I don't think it matters to Musk.
I mean, I don't know the man, but I don't think it matters to him very much anymore if Tesla tanks or SpaceX doesn't work. Eventually, it's going to matter to his shareholders.
And eventually, he's going to have to get called back to the office i guess i guess he could and he could say fine you know i quit i'm still the i mean all of this could go away and it's still he like jeff bezos you know everything could go wrong with the washington post that's a rounding error in his pocket at this point you know all of these guys are fantastically wealthy i'm telling you they've to quote our friend bill crystal you know this level of wealth is starting to bring out my inner socialist. I think he says democratic socialists, to be fair to Bill Kristol, but he might be on the way to full socialism.
I don't know. I think he said, we're going to have to go check the quote.
But this is an object lesson in what happens when you are so fantastically wealthy beyond any comprehension in a normal capitalist economy that you become ungovernable. You say, do whatever you want.
I don't care. I'll go buy an island.
I'll be Mark Zuckerberg. I'll build a bunker somewhere.
I don't know how you reason with folks like that other than to, again, take legal and legislative steps to basically curtail their power and say, no, the government is not your actual. I've been thinking about this.
I'm going to totally jump tracks. I'm thinking about this because I've been watching a show called Paradise.
Have you been watching it? No. All right.
I won't ruin it for you. It's what happens when multi-gazillionaires go completely nuts.
And it's a fantastic series. So if anybody out there hasn't watched it yet, the first season is now over.
Can you just leave us with any hope? Can gazillionaires eventually suffer the consequences of their actions? Is there any hope in the show? It depends on what you mean by suffer. Financially, no.
I think what Musk and the others really fear more than anything is ridicule. Yeah.
You know, like that's why they're in that's why they're in this game. This is the ridicule though.
I mean, if you're the spaceships breaking up and the, and that your car company is imploding and you have to report to little Marco now before you can fire people, you know, eventually the ridicules can pile up. This is my hope.
Don't take this from me. Dude, I'm not taking it away from you.
And I actually think that there is is a i think that there are several people in this administration who are headed for some kind of major emotional break sooner rather than later because i think they're all in over their heads and working at an unsustainable pace beyond their already fairly limited talents how's that we can only pray thank that was a great way to end. Thank you, Tom Nichols.
Everybody enjoy your weekend. We'll be back here.
Actually, Bill Crystal, I forget what he's doing on Monday. He's doing something else.
I have a new guest for the Monday show, but me and Bill are going to be hanging out on Substack Sunday afternoon. So if you can't wait till Monday for me, you can come on over to the Bullerick Substack on Sunday afternoon, get a little bit of Tim and Bill.
And Tom, you'll be back in six weeks.

Who knows what horrors will await us then.

I will see you in some fresh hell next month.

Sounds good.

Tom Nichols, thanks so much.

Everybody else, we'll see you soon.

Peace. In all I gave, you should have stayed at home yesterday.

All words can describe the feeling and the way you lied

These games you play, they're gonna end in more than tears someday

Oh, and all again, it shouldn't have to end this way It's 8.15 and that's the time that it's always been We got your message on the radio Conditions normal and you're coming home Inola gave his mother proud of little boy today Oh, this kiss you give The Bulldog Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper

with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.