Sam Stein and Adrian Carrasquillo: We Are in a Simulation

Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.
Today, we have a two-part episode that wades into the splash radius from Monday's Executive Order Bukanki covering DEI, NIH, hiring, freezes, and immigration. And first up, the right man for that job, it's Managing Editor at The Bulwwark you may have seen our two-man comedy routine on youtube and we're bringing it to the audio podcast it's my newish work husband sam stein how you doing sam oh man wow i didn't realize we were we had hit that point in our relationship but we hit it uh yesterday when we were bickering it was not a compliment to call you work husband.
It means that there's a love and bicker relationship that we are building. I feel touched.
Good. An honor to be in a second type.
Mike Johnson. Not physically touched, emotionally touched.
Well, we have a lot of pressure today because I'm here at 30 Rock in the Hotel California that I can never leave since I can't go home to snowy new orleans until they figure out how to de-ice the runway we have brian gumbel and jane paulie sitting over my shoulder here and so they will be keeping an eye on out for us that's like us it's kind of like us yeah are you brian or jane i guess i'm i guess i gotta be jane yeah clearly i love jane though she was kind of a she an icon. All right.
Of course. Let's get to business.
We're going to start, unfortunately, with Donald Trump. I gave all of you listeners a 72-hour respite from his voice, but the respite is over.
Here he is last night with Sean Hannity on what he thought about the January 6th pardons. Some of those people with the police, true, were very minor incidents okay you know they get built up by that a couple of fake guys that are on cnn all the time nobody watches they were very minor incidents i mean my favorite part of that was sean hannity got mad that he was watching cnn yeah Very minor injuries.
You know, it's, it's like too trite at this point to do the, like imagine if Barack Obama talked about the very minor injuries that cops suffered at the hands of a, you know, I don't know, violent mob of black Panthers or something. But anyway, the new black Panther party.
That's an old, that's an old one, yeah. Will there be any punishment for that?

This is just whatever at this point.

To me, we're at this point where it's like,

I'm not surprised he said this stuff.

I even think he probably believes some of it.

He's convinced himself of it.

Of course, these are not minor injuries.

I mean, officers committed suicide after what happened. It was an incredible trauma, physical and emotional.
We talked to one who was talking about seven straight hours of just being bombarded, worse than anything he had dealt with when he was serving overseas. And it's like, to trivialize that, of course, is outrageous.
But then at the same time, it's just, that's Trump, right? Like, it's all self-serving. It's all designed to rewrite history.
You know, they say to the victor go the spoils, and you get to write the history. And I think that's what he's doing here.
And Haney's kind of funny. I think Haney's more interesting here, but not because he was mocking CNN's audience.
But there's another part where they were talking about, I think Trump was like, you know, they were just there to protest the vote and they have the right to protest the vote. And Hannity kind of sheepishly realizes that this is ridiculous to say something like that.
He's like, well, you know, they don't really have the right to like storm the Capitol, right? It's like, Hannity's just got to be like, whoa, I think he took it too far. I mean, our man Sergeant Connell sent you, right? He texted you the picture.
He was like feet. Sergeant Connell sent me pictures.
And you look at his feet and his hands. And they're battered.
They're inflamed. They're bruised.
They're stitched up. He's had pictures where the arrow, the red arrow is pointing at him yeah imagine going through that for seven straight hours where you just have wave after wave of people coming at you with you know projectiles and flag poles and you know beams and and they're just throwing them at you and you're just like in what he called combat for seven straight hours and to be like oh well you know just minor stuff that jake tapper is all you know trying to take advantage of and make into a sob story it's like come on dude it's a piece of shit did trump think trump's ever been punched or punched anybody i guess he was in wwe that's not real obviously but you know who cares like who gives a shit if he's been punched or not even if you've never been punched yeah but even if you've never been punched during a fight like it doesn't take much to realize that that's not you know what happened on january 6th is bullshit and you should never have that happen it's not minor i guess there was some ear injury yeah he's been shot let's be clear about that he has been shot yeah i'm just saying i just compare it to what sergeant cannell went through it was aze.
He also had some issues with President Biden, and you'll be surprised that his revenge against President Biden is not going to be governing well.

Let's listen.

He pardoned everybody, but he didn't pardon himself.

And remember this, those people that he pardoned are now mandated, because they got a pardon, to testify and they can't take the feds.

Should Congress investigate that? I think we'll let Congress decide. Would you want the Attorney General to investigate it? You know, I was always against that with presidents and Hillary Clinton.
I could have had Hillary Clinton, a big number done on her. Have you changed your mind? Well, I went through four years of hell by this scum that we had to deal with.
I went through four years of hell. I spent millions of dollars in legal fees, and I won.
But I did it the hard way. It's really hard to say that they shouldn't have to go through it all.
So it is very hard to say that. Yeah, I remember like two minutes ago when Pam Bondi was going through a confirmation hearing over in the Senate and people were like, Pam, what are you going to do if the president directs you to do something inappropriately? It's like, that's a hypothetical.
Donald Trump would never do that. Here he is on Fox two days later saying, yeah, I think that the attorney general should look into former President Biden, apparently.

Apparently.

You know, it's ironic because it was his lawyers who successfully argued to the Supreme Court that you get broad immunity while acting as president from these types of things.

So I think Biden probably will be in the clear.

They also didn't try to impeach Biden. James Comer didn't really work out.
But look, you know what? I mean, again, I try to distinguish between what's real and what's not. And I'm trying to be true to the idea that we should react to what's real and what's not.
Obviously, this is not yet real, but it could be real. And it would look ridiculous, just as Joe Biden's pardons look ridiculous.
In terms of the spending money that he had to spend on legal fees, yes, Trump did have to spend a lot on legal fees. He also basically raised a lot of that money from donors, and then he sold some fucking shit cryptocurrency and made 20 times that.
The mega Americans paid. Right.
Mega Americans paid his legal fees. Right.
Regular, the forgotten man that was not invited to the inauguration. They all gave to the PAC, who then covered the legal fees.
He didn't really spend that much money. And then, of course, he made like $30 billion, or whatever the fuck it is, on meme coins.
Maybe that's what Biden should do, honestly. Or any of these people who are going to be in Dragnet.
Launch some shitty meme coins to raise some cash for the lawyers. I don't think that anybody's going to buy Joe Biden's meme coin.
A Biden meme coin? I don't know. Maybe a couple of blue MAGA influencers.
Is JoJo from Jers still on the Biden train? I don't know. I don't think that that's going to be a very good selling meme coin.
Back to the drawing board on Biden fundraising ideas for his legal fees. Wait, what is going on? Let's not go back to the drawing board.
Let's think of some other idea. Biden should sell guitars or Bibles.
I think that he's going to have to outsource this to somebody else. I don't know that there's a huge groundswell of people wanting to throw him cash right now.
Because of the presidential immunity, you are correct that probably not a lot here. And because of the fact that Biden didn't break any laws.
So, you know, I don't think that he should be quaking in his night shoes in Rehoboth Beach. But also the idea that this hasn't been investigated before, I mean, he's going to talk about what, the business dealings that Hunter had in Ukraine and China.
It's like, this has been subject of an immense amount of scrutiny. I mean, Trump basically tried to, you know, get Zelensky to look into it by withholding aid, right? Like, this is, all this stuff has been litigated.
So are we just going to do this for the next four years? Probably. Probably.
But here's what worries me, though, is Trump specifically mentions that Biden gave preemptive pardons to people, and he kind of implies that lets them off them off the hook right in this answer there's a longer answer that that he goes deeper into this and Hannity eventually tries to interrupt and say my producers want me to talk about the economy and Trump's like I don't care about that I'm gonna keep ranting about this like literally but Biden's probably fine it seems that Trump was not focused on the preemptive pardons there's another category category of people, though. You know, I think about like the Cassidy Hutchinson's of the world.
People that were in there that testified to the January 6th committee who were not included in the preemptive pardons. Yeah.
Who there is personal animus towards. This sounded like a man that wanted other people to go through hell.
I guess this is my point. This sounded like a man who wanted other people to go through the supposed hell that he went through.
And I find it hard to believe that they won't put a couple of people through hell, listening to that answer. Yes.
To that question, I agree. And I don't think it's just Trump who feels this way.
I think anyone who was brought in before the January 6th committee, AIDS to Trump, lower level staffers who were subpoenaed, whose records were accessed. You talk to them, I have.
They feel like they were subject to a politically oriented prosecution and that they didn't deserve to have all their records, all their time, all their legal fees taken over by the committee. And so they want to exact a bit of revenge.
And I think yesterday, the big news yesterday wasn't whatever Trump said to Hannity. It was Mike Johnson basically giving the go-ahead for this new select committee to investigate what preceded January 6th and what came after January 6th, which is basically just Barry Lattimer is going to basically take Cassidy Hutchinson, anyone else who was involved in the January 6th committee and testify before it,

make them come up, make them give records, make them sit for testimony,

make them come to hearings, and that's a real

burden. It's a real stress, and it costs money.

You can't just do it. You can't just be like,

oh, okay, I'm going to go through. You hire a lawyer to prepare

for that stuff. It costs money, and it's tit for

tat. It is.

They're going to try to find ways that they supposedly

perjured themselves, like look for anything to go after them for. And I think that's something that I'm, it's very,

it's very,

it's very,

it's very,

it's very,

it's very,

it's very,

it's very,

it's very,

it's very,

it's very,

it's very,

it's very,

it's very,

it's very,

it's very,

it's very,

it's very,

very,

very,

very,

very,

very,

very,

very,

very,

very,

very,

very,

very,

very,

very,

very,

very,

very,

very,

very,

very,

very,

very,

very,

very,

very,

very,

very,

very,

very,

very,

very,

very,

very,

very,

very,

very,

very,

very,

very,

very,

very,

very,

very,

very,

very,

very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, attack it is right and they're to try to find ways that they supposedly perjured themselves right like look for anything to to go after them for and and i think that's something that i'm it's very alarming anyway so we'll continue to monitor that one i want to play one more bit from uh trump this was him talking about california there is this like even among some like quasi normal people in the anti-anti world there's like this sense like trump really did have some points about that he was on this with the fires with the raking and the and the water coming down from the north yeah i honestly like not even mega people there have been people that are like you know you got to hand it to trump on this one i don't think you have to hand it to trump on this one he kind of expanded on what he wants to do with regards to the fires in this interview let's listen i don't think we should give california anything until they let water flow down into there just from the north to the south this is a political thing i don't know what it is you know they talk about the delta smelt it's a little tiny fish like this i want to they say it's an endangered species well how is it endangered no wonder it's endangered it's not getting any water how do you if you have a fish and you're stopping the water isn't that to hurt the fish yet? I'm glad we can use the R word again. We had Elizabeth Weil on this podcast.
There are definitely things that California did with forest management that was wrong. This is not the issue.
Water coming from the north to the south, the smelt not having enough water. This is not the issue.
Yeah, but you should be honest, Tim, that you are a big fan of the Delta smelt, and you're incredibly biased. I do want to protect the smelts.
You won't shut up about the smelt, your favorite fish. No, it's madness.
But this is insane, though. Again, he's threatening, and you got into a little tiff with some people about this.
I love this one, because after the fire started breaking out, it was very clear that this was going to be a huge tragedy and a multi-billion dollar catastrophe that would require the federal government to help out. I had the audacity, I mean, I'm so stupid, I had the audacity to note that Trump has been in the past reluctant to give California aid because he believes it's a blue state that voted against him and they don't deserve it.
And people were like, oh, how dare you point that out in this moment? That's ridiculous. And now here we are where he's refusing to give California aid unless they do some weird water policy that he thinks would have potentially prevented this.
It's absurd, obviously, because one, we don't condition aid. We never have.

This would be new policy.

And it's easy to see how this can get into a bad place fairly quickly for a lot of red states down the road. Two, anyone who you talk to said the issue is not the fact that water is not flowing more from the north to the south.
It's a combination of climate issues and the inability to stop a massive expanding fire when there's 80 mile per hour winds. The interview was right.
It is insane to go on Fox News and say, we're not going to give them aid. Yes, they can manage fires better.
But when you have 80 to 100 mile per hour winds in completely dry conditions, a manageable fire quickly becomes an unmanageable fire. And nothing that California could have done at that point, there was nothing they could have done at that point.
And so then the choice becomes, do you want to give them the help they need to recover or not? And it seems like he doesn't. Yeah, and nor the Speaker of the House also.
So I think this is going to be something that is going to end up becoming a massive fight that we're going to be monitoring.

There were 200 executive orders, and so getting to the splooge of all of it has been sort of challenging over the course of a few days. But we're starting to clean it up and kind of get a clearer picture here.
So I want to walk through a couple of them. There was a DEI executive order, like ending DEI across the government.

And an email went out from Russ Vose OMB. He's not confirmed.
Maybe the nominated director of the OMB had some influence on this. I can't say for sure.
Thank you for clarifying that, Sam. So this email went out to federal government employees asking them to snitch on anyone doing secret DEI or CIFR wokeness.
I want to read from this email a little bit. Dear agency employees, we're taking steps to close all agency DEIA offices.
I guess it's like LGBTQ plus. They keep adding new letters, but they're ending all DEIA related contracts in accordance to the executive order.
The email extends. These programs divided Americans by race, wasted taxpayer dollars and resulted in shameful discrimination.
We are aware of efforts by some in government to disguise these programs by using coded or imprecise language. If you are aware of a change in any contract description or personnel position description since November 5th to obscure the connection between the contract and DEIA plus or similar ideologies, please report all facts and circumstances to DEIATruth at opm.gov within 10 days.
That is fucking insane. That is an insane email to send.
They want people snitching. What can you say? It's like very evidence.
First of all, the A is accessibility. I know that because I just looked it up, trying to find the USDA's page on this, and then I clicked it, and lo and behold, I got a 403 error code because they've taken down all DEIA content.
And yeah, they want people to snitch. I guess I've been a little bit surprised.
Maybe I shouldn't have been at how like monomaniacally focused they are on DEI stuff. I mean, it is like they are like passionately trying to rid every semblance of this from the government.
It's probably like the most consistent thing that I've noticed over the past two or three days that they've been in office is they just really want to go hard on DEI. I'd like to know a little bit more about what's the coded DEI? What is a diversity word that does not quite use the name of affinity groups, I guess? I don't know.
I kind of have a rant about this DEI thing, if you'll indulge me, Sam. But hold on, stay with that.
If you heard your colleagues say something like, let's include Johnny at lunch. Is that worth snitching? Do you get in trouble? He used the word include.
I don't know. It's tough.
Or if it's like we're looking for diverse perspectives. Whoa! Watch.
Watch out. You know what I mean? Or if the job description lists very different types of attributes that you're looking for.
And some of those attributes code towards various races. I don't know.
It seems very fraught, to say the least, as far as the snitching is concerned. And I don't think it probably creates a very healthy workplace environment.
And we have a great workplace environment at the Bulwark, so I know how that goes. And it's not by telling your colleagues to snitch on each other if they get a little too woke.
but here's my DEI thing on like three podcasts this week I've done a throat clearing about how I find a lot of DEI

pamphlets and

resolutions and like

training On three podcasts this week, I've done a throat clearing about how I find a lot of DEI pamphlets and resolutions and trainings dumb.

And I do. And Robin DiAngelo's book was really stupid.
That said, though, the pendulum has swung so far to me. And it is like wild to think that we're at a point now in 2025 where it's like the government should not have any interest in making sure that people from different diverse perspectives are involved in these jobs because you know we've already ended racism and to have the representatives of that government be like a group where the inside circle has more white south african males than non-white women.
The Republican Senate majority leaders race included, I think, four people named John. Yeah, a lot of Johns.
Four white guys named John, right? And behind Trump, they had all the richest people in the world. Got to shout out Sundar was there.
Besides that, it was all white guys.

Sundar is also a man.

I think he's still identifying as male.

So, you know, I should also say,

while some of the trainings are dumb,

it does feel like we still have a little bit of work that we can do.

And it's probably not too harmful

to have a couple of positions in government

where they're trying to say,

hey, you know, I don't know,

maybe in law enforcement,

we should have more people

from marginalized communities. Maybe in this, right? I mean, like, it seems on its face, like the Trump people would be the representatives of we have ended at racism is a little galling, I guess.
Of course. I mean, their point is that it's all about merit.
It's all about merit. That's why we got to put a drunk weekend Fox and Friend host in charge of the military.
Merit only. This is a merit-based show.
Speaking of merit, imagine if, I want to get to Tulsi in a second, but like imagine if Tulsi had never been red pilled and she just, you know, stayed as kind of like a lefty Bernie type in Congress and did a lot of MSNBC. and then Bernie got elected and made her Secretary of Defense.

The DEI conversation around her would be insane. You know, it'd be like, how could this person get this job? They're so unqualified.
How could you put a Hawaiian woman in there just because she has the spirit of aloha? Like, it is crazy that the stupidest Americans could put together an organization full of mostly South African and de-rate white men and be like, we've solved this. We've solved this.
We're in a post-racial society. It's even worse than that.
How could it be worse than that? Well, because you said it was just government. But the actual executive order, if you read it, they told contractors, private companies, that you can't do DEI anymore.
It's like if you contract with the government and you have DEI in your pamphlets or on your website, you're in trouble. So it's like the government is enforcing this vision on private companies too.
This is the first actual job creation idea I've seen from the administration because Deloitte has so much DEI material on their website, they're going to have to hire in a full team of technical experts to come in to scrub everything. They are creating some new works.
Hold on, there's a good story there. Maybe it's replaced by AI, but there's got to be some engineer somewhere whose profile is like alright, I got this new tool that I'm going to plug in it's going to do a thorough scrub of our company's website any word diversity is off we're going to replace it, what's the synonym yeah, there's definitely a new cottage industry of people who are consulting people about how to just not look like you're celebrating diversity.
There's also a no pride flag initiative. Yeah, only one flag.
This is what we voted for. I guess three flags.
There's the thin blue line. There's the Trump flag.
Right, right, right. Confederate flag.
Any MAGA flag, sure. American flag.
Of course. No other flags.
All right. We have some other serious business on these EOs this is serious oh no this was all serious I mean the flag jokes maybe we're not that serious we had another executive order I've received a couple of emails from listeners flagging the shrapnel from the EO regarding the National Institute of Health Trump issued an executive order that stopped all external communications, NIH, which might seem like, what is that? Is that just press releases? Well, here are a couple of things.
One is something called study sections, which are the official proceedings to review new grant applications for funding. This effectively holds up all research that the U.S.
government does, pediatric cancer, Alzheimer's, anything, because you have to have external communications with whatever, doctors and experts to kind of review what types of grants for new research should be done. So we basically had a freeze on all scientific research in the federal government, which is great.
It also includes alerts about things like bird flu, right? This is why your egg prices are going up because, you know, there's another avian flu outbreak,

but right now the government can't put out alerts about various areas where we've seen outbreaks.

Is that that big a deal?

Yeah, what could go wrong?

I, you know, I'd rather not know if my, you know, eggs are like going to kill me.

Just eat them. Take a chance.

Maybe it's like a kind of a word of mouth thing. Hey, don't eat the eggs.
Don't eat. Just don't eat those eggs.
We're going back to the before times, you know, where you just hear rumors, you know, through secret channels. We can have, like, an underground bird flu railroad going from.
An underground egg exchange? These eggs are fine. Don't worry about these eggs i also think that um and this is i guess 90 days whatever so you can say okay well whatever but rfk your boy we've got his nomination next wednesday we'll be live streaming that on the blark youtube so everybody can check that out um but he has said that he wanted to end all research being done by the federal government across i don don't have the quote in front of me.
He wanted to end it on infectious diseases. All infectious disease.
Yeah, he wanted to look at chronic diseases and things like that. I mean, in the totality, and I've done a bit of prior reporting in this world because I kind of obsessed over it for a little while while many years ago.
But look, the NIH is the premier scientific research institution in the world, right? It's a $40 billion budget. It's done immeasurable good and produced incredible breakthroughs across a host of different fields.
It is the gold standard. And various presidents over the years have lauded the work it's done.
George W. Bush was a huge NIH guy.
Obama, big. Biden, he was, you know, he wanted to do the whole brain cancer moochant.
How'd that turn out? Well, they made real progress, honestly, but obviously they need to do more. I anticipate that this is a momentary issue here, but I think the larger issue here is what we should focus on, which is they're going to create a climate, whether it's this, whether it's RFK coming on board, whether it's Doge looking for serious budget cuts, in which the young scientists in our country, many of whom are here looking for a pathway to just stay here, they will look elsewhere.
They'll just look elsewhere because there's too much uncertainty. And in scientific biomedical research, you need certainty.
You need five to 10 year funding windows. You need to know that the government's going to be there to communicate with you and not change course.
You need to know the government's not going to pull your grants because Elon read something from Catcher 2 about some shrimp on treadmills and shit. And they're like, oh, let's pull it.
You know, like you need certainty. And so my, my hunch is that we're just going to see what is in essence, a huge brain drain and people who would normally stay here and produce studies through the academic system to the universities are just going to look to South Korea, to China, to Canada, to Israel, to other places where they will say, Hey, cool, come on.
We will take your work. We will take your expertise.
And we will build off of the breakthroughs that you produce. And we'll get screwed for that.
Well, I think that's probably going to be good news for MAGA because they're like, look, we're going to get rid of all these smarties. And those jobs are going to open up jobs for the Turning Point USA campus chairman at LSU.
They might now get to go work at NIH. I know you're being a little tongue-in-cheek, but yeah, I actually think they might think that.
And also, the other thing is there was an announcement from the White House two days ago where Larry Ellison was talking about AI is going to produce these amazing mRNA vaccines that are personalized and can cure your cancer. It's like, wait a second.
I thought MAGA was super opposed to vaccines. But maybe AI will just solve all these issues and make the NIH totally obsolete.
Let's hope, right? I'm optimistic about AI in medical spaces. I'm pretty pessimistic about the American government's health research regime going forward.
So we'll see how all that turns out. We don't do schadenfreude here, obviously, when people experience the consequences of their vote, but we do want to inform when things happen.
One of the other EOs I want to flag is there's just a cross-government hiring freeze. This is, again, who knows whether Russ Vogt actually wrote this EO.
He hasn't been confirmed yet to run the OMB, but it's certainly in line with his mission to cut down the government and to not bring in subject matter experts, to only bring in political hacks, and to get rid of people through attrition. So there's been an across-the-board hiring phrase with a few carve-out exceptions, national security, border security, of course.
This is already affecting people. There was a tweet I saw from a guy named John Basham.
Attention, please help, at POTUS Trump and at Senator Ted Cruz. My wife is a nurse and was recently hired by the VA.
Our home is packed up. We have a new home.
We've spent thousands to move our family to Waco. Following Trump's hiring freeze, EO, VA rescinded her job offer.
My wife is in tears and inconsolable. My family is devastated.
That is unfortunate. It's a pretty devastating story.
I should note that John Basham has on his feed that he's a very big MAGA supporter. So there you go.
That shit happens, man. It's all fun and games until it actually happens.
And you're seeing already reports, VA issues at the VA because they can't bring in new people to help. You're going to obviously see, we just talked about it with the NIH.
You're going to just see it across the board, except for the border. We're going to surge at the border and we'll have that.
This is the thing. The government actually does stuff and people always are talking about how stupid the government is and wasteful, but that's because they don't know that the government's doing stuff that they don't recognize and so when your eggs have you know deadly viruses or salmonella and suddenly you can't eat those you know omelets that you love because they don't have health inspectors like yeah that's because the government does stuff and uh it it's going to be a rude awakening for a lot of folks so yeah so we're only three days in and who knows how the policies will shake out but just as a quick scorecard by the way three days in three three days how you actually feel better than i was on monday i was i was in a really dark place on monday yeah kind of contemplating my life choices in a very serious way the tone of your youtubes were bleak bleak i was doing a personal inventory of the worst days of my life and trying to figure out where it fit.
Where was it? Top 10? Just even doing that kind of inventory is not really a great sign. That doesn't sound healthy, Tim.
Jeez. Yeah, it was good though.
Yeah, it was useful for me to kind of process. I do want to do a scorecard though for the final three days because we've got skyrocketing egg prices.
Who knows? Maybe temporary. We've had quite a few people, it seems like, lose their job because of the executive orders.
So we have some substantive job losses. We don't have any EOs really seeming like that focus on economic gains.
We've had some crypto, some gains in crypto. So if you're investing in crypto, you're looking good.
Other than that, more guns, I guess, I guess more criminals have purchased guns. You know, we had the shaman said that he was excited that he could go buy guns.
So we've released cop beaters. We have criminals purchasing more guns.
We have higher egg prices. We have MAGA Americans that wanted to work for the VA losing their job.
That's our scorecard so far. We'll see how it turns out.
We'll continue to monitor. We mentioned the director of national intelligence from Aloha, who is sitting next to the CEO of a Chinese spy app at the inauguration, which seems a little bit, maybe it was kind of keep your friends close, keep your enemies closer type situation, but I don't think so.
Semaphore is reporting Tulsi Gabbard's bid to become Trump's director of national intelligence is on shaky ground. Republican lawmakers raising private concerns.
Trump now urging her, she has to get more aggressive. Republicans are hesitant about her past statements that some have read as too warm towards Vladimir Putin.
You don't say. And former Syrian regime leader Bashar al-Assad.
The disappointing part of this report from our friends at Semaphore was that the Gabbard confirmation was set in contrast to Kash Patel, who apparently has been impressing Republican senators with his children's books about the insurrection. I don't know.
Any thoughts on that? We've got Cash and RFK are set for next Wednesday hearings. I don't know if we have a date for Tulsi yet, but any thoughts on the remaining numbs? Tulsi's date uncertain so far.
And yes, I have a lot of thoughts because this is the subject of today's press pass. I wrote with Protacon.
So I was at a briefing with what we have to refer to as a GOP member of Congress. Those were the conditions of the briefing last week on Friday.
And the member went through the list of, or there was pressed on the list of the controversial nominees. And it's like RFK Jr.
And he was like, well, you know, should be fine. Because we've got a lot of pro-lifers who are going to be surrounding him.
So I think he's going to be fine. Cash would tell.
He's like, well, you know, he said some problematic things in the past. But he'll be fine.
Because everyone thinks he'll get beyond that. And then they were like, Tulsi.
And he was like, she's got work to do. And that sort of really jumped out at me.
It was a totally different tone and demeanor with respect to Tulsi compared to the other two. The issues are plentiful, right? It's not just Bashar al-Assad and Putin and all that stuff.
I was like, well, I've got to figure out what's in the record book. So I went through the archives of her House website and looked at the foreign policy section.
I mean, she's not fit for this Republican Congress, even though they are totally made by Trump. But she was very, you know, she's critical of any aid to Saudi Arabia after the Khashoggi assassination.
She has encouraged the pardons of Snowden. She's encouraged the pardon of Assad.
She's somewhat supportive of the BDS movement. She's been somewhat critical of Israel for how it's treated the Palestinians.
Things that not every Republican member of Congress is on board with. You combine that with the fact that she was very recently Democrat.
And honestly, someone mentioned this to me, that she's a woman. I think that's not a great recipe for her.
I did talk to one very plugged-in GOP lobbyist about this, and they made the point that I think is valid, which is they think she'll get through because the establishment-type Republican senators know that John Thune would be in real trouble with Trump if she didn't get through. And so they want to throw Thune a bone and keep him in his place because Thune's about as good as it gets.
You got to have somebody like John Thune in there. You want to know if somebody can trust that has a backbone, who when he was asked about the Capitol Police to protect him, getting mauled by supporters, being pardoned.
You know, he said, well, sometimes shit happens, essentially, with the Senate Majority. So it's important you have him in there because he'll respect the interests of the establishment.
The other thing that jumped out at me when you sent a memo about that briefing with the GOP lawmaker was that there still remains like kind of a delusion among certain types of GOP lawmakers, let's say,

that Donald Trump isn't really going to do anything that he says.

That was the gist.

You got that from the moment.

He's like, oh, it's going to be all right.

It's just like all of the challenging things.

Like, what about the mass deportation?

What about this?

Well, you know, on that thing.

And it's like on the other stuff, the tax cuts are going to happen.

So anyway, I was intrigued that that delusion still persists. All right, I have to get you on the final topic, which is Sam Altman versus Elon Musk.
There was an announcement. Trump put out an announcement.
Sam Altman and Elon Musk. Sam Altman runs OpenAI.
For people who don't know, there's a long personal rivalry. I don't know, probably related to some microdosing party they were at in Silicon Valley at some point.
I actually don't know the backstory on why Sam and Elon don't like each other. But Sam said that OpenAI was going to be contributing 500 million to investing in the country for some AI project.
Elon replies to the announcement with like, bullshit. Shocking.
It's like, bullshit. Not going to happen.
And so I'm like, okay, so he's undermining Trump's own rollout on this. And then there becomes like- I've never seen anything like that happen.
Ever. It was incredible.
A senior official at the government, and he's a government official at this point, being like, that's what the president made yesterday is just bullshit. What the fuck? It's insane.
We'll see how long that lasts with Elon and Trump. But I was actually more interested by Altman's response.
So Altman's going to just skewer it on X by all of the MAGA people. Yeah, he's getting killed.
Going back to all his old never-Trumper tweets. He was a J.D.
Vance, Tim Miller type back in 2016. I'm the only one still standing.
So Sam sends this tweet that I have to read to you. Watching at POTUS Trump more carefully recently has really changed my perspective on him.
I wish I had done more of my own thinking. I definitely fell in the NPC trap.
I'm not gonna agree with him on everything, but I think it'll be incredible for for the country like this is the man running the largest ai operation like this is the person we're entrusting our ai future to somebody who's like either so stupid or so gullible or so shameless that he was like you know i just had to watch donald trump a little more closely before i could and i real like he was criticizing him through 2022 it's like what has he seen in the last year and then that he's using this like online like if you don't know what an npc is like a mega like poster reddit poster thing where they like make fun of people who just go along with the conventional wisdom on everything and they say that like you're like a non-player character in a video game like who talks like this like sam altman is tweeting like he is a median, intelligent, never-Trump-returned-mega internet personality. This whole suck-up routine is pretty scary.
Another tweet that he sent today, which just had me laughing, and this was obviously directed towards Elon, was, just one more mean tweet, and then maybe you'll love. Like these guys are like out here in the open, just embracing these like weird psychodramas and the fragility of their collective egos is remarkable.
I mean, you are worth so much money. You have been asked to have so much responsibility for like literally the future of society.
And you're out there being like tweeting at each other and being like you know stop being mean and and oh i was so stupid and i should have known more about trump and done my research it's just like go to fucking work go build your ai like get off the fucking twitter and do work like everyone else okay like they tweet more than me and my job is to tweet somewhat and follow this stuff. What the hell? Go do work and stop doing this shit.
And if you have problems with Elon, call him up. We don't need to see this whole thing play out over X.
I'm tired of it. I can't believe these emotionally stunted video game boys are running our future.
But it also makes me think we are in a simulation, though, because it probably is an emotionally stunted video game boy like Sam Altman that is laughing at us in the sky right now. Because how could this be real? I mean, it's possible.
It's possible that we're in a Westworld type thing. But it's like, at some point, you've got gotta like, you gotta like think to yourself, how did these people, and maybe, maybe that's the way that I thought about this philosophically.
Like, do you have to be built like this in order to be this successful? Like, do you have to be this online and this strivey and this emotionally insecure to like build this type of wealth or, or, or is working the other way, where you become the successful and you feel constantly on edge and hurt and that you have to lash out at all your critics in weird cryptic posts? Elon was on this morning making totally bananas and not really particularly funny Nazi jokes. It's like, dude, go do Doge.
Go do rockets. Do anything other than tweet.
We don't need this anymore. Or maybe get deported.
I don't know. Could be part of our new immigration regime.
We're having some new stricter rules, so we might have to review your documentation. Sam Stein, thank you so much.
It's been a pleasure. We can discuss existential matters about the existence of our society

on another day.

Everybody follow us on YouTube

if you haven't.

Me and Sam do funny little bits

from time to time.

Can't wait for the RFK hearing.

We'll be live for that.

Up next,

our newest bullworker,

Adrian Karasco. regime or whatever emerges from that.
He's reported on politics and Latino issues for over a decade, including at Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Politico, and The Guardian. It's Adrian Karaschia.
Welcome to the pod, man. Tim, thanks so much for having me.
I was ranting with Sarah and JVL on The Next Level yesterday about how sometimes in our biz, in the political commentary biz, there is a tendency to, after you learn what happened about something, the next question is, like, will this matter? Will people care about this? And I am going to try very hard to resist that temptation, at least over the next year, because who the fuck knows is partly the answer, and there's not another election for, you know, 22 months. I mean, not another broad national election.
And so, you know, immigration is one example of this where I think that people are going to fall into a trap of, well, Donald Trump had a mandate on immigration and people like this. So whatever.
And I think that is just totally the wrong way to look at this. And like the implications of what happens in this area, I think, are about as great as in anywhere besides maybe the federal government stuff we just talked about with Sam.
But I don't know. So I want to go with you.
I want to break through all of the executive orders one at a time with you. But the broadest picture, what is your sense for the mood about how much of this is saber-rattling, how much is is going to be real and the extent of the impact.
I think that we wrote even before Trump became president, that there were multiple parts here. There is a PR campaign.
There is a like, we're pitting a new coat of paint on the deportations that were happening before. You know, ICE released a report in the end of December at the Joe Biden's last, you know, ICE report, basically, they got 81,000 criminals last year.
So the United States was already getting criminals, you get to put a new coat of paint, you get to have the bully pulpit, and you get to say, Oh, my God, look, Tom Homan saying, we're getting so many criminals. So that's one part, these executive orders that we're going to talk about, they really do look to transform immigration in America, you know, to the extent that Trump can do it.
Yes, laws need to be passed by Congress. But the first Trump administration already sort of took a hatchet to the trunk of like legal immigration, asylum and things like that.
So now they are just continuing and now they understand the levers of government better. So this really is an assault on the immigration system.
They are breaking down a lot of pieces of it, which we'll get into at the border. And so no, it really is a new day.
And they have put in a lot of things that are going to cause strife, not just for people who've come here, but you know, there's directives that they can now go into schools and hospitals and churches. So this is going to be a very challenging and it's going to be very difficult for a lot of people.
Let's talk to the EOs. I think the one that we've gotten to since Monday on this pod is the birthright citizenship executive order, which is just preposterous on its face.
I did a reading of the 14th Amendment, I believe, on Tuesday's pod. It's about as clear as you can get.
As far as the sum you want changed, you're going to have to change the Constitution. We'll see if our wise and noble Supreme Court agrees with the plain letter of the law, I guess, over the next couple of months.
But outside of birthright citizenship, let's tick through what some of the other EOs have been. Yeah.
So he declared a national emergency at the border, which unlocks for him the ability to bring troops. He says the Secretary of Defense is going to send troops.
So already, it's 1500 troops that are headed to the border, with the likelihood that they could go up as high as 10,000 troops. You know, we could break that down if you wanted to the fact that three days ago, the New York Times had a story about how basically the border was quiet at the end of Biden's term, but they've declared an invasion and they say that we're sending troops to the border.
So we're sending troops to the border. Part of that is the military sealing the border and putting more barriers around the border.
So that's the first couple. On the emergency side, what was the pretense for the emergency? Because he did this the last term, but the pretense was COVID.
You're right. You're right.
And you bring up a great point, which is that, you know, in the past they were using pretenses. There's this disease, so no one can come.
It's just explicit now. He's calling it an invasion.
This is the same language that Greg Abbott and Ken Paxson used in Texas, which a lot of people felt inspired the shooter in El Paso at the Walmart, who said, you know, there's an invasion. So I'm driving 10 hours to kill Mexicans and Latinos.
I mean, so it's fully US policy that there's an invasion at the border right now. And that's where the national emergency comes in.
So what do the groups you talked to on this one? I mean, is there legal vulnerability here? Or is there a sense that like the president has a wide berth to kind of declare emergencies at their whim? Yeah, look, I mean, I think from the national emergency, the invasion and what that could unlock legally, to things like which we'll get into using the Alien Enemies Act to go after cartels and gangs that

are, he is now designated terrorist organizations. These are laws that have been on the books,

you know, the Alien Enemies Act has been on the books in 1798, which says that like another

country is doing an armed invasion of our country. And so yeah, there's concerns that

US citizens could get caught up if you're if you're Venezuelan, and you know, the gang that

they're going after is Venezuelan. So yeah, there are so many of those concerns.
I think the groups when I first

I first

I first

I first

I first

I first

I first

I first

I first

I first

I first

I first

I first

I first

I first

I first

I first

I first

I first

I first

I first

I first

I first

I first

I first

I first

I first

I first

I first

I first

I first

I first

I first

I first

I first

I first

I first

I first

I first

I first

I first

I first

I first

I first

I first

I first

I first

I first

I first

I first

I first

I first

I first

I first

I first

I first

I first

I first

I first

I first

I first

I first I first I first I first I first I those concerns. I think the groups, when I first talked to them, were sort of shell-shocked.
They knew this was coming, but you're like sifting through even the legal groups and then are trying to figure out which they're going to go after first. So the emergency of the border, birthright citizenship, what else? Yeah, one of them is just the military like sealing the borders and putting up barriers and things like that, designating criminal cartels as global terrorists.
That's part of it. They're also suspending refugee resettlement for four months until such time as further entry of refugees aligns with the interests of the United States.
So that doesn't look like that's going to come back anytime soon. I know they were canceling flights of people from Afghanistan, 1,660 people from Afghanistan, their flights were cleared, they were on the way.
As people say, no one gets more vetting than refugees. It can sometimes take years, and he's just sort of unilaterally canceling these flights.
Those are a couple of the other ones. The Afghan refugee thing is so sick.
And imagine being one of these people, like the work to get out of the country, the horror there to go to another country, you know, to be waiting to come to have your flight ready. It's just like, it's a total nightmare.
Is your sense on the refugee things that they're going to reduce that number to zero refugees? I think that's the sense. They said that they want to revisit that in 90 days and see if it's in the best interest of the U.S., and that just seems like they're clearly going to say that it's not in the best interest of the U.S.
Yeah, great. Huddled Mass is a good name for the newsletter.
You can see it's kind of right on the nose there. What about in the interior? Did any of the EOs affect people that are here on visas or anything such as that? Some of the people who were here legally, they are causing headaches for them.
One of the things that I found really interesting was on, I don't know if you know about the CVP1 app, it was this app that people always talk about law and order and coming into the border orderly, in an orderly fashion. And that's something that the Biden administration created where they said, we're going to have this app.
You sign up. If you come in without using this app, you're done.
You're gone. But if you use this app, you can sign up for an appointment.
And this great Washington Post reporter, Adelaide Hernandez, she had video of migrants crying because their appointments were being canceled. And so this is this is a people say, wait, you're the law and order president.
People say, get in line and do it the right way. And this was people getting in line and doing it the right way.
This is where I say it's sort of an assault from all these different parts because there's so many pieces here when it comes to the orders. Yeah, that video was actually what I was referencing at the top when I was talking about on the next level, something I was like, I don't know if this will matter to swing voters in the midterms, and I don't really care.

It was just a horrific human anecdote.

I will put the link in the show notes if people missed it.

It's just somebody that had waited, had decided that they were going to do this the right way.

They were three hours away from their appointment. They shut down the app.
And just totally brutal. I want to talk about one other thing before we get into kind of what's next and implications.
In addition to the executive orders, we have the Lakin Riley Act. Lakin Riley was the young woman that was killed by an undocumented immigrant.
It became kind of a flashpoint during the campaign. And a lot of Democrats worked with Republicans on this, in part, I think, because on the face of it, it was kind of pitched in a sort of common sense way, which is like, criminal illegal migrants should be punished or deported.
It was just, if you commit a crime, in addition to being in the country illegally, that person should not be given leniency. But the act had a bunch of other stuff in it, as is often the case.
They stuffed these things through. One of the unintended consequences I saw was this litigiousness.
It makes it easier to sue on immigration grounds if you're in the states. And Steve Bannon was pushing, like now red state governors are going to be able to sue the feds if they feel like they're being forced to take H-1B visas or immigrants that are here in various legal ways.
So talk to us about what exactly the elements are of that bill and what the implications might be. So fascinating because I think there was something about doing it at the beginning of the year where it did seem a little bit like the sort of the groups in the advocacy world were quite a little flat footed.
There's been a lot of reporting, people felt that, you know, maybe some of the Democrats hadn't read the bill. I mean, you know, to your point, state attorney general can sue if they feel the federal government's not doing something, abiding correctly on immigration.
Federal government is the one that runs immigration. So now you're empowering the Ken Paxons of the world to find issue with anything and to launch all these lawsuits.
On top of that, I think that there is so much in the political space. You mentioned the word criminal and people say, oh, no, absolutely.
Criminals should be out, you know, Americans and politicians. But this is as simple as somebody shoplifting now can be detained, can have their due process rights taken away.
ICE has already said this is going to cost billions and they're focused on criminals and now they're going to get shoplifters or they're going to get people with nonviolent, smaller crimes. So, you know, it's not surprising that the Republicans push this.
It is more surprising that a lot of Democrats went along with it and that there's parts in there that really seem to be sort of undercover and emerged after advocacy and everyone stepped up and said, wait, what are you doing? How are you voting for this? You mentioned that Ken Paxton, the attorney general in Texas, the ability to sue the feds. One thing I think a lot of commentators are missing about what is coming in the immigration regime is that it is going to push a lot of power down to states and jurisdictions, let them loose to do enforcement as aggressively as they want, right? And I think that while it might be the strategic idea of the Trump poobahs, like we're going to do raids in Chicago and in blue states to make blue politicians look bad, all these red state governors and constitutional sheriffs and attorney generals are going to feel political pressure to butch up and like demonstrate that they're tough on illegal immigration too, and that they're going to have crackdowns in their states.
And I think about that in Louisiana. I think that there's going to be a lot of issues happening in local jurisdictions that people haven't really wrapped their head around yet.
I don't know what you think about that. I think before Trump became president, we saw it from readers.
We saw it from people people who were Trump supporters that said it's not going to be this bad. Stop fear mongering.
Like this is not what's going to happen. We don't we don't believe that he's going to do all this stuff.
Well, a lot of these things are happening. Right.
And, you know, in December, for example, a Missouri legislator said, let's do thousand dollar bounties on undocumented immigrants. You turn in immigrants, you get a thousand bucks1,000 each.
And so people hear that and they're like, oh, come on, that's not going to pass. This is crazy.
To your point, Democrats have really lost the enforcement battle. That's a little preview of my next newsletter.
So a Democrat was telling me, you want alligators with lasers on their like, at this point, Democrats are sort of giving up on the enforcement piece, which, again, only has Republicans saying, licking their lips saying, how much further can we go in these states? And so, yeah, it's going to be I don't think people are prepared for what exactly is going to happen here. You know, the Democrats do have to be strategic here, right? I don't have to be strategic on this podcast.
I can talk about whatever the fuck I want. But the Democrats have to be kind of like pick their battles, like what is winnable, what is going to be politically salient, what doesn't make them look like they're on the side of violent criminal migrants or whatever.
You're saying that they're kind of just going to let the Republicans have what they want as far as border enforcement is concerned. Where are they starting to look to actually try to pick fights and limit the scope of this? A source yesterday was telling me that the law and order piece is an area where they can say, wait, Trump said he was going to come in and bring law and order.
He's canceling things like the CBP One app that actually brings some order to this process. You know, what's going on with birthright citizenship is very much an area that is fertile ground for Democrats where you can say, this is not right.
This is in the US Constitution. The executive can't edit the Constitution like it's a Wikipedia page.
This is not happening. So those are some areas where they can fight back.
I was thinking of this frame of sort of like, I would wear enforcement, they're giving up so much on enforcement. It's like, yeah, you can have a border wall, but leave immigrants in the interior of the fuck alone.
And I think that there's going to be fights on, you're trying to tear apart families, you're trying to go after small businesses. ICE used to, there used to be migrants, immigrants who would be able to claim, let's say sanctuary in a church, right? And why are they able to do that? ICE is not going to a church to drag you out.
Well, now there was a directive literally under the cover of night the other day, the DHS is now there's a memo where basically, you can go into churches, you can go into hospitals, you can go into schools, and they told ICE to use common sense. So you know, I had a great legal source telling me that ICE offices are like police precincts.
They're very individual. They very kind of do their own thing.
And so they very famously don't listen to memos and directives, by the way. So this is one where now they can just do what they want.
And if somebody maybe heads into a church, maybe they can go in and drag them out, right? There's a lot of fear around schools and things like that. So I think that's the slippery slope for Republicans in the Trump administration.
Are you doing things like this, which I think will play into the Democrats' hands? You're right. They can't oppose Trump on everything.
But this is an area that I think could be problematic for Republicans. Yeah, well, the Christian party.
It's like, hey, we're going to start going into churches to deport people. It's just kind of that is right out of the New Testament.
If you just sort of read between the lines is exactly what Jesus was advocating for. One last thing on enforcement, and this is going to be me editorializing.
I'm wondering if you have any reporting on this from what happens on the Hill. I'm worried a little bit, to your point, that Democrats in their rush to want to seem tough on border security and to concede to Republicans on border security, that they are going to bail Republicans out of a couple of budget pickles, you know, because they don't want to be seen as blocking immigration enforcement.
You know, you can already see this on the Hill. There's some conversations happening where Republicans might cut a deal, want to cut a deal where they can increase the debt limit and keep the government open in exchange for border security.
I just think it would be a massive mistake for the Democrats to go along with that. And I'm worried that they are.
So I don't know if you've had any conversations with folks on the Hill or advocacy groups and how they're kind of thinking about the coming budget fight. It's a great question, because I did see that reporting yesterday as well, that they're considering some like huge deal on all these fronts.
I did talk to a senior Democrat yesterday, though, who said, we're not going to be bailing them out anymore. If Republicans can't govern, Democrats shouldn't come in to help them out with all the problems that they're having with their own side.
So I do think that that's one piece that's interesting and something to watch. I don't know for sure.
I know people are talking about this big deal, but there's definitely Democrats who don't want to do that. All right.
Thanks so much. Newest bull worker.
Excited to have you on board. Adrian Karasquio will continue to be talking, unfortunately,

because I think there will be a lot of news on this front.

So we'll look forward to having you back soon,

and we'll be back tomorrow for another edition of the Bull Work Podcast

with our buddy David French.

See you all then.

Peace.

Pedro lives out of the Wilshire Hotel.

He looks out a window without glass.

The wall's made of cardboard. Newspapers on his feet feet and his father beats him because he's too tired to bed.
He's got nine brothers and sisters. They're brought up on their knees.
It's hard to run when a coat hanger beats you on the thighs. Pedro dreams of being older and killing the old man.
But that's a slim chance. He's going to the boulevard.
He's going to end up on the dirty boulevard. He's going out to the dirty boulevard.
He's going down to the dirty boulevard. This room costs $2,000 a month.
You can believe it, Oh man It's true. Somewhere a landlord's laughing until it wets its pants.
No one dreams of being a doctor or a lawyer or anything. They dream of dealing on the dirty boulevard.
Give me your hungry, your tired, your poor. I'll piss on them.
That's what the statue of bigotry says. You're poor, huddled masses.
Let's club them to death. Get it over with and just dump them on the boulevard.
Get them out. On the dirty boulevard.
Going out. To the dirty boulevard.
They're going down on the dirty billboard. Going out.

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