Sarah Longwell and Jonathan V. Last: We Are Sticking With the Mission

Hello and welcome to the Bulwark podcast. I'm your host Tim Miller.
It is New Year's Eve. So I'm here with my besties.
It's Sarah Longwell, publisher of the Bulwark and JVL, editor of the Bulwark, author of the Triad newsletter. It's an underrated newsletter.
I'm not sure if you've heard of it. Sarah reads it from time to time.
How are you doing, guys? How's your holiday been? I've missed you guys. Yeah, I did not realize how much I missed you guys when news happens and I can't talk about it with you.
I can try talking to the people around me, but they reach a threshold. Have you not been talking to the people at the lesbian cottage that you're in? No, I have.
Did you sit down with your children and say, boys, boys, we need to talk about H-1B visas.

Yeah. I was like, because I haven't even broached Elon Musk.
Like, I've already done, you know, they know about the Trump stuff, but now, I mean, the number of villains in this story, I need them to have, you know, hope and optimism. Anyway, I'm glad to see you guys.
I've got a lot of things that I would like to talk about and catch up on. I had the same thing, Sarah.
We have our kids are the same age. Like the fact that they're going to remember this next administration was like actually the saddest thing for me on election night.
JVL has already dealt with us. He has grown children.
So, you know, they've already had their night, their childish naivete dashed, you know, by the world, but it's tough. Okay, much to discuss.
The only actual news we have since yesterday's pod is Trump has endorsed Mike Johnson for speaker, presumably averting the first hurdle there of the pre-presidency. He wrote in a bleat, the American people need immediate relief from all the destructive policies of the last administration.
Speaker Mike Johnson is a good, hardworking, religious man. It's interesting.
He'll do the right thing and will continue to win. Mike has my complete and total endorsement, all caps MAGA.
So there was some pushback on this. Steve Bannon and the folks at America Fest, where I was at at last week were booing Johnson.
Breitbart was trying to defenestrate him. There were some other people inside the caucus, like maybe 12, that said they wanted to get rid of him, but Trump is trying to stop the nonsense early.
Sarah, I want to start with you because I think you're the hardest hit by this result. On our YouTube feed, we had an amazing video where everybody gave their 2025 predictions.
We have some really smart colleagues. Some of the predictions really tickled me.
But your prediction, Sarah, was that there would be three Republican speakers in 2025, which is still in play, but I think was heard a little bit by Mike Johnson surviving here through the first week of January. Oh, Tim, my sweet summer child.
Come on. You think that Trump endorsing Mike Johnson just now is going to solve Mike Johnson's problem? Because let me tell you what, they may have they have to have a speaker vote, then they've got a vote on this bill to pass funding the government.
And that is a speaker eater. That's where people go down.
Can I just say my favorite thing about the speaker, just like fights in general is that trump put out another bleat in which he blamed kevin mccarthy and said he did the dumbest move in history passing the last funding bill but he's a good man he's a friend but it's the dumbest move ever made and it's that especially tickle you for any reason it did trump is the worst in all cases but there is something about people who have sold their souls to him and in return he kicks them in the face and whenever that happens i'm going to look we've got to take our little pleasing kicks where we can yeah where we can get them and seeing kevin mccarthy what is kevin mccarthy i don't know what his job is these days, but presumably he's angling something in the Trump administration. And I felt like that was a little bit of a sign that maybe Kevin wasn't getting any cool ambassadorships or anything.
JVL, what do you think, Mike Johnson? Survivor. All Trump endorsements are conditional.
If it's clear that Johnson can't survive, then Trump is going to withdraw his endorsement and endorse someone else. I mean, I don't take this as settling anything.
And I think it's like an attempt to try to get Johnson to do the thing he wants, which is to get rid of the debt ceiling before he takes office. And that's it.
Honestly, I'm not saying that I would take the over on three speakers in 2025, but I'd be tempted. I'll tell you this.
If it was two and a hook, if it was 2.5 speakers as the line, I would take the over, not the under. I think Sarah's call is absolutely in play.
I think I might take the under, but I do think that the Trump lead is kind of like a covenant eyes on Johnson. It was like an endorsement, but it's also, and I'm watching you.
You know, we're going to win. We need to win.
And I'm going to be monitoring, you know, your private internet searches. I do wonder, like, you know, as far as the debt ceiling thing, Bill and I talked about this a bit yesterday, and it does seem kind of similar to the way that Elon intervened in the year-end budget battle.
I was talking to my in-house parliamentarian, my husband, yesterday, and it's like the types of things that they'd have to, they have to get committees up, the types of things that they'd have to do to actually extend this or eliminate the debt limit before the inauguration seems very implausible. And that this is really just more of a pressure.
It's a question of whether this is a pressure game that Trump is putting on Johnson or whether he just doesn't know anything and just like, let's just get rid of it now. Why not? I'm a dictator.
I'm a quasi-dictator. But this is a win-win play for Trump, right? Because this is what he does is either he gets what he wants out of Johnson, Johnson does it, or Johnson muses for not doing what Trump wants.
And Trump sends the message, you don't do what I want, and you don't get to hold this role. And so for me, it's a decent play by Trump.
But the other problem for them is that there are still some insane true believers. And I got to say, sometimes I value the insane true believers over the cynical MAGA players.
Because like a Chip Roy, like these are the people who built the debt limit. They fought really hard to get a debt ceiling.
And so the idea that Trump would just overturn it, they're going to fight that. Yeah, there might only be eight deficit hawk true believers in the House.
Frankly, there might only be two. It might only be Tom Massey and Chip Roy.
I don't know. They might have a couple other buddies there.
But they don't have room for much more than two to give away. And I do think that eliminating the debt limit might just be the one thing that could push them a little bit too far, right? Like there might just be two or three crazy true believers that I think will oppose that gambit.
And who staked their entire careers, right? Their entire reasons for being is about spending. And so the idea of getting rid of the whole point of the debt limitminute ceiling is to keep spending under control, right, is to force people to have these fights.
Republicans did that. That was their idea.
Yeah. JVL, what do you think? I got to say, Tim, I was listening to you and Bill yesterday.
And if a single Democrat decides to help bail out the Republicans on this, I will lose my mind. I'm sorry.
There are a lot of Keynesians out there that would see this as a big win. That's like money isn't real.
We could just now spend forever. They won't be able to use this against us next time we get in power, if we ever win again.
That's the mindset. Yeah.
You know what? You know what is real? Politics. Politics is real.
And, you know, to be the only party that believes in policy is like putting yourself hostage to the worst villain in the world. And this is the case.
You got to shoot the hostage, you know, as Keanu Reeves learns in Speed. And in this case, the hostage is the debt ceiling.
And do not, do not give a single vote to help bail Republicans. You've already done it once.
How'd that work out for you with the CR, right? Did Democrats get anything for that? Did you see a big uptick in approval for congressional Democrats? I didn't. I saw an uptick in approval for Donald Trump.
The Wall Street Journal editorial board gives them credit for being the grown-ups in the room, willing to do the job, make sure that the markets kept running. No, I don't think so.
I want to go a little bit deeper. We've been texting.
We don't talk that much. We've been texting a little bit about the MAGA versus DOGE, the Nationalists versus the Tech Bros, however we want to define this fight.
And I guess JVL, shockingly, on text is siding with Steve Bannon. So I want to get to that in a second.
But Sarah, I'm just interested in your top line thoughts, kind of watching this fight from your winter cottage. The worst part about it, and maybe Tim, you know, I catch these intermittent battles and I'm trying to stay off X, but I did go deep on a couple of places.
But one of the things I couldn't quite figure out is there is a guy who is Indian. His family originates from the continent of India, as best I could tell.
And he is in some way, he is liked by Elon and has a role. And MAGA's base may be led by laura loomer it's unclear they were upset that this gentleman is going to have a role and that i think is what kicked off the h1b visa yeah shriram krishnan is his name he's an ai advisor i actually like you was trying to stay off so it was unclear to me who who fired the first shot in this battle I don't know what the Lexington and Concord was of Shroom Krishnan but um he was the person that set this off and it's not just that he's it is that he's Indian but it also he has been a big advocate for these H-1B visas but but the anti-Indian sentiment was was certainly a big part of it so this is the part, that I ended up weirdly going deep on because I was genuinely shocked by it.
There are these big accounts and they were just saying horrifically racist things about America. Like you talk about shots fired, like the shrapnel was the Indian American community who was suddenly.
And so and part of it was also there's a lot of players, but then there's Vivek Ramaswamy, right, who also in this fight put out a tweet in which he said

that the problem with America is its culture, that we value sort of the quarterback and homecoming

queen over the science fair winner. We value, what is it? Stefan or Kel over the Steven Urkel.
These were some like real throwbacks to the, you got to be like deep in both nineties, like sitcom world to get these. Cause it was like, he dragged us.
Yeah. Right.
An elder millennial. And, but so vivid.
It was peaking JBL's interest, I notice. It was piquing JBL's interest a critique of the American culture and the American worker from Vivek.
All of a sudden JBL is like, ooh, I might be Doge curious. Vivek wasn't, I mean, when Vivek is talking about that, the quarterback guy, football captain team, the people he's criticizing their culture are MAGA culture.
The science fair winners who go to college and then take professional white collar jobs, those are Democratic voters now. It is a weird thing.
Not in Silicon Valley. Not in Silicon Valley.
Still most of Silicon Valley. Not at the founder level anymore, maybe.
I think this is part of the rub of the fight, is that Vivek Ramaswamy is saying that the best people are like the people in the tech sector and the sector that he works in who value these things. And there is this contingent, right, that became a very dominant MAGA force in Silicon Valley.
it is like the Elons, who is also an immigrant from a different country, who came here, by the way, illegally before

his H1B visa. Illegally.
Right. Illegally.
Let's be clear. It was never on an H-1B.
Elon says he was there on an H-1B. College.
No, but Elon's lying about himself. That's the point that's important to understand here.
But this is the rub. There is a huge disconnect between the reasons that the Silicon Valley type guides are into Trump and the reason the base MAGA voters are into Trump.
And that is the tension that got exploded. There's different threads, but one of them was because of Vivek and then because of this other guy who was the AI consultant who MAGA was targeting, there became this sudden narrative

around, well, Indian Americans that we import here because they're smart are a big part of the problem. And then when I went down the rabbit hole of all the people tweeting about it, it was like dark.
It was dark and racist and gross and awful. And then you see some of the Indian MAGA types going,

wait, are there racists in the Republican Party?

Could it be? Could it be that this is a movement that perhaps isn't for us? And so watching all of this come into view, there's always a little bit of, right, any moment where the scales fall from people's eyes, where sort of they see clearly something that you've been seeing is a moment of saying, yes, this is a problem. And also, if you thought that Trump was super pro-immigrant, I don't know, did you hear him say that eating the dogs and cats? He hasn't mentioned that lately, I know, but did we forget? The anti-Indian rhetoric.
I think we can all stipulate, before I play this next clip, I just want to all stipulate very clearly. There is anti-Indian racism among MAGA.
It is not good. We are disgusted by it.
These people are gross. Everyone should be aware of it.
We can stipulate this. The people that are perpetrating this are bad people

that have dark souls and should go to confession. Yeah.
Okay. One such person, though, Laura Loomer, was making some interesting points on Steve Bannon's podcast recently, and I'd like to listen to it.
And what we need to have a conversation about is what is it going to mean for the future of our country, our national security and the incoming Trump administration? If we have a bunch of technocrats who are also essentially welfare queens because their companies are receiving government subsidies and they want to take over our defense industry. If you have a bunch of tech bros with billions of dollars and direct unfettered access to the vice president and the president of the United States, and then they are also, you know, very cordial with our adversaries, as in China and Iran.
We see that Elon Musk is having these meetings off the books with Iranian officials, with Chinese officials. What does that mean for us and the future of our constitutional republic? Hang on.

JBL.

The worst person in the world just made a good point.

JBL is going full Loomer Bannon, I think, right now.

I could have written that.

So, look, here's the thing.

She's right.

She's right top to bottom on it.

I think it's important to make a distinction here. And this is where we actually do have to get a little Thomas Piketty.
Is it Piketty or Piketty? I mean, I don't know. I've always said Piketty, but, you know, I'm...
Okay, whatever. I'm sure the super libs that listen will let us know in the comments.
Go ahead, JBL. There's a difference in Silicon Valley between the founder class and the worker class, right? And, you know, Elon and Vivek are founder class guys.
I mean, Vivek isn't really, Vivek didn't do anything to make his money, but Elon did. Scam.
He did a scam. He scammed people, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Alzheimer's, about Alzheimer's. But they rely on a worker class of just like, you know, network engineers and coders and developers.

And those people are always kept in the back of the house and they're

disposable.

And what this is really about is the founder class wanting access to cheap

labor.

That's all it is.

So you, you, you get to pay H1B visa type workers workers something like 70 cents on the dollar and they can't leave. That's the other thing.
Once they're with you, they're basically indentured servants. And so it is no surprise that the Elon Musks of the world want more of these people.
They want to lower their labor costs and not have to worry about guys who are going to go and pick up and go for a better job someplace else because they're tethered there because of their visa status. And that's bad.
And what I, I mean, I think Laura Loom is right. Because what I want most in the world is I want Elon Musk to have to hire for SpaceX and Tesla and Twitter entirely from the audience of the Madison Square Garden MAGA event.
I mean, look, there's 30,000 people there. Surely he can find some really top notch devs and engineering talent there who are just true American patriots.
Is he saying that these mouth breathing Cletus types are idiots? Yes. Is that what he's saying? Yes, he's saying they're retarded.
He said they are retarded. He agreed with Autism Capital, who tweeted that the MAGA Americans are too retarded to do these jobs.
Elon said, spot on. So that's what Elon thinks.
And so I think that he would argue that he isn't looking for cheap labor. It's just that he can't find the Americans that he needs to do the job.
And so he's a globalist. I'm sorry.
So here's the thing. This is a big country.
There's 330 million people in this country. And the H1B numbers, I think, are the order of magnitude.
85,000 a year. Yeah, it's like low six figures, you know, or maybe not even high five figures a year.
You can find them. And if you can't, do you know what businesses are supposed to do? They're supposed to pay taxes.
The government can use the taxes to create a skilled labor force. Skilled labor forces don't just appear.
They're not sui generis. You have to spend money on infrastructure.
You have to spend money on education. You have to have a social support network to go into disadvantaged communities and find bright people and build pathways to have them elevated and realize their potential.
But of course, these guys don't want to do any of that. They want no part of paying for the infrastructure of a government that actually runs a society and creates human capital.
They just want the human capital so that they can make money. And for them, the H-1B visa program is a way of short-circuiting all obligations to the society in which they luxuriate and operate and make so much money.
And I, you know, like, fuck that. JBL sent out on this rant.
Pay your taxes. With was pro Karl Marx and Laura Loomer.
JBL's going full horseshoe. He's full horseshoe on this one.
This is also like the Obama critique. Remember, this is like, you know, you didn't build that, which is always is right, right? I mean, you have a business selling widgets.
Well, your business depends on the fact that there's a police force to enforce the rule of law and a government which isn't going to govern by fiat, right? Your business depends on the entire society functioning. And that's why you pay taxes.
And instead, these guys want to pay fewer taxes or no taxes at all. And they want their labor to just magically appear.
And even better, if that magically appearing labor will be cut rate and can't leave.

Here's my view on this.

Within the MAGA rubric, within the America First worldview, to the extent that it exists,

JBL's point is, and Laura Loomer are absolutely right.

We're going to now have two clips of people saying Laura Loomer is absolutely right,

that people can just play on X for us to try to own us.

But within the America First rubric, there's really no argument for the elon position here right i there just isn't and now i'm not america first i'm a globalist cuck and so i think that we should probably have 500 000 h1 bvs a year and we should let a thousand flowers bloom and bring more people into the country and some of those very smart people that we bring in from around the world will create some other widget which will create jobs for other people like this is the freedom like there is a free market freedman view of all this which i share and so i technically would be on the side of capital i guess on the in in this argument but i within the confines of their argument i don't even understand the point like that you like elon is fighting a battle that is totally losing unless it is just such that the magas have traded out one class of capitalists that love unfettered immigration for a different class of capitalists that love unfettered immigration and that donald trump likes the attention of famous rich people. And now they're fucked and stuck with it, which I think is pretty possible.
So I actually think they're going to get away with it. So can I just, I want to propose something and then you guys tell me if I'm wrong.
The founder class, the Elons and Viveks and Andresens of the world, they don't want unfettered immigration. They only want immigration that helps them.

They are indifferent to all

other immigration, like, you know, agricultural,

seasonal workers,

who the fuck cares, right? They don't, you know, they

certainly don't want normal immigration. That's

bad. They don't want people coming

in for asylum. They want immigration that helps

make them money. And

they now have a president

who seems to now want

to give that to him. People forget, Trump was against

H-1B visas. He said they were bad the first

Thank you. them money.
And they now have a president who seems to now want to give that to him. People forget Trump was against H1B visas.
He said they were bad the first time he issued an executive

order in June 2020, sort of putting a halt on them. And then he came out like, you know,

a week ago and said, Oh, I've always thought they were great. It is unclear if he actually

understood what anybody was talking about. It seems like he was talking about H2B, not H1B.
because he mentioned

the ones that he used

yeah

because he mentioned

because he mentioned

because he mentioned

because he mentioned

because he mentioned

because he mentioned

because he mentioned

because he mentioned

because he mentioned

because he mentioned

because he mentioned

because he mentioned

because he mentioned

because he mentioned

the ones that he used

because he mentioned

because he mentioned

because he mentioned

because he mentioned

because he mentioned

because he mentioned

because he mentioned

because he mentioned

because he mentioned

because he mentioned

because he mentioned

because he mentioned

because he mentioned

because he mentioned

because he mentioned

because he mentioned

because he mentioned

because he mentioned

because he mentioned

because he mentioned

because he mentioned

because he mentioned

because he mentioned

because he mentioned

because he mentioned

because he mentioned

because he mentioned

because he mentioned

because he mentioned

because he mentioned

because he mentioned

because he mentioned

because he mentioned

because he mentioned

because he mentioned

because he mentioned because he mentioned because talking about. It seems like he was talking about H2B, not H1B.
Because he mentioned the ones that he used. Right, because those are the ones he used.
I think Elon gets what he wants. They get to have H1B.
And the MAGA base, like Laura Loomer and Steve Bannon will get upset, but they aren't the base. Those are the elites.
They are

MAGA elites. The base are the actual voters.
And I don't think the voters are going to give two shits about this because it is only like 85,000 people. And so long as Trump is doing something else to make them happy and to excite them, they're not going to hold a grudge over this.
And so they're all going to get away with it. Sarah? well I don't really want to answer that particular question

because maybe

it's been to grudge over this. And so they're all going to get away with it.
Sarah? Well, I don't really want to answer that particular question because maybe. It's bigger than just the one issue, though.
I do think part of what we're seeing is actually a more fundamental tension that exists between the actual MAGA base and many of the new people who've become red-pilled into the Trump transactional coalition. And I don't think those tensions go away.
It's sort of how I feel about the Speaker. That's where, like, there are a lot of events that are going to take the fundamental tensions and they're going to create the rub where these things sort of burst into view.
And also, I think part of it, too, is that if you're Steve Bannon and Laura Loomer, you too have a base. And you have been saying things to those base and your base is in part contingent on the idea that you have influence over Donald Trump.
And Elon now has influence over Trump and has his own base, right? And so when those are in tension, those things will also create these inter or like intra coalition fights that I think can fracture. And this is what I've meant when I've been talking about how, hey, look, as we look at the future, we need to remember that governing is harder.
right, getting elected and just centering everything around Trump, Bannon and Elon agree,

Trump. Bannon and Elon do not agree on much else.
And they have constructed their own visions of what MAGA means for audiences that have viewed it through their lens. And as those things then are forced into a policy realm, I think you will see those tensions continue to ignite.
And so I don't know that I agree that everybody just gets away with it. Maybe, maybe.
But can I also just on both of your globalist versus JBL's sort of more, I would say this is even sort of like a Bernie Sanders version, because it used to be that Democrats were the ones saying, no, you have to make things in America. You know, we want American labor, right? They're against shipping jobs overseas, et cetera.
And so, because the coalitions now are completely different than they once were, I think having these arguments come with a new sense of like, who's on which side. But I don't think that your sides, JBLs or TIMs, need to be in tension, right? Like, in an optimal society, we would be talking about how do we improve the American education system? How do we defeat China, right? How do we make sure that we continue to lead in technology? And like, there's an aspirational way that you can talk about this that both creates then an appetite.
Like, we want to both produce the

smartest people and attract the smartest people, and we want to be such a big, rich country that people want to come here. It used to be a point of pride that people wanted to come to America because we were a great place and they were going to be additive.
And that is a sense that we've lost, right? Because the nativist wing of MAGA, which is a big, big piece of it, right? Just wants nobody coming in. And this is where Elon and Vivek, they see things through a prism of their own experience.
Like it's in their tweets where there's a clear sense of there are good ones and bad ones, right? There are good immigrants and bad immigrants. And those are classes of people that they seem to take for granted in their mind.
Whereas like, I used to do a lot of work for the restaurant industry, restaurant industry, they want people from all these other countries to come and many of them are illegal, right? Like they're the ones right now thinking, I hope Trump doesn't mean it when he says he's going to raid us because our kitchens are full of immigrant workers that the American economy relies on. Part of the other tension, though, between the Loomer MAGA and the Musk MAGA is that the good immigrants are different.
Yeah. And the good immigrants are just the white immigrants in the nativist world.
And in the Musk vision, the good immigrants are the smart immigrants immigrants or whatever like the immigrants that are good at stem that we're getting uh they're coming here largely largely from asia yeah which is basically they mean asians yeah right i think your point sarah this is an issue that now there's tension within both coalitions on right to your point like i think both sides now are kind of split on this in some ways it's just yeah the republic have to govern. So I think it will be more cute on their side for the next four years.
The Musk thing, one of the eye-opening things in my convo with Bannon was just that he, like, even mentioned. Like, I mean, this guy gave a quarter billion.
I don't like him. But, like, he made it happen.
You know what I mean? And I think that if Musk was, you just kind of go back through the history of trump's person of the moment that he likes like the mooch or whatever like the mooch was a donor that then became the comms director that was you know that was hanging out with trump a lot and only lasted one scaramucci right why because he didn't give that much money he didn't have like a base of support like trump could just be like okay this guy's become annoying i'm ready to move on for him and we'll bring in somebody else right trump is a little bit stuck with musk more than he's been with anybody else because of the amount of money that musk has put in and musk is kind of his muscle now in threatening these senators that i'll go put in another 250 million in your Senate primaries. And Musk has his own audience of the Twitter weirdos that aren't necessarily OG MAGA, right? Musk has all of these levers that give him way more power than anybody else that's been in the Trump orbit since he came on the stage.
Yeah, I totally agree with that. But I could also flip the telescope around.
I mean, Trump has the power. Trump is the one who gets to person or unperson people.
I think that's still true. He couldn't entirely unperson Elon, but he could unperson him.
And the other thing is, at this point, he could take a lot of people

out of Twitter. Twitter has already hemorrhaged users.
I think if Donald was unhappy with Musk,

he could tell a lot of people, now that he's got his nose under the tent on Twitter,

he could say, yeah, this platform is woke now. You got to come over to me with truth.

And if the MAGA social media actually fracturedured because right now it isn't really fractured they're all on twitter and they're like you know five people on truth social and five people on parlor maybe or whatever getter getter right i think that could hurt musk because the only thing twitter has going for it right now is mass. And if the mass on it is

significant, could hurt musk because the only thing twitter has going for it right now is mass and if the mass on it is is significantly eaten into at a stroke then the network effects on it completely unravel and musk is now running this the thing that musk cares about most in the entire world becomes like nothing isn't the bigger one really that trump goes, I've learned that Elon is in bed with the Chinese and we just can't do this anymore with him. Yeah.
Right. And like, we've got to cut him out.
Like, it's just like, he's been undermining us with China and we've got to be tough on China. Like, sure.
That seems to be a bigger. No, we could do this.
Yeah. Okay.
Sarah, do you have one more? I think it's a vulnerability, but here's the thing. It's a vulnerability.
This is much closer to a mutually assured destruction than any relationship we've ever seen out of Trump. Like Trump could do that to Elon, but not without real costs to himself.
And so the question is, and for me, I think the most interesting piece of the new dynamic has been Trump's perceived, whether people see him as a lame duck or not, because I think there's a reason. Yes.
Thank you for saying this. I think there's a reason why everybody is suddenly saying like, okay, we got four years of transactions.
Trump's a transactional guy. We can get him to do what we want.
We just got to be nice to him. And he's gone.
And I do think there's a way in which Elon is much more of the future than Trump is. And so I don't know.
I mean, I think Trump has real power. He's president of the United States.
But his hardest hardcore people, they're already on truth social. I just don't see how Trump could, he would not blow up Elon over nothing, just because he's's annoyed like elon has utility to him in a way that nobody else has and also has his own power base in a way that nobody else has and vice versa which i think makes them unlikely to blow each other up super quickly can i just point out how weird it is that we are in this will he won't he be a lame duck period because that is what's going on like people are like yeah he's a lame duck he's right right isn't he he's a lame duck isn't he and that is what is driving all of this stuff as and i'm so glad you said this sarah because you said this like a week week ago, and it was like a light bulb in my head.
And the perceived like, well, wait a minute, maybe he could just keep being president introduces a level of uncertainty which unsettles all of everybody's calculations. And it is insane that we exist in a world where there is any question about whether or not he could run for a third term.
But that's the world we live in. And I know that George and everybody's like, oh no, the 22nd Amendment is ironclad.
No, it fucking isn't. I am sorry, it isn't.
The 22nd Amendment is what five Supreme Court justices say it is. Period.
The end. Here's the thing.
I kind of agree with you, JBL, but i hate to give them this out because they're going to use it like to your point they know like the mega world knows so during my conversation with ban and i'm just pulling out the transcript right now he's talking about how he's trolling i forget what word he uses like soup mega trolling mag mad you know mac troll maxing uh about this trump third term thing and how the media plays into it msnbc does a view on it and so like there is something to that i don't want to like play it straight because they're not playing it straight that said though the serious part that is underneath it is that they recognize that as soon as he's considered a lame duck the house of cards really could crumble right and right? And here's what Bannon said to me. He said, like they said about Louis XIV, after me, the deluge.
There's nobody that can replace Trump. He's a unifying figure and also a figure as a deliverer of blunt force trauma that only he can do to the established order.
I'd love the opportunity to have Trump back. Like, that's just flat.
Like like it is just a straight recognition that part of this is a game because they know that after trump is mega question marks and part of this is an admission that don jr isn't really up to it because that's the i mean the obvious thing is that if trump doesn't run he's going to to. I have to tell you the saddest Kendall from Succession moment at Turning Point USA that hit the cutting room floor on my material that I reported.
So Bannon does the Trump 2028 shtick on stage and the crowd cheers. Don Jr.
is up after Bannon. And Don Jr.
comes out on stage looking fully like Kendall for Succession in a suit and sneakers and like super awkward puffed up face and like his first line is thanks for the endorsement there Steve and the crowd is just like silent and then and then he's like just joking just joking and then he starts chuckling to himself and everybody's like I didn't even occur to be like people didn't even like when Steve was in Don jr's head, he was like, Trump 2028. He's talking about me.
I can make a joke about that. The crowd didn't even get the joke because like, they're not even contemplating that Don jr could have been the person that he was referencing.
It was a pretty funny, uh, V fish successionist moment. I've never agreed with JBL's particular contention that like one of the Trump kids is next in line because there is nobody.
Trump is such a unique blend of things. But I will say I brought this up at that deal book thing with Kevin McCarthy.
And I wish, you know, when you replay things in your head and you think, man, I really wish I said this or hit this particular piece harder. But I pointed out, like, what are you guys going to do post-Trump? Because you've run off, you know, all the regular Republicans.
And so now everybody's fully MAGA. What do you do without Trump? He's the one who's turning people out.
They don't turn out for regapromas. And I wish I had pointed out to him that I have done many, many focus groups where I've asked people about Kevin McCarthy.
And if they know who he is, which is often not the case, if they know who he is, they hate him, right? They hate him and they hate other people perceived to be the establishment Republican Party. And Trump gets away with things.
That's why it's red-pilled. They're not Republicans.
The Elon thing, they're not Republicans. You think they're going to...
Now, maybe they show up for Vance because Vance is one of them. But do regular people who like Trump because they've watched him on the television show where he fired people and they think he's a great businessman? Does he have the same mythology? Does he hold the same place in the American psyche and American lore? I don't think so.
So what do they do? Many too many years ahead to discuss that question.

So just let it hang over the ether.

We're here.

We're together.

We're pals.

We're not going to be able to kiss at this clock striking midnight tonight here.

And so I want to do now close with our 2025 personal and professional New Year's resolutions.

I've prepped you.

So if you don't have any, it's your fault. JVL, I'd like for you to start.
Yeah, I don't do personal ones, but I have a big professional one. Can we just talk about why you don't do personal ones first? Because you're growing all year long or because you don't want to grow? I find the idea of making a specific point of introducing change in your life just because it's the New Year's to be insipid and toxic.
And that when you want to change something or do something differently, you should just do it. Doesn't matter when.
This is why I'm a good host. I've grown as a host.
Doesn't matter. To ask that follow-up question there to get JVL to reveal that he finds them insipid or toxic was really inspired.
I do wonder, but do you do a Lenten resolution? Why is that different? As a good Catholic, you must do a Lenten resolution. No, because the Lenten one is a penitential.
Do you not need penance in the new year as well? Do you just need penance once a year? I don't understand the question. This is for the Catholic podcast.
My professional was that I'm not going to chase bait. And this is, you know, I worry that Trump and MAGA are like, you know, it's like they're sitting up on the porch with a tennis ball and they throw the tennis ball because they want the dog to go chase it.
And they do this all the time. That's what Greenland and making Canada the 51st state and the Panama Canal is.
They're just trying to get people off the porch to go and run around and bark and chase because they want people to talk about that. And in print, I'm not going to do that.

I hope.

I'm going to try not to.

I won't say that for podcasts and YouTube because I think you can't ignore these things entirely.

Like you do, you do have to register that they're taking place.

But for me, print is the primary product and where I spend most of my energies and try to do my deepest thinking. And so I'm not going to chase bait anymore.
We've all talked about this before. I am skeptical about the mass deportation thing.
Maybe it'll happen, but I'm not setting my hair on fire until it does. Because it's clear to me that that this is going to be anything

more than the wall right i mean the wall which we built 437 miles of or something let me push back on the panama canal on both actually and talk this out is the panama canal bullshit not going to impact the actions of the leaders of Panama.

I agree.

It's crazy.

Having an insane president making wild threats at other countries, though, will impact the way other countries act. So is it nothing or is it bait or is it an actual geopolitical news item that should be covered? I think it's primarily bait.
I think it's primarily bait. And I'm not saying don't cover it.
Again, I'm not saying don't cover it. My personal thing is that in the product that I work hardest on, I'm going to try not to give oxygen to that stuff, which is different than saying nobody should cover it.
That's not what I'm saying. With these things, they can originate as bait.

And then, you know, like throwing a pebble into a pond, you know, it can be ripples that actually have real effects.

The Panama Canal and Greenland, maybe they could have real effects.

You know, Heather Cox Richardson, one of my writing crushes, talks about how she thinks the Greenland thing is actually part of an attempt to break NATO.

And if true, then that would be a very big deal. But I want to see it.
If he's serious about Greenland, then he should either go put troops in Greenland without the Danes agreeing to it or be informed about it. Don't sit there and, you know, like whisper to me about how tough you're going to be.
Go ahead. Go.
Greenland's right there. Go send a frigate over there and put a battalion in with drones and all the things that you say you think we need.
Otherwise, shut the fuck up. Because that's all you're doing is yapping, Mr.
President. That's basically my view.
But the difference is Ukraine, right? So he has reiterated that the Ukraine war will be over 20 days from now because he's going to have Ukraine all sorted out within 24 hours. That is also bait, I think.
But that is bait that has serious, for real, real-world consequences, whether he does it or not. And so that, I think, is worth taking more seriously.
So I guess I'm trying to make like some distinctions here. Am I, are you look not, not sold all the way? No, I wanted to hear what Sarah thinks about your resolution.
Yeah. So I want to defend JBL actually on this and I'll tell you why.
Um, so I am part of a lot of like democracy groups and there are many, uh, scenario planning exercises that people do in these spaces to sort of figure out like okay well what what is trump going to try to do how's he going to behave and i uh had the displeasure of of playing trump in some of these scenarios and here's what my team did i'll just tell you how we approached it we wrote a hundred tweets and they were everything from let's invade Canada to kid rock is a great American and everybody should celebrate him. You know, like just in just a bunch of like insane stuff.
And then over here, we had a plan for how to actually dismantle the government, which is actually what sort of what I was going to say first is tearing things down is a million times easier than building anything. Right.
And so when you play these scenario, when you do these scenario things, you are already at a massive advantage when your role is to burn stuff down because people trying to react then, because what Trump is trying to do, and the reason I, the reason we had a pretty clear strategy about how to approach it is dismantle the administrative state over here, what they would call the administrative state shutdown, you know, Department of Education, do real things over here and over here tweet. Because no matter how long Trump is in our public consciousness, nobody has seemed to learn that he is like a guy with a laser pointer and we are all cats, right, that chase it.
And so I think to JBL's point, so much of this second term should at least be among the journalism or pundit class should be able to disaggregate, we should be able to disaggregate the real from the trolling. Now, to Tim's point, though, I think the idea that the trolling doesn't have real consequences, because not everybody's able to disaggregate these things, or because sometimes things that read as funny, like, saying we're going to take over Canada is kind of funny to Americans because of, and maybe even to some Canadians, just because of the unique relationship, the closeness, the cultural closeness, but also, like, no one really thinks this is is going to happen but does that change certain geopolitical calculus does does it like trump wants people to be like he's unpredictable he's a madman and he wants to do it to places like greenland and canada where he feels like everybody will kind of be cool about it as opposed to iran and uh egypt and you know and places where it can set off real potential issues and so cuba i think even you can you can imagine him saying cuba should be well which part is his game and which part of his real aim is part of it and the only way to try to dig in on that is to not chase too much of the shiny stuff that is meant to be part of the zone flooding shit yeah you haven't won me over but it is but I knew what your resolution was going to be since you kind of wrote a triad about it already, and mine is related.
And so I'm going second, and then Sarah can close us. You can see where my kind of agreement and disagreement might be.
My work resolution is actually related to my personal resolution, which is I'm only going to care about what I care about. And that is like maybe a little more solipsistic than yours about how to think about what to cover and what to talk about.
But I guess my point to you in pushing back gently on the Panama thing was, I don't know what is actually going to matter. I don't.
You know, I think that you having the North Star is correct, right? We should only focus on things that actually impact people and have an actual effect on people's lives. And we should try to focus on that more and not focus on the ephemera.
But I think that there have been a lot of times in Trump world where like sometimes he bleats random shit and then they then then like the people around him like make it happen you know what i mean like things come into fruition just because it came out of his pie hole you know and other times things that he's really you would think that he was really focused on fizzled right and so like to me as i was just thinking about this on the slopes last week i I was like, I think the best guiding force for me,

and it's related to the 1990s term of work-life balance, is like, there are certain things I know I care about, right?

Like in the home life, I care about my family,

and I should not be paying attention to whatever I'm doing with my child

because I'm focused on some stupid shit that Donald Trump is saying that I don't really care about, or some stupid fight between Vivek and whatever, like I should at least try again, this is all aspirational, I should at least try to just care about the things that I care about. I think there's going to be a lot of things that he does that I do care about, right? And that make me very mad or upset, or laughter, laughter is a form of caring.
Pointing and laughing is also okay.

And there will be some things that are maybe serious that I just can't be made to care

about because I only have so much room in my heart or in my gut.

And so that is, I think, how I'm going to try to deal with it.

And I think that is something that's obviously particularly relevant for us,

deciding what we're going to write and talk about.

But I think it's also probably relevant to listeners.

The number of people over the last two weeks have been like,

ooh, I had to take a week off.

Or ooh, I had to do this.

Or I had to do that.

Or I wanted to take a week off, but then I just had to listen to what you had to say.

I'm like, my response has always been awesome.

Like, great.

You should care about what you care about. You shouldn't get, you shouldn't't I'm not saying you should do the Benedict option and move into the woods but you should find things that you care about in your community and focus on the things that you find nutritious hopefully we will be providing a good amount of that if sometimes it feels unnutritious for a week that's fine it's going to be a long ass four years and so that's kind of my my mindset and which is i guess a little bit different than what you're saying but not really it's the directionally the same i'm just processing it a little different yeah i would say part of my thing though is that i would like to be in the position of goading these fuckers into doing the terrible things they pretend they are going to do.

Because what I don't want, and yet what I fear we're going to get, is a world in which

they only do the terrible things that are going to make it easier to perpetuate power.

But all the stuff that is what their base wanted, they won't do it, and the base won't

care.

And the reason the base won't care is because the libs will have been triggered by the tweets or something like that. And so that's why, you know, like, oh, mass deportations.
Great. Let's see them.
Well, I don't, I don't see any federal forces on the streets of North Carolina down by the Tyson's plant. Why not? We should see more of that, right? Are you going to annex Greenland? Great.
Let's see it. Let's see you do it.
Oh, you don't have the stones to do it. Everybody said, oh, we don't want the autocracy.
We just want the policies, and we won't get those policies. We'll only get the autocracy.
That's one of my concerns. Sorry.
We accidentally went to Spanish Mass Christmas in Vale. We forgot we didn't look that closely at the schedule.
I'm trying to say this in an appropriate manner. The types of people that go to Spanish Mass in a ski town are working class people.
I wasn't checking anybody's papers, but it was a very working class audience with a couple of touristas like us who didn't check the schedule that closely. And it was hard for me to not think about the other side of the coin of what you're talking about.
This is something that I care about. And I was just looking around and I was being like, I cannot let Donald Trump be, Christmas Mass be about Donald Trump.
That is not healthy. But it was hard to not.
Like, just look around and be like, I don't think that the plans are such that we'll be very peaceful for communities such as this. And if they wind up being not peaceful, then we can object to them, is I guess what I'm saying.
Yeah. Right? But don't give them cover of, like, setting your hair on fire about the mass deportations before they're RNA.
I'm preemptively mad, though. Because that only serves to help.
I'm preemptively mad, though. Yeah, I get that.
But I guess I'm saying we shouldn't be preemptively mad. We should be preemptively skeptical.
And if he goes through with it, then we can be mad. Sarah, do you have any final thoughts before you give us your 2025 resolution? My only thought is that, and this is where JVL and I tend to depart a little bit, is that, you know, even if he doesn't, let's say, do the thing, and I'm not eager in many cases for him to do the thing.
I understand JVL's point that we can't keep sort of protecting people from the consequences of their actions. JVL and I talk about this in The Secret Pod all the time and other places about how there's sort of, I keep drawing lines between, okay, where are the consequences just enough that people have like touched the stove and they have to experience sort of what they have wrought with their vote versus you know what is going to have consequences for so you know deleterious consequences for so many people that like we should try to fight it and i think that is a something that we should endeavor to sort of sort through over the next four years that's my main takeaway on that four years in a month oh but actually sorry and i'll just say one other thing though that's bad about it though is it does create an appetite for people like just because he doesn't do the mass deportations but talks about it forever it doesn't mean that it doesn't have consequences right like it continues to have the consequences of demonizing people, of creating consequences, or just creating an environment that we live in where people are like, oh, well, they didn't do mass deportation, so I hate immigrants more.
None of this is consequence-free. I agree with Tim, though.
I agree with part of it is that we should do more pointing and laughing. But this is, again, I think for us to figure out, like this is why the doge fight the lure loomer versus elon must fight is a good point and laugh moment while also acknowledging that the consequences like i would say that you know trump trump reveals people right it's not just that he changes people although i think he does that but he also reveals people and i guess i can still be shocked by the amount like reading all of the way that people talked about indian americans and like call centers and i mean it was i don't even want to i don't want to repeat all the racist stuff i was i was still genuinely shocked by how much of it was out there and it's not good for us right anyway it's not all consequence not all consequence free.
Yeah. Well, I mean, these are STEM, these are STEM engineer, PhD types whose jobs are being taken by the H1B visas.
I assume. So these are, you know, these are real top level, you know, a plus plus developer types who would have a great paying job at Oracle or whatnot.
If it weren't for some indian yeah i'm sure indian guy on an h1b visa taking their job one of the other sort of strains of conversation that ran through there's the anti-immigrant conversation and then there was sort of the white people can't get jobs you know like my there's a lot of like my son is you know white male and can you know can't get this job or that job unemployment has been four percent for four years oh my god that is like clearly again not pervasive but it's a little bit like the the health care shooting where you're sort of like oh my gosh look at all these responses and the way that people are are willing to like be ghoulish about the fact that a man died, because there's been this festering issue for them that actually clearly sits more on the surface than you realize. And this is now sort of popped a lid off of something.
And now you're hearing about it. I do think their racism is sort of similar that we're seeing or the acrimony or not acrimony, the sense of that Americans are being passed over, like that is pretty deeply held and I think rooted in certain quarters.
And in those quarters, it is straight up anti-immigrant feeling in part because this is how authoritarians work, which is they pit people against each other. And I think what's interesting in this fight is the fact that the coalitions that they pit against each other actually are in the same coalition and maybe didn't quite realize it.
This has been a good show, long show. Poor Jason is going to be editing this all the way through his New Year's party.
So I want to get to Sarah's 2025 resolution. And I do just want to say one thing, because we're cross-talking a little bit.
I'm actually more sympathetic to the JBL point of view on a lot of the other areas in immigration for the simple reason that fear is a consequence. Even not doing the mass deportations, but freaking people out, this is where my inner lib comes in.
Sometimes feelings do matter, not just facts. Sarah, I want your 2025 resolution to close this out.
Okay, my 2025 resolution is actually really about the business. I think that for those of you who listen to Tim's podcast, it's obviously become a juggernaut.
Just in general, it's one of the top news podcasts out there. It's an enormous accomplishment.
Our YouTube channel has absolutely exploded in large part because Tim is a workhorse who has been just churning out tapes. People are going to think that I set you up for this.
I'm getting uncomfortable at a compliment. I'll stop.
I'll stop. But we've had a big growth year.
But 2024 was a big growth year for us. And I think that one of the things that has been the most alarming to me since Trump got elected, and even just before the election, has been the pre-surrender of the media.
I don't know if you guys have been following the media defections, but, you know, The Atlantic picked up Ashley Parker and Michael Schur. And, like, they're sort of poaching.
The Washington Post's top political people are leaving. I think that you can expect the Washington

Post to be a very different publication. They've also had, you know, material, like big editors,

like people are not getting their contracts. And so that of the big papers, right, we've seen the

gutting of small papers, but I think you're going to see a massive shift in the media environment

to be much more accommodating to Trump over these four years. And because people are afraid, because Kash Patel and others have said they're going to specifically target the media, there's a lot of people, they may not even realize how they calibrate.
Like, I think a lot of the people in like National Review land or commentary land, I think they realize how much they started to calibrate because of their audiences into Trump and how much it changed them. And so I think that we will be sort of singular out there as a publication that will not calibrate at all.
And what I want to ask people, because it's part of my resolution, is to, I want to be in a million free subscribers. I want to be in a million free subscribers by the end of 2025.
And I think we can get there, but you guys have to go tell everybody about the bulwark. And here's the thing, talking about free subscribers, I'm not talking about paid, because one of the most interesting things about the bulwark is that we make most things free.
And people who become paid subscribers typically do so for one of two reasons. One want to go deeper with us as a community member and so they get a lot out of being in the comments sections or doing the secret pod with me and jbl and obviously jbl's triad is one of the it's sort of the signature gated piece of content right there's still like all the youtube stuff it's all free so i want to be at a million free subscribers but we're going to need all the people who listen to this podcast to help us and go tell people about the bulwark we're tipping over i think in public consciousness a lot more people know who we are now than they did before but i want to go big because i think we will be pretty fearless i think think we deserve an audience that big.
So go tell all your friends. Hold on, though.
You're the boss, though. You say that there's going to be no calibration, but I was going to have a lawyer come on at the end of every podcast and correct any comments that I made that might be somewhat slanderous towards a MAGA person.
That was going to be a new segment I was adding in 2025. Like Tony Reale, like Stat Boy at the end of PTI.
Like Tony Reale at the end of PTI. I was going to have a lawyer come in at the end and be like, Tim didn't really say that he was on ketamine.
He was just saying that he may or may not use ketamine from time to time. I mean, try not to libel people if I would like you to try not to.

And look, there's probably more lawyers in everybody's future. But no, don't calibrate.
Tell people, you say like, you're going to do, you're going to care about what you're going to care about. We're going to tell you the truth about what we think.
And that's the thing that's made, I think, this really special. But I really want to grow it.
Not for the sake of just more subscribers or because there's some number, but because I believe we make an impact on people's lives. The number of people who come up to us at the shows and talk about how we keep them sane or like they feel in these relationships with us, that feels great to us.
And I think that, like, I think it's a good thing. I think we should have more subscribers.
I think more people should do this. I think it will help us get through this particular period of time.
I have an earnest connection between our resolutions, which is a lot of people go and check up subscribers by pretending to care about things they don't care about. Yeah.
Actually, right? There is no shortage of media out there of people pretending to be offended about shit that they aren't really offended about because they know that's going to do numbers and um my one self-pat is i don't really think that we do that and i think that to your point the growth and expansion has been from people that find the stuff that we're doing actually genuine and substantive and so uh in order to keep being able to do that we need your help to go out and tell people about us because we don't get quite as many, you know what I mean? You don't, it is easier to go out there and be like, I'm really fucking pissed about this thing that is in the news in a given moment. And sometimes there are many times there are things in the news in a given moment that I'm really fucking pissed about.
And that does help. But doing it all day, every day is not something that we're going to be doing.
And so we need your help to help us grow. So JBL, do you have any other final thoughts or wishes for 2025? Darkness? I just want to clarify what Sarah means here.
The reason we want to get big is because I think we're going to be needed as a counterweight over the next four years, because a bunch of traditional media places are going to stop being counterweights. I mean, I'm worried about the post, frankly, and I, you know, I love the post as an institution and I'm concerned about it.
I'm concerned about time magazine. I'm really concerned about cable news TV and network TV.
I don't know if you guys saw the, in Semaphore, the woman who runs NBC News is like, oh yeah, the most important story we ran was about how people in Nebraska would drive two hours round trip just to save $2 on a loaf of bread because inflation hit them so hard. I'm just like, you fucking idiot.
And it's like us in the Atlantic, you know, and like NPR. There are very few places that are really dug into doing things the right way and not being cowed.
And because of that, we need to increase our throw weight, I think. I think we need everybody's help to do that.
All right. Well, let's go ahead and do it, everybody.
It's 2025.

Maybe by the time you're listening to this or later tonight.

So take it easy this evening with your friends. On Thursday, we'll begin again on this podcast.
We'll see you all then. Thanks to Sarah and JVL.
Peace. Give it time

Go ahead

Give it hell

Give it all you've got

Give it up

There's something else It's a revelation It's a hallelujah It's the nature of the spirit running through you So take it easy Just pick it again Take a step back from the race that you've been running in

It's the next song, coming on the radio

It's what you need

So turn it up and let it go

Turn it up and let it go

Turn it up and let it go Turn it up and let it go

Turn it up and let it go guitar solo Thank you. The Borg Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper

with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brough.