Susan Glasser: A Lame Lame Duck

Hey mama, you don't have time to be messing around endlessly scrolling to find a caregiver for your child. Let me clue you in to my trick to save time and my sanity when finding a sitter.
Sittercity.com. Sittercity knows what they're doing.
They've been helping busy parents find the perfect sitter for over 20 years, while other sites overwhelm you by throwing hundreds of random profiles your way. Sittercity matches you with caregivers who actually fit your needs.
No endless scrolling.

No guesswork.

I love that all caregivers undergo ID. hundreds of random profiles your way.
Sitter City matches you with caregivers who actually fit your needs.

No endless scrolling, no guesswork.

I love that all caregivers undergo ID verification.

They have background checks, specialized qualifications, and real parent reviews to know if they showed

up on time or really know how to handle my sassy toddler.

And if I need help, I can talk to a real live human, not a robot, with Sitter City's

delightful team.

You know, my employer pays for me to get Sitter City completely free as part of my benefits.

This is the first time I'm talk to a real live human, not a robot, with Sitter City's delightful team.

You know, my employer pays for me to get Sitter City completely free as part of my benefits.

Yours could too.

Sitter City is my go-to for a smarter, simpler way to find reliable, trustworthy care.

Don't wait.

Go to sittercity.com slash XX and get the help you need.

Okay, so we all need to get away from the world sometimes.

Well, in the all-new 2025 Nissan Murano, you don't even have to go anywhere. The Murano is the getaway.
Just picture it. The Bose premium sound system plays your favorite music as the Murano's massaging leather-appointed seats melt away your stress.
Yeah, that's a real getaway. Drive the all-new 2025 Nissan Murano today.
Bose and massaging leather-appointed seats are optional features. Hello and welcome to the Bullard Podcast.
I'm your host, Tim Miller. Stick around at the end.
I've got a few thoughts for you on the arrest of Luigi Mangione, the UHC assassin, as well as the verdict in the Daniel Penny case. We've got a mini mailbag, but first, a staff writer at The New Yorker, where she writes a weekly column on life in Washington.
She's also the co-author of The Divider, a history of Donald Trump in the White House, no longer a history, which she co-wrote with our husband, Peter Baker. It is, of course, Susan Glasser.
Welcome back. How are you doing, Susan? Hey, it's great to be with you again, Tim.
I guess since everybody's talking about it, and I'm saving my thoughts from the end, but do you have any deep thoughts or hot takes about Luigi or about Daniel Penny? Do you have anything you want to get off your chest on the issues everybody's talking about? You know, not beyond the blindingly original observation that, you know, we live in a terrible,

terrible timeline and maybe everybody needs to be a little bit less online and a little

bit more connected to people.

That's great.

That is not original, but true and important and kind of related to what I'm going to get

to at the end.

So that is right.

Go to the end. So that is right.
Go touch some grass, people. Go meet some neighbors.
It's not as bad out there as it might seem. You've renamed your column back.
We renamed it. New Yorker back to a letter from Trump's Washington, which obviously brings with it the implication that it is Trump's Washington again in which you live.

I'm just wondering how you're processing that.

Well, first of all, I mean, I would say it feels more like an undigested, unprocessed lump so far.

But, you know, I think it does speak to the moment that we didn't even need to wait until the inauguration to do this. You know, and that is really the reality in Washington, as I think we've experienced it these last few weeks, is that it was, in effect, an instant psychological transition.
I've never seen a lamer lame duck than Joe Biden in terms of just a sense, an almost instant sense of irrelevance. Now, of course, that's, I think, compounded by the fact that he didn't run for re-election.
Maybe it would have been different if he had run and lost. But in this moment, Trump is doing things that would have been, of course, head exploding, even in the first Trump transition.
He has essentially taken on the role and function of president without the responsibilities, without the information. Here he is, you know, flying to Paris, meeting with other world leaders, openly conducting a foreign policy for the United States that is in some ways at odds with the actual current foreign policy of the United States.
It's really, there's a reason why we have the idea of only one president at a time. And I think that's another one of those norms that's just being thrown out the window, actually.
Is there anything Biden could have been doing to unlame himself at this point? I kind of suspect no. Part of it is just the nature of just how big of a departure Trump is and how unwilling he is to kind of abide by the types of transitions that we had had throughout our lives before 2016.
But part of it is really, I think, that Biden's age and kind of lack of forcefulness speaking. And he almost kind of conceded the status to Trump when they had their White House meeting.
So I don't know. Is there anything you feel like that the sitting president should or could be doing to offset this? Yeah, if it was a different president, it would be a different transition.
In fact, you know, look at Barack Obama. I think he had a very different transition.
You know, if you'll recall, I mean, again, there was so much more kind of shock and upset and surprise at Trump's victory in 2016. But I think people were really hanging on, you know, what did Obama have to say? How would he frame this very kind of threatening moment up for his supporters? Remember, he made a big trip, his final trip was to Europe and to Germany.
And then he went to Athens and he spoke about democracy in a big speech. You know, so it was a it was a different transition for a different president and a different moment.
You know, I remember watching Trump's initial inauguration in January of 2017 from a gathering at the top of a hotel in Washington, you know, that had a kind of panoramic view around the city. And, you know, that moment when Obama's helicopter flew away, and, you know, it's just Trump now, you know, that was that was a real, like, wow, what are we in for kind of a moment.
And I don't think it's going to be that way this time with Joe Biden. Do you have any thoughts on kind of the swirling conversations around preemptive pardons? Any reporting? Anything you're hearing? Any notions that's in your own mind? Yeah, I mean, you know, this is a very, obviously, it would be quite a break, I think, with precedent to do so for people who have not even been accused in any way of crimes.
In fact, who would be very offended at the idea that they need a pardon, many of them. And I have run into several people just over the last week here in Washington who are on that 60 person enemies list compiled by Kash Patel, Trump's nominee to head the FBI.
And, you know, to a person, they were very adamant, you know, I don't need a pardon. I don't want a pardon.
Please do not give me a pardon. This is my country.
I'm not leaving the country. I would like to stand and fight.
And so, you know, that's the kind of pushback I've heard. Perhaps there are others who aren't vocal, who are privately urging the White House to consider this.
I think that it's, you know, we'll see. I'm skeptical about it.
But then again, you know, I also very much am in the belief that Democrats continue to underestimate Trump and those who surround him. And that that, in some ways, I think was the failure that led to his reelection.
But it also would be a potential terrible error to make when he's openly threatening to jail his opponents. His comments the other day about January 6, and that the real criminals were the January 6 committee that investigated him.
That was something to pay attention to. Talk more about that notion that the underestimation of Trump led to his re-election.
In what sense do you mean that? Well, I mean, look, you can follow the chain back as far as you'd like to, but in my view, one of the fatal errors of the Biden presidency occurred in the very initial weeks and months of the Biden presidency, which is this notion that Donald Trump couldn't possibly come back. And I should say, that's not just a mistake of Democrats.
Of course, many Republicans who wish to see Trump gone, i.e. Mitch McConnell.
Yeah, Mitch McConnell's on the top of this mistake list. Yeah, oh my goodness, Yes, absolutely.
You know, I think that that was a crucial error, a judgment by many, many, many people in Washington and around the country. And, you know, I've been haunted by this quote in the latest Woodward book.
It's a quote that he attributes to Ron Klain, Biden's first White House chief of staff, sometime in that initial period, essentially saying, Donald Trump, forget about him. He's just a sideshow.
He's irrelevant, essentially. And, you know, that was a mistake.
I love Ron, but yeah, that one hurts. Okay, I want to talk about your latest column, which is about how the scandal in the Trump cabinet appointees isn't just their personal failings.
It's easy to focus on their personal failings, of course, because there are many among pretty much all the cabinet appointees, with a couple exceptions. I'm wondering, as you kind of assess the cabinet, what are the greatest concerns that you have? What are the scandals that you think people should be focused on? Yeah, I mean, look, to be clear, obviously, the personal failings are something to focus on as well.
It's as if Trump went out of his way to seek out potential nominees who, you know, had an array of allegations against them. You know, it's as a group, I've never seen so many potential senior officials in the US government accused of sexual accused of sexual misconduct.
Even the women, even Linda McMahon as part of a cover-up related to sexual misconduct. I mean, come on, right? It's pretty remarkable.
It's as if Trump seeks to benefit from the relativity, right? If all these other people have been accused of so many terrible things, maybe the terrible things I've been accused of in my personal life won't seem so bad. So I don't mean to minimize those allegations because taken together, they suggest a cabinet that should be disqualified on that basis alone in many instances.
Certainly, if Trump sought to further annihilate any respect and admiration that Americans would have for senior leadership of their government. One way to do it is to appoint people with such a collective set of alleged moral failings and personal failings.
But putting that aside, what's notable to me, and I think it can get lost partially probably by design in the kind of serial controversies, is the collective real extremism of this group of appointees. And in that, I think they are very reflective of Trump's own path here.
This is where it is a different potential presidency than it was in 2016. If you look at in many of the key positions in 2016, what was Trump seeking to do? He was seeking to reassure a Republican establishment, if not a Democratic one, that was still very uncertain about him.
That's why he sought out figures with kind of brand name stamp of approval. People like the CEO of ExxonMobil, Jim Mattis, incredibly not only decorated, but admired former four-star Marine general.
You know, his economic appointees were Wall Street leaders who had served in Goldman Sachs, the kind of marquee Wall Street brand. So that was Trump 1.0.
Trump 2.0 is a collection of essentially MAGA first, second, and third tier celebrities whose only claim to the job essentially is a personal loyalty to Trump, an ability to rally and excite his electorate, his base, and a willingness and even a desire essentially to blow up, or as Steve Bannon put it, to take a blowtorch to the very institutions that they're being named to lead. And this is a big shift that may go underappreciated at a moment when we are, again, understandably focused on, gee, is the chief of the Pentagon the largest, most formidable bureaucracy and most powerful military that the world has ever seen? Is this guy capable of managing a 20-person veterans group? No.
Let's talk about him, Pete Hegseth, the weekend Fox anchor that is supposedly going to be leading our military. You kind of mentioned in your column about how there's a little bit of an under appreciation for the threats about using the military to go after the enemy within the quote-unquote enemy within and how chilling that is i also want to talk about the military use with regards to deportations and i want to listen to this is a steven miller on laura ingram the other night and i think that if you listen to his tone is Stephen Miller on Laura Ingram the other night.

And I think that if you listen to his tone, it is out of step with what you are hearing in the prevailing conventional wisdom about what to expect on the deportations issue. Let's listen to Stephen Miller.
Everything in the world, everything in the world is going to change on January 20th. Because the President of the United States is going to use

every single legal, diplomatic,

and financial tool to halt

the entry of all illegal

aliens into this country. There will be no

benefits, there will be no entry, there will be

no asylum, there will be no admission.

You may be prosecuted, you will

certainly be arrested, and you will absolutely

be deported.

The entire world, Mexico, Northern Triangle, Central America, South America, Africa, Asia, the Middle East will get this message. There is no unlawful route to enter the United States of America.
Every presidential authority, including his absolute authority under Article 2 to defend the territorial sovereignty of the United States will be used from the Department of of Defense to the Department of Justice to Homeland Security and every single other lawful authority at his disposal. Absolute authority using the Department of Defense to deal with this issue.
Obviously, I think also the cracking down on protests element will be there. What are your thoughts, what are you hearing about having Pete Hegseth in a position where the president will be using the military in this manner? First of all, I have to say, Tim, listening to that clip, I mean, my blood pressure, my heart is pounding just listening to that rhetoric.
It's very, you know, it's very... This is why I wanted to play that clip, because I do think, don't you think there's like a lot of like...
Everything in the world will change. Yeah, right.
Everything in the world will change. First of all, that's quite a message to send to Trump's reporters.
I mean, talk about expectation setting. It's a pretty remarkable expectation setting.
I would point out, by the way, that there are laws. And if you followed Stephen Miller's logic there to their extreme, Trump would be violating a whole host of them in order to carry out what Stephen Miller says he's going to do.
It is not illegal to seek asylum in this country. And in fact, it is something that is a legal tool available to people who are fleeing persecution and political violence.
And that is who we are as a country. And by the way, it is not illegal to seek asylum in this country.
We have a process for determining whether you're eligible for it or not. Yeah.
And that is why I wanted to play it because don't you sense that there's kind of like, well, is he really going to do it all? Is he really going to actually do all this? And even Trump's rhetoric himself was, I mean, again, on the Trump scale, totally outside the bounds of any normal politician. But on Kristen Welker, you could see at times how he would try to modulate things.
And he's throwing a bone at the dreamers and that sort of thing. Stephen Miller is going to be in charge of this deal, him and Tom Holman.
And his rhetoric is unmistakable. And I do think it's important to take that very seriously.
Yes, exactly. For sure.
I mean, I am amazed at the, you know, ability, I think it says something

about human nature, human psychology, but you know, the triumph, you might say, of hope over

experience when it comes to Donald Trump, again, and again, and again, people believing that he

somehow doesn't want to do the things that he's been very clear in saying that he wants to do.

You know, I spend a fair amount of time with foreign policy types. And believe me, you should hear what they say privately, even many very stringent public critics of Donald Trump.
They just can't really believe that he means to do to Ukraine what he's been saying very clearly and what his backers have been saying very clearly that they want to do. You know, they're still talking about, well, maybe he's going to give Ukraine more aid in order to get a bargaining position.
Seriously, seriously. And so who is saying that more people than you would realize, people that should know better, people that should know better.
You know, again, it's I understand it when they look at the problem and try to unpack it rationally. They think about things like Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon.
How do you Vietnamese to the table? Well, you escalate to deescalate. OK, well, is is that an option that's really available in the Donald Trump, J.D.
advance world where you're going to somehow send lots more weapons to Ukraine in order to convince Putin that you're serious about making a deal. You know, color us skeptical, right? Nixon and Kissinger ain't walking through that door on January 20th.
That's Trump and Hegseth. It's not the same deal in Tulsi.
Not the same deal. You know, look, is it true that Donald Trump often talks tough and fails to fully deliver? Sure.
Ask him, where is that entire big, beautiful wall with Mexico that Mexico was going to pay for in December of 2016? Well, you know, he often over promises and under delivers. You could say that that was the motto of his business.
And in some ways, it's been part of the motto of his career. You know, translating the very unfleshed out threats and slogans and tweets of his 2024 campaign into policy will inevitably leave a lot on the table that is not possible to carry on and to execute.
But that's a very different phenomenon than the one you're talking about, which is people who just, they pick and choose. They see Donald Trump as this sort of, I'll just take all the good parts and forget about all the bad parts.
And I think that's going to be a recipe for a pretty big disappointment for a lot of people who may have voted for Donald Trump thinking that he was going to reduce the price of eggs only to find that he's doing a lot of stuff that they feel that they didn't vote for. Including the opposite, which is maybe increasing grocery prices with tariffs and deportations and extending the Trump tax cuts is not exactly a deflationary agenda.
I do want to get back to Hegseth, though. The other news yesterday was, which you know, because I'm living in reality, which I previewed for people on this podcast yesterday.
I was talking to Iowa Republican friends, none of whom thought Joni Ernst was going to be the key person that spiked Hegseth in the end. She put out a statement yesterday afternoon.
I appreciate Pete Hegseth's responsiveness and respect for the process. Following our encouraging conversations, Pete committed to completing a full audit of the Pentagon and selecting a senior official who will uphold the role and value of our service men and women based on quality and standards, not quotas, etc, etc.
So Joni seems like she's going to kind of find a rationalization to get there here based on some promise by Pete

Hegseth that he won't ban women from the military. Not surprising, but I think telling of where things are going in Trump's Washington.
I just, I wonder how you assess kind of the Hegseth nomination and what Joni said at this point. Yeah.
I mean, look, Hegseth decided to fight and took a page out of the Kavanaugh playbook

and is just sort of brazening through, aided by the kind of MAGA media mob that has proven to be a sort of, you know, the MAGA media mob, which has proven to be a very effective police force for the Senate Republican conference. These guys are desperate not to be the face of resistance.
They all know what happens to the resistors. They're isolated, shunned and forced out of office in Donald Trump's worldview.
And so, you know, math, however, still math, and they actually have a pretty tight margin here. They can only afford to lose three Republican senators, assuming all Democrats hang together on any individual nomination.

And it strikes me that, you know, perhaps the Ernst's and Collins's and Murkowski's of the world are, you know, waiting, biding their time, hoping that an actual FBI background check, an actual committee process turns up material in writing, you know, in sort of fine print that you can't dispute that makes it more possible for them to get rid of this nomination. If it actually comes to a vote, I think it would be very hard for these senators to publicly oppose Trump at the very beginning of his presidency.
But I don't think it's a done deal yet on Hegseth in particular, because there is a paper trail here. And what are they going to do when they're confronted in writing with that whistleblower report that my colleague Jane Mayer reported about in The New Yorker? You know, I think it's a pretty damning indictment.
Hegseth and his allies have misrepresented what these allegations are, claiming that it's, you know, simply the word of a single disgruntled employee could not be farther from the truth. That would be confronted.
I think they would then, the senators would have to confront the fact that Hegseth has been publicly misrepresenting and not telling the truth about what these allegations even are, even since he's been nominated by Trump. So, you know, I don't think it's a done deal yet, but I agree with you that anyone who is expecting the Republican Senate to grow a spine and to, you know, be in a confrontational mode from Donald Trump from day one, they are totally misreading the politics of this in the situation.
It's possible, at least in the case of Tulsi and RFK, that there might have to be a couple more Republicans that dissent because there's some reporting yesterday that Bernie might be open to supporting Tulsi and RFK nomination. I think Fetterman potentially, at least in the case of RFK as well.
I think Cory Booker maybe even allowed some openness. I kind of find that hard to believe but TBD.
Hey everyone. Welcome back to Bachelor Happy Hour.
I'm Joe. And I'm Serena.
And we are here with the iHeart Music Awards and David's Bridal. Who are sponsoring this podcast and we are so grateful to them.
Thank you. Thank you for finishing my sentence.
And we are here with our favorites, Dotton and Charity. Where were you in Bikinis in the Snow? Montana.
Okay. She flew out and joined you guys.
Isn't it cold? No, it was. Well, yeah.
It's Bikinis in the Snow. First it's cold.
We risk getting hypothermia for those photos. Wow.
They were sick, though. I don't get Bikinis in the Snow.
It's just like an aesthetic. I don't know.
If him and I did that, if we did Speedos in the Snow, you guys would be like douchebags. No, I wouldn't.
Well, Speedos in the Snow would be hilarious. I would be like, let's see it.
Come on. I would not complain.
I'd beg him to do stuff like that. He's like, no.
That's going to be the name of this podcast episode. Bachelor Happy Hour, Speedos in the Snow.
David's Bridal, if you're listening. David's Bridal.
Shift your branding a little bit. David's Bridal, Speedosal sponsored by branding a little bit looking to transform your business through better hr and payroll meet paycore the powerhouse solution that empowers leaders to drive results from recruiting and development to payroll and analytics paycore connects you with the people data and expertise you need to.
Their innovative platform helps you make smarter decisions about your most valuable asset, your people. Ready to become a better leader? Visit PayCore.com slash leaders to learn more.
That's PayCore.com slash leaders. You did some reporting kind of as is of your expertise, like from abroad, what our allies are saying, what foreign diplomats are saying.
There was a delicious quote from a French ambassador in your column about the nomination of two of Trump's daughters' father-in-laws to ambassadorships, one of whom, Charles Kushner, who he had pardoned, the other Tiffany's father-in-law. I'm wondering what you're just kind of hearing out there about just that, you know, that group broadly, also, if anything, specifically about Hague stuff.
Yeah, I mean, I think, look, the world of diplomacy is not shocked this time about Trump. They've been preparing for it.
I think maybe some of them have taken some of the wrong lessons from Trump 1.0. The current thing that I'm seeing right now in, you know, kind of foreign policy land is an absolute proliferation of op-eds that all have the theme of, here's how Donald Trump, you brilliant man, you could win a Nobel Peace Prize, followed by, insert the foreign policy person's favorite policy prescription..
And so I mean, literally, like whether the topic is, you know, the Middle East and Iran, or it's Ukraine, Russia, you know, there's a lot of Dear Donald, you know, I'd love to help get you your Nobel Peace Prize, if you only follow my prescription to do exactly the opposite of what you have said, you are planning to do. But putting that aside, I think that, you know, there is a view that Trump is pretty transactional.
I think there is a fairly clear eyed sense that especially for Europe that, you know, it's going to be a longer term, almost a structural shift away from the kind of deep partnership that the U.S. has built with its allies in Europe over the last few decades, that that is coming to an end in some way and will be fundamentally rearranged both by our growing economic nationalism and protectionism, which has been true to a limited extent even in the Biden presidency presidency, and also by just absolute louder and louder demands, again, in both parties, that Europe pay more for its own security.
So that's, I think, one big realignment that's happening. I think there's a sense of fault lines emerging inside, potentially the new Trump administration on issues like what to do about Iran, negotiate or go all in and tough on Iran.
Same thing with China. I think there are a real constellation of opinions about China and, you know, some super hawks on China and Taiwan who are going to be entering the Trump administration.
But then Trump himself, who, as you know, is constantly wanting to make a deal with Xi, whom I must say, I find it hard to believe Donald Trump is ever going to be going to war to defend Taiwan. A very big difference from many of the hawks that he's put inside his own administration.
Just for posterity's sake, the quote from Gerard Arad, who is the French ambassador to the U.S., was, in the madness of Trump's nomination, there is expressed the near total contempt for human respect, customs, and law. They do it well.
They do it well over there. Gerard is a very, very pithy ambassador.
And by the way, he was the French ambassador here to Washington in the first Trump term. And I will never forget at the end of Trump's first year in office,

his annual holiday party, he hung the Christmas trees upside down in the French ambassador's residence. Yeah, taking a page out of Mrs.
Alito's playbook. I want to go back to the Ukraine conversation you were mentioning earlier.
There's maybe some gullible hopefulness in some quarters, But, you know, J.D. Vance has kind of laid out an outline for what they think the end of the war would look like, having maybe a demilitarized zone, stopping at the current lines of combat, a promise that Ukraine's not going to join NATO.
I mean, that would be a clear loss for Ukraine. I've had on the spot Michael Weiss and Bill Kristol recently.
I've had several people on the podcast who are not quite as confident as everybody else seems to be that Putin is actually going to go along with whatever deal Trump wants, that maybe he might think that this is an opportunity to push further. I'm wondering what you are hearing and what you think the state of play is.
Yeah, that's right. I think they're right to spotlight that.
That is being a big question. You know, why would Putin want to hand Trump an enormous win on the very front end of his presidency? Putin defines his conflict.
And I think it's very important because it's underappreciated here in this country. He says to his own public that he is at war, not withraine but with nato and the united states so putin has defined russia as being in a state of armed conflict and war with the united states and nato and i think that that's an important reminder when thinking about well what what would cause putin to to stop being in that war, it's an incredibly costly and painful war.
There are literally thousands of Russian casualties every day, every week. It is long-term unsustainable, but in the short term, perhaps more sustainable for Russia than for Ukraine.
Trump, reminder, has promised to end the war in 24 hours. There's essentially no one who believes that that is an actual possibility.
At the same time, there is a strong view that we may well see a de-escalation, a ceasefire in place. Donald Trump, whatever it is, we'll call it the greatest peace deal in the history of time, but it's far, far more likely to be not a peace deal that definitively ends the war so much as a ceasefire that would enable both sides to regroup.
The big question is, what, if any, security guarantees for Ukraine is Trump and other European allies prepared to offer? Because otherwise, it's simply a pause that enables Putin to rearm and to find new ways of going back after Ukraine after some interval of time. And so that part is very, very unclear.
Donald Trump, as you know, is a longtime skeptic of NATO. He's a longtime skeptic of Ukraine.
And is he really going to commit the United States to securing Ukraine's independence and sovereignty in some meaningful way. I mean, I, you know, I have a lot of questions about that.
Rakuten is the smartest way to save money when you shop because members get cash back at over 3,500 stores across every category, including fashion, beauty, electronics, home essentials, travel, dining, and more. Your favorite stores like Walmart, Lenovo, and Wine.com pay Rakuten a commission for sending them shoppers, and Rakuten shares the commission with its members.
And that could be you. Cashback is deposited directly into your PayPal account, or if you prefer, Rakuten can send you a check.
The choice is yours. You can even maximize your savings by stacking cashback on top of other deals, like store sales and coupons.
You're already shopping at your favorite stores. Why not save while you're doing it? Membership is free and it's easy to sign up.
Get the Rakuten app now and join the 17 million members who are already saving. Cash back rates change daily.
See Rakuten.com for details. That's R-A-K-U-T-E-N.
Your cash back really adds up. Hey everyone, welcome back to Bachelor Happy Hour.
I'm Joe. And I'm Serena.
And we are here with the iHeart Music Awards and David's Bridal. Who are sponsoring this podcast and we are so grateful to them.
Thank you. Thank you for finishing my sentence.
And we are here with our favorites, Dotton and Charity. Where were you in Bikinis in the Snow? Montana.
Okay she flew out and joined you guys. Isn't it cold? Well yeah it's Bikinis in the Snow.
We risk getting hypothermia for those photos. Wow.
They were sick though. I don't get Bikinis in the Snow.
It's just like an aesthetic. I don't know.
If him and I did that if we did Speedos in in the Snow, you guys would be like douchebags. No, I wouldn't.
Well, Speedos in the Snow would be hilarious. I would be like, let's see it.
Come on. I would not complain.
I'd beg him to do stuff like that. He's like, no.
That's going to be the name of this podcast episode. Bachelor Happy Hour, Speedos in the Snow.
David's Bridal, if you're listening. David's Bridal concerning news we have we had some good news with the fall of asad and

maybe who knows what the future will hold for syria but um given just how horrific and depraved

his management of the country has been having to have him flee to moscow is good news

I'm sorry. and depraved his management of the country has been having to have him flee to moscow is good news at least in the micro i prefer to be that to flee to siberia but moscow might be okay we'll see how that shakes out for him i'm wondering your kind of thoughts on the developments there in syria and in particular like what that says about the weakening of r, and you know, what the view might be from Russia since you've spent so much time there.
Yeah, it is fitting in many ways that Assad ends up in Moscow, you know, maybe he'll be getting dinner with Yanukovych, the deposed former leader of Ukraine, and they can commiserate. First of all, of course, it underscores the extent to which Assad really was a client and dependent upon Russia as well as Iran for his survival over these last, you know, more than a decade of horrific civil war in Syria.
And when his backers withdrew their support, he fell with astonishing speed and rapidity. I think you're right to say we should take a breath and note that this is a good day.
Whatever comes next, and there are very justifiable reasons to be concerned, skeptical, worried about the future of Syria, this was a horrific, horrific dictatorship, and it lasted more than 50 years. You know, I've been really having flashbacks the last few days to the fall of Saddam Hussein, which I covered on the ground for the Washington Post.
And I remember interviewing prisoners in the prison that they had been tortured in, in the southern city of Basra, within hours of their jailers departing. And that for me was an unforgettable experience and a reminder, you know, that this is how these dictatorships rule is through fear and torture and a kind of repression that is almost hard to imagine.
And so I think it's really important to take note of this, watch the scenes of these prisoners desperately searching in the Sednaya prison in Damascus. It's something really powerful and important that's happening.
But to the point about the geopolitics of this, it's going to force Donald Trump to immediately make a series of decisions. And you don't really know what the right answer is going to be.
It looks like Iran is seriously weakened. It looks like Russia is seriously weakened.
And by the way, not only were they propping up Assad, but they had their major naval base in the region that was a way for Russia to project power, not only in the Middle East, but also into Africa with its mercenaries that were based there. It looks like they're going to be losing that.
And I think it's the kind of blow that a more traditional American foreign policy leader, whether Republican or Democrat, would absolutely see opportunity in this. But remember, you know, Trump is the guy who seems to admire the autocrats and adversaries and be very dismissive of the allies.
So it's not clear to me what he'll do. You saw his all caps, hands off, not our problem, missive the other day on True Social.
Of course, it's our problem and our concern. This very directly concerns America's ally Israel.
It very directly concerns America's interests throughout the region. And it's a little worrisome to have somebody whose basic instinct is to, you know, stick their head in the sand or to want to be treating with the dictator Vladimir Putin, who made that civil war possible for the last few years.
Yeah, and it matters to the hundreds of troops that we have still in Syria, which he might not know about or care about.

Who knows? The other thing to me, the other kind of glimmer of hope, you tried to bring us back into Trump. I'm taking this away from that.
All right. We just, it is what it is.
We'll see what Trump does with this in January. But you posted a picture of Assad at the Arab League.
Like that was in 2023, I guess it was. And to me, this is kind of a lesson about, again, not to be Pollyanna about who ends up taking over Syria or what that looks like, but about the smarties don't always exactly know what's going to happen.
And we don't have to submit to just total cynicism in all of these cases, positive developments can happen, change can happen. And it's darkly funny that like, right at the moment that Assad was kind of being welcomed back into the League of Nations, because people are just like, well, I guess there's nothing we can do here.
We're stuck with this guy, we're stuck with this butcher. And it is pretty shortly after that moment that he's toppled.
And I think there's a lesson there. No, I mean, that image really has always stuck with me.
That was just, I believe, in May of 2023, that Assad was welcomed back to the Arab League. There he is featured in that family photo.
Remember, many of those leaders in the Middle East are the ones that Donald Trump and his family feel most comfortable with.

Those are the hereditary Gulf Arab potentates that he may be well soon making deals with again. But it's also a consequence.
It's not just like this happened and it was some sort of miracle from above. I mean, one of the proximate causes of Assad's falling was the backlash and the war that was triggered by Hamas's terrorist attack against Israel on October 7th of last year.
And so this is absolutely can only be seen in that context of the dramatic weakening of, you know, the quote unquote axis of resistance that is Iran and its proxies around the region. Hamas, there's also been the war between Hezbollah and Israel, which now is entering a ceasefire, but, you know, has dramatically weakened Hezbollah in neighboring Lebanon.
Iran itself been weakened. And, you know, Syria was a major transit point between Iran and Hezbollah and Hamas.
This is where and how the weapons and intelligence, that's how the alliance worked was through Syria. So it's a major defeat for those powers as a direct result of October 7th.
But, you know, I do also I know you want me not to talk about Trump here. But do it.
It's fine. It's fine.
No, look, I just, I really, I really think that, you know, you're seeing in that true social post from Trump in everything that he says and does is a, forget about the big, bad, scary world, except that I'm strong Donald and I'll be out there, you know, defending you in it. But, you know, he's redefined America first, he's redefined national security threats as not what happens because of instability in Syria, but what happens here in the United States.
And I just, I think this quote that he said in mid-October of the campaign did not get nearly enough attention. But to me, it is the story of what he's really going to be doing in this next term.
And he was asked about, you know, these Ukraine, Russia, whatever. What did he say? He said, we have two enemies.
We have the outside enemy, and then we have the enemy from within. And the enemy from within, in my opinion, is more dangerous than China, Russia, and all these countries.
That is chilling. I want to just close by circling us back to the topic at the top about the lame duck president, because something just said there about how the response to October 7th precipitated a lot of this.
You can imagine a different world, a different the u.s president was i don't know crowing right now or talking about american influence and and how much influence we have in the world right i mean like between ukraine and the assistance we've provided ukraine and israel and the assistance we've provided israel like the strategy that has been put forth, while obviously not perfect or not without flaws or things to criticize,

has succeeded in weakening Russia and Iran and their malign influence. And I feel like nobody

wants to give any credit for that. Like the Democrats don't want to because some of them

don't like the way that Israel's conducted the war. Neocon Republicans don't want to give Biden

Thank you. wants to give any credit for that.
The Democrats don't want to because some of them don't like the way that Israel's conducted the war. Neocon Republicans don't want to give Biden any credit for anything.
MAGA Republicans obviously don't want to give him credit for anything. Biden doesn't want to take credit.
I don't know. I do think it's noteworthy, though, that we've seen this diminishment of our foes, and it's almost like as if the American role there is barely even part of the conversation.
Yeah, I think you're exactly right. You know, it's the squeeze.
What's happened as a result is that, you know, Biden, even his foreign policy legacy for someone who was so experienced as a foreign policy leader who made that a big part of his selling point, it's not clear, you's anything permanent to look at that says, here's what he accomplished. That's true in Ukraine, despite vast amounts of aid, despite shoring up Ukraine when it mattered, unable to provide sufficient amounts.
And you can say, well, that never was possible or conceivable or politically doable. But whatever the reasons, you know, Ukraine is not winning that conflict right now and is now facing an American president who seems to want to withdraw support.
Same thing in the Middle East. Israel is prevailing, but at enormous and horrific cost.
And it's been at a political cost for Biden inside his party. One thing I would spotlight in these next, I think it's about 40 days between now and the inauguration, a lot of chatter about the prospects for a hostage deal with Hamas.
There are still, it's unclear how many, but there are still living hostages, both Israeli and some American inside Gaza. I'm sure the Biden administration is working all out to make that happen.
They really want to have another, you know, sort of accomplishment to point to before Trump comes in. I don't know if it's possible or not.
We've been living on fumes of false hope for a really long time when it comes to the hostages. Susan Glasser, thank you for, you know, reporting on Trump's Washington for me, so I don't have to, so I can view it from

afar in New Orleans. I appreciate you and hope to have you back.
We certainly will have you back

in the new year. Tim, it's great to be with you.
If we have to go through this, at least

we can talk it through together. And you are an incredible voice.
So thank you so much.

I look forward to it. Everybody else, stick around.
I've got a couple rants for you. All right, guys, everybody's talking about Luigi Mangione and Daniel Penny and Penny's acquittal, Luigi's arrest.

I want to talk about something in particular that has bugged me about the conversation around these two incidents. It's centered kind of around this word radicalized.
It's in vogue these days to talk about how people are being radicalized by events. I feel like this might have started in 2016.
Does everything leave back to Trump? Maybe. but how MAGA voters were radicalized by the wars or NAFTA or Brett Kavanaugh, by people being too mean to Mitt Romney and how that rationalized their support for Trump.
Robert Evans, who I like a lot, is far left of me, but he writes today about how Brian Thompson's killer, Luigi Mangione, was radicalized by his pain, by his back pain. There are so many people I've seen on the right, including Meghan McCain, in particular, discuss how they're being radicalized by the treatment of Daniel Penny.
I think that all this radicalization talk is just simply fancy excuse making for people who are living in decadent times. Like it is creating an environment that gives people a rationalization for defending horrible actions or for acting horribly or for voting for somebody that they know is bad.
In some cases, it even romanticizes horrible actions as being part of some existential good. We've seen this in the case of Mangione.
I want to push back against this, beginning with Luigi. We're going to learn more about this guy's motivations in the coming months.
So some of this might be wrong, but we know that he disappeared a couple months ago in November. Family and friends were looking for him.
So he possibly had a psychotic break. I don't know.
We know he was reading pain books on the x-ray of his back on his Twitter header. We read his little his little mini festo i'm not calling it a manifesto it's like it's like two pages okay it's more of like an outline a rant so his little mini festo he rants about the health insurance industry but the media is consuming if you look at his social media feeds was not like anti-capitalist stuff it was more kind of like center-right podcast bro, like RFK, Rogan world type stuff.
So based on that, you know, we don't know exactly what Luigi's pain was. It may have been debilitating.
I saw a report from a roommate that said he couldn't have sex because of it. That's not great.
I wouldn't like that. His Goodreads account, as I said, indicates he was kind of searching for solutions for this pain but it kind of doesn't matter really how bad his pain was in the context of radicalizations because in a world where like people are putting out everything is romantic super cuts about a killer because he's got abs and trauma then that gives everyone a rationale to kill it gives everyone and the opportunity to feel like they can become famous if they kill.
I mean, have you seen these things? It is way over the top. And it is leading us to a very bad place.
This is not a world that we want to live in, where you get to rationalize your pain, your trauma, the bad experiences of your life into vigilante murder. I'm sorry to be harsh about this, but Luigi's got pain, you got pain, everybody's got pain, all right? This type of radicalization origin story could justify basically anything, all right? You could imagine me doing something like this, a decade of being indoctrinated by teachers and priests telling me that I was a sinner who needed to deny myself love and be alienated from my family if I was going to, you know, do what I felt was right for me.
That wasn't great. That felt painful.
You might say it was radicalizing even. I don't get to kill the archbishop over it.
All right. I've got middle-aged guy pals who deal with really horrible, like debilitating pain from past accidents that they were in when we were younger or bad genes.
I feel horrible for them. I wish I could do more to help them alleviate it.
I don't wish that they could start capping fools. If you get in a car wreck and somebody rear-ends you and you have long-term back pain, you don't get to go kill the CEO of Ford ford or the person that rear-ended you like that is bad luck it sucks it's life the u.s health industry also kind of sucks plenty of people have had bad experiences with it u.s health care system also performs miracles every day there is this romanticization of health care systems abroad like and let me you, healthcare systems abroad have bad outcomes too.
You know, I was reading Noah Smith's column about this, where he's talking about how people have various complaints about the way that the system works in Australia and in England, which have more socialized healthcare systems. You know, there are dehumanizing ways that we treat people in our healthcare system and that people are treated that way elsewhere.
Any system of care is going to lead to bad outcomes. All of us eventually get pain.
All of us eventually die. Sometimes the system can't do for people what we wish it could.
Does that mean that we just accept those bad outcomes? No. Should we have serious discussions about how to reform it and make it better? Yeah.
Should we raise awareness about particular areas of our healthcare system that don't work? Should we steal ideas from other countries where certain parts of their system work better? Should politicians campaign against the failures? Should you write polemics about healthcare executives that inspire change? Sure, all that, sure.

Murder on the street? No. And that takes me to Daniel Penny.
This is another thorny, complicated situation in life that people don't like to contend with. My colleague Kathy Young wrote about the complexity of this case a while back for the Bullock.
I'll put the link in the show notes. But the short of it is this.
Jordan Neely was on the subway acting erratic. He was threatening and menacing people.
He had a history of such behavior. In this instance, Penny intervened, tried to subdue him.
As a result of that exchange, where other people, by the way, came and helped Daniel Penny, including a black person for those who want to make this all about race, Jordan Neely died. This scenario is a tragedy.
Daniel Penny is not really a hero in any meaningful sense. He's not a premeditated murderer.
Obviously he's a guy who tried to restrain a threat and ended up killing the person that was the threat. It is a tragedy that I'm sure will haunt him and that will haunt the family of Jordan Neely.
This is not a hero villain story in our woke culture wars. There's nothing that should be radicalizing about this.
This is a fucked up situation. It happens in life.
There's just something childish, I think, about all of this kind of talk about people getting radicalized by things like this. People want to be characters in a children's story.
They want a Robin Hood, a good guy and a bad guy, a evil monster who must be toppled. They want Avengers to come and right all the wrongs that have been done by them.

I get that impulse,

but Donald Trump is not bringing the coal jobs back.

Okay.

This is because you are radicalized because you live in the rust belt and

your towns have been hollowed out.

Like there are ways to fix that.

You know,

deciding that a total grifter should be the president isn't going to do it. I'm sorry.
We don't live in a fairy tale. Brian Thompson's murder, it isn't ushering in a new era of more humane socialist healthcare.
I'm sorry, Red Rose Twitter. That's not how this stuff works.
Things are complicated.

There are tragedies in life.

We all need to work together as a society to try to improve them gradually over time.

That's the solution to all of this.

It is not as satisfying as being in a superhero movie.

Or it is not as satisfying as saying like, hell yeah,

ripped abs guy taking down the man. It's hard.
It's complicated. It requires dealing with gray areas and recognizing that sometimes people get boned by life.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't have empathy for them. Doesn't mean we shouldn't try to fix things.
Just means that we should be serious about it and not try to tear down the fabric of our society by putting in a cockistocracy to run the country or by supporting random vigilante murders against rich people we don't like because we think that's going to make everything better it's not it's taking us towards a dystopia and we should resist it. Okay.
I'll be back here tomorrow.

We got another double header on the board podcast,

friend of the pod.

Very much looking forward to it.

I'm over.

Some people might've noticed this on YouTube.

We had a little,

we had a little mix up.

We had a little communications error.

I'm going to have Scott Galloway on this pod sometime soon.

I'm on Scott Galloway's pod today.

So you guys should go check that out as well.

He's great.

We're going to have a nice exchange for everybody else.

We'll see you right back here tomorrow.

Appreciate you very much.

Peace.

Bad tattoos on leather tan skin.

Jesus Christ on a plastic sign.

Fall in love again and again.

Winding roads doing manual drive. Bad tattoos on tanned skin, Jesus Christ on a plastic sign Early nights in white sheets with lace curtains Carpuri in the distance Bad tattoos on leather tanned skin, Jesus Christ on a plastic sign All in love again and again, winding roads through manual drive Bad tattoos on leather tanned skin, Jesus Christ on a plastic sign All in love again and again Winding road through manual drive Bad tattoos on leather tanned skin

Jesus Christ on a plastic sign

All in love again and again

Winding road through manual drive

Early nights with white sheets with lace curtains

Carpberry in the distance

In a place that can make you change

All in love again and again

Early nights with white sheets with lace curtains

Carpberry in the distance

In a place that can make you change

All in love

Everything is romantic Everything is romantic Everything is engineering and editing by Jason Brown. Legends, the greatest social casino and sportsbook experience has arrived at legends.com with thousands of the best free-to-play casino-style games,

chances to earn millions of bonus coins,

and win real money. Legends is

revolutionizing the Vegas experience

wherever you are. If you love winning,

then you'll love playing at

legendz.com.

Legends is a free-to-play social casino void.

We're prohibited to play responsibly. Visit Legends.com

for more information. Legends with a Z.

.com is legendary fun.