Tom Nichols: The Cat Was in the Basement

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Speaker 11 Hello and welcome to the Bullwork Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.
He's back.

Speaker 11 It's Tom Nichols, Professor Emeritus at the Naval War College, staff writer at the Atlantic, author of the Atlantic Daily Newsletter. His books include The Death of Expertise.

Speaker 11 We'll be talking about expertise. What's happening, Tom? Hey, Tim.

Speaker 11 What's happening? I don't know. World's on fire.
People are losing their minds. Dogs and cats living together.
Other than that,

Speaker 11 just another late, sleepy, late summer news cycle. Not getting eaten, though.
And that's where we're going to start the day.

Speaker 11 I keep wanting to move on from this story, but I just can't when you have this anecdote. This is my favorite story, maybe of the year.
I don't know if you've seen this.

Speaker 11 So in the Wall Street Journal today, a Vance spokesperson

Speaker 11 on Tuesday, so yesterday, provided the Wall Street Journal with a police report in which a resident had claimed their pet might have been taken by Haitian neighbors.

Speaker 11 Luckily for the Wall Street Journal, they had a reporter who lives in Ohio, Chris Maher, a guy I've worked with before. So Chris Maher went to the house of the police report.

Speaker 11 The woman's name was Anna Kilgore. He went to her house yesterday evening.

Speaker 11 She said her cat, Miss Sassy, which went missing in late August, had actually returned a few days later, was found safe in her own basement.

Speaker 11 Kilgore was wearing a Trump shirt and hat and said she apologized to her Haitian neighbors with the help of her daughter and a mobile phone translation app.

Speaker 11 A beautiful story in Springfield and a disgusting display from the Vance campaign. What do you think about Miss Sassy Gate? I mean, I actually don't want to move on from that.

Speaker 11 The one I was getting sick of was whether or not Rich Lowry misspoke himself.

Speaker 11 Let's not do it. I can't go there.
Yeah, I can't. I'm tired of that one.
And I don't think, you know, I have my complaints about Rich Lowry, but I don't think he did what people said he did.

Speaker 11 I have a scroll worth of complaints about Rich Lowry, and we can just stick to what's on the scroll. Right.

Speaker 11 But the cat story, and I mean, I was thinking of it this morning, you know, because I knew it was coming on here, and I knew we were going to talk about that story, and I couldn't actually find my cat.

Speaker 11 My wife's away right now, and I couldn't find Lily. And I'm going around the house, and I was thinking, you know, if I see one Haitian

Speaker 11 somewhere,

Speaker 11 I mean, it's just so stupid. You know, I mean, it's just this insane, you know what it is, Tim? And we ought to to call it by its right word.
It's a moral panic. Yeah.

Speaker 11 It's literally the equivalent of a moral panic. It's like the it's the equivalent of razor blades and apples.
Yeah, the laced weed. The laced weed was always my favorite moral panic.

Speaker 11 Once, you know, close your ears, mom.

Speaker 11 Once, you know, I started to dabbling in college, it came to me very quickly that I was like, you know, drug dealers aren't really in the business of just kind of handing out free drugs to teenagers just for kicks.

Speaker 11 You know, if they're not trying to to upgrade the weed to make it stronger. If they have the stronger

Speaker 11 materiel, they're trying to sell that, you know, for more money. That's how drug dealing works.
Right. I do like the way you carefully said dabbled.
Dabbled. You know, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 11 It's like, hey, wouldn't it be fun to like drive a bunch of my teenage customers on whom I rely for money completely psychotic? Yeah.

Speaker 11 For no extra income, yeah, anyway. The daycare panic, the satanic daycare panic of 40 years ago, which I am old enough to remember that story.

Speaker 11 I mean, it is literally creating a moral panic in order to motivate and freak out people who, you know, otherwise would be completely ordinary, normal voters who might actually vote on things like who's the better candidate and, you know, things like that.

Speaker 11 And instead, what Vance and Trump are doing is that it's really a way of just shorting out any kind of

Speaker 11 rational capacity for thought in the voters.

Speaker 11 And it's only real if you believe type type situation, right? Like it is totally, you know, just don't look at the man behind the curtain here. I mean, these fuckers, the thing's kind of sad.

Speaker 11 The Miss Sassy, the Anna story makes me kind of sad, actually. Well, it's embarrassing.

Speaker 11 You have to feel for the person who says, wow, I'm the biggest jerk in, you know, like everybody in Springfield, Ohio knows that I'm a jerk.

Speaker 11 But the happy ending of the story is that even, you know, with my Trump flag out there, I went and apologized, which I think is, you know, really important and nice ending to that story.

Speaker 11 That is the happy ending. And this is important.
Anna Kilgore did a bad thing. We all make mistakes, and she apologized.
She was fooled. Like, this is the thing about all of this, right?

Speaker 11 Like, this is why J.D. Vance is such a fucking sociopath.
She was fooled, right?

Speaker 11 And these assholes think that they can get away with this stuff by just being like, oh, we're just, we heard there were some reports. We're just asking questions.
Yeah, we're just asking questions.

Speaker 11 Yeah, we're just advancing this same old wives tale that's been going around about refugees since the 1970s and just pretending like it's happening now and just pointing our finger at a new group of immigrants.

Speaker 11 And they're doing it so brazenly that they literally give this material to the Wall Street Journal without even trying to verify it or care whether it's true or not.

Speaker 11 They end up really humiliating their own supporter. And you know that they don't care.
They don't fucking care. They don't care about the Haitians.
They don't care about Anna Kilgore.

Speaker 11 They don't care about anything. Right.
I think the thing about J.D. Vance, especially, is, you know, Trump, this is going to sound weird.
And

Speaker 11 sometimes I've been accused of saying this as a kind of an apologia for Trump, you know, like, or being a Trump. Do you know how you pronounce that? I've always pronounced it apologia.
Is it apologia?

Speaker 11 I don't know. Now that I'm a podcast host, I like to get, I've noticed there's certain words I pronounce wrong.
So I'm just trying to correct myself. But anyway, continue.

Speaker 11 Well, I'm sure our listeners will let us know. Yeah, 36 years with a PhD, and I thought I was saying it right, and now I don't know.

Speaker 11 I don't know. I don't know if they're.
But as I was saying, some people would say it's a rationalization for Trump. I do know how to pronounce that one.
To To say he is just so

Speaker 11 stunted and so unstable and so emotionally limited. He really doesn't have a firm grip of right and wrong.
Like, he's, he is a goldfish, right?

Speaker 11 He just darts around in a bowl looking for food pellets, and he doesn't care, you know, who's in his way, what's good, what's bad.

Speaker 11 The thing that's so horrifying about Vance, he knows, and he's hurting the people that he claims to champion. Yes.

Speaker 11 When I first wrote about him three years ago and I called him an asshole, which, you know, I think actually he kind of got off easy on that one, is that it was kind of personal to me because I feel like he and I come from that the people he kind of abuses and uses are our people.

Speaker 11 My people and his people, white, working class, you know, struggling, not educated, you know, in his case, Appalachia and steel country.

Speaker 11 In my case, you know, the dying textile industry towns and all of that. And I thought, you know, okay, the Hillbilly elegy has this kind of smug

Speaker 11 tone to it: you know, look at these stupid rubes who couldn't pull their bootstraps up because their culture is so screwed up. But there was a truth in it, and he was

Speaker 11 saying something that had, that was at least true and a useful place for a conversation. Now he treats those same voters, you know, like cattle.

Speaker 11 You know, he just extracts a hunk of prime rib or, you know, loin or a filet mignon out of them at will, you know, by pushing their buttons about cats or, you know, whatever he's on at any given moment.

Speaker 11 And he knows, and the horror of it is he knows. He knows exactly, and he doesn't give a shit about these people.
I mean, he just doesn't.

Speaker 11 He is probably the only person who is more of an empty vessel of pure ambition than Elise Defanek. And that's saying something.
Yeah. Oh, man.

Speaker 11 I mean, Elise looks downright appealing by comparison to JD. I mean, Churchill next to this guy.

Speaker 11 JD also, I just think we should talk about when podcast frequenters are in the news. I feel like we should mention it.
Your colleague David Frum and JD got into a feud.

Speaker 11 This is, I think, a new thing in our politics. We have the vice presidential candidate kind of troll tweeting people.

Speaker 11 From wrote that there's a difference between what Trump and Vance are arguing and what their opponents are arguing. From rights, the upsetting things said by Trump and Vance are not true.

Speaker 11 The upsetting things said about Trump and Vance are true. Trump really did mount a violent coup against the Constitution.

Speaker 11 He and his relatives really did take bribes in office, including from foreign governments. He really was helped into power.
by Russian espionage agencies.

Speaker 11 He really did steal secret documents from the U.S. government after his election defeat.

Speaker 11 And Vance really did, by his own admission, create stories for political advantage that put residents of his state at risk of physical harm. J.D.

Speaker 11 replies, I'd say the most important difference is that people on your team tried to kill Donald Trump twice. Yeah, it's incredible.
You know, good thing we're turning down the temperature,

Speaker 11 you know, and accusing a magazine writer of being on the team that has, you know, tried to kill the former president twice.

Speaker 11 First of all, as if there's a team that is, you know, team kill Trump or something. Once again, J.D.
Vance knows.

Speaker 11 Like that this 20-year-old in Pennsylvania with like serious mental problems and was apparently from a Trump supporting family is like a big reader of Fromm's, you know, Trumpocracy.

Speaker 11 I wasn't going to take an AR down to the rally, but then, boy, that July issue of The Atlantic just spun me right up, boy. And, you know,

Speaker 11 I heard David Fromm, you know, I mean, it's, it's nonsense, but it's dangerous nonsense because that's Vance, you know, basically accusing David and anyone, you know, you, me, everybody who's not on Team Trump of basically trying to get Trump killed just by criticizing him.

Speaker 11 And I suppose the more serious issue we ought to be talking about underneath all that is that, again, J.D. Vance knows all that.
What he really wants is for David Frum

Speaker 11 and you and me and millions of other people to shut up.

Speaker 11 to stop talking about Donald Trump. Because now you notice how the game's being played.
Saying anything true about Donald Trump is therefore trying to get him killed.

Speaker 11 I have a piece coming out tomorrow about presidential assassinations from the archives at the Atlantic. But I wrote on Monday, people take pot shots at presidents and make threats.

Speaker 11 Gerald Ford almost got aced twice in 17 days.

Speaker 11 You didn't see Ford step up and say, you know, if Jimmy Carter and the Democrats don't stop calling me the guy who pardoned Nixon. And, you you know, actually, one of the people who went after Ford

Speaker 11 thought she was, and not, and amazingly, it wasn't squeaky from, who was just nuts.

Speaker 11 Sarah Jane Moore in later years, when she got out of prison, said, yes, I was obsessed with Vietnam, and I was hoping that killing Gerald Ford was going to spark a revolution.

Speaker 11 So, you know, there was very clear political content to, you know, I'm going to kill Gerald Ford and there will be a revolution and this is payback for Vietnam.

Speaker 11 And Ford didn't get up there and say, okay, all you protesters, all the people that were, you know, giving me and Nixon shit all these years, stop criticizing me because you're going to get me killed.

Speaker 11 But Gerald Ford was a real man and a good president. You know, Reagan didn't stand up and say, you know, thanks, Tip O'Neill.
Yeah.

Speaker 11 You know, or the commies, the Marxist commie sympathizing Ted Kennedy. Thanks, Harvard.

Speaker 11 I mean, people at the time were saying Reagan is going to get us all killed in a thermonuclear war. I mean, Reagan, you know, is the most dangerous man alive.
That's not why John Hinckley shot him.

Speaker 11 And when Reagan talked to the country, gave an address to Congress about economics, he literally spent like three paragraphs thanking his doctors, talking about a little kid.

Speaker 11 And then he said, now let's talk about

Speaker 11 crushing inflation. And that was it.
This is really

Speaker 11 an attempt in the same way that the Ohio story is an attempt to spark a moral panic.

Speaker 11 What Vance is doing, and boy, I'm so tempted to swear because you started working blue right at the top here this morning. But, you know,

Speaker 11 no, I'm trying to,

Speaker 11 by the end of this, there probably will be an F-bomb that I can't control.

Speaker 11 But what Vance is doing is trying to spark another moral panic, which is that America is full of lunatics, you know, who are waiting to kill presidents and presidential candidates based on the say-so of magazine writers like David Frum.

Speaker 11 And it's an attempt to shut down debate and to stop saying things that are true. And to their credit,

Speaker 11 you've already seen people like David Rothkopf and Rick Wilson and David Fromm and others say, you know, speaking the truth is not endangering your guy. The truth is the truth.

Speaker 11 Speaking the truth is, I think Ender Edgar wrote this for us of the book. Speaking the truth is 100% defense against the charge of overheated rhetoric.

Speaker 11 Like the truth is the truth and it should be spoken. I actually think it's a little worse than you said.

Speaker 11 I don't think that they're just trying to spark a moral panic and I don't think they're just trying to stifle debate.

Speaker 11 I think that they're actually trying to stir and stoke further division because I think that's how they think that they win. Like the idea is if the other side is behind these horrific, obviously,

Speaker 11 crazy people, then

Speaker 11 there's a standback and standby element on our side, right? It's the stuff that they didn't do.

Speaker 11 And I gave them credit for this because I was worried that they were going to do this after the first attempt. They did not do it at the convention.
They did not wave the bloody shirt, really.

Speaker 11 And I, you know, there was the Trump speech, but it was like very kind of low energy and toned down.

Speaker 11 There was not a lot of vengeance for Trump at the convention. There is increasingly a sense of vengeance for Trump, and it does tie to the Hades Haitian story.
They do want

Speaker 11 people to be pointing fingers at immigrants and raising the rhetoric and attacking and criticizing them and blaming them for cat eating.

Speaker 11 Like they want to raise the temperature and they're cloaking this sort of high-minded bullshit

Speaker 11 in their political end of further dividing and

Speaker 11 raising the temperature.

Speaker 11 Well, and I think what I thought you were going to say is that they want to raise the temperature and encourage more threats.

Speaker 11 And I think that that is part of their goal to say, intimidate these people, tell them, you know, they're next.

Speaker 11 Because every time this stuff happens, anybody who works in public media, you know, we get threats. I mean, it just happens.

Speaker 11 And instead of saying, look, you know, we all have a right to express our opinion. And as you said, the truth is a defense against overheated rhetoric.
They kind of wink at the camera and say, no,

Speaker 11 I'm not saying that,

Speaker 11 you know, Trump's opponents are trying to get him killed. But if you want to reach that conclusion, And maybe express your feelings to those people.
Well, who could stop you, really?

Speaker 11 I mean, on the one thing, I'll say this, that Vance and Trump and everybody else is right. The world is full of unstable people who can be motivated to violence.

Speaker 11 And I've thought about this as it's not a heckler's veto. What they're really arguing for is an assassin's veto.
Don't say anything bad because you will trigger unstable people.

Speaker 11 Well, okay, that's a good rule of thumb

Speaker 11 if by bad you mean something literally like somebody saying someone ought to kill Donald Trump. I've seen people say that.
They say, look,

Speaker 11 my early political days were when Reagan was president and people said it all the time. I can remember when Reagan was shot and people saying, too bad he survived it.

Speaker 11 That's it on social media after Trump, after the Trump thing, too. And that's bad.
Yeah.

Speaker 11 Okay, that's overheated run. That's un-American.
It's unpatriotic. And it makes you a shitty person for saying it.

Speaker 11 I don't care if it's Donald Trump. I don't care if it's Ronald Reagan.
You know, you just, there are things you don't do.

Speaker 11 But if the argument is, don't say Donald Trump is a threat to democracy or you're part of the plot to get him killed, that's just an attempt to shut you down and to keep you from saying things that are true and that are within your rights as an American citizen to say.

Speaker 11 And the other element to the first part of what you're saying about the increasing the threats on the other side is he did this faux machismo thing. I don't know if you saw this.

Speaker 11 He had a rally yesterday where he was like, was this Vance? This is J.D. Vance, not Trump.
Vance. Yeah.
Yeah, he was in Michigan. I'd like to see an assassin try and get in here.
Yeah.

Speaker 11 Oh, for God's sake. With these 500 patriots in here, we'd see what happened to him.
And again, I, okay, I,

Speaker 11 you know, I understand the impulse there to like put on a brave face and be like, we're tough and we're strong and like our people are united and we're patriots.

Speaker 11 But still, it's just like there's a responsibility as a leader in that moment, in this moment to like

Speaker 11 chill things out. right to be responsible to be a grown-up you know and not to you know rile people up and be like, oh, yeah, you better watch out.

Speaker 11 You know, one of our guys might start firing back at you. You know, because

Speaker 11 that can go very bad, that notion. Right, because then you're priming people for violence.
Yeah.

Speaker 11 And I said months ago, I think what Trump's been doing about the election is to prime people for violence, to say, if need be, take guns and, you know, go down to your local election board and once again, stop the steal.

Speaker 11 I mean, this is a guy who has never taken responsibility for what happened on January 6th,

Speaker 11 even though it is his responsibility. I don't think he has any compunction about doing it again.

Speaker 11 But you're right, you know, to stand there and make jokes about, well, I'd like to see an assassin get in here. Yes, yes, we get it.
You're tough. Okay.
I mean, JD is not that tough.

Speaker 11 Some of the people on there are tough. But I mean, is that why you're running to show what a tough guy you are?

Speaker 11 I mean, if there's one word that I think always comes back to me during the Trump era, it's how childlike everything is. It's like you're watching like seventh graders, you know? These aren't adults.

Speaker 11 This is not, J.D. Vance does not come across as an adult.
He comes across as this kind of hanger on of the school bully. Maybe because I grew up in the 70s.

Speaker 11 I mean, he's that kid with the greasy long hair and the jean jacket, you know, who like is always hanging just behind the big guy in the schoolyard.

Speaker 11 Or maybe he's Cartman hanging behind the guy in the schoolyard, I guess,

Speaker 11 since I grew up in the 90s. I'll give you a 90s reference.
I've never had the displeasure of shaking his hand, but I feel pretty strongly that his hands are like mine.

Speaker 11 I don't think he's got a lot of calluses. I don't think that

Speaker 11 this is a tough guy. I don't judge him for that.
I don't judge him for it either, but don't fucking pretend like you're a tough guy. There you go.
That's where I was going.

Speaker 11 Oh, wait, we have one more JD. We have one more JD.
Why don't we just do it now? One more JD. Let's get it out of the way.
Why you do this to me, Demi? Sorry, here's just a great quote.

Speaker 11 I just have to share this quote

Speaker 11 because it was so good. We conservatives rightly mistrust the government to efficiently administer business loans and regulate our food supply.

Speaker 11 Yet we allegedly believe that it can deport millions of unregistered aliens. The notion fails to pass the laugh test.
It's a great point. And I know who said it.

Speaker 11 Who said it? Lifetime Jeopardy champion. Who is JD Vance, Tim Miller? Ding, ding, ding.

Speaker 11 That was only a $200 question, though, for you. That wasn't the hardest one.
Was JD Vance 2012? He had the blog post deleted because he knew this stuff was going to come back to get him.

Speaker 11 That's the thing. He's just no, they just know better.
They know. Well, and also, can we just point out before we move off this point, how

Speaker 11 incredibly,

Speaker 11 you know, ambitious was it to say, yeah, that thing I put on a, when I was in law school, by the way, this wasn't like I was like a, you know, like I was really high in the dorm in my freshman year and I posted this on, you know, can we please take it down?

Speaker 11 He wrote this as a law student, as a grown man, and had the foresight to say, yeah, this is going to screw me in Republican politics. Can we take it down?

Speaker 11 So the thing I said that was true is going to hurt me in Republican politics. So can you please take it down? I mean, what a weasel.

Speaker 11 What an incredibly, I mean, in a way, you have to kind of admire the hustle, right?

Speaker 11 You know, it's like, that's pretty foresighted. You know, he looks back, he says, hey, I want to go to work in Republican politics.

Speaker 11 So I need to not have it out there about true shit that I said about the Republicans. Yeah, it's weasily.
Another thing, though, that it ties to the count story, which we go back to, where

Speaker 11 at the level, like it's just nihilism. Like he just, he doesn't care about the people that he's fooling.
The MAGA people that he's fooling.

Speaker 11 He doesn't care that they might not take the vaccine or that they might have stormed the Capitol because of his lies or that they might be

Speaker 11 advancing embarrassing, humiliating lies about their neighbors eating their animals. Like he doesn't care about them.
He also doesn't care about the Haitians.

Speaker 11 Doesn't care if there's some negative consequences. And this is what it comes down to.

Speaker 11 Like, dude, knows, we know he knows because he wrote about it in law school that, like, if the government starts trying to deport millions of people, there's going to be some collateral damage.

Speaker 11 Like, there's going to be people that shouldn't have been deported that get deported. There'd be family members that get wrapped up in it.
There's going to be people

Speaker 11 that are, their rights are infringed upon. He knows, he said it right there.
Like, it's not, you can't efficiently do this. You can't, you know, just get rid of the bad people.

Speaker 11 But he's like, let's just delete that. Like, he doesn't care.
Like, he just doesn't, he doesn't care about that. One thing that Vance shares with Trump,

Speaker 11 he thinks that all people around him are supporting players in the drama in which he is the main character. And everyone is there to help J.D.
Vance achieve and succeed and reach his goals.

Speaker 11 They're just raw material, you know, Haitians, poor whites in Ohio, Republican Party elite. It doesn't matter.
They are all there for the greater glory of J.D. Vance.

Speaker 11 And the only sun that should outshine the greater glory of J.D. Vance is the Sun Eater himself, Donald Trump.

Speaker 11 Because that's the, just to mix my metaphors, that's the star to which he has hitched his wagon. Can we point out one other thing that's been happening with Vance and these other guys?

Speaker 11 Please, I'm excited to get to the star Sun Eater himself, though. But yeah, let's hear.
Who is they?

Speaker 11 Who is they? You notice that? Well, you know, they now have tried to kill. They've tried to silence him.
They've tried to kill him. They want to.
Who the fuck? Oh, there it is. Sorry.

Speaker 11 But who the fuck is they?

Speaker 11 You know, and I mean, it's this incredibly divisive.

Speaker 11 Basically, what he's saying, and this is kind of the essence of authoritarian populism, they is everyone who isn't us.

Speaker 11 You know, all those other people that aren't at this rally right now, they are not real Americans. They're not really the people.
They're not your fellow citizens.

Speaker 11 They're not your, you know, your friends who disagree with you or your coworkers. They're they.

Speaker 11 They remind me of this, when Vance and Trump do this, they remind me of this crazy uncle I had, God rest his soul, who always used to say, you know what they ought to do, and they did this.

Speaker 11 And one day, and I don't know, Tim, I don't think I've ever told you this story, but I have told it.

Speaker 11 My uncle says to me, they're all corrupt in Washington. They, they're all corrupt.
And he was just getting up ahead of steam, right? You know, he's like, you know, you can hear the engine going,

Speaker 11 you know, building up. And at the time, I was working in the Senate.
And he said, they're all corrupt. And I said, Mark, I said, I, I work in the Senate.
I work in Washington.

Speaker 11 And without even thinking, he said, well, then you're corrupt too.

Speaker 11 And, you know, it is, it's how it overtakes you. And I just looked at him and I said, you've known me since you were, since I was a baby, and you give me money every Christmas.

Speaker 11 You know, and he was like, well, you know what I mean. You know, you just couldn't.
It was like,

Speaker 11 and I think

Speaker 11 that's the state of mind. There's a more serious point under all this.
That's the state of mind that Vance and Trump want those people in that room.

Speaker 11 They want them to go home, turn to their friends, their nephews, their nieces, their brothers or sisters and say, you're they.

Speaker 11 You're them.

Speaker 11 And that's extremely dangerous. It's again, it's, it's a piece with what we were saying.
Yeah, it's a piece of thing. They want to spark the unrest.
They want to spark people,

Speaker 11 you know, increasing their rage at one another, at the enemy within. You know, Bill wrote about this earlier this week.
A phrase that Trump just used, by the way. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 11 Bill wrote about this earlier this week. The J.D.
Vance interview in 21 with James Pogue, which is so good. And, you know, he says that our people hate the right people.
That's what this is.

Speaker 11 They is anybody you hate. Like, they can be different for different people.
It can be Haitians for some people. It can be Mexicans for some people.
It can be Tom Nichols for some people.

Speaker 11 It can be journalists.

Speaker 11 It's just can be childless cat ladies for everybody. Anybody you hate, that's it.
They. It's the people about shadowy people behind the curtain.
It's the military. Like, whatever.

Speaker 11 That's who it is.

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Speaker 11 Let's go to the Trump Town Hall yesterday. Sarah Sanders, a very Ozempick-y looking Sarah Sanders.
I honor that. I'm just observing.
I'm just observing.

Speaker 11 A very Ozempick-y-looking Sarah Sanders last night interviewing Donald Trump in front of an audience. And I thought this answer was maybe Trump at his best.

Speaker 11 Let's listen to Trump response to whether or not people leave his rallies.

Speaker 13 So we do these rallies, they're massive rallies. Everybody loves, everybody stays till the end, by the way.
You know, when she said them, well, your rallies, people leave. Honestly, nobody does.

Speaker 13 And if I saw them leaving, I'd say, and ladies and gentlemen, make America great again. And I'd get the hell out, okay? Because I don't want people leaving.

Speaker 13 But I do have to say, so I give these long, sometimes very complex sentences and paragraphs, but they all come together. I do it a lot.
I do it with

Speaker 13 Raisin Cain, that story. I do it with the story on the catapults on the aircraft carries.
I do it with a lot of different stories. When I mention Dr.

Speaker 13 Hannibal Lecter, I'm using that as an example of people that are coming in from Silence of the Lamps. I use it.
They say, it's terrible. So they say, so I'll give this long, complex area.

Speaker 13 For instance, I talked about a lot of different territory. The bottom line is, I said, the most important thing.
We're going to bring more plans into your state and this country to make automobiles.

Speaker 13 We're going to be bigger than before. But the fake news,

Speaker 13 and there's a lot of them back there. You know, for a town hall, there's a lot of people.
But the fake news likes to say, the fake news likes to say, oh, he was rambling. No, no, that's not rambling.

Speaker 13 That's genius. When you can connect the dots, you got to.

Speaker 11 That's genius, Tom.

Speaker 11 How many people left during that answer?

Speaker 11 Well, a couple of things. First of all, I am really struck that you're seeing more of it now.
You know,

Speaker 11 there are verbal tells that show when he's really stressed, you know, like when he's really mad. I mean, Harris really got under his skin with that thing about rallies.

Speaker 11 And so when he starts doing this, there's a lot of them, you know, and he starts to, it's really, you know, he's really, and then, of course, he imitates somebody else, sir, people are leaving your rallies.

Speaker 11 That is Trump when he is just freaking out. I think I've been, you know, I'm not a psychologist, but I am an experienced, you know, I think I'm about to complete my dissertation and Trump watching.

Speaker 11 You're an observer of the human condition. Or of his condition, whatever we want to call that.

Speaker 11 The human adjacent condition.

Speaker 11 The abnormal human condition of whatever Trump's doing. And I think, you know, that's these really stressy kind of like he's just kind of melting down up there.

Speaker 11 But these answers that he thinks make sense,

Speaker 11 even in defending how much he makes sense, he doesn't make sense.

Speaker 11 And by the way, from now on, whenever I'm on deadline with the magazine and my editor is like, hey, you know, why do I have 3,000 words of gibberish? I'm going to say it's genius. It's not rambling.

Speaker 11 It's genius. It's just so complex.
It's too complex. It's over your head.
It's over your head.

Speaker 11 And then he comes back to the auto jobs.

Speaker 11 Even being generous to him, the only sense I could make out of that was he was trying to say that people don't leave his rallies and that he gives very lengthy speeches, that he ties them together.

Speaker 11 He ties his themes together eventually.

Speaker 11 I guess is what he's trying to say. What came across to me is that he is deeply stung, and this is his way of doubling down.

Speaker 11 Like when he got criticized about Hannibal Lecter, his way of dealing with that, a normal person would say,

Speaker 11 you know, I made a joke about Hannibal Lecter. Some people, they just don't get my sense of humor.
He'd move on.

Speaker 11 But instead, Trump being Trump, he has to repeat it and keep trying to like drive home the joke just out of defiance of the people who don't like it.

Speaker 11 And now no one, like nobody in the audience gets it. Trump himself, insofar as he understands it, doesn't understand the difference between asylums and insane asylums.

Speaker 11 That's where that came from. But in Trump fashion, if you told Trump, tomorrow,

Speaker 11 stop talking about, because he's done this, right? Stop talking talking about what an attractive woman Kamala Harris is.

Speaker 11 If you told him, don't do that, and all of all the newspapers and Wall Street Journal and Fox, if everybody criticized him for it, that's all he'd talk about because that's what he does.

Speaker 11 He has oppositional defiance disorder, and you get two hours of

Speaker 11 how beautiful Kamala Harris is because he can't help himself. I mean, in a way, you could really manipulate him this way.
Hey, Donald, stop talking about how good the economy was under Joe Biden.

Speaker 11 He would just do do it, you know.

Speaker 11 I think you might have just given George Conway his next ad for the golf channel in Palm Springs just about Donald Trump. Why won't you stop talking about how beautiful Kamala Harris is?

Speaker 11 And you saw it during the debate.

Speaker 11 I mean, it was amazing to me that you could watch Harris just like opening this bucket of chum and just taking out a big hunk of like fish guts and throwing it in the water.

Speaker 11 And every single time he jumped out of the water and just grabbed it and wrestled with it.

Speaker 11 And then the moderators would say, All right, well, now that you've, you know, burned yourself to the ground on abortion, let's move off this issue.

Speaker 11 And Tort would say, No, no, I have one more thing to say about abortion. I have to say it again.
I just want to take one small victory lap here, Tim. Please.

Speaker 11 I said to people before the debate, they were like, I hope she does that. You know, I'm speaking and shut up.

Speaker 11 And, you know, I hope that she puts him down and gives him the triple Z snap and tells him to shut up. And I said, I want her to let him talk, just let him go.

Speaker 11 He got the last word every time he wanted it. I mean, he interrupted and I went one more minute.
And you could see Harris, to her credit, looking over.

Speaker 11 And she was basically like, no, no, please, please go ahead. I'm sorry.
Take the floor. He talked, I don't have it in front of me, I think either like nine or 11 more minutes than her.

Speaker 11 A significant amount of time. A significant amount of time.

Speaker 11 And she was all for, you could just see her saying, oh, no, if you'd like to say one more thing about abortion, you know, I cede my time to the gentleman from Florida. You know,

Speaker 11 there were some Democrats that were complaining about this. I'm with you the next day.
They were like, look at the time difference and look at how Trump always got the last word.

Speaker 11 And I was just like, no, that was the plan. That was the plan.
Trump always got the last word in the sense of Trump always, you know, hit himself in the head with a brick last,

Speaker 11 you know. But to go back to the point, he can't can't help it.

Speaker 11 I mean, it's just that's what you hear in these winding, meandering things is that whatever he's been criticized about, he has to nurse that injury and talk about it.

Speaker 11 And it's like these rallies are like therapy for him.

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Speaker 11 All right, well, now we get to, I feel like we need a sound effect for this when you're on. We get to the death of expertise section of the podcast.

Speaker 11 Here's another clip from Trump last night, and I'm just, it just made me happy that my father made me take Macroeconomics 101 when I was in college. Let's listen to him talk about food prices.

Speaker 13 How are you going to bring down the cost of food and groceries? Good. Very good.
Thank you.

Speaker 11 Very good question.

Speaker 13 So

Speaker 13 we have to start always with energy. Always, I don't want to be boring about it, but there's no bigger subject.
It covers everything.

Speaker 13 If you make donuts, if you make cars, whatever you make, energy is a big deal. And we're going to get that.
It's my ambition to get your energy bill within 12 months down 50 percent.

Speaker 13 If I can do that, you've done a hell of a job. 5.0, 5 not 15, 50.

Speaker 13 And we got to work with our farmers. Our farmers are being decimated right now.
They're being absolutely,

Speaker 13 absolutely decimated.

Speaker 13 And you know, one of the reasons is we allow a lot of farm product into our country. We're going to have to be a little bit like other countries.
We're not going to allow so much come.

Speaker 13 We're going to let our farmers go to work.

Speaker 13 And I don't know if you remember.

Speaker 13 I love the farmers because, you know, I had many meetings as president.

Speaker 11 Prices are too high, so we're going to constrain supply. That's our plan.
We're going to tariff foreign countries and we're going to constrain the supply of food. Is that how supply and demand works?

Speaker 11 I forget. It's been a while.
I have always thought that how unfortunate it is that food prices are so high because we allow cheap grapes,

Speaker 11 you know, in the middle of winter.

Speaker 11 He doesn't understand anything. You know, I'm sorry.
Literally, the first chart. It's like, I can picture myself in college or in the big room because it's the one-on-one class.

Speaker 11 It's like the first chart. Here's supply and demand.
It's like,

Speaker 11 it's like, we don't have that. We're going to constrain the supply.
That's our answer. That'll definitely lead to lower prices.

Speaker 11 Did the guy that took his tests or, you know, or went to class for him at Wharton,

Speaker 11 you know, did the guy who sat in class for him at Wharton, like tell him what happened in those classes?

Speaker 11 Or I shouldn't say, I'm sure he took his own tests and I'm sure they were terrible, which is why he won't release his grades. But you're right, it's econ 101.

Speaker 11 But it's also what he was really trying to do, once again, if we're going to do the kind of exegesis of a Trump statement, he got sidetracked in his brain from, here's a grandmother asking me about food prices.

Speaker 11 Oh, but I have to remember to suck up to the farmers and say something that indicates to farmers how their income is going to increase because I will make food more expensive and they'll be better off.

Speaker 11 Oh, but wait, this grandmother is still here and she, of course, will pay those higher prices. And so, in conclusion, Libya is a land of contrasts.

Speaker 11 You know, I mean, he does, he just, his brain. I like David Brooks's comment about his brain.
It's like a bunch of fireflies in a jar. I think of it as a pachinko machine.
Remember those?

Speaker 11 A pachinko machine, you drop the ball, these like Japanese. Plinko? Was this plinko? No, no, no.

Speaker 11 A pachinko machine, it's like this Japanese pinball where you drop this metal ball and it kind of bounces off all these little spikes.

Speaker 11 And at the bottom, it ends up in, you know, this many points, that many points. This is kind of like Plinko.
This is like Plinko. The price is right.
Pachinko and Plinko.

Speaker 11 I guess I just never realized that the price is right stole this from Japanese culture. You know, it's like you drop the ball.
The ball is a question. How will you lower prices?

Speaker 11 And it goes dink, and it might be energy, and then it bounces over to farms, and then, and it might land in, you know, Hannibal Electorland.

Speaker 11 You never know. And it's a completely random thing.
Sometimes it pays off, right? Sometimes it goes ding, ding, ding, and the answer is actually the question that was asked. That's pretty rare.

Speaker 11 But this is also where I just have to keep excavating the Fran Leibowitz quote. You don't know anybody as stupid as Donald Trump.
You just don't.

Speaker 11 And that's a basic problem. It's not just that he's 78 and that he's declining and that he has all these kind of narcissistic, you know, twitches and that he's emotionally unstable.

Speaker 11 He's also just dumber than a a bag of hammers. He just always has been.
Well, I'm going to challenge that friend Leewowitz quote.

Speaker 11 Let's listen to the person that might be the head of Donald Trump's CDC if he becomes the president. President Trump has asked me specifically to do two things.
One,

Speaker 11 to help

Speaker 11 unravel

Speaker 11 the

Speaker 11 capture of the agencies

Speaker 11 by corrupt influence. You know, I don't have a post for myself that's picked out.
I know that I'm going to be deeply involved in helping to choose the people

Speaker 11 who are

Speaker 11 who are who can run FDA and NIH and CDC in a way that restores public health rather than

Speaker 11 rather than

Speaker 11 can you imagine if you're at FDA or NIH and Bobby Kennedy all of a sudden

Speaker 11 I mean they must be dying. They must be dying.

Speaker 11 But I'll bring in people to run those agencies like Callie Means, like Casey Means.

Speaker 11 They have nightmares about that.

Speaker 11 Yeah, they should.

Speaker 11 And they should. They should.

Speaker 11 They should. The one thing all of us agree with Tucker and RFK and and Tom Nichols and Tim Miller agree on, we should have nightmares about that.
But you have failed in your challenge.

Speaker 11 He is not stupider than Donald Trump. I mean, Donald Trump is...
Even with the brainwashed. Donald Trump is depleted uranium levels of density, you know, when it comes to stupidity.

Speaker 11 RFK is just bonkers.

Speaker 11 He was once an intelligent man who is now just living, you know, somewhere out in the, like, the Cassini rings in outer space. And Tucker is just pathetic.

Speaker 11 I mean, Tucker is, Tucker's just, just pathetic, but RFK is not stupid.

Speaker 11 I would say this, though, my one pushback to you on this is if Donald Trump left to his own devices, would not, and if he was in charge of the government, would not like be, you know, make rules that would bring back the whooping cough, you know, and RFK, with RFK, though, that's, that's the objective.

Speaker 11 Tim.

Speaker 11 Tim, if someone said it's to your advantage and it'll help you win Wisconsin and you won't go to jail, He would hand out live whooping cough, you know, virus. Okay.
So let's cut that shit right now.

Speaker 11 All right, you win. I concede.
Donald Trump's stupid. You know, two interesting things.
One is he's saying, you know, RFK is not saying about, well, I'll take over the NIH.

Speaker 11 And, you know, the people, and he's not really saying very much. And you can feel that, you can hear them in the back of the crowds going, yeah.

Speaker 11 Whoa. And they're like, it's like, dude, he hasn't really said anything yet.
So I know know you're trying to maintain your energy here, but you don't have to amen,

Speaker 11 you know, every article and pronoun coming out of him.

Speaker 11 And it's, and again, it shows you have kind of the syntheticness of this, this movement, you know, this kind of, I don't want to say it's not astroturf, it's, but there's a fakeness to all of this of, you know, it's just people.

Speaker 11 who want to hear somebody say something crazy and they don't really care what it is. But interestingly enough, and now I'll throw in a little news tidbit.

Speaker 11 One guy that doesn't seem to be on board with this as much that you would think is Joe Rogan. Yeah.

Speaker 11 And, you know, it could be that there's kind of a, there's kind of just a line beneath which Donald Trump, it's not because Joe Rogan is like had a dark night of the soul and said, am I pushing really bad stuff?

Speaker 11 You know, because he doesn't care about that. But is there a moment at which that these guys, that the brosphere says, these guys just aren't aren't cool anymore.
They're like, just

Speaker 11 weird.

Speaker 11 They're just weird and nerdy. Like, you know, I'm sorry, but, you know, JD Vance,

Speaker 11 you know, I'm going back to Vance, but I could see Rogan going, Trump, you know, I went the distance with the guy. Vance, these guys are, I can't hang out with, these are the loser kids.

Speaker 11 These are, you know, this is like hanging out with Ralph Wiggum, man. You know, I can't, I can't be a part of this.
Totally. And Kamala alpha him in that debate so hard.

Speaker 11 And the person that's supposed to be the biggest alpha, Kamala was clearly the alpha. She stared him down.
And on the abortion stuff, these guys are not evangelical Christians.

Speaker 11 Joe Rogan and I'll throw in Dave Portnoy over at Barstool. These guys respond to alpha and

Speaker 11 they also do not want to have any accidents

Speaker 11 where they are unable to

Speaker 11 have the woman that they had an affair with make the choice that they would prefer. Like they, they're not for either of that.
And so it's an awkward coalition.

Speaker 11 Let us put that more kindly and say they live the kind of life that their libertarian values are misaligned.

Speaker 11 Yes, exactly. Are misaligned from the abortion bounty system in Texas.
How about that? Joe Rogan lives in Texas.

Speaker 11 I think their libertarian values, there you go, are misaligned from the abortion bounty regime that's been put in place in Texas.

Speaker 11 So between that and the albinist, it is, it is noteworthy that they're losing them. Okay, while we're on positive, one last thing.
There's news. This is the official podcast of Never Trumpers.

Speaker 11 So we've got to shout out Never Trumpers when they do the right thing. Over 100 National Security Republicans for Harris this morning.
Many of the names you already know.

Speaker 11 But a couple of things jumped out at me. Charles Bustani, former Louisiana rep, pretty conservative.
Former rep Florida, Dan Miller. John Negroponte.
No squish there. Bob Zellek.

Speaker 11 All these weak sisters. Yeah, Bob Zellick, who was criticizing Biden's economic policy just last year.
Then you got my favorite, Christopher Buckley, son of William F.

Speaker 11 Buckley, but also the writer of Thank You for Smoking, the film of which was produced by, do you know who?

Speaker 11 The Trump and Putin Buckboy David Sachs.

Speaker 11 David Sachs produced that film. And so that's a nice little poke in his eye.
That's great news.

Speaker 11 And to all the other, all of our friends are on there, Elizabeth Newman, Olivia Troy, everybody, Kinzinger, but that's good. Robert Comstock.
Who's the guy in South Carolina, too? There's a former

Speaker 11 boy, right, right, right. Yeah.

Speaker 11 No, and I I mean, you know, this is, this is the natural, I mean, my argument, as you well know, Tim, because, you know, we have been kind of banging the same gong from, you know, in different pitches across the,

Speaker 11 I don't know where I was going with that metaphor, but you know what I'm saying. We've been, we've been hitting that same note.
We've been banging that gong.

Speaker 11 Banging that gong of saying, look, you know, if you, if you get up there as a Republican and you say, I believe Donald Trump is an existential threat to the Constitution, my question was always to Ed, and therefore what?

Speaker 11 Right. And what are we going to do about that? Right.
It's the Sean Connery moment, right? What are you prepared to do?

Speaker 11 You know, and the answer was always, well, you know, you get the John Bolton answer. Well, I'm going to write in Ronald Reagan.
Well, that's, well, that's cool. He's been dead for a while.
Yeah.

Speaker 11 Or fortunately, depending on how you want to look at that. But, you know, that was not an answer.

Speaker 11 And so good on these guys for, look, it's at the very least, good on them for being politically consistent and saying, if I believe this, then it is obvious that the next step is that.

Speaker 11 Yeah, our friend Brett Stevens of the New York Times seems to be vacillating. Oh, do we? I'm sorry.
I'm sorry. I was supposed to be not happy.
Okay. Just pretend I never said it.

Speaker 11 Well, no, I can't. No, now you said it to take a line from gross point blank, Tim, one of my favorite movies.
No, but you said it, and now I'm left with the aftermath.

Speaker 11 Let it rip.

Speaker 11 Oh, my God. Well, she hasn't earned my vote yet.
What? I read that whole article and I was like, well, she hasn't really explained, you know, her trade policy yet. I'm like, oh, my God.

Speaker 11 And then he, and then he says, and I thought of you, he's like, well, you know, for many of the Never Trumpers, but Trump.

Speaker 11 And I thought of the reason I thought of you was your, your great column about actually orange man bad is enough. That is enough.
That is actually a good enough.

Speaker 11 And when people are saying to me, oh, so you're just saying orange man bad. Yes, and that's enough.
I'm sorry that I don't need to say, you need to say more than that.

Speaker 11 No, no, I don't actually need to say more than that.

Speaker 11 And Stevens has this whole, I mean, it really came across to me as like, I don't know, eight, 900 words of, I want to remind you all that I'm still a very, you know, cerebral conservative who cares about trade deficits or something.

Speaker 11 Well, you know, that's, that's great for, and in 2028, you know, that'll establish those bona fides.

Speaker 11 But it was just a, it was an an article that didn't make any sense to me, other than as kind of performative, sort of, well, you know, I'm not, I'm very independent and I'm an independent thinker.

Speaker 11 And especially for somebody living in New York, where he says, well, it doesn't really matter. But there are a lot of people like

Speaker 11 Stevens taking that position who do live in places like Virginia

Speaker 11 and Pennsylvania and the greater part of Milwaukee. You know, yeah.

Speaker 11 And I just, I didn't, let me put it this way. When I saw the head, somebody did a screenshot of that page with Stevens, Kamala Harris hasn't earned my vote yet.

Speaker 11 And I saw that and I thought it was one of those parody headlines.

Speaker 11 And I thought, no, that's, that can't be, you know. It's unfortunate.
We got 50 days to win him over. We didn't get to Kamala at the NABJ yesterday.
I did a video with Sam Stein on that.

Speaker 11 So also we didn't get to Donald Trump's interview with conspiracy theorist Wayne Allen Root. So I did YouTubes on both of those.
So if you have not gone to the Bulwark YouTube page, go do that.

Speaker 11 But before I let you go, Tom, we will end on a high note. You have a new cat.
You referenced her earlier. Her name is Lily.
You wrote the beautiful piece about Carla. And

Speaker 11 I believe this cat's Lily is, her name maybe has a Carla tribute in it. In keeping with naming my cats over the years from cheers, Carla Tortelli Nichols.
And now I have Lilith Carla Nichols.

Speaker 11 So Lily for short. And she's about six months old and she is a murderous little ball of energy.
I was just before I came here today to talk to you.

Speaker 11 I have all these toys and all the little laser zappies and the little automatic things. And I turn them on.

Speaker 11 And no, what she'd rather do is jump out the minute I get out of the shower and grab my ankle because she's a kitten and kittens need to murder things.

Speaker 11 But she is hilarious and she's quite an affectionate little kitten. You know, we grieved for Carla for almost six months.
We just couldn't even look at another pet.

Speaker 11 It was just, we threw away all our pet stuff and we put things away. And then we went to the shelter when it was kitten season and they had just tons of cats that they had to get rid of.

Speaker 11 And this one jumped up and kind of banged on the window and said,

Speaker 11 Forget about the other ones. I'm right here.
And we said, okay, that's the one. That's wonderful.
Well, if you lose her for an hour or two, she'll probably come back in through the bedroom window.

Speaker 11 Don't be calling the police and blaming the Haitian neighbors.

Speaker 11 Yes, I start searching for her among the large Haitian community of Newport, Rhode Island.

Speaker 11 You know,

Speaker 11 good God. But yes, I have a new kitten, and so far she seems safe from being turned into an appetizer.
Wonderful. We appreciate Lily and Miss Sassy and everyone else that got us here.

Speaker 11 Thank you, Tom Nichols. You're the best.
We'll be back tomorrow for another edition of the Blorg podcast. We'll see you all then.
Peace.

Speaker 11 don't feel at all.

Speaker 11 Ah, she came into the bedroom window like a blue girl,

Speaker 11 like a blue girl,

Speaker 11 like a blue girl.

Speaker 11 No seen a try so hard.

Speaker 11 The whispered words couldn't end broken hearts.

Speaker 11 The sundries flying on a hurricane.

Speaker 11 All boys squeal like someone left off her.

Speaker 11 Don't believe everything you see.

Speaker 11 It's only really

Speaker 11 round and round it goes.

Speaker 11 The shirt is crowded as in a movie song.

Speaker 11 Little lean back in the very last room. Now the show goes on

Speaker 11 The Buller Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

Speaker 11 This is Matt Rogers from Lost Culture Eastos with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang. This is Bowen Yang from Lost Culture East with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang.
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