Jeffrey Goldberg: Trump Doesn't Believe in America

Hello and welcome to the Bullard Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.
I'm delighted to be here today with Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, host of Washington Week on PBS, his new book on heroism, McCain, Milley, Mattis, and the Cowardice of Donald Trump. Welcome to the Bullard Podcast, brother.
Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Well, I'm having you actually for two selfish reasons. Number one, next week we're

together at the Atlantic Festival, which I was happy to be invited to. Thursday, September 19th and 20th at the Wharf in D.C.
if people want to come. Speakers include Kentonji Brown-Jackson.
Nice advertising. I like that.
Did we pay for that advertising spot? No. Oh, wow.
We're getting to that next. Thank God.
And so this is i i think i have more atlantic writers on this podcast than any other outlet and god bless you we're always pushing subscriptions i'm just wondering i feel like i need to start getting a vig though or something what are you mr 10 what do you i'll do eight i'll do what about your partners in crime yeah yeah yeah sarah can get in on that we'll see about everything they'll get something from you yeah exactly a little walking around money you know what you get by being you get the world's greatest minds you get access to the world's greatest collective of writers and thinkers that's what you get all right well the atlantic is essential and i tell people to subscribe all the time and my favorite guests are from the atlantic appreciate that. I'm just hoping to get a little bit of a – just, you know, a little throwback.

You want a little something in your stocking.

Yeah, just a little something.

I don't know.

Just send me a nice mug or something.

A little taste.

A little taster.

You just want to wet your beak.

Exactly.

I got it.

Man, the book – I want to get into the book, but it's, I think, timely to have you on today and you're writing a book about heroism and cowardice at the big news item of the morning is that donald trump who would not look kamala harris in the face during their first debate he was so scared of her has announced that he there will be no more debates he uh he claims that he won the first debate dubiously and now he says he won't debate her again i'm wondering if you had a reaction to that yes i do i think you know the issue of whether he why he didn't look at her i don't know if that's fear or a kind of contempt i i don't know how to interpret that obviously maybe it's contempt with the underlying fear a little bit of contempt bit of fear. You know, it's so obvious it barely needs stating.

There's a part of him that knows things that are true, and he knows that he got bested by Kamala Harris. And, you know, I try to avoid all the, you know, the shrinkery here with Donald Trump.
But a woman of color, a black woman, you know, besting him in a verbal battle that probably doesn't sit that easily with him. And so, of course, he's going to spin.
It's totally inevitable that he's going to spin it and say, I won. Why do I have to do it again? I saw his truth social post on that.
A champion boxer doesn't go have a rematch or something like that. I mean, I guess it makes sense from the campaign perspective, right? Do not put him in a room with a woman who triggers him.
Not only her presence triggers him, and she has become the world's leading expert on keyword usage for triggering. It was amazing.
I mean, you could play, you could have a bingo. I'm sure you had this kind of, I was jotting down every triggering word, you know, from crowd size to John McCain.
It was, it was brilliant. T inheritance was my favorite one.
Yeah, yeah. It was brilliant.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. He might know.
There might be some part of his brain where he knows that I am Donald Trump. I am very easily triggered.
This woman triggers me. I can't get in a room with her.
But his campaign certainly knows that. And I can't imagine that they think it would be a great idea to go back into that triggering situation again all i would do if i were kamala harris in the next debate is uh let's go through the crowds one by one so the inauguration the park service says you know i don't know it was sort of an amazing thing to watch i mean we all are we all have our triggers right i'm sure you have your triggers but you also try to impose some verbal self-restraint the only thing for me and i i assumed he was going to do the second debate and i don't think it's out of the question yet that he changed his mind don't trump is a fickle man maybe it is so weak and tim alberta for you guys wrote a really trenchant piece about what the trump campaign lasvidan wiles and trump saw as the frame of the race when biden was still in was just this trump strong alpha strong man will fix your problems biden weak dithering old man that can't and then it switches to harris and that frame doesn't work anymore but even still like they have this instinct they want to be alpha they want to be strong to just say i'm too wimpy to go up against her again you know i mean there was the mike the congressman mike collins tweet was like you'll know who lost when you see he doesn't want to do a second debate doesn't his manhood get in the way eventually of being too scared to see her again well just as he can get goaded in the room with her he'll be goaded for the next month or however long it takes by people saying precisely what you're saying which is like a a real man would go debate Kamala Harris.
And maybe that will move him back. Remember, you know, as Tim noted in that Atlantic piece and Tim and others note, you know, this is not a case where there's a campaign managing a candidate.
There's a candidate and then there's this completely separate entity called a campaign and they operate on different tracks. so you're probably right in fact we should not be surprised by a post in a week or two or a phone call to fox and friends where he says yeah i'm gonna debate i'm gonna let's i'll call her and we'll do it now you know or something like that you know or meet me in the alley at midnight kind of thing so to the book which also relates to all this stuff i was i was going through it i know this essays that you've written before kind of put together uh into this frame about people have shown political heroism and people who haven't specifically donald trump but i was intrigued the first story that is mentioned in the book is about my friend lindsey graham he called mccain's sancho panza sancho and i had I had an encounter in the spin room, right outside the spin room the other night, where he was very upset at me, purple-faced, screaming about how I should be ashamed of myself.
Maybe you should, but not for your politics. I don't know.
I don't know. I can't comment on the other part.
You're on to something, but we don't need to go there. How you live this line down was in a conversation he had with you in 2018 where he says essentially jeff if you know about me you know that i need to be relevant like really that just says everything like all of the other rationalizations everything else is just like ornamentation on that underlying element and i do think that is true of lindsey and true of the other enablers that you write about.
Yeah. His transformation is extremely surprising because I was a close observer of the McCain-Graham relationship.
I knew Senator McCain pretty well relative to a lot of people. So I knew by extension Lindsay Graham pretty well, who's funny, charming, delightful, cutting, fun to be with, as opposed to most senators, whatever.
The two of them together were a great team. It never struck me.
You once told me a 20-minute-long joke that had me and Jeb just in tears in the darkest day of the campaign. The man can spin a yarn.
No, no, no. He's extraordinarily talented.
And I told this story the other night. I haven't mentioned it in a while.
I just have this image. I was flying with them back from the Munich Security Conference, you know, a dozen years ago.
Government plane, small plane. And there was some one sort of couch.
And Senator McCain is the older senior person on the plane, got the couch. And he was lying down on the couch.
couch and we were sitting around talking and Lindsey Graham decided to lie down and he he he he he stretched out on the floor right next to the couch put something under his head and I just had this image of like Lindsey Graham at John McCain's feet basically and that was their That was kind of the relationship. So my definition of manhood, let's just go there, is if someone insults your best friend and mentor, or your wife, for that matter, putting the Ted Cruz overlay on this, like, you don't forgive.
You don't forget. Or at least, you know, maybe you forgive and move on to some kind of neutral position.
But you don't forget. and I just don't forget or at least you know maybe you forgive and move on to some kind of

neutral position but you don't forget and i just don't understand for the life of me how

after the horrible things that donald trump said about john mccain and did to the mccain family

in the time of the funeral right ordering the flags back up you know refusing to to support

a funeral of a national hero i don't understand how lindsey graham can act like of the boats

Thank you. right ordering the flags back up you know refusing to to support a funeral of a national hero i don't understand how lindsey graham can act like of the boats the moving of the john mc uss mccain moving the uss john mccain i forgot about that one unbelievable right i just don't get how forget man how a person how a grown-up how somebody with self-respect can just hop on board the train i mean lindsey needs um he needs relevance and he needs a mentor a father figure something anyway it's just sad i think you hit on the answer i just i don't i don't think he has self-respect i think that's it unfortunately no and i guess to be in politics you have to swallow a lot of stuff that you other people you can successfully avoid in life.
But man, oh man, how you can go with that. He explains everything about Anne Applebaum, one of the many other talented writers at the Atlantic, talks about complicity as the dominant theme.
Most people make themselves complicit. Most people aren't brave dissenters.
We celebrate dissenters after the danger has passed, after the dissenter is gone. But that's just pure complicity.
The other story, central story, really, that underpins the book and kind of your work along these lines was, for listeners who don't know, you're the one that originally broke the story about Donald Trump calling dead soldiers suckers and losers. It was referenced in the very first debate, and it's still extremely relevant to this day, especially after what happened at Arlington.
To me, always the other anecdote in that story that gets lost, I think just because suckers and losers is so easy to kind of remember and grab onto, was the conversation with John Kelly, the chief of staff. Well, he might have been Secretary of Homeland Security at the time of this conversation.
He was DHS, yeah. The Arlington, the other Arlington story.
So he's there at Arlington where Kelly's son Robert is buried. And Trump says, I don't get it, what was in it for them.
Yep. To John Kelly, whose dead son is there.
You know, John Kelly now is acknowledged as publicly, so I can talk a little bit about John Kelly in this context. Here's one of the most interesting things about John Kelly.
John Kelly was driven so mad by Donald Trump in the White House when he was chief of staff for that year or more that he was chief of staff, that John Kelly would leave the White House, drive to Arlington, and sit by his son's grave. His son was a Marine captain killed in Afghanistan in 2010, I believe.
He would just sit by the grave until he calmed down and recognized that whatever sacrifice he's making to serve his government and his country by being in the White House, by trying to control the chaos of the White House, it was not a sacrifice as great as his son, as that of his son. And so he would go there to sit, just drive across the river, go there and sit for a while, then go back to the White House, say, all right, I can do this for another day.
The other thing about John Kelly that I don't think people know is that John Kelly, as a young man, had bone spurs in his feet. You know this story? I don't, actually.
John Kelly had bone spurs. Okay.
Real ones. He had bone spurs.
And when he got called for the draft, he went to the draft board, and the doctor said, well, you have bone spurs. You can't serve.
And John Kelly asked the doctor to lie so that the Marines would take him. John Kelly said, don't worry, I can fully function as a Marine.
Just say that it's not. So please, please let me go to the Marine Corps.
There's your bone spur dichotomy right there and the character difference between the two men. And John Kelly was always in a pedagogical frame of mind when he was around donald trump i'm gonna teach him remember this is you know john kelly who also taught him who were the good guys in world war one and world war two when trump didn't know did trump not know who the good guys were or was he just you know kind of well i mean maybe there's a knowledge issue no no no no no he literally literally, this is another story that gets lost in this welter of stories.
He literally said on the plane ride over to France for that now famous cemetery catastrophe when he wouldn't go, you know, and he called them suckers and losers. He asked John Kelly, who were the good guys in World War I? And Kelly answered, said, Mr.
President, the good guys in any war are the ones that america is fighting with as an easy lesson here's a here's a heuristic here's an index card remember if we're on their side that means they're the good guys okay i mean it's pretty again pretty easy to be president and in that sense just remember that know, he brought him to the cemetery and he's trying to explain sacrifice and service. And Donald Trump is not capable, as we've seen time and again, of understanding people who do things for selfless reasons.
The reason he thinks anyone who goes to the military is a sucker is because if you're talented, you should be able to make some money somewhere, right? Famously, and this again was in that story, that 2020 story, he said to a group of military cabinet officials, after Joe Dunford, the former chief of staff, joint chiefs of staff, Marine four-star, left the room, he said, that guy's pretty smart. Why did he join the military? And as that conversation unfolded, the subject came up of what Joe Dunfordford as chairman of the Joint Chiefs made, what he earned for a living.
And John Kelly, just toying with Donald Trump like a cat with a mouse at this point, cat now is a new triggering word, I guess I shouldn't bring up cats, said, what do you think he makes? Mr. I mean, can you imagine the president doesn't know what the salary range is for the people who work for him but whatever uh what do you think he makes trump settled on three to five million dollars and then john kelly said i think the number was like 189 or something like that 100 and trump couldn't imagine he couldn't imagine why anybody would do this and this is like this is a it's a failure of imagination it's a failure of character that he doesn't all of this all of these feelings about people being suckers people being losers and remember it's not just military people he thinks are suckers and losers right he thinks most people are suckers and losers it all comes from well if you're not scoring then you're losing he also losing.
He also doesn't just think that America is of any significant value and worth fighting for. That's like the other big lie, his patriotism or whatever.
To understand the sacrifice means that you have to understand that you're sacrificing for something that is of value, which is the American ideal. And he doesn't give a fuck about that.
He doesn't doesn't think america is really any different from saudi arabia except we just like have more no he he has no higher belief system or moral belief system or look you know this is why you know this discourse around undecided voters is so amusing to me. It's like, what don't you know? And I'm not saying that to people who are voting for Trump.
I'm saying you're undecided. You literally can't tell the difference between these two people.
Really? It's all there. It's all in the record.
He doesn't believe in America. He doesn't believe in service.
He doesn't believe in selflessness. He doesn't believe in democracy.

He doesn't believe.

He doesn't care about the Constitution to the extent that he knows what's in it. I always think that we need to work consciously to renew our sense of surprise.
he's been with us for so long

that

every so often you should sit back and

sort of look at a compendium of things he's said

and done and say how did

politics in america go so thoroughly off the rails that this is the three time now candidate for one of the two major political parties well sorry i mean it's just like i do this i do this reflection like every like every other day sometimes i'm in the shower and I'm just like, what in the fuck? Yeah. So one of the things that makes me think that, what in the F, is one of your other people that you feature, Jim Mattis, who I have a lot of respect for his service.
But I was reading one of the segments you had about him, and there was one line that struck me. You were interviewing him.
Yeah. I think it was in 2019.
And kind of the subtext, I guess guess was that you felt a little flummoxed or wondering why he wasn't speaking out more against trump in that election and he said to you that there's a french saying about devoir de reserve which is the duty of silence and when trump was president commander-in-chief is president you have a duty but the thing is like trump's not president now why are we still being duvoir i've thought a lot about this and i understand the impulse the frustration on the part of anti-trump people millie mattis kelly and so on not to get involved the thing that i'm trying to put myself in their shoes, the thing that you really have to focus on is that there is a profound allergy to partisanship that is cultivated in senior officers. By the time they get to positions that matter in a strategic way or in a policy way, colonels and so on, they take huge pride in the fact that no one knows what party they belong to.
Some of them don't vote because they don't want, while they're active duty, because they don't want to think about the qualities of the commander-in-chief. They just want to follow the lawful orders of commander-in-chief.
I get it. I actually do get it.
I also recognize as a journalist and a journalist who's read a lot of books about the Trump years that the experiences that a lot of people who served in this administration had worked their way into books and journalism and, and other, you know, so, so it's not as if we don't know what it was like inside the Trump White House.

I don't know what it would mean if the 10 senior most recently retired generals in the American military stood at a press conference and said, this man is a danger to the Republic. I would assume it would move some people, but not a lot of people get moved anymore.
But I understand the ferocious desire on the part of general officers

not to engage in partisan politics.

That feels like a military defense, though, not really a Madison Kelly one.

Well, Madison, yeah, Madison Kelly both joined politics.

They went into politics.

I get your point.

But you know what?

I mean, you never leave the Marine Corps. Right.
You know? I mean, these men started at 18. Ingrained.
It's ingrained. And by the way, we want it ingrained.
I mean, look, the cosmic irony, one of the many cosmic ironies of January 6th, right, is that in American popular culture, I'm thinking back all the way to like seven days in May and that kind of thriller. In American culture, in fiction, the coup, the coup attempt was always going to be the crazy general, strange loving and, you know, whatever.
In January 6, we had a situation where Millie and others were protecting the constitution from the civilian it's the flip of what we always

expected again and the reason we expect it is because we have you know you look around the

world and you look at hundreds of military coups over hundreds of years and you just expect you

know that no general is going to be impervious to that temptation but they just pray for a day when

they don't have to be engaged in in these kind of conflicts conflicts. I think, you know, I don't want to get into a defense of their behavior.
I understand both sides of this argument, but it's not a sign of a healthy country when the generals are telling you what to do politically. That is true.
I would say that we, but we're not healthy. We're not know as i was saying that i was thinking you're gonna say well the horse is out of the barn i don't know if you noticed but yeah okay well you know here we are uh what i was listening to another interview you did recently where you talked about the bias towards coherence of the media yeah not a problem at the atlantic or the bulwark, but I was enjoying there's an Orlando Sentinel headline.

Oh yeah, I saw that. Earlier this week.

Headline, Trump threatens to jail

adversaries. Simple.

It is factual to what he posted.

It doesn't contain

editorializing. It isn't

biased. It's just

the headline says what he said.

Sometimes you're like, is this that hard?

I think that is the

frustrating thing. I hate to do media

criticism because it's silly. There's so many media outlets and people have good days and bad days.
But the fact that that Orlando Sentinel thing was so just crystal clear made you think, we could do this. Other places could do this, right? Yeah, yeah.
We do it. We're a magazine.

It's a little bit different.

But bias toward coherence is different than sane washing because the neatening up of Donald Trump's quotations, some of those quotations don't indicate insanity.

They just indicate they can indicate ignorance, prejudice, whatever. It's not just sanity that's being washed out or imposed on Donald Trump's ideas and thoughts and speculations.
But what we do, and I've been trying very deliberately to do this, is when he talks about sharks and batteries, we should cover that. If a former president, current nominee for president, really feels that discussing whether it's better to die by being electrocuted by a boat battery or eaten by a shark.
I think we should know that. And the rule, the ironclad rule here, and you'll see why it's so obvious that we should do that.
If Kamala Harris spent 10 minutes of a speech talking about sharks, batteries, windmills, bacon and Hannibal Lecter, I have to assume that somehow the grandees, the potentates of the Democratic Party would find a new candidate. And certainly the Today Show would talk about it.
Because they feel like, what's happening with Kamala Harris? No, and this is the, you know what it is? It's the hard bigotry of no expectations. When you have no expectations of someone, you don't hold them to a standard.
It's completely understandable, but you have to differentiate. There's Donald Trump for whom we have no expectations, but there's the Republican nominee for president for whom we have to have, structurally, we have to have expectations.
And so, fine, Donald Trump always says this is not an argument against covering it it's an argument for covering it yeah and and i think that this focusing on the incoherence and talking about it is an uncomfortable place to be for a straight news journalist right and i do understand this i understand that that actually that was the case a little bit with the biden stuff too or like how do you put into a story that like he seems to be declining a little bit or he seems to be a little bit more less forceful or coherent than he used to be but i want to credit cnn because i was watching this clip where they showed his 2016 answer on immigration and in the debate versus hillary versus the one he gave and the debate versus com harris this week and the 2016 answer. Also trump being kind of racist and whatever but it was like we need a wall because drugs are coming across the border and crime is a problem and right and there's some bad hombres coming in and people kind of you know tacked onto the bad hombre line in that debate but yeah but that's kind of a fun that's like actually interesting political discourse yeah it's kind of controversial but it's kind of like oh okay he's creative with language or something at the very least you can make political discourse.
Yeah, it's kind of funny. You can make it controversial, but it's kind of like, oh, okay.
He's creative with language or something, at the very least. You can make up something.
Yeah, and you can understand it. Like a regular person who doesn't watch Fox or read The Atlantic or whatever, somebody who's just a sports viewer that just tuned in for the debate could understand his argument.
It was coherent. His argument with Harris in the debate where he starts talking about the cat, he doesn't even set it up.
It's not like, oh, problem at the border and people are coming into the border now we have an influx in a city and there have been some reports that you know one of the that would still be a conspiracy theory but it would be coherent he wasn't coherent he's just like they're eating the cats and they're eating the pets world war three is coming like he was all over the place world war three was coming i don't know if you noticed this but i'm sure you. Three or four different mentions of the end of the world are World War III.
And sometimes you always wonder when people are overly apocalyptic, are they conflating their own inevitable demise with the world's demise, right? But to your point, it's obvious to everyone who listens to Donald Trump over the years that his vocabulary is dramatically diminished. His access to words is dramatically diminished.
That's why his cat and dog discourse sounded the way it did. You're right.
You know, it's interesting. We just ran a piece on this the other day, fascinating piece, just about why the person who's presenting himself to the public would have difficulty passing a cognitive test at this point.
Yeah, the repetitive speech piece. It'll put it in the show notes it was really good yeah yeah yeah um it was very interesting and i'm more comfortable than i used to be as an editor of publishing you know informed couched speculation about a person's mental or physical or cognitive health and by the way to okay this is like the baker praising his own bread here, but, you know, Mark Leibovich, another of our stellar cast of superheroes here at the Atlantic, was one of the only writers over the last two years saying, Joe Biden seems pretty old.
Anybody notice? And then boy, would we get, you know, shit for saying that. And it's like, I don't know, you know, I have eyeballs.
I can watch him walk across the stage and say, that guy's pretty old.

A lot of this is just going back to your original point and what the Orlando Sentinel did to its credit was stated plainly what was observably true. on the cats and dogs thing we got to get to the person that is mentally coherent and capable but

is still advancing these conspiracies, which in some ways makes it worse. And that's J.D.
Vance. Before that, I need to, you know, because it was a real journalistic outfit here as well, I do need to make a correction on yesterday.
I was talking about this. The thing that underlied this story, like the thing that kicked this all off was this horrible accident in Springfield, where a Haitian immigrant crashed into a bus the bus tipped over and that's where aiden clark died i read the comments from his father yesterday which are just unbelievably brave but i mentioned on yesterday's podcast that the bus driver was haitian it was the driver of the car that crashed into the bus so i want to correct that but jd's been the one pushing this and there was this interesting post that uh carl quintanilla put out that i had was J.D.
wrote this in 2016, around the time that he wrote that also great Atlantic piece about how Trump is heroin. He wrote, Trump makes people I care about afraid.
Immigrants, Muslims, etc. Because of this, I find him reprehensible.
God wants better of us. And here we are today in Springfield, there's bomb threats and Haitian

immigrants feel afraid. And J.D.
Vance is the one doing it, not Donald Trump. Yeah.
You know, Donald Trump's also doing it, but J.D. Vance is the one that's pushing Donald Trump.
No, but you're right, right. You do have, I think we all have higher expectations, intellectually, cognitively for J.D.
Vance, right? Obviously a very smart person. One of the sub-tragedies of all this is that all of this noise and all this malevolent carnival that surrounds all of these issues keeps us from talking about real things, which is the difficulties and opportunities towns and municipalities have when immigrants come.
And there are fascinating and important policy discussions that should be held. And we should hear a wide range of voices from the people in Springfield who say, oh my God, these Haitians are great.
They fill my church on Sunday and they work in our factories. And they're incredibly industrious and they just want to make it here.
To the people who are saying, you know what, it's overwhelming our town and its resources. And the goal of the anti-Trumper should not be to make believe that everything is perfect.
The goal should be to say we have serious policy issues around immigration, crime, economics, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But all of that gets lost or is pushed away by the sort of xenophobia and the racism and the cats and dogs discourse.
And it's just not a way a functional country should be. And you're right, we can't lose sight of the fact that these law abiding in the main, obviously, when we know that immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than native born Americans, that these immigrants immigrants in springfield some of whom i'm sure are criminals but most of whom are not you know are now frightened after coming here in order not to be frightened right and it's just um it's not a good situation tim it's not a good situation no so jd is is participating in the thing that he said that he finds reprehensible.
He said that God wants better of us, but I guess he doesn't want better of him. So, he's wrong on the conspiracy mongering morally and factually.
He's also wrong on the policy. I want to play you a clip of J.D.
Vance on CNBC talking about immigration's impact on our country just earlier this week. If the path to prosperity was flooding your nation with low wage immigrants,

then Springfield, Ohio, would be the most prosperous country and the most prosperous city in the world. America would be the most prosperous country in the world because Kamala Harris has flooded the country with 25 million legal aliens.
What's actually happened is that over the past three and a half years, while we've had this massive influx of illegal labor, what's happened? We've had skyrocketing inflation. We are the most prosperous country in the world.
We have the largest economy, the greatest research universities, the most powerful military. We are the most prosperous nation in the world.
Also, immigration is deflationary. Yeah, of course it's deflationary.
I mean, it keeps wages in check because you have people who are willing to do jobs that native-born Americans don't want to do. I mean, talk about a fact check.
He's fucking awful. Also, his tone is just, he's so smug.
I say this as the grandson of two people who my grandfather and grandmother met, believe it or not, in a thermometer-making sweatshop in Brooklyn. Wow.
And I once joked to my grandfather, I said, what was your job, to carry buckets of mercury around? He goes, actually. I mean, it's like they came, they did the jobs nobody in their right mind would want to do.
What are we even talking about? I mean, it's what he's saying is detached. It's unmoored from observable history and observable current reality.
Doesn't mean they're not tons of problems. Fine.
Sure. Can you imagine a bucket of mercury, by the way? Yeah, I'm just thinking about how ill-suited I would be for that job explains why i used to used to have a head right here you know they had thank god i lived in a time where podcast hosting could be a job because that was a mercury mercury bucket holding i don't i don't air conditioning and chairs that's what i say are two two great work inventions not sure 42 i would have seen if that was uh if that was my job um so you talked to a foreign leaders also and jd J.D.
Vance. The choice of J.D.
Vance was very telling about what to expect from Trump, particularly with regards to Eastern Europe. So I want to play a clip from J.D.
Vance talking about how he thinks Donald Trump would end the war in Ukraine. And then I'd like to end with you just talking about the policy generally and how worried people are about a Trump Vance ticket in Europe.
So let's listen to J to JD. So I think what this looks like is Trump sits down.
He says to the Russians, the Ukrainians, the Europeans, you guys need to figure out what does a peaceful settlement look like? And what it probably looks like is something like the current line of demarcation between Russia and Ukraine that becomes like a demilitarized zone. It's heavily fortified so the Russians don't invade again.
Ukraine remains its independent sovereignty. Russia gets the guarantee of neutrality from Ukraine.
It doesn't join NATO. It doesn't join some of these sort of allied institutions.
And I think that's ultimately what this looks like. Well, you know, there was a reason that Donald Trump, when asked the easiest question of the debate, do you want Ukraine to win, couldn't answer because they don't want Ukraine to win.
It's just so interesting to me that he doesn't want Ukraine as an ally of the United States. I'm actually, to go back to a word I'm actually flummoxed by that because I don't understand the impulses

I would understand the impulses if American troops are on the ground fighting for Ukraine, but they're not. We have come upon a pretty decent formula for supporting a beleaguered democracy fighting an authoritarian giant, which is to say, we provide weapons and materiel and intelligence, and you guys do the fighting.
And by the way, if you do the fighting well with what we're giving you, then our troops in Europe won't have to go and physically defend our treaty allies from further Russian advances. And by the way, by the way, if you're interested in building America's manufacturing base, I know this is not a popular argument with progressives, but I don't care.
The money that we're sending to Ukraine is actually stuff that we make in our factories, right? In Pennsylvania and Ohio and Alabama. What did you think if J.D.
Vance was authentic in his views about rebuilding those parts of the country, he would care about? No, I mean, it's not an argument. You shouldn't make weapons just to make weapons and send them to bad people.
Fine. I get that.
The cause is good. It's like a virtuous cycle.
Like we're giving them the weapons. We're buying the weapons for them that they then use to push back an imperialist advance by Russia that is protecting our treaty allies across Europe to whom we promised after World War II that we would participate in your defense.
I don't know. I don't know.
I don't get it. I just don't get it.
It's alarming, concrete, well, rare concrete policy proposal. We know what they want to do.
Mass deportations, give part of Ukraine to Russia, and ensure that Ukraine's not our ally anymore. And tariffs.
So that's it. That's their policy agenda.
Tariffs will pay for all of it. Jeffrey Goldberg's got to get back to editing America's Best political magazine.
I've got a little candy for you guys on the other side. We didn't make it through all the J.D.
Vance clips. I've got my favorite one that just me and you, the listener, will get to talk about.
So stick around for that. Thank you very much, Jeffrey Goldberg.
And my love to all our friends at The Atlantic. We'll see you next week at the festival.
Thank you. All right, y'all.
That Jeffrey Goldbergberg is great that is a pretty good magazine but i do have to say uh as good as the atlantic is the best daily newsletter out there in america is my colleague jonathan v last triad i know sometimes people are like who's jvl you keep mentioning that's that's jvl you're at the triad every day it's really good really really good it's always interesting and so if you haven't subscribed to the bulwark plus sometimes his newsletter is behind a paywall so you can check it out in the free trial you go to the bulwark.com slash free trial but i want to talk about his newsletter from yesterday because i just can't help myself it's too delicious jd vance weird podcast frequenter another one of these old podcast videos was surfaced the other day. It was on this podcast called Viva Frey, like some kind of Canadian, a MAGA Canadian, which is a pretty weird combo.
And J.D., like a stoned freshman at the SAE frat house in a SEC school, starts vamping about what he thinks about American culture and life. And I want to just listen to a little bit of it.
Yeah, but Mike once told me that American history is, it's a constant war between Northern Yankees and Southern Bourbons, where whichever side the hillbillies are on wins, Right. And, and that, that, that's kind of how I think about, you know, American politics today is like the Northern Yankees are now the hyper woke sort of coastal elites.
The Southern bourbons are sort of the, you know, the same old school Southern folks that have been around and influential in this country for 200 years. And it's like the hillbillies have really started to migrate towards the Southern bourbon instead of the Northern woke people.
It's just like a fundamental thing that's happening in American politics. Lay off the bong, bro.
I just, in case you missed it, because you know, he's trying to color it in some highfalutin language. What he's saying there is that we're, we're, we're still in a continuation of the civil war something that i reject like where the where we have where there's some i guess some underlying cultural cold war happening between the yankees and the southern bourbons i don't know where we then the hillbillies are in the middle ground remember there's a whole part of america that's that's been added to the country since since all this i don't know where Colorado, where I fit in this imaginary kind of game of risk he's playing.
But the interesting item there is that he sees himself representing the hillbillies and he sees them as aligning with the Southern bourbons, the same people who've been around for 200 years. I guess he's talking about the slave owners there.
How you get yourself into this place where you are creating an imaginary culture war, an imaginary war within our country that you see as a reanimated version of the Civil War, and then determining that you are on the side of the slave owners. I just don't know how somebody that went to yale and and married an indian immigrant gets there in their head and it's like that is the side of the righteous now because the yankees i guess are the woke childless cat ladies that i don't like it is nonsensical it's not even really representative to defend the south here for a minute.
Obviously, a lot of the Southern states have voted red, but most of the Southern bourbons, like the big Southern cities are Democratic now. Like is Atlanta? Who are the Southern bourbons in Atlanta? I guess J.D.
Vance doesn't count Atlanta because there's so many Black people there as part of the Southern bourbons. Maybe Atlanta is now with the Yankees.
it's hard to get inside his head and understand that but i think it's extremely revealing he's sitting there by the way in that interview there's the mega canadian blogger or vlogger and then the other guy robert barnes is alex jones's lawyer so he goes on a podcast with like a really gross if you go look at this biva fre guys twitter's Twitter feed, and it is just despicable. You would never spend any time with this person.
If I was invited to go on his podcast, I would only go so that I could just insult him to his face. But J.D.
Vance gets chummy with this guy who's just posting all kinds of conspiracy mongering and all the hits, anti-vax and racist stuff. So it's him, it's Alex Jones's lawyer and it's JD.
And JD is spinning a yarn about how he sees himself as like the leader of this hillbilly movement towards the neoconfederacy. It's a choice.
It's a choice. Donald Trump chose him to be his VP pick.
And I think that we have seen now the manifestation of what it looks like when the Republican Party

puts a ticket forth to people that have completely ensconced themselves in this, I'll say the word, weird and racist, like MAGA, online, bro, bubble. It does not yield coherent policy or results.
yields the presidential candidate shouting on the stage about killing the cats and killing the dogs thanks to svp thanks to svp there's reporting we've got a great story from mark caputo on this and joe perticone on on how laura loomer has been influencing trump this morning in today's bulwark you should check out nbc has a story where there are people that are on the Trump team saying that this is JD's fault JD was the one that pushed the cat and dog eating and abducting we can't forget the abducting element into the Trump campaign and it's all it was all there it was all there it was like you choose a guy that wants to go on a Canadian mega blog with Alex Jones's lawyer and vamp about being part of the neo Confederacy. And, uh, you know, the result that you get is a screaming old man on stage talking about immigrants eating dogs.
So, so that's what I'll leave you with for the weekend. Great week, great week for the country.
Great week for Kamala Harris. By the time we see you on Monday with Bill Crystal, I'm sure we'll have some polling data.
We'll get to see what the impact is.

We've seen some national polls that have Kamala Harris edging up a little bit.

We'll see if that trickles down to the states.

And I hope everybody has a wonderful September weekend.

We'll see you all on Monday.

Peace.

The Civil War is over.

And we're all one and two If we can live together, the dream it might come true Underneath the country, the dream is still alive A hundred million lifetimes, a world that never dies We live, and we breeze We drive on this highway of fire Should we awake or find it gone Remember this our favorite time We live in this city of dreams We drive on this highway of fire Be awake and find it gone Remember this our favorite time

The Bullard Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper

with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brow.