Tim O'Brien: The Most Corrupt President. Ever.

Welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes.
It is January 9th, 2024. And geez,

the former president of the United States has some more deep thoughts to share with us.

Over the weekend, of course, he referred to the January 6th rioters as hostages. He once again

mocked John McCain's disabilities. And he suggested that he would have done a

better job than Abraham Lincoln in the Civil War.

So once again, to dive into the twisted mind of the malignant narcissist who would be president

again, we are joined by our good friend Tim O'Brien, senior executive editor of Bloomberg

Opinion, host of the podcast Crash Course.

Tim, welcome back on the podcast.

Hi, Charlie.

Good to be here.

Okay.

So let's start with just the last 24 hours.

And again, I'm fully aware of the way in which Donald Trump uses this sort of fire hose of

awfulness to wipe away the previous awfulness and how hard it is sometimes to keep up with it. But, you know, and over the weekend was rather extraordinary.
But in the last 24 hours, this is what he had to say. So he goes on some show that we're not going to even take the time to figure out which it was.
And he talks about his hopes for a stock market crash. Let's play this.
We have an economy that's so fragile. And the only reason it's running now is it's running off the fumes of what we did, what the Trump it's just running off the fumes.
And when there's a crash, I hope it's going to be during this next 12 months because I don't want to be Herbert Hoover. The one president, I just don't want to be Herbert Hoover.
All right, Tim O'Brien, you have spent a lifetime analyzing and studying the stable genius that we just heard there. Donald Trump hoping that the stock market crash, he wants it to be in the next 12 months so that it won't be under his watch.
Because it's America first, right? Let's make America great again, rooting for his country. He's willing to visit financial disaster and misery upon millions of people, just so he doesn't get painted as Herbert Hoover, even though we already know that he's Warren Harding.
And, you know, he's easily the most corrupt person to ever inhabit the White House. Easily.
He is rudderless, and he's a moral vacuum, and he's soulless, and he's malicious, and he's willing to create panic in people's minds. First off, on the U.S.
economy, as we all know, inflation has been a nightmare for average Americans, for all Americans, but specifically for working Americans who really get hit harder by those price increases. However, we've had robust GDP growth.
We've had good wage growth. We've had good job growth.
The U.S. economy is outperforming all other Western economies and has rebounded from COVID even more smartly than China's did.
The idea that the US economy is running on the fumes of Donald Trump's machinations is ridiculous. And he, by the way, when he entered the White House, he wasn't willing to give any credit to the Obama administration for giving him any tailwind when he went in.
As we also know, the stock market is never a perfect proxy for the economy. It is a sort of temporary gauge of investor sentiment in the short run.
And in the long run, it's more directionally clear about having value and being reflective of the broader economy. But again, let's return to this idea that Donald Trump is wishing for a catastrophe in order to seal his own political destiny.

And it just shows how absolutely craven he is and how absolutely divorced from reality he continues to be. See, what really strikes me, and again, none of this is new, but as you mentioned, you know, pattern recognition is really important.
It's one of the reasons why I think we need to keep reminding ourselves who and what he is. You know, in this discussion of the crash of the economy, which of course would devastate, you know, millions of businesses, affect people's livelihoods, their retirements, his actual focus in that bite is, of course, as always, on himself.
Now, what would it mean for the average American, the working American, the forgotten American, but what it would mean for him? Because he doesn't want to be remembered as Herbert Hoover.

It's always all about Donald Trump.

He cannot help himself when he talks about this.

It's all about what it would mean for me, not what it means for the rest of the country, but what it means for him.

And this should be obvious, but I think we need to repeat it. Just on that point, Charlie, you know, another thing is Donald Trump wanted to go into the movie business before his father basically forced him to go into the real estate business.
And he has this very cinematic sense of himself. And he sees himself as being cast in his own reality show.
And so he constantly thinks about theatrics. So of course, as you point out, the first place he'll go when thinking about a stock market crash is what does it mean for his stage presence? Not what does it mean for average Americans? That's a great insight.
Okay. So the second thing that I wanted to bounce off you was this bizarre six minute rant that he posted on social media last night.
I won't play the whole thing, obviously, but I apologize in advance for playing any of it. But of course, this was a preview of today's big hearings.
And of course, speaking of being on stage, he is going to be showing up at the court hearing, the appellate court hearing on his bid to be to have complete immunity for many of his crimes. Now, he is not required to be there.
He is not being, you know, pulled from the campaign trail. This is completely voluntary on his part.
He's not a participant in the hearing. In fact, he is just a spectator at the hearing.
But last night he said something, and he's repeated it now several times, what appears to be, I don't know how you don't see it this, as a direct threat that if I don't get immunity, I will go after Joe Biden. And so here is the man who has said, I am your retribution, once again, rather directly and unsubtly threatening to go after Joe Biden if he is elected.
Let's play about one minute of this. They're running a political campaign in a dirty way even worse than they did previously and frankly it's never happened in our country before it only happens in third world countries or banana republics they're using their department of injustice to go after his a political appointment And this is all him, 100 percent him.
He's the one that told him to do it.

And they obey his orders. It's a shame.
Never happened in the United States before, but it's happened now. And he has to be careful, because that can happen to him also.
The next president, whoever that may be, has a statute of limitations that go back six years. That's a long time, Joe.

You have to be very careful. We have to guard and protect our country.
We have to do what's right

for our country. You don't indict your political opponent because he opposes the corrupt election,

which you know was corrupt. Everybody knows it was corrupt.
The American public knows it was corrupt. You don't indict your political opponent.
Thank you very much. Thank you very much.
You know, I feel, Tim, that we should play that over the, you know, the bed of the theme from The Godfather, you know? Joe, it'd be a shame if something bad were to happen to you. Just saying here.
I mean... While Donald strokes his cat, you know, in his dark office.
You know, again, it's not breaking news that Donald Trump so often sounds like a mob boss, but damn, Tim, what did you make of that? Well, also, you know, the idea that like we are now a third world country and a banana republic, the reality is that that is what Donald Trump wants to bring us to. The justices in the various cases, the judges and justices in the various cases, hearing the innumerable counts that have been lodged against him aren't doing Joe Biden's bidding.
They are trying to exercise the rule of law. And he has faced backlash for both Republican and Democratic appointees.
His own minions have called on Kavanaugh to do Trump's bidding, including his own attorney saying that Kavanaugh owes Trump, quote unquote, because Trump put him on the Supreme Court, and he's scared. So of course, he as he has always done, he is trying to lash out at the foundations of our democracy and the foundations of the rule of law to portray himself as a victim.
And you know, his role, which links us to what we talked about earlier, the theatrics around this, his role as a victim is a profound emotional bond he shares with working class voters who also feel victimized. And he connects with them very profoundly on that level.
So as much as there's this ridiculous and dangerous methodology in what he's doing, it also resonates with his supporters. And, of course, he knows it.
It resonates with his supporters. You know, whether it's going to resonate with the rest of America, I think, is still the open question.
This whole idea that, you know, this has never happened before in American history. By the way, that is completely true because no president had tried to overthrow the government before.
No president had actually tried to orchestrate a coup up until Donald Trump. We had had a peaceful transfer of power after every presidential election.
And for the first time, you know, we did not have it. So this is, in fact, unprecedented.
OK, so you wrote the book, you know, Trump Nation, The Art of Being the Donald. And you've been following his, you know, his business acumen over the years.
I want to get to some of the recent revelations. But what did you make of the fact that, you know, during one of his rambling rants over the weekend, for some reason, and I talked about this with Will Salatin yesterday, I'm still puzzling about this.
he felt the need to explain that he was a better negotiator than Abraham Lincoln and that he could have negotiated the Civil War. So talk to me about this because Donald Trump is not just the greatest, you know, art of the deal negotiator in American business.
Apparently he wants to be thought of as the greatest negotiator in history. Why does Donald Trump go out of his way to compare himself to Abraham Lincoln? You know, in a way that I've never heard any politician do, right? I mean, there's no false humility here, right? So because he first and foremost, he correctly understands that Abraham Lincoln is probably the greatest president in US history.
And there's a broad historical consensus around that. There was other incredible people

who occupied that office, but Lincoln during a time of national crisis rose to the moment. And he defended the fundamental values that the country is built on.
And he was willing to go to war to do that. And that is where Abraham Lincoln's greatness continues to reside.
And Donald Trump being a radically insecure, ignorant, and paranoid man, whatever field he inhabits, he tries to compare himself to whoever is considered the best. When he was a real estate developer in New York, he routinely compared himself to the other big developers.
When he became a national business figure, he routinely compared himself to Jack

Welch, and then he would privately demean Jack Welch. And since he finally clawed his way into

the Oval Office, he now sees fit to compare himself to Abraham Lincoln. And he said, gosh,

at least four or five times during his first run, I may be the greatest president in U.S. history,

except for perhaps the great Abraham Lincoln. He's looking for a promotion.
Yeah, he's looking for a promotion. Secondly, let's really remember that Donald Trump is a horrible dealmaker and negotiator.
You know, the art of the deal is essentially a nonfiction work of fiction. He was routinely taken to the cleaners by people who were better deal makers than he was.
Most famously,

I think the Plaza Hotel deal, you know, where he overpaid, he had to put it into bankruptcy about two years after he bought it, he got out negotiated and other deal makers who were shooter took him to the cleaners. So the idea then that Donald would magically land in 1860, and pull out his great negotiating skills

and somehow forget about what a divisive and fundamental issue slavery was and negotiate his way around that is comical. But it's a reflection on both, I think, the party's recent effort to recreate the reasons that the Civil War occurred, the Republican Party, and then Trump's own, again, cinematic sense of himself and wanting to insert himself into the League of Great American Presidents.
Going back to his insecurities, is that why he's also weirdly obsessed with John McCain? He cannot let it go. John McCain, who's not a hero, I prefer people who are not captured.
You know, in my newsletter this morning, I talk about, you know, reminding people of that really bizarre incident where they tried to avoid having him see the USS John McCain. You know, even after his death, he, you know, waited two days to lower the flag to have the mask.
And then once again, over the weekend, he's mocking John McCain. For some reason, he couldn't raise his arms.
Yeah, for some reason, because when he was shot down in October 1967, he broke both of his arms and his leg and was tortured for years and years and years. How obscene is this? John McCain's a war hero.
Yes. John McCain served the country by any standard.
By any standard. Donald Trump and his father engineered five draft deferrals so he didn't have to serve in the vietnam war so again the guy who is constantly looking over his shoulder and assessing people who when push comes to shove perform honorably and nobly on a public stage while he cowers in the shadows is finding reason in the present to go after those people,

in this case, the great John McCain, because one, McCain is dead and can't defend himself. And secondly, it's a reflection again of Trump's own self-awareness that he is not a war hero himself, that he avoided serving, and that that still looms large in his memory.
Also, John McCain cast a decisive vote that turned down Trump's party's efforts to overturn the ACA, and he'll never forget that either. This is what I've described in the past.
Actually, I wrote back for the Weekly Standard in 2018. Donald Trump's crab bucket moral universe is like the crab bucket where he's constantly pulling anyone know, that anyone he sees as more successful or braver or whatever, he feels the need to pull.
If I can't have it, nobody can. Charlie, on that point, again, it gets it.
And then why is he doing it? It's because he has this deep self-awareness that he is not very smart, that he is not as successful as he claims, that he is not as brave as he claims. Anytime he goes after somebody, it is projection, and it's projection on what he's the most insecure about.
You referred to Donald Trump as the nation's most corrupt president. I think he is comfortably the most corrupt president.
You mentioned Warren Harding. Warren Harding seems like a piker compared to Donald Trump.
So let's talk about this one story. And again, you know, because of this fire hose of information, it's easy to get lost.
The report about the foreign cash that Trump received while he was in office, I mean, we learned that Trump took $7.8 million from foreign powers and entities while he was president. This came from foreign governments and officials of 20 countries, most of it from China, but then Saudi Arabia, Qatar, others also chipped in relatively modest amounts.
Now, this report was issued by Democrats on the House Oversight Committee, but you said this ought not to be dismissed as a partisan hit job. Why not? Because it's fundamental about good government.
I think it's a bipartisan standard that we want to make sure that people who

are working in the public interest and hold high public office can't be bribed, and that money will not influence how they make policy. It's a standard that applies to members of both parties.
It's a standard that applies across the federal government. As we've come to learn, the Supreme Court and the president both are relatively immune and aren't beholden to most of the ethics guidelines that apply to other branches of the government.
I think there were reasons the framers built it that way. I think they felt that if you began figuring out ways to create parameters around the president's actions, the president wouldn't be able to take any action at all.
They, however, the framers were also deeply aware that presidents could be bribed, hence the famous emoluments clause that doesn't allow a president to receive gifts or compensation from foreign entities without the consent and approval of Congress. And the report that the Democrats on the House Oversight Committee produced noted that not once in any instance in which Trump received this stream of payments did he seek congressional approval.
Secondly, this is just a small piece of a possibly much larger pie. The members of the Congress had to wrestle with Trump and his team to get the information that created the $7.8 million figure.
Most of that money came from China. A major Chinese bank was a tenant in Trump Tower.
Trump later refused to take action against that bank and other Chinese banks, even though Republicans wanted to do it because there was a concern that they were funding Korea's nuclear arms buildup. So is that a quid pro quo? It sure looks like it, but we won't know unless there's more investigation.
But again, it comes back to this fundamental issue that financial conflicts of interest are problematic for any politician, regardless of party. And as you wrote in your column last week, the quickest path to Trump's heart has always involved plopping a bag of cash on his desk.
And battle-hardened realists overseas who are seeking geopolitical, military, economic advantages over the U.S. are well aware of that.
This is not a secret. I mean, back in 2017, you actually wrote it that seven years ago that Trump entered the White House with more potential business and financial conflicts of interest than any president in U.S.
history. So a lot of this is not a surprise.
A lot of it happened really in broad daylight. And to your point about projection, it's interesting how virtually every Trump soundbite, every Republican soundbite now talks about the corruption of Joe Biden and how Joe Biden allegedly took money from foreign countries.
And again, this pattern, this playbook, which again, is not subtle. It is wide open in public that, you know, whatever he has done, he's going to accuse others of doing.
So we have all this documentation of the money that he's received, that Jared Kushner has received, and yet Republicans, I was going to say poised to impeach Joe Biden, but I don't think they have the majority to do it. But this is part of the pattern and practice of Donald Trump, and there's nothing subtle about it.
Jared Kushner got a $2 billion investment in his asset management firm from Saudi Arabia. Jared Kushner had no discernible success as an investor, who's a junior jammer in the investment world by any standard.
I don't think the Saudis decided to pad his investment mess because they thought he was a particularly unique and sharp investor. I think it was simply about buying access.
I think this animates, in theory, why people are concerned about Hunter Biden's proximity to his father. That's a legitimate good government concern.
But I don't think Hunter Biden engineered $2 billion in payments from anybody, as far as I can tell. It has animated the prosecution of Bob Menendez for what allegedly appears to be comically corrupt activities.
It's what led George Santos to leave Congress. These are bipartisan moments all around the same issue, whether someone's grifting.
And not only was Trump the most financially conflicted person ever entered the White House, he was the one who had the least moral and ethical and personal standards around his own behavior. It was a fairly wicked combination.
I don't think the framers could have imagined this kind of financial Godzilla walking into the Oval Office. Want to know one of my favorite sounds? Here it is.
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Get 55% off at babbel.com slash bulwark, spelled B-A-B-B-E-L dot com slash bulwark rules and restrictions may apply okay so i want to stay on this corruption issue for a little while because you point out like we all know about the love letters with the north korean you know thug leader you know kim jong un we all know about the embarrassing fawning over vladimir putin but also trump trump also spoke about real estate deals in north k Korea, and he pursued that deal for a tower in Moscow as he ran for president in 2016. Another one of the little details that got dropped into the memory hole.
And while the amount of money might not mean as much to a really, really rich man, I mean, the fact that the oversight committee found that 5.5 million of the 7.8 came from China. As you point out, this state-owned bank is one of the largest tenants in Trump Tower.
I mean, the entanglements are stunning. And it's almost as if Trump thinks, okay, if I'm going to be a grifter, I'm going to grift on a massive international global, I'm going to make it so big you can't keep up with it.
But again, it's not subtle and it's not particularly hard to understand, is it? It's not. It's really not complex.
There's just a clear standard here that someone who takes money from a foreign entity is beholden to that foreign entity and therefore they are a national security threat if they're the president of the United States. That, by the way, is now a related point because it's not just grift and corruption.
You make the point that this is a real national security threat. And so talk to me about the implications for a second Trump term in national security terms.
Well, imagine someone who has escaped two impeachments, several criminal and civil indictments, and an election loss, and despite all that, comes back into the Oval Office, he is going to feel empowered to do whatever he wants. And whatever he wants to do is usually two things.
Make a lot of money, regardless of how you make it, and enhance his own ability to loom large on the stage. And he is going to go in with the third piece in the next term, which is revenge, which we talked about earlier in regards to Biden, putting revenge off the table for the time being, and just looking at the national security issue.
How is Donald Trump going to position the U.S. vis-a-vis Vladimir Putin in Ukraine.
How is Donald Trump going to look after U.S. interests in the Asia-Pacific region, where you have a more than ascendant China, the world's second most powerful economy and military power now, with our allies in the region worried about how we're going to stand up to China in the long run? If China decides that can be solved for them by simply giving Trump more access to Chinese markets and Chinese real estate, as they did, by the way, during his first term, when they fast-tracked trademark agreements for Trump's relatives, none of this is hard to imagine.
In a perilous world, the world we're facing right now with a major conflict in the Middle East, a major conflict in Europe, and looming conflicts in the Asia-Pacific region. We're going to have a president enter the White House who is ignorant about the dynamics involved in all of those conflicts and is also dead set on padding his financial nest and not looking after the interests of American voters.
Well, in case there was any question in listeners' minds about, well, why does this matter? I think that certainly answers it. Okay, so let's switch to the New York fraud trial, which again is not necessarily the most important thing going on in Donald Trump's life right now.
But you talked with Andrew Weissman recently on your podcast, and one of the takeaways was to expect a really big verdict this year against Trump money-wise, as well as possibly permanently banning Trump and his company from doing business in New York again. You know, since then, since you talk, Andrew Weissman, Attorney General Letitia James has asked the trial judge to impose a $370 million penalty on the Trump organization.
Now, I think people know that basically he's already lost this lawsuit. They were having a hearing.
They've been having hearings on what the damages would be. So what do you think the fallout from that case is going to be? And when are we going to see it? I don't think there's going to be electoral fallout.
Right. I think we'll probably see something this month.
I think we're going to get a ruling this week. I think Trump will appeal it and we'll have to see how long the appeal runs.
But the net result of this one is an end, I think, of the Trump legacy in New York, which was never a great tight end of business legacy, like say the Rockefellers or a great political dynasty like the Kennedys. Although Trump likes to compare himself to those kinds of dynasties in his family.
They're essentially a situation comedy version of all of those families. Nonetheless, Trump's fortune is built upon his father's hard work as an entrepreneur in New York, and then branding the family's name is inextricably bonded with Manhattan and Manhattan real estate and Manhattan wheeling and dealing.
And this ruling, if it goes completely wrong for him, will involve he and his eldest sons and the family business being permanently banned from doing business in the state of New York, and they will pay a heavy penalty. And I think Trump has been incredibly exercised over this because he realizes what it means reputationally.
It is the state in which he was born and where his family built its fortune, telling him, get out of Dodge. You're not the kind of person we want here.
One detail I think is worth mentioning for our podcast listeners is that Donald Trump once sued you over details you provided in your 2005 book, Trump Nation, because you were one of the first people to say, yeah, a lot of Trump's numbers and claims are complete bullshit. So again, this is not something new.
This has been a long time pattern that he's been inflating the value. He's been lying about things.
But it is interesting how that caught up with him. And one of the strongest parts of the attorney general's lawsuit was Trump's claim that his apartment at the top of Trump Tower was three times its actual size, which seems to be an objective fact, right? You can't just say, well, I was thinking that the market would change or this was aspirational.
It's either what it is, or it is this mythical, fake, fraudulent, three times the size. And that's really going to sink them.
I think Andrew Weissman called that evidence a rock crusher for Donald Trump. So years and years, decades and decades, and it's finally caught up with it.
And it's documented, as you noted. It's not stuff you can just simply walk around.
When we litigated with Trump after he sued me for libel, I was at the New York Times at the time. You know, the book covered a wide variety of subjects in his business, personal and political life.
But he focused on three pages of the book that showed this sort of decades long farcical dialogue he had had about how rich he was and how he used that to lead the media along

quite effectively. He got outsized attention relative to his actual accomplishments.
I think it allowed him to get meetings with banks he might not otherwise have had. And again, it was a reflection of his own insecurity.
Where am I on the pecking order? I want to be seen as one of the titans of American business and one of the wealthiest people in the United States, even though I'm not. And he sued me, essentially saying that my sources, who were insiders in his

universe, who said he was worth a fraction of what he claimed he was, and that he bloviated

because of his insecurity. He said that defamed him.
He said simply raising the question about

whether or not he was as rich as he claimed to be was defamatory. He lost that in spades.

During the course of litigation, we deposed him for two days, for two eight-hour sessions, so 16 hours of deposition. And during that, while he was under oath, we got access to his tax returns, his bank and business records, and other documents that actually put numbers and reality around his claims.
And we found at least almost three dozen instances in which he had inflated how much he got paid for speaking engagements, how much he sold a condo for, and on and on and on. And he couldn't deny these things under oath because they were there on the paper, right in front of him.
And they were contradicted by public statements he made. And I think that's the heart of Tish James' case now in New York.
Let's double back, I think probably to, I think we're probably going to be doubling back to something you said earlier in the program, but what do you make of the theater of Donald Trump today where he is showing up in Washington, D.C. for this hearing? He does not have to be there.
He could be in Iowa campaigning. He could be in New Hampshire campaigning.
He has chosen, he thinks it is obviously in his interest to show up at this appellate court hearing on his immunity plea, which he's almost certainly going to lose. So in terms of Donald Trump, the theater of Donald Trump's mind, what does he think is happening today? Well, he knows that it's a pivotal decision in the prosecution of him.
And so he knows it'll be media attention. So he wants to partake in that moment to again, portray himself as the victim, as someone being unreasonably prosecuted and the's the victim.
And the prosecutors are instruments of Joe Biden's political whims, as opposed to actually enforcing the rule of law, which is in the interest of every American. So he's looking at the polls.
I mean, there's a certain, you know, lizard instinct here. He's been looking at the polls every time he's been indicted or there's been a court action.
It seems to raise his numbers with Republican primary voters, because, of course, they rally around him. And so to do this, you know, days before the Iowa caucuses, you know, weeks before what's happening in New Hampshire primary, he thinks is going to, you know, again, suck the oxygen out of the room, portray himself as a victim, and sort of demand that everybody, you know, pull around him.
And I think that may actually work for him. The question is, once he seals this nomination, and that's not going to be that long from now, I mean, do you agree that he's going to wrap up the nomination probably by the middle of March, it'll all be done? Despite Nikki Haley's recent surge in New Hampshire, I don't think anybody's going to take the nomination away from him.
So he's going to look like this, this towering, you know, dynamo. Jonathan Last had a really interesting piece yesterday in his newsletter, you know, and he's going to look like he's got all this momentum, but he will have really been untested because now he shifts to a general electorate.
And I wonder what you think about how it's going to play out, whether these theatrical, you know, I am in the dock, I am the defendant, I am in courthouses all the time, plays once you get out of that relatively safe space of the Republican primary. Because with the exception of Chris Christie, nobody's really laid a glove on him.
Nobody's gone after him. He's dealing in a, you know, kind of an alternative reality universe where this stuff all redounds to his favor.

What is going to be the post-nomination environment for Donald Trump defendant?

What do you think?

That's such a good question, Charlene.

It's a really fundamental question because it gets at the electoral dynamics we're dealing

with right now.

Of course, Donald Trump as victim of vengeful prosecutors plays well in the MAGA universe. And the Republican primary process right now is deeply, deeply influenced and beholden to the 30% or so of hard right Republican voters that Donald Trump has a hammer lock on.
Unfortunately for Donald Trump in a general election, that voting bloc is not enough to get him up over the hill. And I think this is going to be a close election.
I think it's going to be, you know, on a knife's edge. I think it will come down to blocks of independent and moderate voters in a handful of swing states who will determine the outcome of this election.
And I think the question then is, well, what do they think about these prosecutions? And how do they view Donald Trump's rodeo clown show? And I think in 2016, that voting block wasn't that familiar with what he really was. And to their, I think, regret, didn't spend enough time getting to know him

before they either voted for him or didn't care if he got elected. Now they know.
And they've seen that. I think Pew or one of the other polling outfits had a poll a few weeks ago that showed that the Trump indictments don't matter to the far right MAGA supporters.
They do matter to Democrats of all stripes, but they also increasingly matter to middle of the road, independent and moderate voters, and that they actually are concerned about this. And that if he goes to trial and you actually get a public airing of the charges against him, that could be pivotal.
So I don't think his victim act necessarily has national legs. I think you're right.
I wanted to sort of bounce something else off you. I always hesitate to deal with the psychology of Donald Trump, but since you have spent so much time thinking about this, I mean, all of us at various times are going to have moments where we become a little bit unhinged.
We become angry. We become depressed.
We lash out. We engage in certain behavior.
And for the vast majority of people, what happens is that there's somebody who will be some check. Somebody will say, this is damaging.
This is dangerous. You're going to get fired if you do that.
You're going to get yourself in trouble. There will be some guardrail limit break on all of that.
In Donald Trump's mind right now, it seems that he's realizing no matter what I said, no matter who I attack, no matter what norm I violate, no matter what I threaten, it doesn't matter. I can do or say anything.
So he is completely unchained. I mean, this is raw, unplugged Donald Trump.
And I wonder how that plays out because

he doesn't think there are any limits. And maybe right now that may be true with Republican voters.

And that goes back to this question of the post-nomination Donald Trump, because just in

the last week, he came out with a document basically reiterating the big lie. I mean,

he is totally doubling down on this, doubling down on endorsement of January 6th, knowing Donald Trump, he's constantly going to ramp that up. But you ramp that up for these voters you just talked about might play very differently than it's played right now.
But I don't see any indication that Donald Trump is going to moderate, shift to the center, or control himself between now and November. No, and if he's not the nominee at the RNC, he'll hold his own convention.
He'll burn it down. He'll burn it down.
You know, we talked earlier about how the framers never envisioned someone entering the Oval Office with Donald Trump's financial conflicts and his lack of ethics around those things. I also think no one could have imagined someone going into the Oval Office who is as uniquely craven and unhinged as Donald Trump is.
And the reason he's willing, you know, when you started off this question by saying the rest of us feel angst when we've hurt someone we love, or we've acted inappropriately in a given situation.

You know, we've let our own demons get the best of us.

None of that stuff ever enters in to Donald Trump's thinking, in part because he's a deeply damaged person psychologically and emotionally.

But it's also because through a sort of freak series of accidents, he's never had to be

accountable for his own behavior. He's been protected from the consequences of his own actions his entire life.
He was born into a wealthy family, and his father protected him from his academic and social shortfalls and his business shortfalls, and essentially gave him a ladder to early success. And then he became a celebrity, and a reality TV show celebrity.
He benefited from all the forgiveness the media gives celebrities around the truth and performance and personal behavior. And then on top of that, he becomes president of the United States.
And he does accrue a certain amount of legal immunity. And each step of the way, he's never had to change course because he hasn't been held accountable for his own actions.
And so like normal adults who become ideally, the end result of learned behaviors and regret and a desire to self improve, Trump is just this energizer, bunny of disastrous and self absorbed decision making. And he will never change, because he's never had to be held accountable for it until now.
But, you know, the clock is ticking. Yeah.
And I mean, he's always a creature of that unaccountability in which, you know, may explain why he's going the direction that he is going. Tim O'Brien, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
Tim O'Brien is a senior executive editor of Bloomberg Opinion, host of the podcast Crash Course, political analyst at MSNBC, former editor and reporter for the New York Times, author of Trump

Nation, The Art of Being the Donald, published in the before times. If only we had been warned,

right, Tim? Thanks for joining me. Thanks, Charlie.
And thank you all for listening to

today's Bulwark podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes.
We will be back tomorrow and we will do this all over again.

The Bulwark podcast is produced by Katie Cooper and engineered and edited by Jason Brown.