Tim O'Brien: A Clown Rodeo

Welcome to the Bulwark podcast. It is June 23rd.
Wow, is it really June 23rd already?

June 23rd, 2023. And we have so much to talk about.
So welcome back to Tim O'Brien,

senior executive editor of Bloomberg Opinion and the host of the new podcast Crash Course.

So Tim, welcome back on the podcast. It's always a treat, Charlie.
This is fun.

All right. to Tim O'Brien, Senior Executive Editor of Bloomberg Opinion and the host of the new podcast, Crash Course.
So Tim, welcome back on the podcast. It's always a treat, Charlie.
This is fun. Okay.
So you have a new podcast because this is what America needs. It needs another podcast, Tim, really.
You inspired me, Charlie. Mine's a weekly and it's about business and political disruption.
So that's the crash. And then the crash course is what lessons can we learn from that stuff? You had a great one about the whole indictment with George Conway.
We can talk about that. So I want you to sort some things out for me.
You have been covering and writing about Donald Trump for decades now. So I'm obviously going to be very interested in getting your sense of where his head is at, although I think we kind of know.
The Republican field continues to grow. I'm sort of scratching my head about this.
Donald Trump has this dominating lead in the polls, and yet we had another announcement yesterday, Will Hurd, former congressman from Texas, and now we're hearing that Florida Senator Rick Scott is thinking of running, which seems to be on no one's agenda at all. I mean, it's like there is no groundswell of support.
So are these candidates seeing something that we're not seeing or is running for president kind of just a new branding thing these days, as opposed to those good old days when people ran for president because they thought they might actually be elected president? Yeah, that latter point is so important and interesting, Charlie, because it's sort of emblematic of the celebrification of presidential bids, which obviously Trump did that in spades, but it happened with Palin. And it's happened in little bits and drabs in the past, but now I think candidates see it as a way to essentially create a broader awareness of who they are, even if they're not serious candidates.
So I think that's one piece of it. I think the other is that it's a reflection that DeSantis isn't necessarily the designated competitor against Trump anymore.
There's a little bit of weakness around DeSantis. Trump's had his own travails, obviously, with the law.
And so I think you have people just throwing their hats and doing, but some of it's ridiculous. I mean, you know, Chris Christie's out there on the periphery, I'd put him in the same category as Rick Scott.
You know, Heard has jumped in. There's an interesting thought around whether or not the GOP is really embracing diversity now in terms of its slate of candidates it puts up.
But I feel like it's been is, does Nikki Haley and Will Heard and Tim Scott get them there when the lower reaches of the party all are still not completely diversified, but there is the temps to get there. But it just all feels to me like a clown show, like a clown rodeo, you know, right now in the GOP with everyone held hostage to Trump.
Well, we will get to the clown rodeo in the House of Representatives in a moment. So Heard is the latest, you know, Republican candidate.
And he said yesterday, he went on CNN, and he said he's not going to sign that RNC pledge to support the nominee. He says, I'm not going to support Donald Trump.
And then he was asked, did Trump betray the nation if the allegations against him are true? He says 100% he did. So good on Will Hurd, although I'm still wondering what exactly he thinks his lane is.
And by the way, I don't want to push back a little bit. I Chris Christie has the same shot that Rick Scott has, but he and Will Hart are clearly running different sorts of campaign.
I have no freaking idea what kind of a campaign Rick Scott would run, except, you know, make Medicaid fraud great again or something like that. But they are doing something that is at least somewhat interesting, that they're taking very direct, very uncompromising shots at Donald Trump.

And thank goodness for that.

And Christie is relentless.

And, you know, and Christie, you know, he is one of those veterans of the Trump universe,

you know, one of the planets floating around the Trump sun who has pandered to Trump and

then met a critic of Trump, pandered to Trump, and now he's a critic again.

You know, it's hard to tell when Chris Christie is motivated by principle resentment or just raw egocentrism when he does things. That was certainly his legacy as governor of New Jersey.
It's all of the above, right? Yeah, it is all of the above. And I think it is useful that he's calling Trump to task in bald-faced ways because not enough people in the GOP are doing it, obviously.
And he's a pox. Trump is a disease.
And he's not a conservative. You know, he's an anarchist.
And people have to think of him as an anarchist who is not interested in policy or dialogue. He just wants to break things.
Well, I mean, speaking of which, let's talk about the clown show that we had in the House of Representatives this week. I mean, this seems a little bit redundant, but in season three of this particular sitcom, to have Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene yelling at each other, calling each other with little bitches on the floor.
I mean, to say it's Mean Girls, I think is unfair to the Mean Girls. It's sort of, you know, viper on viper.
And then, of course, you have this weird kabuki dance where Lauren Boebert wants to force a vote on an impeachment of Joe Biden, which is plagiarizing Marjorie Taylor Greene's demagoguery on it. Kevin McCarthy derails that, but then throws the deplorables the bone of censuring Adam Schiff.
So what is going on here other than the clown card dysfunction on full display in Kevin McCarthy's House of Representatives? Well, I mean, first and foremost is that Kevin McCarthy's not in control of his caucus. And I think there was never much hope that he would be.
He got the speakership by essentially allowing the MAGA right to define the terms of his speakership. And I think there was this myth around the debt ceiling negotiations that, oh, look, Kevin McCarthy can be a parliamentarian and he can get things done.
And that lasted for about 30 seconds. And now you're back to all of the inmates running the asylum.
And he lacks the character and the spine and the vision to be able to manage and effectively govern a caucus like the one he has. And so you get these perversions of the political process.
You get Adam Schiff being censured and almost fined a massive amount of money. You get Lauren Boebert, who I don't think could get out of a grade school civics class, standing on the floor of the House and calling for the impeachment of Joe Biden.
And the soap opera and crazy amusement of it aside, it doesn't reflect well on us in the world. It does not reflect well on where we are in terms of having a functioning democracy in the Trump era, which we're very much still in.
And I think it also shows, and it's akin to the question you asked earlier about why are these various candidates throwing their hats into the race, is people are getting elected to Congress so they can have a stage to act out their fantasies or their neuroses rather than to get the people's work done. And that's a bad place to be.
And I think it comes out of a long anti-government tradition in the country that's kind of reached a bad logical extreme. You put it somewhat delicately, but I mean, the reality is, and we need to come back to this, is that people like Lorne Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene are just not very smart.
I mean, they're without principle, but they're just dumb. It's so painful.
It's so painful to hear them speak because they are. They're flat out ignoramuses.
They are. And everything sort of comes back to this that we joke about this is idiocracy, but it is.
Just look at all of this. Matt Gaetz, Jim Jordan, cut from the same cloth.
All of them. And it's going to get worse.
So on this impeachment vote, this was really weird. So Lauren Boebert tried, you know, single-handedly to drive this impeachment resolution.
And according to the AP, this caught Republicans off guard. Many of them viewed it as a distraction from their other priorities, like investigating Hunter or something.
I don't know. She wanted to charge Biden with high crimes and misdemeanors over his handling of the border with Mexico.
And apparently she was trying to use house rules to force a snap vote on, on the impeachment. I mean, no hearings, no nothing.
She wanted to vote right then and there. And so even Kevin McCarthy went, okay, that's probably imprudent.
So they had a vote yesterday, 219 to 208 to send her resolution to committee for possible consideration where it may go nowhere. I mean, but that is just kind of an amazing moment.
So and what is the crime or the misdemeanor around a policy screw up or debate at the border? It doesn't matter for these folks because they'll come up with something. It's like, we'll have the, what is the Alice in Wonderland thing? You know,

sentence first trial afterwards or something like that. So they don't matter.

Well, it works for them too, though, Charlie. I mean, yes, they're stupid.
Yes, it's nonsensical,

but they also know that it scores points with their constituents and that it is useful

demagoguery to engage with in order to make Biden weaker heading into 2024. So the big question is, they put off the Biden impeachment vote for now, you know, while the hard right is clamoring for action.
But what do you think? Do you think they'll be able to hold the line or will Kevin be forced to have this vote? At some point, if Trump down in Mar-a-Lago begins rattling his chain more loudly, will Kevin McCarthy just have to say, okay, screw it. Everybody expects us to impeach Biden.
That's what we do now. Let's do it.
You know, if we get to that point, we have lost the argument and lost the court because it would simply show that the Congress and its legislative and committee processes are now hostage to vaudeville and cage matches. And it could happen because I think that's the era we're in right now, but we'd have to really grapple with how to fix that if it does.
Well, hasn't that already happened? What was the shift center all about? Well, it was, again, it was an attempt, I think, to get the idea of Trump and Russia center stage again by flailing him publicly for being a leading voice on the issue of whether or not the Trump campaign and Trump advisors colluded with Russians in 2016. And it would be very hard to prove a criminal conspiracy existed around the fact pattern that exists around Trump and Russia.
But there's no question they were in communication with Russians and their agents and that they were receiving purloined email from hackers that were working on behalf of Russia, etc, etc. And I think the hearings themselves, the public portion of some of the hearings around that actually vindicated Schiff, but the net result was to treat him as a miscreant.
But why did they spend so much political capital on it? I mean, obviously this is going to help Adam Schiff in the Senate bidding in California. This seemed like either just throwing a bone to the far right or once again, doing Donald Trump's bidding, because it's kind of seemed out of left field to do something like this, to spend this much time on all of this.
Censures are not that common in the House of Representatives. So at least on the surface, it kind of looked like, OK, we're not going to impeach Joe Biden, but how about if we set Adam know, set Adam Schiff on fire? Will that satisfy the orange God King, the orange Caligula, at least for now? Will that get him off his fireback? Think of the people who haven't been censured when you look at the fact that Schiff was.
Oh, good. Yeah.
You know, the kind of other behavior that's been tolerated and then Schiff gets censured. Paul Gosar.
George Santos votes on this. Yeah.
Yeah. How is Santos not, you know, censured yet? And Adam Schiff is.
Because irony has been beaten to death by hammers. Yes.
And again, Kevin McCarthy has a rubber band instead of a spine in his back. I think that, though, there is a method in the madness again.
And I think it's akin to all of these public acts of bravado and scorn, which it works for the GOP right now to be anti-anything Democratic Party and anti-democratic in terms of the democracy. But also I think that there are certain poster children that work especially well in that pantheon.
AOC is one for them, Biden is one for them, and Schiff is clearly one for them. And so to tee up Adam Schiff and turn him into a public pinata, simply because it gets emotional traction with their constituents is useful for them.
Well, and of course, they're also going to continue to pivot to Hunter. I don't want to spend a lot of time on this because I don't know much about it, but the big story over the last 24 hours has been this IRS whistleblower, the IRS agent who told Congress that Hunter Biden had invoked his father in a business deal.
This is the New York Times report. The lead IRS agent investigating whether Hunter Biden committed tax crimes told Congress that his team uncovered evidence that Mr.
Biden had invoked his father, who was then out of office, while pressing a potential Chinese

business partner in 2017 to move ahead with the proposed energy deal. And these agents are also

saying that they thought that the investigation had been slow walked by the Department of Justice.

Given the obsession with Hunter Biden, this just strikes me as something we're going to hear a lot

more about this. This feels like it's going to pour kerosene on the fire.
So strap in for all Hunter all the time. Thoughts? And let's remember Donald Nixon and Roger Clinton and Billy Carter and all of the other embarrassments the presidents have with relatives who are out of control and try to monetize the fact that their relative is in the White House.
Let's also remember this began with the Burisma investigation into whether or not there was an actually broader form of malfeasance in that Joe Biden was tolerating corruption in Ukraine when he was vice president for his son to get business contracts over there. That was what spawned most of this.
And that went nowhere as an investigation. I think what we're left with now is a possible gun problem and some tax problems, which you should be prosecuted for if there's meat on that bone.
But I don't think any of it ultimately rebounds back on Joe Biden. And that's the key, isn't it? I mean, okay, I think we can stipulate that Hunter Biden has had some issues, that there's a real sleazy streak through him.
Very much so. He was a cocaine addict or a crack addict and behaved in reckless ways.
Takes too many pictures of himself in bathtubs. Oh my God.
It's just so bad. No.
Take the camera away from him. Right.
Here's a life hack. Do not take pictures of yourself naked when you're taking a bath.
I just want to put that out there. But it comes back to the question of, can you actually tie Joe Biden to any of this? Okay.
So Hunter was clearly trading on his name, but it's certainly not clear that they have any evidence that actually puts Joe Biden in the room or in the loop here. This one communication that they're citing invoking his father is while he was, you know, addicted.
And again, I don't know, I'm not making judgments on all of this, but you know, the fact that he invokes his father's name does not mean that, that his father was involved. Now, if he was, it's a very serious problem, but I think we're a long way from that.
And again, that is the key. You have a sleazy son who's got a lot of problems, but does that implicate the father? And I would say at this point, show me the evidence.
Yeah, there's no evidence of that. The other thing to remember, too, is the last time this came up during the 2020 campaign.
And Biden, I think to his credit, brought up the fact that his son had struggled with drugs. And he had disappointments in his son, but he loved his son and he was going to stand by him.
And that actually played well with voters. And there's a possibility that the Hunter issue could, you know, humanize Biden in the race if it doesn't spill into incriminating Biden.
Hey, folks, this is Charlie Sykes, host of The Bulwark podcast. We created The Bulwark to provide a platform for pro-democracy voices on the center right and the center left for people who are tired of tribalism and who value truth and vigorous yet civil debate about politics and a lot more.
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That's thebulwark.com forward slash Charlie. I'm going to get through this together.
I promise. okay a couple more things i just wanted to run past you before we get to

what's going on inside donald trump's head the no labels group you know continues to raise question this is this apparently well-heeled organization that is playing with the idea of a third party bid it's sort of not clear exactly when they would run what their circumstances are but any case the latest is that No Labels declines to reveal just who is funding its third-party bid. So no transparency, please.
We are No Labels. So given the fact that Donald Trump, I think, can plausibly, possibly win the 2024 election, a third-party bid seems more dangerous than usual.
what are your thoughts about this? What is going on with the no labels folks? Well, I mean, I think this is hardball trench warfare in electoral politics. And I think at this point, there is no third party effort that's actually going to get meaningful national traction.
It's too hard to get on the ballot. Republicans and Democratic operatives in both parties at the state level control the machinery that determines who does and doesn't get on ballots.
I think that's always been one of the hurdles for any third party movement. If they were a legitimate third party movement, I think they would have formed quite a while ago.
If they were legitimate, they would have no issues about being transparent about who is behind them. And they won't be.
So there's an irony that no labels has no transparency. You don't need a label when you're not really telling people who you are.
You know, I don't think they are independent in the classic sense of what that means from a policy prescription. I think they are a torpedo aimed at trying to tear off independent and moderate voters from Biden.
Because I think that in 2024, if it's Biden versus Trump, that's where the match will be won, is around that voting block. And Trump convinced enough of them in 2016.
Voters now, since then, have learned who Donald Trump is. He's lost every federal referendum since 2016.
And I think this is Ralph Nader in Florida, in Bush v. Gore, that that's what no labels wants to be at the national level right now.
And I think, you know, given that, you know, this is fisticuffs, there's a lot of efforts underway already to disqualify them from ballots and mount legal challenges to their slate. And they're going to have to contend with that, too.
You mentioned other spoiler races. We now have Cornel West running on the Green Party ticket and Jill Stein.
The great Jill Stein. Yeah, another one of the

Putin stooges out there. Useful idiots.
Am I being too blunt today? She is going to be running his

campaign. There are a number of Democrats that think that, you know, that poses a really

significant threat to Joe Biden, because all you need is to draw off, you know, three, four percent

of sort of the hard left vote. And that could flip some states like my home state of Wisconsin.

What do you think? Don't leave RFK Jr. off that list too.
I have this on my note next. You know, maybe Susan Sarandon will run too, just to, you know, just, you know, again, this is, I think people who are putting, it is the left equivalent of some of the people on the right, we mentioned earlier in the show.
These are people putting their own egos and need to be in the center ring of the circus ahead of sobriety and a serious sense of purpose. Okay.
Now my head is hurting because you mentioned the name that I was going to ask you about next, RFK Jr. Or as Donald Trump calls him, JFK Jr.
Yeah, I know. He's worse than people think he is.
I mean, he's a conspiracy theorist. He's a crackpot.
He's a Putin stooge. He's the new darling of the right.
I'm looking at a picture here. He's a horrible public speaker.
He may have had the Kennedy flair at one point, but that's long gone. There's something gone there.
So there he is with Roger Stone and Mike Flynn and all of those others. Steve Bannon is giving him a tongue bath every week.
Tucker Carlson. Joe Rogan loves having him on.
Oh my God. And yet every time he opens his mouth, he says something that is certifiably batshit crazy.
There's a story out now that he says that Russia acted in good faith in invading Ukraine. I mean, just to set that aside of the crazy things.
But so what is this about? I mean, Trump made this okay. This is the kind of stuff Trump said.
I mean, every time Trump opens his mouth, he says the most ill-informed bonkers things. He can't talk about policy or reality because he doesn't read and he's got a low IQ.
And RFK Jr. is another version of that.
But obviously there's an audience for it. I mean, so Donald Trump is low IQ and he doesn't read and everything and he's got a low IQ.
And RFK Jr. is another version of that.
But obviously, there's an audience for it. I mean, so Donald Trump is low IQ, he doesn't read and everything.
And he believes, you know, things, you know, tinfoil hat conspiracy theories. But apparently, right now, there are tens of millions of people that go, huh, that's plausible.
That could be true, right? And they can check in on it in depth on their social media feeds. Whereas a generation or two ago, the media gatekeepers would not have let that stuff get into the public dialogue.
And there's a virtue into freer access to the public dialogue. Your show's an example of it, I think.
But the downside is that it is easy to sway the masses by appealing to their emotions and their hatreds rather than a higher sense of purpose. And that's what RFK Jr.
is doing. You know, you and I both thought a lot about how things have changed in the last few years, you know, what has broken in American politics and American culture.
And I think, you know, this is certainly one of them, is that these crazy ideas out there have constituencies because they have platforms. And if somebody wants to believe that, you know, the government is, you know, implanting things in your brain or some such thing, or, you know, that they're turning frogs gay or, you know, Alex Jones, they will be able to find confirmation of that.
And I was talking to a Republican politician who, you know, has tried to walk the line, tried to appease, you know, the, the MAGA type, but tried to, you know, not go completely crazy. And he said, what's impossible is that people you've known for 20 years will come up to you and they will have these incredibly insane theories.
And you say, where do you get that from? And they will say, what you don't read, you know know, risingtigereaglepatriot.com. And here's this video that, you know, conclusively proves that X, Y, and Z.
And how do you answer that stuff? So the crazification of our politics has accelerated. And the fact that Robert F.
Kennedy Jr. is even remotely being considered as a presidential candidate, he won't win the nomination, of course, is I think it's kind of a marker of how crazy it's all become and how, in fact, the information pool has been so thoroughly polluted and distorted.
Well, remember that he had already gotten traction as an anti-vaxxer long before COVID came along. He got traction with junk science because of social media.
I think it's a logical leap from there to politics. We are surrounded by an ocean of misinformation masquerading as credible takes on reality.
We can't put that back in the bottle. And the only thing that's going to change that is for the electorate to become more sophisticated.
But that's going to take, I think, like a generation. And a lot of things could get burned down between now and then.
No, I think that's exactly right. Let's talk about Donald Trump.
And you've been writing about him for more than 20 years you wrote Trump Nation the Art of Being Donald which was published in 2005 which is like in the distant mists of time now right I mean it's like before the before times I was a research assistant on the first biography of him by Wayne Barrett in 1992 that's how I first got exposed to Donald Trump. It's 30 years.
I mean, I've done a lot of other things, but I feel like he's the ghost of Christmas past, the evil ghost of Christmas past. You know, every time you think you move on, you hear the chains up in the attic.
There's this myth around him that he lives beyond the reach of the law and that he can't be held accountable. And I think that's simply because federal law enforcement never got serious about him until he was president for good and bad reasons.
You know, white collar criminals often get by with stuff blue collar criminals can't. But I think he has never encountered the kind of serious prosecutorial force bearing down on him that he's experiencing right now.
And I think he's in trouble. And I think he's scared.
Okay, so you are uniquely qualified to answer this question, which is that, okay, what is happening with him? I think there are a lot of things about Donald Trump that have always been present. He's always been a con man.
He's always been a bullshitter. He's always been Donald Trump.
I mean, he is who he is. And everything that's happening now is a reflection of everything that we've always known about him.
But you wrote about him 20, 30 years ago. I've watched videotapes of him where he's still Trump, but he's somewhat more coherent, somewhat more.
Well, he was, he was just younger and less stupid. Okay, but has he gotten more stupid over time?

Is he decompensating? What do you see happening with him, with his psyche? I don't think he's King Lear. If King Lear also never read and was happy to run around the heather in the thunderstorms, screaming at anything that came by, and also at social media, newspapers, and radio and TV to blast his eccentricities and inanities out to the world.
This is a very deeply narcissistic, deeply bent person who's been given far too much power and credibility because he struck a nerve around real issues and chose to sensationalize them in the most grotesque of ways. Racism, bigotry, for starters, but he's also polluted our national security discussions.
He's also polluted our policy discussions, a balance between private enterprise and government purpose. And at the end of the day, he's a performance artist who is very good at tuning into the proclivity of the audience and then exploiting them.
So he's a joke, but the joke's on us. So you commented on your podcast with George Conway that the indictment, the Mar-a-Lago document indictment is potentially the most devastating legal action that this human wrecking ball has ever faced.
You know, and you point out that there may be multiple motives behind him taking those documents, including money, because he thinks about how much money he can make and also concerned about the historical record. But still, we keep coming back to having taken them.
He had multiple opportunities to give them back and he chose to defy the subpoena. He's making no bones about it.
He was on with Brett Baer, basically confesses. Yes, he had the documents.
No, he wasn't going to return them. So what's the motive for basically saying, screw it.
Even if my lawyers are telling me to give it back, I'm keeping this stuff. Do you know the movie Finding Nemo? I don't know if you remember it.
I do. I watched it recently.
Okay. So remember the seagulls? The seagulls are flying over the coastline.
They're constantly going, mine, mine, mine, mine, mine, mine, mine, mine, mine, mine, mine, mine, mine, mine. That's basically, we could call that a flock of trumps instead of a flock of seagulls because everything is his, his, his, his, his.
And somehow he couldn't distinguish between the custom scale model of Air Force One and nuclear documents that were in those boxes. And he equated both as things that he should get to keep.
I think part of it is just he wants to say he can do whatever he wants. And since he's been seven years old, he's been able to do that, insulated by wealth, then by celebrity, and then by the presidency from the consequences of his own actions.
He's never been called to heel. So he's just saying, yeah, I did that.
And I'd do it again. That's how I roll.
But again, he is playing with fire here. And I think he may have wanted to sell those, you know, a bag of cash to Donald Trump of any size is always spectacular.
And he saw Jared Kushner and Steve Mnuchin monetizing their time in the White House within 20 seconds of leaving Washington to the tune of billions of dollars. And I think he wanted some of that for himself.
I think he wanted to possibly have information he could use to blackmail other people because that's also where he lives. He's like a mob boss.
But I also just think he had his short-fingered, small-handed grip on that stuff and wasn't going to let go because of mine, mine, mine, mine, mine, mine, mine. I also think of him as Gollum from Lord of the Rings, my precious.
Yeah, Charlie, how many gross movie references can we pull? I don't know. Gollum is perfect.
Gollum is perfect. Let's go.
We could spend the whole podcast. Yeah, I guess that makes you and me Frodo and Bilbo or something in all of this.
I'll be Frodo. You can be Bilbo.
So, okay. So we've talked a lot about his, you know, his connections with Russia, you know, the business he's done with China, but it does seem like the real nexus for Donald Trump and cash is the Middle East with the Saudis and this deal in Oman that he recently cut.
There were reports that Jack Smith was looking into some of those ties. We don't know whether there's anything there, but it's certainly suggestive.
Also, in terms of Donald Trump's endless projection and the way that he's passed that off to the Republican Party, the obsession with Hunter Biden's business deals, leaving that aside,

pales in comparison to what Jared Kushner is pulling up.

And what Donald Trump seems to be very interested in, which is to make as many partnerships with Middle Eastern mob bosses that he possibly can to cut these kinds of deals. I mean, that seems to be a target rich environment.
That's how he saw the entire presidency. He ran for the presidency as a marketing event.
He walked into the White House trying to figure out how he could monetize his new standing in the world. He was pursuing a real estate deal in Moscow while campaigning, which goes a long way to explaining why he fawned over Putin.
Everything for him is about how can he manipulate a situation to get attention or to get money. And it's not about anything else.
So let's talk about Jack Smith's indictment. You and George Conway were impressed by it.
I thought your comparison that it was more Hemingway than Faulkner, the way that he tells the story. But also, Jack Smith is not Bob Mueller, is he? I mean, he clearly has learned from that.
Yeah, and Bob Mueller was Hamlet. And I think he was someone who did not have a correct take on who Bill Barr and Donald Trump were and are when he got appointed as special counsel.
And I think his report was yeoman's work. It was full of evidence that should have been followed up on.
And he lacked, I think, the kind of sense of purpose you needed to see that across the finish line. Jack Smith is cut from a different cloth.
And I think he's very tactical and strategic. And that indictment is clear.
And it is bulletproof. And it is, you know, it's a speaking indictment that is putting Trump on notice and his lawyers on notice and the jury on notice that what is in that document has a lot of clarity and it's damning.
You made a very interesting point that I haven't heard elsewhere. You say that it's weird that Trump did not distance himself from his aide, Walter Nata, the former naval officer who's been pulled into the MAGA world? What do you mean? Well, because he's always set other people to take the fall for him, whether it was Michael Cohn, or his own children, or any number of legal advisors.
You know, he is a dumb man, but he is street smart about his own survival. And he was not going to put himself in harm's way if he could have others be crash test dummies for him and he failed to do that here.
Walt Nauta is now testifying against him but also Walt Nauta testified that Trump himself was orchestrating everything. Trump didn't have layers of deniability built into this and that's going to really really hurt him in court.
So at the beginning of our conversation, you said you thought that Donald Trump was afraid. Talk to me about that a little bit.
You've noted that Trump watched Jack Smith on television. He studies the people he fears and the people he admires and envies.
What makes you think that he's rattled by this? Because he's publicly saying, Jack Smith, I've watched him really closely, and he's a loser, in essence, is what he's been saying. And this is a witch hunt, his typical attack line.
And he wouldn't be taking to the airwaves to comment about Jack Smith and letting people know that he's watching him closely unless he wasn't alternately fascinated by Jack Smith and afraid of him. and Jack Smith is untouchable.
Trump cannot get to Jack Smith.

That's going to scare him.

Donald Trump can't get top tier legal representation because one, he never pays his lawyers in the end. That's out in the market.
He ends up usually with second tier lawyers. HABA, she has a small New Jersey firm that basically does real estate deals and represented a parking garage operator.
And now she's on TV talking about, you know, national security investigations and state secrets. Everyone around him is in over their head.
The people he would need to sort of bail him out aren't present and it does not look good for him. So, you know, Alina Habba is saying that Trump should take the stand in federal court because he'd be a fantastic advocate for himself.
Yeah, just do it. So Tim O'Brien, thank you so much.
It is always great to have you. Tim is senior executive editor of Bloomberg Opinion, host of the new podcast Crash Course, and the author of the 2005 book Trump Nation, The Art of Being the Donald.
Tim, thanks so much for your time this morning. Charlie, now you have to come on mine.
I will definitely do so.

All right.

Thanks for having me.

And thank you all for listening to this weekend's Bulwark podcast.

I'm Charlie Sykes.

We will be back on Monday and we'll do this all over again. My, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, Thank you.