Project 2025 Is Coming Back To Bite Trump

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Hello, and welcome to the Bullard Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.
We might be a little tight today because

I think there's a bonus pod coming tonight. So keep an eye on your feed for a second entry.
We'll be maybe a little more prurient than this morning's entry. We'll see how it goes.

But I'm excited to welcome to this show. Formerly at the Bulwark, she's now a writer and editor at Protect Democracy.
Their sub tag is If You Can Keep It. It's all caps Amanda Carpenter.

What's up, girl? Happy Thanksgiving. Hey, good morning, Tim.
You have been killing it lately. I am so,

I'm just so happy to see all the bulwark success. And

the second interview sounds pretty juicy. What's going on? Okay, well, we'll see how it goes.

We'll see how it goes. We'll see how it goes.
Keep an eye on the feed. Yeah, you know, we miss you.
It's good to see you. It's been a minute.
You're doing the Lord's work.

It's like right there in the name, Protect Democracy. It's kind of an important, important job.
So I'm happy you're doing that, but we do miss you.

I want to do big picture because like, I think since the last time we talked, obviously, the, you know, Project 2025 has rolled down the tracks further, but they've also had some spokes in their tires a little bit.

I was on with your boss, Ian Bassett, on Nicole last week. And Ian, for people who don't know him, like me, is a little dour.
You know, he's a little bit of a rain cloud at times. And he was like,

he was. sound and optimistic, it kind of felt like about our trajectory.

So I'm just wondering what you think kind of biggest picture in the, just from the democracy perspective, and we'll get into the other stuff, like what kind of, where we are right now, what the threats are, what maybe some positive developments have been.

You know, we get this question a lot, and in my head, I always have this kind of like scorecard of where we are on the matrix of all the categories, like when it comes to military deployments, pardons, and quashing dissent, and campaigns against the press, and weaponizing the Department of Justice.

So, like, that's always into account. There's never like, yes, it's going great, or we're at this part on the map kind of answer.

But I think the biggest reason for optimism at this particular point in time is that Donald Trump's policies are incredibly unpopular. I mean, his job approval rating right now is at 36%.

And the key to defeating authoritarian, you know, these populist policies is to make them unpopular so that they are unable to entrench themselves and their faction in power.

And we did have successful elections. So, you know, this is real reason to have, you know, faith in the future that's ahead.

And one thing that I spend a lot of time thinking about is sort of what you mentioned. They had a plan for year one of Trump 2.0.
That was Project 2025.

You know, they had it written for every department. They were going to oust these people.
They got everything they wanted for the most part. And it's not turning out well for them.

And I don't think they have a plan for year two. And so it is my hope.
and dream that year two is the year that accountability starts. And I think we're starting to see it.

You know, it's December 2025 right now. We are finally starting to see some oversight happen and things like these insane boat strikes that are happening in the Caribbean.

You know, we knew what kind of person Pete Hegseth was going to be. We saw what they were doing with the whole Department of War branding, and we want to loosen the terms of engagement.

And now we're seeing that play out. And there is real bipartisan interest in exercising some oversight for the first time.
And so I am particularly,

I don't want to say happy, but I feel good about that because I think the single biggest threat to our democracy comes to these military deployments, whether it comes to these strikes in foreign waters, whether it comes to agents in the streets of our cities, when it comes to ICE, the National Guard, and stopping these unlawful deployments and types of military and federal action is absolutely essential when it comes to election protection and the future of our democracy.

So, if we make that unpopular and we can have oversight and we can stop it in the courts and stop it in the streets, I feel a lot better. Yeah.

For those who are podcast-only folks, Mark Hurtling, who's more formally joined the Bullark, has been so good on all this, like the democracy threats for military deployment.

And just so you can check out his work at the website and YouTube, and I'll get him back on the pod soon.

It's like basically true, right, that the best fight against the authoritarian threat is like making their populist policies unpopular.

I mean, there have been examples where unpopularity has not worked in stopping authoritarian, but I do think that in America, we have a lot more checks than some of these other countries where driving his numbers down is the best thing that can be done.

And the funny thing is about the whole Project 2025 is back in 2024 during the campaign, there was like one thing that

Trump and all of us who opposed him did seem to agree on, which is that Project 2025 isn't popular. Like he knew, he knew it wasn't going to be popular.
We knew it wasn't going to be popular.

He tried to disown it.

And he did it. Yeah, he tried to disown it.

And so it is strange, kind of, that they have, that he had the survival instinct during the campaign to know they had to distance himself from this toxic, the toxic elements of it.

And then this year, he just kind of ran headlong into all of the most unpopular elements of it, whether it be the Doge stuff or, you know, you can, you kind of go down the line.

Yeah, I think we should, I mean, Doge needs to be more purely branded as the spectacular failure that it was.

Maximum chaos, no savings. You did all the damage.
You ousted all these people. You did the Schedule F, and you didn't save money.
I mean, you killed life-saving programs.

I mean, maximum damage for maximum nothing. I mean, I think Elon Musk will also try to make some kind of comeback when it comes to political influence in the future.

I don't think he's going away forever. But I do think we should do a better job explaining how much damage that caused for absolutely no payoff.

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You mentioned Venezuela. That's kind of the biggest latest news of the week.

Since we taped yesterday, the White House changed their tune a little bit on this double tap strike, which is kind of a bloodless way to describe the this thing which is just like you know a follow-up bomb to make sure we killed the people that were in the in the sea yeah because the first bomb was okay yeah

that's how i feel about it the first tap you get like a free a free tap yeah bonus tap yeah it's anyway for folks who are just kind of locking back in after the holidays so basically over the weekend you know there's the washington post story saying that that pete hegseth had ordered that everybody be killed in the first boat strike in the caribbean and and the first bomb hit the boat two people people survived.

Then they sent in a second one that killed two people in the sea. That was the Washington Post reporting.
Over the weekend, the Department of Defense spokesperson called that reporting lies.

He said that the reporters were enemies of the people, said that it wasn't true. Yesterday, the White House changed their tune on that.

They're saying that it was maybe Admiral Mitch Bradley and not Hegseth. So maybe that's their little, how they're trying to slice this, that directed this.
so-called double-tap strike.

Hegseth sent a tweet about this. Let's make one thing crystal clear.
Admiral Mitch Bradley is an American hero, a true professional.

I stand by him in the combat decisions he made on the September 2 mission and all others since. America is fortunate to have such men.

When we say the Department of War says we have the back of our warriors, we mean it.

If you kind of dissect that sentence, Britt Hume, not exactly a big critic of the administration, he writes, this is how to point the finger at someone while pretending to support him.

It's like, okay, I support him, but he did it. So anyway, that is where we stand in quite a turnabout from where they were.

On some level, level, is there some positive that they feel like they have to rationalize this? I don't know. What do you make of all this? I think there can be positive.

And now there's a lot more attention and scrutiny over what the hell we're doing with Venezuela.

I mean, to me, like the he said, he said, who's responsible and the chain of command, that is extremely important.

I do believe we will find out all the details because there is certainly documentation for this. I mean, this just doesn't happen in the ether.

Well, probably not legal documentation since we got rid of all the jags. Oh, yeah.
Well, Well, yeah. But like, that also speaks to like this was always the plan.
So, what are we doing?

Why is Pete Hegseth overseeing any kind of strikes on drug boats down here?

I mean, the official story from the White House, you know, over the past four months that has been building and simmering, I think, in the background with not enough attention is that we are supposedly taking all this action against these narco-terrorists, which obviously drugs are a problem, but

are we at war with narco-terrorists They are designating these terrorist organizations, and they're all doing it, you know, laterally with no oversight from Congress, no buy-in, no anything whatsoever.

And the real story here is that Donald Trump wants regime change in Venezuela.

I mean, it's not just the drug straights, we have a huge military presence building in the waters down there to intimidate Maduro to try to get him to step down.

Because I think Donald Trump has talked about how, you know, he wants another nation state where we can send deportees and have oil and mineral deals.

And that would be a huge win for the administration. But along the way, I guess we're apparently just putting all these military forces in the water and striking drug boats.

If they're drug boats, I haven't seen any evidence of that. Surely they would be able to compile that as a means of intimidating Maduro.
I mean, is that what's really going on here?

And if that's true, Congress should be involved, right? Yeah. Well, and they're starting to, I guess.
This is like the Grandpa Trump side of it to me.

It's like, why does he want a regime change change in Venezuela?

We've talked about this in a lot of shows, but I still don't really understand it because you, and maybe it's related to the deportees that you said there, because I was just listening to your explanation.

It's like, well, okay.

So that is the one thing that he's limited by. And it's not like Donald Trump has shown that he feels icky about doing deals with dictators.

And he could just do an oil and mill neurals deal with Maduro.

Like, supposedly, they talk to each other. Maduro has reportedly said that he would.

Trump has had no issue with that.

Why is Maduro different than

the Middle Eastern dictators he's doing deals with or the fact that he wanted to be buddies with Kim Jong-un or Shi or Putin? Maduro is not like meaningfully different from any of them.

To me, the strange thing is that it almost feels like he's being dragged into this by Marco. Like, I don't know how else to understand what's happening.

And I think Pete Hexa just likes doing bombings. I think that's a plausible explanation, but we're sort of reaching it could be this, it could be that.
What are we doing down there?

Like, we can guess, but it's not our job to guess. If Donald Trump wants, he has the world's largest aircraft carrier stationed in the waters down there.

Why?

Why are we doing any of this? And to me, it's outrageous that Congress, I mean,

there has been interest from Congress in having some kind of oversight and doing war powers legislation to stop Donald Trump from doing unauthorized actions. I should give some credit.

Like, Tim Kaine has been pushing it. The Senate Senate Democrats have all been united on this and getting support from Rand Paul and Lisa Murkowski.

They pushed this resolution, I believe, twice, failed because the Republicans wouldn't support it and are going to re-up it again in light of this new information, which is extremely important.

I think this is a huge winning issue, important for protecting the interests of our military, our country, our stability, all kinds of things.

But what Pete Hedsek is doing, it's just, you know, it's an important part of the story that's making people pay attention because, you know, if this is just some kind of intimidation campaign and trump said blow up the boats pete hexeth took the orders kill them all and i'm just speculating here and we're just blowing people out of the water to intimidate maduro that seems pretty bad it also seems pretty bad to call the reporters that are reporting this the enemy of the people and then admitting three days later that

like they were right. Yeah, basically.
Absolutely.

But just like in terms of a baseline of like how this should go, when we were blowing up terrorist cells, I remember typically the Bush administration would say, you know, we launched this attack.

It was these terrorists. We had this evidence on them.
This is why we launched the strike. We're getting none of that.
when it comes to these narco-terrorists.

And I don't even, like, I don't have a reason to believe that label because we don't know who these people are.

And previously, when members of Congress have asked for briefings on this, Rand Paula said, we don't get briefings.

I was looking into what Democratic lawmakers were saying in October, and they were essentially saying they won't give us information because they don't think they're worth interrogating.

The people that we don't kill, we just let them go. So, to me, that tells me they're not really terrorists

if we just let them go and we're blowing up boats for effect and performative reasons, which is really what this looks like to me at first blush.

And we know they've been wrong before about taking action against Venezuelans with the ones that they sent to El Salvador that they misidentified as gang members.

So, it's like there's no reason to believe that they're right now.

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You mentioned Rand. He's been pretty good on this.
He's been over on Fox talking about it, which I like. It's your old tea party buddy, the wacko bird.

You know, you got to keep the libertarians around. Sometimes they're the only conscience the Republican Party has.
And so Tom Massey, Rand Paul, I am never going to let them go and write them off.

Yeah, they're pretending as if we're at war, Rand said. They want to just blow people up.
That's not how this works. I appreciate that point of view for Rand.
And like, it's funny watching him on Fox.

The Fox hosts are struggling to like deal with his very clear. You know, there's a lot of jarbled rationale for this.
And Rand Paul's is very simple. It's like, we're not at war.

If you want to go to war with these guys, let's vote on it. Let's go to war.
There is a contrary view, though, from former Fox host, Megan Kelly. And she was on with Mark Helprin.
Oh.

Did he talk about abstaining and sexual harassment? I don't know.

I didn't watch the whole segment, but I did hear this clip from Megan Kelly talking about her, I think, unconventional view of what she would like to see with regarding to the bombings in the Caribbean.

So I really do kind of not only want to see them killed in the water, whether they're on the boat or in the the water, but I'd really like to see them suffer.

I would like Trump and Hexeth to make it last a long time so that they lose a limb and bleed out a little. Like I'm really having a difficult time ginning up sympathy for these guys who

10 seconds earlier almost got taken out by the initial bomb, but because they managed to get ejected, you know, a little too soon, had to be taken out in the water.

I realize legally it may make a difference, but truly, Mark, this is a tough case to really gin up the sympathies of the American people. This is sick.

Like when she says I'm having trouble finding sympathies for these guys, as you just mentioned, we don't know who these guys are. How can you have sympathy or not have sympathy for them?

We don't know who they are.

Like, how can it is so depraved to have these torture fantasies about essentially anonymous Venezuelans that in like the most generous view to the administration are drug traffickers, which is, again, not a great job, but it's like, do we do torture in this country?

We torture drug dealers dealers now? Is that what Megan Kelly's new policy is going to be?

We're going to go down to, you know, the park and find somebody selling drugs and we're going to blow off their arm and watch them bleed out. That's what you want for a free country.

Who says something like that? I mean, even your worst enemies, the worst criminal, you want to watch them suffer and bleed out and make it last a long time

and lose limbs.

I don't even know how those words come to someone's mind. And like, this is a person who knows how to use her words.

She's a professional lots of years on Fox, lots of years NBC, got paid tens and tens and tens of millions of dollars over the course of career for how she knows how to speak words. And now,

which I, again, I don't understand like why you aren't just like spending time with your kids and enjoying life. Right.
But she wants to sit. No.

shade to podcasting, but she wants to sit in her little hole

and talk to Mark Calpern.

And these are her pure and true thoughts that no producer is telling her to say. There's no Audrey Ailes manipulating her to wear the skippy shirt and say the crazy things now.

It's really sick. It also is in the context of she really got on the moral high ground, moral high horse around the Charlie Kirk assassination.
And like, you know, which I

had a deep emotional reaction to, but like after that Charlie Kirk thing, rightly, we here at the Bulwark and her and others were praising Erica Kirk, who gives this speech that's like, we should should turn the other cheek.

And that's the Christian way to do it. And so I'm just listening to you react.

And it's like, if you are going to have a kind of revenge fantasy where you want somebody to be tortured and suffered, like you would think it'd be about the person that murdered your husband in cold blood,

but she didn't. Like she, she modeled a different view.
Megan Kelly praised that. And now here's Megan Kelly being like, It's not even a person I know.

It's not even like this person killed my family member and I want to see them tormented. You can at least understand that.
We don't even know their names. We don't even know what they're doing.

They might be people being human trafficked. They might not even be drug dealers.
Yeah, this point has been made.

She'll support the guy who is pardoning the ex-Honduran president who trafficked 400 tons of cocaine into the United States. Get therapy, Megan, is what I would say.

I think this is a call for therapy. It's interesting this whole

Venezuelan vote illegal order conversation happens

like in the days following this big controversy over Democratic senators and members of Congress putting out a video where they encourage soldiers to not follow a legal order.

They may have known something in hindsight. Yeah, exactly.

You almost wonder if they were briefed on this or if otherwise it was just pretty in a macabre sense, in a dark sense, kind of fortuitous timing for just the political argument.

But they were out there doing this. Trump says it's treason.
The Democratic, particularly Mark Kelly kind of leading the way, has been out there continuing to speak on this.

Trump bleeded yesterday, Mark Kelly and the group of unpatriotic politicians were wrong to do what they did.

I hope people looking at them are not duped into thinking that it's okay to openly and freely get others to disobey the president of the United States.

Actually, openly and freely disobeying the president of the United States is a pretty fundamental American value. Yeah.
Yeah. I guess we're not, you know, it's not China.

You don't get, you don't get jailed for putting up a Winnie the Pooh picture of the president. Like, the president wants you to do something illegal, you can disobey them.

That's how a free country works. But anyway, carry us your thoughts on Kelly and the whole and the whole discussion.

Well, yeah, I mean, again, this has been an issue that's been simmering for a long time. Why are we hitting these boats in the Caribbean, off the coast of Venezuela? Like, what are we actually doing?

The double-tap killing has brought it to the forefront, obviously, because it's so outrageous and in your face, and because of the incredible Washington Post reporting, much credit to them and other people that are following up on it,

outlets like the Wall Street Journal, CNN, et cetera.

But when it comes to speaking out against it, obviously the White House was worried about this and what these Democratic lawmakers with military experience said set them off.

So much so, I mean, we have to really revisit what the White House is saying about them, accusing them of treason, sedition, talking about hanging them.

And then Mark Kelly was threatened with a Pentagon investigation. I mean, think about this.

He is a retired member of the military, expressing his free speech rights as a duly elected senator protecting his constituents his veterans conducting oversight dues completely within his rights and

now he has the pentagon investigating him supposedly and the fbi is making inquiries into all the lawmakers i mean this is really over-the-top, insane, authoritarian behavior.

And I just want to give a lot of credit to these lawmakers. I know some people sort of disagreed or or cribbled with the video, but they're not hiding.
They're not backing down.

Mark Kelly has answered it with interview after interview.

He did a press conference yesterday, and I think he's a great spokesperson on this because of his background, because the integrity that he has. And it's just really important to force this issue.

What the hell are we doing down there? This is completely within congressional oversight wheelhouse. We should have a discussion about war powers.

We should have a discussion about reigning in Pete Tegsith, who fundamentally disagrees with the law when it comes to the rules of engagement. That is his view.
But if he exercises that view.

And it's been his view. I mean, he's been a pro.
Which, like, why did we confirm him? I don't know. But now we're seeing what this looks like.

He disagrees with the law, and now he's acting accordingly. So now we better do something because we're putting members of the military in terrible, impossible, unlawful positions.

Yeah, he basically had a long history of defending war criminals, siding with war criminals, criticizing JAG officers. Yeah, it's arguably how he got famous on Fox and got Donald Trump's attention.

That huge hand campaign that he did to advocate for Eddie Gallagher, who is the Navy SEAL who stabbed and killed an ISIS teenager in the neck, which, you know, we can talk about that, stuff happens, but then took photos of it.

And they wanted to drum him out of the military. And here Pete Hagseth comes to this guy's rescue, tries to rehab him as a kind of war hero.
you know, against what the military justice system said.

When they kept saying, like, this is unsafe. We don't do this.
It's against the rules of engagement. It hurts our own soldiers when you have unhinged actors like this within the change of command.

And we took that advocate and we made him the head of the Department of War. And these are the consequences.

And I say Department of War, I don't believe that, but that's what they're wanting to call it. And they're acting like it.
Yeah, it was kind of with an eye roll.

It was like Department of War, I rolled. Yeah.
Just making sure I rolled.

Just one pundit accountability note for myself. My overarching advice to Democrats has continued to be just try shit.

Just attack him, criticize him, go after him, try different things, try different tactics. You don't know what's going to hit.

And that is correct advice. And I went against my own correct advice on this because I kept seeing these guys on Fox when I was watching it.

It did feel like kind of they were losing the argument on Fox just before this recent batch of reporting about the Caribbean. Yeah.

And I was kind of saying like, God, there's so many things you could go on Fox to hit Trump on right now. Maybe this isn't the best one.
Little egg on my face on that one.

Because it turns out, I think, just as we've seen the news develop, it shows the kind of the overarching advice of whatever it is you're passionate about, you think you have a strong argument about.

Go and take it to the American people. And some of the stuff's going to work, some of it's not.
In this case, I think the table's really turning.

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I want to ask you about ICE. I've got ICE coming down to New Orleans.
I just landed back here. FCBP, I should say.
ICE was kind of the shorthand for what the immigration actions were for a while.

And then this kind of weird thing happened where... Tom Homan ended up being like the moderate in the regime.

And so then the Customs and Border Patrol started to be become kind of more of the aggressive enforcement operation but anywho you guys at protect democracy working with other advocates and other legal advocates you got a bunch of lawyers on your team did a bunch of work in illinois and so i'm just wondering kind of what the after action was on that what the lessons are what we should be thinking about as they move on to other places yeah thanks for um bringing that up i think there's a lot of important lessons that we can draw in particular out of Chicago.

And I think this is one of the most successful areas where collective action, which is like, you know, such kind of like a progressive phase that I'm still not comfortable using, actually worked.

We're libs now, Amanda. I've already went through that.
You are. I heard that discussion.
I didn't go through that last week. Just embrace it.
Just okay. We're libs now.
We do collective action.

We have safe spaces. No, we do the whole thing.
We've embraced all of it. Okay.
Just accept it. But the lesson there is that there was a broad-based coalition literally in the streets.

You had members of the media, you had members of the faith community, you had, you know, regular activists who were there in solidarity 24-7, keeping tabs on the situation.

And the reason we were able to take legal action and represent people, you know, like that pastor who was hit in the head with the rubber bullets, which is so

just insane to see happen, was because we had people in the streets actually collecting the evidence, right? That is absolutely the first line of defense. And so you can't.

go to court, you can't win, you can't get injunctions unless you have people there watching, standing their ground, and recording and ready to take it into a court and win when you don't know that you're going to do that.

And as a result of that action, there's still like pending appeal. But Vino like cut loose and ran.
He got out of the city.

A lot of threats happening from him, a lot of big shows of force, all the media attention. And then he's out of there.
And so.

A couple of things that we're looking at that we think absolutely can be replicated. And Tim, you know, I do sort of hate to tell you this.

I do think the biggest, you know, threats coming, not only for ICE action now, but in the future when it comes to elections, are going to be blue cities and red states. No, definitely.

Yeah, like that's like everybody should be aware of that. It's going to be blue cities and red states of, you know, electoral significance.

And so if the troops are coming to your streets, there's a few things that I think everybody should wrap their heads around doing. Number one, you got to start pre-bunking the federal justifications.

If they say we're coming in here to stop crime, you need to have the statistics, you need to have the mayors, you need to have the governors showing as much as you can, like, this is what we've done to stop crime.

This is what we're doing. And most importantly, we don't want your federal help.
Like, this is where it really gets invited in when you have one mayor say, well, actually, we do want the resources.

In Washington, D.C., I think the mayors really tripped up on that and they realized too late they were making an invitation that they shouldn't have.

And so, you know, pre-bunk the federal justifications, force the issue in saying, we don't want your help, but then immediately have people in the streets, a broad-based coalition, you know, all kinds of strange bedfellows.

We need everybody. Nobody is your enemy or your adversary if you are fighting against this kind of action and start documenting all the federal abuses that you see.
Your cameras are your best friends.

I mean, God bless. You see all these

people swarming. agents, you know, they're standing their ground.
They're not being aggressive, but they have their cameras. They've got like Brahma's on scooters and all the silver hairs.

We make fun of the retired people, I think, in a very negative way. They have time to do this.
God bless them. Thank you, retirees, for coming out and doing this.
I have no hate.

I have no shame on you because you are the ones that have times to do it. You could be safe and warm in your homes watching cable TV.
No, you're not out there. This is awesome.

I could be doing my showing. Yeah.
Thank you.

So that's amazing. And then, you know, the most important thing is while you're doing all this, absolutely keep it peaceful.

I mean, the things that people are doing in Portland with the costumes, it's just absolutely brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.

The way that they took a sense of humor about it, I mean, it was also had a protective quality because, you know, you can't really be documented with a photo ID if you're wearing a big frog costume.

If you happen to be worried about that, maybe you are, maybe you aren't. But most importantly, that had an element of keeping things peaceful.

It's different when people are running around in frog costumes versus, you know, black masks.

And so I think those are some things that can absolutely be replicated in place like New Orleans and anywhere.

Yeah, I'm already seeing the text chains get started and people sending me what's your costume?

I don't know that I'm going to be cosplaying, but you know, nobody does costumes better than New Orleans. So I don't, you know, you'll have to get.
Okay, you guys are going to have fun with it.

I think there'll be some creativity, you know,

a lot of papier-mâché. Anyway, you'll have actually good protest music.
Oh, yeah, of course. Yeah, no, a little second line.

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You went to college in Indiana, right? Ball State, Indiana, right? I did. Isn't that an Indiana? It is.
Very good. Muncy, also known as Funcy.
What's the nickname? The Redhawks. They're the Cardinals.

I mean, the Cardinals.

That was really close. It was in my head somewhere.
Very good. Okay, so we've got the Cardinals.
There's not really that much connection to this, but

I just like to shout out all state grads. In Indiana, there's really kind of a dark story happening that's like right down the wheelhouse of what you guys are doing at Protect Democracy.

And that is this redistricting fight. has gotten, I think, uglier than anywhere.
And it's like over one seat.

In the grand scheme of things, it's much smaller than the Texas and California redistricting or even Virginia, for that matter, for like the big picture impact. The advance was pushing for it.

Some rumors, I think that Pence behind the scenes was pushing the other way, telling the Indiana legislators to stand their ground.

Shout out respect to some Indiana Republican legislators who have stood their ground on this and said, no, we're not going to get redistricting just because Daddy Trump tells us.

The administration has continued to push on this. The governors continue to push on this.
And now we are seeing just very real threats to these legislators.

We had 11 were targeted with threats or swatting attacks in the past few days. And you can see the dark place where we might be headed.

Yeah, I mean, I do think these kind of threats do get disproportionately hot in red areas where legislators are expected to do the president's bidding.

So it is kind of surprise and constituents get angrier at them than normal. I mean, say that without knowing exactly where the threats are coming from.

But what was sort of, I've been tracking this sort of surprising to me, and I was kind of wondering about is one of the legislatures said, I'm not going to vote for redistricting based on the comments that Trump said about disabled people because I have a disabled daughter.

Like,

he's taking the right position, but those things don't go together. Can we just give a guy a pat? I'll take it.
Yeah, no, no, yeah.

I'm desperate. I'm like parched.
I'm in the desert. I'm looking for somebody just to say no to him that has a Republican behind their name.

But But it's always interesting to me to see where the breaking points are for people in the president's faction, because it remains important to a lot of those people that they not betray the president on a policy that is perceived as MAGA, and it sometimes has to be about something else.

And that's just something I'm always trying to dig into and understand.

Anything just on from the protective democracy standpoint on, you know, just thinking ahead to the midterms and these kind of threats and what impact it could have on elections?

Yeah, I mean, I am sort of like

hyper-focused on the role of the military and other federal agents when it comes to National Guard, Marines, DHS, ICE, et cetera, because

Donald Trump is predisposed to make claims about elections being stolen, rigged, et cetera, cetera, anytime he loses.

But if he has the military on his side, those threats become exponentially harder to surmount.

And so to me, it remains absolutely essential that we break that link so that the military doesn't become politicized and personalized to carry out his political goals.

I mean, and so I should tell you, so we have this campaign, educational awareness campaign going on right now called Not the Mission. You can check it out at notthemission.org.

We started running billboards and, you know, the trucks with billboards all through Washington, D.C. when the guard there was first deployed.

And what this campaign is aimed at is people who support the military, love the military, are patriotic, but don't want to see them unnecessarily used. You know, this is not their mission to go.

you know, pick up trash in the streets of D.C. We respect them.
We love them. This

should not be how they use. And so I am also like sort of extra wound up about this because I'm out in West Virginia.

The National Guard member who is in the hospital right now, Andrew Wolf, is from Inwood. That was like the same little town our main babysitter is from that took care of our children.

I'm going to be there in Inwood on Sunday to run an annual Christmas 5K that's before a wonderful community parade that, you know, I've done for years now and our whole family goes to.

And I fully expect to see all the red ribbons in support of Andrew. But you can talk about like, should he have been there? Well, it just, do you have respect for how these troops are deployed?

This also gets like to the broader question of what is the mission of these troops when it comes to the drug boat strikes? How are we using these men and women? And are we respecting their service?

I don't think we are. The president is not.
When we give these kind of orders willy-nilly that are incompatible with the law, it hurts them. And so I just, I hope he's going to be okay.

This isn't the point of the not the mission camera.

Yeah, but the other woman was lost. So we do have more billboards coming aimed in Baltimore at the Army-Navy game coming up next week.
And so this will continue. And I just think it's a really,

really important message that when you misuse the troops, it escalates tension unnecessarily. It compromises troop readiness and performance.
And it just endangers troops unnecessarily. I love that.

I'm always arguing this. I talked to Wes Moore about this a while ago now, talking about kind of taking back patriotism

from these guys on the other side. And

it's not the National Guard troops' fault that they were sent on these terrible missions. They signed up to help.
Yeah.

It's interesting when you think about combating, it's not really authoritarianism, but this is like right-wing populism.

I was talking to, there's a, there's a gay, millennial, handsome president in the Netherlands now. Oh, that's his name, Tim.
Tell me.

Obviously, I've been paying

a lot of attention to that. And one of the things that he used, one of the tools that he used was like being very pro-Dutch, you know, and their campaign had a lot of

Dutch flags and Dutch themes. And we're taking that back.
And I think that

A, it is the right thing to do. It is not their mission.
And I think I'm glad you guys are doing this.

But B, I just think it's a political matter that is smart and wise to try to take that kind of argument back away from these guys.

I said president, prime minister. I'm so America focused.
I'm such a fucking Yankee.

Rob Jetton is the prime minister. He's handsome.
His boyfriend, his husband rather is handsome. So Google him.
You know, it's a great effort. I appreciate that you're doing that.

And you got the 5K this weekend. How are you feeling about that? Anything else you want to leave us with? I'm feeling good.

It's my first run since I did the JFK 50 mile race for the third time, three years in a row. I think I'm taking a break next year, though.

So three for Theory, and then we'll see if I want to come back and get the whole two. If you run it five times, you're in the 250 mile club and you get a sweatshirt.

Okay, you know, hopefully, it's a cozy sweatshirt.

I think it's a very plain gray one. You've earned that sweatshirt.
Amanda Carpenter, I appreciate you. I missed doing this.
We'll be doing it again soon. All right.
Have a great holidays.

Hug those kitties, okay? We'll do. All right.
Everybody else, we'll be back here maybe tonight, actually. So keep an eye on the feed.
We'll see you all then. Peace.

I remember the first time I drove through Indiana,

watching fences in the distance fade away.

Once there was a girl I knew there, and she was pretty.

We kept in touch until we just went our own ways.

I remember the first time I drove through Neana,

waving goodbye to the towns that we drove through.

Far away. I know they're deep inside a city

rushing back and forth, wanting only to get home.

Once I was there in a dream,

meeting people

without names and without faces

they live.

I remember the first time I drove through Neana.

I remember the first time I drove through Neanna.

I remember the first time I drove through Neana,

watching semis hauling grain to the west.

They're gonna make it all the way to Colorado.

Where the mountains touch the sky, the rivers bend.

I remember the first time I drove through Indiana,

thinking to myself how big this land really is.

Amber waves of grain

from the highway

Who lives in that house so far away

I remember the first time I drove through a Neanna

Watching fences in the distance fade away

I remember the first time I drove through an Indiana

I remember the first time time I drove through Lienna.

The Bulwark podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brett.

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