The Bulwark Podcast XX
[0] Hello and welcome to the Bollard podcast.
[1] I'm your host, Tim Miller, and I got to tell you today, we just have an unbelievable tonnage of dumbassery to review.
[2] And so I've just, I brought in the only man for that job.
[3] Rick Wilson, co -founder of the Lincoln Project, Adman, host of the podcast, The Enemy's List.
[4] He has his own substack, Rick Wilson's Substack.
[5] He's written some books.
[6] Everything Trump touches dies.
[7] You probably heard of that running against the devil.
[8] Hey, brother.
[9] How you doing?
[10] Welcome to the pod.
[11] Welcome back to the pod.
[12] Thank you, my friend.
[13] good to see you.
[14] It's good to see you too.
[15] Just before we started taping this, the defense, if you want to call it that, has rested.
[16] It's not rested their eyes.
[17] They've rested their defense of Donald Trump.
[18] I do want to spend some time of that.
[19] But I feel kind of as a hazing ritual since the first time you've been on since I've been the host chair.
[20] We need to begin as I did yesterday with your former boss.
[21] I'm so sorry.
[22] Yeah, well, I want to, I just want to play a little.
[23] We covered the Cougar party at Caroline Renn's house already yesterday and the subpoena.
[24] So today I want to cover something else.
[25] He's got a new infomercial out.
[26] Jason, can we listen to a little bit of that?
[27] You all know I stand by the truth.
[28] And if I put my name on something, I truly believe in it.
[29] Today, I'm thrilled to introduce you to something I'm incredibly proud of.
[30] My own brand of organic specialty coffee, Rudy coffee.
[31] Believe me when I say, it's the best coffee you'll have try.
[32] It's smooth, rich, chocolatey, and gentle on your stomach.
[33] It's so good.
[34] I even recommend drinking it black.
[35] It comes in three varieties.
[36] Comes in three varieties.
[37] So my first question for you, what are the three varieties of Rudy coffee?
[38] Perjury, evasion of service, and complete moral and mental collapse.
[39] I mean, that's four, I guess, but close enough.
[40] That's close enough.
[41] That's pretty good.
[42] Even black.
[43] I don't know.
[44] Was that a was there a little racial subtext there?
[45] I don't even, you never can't tell anymore.
[46] As somebody who was around Rudy a long time and helped in his 97 reelect and I was in City Hall as an advisor to the mayor and then I was on the campaign against Hillary, all these things, right?
[47] I've said this for a while now.
[48] The last time he and I spoke was 16.
[49] He used to talk all the time.
[50] Would you talk after he had a couple pops?
[51] Is that usually you talk?
[52] Oh, yeah.
[53] But it's like.
[54] How is it that this guy who was not a dumb man at the time has gotten so far into the swamp and the mire of this unbelievable.
[55] He's like the alpha case study of everything Trump touches dies.
[56] And it doesn't ever get any better.
[57] He always like hits the bottom and he's like, I think I'll dig some more now.
[58] I mean, the fact that he's shilling coffee, he's desperate financially.
[59] We all know this.
[60] You know, he correctly got his head handed to him in the Georgia election workers defamation case.
[61] And I guess he still believes that somehow or another Trump is going to save him from, I don't know, ending in the last years of his life living on the street, panhandling.
[62] It is really depressing.
[63] If Rudy had not gone into Trump's universe, even with all his flaws, when he died, people would have named high schools after him.
[64] They would have named bridges after him.
[65] I always say this.
[66] If he just did speeches, if he just moved to Italy and drank wine, they would have renamed LaGuardia, Giuliani Airport.
[67] A hundred percent.
[68] A hundred percent, Tim.
[69] He all we had to do was, was like, not fall into the trap of this garbage with these people.
[70] And unfortunately, he kind of likes it, I think.
[71] I think Rudy has always been, I mean, even when I was working for him, there was always kind of a starfucker thing with Rudy.
[72] Like, I remember the Sopranos were just out.
[73] And, man, he loved, like any cast member, crew member, any Sopranos adjacent person was always like, we've got to have so and so to Gracie.
[74] We've got to get someone's, and you know, whatever.
[75] Some politicians are like that.
[76] We should call Stevie Van Zandt.
[77] We should plan a troll.
[78] Oh my God.
[79] Steve, you do a good troll.
[80] See, would crush that.
[81] But no, look, I mean, this is a guy who had hundreds of millions of dollars back in the 2000s.
[82] He made a lot of money on Giuliani partners, all this national security stuff he did.
[83] He lost it all.
[84] He keeps losing everything all the time.
[85] And it's weird that he can't.
[86] see that his proximate relationship with Trump is what's causing him in a large measure to lose everything over and over again.
[87] He just doesn't get it.
[88] Again, not a dumb man, but really morally flawed and deeply fucked up and deeply unable to process just how bad it's going to continue to get for him.
[89] If I could feel assured that Shea and Ruby would be getting their money, I would buy the coffee.
[90] I would buy the sedition coffee if I knew it was going to go to them.
[91] But I'm just not confident that that's going to happen.
[92] Same here.
[93] And I think that he will do everything possible to play fuck around with them until, you know, he's trying to run out the clock on his life, basically.
[94] And, you know, for a guy who is a chronic cigar smoker and heavy, heavy drinker at 80, he's lucky to still be around.
[95] They're never going to get what they deserve out of this very, you know, terrible situation that he put them in.
[96] That's macab.
[97] Okay.
[98] Speaking of dark stuff, a new ad, Donald Trump bleated out a new ad on his social media feed there.
[99] On trash social.
[100] Yeah, trash social.
[101] We don't really know yet.
[102] This might be a DeSantis situation where they're pretending like this was like some fan that made it, but it turns out to be a little Nazi like Nate Hockman on the staff that did it or something.
[103] But what happened essentially is they put out this ad in bold headlines that includes such things as 15 million illegal aliens deported.
[104] So even the text was not particularly heartwarming, but the subtext, there were these faint headlines underneath that you had to like really kind of squint to look at.
[105] One of them said, quote, industrial strength is increased by the creation of a unified Reich.
[106] This is imagining what would happen in a Trump administration.
[107] Unified Reich, R -E -I -C -H, you might be familiar with that term, failed congressional candidate Caroline Levitt, who is the spokesperson now wrote, this was reposted by a staffer who clearly did not see the word.
[108] right while the president was in court president was too busy in court defense rick what say you about this one listen trump may not be the brightest guy but he has a certain degree of like feral cunning he has a certain degree of like animal instinct for shit that is going to fire up his base and cause a public controversy he likes it and so i am not believing for a second the guy didn't see it.
[109] I'm also not believing for a second that very smart people like Chris LaSavita and Susie Wiles and I won't say Jason Miller is very smart, but bright enough.
[110] Your former colleague.
[111] We're just playing all the hits from your past.
[112] This is Rick Wilson, this is your life.
[113] Chinless Jason Miller.
[114] But none of these things happen around Trump by accident.
[115] None of this stuff happens around Trump by, you know, some sort of weird set of coincidences.
[116] He loves this kind of.
[117] of thing.
[118] He loves this kind of play.
[119] He loves this kind of like, I'm going to cause chaos and I'm going to cause, you know, I'm going to stir the shit.
[120] He loves to stir the shit and he's very good at it.
[121] Let's be real.
[122] He's a talented guy for triggering a public disgust.
[123] And he's okay with that.
[124] He likes that.
[125] And you know what?
[126] The people that made this ad, whoever the fuck they are.
[127] And I think they're the same people that produce the God Made Trump ad, which for the party of Christian values, the idolatry is rocking through the ceiling on that one.
[128] But it's far from the end of this kind of shit we're going to see this year because Trump gets it.
[129] And look, as I've said a million times, and I'm not the only one, I don't believe that Donald Trump is an actual Nazi, but I think the Nazis are okay with him and he doesn't have any enemies to his right.
[130] He's adopted the ban in philosophy.
[131] And this is, I think, the important part of this is there's the trolling part.
[132] There's the how the fuck did we get here that we have a Republican presidential nominee and former president tweeting Reich references.
[133] The serious part that I think some of times gets lost among our old friends.
[134] And when I say old friends in this case, I'm not talking about Jason Miller.
[135] I'm talking about the ones that know better with Trump.
[136] You know, you see this a lot, which is like, well, I can't be for Biden because the people around him, he's got these aggressives around it.
[137] And they're, they're wearing kaffirs and they're pro and they're far left.
[138] And like, that's not really the case.
[139] Like those people actually dislike Joe Biden.
[140] And the true cases, regardless of what you think about Donald Trump's Nazi tendencies, like the young people that are working on these campaigns now, the early 20 -somethings that have been attracted to Donald Trump and to Santos for that matter, we've seen it time and again.
[141] And Tucker Carlson, we've seen it among the Purdue, all these controversies where we, it's like another 4chan account by a Tucker Carlson producer has been revealed with N -word all over it.
[142] Like, there is a big group of racist, anti -Semitic young bros that work on these campaigns that are around Donald Trump.
[143] That's how he ends up having dinner with Nick Quintas or lunch with Nick Quintas.
[144] Those are the people that Stephen Miller is going to hire if he gets in there.
[145] And like, that is a serious and real threat that I think that sometimes like the Wall Street Journal crowd just doesn't take that seriously and everyone really should.
[146] I think that's right.
[147] Again, the gentry conservatives, the Waltry Journal guys, the National Review guys, they have this sort of moral escape clause.
[148] It's like, well, I don't like Trump or Trump's tweets or Trumpism or Trump voters.
[149] However, the choice is either that or full communism.
[150] I'm like, what?
[151] Wait, what?
[152] And the irony underneath it all is that these guys are now saying things like, well, we have to vote for Trump.
[153] Otherwise, you know, we're going to have authoritarian social.
[154] You know, debanking us and de -platforming us all.
[155] And yet, the projection with these people is so astounding because it's exactly what they're proposing for everybody else, being a project 2025 and all these things that we have been told over and over again they want to do.
[156] And that when Trump says, you know, we're going to stop the poisoning of our blood and all these things, just add it all up.
[157] And you're like, wait a minute, they literally always tell you what they're going to do.
[158] they literally every time tell you exactly what they're going to do why would you not listen to them and our friends in that gentry conservative world they have a deafness that they've set up a blindness they've set up for themselves so that they don't have to ever acknowledge that they're now party to some of the worst ideas and people in the world well put speaking of the worst people in the world we've a new segment on the podcast you know our friend johnny mackinty yes the deputy president the gambol Blur.
[159] Yeah, the deputy president.
[160] Two -fisted, Johnny.
[161] Yeah, we have a new segment called The Right Stuff.
[162] It's important to keep an eye on this.
[163] I think in the day after, you know, some little Johnny McEntee -acquite posts, Trump will bring in the United Reich advertisement.
[164] We should listen a little bit more to what they have to say.
[165] Let's listen to a couple of Johnny's recent posts.
[166] Here's the first one.
[167] I'm just going to ask this one more time.
[168] Why do we only judge white people for owning?
[169] slaves when every culture had them.
[170] You know, excuse me, I've got pneumonia, so I'm going to hack and cough a little bit.
[171] But Johnny, do you just want to go down to the dollar store and get yourself a white hood now?
[172] Because that's that language right there.
[173] And, you know, again, this is that tendency inside the Bannonite tendency of no enemies to my right.
[174] And whether or not Johnny McEntee is a deeply knowledgeable person about America's fraught history with I don't know, chattel slavery.
[175] This is a real tell on what they believe.
[176] It's a real tell on what's inside their hearts.
[177] These are not good people.
[178] These are not people who want to make America great again.
[179] These are people who want to have a return not to the 1950s, but the 1850s.
[180] I know people think, oh, you're exaggerating, Wilson.
[181] I'm really not.
[182] And remember, folks, this is the man, Johnny McEntee is the man who will be in charge of all presidential.
[183] hiring for Donald Trump if he wins again.
[184] He will pick every single person in the administration.
[185] And remember, they're telling you very clearly, they're going to burn down everyone in the government who isn't a Trump -supporting acolyte.
[186] They're going to burn down everybody who doesn't swear fealty and allegiance to Donald Trump.
[187] So work that problem, folks, for a minute, and you're going to see that, again, they tell you everything they're going to do.
[188] They always tell you everything they're going to do.
[189] These are the people, just to put a bell on it, that will staff.
[190] He will choose the staffing.
[191] The people that, you know, want to do apologia for slavery and put the Unified Reich in videos are the people that will staff the next administration, no matter how much you hate the craziest leftist on GW's campus.
[192] That person is not going to be Joe Biden's head of personnel, you know?
[193] Nope.
[194] Joe Biden's staff is like mostly DLC old guys from the 19, early 90s, which is a a problem in its own right, but it's a much better problem than having Johnny McIntyre around.
[195] Right.
[196] You can critique the Biden administration in a thousand different ways, and I have, but if Joe Biden came up and said, you know, I'm going to name the head of the Communist Youth League to a senior position, people would lose their minds.
[197] Fox would have a 24 -7 crawl on the bottom of their screen, day seven, communist takeover.
[198] But these people around Trump, the Johnny McEntees, and the rest of them who are right now, whether they're inside government or outside government in the Trump era part two, you know, fascist boogaloo, they will be the people like the Jack Posobiacs of the world.
[199] And you will see people in senior government positions who you would not let run a goddamn waffle house.
[200] I mean, folks, you should prepare yourselves for ideas like national security advisor, Seb Gorka.
[201] And the clownish stuff that you kind of want to laugh at, I'm like, oh, these are idiots.
[202] A lot of them are idiots, but you know what?
[203] A lot of them are, have a very intentional, dark, evil, directed vision of America that folks, you're not voting to build the wall.
[204] You're voting to put in to power people who are not in any way what you think they are.
[205] It is going to still do a lot of damage.
[206] All right.
[207] That was good enough.
[208] We'll save Johnny's other missives for a future episode.
[209] That was the right stuff.
[210] We got to talk.
[211] about the courtroom yesterday.
[212] So the fence rested, as I said, at the start today.
[213] So we've seen the end of their case, if you want to call it that.
[214] If you will.
[215] You had the last witness that they called on the stand, speaking of idiots, was this guy Bob Costello.
[216] They had to clear the courtroom yesterday for this clown.
[217] Here's Judge Mershahn.
[218] I'm putting you on notice that your conduct is contemptuous.
[219] If you try to stare me down one more time, I will remove you from the stand.
[220] These are the types of, you know, gumbas that the Trump defense is putting forward.
[221] Costello, for his little background, for people who don't know, the reason why he's on the stand is that he tried to be the mediator between Cohen and Trump and Giuliani, our friend Rudy, in the aftermath of all the Stormy Daniel stuff in 2018.
[222] You'll be surprised, Rick, to hear that that relationship broke down when Giuliani stopped paying him.
[223] I am stunned by that news, Tim.
[224] I can't imagine a world where sometimes you need a criminal lawyer.
[225] So anyway, that was the star witness.
[226] His claim was that Cohen told him once that Trump never knew about the payment to Stormy Daniels.
[227] So that's their main pushback.
[228] He did not work out for the defense.
[229] I think as the defense expected, he would work out for them.
[230] That was a shit show.
[231] That showed me that the Trump defense team took the hook that the prosecution kind of wanted them to take.
[232] They thought, oh, we can discredit Stormy Daniels.
[233] we can discredit Michael Cohen, but the real guts of the case, Tim, are the receipts.
[234] I mean, a lot of this case is going to be based on the fact, here's the check that Trump wrote, that Weisselberg approved that he gave to Cohen to pay off this thing, that we had an agreement on it.
[235] There's a paper trail here.
[236] There's a line here of transactions and orders and communications that I think the prosecution has proved beyond a reasonable doubt.
[237] And Costello up there was kind of a long bomb.
[238] play to try to discredit Cohen.
[239] But for all Michael's flaws, he is a guy who ended up verifying what the documents the paper trail said and the paper trail verified what Cohen said.
[240] And, you know, Michael is a passionate guy.
[241] He has, he has been through a lot.
[242] I like Michael.
[243] He's a weird cat, but I like him.
[244] He's just so, so for me. Yeah, I got it.
[245] I got you.
[246] No, I got you.
[247] But I like the fact that he's a person who actually.
[248] was so deep inside that world and got so fucked by it.
[249] And he's a good exemplar for people to understand that no matter what you are with Trump, no matter how close inside the family you think you are, no matter how much you've done for him, in the end, he will always screw you over.
[250] Yes.
[251] And that as an exemplar, I think he's really valuable in the sort of political culture.
[252] Because right now, people like Susie Wiles and people like Chris Lasavita, they really believe, like I'm the one who solved the problem.
[253] I've broken the code.
[254] I'm going to be okay in the end.
[255] Nobody's ever okay in the end with Donald.
[256] Have you talked to Susie?
[257] Not recently.
[258] It's been a long minute.
[259] We had one email.
[260] Like after DeSantis fired her.
[261] So it's been a long time.
[262] You know.
[263] Yeah.
[264] For people who don't know, Susie Wiles is the Trump.
[265] Is her title campaign manager?
[266] A leading campaign role.
[267] Long time Florida political operative was my boss many, many years ago.
[268] Very smart.
[269] On the John Huntsman campaign is what I was going to say.
[270] So like this whole like her going maga.
[271] I'm like, well, no, the John Hudson campaign didn't turn well, that's a whole another long story.
[272] But the point is, was that she was, I didn't see any of this, you know, we were like the squishy mods.
[273] So it's, it's been a journey.
[274] I've never read Susie in all the years I've known her as some sort of like right winger.
[275] She's us.
[276] She's a bushy.
[277] She's, you know, establishment Republican type who for all her reasons.
[278] And then look, part of this is Ron DeSantis.
[279] And there's a long, the Michael Cruz article, folks, if you haven't read it about Susie Wiles, it's a great piece of anthropology of, you know, she felt screwed over by DeSantis, who at the time represented the peak of the surviving establishment tendency in the party in a weird way.
[280] And then, you know, when she got thrown over the edge, she went to Trump, which, you know, he has a very weird magnetic kind of power with people who have grievances.
[281] And that ranges from serious people, like a Susie Wiles, down to, you know, the guy who thinks the Mexicans took his job.
[282] It's just a terrible superpower.
[283] It's good insight, though.
[284] These people do think that they can fix them or they can be the one to sand the edges and nobody can be that person.
[285] Speaking of Trump crimes, there's some news about the social media company.
[286] What did you call it?
[287] Trash social, yeah.
[288] So I don't know if you saw this.
[289] They'd report their Q1 revenue yesterday.
[290] Oh, I did.
[291] Yeah.
[292] So total revenue for the company.
[293] company for the first quarter, $770 ,000.
[294] Not bad.
[295] Like, not bad if you're running like a local mom and pop shop or something.
[296] Yeah, like pretty good for a quarter.
[297] Here's a problem.
[298] Net loss for this quarter.
[299] 327 .6 million.
[300] Like, what in the fuck is happening, Rick?
[301] Like, this is a, there's a crime happening.
[302] There's got to be some skim going on here.
[303] There's got to be some sort of fraud here.
[304] As someone said to me this morning jokingly, this is like, get your advisors at Bear Stearns to help you out on this one.
[305] These fundamentals are amazing.
[306] What the hell?
[307] How do you lose $327 million?
[308] Now, I think what they've done, and I don't know this for sure, I think what they're doing is trying to write off like their cost of IPO and cost of going public, all that stuff, into this quarter.
[309] But this makes no sense.
[310] It's a meme stock completely.
[311] There's no real fundamentals here.
[312] All the market valuation formulas are out the window now.
[313] The idea that it's still trading at a $6 billion market cap is because of, you know, the same suckers who were buying GameStop two years ago.
[314] Or maybe better, the same suckers that were buying NFTs.
[315] GameStop's still hanging around, but all those NFT, all the based monkeys, the based monkeys.
[316] Right, the clowns and the monkey, all that stuff.
[317] Right.
[318] Board ape, all that.
[319] All the NFT market is, was a classic Ponzi scheme.
[320] This is a classic Ponzi scheme.
[321] There's no value there.
[322] this company is only there because the name Trump is attached to it, and it is being juiced by people who, you know, I made a Sopranos reference on Twitter this morning.
[323] This is the like the webistics of MySpace stocks.
[324] It's utterly valueless.
[325] And yet somehow the alternate reality bubble around Trump still has enough these people like, there's nothing Trump does that doesn't make money.
[326] Oh, really?
[327] Look, and the first auditors are already charged by the SEC.
[328] They have new auditors now.
[329] Like, I don't exactly know what the crime is.
[330] I'm not a financial crimes expert, but it doesn't take one to know that, you know, just you only have to watch one CSI Miami episode to know that there's a, there's a, there's crimeing happening here.
[331] And, like, more people are to go down around them.
[332] And this is the other thing is just like, again, back to these so -called credible people that want to stay around.
[333] If you give any of them truth serum, they all would say it.
[334] Of course.
[335] I mean, like, everybody knows this is a fraud.
[336] There's nobody that's smart enough to read the Wall Street Journal.
[337] And, you know, it could be an investor themselves who looks at this and says, this is something other than a total fraud by a career huckster.
[338] Anybody who woke up this morning and said, wow, they lost $327 million and made $770 ,000.
[339] The Ebena formula of earnings and valuation, the T doesn't stand for Trump, folks.
[340] This is disconnected from reality.
[341] If you're old enough to remember Pets .com, this makes Pets .com look like IBM.
[342] It's insanity.
[343] I'm glad that EBIT has finally made it into the Buller podcast.
[344] transcript history.
[345] A few more going down our running list of the fucking deplorables and the dumbassery today.
[346] Let's just go to Florida for a second.
[347] Here's a Florida two for you.
[348] You're two Florida men.
[349] Let's listen to We Little Marco from the weekend.
[350] Will you accept the election results of 2024 no matter what happens, Senator?
[351] No matter what happens.
[352] No, if it's an unfair election, I think it's going to be contested by each side.
[353] Senator, no matter who wins.
[354] I think you're asking the wrong person.
[355] The Democrats are the ones that have opposed every Republican victory since 2000 every single one it's Hillary Clinton refused to concede Hillary Clinton conceded Senator will you accept the election Hillary Clinton said the election was stolen from her and that Trump was illegitimate Kamala Harris agreed we have Democrats now okay I can't listen to any one of that he's such a little bitch he's such a squirmy little bitch you and I have both known Marco long enough to know that this person is a guy the chicken shit level of Marco Rubio is a historic artifact of American politics.
[356] He will end up not being the character he thought he was going to play in the world.
[357] He thought he was going to be this transformative figure who was going to bring a new youthful vitality to conservatism.
[358] And it's turned out that Marco is going to be, I mean, when the movie is cast about Trump, he'll be like minion number seven on the catwalk.
[359] Unless he gets VP.
[360] Do you think he really wants it?
[361] Do you think he really wants it?
[362] No, he wants to be Secretary of State.
[363] That's what he's told people.
[364] that I still know around him, that he wants to be secretary of state, that he can convince Trump he's an absolute loyalist and that he will represent Trump faithfully.
[365] He'll be a great secretary of state as Donald Trump lets China take Taiwan.
[366] That'll be a great part of his legacy.
[367] Right.
[368] It's going to be fantastic as as Russian tanks roll into the Baltics.
[369] And Marco says, well, America's interests are not really served by protecting NATO and Europe, our allies are, they're not paying their fair share.
[370] I have a sense of pity for Marco because he is a very lost guy.
[371] Two years ago, he was desperately trying to get a job as a university president anywhere in Florida.
[372] He would have taken like Palatka Jr. College to get out of D .C. But now that he sort of senses maybe Trump's got a chance to win, he's playing the game again of, oh, yeah, you've gone soft.
[373] I have no pity from Marco.
[374] I just want to say.
[375] It's fine.
[376] It's fine.
[377] We all do.
[378] It's like, it's like John Boehner.
[379] Soon you're going to be crying on every podcast, you know, eventually if you just, you know, men, we just get into our feeling.
[380] as we age.
[381] It's okay.
[382] But I'm also softening, but I'm still sharp enough to not have pity for Marco.
[383] I wish I had feelings.
[384] Since I had you on, I just felt like I wanted a DeSantis update what's happening in the freedom state.
[385] Because I just, you're living it.
[386] I just, I see it in the periphery.
[387] Like, you know, it comes across my Twitter feed.
[388] Like, DeSantis is having a press conference with some dead cows.
[389] And he's like, here in the freedom state, we're going to ban any innovative attempts to create lab grown meat.
[390] Total ban on that.
[391] That's happening.
[392] here in Florida.
[393] Any other updates from our little dictator?
[394] So the biggest update from we, Ronnie.
[395] So first off, he's tried to keep his core team together of people who are going to run his 2028 presidential campaign, which is already well under steam.
[396] They're running Casey for governor.
[397] That's going to be a fun primary against Matt Gates and Byron Donald's.
[398] You really think so?
[399] I can't get, God is not that good to me, that we could get a Casey DeSantis, Matt Gates, inspiring Donald's primary.
[400] Young Matthew understands that Washington is not going to be any fun for him over time.
[401] He's exceeded the limits of trolling as a hobby there.
[402] Do you have room in your guest house?
[403] Because I might have to move to Tallahassee for that primary, at least for a couple of months.
[404] I have a compound, as you may know.
[405] So you're welcome any time.
[406] But the dumbest thing he's done, and it's caused a huge rift inside the party, is he has gone all in on opposition to the abortion amendment and on the marijuana decriminalization amendment.
[407] Those are going to be the hill he decides to die on in Florida.
[408] And the Democratic Party of Florida has been so hapless, snake bit, fucked up, broken, bad at its work for so long that while it's still very, very difficult for them to win Florida, we are now in a situation where DeSantis decided to do this on an amendment that has like 60 % Republican support and 90 % of.
[409] 97 % Democratic support.
[410] DeSantis deciding to burn it down and spend a ton of money to fight this abortion amendment in Florida.
[411] It's the greatest gift he could have given the Democrats.
[412] It's going to make Trump spend money in Florida in some of these areas.
[413] It hasn't put the state in play for Biden in a fundamental way, but it is such a dumb move.
[414] The best strategy was to ignore it.
[415] What about the Senate race?
[416] Is there any hope in the Senate race or not really?
[417] Yeah, Debbie Muscarral Powell is the Democratic candidate against Rick Scott.
[418] She was a refugee from Ecuador.
[419] She is a fluent Spanish speaker.
[420] She's a person who fled authoritarianism.
[421] And so she can neutralize some of that Hispanic South Florida thing of, you know, Soe Communista.
[422] Every time someone mentions a Democrat's name, it's a lot harder to play that game with her.
[423] And I will say this.
[424] Rick Scott is, he's a person who proves.
[425] that if you put enough thrust behind anything, you can shoot it into orbit.
[426] And Rick Scott has spent, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars of his stolen Medicare bounty, getting himself elected repeatedly in the state of Florida.
[427] He's not quite the same guy he was.
[428] He seems a little bit off -kilter.
[429] And some people that are close to him are like, he's getting older.
[430] He's not, you know, he doesn't have the same sort of like stupid confidence he once had.
[431] It's a tough race.
[432] She's got a chance to try to engage with him on a level that isn't.
[433] Charlie Christ on a level that isn't, you know, the sort of generic Democrat.
[434] But she's got to do a lot of things right.
[435] But I do think she's an impressive candidate, just a hard hill to climb.
[436] It's like Florida and Texas are tough states for our Democratic friends and they're going to remain so for a long time.
[437] One more Florida item.
[438] I just, I have to shout out JVL's triad yesterday if people didn't read it.
[439] It was about the killing of Roger Forston.
[440] And the TLDR on this story is Roger Forston was a black 23 old airman.
[441] He was at his home in Fort Walton Beach.
[442] Somebody else in the apartment complex, I guess, calls the county sheriff's department.
[443] He's just sitting up there on a FaceTime with his girlfriend.
[444] The cop comes to the door, bangs in the door.
[445] He's holding his gun, legal firearm, constitutional carry in Florida, and opens the door and the cop shoots him, and he dies the funeralist this past weekend.
[446] The interesting thing about the JVL piece is, and because it ties the Texas thing we've been talking about, and I know you're a Second Amendment guy, is just like, it's almost too obvious to say, but it merits saying, just like the hypocrisy and the latent racism of like the NRA in this movement.
[447] Trump speaks at the NRA this weekend and there is no recognition of either Forston or of the protester who is shot in Texas, you know, and killed.
[448] And these guys were both carrying their firearms legally and they get shot because of it, one by the state, one by a vigilante mega freak.
[449] And it's like there's no, I mean, it's a pretty dark place here where there's No acknowledgement, really, of these victims.
[450] There is a cop culture inside the Republican Party now that will defend this officer, even though the body camera footage shows that Roger Fortson was dead on the floor before the officer started yelling, drop your weapon, drop your weapon.
[451] And without a body camera, it would have been described in that world as, you know, black guy attacks cop.
[452] And I'm sorry, if we're going to honor the Second Amendment, it has to apply to everybody, regardless of skin color.
[453] Look, we got swatted at my house a few months ago, and all of our cameras and alarms start going off.
[454] And my natural instinct, because we've had a lot of problems, obviously, my natural instinct is to press the buttons, pop the gun out, and walk out.
[455] I didn't do it because I looked on the cameras and I saw a line of police cars parked up at the top of my driveway.
[456] Now, if I'd been a young black guy, chances are that could have gone a lot differently.
[457] And this idea that if you're going to have, you know, states that have constitutional carry, if you're going to have states that have the ability of citizens to, to exercise that right, then the police have to start treating it like it is something that the shoot first stuff cannot continue.
[458] It is not a world where we can excuse the behavior of some cops when they do things like this.
[459] And where we don't reconcile, you know, that there are tradeoffs in that, that risk profile, especially if you're African -American in this country that, you know, we have not addressed as a society.
[460] Well, go read JVL's piece if you had in the Roger Forston, R &RIP.
[461] It's terrific.
[462] It's just unbelievable.
[463] Okay.
[464] I want to make us feel like Republicans again for one second, and then I want to talk a little strategy with you before we let you go.
[465] The UN yesterday, did you see this?
[466] I did not.
[467] This is an example of dumb assery, non -maga category.
[468] Despite earning the nickname the Butcher of Tehran for presiding over Iran's human rights abuses.
[469] The United Nations on Monday held a moment of silence for Abraham Raeisi after the Iranian president died in a helicopter crash.
[470] They all stood.
[471] Security Council, silence, including our member.
[472] I saw it because it was shared by press TV, the Iranian state TV.
[473] These guys can't get out of their fucking way.
[474] Or maybe they actually just are sympathetic with the Iranians, but it makes it hard to take the moral high ground on things, you know, like what's happening in Gaza when you're you know, giving a moment of silence to the butcher of Tehran.
[475] When Reisi was killed in this helicopter crash, I got a little bit of static from it, but not not much.
[476] I said, listen, I didn't want Racy to die in a helicopter crash.
[477] I wanted him to be beaten to death by Iranian pissed off women because he's he is systematically engaged in the abuse and oppression of women in Iran at a level that Americans do not realize.
[478] And the UN, of course, has put Iran on the UN Human Rights Commission.
[479] What?
[480] What?
[481] That's like putting Donald Trump in charge of the treasury of a Boy Scout troop.
[482] He's going to rape and pillage.
[483] He's going to steal the money.
[484] The Iranian regime, this is a regime that kills unveiled women on the street, that beats women to death for dancing on videos that hangs gays from cranes.
[485] These are not good people.
[486] There's nothing good about the government and the leadership of this medieval theocracy in Iran.
[487] It is a universally corrosive force in the world.
[488] We should not be acknowledging and saying, oh, poor, poor pitiful him.
[489] Listen, I'm a pilot.
[490] And, you know, flying your helicopter in bad weather is a bad idea.
[491] But in this case, you know, I salute the pilot's judgment because it took some very, very bad people off the board.
[492] I have zero fucks about the Iranian leadership.
[493] Just none.
[494] I'm snapping.
[495] I come in a New York Times staff meeting for that.
[496] That's good.
[497] Okay.
[498] I want to get a little campaign shop talk for I let you go.
[499] Yeah, yeah.
[500] I'm worried.
[501] I don't know where you're at on the nervousness versus confidence scale about this election.
[502] I know one thing, though, we are both aligned at the scale of the threat here.
[503] And the most important thing in front of us is taking out this fucking burnt sienna bastard.
[504] I don't want to get into poll talk and cross tabs diving and all that.
[505] Like, it's just reality.
[506] Like, it's not one poll.
[507] It's like in Pennsylvania, in Georgia, in Arizona, consistently, every poll Joe Biden is losing.
[508] He's got to win one of those.
[509] So my question for you is thoughts on the state of play.
[510] And if, you know, Uncle Joe, President Joe called you tomorrow, what advice do you have for where we're at right now?
[511] I think Pennsylvania is expensive, but it's the easiest one to change the water temperature.
[512] I think Arizona has prospects at Lincoln.
[513] We're heavily advertising in Maricopa now, specifically targeting pro -choice Republican women.
[514] That's where the fish are.
[515] You know, fish where the fish are.
[516] Like everybody else, we're looking at four states where there's a window of opportunity.
[517] And it's what everybody else is doing too for a large part because, you know, again, that's where the swing votes still remain in the world.
[518] It's in the Wow counties in Wisconsin.
[519] It's in Oakland and McComb in Michigan.
[520] It's in Bucks and a couple of other counties in Pennsylvania.
[521] Trump has benefited for the last several months from a fairly obvious and fairly consistent framing by the national media.
[522] You know, Trump may be an incipient fascist and a criminal, but Biden is so very, very old.
[523] How will Biden's age play in Trump's criminal trial?
[524] And I get it.
[525] I get that the Times is butt hurt, that Joe Biden won't give them a private interview, and so they're taking it out on him.
[526] I get that there is a novelty seeking behavior in the media to make this into a bigger drama, a worse race.
[527] This race should not be close.
[528] This should be a goddamn blow.
[529] This should be a goddamn low out.
[530] And yet here we are where Trump has a meaningful chance to win this election.
[531] And there is a sense among the moneyed class in the country that it's time to pony up for Donald and they're giving him money.
[532] There's a sense in the media class that the race is over.
[533] And so they're framing it and covering it that way.
[534] And I think what it comes down to, Tim, and I've been thinking about this, I've been writing something about this last couple hours before I came on with you.
[535] There's a sense in the pro -democracy movement that they're playing offense and we're playing defense and the American people traditionally want to see some fight in the dog when you've got a dog fight going on.
[536] And I think that there's a sense of like we're warning them about the apocalypse.
[537] Trump is like, fuck it, we're having a bonfire.
[538] Let's do it.
[539] Let's get let and have a bonfire.
[540] And that idea is kind of appealing to a lot of people and it's profoundly dangerous.
[541] And the stakes could not be higher.
[542] I said to a Times person recently, I'm like, who was defending to me their coverage of Biden.
[543] Like, we're reflecting what a lot of Americans want to read about.
[544] And I said, you know the minute he's in office, you guys are first up against the fucking wall.
[545] You guys are going to be day one targeted in ways that right now you think you're being even handed and fair.
[546] These people are not, they're not trying to go in and pass just a tax.
[547] bill.
[548] They're trying to fundamentally recalibrate what America is, including things that will reduce or eliminate the freedom of the press, including things that are incomprehensible to people who live in a comfortable bubble in Manhattan or in McLean, Virginia, who say, oh, you know, it'll be crazy, but it won't be that crazy.
[549] What could go wrong?
[550] Everything, folks, could go wrong.
[551] And that's why the stakes are where they are.
[552] I think we have always underappreciated the risk that Trump poses to the future of the country.
[553] Maybe not you and me, but, you know.
[554] Yeah, no, no, no, a lot of people have for sure.
[555] And, I mean, couldn't be more aligned on it.
[556] Last thing, just one more strategic question for you, because it's something I've been noodling on.
[557] And I'm interested in your take.
[558] I'm interested to hear you guys are doing abortion ads.
[559] That makes sense, pro -choice women.
[560] The group I'm worried about is people in the Democratic coalition who are less engaged, who inflation has hit hard because maybe their salaries haven't gone up as much as, right?
[561] And so the economic message, I keep vassing back and forth between whether Joe Biden should be going out there and doing morning in America again and hell yeah, America's got the best or whether he needs to be doing the man. We're working on that.
[562] And, you know, more nuanced, more empathetic message.
[563] What would your advice be on that?
[564] I think the latter.
[565] Because remember, one of the reasons Barack Obama, I think, did very well in 2011 and 12 was that we were coming out of the 2008 crisis.
[566] And he always framed it like, we're getting better, but we're not there yet.
[567] We're doing better, but we got a long way to go.
[568] I think Biden has to frame that because the economic pessimism in this country now is, as a lot of people have pointed out, is now inversely driven.
[569] It used to be that your feelings about the economy informed your feelings about politics.
[570] Now your feelings about politics inform your feeling about the economy.
[571] And so because of the softness in Biden's base in the center of his base and the more moderate Democrats who are working people, who are paying more for gas, who are.
[572] are getting hit with inflation, it's important not to pretend that those people are having a great life right now.
[573] They're having a tough time.
[574] This is not easy for them right now.
[575] And so I think that he has to continue to be cautious about it.
[576] He's just to continue to be like, we're making progress, we're doing good work, we're helping you.
[577] But it's not sunshine and roses and puppies and kittens right now.
[578] It's still a long road.
[579] We're going to see in the next week, Trump's going to be found guilty, I think.
[580] And I think we're going to see a group of people that have embarrassed me as a former Republican watching these idiots wear the same outfit, where the white shirt, red tie, blue suit uniform going to New York to crawl across broken glass to kiss Trump's ass.
[581] I think we're going to see that going into overdrive.
[582] These people are the cultishness of it and the political ambition of it is staggering.
[583] I find it so offensive that people who are supposedly representing their states and their districts, don't give a shit about what they do for their people.
[584] They care about Trump.
[585] That's it.
[586] The fucking outfits.
[587] The little mini trumps.
[588] It's so weird.
[589] Why don't you guys all just wear fucking jumpsuits now, you know, with logos on them, make wonder bread.
[590] So weird.
[591] Rick Wilson, co -founder of the Lincoln Project, host of the enemies list.
[592] He writes Rick Wilson's substack.
[593] Maybe my future landlord, depending on how things go.
[594] Thanks, thanks for coming back to the Bullwark podcast.
[595] We'll see you again soon, brother.
[596] Anytime, Tim.
[597] Thanks for having me. All right, guys.
[598] We're going to be back here tomorrow with an update from the trial and a special guest.
[599] We'll see you all then.
[600] Peace.
[601] I was up in the morning with the TV blurring, brush my teeth, sitting watching the news.
[602] All the beaches were closed.
[603] The ocean was a red sea, but there was no one they departed into.
[604] There was no fresh salad caused as hypers in the cab.
[605] Staten Island disappeared at noon.
[606] And they say the Midwest is in great distress, and NASA blew up the moon.
[607] The ozone layer has no ozone anymore And you're gonna leave me for the guy next store I'm sick of you I'm sick of you They arrested the mayor for an illegal favor So the empire stayed to Japan And Oliver North married William Cork and gave birth to a little Tehran And the Ayatollah bought a nuclear warship If he dies and wants to go out in style And there's nothing to eat that don't carry the stink of some Some Humweys dumped in the Nile.
[608] Well, one thing is certainly true.
[609] No one here knows what to do.
[610] And I'm sick of you.
[611] I'm sick of you.
[612] The radio said there were 400 dead in some small town in Arkansas.
[613] Some whacked -out trucker drove into a nuclear reactor, killed everybody he saw.
[614] Now he's on Morton Darnie, and he's glowing and shiny.
[615] Dr. Say this is a medical advance.
[616] They say the bed makes the good, there's something to be learned in every human experience.
[617] Well, I know one thing that really is true.
[618] This here's a zoo, and the keeper ain't you, and I'm sick of it.
[619] I'm sick of you.
[620] They ordained the trumps, and then he got the mumps.
[621] He died being treated at Mount Sinai.
[622] And my best friend Bill died from a poison pill some why a doctor prescribed for stress.
[623] My arms and legs are shrunk.
[624] The food oil has lumps.
[625] They discovered some animal no one's ever seen.
[626] It was an inside trader eating a rubber tire after running over Rudy Giuliani.
[627] They say the president's dead.
[628] No one can find his head.
[629] It's been missing now for weeks.
[630] But no one noticed it.
[631] He had seemed so fit.
[632] I'm sick of it.
[633] I'm sick of you.
[634] I'm so sick of you.
[635] Bye, bye, bye.
[636] The Bullock podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason out.