Bulwark Takes - 62% Say Trump is Using the Presidency for Cash

Episode Date: February 28, 2026

Tim Miller joins Nicolle Wallace to discuss a stunning new reality: Americans are leaving the country at record levels, the U.S. may be facing population decline, and Trump’s “golden age” looks more like national humiliation. From the Qatari jet embarrassment to foreign-backed media consolidation and escalating tensions with Iran, the conversation covers how corruption, chaos, and bad optics are colliding. Plus: brutal new polling that shows majorities questioning Trump’s honesty, competence, and abuse of power.Watch Deadline: White House on MS NOW: https://www.ms.now/deadline-white-house

Hey, everybody, Tim Miller from the Bullwork. I was on with my friend Nicole Wallace for a full hour, as is her want to keep me around as much as possible. We love our FaceTime together. Our friend David Frum popped on at the end. We talked about a bunch of stuff. We talked about the drums of war in Iran and some New York Times reporting on that. We talked about this Allison Deal. And we talked about Donald Trump's poll numbers.

Nicole cut me out of a question of. about a story about how so many people, citizens are leaving the country right now. So I want to talk about that with you and tie it a little bit into the conversation about the acquisition of Warner Brothers Discovery, which has CNN. So this migration story, it talked about how there is a greater percentage of people who have left the country, a percentage of people who say they'd like to leave the country. For some of them, it is Trump. For some, it's crime, for some of its affordability, for some its lifestyle. but like way more than even during the Great Recession,

Americans are leaving and Wattoleaf. On top of that, Donald Trump's policies are preventing people from coming in and encouraging people to self-deport and then actively deporting others. Here's the result. The final numbers aren't in, but it seems almost certain that in 2025, we lost population in America. And I think David Trump suggested this on MSNBC. I think for the first time ever.

MS now, excuse me. David Frum suggested that this has never happened that America's population declined in a year. I don't know. Maybe go back to like the flu and the World War I. But I don't think so. But it's an interesting homework project for somebody. Maybe when you can look into that and tell me in the comments.

But like that is a very, very bad place to be. That as a result of Donald Trump's behavior and his policies, more people are leaving America than coming. And if you don't believe that it's a bad place to be, if you're interested in this idea of wooden soil nationalism and keeping people in the country, we want a smaller, more contiguous, socially coherent group, the JD Vance view, wider country.

Here's some of the countries that, I pulled this up during a commercial break, didn't get to use it. Here's some of the countries that have a negative net migration rate. This is from the year 2023. Most negative net migration, Syria. Syria, obviously, it was war-torn then. Number two, Ukraine, also war-torn.

Sudan war-torn. Venezuela, war-torn. Those are, those are the top countries for negative net migration. If you look at the total negative migration, you got Pakistan against Sudan, Bangladesh, Turkey, Ukraine, again, Brazil, Philippines, Greece. I mean, like, is this, this is the list we want to be on? These are the countries we're trying to emulate. When you think about success, when you think about creating a golden age, you want to be one of the countries that people are leaving. You want to be on the list with the countries that people are fleeing because of war or genocide?

Because that's us right now. So that's something to sit with. And it speaks to this broader. I talk about this in a cult. You'll hear more about it here. But like, I'm working through this in real time. I think this is a potent message for Democrats. is America is so weak right now.

I think about this. Donald Trump has to beg Cutter to give them their backup plane. We can't make our own plane. We can't make our own presidential plane. David Ellison, Nepo baby David Ellison, had to ask the cutteries and the Saudis and the UAE to help him finance the debt on his new toy at CNN. The Trump family is doing business.

is getting their pockets lined by the UAE and Cutter. Like, why are we Cutters bitch? Like, is that how we make America's great again being Cutters bitch? Because it seems like that's what we are. It seems like America cannot, you know, fund itself. Like, we cannot provide a president with a plane made in America. like we need to borrow a used one. Like what?

Why are we borrowing a used jalopy plane from the cutaries? Why does the person that has been handpicked to take over some of our famous movie studios and our most notable news brand? Why are they so laden with debt that they need an assist from, Abu Dhabi. It's just a sign of utter and unbelievable weakness that our country, like the people in our country are fleeing

and the leaders of our country need to like take out an IOU from the Sharia law oil dictators in the Middle East. Seems bad. Seems bad. And it doesn't seem like it's making America great again. It doesn't seem like we're in a golden age.

It just feels like we're Cutters, bitch. Cutter's like the size of what. It's got to even size of New Jersey. I'll look into that. You might be hearing this rant again, so I'll get that prepared for the next one. Everybody, stick around for Nicole Wallace, me, David from. Tim Miller, your thoughts on where this stands this afternoon.

Yeah, we could do about an hour on this, Nicole. There's so many kind of layers. We have the time. Let's do it. Because, you know, I think the initial reaction everybody has is right, which is I think that we have concerns about consolidation of media corporation in the hands of Trump's allies, right? And what that means for CNN, that matters to a lot of people.

I feel pretty happy if the bulwark is independent. It's not going to matter that much to me. And I think we should talk about it that matters. But there are elements of like the corruption of this deal that, you know, I think I kind of get lost a little bit in this that I just want to talk about. I mean, for starters, this is like, this is not, I think it was Oliver said this is not how things work in a functioning democracy. This isn't how things work in a functioning capitalist system either.

Like, this isn't really capitalism. Right. It's an oligarchy. Right. Yeah. Mortimerbillus discovery has a ton of debt, a massive amount of debt. And, you know, the, and more debt than, like, Paramount has in money. So how is Paramount buying this?

Right. Like, Netflix has enough money to buy this. Like, how is Paramount buying it? Well, they're debt financing it from the dad of the Nepo baby, Larry Ellson, the friend of Trump, one of the richest guys in the world. And from a bunch of four. foreign countries, Qatar, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia. So it's a bunch of foreign entities and Trump's oligarch buddy that are debt financing this company because they want to control the media outlet.

Like that is, that's what is happening here, right? Like, it is not as, you know, it's not as if, oh, Trump just put his thumb on the scale, you know, in kind of an even Steven situation because he liked one owner better than the other. That would be bad, you know, that would be a banana republic type situation. But it's like it's far worse than that, the scale of it. And then you lay in like the free speech side of this. That, that how are you going to act if you're a board member of some other multinational who might have issues before the government over the next year or two after you just watched what happened this week where Susan Rice like talks on a podcast and the next thing you know, the president of the United States threatening her to get fired and, you know, helping usher in their competitor, you know, to get a business with the help of the Saudis and the Qataris. I think it would be rational for a lot of people who are in business to decide they don't want to.

They won't. They're not going to speak out about stuff. So like we, you know, as a result of this deal, like there's some real issues down the road to CNN that folks can, we'll see how that plays out. But like already right now immediately, it's a chilling of free speech. And there's even more power put into the hands of both Trump's buddies and these foreign entities that he's doing these crypto deals and these other deals with. It's crazy. Why is America the junior partner now under Trump to Cutter and to the UAE? Why do we need Qatar and the UAE to bail out American companies and the president's family? Like, that's the situation that we're in right now. And it's not a pretty one.

Yeah, I mean, Tim, your point about independent media is so right. I mean, I don't think that the cable channels really compete with one another. This one at least competes with you and competes with. PODSAVE America and competes with Oliver Darcy because that's where the trust is. And if you look at the bet that Roger Ailes made all those years ago, his bet was that a big chunk of the country didn't trust establishment media. With Donald Trump at 34 to 36 percent of the polls, you've got 65 to 66 percent of the country that doesn't trust the establishment.

You know who's reeks of establishment? Donald Trump, Larry Ellison, his Nepo baby David Ellison and his baby media mogul, Barry Weiss, and the man baby they're trying to keep happy, Donald Trump. I mean, that is now a massive media empire catering to a shrinking number of Americans. And yes, they have reach. They have reach. But content is not something, it's like the dog food that you can't make a dog eat. If people aren't buying it, the opportunity for independent media and others to appeal to 65% of the country is a massive business opportunity.

It's a business opportunity that paid off for Roger Ales. And you can say a lot negative about Roger Ales, but he, like, correctly identified that there was a lack of trust and there was a little bit of atrophying in the mainstream media when he started Fox. And he also correctly identified the value of propaganda. So you've got to keep that in mind, too. But, like, it worked, right? And so the audience is going to go to news outlets that they feel that they can trust. And I don't think that there's actually a huge news audience for, like, soft mega or whatever. You know, they think corporate mega.

I think that that's a pretty small niche of people that like corporate MAGA, David Ellison and Larry Ellison are in that group and, you know, a handful of rich Trump supporters. But I don't know how well that's going to do business-wise. We'll kind of see how that all plays out, at least in the news area. That's what I think the area to be concerned about. I feel bad for CNN and Washington Post and all these other outlets that are being just torn apart for no reason because, you know, of the aspirations of some of the richest people.

of the world. Like, that sucks. But for all of us, like, most people can, if they don't watch Washington Post, they can come to us, so they can go to whoever, right? They can go listen to, there are a lot of outlets nowadays. But I worry about it is the algorithms, right? Because these same people are, you know, now control the TikTok algorithm, the Allison's, right? And you don't have as much choice there, right? Like, most people consume TikTok, they're being fed stuff. It's on what's called the For You page, right? So they're just scrolling and the algorithms telling them what they see, right? That worries me. Obviously, X is owned by Elon Musk. Meta is owned by Mark Zuckerberg,

is maybe a little more malleable than Ruskin, Muskin, Ellison, but even still, that's Instagram, right? That is what worries me, right? That it's like there was a shrinking number of people who go to trusted news sources and an increasing number of people who are getting propagandized on their phones. And I think if I was the Democrats

and Chris Murphy next time, I'd focus much more on that and what kind of rules can be made around that, focusing on TikTok and these other social media networks than the media's consolidation. Tim Miller, I don't love giving maggot intellectual consistency points, but I will on the issue of non-interventionalism. The heat behind Donald Trump's candidacy in 2015,

where he defeated, among others, your old boss, Jeb Bush, was around this promise to focus all of his energy and all of our money here at home. This, I think, would be the third or fourth military operation of his presidency in month, I don't know, it feels like month 37, I think it's month 13.

Your thoughts on the sort of political pressures on Donald Trump? I think this is crazy. I truly don't understand what he's doing for the reason that you just laid out, Nicole, and it's a direct affront to his base and the message he offered and his mandate, such as there is one from his election. Look, I mean, we know on its face

that their stated rationale for going into Iran is a lie. So that's business as usual from these guys. But obviously they're not weeks away from a nuclear bomb. As we just heard, it's not, we don't have an imminent threat to our country from long-range missiles. So, like, that is not what we're going. So then the question becomes like, why are we? And some people say, well, it's a distraction thing. It's a wag the dog.

It's distracting from Epstein. This would literally be the stupidest thing you could possibly do in a real war. or a hot war with Iran to distract from Epstein. I mean, there are a million things he could do to distract. And this seems like one that risks sinking his whole presidency and consuming his whole presidency. So I don't think it's that. I mentioned the last segment. He's in a lot of business with the Arab states.

So I don't know. Maybe there's something happening behind the scenes we don't know with the cutaries of the UAE or Saudi. They seem to be walking us around the block quite a bit lately. Two sources told Politico this week and said the administration that they wanted Israel to attack to attack and the hopes that Iran would counterattack and the hopes that that would provide rationale for getting into to the war. Again, like, I find that just as a political matter crazy. I don't think that nobody in the country, nobody in MAGA wants to go to war for Israel.

Like, that's not nobody, but a very small percentage of MAGA. So it doesn't make sense to me on any level. And I think all of the explanations they give publicly are just are clearly false. And the things that people impute on them seem to me to be very strategically stupid if that's what they're really thinking. Tim, do you believe Trump is honest and trustworthy? America? No, 70% of us. Is he mentally sharp enough to serve as president?

This is even a question asked about Trump to me feels like half the story. 56% of Americans, no. Is Donald Trump committed to protecting Americans' rights and freedoms? 56% of Americans underwater 13 points. Do you think Trump is using the presidency to enrich himself? 62 percent, yes, what gave it away? The Qatari jet, has Trump exceeded his authority as president? 65 percent, yes.

These are extraordinary numbers, but even more extraordinary are the questions. The narrative around Trump's presidency, the questions, the questions answer, is he grifting in and of themselves? It's just an epic failure of morality and leadership. And I wonder what you make of sort of the slow pace of realizing just how bad it is. Yeah, the insider of the questions is right, you know, because if you go back, well, you know, I don't know, to do this in 1991, you know, and you're asking some of those questions about George H.W. Bush, like, is he grifting? Is he stealing? You know, is he mentally competent? You know, and these are 90-10 questions, right? even people that didn't vote for him that like Bill Clinton or Michael DeCoccus or that. You know, I never assume that.

So the fact that it's being asked is a big change and I think is noteworthy about just how dire the state of affairs is. The other side of that coin is, look, some of those numbers, you know, 43% don't think that he is infringing on people's rights and 43% think he is, you know, capable to be president. Those are still just a little bit too high for where we need them to be to make it. to make it too big to steal in November. And I think that is the big task for Democrats and for, you know, folks, anybody in the pro-democracy coalition over the next few months,

Trump's doing the job for us himself a lot to drive his numbers down. But, you know, if you look at that, that's, to me, says that the Democrats are on track for winning the House, but maybe not the Senate in November. And so I think there's more work to be done. Well, interestingly, interesting. on the question as he exceeded his authority as president, he drops 10 points and is down to 33%. So since stealing the election is a clear example

of exceeding his authority as president, if that's the path he chooses, he loses 10% of that 43% that still thinks he's sharp as attack.