Bulwark Takes - JD Vance’s Shutdown Talking Point Is a SHAM

Episode Date: September 30, 2025

Tim Miller and Will Saletan take on JD Vance’s weekend press tour of BS, as he lies about the shutdown being about undocumented immigrants’ healthcare and the motivations behind the Comey indictment.

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You take the first leap and RBC can help with the firsts that follow. Like registering your business starting at $49 with owner and opening your first RBC business account starting at just $6 a month. Visit RBC.com forward slash your business to learn more. Hey, everybody. Tim Moe from the Bullwark here. My colleague Will Salatan wanted to do a video on J.D. Vance's lies. And obviously that tickled my pickle. That's a favorite topic of mine, J.D. Vance's lies. And we listed out a few of them from over the weekend. And before we get to those, Will, the one that I just can't get over is, because it continues to be something these guys advance is his lie in the wake of the Charlie Kirk assassination about what motivated. that shooter and we can just play a little clip from it here we're talking about having law enforcement go after the people who engage in and fund literal violence and they're saying somehow that's beyond the pale even though we know joe biden's FBI was investigating charlie kirk maybe they should

have been investigating the networks that motivated inspired and maybe even funded charlie kirk's murder if they had charlie kirk might be alive today this is him saying that like that this person that Tower Robinson might have been funded by the left. The degree to which the vice president has gone overboard in trying to act like any of these shootings that have come from a perpetrator from the left might be part of some broader scheme. Well, meanwhile, there are a couple of shootings over the weekend that potentially it seems like the perpetrator might have come for the right. He doesn't talk about those at all. That's the most maddening for me of his lies. I haven't had a chance to talk to you about that, but I'm wondering what you, what you think.

Yeah, I mean, I think it reflects the basic opportunism of the Trump administration. I mean, okay, it's a totally human reaction to say a friend of ours was murdered in cold blood. You know, this shooter should be fully prosecuted. But to then try to pull threads on that to implicate like organizations that have nothing to do with violence. That tells me they don't really care. I mean, I don't want to say they don't care about Charlie Kirk. They do. But they're using it.

They're seizing on it as an opportunity to try to implicate some broader. network and basically people who are just speaking out against the administration who they trump and bans can then accuse of instigating violence yeah it's pretty sick really honestly and it's funny because it's kind of the inverse of the Kimmel stuff and one of the clips she said which we've talked about a lot here which we just run through really quick is in the clip over on on Ingram last week where he talks about how Brendan Carr didn't do anything right like that like no matter what these guys just cannot just accept what the reality is of the situation.

And he does it in such a smarmy manner. Right. So he's like simultaneously, he's falsely implicating innocent people on the left in somehow supporting or inciting violence and being literally involved with the shooter of Charlie Kirk, right? And then on the other side,

you have this very explicit action by Brendan Carr saying we can do this the easy way or the hard way. And then literally, what is it, hours later, ABC pulls Kimmel off the air, right? And somehow that obvious connection, Vance just denies it. Let's go to the weekend of lies from JD, because this is stuff we haven't covered. He was on Fox News Sunday yesterday. And let's play the clip where he's talking about the indictment of James Comey. There were three requested indictments. The grand jury returned two of those three indictments. So I think they showed they were judicious. What do you think? Will, do you

think that they were the department of justice was judicious in this in this indictment i mean tim this is just the most egregious bullshit from vance it's judicious because they failed to get the indictment so so first of all he's bragging about failing on one of the counts when he says that they didn't that they didn't get approved some of them they didn't get two out of three he says they got two they got one out of two just so everybody's clear about this indictment the third count is this obstruction of justice count that just piggyback on whatever perjury count. So they had two perjury counts.

The grand jury rejected one of them. And the other one, they got 14 out of 23 grand jurors. And just so everybody's clear about how a grand jury works, there is no defense. The prosecutors come in with whatever evidence they have, and they don't even have to meet, of course, the Beyond a Reasonable Doubt standard. And it's like, Tim, it's like in soccer, you know,

shooting on a penalty kick with a goalie. Well, what happens if you take the goalie? goalie away. That's what they missed here. They had no goalie and they couldn't put the ball in the net. So the whole thing is a total embarrassment. They should never have brought the case. You never bring a case if you don't think you can get the grand jury to approve it. And they obviously failed. Also, by Vance's definition of judicious, if they had brought 10 bogus counts, they'd thrown the whole kitchen sink at Comey and the grand jury approves one, does that make it more judicious? I mean, his whole logic is nuts.

Yeah, I'd also throw out there. Also, it doesn't seem very judicious to run out the prosecutor who made a, you might say, judicious judgment that this was not worth prosecuting. You run that person out, replace them with a hack, and then get this result. I think that adds to just the ridiculousness of what they're putting forth. Okay, one more clip on Comey. This one is just, this smarmy fucker. I just, sometimes I can't. I just can't.

He's just so unappealing. Let's listen to him talking about the motivations behind the indictment. The idea that this is driven by politics, I think it's preposterous when you actually read the details of the indictment and the obvious fact that James Comey did lie under oath to Congress multiple times. Proposterous, Salatin, preposterous to suggest this might be politics. Yeah, it's preposterous, he says, when you read the details of the indictment. Tim, have you ever seen less of an indictment? I mean, the, let me, let me just pull it up for you. I've seen longer tweets from J.D. Vance than that indictment.

He writes those long tweets now. This is, this is the indictment, okay? It's like, there's nothing here. It doesn't tell you anything. Like, the indictment literally says the one count that they got him, right? That Comey was falsely stating to a U.S. Senator that he had not authorized someone else at the FBI to be an anonymous source in news reports regarding an FBI investigation concerning person one. okay, they don't explain who person one is. Not only do they not explain that, legal analysts who are steeped in all of these cases cannot figure out who person one is. There's one theory that it's about the Russia investigation. There's another theory that I think is true, that it's about the Clinton Foundation investigation, right? So nobody can even tell what the context of it is. So there's no evidence presented in this. Remember the Trump indictments, the Jack Smith indictments? There's the, uh, there's the, uh, it's, uh,

false electors one. Yeah, the classified records one. Tim, we read those. That's like 40, 50 pages of details. Like you can see. I think on this page, we did like an AI reading of one of them, and it took 48 minutes or something. It was an extremely dense document with a lot of particulars. Yeah, I mean, so all the evidence is in there. So for J.D. Vance to say that the details of this indictment show how damning it is. I mean, it's like, Tim, did he read it? I mean, it would have taken him 10 seconds. I guess I would add on top of that, the idea that this is driven by politics, I think, is preposterous. Donald Trump just says it's driven by politics. I mean, like, his boss just posts all the time that he wants to go after his political enemies.

And he wants to go after the Democrats. And the Democrats are evil. And they deserve it because they came after him. I mean, it's not even subtext. So it's like you're just straight lying to our face. It's like, Donald Trump is like, yes, this is politics. And J.D. Vance says, I think it's preponder. to suggest this politics. And somebody, the only silver lining for this to me is, like,

it is hard to imagine J.D. as the heir apparent to all this when it's like, I kind of think that Trump-based, the Fox viewers want him to go out there and just say, hell yeah, it was revenge like Trump does. I mean, like this, does anybody like this obviously BS, smarmy nonsense? I mean, I don't know. There's something just, it's just so fake, like his name. But don't you think that's part of Vance's job in this administration? Like Trump, It just goes off the wall and he says, you know, he just says the quiet part out loud. And people think it's somewhat endearing that he, you know, comes out and says, yeah, I'm doing this out of revenge, whatever my bad motives are. And Vance's job is to be the conventional politician and just pretend that none of that is there to be slick and smooth.

And look you right in the eye and lie to you about this obvious fact that his boss is out there calling for revenge against his enemies and that this prosecution is part of it. it. One more. This was from Friday night, but I don't think we've covered it on the page. I think it's worth watching. This is about JD's spin on the government shutdown, which we're coming up on here in the next day or two. Let's watch together J.D. on Laura Ingram. The Democrats, their whole argument is we are going to shut down the government unless you give a trillion dollars for medical benefits for illegal aliens. The major health care reform that we've done in this administration is we've made it harder to give your hard-earned tax dollars to medical benefits for illegal aliens. The Democrats want to undo that. And they're saying that unless you give that money to those

illegal aliens, unless you give those benefits to those illegal aliens, we are going to shut down the people's government. Illegal aliens, illegal aliens, legal aliens, legal aliens. Is that even the Democrats point? It's just, it is, it's just so fucking over the top. Anyway, go, go ahead, well. Yeah, yeah. Okay. So you heard four, four times in that, whatever it was, 15, 20 seconds. He says illegal aliens. And just in case you weren't sure, in that, about a two minutes of that interview, he says it eight times. For illegal aliens, for illegal aliens, for illegal aliens, illegal aliens, legal aliens, legal aliens. And then on Fox News Sunday, he said it three more times.

So just like, it's pretty obvious what the talking point is, right? They're doing this for the illegal aliens. So first of all, there were zero Democrats out there saying anything like we're shutting down the government or we're holding the ground on this continuing resolution. so that we can fund health care for undocumented immigrants. Nobody is saying that, right? Just like the most obvious thing. What they're doing is they're saying they want to fund health care in general. So how much of the health care subsidies?

In particular, like the specific issue. They're talking broader up Medicaid and all the other stuff, but like really the sticking point that keep bringing up is this extension of the Obamacare subsidies. Right, right. So the Obamacare subsidies, Medicaid funding, they want to restore some of the health money that the Republicans have cut. So how much of this money actually goes to undocumented immigrants?

Our colleague, Jonathan Cohn, did some looked into this. The most you could construe goes specifically to that group is about $28 billion that that goes to a program to compensate states for uncompensated care, some of which could go to undocumented immigrants, right? Like that's the outside. So Vance is saying a trillion dollars. there's no way you can get to a trillion from 28 billion honestly. So what is Vance really saying?

What Vance is really saying here is anytime you are funding Medicaid or Obamacare subsidies, whatever it is, that goes to people, some of it will go to undocumented immigrants, even though that is against the law, it may end up in somebody's pocket. And that therefore, all of it, all the Democrats are trying to do, is support illegal. So crack me if I'm wrong, Tim, isn't this? an argument that any health care funding at all, because theoretically, even if illegally, it could end up in the hands of illegal immigrants, we shouldn't have any of it because they shouldn't have any of it. Yeah, they are saying that because they want people's hard-earned

tax dollars instead to go to more massed ice agents and to bail out the farmers who have rotting soybeans because their tariffs won't let us trade overseas. That's what your hard-earned tax dollars should go to, according to J.D. Vance. Yeah, no, the whole thing is galling, you know, that he's able to sort of go out there and get away with all of this. I mean, it's also interesting, I think, a note where you know,

about what you say his role is in the administration, sort of whatever mansplain, V's plain Trump's craziness is like, left to his own devices, I mean, J.D. was trying to position himself in kind of the holly camp as more of a populist MAGA, right?

Somebody that was like, you know, we should actually do Medicaid. We should do health care for our people, right? And he's had to get rid of that talking point in order to align himself with Trump's actual policies. And so I think that's going to, that is at least noteworthy, I guess, while we're being outraged. Do you think they're going to get away with it?

Do you think that if we go into this shutdown and the Republican line is Democrats, all the money that Democrats want to restore for Medicaid or for Obamacare is for illegal immigrants? Do you think that line will play? I mean, it might work with them for Fox viewers. You know, and I think part of that is like giving something to your own people, like giving your people a talking point that they can work with. You know, I think the question, the real question here is in the real world, like outside of the pundit world where we inhabit will. Some people are going to, their healthcare premiums are going to go up this fall. It's already happening, right, in places. And so the question there is, are Democrats able to message clearly enough that this is the results of their bill?

this is the Donald Trump policy, like that's why your health care is going up. If so, then I think that maybe they won't get away with it, at least with some people, right? Because some people will suffer real ramifications. That's a big if, though. It's a big if about whether the Democrats can successfully get that message out there. And I think, but I think that's at least what they're trying to do if you look at what their strategy is around the shutdown. I'm trying to think everything that the Trump administration has done so far aimed at illegal or undocumented immigrants has been particular to them. You can isolate it from ordinary people. But if you're going, if in the name of depriving illegal immigrants of

health care, you're depriving citizens of health care, I think people are just going to feel that. It's going to be too real for the Republicans to overcome. We did this at the live show in Toronto. Well, we discussed, I discussed why J.D. Vance was my least favorite person in public life ever in history. And I did a very deep thought, think about this. Like I went back through. like old sports rivals, you know, teachers I didn't like, bullies on the playground, campaigns that I ran against other candidates. And I can't find a single person that I find more detestable than J.D. Vance. I'm wondering where he is on your scale.

And who rankles you the most? Yeah, I mean, for me, it's hard to get anybody past Donald Trump. Yeah, sure. I know. And that shows credit to J.D. high bar that he got past Donald Trump for me, because Trump was obviously very high on my rankle scale for a long time. So you'll appreciate this as an old Reagan Republican. My dad and I used to have the show.

I mean, I was a baby. We should just say, for the record, I was, no, I was a fan of the Reagan mystique, but I don't know if I would qualify as a Reagan Republican in kindergarten. I don't know if my dad, my dad's a term that allows you to put a button on me. Okay. So my dad and I used to have this argument. We were Democrats and we had this argument about Reagan or Bush, Bush the first, which one we hated more. And my dad said Reagan and I said Bush. And my argument was, and now I think George H.W. Bush is like the greatest thing ever

because I've seen what came after him in the Republican Party. But at the time, my argument was he knows better. Reagan doesn't know better and Bush does. So I would say because I believe Donald Trump is delusional and because I believe J.D. Vance knows everything about what he's saying. He understands his lies in a way that Trump doesn't understand his own because Trump's a bullshitter. I think Vance is worse.

there we go we got it that's will salatin uh with jd vance's lies for you thanks for doing this with me