Bulwark Takes - Republicans Just Bucked Trump by Accident...and Nothing Happened

Episode Date: July 11, 2026

Tim Miller joined the Deadline: White House panel to discuss Trump’s failed attempt to stop the bipartisan housing bill, the Republican cowardice it exposed, Trump's Qatar jet fiasco, and Graham Platner’s withdrawal from the Maine Senate race.Watch Deadline White House on MS NOW: https://www.ms.now/deadline-white-house

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Hey, y'all. It's Tim Miller from the Bullwork. It did a little end of the week wrap up over on Deadline, White House, the big panel. We're coming up on the midnight deadline for this housing bill to go into effect over Donald Trump's tantrum objection. So we talk a lot about that. We talk a bit about kind of the Democrats in response to all this, what some good messaging is, some good strategy is. I was on air as Graham Platner officially. filed the paperwork to drop out of the race. So we respond to that. Just kind of putting a little bow on the week for you all. So it's me and a whole cast of characters over there on Deadline White House. Stick around for that. Subscribe to the feed here.

We really appreciate you. We're getting into the dog days of summer. And I know that, you know, you've got other choices out there on YouTube. You can be watching muckbang. You know, can be watching World Cup highlights. But you're right here.

And we appreciate that. So tell your friends. Comment, like, subscribe. I'll tell you this. Here's a little funny one for you. Is this concerning? I might get a bad parenting slap on the wrist just for this. Me and my daughter were playing imagination the other day.

And she was a character and I was a character. And then, you know, we're both different animals. Her animal became a influencer of some kind or a YouTube creature. and so I'm going along with the plot, and then she does like and subscribe. So I don't know if I'm letting her watch too much YouTube or if she's spending too much time listening to my bullshit, but that tickled me.

So we'll leave you with that for the weekend. Stick around for me in the Deadline White House group. Let's talk about Hakeem Jeffries' take on what's going on here. He posted on X, Republicans would rather make it harder to vote than easier to afford a home. When people show you who they are, believe them. Is this the right message from Democrats on this eve of the housing bill going into effect? I think it's related to the right message. I'm not going to nitpick every tweet, Hakeem Jeffrey's fans. I don't know. I mean, there's some of that hit a little harder than others. But I think it's important just to

kind of keep the pressure on Trump. I think that the Democrats, for me, I think that the best message they have Kind of is this umbrella message about what we were talking about at the beginning of this segment, which is Donald Trump like caring more about his house than theirs and kind of tying corruption to, you know, the economic struggles that regular people are facing. And Donald Trump's made that very easy for them because he says over and over again that he's bored by the housing question. And he has obviously, I think it's obvious to anyone paying attention that his focus is on the remodeling of the White House. and, you know, the Kennedy Center and the marble armrests, and, like, this is what he cares about. He doesn't care about making things more affordable for people. He calls that a hoax the idea that affordability is an issue. So I just think if the Democrats can kind of have a two birds with one stone thing here where they can go after him on his corruption.

And also just talk about how that money that he's wasting and using in D.C. is, like, not going to help their lives. Like, they're not getting a new, you know, a new room. in their school or a new room in their hospital, Trump's getting a new room at the White House. And I think that's the right message for them. The other funny thing about this for the Democrats, Jack, I know, you talked a lot of, you know,

and you're reporting the Republicans, you know, the my old people, the more mainstream kind of the old guard Republicans. And oftentimes over the years, they've said, hey, we can't buck Trump on this stuff. We can't vote against tariffs. We can't vote for Ukraine funding because Trump's too

powerful. You know, we don't want to lose our seat. Like, it's a political imperative that you stick around Trump because Trump's so powerful. I found it very funny and ironic that by accident on this housing bill, they bucked Trump because they didn't know that he was going to have this temper tantrum over the SAVE Act. And look at what happened. This thing is going to go into effect at midnight because Trump's not going to veto it. There's a bipartisan veto-proof majority. All Trump's going to do is whine about it on social media. None of these Republicans are going to lose their jobs over it. We've spent 10 years being told that they can't have a backbone. They can't demonstrate any

courage because they're worried that they'll lose their seat if they do. And here we see on the housing bill that actually this whole time they could have. Like Trump's not as strong as they think. Well, back to this idea that you just more eloquently said Tim of the president caring about his house than really anything else right here. You brought up him. You made a very good point about him nitpicking at other costs. And that is the message that I am hearing from my Democratic sources, right? That this is an administration. This is a party that now haggles over $8 billion for renewing food stamps,

would rather have people go hungry, but continues to enable a president who has been able to circumvent Congress in order to spend not quite $8 billion on these renovations, but a pretty large figure on the vanity projects. Why is there such an acceptance of this kind of messaging and behavior? Yeah. Well, it's not too different than how the Tea Party's been acting for a long time, right? I'm the Tea Party, you know, kind of rationale in Congress fighting, you know, kind of that wing, fighting, you know, within the House Republican caucus was always trying to, you know, kind of cut, relatively speaking,

to the sizes of the budget, like small programs, you know, in the name of, you know, alleged fiscal responsibility, but not doing anything to stand up to, you know, Donald Trump's through two terms now, profligate spending and its tax cuts. And so, you know, this is kind of of a piece of how these Republicans have been acting for 10 years now. But like, I mean, a prime example of this is you look at what was that last shutdown fight over? I know it's kind of hard to remember because so much happens, but it was over the extension of the Obamacare subsidies. And And that affects real people, you know, the amount of the cost that people are paying, you know, in their premiums. And the Republicans and Donald Trump did not want to give people relief on their health care premiums and extend these subsidies.

And like the line item on that was nothing compared to how much we're spending on the Iran war, compared to what we're spending on a lot of other Donald Trump's other more selfish and corrupt priorities. And so I think that they're giving Democrats a big, you know, kind of political opportunity with that. contrast if they can take it. Air Force One, the gift that was presented to the president by Cutter, which I feel like is pretty emblematic of so many things that we have seen with this administration. A very dubious decision and very expedited, done in a very expedited way that obviously comes up short the way so many other of his vanity projects and policies have ended. Tim, why do you think that the president decided not to fly back on the new Air Force One?

Do you buy that the White House's pushback, that it was because they wanted soldiers in Europe to be able to view this gift from Qatar? Or do you believe the New York Times reporting that the new Air Force One lacks the same defensive countermeasures that were security features of the old model, including its advanced anti-missile capabilities? This is according to multiple officials who have been briefed on how the jet was retrofitted, and that Mr. Trump had pushed for the new plane to be put into use as quickly as possible and complained that the old presidential aircraft was not impressive enough to take on international trips. Yeah, there is a lot here, Jackie, because it does kind of wrap up a lot of the themes of Trump. He's obviously lying. I mean, it's insulting, lie, frankly, because he was bragging about how much he wanted to,

how he liked flying on that jet because it was more luxurious or whatever. Like the idea that he would not want to ride it back because he wanted to show it off to, like it just doesn't even make any sense. Obviously, I trust the experts of people who are reporting on this that it just was not safe and that it didn't deem it safe to fly out of Ankara, in part because it's so close to Iran because he started a stupid war in Iran. So, I mean, this does tie exactly to that. And the other thing about this plane, you know, sometimes I like to put my former Republican

hat on and think about like how Fox would be covering this if this was a Democratic president or how Republican politicians would talk about this. And I also just think it's extremely humiliating for Donald Trump. And we had to take a hand-me-down plane from Qatar, from the Sharia law dictators in Qatar. That's what we're doing. That's where America is right now. And it's a pretty good encapsulation of American decline. And I think that sometimes maybe that is more effective kind of message and talking about Trump because everything else, you know, all the details of his corruption get kind of complicated. But like the fact that that we, the taxpayers, had to pay half a trillion dollars to fund his hand-me-down plane is pretty

embarrassing and humiliating, I think, for the country. Do have some breaking news, though. We've been waiting for this, and now we can report that Graham Platner has officially withdrawn from this Maine Senate race. The Office of Maine, Secretary of State, said it that received Platner's formal withdrawal removing him from the ballot following sexual assault allegations that surfaced earlier this week. He had until Monday to get out of the race so that Democrats can pick a replacement. And as of this morning, we had reported that Platner was going to wait until the bitter end until Monday to actually drop out formally and wait until again the bitter end. But Tim, what's your reaction to this news?

And do you think that Democrats have made a mistake by not rallying around Platner? Yeah, I mean, we could do hours on the Graham Platner drama, and I've done that basically over on the board YouTube page. So to sum it up, I don't think that the Democrats have made a mistake. I mean, I think that the accusations against him are very serious. I think if they weren't true, he'd have the opportunity to defend himself vigorously and run a campaign. And he decided not to do that. People can take that fact for what it is. By the way, I think the Republicans were holding a lot of opposition research on Grand Platner.

I've seen some grandparent supporters say this is like convenient timing or whatever. I think it's very inconvenient timing for the Republicans who wanted this deadline to pass before they put out more information about him. I don't know what that would have been. But I think that he was a very risky bet for Democrats in a state they absolutely have to win. And all of the big Senate races this year, North Carolina, Iowa, Texas, Ohio, you go through them. Maine is the only one the Democrats won at the presidential level in 16, 20, and 24, Hillary, Joe, Kamala, all one. And so all the Democrats need to do in the Maine Senate race is get all of the Harris Biden-Clinton voters to vote for whoever the nominee ends up being. So if they can rally around somebody that can unite the Democratic coalition, they should be able to pick up that Senate seat.

And I think, you know, risking it with someone that has such serious allegations against them and with some unknown. possible others was something that was just not going to be in the cards. And I think the Democrats also showed that they have some red lines when it comes to accusations, particularly around sexual assault.