Bulwark Takes - The Joke Tim Couldn’t Say on Live TV

Episode Date: April 30, 2026

Tim Miller was all over MS NOW, talking about Trump’s $400 million “gold ballroom” obsession as his poll numbers slide and voters feel squeezed. He breaks down why the GOP’s usual message machine—coordinated distractions, echo chamber spin, and nonstop attacks—is suddenly falling flat, with backlash over Iran, rising gas prices, and broken promises piling up.For a limited time, listeners can get an exclusive $25 off AuraFrame's best-selling Carver Matframe at https://on.auraframes.com/BULWARKTAKES with code BULWARKTAKES.Watch All In with Chris Hayes on MS NOW: https://www.ms.now/allWatch Deadline: White House with Nicolle Wallace on MS NOW: https://www.ms.now/deadline-white-house

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and the faster you'll get back to a good night's sleep. The Credit Counseling Society, when debt's got you, you've got us. Hey, everybody. It's Tim Miller from the Bullwark. Did Double Duty on MS Now. Was on with Nicole Wallace and my guy, Mark Elias, over at Democracy Docket. And then later with Chris Hayes, there's a lot of ballroom talk. There's a lot of mockery at the ballroom. The fancy Versailles ballroom. Even later, after both those heads, the images started to come in from Trump

and his white tucks at the really gold White House right now. And it's like, isn't this fine? Isn't this good enough? No. No, they need $400 million of your money to do a fancy ballroom while his numbers tank. So we discussed that at length. And then with Mark Elias, as usual, we get into, you know, kind of more questions about the ways that these guys are trying to monkey with the midterms. So that's that.

Stick around. There's some good ballroom content. there's some laughs. Chris Hayes before he turns to me, talks about how Republicans like fancy balls. I was like, that's kind of rude to throw to me like that

on primetime cable news because I want to make a joke about Lindsey Graham or something, but I can't. I can't do that. So anyway, I just did it here, I guess. Anyway, stick around, subscribe to the feed. Fancy balls talk on the other side.

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Bullwork Takes. That's A-U-R-A-Frames.com promo code Bullwork Takes. Support the show by mentioning us at checkout, and terms and conditions do apply. First, Tim, I was so struck by the optics of all this. Obviously, it was very scary and upsetting what happened. Thankfully, it was not. More people who weren't hurt. No one was killed. Thank goodness. But just like at this moment, when people are not happy with the right track, wrong track,

they're not having the economy for the entire party to be like, you must build us a ballroom and we're going to use taxpayer money. And this is the most important thing in America right now struck me as shockingly tone deaf. Yeah, 400 million. We need 400 million of your dollars. to build this ballroom right now. And it's going to be very gold. Very, very gold.

And here's the picture of it. It looks very gold and very fancy. How are things going to go for you? How do your school rooms look? How do your hospital rooms look? The ballroom's going to look amazing. Yeah, there it is. I don't know, man.

I think that it's interesting because what this has shown is that there's been something that Trump and the Republican Party and the mega media apparatus has been very good at for 10 years now, which is something happens in the news cycle and Trump says squirrel and everyone goes and looks at the squirrel and talks about the squirrel and talks about how important it is and oftentimes that is something terrible

that the liberals have done sometimes it's something that Trump wants to do but everybody sings in one echo chamber about it and they've been much better at that than the Democrats have it just doesn't feel like it's working on this one like on this one that is something that works if you're tearing down the other side if they're doing something wrong.

It maybe works if people are kind of happy with what you're doing and they're just interested in whatever the story of the day is. When people are really upset about what's happening at the pump with Epstein Files, with the war in Iran, to just like get everybody singing from the same ballroom hymn book, I just don't think is doing them any good. The other part of this, I mean, here's the Reuters polling today, Tim. The other part of this is approvals of 34%, disapprovals of 64%,

disapprovals of 64%, like this has been in line with all the, polls. His handling on cost of living specifically is the lowest handling he has. It's 2269. And I also thought it was funny to watch members of Congress come out, loaded for bear to be like, that's it. Last straw. Guess what we're going to do now. We're going to introduce legislation to authorize this and appropriate the funds. And I was like, yeah, that's the way it works. If this is so much, this is so important to you, you should have done that from the beginning and had the fight. And if you win, you win, that's what democracy is. Yeah.

And they don't really have, in addition to being focused on the ballroom, like you're saying, they also don't have any message, really, for the American people right now on how they're going to get costs down. And like, what are the other bills that they're talking about on the hell, right? It's the Save Act. We've thrown in some transports on top of that. You know, there's some discussion of some new rules around boxing and MMA. Like, there's no, it's not like there's a big bill coming this year. or regardless of whatever you think of the merits of it,

you know, that has some Republican priorities around, you know, providing relief, whether that be tax relief or assistance, for working people or a gas tax rebate, like whatever. Like they don't have any of that. They're not offering any of it. And part of the reason why his numbers are so low is, you know, obviously Democrats, people that are engaged are going to be opposed to him. But there are a lot of people that just, that supported Trump,

that are not the MAGA red hat folks, that just were, you know, that weren't really tuning in that closely. They're getting some of the news. And like one day, all of a sudden, they go to the gas station and it costs a dollar more. And they're like, why? And they're like, because we're going to war with Iran. I voted for them because they didn't want war with Iran. Right.

Like this all happened in a flash. And they're not providing that type of voter any message that could possibly resonate with them. I'm struck by how they are still doing what has worked for them. Right? And so they have man, I mean, I guess we're to think it's a coincidence that today on the day that a federal judge allowed Maureen Comey to sue DOJ, DOJ indicted Jim Comey. And it might be, I don't know. I'm not the coincidence arbiter in America, but I can see two dots and then say they're next to each other. But the three things that have permeated the electorate's mind, right? Epstein. There were lies told by Donald Trump and Cash Patel and Pam Bondi. And the Epstein. class is viewed to still be unknown and unrevealed. The Iran War, both the idea of a forever war and the impact on the economy that we're talking about. And the collapse, whether you internalized who Victor Orban was or not, if you're in MAGA, he was daddy, right? He was big daddy. And Tucker went and kissed his shoes, and Matt Schlapp went and kissed his shoes, and J.D. Vance went

and kissed his shoes eight hours before he lost, and he fell on his face. And so whether you're telling pollsters you're going to vote for or not, there are these three seismic things, which are a lot more enduring and a lot more visceral than any of the freneticism that they seem to be pushing through the information pipeline. And I wonder what you make. He's really in a very stable, a stable place with the public, and it sucks. He's in the low 30s. Yeah, a stable and kind of a slow decline, you know, kind of like the green slope on a, on a ski slope. I think that that's right, Nicole. And think about what they've tried to do.

And you mentioned the Comey indictment, which is just so laughable and so ridiculous. Like, we can't say 8-6-4-7 in the country anymore. Because the president's going to indict us over that. It's absolutely preposterous. And I know that Jim Comey will fight it and succeed. But the other story lately that I think is really telling about his political standing is this ballroom nonsense, right? that after the horrible events at the White House Correspondence dinner, you know, everybody gets on this message point of,

oh, Trump needs a new ballroom because he's, you know, he's under attack, and we need this for him to honor him and to be safe. And they did something very successfully. They've done very successfully in the past, which is Marshall, the entire echo chamber. You know, if you turned on Fox at all today, they were talking about the ballroom. If you looked at a Republican politician's social media feed, they were talking about the ballroom.

You know, if you were on Twitter and following a right-wing account, they talked about the ballroom. And, like, this is what they're good at. They're good at, like, getting everybody on message and creating these stories out of nonsense. The other thing that they're good at is attacking their foes and smearing them,

people like Jim Comey. And you can see, like, the machine operating right now. But it's not getting them anything. Like, they're not gaining any ground. Like, that machine works very well when the other side is in charge, right? And you can, and you gin everybody up to smear them and tear them down. It works decently well if everybody's feeling good about what you're doing.

And you're just now giving them this shiny object to pay attention to, to distract them from whatever little problems they have in their life. Like the machine doesn't work if everybody's pissed at you, all right? If people are like, why are we in this war? And you showed the gas prices at the beginning of this. I just saw a report, I think, in the Upper Midwest in particular, gas prices are about to go up a bunch in the next week or two because of issues at the refineries and shortages.

And we're going to keep seeing this all the way through the summer. It's going to be $5 gas the summer. And it already is that in some states on the coast. So if things are getting worse for people, and if they're not responding to the things that they cared about, whether that be Epstein or the gas prices or whatever, this whole machine is just, it's a little masturbatory, right? It's just like, okay, it's who's it for?

It's for the people that are, you know, the remaining 33% that are still on board. It's not getting, it's not, you know, doing anything for them. I'm not making any progress. The intent is also to send a very clear signal, even if all of these attempts to seek out retribution and fail legally, that the other impact will be to scare others from speaking out, as Jim Comey did against a politicized Department of Justice, as Tish James did through her fraud suit against Trump org,

as law firms who used to help Mark Elias have done by capitulating to Donald Trump and signing the executive orders. It seems that in other ways they succeed even when they fail. Yeah, I've mixed views on that. I was not because I agreed with basically everything that Mark said, except for when he mentioned the Trump third term, which was triggering. And I kind of blacked out for a couple seconds after that. Her my brain.

Yeah, the chilling effect is part of it. I think that the key insight here is these things are all going to fail, and they're doing them to please Donald Trump. And that was Mark's point, and I think that is exactly right. and I think that we should mock them and they should feel humiliated by it. And it's not really that different to the Iran war. Honestly, either you could add that one to the list of things that these guys thought that they were going to go in and do and they're going to get revenge on their enemies and they're going to get regime change in Iran

and they were going to rig the midterms with redistricting and it's just been L after L after L for many months now. I think that your point that the environment around this creates a chilling effect, I think is true. I think it was more true in 2025 than it is now. But there's no doubt that after watching this thing with Jim Comey, people don't want to be indicted. They don't want to deal with the hassle. And there are people out there that would think to themselves,

maybe I shouldn't post this meme criticizing Trump. It's not worth it. And we certainly see this at the CEO level. We're seeing it even at the media level. I mean, you know, before the correspondence dinner was interrupted by this kind of horrible attempt at, at a shooting, you know, I was kind of struggling about how many of these people were showing up,

actually, even, you know, and we're gonna allow him, and we might have another one in a month, who knows, are gonna allow him to roast them when he is engaging in a direct assault on free speech, when they're going after ABC and Disney today, over some completely fabricated nonsense about DEI or whatever. They're trying to get rid of their licenses for a few local stations.

So, I mean, he's engaging in an assault on free speech, They're failing in the courts, thanks a lot into what Mark is doing, but also others. They're starting to fail in public opinion. You're right, they're still succeeding in other areas where people are afraid to push back on them. But you're seeing kind of limits of that bullying.