Bulwark Takes - Tim Miller: Comedians Are Popping Trump’s MAGA Bubble

Episode Date: September 6, 2025

Tim Miller joins Nicolle Wallace on MSNBC’s Deadline: White House to take on Trump’s ‘Department of War’ rebrand, the collapse of his anti-war image, and how comedians from South Park to MAGA comics are skewering his tough-guy act. Watch Deadline: White House — https://www.msnbc.com/deadline-white-house

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It's what we've been doing since 1944, because the world needs more Canada. Together, let's give it to them. Visit edc.ca.ca.ca.export for more. Hey, everybody, Tim Miller from the Bullwark here. I was just on for the hour with my friend Nicole Wallace and Tom Nichols, one of the pod favorites and some other folks talking about a bunch of stuff. We end with some serious fun looking at the comedians, looking at some of what South Park's been doing, what we've seen from the late night comedians. I mentioned what we've seen from a couple of the MAGA comedians that I follow, kind of popping Trump's bubble a little bit. What I didn't get to mention was my favorite South Park bit lately. is the um is how one of the one of the south park kids is bad because the loboos are getting tariffed like for some reason i like that's a little bit more of a subtle policy hit than you know trump's fucking satan which is also funny in its own right but but getting that to seep in about this is annoying my lobooboo is getting tariffed i don't know i feel like there's something

there that might settle in people's brains um a little bit more than some of the you know big thought, think stuff about democracy. And to that point, I wanted to expand on a little bit right now what I was getting at in the second segment where we talked about the change of the Department of Defense to the Department of War. And

I feel bad about crediting this person because a friend sent it to me, so I forget who, so I don't know who tweeted it, but I'm stealing this notion from them where they said, you know, maybe the silver lining of changing the Department of Defense to the Department of War is that in the

future will be easier to cut funds for the Department of War. And I don't, you know, I don't know, who the hell knows, right? Like, that's, that's maybe probably not true. You know, it's always going to be tough to cut money from the Defense Department because of, you know, the defense industrial complex, the military industrial complex, excuse me. But I think that it was a smart insight in that it's bad branding for Trump. Trump thinks it's good branding because he thinks it's tough guy macho. But it's bad branding because it's like, people don't like war.

And you thought Trump would have known that because it really helped Trump to have been seen as the candidate that didn't involve us in additional wars. That helped him. That helped bring in the Bobby Kennedy tribes, the Tulsi types. It helped with younger voters. I hear this from young men a lot when I go to the MAGA rallies. And I'm talking to, you know, interviewing college guys that are showing up for that. A lot of them say they were drawn. to the anti-war part of Trump.

Obviously, that was all bullshit. But a lot of Trump's brand is bullshit. And usually he knows how to brand stuff. That's the one thing he's fucking good at. And so I think the Department of War really is a crossways with his brand. And I think it provides an opportunity for the Democrats that goes probably against my preferred policy interests. but is I suspect smart politics. So I get into that a little bit more with Nicole.

Stick around, hang up with that, subscribe to the feet. We'll be seeing you all soon. You know, Tim Miller, the old explanations don't apply anymore either, though, because to Paul Reichov's point, this isn't where the American people are. This isn't where MAGA is.

I mean, there isn't some mandate to put troops trained for war or natural disasters on the streets picking up grass. garbage. There's no mandate for that. The argument that Democrats have begun advancing about crime and violence, I think we heard at the beginning of the week from Governor Pritzker and the mayor of Chicago, and they said, our cities will continue to have a violence problem as long as red states have a gun problem. I wonder what you make of the extreme confidence in acting well outside the mandate of even the MAGA voter.

Yeah, they're actually probably acting in an anti-mandate stance, at least when it comes to the military part of this, maybe not the troops in the streets, but there was at least some, Trump had this weird coalition where, you know, there were some people that were excited about his violent rhetoric and authoritarianism and saw him as a tough guy, and then there were other people that saw him as a peace candidate.

And you heard this, this was part of the RFK-Tulsi coalition, right? And part of the Manistphere coalition, they didn't want, they wanted, they thought they believed Trump. And he was like, I'm going to get us out of wars. And so here he is renaming the Department of Defense, the Department of War, not exactly subtle. And to use Pete Hagsler's language, smoking random drug boats, allegedly drug boats in the Caribbean. And so this was absolutely not what at least some segment of his electorate had voted for. And, I mean, again, I think that if people had the courage to speak out against it, there would potentially be vulnerability here politically, particularly on the military side of things.

I think that the, you know, law enforcement side of things in the streets of the cities maybe is more, you know, probably appreciated among his supporters. But, you know, look, I don't, and I think that we can even, should even step back and not even really grant that it was a drug boat that they, that they, that they, took out in the Caribbean until we know the facts. I mean, the same people that lied and sent these Venezuelans to a foreign torture prison based on their tattoos. And Trump, it's the same president that went out and said that they had sent a Rego Garcia there because he had MS-13 on his knuckles, and he was looking at a photoshopped image. He was too stupid to realize that the photoshopped image was not real and that those weren't his real knuckles.

So you can't trust these guys to be telling us the truth. And I think that watching them act with impunity doing, you know, summary executions and renaming the Department of Defense Department of War is something that I think there could be a backlash among some segment of his base if, you know, folks were willing to speak out about it. Tom, let me come back to your piece about the other big piece of news on this. Pete Higgs says, Department of Cringe is the title of your new piece. Quote, last month when the plan was still just a hypothetical, the president was asked why he favored it. He said that Department of War, quote, just sounded better and that it would be a callback to the name

under which U.S. forces fought in the two world wars. But the change is also a reflection of how much Trump and Secretary of Defense, his title for now, Pete Hegsuff, think of themselves as tough guys, real fighters who will no longer trifle with silly names about defending things. Hegseth in particular is obsessed with war fighters, a clunky Pentagon term that's been around for far too long, who will engage in war fighting with great lethality. It is the height of stupid politics for Donald Trump, who beat both of our old boss, I mean, who wins in the Republican primary in 2016 because he is the most anti-war person and then drives a wedge between Hillary Clinton and some independent voters over issues of national

security and war. His entire identity is wrapped up in being an anti-war figure. And so is he shedding voters over his crappy economy and shedding voters who were, really, really looking forward to reading all of the gigabytes of data. And since I asked how big a gigabyte is, my feed is full of explanations of how many documents that is. This is a lot of documents. They're waiting for all of them, not one book. He's shedding another little layer of the onion here. And I'm not saying he's going to lose the Maga Coalition. And I'm not saying anyone in Congress is going to wake up tomorrow morning and find their spines or any of their body part. But it is not good for him politically to be wrapping all this up in the thing that is part of his political

strength and identity. Yeah. Look, let's just set aside the merits of his foreign policy and of isolationist foreign policy for a second because I'm pretty much against all of Donald Trump's foreign policy instincts. Maybe not every single one, but darn close to it. And just look at the politics of this purely. I don't think you could argue with the fact that Donald Trump clearly benefited politically and the Republican Party benefited politically from being positioned as being a more anti-war party over the last eight years. Maybe that was BS. Obviously, maybe people that were Palestinian advocates who kind of went along with that, might look back of that and think, ooh, that was a bad deal that we made. But like, just out of pure politics, he positioned

himself with the electorate as somebody that was going to be more skeptical towards these wars that people are frustrated with and tired of. And he did that effectively in both 2016 and 2024 in his victories. And I think that the Democrats, you know, because a lot of times Democrats get stuck in this bind where they want to defend institutions for good reason, want to defend the Defense Department, want to defend the FBI, like found themselves at times kind of being more defensive over this foreign policy, bipartisan foreign policy establishment that people weren't that fond of. And so to me, I think it's a stupid name change, obviously. It's childish. It's silly. But it also, I think, provides Democrats a little bit of a

propaganda opportunity back to kind of say, no, actually, these guys are who you thought they were. They are the war candidates. They're the ones that are acting recklessly. They're the ones that are going to create problems in foreign affairs. And I think it'd probably be smart for Democrats to try to take that mantle back a little bit. Viewers of this program know it was. Well, institutions across our country are buckling and self-censoring on a daily, sometimes hourly basis in the face of Donald Trump's reelection and his clear, brazen public commitment to pursuing authoritarian tactics and quest for power. Just this week, Northwestern lost its president who had clashed with Republicans. Harvard is still negotiating a massive settlement with the Trump administration, despite a big win in court this week. law firms are quietly working for the Trump administration now as part of their quote-unquote deals.

CBS is on the precipice of a legacy-altering set of decisions, but amid all of this cowering and shape-shifting, one group, rather inexplicably, remains completely undaunted, emboldened, actually. They're comedians and comedy writers. Case in point, the cartoon South Point, South Park has been merciless, more provocative than ever since its new season began earlier this year in skewering Trump and his administration and those figures and institutions who have fallen in line, highlighting the absolute absurdity of that complicity in the process. Does any of it matter politically? Yeah. Well, I think there are two parts of this. One is, can it give other people the backbone to get to speak out? And that's like the most frustrating part about all of this is

you would think that South Park would be showing the way. There's not the risk here that all of these people say there is, that you can speak out against Trump, especially if you come from a place of power and privilege. I think that's the most frustrating thing about watching all these tech execs go there and slobber over him yesterday, as if, you know, the richest people in the history of the world could not survive and keep their dignity intact, you know, at the same time. But hopefully, I don't, I'm not, you know, counting our chickens on that. To me, I think the political implication that is maybe more powerful, which is true, especially of South Park, is you're seeing this trickle down into other more kind of comedians

that appeal more to people on the MAGA Wright, particularly the kind of Manistphere-type comedians. I'm thinking of Tim Dillon in particular, and Andrew Schultz. Your viewers might not be familiar with them, or they might. But I've been watching a lot of their shows lately, and they are pretty, they're starting to get pretty skeptical of this administration, and they want to be outsiders. They don't, you know, comedians don't want to be talking heads and mouthpieces for the administration like a Charlie Kirk might. They, you know, they want to be contrarian.

And Trump's given a want to work with, whether it be, you know, the military stuff or whether it be, you know, there's a lot of funny material out there about J.D. Vance I've been watching and how, and Peter Thiel, it has four speeches on the Antichrist he's coming up and how maybe we should be a little bit concerned if one of the most influential people in MAGA is giving four speeches on the Antichrist in the next month. So I think that, like the South Park and the Tim Dillon's, you know, starting to poke fun at these guys, I think, could have a real political impact because it might pop the bubble of invincibility that Trump has had with some part of his base.