Bulwark Takes - Tim Miller: GOP’s Strategy Is To Make You Miserable

Episode Date: October 3, 2025

Tim Miller joins Michael Steele, Symone Sanders-Townsend and Alicia Menendez to discuss the military crackdown and national guard going into new cities, and the White House admitting there will be suffering from the government shutdown. Watch The Weeknight on MSNBC: https://www.msnbc.com/weeknight

Hey, I just got off with Alicia Menendez, my girl, Simone Sanders Townsend. Have you seen our pod today? We're on, and Michael Steele. And we're on set, and we were focused on Trump going into the cities, the military cracked down, how they're going after the enemy within. There's news coming out of my city, New Orleans, that I'm going back to about how this is imminent to the National Guard and maybe the military coming into New Orleans. So much to discuss. Stick around for that conversation. Subscribe to our feed. We'll be talking to you soon. If this were simply about normalizing the use of military forces in American cities, then one could argue they should be playing it cool, right? They should be going in. They should let the action speak for itself. It is almost as though they cannot contain themselves and allow the action to simply speak for itself. They have to narrate what is happening. Yeah, it's intimidation theater, right? Like, that's what that is. I mean, Hague Seth was a weekend talk show host. So, like, that's what he knows, theater. And that's what you can tell. Stephen Miller's trying to do to sort of blitch himself up. And I'm with Phineone. Look, and he's said that the policies and procedures are ingrained, you know,

in our local police departments. And obviously, he's going to know that better than me, and I trust that. This is the issue, though, is there, it is an intentionally a recruitment effort. Like, they have the resources now for recruitment. I mean, the ICE amount of funding that's going to ICE, you know, if the government ever starts working again, is going to be greater than the State Department. And it's like greater than the Israel military, the matter of money is going to ICE. So they've got to recruit and bring in a bunch of new people.

And the new people they're bringing in, they're trying to draw the types of people that want to be unleashed, that want to go after the enemy within. And I think that's the ominous part about this. And if you look at Trump's, the one thing I'm just going to add to the quote you played from Trump is he doesn't just say that we have an enemy within. He says that the enemy within is more dangerous than the foreign enemy. And you don't know who they are because they're not wearing uniforms. It could be anybody. Like, that is just laying the groundwork for these new recruits or maybe existing people that are on board with that to, like, come in and start roughing people up, start treating people like enemy combatants. And I think it's a legitimate thing for folks to be worried about.

I'm worried about it as we're kind of talking today in New Orleans. There's news that they're going to be sending troops into New Orleans, I think, imminently, too, on top of Memphis and the other cities that have been mentioned. You know, Tim, I am just oftentimes reminded that rarely what Donald Trump does, what his administration is doing, is original, that he is, they kind of like combed through history's greatest hits, whether we're talking about history's dictators or things that they've seen in America previously. And what is happening right now with his attempted, well, not even attempted, these military deployments, the president literally turning on American citizens, calling them the enemies within. It reminds me of during the Wilson administration during World War I, where dissent was criminalized, where it wasn't violence that was the concern from the Wilson administration. It was people who were speaking out against the president. During that time, journalists were jailed. Newspapers were threatened and shut down.

Activists who were speaking out against the war were put into jail for long periods of time. One gentleman served 10 years. and the whole thing was about looking for the enemies within this country. It sounds very similar to what the president of the United States not just says he wants to do, but is attempting to operationalize. And I just, I want to shake people to him because it's like, oh, baby, it might not be, it might not be maybe about to happen. We are living it.

And so folks have to be aware. But am I just, am I being dramatic? Well, I mean, we're not there yet. You're not being dramatic to warn about it at all. I mean, I think that it's a legitimate thing to be concerned about. I look at, you know, they're testing ground a lot of times with immigrants, right? Look at what they're doing at the border, you know, with folks that are coming in on visas right now. And Marco Rubio just says this.

This isn't, this is out in the open that basically, if you're coming into this country on a visa, they're going to look at your phone and see if you've posted anything nasty about the state of Israel or Charlie Kirk or, or Donald Trump. Like, honest, and if so, they're not going to let you in. Like, that is not how America has worked. We have to worry about that stuff at the border. And I just went to Canada for a bulwark show. And, like, our lawyers are like,

you should turn your phone off so they can't look through your social media at the border. That's insane that that's where we are in this country right now. And so is that going to come to domestic Americans? I don't know. We'll see. Is it going to come to U.S. citizens?

I don't know. We'll see. I think it's good to warn about. Just one really quick thing. When you mentioned history, though, I also think it's important to talk about. But there has not been an example of the president going into a state over the objection of the state's governors and local politicians with National Guard troops since the civil

rights era. I came back in the civil rights era, it made sense, right? This is, you know, we're going into Alabama, you know, because the protests are so- To enforce the civil rights law. Yeah, yeah, to enforce civil rights laws. That was the last time it happened. It hasn't happened since then. And now Donald Trump is doing this over the objections of the local officials in Illinois,

Oregon, and California, like premised on what, based on what, like an imaginary emergency, rather than just doing what they could do, which is if they really did care about violence in the streets of those cities, they could just pass a bill right now through Congress. They've controlled everything that funds more police officers and go get well-trained people and put them into those cities. Like, they could do that if they want to. There have been COPS acts before, but they are doing this and they're using that precedent, which is not, and like you said, it's happened before in history, but to do it such as this

with no actual emergency is really without precedent. This is Doge by another name. And if you really think about it, remember, Doge was unpopular. The reason Elon Musk even had the unmitigated gall to tell us that President Trump

was in the Epstein files was because he was excommunicated from the inter-circircle from polite society of this Trump administration White House because he became untenable and what he was doing was unpopular. That's why he's out.

And so I do think here that people have to remember that. Like, Russ, vote, this is actually the same guy that remember when he shut down that Medicaid portal early on in the administration, and Republicans and Democrats were calling up the White House saying, you got to get this back online. I'm hearing from the folks in my state. And Russ Vote thought he was on solid ground then. But because the people pushed back, because the members also raised their voices, within hours, the decision was reversed.

And so I do think here that there is a chance here that Mr. Vote is not on solid ground and that just like the president turned on Elon Musk, he will turn on him as well. Well, I'm not sure about what the president's relation to show what the Russ Vote is and how that's going. I do agree with the point that just like Doge, this is what they want to do.

Like, they want to dismantle, the phrase that Steve Bannon always uses, dismantle the administrative state. Like, that's what they're there to do. That's what Doge was, and that's what Russell Vote is there to do. And I think the only difference this time is that they're trying to blame the Democrats for it

to do what they already wanted. You know, I'm not as good a reporter as Vaughn, so I didn't write the quote down. But Caroline Leavitt this morning was out there and essentially said something to the effect of, like, the pain is going to continue until the Democrats, you know, have an agreement with us. Do you want to listen to the sound?

Yeah. Let's play Caroline Levitt. Look, it's likely going to be in the thousands. It's a very good question. And that's something that the Office of Management and Budget and the entire team at the White House here, again, is unfortunately having to work on today. These discussions and these conversations, these meetings would not be happening if the Democrats

had voted to keep the government open. Yeah, and she goes on for that. The point with that quote is, it's crazy that they're just basically like, look, there's going to be pain. We're happy about the pain, kind of. And it's the Democrats' fault. If they want to stop the pain and they have to go to the table, they're just admitting, like, the White House is just admitting people are suffering because of this, but they don't

care. I guess you've got to give them credit for the brazenness. and for the, you know, for being candid. But, like, that's their position right now on the shutdown. They want to cut these jobs, and they don't really care if people are going to be harmed by it. The headline that sort of encapsulates everything we've been talking about, and especially the last point there, they've got it all. The White House, the Congress, the Senate.

They've capped the judiciary. You know, they've said, the court has said, hey, you can do whatever you want. The headline that strikes me on all of this right now is, the one that reads the White House use its shutdown to maximize pain and political punishment. Yeah. Because at the end of the day, that has been the end game. It is the retribution model. It is the pain part is we're going to blame that on the Democrats.

I'm getting what I want. The party is, as I said before, they are concerned until they aren't. And they largely aren't. They're unapologetic about it. And that's it. It is retribution. Like right now, they're trying to blame the Democrats. But, I mean, it's kind of silly.

Like, you know, it's really just a fig leaf, right? They are thrilled to cut funding right here in New York for the transportation. They're thrilled to cut funding to these environmental projects, even if it's working Americans that are working on that. Some people have voted for Donald Trump. You know, we covered that at the bulwark. That's what they want to do. That's their agenda.

And we'll see if it pans out for them. They think that it's a winner. Well, we'll see because right now the American people are losing.