Bulwark Takes - Tim Miller: If You’re Feeling Hopeless, Hear Me Out

Episode Date: March 28, 2026

Tim Miller was on MS NOW's Deadline: White House to explain why Trump’s Iran decision may be doing lasting damage to his own coalition. From GOP infighting to failed election interference efforts and another Democratic win in Washington, MAJOR cracks are starting to show.

Hey, everybody, Tim Miller from the Bullwark here on the Borg takes feed. Subscribe to the Bork, if you haven't yet. Subscribe on YouTube. We're trying to get up to $2 million. Subscribe to Bork Takes on Apple, podcast, or Spotify. I'm not going to be a habit about this. I think it's the second time I've done this this week. But I'm going to give you guys a little hopium.

You're going to be positive and optimistic about the state of affairs. It's actually a nice appetizer for No Kings. For us to all have a positive day of activism and outreach. and a primal yop about protecting our democracy, that before that, I give you a little bit of optimism because who the hell knows what Monday will have in store for us. But I was on with Alicia Menendez and a bunch of other folks on MS Now and the deadline White House hour.

And we talked about a bunch of stuff. We talked about the efforts to screw with the elections coming up in the midterms. We talked about the TSA funding fight. And I gave kind of my update, on the latest on why the Democrats have now won that funding fight. And we talked about the cracks in the Republican coalition over the Iran War. And in each segment, I was the optimistic one. I don't think that their election efforts are going to succeed, that the Republican efforts

to mess with the elections. I don't think it's going to succeed. We have to be vigilant. We got a fight. We need lawyers out there and activists and folks in the ground and media figures like us watching and alerting people. Everyone has a role to play. and ensuring that the pro-democracy side overwhelms the MAGA effort to rig or screw with the elections.

And I think of what's going to happen. On the funding fight in Washington, I've called it officially, second straight shutdown fight victory for the Democrats. It's not really even close. Republicans don't know what the hell they're doing. The House Republicans are now left holding the bag where it's their fault because there's been a bipartisan Senate vote. to fund the TSA. We got a text from a Democratic congressman just a couple minutes ago about the House Republicans positioning on this.

The text reads House ours are a train wreck. They don't know what they're doing. They can't cover it. And then obviously the cracks in the MAGA coalition over Iran are showing up everywhere. So in each segment, midterms, Iran war. shut down fight on Capitol Hill. I was the optimistic one. Ws for the Democrats on each one of those.

Bad news for the Republicans for Trump on each one of those. Like it doesn't mean that Trump is going to collapse and resign. And we're going to end up with Speaker Hakeem Jeffery's ascending to the House. You know, look, we've got to deal with almost three more years of this. Who knows what the future will hold? I can tell you this. The Trump Coalition has been permanently wounded by the actions of the last three weeks. This Iran war is going to be an unbelievable shit show.

It already is. But the fallout from it will be a disaster of epic, epic proportions. I said a few weeks ago, and I stand by it, this decision to go into this war was the most catastrophic decision of either term. from the president. That's a competitive category. A lot of bad choices. A lot bad. He's mismanaged a lot of stuff over the course of two terms.

This one is the worst, and I think it's the worst by a wide margin. And that is why the Democrats have regained power on the hill, because the Republicans are divided, and they see the mess that they've made, and they don't know how to deal with it. That is why we see the mega coalition breaking up, because influence,

and commentators and politicians even don't want to be made out to be fools to their voters or to their listeners or viewers. It's going to be pain as a result of this terrible decision. So we shouldn't be late about it. But he has caused himself a massive, massive political problem, one that I think that his coalition may never recover from. So that's where we are right now. I'm not that guy. If you've been watching this feed, there's some other YouTube's out there where people have been like, the walls are closing in on Trump every day. Trump's going to be in jail.

That was never made. I've been negative. I'm still negative. I'm still worried. I'm still concerned. But as a political analyst, I think that people are slow to recognize what is happening. And that is that the wheels are really coming off of MAGA and that maybe the wound is able to be sutured, but the wound is deep. the news is bad for MAGA.

And that's good news for us. So please subscribe to the feed. Go out to the No Kings Rally. Have a little extra skip in your step. We'll be talking to you all soon. Donald Trump's latest probe into his 2020 election loss is facing its first major legal test. Today, lawyers for Fulton County, Georgia,

argued in federal court for the return of thousands of election ballots seized by the FBI earlier this year. As part of the Justice Department's reinvest investigation of Trump's claims of fraud in Georgia, debunked by multiple audits, court rulings, and Trump's own former Attorney General. Fulton County says agents misled the court with transparent conspiracy theories about what happened in Fulton County during the 2020 election in order to obtain a warrant for that unprecedented raid, which included a baffling appearance by Trump's director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard. Today's hearing, and whatever the judge decides,

it is a test run for Trump's DOJ, whose latest probe has alarmed election officials. It will set a precedent for future elections in Fulton County and other jurisdictions where Trump has yet to accept defeat. Joining me now, host of the Bullwark podcast, political analyst, Tim Miller. The whole thing to me feels like a stress test, of course, not just retrospectively but prospectively. Yeah, look, I think that's right. This is, I think that it's important to kind of disentangle what, is happening with MAGA, with their efforts across a lot of different verticals, because there are some areas in which they're actually pretty effective and competent.

And I think that we've seen that from Stephen Miller and the immigration regime, the deportation regime. Obviously some of the ice thugs they've hired have not been competent, but like the effort of we're going to do a mass deportation, and they followed through on that. Rosvote, with Project 2025, we are going to dismantle the government. They followed through on that. and been successful in a lot of ways, less successful in other places. The DOJ effort to target foes and try to create a rationale for stealing the next election,

that effort so far has been a disaster. I mean, these guys are Keystone cops. They've been rejected by judges left and right. They have been unsuccessful at going after the folks on their enemies list, despite trying to. and they've been unsuccessful so far in their efforts to try to you know unbalance the playing table for the midterm election. I mean, they first tried to do, you know, the midterm redistricting thing. That has blown up in their face in large part of things to Gavin Newsom and Abigail Spanberger and others.

And I think this effort is in that vein, right? Where they're trying to come up with pretext and rationale to create problems in November. And so far they're coming up with Buckkus. Tim, you know that I generally feel that you are way less optimistic than me. So if Michael Feinberg is less optimistic than you, then we are in a pretty dark place. But I do think he's connecting dots that you too often connect, right? Which is each piece of this is a part of the larger hole, whether it is the president, Republicans demanding nationalized elections, whether it is redistricting, whether is what they're trying to do with the SAVE Act.

I mean, they are approaching this from every angle with the understanding that any gains they can make advantage them. And so I wonder sort of where you see us on the ladder of escalation when it comes to their efforts to mess with these midterms. Yeah, that's true. And they're climbing up additional rungs on the ladder to go along with your metaphor of escalation of trying to mess with the midterms. And I've, you know, we've been on the floor with Mark Elias and others. And for me, I think one thing that, you know, worries me in particular, and I've talked to Mark about is, you know, this post-election, you know, as Mike laid out there, you create doubts about elections, you know,

happening in certain states or certain cities. And then, you know, you challenge whether or not those people can be seated. I guess, though, I just, I do want to caveat this. I think it's important to be vigilant. I'm glad that there are people like Mark Elias out there that are fighting this and many others, and I do think we need to be ready for it. I just think we should also be clear-eyed about the ways in which they've failed, and which the ways of which their political project is failing right now.

And, you know, you notice, I use this example a lot. After Doug Maastriano, you probably don't even remember him, he ran against Josh Shapiro in 2022. He was an insurrectionist. He ran for governor of Pennsylvania, and he was talking like Trump, like I'm not going to accept the election. This is rigged. It's fraudulent. And Josh Shapiro beat him by 18 points.

And Doug Maastriano just conceded. Nobody stormed the Capitol in Harrisburg because the election wasn't close enough to steal. And I think that all of that is at play here. And I think that that part of the democracy movement, making sure that the people who oppose this administration turn out in a midterm election and turn out in such numbers

that these efforts, these kind of half-baked efforts to try to screw with the election, just don't match the scale of the opposition. And that's the trajectory I think we're headed on. I don't believe that that doesn't mean that they shouldn't be vigilant, that there won't be monkey business, that they're not going to try to pull whatever levers that they can. But I just think it's important to kind of see clearly we're at and not let people get too, hopeless about the importance of actually voting in the midter. After subjecting millions of Americans to long lines at airports across the nation,

while thousands of TSA agents worked without pay for weeks, Donald Trump, in an attempt to clean up a mess entirely of his own making, just signed an executive order which will pay TSA workers as the Homeland Security shutdown drags on. That move would not have been necessary if House Republicans would have voted for the bill passed unanimously by the Senate to find, most of the Department of Homeland Security, with the exception of ICE and Customs and Border Patrol.

But House Speaker, Mike Johnson, instead, is refusing to bring that bill to a vote, which will extend the shutdown as lawmakers leave town for a two-week recess. We are back with Tim Miller. Listen, this has always been a very tricky caucus for Mike Johnson, but they own this now, right? There's no question about that.

Yeah, I mean, this is, like, the least important element of it, which is who is winning the spin battle of this in Washington. But to the extent that it matters, the Democrats have officially won the spin battle in this shutdown in Washington. Trump absolutely owned this. The Republicans and the Democrats in the Senate came back together, and they said,

look, this is getting out of hand. This is unfair to the TSA agents that they're getting paid. It's a disaster for travelers. And let's just pay, you know, let's just fund the other. parts of DHS besides ICE and CBP and deal with those conversations later. It's a totally reasonable thing.

That's what the Democrats have been proposing for a while. Republicans in the Senate agreed, and now Republicans in the House are holding it up. So there's really only one group of people that can be blamed for the long lines and the lack of pay for TSA, and it's the House Republicans. And I don't even really know what they want to plan to get out of it at this point. I guess maybe they, in theory, they would think that they'd have leverage to pressure the Democrats to fund ICE or CBP, but why would the Democrats do that right now when the House Republicans

are the ones holding the back? Right. I mean, I understand your point about this in the broader context being the least important element of this debate, and yet the reason that it feels relevant to me is we are reminded over and over again that there is a small part of the Republican caucus.

The larger Republican caucus, notwithstanding, that makes it very difficult for common sense, practical, bipartisan measures to move. And you have made the point to me many times, like this is not a Republican Congress so concerned with legislating and perhaps given their priorities,

it is best that things aren't just like speeding through there. But in addition to sort of the role that Congress should be playing in pumping the brakes on this president's worst impulses, whether that is on Iran, whether that is on tariffs, and all of the power that Republicans have conceded the executives. There's also just a reminder of the opportunity cost of their not understanding

Tim how to get things done. Well, they just can't govern. This is just fundamentally it. They can't govern. And we're in a crisis, and you need to have people in Washington that can govern. And even if, you know, look, we've been in times before where you and I disagreed, Alicia, where people disagreed with who was in Congress. We understood that in times of crisis, in times of emergency, you needed grownups on Capitol Hill. who could come together and say, hey, we need to figure out something to solve this crisis. These guys can't do that. Like, they're not capable of doing it.

And so they're to blame for, you know, the continued lack of pay of the TSA agents and the continued lines that people are going to have to suffer through this weekend. And, you know, look, I think it's an ominous side as things start to unravel as a result of the Iran war, be that economically or militarily, or both. there's nobody home on Capitol Hill to try to reign the president in. I'm not attached to the phrase, make America great again.

I don't care. But if that phrase sucks, here's the thing. First of all, America is great. Make America greater, I'm down. But make America great again and then it becomes a movement of a bunch of dorks. Because a lot of them are dorks. A lot of them these really weird,

un-interesting, unintelligent people that have got something and they cling to. And there's a lot of people that are just real genuine patriots. And they're all lumped into this one group and you've got to accept the dorks too. That. Like the concept of making America great is a great idea. But as soon as you have a team and you allow anybody to join up, you don't even have tryouts for your team. So you've got a bunch of dip that are running around spouting out opinions and you have to go

along with him because they're MAGA. Okay, I just want to say, Tim Miller, I'm not sure, and he didn't name names in that particular clip. It shouldn't have taken anyone who was listening or paying attention this long to realize that, let's just say, Stephen Miller is a huge dork, and that his ideas are so radically out of line with where most Americans are, and that he is not actually interested in making America great in any forward-looking vision.

But still, welcome, glad you are here. Welcome to the party. I am curious what you think this says, but also what is motivating this, folks? Because I think we have to be honest about the fact that they have brands too, and that they recognize that the brand proximity to Trump no longer has the prestige that it once did. Yeah, I think it's going to be tempting for about a year now,

or maybe longer, to just do, how didn't you see this before we were so right? We tried to tell you. And so, I don't know, maybe we can all allow ourselves, like five minutes of that a week, so then you can move on to something more productive, because I hear you on all that, Alicia, right? They were always dorks. Like, if you've gone to a, I've been to CPEX, okay?

It's nothing new. It's not the cool kids table. So, look, I think that the significance of the Joe Rogan thing to me is twofold. One, moving from being critical of Trump and doing kind of what Angela is talking about Megan Kelly doing, kind of saying that he's being miserved or something must be wrong, there must be something else happening in Washington, doing the conspiracy talk. That's a baby step away from Trump.

Starting to mock him, starting to mock his movement, mocking the name of his movement. That is different. That is somebody that, as you said, is trying to separate himself brand-wise from Trump. And it's someone that's trying to save face with his audience because he sees it's going very badly and he doesn't want him to be made to look like a fool.

And that's extremely potent. you know, once you move away from disagreeing or criticizing or trying to do a 40 chess rationalization for why it's happening into mocking and contempt, you know, I think that is going to resonate with the audience. And I think that what you see from these guys is I'm moving to, I think as Angela said, again, like not to the Democrats, but back to where they had been. All these guys were non-voters. A lot of these guys were not engaged in the process.

And I think that is, that's the first step. And I was watching, I have one of the Barstool podcast with a couple of these guys. It's a smaller show than any of these, but I thought this was telling. The two of them were talking to each other, these two guys, and they're like, you know,

he's doing terrible. But, like, you can't say it, because then the MS now people will start to come for you and rub it in your face. And he's like, and then, you know, you lose the fact that the other side is still unacceptable to me.

And I think that is where they are in the process right now. Like accepting the fact that Trump has betrayed them, accepting the fact that he is a disaster, and trying to maybe do the first step, which is maybe I'm not involved in politics at all. I'm checking out of politics, which is better on balance and voting for MAGA. I've been gifted five minutes a month of saying, I told you so, by Tim Miller. I think I've used up about 30 seconds of it. Look forward to the next four minutes and 30 seconds. while March remains.