Bulwark Takes - Tim Miller: JD Vance Can’t Keep His Story Straight

Episode Date: November 15, 2025

Tim Miller takes on JD Vance’s latest lie, the immigrant scapegoating cycle, and why Trump’s economic crew keeps bending reality on prices, tariffs, and the state of the economy. He also joins Nicolle Wallace to dig into it.  Watch Deadline: White House on MSNBC: https://www.msnbc.com/deadline-white-house

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She had also booked my podcast from today, David Frum. We had my old buddy from the Bay Area. Ian Bassman was on as well. And it was just this great coincidence that, David and I did a full hour today, and like the one thing that I didn't get to that I wanted to talk to him about was J.D. Vance's ridiculous comments about why housing prices are going up, blaming and demonizing immigrants. And it turns out, first question from Nicole about that. So David and I got to talk about it. So this is kind of like a post game, a little bonus episode or a little, you know, post game interview where,

you know, we get to cover the stuff that we didn't get to during the main broadcast. So, JD was on with Hannity, and he's trying to figure out how to explain the fact that the housing prices, the housing crisis is still real in this country. This administration has done bupkis on it in, you know, almost a full year at this point. And he's trying to explain, well, what, how could that be? What could be the problem? What can I, rather than like try to say, hey, we've got these solutions in mind. It's like, you know what the problem is, Biden and the immigrants, immigrants, they'd be taking your houses.

It's like, all right, bro. Okay. Well, actually, we'll leave in some of it from the show. You'll see he gives me a yes and on my mocking of J.D. Vance. So you can stick around and watch both of those. It was a good chat. Needless to say, if you're worried about housing prices, hopefully you live in a jurisdiction where you have a YIMB mayor or governor, if somebody like Mikey Cheryl, who actually is going to care about this as we talked about it earlier this week

and actually, you know, institute some policies to try to alleviate the pain for people because the vice president ain't doing shit. All he's going to do is make fun of immigrants. It's only card. He's got in his deck right now. So stick around. It's a funny contrast, by the way, between this video from Hannity, we played this night, we'll play this for you.

And I'm going to play another interview where JD had a different take. on the housing issue with immigrants. It wasn't that immigrants were taking up to so many houses was that there were so many immigrants in one house. So watch both of those back to back. Then on the other side, you'd hear

me and David Frum talk about it again. So if you liked the first podcast with David From, you'll like this one. Subscribe to the feed and we'll be talking to you all again soon. A lot of young people are saying housing is way too expensive. Why is that? Because we flooded the country with 30 million illegal immigrants who were taking houses that ought by right go to American citizens.

And at the same time, we weren't building enough new houses to begin with, even for the population that we had. This out of a house is actually evicted from the house because there are people who are going to pay more for rent. And then what happens is 20 people move into a three-bedroom house. 20 people from a totally different culture, totally different ways of interacting. Again, we can respect their dignity while also being angry. at the Biden administration for letting that situation happen and recognizing that their next door neighbors are going to say, well, wait a second, what is going on here? I don't know these people. They don't speak the same language that I do. And because there are 20 in the house next door, it's a little bit

routier than it was when there was just a family of four, a family of five. It is totally reasonable and acceptable for American citizens to look at their next door neighbors and say, I want to live next to people who I have something in common with. I don't want to live next to four families of strangers. MSNBC political analyst hosts of the bulwark podcast, Tim Miller's here. Tim, they have blamed and sought to dehumanize people in this country illegally, as well as asylum seekers. Since the beginning of the MAGA brand, it actually predates J.D. Vance's attachment to the brand. But this smear from J.D. Vance that the housing crisis is because of 30 million people in this country illegally seems like the bottom of the rungs that they've touched. And I've stopped saying

that they can't go any lower. But it also doesn't have any association with the truth. But it does reveal it's like mask off, or we're just going to blame people who've come to this country from other places for absolutely everything. See if we can stir the hate pot a little more frothy. Yeah, it's funny. It's somebody who has to suffer through J.D. Vance's interviews a couple of weeks ago. He was on, I think it was the New York Post. And he's telling a different story about immigrant housing. He was once again smearing immigrants.

But he was talking about how people get upset because they're living in the suburbs. And he's talking about how American citizens have a right to get upset if somebody moves into your neighborhood and they buy a three-bedroom house and 20 people move into the house. and they speak a different language and it's getting rowdy over there. He didn't mention the cat eating, but the host then did, and he laughed about that. So, like, on the one hand,

all of the migrants are in the country are jamming into one house like a clown car and eating pets. And then two weeks later, it's like, well, that's not actually true. They've bought 30 million houses, and your house is expensive because of them because migrants are coming in the country

and I guess competing with millennials for the condos, the apartments they want to buy. in Brooklyn? It is, he doesn't care, right? It's just like at the moment, whatever argument he could make to blame immigrants is the argument he's going to make because it's a safe place for him. He knows that Donald Trump won't get mad at him if he does that. He knows that the mega base put them in because of animus towards immigrants. And so, like, that's all he's going to do. I would, there's one of the thing they've done this week that I think is worth noting

on the costs, because they haven't considered one policy change. And that's, and that's, is they're thinking about rolling back some of the tariffs. The New York Times is reporting this yesterday. And that caught my eye. So it's like, that's interesting. You think that rolling back the tariffs is going to lower prices. I think that would imply that putting the tariffs on raised the prices, you would think.

And so, you know, that, I think, is the only substantive move that they have made or that they're talking about making is rolling back what they did to create the problem in the first place. The unbelievable legacy for Scott Bessent. I don't know if Howard Lutnik realizes that'll be his legacy or cares, but Besson should. Yeah, there's some reporting on before I came on and how well Lutnik's family is doing in the markets right now. Just coincidence, I guess, that the Lutnik family is doing better than ever. So that might be his legacy, it turns out.

But look, here's the thing, Bessent, you know, when you came in to Trump 2.0, Most of the people that came to the cabinet this time, as we discussed, you know, different than 1.0, we're fully on board with the agenda, right? There were just a couple of people that were pointed to that people were saying, well, maybe they can be bumpers on some elements of his agenda. Marco Rubio at State and Besson of Treasury, you know, the two most noteworthy. And I guess at times it seems like Besson did, you know, protect Trump and Lutnik from their worst impulses, particularly Besson. back in the spring when they were really pressing the gas on the tariffs. But once that was accomplished, Lutnik has now spent

the last six months doing exactly what Marjorie Taylor Green said not to do at the beginning. Gaslighting people spinning, speaking illiterately about the economy, saying things he knows are not true about what the impact of the tariffs are gonna be on the economy, about the trajectory of the economy, about what things are costing the American people these days. And he decided to do it in a very kind of haughty manner.

And, you know, eventually the bill's going to come due for that because the economy is one thing. Look, you can trick people, you can trick your own supporters, not the whole country, into thinking that you won the election when you lost, right? Because they don't know any different one way or the other, right? They're being told something by people that they trust. You can't trick them into thinking that their grocery bill is lower than it is, right? They experience that when they get a store every week. And I think that is going to – so it's going to be much harder for Trump and best –

and Lutnik to use the tools they used in the 2020 election to trick their own voters into advancing a big lie when it comes to the economy, much tougher on the economy than it was on democracy. The knocking down of the White House isn't just a story about destroying something that people value and associate with the government and the country's identity. It's about building himself the most opulent thing that's ever been built by the American state. it's also an example of his disregard for people who are closest to him in this case literally because it looks like he's filling the white house ventilation system with deadly asbestos because the east wing was built during world war two when people used asbestos to fireproof

and when you demolish such a building in the modern age you need elaborate safeguards to protect the workers and the people next door and those don't look like to have been put in place one of the go-to moves when things begin to go south for this kind of authoritarian leader as as Ian well knows, is military adventurism. And we are seeing a revival of that, the threats against Venezuela. And just more recently, a revival of the threatening language against Denmark and Greenland. I don't know how excited the American people are going to have to be to have a giant glacier island all of their very own against the will of the people who live there. And in violation of NATO treaties with Denmark, but that seems to be one of the things you're going to get instead of affordable pasta.

It's amazing. Tim Miller, you get the last word. I'm still hanging on the idea of the four people who were exposed to COVID during Trump one, now breathing in asbestos in Trump, too. Yeah, I wanted to hear more from David Fromm, actually, but I guess briefly, my last thought is I agree with what he just said. And if it is true that he decides that his way out of this is more aggressive action in Venezuela or Greenland or otherwise, Canada, I guess. I think that that is not a path to success for him, because I think that the Trump, The elements of the Trump base that are the most vulnerable, that he's the most vulnerable to losing, the people that are upset about Epstein, the folks that are more lower income and are more sensitive to costs, there are also the folks that were more interested in his isolationist pivot in the party. The people that he brought into the party were the ones that didn't like the adventurism of Republican presidents past.

And so I think that, frankly, it would be potentially the, potentially, the, potentially the best way to get that number down into the low 30s would be to try to wag the dog this thing. But I don't think that that's necessarily going to stop them. Extra value meals are back. For just $5, get a savory and sweet sausage egg and cheese McGrittles, plus hash browns and a coffee. Only at McDonald's.

For limited time only, prices and participation may vary. Prices may be higher in Hawaii, Alaska, and California, and for delivery.