Bulwark Takes - Tim Miller: The MAGA Freak Show Is Big Mad Again

Episode Date: May 17, 2025

Tim Miller joins Nicolle Wallace on MSNBC’s Deadline: White House to discuss Trump's reckless tariffs and high interest rates driving economic anxiety among everyday Americans, Republicans doing nothing, and why even MAGA loyalists are now turning on Trump over his controversial acceptance of a luxury jet from Qatar.

We interrupt this program to bring you an important Wayfair message. Wayfair has got style tips for every home. This is Nicole Byer, helping you make those rooms flyer. Today's style tip? When it comes to making a statement, treat bold patterns like neutrals. Go wild! Like an untamed animal print area rug under a rustic farmhouse table from Wayfair.com. Ooh, fierce!

This has been your Wayfair style tip to keep those interiors superior. Wayfair, every style, every home. Hey guys, Tim Moore from the Bulwark. I just jumped off with Nicole Wallace and changed shirts before I remembered to talk to the YouTube people. And we were chatting about the kind of underlying economic issues, the consumer sentiment numbers, which are in the toilet and how even though, you know, kind of these top numbers, GDP, unemployment, the stock market have stabilized, there's still a lot of unhappiness out there over the tariffs and over the persistently high interest rates. And so we talked about what that means for Trump, what that means for Democrats, and how Democrats could leverage that.

And we got into some other fun stuff. So check it out. Subscribe to our feed here at The Bulwark. And we'll be back sometime this weekend as news develops. We'll see you all soon. Peace. The American economy is about a lot more than just numbers and data and percentages and decimal points. It is about real people living their lives.

Moms and dads, Republicans and Democrats, Trump voters and otherwise, consumers, business owners, big and small, in every corner of the country right now today, feeling pain because of Donald Trump. Watch. I hate grocery shopping. Dealing with high prices has left many shoppers dreading going to the store. $6.19.

For Jacqueline Gollin, it's something she's noticed over the past few months. I mean, it's expensive, but everything seems to be, so just do what I have to do. We try to be very careful about the special things that we're picking and really just try to stick to the basics. I spoke to about 10 different shoppers to hear how they feel about the incoming price hikes. Some of them aren't happy. And I'll probably stop coming here. I mean, there's a lot of different places that offer way better prices. I used to pay $100. Now I'm paying $150 just to get groceries. It doesn't make me feel good. There's been no impact, at least at my level, as far as

saving any money. Those refillable containers also cut down on packaging expenses that are expected to increase due to tariffs. You know, like, I don't know if I should put in an order for bags that are coming from Taiwan. A one-man operation owner of Blind Tiger Coffee, Charlie Biondo, says the costs are adding up. It's hard. It's harder to compete with larger roasters that can buy more and get better discounts on volume. Biondo says he'd like to focus more on the coffee rather than being steeped in spreadsheets. I like the old way better. I like to say the entire store really exists in

the international trade, right? About 90% of the items are sourced from China. From China specifically? Yes. Yeah. So, you know, just like a pack of hair like this, you know, that would be $6.99. So this could very well be double the price. So a lot of these increases are ultimately, it sounds like, going to the consumer. Absolutely. It's like a stress ball. Dwayne Nelson loves shopping for his grandson at Five Little Monkeys in Lafayette. But he's bracing for prices to spike as stores face big tariffs on toys. The tariffs directly affect our grandson

and anybody who uses toys. Tim Miller, it is gold. It is the most precious thing you have when you're running a campaign. It is supposed to be the thing that leads your decision-making when you're running a White House. And it is the thing that matters most when you're trying a campaign. It is supposed to be the thing that leads your decision making when you're running a White House. And it is the thing that matters most

when you're trying to run an economy. And those were people, they were, we just cast a wide net for local coverage of how people feel when they're shopping for things and they feel bad. Yeah, well, it's hard for me to compete with David Frum when it comes to talking about the macro problems here. He's just so good at that.

So I'll talk about, like, the politics and the impact on regular people because this is the element, right? You look at when we were on a couple weeks ago with you, right? We were so focused on the stock market and what was happening with the crash and what the Wall Street guys were thinking. And because Trump backed off his essentially trade embargo with China. Some of that is stabilized, right? And so you see some MAGA folks out there trying to go, well, look at that. Look, he made a great deal. See, nothing, no problems. All you guys were catastrophizing. But like the, while Wall Street is part of the economy, it's not the whole economy. And we saw this a lot during the Biden administration. Like, let's just be honest, where some of the fundamentals, some of the numbers were looking good, be it the stock market or GDP, but like regular people were frustrated and annoyed. And those are the people you have to talk to in politics. And a lot of

folks, and this is happening with me down here in New Orleans, I'm sure it is with other people in their lives, that you're either as a consumer or as a friend who is a small business owner, or you're touching some part of the economy that's touched by this. And when you feel like you unnecessarily have this 30% hike, you know, for some product that you buy or for some product that your friend or family member sells at their little store, you know, like you get mad about that. Like for good reason, because it's you that are suffering, you that are being put out, you're being annoyed. You're the one that has to scrimp or, you know, tighten your belt.

Because why? Because like the president is in a, you know, toddler fight with Chairman Xi, like with no goal, you know, with no end game. And so I think that's like the interesting thing looking at all those clips, right, is it's just, it's touching a bunch of people that aren't necessarily, you know, whatever, politically hyper engaged or whatever. All they're trying to do is live their lives. And there are real ramifications that are just kind of filtering out throughout the whole economy. People are upset about it. And I think that's why you're seeing those consumer confidence numbers that are so low, you know, even if some of the like

the larger GDP numbers are a little stable. Tim Miller, his own conduct on this is so counterproductive. His own utterances. I mean, saying, and again, let's just put the 30-doll family in our hearts for a minute. That's what Donald Trump talked about. If you're a 30-doll family that has to go to two, it's still a story of austerity. I mean, it's still a story of austerity. I mean, it's demented. It's weird. I don't know anyone who has 30 dolls. My daughter has two.

But even in Donald Trump's telling, if you're like one of his people and you track with him, you've learned to track with him, in his own telling, it is a story. It is a tale of austerity. It's not a tale of American greatness. And it's right there in the name on the hat to make America great again. Right. It is very it is counter to what you think the brand is. As similar to what you're talking about earlier this week about the cutter plane. It's like we need to get a 13 year old plane from like a regional sand despot in the Middle East. We can't build our own plane like i'll put it all together it does go against kind of the opulent america's great brand that he has tried to cultivate and i

think that you know as they've kind of grasped around for rationales for a trade war that doesn't have a rationale really besides donald trump's whims you land on these talking points that aren't helpful i just want to think on the thing you brought up about the 75% of people buying it that don't want to buy a house. I also think this is the other thing that's hanging over everything is these high interest rates, right? And I think that's something that really harmed Biden, which is if you're in a situation and you want to be able to move to a different city to take a new job, or you want to move out of an apartment into a home, or you want to, you're having, your family's expanding, you want to, or if you want to downsize,

if you're in a home and you're a senior and you want to get to a smaller home, you can't do it right now. The interest rates are so high, it doesn't make any economic sense. And so you have this environment where people feel stuck. And then on top of that,

Donald Trump comes in and says, hey, you already feel stuck because of these interest rates. I'm going to put a 30% tax on everything that you buy at Walmart and you're just going to have to like it. It's just not a winning political message. It's where you can see a schism emerge between Trump and Republicans who understand history of this country. I mean, malaise is malaise, and it is the third rail of American politics because malaise was what was used to

describe Jimmy Carter's economy and it was so toxic it was used for a generation in American politics Trump is either wittingly or unwittingly making people feel that malaise absent some of the fundamental economic weaknesses that ushered in that era. He's creating them as though in a malaise lab. Right. No. And if he does create it and we end up with that stagflation, I mean, that is literally the economic environment around Carter, where when the malaise economy, you know, or when that coin was termed to define the economy. So it is a big problem for him. You're seeing this just a hint on the hill right now in these budget negotiations, right? Where, again, that I think that if everything was really humming, you know, if the economy really took off and we're in

a golden age after Trump got in on January 20th, I don't think that you would see the Republicans on the hill, you know, being so, you know, so much infighting and nitpicking over a budget, you know, over what exactly the taxes are going to be. They would want to continue the momentum, right? That as you go into a time when, oh man, Trump might be bumbling us into this 1970s stagflation, and on top of that, he wants to force me to vote for, you know, some massive tax cut for the rich

that's going to jam up our, that's going to increase our debt by $6 trillion on top of the trillions that we're already planning on adding to the debt. And that's going to drive interest rates up more. And that's going to continue to drive this spiral. I don't know if I want my name on that. Or I can at least, you know, I just want to slow it down a bit and see, you know, kind of how things shake out. So I don't know if you're really seeing a schism or cracks or whatever, but just the fact that they've slowed the gears on that, I think, is in part a reflect of what's happening economically. You can't really describe Donald Trump's second term as fitting anything resembling America first.

And he's been hearing about it from some of his biggest media superfans, the same people who tolerated, celebrated, and normalized the January 6th insurrection, his 34 felonies, and his botched channeling of COVID. It turns out Trump's plan to accept a luxury jet from Qatar was the perfect story for Ben Shapiro, Mark Levin, and Laura Loomer to publicly break from Donald Trump and turn their base against the jet. As for Laura Shapiro, Mark Levin, and Laura Loomer to publicly break from Donald Trump and turn their base against the jet. As for Laura Loomer, her influence has only grown during the presidential campaign

and now with Trump back in the White House. Frank Bruni of the New York Times examined the outsized role and the challenges that one of Trump's lead chaos agents has played in Trump's second term. Bruni writes this, quote, Loomer exemplifies the danger to Trump's own fortunes as well as the country's of how he often sizes up potential allies. He looks not at the quality of their ideas, but at the audacity of their provocations, not at how nicely they play with others, but at

how reliably they rile their followers. That's a fine approach if you're just owning the libs and staging a carnival. But if you mean to govern, the freak show gets in the way. We're back with Tim and the Rev. Tim, this Bruni column, I read it and wanted to know what you thought of it. Frank's really good. A couple of turns of phrase on this point.

But that last line is the key one, right? Is that, you know, the freak show is helpful, actually, in a campaign setting, right? It might not be good for the body politic, but it's helpful to Donald Trump. It creates a lot of noise. You know, it creates a lot of attention. It's good at going after your foes. It's good at making a big deal out of some little thing. And we've seen this with the James Comey, you know, Instagram posts this week or yesterday where they're all, you know, pretending like he should be in jail over some seashells posts where

he's talking about how he poses Trump, right? Like, you know, they're good at that part. Like having that freak show is helpful. It's not that helpful, though, when you actually have to do things. And I think this relates to the last segment. It's not that helpful, though, when you actually have to do things. And I think this relates to the last segment. It's not that helpful, actually, when things aren't going that well for you politically and they feel like they need to, they can use their powers of attention for ill. And I do think that we're starting to see that right now. And I think that they are, you know, feeling more and more free to critique Trump because of, you know, kind of the absurdity of his recent moves, particularly with regards to the Qatar plane. And so we saw that with Laura Loomer and with Mark Levin. That's the great one.

I guess you've not been paying attention. Sorry, what did I say? Levine? Levine? Yeah. You don't know the great one? First time listener. Okay.

Anyway, so that I think that's true of them. And then I think it's also true of the policy. I just want to say we just saw about an hour ago, whatever it was, the Supreme Court, all three of Trump's Supreme Court judges that he put on on the highest court opposed or said that he was wrong with the deportations to El Salvador. Right. And the spectrum, when you're going out there and doing all these crazy things, it creates room for those oppositions. And if Trump had just wanted to go into the White House and just have a freak show, he didn't really do a whole lot, and he just did Gulf America and kind of let everything else go as status quo, I think he probably would have been in good shape. But once you're trying to govern and do a lot of these extreme things, it creates room for the freak show to create problems

for you. Tim, I am out of the business of asking what Democrats should do. They have the whole fate of the democracy in their hands, right? They're the only ones out publicly as a pro-democracy party. The Republicans in Congress who control everything have rolled over. So let me ask it differently. What we have learned is that the American people will tolerate a lot of anti-democratic conduct in the spirit of economic opportunity. And instead of judging that or bemoaning that, I think it's maybe a moment to accept that and try to understand that. What opportunity do Democrats have to sort of stand

with all Americans, regardless of who they voted for, in this moment of genuine economic insecurity and anxiety? Look, I think the opportunity they have is to channel people's anger. And that doesn't necessarily mean, you know, to go and, you know, whatever. Sometimes people hear that and it's like, oh, well, that means you have to be, you know, screaming and yelling and like posting on social media all the time and doing, you know, doing crazy stuff and doing dances at protests and all that. And I don't, you know, I think everyone should do what feels authentic to them as a politician. But I think right now, you know, there are people out there that, as we discussed in the last segment, that are upset about what's happening with the economy. There are other people that are upset about other things that the administration is doing. And I think that the opportunity the Democrats have is to try to take back some of that, you know, against the status quo, oppositional energy.

Right. And go and say, I am going to fight this. Yeah, I'm going to fight this. And I'm upset about it. I'm upset that he, that these rich guys who are insulated from all this are doing this to you. I'm upset. Fight on your behalf. And I think that is the opportunity. And so I think that is sometimes where I see, I feel like Democrats miss it a little bit if they are out there talking about working together or figuring out solutions. Solutions are important. But I think right now we're kind of in a channeling anger phase. And I think that is a good first step. And then we can kind of build to what those solutions look like as you get closer and closer to other elections, which are still a little ways away now.