Bulwark Takes - Tim Miller: The Wheels Are Coming Off The Trump Train

Episode Date: November 20, 2025

Tim Miller takes on Trump’s terrible week—the botched Comey prosecution, the Epstein mess, the gold-plated White House antics, and why even MAGA-friendly voices are calling him a lame duck. Check out Deadline: White House on MSNOW: https://www.ms.now/deadline-white-house

Hey, everybody. Tim over from the boatwork here, back in my hotel. I'm just running around. I just got off with Nicole Wallace. And we discussed a bunch of stuff. We'll give you the candy first. We discussed why we think the wheels are coming off of the Trump train right now. And we went to how people from a bunch of different ideological sides see that. I played you the Tim Dillon, the kind of bro-y, magish comedian, his take on Trump being lame ducked. we read Paul Krugman and then kind of battled around between Nicole and myself and Angela Carousone over at Media Matters. We also discussed my interview with Kamala and I just talked about the good parts of it and what is encouraging about the interview with Kamala. So I hope you listen to that and then also the breaking news around the botched political attempt to put Jim Comey in jail. So lots of stuff, me and Nicole Wallace, hope you enjoy.

Subscribe to the feed. Comment below. Tell me what you think. Sorry about the background on this one. I'm doing the best I can out here. All right. Stick around for me and Nicole. Peace.

Tim Miller. Let me take a non-lawyer cable host swing at this. The Keystone cops would be pissed if you compared this group to the Keystone Cops. I am told Lindsay Halligan was chomping on gum in court today. I am told that the judge's silence might have been to sort of the best case scenario for the government in there, that there was nothing to say. And, you know, not for nothing. If this was someone that the government thought had carried out horrible, violent crimes, they would be jeopardizing their own ability to put a violent criminal away because of their misconduct. So we can sort of trivialize the severity of the procedural mistakes that were made.

But if this were a prosecution of someone really, really bad, which the vast majority, I mean, the reason Mary never got no true bill, which means no indictment, is because what the government is supposed to do is prosecuting people who are really, really bad. Jim Comey's innocence can be testified to by Eric Siebert, who is the sort of a Republican in very good standing, who ran that office. was run out or resigned because he refused to bring a case against Jim Comey. So the whole thing is a debacle and an embarrassment on the Trump side. Legally, you've got the Comey team looking at five different ways to make this go away.

But we should stare at the sun of what this is. And it is a stain on the rule of law in America, seeing the world over. Yeah, you and I are aligned on this, Nicole. just a simple country podcaster, so I can't get into the details that Mary and Carol with their expertise can on this. But I look at all this, and it's just, it's blatantly incompetent, right? And so I don't know how much more time is necessary to spend on that. To me, it's like the incompetence almost papers over the perniciousness of this, right? I mean, I was, I don't know why this struck me in particular, but I was looking at this selfie

that Mark Beniof, the CEO of Salesforce, took with Pam Bondi at the state dinner with MBS last night. I was just looking at that, and I was like, that just picture, in contrast with this story, you know, to me, I just found extremely gross, right? Because I think that there's something to the fact that we all kind of know that this is a preposterous case and that Jim Comey's not a real criminal and that they're doing this for show. And so the stakes feel a little bit low for people at some level. level. But to me, it's like, look, this is the government of the United States. That's the attorney general in that selfie with a tech CEO who is ordering an investigation against

a political foe that's purely political. It's based on nothing. It's just based on pure politics because her boss told her to do so, like it's a banana republic. And she assigned a Florida insurance lawyer to do it because none of the professionals would actually do it. And then that lawyer botches it so badly that the judge is gobsmacked, like to me, that series of facts would make, you know, would want to make anybody in polite society want to say, I don't want to be seen with Pam Bondi. Like what she is doing is a frontal assault on the rule of law. She's doing it in an extremely incompetent manner, so maybe the risk is a little bit lower than if there was an attorney general who is really good at assaulting the rule of law and

going after their political foes. But, I mean, it is, it's really, outrageous, you know, when you look at it from kind of that 30,000 foot perspective. Given everything we've covered today, ask yourself, when actually, not wishful thinking, but when was Donald Trump actually this week? This diminish politically and otherwise. Don't answer. We'll look at the polling. Congressman Swallel just alluded to it, though. The latest from the Maris poll illustrates a rather stark picture. On the generic ballot right now, registered voters prefer a Democrat over a Republican by a whopping 14 points. It is the highest advantage Democrats have had since the year 2017. One year ago, the same poll had these numbers

tied, literally the same number in the generic ballot. Part of this has to do with what's going on inside of the MAGA movement itself. Tim Dillon, he's a voice inside the Manosphere, who is adjacent to the MAGA coalition. They helped Trump reach young men during the election. he said this as part of a conversation about H1B says. This is the end of the Trump administration. This is the beginning of the lame duck presidency. It's obvious to everyone, even his most ardent, ardent supporters show up to the White House, like Laura Ingram, which is kind of shock on what the hell is going on.

Now we'll start, you know, three years of talking about the ballroom. He will trail off. He will get older. he's going to, he's adorned the White House in gold. Epstein's going to suck the oxygen out of a lot of this. We're going to talk about that a little later on. Pretty much. On Trump's political standing, Paul Kragman writes this, quote,

power is unitary. Trump seems to be collapsing on multiple fronts, with the collapse on each front, reinforcing the collapse on others. The Epstein affair is coming to a head, even as the public loses all faith in his economic policy. and the whole structure of fear on which his regime rests appears to be evaporating. He also seems to be unraveling personally.

I don't know how this ends, but all of a sudden a rapid implosion looks possible. No, I don't know what that looks like, but the U.S. political universe looks very different than it did a few weeks ago. Tim, his problems, too, are, as Kremlin writes, they all exacerbate the other, right? He has no credibility because he promised to release the Epstein files, and then he had his government go through the Epstein file, so we know they're a pile of things or a data file of things. We know that they went through them, so we know they exist. So whatever he says next, whether he says, I can't show them to you because I'm looking for Democrats in them, we know he went through them already.

He already knows the answer to the question he's asked Pam Bondi to go investigate. On the economy, he hurt the economy. And it just seems like whatever he tries to do, the thing he can't get back is his credibility. Yeah, look, just one way to look at this is like think about the types of people that were talking about, people that voted for Trump but aren't, you know, the people in the red hats at the rallies, right? And up until about three weeks ago or a month ago, they weren't getting the core thing they wanted, which was a better economy and things to be cheaper, right? But Trump was doing some stuff that they liked, right? And so you could, you know, whether it would be, you know, we didn't, I did not support National Guard in the streets, but if you're somebody who's concerned about law and order in the city, that was a big issue for you. Like, okay, Trump is caring about that. He's trying to clean up the cities. If he cared about the border, Trump is doing that.

And then, like, October comes around. And you're thinking, everything is as expensive as it was before. It's more expensive in a lot of ways. And we're coming up in this first round of elections, this first inflection point. And what is Trump doing? Trump is turning the White House gold, and he's bulldozing part of the White House, and he is gallivanting around having great Gatsby parties. and he's having foreign dictators over for the fancy ball last night with MBS at the White House.

And if you're one of these people, and you're looking, and all of a sudden you're saying, what is he doing? He's not doing anything to help me. And that's what, like, Tim Dillon was basically getting at in that. And by the way, on all these other non-economic issues that you cared about, one of them was the Epstein files. And Trump is doing the opposite of what you wanted on that, and it's starting to seem like that he's complicit in it. And so to me, like, the interesting thing was one of his bleats. he sent out earlier this week on Truth Social.

He was sounding like a losing political consultant. He's like, fine, we'll let the Epstein files get past because we want to pivot back to affordability. He's like, now it's like Trump is the one that's like, we need to talk about kitchen table issues. And it's like, well, the kitchen table issues aren't getting better for people. You don't have a plan. You've made them worse.

And the people for whom that it really matters, they're looking at you and saying, you're completely disconnected from my concerns. I do think that's hard to get back on track. Maybe other things will happen that will give him a chance to get back in their good graces. But, like, right now, it's a tough road for him.

I think the bigger problem is someone told him what that... Well, I don't even know if they told him what it means. What does kitchen table mean to a man who has gilded the Oval Office in gold and knocked down the east wing of the White House to replace it with a ballroom? Like, anything...

Like, that's fine. We're going to pivot back to kitchen table issues. No one thinks he knows what the kitchen table is. No one thinks he knows what the kitchen table is for. No one understands that most people's kitchen table doubles as the place where they wipe away the dishes to one side and sit down with the stack of bills and tries to pay them. No one will ever believe that he knows what that feels like. And not that they ever did, but they used to think he was going to make those problems better. And now I think

that he's surrounded himself with autocrats and gold and ballrooms. I just, I don't know how he reengages that conversation with credibility. Steve Files, I think it is. I think it is, again, just another, the current president's statements most recently about this are another example of him attempting to gaslight the American people. And I say that because all of a sudden he's saying he'll wait to see what Congress does. Since when? All of a sudden, now he's waiting for Congress to greenlight what he will do or wants to do. Come on. So, Release the files. Release the files.

He is the president of the United States. He is the head of the executive branch. He has taken unilateral action without concern about the three co-equal branches of government on almost everything he has done. So release the files. Tim, what I've seen is great. It's publishers. I've been on the air.

so I haven't watched the whole thing. But this is not just the former vice president saying it. This is what the American people believe on this. He has the power to do it. Yeah. For sure. And the people in the room were very excited. We were in Nashville for that, and it was really cool to be with her.

Here's the main thing I took away from her message on the Epstein files, on a number of different topics we talked about. she is adamant that this is still our country and we should still be fighting for it and to me, from her given just how painful it was and that we've all read the book

and heard from her and just know intuitively how painful it must have been to be back out there on the road and have that positive uplifting message and attitude I think is meaningful you know, she could have disappeared

into the bushes and I don't think anybody would have blamed her and so it was cool to see her out there doing that I mean, we covered a bunch of other stuff, too, but I think we did a little bit of going back into the campaign. But the overarching kind of attitude of positivity and forward-looking and belief that this can be defeated was something that was pretty striking to me.