Bulwark Takes - Tim Miller: They Elected a Moron, Now They’re Coping

Episode Date: April 8, 2025

Tim Miller joins Nicolle Wallace on MSNBC Deadline: White House to discuss Donald Trump's tariffs tanking the economy and sending us to a recession as Republican lawmakers do absolutely nothing.  Watch Deadline: White House

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The politics, the gravitational pull, the politics is that Republicans will lose both chambers. Why does Trump want that? Does he believe that? I guess, I don't know. This is all we get into the psycho. Ted Cruz clearly believes it. We get into psychoanalyst table. Let me show you where his coalition is. Here's David Portnoy.

This one's the only one that I can think of that's like man-made. Like the stock market crashes in 9-11. Yes. Stock market crashed-11. Yes. Stock market crashed COVID. Yes. But this is like a decision that one guy made that crashed the whole stock market.

That's why we're calling it Orange Monday, not Black Monday. I saw Howard Lutnick being like, we're going to live in a world where there's an army of Americans screwing in little things into iPhones. Like what? What American is going to take that job? So to me, this is all about negotiating the tariff rates. It's all about getting equal trade, fair trade, which everybody wants,

and it's a noble thing that Trump's trying to get done, but he can't really have leverage negotiating these deals. If the stock market is going to crash, everyone's going to join. What's he called? The panicking party. And he has to reverse course. So you see, he's kind of like stuck. See, see.

Yeah. When I see a lot from Dave Portnoy and from the Mar-a-Lago Accord crowd, I listened to a long podcast about that to try to understand it. The other day is what I would call cope. Cope is the word that's happening because these guys just refuse to believe the reality that's in front of their eyes, which is that they elected a moron who bankrupted a casino as president, and now he's doing to the country what he did to several casinos. That is what is happening here.

There's not any complex plan in place. There's not a 40 chest negotiation happening to rebalance trade between us and and Europe. Like there's not like none of that is they're not devaluing the dollar to pay down the debt. Like none of that is part of the plan. Like this is a mad king who doesn't know what he's doing, who loves the word tariff, and who is stubborn, and who is going to ride or die on this. Maybe one day he'll change his mind and decide, I can declare victory because I have a cult of 33% of supporters that will go along with it, and I'm annoyed with rich people calling me and complaining. That might happen someday, but that won't be because it was part of a broader plan that was in place. Here's the other thing. If the negotiations were happening, let's even give them the best case scenario. Let's say that Scott Besant and Trump negotiate 15 deals with

Israel and Turkey and a handful of other countries. Like we still like the China tariffs are going the wrong direction. He's moving them up to 104 percent. And like even if they cut 12 deals, we still would have a tariff increase that would be beyond anything that happened in Trump 1.0, anything that any of the small tariffs that Biden did and like any imaginable tariff. So that wouldn't, you know, it might help the stock market for a day or two, but it would not help like these long term systemic problems that are being created. And I was pretty struck by Doug Holtzikin. I don't know if all of the viewers caught this, but in a normal Republican presidency, Doug would be have Kevin Hassett's job or Scott Besson's's job and for him just to bluntly say we're headed towards a

recession and probably stagflation like that's not coming from somebody you know in our camp they can number one limit that authority by by saying okay we'll take votes on on those emergencies and they did one in the senate uh and it passed it's probably not to get through the house or they could take back the powers of levity tears take it away from the president there are bills to do that so think about this nickel if this was part of the congressional process they would have to pass it in law probably in this reconciliation bill there would be an effective date you know when they started there would be a rate you would know what that rate would be there would be a base you would know what countries were in and out what products were in or out

Who got an exemption instead of going out of commerce and trying to get one out of you know, lobbying a secretary Let Nick it would be a same process You're not like tariffs, but you would deliver them in a reasoned and debated way and and they gave that away Thank you I guess a lot of what Doug said there, but there was one kind of thing you elided over, which is this bill to take back some control, I believe it was just on the Canada tariffs that passed the Senate. And he said, well, you know, that's probably not going to get through the House.

But like, why is that? Well, it's because Mike Johnson won't bring it up because it would get through the House if you actually brought it up to a vote. And so then the question is, is it on the republicans in the house who are opposed to this to not just say they're opposed to it when they go on cnn or whatever but to actually do something because they they could do that mike lawler here in new york and don bacon and ryan fitzpatrick in pennsylvania they could all get together and just and and either uh pass a uh there's a certain type of resolution that forces a vote they could do that they could get really crazy and tell Mike Johnson that

they're going to do what Matt Gaetz did and and try to tank his speakership over this like the the small handful of moderate Republicans in the house who are smartly rightly criticizing this actually have power and agency here. It's just we haven't seen them use it in like a decade or two, so we sort of forget that they do. But they do. They could act right now, and we could stop them. They could stop this this afternoon if Don Bacon put up a privilege resolution

and they forced it through the House and forced it through the Senate, and then Trump could veto it, or we'd see how that would turn out. But the majority votes are against this in both houses if the small group of normal Republicans had the courage to do something about it. Well, I'm done looking for courage. Why not their own political salvation? I mean, right now, the smart political bet, right? Like, there's no courage.

Like, that's so 2014. But why not? I mean, you could be well-funded if you put together a pro-economy coalition in Congress with Democrats and Republicans. Jamie Dimon is obviously shopping for someone who's interested in not destroying the economy. I mean, you'd have a receptive ear at Capitol Hill. You could also do what used to happen in the old days. I mean, Congress used to, senators used to mean something around the world. I mean, you've got men and women in the Congress who don't mean anything. I don't know why anyone would go in a CODEL because they have taken that branch of government off the field in terms of governance.

I mean, why wouldn't you do it if not because you know it's wrong, because you know it's political suicide? Yeah, look, and all these guys are scared of Trump, I guess, that they're losing a primary, but these guys, these front line are... They should be afraid of their neighbors and their voters. Exactly. These front line guys. They're angry and scared. I think that's exactly right.

And maybe, you know, it's only been, what, four days that the market started to go down, and so maybe that calculus changes for some of them. We haven't seen a lot of evidence of that over the last, you know, since 2016. But, look, I think so. I've been saying this all the time. Just as a side thing for me to play fantasy politics and go back to the old days, people used to switch parties. Like, no, it's crazy kind of to me that none of these people have done that since Trump got in in 2016.

I mean, in our time, our own Spectre and Jim Jeffords, we could go down the list, right? Yeah, yeah. So if things got that bad, I mean, I bet Brian Fitzpatrick could win as a Democrat in his suburban Philly district if he decided he wanted to do that. Anyway, there are a lot of different levers they could pull. It's just they've all decided they don't want to pull them, and then, you know, they're going to tweet about it instead and hope that they can survive.