Bulwark Takes - Tim Miller: We’re Being Governed by 12-Year-Olds

Episode Date: October 25, 2025

Tim Miller takes on our “everyone is twelve now” government mentality as the Trump administration posts immature content about former presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, as well as Joe Biden’s son Hunter, on the official White House webpage, and using MGMT songs without permission with TikTok edit styles to glorify ICE’s violent attacks on protesters.

Hey, everybody, Tim Miller from the Bullwark here. The president is 12, and everyone in the White House that works for him pretty much also is acting like they're 12. I wanted to do a little video on this this Saturday, putting together a couple of the recent trolls that the White House has done. It is an homage to Patrick Cosmos, who had one of the hot social media posts of the moment going around, which goes like this, working on a new unified theory of American reality. I'm calling everyone is 12 now.

And I'm not sure if everyone is 12 now, but our White House surely is. And I don't know about you. I guess some people want to have a 12-year-old in the White House. We did the video today, which you have to go watch with Harry Sisson, who is the young Democratic influencer that Trump posts a video of himself shitting on Harry while he was protesting. Because that's what the president does now instead of honoring the First Amendment and people want to speak out. He does AI defecations on people who are just peacefully protesting, exercising their fundamental American First Amendment, right? So we talked to Harry about this over there, and you should go check that out. But it isn't just the AI video of Harry, right?

Trump has now done a number of things I want to go through. There are the DHS videos that we've talked about, and now he's updated the White House website. And before I show you this, I just want to say, just bluntly, I like a sense of you. humor. I want to have a president that has a sense of humor. Both Bush and Obama had great senses of humor. Really, both of them made me laugh from time to time. There's nothing wrong with Josh and around showing that you're a human. So I want leaders that are judicious, but also self-aware enough that they can make and take a joke. That's now what we're getting here. We're getting 12-year-olds. And I don't want a 12-year-old running the country. Some people do. Some

people are very excited about the AI videos and these trolls I'm about to show you. Some people are giddy about having 12 year olds run things. They don't care. They get a kick out of Trump saying, oh, he just wants to kill people in the Caribbean. You know, they get a kick out of the haphazard way in which these guys are governing. They get a kick out of the fact that he's like a big boy up on the truck and just wants to watch buildings go boom, boom. Some people like that apparently um not me not me i don't i think that we should probably be led by somebody that is not 12 that's my take possibly controversial i don't know um because it seems like there are a bunch people while there are a bunch of people who are excited about having a 12 year old run things there's

another group of people who don't really care and so maybe it's incumbent upon us to just like drive home just how 12 they are and so i want to do that right now um here for first is the White House website. They put this up, basically has some spin to push back on Jonathan last take on the East Wing and how what they're doing is irresponsible and wrong and unlawful and outside the spirit of how we treat buildings of this nature in a liberal democracy. And their argument is basically people have made changes to the White House all the time as they go through this timeline. And, you know, again, this is not, I just want to stay up front. This is not particularly compelling because like the timeline begins with like building the White House and

expanding it, not tearing things down. And then then you get into a bunch of changes that are pretty mild. And then you get into their trolls. So we'll just go through here. You know, it's the War of 1812 they have on here. Now we need to rebuild after that. The addition of South Portico. Addition of the West Wing in 02. Thanks to Theodore Roosevelt, addition to the Oval office. Howard, William Howard Taft did that. Edition of the Rose Garden. That was Woodrow Wilson, 1913 addition to the east wing we've talked about this fair amount Eleanor Roosevelt was key to this this was during the FDR administration and then I knew that there had been a reconstruction during the Harry Truman administration this is kind of

interesting just like the degree to which he changed the inside of the White House and then added of course the famous Truman balcony so that presidents can go outside get some fresh air without you know being in danger of getting sniped addition to the briefing room of Nixon so you get up to 1973 here and it's all a pretty straightforward recitation of the history. I'm sure we could get Doris Curran's Goodwin or somebody on here to maybe nitpicks the way they frame some of the stuff.

But generally speaking, it's pretty straightforward up to 1973. Then you get to Bill Clinton, and they add something that has nothing to do with updating or changing the White House. They just talk about how he got a blowjob from Monica Lewinsky in the Oval Office, which did actually happen,

which is kind of different than some of these other things. Then next, it was forward to 2012. It has Obama hosts members of the Muslim Brothers, And then it shows this picture of Obama, not in the White House. This is from one of the trips he wrote about in dreams from my father. Again, so if they were playing this straight, it would be still a BS argument, but you would include here like Obama putting in the basketball court, right? They don't do that.

They do some Barack Hussein Obama race baiting here. And the facts of this, what it's worth is that some members of Muslim Brotherhood did meet some members of the Obama NSC. This was a follow-on to the Egyptian Revolution. during the Arab Spring. And so, you know, they're trying to figure out how to be mediators and negotiate in the region. I mean, Donald Trump has MBS who murdered a journalist wrote for an American outlet coming to the White House like next month. Donald Trump wanted to meet with the Taliban at Camp David, like personally. Donald Trump just rolled out the red carton for Putin last week.

He's a killer. Obama didn't meet with the Muslim Brotherhood. Members of his team dead. That's why this is not a picture of the White House, the picture of Obama from a younger part of his life where they're trying to do racist anti-Muslims shit. Then they mentioned the tennis pavilion, Melania put in, and then they attack Hunter. They say cocaine discovered. I don't know any reason to believe this is actually Hunter's cocaine.

Who the hell knows? There's cocaine in the White House. And then they do the Trans-Day of Visibility. This is a big thing in right-wing media that the Trans-Divisibility happened on Easter. And one year they had a transgender day of visibility event at the White House. And then they do the big polls that Trump put in, you know, overcompensating.

And then they mentioned Trump's. other renovations, including the Oval Office renovations. Look, these people are 12. This is embarrassing. This is the White House, right? This is the White House. Like, while we're talking about 12-year-olds, so if you're 12, you're in like sixth grade, give or take.

And so, I mean, sixth graders go to whitehouse.gov. Like, sixth graders go to do research here, if they're given a paper. Maybe some of them, just because of what's happening with the East Wing, some of them were given an assignment that's like, hey, do a paper on the White House or do a paper on, you know, the monuments in D.C. And so they might come to the White House.gov and go to the major events timeline. And it's like you see this picture of Hunter Biden smoking in the bathtub and talking about his cocaine?

Like, it's just so childish. Like, aren't these the people that, like, didn't want kids to have to read about, you know, gay penguins? They want students who are trying to, like, that's the guy of people who are coming to this website. Students, foreigners, people are trying to learn. And this is what you're getting. You're getting fake news about Obama.

You're getting racist shit. You know, you're getting these trolley pictures of Hunter Biden. It's just so childish and embarrassing. You know, it's just embarrassing. And the fact that people aren't more mad about this, I think circles us back to the original tweet. which is that everybody in America is 12. Not us, but a lot of people.

I want to talk about one other thing. Well, I got you. Because this also bugged me. I've been doing a number of videos on these DHS propaganda videos that are, I don't say this lightly. I do think that sometimes like white nationalism and white supremacy gets like thrown around willy-nilly a little bit in ways that are actually probably harmful to the cause of racial equity. another video on that probably but I just think that when you're making such a serious charge

the charge should be backed up by like very real evidence I just don't know what else to call the DHS videos and memes that they put out besides white nationalism. I mean they just constantly put out these like memes of 1950s America featuring white families talking about how

we're going to protect the homeland and we're going to protect our stock and you know all this blood and soil nonsense and then they put out these videos that are like snuff films featuring immigrants and migrants and brown people and the way that they're being manhandled and mistreated like it is really horrible and the recent uh recent video and we can only play a little bit of it i'll explain why afterwards was um it's at the end of the dark age beginning of the golden age and it um it refers to a song

from a band like mGMt the song's called little dark age let's play Okay, so MGMT complained, and obviously, they don't want to be associated with this. Interestingly, in an interview a couple of years ago, they said at the point of this song, Little Dark Age, they wrote in 2016, and you don't have to really read through the lines about what they were talking about. They were talking about how we were entering a Little Dark Age with Trump taking over the presidency. And so for Trump to co-op that, and the DHS co-op that and use it, again, for another one of these snuffing, films like featuring like the ice agents and federal agents like attacking protesters and and shooting pepper balls and you know wearing these gas masks and going into our cities it's sick

it's sick it's what 12 year olds would do it's what it's what it's fucking psychotic 12 year olds would do and they think it's funny you can tell you think it's funny because they put in some pictures of like of the people in the animal costumes getting gassed and you know it's just to me anyway, I look at on the substance, I look at this video and I think we are in a dark age now. Like they have this wrong. Like this is not, this is not a golden age. This

government agents firing peaceful protesters in the streets, chaos, mass chaos, all for an effort to deport people, many of whom are here just trying to live a life, trying to feed their kids. It is childish and noxious

and grotesque. And I'm happy that MGMT push back on And, you know, if they want to do propaganda, they want to do dystopian adjut prop, I don't know, get Kid Rock to do it or one of the three musicians that actually likes you. So that's that. Everyone might be 12. The president in the White House and our Department of Homeland Security is definitely 12. And that ain't great. That ain't great.

You know, maybe we should have a 27-year-old. 35. 35 was the age constitutionally. So maybe we should aim for people who are like, have the maturity of a 35 year old as well in the White House in the future, you know, presuming we get that opportunity. That's something to think about. I appreciate all very much. Oh, if you're wondering, I'm not trying to grow a beard.

I just got lazy today. I just, it's the weekend, doing a little weekend content for you guys. And I didn't want to shave. So there you go. We'll see you all soon. Peace.