Bulwark Takes - Trump Completely Loses the Plot During a Press Conference

Episode Date: December 16, 2025

Tim takes on Trump’s latest disaster of a press conference, including his claim that fentanyl is a “weapon of mass destruction,” a fake pardon promise, and a doubling down of his attacks on Rob Reiner. Exclusive $35 off Carver Mat at https://on.auraframes.com/BULWARKTAKES. Promo Code BULWARKTAKES

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Hey everybody. Tim Moore from the bulwark here. Donald Trump just finished yet another one of his deranged press conferences where he explained his diluted thinking around the continued prosecution of a war that no one has officially declared in the Caribbean. Also, his decision to fire off one of the most disgusting bleats, following the murder of Rob Reiner and his wife, Michelle. He also covered a few other items. I just want to run through them with you.

No one wants to watch these whole press conferences. So we are going to pull a little bit from them and discuss what I found to be significant. First, the press conference was based on this declaration that he is signing. Historic, he said, that fentanyl is a weapon of mass destruction. Let's listen. That's why today I'm taking one more step to protect. Americans from the scourge of deadly fentanyl flooding into our country. With this historic executive order I will sign today, we're formally classifying fentanyl as a weapon of mass

destruction, which is what it is. No bomb does what this is doing. 200 to 300,000 people die every year that we know of. So we're formally classifying fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction. Like, here's the thing. Fentanyl is obviously terrible, but this is absurd. Fentanyl is used in hospitals. So are hospitals now using a weapon of mass destruction? And I hate to be pedantic here, but fentanyl is a pain relief opiate that has legitimate usages. Like, it is not an atom bomb or sarin gas. It shows you a little bit about the with which they are taking this declaration. So then the question is, I assume Donald Trump is not planning on invading America's hospitals.

And so you do wonder, well, what exactly might be the rationale for making a declaration such as this? Fentanyl deaths are down. They're still too high, but they're down. Trump was president already once, unfortunately. You know, there was no declaration of this nature then. So what is it about now that makes him want to do this? I think we had a little bit of a clue as he talks further about the drug crisis that he sees. Let's watch that.

Drugs coming in by sea are down 94%. And we're trying to figure out who the other 6% are. But they're down 94% and we're going to start hitting them on land, which is a lot easier to do, frankly. but these are a direct military threat to the United States of America. They're trying to drug out our country. Okay. So, and he said this several times before, and at some point there's a little bit of a, I don't know, got to call your bluff, kind of, when it comes to this declaration that we're going to be

hitting people on the land, which is a lot easier. Why don't we just be pedantic one more time? If it was easier to hit up in the land, why weren't we hitting on the land? from the start, you know, I mean, besides the fact that this is an illegal war, it's just not logical, the points he's making isn't logical. But to me, what you're seeing here is they are using this term weapon of vast destruction in the same way they use the term emergency. Like, they're wanting to create, you know, some kind of legal structure and it's, well, get struck down, but some kind of defensible argument for

expanding their war efforts against these drug cartels. Now, there's some flaws with that, obviously. Like, Donald Trump's stating it in a declaration does not make it any more legal, really, than stating it in a tweet, and it just gives them something that they could put into a filing. Like, he has had many executive orders that have been struck down by the courts already. The other, you know, I think a little inconvenient fact here is that assuming the land that they want to strike, there is Venezuela and not Mexico, the fentanyl, that supposed weapon of mass destruction is not, it's not coming from Venezuela. It's coming from

Mexico and China. We've got another video coming up on China here in a minute. So like, okay, I mean, the whole thing is preposterous. So it's kind of hard to get into their head. But I guess what you're seeing here is, again, they don't have public. support for this war. They don't really have clear rationale for it. And so they're trying to kind of build the building blocks of trying to give themselves war powers for these actions based on tenuous claims and orders. And this, to me, this executive order about how fentanyls exposed weapon or mass destruction is of a piece with another piece of rhetoric that you're talking out of the administration was that these drug cartels in Central America and South America

have ties directly to ISIS and Africa. Why were they making that claim? To me, they're making that claim in order to, again, create this legal rationale or justification for treating the drug cartels the same way they would treat terrorists under the 2001 AUMF. And this is obviously preposterous, but they are preposterous. And so that's the best explanation I got. Explanation two is that Grandpa just needed something to do today.

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holidays. You are running out of time. Support the show by mentioning us at checkout terms and conditions apply. A couple other clips here. Trump again weighs in on Tina Peters from my OG home state in Colorado. Let's listen to a little bit of that. And last month we seized another 1.7 million fentanyl pills in the state of Colorado, the poorly run state of Colorado, with the government. who's incompetent and frankly with a governor that won't allow our wonderful Tina to come out of a jail in a high-intensity jail because she caught people cheating on an election and they said she was cheating she wasn't cheating she went over she looked at one of the election scams going on and because she did that they put her in jail for nine years the governor of Colorado

is a weak and pathetic man who was run by Trend de Aragua the criminals from Venezuela took over sections of Colorado and he was afraid to do anything but he puts Tina in jail for nine years because she caught people cheating and when she walked over and got involved in it

they said she was cheating she wasn't cheating she caught people cheating on the election 2020 along with a lot of us other people that cheated on that election. You'll see that coming out more and more. I guess you should say that the governor of Colorado Jared Polis was not run by Trenda Aragua. And Tina Peters was cheating. I mean, she wasn't cheating, I guess, in the sense that she didn't try to rig the votes. What she tried to do was gather evidence that the machines

that she was in charge of could plausibly have been used to rig the votes on behalf of Donald Trump. So what Tina Peters was doing in Colorado, and I've been covering this all the way back since 2020, is basically, like, let's provide some evidence for Donald Trump's batshit claims about Dominion voting machines so that he can successfully engineer the theft of the election that he was working on. That was it. Like, she was just trying to, I guess, kind of similar to our first topic, she was like

trying to create a rationale for him and his. stop the steel rhetoric and his effort to stop the certification of the election so he could stay in power. So that's what she was doing. That is a crime. She is in jail for it. It's a state crime. Donald Trump's pardon powers can't help him here. And Governor Jared Polis, appreciate you for staying strong and continuing to do the right thing on this. Hope you continue to do so. Tina Peters does not deserve a pardon for her actions. Let's move on. Trump talking about the shooting of Brown University and the response from the FBI. Do you know what the motive of the shooter was?

Is it put, when the Charlie did attack? No, it's moving along now. And we don't, and we'll, we're going to see what happens. Hopefully they're going to capture this animal. Hopefully they're going to capture it. Has Kash Patel told you why it's been so difficult for the FBI to identify who the shooter is? Well, it's always difficult. So far, we've done a very good job of doing it with Charlie, with, you know, the various times this has happened.

and they've done it in pretty much record time. But you'd really have to ask the school a little bit more about that because, you know, this was a school problem. They had their own guards. They had their own police. They had their own everything. But you'd have to ask that question really to the school, not to the FBI. We came in after the fact.

And the FBI will do a good job, but they came in after the fact. This is only noteworthy because we discussed this little about with Bill Crystal, but cash has taken a lot of heat from the inside for the number of times that he is now like popped off about a suspect in a high profile shooting and had that been incorrect and and you know that is not great behavior for the head of the bureau it shows a lack of judgment it's notable here that trump is defending him now it's not you know it's trump is tickle he's defended people in the past and then you know left him on the tarmac so we will see but i i i i i I do think that it's interesting Trump is defending cash.

I think something to monitor as we go forward is Cash and Hengseth are so obviously incompetent and are getting criticized from within the MAGA world. It says a lot about what Trump's potential plans are, whether he keeps them in charge. Does he just want incompetent sycophants who will do whatever he wants in charge? In which case does that mean that, you know, he wants to keep his option open for giving them illegal orders down the line. That's a worst case scenario, in my opinion. Or, you know, is he responsive to normal political pushback and, you know, he decides he wants to push out and competent members of his cabinet in favor of competent, more broadly acceptable members?

Cash and Heck Seth are the two that I'm looking at on that front. The Christie-Nome thing is a little different Department of Homeland Security. I, like, Stephen Miller is like really the quasi-cabinet secretary on immigration stuff anyway. So that, you know, like Adrian Keraskio was reporting that she might be on the outset. That to me feels more like an internal politics within the Trump White House situation. The Hague Seth and Cash thing are a different category and something we're going to be monitoring closely. All right. Now let's go to Trump was asked about the bleat the descent insulting Rob Reiner and Michelle Reiner after they were brutally murdered in their own home.

just this unbelievable tragedy. Trump reveals himself once again to just be a uniquely horrendous human being, somebody who cares only about himself. He was asked what he'd say about the fact that even some Republicans in this case had criticized him for his comments. Let's listen. Mr. President, a number of Republicans have denounced your statement on true social after the murder of Rob Reiner. Do you stand by that post? Well, I wasn't a fan of his at all. He was a deranged person as far as Trump is concerned. He said he knew it was false. In fact, it's the exact opposite

that I was a friend of Russia controlled by Russia. You know, it was the Russia hoax. He was one of the people behind it. I think he heard himself in career-wise. He became like a deranged person, Trump derangement syndrome. So I was not a fan of Rob Reiner at all in any way, shape, or form.

I thought he was very bad for our country, yeah. It's impossible to imagine another president saying this, Like, you know, talking about an actor who had been murdered and saying that they were bad for the country just because they oppose them politically. It's impossible to imagine W. doing this or Obama or anybody. Like, it's just, it's hard to imagine, like, somebody in your life. Like, what if you're the coach of your kid's team posted like that? Like, if the coach of, I'm going to be the coach of my kid's basketball team, watch out.

But if the coach of my kid's soccer team posted on the internet, like something is deranged as Trump posted about Rob Reiner's death, I think I'd pull the kid off the team. I mean, it's just like you don't want to be subjecting somebody you love to something or, you know, to a person like that. And you don't really want a person who has that poor judgment and that black of a soul to be in a position of responsibility. And yet the person that is behaving like that is not a soccer coach,

but is the president of the United States. States. So it's pretty depressing. Pretty depressing stuff. But, you know, when you get a Trump press conference rundown, it's not going to be all laughs and giggles over here, is it? Subscribe to the feed. I get some more stuff coming for you. It's going to be a big week here on the Bullwark YouTube page. So stick around. Tell your friends. See you soon. Hey, Ontario. Come on down to Bed MGM Casino and check out our newest exclusive. The price is right, fortune pick. Don't miss out. Play exciting casino games based on the iconic game show. Only at BetMGM. Access to the Price is right fortune pick is only available at BetMGM Casino. BetMGM and GameSense remind you to play responsibly. 19 plus to wager, Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connix Ontario at 1866-531-2,600 to speak to an advisor free of charge.

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