Bulwark Takes - Trump Holds North Korea–Style Cabinet Meeting, But with Naps

Episode Date: December 2, 2025

Sam Stein and Andrew Egger take on Trump’s surreal cabinet meeting—the praise parade, the nodding-off moments, the shifting story on the Venezuela strikes, and the loyalty-pledge Pentagon press corps. Exclusive $35 off Carver Mat at https://on.auraframes.com/BULWARKTAKES. Promo Code BULWARKTAKES

Hey, everybody. It's me, Sam Stein, managing editor at the bulwark. I'm with Andrew Edgar, who is dealing with illness and yet still coming on bulwark takes. This is like the Michael Jordan flu game of bulwark takes. Exactly. Yeah, play and hurt. It's going to be a remarkable performance. People will talk about this for ages.

We just watched two pretty impressive briefings. One was Trump's cabinet briefings. briefing, which included a sort of North Korea style intro with all the cabinet officials heaping praise on the guy. And then the other one was another North Korean style moment where the Department of Defense held its first press briefing today. And it featured a new slate of Pentagon correspondence that were willing to sacrifice all their integrity and dignity and sign a pledge to say they wouldn't report on basic functions of the Pentagon. Andrew watched the Pentagon one. I watched some of it, but I watched mostly the Trump cabinet one. So dealer's choice,

we're going to start a Trump cabinet. Sorry, buddy. So we could go in one of two directions here. One is like the serious news and the other is the sort of laughy stuff. I'll go with serious because I'm a serious person. So this, obviously, it's what people are going to be by. This was the first time that the press got to ask Pete Heggseth, what happened with a double-tap strike in the Caribbean on September 2nd. And Heggseth kind of broke some news here, and I'm not quite sure what to make of the significance of it. He was asked, what happened with you specifically?

Did you sign off on that second strike? Because up until this point, last night, in fact, Hexeth was tweeting, well, I support what happened, but it was a subordinate who actually directed it, and he kind of disavowed ownership of the strike while saying he approved of it. And this is what he had to say when pressed about it at the cabinet. Andrew, you pick up on the flip side. Now, the first couple of strikes, as you would, as any leader would want, you want to own that responsibility. So I said, I'm going to be the one to

make the call after getting all the information and make sure it's the right strike. That was September 2nd. There's a lot of intelligence that goes into that building that case and understanding that a lot of people providing information. I watched that first strike life. As you can imagine at the Department of War, we got a lot of things to do. So I didn't stick around for the hour and two hours, whatever, where all the sensitive site exploitation digitally occurs. So I moved on to my next meeting. A couple of hours later, I learned that that commander had made the, which he had the complete authority to do, and by the way, Admiral Bradley made the correct decision to ultimately sink the boat and eliminate the threat. He sunk the boat, sunk the boat,

and eliminated the threat. And it was the right call. We have his back, and the American people are safer because narco-terrorists know you can't bring drugs through the water and eventually on land, if necessary, to the American people. We will eliminate that threat, and we're proud to do it. So you didn't see any survivors, to be clear, after that first threat.

I did not personally see survivors, but I stand... Because the thing was on fire. It was exploded, and fire or smoke. You can't see anything, you got digital, this is called the fog of war. This is what you and the press don't understand. You sit in your air-conditioned offices or up on Capitol Hill and you nitpick and you plant fake stories in the Washington Post about, kill everybody, phrases on anonymous sources, not based in anything, not based in any truth at all.

And then you want to throw out really irresponsible terms about American heroes, about the judgment that they made. I wrote a whole book on this topic because of what politicians and the press does to warfighters. Yeah, Pete Heggseth, real anti-air conditioning. I think he has his office set to 82 at all times because that's what that's what real warfighters do. There's a lot of interesting stuff going on there. The narrative he is painting, we should be clear, is not necessarily implausible, right? I mean, like we had that very insane Washington Post story that raised a lot of questions about this. Last night we got some New York Times reporting that suggests, you know, maybe there's more like

wiggle room in some of this stuff than the post story had. suggested. It could be the case that Heggseth, you know, did not have, as he said, did not have that specific knowledge of the double tap as it was happening, had not given a specific command for that to take place. The way he says, he had to get on to something else very important, like, you know, putting Mark Kelly on blast on Twitter or something like that, whatever the next thing on his schedule was. So that's plausible. It's interesting here because, like, there's levels to this thing, right? I mean, if what the Washington Post story, like, and originally suggested, which is that Heggseth had not only ordered this double tap,

but had sort of like explicitly ordered this double tap to kill the survivors in the water. That would be kind of open and shut just a war crime, right? Or murder if it's not actually war. I mean, like, there would be almost nothing else to say about it. The narrative that Hegseth is putting forward is more defensible in certain respects, but it is also, we should not forget, still taking place in this environment of like bizarre, like extra legal, extrajudicial attacks on these boats in the first place, right? So, like, we're, if, if his narrative there is true, then we're kind of back to where we thought

we were, you know, before this Washington Post story came out at all, which is this insanely dark place anyway, right? But not necessarily this open and shut thing that I guess if, let's just take him at his word here. And I will just note, not that it matters significantly, but you could tell in his answer, he's looking down at the paper in front of him. him reading. So this is obviously something he had, you know, preplanned, which is fine, happens. But if that's true to his word, then would Admiral Bradley be the one who committed

the alleged war crime? Not if it were actually the case that the thing that was still being targeted was this damaged but not yet sunk boat. I mean, that was sort of what the New York Times reporting suggested is that maybe the target itself had not been like fully taken out in the first strike. I mean, basically what you're, what you're, what you're getting into here is this story where these guys are snuggling right up, like, to the very edge of the definition of what might be construed as, like, legal under, under these stretch, you know, it's, what happened here, as Heggseth says, is that he had to go, congratulated them, got out, in that they didn't bother to alert him to the fact that they had to take another strike at the boat. They didn't even cross their mind to say, hey, can you just make sure that the defense secretary who prides himself on being, you know, on top of all these matters, he said it in his answer, you know, you're the defense secretary, buck stops in the EU, you want to know what's going on. And he, in fact, said on Fox, he had watched the whole thing live. They didn't bother to say, you know what, before we launch another strike at these two survivors in this boat that Pete Hackseth himself claims was up in flames, smoke everywhere, if I gorevar, we're not going to call him. we're just going to do it. I mean, look, maybe that absolves him of some, you know, serious legal

problems, but it certainly doesn't look good from the perspective of, hey, we trust that the Secretary of Defense should be looped in an incredibly important strategic matter. And maybe I don't know what the hell I'm talking about. Maybe that's just normal standard operation. But it is notable that, according to his own retelling, he was not looped in on this. Yeah. And I don't want to miss the forest for the trees here because it is obviously really striking to see Hegseth and Trump both, you know, retreating to this posture of, well, you know, I didn't have all the specifics at the moment it was carried out. You know, they're not admitting any fault.

They're not admitting anything wrong happened. But they, it is interesting to see them sort of like retreat to that sort of like more, more tactically defensible space. Yeah, and it's happening. And again, not to miss the forest retreat. It's like this is a incident in a broader march to war that is happening, right? I mean, we are, and there's another moment in the cabinet meeting where, and it's not even getting that much attention, but basically the president says that we're going to be start, we're going to start doing this on land. I mean, he says, let's listen to the clip right now about what the next phase in our actions against Venezuelan drug smugglers, and I guess in relation to the Venezuelan government, is going to be.

And we're going to start doing those strikes on land, too. You know, the land is much easier. It's much easier. and we know the routes they take. We know everything about them. We know where they live. We know where the bad ones live. And we're going to start that very soon, too.

So there you have it. No equivocation. We are going to start strikes on land. I mean, it's not even like we're going to seek authorization. We're looking at strikes on land. We're debating whether they do something. We are going to do it. We're just marching in effect to some sort of low-grade war.

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to get $35 off ORA's best-selling Carver Matt Frames, named number one by wirecutter. use promo code bulwark takes at checkout that's a u r a frames dot com promo code bulwark takes this deal is exclusive to listeners and frames sell out very fast so order yours now to get in time for the holidays support the show by mentioning us at checkout terms and conditions apply not to sort of waylay your plans for how this is all going to get laid out or anything but i wanted to bring up one moment from the pentagon briefing that touched on this exact thing um this has this has been this very weird moment in time right where as i'm sure everybody out there is aware the the pentagon hegseth kicked all of the sort of like traditional uh mainstream and also trade press uh defense press out of the pentagon press pool um because they wouldn't sign this sort of like some semi loyalty pledge um you know you know everyone's everyone's familiar so we got this first briefing today of kind of like the new guys it's a bunch of right wing like mag influencers and folks like laura and you were impressed by the work you Matt Gates was there.

You thought it was great journalism. Well, let me get into some of that because there were some, like, ridiculous questions and, you know, really amateurish stuff as well. But there were also some semi-sharp questions as well because MAGA, like, as a body, is not humongously excited to go to war anywhere and certainly not in Venezuela. I mean, like, you guys have some, like, hardcore America first or isolationist types who think that, you know, getting entangled and, like, a shooting war on the ground in Venezuela would be a humongous mistake. So let me cue up this clip of this reporter Bradley Devlin from

the Daily Signal, basically queuing up Kingsley Wilson, the DoD press secretary to comment on that. 53% in a recent CBSU-Gov poll said they support the strikes on these drug boats, but 70% said no military operations within Venice. Venezuela. Nevertheless, members of Congress are increasingly calling for regime change there. What's the Department of War's message to those members of Congress? The Department of War stands behind the president 100 percent, and we will execute on the orders that our commander-in-chief gives us, and we're proud to do so. That will continue. And again, any decision that is going to be made about certain military actions in the

Western Hemisphere region will be the president's alone. So you can kind of see the tension there, right? I mean, like Devlin is trying to kind of cue this up as these calls for regime change and these calls for war, these are coming from certain sort of bloodthirsty, neo-conservative types in Congress, right? And like, these are people the president hates. So it's like, it's trying to put that, put that on them. But then, you know, Kingsley Wilson gives this total non-answer that's like, well, look, like, we're going to hit him if we want to hit him. And meanwhile, you have Donald Trump out here who is increasingly just talking openly about the fact that, yeah, this is actually the plan, right? I mean, like, we're going to be going in

there and doing this stuff. And it's just, I don't know. I don't, I mean, it's, it really does feel like we're just sleepwalking into it. It was, it was like the sort of like perfect question for a MAGA reporter, which is, we don't like what's happening here, but we're not going to blame the president, even though he's chiefly responsible for that. The second thing is, I think I could be a press secretary. Honestly, I think I can do it. Like, Kingsley Wilson, she just, you know, just throw some AI slop, might as well. We stand behind, it's like you could throw anything I mean, I'll just say, yeah, we stand behind the president. That's not that hard.

I want a little bit more flavor from the press secretaries. Like, come on, give us a little, like, something to work with. We could do a whole video on her. I mean, like, she's very, very raw and new at this. I mean, like, she's done a couple of off-camera briefings all year. I want to do a video where I pretend to be the press secretary, and you throw, like, insane questions at me and see if you can get me, like, off topic. I bet I can do this.

Well, I'm just saying, I think you would probably do a better job. I mean, like, and she just, even in this, like, real home field advantage situation, obviously this is not really the point of what we're talking about right now. But, like, she accidentally referred to Pete Heggseth as the Secretary of Defense at one point, which, you know, their whole thing is that he's the secretary of war now. She, she weirdly, like, acknowledged, unprompted that, that, you know, experts have analyzed that their strikes on Iran, only set back their nuclear program two years, you know, which is not really the kind of thing they're like to talk about. So it was, it was very plain that she was kind of green. And yes, I think, I think they should, I think they ought to put you in, Sam. I think you'd do a good job. I think it could be, we could do a feature here where it's like, you know, see if you can,

see if I can like pass the test. But that's for another video. This is why I think Trump's like, you know, for as many flaws, like the guy, you know, you got to give him that he has a little flavor to these briefings, except when he's not staying awake. And this is the other issue, the more comedic issue from the cabinet meeting, which was there are various times during not the question and answer session, but when the cabinet officials were lavishing praise on him, where he clearly was drifting. And we have a little bit

of a montage for folks to watch. And you can judge. Like, this strikes me as midday nap style, head bobbing. I've been there. Like, I'm not judging. I appreciate a good midday nap. But I'm not the president. So let's take a look. And you can tell me if this is full sleep, half sleep, how you grade it. Pilot programs that we're putting out there. And if these are going to work, lay up always and make sure that we're paying attention. And we want our workforce to be educated. global coalition of countries to line up behind the peace deal, behind the board of peace. And it's still, every day is a challenge.

But it's been driven personally by the president. It's the reason why we're involved in this whole Ukraine, Russia conflict. That's not our war. It's not the president's war. This war started. It never would have happened if you've been president. I mean, I've been there in like, you know, high holiday services hour one and a half and I'm just drifting. And then I do the little head jerk thing.

That, that to me is like, what? You don't think it's sleep? No, that is. That is the most relatable he has really ever been in these moments, right? I mean, it's like it's very relatable in the specific sense that like a lot of times you're in a place where you want to be there. You're like, you were excited going in like, I don't know, I've gone to like classical music concerts or something like that where I'm like, this is going to be really fun. And this is Trump's thing. Like he gets all his favorite people around him and they just butter him up endlessly.

But it drags on. It's all a little bit the same. And he's heard it all before. And before you know it, he's nod and up. Also, man. Get it together. You wanted to be here. But wasn't he posting like a, I think he posted over a hundred times through the course of the night.

So he like got no sleep. He really was really something. Yeah. He went on a real truth social binge last night, also relatable. The doom scroll was was very powerful for the president all night long last night. One post a minute. And he like went over a hundred. So he was up there all night scrolling.

Of course the man is going to be tired. I don't begrudge him. He had a post after this binge. He had a post like right before 6 a.m. That was something like, I just love truth social. it's like the best side out there he's like he really really was feeling himself this morning you know like out in the echo chamber of his social media platform just throw in chum to the fans all night long and yeah and you end up nodding off a little bit in the cabinet

meeting the next day that's just what that's the way it goes the guy doesn't do the guy doesn't drink he doesn't smoke he doesn't do drugs this is his drug like he he gets high on this shit no wonder he was staying up on that no wonder he was sneezing this morning all right last bit um sort of point of personal privilege because it's a local issue. But he did weigh in on one of the DC region's airports. He does not have particularly good things to say about Dulles. I'm going to zag a little bit here, but let's listen to Trump talk about Dulles and what he wants to do with that particular airport. We're also going to rebuild Dulles Airport because it's not a good airport. It should be a great

airport. It's not a good airport at all. It's a terrible airport. It was incorrectly designed with a good building. Actually, it's got a beautiful terminal. Sarinan was the architect, one of the greatest architects in the world at the time, a great architect. And so they have a great building at a bad airport. But we're going to turn that around and we're going to make Dulles Airport serving Washington and Virginia, Maryland, et cetera. We're going to make that into something really spectacular. We have an amazing plan for it. I mean, okay, I know that everyone hates Dulles. No doubt. I get it. It's the people movers.

It's the fact that you go into the terminal, got to go all the way and get on those people movers, go to the other place where the gates are. He's right that the terminal itself is architecturally very nice. It's quite beautiful. I don't mind Dallas anymore. I think it's actually okay. Like, it's never, I mean, there are very problematic parts. But if you get there and you don't have to wait in that horrible security line, let's say you get there early,

it's a totally fine airport. The dining options are serviceable. I don't think it's particularly packed compared to a lot of other reports I've been to. I'm fine with Dulles. If he wants to make it nicer, whatever, have at it, get rid of the people movers. But I don't think it should be like the top issue for the president. Yeah, I don't know. They could make Dulles like the most majestic, beautiful, wonderful airport in America.

And I still would never want to go there. It's just way too fucking far. You know, like, like Reagan, Reagan, right there in Arlington, the Southwest Terminal at Reagan. It's got like six gates. Yeah. Yeah. That's that a little funny. What?

Dulles and Reagan. No. Dulles and Reagan. How do you say? It's Dulles. It's Dulles. What are you talking about? Dulles.

We're like half an hour into this video and you're nitpicking my pronunciation. Yeah. Like the president. Reagan. What is happening right now? No. We're going to have to cut all this out. The D.C.A, the one in Arlington, the one where you show up, you know, like 25 minutes before

you're supposed to board and you zoom. right through security and you you know it's like a one minute walk to your gate like i i used to fly out of there constantly when i was a campaign reporter a few years ago uh i have i have brand loyalty for regan until i die all you guys can do what you want with dol as i will never go in the end it is an easier experience to do regan but uh i think dallas gets a bad rap i'm not i'm not anti dallas i'm not even anti the people movers honestly it's kind of it's kind of enjoyable unless they crash then that's that's not enjoyable all right buddy i'm i'm just so impressed at your ability to make it through this bulwark take, barely able to eat, barely able to

breathe. You're sick as a dog. Look at you. I might vomit, actually. We'll find out soon enough. All right, Andrew Regger, author of The Great Morning Shots. And I'm Sam Stein, managing out of the bulwark. Subscribe to this feed where you get a whole host of different discussion topics, including the status of the DMVs airports. We'll talk to you soon.