Bulwark Takes - Trump Just Made Us The Baddies

Episode Date: February 19, 2025

Tim Miller and Jonathan V. Last discuss Donald Trump and his administration's new alliances with previous adversaries, and the flipping on allies. Read JVL's The Triad, "Meet Kevin Hassett: Conservatism’s Invincible Ignoramus" Morning Shots, "Staying Patriotic in Trump’s America"

Hey guys, it's Tim Miller at The Bullwark here with my buddy JBL, author of the Triad newsletter that you must subscribe to. Go to thebullwark.com to subscribe, check out The Triad. It's the best daily newsletter out there. A good one today, a real banger about Kevin Hassett, Trump's economic advisor and how big of a fraud he is. I'm just going to leave you there with a little teaser. You should go read it yourself. We were talking in Slack, Bill Kristol kind of wrote this this morning about how weird it felt for him to kind of rooting against america in these negotiations in saudi arabia and how uncomfortable that was for us patriotic uh lapsed neocons and um and i i have a similar feeling and

as we were chatting about it we figured we'd get together and talk about it live because jbl it seems like we've all come to the realization about the same time. The realization is wrong word. We've all come to accept something that we've known for a while, which is, I think we're the baddies on the world stage. Now are we the baddies? Yeah.

I mean, we've got these, the, the, the skulls and crossbones. Doesn't that, doesn't that tell you something? Why do we have to scale in crossbones?

We could just have an Eagle. We could just have an eagle. We could just have an eagle. We had an eagle at one point, actually. So, I know, try to break NATO and get the U.S. out of NATO and that he wouldn't care what happened to Taiwan or Ukraine. I was not prepared to have Donald Trump tell America that we're switching sides. You weren't? I was not prepared for that shirts and skins we're gonna i was not prepared for that so uh what just happened i was prepared for the possibility

the possibility here we are uh coming to reality we have the u.s secretary of state in saudi arabia having a conference with the russians about the future of Ukraine, in which the Americans seem to be stipulating that Ukraine is going to need to have some elections before there can be any peace, because you got to get rid of that rat Zelensky out of there. The autocratic Russia does not need to have elections. They're fine. We're hearing that Russia wants to force Ukraine to hold new elections in order to sign any kind of a peace deal Is that something that the US would ever support? well, we have a

Situation where we haven't had elections in Ukraine It's just frankly amazing you have Trump talking about reinvesting in Russia the United States reinvesting in Russia Let's just sit on this one for a second because this was this was the thing that um has happened since i taped with susan glasser we covered some of the chart and she's so great if you haven't watched that video go watch it but um so the three major outcomes that uh rubio uh is is indicating have are coming from this meeting in saudi arabia also a sign that were the baddies that we're meeting in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. It wasn't like Switzerland was doing the meeting.

It wasn't even Jordan. It was Saudi Arabia. Okay. Anyway. The three items. One, we're going to normalize and build back staffing at each respective embassy. I thought we were firing all the people at all the embassies,

but I guess we're going to have a couple Russians, a couple at the Russian embassy. We'll move people that were at the other embassies that have been fired. So that's one. Two, work more closely together on diplomatic ties and economic investment. This is what you're alluding to.

In addition to being on the bad side of this it's also a bad deal like isn't the point of trumpism foreign policy that we're getting screwed by everybody and we need to get ours and and he's talking about i guess we're talking about stealing money from the ukrainians so i guess that's where we get ours but the russians are getting investment we don't get anything out of mutual investment from russia what are we going to get out of that? So we're just going to open back up the markets for them and help their economy? So this deal so far is just like a big gift to Russia economically.

Am I missing something? No. And, you know, again, are we the baddies? The same administration who's trying to put the boots to Canada, our closest trading partner and ally, and is talking about they're ripping us off and we're going to bring them to heel and subjugate them. And we're going to, you know, whether they want to or not, we're going to make them the 51st state. They are like, and we're going to really work on our relationship with Russia and try to deepen our economic ties. What the I mean, it is crazy town. And the only as I said, the only way to to interpret it really, because this is far beyond art of the deal, like, well, you know, Trump is just being crazy and unpredictable.

And this is just full on side switching. And the only way I think get theirs in the Indo-Pacific and the Russians get theirs in Europe. And we're all going to stay out of each other's way. And we're all going to shake down our neighborhoods to get as much loot as we can, because the entire world is basically like a five block section of Queens or something. Are you ready for any of the potential rationale?

Can I float a potential rationale? Sure. Okay. So, all right. We've given up the idea that we care about American values. That's gone. Okay.

So as part of this deal, there was, I would have assumed that I would not have been for this, but like you could at least hear a rationale that there, that you do some sort of deal. That's about American economic interest interests, like broadly, right? Like that there that you do some sort of deal that's about american economic interest interests like broadly right like that's where you get we're gonna get the ukraine's rare earth minerals and like we're gonna do you know we're gonna continue to sort of limit

russia and and tell them that like we'll give you like promise ukraine won't be in nato but you're not gonna get you know what i mean like trying to to triangulate on a re on and just Uber realism to try to get something for America, um, vis-a-vis Russia. That's not happening. What if what we're getting is not for America, but for Trump himself. And it's two things. One is that there's some financial back channel, potentially. Again, I'm just floating it. That's a personal back channel. We already know that they have released the biggest Russian crypto scammer. He started a Russian crypto coin. Who knows? Or maybe it's even dumber than that. Maybe it's just like Trump, in order to feel like he should get on Mount Rushmore, just wants a peace deal, just wants to say he got the deal done. And so he doesn't actually care if Ukraine gets fucked.

He doesn't care if Europe gets fucked. He doesn't care if we, America, Americans, get anything out of it. He doesn't care if Russia ends up sort of becoming, again, stronger vis-a-vis America. all he wants is to be able to say sleepy Joe Biden didn't get the deal I got the deal take whatever you want it's a win for me personally that's possible I think that his view of how he gets to Mount Rushmore which by the way is the thing we should all just resign ourselves to. That's happening. That's happening. Well, I did,

I've actually done a deep dive on this and I'm not sure there's enough rock around there. So there might just be like a Mount Trump that's like near Mount Rushmore, you know, that's just Trump on it. But anyway, continue. God help us.

Um, no, I, I think the way he thinks he does that is, is by expanding the American sphere of influence so that it is entirely unchecked. And so basically, I think he wants to turn both North Central and South American to vassal states, basically. But vassal states where the brown people stay put. And Greenland, right. Vassal states where the brown people pay tribute but don't ever try to come up to America. And I, you know, I don't want to,

I don't want to do any sort of ethnic national stereotyping, but I will say this. The end result of what Donald Trump is proposing in terms of realigning the world is Germany with nuclear weapons. I think maybe that might not be a great idea. Not trying to make any stereotypes. The Germans have been excellent allies for the last 40 years. Who's Germany with the nukes in this case, Russia or us? No, no. I mean the germans will have to get nukes so you know no no one thing is if nato breaks apart yeah oh yeah germany which has you know mona and i talked about this today on her show uh germany has nuclear weapons on its soil, but not under its control. They are NATO nuclear weapons. If we break apart NATO, then Europe has to band together against Russia. Within Europe, the French have nukes,

the English have nukes, the Germans don't, but the German economy is by far the biggest in Europe. And so, you know, the EU cannot hold together as a world power without Germany. And Germany can't exist within that as a junior partner of the coalition. Do we really want a nuclear Germany? Is that is that really what the is that in the world's best interest? I just feel like like maybe we shouldn't go for that. But again, none of this matters because we are now on the side of the autocrats. And here's the question I asked on Slack. How far away do you think we are from Trump, not even tacitly, but basically winking at Xi and saying, yeah, God, do the Taiwan thing. Go do your deal. and are we already there i so i talked to when i was

talking to glasser today she was like do you think there's any world in which trump would the trump administration would defend estonia who's a nato ally that were required by law and i made the same face you just did absolutely not nobody thinks so and i and and i think the same is for taiwan i guess i do think there are some other people out there that have deluded themselves that trump is like kind of a tough guy and that he he just likes to keep people on their toes and he doesn't want to be embarrassed he just wants to win and so if push came to shove many maybe he would defend Taiwan or European countries. I just don't see it.

I don't see a single piece of evidence that he gives one wit about any of the Baltic states, Taiwan, etc. Now, it's harder for me to game out Xi's and Putin's interests here. Like if you're Putin and you're like, Hey, okay, well they're on the side of the baddies. They're on my side. Maybe I can,

I, you know, maybe I don't have to waste any more resources on this. Like maybe I, maybe Ukraine will just fold, right? Like maybe we can do a fake election in Ukraine where I get a puppet in there and,

and we just, and I just take over Ukraine sitting behind behind a big fancy desk you know rather than having to do it that's why the election is one of their preconditions right exactly they want to see if they can simply torpedo the ukrainian people so if you're them maybe like we don't need to interfere to to invade any of these places yet because we can kind of just gradually keep getting what we want yeah keep rolling it over um i uh it's can i you know i'm gonna say something and maybe it's bad and we should uh and we'll cut it maybe jamie will cut it let's just say this is a safe do you read ben thompson from stratechery occasionally i should read him more because it's always good when I read it. Yeah, I've canceled my Stratechery subscription. Why?

Because Ben is like so many tech bros. Trump curious. Like he's never outright pro-Trump, but he talks about how, you know, the DEIs are so terrible and the censorship on the internets and the social media. Maybe I'm only getting sent the good ones. And those things are quite bad. And so whenever he dips into politics, he sounds like he's in 10th grade. He's very, very smart about chip manufacturing. Sure.

He knows as much about chip manufacturing as anybody. It's very valuable. But when he talks about politics, it's all bad. And he lives in Taiwan. I don't think he's thought through the logic of his position. You know, and I it is amazing to me to have somebody who is, again, like a Trump curious type who who literally lives with a a giant target painted around his house thinking that like well you know as long as you get rid of the deis and the over-aggressive censorship that uh that meta used to do during the pandemic that was all terrible like fuck you dude this is this is not dissimilar from the FBI agent class. I've been having some conversations off the record with people in that world.

And it's like there's like a Trump advanced myth that the FBI is full of deep state libs. And the truth is the FBI is like 75, 25 Trump voters probably. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. Maybe higher. And what I'm hearing is there's a lot of people like, well, doesn't seem great. But we'll see. Let's see how everything shakes out. And maybe it'll all work out for me. And it's like, all right, I don't know.

Maybe it'll all work out for all you guys. We'll see. I made this analogy with Sarah. It's like you have a a house you basically like your house but there are a couple pieces of furniture in it that are your wife's and you hate them like this there's this sofa that she clings to and every time you see it it makes you want to throw up it makes you angry actually it's tough you have to have this sofa in your life right and uh and then the guy comes into your house the blowtorch and just starts like

burning it to the ground gleefully and he's gonna burn your entire house into ashes imagine what sort of weird person you'd have to be to sit back from that and say well you know what at least he's getting rid of that sofa because i hated that sofa because that's basically what this is right i just want to sit around and watch the sofa burn. I want to watch. I don't care that everything else is going. And I understand that that guy isn't trying to burn the sofa. He's just burning the sofa in the midst of burning down everything in my house because he hates me. The reason he's burning my house down is because he hates me personally.

But that's basically where we are. And the other thing J.D. Vance said was, remember J.D. Vance said in Munich that he wasn't really worried about the Chinese, the Russians. He was worried about the enemy within. The threat that I worry the most about vis-a-vis Europe is not Russia. It's not China. It's not any other external actor. And what I worry about is the threat from within. I mean, that's saying that he thinks the real enemy is his fellow Americans, the Democrats, right? Yeah. Uh, this is that Putin's real enemies are like the, you know, the people who keep falling out of their first floor windows. Um,

and, uh, this is, wow. You really took us to the dark place here, JVL. Look. Look. Trump's dearest wish is to be able to do to his opposition what Putin and Xi do to theirs. Maybe his dearest fantasy, but he doesn't have the balls. Oh, I – we'll find out. We're going to find out. Let's leave it there JVL, everybody subscribe to the feed

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