Bulwark Takes - Trump Loves Putting His Own People Down

Episode Date: March 28, 2026

Sam Stein takes on a series of bizarre Trump appearances, ranging from crude jokes and made-up stories to comments that may have revealed something far more serious. The pattern raises a bigger question: when the president speaks, how much of it is real?

Hey, everybody, it's me, Sam Stein, managing editor of the bulwark, and I am joining you on Saturday morning for Little League with the kids because, well, to be frank, I don't really want to do this. Donald Trump has been saying things that suggest, and I'm not trying to be funny about this, that he's horny. I'm dead serious. There was a speech last night, a speech last night that he gave to a Saudi investment fund, a Saudi sovereign wealth fund, I should. be more accurate, in which he had this peculiar little aside where he went to the question and answer session. And then suddenly he just decided, you know what, I'm going to open this up to anything including sex. Let's play the clip. So I want to just thank everybody very much. And I'm asked to take a few questions. And unlike other politicians, they would like the question screened.

I don't ask for screening of the questions. You can ask me anything you want. You can talk sex. you can do whatever the hell you want I'm here for you whatever question you want okay well look the Saudi sovereign wealth fund might not be the right form for that and you might be saying well whatever it's one instance

don't jump to conclusions he's just making a joke surely you have to have a pattern before you make an accusation like you did up top and I do have a pattern because not even like a day before that, he called into Fox and Friends, the Five, their very popular afternoon show. And he was asked like a really serious question by one of the hosts, Dana Perino, about what is going on in Iran, how we're getting information from that country if there is a humanitarian disaster unfolding. You know, we don't really have great insight into there because internet access is

limited. There's obviously very limited media on the ground, if any at all. And she wanted to to know, does he have his finger on the pulse about what's happening to the people of that country if there's a real crisis happening here? And this is what he said in response. Do you have any insight as to how they are doing? Do they have drinking water? Do they have food? Right, I do. It's upsetting. I do. But first, do you remember when we had lunch years ago in the base of Trump Tower when it was a brand new building? It was a long time ago. A long time ago. And you haven't changed. You have not changed. Now, I'm not allowed to say this.

It's the end of my political career, but you may be even better looking, okay? So I don't know what you're doing. But I will not say that. I mean, come on. That's gross. Also, he does this thing now where he said, I don't know if people have noticed this,

but he thinks that he can just sort of say anything he wants if he says, well, if I say this, I'm going to ruin my political career. And then he says it, it's not like you get out of jail free card just because you've preempted it by saying you might ruin political career, but he said it.

All right. So you're saying, Sam, that's just two cases, like get over it. Obviously not a pattern. But then the White House put out this graphic. This is, again, the back around here, they're doing an event to talk about farmers. And look at this. Only farm. I mean, I give them credit because it's kind of funny, but like it is a little bit ridiculous

that they are just posting playoff of only fans like this. they are just sexes on the mind at this White House and among this president. It's like a White House run by, you know, 14 or 15-year-old boys with the commander-in-chief being atop the gang. So this has been a weird pattern. And then every now and then you'll see Trump say something about, you know, it's good-looking dudes and stuff like that. And, you know, he gets a little bit weird about that.

He did that also at the Saudi Southern wealth fund. So he's talking about, you know, the people that he associates with, the cabinet that he's, you know, surrounded himself with. And he made this little omission. Now, before we play the clip, I think it's worth noting he does this from time to time where he kind of deliberately or inadvertently absolutely roasts his own cabinet members and humiliates them. But a couple days ago at one of these cabinet meetings, he was sitting next to people. Pete Higgseth, the defense secretary, and he talked in front of the entire cabinet in the press car about how someone recently came up to him and told him that appointing Pete Hegseth as defense secretary was a mistake.

Somebody came up to me yesterday, gave you a very hard time, said, you know, I made a mistake. Pete Haxeth is doing a good job. So when I tell you, you're not even going to believe it, he said, Hexas. He gave you such a nasty hard time. Pete Haxith is sitting there, forced to endure it and laugh. As Trump says, people are coming up to him telling him that Pete was a bad choice for defense secretary. So that's just like public humiliation. This at the Saudi sovereign wealth fund event is more of the genre of sort of indirect humiliation.

So here he's talking about how he doesn't like to hang out with cool people. You know, I've watched a lot of people leaders, great leaders. And, you know, the one thing about sports is you break it down into, you know, two, hour period. Something nice. You don't have to wait a lifetime to find out is somebody a winner or a loser. You got a lot of losers, mostly losers, fortunately. It's a good thing to have a lot of losers. I always like to hang around with losers, actually, because it makes me feel better. I hate guys that are very, very successful and you have to listen to their success stories. I like people that like to listen to my success.

Oh, man. Well, whatever. That's what they get. They get to be humiliated by the man time and again. So this whole event was just kind of an odd, weird Friday night musing from Donald Trump. I'll note that he skipped the conservative political action committee, which is currently happening down in Texas. That's that big yearly confab of Republican and Conservatives. It's apparently not going particularly well, not exactly well attended, some odd moments here and there. Mike Lindell was served a lawsuit, bizarrely enough. We're on TV, please. We're on TV, please.

We're on TV, please. We're on TV, please. But Trump has always spoken there. He skipped it this year and instead did this with the Saudi sovereign wealth fund. I think the takeaway is that when you put a lot of money into Trump enterprises, you get a speech from the president. And maybe the organizers of the CPAC, Matt Schlapp, needs to up his game and put more money into some Trump pack somewhere or some crypto ventures that Trump sons are doing.

But that's for another place. This was sort of a classic Trump speech, the weave, the sort of meandering, the digs at people who he associates with, the kind of borschbel humor. And of course, the, what appears to be entirely fabricated stories meant to impress people in the audience, basically concocting. meetings that he had or friendships that he had that clearly didn't exist. So again, this is a pattern here. So a couple days ago, again, at the White House, he was telling this weird meandering story about those Sharpie pens that he loves to sign his bills with because the black ink is so profound

and it works so well. So he's going on and on about these Sharpies, which he says he specifically and individually negotiated with some Sharpie CEO or something like that. Here's what I call the guy. I said, I'd like to use your pen, but I can't have a gray thing with a big ass on it. Saying Sharpie. He didn't want the $1,000 White House pen. He wanted the Sharpie because the Sharpie looks good. Again, if your uncle was talking about Sharpies in this way, you'd be like, man, get this man. A little help and maybe a pencil.

But Trump was talking, and I'm just going to quote from this piece that you see up there. This is Trump. I called the guy, said, I'd like to use your pen, but I can't have a great thing with a big S on it saying Sharpie. as I'm signing a $1 trillion airplane contract to buy brand new fighter jets. And Trump, you know, pretend to be the CEO says, he says, well, I can make it nicer. I said, what can you do? He said, I'll paint it black. I said, that's nice.

And this went on and on, on. Anyways, the post, as you see, they called up Sharpie and they presented them with the transcript. And this is what they report. A spokesperson for Sharpie maker, Newell, Brands, said it did not occur. Quote, we don't have any information about the conversation described. the spokesperson said, we're proud to be a beloved brand trusted by so many globally. And that's true. I trust a Sharpie.

You know what you're going to get. It's a good brand. But, you know, I didn't make up a negotiation with the CEO of Sharpie either. So what does this have to do with the sovereign wealth fund speech? Well, again, he talks about these made up things. People that win, it's much easier to lead when you're successful and you win. you know, Vince Lombardi was a very tough person, a very tough football coach. He was sort of a violent guy, actually.

I knew him. Did he know him? Well, the ex-Washington Post reporter Paul Varee said, there's no record of Trump ever meeting Lombardi. Lombardi died in 1970 at 57. Trump was 24, just out of college at the time. And Trump has previously said, quote, we would have been great friends, which suggests they never actually met.

Okay. It's a small thing. not really not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, but there's like these little sort of white lies that just add up. And for no other reason than to just make himself seem bigger, I guess. I don't know. Not a big deal, but it just kind of grates at you because you'd like to know that the words coming out of the mouth of the president actually have some meaning

and some truth to them. All right. And that brings me to the serious stuff. So we've been joking around about all the weird things that Trump said last night. But there were two things that really stood out from the speech that mattered. And the first was this, where Trump was talking about NATO. Now, the backstory here before we play the video is that Trump's just mad at NATO and has been for a while, for frankly, decades. But as president, he's been really vicious towards NATO. It doesn't think that the countries who are in NATO are

doing their fair share to contribute to collective offense. He thinks that this is some sort of collective venture where you put in money and everyone shares the sort of defense budget. That's not how it really works, obviously, but he wants the NATO countries to spend more of their GDP on defense. They have upped it, but there's been disagreements, obviously, about what's happening in Ukraine and so on and so forth. It's really particularly problematic now because Trump wants NATO countries to help with the Iran war that he started without consultation with the NATO countries. He wants them to come and open the Strait of Hamos with them because they get a lot of oil through there, even though he has simultaneously said he can open it himself and also that it doesn't

matter if it's closed because the U.S. doesn't really get its oil through there. It's boiling over and it's increasingly creating problematic rhetoric from the president, including this last night. Because we spent hundreds of billions of dollars a year on NATO, hundreds of protecting them. And we would have always been there for them. But now based on their actions, I guess we don't have to be, do we? That sounds like a breaking story, yes, sir. Is that breaking news?

I think we just have breaking news. But that's the fact. I've been saying that why would we be there for them if they're not there for us? They weren't there for us. Well, they were there for us. The only time Article 5 has been invoked is after 9-11. Everyone knows this. He knows this.

It's silly. But to tell us how he's like, ooh, breaking news. Like, this is all gay or a negotiating boy. And he knows it. And he's trying to create controversy and drama. But obviously, this is serious stuff, right? Like, I suspect, without any insider knowledge, that NATO may have been more willing to come to our assistance currently in the Iran war. If we hadn't spent months threatening to invade Greenland, thereby taking over territory that's associated with the NATO country.

Just a small lunch. But that's just me. So that was obviously quite problematic. We don't want to be, I don't know, just blowing up NATO. That seems like it could have some ripple effects geopolitically. And then there was this last one, which kind of went under the radar a little bit. But I think is, well, it raises a lot of questions. Let's put it that way.

So you might remember this a couple days ago. Maybe a week ago, time is just honestly a flat circle at this point. there was a fire aboard the aircraft carrier Gerald R. Ford. Now, the carrier had been at sea for like 10 months. Apparently, it was just, you know, it had been a slog. And they were ready to get out of there. But the reports were that there was a laundry fire, a fire in laundry room, I want to say, or a laundry area.

I don't know. I want to be precise here. The Times called it a laundry area. And according to the Times, it took more than 30 hours for sailors to put out the fire aboard the aircraft carrier. And according to the times, more than 600 sailors and crew members had lost their beds and have since been bunking down on floors and tables. According to the U.S. military's Central Command, two sailors received treatment for non-life-threatening injuries.

And people on the ship reported that dozens of service members suffered smoke inhalation. So this was like a kind of peculiar story, right? Like that seems like a pretty wildfire on an aircraft carrier to take that long to put out and to damage that much. Now, I don't know anything about putting our fires on aircraft carriers. So whatever, it's possibly that's totally normal. But it did seem peculiar at the time. And then just in the course of his free associations last night, Trump lets this slip. We knew there was a problem when we knew.

noticed at 1 o'clock in the morning, every 32 seconds, another airplane, a very fast plane, was coming off the deck of an aircraft carrier. That's actually the biggest aircraft carrier in the world. And every 32 seconds, boom, fom, fom. And it was one o'clock in the morning. So he said, okay, I think we were in trouble. But they were ready for us, Johnny. And we were ready. He said, we were ready. And then they hit us. And they came from 17 different angles. they were here, they were there. We ran for our lives. It was over.

Okay. They hit us is what he said. He's clearly talking about the Gerald Ford Aircraft carrier. I don't know how else you can listen to that and not take away the conclusion that this was not a laundry fire, that we were hit. Again, we don't know because this could also just be Trump fabricating. entire story, which brings me back to my earlier point. When you have a president who just makes things up on the fly like this, it becomes hard to know when he tells serious stories what is an actual reality

and what is just his imagination. But in this case, it doesn't make total sense that he would, I don't know, dramatize this in that direction, right? acknowledging that we were hit by the Iranians that this ship was actually damaged, not by a laundry room fire, but by enemy fire. It definitely raises some questions. And I'm going to be looking to see if the Pentagon correspondents, who admittedly are now annexed in some far away room because Pete Hick-Seth doesn't like

having adversarial press near him, I'm going to be curious to see if they get to the bottom of this one, because it seemed a little bit suspicious when it was initially reported on March 16th or so. And now Trump's basically said, yeah, that was a cover story. Which leads me to this, and I'll conclude with this. The way he sort of flippantly talking about this is kind of bizarre, right? You know, oh, we were under fire. We were running for our lives.

Planes were being tossed off the ship at one in the morning every 30 seconds. and, you know, we thought it was over. Like, this is a, it doesn't seem like a game, but he's treating it like one. And these stories that he's telling over and over again, the one emotion that seems totally absent from his retelling of them is, you know, soberness or, you know, empathy or a sense of the stakes, right? He's just laughing. And in between telling little asides about meeting Vince Lombardi and talking, hey, you can ask me about sex.

Hey, Dana Prina, remember when we had lunch? You're much prettier now. Like, there's just not really a level of sobriety here that you would expect, considering how poorly things are going. And he even acknowledges that. So, I don't know. I watched that entire thing last night. And I came away wondering what is going on inside this administration. why they feel like they're, you know, it's cool to post only farms memes and the president

to talk about sacks and makeup stories of Vince Lombardi. Like, I just feel like this is just not the right time for that. But that's just me. Maybe I'm just too serious about this stuff. Anyways, it's Saturday. I got stuff to do. I appreciate you listening to me. I hope this was a helpful recap of a bizarre moment from last night.

But frankly, we have so many bizarre moments. We'll probably end up doing this in a couple days again. If you like this, subscribe to the bulwark. We appreciate it. Hit like. That helps with the algorithm. And stay tuned for more. We'll be talking to you soon.