Bulwark Takes - Trump Shows Up and Wrecks Everything!

Episode Date: May 20, 2025

Trump’s visit to Capitol Hill was supposed to rally Republicans but instead, it exposed a total mess. Tim and Sam break down the chaos, the SALT Caucus embarrassment, and yes, they briefly address your comment section grievances.

Hey everybody, it's Tim Miller from The Bulwark here with Managing Editor Sam Stein. We are going to talk about Trump's disastrous meeting with House Republicans and the total shitshow on the Hill when it comes to the big beautiful turd of a bill. But before we do that, we need to address something that's pretty important to the channel. I'm hosting this right now because we've received overwhelming negative feedback about Sam's hosting, about how rude he is, about how he interrupts people, about how he's inconsiderate, about how he maybe had bad parenting. Not that he's a bad parent. We think he's probably a good parent, but maybe it was your parents that turned you this way or was it bad teaching or what was it? What is it about you, Sam, that made you like

I saw the comments and I was blown away. Let's put away let's put it that way not not that excuse me let me interrupt right now what were you blown away about not that people were uh upset that i keep interrupting uh the guests how many people are upset that i keep into it was an endless stream of anger uh and some and how rude you are people kept talking about how rude you are the way you interrupted some truly outlandish suggestions that i might be on drugs or might be drinking too much. MAGA? People called you MAGA? About how your rhetoric is very MAGA-esque?

That's MAGA behavior, interrupting? Yeah. I mean, it felt a little personal at times. And my only solution is to just interrupt more. I'm going to go even further. No, Sam. That is wrong. That is the wrong response going to go even further. No, Sam, that is wrong. That is the wrong response to the feedback.

Have you considered active listening? Have you considered active listening? Have you tried that at all? I'll tell you, the truth is, this comes from a place of, you are right to say it's about, not about my parents, but my family. I'm a middle child,

and I've overcompensated for the neglect that I felt for decades by deciding that I need to be heard at all times and that I have thoughts that need to be shared and that people should finally listen to me. It was hard to get a word in edgewise at the Stein family dinner table? Oh, impossible. Impossible. A lot of chatter. Does your older sibling have a lot more expertise than you do? No, but she pretended like she did.

Let's get your sister on. What could she talk about? She's that Jenner and Block, so she could talk about a firm that's not capitulated. Let's do that. We're going to work on it. i also think everybody could just chill out a little bit sometimes i do think what do you mean but i agree that sam should stop interrupting and it's rude that sam interrupts i also just think that you know we're humans we're doing our best it's nice to have a lively conversation back and forth and and i do think sometimes commenters now don't get don't get everybody's feelings hurt, sometimes project.

Like there was a person on Blue Sky who was hate tweeting me about how I was being, I was asking one of the individual co-hosts, one of the people that founded Indivisible, which is doing the hands-off protest. I was asking about their marriage. I think it's so interesting that they're married and like they're running this organization together while being married and have young children. And I found that to be very interesting. was one person who yeah who said that was sexist i still don't understand why it was sexist and and they went at me so aggressively that leah just one second did you see i just interrupted you i did see that leah herself had to come on and reply to that person be like no no i like talking about marriage that's fun we're all having a good time so sometimes sometimes you're projecting your own issues uh and i'm gonna interrupt sam a lot i guess

on this show is how we're gonna combat it's payback and hopefully sam will learn his lesson and be a little bit better listener your poor children like you know it's important to listen actively hear and reply um something i've been working on okay what are we talking about again besides sam being terrible oh right disastrous meeting on the hill today so he has this meeting on the hill um and uh among the things that he does after this kind of this readout this meeting was kind of house republicans there's some readouts and uh and there were two things that jumped out to me uh one was the negative feedback from the Freedom Caucus, from the conservative side. And the other was just the way that Trump totally pantsed the SALT Caucus.

Anyone that's been following us today over the past few days knows about my disdain for the SALT Caucus, these supposed moderates who have gone along with every element of Trump's authoritarian agenda but are trying to draw a line at the level at which we deduct the state and local income tax. That's their red line. Other people have other red lines, disappearing people to concentration camps, for example. Storming the Capitol was Liz Cheney's red line. For Mike Lawler, his red line was a deduction for local income taxes. That's what he's going to be telling his grandchildren about. That was what he fought for uh it was his kind of edmund pettus bridge was the salt deduction and trump basically came out of the meeting and was like eat a dick my clawler and it's just basically like i'm not

going to bail out these blue state republicans that have high taxes and so it seems like bad bad news for the salt caucus What do you make of it? The Edmund Pence. I thought it was, yeah, it was, it was, it was like one of those rare cases where I was like, way to go, Trump. You know, like, I mean, obviously the motivations are totally impure. You know, half a year ago, he was saying he would solve the salt issue and work with Democratic governors. And now he's saying, screw the Democratic governors.

I'm not throwing them a bone. But, you know, if you're Mike Lawler, you know, what is what are you going to do here? Right. You're probably going to bend once again, because that's just what you do. But Trump's Trump was like, look, I think that's just what Mike Lawler does. He just bends, just bends. I will say this. Trump's kind of right in one sense.

This was reported from the meeting. He said, if you're losing because of salt, then you're going to lose anyway. You're just going to lose anyway. He also said, I know your district better than you do. Which may be true, actually. I don't know. For Mike Lawler's district, New York. Trump's been around. He's built some buildings, I'm sure, in the districts. Oh, yeah. He did put him in a bad spot, though,

now, because once you basically say, no, you're going to do this for me, now Lawler either has to go and look like a lackey for Trump, which is not great in New York, or he, what, holds out and tanks the bill, which he'll never do. But let's say, in theory, maybe he does. I don't know. They said they're not going to vote for the rules, which is supposed to happen at 1 a.m., so we'll see. This is interesting.

I'm pulling this up here. Mike Lawler has been on Fox Business since the meeting, it looks like. He says New York has the highest tax burden of any state in the country. We need to raise the cap on salt. So he's sticking with it he's sticking with it for now we'll see i'm not i'm not i wouldn't be holding if you're if you're a new york resident making the polymarket arts on this don't interrupt me making 450,000 dollars a year uh as a couple and you're concerned about your salt deduction i i'd be i wouldn't i wouldn't

be too optimistic if i were you um okay what about the other side of the equation um we had andy harris uh from maryland um there's a doctor uh who said um essentially that he was not persuaded by the meeting today. His concerns are unusual. His concerns is that he doesn't think the bill does enough to get rid of waste, fraud, and abuse in Medicaid. So I don't know exactly. That's kind of a weird one. But he went on to say the president, I don't think, convinced enough people that the bill is adequate the way it

is. You know, then there's some other guys, the chip Roy's of the world who are unhappy with the, with the debt number on this. And, and then you've got Steve Bannon. Actually,

why don't we just put a little clip from Steve Bannon? Andy Harris. Here's, I got a problem with, and folks, you know, I'm a cake and agree for this, but that's a,

that's part of the business. I don't mind that. Johnson should not put the President of the United States in this situation. The President of the United States should not have to come to Capitol Hill in an extraordinary – for the President to come up and talk about budget and math is unheard of. It's unheard of. For him to come up today and have to – is he not whipping votes? He's not doing Tom Emmer's job? Because Johnson and these guys – Johnson in these rooms tells everybody what they want to hear. That's why people can't stand him because they don't know what's real and what's not real.

He tells the SALT guys one thing. He tells the Medicaid guys another thing. He tells the FMAP we're going to get to FMAP. Then we're not going to do it. So nobody knows where they are. The president, people believe, because the president is coming down and throwing down houses. So the president comes up right now to basically give his say-so and whip votes. And you're hearing guys saying, hey, we respect the president, but we're not there.

That should not happen. If he does come up, it should be he makes his point. People say, yeah, boom, and then it's a group hug. Steve Bannon's blaming this i know steve bannon's blaming this on mike johnson says that that little mike put the president of this in this situation where he has to be the whip and now trump's in a bad spot where he's trying he's got to twist the arms of andy harris and mike lawler and that should be mike johnson's job that's just not again it's a sign of cats and dogs fighting,

mass hysteria over there. Not exactly a sign that they're supposed to get this thing done before Memorial Day. Maybe it will, but not a ton of progress today. Can I speak? We're going to do a pregnant pause before you speak. Okay, Sam. Here's what I think about. I want to do it. I want to like a pregnant pause before you speak. Okay. Well, here's what I think about.

This is this, this happens all the time, but it's kind of funny to see really in action, which is like Trump goes in there. He's like, don't fuck with Medicaid. I think that's the actual quote. And then everyone is just sort of left to interpret what he means by that,

because it could be don't touch the program as is don't touch what we're already doing to the program. Don't go further than the rich. And so everyone's leaving this meeting being like, I think he's on our side. It's like strategic ambiguity, I suppose. It's classic Trump. It's probably not strategic. It's classic Trump.

So Andy Harris is just like, no, we're going to fuck with Medicaid. And we want to do this. And then the moderates, whatever, they're like, no, we're not going to fuck with medicaid because trump said it and so now we're in this place so i get where steve bannon's coming from and to a degree i suppose because like in a normal world like yeah the house should whip its own members but in this case when you have a president who just doesn't actually put anything down in terms of actual clear markers for what he wants, that becomes harder to whip support for. Now, I will also, just one thing about Mike Johnson.

His whole method is just survive in advance, right? Just get through the vote, say whatever it takes, put on a happy face, and then eventually something, you either get it across the finish line or not. So that's why I think they'll, they'll figure it out in the house. But it does, it does, you know, produce problems like the ones they're having right now. Yeah. The strategic ambiguity works for Trump in this situation, you know, because it's like, on the one hand, it doesn't help Mike Johnson and try to figure out where to go, what changes making the bill. But in the end, like when you come to the direct vote, if the voters are confused, right, like is like is was Trump for the Medicaid cuts or not, or just to waste on reviews or they want that. You know what I mean? Like then it's then it makes it hard for the members to be like, no, I'm going against Trump.

Like if Trump came out, like the salt is the one different example of this. Like now Trump comes out clearly against the salt deduction. And so now that does make it a little more challenging for Mike Lawler, as we mentioned, because he's going to have to come out and say, I opposed you. The Medicaid stuff is just such a wash of just nonsense and smoke and mirrors. It's so ambiguous, right? Like they can just basically put everything under the rubric of, oh, we're getting rid of waste, fraud, and abuse. You can say, I'm adding work requirements to Medicaid.

Well, that's to get rid of what? Abuse, right? You can say, we're making sure illegal immigrants aren't on Medicaid. Well, that's fraud. You can just do all these things and it's just eventually, but you end up with 7.3 million people not getting access to Medicaid. And that's tougher to spin, right? I mean, you can be strategically ambiguous about a lot of things and then run with it.

But once people lose their coverage, then you're fucked. And so that, but that, they don't care about that. They just need the bill to pass. Yeah, that's a waste of money. They just want the bill to pass. Yeah. I'll call you Jonathan Cohn's article on that. People have missed that. Go to the Bulwark and check out jonathan cone's newsletter on this

because it's very he's been really good on the medicaid side of this and what's actually happening uh and kind of uh you know uh breaking through the fog for people so tim do you think they passed this thing tonight or this week i should say by this i mean the whole bill gets through the house by the end of the week i do um well maybe next week um it's possible it happens next week i don't i don't know that i i the timing of it um i think got a little more challenging today and you know we're running out of time but um to the to the weekend these guys like to have the memorial day weekend so i just um i think i just keep falling back in my prior on this which is it's been more of a shit show than i thought it was going to be and i and i think it's interesting that these guys are are running into a lot of stepping on a lot of rakes and yet the reason

they call it the big beautiful pill uh is because they're sycophant sympathetic and also because it's the only thing they're gonna do this because it's the only thing they're going to do this year it's the only thing and there's potentially like like literally they've passed five bills since lake and riley they've passed nothing except like post office namings there's one other thing about crypto going on i wanted to have a separate youtube on that uh here later this week um because i think that's interesting there is a crypto bill it's kind of moving through um but besides that they're doing nothing and so it's like if this is the only meaningful thing you're doing this year is Lake and Riley and this, it becomes hard to go to your voters and say, I voted against the one thing that Trump wanted me to do. And so I think in the end, these guys all fold because they're jellyfish.

I agree. I agree. And also the risk of inaction remains higher than the risk of action certainly for the short term yeah i mean you it's not just that you can't go home empty-handed it's that taxes will go up if you don't do this and they're gonna like that they just will not stomach that so and the debt ceiling minor little thing um sam stein uh interrupting cow sam stein um here's the thing guys me and sam love each other okay so uh and all of us the boy we're very it's a very communal it's a joyous

uh you know group that we have together i want to say i love you but i love the commenters too i'm not offended i take the constructive feedback yeah we can handle getting interrupting each other he takes the constructive feedback he's going to work on his active listening, but we don't want to take the Sam-ness out of Sam. We don't want to take the Sam-ness out of Sam. Sometimes our flaws are what make us special. And so I do want you guys to think about that as well

when you're being rude to him. But, you know, creative insults are appreciated. Okay, everybody, subscribe to the feed. We'll see you later.