Bulwark Takes - Trump Thinks He’s Going to Heaven

Episode Date: March 29, 2026

Tim Miller gives his take on Donald Trump’s latest Truth Social spiral and why he's boosting pro-war voices like Mark Levin, who’s floating plans that sound more like a uranium heist than a real strategy. Tim breaks down how Trump’s feed has become a window into his decision-making, why the signs point toward escalation and possible troops on the ground, and how the war is already causing global disruptions. He also reacts to the surreal Palm Sunday moment with Trump sharing a letter from Franklin Graham about Trump getting into heaven.

Hey everybody, Timmel from the Bullwark here. It is Sunday early afternoon as we are taping this. We are coming down off the No Kings Hangover. I woke up this morning to look through the news. And there's a lot of insanity and madness out there coming out of the White House. And so I thought I would do just a little Sunday potpourri with you guys going through a few things that are out there since we last talked before the rallies. I guess I want to format this around what is happening on Trump's social media feed. Because there's something different about this president. Well, many, many, many, many things are different about this president. But one of those is that, you know, we get to understand his internal monologue at all times.

You know, there's no like New York Times has to talk to a friend of the president, to the chief of staff, who speaks on background, who can provide some context on the president's thinking. And maybe that's true or not, or maybe that's spin. You know, that's how things used to work. With this president, he just bleats what his thinking is at any given time. And his bleats this morning were pretty revealing on a couple of factors. The first and most important is the status of the Iran War. So I want to highlight a couple of people that he referenced on his social media feed,

Mark Levine and Mark Tiesin, two marks. Mark Tiesin is Mark with C. Levin was interviewing Tison about a column that he had written in the Washington Post about how Trump is not losing his nerve in Iran. And Trump also bleated the column about how he's not losing his nerve in Iran. So in case you had any doubt about his nerve, he's not losing it. Mark Tison wrote about that, and Donald Trump is bleeding that article. So let's look at the column to get a sense into Trump's perspective. Why did he think this was so insightful?

It begins with a Rudyard-Kippling quote, if you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you, if you can trust yourself when all men doubt you. If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, yours is the earth and everything that's in it. That's how Tiesin grandiloquently starts his column. The interesting, the one little passage that he included there that's interesting is the if you can wait and not be tired by waiting.

There's some other reporting going up around over the weekend that Trump is getting bored by the war and are on. And so to me, this was Tiesin, kind of sending a message to Trump, treating him like a child, being like, no, patience is a virtue, sir. If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, you'll get a reward, you'll get a toy at the end. And that strategy seems to have worked because Trump read the article and was like, yes, I am a great man, Mark Tison. Thank you. the article, the column goes on to say, I know from well-placed sources, now here we are including the well-placed sources, but given that Trump has bleated the article, given that Trump bleated an interview about the article, I think it's safe to say that Trump is a well-placed source. I know from well-placed sources that Trump has never been more determined to see this military campaign through to completion. So that's the first little nugget here. If we're kind of trying to read the tea leaves, what is Trump doing? What is he planning? he's posting this article that he's not losing his nerve. Also, over the weekend,

2,500 Marines arrived in the Middle East. So we know that is happening. We know additional troops have been deployed. It's more than 2,500, if you include the other, you know, Army, Navy, Air Force, etc. The other thing that he posted was the Mark Levine show. He was telling his fans on Truth Social, the various. and elderly and firm who are stuck on his website of horrors.

He's telling them to watch Mark Levine tonight, Life Liberty, and Levine. Watch that show. And that's not a show I usually tune into. But I felt like if the president thinks we should watch it, I guess we should probably watch to see what he's thinking on the war. And I want to play for you. It's a bit long. It's about a minute and a half.

So if you can't stand Mark Levine, voice, man's whining voice, micro marks, whining voice. If you can't tolerate that, you can just press the fast forward 30 button three times, and then I'll be back on the other side and explain to you what you had missed. Troops on the ground. He said, no, troops on the ground. I don't remember that in any campaign speech either. But why would we need troops on the ground?

Well, there's a lot of reasons, and we wouldn't need 300,000 of them. It's this uranium, too. We've got to get the uranium. If it cannot be destroyed, if it cannot be altered, we've got to get it. For the reason I just said, you can make dirty bombs,

and over time you can still make sophisticated missiles. So you need to get to the uranium. That's why I'm reading in the paper. We're talking about the 82nd Airborne. We're talking about these various special forces and the various military services and so forth. He's not talking about sending regular army and infantry in by the hundreds of thousands. The men he's talking about, the units he's talking about, they are specialized.

And you know what else? I remember from my days in the Reagan administration. Many of them are trained for a moment like this to try and secure enriched uranium. Many have been trained for moments like. like this. I guess what I'm trying to say is we're in good hands. No, not with all state, but we're President Trump because he's a man with enormous intelligence, enormous common sense. So there's screeching, Mark, talking about why we are going to send boots into Iran,

why we're going to send ground trips into Iran. And we're going to do so to steal the uranium. It's like a national treasure, Nicholas Cage-style mission that Mark Levin is pushing on American troops, pushing on Donald Trump, who is obviously watching the show. Trump desperate for anybody to tell him he's doing a good job. He's looked all around the country. The only two people he can find are the marks, Mark Levine and Mark Tiesin, who have been clamoring for war with Iran for decades now. You could hear there in that interview, Markovin's very upy. to speed on the latest, on the strategies and tactics, as he was saying that he knows from his time in the Reagan administration that the Marines are ready for a mission, such as getting dropped

into the mountains of Iran, breaking into Ishtahan, going underground to get these vats of uranium, that other reports say it's like for each vat they weigh like a thousand pounds, 900 something pounds the vats can be pierced or then you know you die chemicals go into the air that would be bad for you

so that's the mission we got to go into Iran go into the mountains go into their nuclear site go underground steal the vats of uranium exfil the vats of uranium X-fill the vats of uranium while presuming, I presume the Iranians are shooting at you, and then you take it,

I don't know, back to Mar-a-ago where you display the vats of uranium like on the pool deck with the cougars and have a press conference. I guess that's the plan. That's what Mark Levin is pushing for. That seems unlikely to succeed to me. Been proven wrong before. Not here to to coastplay, a military strategy expert, but just on its face, excelling the vats of uranium, seems high risk. I guess that's just, maybe that succeeds. It definitely seems high risk, high risk of casualties. So there we go.

That's what Levin is pushing. Obviously, there's the Carg Island. Conversations been out there for a while. JV.L wrote about this weeks ago now, you know, about how Trump would try to occupy Carg Island. But I just think that if you're reading the tea leaves, in this case, it's not reading the tea leaves, it's just reading the bleats of Trump's internal monologue, you can see they're planning to push forward for weeks ahead, and the troops are definitely a strong likelihood. So that's where we are.

Each day this goes on, and each day the straightforward moves is closed. It's just another day where you have massive supply change disruptions, things you couldn't even predict. like we're in our Slack today. I think it was Sam sent a article from a Indian newspaper about how there's restaurants now have a shortage of butter chicken because of some product that is required and that kind of central dish to Indian cuisine. So, you know, obviously that is a small thing

in the grand scheme of things, but the disruption, the economic disruption that has happening globally as long as the straight is closed, you know, is hard to even grab your heads around right now, like the scale of it. And it's going to harm, it already is harming basically every American in their pocketbook. And it's going to continue to cause greater damage the longer this goes on. So we have a few weeks ahead at least, according to what we're seeing on Trump's social media. I should also say on the weekend that we also learned another thing.

We knew this basically, but the Iranians are getting intel and tariff. targeting information from the Russians satellite imagery. And one reason we know that is because of this. We had parked a plane on the jet way, to call it a jetway when it's a military base. You know, wherever you taxi, the plane on the military base, we parked a couple planes there. And the Iranians heated it with a missile.

And you can see the damage there. we don't have that many of this type of plane. We'll talk to our cartling this week about all the details what the implications are, but that was a very expensive attack on our plane as part of this ongoing escalated war in Iran. Another thing that was happening over the weekend is when a flag. Trump posted this morning, it's Palm Sunday. Happy to Palm Sunday to all those who celebrate this. It's a letter from Franklin Graham, son of Billy Graham, the right-wing pass.

I want to read a little bit of this. The letter came in October, but Trump posted it today. Dear President Trump, this week you commented to the media that you might not be heaven-bound. Maybe you responded in jest, but it is an important issue to know for certain that your soul is secure and will spend eternity in the presence of God. The only one who can save us from hell is Jesus Christ. You can save yourself. I can save myself. Good work.

Prominent success. None of these goodness to heaven. only way to heaven is through the shed blood of Jesus Christ. God requires us to turn from our sins by faith. Believe in our heart that Jesus came to earth, died on the cross of our sins and was buried and God raised him to life on the third day. If you accept that by faith and invite him to come to your heart, you are heavenbound. I promise you. So there you go. Trump posted it mostly, I think, to show to people that he's going to heaven. Mike Johnson posted it as well. And, talked and said explicitly, you know, highlighting the fact that you can only get to heaven

through faith in Jesus, which again, in a country that we have separation from church and stated as pretty, you know, it's a little much for the Speaker of the House and the president to be basically saying to Muslim Americans, I mean, hell, depending on how you look at it, Catholic Americans, Jews, you can't go to heaven. I mean, literally. That's what Mike Johnson and Donald Trump posted today. Jews, you can't go to heaven. So a lot of conversations about anti-Semitism out there. But in the role of speaker of the house, posting that the only path through heaven is through Jesus, our Savior,

certainly sending some kind of message to the non-evangelical Christians, non-Protestants in the country. Trump, I think, posted it just because he's like, hell yeah, I'm going to heaven, bitches. Franklin Graham, he's a holy guy over here, says, I'm going to heaven. And you know what else Franklin Graham said? Let's watch this. This is Franklin Graham at CPAC over the weekend. And I love Donald Trump. Is he perfect?

No. But I love that guy. I love him. And we'll only have one chance at this. We'll never get another president like Donald Trump. Never. And that's why it's important that we do everything that we can to try to get him reelected. So I don't know if Franco Graham has.

dementia. That would maybe explain the fact that he thinks that Donald Trump could run again for office and the fact that Donald Trump is going to heaven and has brought Jesus into his heart. Can we just go back to that for a second? The idea that Donald Trump has really genuinely brought Jesus into his heart and believes that Jesus rose from the dead after the third day, like it's absurd. It's ridiculous. Everyone knows that that is not true. Okay. Everyone knows it's fake. Trump's family members wouldn't even say it was true. There's nobody that would believe that this is actually true. like everyone is doing K-Fabe. But Franklin Graham, I guess, believes that Trump really is brought Jesus into his heart

and either believes that it's the year 2019 and he can run for president again, or he wants to end American democracy and turn the country into a Donald Trump theocracy, which would be the most amusing and ridiculous theocracy ever in the history of the world, probably. But I don't know. I'm opposed to that. I think that most Americans are opposed to that. I think that as the calamity continues to unfurl from this war of choice in Iran, I think more and more people will be stridently objecting to the idea that Donald Trump should be

permanent autocrat, permanent theocrat, permanent leader, permanent king of America, that his family has some right, that he has some byright onto the White House, and that we should ignore the Constitution, ignore the law, and let him rule for as long as he sees fit. I don't believe that most Americans are going to think that. And you know why I don't believe that? Because I was at the No Kings rally, New Orleans yesterday. Good to see everybody out there. It was enjoyable to see all the funny signs.

But it's also important, I think, for people to register their dissent. And it was happening in places all across the country. I think there's something nice about that, federalists about that almost, American. It people in small towns and hamlets, big cities. city rallies, big rally in D.C. We were at the Greenway here in New Orleans, and there was a little march around Mid City. That's inspiring. It's excellent. And I think what's really telling, when I talked to Ezra Levin, who organizes these rallies last week on the channel, he said, noticed the difference between the second No Kings and the Third. And the second one, there was this big message that these

were all in Tifa. They were crazy. They're going to do violence. It's far-left agitators. And then afterwards, Trump was, you know, dropping poop from the plane on Harry Sisson and the other protesters, right? Like, that was, it was aggressive pushback. Not a lot of talk about it this time. I mean, some of the cable pundits, you know, on the right made fun of the No Kings rallies, but not a lot of talk about it. No clear message. And if you want to know how they had no clear message to combat the No Kings rally,

you can just see what the Republican Party put up on social media responding to Tim Walls over the weekend. And there it is, no Queens. So that's the best you can do, calling Tim Walls. a homosexual. Oh, oh, that's so funny. That's so funny. Oh, Tim Walz is gay. It's like, well, Tim Walz is a dad with two kids and the person that's gotten us into

this stupid war might be gay. But anyway, you know, it's pathetic. It's sad. And it shows where this is happening. They have no message. They have no, you know, negative message that's resonating with the no kings rallies. And they don't really have a positive message about the second Trump administration right now. They've got no positive story to tell.

And so what they're going to do is continue to lash out. They're going to try to turn people against each other, lash out, do childish insults, and try to delegitimize those who are challenging their lawless and inept administration. And I don't think it's going to work. So anyway, no queens. Oh, it's such a good one. It's so embarrassing. So embarrassing about that gets through the approval chain.

chairman of the RNC is like yeah let's let's do that let's make let's do no queens post all right guys good luck we'll see how that takes um everybody else i'll be back tomorrow monday with bill crystal as news develops we'll be here on the youtube channel make sure to subscribe um we're over on substack of course can subscribe there is well well we appreciate uh everybody who wants to support our effort you can become a board plus member or you can become a member on the YouTube channel. I would really appreciate it. And I'll see you guys later.