Bulwark Takes - Trump Threatens To Blow Up Oman Amid Negotiations With Iran

Episode Date: May 27, 2026

Andrew Egger and Will Saletan give their takes on Trump’s latest cabinet meeting spectacle, from his bizarre rant about the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, potentially bombing Oman, and Pete Hegseth pitching a staggering $1.5 trillion defense budget. As Trump’s poll numbers slide and Republicans brace for a brutal midterm environment, the White House still seems trapped in a reality-defying loyalty pageant.

Hi, everybody. This is Andrew Eger with the bulwark. Donald Trump had another one of his famous, infamous, patented cabinet meeting, love fest praise sessions today. And wouldn't you know it, our Will Salatan was good enough to sit through the whole thing, sift the wheat from the chaff, get some of the highlights, get some of the low lights. He is here to tell us all about how it went down. Well, we've done a lot of these by now, right? We're at sort of a weird place with the president's popularity, with the war in Iran. A lot of wheels. seeming to fall off a lot of buses right now. You wouldn't necessarily have known any of that from the cabinet meeting today.

Before we get started, we've got a lot of clips here. But can you just kind of tell the people what your broad strokes takeaways were from what you saw from the president and his allies this morning? Yeah, so the main wheels that are falling off the bus these days seem to be Donald Trump's very anxious that he's perceived as falling asleep at cabinet meetings and other things, which he does, he does, right? So I think, Andrew, I think they called this cabinet meeting in front of the press. to show everybody.

He's hard at work and he's in command. And it kind of showed just the opposite. Basically, this was more than an hour of a bunch of cabinet secretaries doing nothing but sitting around and watching Grandpa tell some of his favorite stories. So let's get into this. Let's do it. Why take our word for it, right? Let's head right into some of the highlights and low lights from this cabinet meeting.

And right off the bat, you had stressed this as kind of a really evocative illustration going in. But here is a small chunk of the time, the very lengthy period of time that the president spent talking about the renovation of the D.C. reflecting pool on the national mall that he has going. Let's take a listen to that. That horrible reflecting pond is disgusting. It's filthy, dirty, and disgusting. I said, really, I drove down. I said, Secret Service, let's take a drive. And we went down. I said, that's terrible. It was built, I guess, a little after the Lincoln Mover. It's embarrassing. It was so horrible. I never saw anything like it.

It was filthy, dirty. It was Biden. It was Biden. Have you been following this reflecting pool, a little snafu at all, Will? What did you make of all this? So obviously he's obsessed. Look, we all know Trump's a real estate guy.

He thought, I'm building the ballroom. I'm building this and that. I'm renovating this and that. The reflecting pool is his latest obsession. But you can hear all the germphobia in there's, oh, it's filthy, it's dirty, it's disgusting. And Hussein Obama and Biden, they'll, you know, screwed it all up. So he goes on about this, but Andrew, so I clock this. I had to clock it

because it just kept going on and on. Remember, this is supposed to be a meeting to show that Donald Trump's in charge and the cabinet's doing stuff. So you've got sitting next to Trump on either side, the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense. Remember, we're in the middle of a war or an excursion of whatever we want to call it. We're all waiting on this. These guys are sitting there for more than an hour, Andrew. The whole cabinet sitting there doing nothing but listening to Trump talk. And he goes on for eight to nine minutes, depending on how you want to count it, just on a rant about the reflecting pool. And they all have to sit there. And it's all this stuff. It's filthy. It's dirty. It's disgusting. And I'm cleaning it up. I just couldn't believe that this was Trump's idea of how to show America that he's doing his job. Yeah. Well, the president was feeling pretty good for one particular reason, which is that we had some primaries last night. And in fact, this is what he opened up the cabinet meeting with today, was. sort of doing a victory lap. Obviously, the most notable victory that he notched last night was in the Texas Senate primary, where he endorsed against his incumbent senator from Texas, John Cornyn. He endorsed

Ken Paxton, the very maga, very corrupt, very scandal-plagued attorney general of the state instead. And Paxton romped. He won by a lot. But that was not all that Trump was happy with. Trump was pretty happy with the slate of primary wins last night. They show that he remains, he retains his sort of iron grip on on the the voting habits of his MAGA base, of the Republican primary electorate at least, even as every other part of the country seems to be abandoning him in pretty significant numbers. So let's let's just hear him talk about that a little bit. This was right at the beginning of the cabinet meeting. Last night was incredible, not only Texas, but so many other places. The numbers were fantastic. And their terms, I don't care about the midterms. Look what happened

last night. That was the prelude to the midterms. I mean, if you, Just one thing I will say about this. I cannot think of a better example of the way that this guy's mind, this particular idiosyncratic, very strange mind works than to say, well, look, I've still got my fastball in Republican primaries. I think we're going to do great in the midterms. This is a failure to the midterms. The Trump guys won last night.

I think the Trump guys are going to do fine for the broader electorate in November. Yeah. So that second clip, by the way, is him saying, you know, the Iranians think they're going to wait me out because I got the midterms. But I'm not scared of the midterms. look what just happened. It's exactly what you said, Andrew. He thinks that because I won the primaries, I'm going to win the general. So not only is that not true for the obvious reasons, right? He's bragging about taking out John Cornyn, an incumbent Republican senator in Texas with a different

Republican Ken Paxton. So not only is did he take down an incumbent, but correct me if I'm wrong, Andrew, doesn't Ken Paxton perform worse in general election polling in Texas than John Cornyn by a significant margin? That was my impression, right? That's been the case so far, yeah. Yeah. So basically, Trump is bragging that because he just put the Republicans in a less electable position in one race, that that bodes well for the midterms. I mean, I don't know whether to say he's dumb or whether that he thinks that all he really cares

about is his control over his party. And if in the course of that, he loses a seat for his party to the Democrats, well, that's not his problem. I don't know. Yeah, I mean, this is not like a corn in. Paxton video, but just to dwell on this for another second, it's not as though John Corny was like a Mitt Romney, Liz Cheney type guy. He's extraordinarily Trumpy, you know, I mean, not not like a base figure like Paxton is or like some of these other senators, not like Mike Lee or something

like that. He was sort of an establishment guy. He predates Trump in the in the Senate by a long time. But like, you know, basically every other senator in the party had gone to go along to get along with President Trump extensively over the years, over and over and over again, never voted to convict him at any of his impeachment trials, you know, never, never really crossed him on any major pieces of legislation. Trump wanted to punish him for a couple of extremely small slights, like not instantly recommitting to Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential primary. And that's, that's the kind of the kind of behavior that we are punishing and taking victory laps over right now, even as it is making Republicans' chances worse in the midterms. And even as, again, basically

everybody without an R by their name is abandoning him in droves in terms of his national popularity. So Trump's saying this with Marco Rubio sitting on his right. Now, Rubio was just a senator. I bet if you looked at Marco Rubio's voting record compared to John Corny's, they're about the same. I mean, what is Marco Rubio supposed to do when his boss is sitting there bragging about taking out a Republican who basically votes the same way Rubio does? I mean, it's just, it's really a dilemma for people in his own party. Yeah. I mean, there are so many of these things. I want to turn to a different thing here because there's so many of these different issues that are like real problems for these guys right now. You know, they're losing support on the war in Iran. They're losing support on affordability. They are, Trump is sort of posting his own way into a candidate quality problem that they're going to have to deal with in the midterms. And yet, when you sit here and listen to them talk in these cabinet meetings, it's like they're on a completely different planet, right? I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, It's pie in the sky stuff. It's yes and stuff about all these things that are going to be politically controversial.

Like, for instance, here's this next one. This is Pete Hegset, the Department of Defense Secretary, the Secretary of Defense, I should say, talking about their gigantic, eye-watering $1.5 trillion defense budget that they're asking for. This is a politically dicey thing to ask for, in part because it needs to be that large to replenish an enormous amount of weaponry that we already spent on this Iran war that we have. one and maybe walking away from in sort of a losing position. But his sort of like, and that's not all style of talking about it is pretty great. So let's hear from Pete Higset. Because of your, the meetings you've held, defense manufacturers are investing in new plants and new manufacturing, new production lines so that we're getting weapons faster than ever.

And then the $1.5 trillion that you've committed to the department going forward, that's a million American jobs. One million American manufacturing jobs. Wow. That's pretty great. A chip Chicken in every pot, a defense manufacturing job in every family. What do you make of this from the Department of, from the Secretary of Defense? Okay, okay. So, Andrew, I mean, you're more of a, you're an actual conservative. Correct me if I'm wrong on the math here. One point five trillion dollars of spending on a federal department to get one million jobs. that is, I believe, $1.5 million per job.

If Democrats did that in any department, right, that would be, Republicans would be all over that, right? This is just, and remember, the defense budget was a trillion dollars. So this is a 50% increase in one department in one year to do what we're saying right now, a war in Iran, which was a war of choice. That's a lot of money. That's an enormous amount of money. And for them to be bragging that the return on that is a job for every $1.5 million.

I mean, I can show you a long line of liberals and progressives who will find you a more efficient way is to get jobs in the public or the private sector than to spend that kind of money to get that kind of return. I kind of liked what you did right at the top there, which was like, Andrew, you're conservative. You must be good at math. I don't really know what the connective tissue was there. We could stop and unpack it. Not actually all that true. I cannot sit here and do the mental fact checking on whether or not you lined it up properly or not. Maybe Matt, our producer will know and he'll sort of quietly stop us. Maybe we'll have to go back and recut that. Who knows? We have no time to do any of that right now because we've got to keep the hits coming, keep the good times rolling. So here we are with this, with this amazing, again, kind of eye-watering ask of $1.5 trillion. And then we're going to go from this to fiscal austerity, fiscal responsibility. I should. should say. We're going to go to the other side of the table back, back across to the president, who is then going to begin asking his vice president and his attorney general about his newfound efforts once again to sort of rebalance the federal budget by just finding a whole bunch of fraud.

So let's talk about that. Actually, it's one thing to uncover fraud, which we've done, and that's part of it, but it's also prosecuting the bad guys that are doing it and stopping it from continuing. And so we had a $1 billion fraud, a conviction at trial last week out of Florida. Yeah, so there's a couple different things going on here. One, there was a moment that we didn't just play where Trump re-brings up this idea that that this is great that we're doing all this because this is how we're going to get federal spending back under control, which was an idea that everybody rolled out last year during Doge, during Elon Musk.

Nothing ever came of that, but I guess we are back to it. We just weren't looking for fraud in the right places. But the other amazing thing is that this is all happening during the sledge. fund during the as as as trump is rolling out this one point seven billion dollar weaponization fund for his own political supporters was that was that discussed at all or was this just a completely sort of swept under the rug look over here at this other thing instead sort of situation in the fraud talk oh Andrew we don't mention the slush fund we don't know we don't mention that we don't mention it since like i don't know how many republican senators at this point i mean they left town

rather than vote on that thing it was so gross but yeah you've got you've got trump saying we're going to balance the budget by finding fraud while we're spending an extra $500 billion on defense in one year, right? And while we're shoveling this money out the door to, you know, J6 felons and everybody else who wants to claim the weaponization. And you got Todd Blanche here. So just to set up the scene for people, you've got Rubio and Higgs that's sitting next to Trump on one side of the table.

And right opposite him, they've got J.D. Vance and Todd Blanche. And Vance and Blanche are supposed to talk about fraud and all the stuff they're doing to fight fraud. So Vance does his schick. And then Blanche does his. And you can see Blanche sitting there. Okay, here he is the acting attorney general. He says, we're prosecuting the bad guys who were doing the fraud.

And then he says, we got a one billion, we just got a $1 billion fraud conviction. So, Andrew, the slush fund, which is for bad guys who got prosecuted. I mean, there were people who were prosecuted for crimes. They are now eligible for a slush fund created by Donald Trump and his administration. And that slush fund, is about twice the value of this so-called fraud conviction that Todd Blanche is sitting there bragging about winning. So this is not an administration that's bringing down fraud general. This is an administration that's finding new ways to create fraud, to give money to people who were literally

already prosecuted and convicted. It's just morally amazing to me. Yeah. I mean, the thing that this just continually drives home to me, and I feel like we're giving people a sense of what's on offer at this, But it was one thing to see this sort of thing happening a year ago or a little more than a year ago when Trump was early in his second term, when his agenda was kind of, you know, banging on all cylinders. He had a lot of momentum. It seemed like whatever he proclaimed was happening and the courts were slow to catch up with him and Congress wasn't able to get in the way. And his popularity was not where it is today. It wasn't like amazing. He wasn't at 65% popularity.

But he wasn't in the high 30s either, right? He was right around 50. And you could see this sort of thing as like, you know, we're still in control, Patriots in control, we're making it all happen. You can just do things. This sort of early 2025 attitude, it is astonishing to sit here in like mid-26 as these guys are staring down what is very likely to be a bruising midterm where they're just going to lose a lot of power.

Donald Trump is going to have to deal with a lot more in terms of investigations, in terms of, you know, subpoena power from Congress. it's going to make his life harder. It's going to make all these guys lives harder because of the ways in which they have facilitated his moving around the law and sort of blowing up judicial precedents and just all of this stuff. And they're still doing the same kind of whistling past the graveyard, red meat for the base and not even really for the base, but for just the president, just to make him feel better

in this nationally televised thing. It's really astonishing to see. Yeah. In some ways, Andrew, it reminds me of the late stage Biden administration when all the Democrats were like, well, let's bring out the president to show everybody what we've got and like all the stuff we're doing. And every time people would see it, it got worse, right? It was like, no, this is not helping actually to see this old man sitting in the middle of his cabinet meeting, saying all this crazy stuff. And, you know, all the cabinet secretary sitting around him,

fawning and nobody really addressing the needs of the people. How was the energy, though? Did he, did he seem on the verge of sleep at any point? Or did he, did he manage to stick the landing on that one? He stayed awake. I stayed awake, too. I kind of think, Andrew, they scheduled this. this was a little odd. They scheduled this meeting for 11. They didn't do it in 11. They did it closer to new, but it's relatively early. I'm kind of thinking they scheduled it early to make sure that if grandpa needed to nap around 2 o'clock, that wasn't during the cabinet meeting. You know, if we moved the meeting up, he can nap later and we won't have to do it on camera. So I think that was this strategy. And if it was, I just want to congratulate the comms people. It really worked.

Yeah, worked in that respect. Can't say so many good things about anything else. We should talk about one other thing that happened because we actually did get some breaking news. on the subject of this on again, off again ceasefire, this Schrodinger's ceasefire, and that Schrodinger's Strait of Hormuz that we keep getting bizarrely conflicting versions of from the White House, from Iran. Nobody seems to know whether we are actually close to a deal or not. President Trump keeps going back and forth on this. Nobody seems to know really what would be in the deal if we were.

But we got some very maximalist talk from the president about what will be happening in the Strait of Hormuz. And in particular, what might happen to one of these small tertiary countries, secondary countries in Oman if they don't play ball. So let's listen to that real quick. Would you accept a short-term deal that allows Iran and Oman to control the straight? And would they have to open it immediately? Or would you be open to that happening over a period of time? No, the street's going to be open to everybody. It's international orders. Nobody's going to control it. We're going to watch over it. We'll watch over it. But nobody's going to continue to. That's part of the negotiation that we have. They would like to control it. Nobody's going to control it. It's

international waters. And Oman will behave just like everybody else and we'll have to blow them up. We're going to blow up him on. It turns out, apparently, apparently, I don't know. Is this, is this just bluffing? Is this just sort of big talk? What do you make of that? This is part of the grandpa problem. The entire Republican Party, the entire Republican apparatus in Congress, is dying for this war to be over. They're dying to get the gas prices back down. They're just dying to restore a sense of normality and to forestall what you accurately describe, this blue wave that's coming at them in the midterms. And so Trump not only is not making any clear moves in that direction.

There's no sign at this point that he's actually about to sign a deal, although he keeps talking about it. But he's adding to the war. He's now threatening a second country. And as you can see, he just did it off the top of his head. head. He's like, I'm pissed off at Oman. There, there's some, I saw there was a report that they might collaborate with Iran to, like, control the straight. And you know what? We might just blow you guys up. That is the kind of thing no other president would say, right? You don't just sit there at a

cabinet meeting and ad lib that you might militarily attack, blow up another country. So he's creating more headaches in the Middle East for our country and for his party politically. One of the things that always really grinds my gears at moments like this is there are so many people in the Republican Party who are, you know, sycophants for Trump argumentatively who look at statements like this and they're like, oh, you know, that's just Trump's madman theory. That's just him, you know, keeping everybody on their toes and not sure what to expect. And I mean, to me, I'm just a simple country dumbass journalist. But to me, it kind of seems like it would be. important if you're going to throw threats around, military threats around, for not necessarily for these countries to know if you're bluffing, because like maybe them not knowing whether or not your bluffing is good for you importantly. But for them to know whether or not you're actually even serious seems pretty important. For them to know whether or not you mean it whatsoever. Whereas this seems completely the opposite of that. Like he just, it's just a thing he happened to think

of saying. And so he said it, right? Like, oh, well, if they don't, if they don't cooperate, we'll blow them up. If you're Oman, if you're sitting there, there's no way for you to process that because there's no way for you to approach it as a rational statement. All it does is get your backup. All it does is remind you that America is not a reliable negotiating partner right now in any way. And if America's not a reliable negotiating partner and you're Oman, that increases the pressure on you to maybe cut some kind of deal with Iran about joint control of the Strait of Hormuz. So it's not only like evil and grotesque and just embarrassing for the whole country, for us to be like threatening random bystand or countries like this for these sorts of reasons,

but it's also completely counterproductive even with his own sort of stated military aims. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, look, it was a tradition for Republican presidents, well, for all presidents. But part of why people would take us seriously was when we said, exactly what you said, when we said something we meant it, we followed through. And part of that is you don't say it if you don't mean it, right? Because what, it's exactly what you said, Andrew, he's cheapening the currency of a military threat from the United States. What is any country to think when they look at that? What is Iran to think when he's constantly threatening to blow stuff up during the ceasefire?

But then he always says, oh, my friends in Pakistan said, I shouldn't do it, so I won't. And he's not serious about Oman. And meanwhile, he also, by the way, in this meeting, said that he, you know, by the way, he thought, come to think of it, if various other Gulf nations besides the ones that have don't sign on to the Abraham Accords. I won't sign a deal to end the war in Iran. I mean, that's just nuts. Like he's negotiating out loud. He's adding another condition as you, another one that is not serious, right? And so what is any Gulf country to think of Trump making these threats? Why should I like, say seriously that he actually expects me to sign the Abraham Accords? And why should I believe that

there's any prospect of him ending this war if he keeps adding these conditions and threatening more countries. I just love the idea that we're going to keep adding new objectives for the war, even as it like sits in this painful position of complete paralysis and stasis. We're just going to keep going on. Gas prices are going to keep inching up, but we're just going to keep throwing on new objectives that have to be satisfied. We haven't made any progress on any of the other ones, but we're going to get some new ones in there as well. Okay, that was the president's cabinet meeting. We all learned a lot. We all had a few laughs. We all, I don't know, made ourselves want to walk off a bridge. But none of that is particularly new. Thanks, Will, for coming on and holding our

hands, being our, being our Virgil, through the treacherous waters of yet another one of these stupid things. You got to keep your eye on it. It's the president and his cabinet. And unfortunately, all this nonsense that they spew does still matter quite a bit. So thanks for doing that. And yeah, anything else tuck us off, Will. No, I'm, you know, it's just really sad that this is what it's come to. And, you know, what I'm really afraid of, Andrew, is that because this meeting didn't go well, they're going to do another one. We're going to have to go sit through another one of these, you know, Kim Jong-un, Fidel Castro, two hours, you know, listening to the dictator hold forth. It's, it could be a long three years. Well, the good news for the people out there is

you don't actually have to do two hours with the cabinet. You can just do 15 or 20 minutes with Will and me afterwards. And you'll probably get much of the same experience with maybe a little bit less brain damage accompanying it. So thanks to you all, all of you who are out there for watching. Hope you'll subscribe to the channel. Thank you, Will, for watching, for suffering through, for bringing back some nuggets to the rest of us, and we'll see you all next time.