Bulwark Takes - Trump Turns the NBA Scandal Into a Delusional Rant

Episode Date: October 28, 2025

Tim Miller and JVL take on Donald Trump’s unhinged reaction to the NBA gambling scandal—and what it reveals about his plan to turn the Department of Justice into a weapon for revenge. Get free shipping and 365 day returns with Quince at https://Quince.com/BULWARKTAKES. #sponsored

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Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connix Ontario at 1866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. But MGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. Hey, everybody, Tim Miller from the Bullwark here with my buddy, JVL, author of the Triad Newsletter, which you must read over at the bollark.com. I wanted to talk about some developing information about what Donald Trump plans for the Department of Justice.

And he tried, he had a take, I guess, let's put it this way, he'll, he had a take on the NBA cheating scandal. I mean, I should hope so. He's the president. Doesn't he have to have takes on everything? Yeah. I mean, surely he always has back on his Twitter feed. And he, I think he one time weighed in on the breakup between Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart.

Yes, good poll. Yeah. So, yeah, so he's going to weigh in on everything. He's like the talk radio call in. I think he was Team Robert, if I'm remembering. I mean, I'm Team Robert. So I don't really remember what the breakup was over. I just find him handsome.

Okay. So anyway, so I just hate for you to lump me in with Donald Trump. So he had a take on this. Many people have takes on this. There's too much gambling involved in sports. There's too little gambling. Like, who cares? Poor Chauncey Billups.

Mr. Bigshot. His legacy now seems to be in question because it seems like he was doing some pretty bad stuff. I'm sure you have some takes on it. His take was a little strange, though. And I'd like to read it to you. It was a little bit of kind of a right turn. It didn't seem like you was like weighing in on the merits of what Terry Rozier was up to. He writes this, what's worse?

The NBA player is cheating at cards and probably much else. black people must probably be doing other crimes. You don't really know, but we can just assume there are other crimes happening. I wouldn't say that about golfers, would he? Yeah, I don't think so. Or the Democrats cheating on elections. The 2020 presidential election being rigged and stolen is a far bigger scandal. Look what happened to our country.

And then we get to the policy portion of this bleat. I hope the DOJ pursues this with as much gusto as befitting the biggest, scandal in American history, if not it will happen again, including in the midterms, no mail in early voting, yes, to voter idea, watch out totally dishonest the California prop voters, et cetera, et cetera, get smart Republicans before it's too late. A lot here, but the most notable thing to me is that Donald Trump is watching TV and live reacting to it as he does, our president. He sees his handpicked FBI director, Cash Patel all over the cameras, getting attention

that he should be getting, talking about how the FBI has found to. cheating in the NBA and his response to that is cash priorities seem to be off here shouldn't you be focused on the biggest crime in history when we pretended that I had lost the 2020 election yeah it's uh I mean what what's cash doing it's a funny thing though because I mean you hate to give it to the the president but he is right if the 2020 election was stolen, then it means that we had an illegitimate president for four years and we were living under a coup, right? I mean, this would be like the biggest story in Western civilization following World War II,

right? A major power of the company. May you're going back to the Civil War in our case? Right, right. I mean, like kind of a really big deal. And this has always been the thing that, uh, that didn't quite make sense. sense about the Republicans, because if they meant it seriously, or if they meant it literally, sorry, not seriously, then you're like, well, I'm sorry, hold on. Like, don't you fight civil

wars everything? Like, if somebody carried out a coup, don't. And yes. And it's true. And I've been kind of making this point as a gag recently, like, and saying on podcast, it's just like, I thought this was the biggest scandal in American history. The election was stolen from Donald Trump. He has now all of the power and resources of the government at his hands, shouldn't they be using that to go after the perpetrators? And my gag comment, the president now is just expressly advocating that his DOJ does look into this. Like OJ, he's searching for the real killers. And I, you know, the funny thing here is, though, and I forget who made this point,

it might have been Ann Applebaum, might have been somebody else. At the end of the day, in a weird way, the criminal, justice system is probably the least subject to total corruption. Like, the prosecutorial side of it can be corrupted. The Department of Justice can be corrupted. The FBI can be corrupted. But at the end of the day, they do have to get, like, 12 normal Americans to sit together. On a local level in individual cases, you could have dirty cops planting evidence on people.

Yeah. But, like, at scale, very challenge. And we've seen this with just, like, grand jury. juries in attempts to indict people in D.C., right? Where the, you know, normal voters in D.C. who are sent to jury duty on this stuff, look and say, F that, no, I'm not signing off on that. And they haven't really shown that they, I mean,

maybe this is doable, but it's just as worth noting that they haven't really shown that they have, like, the balls for a just full effort to, oh, like, we're going to totally co-opt the criminal justice system by doing the things you would need to do, like, such as planting evidence, like using the government fabricating evidence fabricating evidence right they're doing some of the stuff again like you're saying on the margins which is like bill pulte has been googling every democrat in the country's mortgage history and we're going to see if anybody has been you know claiming their second house as their first and then we'll take that to a grand jury and most of the grand jury's been like and we'll see how the you know james case ends up shaking out right but like that your heart's not really in the game if that's what you're doing like if you really wanted to to corrupt it you got to be you're you got to be you even more agro. You've got to give the same effort to it that Trump gave to the stop-the-steal effort, really. Bullwork takes is sponsored by Quince. As weather cools, I'm swapping in pieces that actually get the job

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slash bulwark takes. So this is, I mean, this is, one of the weaknesses of Trump's position, which is that he has found it hard to convince other people to break the law on his behalf. Not impossible. He has found people to break the law on his behalf. He pardoned 1,500 of them, right? He said, Ben and Rudy and all sorts of people break the law on his behalf. But there's also been a class of people who, when like, asked it, you know, Mike Pence was like, no, thank you. And to do like evidence planting stuff, say to, to like,

Oh, Mr. Bolton, look at what we found here. It's a bagmarked top secret, you know, to do that sort of thing. You need a real criminal enterprise. You need the mob. You need to be an actual mob boss instead of like a pretend one that he's trying to. And you do need people who are like, you need FBI agents who totally trust that if they get pinched, the president's going to pardon them. Right. And I don't, I think those are harder to come by right now than the president would like.

will they still be hard to come by in 24 months? I don't know. Sure. I mean, life is coming at us fast. Yeah, right. Yeah, I agree with that. And so in that sense, that makes this, like, in the bucket of, like, you know, the,

what's it called where you have, like, a barrier between something that things can leak through? You know, it's a word for this. The brain blood barrier. Yeah, a brain blood barrier. Yeah, porous barrier. It's kind of porous between these two buckets, but you've got the, like, absurd veep side of Trump's attempt to become an autocrat. And then you have, like, the scary, like, real threats of the ways much Trump's trying to become an autocrat.

This, like, is mostly in the absurd veep side, right? Which is like, Mr. Patel, please investigate the person that stole the election from me. Because, like, nobody did steal the election from them. and there's not a lot of reasons for anybody have concerns. But, like, that is the kind of thing that, you know, if, as you're saying, over the next 24 months, they find more and more accomplices for this effort and it becomes more urgent that they do this sort of thing because, you know, whatever, they have concerns that the law might come for them someday.

Like, there could be a lot of other, you know, reasons. Then maybe that becomes more serious. I would say, though, it is important for people to understand that if you look at totalitarian regimes throughout all of modern history, almost all of them are a combination of Veep plus Stalin, right? Even Stalin was a combination of Veep plus Stalin. You know, go back to Hugo Chavez. He was a preposterous figure.

And he, you know, he watches, he was, you know, on TV constantly warning that the Americans were about to invade any minute when it was like the farthest thing from Barack Obama's mind, right. Barack Obama was not going to invade Venezuela and yet John maybe he had a time machine from the future for the Trump 2.0. But this is you know, it was true for Mussolini. It's true always. These dictators are always

half figure of fun and half serious. And that's part of what makes them successful is because a lot of people can then get lured and saying oh, well this guy, look at what a buffoon he is. Don't worry. It's going to be fine. And I

that's that's dangerous last thing I just think bears mentioning this because sometimes you just have to say these things explicitly um this person the president like is mentally unwell and it is again this stuff just is now the water that we're swimming in as sara likes to say and so like you get used to it at various times but the idea that the president of the united states would watch the news story about how a couple of NBA players were betting on games and and betting the under on their points and assists and and uh and our coaches were set were betting against their team and then deciding not to play their good players serious stuff but like you know in the grand scheme of things it's a sports betting scandal that goes back to the black socks so so you have this that the president of the united states would watch the news about the fact that this was happening in the country and the response to that is i'm sorry shouldn't my FBI director be focusing on the imagining, imaginary crimes that happened to me instead? Like, that is deranged.

It's a delusional response. I guess it doesn't really matter whether he is actually that delusional and thinks that this crime happened against him or whether he continues to feel like he has to put on this performance. But it's just, it's just worth pointing out. It is an unstable mind. It is. But what's dangerous is that he is also projecting forward. to, I mean, we're now 12 months out from the 2026 elections, and he had said pretty clearly, it was there was another, there was an interview he gave to somebody last week, I think it was,

where he said, you know, it must never be allowed, what happened in 2020 must never be allowed to happen again. What does that mean, right? Like, I mean, does he mean Democrats can't, because according to Donald Trump, Democrats have only succeeded and won elections illegitimately since he appeared on on the scene. So they've cheated every single time. Does that mean Democrats can't be allowed to win an election? It certainly seems like what he's saying. And to that point, he specifically mentions this year. He's already laying the groundwork for a stop the steel effort of this year,

where he says the California prop vote is going to be what you're already seeing how it's dishonest millions of ballots being shipped. So that's already having. So he's already laying the groundwork because the polls are out there. It shows that the Gavin Newsom ballot shows, probably going to win. And so he's already out there saying now. And so what's that going to look like? And the answer is none of us have any idea, right? I mean, at the very minimum, it'll be court litigation everywhere. But I don't know, like Mike Johnson has been refusing to seat a new Democratic member of Congress for what, four weeks now. And I don't know. Like, who's the police who's going to come in and force him to see somebody that they say is illegitimate? Maybe he can get states to say,

oh, you know, the great state of Mississippi, which has one Democrat, we think that that congressional district election was really fishy, and so we're not going to certify that one, right? I mean, there are a dozen ways this could go down, and we are in a position of hoping that the judicial system will prevent those things from happening. We are far past the point of simply assuming as a matter of course that the president won't try to do those things. well uplifting as usual jviel as we at least have yokech who'll be playing tonight we know he doesn't cheat ethical basketball only from nikola yokitch the only gambling he's doing is on horse racing and so we appreciate him for that very much jonathan v last we'll be talking to soon yeah good luck america subscribe to the feed everybody