Bulwark Takes - Trump Wanders in Circles During Japan Visit

Episode Date: October 28, 2025

JVL and Andrew Egger take on Trump’s bizarre Japan visit — the wandering, the salutes, the confusion — and what it says about a president who no longer seems to know where he is, or what he’s doing. Get free shipping and 365 day returns with Quince at https://Quince.com/BULWARKTAKES. #sponsored

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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. Hello, everyone. This is JVL here with my bulwark colleague, Andrew Eger, and the President of the United States is lost in Japan. I don't know. It's not an amber alert. What's the alert they put out for old folks who go missing from the old folks home? Because the president is very old and very confused, Andrew. Is it a silver alert? Is that what it is? I've never actually even heard of this. Is there a special color for elderly people? There's a special alert for when elderly folks go missing. And I mean, let's just get right to the video because I want people to see what the president of the United States looks like as he is being escorted around the room by the Japanese Prime Minister, Sanai Tagaiichi.

So she gestures him down and brings him over and is guiding him. And he's just walking up towards the dudes. So here's right. Here's where I stand, right? Wait, okay. I'll go over here, the shoulders are hunched, shoulders are hunched, just walking in a circle. Now he's going to come down the line with the color guard and just salute, you know, sort of lazy salute as he walks past the marketplace. She's like, okay, sir, please keep going.

Please keep going. It's almost lunchtime. There he goes. You're just wandering. That's sort of like, yeah. now what they're like rushing to keep him up and keep grandpa going keep grandpa going no please over here over here and uh he the whole thing is wild absolutely wild so Andrew I uh I want to say the other thing that happened is when they band played the Star Spangled Banner the president

went to a salute and so I don't think that's something I often see. Maybe that's normal. Maybe the president always salutes. But it, again, it had real, remember that COVID balcony press conference where he stood up there and like that real real little duche feelings to it. But Il duche mixed with Grandpa Abe Simpson. I'm cold and there are walls outside. What do you think? Is everything cool? I had heard that Joe Biden's age was a real concern to people. I got a little distracted, to be honest, watching that right side broadcasting clip of that. I don't know if you noticed the Chiron scrolling along the bottom with the sex warfare. China and Russia are sending beautiful women to seduce tech lords and steal their secrets.

I don't know what's going on with that story. Maybe that's another video. But no, I found this a few things. One, I found it a little bit relatable. I, too, know what it is like to be an American with no idea what he's doing abroad. No idea where to walk, who to salute, which flags does. to stop for which troops to acknowledge how, you know, that's a, as, as a guy with, with, with very few sort of, uh, uh, diplomatic mores sort of baked into me. Uh, I, I, that, that part I got.

But yeah, I mean, uh, the first turn was maybe the best. Uh, I guess, I guess they kind of had him like the plan was he was going to do like a circuit of the room, sort of like, like a dog show. What's four? One lap before he got up there for the star spangled banner. But he kind of got to the first turn. And he was like, is this where you want? Is this where you want me? And yeah, it's a good, uh, it's a good, good show all around. Sir, sir, uh, what's here's in their eyes. They said, sir. The whole thing is, again, we just came off of a presidency in which everybody was constantly, I mean, how many New York Times stories did we have about the, the difficulties of president's age? And I feel like I hear a lot of that from the mainstream media with Trump,

but maybe, maybe I'm reading different sources. I don't know. Maybe they're different rules for different people. But also, there's a lot of this sort of stuff everywhere, right? I mean, you've got a couple of your favorite old man Trump bits. Yeah, I mean, this is a thing we've been talking about since the campaign, right? I mean, like, there was all that stuff about the weave and the way that he increasingly kind of can't string sentences together. One fun thing about watching Trump now is it's very difficult to pick apart what's happening because he's old versus what's happening because he is Trump and has now sort of succeeded beyond his wild. oldest dreams of before in surrounding himself with people who only give him information he wants to hear, right?

So he's like, he's like drifting outside of reality and outside of sort of the fact-based universe for several different reasons. And it's kind of hard to pick them apart. He will, he'll sign executive orders that he's told them to go off and write like, hey, go write me an executive order that says if you burn an American flag, you get a year in jail. And they'll say, yes, sir, right away, sir. And they'll go off, they'll write him up an executive order. They'll bring it to him. He'll sign it. He'll be like, this is the executive order where if you burn the American flag, you get a year in jail. The executive order doesn't say anything like that. But, you know, it's just fine. It's just he's having a good time, you know, living his life around the people

that he's with. And so, like, when he seems to be sort of like just drifting, this is a, this is a sort of unique example because it very plainly is just like, just having no idea what's going on in sort of the ordinary way, like not sure where to walk or where to stand. Or one other thing on the saluting, sorry, I'm rambling now. You mentioned the, the, the, the salute. And, and my understanding of this clip and of sort of the general protocols is that these are, you know, Japanese troops in this room. Like that's, that's, these are not US service members, um, which is important for the salute because like, you know, when, when, when the president encounters our service members, he salutes, um, when, you know, it'd be perfectly appropriate

of him to do that during, during the national anthem or whatever, when our soldiers when US service members are playing the national anthem. But this is, this is, you know, a welcome reception from the Japanese government with their troops, their troops playing our national anthem, yes, but like with our flag there. But it's just like, you know, for Donald Trump,

you know, what's the point of a troop? The point of a troop is to like pay him honor and pay him obeisance. And whether that's their troop or our troop, it's all basically the same thing as long as they are like, you know, saluting him and playing him the national anthem and all those sorts of things. So you go right to the salute.

It's all the same to him. It's very hugging the flag vibes. Remember those days? That was good. That was good. We should do that more often. Bullwork takes is sponsored by Quince. As weather cools, I'm swapping in pieces that actually get the job done.

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conservative in Japan, and that creates all sorts of interesting cleavages because she has some views which members of the MAGA base, certain members of the MAGA base, might be sympathetic with. For instance, she's not entirely sure that the Japanese were the bad guys in World War II. You know, I don't know if World War II revisionism is solely on the American right built around exonerating Hitler or if it also exonerates the Japanese maybe because the Japanese people aren't white it's fine with saying the Japanese are the bad guys

I don't I don't again I'm not deep in to the that that Groyper subculture maybe do you know they answer this are they my my somewhat more steel manny speculation would be that a lot of that World War II revisionism has like a load bearing pillar

of that is the idea that like you know Germany got a really raw deal coming out of World War I and all that stuff. And it's a lot harder to construct that argument, you know, for Japan, which just very obviously was like a first mover, aggressor in World War II, both to their West and to their east. I mean, they pretty famously brought us into the war by hitting Pearl Harbor out of nowhere. So, so I have not seen.

I think it would be kind of hard for what's that guy martyr made, Tucker Carlson's favorite Nazi sympathetic sympathetic historian. I would be interested to see what he had to say about that, but I kind of doubt that he is quite as sort of like Japan, like Hirohito curious as he is, Hitler curious. My guess is he's not because, again, they do have a different skin color. There is that also. I think that's probably the dispositive part of it. But the other thing is she is interested in altering the charter, which prevents them

from having anything other than a self-defense force. This is, I mean, this is interesting because she is seen as being a whatever the Japanese version of Trump is. which is to say nothing like Trump, but, you know, more considerably more conservative than the average Japanese prime minister. But that leads her into the place of understanding that America is no longer a reliable ally in the region. And so Japan's got to chart their own course, which is really interesting, right? So she's in the place where she is superficially trying to strengthen Japanese-American

relationships, but while doing all the things that one would do, if you realized that you couldn't count on the Americans at all. And at some point, you're going to have to deal with the Chinese on your own. Yeah. Which is wild. Again, all the different internal contradictions of Trumpism. Yeah. It's a whole bunch of stuff that would be like geopolitical new things and new wrinkles and new angles,

all of which would be like very interesting to contemplate in some sort of alternate historical fiction and which are a lot less fun to have to grapple with in real time, as America sort of pushes away historic allies and finds, I mean, the other angle in all of this beyond the, you know, geostrategic stuff militarily is the tariffs, obviously. That's been a big sort of bone of contention between the U.S. and everybody, but between the U.S. and Japan, you know, trying to hash out various trade deals here. I don't know. I actually couldn't tell you off the top of my head, but the current state of, I think we did have a tentative deal with them at one point over the summer. I don't know. I haven't checked in on that recently.

But that's another thing here is like, yes, you know, conservative, and in theory, better able to get along with Trump for that than maybe otherwise, but also some of these conservative leaders still want to be able to trade pretty openly with the United States. And Donald Trump is not a, not a hugely into that for all the reasons we've talked about a lot. I feel like there would be an amazing version of Lost in Translation where it's Trump at the Crown Plaza and not Bill Murray's character. And he's just sort of wandering around the halls, kind of lost just like this, saluting people random. saying slower and with more intensity.

I don't know. Andrew, this is the world we live in now. It would be amazing to just be able to like get inside the prime minister's head and all of this because this is a character who like, I mean, like all these world leaders, right? Her job is to just get through these Trump interactions, do the best she can, butter him up, the best she can because that is the alpha and the omega of keeping a good working relationship with Donald Trump, you know, Mr. Trump, you're the best. Mr. Trump, you know, what were the Americans doing without you? You were, you were not a hot

country before and you're a hot country now, all that stuff. And like to do that and to like be grappling with the fact that this guy is sort of just screwing up your, again, the geopolitical order that you sort of rely on as, as this country that's not really allowed to have much of a standing army while China, you know, gets more and more hostile and more and more aggressive in the region. And to be dealing with the fact. that, like, you have economic pain, a lot of economic pain based on the economic decisions this guy is making. And then after all, like, you know all that going in and you know you're going to have to, like, suck it up and butter him up and, like, just do the best you can anyway. And then you can't even walk the guy to the podium without it being, like, so clear that he's just...

And then you meet him, and he's a doddering old man who's just lost and you have to, like, take him by the elbow. And you're bowing and scraping while also just trying to manage this ancient, decrepit. festering piece of lard. It's amazing. It's amazing. And we'll be back soon with more great news from this exciting world that we all get to live in.

Good luck, America. Everyone's got a pro. Need tires? I've got a pro. Car making it a weird sound. I've got a pro. So who's that pro? The pros at Tread experts.

From Toyos Observe Winterline to Celsius and Open Country. Toyo tires can handle it all. Get up to $100 on a prepaid visa card when you purchase a set of four eligible Toyota tires. Find a ToyoTredexperts dealer near you at treadexperts.com slash locations. From tires are auto repair, we're always there. Treadexperts.coma.