Bulwark Takes - Trump’s Golf Obsession, Groyper Conference Disaster, Daily Wire Layoffs | MAGA Monday

Episode Date: May 4, 2026

Will Sommer and Sam Stein are going live to cover the biggest news in the right wing fever swamp.For a limited time, listeners can get an exclusive $25 off AuraFrame's best-selling Carver Matframe at https://on.auraframes.com/BULWARKTAKES with code BULWARKTAKES.Tickets for our Bulwark Live shows in San Diego and Los Angeles in May: https://thebulwark.com/events

All right, hey, everybody. We are back. It's Maga Mondays. Mondays. I want to make sure it's plural. There's been a slack conversation about whether there should be a singular show. I like plural because we're doing it multiple Mondays. I'm here with Will Sommer. It is Monday, May 4th, 10 a. How are you doing, well? Good. You know, alert viewers may notice that the art behind me fell right before we started. So we're down to two paintings. But, you know, I'm hanging in there. I think we have a lot to discuss. I'm excited. You know, Will, just to pull the curtain a little bit here, Will is coming, this is like, I've never seen such bravery in podcasting before. The art fell, Will's microphone may or may not be working. The other day when Will was doing a broadcast with us, he had a real technical problem with his microphone, frantically looking for a solution to it and then realize he hadn't plugged it in. So that, you know, this is the stuff that Will does for you. Dear listener, you know, last week's Maga Monday, I was also in this room. Now that it's spring, the leaves have come in.

And so it was giving me kind of a Kermit the Frog tint that people noticed outside the window. And so there's a lot that we're dealing with to make this happen. But I'm excited. This is Hero stuff. This is Hall of Fame stuff. And I'm just so proud to call you a colleague, honestly. It's making me a little choked up. We're going to be talking about a little bit off-topic stuff today.

We do have some MAGA-ish stuff for sure. We're going to touch based on the daily wire and whether there's some firing's happening there, how big a deal it is. We got that Tucker Carlson interview with The New York Times where he seems to either not know or disavow things that he is on tape saying. That was a weird one too. But we got to start with golf. You know, I'm going to use a little bit of editorial privilege here.

This is a show about what happened over the weekend. People golf on the weekend. And on top of that, there's a lot of drama happening with the D.C. public courses because Donald Trump, who loves golf, seems to be obsessed with taking over D.C.'s public courses. Now, just a little backstory here for those who do not know, D.C. has three main public courses. There's Langston, there's Rock Creek, and there's East Potomac. These are classically run-down municipal public courses. If you grew up in D.C., if you came here as a young professional, and if you're interested in golf, or even if you just wanted to play around, you're not

that interested, you probably played one of these three courses. they don't cost much, they don't provide much, but they're awesome. Like you go there when I was doing this stuff, it was $20 to $40 around, you have a bunch of beers, you sneak them in your bag, you play, you have fun, you'd be out in the sun, it's great. And, you know, I love these courses. They're fantastic. Donald Trump doesn't love these courses,

precisely because they're kind of run down in pieces of junk. But that's what gives them their charm. So over the weekend, there was a story that emerged from Reese Gorman over at Notice, soon to be the Washington Star, that said basically they're going to start taking over East Potomac, which is one of the three courses, probably the flagship course. It's right down in the tidal basin. It has a wonderful view of the Washington Monument as you're playing.

And that construction was basically going to start today and that Sunday was going to be the last day. And this caused all types of freak out online. So I haven't been totally up to speed, but my understanding will is that it's in flux, basically, that it is open today, but there's a bunch of court filings going left and right. Why don't you sort of summarize where we stand? Yeah, I mean, so, you know, it's not just the golf, right?

I mean, look, I know your bagger vans out there hitting the balls, right? I mean, this is like basically essentially a part of the mall, right? I mean, it's kind of the extension of kind of like that federal greenery. It's East Potomac Park, as you said, also Haynes Point, people call it. You got bikes, your bike and jogging tracks around there. have cherry blossoms. And so, you know, to the point that the post had a follow-up as well, and they had the images of like what's being used as like fundraising documents.

And all that stuff would be gone, including the cherry blossoms to make like, I guess, the new Mar-a-Lago golf course. I mean, it looks like a real kind of like Florida, you know, Scottsdale maybe kind of golf course looking thing. And I want to say as well, West Potomac Park, which is like, again, all this is like right by the Jefferson Memorial would be taken over for the long-awaited statues of heroes, the Garden of American Heroes, where people like, I don't know, like John Wayne, I was looking at this last night, the guy who invented the Dow, I guess.

You know, I mean, okay, I mean, is that really like up there in like top 100 American heroes? Yes. So, I mean, it's this huge, yes, thank you. Oh, look at that. Yeah, so you've got, you know, people kind of, oh, look how happy they all are. But, you know, people. Oh, they got a little girl with balloons, you know, on her own, a little creepy, I guess. But, you know, it's already, like, I guess this, and we'll get to come to the state of play, but

keep up the picture. Keep up the picture. Keep up the picture. The girl of the balloons, just walk in there. Where's mom? Where's dad? It doesn't matter. She's got balloons. She loves American heroes. She wants to see Lewis and Clark. You can see the arc in the background. Unbelievable. I hadn't seen this before. This looks amazing. Okay, go on. So I guess it's just driving me crazy and how this guy's not even going to be in office in three years. And yet it's like he's going to totally remake the Capitol and allowed to do this stuff

up and, or I was going to say he was allowed to do it with impunity up until today. And so there's a lawsuit about this. And a judge said today, basically he said, you can't shut it down without giving notice. And you can't cut down more than 10 trees. So they're trying to prevent this kind of fade-a-complea thing we've seen from the Trump administration with the east wing of the White House. Okay, I have a few thoughts on this.

We can take down the girl with the balloons pick. I was having conversations. So I'm not Baggervance. Maybe Baggervance will be in the hall of heroes or whatever they're going to call it. But I do play golf. And I was talking with a couple people about this this weekend because it's like, you know, you chat in your social circles about this stuff. And to your point, they're like, isn't this an indication that Trump's

absolutely going to try to be president again. Like, why go through all these renovations, like all over the city, the ballroom, the reflecting pool, the East Potomac, the West Potomac, the Ark? I mean, I'm sure I'm missing five. Why do that all only to then leave the city? It doesn't make any sense, right? Like, that doesn't quite compute. And it's not like they're going to finish this all in three years, right?

I mean, who knows how long this shit would take? So that was one. And then the other thing was on the golf, it's like, I guess people are just sort of like, why does he, like, how does he have time to spend on this shit? Like, what, doesn't he have a bunch of stuff going on that would obviously be more important than renovating a golf course? Now, I don't know if we had the picture of the golf course. If we do, can we put the, okay. Look at that. Okay.

So people, look at this. This is, I mean, okay. I will say like it looks like a nice golf course. I mean, I'm sure it will be great if they had their druthers and they're bringing in apparently designer Tom Fasio who's like very good at designing golf courses and all this stuff. But two things, three things maybe. One is, well, you're right. Like people have been running around the East Potomacain's Point forever. There's usually a path all along the sides that you can walk or run and people use that.

On the West Potomac, there's soccer fields and baseball fields that are some of the few public parks. that you can actually play games. Those will be gone. Secondly, is there some rumors running around that they're going to try to host tournaments here, like the Ryder Cup in the U.S. Open? I mean, come on. Seriously. It doesn't make sense to me.

I mean, maybe they do it, but I've played down there. That place floods all the time. And then I guess I just got to go back to my final point, which is my initial point, which is this should not be top of mind for a present. It shouldn't be like the 10th or 20th thing for a present to deal. with. He should not have a care in the world about golf. Go ahead. You know, Sam literally, as we're supposedly preparing this operation to reopen the Straits of Hormuz, Marine One did a flyover of the golf course last night. And so, oh, let me go check out my golf course, but we don't know that Trump

was on it. But, you know, I mean, it apparently diverted and was simply like, let's just do a little tour of the golf course. So, I mean, you know, for people who live outside of D.C., maybe don't come here that often to play a couple rounds, you might say, who cares? But I think number one, to your point, it is true that it's like he has better things to focus on. But also, it's just this sense of like taking stuff away from the average person. You know, this idea of, as you said, I mean, people were saying, you can play around there for 20 bucks. Whereas, you know, this kind of upscale golf course. I mean, it's me, what, 150 bucks, 200 bucks for a round? So I think it's, and, you know, Trump just really seems like on the loose with these golf courses. You know,

with all this coming up, he also tried to take another one, the Langston golf course, which is kind of like very popular kind of historic home of like black golf in dc and then he just randomly was like you know what can the washington commanders run this because it's kind of close to their new stadium like what you know he just seems to be like everything needs to be upscale and kind of like at a trumpian level and you know out of reach of the average person and it hasn't been fired up i'm very fired up about it point of privilege on langston because so i lived on capitol hill and i would go to langston of the three the most langston is closest to Capitol Hill. It's down near the old RFK Stadium, which is where they're building the new Washington commanders football Hill. Again, another Trump project. He's been like all obsessed with

this. They're going to have the NFL draft there and all that stuff. I would also argue that among the three, it's probably the best. It has, you know, real history. And not like, you know, I'm not like trying to be like, I'm not trying to overstid it, but like this is one of the few places where black golfers would get out and play. There is real. history there. You go into the clubhouse. And these places are just, you know, they're run down. But that's their charm. And they have pictures on the walls of black golfers. They like take real pride in it. The course is great for like how run down it is. It's fun. But mostly it's accessible and it's open. And we ran a piece. This is not on Langston. We ran a piece at the bulwark by a guy

named Patrick Granfield, who is a D.C. guy. He had worked on the Obama administration or maybe the Biden administration. But he wrote about bringing his son to East Potomac. And Patrick in his piece was like, I'm a shitty golfer. I hack it up. Don't do well. But I do go out my son. And we just spend a couple hours out there and it's just me and him. And it's cheap. And it doesn't matter how bad we are because we can just go and have fun. And it's a great time to bond with my kid and to Teach him a game that while I may suck at, I take real enjoyment out of. And Trump's taking that away. And so it's not just golf.

It is obviously golf. But it's about accessibility to something for the masses that Trump wants to make into a country club setting akin to Mara Lago. And it's, you hit absolutely the right point. Now, to get back to the sort of legality of it. So the company that is trying to fend this off is the, uh, national links, which basically owns this property and has basically been given a chance to, you know, renovated itself without interference from the administration. Now, they've filed injunctions or they filed a request for a stay. And they're using a group named Democracy

Forward, which has been doing a lot of the legal action against the Trump administration. So they filed an emergency motion for a status conference. And they basically got it. But in the response, and this is what I thought was kind of interesting. The National Public Service, which is the government entity that is overseeing this at the behest of Trump, said, we're not trying to renovate the place. What are the, you guys are crazy. And then they listed this. I'm just going to read this because not everyone's watching this.

NPS, that's the National Public Service, has decided to begin initial deferred maintenance and repair activities on May 4th. That's today. They're trying to make a distinction between initial deferred maintenance and renovation. Initial work will include basic housekeeping and repairs that do not require any environmental compliance documentation, like fence cleaning and debris cleanup activities. Okay, that sounds fine. NPS is still evaluating the scope of repairs and deferred maintenance issues, including critical safety issues that the National Links Trust allowed to proliferate.

An initial assessment reported that, and here was the killer. The parking lot, retaining wall, signage, exterior of the clubhouse, interior of the clubhouse, flower beds, light poles, car paths, maintenance compound, driving range, buildings, driving range, golf course barn, barn, starter building, and trees in the parking lot were all in poor or critical condition. Okay, so they're like, yeah, we're not renovating the course. we're just tearing up every single thing around the course, which of course would necessitate the closure of the course.

Yeah, no, it's crazy. I mean, initially in the first Trump administration, this kind of rehab with the National Links Trust was sort of a Trump administration initiative. But I guess it like, you know, wasn't up to, you know, country club standards. I think the idea was to make a nice municipal golf course in the center of the capital or, you know, in the Capitol. And so, you know, it's just crazy that, you know, even these people are now, who I think are very kind of like we're happy to work with Trump on improving the course.

And now they're being treated as these like layabouts. And, you know, I am glad the judge stepped in here because this is such a classic Trump thing where they go, oh, this thing's a dump. And then you say, well, wait, what are you doing with it? And then they rip it up and they say, well, we can't just have a hole in the ground. We've got to build the country club. And that's, I think, overhanging all this, which is what they did with the ball, So with the ball arm, they just tore shit down and then said, well, we got to build something there.

And so, you know, I think the judge referenced that, or maybe it was the National Links reference that saying we can't just do a tear down, decide later type situation like you did with the bottom. All right, I have a general rule that if it takes, if it takes longer to talk about a topic, then it does to finish a hole of golf, you probably should move on. So we're at like 14 minutes. It's usually about the time it takes to finish a hole. So let's move on. All right. Tucker. Tucker.

Yes. Tucker. I didn't see this. He went on that, he did what is now becoming essential viewing, I think, these New York Times interviews, the interviews, they call it. It's great, but I can't believe he agreed to do it. Why do he agree to do it? I mean, Tucker really got owned here and there's something right going on outside my window

that will resolve shortly. But basically, he agreed to do it and he got owned here. I mean, I came away looking at this as like, you know, Tucker, you know, I think he came off pretty badly. I think he's looking kind of wounded as a character. Well, one, explain why he looks bad. Like, I didn't watch the whole thing. I saw clips. Sure.

So, you know, he comes off. This is this moment where he's, you know, the times are coming to him as he has really turned on Trump. He said Trump is the Antichrist, which we'll get into. And, you know, he really regrets supporting Trump and all this stuff. And the Times kind of ran the table on him. I mean, you know, let's focus on this Antichrist thing. Can we play that? Do you want to play it?

Yeah, let's play it. Thing, which is you cannot mock other people's gods and put yourself in their place, period. That is a deal killer for me. That's worse than the war with Iran, in my opinion. Yeah. But I ask because, you know, you've been talking on your show about whether Trump is the Antichrist. I have not said that. On your show, the day after Easter, you noted he did not put his hand on the Bible during his swearing and ceremony as president.

You said, and I'm quoting, maybe he didn't put his hand on the Bible because he affirmatively rejects what's inside that book. And then on a recent show, you went further saying, here's a leader who's mocking the gods of his ancestors, mocking the God of God's and exulting himself above them. Could this be the Antichrist? I actually did not say could this be the Antichrist. Here's a leader who's mocking the gods of his ancestors, mocking the God of gods, and exulting himself above them. could this be the Antichrist? Well, who knows? I don't know where that comes from,

but I know that those words never left my lips because I'm not sure I fully understand what the Antichrist is if there's just one. I actually tried to understand it. I may have said some are asking that. I'm not weighing on that because I don't understand it. Just to be totally clear. No, in Revelations, obviously, the...

Cozy cardigan look on the Times reporter there, or Blanca, you know. Yeah, she's up at Tucker's main cabin. Yeah, it's sort of one of several moments in the interview where he says, you know, all these people in the administration were against the war. They thought Trump was being tricked. And she says, okay, like who? And he goes, oh, you know, I don't want to say who.

So, you know, I think he really backed down here. Well, I would have gone with maybe the Antichrist had come within me when I said that. And that's why I don't remember it. He left that excuse on the table. You made an important point. This interview was on his home turf. That's not nothing. Like they got, he must have agreed to say to this interview saying, I will do this,

provided you come up to my cabin in Maine. And it's on my home turf. You know, most of these interviews are often done in the New York Times zone office. So he should have had home field advantage, but he did get owned there. And it's a little bit of a weird thing that he didn't remember saying Trump was the Antichrist. Like, is that him just trying to like sand down his criticisms on Trump to get in his good graces or is there something more to it? You know, I think it's, Tucker has been, it is kind of funny, he claims he doesn't remember that

because it's sort of been one of his signature things, or at least was last month. And he did like kind of whole walk up to it where he said, you know, he's a man who wants to be bigger than a God, who wants to destroy religion and all this stuff. And then in that later episode, he said, explicitly said antichrist. And so I don't know if he was like, oh, wait, I messed up. I only meant to heavily imply it without, you know, look, we've all read the left behind books the infamous anti-crice figure, Nikolai Carpathia. So maybe Tucker, that's working on him and, you know, it kind of let it slip.

I've not read the left behind books. There was another clip in there. We don't have it, but I want to talk about it, where he was like sort of, he was just like kind of going off a little bit. Not going off. He's just sort of like trying to talk about what it's like to be around Trump in this sort of like, there's like a mythical aura and you get sucked in and he's charming and he overwhelms you. But I forget what he said about it.

He said something very specific about how Trump can like, I don't know what, I wish I had the words in by him. But he says it's like smoking hash. Yes. And then he says he has this power. It's maybe supernatural. And so, I mean, again, there's kind of like an ant, like, what kind of, like, is he using voodoo?

Like, what kind of flavor? Is he a sorcerer? So, I mean, you can tell, I guess for me what emerged from this is, you know, people are always like, what happened to Tucker or whatever? You know, is it a mercenary thing? Has he just gone nuts? Is he, you know, kind of vengeful because he feels Trump hasn't, you know, recognized his genius? I mean, for me, whatever the motivation is, I love feeling that at the moment he's kind of, he's kind of losing his grip.

You know, he's a guy who clearly, like, he's not even in control of what his narrative of this current moment is. Like he's saying, oh, anti-gris? Oh, I guess I did say that. Sorry. You think that, so I, when you start talking in these weird sort of supernatural terms, right? this is the Antichrist and there's like a weird voodoo that he gives on you and you're like leaving your body and you don't really recognize yourself All these things. There seems to be like one of two explanations. One is that you're just full of shit and you're talking in an incredibly weird terms and it's an act and you're trying to like up the ante a little bit, which is possible here.

And the other one is that you're losing your mind a little bit, right? Like you're seeing Antichrist in the president. Even like deranged Trump critics probably aren't going to call them anti-crace. That's kind of the ultimate TDS. That's a new degree. I mean, we at the bulwark are accused of TD. I don't think we've ever printed something saying he's the Antigris. I don't know how I feel about where Tucker is on that.

Like I do think he's a smart guy. I mean, maybe that's blasphemous for me to say. But also, like, talking in these terms doesn't strike me as, like, someone who's grounded, if that makes sense. Yeah, I mean, like I said, I mean, I think we can kind of think, maybe like Trump himself. Like we can think he's kind of playing 40 chess. And I think there's been a lot of thought about that. But then when you get down to it and it's like, well, wait a minute, this is the guy who's talking about like a demon attacking him at night.

And he says President Trump has supernatural powers to make people do what he wants and stuff. And then he started to think like, well, maybe the Alchem's razor is this guy's going a little nuts. Yeah. Like at some point, you're like, okay, this is more than just a pattern here. It's interesting to watch the rights reaction to this too. Like, there's been some people out there defending him, for sure. But more people are opportunistically jumping on this being like he got owned and he's a joke. Yeah, I mean, I think it's been a good week or so for the sort of traditional MAGA people and the kind of like the pro-Israel people.

So like Mark Levin, kind of like people around that. And, you know, we'll get into another reason with this Gryper conference. But, you know, Candace Owens got sued for defamation. Laura Lumer pulled up her husband's DUI arrest. And now you have Tucker kind of face planning here. So I feel like the sort of the Trump loyalists are feeling good. Yeah, for sure. And we'll get into a little bit more.

There's some caveats I want to add to it later on. But yeah, it does seem like they've been sort of biding their time, waiting for Candace and Tucker to flame out. And Candice and Tucker are kind of giving them some fodder to go for it. We'll get into more in a little bit. But first, we do need to keep. the lights on, so we're going to take a quick break and play a note from our sponsor. This ad is brought you by ore frames. Orrframes is a great upgrade from your typical Mother's Day

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Well, the reason I was going to caveat what you said, heading into the break, was what's happening at the Daily Wire, which seems to be in some sort of state of uncertainty. I think that's the, like, kindest way to put it. Candice, not trusting her as a source,

before the weekend was like, oh, they're going to fire half their staff. It didn't look like they're going to fire half their staff. But they did fire people. And then on top of that, hold on top of that, but for the grace of God, it looks like Ben Shapiro is suffering on the YouTube front too. But for the grace of God, folks, don't unfollow us on YouTube.

Follow us. But what's the state of play there? Yeah. So this is an interesting one. And it's a little hard to get to the bottom of this. You know, when I was a more traditional media reporter, you would always have a union that would tell you exactly how many people got laid off.

Obviously, the Daily Wire is not unionized. So in this case, I think this was Friday that this all went down. Basically, you had this one guy at the Daily Wire who said, you know, did a classic like, hey, folks, I got laid off. I need a new job tweet. Yeah, here we go, this guy. And what's interesting to me about this is like he was a more of like a reporter for them. And they were supposed to be doing this pivot towards reporting.

And they kind of been building out their DC Bureau. And so then we can throw up this Candace tweet. Obviously, Candice is an archimony of the Daily Wire. And she makes up a lot of stuff. And so let's take it with a grain to salt. She says, hearing that the Daily Wire laid off over 50% of their staff today, as much as I positively despise what their executes put me in my family through, you know, whatever. So she says, you know, think of the people got laid off. The Daily Wire has denied that it was 50, they said it's nowhere near 50%.

But let's say, you know, again, we don't have really anything close to real numbers here. Let's say it's 20%. Well, that's nowhere near 50%. That's true. But that's still a lot and not a great sign. How many people do they employ? I think it's fair to say hundreds, you know. You know, it's because they had all of these, and kind of the backstory here is over the past few years, up until 2025, they had these big entertainment ambitions, right? And in some ways they still do, but they made, you know, Penn Dragon cycle about King Arthur.

They had a kind of a bluey knockoff cartoon show about chinchillas. And so they had this aspiration. Hold on. What? I've never heard about the bluey knockoff. It looked a lot like bluish, and it was like instead of dogs, it was chinchillas. Killas. And so they have a lot of children's programming.

That seems like, I mean, we're always trying to get young voters or young viewers to come to the Bullwark. We're trying new things here and there, but we've not tried a blue knockoff. Maybe Tim's got to, Tim Miller's got to do something. Can you imagine? We got Bill Crystal as a Chilla number one. We can do the voice. Chip Chilla, thank you.

Thank you. That's, this is a daily wire product? Yes. Oh my God. What the fuck? It looks like they're in the... They're in the Hall of Heroes. Put it back on.

Yeah, right back to the Hall of Heroes. Yeah. They're running around. Well, I assume Chipchilla, I think if Trump has it in the way, he'll be in the Hall of Heroes as well. Yeah, okay, great. Get a statue. So, you know, this has been... You know, you also mentioned this idea of the Daily Wire YouTube views going down.

Someone recently wrote an article that said, well, actually, the Daily Wire podcast are going beast mode and they're crunching it and all this stuff. But you look at the view. on YouTube. They're not great. The Daily Wire, Ben Shapiro is obviously a very prominent commentator, but as we talked about here before, I think he's kind of on the back foot

politically at the moment. They're a little too tied to Trump, even on the right. And so, you know, it was not a surprise to me that they had layoffs, but if the scale is anything like Candace is claiming, you know, I think it's noteworthy. How magnanimous of Candice. Think of the

people. Don't worry about it. While I. Yeah. Yeah. So, of course, she had previously worked there, right? That was the background. Yeah, of course. Again, like I said, but for the grace of God on YouTube stuff, you know, we're all sort of beholden to the algorithm, but I do think it's probably Iran related, a bit of it, right? Like, it's just, I continue to think that these public polling results are not indicative of where the real it is on MAGA. Like, people are going to say, you know, if you're asked, do you support President Trump's Warren, Iran, you look and you say, oh, do I support President Trump? Sure. Yeah, I do. But

If they, you know, I think that if it comes down to it, I think a lot of the right is not happy with what's happening here. And if you're Ben Shapiro and you're sort of the face of the MAGA, you know, support for the war, it becomes tricky. You're going to lose your numbers. And maybe they, you know, maybe they feel like that's fine because they want to be ideologically consistent. And kudos to them if that's the decision they make.

But it is notable that they are struggling right now, or at least appear to be struggling. What's the, I mean, are there any sort of other indication that this is an indiological that this is an industry trend, or is it just a daily wire thing? You know, that's a good question. A lot of people have left the blaze recently, although the blaze, as we know, is about to get crushed like a tin can by the January 6th pipe bomber lawsuit. So I think overall, you know, if you listen to, there's this guy called The Writing who kind of analyzes the traffic.

And it's down. And, I mean, you know, it's kind of a classic thing with partisan media where when you're in charge, you have trouble. Clear your throat. There we go. You're having, speaking of having trouble. Yeah, no, no doubt. Like, I was at Huff Post in the day when Obama took over, right?

And, you know, Huff Post had kind of risen in 2007-08 opposing the Iraq war, opposition to Bush. Obama takes over and sort of like, well, you know, what now, right? Like, how do you cover this? Is it going to harm us? And I think, you know, one of the reasons that we were able to be somewhat successful and keep the operation going and growing was we were pretty critical of Obama on certain things from the left, right?

You know, FISA stuff, drone bombing, the handling of the health care reform. We, you know, we were sort of on left criticizing him on that. And it becomes a little bit tougher when the way to succeed and continue to persist in this industry is that you can't cross Trump. And so that becomes a little bit tricky. I would say Megan Kelly, you know, Candace, Tucker, they've had success. going after Trump. I mean, their audience is pretty large and robust, it seems to me.

They don't seem to be struggling to this degree. They may have had a bad week or so, and Tucker may be losing his mind. But it does seem like they have more success getting at Trump on certain issues. Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, I think a lot of these people are pivoting, obviously, to a way that I think is going to appeal to the audience, even as Trump gets less popular. The last thing I would note about the Daily Wire is, let's remember, before these cuts, that's when they had the movie with Jonathan Majors,

where Jonathan Majors fell out of the window. How's he doing? How's the other guy doing? Well, right. I mean, I guess they're back in action, and I think it's still filming. But keep in mind, that was before the cuts. What's going to happen on this set now that the cuts are actually happening?

Watch out. The movie could be really budget. All right, you're going to have to anchor this one, because I have no clue what the Grimper conference was. Go for it. Yeah, okay. So here's the deal. So over the weekend,

there was a conference of Groyper. So these are fans of Nick Fuentes. It was called America First United. It took place in Ohio. And let's just say it was a disaster. They're calling it Groyper Fire Fest. Right. Okay.

So this was put on by a woman named Amy Dangerfield, who was a former kind of associate of Patrick, that David, kind of the business hustle guy. She left his operation. She's Australian, by the way. So it's kind of like, what are you getting up to here? But so she's now kind of like Groyper-Fied. People may remember.

she had a thing where she was like, I got married, and now we're going to have more grope pets, you know, little groipers. So she had this event with a lot of kind of like Flentes affiliated people, but it was a big flop. It looked like 30 people showed up. It was really funny, you know, they messed up the audio. Yeah, so put up the picture here because I want to run through the characters here.

Okay, so right off the bat, we got a guy on. What is going on? So running it down from the left, we've got Evan Kilgore, who's like, you know, whatever, kind of like a maga. Or like, Fuente's an adjacent guy. Then we have a guy in the mask. He has a daft punk mask where he kind of looks like the DJ marshmallow. He's completely like in a black like body suit and, and his face covered.

Now, this guy is a quote, hacker. And he's using, I think, a voice modulator. He kind of sounded like Adam Driver. And he would just be like, oh, it's just like all these like fucking like Trump's got to get in line on. It's real, man. And then we have a lady. Morgan Ariel in like a pink enormous shoulder pad outfit. Now she she figured in, you know, going back to last year, like she figured in the whole like,

you know, the drama about like the various MAGA women throwing sexual accusations back and forth. And then, yeah, I don't know who this guy with the mustache is. And then on the right we have Faith Merrill who is sort of like number one, kind of self-described like number one grope pet, number one most loyal lady. Groyper. So this event, look, it looks bad, right? And it was. And so now,

one other kind of funny moment, they were out in like the middle of nowhere in Ohio and then they get up at the mic halfway through and they're like, all right, now we're going to have lunch. We will be serving the speakers and influencers. Everyone else, maybe about a 30-minute drive. You've got to go back into town. No. It was so funny.

All these like dejected people got to slug. I was like, yeah, I think there's a Mickey D's, at the highway off the radio. So it was a pretty grim scene, and so now Nick Fuentes has come out and denounced it. He said, you can't call it America first. You know, we saw this a few weeks ago with some Groyper's

who did an interview with CNN. They were run out of the movement. And to me this is an interesting thing where it's like, I think Nick Fuentes is a very malevolent figure injecting a lot of bad stuff into our politics. But it is also telling... Whoa, what gave that away? Right.

But it's also telling to me that. Telling to me that like any other supporter of his in public, people are like, oh, this is a disaster for us. Like, we look terrible. I did think immediately of the CNN interview with the, with the Groyper's where Frantus was like, ah, he looks so flabby in those shoes. He got really mad. There's like the public facing the element of this movement is just not attractive or competent.

The idea that they set them all 30 minutes away to get lunch is crack me up. How did you know there's only 30 people in attendance? There was a picture from further back of the room. I mean, it looked like kind of like a just regular-sized conference room. Do we have any other pictures or now? Because I want to see anything else from this. There's one more thing I have to say. So this is like, there's a couple more.

This was supposed to be like a big, like bipartisan anti-Israel thing. And so but the Groyper's, right, they don't like non-white people. And so like they had this guy, Joel Webbin, gets up there who's kind of this like white, this pastor who's like America's a Christian nation, all this stuff. And then he's immediately followed by a woman in a hijab who gets up and goes, this Malal Rahmanah Rahi. She's doing this Muslim opening. And everyone's like, who are a groipers?

How is it happening to us? And so then whenever like a groipers says their head. You know, I guess she's some like anti-Israel activist, but she wasn't like a part of the griper scene. It was really bizarre. They had like a guy from the LaRouche party, a Hispanic guy who was going off about like America's like a colonial nation. It was a real shambles.

And so then, you know, whenever a groper pops their head up and embarrasses them all, they have to have struggle sessions online. And so Varyllium, who's like one of these gropers, a groper general, who famously got exposed for being, like, bisexual and having kind of like a gay, like thought arc, whatever, he pops, he was at this event. And then he had to do kind of like Twitter spaces where everyone yelled at him. And he was like, I'm sorry, bros. like, I just didn't know. We were stuck out in Ohio. We got there and we couldn't leave.

And he claimed the organizers got very drunk because they were getting roasted so much. And then later that night, everyone was just like, really like, what have we done? We've enraged Fuentes. Oh, my God. Sorry, again, maybe I lost the plot here. But like, what was this organ? Who organized this? Why do they organize this? What was the point of this? This kind of like rising, you know, or would be.

star right-wing woman named Amy Dangerfield, who I think is trying to... She's very tight with James Fishback. She's kind of trying to become the leading... We haven't heard from Fishback in ages. You know, I know. I've been working on some fishback stuff, but I haven't been following his campaign that closely. I will say I watched a video last night

where his... I wish we had it, but it was like... His campaign, he's doing a campaign stop in front of what appears to be a liquor store. It's like, at night, it's like a convenience store and it just says like, Lotto, Lotto. But he's still drawing the crowds. Byron Donald's just put out something saying the fishback is at 9% in the polls.

And so that's Byron Donald's trying to dunk on him. But, you know, 9% is not nothing for such as kind of Charlottled and like fishback. Yeah, that's not great if you got 10% and you're a complete joke and you just go into Waffle House to like get kicked out and shit like that. Oh, wait, no. He was welcomed into IHop. Do I have that? Maybe I fucked that up.

He was banned from Waffle House and then he fabricated an invite from IHop as we found out. Amazing. I just want to say, like, watching you for the past five to ten minutes talk about the Squer conference, I have to imagine it's like someone who, like, had the luxury of like watching Picasso paint, right? Like, it's just watching someone in his absolute prime. Thank you. Just strokes of genius on a canvas. Only in this case, it's a little modernized. We're on YouTube.

But it's like, sometimes you sit back as an editor and you just kind of pinch yourself. watching this transpired. This is like the fucking Mona Lisa of Groopers right here. Unbelievable. Unbelievable. I don't think people, do people in the comments understand what they're watching? I don't think they do.

I feel like they don't appreciate what just happened. That was awesome. Thank you. All right. Yeah, no worries. Don't get too egotistical about it. We're going to end on a fun note. So, SNL, you know, I don't watch religiously,

but I do watch the clips. They had Aziz on to be Cash Patel. My understanding is that he hasn't done this before and that they've been as well. He's been he's been away for a while, but he's back. He's back. Yeah, he did have an issue. But people, I guess, were pining for it for obvious reasons. I watched it with Conjoist as Pete Hagsuff.

It was good. I will admit, it was really good. I don't know how much we're allowed to play, but we're going to play what we can. You guys should not be reporting the lies in the gossip. You should be reporting on the. historic nature of my appointment i'm a trailblazer i'm the first indian person to suck at their job everyone says indian people are smart hardworking incredibly intelligent i've proved without a shadow of a doubt that we can be just as incapable and incompetent as the whites all right i thought

that was pretty good i thought he got it i could have mulched his eyes a little bit more yeah i i feel like maybe the physical mannerism but i feel like he He got the voice pretty close there. You know, I feel like if you're Cash Patel already, people are constantly writing articles about how you're about to get fired. And you know, you're in this. You can't be thrilled that now SNL has like a new hit impression of you. Oh, for sure.

I mean, say what you are about Donald Trump. He's got weird obsessions. Like this morning, he was some fucking weird bleed about Van Jones out of nowhere. Nowhere. Like, I was like weird. He watches SNL. He watches Bill Maher. Like, I think he knows this.

And once you become part of the cultural zeitgeist as a failure and a fraud, that doesn't always look good for you. Then again, we've been dealing with cash is about to get fired stories for what? Months. Yeah, it feels like a year. Yeah, man, he's a survivor. How do they survive this long? It's amazing. Okay, buddy, any final thoughts before we wrap this bad boy up?

No, I'm just glad we got to the Groyper conference. You know, there's a lot going on. I think we're gearing up for a full week of right-wing media news. Oh, I want to, can I just, can I tease your newsletter tonight? Is that okay? Yeah, please do. You are writing on the agreed-upon topic. You're not switching gears on me to the Groyper conference.

Okay. So we got, Will's got a good one coming tonight. So obviously, last week we were talking a lot about the shooting at or the attempted assassination should say, at the White House Correspondents Association Dinner. And in the aftermath, there was a lot of sort of false flag conspiracies. Was this a siops? Was this, you know, mostly people thought liberals were pushing this stuff like, oh, Trump's just doing this to, you know,

gin up sympathy and, you know, help the midterms and all that stuff or cover up for Jeffrey Epstein and something like that. And, you know, we at the bulwark tent and say, chill out, calm down. There was a manifesto, like, this guy seems real. Like, just relax. What's interesting now is that we have a focus group that Will's going to be run about,

which shows that it's the Trump voters, the Trump voters who think it's a sci-op. So be on the lookout for that. And of course, of course, subscribe to false flag, which is like an essential newsletter, folks, in addition to Magamund Days. Before I close, one last programming note. We are getting really close to our live shows out in California. I do this every time, but I got to plug it again.

May 20th in San Diego, May 21st, in Los Angeles. We're taking a bus. I'm not happy about this. We're taking a bus between San Diego and L.A., and I guess we're going to be like live streaming or something like that. seems like very high school theater type but whatever we're doing it's going to be fun no it sounds horrible if it's just to me i get a little nauseous on these things so we'll see if i puk all over the place on the bus ride it's going to be me tim sarah should be fun if you're in the area

definitely go get a ticket it's at the bulwark dot com slash events again may 20th in san diego may 21st in los angeles thank you guys for joining us on another edition of maga mondays we will be back next monday talk to you that peace see yeah