Bulwark Takes - Trump’s Idiotic Government Spending $2M on Another Conspiracy?

Episode Date: June 5, 2025

Tim Miller and Sam Stein discuss the $2M being spent to determine if DEI causes plane crashes, and Trump’s latest travel ban on 12 countries, including Afghanistan while contradictorily lifting protections for refugees.

Rural communities are being squeezed from every side. From rising health care costs to crumbling hospitals, from attacks on public schools to the fight for paid family and medical leave, farmers and small businesses are reeling from the trade war. And now, Project 2025 is back with a plan to finish what Elon Musk started. Trump and the Republicans won rural votes, then turned their backs on us. Join the One Country Project for the Rural Progress Summit, July 8th through the 10th.

This free virtual event brings together leaders like Senator Heidi Heitkamp, Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Governor Andy Beshear, and others for real talk and real solutions. Together we'll tackle the most urgent issues facing rural America. Register today or learn more at ruralprogress.com. Hey everybody, Tim Miller from The Bullwork here

with managing editor Sam Stein. We've got a little potpourri of transportation issues here for this YouTube. They're connected only in our heads, but we wanted to talk about them. One is horrible and one is tragic and funny and horrible. And so we're going to start with the tragic and funny and horrible one first. I bet we can connect a third, but go ahead. Oh, great. Yeah. There's a full gumbo of transportation.

Under transportation disasters. Yeah. The Sean Duffy video. Okay. Here we go. Here's the headline from the Atlantic. Isaac Stanley Becker, good reporter. He wrote this, the Trump administration is spending $2 million to figure out

whether DEI causes plane crashes and the president may be disappointed by its findings, Sam, uh, you've been tick disappointed by its findings. Sam, you've been tickled by this report and particularly one staffers involvement. Well, it's not even a staffer. That's the thing. Okay. First of all, the headline gives it away as good a reporting as this one of these stories where it's like once you pass graph through, you get the gist. Okay. We don't need an editor. The Atlantic doesn't need you doing freelance editing for them. Let's just talk about it.

Fair enough. I it's great reporting $2.1 million spent to study whether or not, again, DEI cause the crash, the fatal, horrific crash at Reagan early in Trump administration. You don't need to spend that much money to get the answer and it's no. And it's kind of insulting that they felt the need to do this. It's a huge waste of money. But what really tickled me is they went to Alex Spiro. Now, Alex Spiro is not in fact a government employee.

Alex Spiro is a foreign prosecutor. He is a very prominent defense attorney, but not like in the sense of he's handled like these, you know, great constitutional cases involving like, you know, righteous clients. He handles cases for celebrities. Elon Musk is a client. Jay Z. Yeah.

Eric Adams was a client. Oh, Mr. Beast. Yes. Mr. Beast. We might need to look into this now that we're YouTube star. He's famous. There's like a New Yorker piece on him. He's the go to guy. He's very brash lawyer. One thing that he doesn't really have at all, as far as I can tell any expertise or understanding of aviation. Well, he does have some expertise on certain things.

Like for example, he was part of Robert Kraft's legal team defending him against the charges of solicitation when he was doing the jerk off at the massage parlor. If you can draw the connective tissue between that and like the crash at Reagan, I will be very amazed. I don't know. I can't. Try? No, I don't.

I was trying to think about the ejaculation. No, let's go. Come on, keep going. Move on. Move on. You're the one who said it. Why are you putting it on me? You bring up that shit and then you're like, Oh, come on. No, this is so anyways, I will try to bring this back on track. This is a huge waste of money. We didn't need $2 million to be spent on this. You know, the Doge Bros, where are they? They could put this one on their list. They should revoke the contract and say this was not really useful time, but this is the stuff that we get in Trump 2.0. Hmm. It's amazing how much stuff on the legal stuff costs interviews with 10 to 15 key stakeholders regarding this quote regarding this area was going to cost $150,000.

Why do we need to pay an outside attorney for that? Isn't that like something that the DOT could have done? 1.8 and legal analysis. Yeah. It ties to all of the other Doge stuff that I feel like is underappreciated. It's like for all of the people they cut, there's now going to be legal fight. Yeah. Legal. There's like, there's so many legal fights. The amount of money, like they wanted to drain the swamp. The amount of money we paid lawyers for stupid shit, like Elon wrongly firing people or Sean Duffy deciding that the reason why planes crashed is because we have black pilots now, is extremely inefficient.

Let's just say. Oh, no. I think I vaguely remember tweeting about this once being like, it's going to cost more to defend the lawsuits than it will for the savings. And all the conservatives, my mentions were like, Oh, you know, short-term pain, long-term game. And it's like, Elon left and now there's no long-term gain. So no, I, it will be an astronomical legal fee. Obviously we'll never know how much the government is spending on this type of bullshit. But this isn't even a defense. This was a proactive expense to investigate something that everyone knew was not DEI.

It's also important to put this in the context of the fact that we have a shortage of air traffic controllers. And you've got Sean Duffy on TV. It's like, oh, we're going to have to do more with less. You all know that we're 3,000 controllers short across the country right now. The problem we're seeing with controllers, it can't be fixed overnight. You know, we're going to tighten the belt around here at DOT as part of the Doge process. And so it's like, well, we're doing more with less as far as like people who have real jobs.

You know, we could have done, we could have taken that $2 million. I hired a couple of New York controllers. I don't know. Maybe hire me to come up with that consulting genius that I just did. I'm not flying into New York. All right. So also last night, there was an executive order that is going to ban people from flying into the country if they come from 12 countries that Donald Trump has deemed bad. We have a new- Not just flying. You can't take a ship in, can't cross the border if it happened again to Mexico.

I think most of the people were going to fly though, so I think it's a pretty clean transition. So the new travel ban, obviously it all stemmed from the original Muslim ban, which then was rejected by the courts back in 2017, which then they needed to decide, oh, we need to come up with a rationale for this that isn't religious discrimination, so we're going to call it a travel ban and just do Muslim countries and then throw North Korea on top, cover our ass. And now you know, that travel ban has kind of expand, you know, we got this Frankenstein monster that has now expanded its tentacles. Now we have 12

different countries that are we're banning people from travel from. I just want to just like, uh, like my rant about this. Susan of Trump 1.0 was at his graduate school graduation, uh, which I attended, which has a little bit or about it's kind of like how many graduations I have to go to, but, uh, uh, the, getting degrees, the valedictorian of this master's program was either from Afghanistan or Pakistan. It's been a few years. I don't recall. And her, and she gave the speech at the graduation

and her family couldn't come. And it was like her family wasn't terrorists. They couldn't come. Is this like the greatest injustice in the world? No. Like in a free country, which we ostensibly are, not China, like people who are vetted should be able to travel into our country as long as they're filing the appropriate paperwork and doing all the stuff you have to do when you go through customs and not doing anything illegally. Like that is how things should work in a free country. There are Americans who have American citizens who are actually harmed by this. It's not just harm of foreigners, like people who have family members or friends or business or whatever, like interests in some of these countries. Now, there's not a lot of international business happening in some of these 12 countries that they've picked, but even still, there might be reasons to travel back and forth for American citizens. And now, like that is challenging. And we're doing it like for no real reason.

It's like based on a racist premise initially with the Muslim ban. And now it's kind of put on top of it some like security reasons. And obviously with what happened in Boulder, this guy that comes from Egypt, which isn't one of the countries, is the purported rationale here that we don't want other potential, you know, random terrorists coming into the country. No, I know very little to add on that. I mean, you're absolutely right. It's, it's just a, you know, a blunt force object when we can do the actual individual vetting or we should

be able to do the actual individual vetting. And it's just, what's the angle here? Like, I mean, obviously, if you think about it, it's probably because they just want to just have net zero migration to America, right? Like that's it. And this is one other way for them to get there. But the rationales that they're offering are so ridiculous on its face, like, oh, the boulder incident. Well, he's an Egyptian national. Egypt's not on the list. And then they're like, Afghanistan's really in a dangerous situation. Well, you know, three weeks ago, you ended temporary protective status for Afghan nationals because you said it was getting better in Afghanistan. They could go back home now. So which one is it? Is it dangerous there or is it not? Like, it's just, it's

farcical. But really, I mean, we all know what they're trying to do here. Is it trying to just have net zero migration to America? Did you have a third topic? No, I save it anyway. Surprise us. Me and Sam, me and Sam, we're gonna be doing a full length podcast tomorrow, in person together, we're gonna noogie each other. The people of the YouTube page like the me and Sam combo. So you're gonna get a full hour of me and Sam tomorrow. Sam, start taking notes on some topics you want to do. Start hydrating. Yeah, start hydrating.

Sure. And we'll see everybody there.