Bulwark Takes - Trump’s Sunday Night Brain Dump Will Leave Your Jaw on the Floor

Episode Date: May 5, 2025

Sam Stein and Andrew Egger talk about Trumps Sunday tweets. Whether it’s tweeting about NFL draft picks, making up coal policies mid-speech, or ranting about tariffs on foreign films, Trump’s ideas often begin as bizarre off-the-cuff thoughts and are instantly turned into policy by those around him. His feed reflects this chaos: a mix of dumb sports takes, weird culture war grievances, and impulsive economic bluffs.

Hey guys, it's me, Sam Stein, Managing Editor at The Bulwark. I am joined by Andrew Egger, author of Morning Shots. We are coming to you Sunday night because there's just a lot of crazy stuff that Trump is posting on his feed and that's breaking on the internet. Truly makes you wonder, what actually is this presidency about? What is it really about? What is he doing here? Before we get into that, subscribe to the feed. Really appreciate it all right andrew um there's like four things that we could talk about um but let's just go with what was on the feed tonight so i was doing bath time with the kids i got you know got them into the bath i took my phone out just to take a look and like you do when you're a bad parent this is what i do yeah i know at least

they bathe them. All right. Lo and behold, Donald Trump wants to bring back Alcatraz, the rock. I'm assuming everyone knows what Alcatraz is. But if you don't, it's the prison off of San Francisco in the Bay. It's been closed since 1963. It's a tourist site now. I've been there myself. Infamously famously, I should say. The setting for The Rock, which was he was asked about it by the pool and all he said was, I had the idea.

I had the idea to do it. Yeah. No kidding. You had the idea like, uh, yes, you tweeted it. So anyways,

what do you, what do you make of it? This is what's so cool about the second Trump term is, is like, it's just a tiny microcosm for everything that's happening right now. Okay, not everything that's happening, but everything that Donald Trump himself is doing. This is how Trump views his president. We don't know what he was doing, Andrew. He could have been literally watching the movie. Yeah, yeah. But it's all like that. It's all like that. Things

kind of come across his field of vision and they spark an idea in his brain he's like well hell i'm the president of the united states let's make it happen and the whole apparatus is set up to to like you know it's it's kind of like the old like executive time joke from from back in the first term but executive time now is like donald trump will have crazy ideas and then it'll be like all right well he put that up there and we're gonna we're gonna figure out to figure out how to put it in, put it into play, you know? So we're going to jump forward then, because that's a great segue to the news that broke tonight, which is that Trump is going to announce tomorrow or Monday that he wants,

or the DC will host the NFL draft in 2027, possibly on the national mall. So I, my guess, I i mean this is occam's razor but obviously he watched the draft last week and was like that looks cool yeah let's do it on the mall like he's doing my he's doing cool stuff yeah like no uh and we know we we don't have to guess we know that he watched the draft last week because he was doing commentary you remember that one when shiders anders fell to the fifth round he He was like, are these owners schmucks? What's going on? This guy's a generational talent, you know, son of a Hall of Famer.

Yeah. So, no, I mean, it's all like that. I mean, like this is Donald Trump's life now, right? I mean, he is having a blast because he just kind of goes through his day. He goes down to Mar-a-Lago. He bumps into people. Different people come to him to solicit different things. They all want something out of him. And he's the guy who can

just say, Hey, that is a pretty cool idea. We're doing it. Or like, Oh, that's such a, I mean, a couple of weeks ago he was, uh, he was doing that event with the coal miners. You remember that? Um, and like he was, he had like a, some, some like, uh, you know, American energy speech, um, where he was. It was just like a pay on to coal. That was the whole thing. And while he was up on stage, he was like, you know, we just had this idea. We're going to have we're going to A, we're going to make it illegal for future administrations

to like roll back our coal policies. So you're welcome. I just had this idea. And then B, I also just had the idea that we're going to – all these law firms that keep capitulating. Oh, I do remember this one. We're going to make these guys do pro bono work on behalf of America's coal companies. And these are just thoughts that are occurring to him, but he's the president. And the whole apparatus is set up to let him rock with these things, let him cook.

And he's just doing it. That's what he's spending his time on. There's the improvisational element to this uh and it does make you wonder like is the best way to influence him just to get lucky and be on tv in that moment possibly another thing he came out with tonight um i don't know what the origin to this one is but maybe he just like talked to some producer or something but he announced that he will be, uh, I think issuing an executive order saying that, um, you will be tariffed. Sorry. Not an executive order. He's going to put tariffs a hundred percent tariffs on films that are made overseas. Let me get the actual, I know I'm pulling it up. He said, okay,

this is the best part. He said, uh, Hollywood and many other areas within the usa are being devastated this is a concerted effort by other nations and therefore a national security threat it is in addition to everything else messaging and propaganda therefore i am authorizing the department of commerce and the united states trade representatives to immediately begin the process of instituting a 100 tariff on any and all movies coming into our country that are produced in foreign lands. We want to make movies made in America again. Now, this is one where, yes, it was shot out of his ass probably, but Howard Lutnick,

the Commerce Secretary, says we're on it. And we're trying to figure out internally in football, what it means. Lots of movies have different shooting locations. Yeah, yeah. If you have like even one shot overseas, you're going to get tariffed? Like what happens here? Yeah, our poor movies guy, Sonny Bunch, is like in Slack with like his eye twitching. Just like these words don't add up to anything, right? It's like, yeah, are they going to tear?

Like if you have like the reel, like he knows all this stuff better than me. If you have the reels that are going to get shipped to the theaters individually, are those not allowed to come in from outside? Or is it the creative process somehow? If it's a Bollywood film, are those the ones that are – This is definitely going to hit Bollywood. Yeah, yeah. That's for sure. If you're going to rent that on Amazon Prime Video, like, is there a tariff on that now? Bill Kristol, your partner in crime, is deeply worried about Bluey.

Yeah, yeah. But Bluey's not a film. That's true. That's true. It's a show. Yeah, and, you know, I'm surprised that this deeply well-thought-out policy that the U.S. government is rolling out now is not, you know, giving us clarity on whether it's movies or the shows, you know, what are we doing? I know people, I know people are wondering this cause I was wondering this Donald Trump was in

home alone to home alone to involves a family that gets on a plane and goes to France. Were, what were those scenes shot in France? And the answer is no it wasn't in charles de gallo part it was in o'hare and they made it look like we used to be a proper country we shot i know the scenes in france here maybe trump understood that i know i know that's the way it should be done yeah yeah he's got that line to the zeitgeist you know we gotta we gotta get it back all right there's some other ones uh he wants howie kurtz to retire. I don't know why he tweeted that one out. Just decided, you know, Howie, it's time for you to go. Then there's some other reports.

He did a pool with reporters. He went off on The Wall Street Journal for no apparent reason. And then this one actually is serious. Scott McFarlane of CBS, he said that the White House confirmed that Trump had a conversation last night with Enrique Terrio, who is, of course, a Proud Boy member, was involved, obviously, with January 6th, was arrested and then pardoned or commuted. I want to be clear. I should have known which one. But anyways, he says the two of them talked and Enrique said that Trump told him to thank the J6ers. So like we have this weird dynamic where a lot of weird bullshit

happens and Trump like sort of re-engineers the executive branch to make it happen. And then sprinkled in as some serious shit. And it's hard to figure out like which one to care about. It's actually not that hard. You know which one to care about. It's all sort of signal and noise to a degree. But this is the kind of dynamic of Trump 2.0 where it's like some of it's very serious. A lot of it's very, very serious. And then he seems to be totally preoccupied with like the shiniest of objects. Yeah, yeah. And it's all, I mean, I think to me the important thing to point out is that it's all one thing.

It's all the same phenomenon. It's Donald Trump waking up in the morning, tripping through life and shooting from the hip, right? And when he trips through life, some of the people he's coming into contact with are Hollywood executives. Some of the people he's coming into contact with are the biggest psychos in the universe. I guess Hollywood executives might count,

but I don't mean the Hollywood executives. I mean, Proud Boys. I mean, Enrique Terrio, he's going to bump into him at Mar-a-Lago. He's going to bump into Laura Loomer. He's going to bump into Nick Fuentes, maybe, or Kanye West. And it's all one piece to him because he has no filter for like,

oh, these are the people I shouldn't be associating with. For him, the people he shouldn't be associating with are like the rhinos. You know, it's like Liz Cheney. He's like the only person he doesn't want to hang out with. He super happy to hang out with both jeff bezos and enrique terrio and and then and then he that's input for him right that's he he goes among those people and he hears what they have to say and he comes up with his ideas and then he goes to work and he turns them into policy and there's no there's no guardrails around it whatsoever so like you know

if you have a line to the president if you are a the kind of guy who can pull him aside at mar-a-lago you are just as influential over over what he has to say as the editorial board of the wall street journal certainly you're more influential than the yes yes i mean but but yeah you're right you're 100 100 but the is, like, this stuff just gets laundered into real shit very quickly and easily and out in the open. Yeah. Well, you know, us DC residents, at least we're going to get the NFL draft in 2027. Look, they ripped a billion dollars from our budget, so we get this nice little shiny object in exchange. Thank you.

Unironically cool shiny object. I had not heard about that one. That'd be kind of fun to cover, right? I don't know. Where is it usually? Is it in Ohio? Is that the Hall of Fame? No, no, no. They do it in different stadiums this past year is at lambeau

field they they've done in new york they didn't i think they did one in dallas this is just he clearly watched it and was like this would be really cool right um all right andrew thank you for doing this buddy really appreciate it i know we don't always like jump at every chump tweet and rightfully so, because we would just be doing this all day. But the succession of like rapid fire idiocy tonight demanded this quick take. And I think every once in a while,

it's good to pop in and be like, Hey, this is happening all the time. And we're just going to, we're going to get out. But remember, even when you're not paying attention to it, it's always happening.

It's just the, it's just the water. Endless. Endless. All right. Andrew, buddy. Appreciate it.

Thank you guys for watching. Subscribe to the feed and we will talk to you soon.