Bulwark Takes - Under Pressure, Trump Retreats on Iran and DHS | Morning Chaser

Episode Date: March 24, 2026

Bill Kristol and Andrew Egger are going live to discuss the DHS funding fight, ICE at America's airports, and Trump's erratic flip-flops in Iran.

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Hi, everybody. I'm Andrew Eger with the bulwark. This is Bill Crystal. Also with the bulwark, we write the Morning Shots newsletter. And as we have begun to do, we're coming to you live on Tuesday morning at 10 a.m. for Morning Chaser to talk about some of the stuff we wrote about in our newsletter today, some of the other stuff that's going on in the world. Today, it's most of the same stuff because I don't know how you feel about it, Bill.

It kind of seems to me like we are looking around. There's so much going on in the world. There's the conflict in Iran. There's the ongoing negotiations over funding the Department of Homeland Security. And in theory, Donald Trump is sort of the prime mover of basically everything that's happening. And yet when you actually sit down and listen to him talk, and sort of follow along with the way that he is participating in all of these things. There's a strange disconnect a lot of the time.

I mean, it seems like the way that he speaks, the way that he sort of like issues commands out into the air that then aren't really followed up by anybody, including him. It's kind of new. It seems unlike the way that he has done things in the past. We're going to talk about a lot of that stuff today. But let's just start with the latest kind of breaking news about the DHS funding fight, about the government shutdown. You wrote about this in morning shots today, Bill, and we've even got some new details from Politico about what the shape of the possible agreement that seems to be

taking shape might end up looking like. So let's throw a couple of these pieces of reporting from Politico up on the screen for you guys now. Basically, what we're looking at here is Donald Trump seems to be getting out of the way of a possible deal that would let government funding go through for everything in Homeland Security except for ICE, which means, you know, most obviously that TSA agents who are not being paid right now, it's leading to a lot of chaos at airports, they would start getting paychecks again. That problem would be solved. And that then Republicans would turn around as this, as this Politico's reporting here indicates. And they would then pass a reconciliation bill, a budget bill that would only require 50 votes

instead of the 60 for a normal spending bill. And they would try to get ICE. refunded as part of that reconciliation package. Politico reports that even though Trump had been formerly opposed to this plan, Trump agreed in a meeting last night to back off his demand to link the bills on the condition that provisions from the Save Act, the voter ID and a few other goodies bill that is the other big Republican priority right now, become part of the reconciliation push to people granted anonymity to describe the meeting, told Politico. So this is kind of where we are right now, it kind of seems as though Democrats have succeeded in one respect. They have held together despite the pressure from Republicans and the attempts of Republicans to try to blame them for this

DHS shutdown. And so Republicans are still kind of trying to scramble here. I mean, do you see this as a Democratic win bill? I mean, what's kind of your assessment of how they have handled this, this spending fight on DHS specifically since it's been shut down. Yeah, no, I do think it looks like a win. Let's do what happens here in the negotiations. As with Iran, these things are all up in the air. You know, on your earlier point, which we'll come back to, I think it's so interesting you had a good piece this morning and morning shots on

the disconnect in a way between Trump talking and what Trump's doing or what the administration is doing. But I wouldn't go too far. I'm only caution, he is doing, I mean, he has been an extremely consequential president and remain so. There would be no war if Donald Trump didn't decide to go to war in Iran. That was not like, oh, the administration had many deliberations and many cabinet secretaries and many allies. He wanted to go to war.

We're at war. He wanted to kill the deal on Sunday with DHS. He killed it. Monday evening, they came to the White House. They seemed to have persuaded him to go along with basically the Democrats' demand, which was to fund the rest of DHS, TSA and FEMA and all that, not ICE and Border Patrol. Obviously, the Republicans could always, not obviously, they presumably always could always. could fund that later on, add funds to those parts of DHS later in a reconciliation bill, which only takes 50 votes. We'll see that's not going to be so easy to do, but they can try.

So I think it's a pretty big victory for the Democrats. They hung tough. I don't know who was, they were, they may not have been succeeded in blaming Trump entirely for what's happening at the airports, but I think they succeeded in not being blamed, more blamed than the Republicans, right? There's no evidence in polling or anything else that the Democrats are paying a price, maybe some little evidence the other way. And anyways, the Republican senators seem to be feeling the heat warden the Democratic Senator. So I think this is a case where for all that one likes criticizing democratic leadership on

the Hill and democratic messaging and democratic incompetence in general. And they've done pretty well on this. I've got to say both these issues, incidentally, on the war and on the and on ice, I feel like they've been pretty unified and pretty coherent in their messages. Yeah, yeah. Let's pull up the one kind of flying the ointment and all this stuff is the other, the other Politico point here on some potential Democratic trip wires. There are a couple of caveats that, you know, may keep Democrats from fully embracing this bill.

One of the things is that, for instance, you know, this deal would ultimately fund some parts of immigration enforcement, but not ICE. I mean, it looks like Border Patrol is actually part of the deal that would get funding, you know, under the terms of this. this agreement that's just starting to take shape. So we will see how Democrats end up deciding to respond to that. But I think the point that you made about the reconciliation package is an interesting one. I mean, it kind of appears as though Trump thinks that this will end up permitting him to get everything that he wants on a party line vote later. That's not necessarily true, right?

As you were kind of just suggesting, there are a lot of sort of weird little fiddly rules, parliamentary rules of procedure about what can and can't be passed under this, you know, strange budget reconciliation apparatus. And we can get Joe Perticoe on to talk about some of that stuff later. But it almost seems as though, you know, John Thune and some of these other Republican senators are kind of giving Trump a bill of goods here, right? I mean, he, he crushed their last attempt to, to, you know, relieve some of the pressure here by getting TSA reopened. And it seems as though maybe now they have pitched him on. Yeah, no, don't worry about it, Mr. President.

We're absolutely going to push to get all the provisions that you want through on this party line vote later. Let's play this one clip again. This is Trump just talking just yesterday about the situation when he was in Memphis. And this is kind of what I'm thinking about when I'm trying to get my head around this disconnect, right? Because this is Trump talking about this exact thing just less than 24 hours ago, you know, less than 12 hours before this meeting and this deal was supposedly. struck and talking in kind of no uncertain terms about how he does not think this is the right strategic play. So let's just play that clip here of him in Memphis. In any event, the Democrats are being blamed by the American people for the catastrophe going on right now at our airports

and at other points of transportation and beyond. And we want the public to know we're not going to let them out of this trap that they created for themselves. And I'm suggesting very strongly that the Republicans in going for the Save America Act that you, you weld it into exactly this, because voter ID is part of homeland security. Think of it. We're talking about two separate items, but they're really the same. Voter ID is part of homeland security. And citizenship, proof of citizenship, is part of homeland security. So I think it should be welded in. I think it should be together. You should vote together. because the public has not liked what they've done at the airports.

And they've done it and the public understands it. So first of all, he's totally kind of slurring his words. And, you know, he's getting up there. I mean, he's a little bit difficult, more difficult to understand than he used to be. But not so difficult to understand that it's not very clear what he's arguing. I mean, he is very explicitly making the case there. There should be no deal that does not just continue to hold Democrats' feet to the fire, continue to kind of push their faces down in the TSA problems and try to blame them for that.

And not only should the Republicans be holding out to get ICE funding, they should be holding out and not willing to strike any deal until their, until Democrats are willing to roll in the entirety of this massive voting bill that is like the main thing that Republicans want this year. And just, again, just just a few hours before, apparently it's been reported, he was willing to completely go back on that, sort of in, after this meeting with, with, with senators. I mean, am I, am I missing something? Is there? Yeah, I'd say you're, I mean, I'm sure somewhere in the art of the deal, one of those books

that Trump never read, but quote, wrote, he says something about how you've got to stick with your maximalist terms until you make the deal, you know what I mean? No, don't, don't show weakness. And so with Iran, too, right, the bluff at the last the 48 hours ultimatum, I think that is sort of his style. I think, no, I don't want to credit him with playing four-dimensional trust or anything silly like that. A lot of it is bluster.

A lot of it is him. He feels he pays no price for, I guess, is the way I put it. And it's fun to beat up the Democrats. And maybe, you know, he tries it for a day or two or a week or two. He tries the war for three and a half weeks. And then his attitude is kind of, he's not like a normal human being that thinks that you are somewhat constrained by what you said a week ago or a day ago or five hours ago. And I mean, seriously, it's part of this narcissism and almost.

you know, associate path to something. He just pivots and decides, and who knows what he was told? I would say one more. I mean, I think everyone's taking it a little. Trump has had total control of the Republicans on the Hill, obviously, for during the last year and a half. And before, in 2024, he killed a budget deal

that they were enthusiastic about and that a lot of them voted for in the Senate by just saying I'm against it, right? And it was a Republican-ish, tough on the border deal. Obviously, he didn't want to give Biden a victory. So he has had that kind of amazing stranglehold on the Republicans. Maybe that's getting a little weaker with Trump at 40%, not at 50%, maybe privately. I mean, again, it's not as if Trump's literally can snap his fingers and stop these

deals, right? I mean, five Republicans, four Republicans could de facto and pass the Democratic version of the DHS bill or maybe, depending on filibuster their own, you know, take 13 Republicans, but it's not as if there's no one in the Republican conference who has said that he wanted such a deal. Senator Kennedy said on Louisiana said on Sunday that he was hoping for a deal and that Trump killed it. And he was disappointed that Trump had killed it. So maybe the student went to him and said, look, I can't hold them forever. And maybe Trump is grown up enough and responsive enough to real world events, just as he maybe has been with his trade in four moves and gas prices and energy prices to say, you know, without ever saying it, to kind of

register that somewhere. That's a big question about Trump. How much of it is, how much is you registering beneath all that surface idiocy and bluster? And how much is he sort of, I don't know, literally making things up every, every hour. Yeah, yeah. I mean, and the other component of it is that so much of Trump's stranglehold on the Republican Party has always been a question of, how's he going to get back at you, right? And especially early on, you know, he was careful and, you know, he was punctilious, and he really made sure, especially in the first term, that if people crossed him in high-profile ways, he was going to go back and get them later. There has been some of that, like, don't get me

wrong in the second term. I mean, he's pretty determined, for instance, to try to primary Thomas Massey, the representative from Kentucky. And yet, I do wonder, like, again, I'm still just trying to get my own mind around some of this stuff. It's like, why do we now see this sort of upsurge in, for instance, the stuff you're talking about, with Senator Kennedy being willing to kind of, like, go out there on TV and say, yeah, it was Trump who blew up the deal. Let's just play that clip real quick. We have it. The Kennedy clip you're talking about here. Senator Cruz and I came up with a plan. We said, look, it's a two-step process. The Democrats have offered to open up everything but ICE.

Ted and I said, okay, let's accept their offer. And then at the same time, we would offer a bill for reconciliation where we don't need any Democratic votes to do whatever we wanted to do with ICE. And that way we're out of the shutdown and DHS is back open. We submitted that, Senator Kofoon submitted that to President Trump, as is his right. He said no. No deals with the Democrats. So we're back to square one. Yeah, I mean, like it's strange, right? Because on the one hand, you're totally right. I mean, Trump still exerts, like never before seeing levels of sort of personal control over basically all of these people. And yet,

at the same time, you know, here they are out there in public basically saying, you know, we're still going to wait. until we get Trump's say-so on all of this stuff. But, I mean, they're not kind of shying away from the fact that he is, at this point, the main impediment to a deal. And it appears as though, as of last night, again, the details are still coming out, but, like, that Trump is the one who has blinked on this, right? Yeah. I think so.

I mean, one interesting fact here is, I mean, filing deadlines are beginning to pass for filing for primaries, primary filing deadlines for the House and for the Senate. I think now pass in most states, actually, which means if you're a Republican House member, you suddenly can't be primary, depending on what state you're from, by Trump, or at least it's very late in the day to do so. If you cross him, Senate, even he has less leverage, because obviously two-thirds of the senators aren't up this year. Some of them will retire. Trump will be less, presumably less powerful in 28 and certainly, well, presumably in 2030 than he is today in terms of primary challenges. It'll be a while time will have passed. So people may well feel

less constrained to differ with Trump, maybe not to cross him directly. It was striking that Kennedy says, what we submitted it to Trump, as if I'm old enough to remember when senators thought if they made a deal, they made a deal, and they wanted the president to, if it was their party, to support it. But often they went to the president and said, hey, we got 80 votes for this. You better support it, you know? And I still like submitting it as a, as a, what's the where I'm looking for, you know, not a beggar, but a kind of. Supplicant. Supplicant. Thank you. Yes. So they're a good word there. subsequent to Trump. So I think the primary situation is sort of interesting. I do think you mentioned

Massey. I think it's kind of important what happens to the Massey primary in Kentucky. I'm blank, not exactly when that is, but I think it's maybe a couple months off. May, I think. May. And the Cassidy primary for Senate, he's the incumbent who voted to impeach Trump. He's since been pathetically and desperately tried to make up with Trump, including voted for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and then criticizing Kennedy, but never quite pulling the trigger. Anyway, all that. Still, Trump's out to get him and has endorsed his opponent. And so, and that I think is also maybe May or June, I can't remember. And so it'd be sort of interesting what happens there. I do think that if Massey can win and if Cassidy can win it, I'm not sure either will. But that would, I think, we can trump.

Obviously, if Trump beats them, there'll still be some threat hanging over people's heads. But again, I come back to the fact that once we get past June, basically, they all have their general election. They have their private, they've passed the primary stage. the margins are narrower enough, God knows in the House, but also in the Senate that no one's going to be willing to sabotage a Republican, none of the big committees are going to be willing to sabotage a Republican running in a competitive seat in either place. So at that point, Trump's leverage disappears. So I think actually Democrats are also smart just to kick everything down the road as much as possible. I do think after July 4th, let's say, you know, Trump has much less leverage over his own party members in the House of the Senate. Yeah, yeah.

If anybody happens just to be tuning in, I'll say one more time. I'm Andrew Eger, White House correspondent with the bulwark. This is Bill Crystal, our editor at large. We write the Morning Shots newsletter. We come to you live on Tuesday mornings at 10 Eastern to talk about what's going on. This is Morning Chaser. There's one other interesting contrast here that I wanted to bring up because I do think it just really illustrates the fact that there is no like single path to sort of the way things get done with this administration. All of the lines of kind of argument are so snarled. I mean, he, Donald Trump himself has always

obviously been an extremely impulsive and kind of erratic thinker and, you know, trying to shove the Save America Act into a DHS funding bill is a pretty striking example of that. But that is not the only policy pipelines, not just sort of brainstorms from the mind of Donald Trump that are getting translated into real policy these days. We should talk a little bit about the other new thing that's going on in DHS this week, which is ICE at the airports. This is a new thing as of yesterday. It seemed to come about very quickly and abruptly over the weekend. There's been a lot of reporting that ICE was sort of taken by surprise by Donald Trump's announcement that they were going to be performing this task. We've already seen a couple of sort of strange and sort of unsettling incidents. Maybe we can

play real quick a clip that took place at the San Francisco airport yesterday that was kind of welcome to the new the new era. There's ice at the airports now. What's your name? Can show the badge? Where's a badge? Where's your badge? Can someone call 911? Where's your badge? Can I see? Let me see your badge. Can I see your badge? I don't know if that's legitimate. Can I see your badge number, sir? What is your name? Yeah, so I mean, that's obviously, you know, unsettling and horrible footage.

We don't know to what extent, you know, this is a widespread thing. As far as I've seen, this is the only, like, pretty, you know, this is the only footage of an actual arrest being taken place. But there's a lot of footage now of ice just sort of milling awkwardly around at these airports. It's not really clear what they're there to do in a lot of circumstances, whether they are there to just help out with TSA tasks or, as that clip seemed to indicate, doing normal ice enforcement at the airport. It's not clear how that is supposed to, you know, lower anybody's, stress levels or, you know, make things less chaotic at the airport. But, but a lot of people over the weekend were kind of scratching their heads about all of this. Like, how does this exactly fit into Donald Trump's political objectives when it comes to the funding fight? Like, like, what's,

what's this for? And we have gotten an interesting suggestion of what this is for. And, and we'll play a couple of clips now from a conservative podcast and then from Fox News that kind of trickled up last, last week people are starting to pay attention to now. I think I have a solution to the TSA problem. What we need to do is we need to supplement where we're missing out on TSA agents who can't afford to work for us anymore. We need to bring in ICE agents. I'm going to say it's kind of a brilliant idea.

I had a caller on the show, the Clay and Buck show today, Charlie, had an interesting idea. What if President Trump announced that ICE agents were now going to be supplementing TSA agents inside of all of the airport. Yeah, and there you go. I mean, that was then the tweet that came up a few hours later. And look, we don't know for a fact that this is what happened, but we do know for a fact that the idea seemingly came out of nowhere,

that nobody was kind of pre-prepped for Trump to make this announcement, and that this announcement came, you know, pretty shortly after Clay Travis said that on Fox News. And this is far from kind of the first time that we have had this sort of sort of sloppulous policy up filtering from just kind of like a range person in conservative media who the algorithm happens to bless enough for, for, you know, more important pundits to see it and then magnify it and then it going straight to the White House. I mean, this is what we saw. This is what kicked off the whole Minneapolis ICE operation was

that very viral kind of like investigative video of that right-wing YouTuber Nick Shirley who went there and, and, you know, cut a, cut a video purporting to demonstrate, you know, millions and millions and millions of dollars in fraud at Somali-run daycares. And I mean, we don't know for a fact, again, that this is exactly what happened here. But the timing at least is interesting. Or wouldn't you say? I think we know for a fact that this is what happened here. You have a very high bar here for what we know and don't know. I'm going to say that that's why it happened. It's an idiotic idea. No one's suggested it. Ice doesn't want to be doing it. They're not trained to do it. There are many, if you want to add people to TSA or people who are not part of TSA to

see ICE would not be your first choice of all the other law enforcement entities in the federal government, incidentally. There are others who were trained for things that are more like what TSA does, you know? So it's, it's, I suspect, I'm good, I obviously, I don't know for a fact, but I think that's how it happened. What it tells me, though, is that Trump and people advising Trump in the White House worried about the TSA situation and wanted to be seen to be doing something. I think that's why he's doing it, right? I mean, it shows that he's not telling the truth when he said Monday they're blaming the Democrats. If you, if you're blaming the Democrats, no pressure on you. If they're blaming you, I'm showing I'm doing something. I'm sending the

ice guys there. And he did get for maybe, I don't know. 12 hours, at least among his own supporters, a little bit of C. Trump's even doing something about it. Those Democrats are just blocking the funding. Now it turns out this was ineffectual, and it's silly and more prodigious. And anyway, it didn't affect the lines on Monday, obviously. And so the pressure was on for Trump to accept the deal that he rejected, I guess, it was on Sunday, right?

So I do think it shows the politics of this were against Trump. It shows how Trump makes these idiotic, you know, thinks these are all interchangeable. I would say it's not even quite like Minneapolis, not to go back to that too much. But I mean, at least there, at least, but he had a mass deportation agenda, and he found an excuse to go into Minneapolis. Again, why ISIS related to a, if you want,

if there's fraud going on, you can send people to investigate fraud. Not ICE, that's not what they do. These were 90% citizens who were doing the fraud, apparently. They were originally from Somalia, their parents were. But anyway, it's not an ICE issue. And, of course, they went into Minneapolis

and did nothing so far as one can tell with Somalis particularly, and went around doing terrible things otherwise. But again, that was an excuse, I would say. Whereas here, I feel like, yeah, really, so I think it fits in with the point you make in warning shots, though. The degree of flailing is a little different, right? I mean, the Somali fraud didn't justify ICE,

but it was a real problem. There was real fraud. Our Jonathan Cohen wrote about it. Cohen wrote about it. And, you know, and again, if you gave him a little bit of a hook to say, crisis in Minneapolis, this is literally a caller with older. respect to her to a right-wing talk radio show who then gets himself on Fox to promote his college brilliant idea seems to go unfiltered to Donald Trump and there's not even the normal staff

work of, I don't know, is this really wise and is this going to help us or hurt us and how does it look 48 hours later and should we at least pretend to train them for two or three days before we send them into the airports? And clearly Trump or someone said, oh, I want them there Monday morning. I want to be able to say this. I'm doing this on Sunday. That is a level of of decision-making that's not good. In this case, it's mostly pointless. It doesn't do great damage. But I would just get back to the war for a minute.

This is the one worries how much of the decision-making about the war is similar. Someone told me about Karg Island. I think it's over there somewhere near the straight. It's like 350 miles north of it. But anyway, you know, and that's where the Iranian ship their oil from, right? And, well, yes, sir, but, you know, we're actually trying to, we want them to ship the oil out. We just took off the sanctions because you think it will leaves the, whatever, the to that, but, you know, decision, but still it leaves the pressure on the world saying,

yeah, but we should take Cargallet or at least think about it, send them a raise. I mean, this is one reason on the war, and certainly why even if you're a hawk on Iran and even if you're not opposed to some of these interventions, you cannot trust these people to do it. I mean, I think, I think for me this has been one thing that's seeping through to people now out there who are not, never Trumpers, you know, but who are kind of just not following politics too much or a little ambivalent about some of these policy areas is, do these guys know what they're doing? And this thing would be another instance of this. And again, it's one thing to be sending a few people to stand around the airport. And it's another thing to be getting us in a war and having

Marines coming and using ground troops or stuff that's not been thought through at all. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's such a good point. And bringing in the war is apropos there as well. I mean, I think that to me, the thing that kind of unites all of this stuff is there's just been sort of a great flattening of the decision-making process. And it almost doesn't matter what the inputs are, right? You can be a senator who's been, you know, doing all this legwork to try to strike a funding deal across the aisle. You know, there's like different moving parts and it's very kind of fragile. And you might be going into the office. Or you might be on the National Security Council. And you might have done, you know, analyses or had analyses done about the various effects of different strategies. And you might be needing to present those to the president. Or you might be Linda from Arizona. And, you know, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, she sounds like a nice lady. You might just be happened to find your, your suggestion on Fox News. And in, in each of those cases, Donald Trump will not have done the preexisting like work. He will not kind of have any, any, if he has like for, like preexisting thoughts about whatever it is you're proposing, it will just be kind of whatever happens to flit across

his brain, and you need to sort of like shake the dangly object in front of his eyes long enough to capture his attention and get his, oh yeah, I guess that sounds pretty good, kind of sign off on it. And everything runs that way now. You know, like all of the policy of the United States of America is choked off at the bottleneck of getting Donald Trump's attention span and finding some way to kind of move through the tortured neurons of his brain to get the, yeah, okay, I guess, sort of sign up on it. Yeah, and no, and no, and no, apparently within the system or almost not. That's what's real. I think on the military side, hopefully there are some and hopefully, you know, at the end of the day, we're not going to be

landing Marines in places that we haven't, if we were to land them in places that haven't been prepared and the work hasn't been done and so forth. The military, we will ensure that. But in almost every other part of the government, what has no sense in any of this work, since look at the Justice Department with all these cases. I want a case for it against those people. Well, it turns out it gets dismissed. I mean, right. You're right that it's so pervasive. And, you know, I kept to Washington in 85 and worked for Bill Bennett, one of his sector of education as a special assistant and then she was staff. And Bill was a hard charger as sector of education, and I think effective in being that. And he used to joke,

I only have a gas, I only have a gas pedal, not a break. And, you know, he was proud of being a Reagan second term when some people were kind of, a little steam was going out of the Reagan revolution. Bill, who just became education secretary at the beginning of the second term, was a full steam ahead guy. But he himself would then say, hey, I'm the gas pedal. You guys need to be the break where it's needed or at least to tell me we can't hit the gas for 48 hours.

We need to staff this out. And so a lot of what I did as check the staff was pretty easy. I asked other people in the department who knew a heck of a lot more about the laws covering education policy and about previous decisions that have been made and research that have been done

of whether this was a good idea or that I did included in the speech to say, hey, look, Secretary is really interested in doing this. Give me a pretty quick turnaround on whether it's, you know, get out of the question, great idea or somewhere in between, or we can tweak it in this way and that way. And that was a lot of what I did and a lot of what the senior staff did at that department. And I think it's done in White House over the years and in most cabinet agencies. It's not a bad way to write it.

One person pushes a little on the gas and the other person says, wait a second. One gets the impression that with exception maybe of the military, no one is doing that in the Trump administration. And that is dangerous. I mean, it's just in life it's dangerous, right? It would be as if every stupid idea I had or you had, no one else at the bulwark said, well, actually, there's reasons why we can't do an eight-hour podcast on Tuesdays,

even though you guys have eight hours worth of stuff to say because our audience probably wants 35 minutes. I mean, I just feel like that I do think, and that was not the case in the first turn where there were all these people saying, no, sir, and you can't do this. And he didn't steamroll, didn't steamroll Jim Mattis or Gary Cote and so forth. There's a tiny bit of it in the second term.

I guess the only breaks now are the military internally. The markets kind of externally and gas prices and things like that, I suppose, and him's watching. The brakes can be when a policy of his looks like it's backfiring, I guess, the lines at the airports and so forth, where he's getting blamed for it. But in terms of actual staff work, I wonder what it's like to be a staffer in the white. Susie Wiles, I mean, she's, you know, not, she's taking treatment now for, I hope she does fine, obviously. But so maybe she is a little distracted as she for staff, but I don't know. It just feels like there's no normal process to vet anything. And that can't be good.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I like the bulwark comparison there. Mr. President, sir, if you're listening, we recommend you hire Sam Stein immediately, bring him on board. He'll shoot down all your bad ideas and probably some of the good ones, too, if we're being honest. But yeah, I mean, the fact that it is just the man alone, the man alone in the chair, this has always kind of been the way it is with Trump. It has been really obvious during the second term. And I mean, just again, to go back to, I wrote about this a little bit this morning,

to go back to that Memphis event yesterday, where any time the man is putting himself on display, it's not just the fact that it's only one man in a chair, which would be bad under any circumstances. But it's this guy, right? This particular man is a pretty bad man to have to be the sole guy in the chair. And the fact that he is so surrounded at all times by just the biggest licks fiddles and flunkies. And, I mean, the tongue baths that they give him all day, every day, I mean, it would ruin anybody's brain to be in that environment. And he was already pretty predisposed to, to, you know, mate, like solipsism and monomania and thinking, you know, he's the smartest guy in every room. And it's just, I mean, it plainly has completely accentuated and caricatured all of those.

characteristics in his own mind to such an amazing extent. Let's just dwell on a couple of these moments from yesterday. This is, this is, you know, after Donald Trump got done, sort of slurring his way through his borschfeld schick about how Chuck Schumer is a Palestinian now and how beautiful young women keep coming up to him in the streets of D.C. to talk about how grateful they are that he's made it safe. But this is after all that, and this is when it came time for Stephen Miller and Cash Patel to weigh in on how good Donald Trump is. So let's take a look at that. President Trump is done on border security and public safety is a national miracle that will be studied, not only for generations, but for centuries to come. Thank you, President Trump. Thank you, Steve.

So, Cash, see if you can top that. I don't know. That's a tough one, Cash. That is tough. You know, Mr. President, as I look around this venue, I see, and I'm reminded again, why we have the greatest warriors on God's Green Earth, the men and women serving in uniform, the men and women serving and wearing the badge and law enforcement, our police, our sheriffs around the state of Tennessee. I'm reminded that Americans exist to protect this country day in and day out and they've done it like we've done it here. But what we didn't have was you. We didn't have a commander in chief who backed the blue, who resourced the blue, who funded the military, who did whatever it takes to safeguard every single life.

Isn't that nice? I mean, that clip doesn't even hardly get get it. Like you would you have to, I mean, we're not going to subject. all of you find people to it. But I mean, Stephen Miller talked for about three minutes on that topic of, of, you know, just the dark age that came before and the miraculous sort of rebirth and renewal of America under Donald Trump. And then Donald Trump takes that. He's like, oh, that was great. And he turns to Cash Patel. He's like, all right, there's your, you know, there's the bar to clear. What do you got? I mean, that's just, and they're in public. They're out on a stage. This is how these men interact with one another. God knows how much, you know, more obsequent.

as it is behind closed doors, I'm not sure how much more obsequies it's even possible to be. But that's the sort of, that's the sauce that Trump's mind is marinating in as he carries out these duties all the time. It's an interesting situation. It's kind of sickening. It's an American. I mean, the one thing we've been pretty good at in America is we are a democracy with there's been a certain amount of, there's a little deference to big shots, obviously, into presidents. I've been in the White House. I've seen it a little bit.

But on the whole, we're pretty irreverent, which is good for the country and pretty good at talking back and pretty good at not simply being sycophants. And this is one weakness of old-fashioned kingships, but also of autocracies. I mean, there's a lot of studies of war. Democracies are often caught flat-footed, slow to react. You know, the popular public opinion doesn't quite see what's going on as much as maybe one, you know, far-sighted statesman would. On the other hand, the great advantage democracies have is you don't have this. kind of stuff that we just saw, right? You don't have the total, the chief, the leader,

the dictator, the autocrat in a little balloon of his, a little bubble of his own, only being surrounded by sick offense and never getting a dose of reality. And in America, we've been pretty good at making our political leaders at some point get subjected to reality. I guess Trump still does a little bit with, you know, we just let you guess. I mean, the fiction, I guess you just make up, he makes up stuff he always has, right? the women coming up to on the streets of Washington. He literally has not had a single human being. I mean, his only time he's been in the streets of Washington is in his car.

Has he ever walked anywhere? I don't think so. He's not like he doesn't go to restaurants the way I don't know, Bush or Obama did or anything. I wonder whether it's like he's thinking about his own sort of junior comm staffers when he happens to bump into them. It's like these young women, he just sort of happens across. Does he even, yeah. And they say, Mr. President, I live up in Petworth,

and it's just been so much safer since you said to the national guy. I'm a little doubtful. So, yeah, I mean, the whole thing is fantasy. But it is, I mean, my only semi-serious point is it's bad. Even if Trump were a different type of person and much more serious in his personal thinking, it would still be bad. They should still have the cocoon in the bubble, right, and the lack of reality testing. And it's so un-American.

It's so un-American. You know, I mean, one just thinks of whatever, one thinks of all these presidents we've had. None of them wanted this, none of them subject this. Nixon maybe so insecure of them. and there are things in the nicks and tapes that one sees that are embarrassing with Kissinger, sucking up to him and so forth. But again, not in public, it's used to sort of say at this point about the private thing, but in public, you didn't see this level of pathetic sycophoncy.

And it's so, I mean, honestly, it's worrisome. This is only 14 months into the second term. What's it going to be like 14 months from now? And then another 14 months, right? Yeah, it is, it is grizzly. It's alarming. I mean, it's you, it's, it's comical. And then when you stop and look and think about it at all, you, you stop laughing pretty

quick. But I will say, we're only flesh and blood. We got, we got one more good clip. This is pretty much just straightforwardly funny for you. Because the other thing that that was that Trump did yesterday in Memphis, he did not just go there to kind of puff out his chest and talk about his, his crime record and have all of his toadies do the same for him in front of an audience. He also took a little pleasure trip after,

his speech to that task force. And he went over to Graceland. He went to check out, uh, check out Elvis's home. Um, you know, there's not much going on in the world. Oh, you can, we can afford a few, a few, uh, extra little bonus trips when we're in the area. Uh, and, uh, and so here's just one clip of Trump at Graceland, uh, yesterday. He was just comfortable here. Yeah, very, this was his home. This, this, this, no matter where he lived, he always came back in. Always came back to Memphis. And whenever he talked about Memphis, it was always home. And that's what this represents. That's very nice.

And now it's safe again. Yep. That's great. So our next... I mean, what can you even say? I mean, thank you, Mr. President. Thank you, Donald Trump. You've done it.

You've made Graceland safe again. Nobody is, nobody is, you know, touring the Elvis House and worried about getting stabbed or pickpocketed or seeing any illegal immigrants of any kind. I mean, it's just that's the mind, right? That's the mind. I'm the guy who made Grace Land safe again while Pam Bondi looks on. adoringly from behind. You got anything on that, Bill? Did you've been to Graceland?

I've never been to Graceland. I've from Missouri. I should have gone. I could have gone. Maybe someday. I'm not a big Elvis person, if I can be honest. I guess he really was talented. I've read that places that, you know, it became such a caricature of himself, unfortunately, in his later years, all the drug use, I guess, and stuff. But I guess he really was, you know, a phenomenon, obviously in the 50s. And genuinely, a real talent, but I never, never, never my thing. My wife lived in a house called Graceland in college, off-campus house, and it had, I still remember, a large, like, Americana, like black velvet portrait of Elvis in his Vegas era with one tier running down his face very prominently in the living room.

So I have, I have fond, you know, do you still have that? No, the house does. The house does. We didn't, you know, we wouldn't. You should have brought out. You should get another one. Put it up behind you when you do one of the, you know, do this podcast. next week. Yeah, yeah, you can't, you can't, you can't run off with, with the household gods,

you know, when your stint in Graceland is over. But, but, but yeah, I mean, we, we, we, we, we can put a pin in that. We can put a pin in, in all Elvis discussion, or we can talk for, you know, another hour. Suddenly, suddenly, this is a musical review, uh, program. It's an underrepresented market for bulwark content. We don't get into it enough. Tim does some, but, but, but, but, but our tastes are different than his, I would, I would go so far as to suggest. Anyway, we can call it there. Uh, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm just ranting at this point. That's a pretty good sign. It's time to get off. But thanks, Bill, for coming on and talking through some of this stuff. Thanks to you guys all out there for watching. Obviously, there is a lot of insane stuff going on in the

world right now. We're going to keep following this DHS fight. We're going to keep following the war in Iran, obviously, and all the economic ramifications of that. And if, you know, if Donald Trump heads over to Liverpool to visit the birthplace of John Linon, and we'll let you know about that, too. So thanks to you all for watching. We hope you'll subscribe here, subscribe, you know, on our YouTube, on our substack, head over to the bulwark.com and get Bill and my newsletter morning shots in your inbox every weekday morning for free. Thanks, and we'll see you all

next time.