The Bulwark Podcast - Andrew Egger: Trump’s Travels with Natalie

Episode Date: August 17, 2026

Thanks to a shrewdly-timed Jon Ossoff campaign event, a lot more people are suddenly learning about young and blonde Trump confidante Natalie Harp AKA ‘the human printer’—and one of only three aides who accompanied POTUS on his catering truck-secret flight escape. Meanwhile, Trump is lending a hand to white-collar criminals and expanding his extortion and bribery options with his crypto firm. Plus: the flat-out lies about Fauci and miscarriages, Andrew loves the Great Lakes, the tariffs have done so much damage that even Sherrod Brown is against them, and Tim has some choice words about the primary challenge against Jared Moskowitz in Florida.show notes: Catherine's piece on Trump trying to destroy the shell company registry  Tim on crazy, stupid Republicans running in the midterms. First up: Mike Collins Andrew's critique of Politico's piece on Trump's tariffs in "Morning Shots"  Bulwark LIVE: GOOD FIGHT TOUR with Tim, Sarah, Sam and JVL is coming to the Southeast in October. Tickets go on sale August 21. Bulwark+ members get early access via our presale starting August 18. Watch your inbox for details. Head to TheBulwark.com/Events for details and to get your tickets.

Welcome to the Bullwark Daily. I'm your host, Tim Miller. It is Monday, but Bill Crystal finally gets to go on vacation. The eldest member of the Bullwark team has been the one working the hardest and most diligently this summer, all the rest of us gallivant about. So finally he gets a break. And sitting in for him is our very own White House correspondent and his co-author on the Morning Shots newsletter at Sweet Andrew Agar. How you doing, Andrew? I'm great. How are you, Tim. I'm doing pretty good. I'm doing pretty good. It's good to be back in New Orleans. It's good to be termiteless in the helm. And, you know, we're just pressing forward. We've got a lot to talk about today. You have some bad takes that I hope we have time to get to the very end. And you have a couple of good things that you've been really

excited about and angered about righteously that I've not talked about on the podcast at all. So I do want to get to those as well. But I want to start on the corruption beat. A couple of things. things that really caught my eye over the weekend and late last week. The first one is this Trump Crypto Bank story. This might seem niche, but I just, I think that it is the most tangible example of the administration's corruption. And I feel like in the year, I don't know, 2034, when we're looking back on this, I feel like this and the internment camps are going to be the things that we look back on.

I mean, who knows what horrors are ahead of us between now and then, but like, from From the period of 2024 to 26, like the internment camps and this are going to stand out. Does that feel right to you before I get into the details of the story? Don't you just think there's so much we don't know on the corruption side of us? Yes, 100%. I think that's right.

I mean, you say like the, it seems niche, but like all businesses are sort of niche, right? I mean, the whole point is that like he is going into these quote-unquote niche industries where there's still billions and billions of dollars to be made. And he's getting his beak wet on the past. of the presidency and the access that that is involved with that. So yes, I 100% agree that the broad overarching corruption story is going to be a major, major part of the legacy of these years. So here it is on the bank. So World Liberty Financial, which is the like Trump family's main

crypto venture. They have several side ventures in crypto. They have received preliminary conditional approval from the office of the comptroller of the currency to become a bank. Now, I'm sure we have, you know, really people of high integrity at the Office of the Comptroller of the currency and the Trump administration. A lot of people of deep expertise and no conflicts at all. This, what this means, this approval means that World Liberty will be able to issue, redeem, and safeguard U.S.D.1, their dollar-backed stable coin. Jeff Stein, who used to be at the Washington Post, I went to notice, will translate that for people who are not, you know, into crypto world. he writes this a Trump appointee has approved Trump's personal crypto firm to operate as a bank. This means corporations can conduct transactions using the stable coin where the Trump family gets a cut.

The public will not have to be informed. There's no precedent for this. Think about it this way. It's like the it's kind of like the Venmo now or whatever where the Venmo company takes whatever, whatever, 3% of a transaction fee on certain types of transactions. Now people can make transactions with the Trump coin and get a fee, and then they just get to operate no different than whatever, if you're zelling on your city bank account.

Important to note here, Chinese-born scammer and current UAE citizen, Chengpeng Xiao-C-Z, he had purchased half of these stable coins in circulation. and got a pardon for the Trump administration. The UAE and Pakistani officials have also invested Pakistan's negotiating the MOU, which we'll get to in a second. Seems bad. I don't know. Seems bad. Yeah, yeah.

To me, this is interesting in part because Trump has already extracted enormous amounts of value from a lot of people in and connected to the crypto industry with this exact corporation, with world liberty financial. And this now seems to be a way to just expand. the net of somewhat extortionary sort of behavior much more widely. Like the idea here is if you yourself are already like big in the crypto space, you're probably already kind of all tied up with World Liberty Financial. But now this is just yet another way for unrelated businesses,

businesses that are not primarily crypto businesses necessarily. It's just another new place where you can curry some level of favor with the Trump administration get, you know, for whatever business purpose that you might want. Like, you might be a random, you could be any kind of corporation who might have any kind of business before the White House. One really easy way to make Donald Trump look favorably on your business will be to just conduct transactions on this platform instead of whatever other banking platform you might have been inclined to use.

Obviously, I'm sure there are, I'm not a financial reporter or a financial analyst or anything. I'm sure there are many reasons why you might prefer. longer running, more stable sort of platform with more services on offer, more professionals in the building, all these sorts of things. But this is the offer that's being made is why not come transact over here? Let me collect your fees and show that you're a good patriotic corporation while you're doing it. I like the word bribes because that's what's happening here. I mean, they're just bribes happening. I mean, ZZ got a part in an exchange for purchasing these stable coins. We talked on Friday with Sarah about the thing Joe Rogan was surprised to learn that the

Trump, Truth Social, is taking bribes from financial, you know, investors who want early access to Trump's tweets so they can then bet on, you know, the reaction in the markets. Just, you know, a little insider trading up in the open. And like, what situation that is not corrupt would make you want to bank with World Liberty Financial? And like, this is, if you just put it that way, right? If the only point of this is like you're looking for, you know, a vendor with which to exchange, you know, currency, like there are a million options out there in the world. Like, there is absolutely no reason that you would want to go with the company that was run by Devin Nunes that is not stable at all, right?

That's are people that don't have history, you know, safeguarding money. Even if you're going to do it in crypto, even if you're going to do it in crypto, even if you're, if you're going to buy stable coins, like there are options that are more professional than this, right? Like, the only reason to use this is to curry favor with Trump. Yeah, no, I think that's basically exactly right. And that is a pretty compelling reason for a lot of companies, given how much of the economy right now, in large part because of tariffs, but also because of different regulatory decisions and all these sorts of things. So much of the currently constituted economy relies on the sort of personal blessing and say so of the president.

So it's a pretty grisly situation all around. Our colleague Catherine Rompel wrote another article. This is a story. I think it's also important to cover the stories where the Trump corruption does not just extend to his personal wealth. I mean, like most of these stories, he is, as you say, getting his beak wet. But he's also looking out for white collar scammers and grifters of all types. And here's one example of it. Catherine went about this in a receipts newsletter last week.

Treasury announced that it's going to stop the government's, excuse me, not stop, destroy the government's registry of shell company ownership. This was an anti-corruption database that Treasury was required bylaw to maintain. It actually was signed in the first Trump administration, this database. It was a bipartisan effort. Among the people pushing it were the current Secretary of State, Marco Rubio. They're not just going to stop requiring registry. They're going to destroy all the data that it's collected already. so that no future administration or any local police apartment can use it.

Tom Malinowski, a former Democratic congressman from New Jersey, who was instrumental in getting this past initially, he said this is like Trump ordering the deletion of the FBI's entire fingerprint database. There were some pushback. I saw it to Catherine's article on, you know, kind of the Winnie the Pooh and the Tuxedo, right, to try to be anti-anties to try to come up with that. They're like, well, you know, this was, this database was a little burden. on some small business owners.

It's kind of like, I mean, I could see that it probably was burdensome on small business owners if, say, like, you're a real estate company and you have a million shell companies that you're using to purchase various properties everywhere, and I'm sorry that you have to deal with that. But for, like, most companies was not burdensome

for the bulwark, for example. We're not operating several shell companies. You know, it's like a 15-minute paperwork filing. So I just, I don't really see, Like any reason, well, A, this is illegal and it's passed into law. I don't know why we think the Treasury Department can just veto it without having Congress veto something that was passed by Congress and signed by the president. But in addition to that, I think that any explanation for this that is not centered around corruption leaves me a little wanting. Yeah. And I mean, this is one of these stories, too, where just the raw overarching facts of the open corruption of the administration from top to bottom, I mean, it just, it bleeds. through everything. And it makes it so impossible to even tease out stories like this where,

where I don't know, maybe, maybe if it were a different administration that was doing this, you know, lawfully, if they were actually pushing to overturn the law or something like that, you might be able to put some stock in those sorts of explanations. Again, this is not exactly my area of expertise. I've never drilled down on the second and third order effects of the functioning of this database. But like, you would have to be so blinkered. You would have to stick your head so deep under the sand to look at a story like this, any other light than the overarching light of the open corruption, of the open sympathy, the weird personal sympathy that the president has for people accused of white-collar crime,

where he just goes out there and he pardons them, sort of like, out of the goodness of his heart a lot of the times. This just seems to be so obviously of a piece with all that sort of stuff that maybe you can cobble together these post hoc justifications. Maybe there are some businesses out there that will be grateful that did, you know, really struggle with these compliance costs. But on the other hand, come on. Let's wake up and see what time it is.

Blinkered coverage of Trump policy from National Reviews of the corner, Andrew? I never. I would never make that accusation. All right, as referenced, today, the Treaty of Versailles II, electric boagaloo, was signed how many days ago now? I want every listener in their head

to think about how many days ago they think it was because it's hard to kind of orient yourself in time during the second Trump administration. Okay, do you have your guess? It was 60 days ago. Today is the 60th day, which is when the MOU is set to expire. Important number, yeah.

Yeah, I believe it lasted 60 hours, maybe. But it was supposed to last 60 days. The various elements of the Memorandum of Understanding signed with such great fanfare was the immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts, removal of the naval blockade, completely open and de-mines,

Strait of Hormuz. Aronov's going to get an economic reconstruction fund. There'd be a deal on enrichment and nukes. No, no, no, no, no, nothing. None of it. Yeah, we didn't get any of that, it turns out. It is kind of crazy to look back at, you know, the president's tweets right at that moment. You know, the Strait of Hormuz is now open to all.

Let the oil flow. You know, congratulations to everybody. And like even then, it was a lot of fanfare over what was essentially an agreement to agree on a bunch of things later. And yes, it did blow up on the launch pad very quickly after that. But it is just sort of, I don't know, we've been at this. We've been in this war quite a while now, a long, long, long time. And it just sort of seems to keep on persisting. I was rewatching the video of my guy Adam Mockler serving it to Scott Jennings on CNN.

This was the video for people who are sickos like me and just consuming way too much internet politics slop. You'll remember this at the time that Scott Jennings. said, get your fucking hand out of my face on primetime CNN. It's kind of had a meltdown. And he was defending the war and condescendingly talking to Mockler about how like, oh, you can't handle eight weeks. It's a forever war now because it's been eight weeks. And I was just, there's a deliciousness to watch it now, you know, thinking back to the like Trump fluffers spin when this MOU was happening. And prior to that, J.D. Vance, the vice president,

talking about how only stupid presidents in the past got us into these wars that didn't have any resolution. And like, here we are at the end of the MOU period with a war still on-ish and nothing to show for it. And actually, it's worse than nothing to show for it. And like negative consequences to our troops to consumers here in America, to our alliances. If you ever roll back the tape on the various kind of moments in the early development of this conflict,

just the remarkable level of smugness at every single stage, right at the very beginning when we were going over there when we first launched the war and we were, you know, we had total aerial supremacy and domination. We were blowing up all these military targets. And you had all of the hawks who were like, yeah, you know, we should have done this decades ago. You know, it's like USA, USA. saying, can you believe these sort of naysayers and these wet blankets who are like, oh, gosh, like what, what were at war with Iran all of a sudden? Was, were we talking about this?

Are we sure we've really thought this one through? And then they closed the Strait of Hormuz. And there's all this reporting that they hadn't really thought this through. And again, just the smugness of, do you honestly believe that the United States government didn't contemplate the possibility that Iran would retaliate with the Strait of Hormuz? We've known they would do this if we ever did this for, We've got them right where we want them. And then like the Forever War stuff, again,

like we're just like four, five, six weeks into this war. And the same people are basically like, really? You're out of juice already. You're out of steam already after these amazing victories that we've had. And we've got them on the run. And, you know, what? Are you like some kind of subversive or like, and just over and over and over again.

You get to the memorandum of understanding. And it's the same thing where it's J.D. Vance being like, look, I think we all need to put a little trust in the president right now. President Deals who has landed the plane on this thing. And like again and again and again, I feel like maybe I'm just looking at different sources now. I feel like a little bit of the smugness has leached away the last couple weeks, couple weeks, maybe month or two here as it really has just turned into another one of these boondoggles with no real way out. I feel like maybe they're not leaning into it quite as much.

But I have not seen a lot of, I don't know, I haven't seen a lot of come to Jesus moments about where these people were predicting this conflict was going to be at this point versus the boondoggle that we're in right now. Commentary podcast, guys. They've seen some things that they don't like. I don't know if they've had to come to Jesus, exactly. Come to Yahweh. But, yeah, they, I definitely have seen some, well, this didn't turn out like we'd hoped, guys. I admire that. Good on the commentary people.

I should listen to the commentary podcast. On the other hand, you don't say. But, okay, it's good, it's good. I mean, you know, I'm just saying. If you miss something that was very obvious, get a little less credit from it. But I agree. It's good to acknowledge. Good to acknowledge.

I'm sorry. I was letting bad JVie all get in there for a second. You know, sometimes you have to, I still have Andrew Eggar on. You went to church yesterday. You know, I'm trying to think about my better angels right now. Good for those people. The few who have admitted that this thing was a total disaster from the start. One thing I've been agitating for is for Democrats to really rub the president's nose in it, you know, about how humiliating this is and how.

how much it had been affronted as to the country and to the troops that you got into this stupid-ass war with nothing to show for it. And, you know, the new hotness, the man that everybody seems to be getting a thrill up their leg for lately, John Ossoff, did exactly that at a campaign rally over the weekend. Let's watch a little bit of it. There's something uniquely despicable about lying a night. nation into war. Treating citizens as fools and those who serve as pawns. Abord the USS Abraham Lincoln, they've now been at sea for 240 plus days without a port call. It's a Navy record. And still, and still, and still, they serve with excellence. And still they serve with excellence. While he fruitlessly drains our munitions and oil reserves, the president sleeps.

through his meetings. He golfs and trades stocks. See, he doesn't want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the

Emir of Qatar. Ouch. Thoughts? Where did all this Natalie Harp discourse come from all of a sudden? I thought we had done like the Natalie Harp thing. The regime change book. Years ago. It came from the regime change book.

It was all of the mash notes. I interviewed Maggie about this. When she came in the show, when I asked her, I said that her book did something, which I think is important in reporting. It changed one of my priors. I had previously thought that Donald Trump was now impotent because he was so old.

And I thought that explained, you know, the fact that we haven't had any sex scandals with Donald Trump. His whole life was sex scandals up until now. And now reading the book and reading all the love notes, that Natalie Hart wrote to Trump, certainly with maybe not, maybe not impotence. Yeah, I'm not. Maybe something's happening.

I'm not going to touch that one. I do think there is, you know, things change. Things change. You get a little older. Maybe it's not the physical thing quite so much as it is just liking to be adored by, you know, young attractive women. Who knows? Who knows how it all holds together.

But I, on the awesome. Another thing you don't have expertise on that I brought you to talk about, When you stop wanting to grab women by the pussy against their will, that's something that Andrew doesn't have, you know, it's hard for you to kind of get your head in that brain space. And I appreciate that. So you can move on from that. Never started. Never started. Wouldn't know. Wouldn't know when to stop. But as a strategic question for Asoff, instead of putting it as a question, I'm going to put it as a statement that I want you to react to. This is kind of what Sarah and I are asking for. Like on Friday, we are talking about how we want, and there are different ways to go about this. There's ways to go about getting attention. in the media about Donald Trump's horrors by being extremely outraged about something. There is like there is like actually going to places to advocate passionately, Chris Van Hollen, for example, going to a second meeting with Kilmard-Ra-Rig Garcia. There are ways to do it.

There are also ways to play this game by saying and doing things that point out Donald Trump's offenses that titillate people, that draw attention that might get interest from, you know, people who are not reading the news day to day, but are just kind of scrolling clips on Instagram. They're kind of like, what is this? Trump has a girl named Natalie's flying around with. It's a tactic. I think it's a smart tactic. What do you think? Yeah, yeah. And it's interesting, too, that that was such an applause line, even in the room. Because, like, on the one hand, all the aesthetics of Asaf are, like, sort of recreating the Obama strategy. It's like this soaring oratory in these big rooms and like in theory all of that is geared toward like normies and and

non-political obsessives. But in terms of the content, it's plainly a lot of people who are tracking this stuff online, right? I'm sure there's a lot of like bullwark people in that audience. We're like, oh, the human printer, he went there, you know, that kind of stuff. So it's an interesting combination of things there. I had somebody text me the other day, who is Natalie the human printer? And I was like, you just revealed you haven't been listening to my podcast.

Hey, it's never too late to learn about the human. I know it is never too late. I'm just saying sometimes friends reveal that their engagement with my content isn't as fulsome as they might want me to think. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm grateful to Asoff in one level. I do not know. Just like as a factual matter, I don't know whether this is going to be the sort of message and the sort of strategy and the sort of politician that ends up resonating with Democratic primary voters and just the electorate in 2028. I can see an argument.

I've seen a lot of people make the argument that it reads as a little. little slick. It reads as a little bit overproduced. It's all very somber and solemn. Even the moments that are like a little bit of a joke like he himself plays them very stray, doesn't crack a smile. I can see those sorts of things doing well

and I can also see them bouncing off in our more irony-poisoned age. But I am grateful. I think it's good that we have a guy who's plainly like pushing this strategy as far as it can go. He is owning it. He is a perfect fit for it. He's like a former documentary filmmaker himself.

He is very suitable to this strategy and to this role and to this lane that he's trying to run in. You don't want to end up in a situation where, like, Republicans were in 2024, where it's like, oh, you know, somebody is putting together a perhaps interesting and perhaps plausible alternate narrative to Trumpism. And his name is Ron DeSantis. And he has all these interesting good things going for him. And then it just all falls apart because you are like a bag of oatmeal up on the campaign stage. Right. So it's good. I hope we get a lot of good and interesting.

sort of like successful possible avenues to fight against each other in the 28 primary. Try a bunch of different things. I will say this. One of my other priors has been updated by this is like this is a 2028 speech. I mean, he is running away with his Senate race. And this is not to say that he's taking his eye off the ball on that because he's been doing a similar strategy to this for a while now. And it's obviously working. His opponent is an insane person.

I'll put it in the show notes. I did a single video on Friday. I'm going to do it. I feel like there's just been. so much attention on the Hongs and the El Syedds of the world, the media. And I think that like the media is kind of bored with like crazy Republican story. So nobody even like talks about Mike Collins like tweeting white nationalists and being the nominee for Senate and Georgia.

Like not an not an, not an in a swing state or Andy Biggs being the key in like one of the key men of the insurrection being the governor candidate in Arizona. So I'm doing a little series on them. You could go live, do a deep dive under Mike Collins. But I, to me, this. sort of stuff is demonstrating, is modeling, like, what a 2028 campaign could look like. And like you said, whether that is the one that works or that resonates, who knows. But like, it's hard to think about with the value of bringing up Natalie Harp in the Georgia Senate race context.

Right. Like, it is good for narrative domination, attention gathering. I wish that there were 20 Democrats doing this kind of thing, trying doing it in different ways, going about it in ways that are authentic to them, because I think that that is important for breaking through. But it feels very 28 to me. Yeah, and look, I've covered a lot of Senate campaigns.

This is just not the typical sort of aesthetics that people reach for when they're running for Senate. It's just small. It's a smaller ball sort of thing. You want it to seem more kind of personal. You want it to seem more like you're in the room, like you're standing on the ground, maybe at a podium with a bunch of people in church.

chairs or something like that. I mean, this is, this is a specific aesthetic that they have been chasing. They've been chasing it for months. You know, he keeps doing events like this. They have a constant drip feed of Asoff, you know, like the Chia Roscaro lighting and he's up there on stage and the cameras,

the different camera angles are cutting between the shots. The hero's shot. It's always on Friday nights. The campaign events are always on Friday nights. So it's like we can like share the videos over the weekend, talk about it on Monday. Like here it is, you know, extend the narrative. Every word out of the office is, I don't know what you people are talking about.

I'm running for Senate. It's all I want to do. And it just seems kind of like a lie, which is fine. But yes, I'm with you. It really seems like they have their eye a lot bigger than that. All right, you guys know, we love Ridge around this podcast and make amazing power banks, wallets, luggage, and premium everyday gear. The power banks have been a lifesaver for me.

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ever, a Lamborghini of Lossar after a Ford Bronco or 100 grand in cash. No purchase necessary to enter. But every dollar you spend, get you more entries. That's Ridge.com and use The Bullwork after you purchase. purchase. They will ask you where you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them we sent you. Just a small little note from me. I'm out of the PR game. I've been out of it for a while, but something that I've been on for a while that I was teaching younger PR people. And so if you are a PR person that enjoys this podcast in between the terrible PowerPoint presentations and

ungodly Zoom meetings that you've got to go through, let me give you this piece of advice. The Friday news dump is so wrong. Now it is opposite. And John Osse, I'll get that. You want things to come out on Friday night and the new media environment because then, you know, those of us who are going to put down our phone on the weekends, talk about it and share the stuff over the weekends, then the Monday news shows have to talk about it in the morning. They're good. Tactically, he knows what he's doing. And just one last thing.

It's a clean hit. I mean, like, I saw, like, Peter Meyer was out there like, I'm tired of this innuendo campaign, former kind of a congressman from Michigan and Republican guy. on CNN a bunch. And you see some of this kind of like pearl clutching from the right. But it's kind of like,

Trump is focused on golf in the ballroom. And it is weird that he has a human printer around that writes him notes. And it is weird that when his plane that was a gift from the Emir

from Qatar, you know, could not defend itself. He had to be taken out a catering truck to a different plane. And the people in the truck with him were the human printer

and the golf caddy. Like, that's strange that all that has happening while people are jumping off the USS Lincoln. Yeah, yeah. I did not think that the story of the catering truck could get any funnier with like Donald Trump back there, you know, just sort of like with the chafing dishes. But the presence of Natalie Harp and Dan Scabino chaperone really, really does kick it up to

a new level. I'm glad we're getting these sorts of details, you know. There's a lot of narrative meat left on the bone of Trump 2.0. I agree. There are a couple times done campaigns. I feel like I talk about the ones that are going very well. like Ossoff, and we talk about the ones we have concerns about. There's this kind of donut hole, middle campaign,

or that it's an important campaign, but they're doing good enough that I don't talk about it. And I feel like it's on me because things like the Ohio Senate race, the Ohio Senate race is absolutely critical. The Democrats are going to take back the Senate. I've been talking about Sherrod Brown very little, because he's just knows of the grindstone, running a more typical Senate campaign like you referenced.

earlier, you know, more localized campaign. But he's winning in a state that Trump won three times right now, if you look at the polls. And there's an interesting ad he put out this weekend going after his opponent, John Houston, over tariffs. I've been doing this 25 years, and it has never been this hard. So many of these things are out of my control. And they're at the whim of some bad political decisions. John Houston has voted 13 times for the war in Iran, and it's had a direct effect on farmers. Diesel fuel has doubled since last spring. fertilizer triple. And John Hustead supports the tariffs, which have driven the prices down which we can sell our crops. At a certain point, it's not just politics anymore. When you start

taking money out of my pocket, it becomes personal. I'm Sherrod Brown and I approve this message. And it was particularly interesting because Sherrod Brown has been kind of on the pro-tariff protectionist side of the Democratic Party in his career back when he was in the Senate. And I thought that, A, it was a savvy strategic move to just go for it, right? I do like that kind of politics. And B, could there be a better encapsulation of, like, how disastrous the Trump tariff policy is, that even, like, the pro-tariff Democrats, you know, from the past, like the anti-free trade or the protections, whatever you want to call them, like, did they feel like one of their opening ads is talking about how disastrous the tariffs have been?

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And it did take them a little while to get there, right? like all last year, it kind of felt like, or at least maybe not all last year. In the early part of last year when the tariffs were going on and like it was just insane and the bond market was going crazy and it was like, is the United States going to have to economically decouple from China? Who knows?

Probably doesn't seem like it should, but that's the policy on paper right now, at least as of this moment. Like all through that, like Democrats were a little slow to go after the tariff stuff in part because of this, because they have liked protectionist policies for at, at, at, at, at, some level for a long time. And none more so than, you know, guys like Sherrod Brown in sort of post-industrial Rust Belt, Ohio, who want to see some sort of resurgence of domestic manufacturing, who have a gigantic part of their political brand being, you know, the dignity of work, the dignity of blue-collar work, wanting to create a world where people can work with their hands and provide for their families. And now we've had, you know, 18 months of Trump tariffopia. And it's

Just even these guys now see it as a clean hit because it has just not succeeded on its own terms in any of these ways. I mean, it's been unbelievably chaotic in its rollout. It's been they have slammed new tariffs on and pulled old tariffs off voluntarily. That's been a large part of the strategy. But then also, you know, some of that's happened to them because they have gone way overboard with trying to squeeze too many tariffs onto tariff authorities that don't support them. And so the Supreme Court yanked a bunch of the tariffs. and they've had to try to slap new ones on. They've had to refund a bunch of collected revenues back to the companies.

And like it just all has not added up to anything. There's nothing to show for it, nothing to show for it at all. And really, they have just turned the page to different economic matters by now. But, I mean, manufacturing has not been coming back, like to the extent that anybody wanted it to. It's interesting that this ad was not about manufacturing tariffs. It was about the impact on farmers who have been, you know, perhaps worse than anybody by all these tariffs. So it's a giant mess and it's a clean hit. The lack of resurgence of Rust Belt jobs and manufacturing jobs is also like the key data point at point of the failure.

Like there's no progress on the horizon. Like all the only growth in manufacturing jobs are data center jobs that have nothing to do with the tariffs. Have you heard Trump talk about this where he will he will like explicitly make this point where he's like, oh, you know, we've seen, you know, construction and manufacturing come back. Like we've never seen when you look at factories and also. So, Tatea, Cinerce. He connects them on the trail. Yeah, very different thing. You offered a little light media criticism this morning.

This is the Eger Mad and Right section of the podcast. Because our friends over Politico had this headline, Taco No More, how Trump won on tariffs. You laid out, I think, the weakness of the argument of the idea that Trump could have won on tariffs there, just by highlighting all the failures and the fact that even shared Brown his campaign against, against it. Like the media, you know, the meta-criticism of this is just like the degree to which Trump gets curve-graded. The fact that like this is continuing 10 years in, or maybe even worse, it might even be getting worse than it's ever been, the curve-grading. Yeah, I just,

I just kind of thought we were all collectively past being sort of wowed by this gimmick that Trump does, where he proposes something that is ultra-insane, like so insane that no human being has ever contemplated it before. Like, you know, 40 to 80 to 110% tariffs on like 60 different nations all at once last April, including China, you know, massive new tariffs on China. And like everybody freaks out because that would be insane.

And then he says, well, you know, I've decided to pull back, you know, the six worst, most damaging, most insane parts of this. And everybody sort of breathes a sigh of relief and all his boosters are like, art of the deal, you know, he got you again. But like he didn't do anything. He didn't actually get a win. There's been nothing from all of this. Yeah, it's worse than baseline. Yeah, it's worse than baseline. And the entire framing of this article is that Trump won on tariffs by not crashing global economy with tariffs as some people expected that he would. And that now when he, you know,

continues this, you know, 10%ish on most countries, higher some places than others, tariff regime, regime and the markets sort of tolerate it, that that is like a big victory. But it's not a big victory unless you're actually getting something from those tariffs. Like you're sacrificing a certain number of jobs. You're sacrificing a certain amount of economic growth. Like what's the payoff? The payoff can't just be, didn't crash the economy again today. But like that's the frame of the article. And I just kind of couldn't believe it. It's the way people get slave to narrative on all this. And Trump and his boosters play into this excellently and like far too many people just go along with it where it's like, well, you know, the doomsdayers wrong again.

You know, like think about all those people with their hair on fire, the people with the Trump derangement syndrome that said that this was going to crash the economy. Well, the stock market's up, so you got to hand it to him. Got to give it to Trump. It's like, well, like, but no, he was the one with agency. He was the one that instituted the policy and said that it was going to bring about a golden age, and it made things worse on balance. Yeah, yeah.

The stock market is way up, by the way, off of the back of, a gigantic AI build-out, which may or may not pan out, first of all, like, that could end up popping still. I think that the odds of that have come down a lot because these technologies just truly are astounding and do actually have a lot of applications. So I think that they will create a lot of value. But in terms of the present leverage of the market, we could have a bubble pop still on AI. But the other amazing thing about that is that the AI sector, far in a way more than any other part of the economy, has been exempted from the president's tariff regulations. I mean, we have brought hundreds of billions of dollars of chips into the country.

The kind of exact stuff that, you know, these tariff policies are supposed to help us encourage people to build here. That's the whole point of them is like that you would put tariffs on these gigantic industries in order to force these companies to build these things in the United States of America. And instead, you know, we have been allowing the economy to pop off of free trade when it comes to GPUs and other chips that these data centers need to function. And that it's just so weird, like that we, well, you know, the tariffs must not be doing too much damage because look at that stock market.

Well, the stock market is going bananas off of the one part of this that is least affected by the tariffs. So it's just, I mean, it's just all so stupid. The tariff damage offset by the corruption growth. Right. Yeah. Like, that's the working part. The working part of the tariffs is the corrupt part where Trump gives a carve out to the richest

people at the country who supported his campaign and are paying for the ballroom. Part of it, we're paying for a lot of it and have sucked up to him gratuitously. So there you go. You've heard me talk about our friends at Seoul because I love those out-of-office THC sparkling beverages. But if you haven't given Soul a try, I'd say maybe check out their new mood gummies. Seoul's a wellness brand that makes delicious hemp-derived CBD and THC products to make feeling good simple.

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Right now, Soul is offering my audience 30% off your entire order. Go to getsole.com and use the code the bulwark for 30% off. You've covered this a lot. So some people, I'm sure, have seen this elsewhere. But for the bulwark pod listeners only, I just want you to do a two-minute hate on the topic of there's a story going out in right-wing media about how in the Fauci diaries, he had said that he was keeping an eye on whether the jab had any impact on miscarriages. And this story just totally just explodes in right-wing media,

Republican senators pushing it. Megan McCain, I saw, for one example, sent a tweet about how she was blaming her miscarriage on this jab based on this one story. I mean, this was everywhere. Joe Rogan says he personally knew five women who miscarried after getting the shot, yeah. Yeah. So you were hot on the collar on this. And so why don't you just give us a two-minute rant? Man, this is crazy. This is like a greatest hits of like all of the stories that have spiked my blood pressure in the last like 72, 96 hours. I hope I make it to our editorial call this morning. Yeah, I mean, it's, it's bogus, right? It's made up. It's invented. It is, it, what they did was these guys have have had a bone to pick with Fauci forever. you know, it kind of seemed for a while like he was pretty low down the target list,

but, you know, you work through all the other ones. And eventually it's Rand Paul and Ron Johnson's turn to put some, you know, resistance figure in the barrel to take pot shots at. They've been, they released his diary a few weeks ago. They all kind of pointed and laughed at him about how he was glad he was on shows. This is a bigger thing even than that. They released some of his text messages. They grabbed one text message from January 2021, where he, you know, before the vaccines had really

been rolled out at all, and before there was a lot of data on how pregnant women would respond. He raised the hypothetical possibility of a theoretical pathway that if these vaccines are giving high fevers and creating cytokine storms after you take them, that could, in theory, be linked to miscarriage. So it's a thing they need to watch out for in the data is essentially what he was saying. This gets immediately blown up and distorted, taken out of all proportion, and turned into a claim that Anthony Fauci knew that the vaccines were causing and would cause miscarriages, that he covered that fact up and that then he had a bunch of pregnant women get it, you know, without knowing the risks.

And it's just a complete lie and exaggeration of what was actually happening on the ground. It gets coupled with a piece of bunk science that came out later, which Paul and Johnson also turfed up, that they claimed that the vaccine would go on to cause a miscarriage rate. of more than 80% in women who got it in the first trimester, which is completely incorrect. It just never happened. Millions and millions and millions of these women got the vaccine under these circumstances. It was never linked to miscarriage because it just never resulted in that.

And also, the CDC was not recommending that pregnant women get the shot at first for exactly these reasons, because they didn't know yet, they didn't have a full picture of the risk profile. So they didn't recommend it. They waited for some to go out and get it. They surveilled them. They waited for some more to go out and get it. They surveilled them. they got a better and better picture of what the miscarriage risk and other side effects risk was,

which, thank God, was extraordinarily low. The vaccines worked. It was great. We all went back to normal. Like, we landed the plane. We landed the pandemic plane. And five years down the road, we've just hallucinated and constructed from lies and misunderstandings, a complete revisionist narrative that slanders people, slanders Anthony Fauci,

on ridiculous grounds, blames him for a holocaust of, you know, first trimester babies that never happened. You can see in the day that there was no surge in miscarriages that was ever linked to the COVID vaccine or that happened at all during this time. There was not even like some unexplained surge in miscarriages at this time. So it's just, yeah, it's just a remarkable testament to the power of the right-wing infotainment machine to just gin up anything on anything about anybody and sort of throw it out there as chum for for the piggies. And it was, it was really appalling to see.

We're snapping now. Snaps for Andrew Edgar. You did another tweet I liked. We're moving forward. That was good. That was all I wanted to. I went on a Twitter bender like I haven't in years. The day all this went down.

I was like, I was like reading tweets and getting mad about them and tweeting myself like deep into the night, which is like, you know, I associate that behavior with like 26 year old me. I love that. Yeah, no.

Rage tweeting from bed. You know, it's a concerning sign. And something I try to reflect upon when I do it. Notice I'm not saying I've stopped doing it. But I try to use it as a sign that maybe I should, you know, read a book. The other tweet you said that was good, well, we're just complimenting you. It just piqued my interest. I was like, you're going to have them on the pod.

And I want to hear Andrew tell the story. I wanted more. It left me wanting. There's this discourse, you know, about whether, you know, there's some people on the right who were saying there's no actual equivalent to woke on the right one. AOC said woke one was crazy. There's no equivalent to this of something that, you know, where the right got all wrapped up in something that caused harms.

This is obviously absurd. The entire Trump cult is something like that would fit the bill there times a million. And God willing, sometime in the future, there'll be a Republican who is in Congress right now, who is on a Sunday show that says Trump too was crazy. And hopefully that happens. happens in the future. But anyway, you pointed out that, you know, the delusions around the, you know, 2020 election fraud did actually have tangible consequences for people, some people

who got wrapped up in them. And you wrote this. I have vivid memories of talking to women whose husband's boyfriends had told them in early January 2021. They'd be back in a couple days, ended up going and storming the Capitol and then got themselves multi-year sentences. I just wanted to hear more about that. Yeah, I can tell this. Yeah, this was in, in Iowa. And can't remember at what point in the primary it was, but it was, you know, pre-Iowa caucuses in summer of 2023, I would guess, maybe fall of 2023. And I went to a, what was supposed to be a Trump rally in Des Moines, which ended up getting rained out. And I don't remember exactly with thunderstorms in the area or whatever, but, but it was canceled at the very last minute.

So I was there and there were a whole bunch of people just kind of milling around who had intended to go there. And I was just talking to a bunch of them because I had to write some story. And I just happened to start talking to this group. of women who were, it turned out, were all there and had kind of found one another over this insane shared experience of their spouses or boyfriends, their husbands and boyfriends, having been J-6ers. And I just talked to them about the very strange, surreal, lived experience of these people who were not necessarily that political themselves, probably pretty conservative in sort of an unconsidered way, but were not like obsessives or chunkies and just the way that their people

had, this is not really the way they put it because they were still more sympathetic, but had really just fallen into an internet rabbit hole on this stuff and felt like they were, you know, had this calling to go out east and help Trump, you know, expose the fraud and save the country. And then had gotten pulled into the mob. I mean, these were not like proud, proud boys. These were not like people who went out there intending to do harm at first, but who did end up doing harm. I mean, they had them on real charges, real charges of doing damage and violence. You know, they could prove in court and that they did prove in court.

And these guys are serving long prison sentences. Well, we're serving. Yeah, we're at that time serving. And that was why they were there. You know, they were like, you know, Trump gives us some hope that if he gets back in there, he may let our guys back out, which, you know, I guess good for these women. That is what ended up happening. I would have maybe moved on if I was them. I don't know.

I know you're in there as a reporter role, but I think that, you know, there might have been a goodwill hunting situation here. You might have wanted to do the Robin Williams and hugged them and be like, it's okay. There are other men in the sea, you know. It was a very strange interaction. I mean, because they had become more militant right winger's themselves.

After. Maybe, understandably, where, like, first of all, they're like, hey, we feel like our guys kind of got a raw shake for this. they were just caught up in the moment, you know, that kind of stuff. And then also, you know, anytime they themselves had tried to like poke their heads up online or anything like that, they had been demonized as sort of the, you know, the spouses of these January sixers. And so you could, you could sort of see their own sort of unfortunate path to a certain

unusual kind of radicalization. I mean, I don't know. There's just so many different kinds of broken people in the Trump coalition. I'm sure they had that same empathy for the people to get caught up in the moment at the Kenosha riots, et cetera. I'm sure that they had the same, the same empathy applied. This I'm always like,

some of the left sometimes get mad. The prime example of this was Rob Portman when he comes out for gay marriage after his son comes out and, you know, you see on the left, I think a valid point is made that's like, why do the Republicans always only find empathy for these people when it affects their personal lives?

My response that was kind of like, well, at least he found the empathy for other people. I don't know. Like, that's good. Yeah, you can do worse. It turns out. It turns out you could do worse than unevenly applied empathy, and it's being a total sociopath to everybody all the time. That's good.

Oh, no. No, evenly implied empathy. Once you experience it, then projecting that out, that's better than you experiencing it and only having empathy for the person that you knew. I was getting screwed over, but not everybody else. Or sociopathie. You know, it's a sliding scale. They are back in the lineup. It's that game-changing product I've been telling you about.

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Unfortunately, I guess if you call this a news item, some people only get their news from this show. So when things happen, it's like, I guess I should just tell them that this happens. Donald Trump sent a tweet about how much he loves Kim Jong-un. We're having military exercises in South Korea today. They're ongoing, I think, as we're taping right now. And Trump said this, I am not happy with the fact that the United States has long ago agreed to participate in these joint military exercises with South Korea. They send a sign that is totally inappropriate and hostile to a country that, as long as Donald J. Trump is the president, has been unthreatening and respectful. So South Korea

inappropriate and hostile North Korea Unthreatening and respectful Therefore and based on the fact that it's too late to cancel I instructed Pete Heggseth to substantially reduce the exercises And then he goes well somewhat unrelated question mark I recently asked the resident of South Korea

If they could join us in the denuclearization of the Islamic Republic Iran and they said no thanks So I guess we're going to punish South Korea Because they're not getting involved in the stupid war That we started without informing them that is causing real economic damage to their people, and instead we're going to cozy up to the dictator running a prison state. I think that, I mean, there's a lot that you could unpack in this statement.

I think my personal favorite bit about it is that it's too late to cancel. It's like, this has been in the works for who knows how long, but the president is only just getting around to being like, oh, wait, let's not do that one. And it's like, actually, it's a little late for that. And so, well, I don't know, make it smaller. I've been busy. It's like if your kid gets a report card that's really bad on a Friday, but you had a birthday party plan for them on Saturday.

And it's like, you're in trouble, mister, but it's too late to cancel. Yeah, but he could have before. I mean, like, once he's been his summer doing, right? I mean, he's been working on the reflecting pool and putting his name back on the Kennedy Center and like all this stuff. And it's like he didn't get around ever telling Pete Hegseth, hey, cool it with those South Korea, you know, military exercises. But now that they're happening, he can't.

can't just be like, well, you know, we'll get him next time next year. We won't do it. He has to make a big weird diplomatic incident out of it. So, so that's not good, actually. I don't know why I'm laughing. Yeah, well, no. I mean, part of the rationale here is I don't know, you know, he needs, he's in the market for some friends and some wins in the foreign policy space. And there's a moment where he's talking about all the wars he ended. And now it's like, well, the Russia-U-Krain war is spiraling out of control, the Iran war. We've got sailors that are like jumping off ships. And we like to have no plan. MOU expired. and we've achieved nothing. And so, I don't know, maybe De Ta-Ton with North Korea can, maybe him and Kim Jong-un can, he can invite him over to the new ballroom. Maybe Kim Jong-un can be the one to christen the new ballroom. That's something to look forward to. Did you see that he threatened to bomb Oman today or yesterday?

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's like, okay. So, I mean, he's been threatening to and Iran over and over. The day I came back from vacation, the big news of that weekend was that Trump was like, I'm giving you one more chance before I really, we did the big one, bigger than anything, since World War II. And here we are today.

And it's like, well, maybe not. Maybe not bigger than anything since World War II in Iran. But maybe we might just, you know, throw a little bomb in Oman. And that might happen. Yemen, the Houthis. An ever-expanding war. What would be another word for that? Kind of an ever-expanding war in the Middle East that you don't know how to stop.

If it goes on long enough, it becomes a forever war. It's like a baby forever war right now, right? Pre-pubescent Forever War. Your bad take, which I need to share because some people are mad at me who are listeners and this and you will give them the comfort food that they're looking for. There is this geographic engagement bait that goes around that just all of us are susceptible to. We're all weak. I love maps. We're map people.

I don't know. And I'm weak. I know it's engagement bait, but I can't help myself. And it's like, you know, they'll divide up a country. you'll see this online and it's like, you know, there'll be a pie or various circles. And you'll say, where would you want to stay if you had to stay there the rest of your life? Okay, here's one of them. There are what it looks like, nine circles in America.

And you have to stay within one of the circles for the rest of your life. One of the circles in New England. The other one's the Mid-Atlantic, New York City. There's the Confederacy, the Southeast, my people. You get New Orleans. You get Charleston. Florida. There's Texas and Mexico.

There is Arizona, California, Alaska, and Hawaii weirdly. You've got Washington, Oregon, and Northern California. That's an appealing one. You've got the Plains States with Denver in there. At least you get Denver. You get the mountains. You get the weird one, which is E in the middle, which is just like Jefferson City and Little Rock. Branson.

Branson. If you really love Branson. And then there is F. Minnesota, Wisconsin, Eastern Iowa, Illinois, Indiana. this was chosen by Andrew Eager as the easiest choice of your life on social media. Last week I made fun of Minnesota, said that there's no good places to vacation in Minnesota. We had at least one person unsubscribe over that show. I'm just having fun, people, okay?

You know, it's not for me. Different things are for different people. Vacationing of Minnesota. Not for me. Some people like it. That's good. That's part of the beautiful society. That's sort of the bounty that God's given us.

I'm a pluralist society in America. People like to do different things. You know, if everybody liked to do the same thing, to be a very boring country, even still, of all of the places to be stuck in America for the rest of your life, Dubuque, Minneapolis, Wisconsin, and Michigan, I think was a poor choice.

Defend yourself. I don't know if you ever spent any time at the Great Lakes. The Great Lakes are perhaps America's most underrated region for a billion different reasons. I could take the easy way out and tell you that this is a very easy circle for me personally because it happens to loop in basically my entire extended family, St. Louis, just barely makes it into F, eastern Iowa, southern Iowa, all in circle F. I didn't even see that Minnesota was in there. I'm sure Minnesota's fine, you know, that little toe of Minnesota this there. I'd head there. But the crown jewel here

is Michigan. It's the Great Lakes. It's Northern Ohio. I don't actually want more people to start vacationing at the Great Lakes because that would, you know, make it a little bit more crowded and a little bit less pastoral and idyllic, but people sleep on that region inappropriately, in my view. Okay. Well, obviously, the only possible answers are B, D, and G, which goes across the South, your desire for winter, and you're going to be stuck there. Where are you going to be? Where are you going to be in February?

Write it out in St. Louis? You're going to be going to write it out in St. Louis? I've spent February. I've spent February in St. Louis. It's fucking sucks. It's different for you. You're from, I mean, like, where... I grew up in San Luis.

I grew up in Denver. Yeah, but you have self-selected. You have self-selected for the South. You're just a different kind of person. It's a big country, a lot of different climates, a lot of different regions. Everybody can win. You know, we're not all crowding into one circle. That's not the point of this exercise.

Thank God. That's true. There will be some people who have decided to go to the Great Lakes. You're going to ride it out in the Great Lakes. That's Andrew Eager. I appreciate you. Wonderful job substring for Bill Crystal. I have a little rant that I need to deal with at the end with just me.

So I'm going to let you go. The rest of the listeners can stick around with me for a few more minutes. And we'll be talking to you soon, all right, buddy. Thanks, Tim. Always fun. Back to school season means doing a lot more laundry. When it comes to the scent of your laundry, it shouldn't smell like the same thing you use to disinfect your bathroom. Amen to that.

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tell them we sent you. It's time to make Laundry Day the best day of the week. All right, I want to do a little primary talk. I just want to respond to some listener feedback I got that was totally legit before I do the Democratic primary talk. And that was when I came back from vacation, I gave this big monologue at the start that was like, can we keep our eye on the fucking ball people? I was so annoyed with the politicians, the commentators, even some of you lovely commenters who are so focused on the fight between the moderates and the DSA and the Democratic Party that they've lost sight of what's happening in the broader war and the real threat

that we have in front of us. And so I offered that critique of those factionalists. And then over the ensuing couple of weeks, I've engaged in that and critiqued Democrats and complimented Democrats who are on various sides of that depending on the situation. And I've had some feedback that's like, Tim, I thought you said we need to keep our eye on the ball and we shouldn't be, you know, criticizing Democrats. And I think that I thought that was fair feedback. And I just want to be a little bit more specific about what I meant and what I'm trying to do on this show. my critiques of people who have decided that their foe within our coalition is the proximate foe they should be focused on. Like if you are a politician or a commentator and you are spending 75 plus percent of your time attacking other people within the tent,

or in the case of third way, spending $15 million going after somebody else within the tent, and like that is your main focus, I reject that. I think that that is a really stupid focus, and I do think that you've lost sight on the true film. I think simultaneously to that, we all want to win. I don't think like putting your head in the dirt and saying, oh, everything the Democrats do is great. I don't think that helps either in the mission of trying to figure out how to counter this authoritarian movement. Like sometimes people on our side screw up. Like, obviously the prime example of this was Biden.

And I think that there was a lot of people within the pro-Biden kind of group that were telling those like Bill Crystal and James Carville and others who were saying he's too old, he shouldn't run again. They're like, shut up. And that wasn't helpful, right? So, you know, like there's balance in all things. Right. It's one of my favorite things. Right. It's like, okay, I think we should keep our eye on the ball, keep the focus.

I think I'm doing that on this show. I always take feedback if you guys think I'm falling down on that. And in addition to that, like, we have to also, like, look inside. the tent and see where we're making mistakes and try to improve and try to be strategic and try to be smart about how to move forward. And in my view, I try to make suggestions based on strategy that are not always in line with what my priors are on policies. Like, my policy views are not the most popular things. Like, I think if a Democratic Senate candidate was taking my views in some of these states, they would probably lose. That's why I'm not running for Senate in Louisiana. There's a lot of

reasons, but like, I wouldn't win. So I think, I think that just, it's important to kind of be strategic assess, you know, ways that the pro-democracy movement can approve broadly. And to talk about that. And like, that's the other ethos of the show, which is like radical candor, right? Which is like, we know who the bad guys are, but I'm also going to be candid about what's happening. And trying to strike that balance, not always going to nail it 100. And I appreciate feedback on it any time. Here's one strategic example I want to talk about. And it is a primary happening tomorrow in Florida, Jared Moskowitz, sin and congressman. It's up for re-election, but he's had to move to a new district.

And there's a DSA challenger who is primaring him. And I think that this primary is very unstrategic and misguided. And I've seen a lot of people on the left, like really promoting this primary against Jared Moskowitz and really smearing him and, you know, spending a lot of effort on this. And I think that, you know, frankly, if it's successful, it will probably cost the Democrats a seat. And let me tell you why. So I just want to back this up. if you are a single issue anti-Israel voter,

you're going to be going for Oliver Lark and the DSA candidate against Jared Moskowitz. And that's fine. And you can probably just move on from this and we'll see you on tomorrow's show. Like, I don't actually agree with Jared Moskowitz

on his Israel position. I've expressed my dissatisfaction with some of his comments on the Iran war, both publicly and privately. And so I disagree with him on that. And I think that because of my disagreement with him on that, I think that is a big part of why I want to explain to people, like, why I think that it's important that he win tomorrow because he is running in a district that Trump won by 9.5%.

Jared was gerrymandered out of his seat by Ron DeSantis. Someone on the left like to smear him as like a pro-Dissantus guy or whatever because DeSantis had hired him to do emergency management in the state. And he did a good job at it. And that's an important job in states in the Gulf South. So to me, that's a qualification, not a demerit. But Ron DeSantis, gerrymandered him out. He could have stayed in a more blue seat. His seat was like D plus two, I believe, previously in South Florida.

But instead, you know, he did not do a primary with another Democratic member. He went to a new district that, you know, had a bunch of people that, hey, he had not represented before that was a, you know, a Mar-a-Lago district, basically. It's Trump plus nine and a half. It's going to be a tough district to win. with anybody. Okay. It's going to be a really challenging district. And Jared Moskowitz was a team player changing to go into this district, this harder district, because he thought as a moderate, he could win it. And his DSA opponent followed him to this district. And I got to tell you,

it just makes no sense to me. There are two other Democratic congresspeople, Lois Frankl and DWS, who are also pro-Israel, who are in Democratic districts. The Democrats are going to win no matter what. And so if you wanted to pick somebody to fight and you want to be strategic about it and you're on the left and or you're part of the whatever uncommitted movement or whatever is unhappy about how pro-Israel the Democratic Party is, like those are two options that are kind of clean, right, where they could have primaried them and the DSA candidate won. They would have likely won. And there are other examples of this. Like I didn't really engage in the show, even though I'm from Denver that much on that Denver congressional. district that Milot Quiroz won against Diana DeGette. It's like it's a it's a democratic seat. Diana DeKette's been there forever. I understand why younger people in Denver might want a congressperson that more represents their views.

I think that well that's actually been pretty thoughtful on a lot of stuff. Again, we're not going to agree on everything issue-wise, but like I think that people might underrate her and she ends up winning that seat against Diana to get. And like that's a no harm, no foul. I think that that's interesting that the people of Denver will now have. have, you know, candidates more on the left and, like, we'll see how that shakes out. If she ends up being a bad rep, somebody can primary her from the center. That's how democracy works. This, like, is not that.

Like, this is a kamikaze primary. This is an effort to take out Jared Moskowitz because people don't like his position on Israel and they would be happy to have a Republican in the seat instead. Because the influencer that's running against him is, like, not going to win that seat. I can seat the Trump won by 10 points with a lot of Jewish people in the district. Like, let's just be real.

Jared Moskowitz could win that seat. It's going to be tough on him. Like I said, he took one for the team to run there. And by the way, if you just go outside of the issue of Israel, Jared Moskowitz brings a lot to the table for Democrats in the one hand. And he's not as anti-left as some of the left people want him to think. I mean, he was on the Medicare for All bill. Jared Moskowitz was on the Medicare for All bell.

Primalognege for All PAC endorsed him. when he first ran. And he's still for it, still for Medicare for all. And then in addition to that, if you go to the hearings, Jared Moskowitz has been doing exactly what we want Democrats to do. He's not like, you know, a John Larson or Diana to get these kind of older Democrats who aren't like up for the moment for what is needed in, you know, pushing back on the right. From a messaging standpoint, Jared's been awesome on this. I picked up just a few of my favorites of the highlight reels of him in congressional hearings. and doing media, and I just want to play that for you really quick.

Well, obviously, Janine Piro is hitting the box wine again. You've called Corey Lewandowski a special government employee. I understand what government means. I understand what employee means. Okay, but I don't know what makes him special. You attack conservative women, and you say that we're either stupid or we're sluts. We keep referring to Christine Nome's dog as a dog, but actually it was a puppy. It was 14 months old.

And so, and that puppy had a name. Say its name. Cricket. Okay, that puppy had a name. Trump's name appears more times in the Epstein files than God's name appears in the book about God. Okay, by the way, this is the Trump Bible. Move over King James.

Now that the national divorce is happening with Elon Musk, and I'm a child of divorce, okay? I mean, who's going to get big balls? I'm worried about him in the divorce. The children always get caught in the middle. I appreciate the kind words the chairman said about me on Newsmax the other day, calling me the core jester. So thank you, my liege. Madam Return General, I have like 25 seconds left.

So because I'm curious, and I'd like to see, flip to the Jared Moskowitz section of the binder. I'm interested to see what staff provided on the appo on me. And because we're in the Olympics, I'm going to give it a grade. I just want to see how good it is. So give me your best one. So there it is. I mean, he went to war with James Comer over the fake Biden impeachment nonsense. He went to war with Christyneum was probably the best Democratic congressman in taking

on Christy Noem and her excesses at DHS. He was the point person for trying to strip the $700 million that was going to ice bonuses out of the budget. You went after Pam Bondi, Judge Janine, as I just played. Like, this legit dude, he's been fighting. and he's going to have to fight to win a really tough district in Florida. That election is tomorrow. And if we got listeners in South Florida who happen to be in that district,

my argument is from a strategic perspective and for perspective, hey, supporting somebody who's been a team player and who's been legit in doing his job in Congress, I like Jared Moskowitz in that race. That's my opinion. All right. I appreciate everybody very much. Thanks for checking in. Thanks to Andrew Eger for sub in.

Wasn't he great? We'll be back tomorrow with another edition. the show. We'll see you all then.