The Bulwark Podcast - John Heilemann: Did Trump Make an Ominous Shift on Iran?

Episode Date: April 29, 2026

At home, POTUS shows how much he wants to be like an Arab despot, plastering his mug all over the place and deploying the Justice Department to fatuously claim that Comey’s use of seashell art can rise to a crime. But on Iran, he seems to have backed off his promise of a short war, and he’s making pretty wimpy threats against the regime. Plus, Disney’s new CEO is standing by Kimmel, Barney Frank has a warning for Democrats, and recent polling data is not backing up the Dems’ midterms bullishness—even if voter sentiment is very bad for Trump and the Republicans.John Heilemann joins Tim Miller.show notes Subscribe to The Bulwark's YouTube John's "Impolitic" podcast Tim’s livestream Wednesday at 8pm ET on Substack or YouTube Tickets for our Bulwark Live shows in San Diego on 5/20 and in LA on 5/21: TheBulwark.com/Events

Hey, everybody. A couple housekeeping notes as well as a news note. As I was taping with John Heilman, the Supreme Court came back with a decision on the Voting Rights Act that was bad, but also a little narrow than we expected. It's weakening a key provision that is going to eliminate at least a seat here in Louisiana that was for a majority minority district, which would obviously end up yielding a Republican white man instead, almost certainly. So we'll have much more on the implications of the Voting Rights Act ruling A on the Bork YouTube page today if you're antsy. So check that out or else later this week on the pod. I am back to streaming tonight. So come hang out about 8 o'clock in the east. YouTube substack wherever you find are streaming. I'll take your Q&A.

I want to do more Q&A today. So holler at me. Come out with me some fun stuff. Just one more reminder about our live shows in San Diego and L.A. It's downtown San Diego, May 20th, downtown L.A., May 21st, working on some fun guests. We'll love to see you out there, make a little trip out of it. Jet fuel prices are going to be going up this summer. So May is a good time to go on vacation.

All right. Stick around for kind of a good show, long show, with one of my faves, John Howland. Hello and welcome to the Bullwark Podcast. I'm your host Tim Miller. Delighted to welcome back to the show, Chief Political Columnist at Puck. host of its impolitic podcast. He's an analyst at MS Now. He's co-host of Hacks on Tap.

He's doing a lot of content. We used to be together on a little show called The Circus. And you just missed a very lively green room discussion of Uncle Barry Finn. It's John Heilman. What's up? Hey, man. How are you? I was really pleased to see for a variety of reasons because I'm always worried about the safety of my dear friends.

I was glad to see for that reason and for the other more underlying reason that you were nowhere near the way of correspondence dinner. Nowhere near. Were you not there? You were not at the Puck brunch? I was reading John Kelly's just kind of very flowery reenactment of the Puck brunch. You didn't get the invite? I of course got the invite.

I kept getting texts from people, you know, that night. Are you at Washington? You at the dinner? I'm like, have we met? Have we met? This has nothing to do with Puck or the Puck brunch or anything else. I fucking despise that dinner. I hate that dinner.

I find it. I found it atrocious. I went for most of the 90s in about like 2003, 2004. I'm like, I'm never going to this thing again. For all the same reasons, I don't live in Washington. What was the wildest thing happening at those dinners in the 90s? Was Christopher Hitchens getting blackout drunk and like doing lines in the bathroom? Yes.

What was happening in the 90s? You know, Christopher lived at the Wyoming, which is right across the street from the Washington Hilton. And the origin story of the Vanity Fair after party, before there were after parties, was that Christopher through the Vanity Fair after party in his apartment at the Wyoming and it was an outgrowth of what was his alternative White House correspondent's dinner, dinner. So like the cool kids would have dinner at Christopher's house

not go to the dinner. And then that evolved into the Vanity Fair Party, which then became a big celebrated thing. I remember a lot of cocaine being done in the bathrooms of the Washington Hill in the 90s at that peak. There was a lot of journalists and politicians passing bullets from one stall to the next. That occurred a lot in the 1990s.

And yet even then, I still hated the dinner, despite all of its, despite all of its other charms. It's annoying. And so I stopped going. And then Bloomberg made us go one year in like 2014. And after having been gone for 10 years, I went for one year. We did color commentary on the red carpet with Walt Clyde Frazier in an alligator skin tuxedo.

And then I said, I'm never going back. And I have not been since. So it's been at least 12 years since I've been. All right. Well, I'm going to find that archival footage of you and Clyde Frazier. I've got a great Clyde Frazier shirt that I like to wear. Let's talk about the news. I want to find that archival footage, though. I'm sure it exists. I can provide for you. The big news, I guess we should start with the bulwark news, right?

We should shout out colleague Ben Parker, who had the exclusive on this. Donald Trump has decided to put his face on the passports. And this feels like a troll of the, you know, globalist libs who get passports. Yeah. He was also in line with his Caudillo-esque desire to live in a country where when you land at the airport, you immediately see dear leader's face. And then you have to see his face on the side of buildings and you see his face on the money. And then, you know, you see his face everywhere on the plates, right? And I guess that is, Donald Trump has not had much success in making anyone's live better.

I think that that is really what he's going to be focused on going forward. I would have thought it was a troll of the globalist planet trotting cosmopolitan liberals like you and me, Tim, except for the fact that he's doing all the other things. If it was singular, I'm just putting my face on the passport. I'd be like, he's trolling us. But the truth is he wants to have his face on everything. He wants to have his face on the money. He wants to have his face on the new monuments. He's building for himself.

It's a very consistent. So I assume Trump's kind of like, you know, we'll assume he'll be asking for to take away state driver's licenses soon. and have a national driver's license ID system in which your face will be on the ID, but the only other thing on the ID will be a larger image of him. A year ago, almost, we were over in London and Berlin

for about 10 days for a couple of things, including a wedding, including the wedding of Paul Banks from Interpol in Berlin. And I mentioned that because I saw you at, you were at the Interpol set at Coachella with Hamby. So I got there and my passport, it turned out, was not expired, but was going to expire in six months. And there's a rule that some of the European countries, like, so I couldn't go, I could fly into London.

I got to England. And then they were like, you can't go to Germany because your passport's not going to inspire. I was in some weird window. Right. In the area. Yeah. Right. So I had to go to the embassy and they took care of it all.

They gave me an extension. And it was not a problem. It was all cool. Actually, the American embassy in London was great about this. but they were like, you have an extension now for another year. And I, the Trump news made me think, wait a minute, like, I haven't gotten my passport expended yet. And I got to get this thing in under the wire because the idea that like, because this is a key

element, right? If you, if I can get it in under the wire before they get his face on it, I will have a passport for a decade. And I'll be past the Trump thing by the time I have to get a new passport renewal. Whereas. Well, Barron might be president then or even like some other AI overlords. I mean, look, it's of a piece with so much other stuff. This is one where I was a pocket constitution dork.

You know, I am the type of person that had a fondness for the idea that, you know, in America, our president is called Mr. President. And we, you know, things are much more democratic and small D. I care about this kind of stuff. When I went to foreign countries where they had, you know, authoritarian dictator, banners and posters on the buildings, I found this to be very weird. foreign. And so that makes me think that people will eventually kind of blanch at this. But then on the other hand, I'm like, I don't know, maybe that's just about me and my priors,

and people actually don't really care at all. There are two competing things going on here if you step away from Trump for a second. One is, I think it's true that cults of personality in general and the sanctification of individuals of various kinds, whether they be, you know, tech trillionaires or sports stars or pop stars, whatever, is more prominent and prevalent now than it was before. personal branding, having your face, your name, whatever. If you get to a certain point on shit. So I think people's tolerance for that as a general thing is higher, right?

I'm with you, and I would go even further than that when you would go to those countries, countries where that kind of thing was prevalent, you'd say, I'm kind of proud I'm from a place where if you think about it, you don't usually think about it quite this way. But you think, oh, what we venerated is the institution, right? It's the presidency, not the president. It's like why people swear oath to the Constitution and not to the occupant of the office because they are all regarded as transient and eventually going to just fade back into the background. And this is the office is what's powerful. And you feel like, I'm glad I live.

We're going to start playing some soft patriotic music behind you. As you relaxed nostalgic about that, Jason, make sure to add that. You just told me you were a pocket constitution dork. So like I can have said the same thing. I love it. I just think you would think about it. Like, I'm glad I'm in a place like that. Right.

And it's distressing, obviously, to think. that were becoming much more akin in both in, not almost every level, but certainly at the symbolic level to the places where despotism, you know, and especially petty despotism, is not just present, but is embodied and as you see it everywhere. The signs of it are everywhere. That's the thing about despots, right? If you've traveled a lot, you know when you're in a despotic country. Right.

Because the despots are constantly reminding you that you're in despotic country, right? And that's what it feels like here, what's so depressing about it is because you sort of go, it's not just that it's more like those other countries, but that, you know, that you see it happening in front of you. This is how it happens, right, which is the president just starts going, I'm putting my name on more and more shit. I'm putting my face on more and more shit. And you're just going to get so used to it that you're going to eventually go, okay,

whatever. And I'm not ready for that yet. I forget who I'm stealing this point from. So I apologize and we'll, I'll credit if I can find it in my social media archive. But when the discourse was going around for a while about like, Is Trump Hitler? Is he Mussolini? Is he like this?

Is he like Orban? Somebody observed that Trump is really kind of an Arab oil despot at heart. Like, you know, extremely gaudy, gaudy, rather, wants to do corrupt deals. And whoever made this point, it was a while ago. And like, it is just so on the nose now and obvious as he's like making these deals with the Arab despots. And they are really our best allies now besides El Salvador. door and like just sort of at a spiritual aura level kind of I do think that's how he sort of sees himself the one caveat to that I think that's true and the Sharia law well no no I mean I think the

caveat to that is that at least I have wives though that's an appeal the thing about the Arab oil despots is that they are largely anonymous they don't want their names and face some money they want to be you know when you see these like the Forbes list or whatever or the who are the richest people in the world. A lot of times we don't really know because because a lot of these, a lot of the shakes are like, we don't really want them to be on that list. What we want is we want to have, we want to have all the money. We want to have all the power. And we, and it's easier for us if we're not accountable so that no one in our population can look at us and go, oh, that guy's the order is oppressing us. Right. So they kind of keep it on the down low.

They have all this dough. And if you're living in the region, you know who these people are. but they're not like on they want to be on the cover of their suit through you if we live in a world where there are still fortune in Forbes says real business magazines but they wouldn't want to be i don't want to be on the fucking cover of fortune i just want to have all the fucking shit and trump is both he's like he behaves like a debt like a middle eastern oil autocrat despot whatever uh oligarch but also wants to be like you know beard. Like Taylor Swift. It also wants to be, you know, Taylor Swiftian also wants to be on everything and be fully acknowledged that he is who he is. That's the big difference there, I think. It's funny to think back to the McCain ad, making fun of Obama, the most famous person

in the world. And that's just like literally couldn't be more on the nose for Trump. The McCain ad was obviously, you know, didn't work. But also was premised on the notion that there was a substantial number of people. The ad was called celebrity. he's the most famous person in the world was opening that ad, right? They showed him at the Renanbergate, and you saw him with other pop stars and stuff. And that was supposed to be, by someone's theory, all of McCain's team, Fred Davis, who made that ad.

They all were like, the American electorate will be like, we don't want a celebrity as president. That was the premise of that, right? So first of all, not only were they wrong, but second of all, like, now you look at it now goes, like, how could you have ever thought that? That would be considered like a devastating ad that would end Barack Obama's political career. Hilarious. One additional way in which he's like the Middle Eastern autocrats is he's very interested in throwing his political foes into prison over kind of, you know, non-existent, fabricated, crazy topics. Something that's very popular, MBS did this very efficiently when he took over in Saudi. So far Trump hasn't gotten the bone saw out, but we'll, you know, maybe that's next.

it's been far less efficient with Trump. We do have the rule of law here still in courts, and so he hasn't been able to lock people up in it's Carlton as much as he'd like to. He's trying once again. He's back to the plate for, I think, the fourth time with James Comey now. This time they've indicted him. A grand jury has indicted him somehow over the seashell picture. James Comey posted a boomer resist meme where he was walking along the beach.

I asked him about this when he was on the podicle months ago. He's walking along the beach. Some MS. Now viewer. Someone is a big fan of you on Nicole's show. Exactly. Some 71 year old

Upper West Side lady resident who watches MSNBC all the time or MS now who was a beach house. Who made this little thing on the show was like kitty hawk

or something on the outer banks. Some seashell art and Bethany that said 8647 which you know is a restaurant term

for kill this not on the menu. You know this isn't this isn't available. And to be clear And that, to just say kill again, kill it. When we say kill it from the menu, no one, like everybody understands that killing it from the menu involves the loss of no life.

It's a metaphor. It's a metaphor. Remove it from the menu. As I mentioned the other week, it was like the Persian person who was trying to say that when we say death to America, it's like literally death. It's not, it's kind of like how when you guys say fuck Trump, right? You don't literally mean I want to put my penis into Trump's orifices. Like, that's not what you're saying.

Right. So killing it from the menu is a figure of speech. 8647 is the seashells. We're laughing. It's, I guess, vaguely serious because Jim Comey is going to have to get a lawyer, go to court, and defend himself over this in an ostensibly free country where you should be allowed to say 86-47, if you want. As a matter of fact, I just did right there.

So I better watch out. Do you have any big thoughts before I take us to hearing cash explain the seriousness of this investigation? Well, I will only say to your point about all the. these things. I found the first three Comey indictments. There are obviously, we don't have to, don't even have to say. These are weaponization of the DOJ, the retribution campaign, blah, blah, blah. But like, it was actually kind of delightful to watch the consequence. I feel, of course, sympathy for Comey for having to deal with this. But watching him roll into those previous legal proceedings with Pat Fitzgerald and be like against Lindsay Halligan and be like, we were just going to

lawyer the living shit out of you and embarrass the Trump administration every time they would go into a courtroom. I'm looking forward to that again in this, because this is not, he is not going to go to jail for this. There is not a jury that's going to convict him because it's such a ludicrous charge. But it will be kind of, I'm sorry he has to go through it, but it will be fun to watch him and his team yet again demonstrate that the Trump people are not just vindicted, but incredibly fucking incompetent and don't really know their way around a courtroom at all. Hey, man. And shout out to Jim Comey, who obviously we have litigated often, the choices he made during the 2016 campaign on this show. And you and I have done it together. I've done it with him on the show. But he could have gone down a lot of different paths, you know. And when Trump called him into the office there, he could have gone down the path of, I'm going to go along to get along like many other people did who are in high ranking positions in the administration. He did not do that. He is being targeted for the fact. that he tried to act in his own integrity and his daughter's being targeted now because of that.

And it's atrocious an abomination. But in some ways, I do think it's an inspiring redemptive arc from Jim Comey and his daughter's now suing the administration. It benefits him that he's going against, it's an insult to the Keystone cops called these guys, the Keystone cops. I would like to play Cash Patel's press conference announcing this very serious seashell indict. Former FBI Director James Comey has now been indicted for two felony counts. While many of you may read this indictment in view this matter as a simple investigation, it is the farthest thing from that. Every single investigation, this FBI and our partners at the Department of Justice undertake,

especially those that involve the threats to harm or hurt or even kill individuals, whether they behold public office or civilians in our country, are met with the same measure of investigative prowess and tools and personnel and partnership with the Department of Justice as anyone else. This has been a case that's been investigated over the past 9, 10, 11 months. These cases take time. Our investigators work methodically. Nine, 10, 11 months, John.

They've been eyeing that picture. They've looked at the metadata. They've looked at the different styles of seashell art. They've looked at, you know, inspiration from past seashell artists to see the level of menace. This actually was a tell for me yesterday because, you know, you also be at that same press conference where you saw Todd, I want to be, I want to be your AG Blanche, saying, you know, there is one thing that's really clear. You cannot threaten the life of the press of the United States. And we will not, that is the law. We will not let me. So we are going to bring these people to justice, right? I haven't done this. I actually, if I had had a few more minutes, I would have done it before the show, try to break some news on this. But like, I would like to go back and have chat GPT or Claude or something. go back and look at how many people have been charged with this crime. And then tell me what the, what in the totality of those cases, what the longest and what the average amount of time is

that has elapsed between the incident for which they were charged in the charge. Threatening to kill the President of the United States is a serious crime. And I am telling you, my gut, my gut tells me that what you would find in all of the cases, is however many of them there have ever been under this charge under this law, is that the time is almost always like trivially short. Somebody threats to kill the president of the United States. Man, the charges are brought instantly. You get on it. And you get on it, right?

The guy's trying to kill the president of the United States. You don't wait nine months. If the guy is seriously intending to kill the president, it would be malpractice to let him wander free for almost a year. This man wants to kill the president, Tim. and we have evidence of it, but we're going to take nine months to a year to bring the charges. Even if this wasn't obviously ludicrous

because it's just an Instagram post, there isn't any fucking investigation to do. That's the only thing there is. It's like, and that kind of just gives the lie to the whole thing, which is the timing of this thing is the most suspect thing about it, which is like what you,

Jim Comey's tried to kill the president. Let's wait a year before we bring the chart, before we bring it to justice. It just sounds so stupid even as you say. I never. Jim Comey is trying to kill the president. Jim Comey is plotting to kill the president. You know what he thought about.

He's walking through the woods, taking pictures and writing captions based on the poetry and literature that he's been reading. That's what Jim Comey is doing. He's meditating. Jim Comey wants the president dead. And what he thought the way to do it was was to post a picture on Instagram, under his own name of some seashells, because that's what you do if you really want to see the president get killed

and you want to help make it happen. It's so, I mean, it's beyond ludicrous. But the point about the timing is that they know it's beyond ludicrous. And I think to the serious point here, and you guys have talked about this already on the various bulwark podcast, but it's like there may be some coincidence to the fact that Comey's daughter has now got the right to sue. But I think the more clear, the clearer thing is that,

that this is, that they have been trying to capitalize on this narrative around the attempted assassination at the dinner. And they're kind of going to run out a runway on that. They got everybody to say that we need to build the, hey, oh, my God, they tried to kill Donald Trump at the dinner. So we got to build the ballroom. What's the next beat of that story? What's the thing that you keep going?

The president is constantly under threat. Now, look, Donald Trump, there have been people who tried to kill him and we take that seriously. But if you're going to try to politicize the White House correspondent's dinner for whatever, purpose, whether it's just to make a Trump look like a victim or look like a hero, or if it's to try to get the ballroom built or whatever, you need that what's the next beat in the story? How do you keep it going? Oh, we have this Jim Comey thing in business. It's sitting around for a year or the seashell case. Let's bring the seashell case. It keeps assassination attempts at the top of the discourse. But it makes those other attempts feel unsurious.

Of course. They're making them feel less serious. You said that there was a tell in the investigation. And here was My Tell in Cash's language in that clip. That's suit too, by the way. Man, he needs a new Taylor. Talk about tells. I mean, he needs everything. His whole Mien needs to change. He needs confidence.

He needs a life coach. He needs a speech coach. His Mienn needs to change? Wow. I love it when you use it. The way he carries himself. Fancy French words on this show. His eyes need to change.

You maybe need classes. I should go to Williamson Eye Center in Baton Rouge. Maybe we can help them out. Here we go. Especially, though, we take all threats seriously. And then he says this. especially those involving threats to harm, hurt, or even kill individuals. Like, throwing even in there is for me the tell.

It's like, even Cash doesn't really believe this. And he's kind of caveating it. He feels too ridiculous to just say bluntly that James Comey was going to kill the president. Like, he can't say that sentence because it would, without laughing. And so even he gives a little tell there. attempted assault with a deadly seashell. That's the one missing charge. They're like, ah, you know, there's only a

photo of this at the seashell. I think that's a puka shell, not a seashell. Like that's a, pukeshell is a seashell, right? Big one. Yeah, that is. You all know that I'm a big fan of Seoul. I've been joined their out of office

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That's getsole.com promo code the bulwark for 30% off. One more retribution thing on your take on, which is the FCC now going after Disney. This kind of relates to our correspondence dinner. In addition to just the dinner being unbearable at any time, I felt like the idea that journalists would go to, you know, when Trump is having a direct assault on many of their outlets in particular. And when he was telling everybody he was going to take a shit all over them in public. Is this a terrible?

In any circumstance, you're like, hey, Trump is telling us he's going to shit on us in public. Let's go and honor him. What a good idea. So anyway, the day after the FCC is going after Disney and the licenses of some ABC stations based on, you know, I don't know, violations of DEI or woke or something. It's the vice being kissed from Buzz Lightyear or something that has been their outrage. You know, we talked by this, I think, both the last times you were on, which is the mood in the media as, you know, Trump continues to go after them. Like, obviously at the very beginning of the administration, everybody was buckling.

I think after the Kimmel situation, we got a little bit of backbone starting to pop up. But I'm just kind of wondering what you think, you know, kind of the environment's, like. like right now at media companies and, you know, whether there's some more, you know, gumption building up or whether everybody's still pretty scared of the administration's retribution campaign. I always like my formulation about no false binaries and now people are saying, you know, two things can be true at the same time. You know, we have a new CEO at whose Bob Iger's successor coming in Disney who,

who at first blush, we're very early in the story because of just really only yesterday. that a car decided to go after those guys over these Jimmy Kimball jokes that are like, you know, as Kimmel himself said, if what he said about Melanie Trump and Donald Trump is is in somehow an indictable offense that would get you fired, just about Don Rickles, Henny Youngman, you know, these people never would never have been able to work. Everybody who the Tom Brady Roast would have to go to jail under that theory of the case. But I think what we've seen so far in early days here is that the new CEO of Disney is trying to at least make it look like right now that he's going to fight and that the

There's not even to be, as you remember, the first Kimmel thing. There was the capitulation, and then they found their backbone when the, basically when the viewers were bolted over it. I don't want to, like, sort of say that there's no one who took a lesson from the fact that that Disney won when they fought back on Kimmel before, and that people aren't thinking, like, well, there's a way to win. We don't have to capitulate on everything when they go after us. I think there is some sign that there are people in the business who

looked at that Kimmel Exchange and took some comfort in that or some hardened and thought, okay, maybe if we get, if we're on the receiving end of a Trump threat, whether it's a regulatory retribution threat or a legal threat that we can fight back. And obviously, there are a place like the New York Times that have, you know, when Trump is the study is going to sue them or sued them, they'd said, bring it on, you know, we'll fight you. So there's some of that. At the same time, I just spent eight days in Los Angeles. And I would say they may be willing to fight back a little bit more, but the appetite for doing things that could incur the wrath of Donald Trump is, I would say, not only not greater, but less. I mean, there is nobody,

Tim, in the world of streaming television, some of the most powerful companies in the world, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, as the three main ones. And certainly we know what the situation is now at Paramount. No one expects Paramount to suddenly be an outlier here. There is less than zero appetite for anything that would be programming of a topical contemporary. nature that might in one way or the other brush up against the Trump administration and potentially piss them off. There's a less than zero. Zero is come and pitch us this thing, but we're going to them respectfully decline. Their attitude now is affirmatively, don't come in this office until after Donald Trump is gone. You're just trying to be honest with you, John. You'll be wasting our time and

wasting your time because we are never going to make anything while Donald Trump is president. And maybe this will change. Maybe they'll be wrong that they will change their mind. Something will happen over the next year and they'll change their minds. But as of today, there is that attitude which is, yeah, we don't even want to do a perfunctory meeting on this because we are never going to make this thing. If it's, if it touches on anything where Donald Trump or anything Trump adjacent could come up and there's some chance that something that you or one of your colleagues or the, you know, on a show like that would say that would make them mad. The financial risk, the regulatory risk, the, it's just too great. Fuck it. We're just going to keep our heads down for

the next two and a half years. It's so crazy. I was talking about this a little bit with Nicole and Mark Elias yesterday and how, you know, these guys have been so incompetent at the, you know, active measures retribution. You know, everybody is walking free. They've won some settlements, I guess, with the media companies. But overall, you know, they've lost, you know, time again in court. They've not successfully gone after any of their foes. Not they've gone after regular people, obviously, you know, immigrants and, you know, folks that are in communities and stuff of that nature. these high profile people have suffered at all. And yet still, they've succeeded in the chilling

effect. Like, there remains cowardice, like, across the corporate CEO class and Hollywood very acutely, you know, I would say. And that's why it's so shocking whenever you see somebody step up. Like, who wasn't the one oil CEO in the meeting who was like, yeah, actually this Venezuela thing isn't good for us, right? It was like, oh, man, like, how refreshing. A rich person in a free country was able to just say what is true about the president's bad policies. Like, this isn't North Korea after all. But the chilling effect side, they've still been effective. Makes you wonder, like, what that person having some kind of an infarction or something at that moment?

I don't know what happened there. I was having a minor stroke when I said that. Sorry, I take it back, Mr. President. But the weird thing about it, and this is actually something we did talk about before on some previous version of this show or mine or something. I can't remember. But, you know, there is one video platform that is actually growing. only one, even like Netflix, which is clearly the leader in streaming, right?

Their subscriber growth in the United States is now basically flat. And they've brought all the live programming on. There's not really much growth for them left here. There's a lot internationally. They can still add subscribers. But here it's not really growing. None of the rest of them are really growing in an appreciable like there was the boom in people making the transition to streaming is kind of over.

It's now just all incremental. But there's one platform that is now, I think, uncontestably at everyone. one in all of this business would say this is one platform that's that's that's growing fast and is now the most powerful video platform in the world that's youtube right so everyone acknowledges that we're trying to get to two million subscribers on our youtube page right now so go subscribe hit subscribe hit like tell your friends we're going for two million 100 percent and you go get the bulw is a good example yeah i mean what is it's what's april right i mean i can remember back when you guys were 800 000 it wasn't that long ago it was like after around the post comel harris's

lost, Trump's victory, end of 2024, you guys were under a million. You guys have doubled, more than doubled in the course of basically about a year, right? But you're not alone. There's other people who've been doing this too, right? Because the platform is, and that's what's fueling the, forget about what you guys do well or don't do well. Sure. You are one of many people who are driving the growth of the platform. Hey, what's interesting about that? How are you guys driving the growth of the platform by talking about politics? And I would say that's true of the far left, really far left and really far right. YouTube's attitude, which is, you know, we have a few rules, but basically we're not going to be afraid of political content.

We're not going to be afraid of controversial content. We're going to let all these flowers bloom. We're not, again, they might do a few annoying things about content moderation where you can't say certain words or whatever. But they're not like, we're not saying we won't put on, you know, Hassan Piker and we're not going to put on Tucker Carlson. We're going to put on both and let it and let it fly, right? And that's not the only reason, but it is a reason why YouTube has become the most. most powerful video platform of the world. And every one of these streaming,

these bigger streaming platforms, they know that, they see the growth. They're terrified of what YouTube is becoming. They're trying to get a bunch of YouTube. They're trying to, how do we tap into this creator thing? They're trying to get the YouTube juice all over them.

Self. Yeah. But they won't. So speak. Yeah. It's like, we'll bring in part in my take. We'll bring in Amy Polar's show, right?

Like some stuff. Right. Yeah. But they won't touch anything. They look at it and go, God, we got that. We'll do this. We'll do that.

We'll do this. But none of it is working because they're avoiding the thing that's actually really at the core of what's generating the actual mojo at YouTube. And I just just goes back to your point of like, this is not just about political cowardice. It's about a kind of they're making what I think people look back on as an obvious economic and business model mistake. Not you set me, they are being cowards. but they're also short-circuiting their own commercial interests by being such pussies. Yeah. And it's also misjudging, I think, where the public is.

And I think this is particularly obvious right now after the Iran War. And that's what I want to talk about. Like, his numbers could not be lower. Or terrible. Right now. And I guess they could be. But, you know, he's seen very gradual decline. Well, they could.

They could be. Yeah, they could be. The main thing is you can't imagine what it's going to turn it around. Like your, if Sarah's thing about the Bush line, it's not just that he's low that you've crossed a certain point. It's that there was a point with George W. Bush and with other presidents where it's hit a certain point and the dynamics are such that you're never going to turn it around. It's unsalvaged. It's post-Katrina Bush. He might stop the collapse, but he's not going to suddenly get back to 48 again or 43 again. It's like you're like at a certain point, you're like,

you're underwater now forever, dude. That's it. My guy, Laxia Jane has a new poll out today and I want to get to the Democratic side in a second. I'm just looking at Trump approval. Two months ago, he's at minus 15, now he's at minus 22. And that's, like, that's this very significant drop in just two months for somebody that for a long time was like pretty locked in in his fave, unfave with just high, strongly favorable, high, strongly unfavorables in a tiny, you know, window of people that were moving. Like, now we're seeing a bigger window of people moving away from him who'd been previously favorable to him.

And, you know, they're trying to manage this with the jawboning. I've enjoyed the fact that I think we've hit an inflection point with the war and about how bad it's going, that for two straight days, we've not had an Axis report from an anonymous insider about how a deal is just around the corner. We're getting one of those every morning at 815. It's like clockwork. It's like, ooh, senior administration officials said the Iranians are interested in coming to the table. Senior administration official says that they're seeing an end in sight. We're not even getting those anymore. I haven't gotten one as of 945. We're taping this Wednesday morning. There was a Wall Street General report last night that

Trump instructed aides to prepare for an extended blockade because he doesn't want to get back into a hot war because he doesn't want to look like a wuss. And so the blockade and hoping they crumble internally is his preferred outcome here. And that's like cutting off your nose despite your face in the most extreme way possible. Yeah, like, I mean, there's so much to say about all this. We will not go down this tangent, but I will raise it. There was a report, NBC News report yesterday that they'd done analysis that there have been now two. billion dollars in uh maybe i can't remember it was winnings or betting on the on the prediction markets about just iran war related two billion b billion billion with a b with a b is in barry yeah

b is in barry two billion what's the i hope the headline of this was yes prediction market bets on the iran war top two billion dollars and i again the reason i said it's a it's a tangent is you know that we don't want to go down is that there is nothing that signifies the dangers of the prediction markets, unregulated prediction markets, or the corruption of the Trump administration more than what I'm sure someday we were going to learn is that the profiteering on those two platforms, both of them now entangled with Donald Trump Jr. One, I think he's on the board. One, he's a senior advisor for Calshin Polymarket. And we have this one guy, special forces guy who's being used as a sacrificial lamb to say, yeah, we're really tough on this, not the guy who bet on the Maduro raid.

while Maga My Man, the account is like betting on the precise timing and targets of various things, various strikes in Iran and in Lebanon, it goes to the Axios thing because a lot of those things, the Axios reports are, Tim, I think about, some of them are about the normal course of spin in the Washington message market, but a lot of them are also about Trump's desperate, frantic effort to keep the stock market from collapsing, which is just an and corollary thing to the ways that they're profiteering in the futures of Britain and the prediction markets, in the online prediction markets. All of this is about money, right?

So a lot of this messaging is being driven to either enrich people who are insiders or to keep the last barometer, the only barometer of the American economy that's actually, that looks healthy, however illusory that is, the stock market. Everything else in the American economy blows. But the stock market is at record highs. There's a whole other discussion about why that is, but that's clearly Trump understands that he has one last thing to hold on to as an economic argument, which is that the stock market is still doing well. I think that your point is correct in the sense that I don't understand what it is that having gotten to where we are now and elevated Iran into a kind of regional superpower by letting them demonstrate a theory, something that will be. was previously only hypothetical, which was, can we control the stratiform moves?

And what will happen if we do that? They now know we can and there will be global economic chaos, right? So they're now more powerful than they were before. They still have the nuclear weapons that they had before, nuclear materials that they had before. And the regime has only become more radical and more entrenched the I, GERC is more powerful than ever. So we have won narrow tactical military battles. We were degraded the ballistic missile capacity and some killed the Navy, whatever.

We've lost on the strategic level, the strategic level. And what is it that changes that equation from the Iranian point of view? What incentive do the Iranians have to come to suddenly be like, you know, let's, yeah, we're going to give up our chokehold on the straight. I don't really see it, you know. The most interesting thing about Trump now is that he is no longer even saying what the timeline is. Right. We've moved into the period of indefinite commitment.

there's he's not even making up his usual bullshit of like two more weeks two more weeks he just goes you know he just starts citing iraq in vietnam and korea and as if those are like well we haven't been there as long as iraq vietnam and korea you're kind of like well we haven't but what do you do in citing those those are like well until we get to the five year mark you got nothing even worried about it's just a short war it's like i don't know it's all very ominous to me i think we could be there for a really long time and again how does that help trump get out of the toilet politically yeah i don't see that i just don't see the way out of it That's what I'm saying. Yeah, even if it was to end soon, it's kind of like, okay, they just, the House Armed Service Committee, they got Heng Seth over there this morning. I'm sure we'll be talking about that more on tomorrow's show. But, you know, one thing that's come out of it already is they're estimating $25 billion has been spent. So it's like we've lost lives, $25 billion is spent. The gas and food prices are going to be up at least through the fall already, even if they fit, even if there's magic effect tomorrow because of the disruptions and all that and what? So, like, would anybody have signed up for?

that deal on January 1st. It's like, hey, we're going to lose American lives. It's going to cost $25 billion. Everybody's gas and food prices are going to be up in exchange for that. We're going to get rid of Iran's ballistic missile capacity and the street is going to be back open. The straight was already open. Like what? Like, what's a win? Right. And Iran's going to be more powerful than it was when we started. We've never made that deal. And I'd say, you know, I had my old, old friends, Zaddyman and Beto's the energy of the economist on my show right now, the one that just dropped yesterday. And I was asking her about this. And she's like, was explaining to me as the way someone who knows, really knows something about the global economy would.

Just like how the supply chain on oil stuff actually works and how long it takes to that's a very long tail. And she's like, the oil shock is coming, you know. And we could, to your point, if this all were resolved tomorrow, the way that the supply chain works, You're not going to get the worst of it for another several months. And as we sit here today, I think it's the case that in Europe, the stocks of jet fuel are down to like days now. The airlines are starting to cancel mass numbers of flights for the summer, like Lufthansa. The beginnings of the serious oil shock, supply shock are going to hit Europe and are already hitting Asia. They're doing rationing of diesel across a bunch of Asian countries.

We will be the last to feel it, but we will feel it. And again, to the point of what's going to turn things around for Donald Trump and for the Republican Party between now and, say, the midterms? Nothing. This is all in the pipeline, so to speak, you know, there's no way to turn that around. And here's Trump's message this morning. Iran can't get their act together. They don't know how to sign a non-nuclear deal. They better get smart soon.

They better get smart soon. I just, I don't know, I was ready to go to the next level yesterday. But like, for all of the messaging on the right about how much of a wet noodle Jimmy Carter was during the hostage crime. and how much of a wussy is. I think people are afraid to say this about Trump because they're worried they're going to bait them into doing nuclear war, which, you know, whatever. But like, this is the most embarrassing, limp thing possible.

It's like you started this war. You agreed to a ceasefire. You unilaterally continued the ceasefire, even though there's no deal. And now you're just like, you better get smart soon, Mullis. Right. You never know.

And again, people are afraid to say this because, to really make your point, how many, it was like two weeks ago? that Trump was threatening to annihilate their civilization from which they would never recover? Like the bluster of,

you know, you fucking lunatics better, you know, open up the straight, you know, like all that Easter Sunday stuff where he's threatening civilizational annihilation.

That was the tenor of him a couple weeks ago. And now he's going, you better hurry up and get sensible, you guys. And don't forget to brush your teeth tomorrow. You know, like he's going to get a cavity.

It sounded like Michael Tracy. Meet me at the. Hampton Inn, Mullis, I'm out here at the Hampton Inn. I'm ready to fight. I want to do some poll nerding stuff because here's my here's my caveat. I feel like I've been uncharacteristically optimistic. So rain cloud Tim wants to come back for a second because there is some political I miss rain. I miss rain. I miss it. There's some political caveats. I mentioned that poll today from Laxia Jane about Trump's approval being down at minus 22. In the same poll, Trump went from minus 15 to minus 22. The generic ballot.

has gone from D plus 6 to D plus 6. So no positive movement for the Democrats. The House Dems put out this like internal poll. And you and I are old hands at this point. You know, when you turn out and put out an internal poll, it's because the poll came back. And you're like, this is kind of on the upper edge of the margin of error. And so we want to make it look as good as possible.

Right. It didn't really blow me out of the water. And some of the stuff is going to be a little nerdy for some listeners. But I'll just like, they put out Arizona 6, the Democrat is leading by 3. But the Republican, Siscomani, only won by three last time. So that's a six-point swing. In Colorado, three is one I know. They say Trump is underwater.

Heard only won that by five last time. And the Iowa three, you know, Trump won by four last time. Now they're saying he's underwater. You know, this stuff is all good. The Democrats are still going to win the House. Like, if you're just putting this out only through the construct of, I represent the House Democrats, and this is good for the Democrats taking over the House. it's a fine press release to put out. But, you know, there's just not a ton of sign in the numbers

right now that we're seeing, as the bottom falls out from Trump, that we're seeing, like, people in red areas saying, okay, you know, it's so bad, I'm going to take a chance in the Democrats. Now, there's plenty of time. It's only April. But I just, I do think, you know, I'm hearing a little bit more bullishness on the Senate than I think the data indicates at this point. Well, I think the key, the key question here is, which data, you know? And that, and by the, and by that, I mean, we have, I would say, these two big and differing data sets, right? One data set is what the polling is telling us. And I'm not trying to be irrationally exuberant about anything. I'm just trying to say, you know, we have now over many cycles, Tim, as you

know, come to, we always find ourselves saying whenever various outcomes occur, we're like, man, the polling's broken. You know, we don't, the polling, we've been said in 2024. We said in 2022. We said it in 20, we're constantly, right? And yet at this moment, you know, we're sitting here, I'm not like attacking you, but we always end up reverting back to the polling. People who've done this for a long time, right? I will say kind of the polling in 2022 was better than the punditry, actually. Sure. All I'm saying is that we've had systematic polling flaws from going back to 2016 now, where it's been quite, and yet we don't really fully incorporate that into the way we do analysis.

And the only reason I'm saying that is not because I'm a poll, you know, a de-skewer or, or, or, truth or something. But just to say that what we also have is another data set, which is what Democrats have performed in elections from the beginning of Trump 2.0 to now. So just to take the most obvious example, you know, the Marjorie Taylor Green district, right, where the polling didn't have a, what was I think, a 25, 26 point swing in that district, a very, very red district that ended up being carried by a Republican, but you saw like a 26 point swing in the course of two years. Typified, exemplifies what we've seen for the last 14 or 15 months.

So I think if you're going to make the case for Democrats are on the way towards whatever a wave looks like in the environment, winning the Senate, the structural environment. Winning the Senate is the right. And honestly, probably winning 52 Senate is to protect yourself from John Federman switching parties. That's the bar. Right.

If you're going to make that argument, the argument, the best set of data to support it is not the polling, but is what is the. actual performance and actual elections over the last 14 months. I don't think anything is about as conclusive, but I do think it's worth at least contemplating that given a full decade of experience which tells us that polling is broken, has been broken, has been subject to systematic error, it might be worth at least equal, at least looking at both data sets and putting them and saying, well, the data over here is telling one story, which is that Democrats are in a good position but not great.

Maybe not as the polling doesn't show the kind of overworked. way that you might expect, but the data from all the elections in the last 14 months does sort of indicate that. And we'll see what turns out to be the case. But to the point we were making earlier, you know, there is, not only are the macro factors that are driving voter sentiment kind of locked in and in a bad place for Trump and Republicans, but on the other side, there's almost nothing they can do to countermand it. I mean, it's like, we're at the point where we're almost out of runway for anything. Their legislation has not been very big on the Republican. They're not even claiming that they have.

have anything to countermand it. Honestly, it's not easy as if they have some message about like, here's the plan. Right. You know, firebombing Democrats with ads is like basically like negative, you know, negative polarization. I mean, in the absence of a Martian invasion that Mike Johnson and Trump and Cash Patel repelled and we had actual live video footage of them repelling a Martian invasion. But I'm an Independence Day type situation like Bill Pullman. Yes, an independent day. So, yes, right.

Right. Right. Mike Johnson gets to be Will Smith and. And Cash Patel gets to be Bill Pullman. I just don't see it. We're locked in. And the question is really only how much more it spins in the anti-Republican direction, not the other way.

I just don't see what those factors are that will turn it around. I take your polling caveat, but I'm just going to throw one little piece of candy at you because you just, why not? Why not do it? Do it. We're 50 minutes in. Two polls out of Texas this week. Yeah.

UT poll has Calerico 42, Paxton, 34, and that's a tonne undecided. The Texas public opinion research poll was more interested in. Tala Rico 46, Paxton 41, Tala Rico 44, Cornyn 41. Now, the one way to look at that is, I don't know that Beto was ever up by five, even in the good campaign. Maybe one poll. On the other hand, 46 is about what Beto got. So maybe there's like a ceiling, a Democratic ceiling there.

But, I mean, that's the best data points in the polling that we've seen for the Democrats all year. Your previous thing was rain cloud is back. The polling is not that strong. I go home saying, well, look at the results of how Democrats have been doing. Like a caveat, but a caveat in the direction of there's reason to think there might be, I don't know, hate to use the word wave, but whatever. Democrats are going to overperform the polling. Let's put it that way.

You look at the Tolariko thing and you feel better rather than feeling worse. I'm just intrigued. I mean, it's interesting. It's two poll numbers. You know, I don't, I'm not getting emotional about Texas Senate polls. I'm just saying that like, that's an intriguing. data. Well, I am intrigued also. And I don't get emotional about those things. But I think Tala RICO is a super interesting candidate and someone who I totally have my eye on as someone who

could have a big future in national politics. I'm over-indexing my attention on that race. I just all I'll say is that both of those polls are margin of error. I mean, they're ties. And so for real people who are sophisticated about this, you look at both those polls, they're both inside the statistical margin bearer. Their right way to talk about this is not Tala RICO is leading in the Senate race. The right way to talk about this, statistically speaking, is Tala RICO is a statistical tie with either of the two. And he's performing a little bit better against Paxton and the more of the bandwidth of in the band of tie. He's better against that, which doesn't surprise anybody. I think he can win the state.

I think he can win, but I think it's going to be very, very close. I don't think anybody should think James Talleyko is going to win. He would be hopes enormously by Paxon being the nominee. And I don't think even then he's going to win by 10 points or six points if he's going to, you know, he'll win by one or two if he wins. But I think it's going to be super competitive. The most interesting thing to me is that the, once he won the primary, watching what they tried to do to muddy him up and how little that had the effect on him. Because I think that is really, you know, you saw the initial wave of how they were going to try to disqualify him. And it hasn't heard his numbers at all.

In fact, his numbers have gotten a little bit better. Speaking of Trump weakness, remember when he was going to bully Ken Pacton out of the race? Remember that? That whoever won the first. round. He was going to endorse. Then the loser was going to drop out and they're going to do it for the good of the party. That didn't turn out to happen, did it? It seemed to have as much success bullying Ken Paxton as he has the Mullas in Iran. And there's just... Well, I don't think he even tried. I don't think he even tried. And I think the thing is there, again, if you're looking for

various data points, I know we are watching the, there's the Trump's general political standing, but there is this really now, for the first time, really, we are seeing not just anecdotal, but empirical signs that the Trump basis is, if not crumbling, is a row, like real erosion in the MAGA base. That, the fact that he didn't try to bully Paxton out of the race tells me that Trump knows that's right. Because like, I think he just looked up and went, I don't want to be on the wrong side. My base, about all I ever, the thing I most had is my base.

I'm starting to see that it's, that it's starting to crack. And I don't want to like go and try to, I'm not going to, don't want to exacerbate that by going after the MAGA guy? How's it going to help me with my base? If I'm, I mean, his bases, he's now insecure with his own base. If he goes after, after Paxton and ends up on corn inside, there's just one more reason for the base to be like, fuck you, you were a liar and a fraud to begin with. I don't know if this rain caught anecdote.

I just saw this article yesterday. I was like, I bet Heilman will have a good stick on this. Barney Frank is dying, which is sad. And he's got a book coming out. And he, according to the article in Politico about his book, he's hoping to use his reputation and his record of being on the left to give courage to many of my colleagues who I know agree with me but are inhibited from saying that some of the left-wing politics is making them too unpopular.

He says, until we separate ourselves from the far-left agenda, we don't win. You know, Barney Frank, obviously mostly known for gay rights, Frank Dodd-Frank, you know, popular, northeastern liberal. And there's one way to look at that, which is like, this is an old, like, move aside, old man. You don't understand where the world is going. The other way to look that is, I don't know, maybe is he savvy? Is he seeing something?

What do you make of the Barney Frank Swan Song? I can talk about Barney Frank all day. Barney was literally, by sheer coincidence, not the first national magazine story I ever wrote, but the first story I wrote what I became when I wanted staffed at the Economist magazine in the fall of 1990 was about Barney Frank and the scandal that was that developing him because he had been involved with this male escort. And he had paid off a bunch of his parking, fixed a bunch of his parking tickets.

And there was a thing that it was around the House gymnasium. And it became a whole thing. And obviously, at Babick of those days, Republicans were better. The escort was in the House gymnasium? There was an element of the story that involved Barty and the escort in the House gymnasium engaging in some activity that was, you know, not what you want to be doing in the House gymnasium. The original Senate twink, kind of.

Yes, exactly right. Republicans really seized on that. There was so much homophobia in the closet was so firmly entrenched back then. But the main thing about Barney, he got past that. There were people thought it would end his career. And he got past it. And he eventually, you know, he stuck around for a really long time. He was by everyone's, and he is, I don't know what kind of condition he's in right now.

But he was, if you asked a four and 35 members of the house who was like the smartest member of the house, just pure candle power, like a high IQ, almost everybody would put Barney on the list of the top smartest house members they ever saw. incredibly brilliant guy, very, very, very intellectually sophisticated and savvy, funny, quick on his feet, all of that. And it's not surprising that like the legislation that he, that Dodd-Frank is the legislation will be most remembered for because, you know, he was a very, very serious person about a pretty complicated area of public policy. But here's the thing about this thing. I haven't read what exactly, I don't know what's going to be in the book, but characterized the way you characterized it. The political experience that shaped him and his outlook on the world more than anything else is when he was the senior age, Kevin White, the mayor in Boston when the Boston busing experience happened in the early 1970s.

If you read Jay Anthony Lucas's book, Common Ground and one of the most brilliant piece of nonfiction writing anybody's ever done. So the story of how busing tore Boston apart in the early 1970s, Barney was the chief legislative aide to the mayor at the time. And I think for a lot of people of that generation, the experience of going through a thing where liberals had ostensibly and really committed to the notion of racial integration had implemented a policy that was what we would today call woke and was a disaster for the party, for the black kids that it was meant to help, that is the kind of thing that I think shaped his worldview. and he was always a super progressive guy who kind of worried that Democrats would pursue identity politics in ways that would harm, again, not just the party, but would also harm, in fact, the groups that they wanted to try to help. So it doesn't, in a weird way, it doesn't surprise me. It sounds a little Bill Maherish to me.

There's the way it's been characterized, you know, and a little bit too kind of easy to caricature. But the notion that Barney would be on that side after the kind of career that he had doesn't surprise me. It's kind of his his roots, his intellectual roots were in a series of experiences that taught a bunch of people in that kind of Clinton generation, that kind of knee-jerk liberalism, which, you know, became wokeism in his most easily caricatured form later on, that that was a bad bargain, again, both for the party politically and for the minority groups that was trying to help. So I'm not, doesn't surprise me in some ways. I'll be interested to read it, honestly. He's a various states he's their easiest mark on.

Senate twink was a Senate staffer. There's a video that leaked of him bottoming in the Senate hearing room. And I always thought it was kind of offensive because we never learned to the top was. And poor Senate Twink has now fled, I believe, to Australia or New Zealand being so ashamed. He's somewhere far away.

And we don't know who the other partner was. So it's a leaked video. If that interest you at all, you can go Google. Can I just say, first of all, when was that? How like what time? 2023. I think it's just awesome that I just gave you this long thing about Barney Frank and then so the period of it.

The thing you came back to was someone who captured on video bottoming. It's like I mean, you're like, Harlem doesn't know about this thing. I got to tell about the bottoming thing. Well, there's, I mean,

there was a tie between the Barney's behavior and the gym and the Senate Twink. I'm just trying to make a generational connection. And I thought that you were very eloquent on Barney Frank. I'd never met him. I had nothing to add on the topic of Barney Frank. You did exactly what I wanted, which was I wanted to put a quarter in the machine

and hear you riff about Barney Frank. I get it. Good podcasting. Finally, we have a couple rapid fires. Then we're going to get you out of here. Yeah. You said to me that when you travel in the country, people are asking you two of the same questions,

how fucked are we and who's it going to be? We could do, and probably will, to do tens and dozens and hundreds of hours on those questions in the coming year. Yeah, right. I just want your 30, if you only had 30 seconds, like literally an elevator take on how fucked are we? and who's it going to be?

What would you offer? I think I say people mostly, I think, that it's hard to tell how buck we are, but more, but I don't think of that at the extremes that you see, one of which is, as soon as Trump has gone, everything's going to be fine, everything going to go back to normal. That's one end of that spectrum. And then the other end of that spectrum is, is we're terminally existentially fuck. The country's ruined and will never be able to come back. I'm more towards the terminally existentially, but I'm not all the way there.

I think the idea that Trump is going to go away in two years and that everything, hey, Marco Rubin will be the nominee and everything will be back to normal. I mean, we could deconstruct that in a million ways, but I think there's been significant damage done to the fabric of American democracy and the institutions that and norms that support it. And there's going to have to be a serious effort to, in a concerted, genuine way, to do a large-scale, broad, democratic revival reconstruction effort. And that brings you to the second question, which is, who's it going to be?

Well, who's it going to be if you ask me like, you know, is the Iowa often say to people, do you mean like, who do I think the Democratic nominee is going to be? Who isn't the hunt for that? Or do you mean who do I think is going to save the country? And, you know, when I, the Democratic nominee thing, you know, I think that the, you know, if you, it's, it really is too early to say. I think, you know, we all think Gavin Newsom had a pretty good 2025. I think Gavin Newsom has a, has a very high, a two-part challenge, one of which is how do you explain California? because you can't run on the California miracle. And that is the thing that you have to explain. And the other thing is I don't yet hear him have any larger vision for how to do the Democratic

revival and reconstruction that we have to like, even if you're going to talk about Gavin Newsom has good ideas on policy, interesting things to say. But if you ask him like a lot of Democrats, J.B. Pritzker's like this too. God, AI is a really big deal. We have to have a really good big, we have to really get to grips with AI. Well, okay, how are we going to do that? Well, we really got to think about that. We have to think hard about it.

No one's really got a vision for it. The lift of the deriving dream or even the big Clintonian policy approach to these big challenges we're facing. People don't really have that. This is a part of why I mentioned Tala Rico. I don't think it's impossible that someone in this class in 2020, given the pace of our politics moves out now, that someone who wins in 2026 could be a presidential nominee in 2028. Again, I'm not specifying favorites here, but I don't think you can rule out if Graham Platner wins that he's one of those people. I don't think if James Taurigo wins, you can rule him out because I don't think the Democratic bench is as strong as some Democrats like to think. And I'm not, again, I like Josh Shapiro.

I like Westmore. I can go on and make a whole long list. But what we've learned in our politics right now is that if Democrats are going to win, the person who's going to do that is going to be someone who electrifies the base and electrify. and electrifies the whole party and looks like the future. And, you know, among the group that people tell you, I think is in the kind of A group in the Democratic Party, there's not, it's not like there's an obvious, you know, at this point in 2008, which is the analogy.

And in this point in the cycle in 2008, you could already, even though they hadn't announced yet, Edwards, Obama, Hillary Clinton, you knew that that was going to be the triumbrate. You're like, those are three serious people. Any one of those guys, people could be the nominee. Any one of those people could win. I think you knew that by 2006.

You know, you could see that forming. There's nothing like that right now where there's an obvious three or two who are like, these are the heavyweights and these are the ones who could do it. So I tell people I think there's still a lot, we'll know a lot more nine months from now about like who the potential people are that could be the person who is going. To a close to the hot take, we had yesterday a lot of discussion on the New York Times songwriters list. They pulled other songwriters.

asked people to get to nominate. Nile Rogers was number one. Lucinda's on there. It's not ranked, though. The order's not. Nile Rogers is number one. It's just, it's 50, unranked.

They are binding. Yes, they did. He's on the list. You want to read the whole list? Not really. I mean, I was hoping you would just get, people can Google it. Yeah.

Yeah, 30. Stephen Merritt. I felt like there's a shortage of indie rock on there. Stephen Merritt of the Magnetic Fields. Steve, you want this is living just. is more to say living American songwriters, right? So that's a self-limiting thing. You've got Jay-Z on there. I think the most kind of one of the Paul Simon's on there, Bob Dylan's on there, Bruce Springsteen's on there, as you'd imagine, but also Missy Elliott's on there, Taylor Swift's on there.

Young thug. Young thug is on there. Now, young thug is on there. Now, young thug is on there, now, I think if you own Apple, you know, there's a bunch of people will have a bunch of, of, issues with some of these people. Like, I think Young Thug is maybe the most, if you just read the music geeks. It's like the most controversial. Not because he's controversial, but just like, really? What a 30 greatest living American songwriters? That seems like a little to a lot of people like maybe an overreach. Fiona Apple is recorded 56.

He was great. At Coachella. Young Doug was great. I like Young Thuggeeketer my expectations. I like Young Thug, but his young thug really one of the 30 greatest living American songwriters. Fiona Apple has put out exactly 56 songs ever, total. You know, you stand that up next to Bob Dylan.

Do they belong on the same list? Or even up here, Matt Berenger, you know, like The National has many more songs written than her. I think all of these are credible choices. But Bad Bunny, you know, he's only been recording for eight years. I mean, is he really, is Bad Bunny done enough to really be in the company of Springsteen, Paul Simon, et cetera? I think that the most obvious, I was thinking about this because I knew you were going to ask. the most obvious, I'm curious what you think of the most obvious omissions, like where you're kind of like, whoa, how does this person on the list? This is a controversial thing.

Okay. Controversial for a lot of reasons, but I think on the merits, Kanye West should be on that list. On the merits of greatest American love. Again, he's a horrible person and he's gone totally crazy. But is he one of the greatest living American songwriters? I don't think there's a rap writer, a hip-hop writer. who's been more influential or greater than he is. Jason Isbell, not on the list.

I think you would get anybody who lives in the world of roots, country, country rock, etc. Jeff Tweedy, you know, another person. A lot of people will raise those, Jason Isbell and Jeff Tweedy and say, ah, there's a bunch of people on this list that I think could go and be exchanged for one of them. Casey Musgraves is pretty great. That's a horrible nomination. Okay. All right. Randy Newman is the most obvious, miss.

Randy, yes. And there's a whole string of people. Randy Newman, yes, I agree with that. Randy Newman and I would have them in the most in the Bob Dylan category as far as I'm concerned. But, you know, there's, you know, if there are to your taste, you know, you have people who would put Jackson Brown on that list. People would put, there's a whole bunch of 70s. Yeah. Classic rock people who aren't there. The lot of people have been citing, you know, Amy Mann, kind of incredible. Tom Waits isn't on the list.

Tom Waits is a number. I think you make a very strong case for Tom Waits to be on this list. I wasn't sure Tom Waits was still alive, so I wasn't going to not meet him. Well, he just did this. He just did this protest song that just came out the song that he did with Massive Attack. Have you not seen that? You know what? I think we're going to leave it there, John Holloman.

I'm going to go listen to the Tom Waits protest song right now, and we're going to take people out with it. Tom Waits on Massive Attack. It's quite good. Okay. Well, everyone will get to listen to it now because we'll play it for the gang. Awesome. I appreciate your insight. on all things, Senate twink, music,

Barney Frank, history. You know, we cover a lot of ground. And if you want to take a time, get in the time capsule and think about how much, how far we've come as a country, Tim. Just go back and search Barney Frank and Dick Army in Google. And you will see what the then Senate House Majority Leader, how he referred to his colleague Barney Frank in public in 1995. And you will be shocked and appalled.

and you will also be like, man, things have changed for the better, at least in this one area. I guess, kind of for modern days, I think the reply would be whatever tiny dick army, micro dick army. I think there's a chance that's actually what Bernie Frank did say. We'll leave it there. We've left you guys a lot of things to Google, little Easter eggs. That's John Heilman. We appreciate him very much. We have maybe one of the answers to the question of who's a question of who's a question of

Who is it going to be on tomorrow's show? So we'll see you all then. Can I say who it is? You can guess if you want. Let's see. Is it Sauramam Dani? He can't be president. He can't be president.

Yeah, I messed that off one. All right. That's John Alman. We'll be back tomorrow. We'll see you all then. Peace is a fucking half machine gun war. Your boots on the ground. Boots on the ground.

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