The Bulwark Podcast - Jonathan V. Last: Trump's Decadence Is Rubbing off on Americans

Episode Date: February 23, 2026

With a shooting at Mar-a-Lago and some real counterterrorism issues associated with Trump's threat of war on Iran, Kash Patel probably had more important matters to attend to than shotgunning beer with the U.S. hockey team. And the team itself might have remembered that Patel himself is standing in the way of investigating the murders of Alex Pretti and Renee Good. But too many people at the top don't give a crap, and others are taking their cue. And that includes the larger media, which has moved on from Minnesota, even though women are having to resort to giving birth at home out of fear that federal agents will snatch family members in the labor & delivery ward. Meanwhile Trump is aggressively promoting regime change in Iran, and Sam Altman sounds like he thinks Neo was the bad guy in "The Matrix." Plus, does Netanyahu's role in helping get Trump back into power—and perhaps pushing him to war— open up a political opportunity for Dems to put pressure on Israel?JVL joins Tim Miller.show notes Tim plays the guest on Bill's "Bulwark on Sunday" Sonny and Tim assess the aesthetics of Trump's performance at his press conference JVL's "Triad" about what he saw in Minnesota The Wright Thompson Bulwark pod interview that Tim referenced The Atlantic on the other aid programs being cut Tickets are now on sale for our LIVE shows in Dallas on March 18 and in Austin on March 19. TheBulwark.com/Events. Upgrade your wallet today! Get 10% Off @Ridge with code THEBULWARK at https://www.Ridge.com/THEBULWARK #Ridgepod Get 20% off your DeleteMe plan when you go to joindeleteme.com/BULWARK and use promo code BULWARK at checkout.

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Hello and welcome to the Bullwark podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. It is Monday, but Bill Crystal and I couldn't work out the schedules. So what we did instead was I did a Sunday conversation with him, which you can get over on the Bullwork Takes Audio Feed or Substack or YouTube. And today we got a special sub, a very special sub. It's my next level podcast co-host. He's the author of the Triad Newsletter, which if you aren't reading, I don't know what you're doing.

He's also an editor at the Bullwork. It's Jonathan V. Last or JVL. What's up, buddy? I'll try to make everybody feel a little more comfortable. all right so tim made me think about bell absug remember me and dinner with her back I don't know maybe it was 72

but you know it's it's funny she was actually closer with with bill buckley than you would have imagined and you know it just shows that things used to be different what's fun of time back there in America that was great for like 11 of us that was really wonderful we are back me and jv I still have my cold we're back from Minnesota you know my Lebanese ancestry

Louisiana residents. I was not built for that, so I still have a cold, but I'm doing okay. We're going to save some time at the end because JVL's newsletter from over the weekend on Minnesota was really powerful in what we learned there. So I want to chew over that on the end. But we have some news first. Obviously, the big news is the Dutch

have finally installed Rob Jett in his prime minister. He's the first of many gay, millennial, neoliberal world leaders that we'll have. Everything will be well once every country as a gay millennial. Jared Polis? Yeah, he's kind of like the Netherlands, Jared Polis. Yeah.

Is that a good thing? For me, for me it is. Yeah, I mean, you know, nobody's perfect, JVL, okay? Sure. Nobody's perfect. But, you know, given the options on the table, it's not bad. Fair. But I want to really start in Milan.

We have the ecstasy and the ignomini. How do you fucking say that word? Ignominy. Ignominy. The ecstasy and the ignominy of being. an American, watching U.S. hockey, defeat Snow, Mexico for gold and overtime.

Just a beautiful victory. Jack Hughes and his handsome brother, missing a tooth. I didn't get to watch because I was live with Bill, but I watched the whole thing late last night on replay. It was wonderful. But then we had to suffer the embarrassment of the head of the FBI

in the locker room, pouring beer down his throat and like being a make-a-wish kid. I was just, just wondering what you thought about the whole scene. I mean, the embarrassment isn't really for the FBI. It's for the U.S. hockey team. I mean, they didn't just tolerate Cash Patel being there.

One of them put their gold medals around his neck, and they were treating him like the king of the world. He isn't the secretary of the interior. He isn't the secretary of energy or labor, right? He runs the FBI, which has prevented investigations into the murder of Renee Good and Alex Prattie. That is the most notable thing that Cash Patel has done over the last six weeks. And the members of the USA hockey team fucking love him.

Well, great. I love that we have a disagreement right off the top because there's at least one woke hockey player. And we may never know his name. We may never know who this great hero is. But initially, the only thing that we had seen, the only video we had seen of Cash was like on one of the live Instagrams where he was embarrassing himself. You know, it was humiliating and shameful that the FBI director was there in the locker room given all the news, which I want to get to.

But we see the second angle of him shotgunning the beer. And it can only come from a player or a player's girlfriend. I mean, like the phone is right there. And so there is one woke player who is at least six degrees of Kevin Bacon away from ProPublica, which published the video. I guess. So we have one woke dissident. Are you not happy about that?

Can you not find some joy in that? I mean, that's nice, I guess. That's nice, I guess. But it does show you that the hockey team itself. I mean, again, I just, I feel like. a crazy person because none of this matters. It doesn't matter at all. And yet I found myself thinking, fuck these guys. Honestly. I love having JBL on. They want to put their gold medal around the guy who won't allow an investigation in the murder of two U.S. citizens. Again, this is not,

he is not a low-level functionary. He is not running the USDA, right? He's not part of some meaningless part of the government where you're just like, oh, come on, just because he's appointed by Trump, you're going to say that he's a bad person. Like, no, he is actively doing terrible things about the murder of Americans. Yeah. And they just think he's the great. Hey, just a bro. Fuck you guys.

I feel like Sarah on the secret podcast right now. I thought, you know, I thought I'd bring up an easy content topic to start the show. We'd make fun of make a wish cash. We'd attack him. we'd attack Politico Playbook who wrote this morning that this was their assessment, a little different from what you're getting here on the board podcast. And frankly, such as the national euphoria at Team USA's stunning double hockey goals, that it's hard to imagine much serious public backlash to cash in the locker room,

glorifying cash. It's to the players. I thought we'd make fun of cash and the media. But no, JVL is like, I'm going to do the harder thing. I'm going to do the more challenging thing. Also be mad at the players. Also be mad at the players. That's fine.

I'm more mad at the players. Okay, great. Cashmettel is what he is. I can only be mad at who I'm mad at. He is what he is. Well, he's the director of the FBI. Fair enough. You know, I can't pretend like I'm mad at people.

I'm not mad at. But also, you know who else I'm mad at? Please. People like Politico Playbook. Yeah. Saying like the national euphoria over, I am sorry. This is hockey. You're talking about hockey.

He's a lymie fuck from Britain. He doesn't know anything. He doesn't know anything. weeks from now, nobody will remember that this happened because it's... Jack Hughes. It'll be interesting to see Jack Hughes's name ID in 10 weeks from. Not that great. Beautiful goal, by the way.

We love and honor Jack Hughes. Sure. Here's just a couple other things for cash. They think it'll get us into the days. There's stuff happening in the world. Again, I don't be grudging. I like to have a good time. I can't shotgun a beer.

I'm not good at shotguning beers. But, you know, in theory, I would like to be in the locker room with the nuggets after they win the championship this year, shotgunning a beer. my job is podcast host. That was Cash's old job. If in five years, Gavin Newsom wants to make me head of the FBI, I think I would recognize I can't be shotguning beers with Nicole Yokic when he wins his fourth NBA title, you know, even though I'd want to, because there's other things on the table. Here are things happening Sunday as Cash was partying in the locker room. Trump's discussing preparations for potential attack on Iran. Now, you might think that's not ruling the FBI's purview, but you think that decision could lead to threats on the homeland. There might be Iranian discipline. or other Islamist. Counterterrorism is the remit of the FBI, Tim. It would be. So you would think that that would be something.

Nancy Guthrie is still not found. FBI, a pretty big job for the FBI, finding Nancy Guthrie who's been kidnapped. Tim, in fairness to Cash Patel, the parents of her abductor have not turned him in yet. And so what is the FBI supposed to do? That's the way the FBI solves crimes these days is they got to wait for the parents of the perps to put a phone call in saying, saying, oh, I think my kid did this. That's how they solved. So he's just waiting for the parents of whoever was who abducted Nancy Guthrie to come to their

senses and make a good choice. That's all the FBI can do in such situations, Timothy. It's probably not a Mormon, actually. This is a problem. The Mormons have high social cohesion, you know. And so the Mormon boys' parents obviously had to jump in. We also have Americans in Mexico are sheltering in place because a drug cartel, top leader of a drug cartels been killed by the country's military.

Things are insane right now if you're at the Hilton in Porto Vallarta. And again, some potential remit there for the FBI. The Secret Service said law enforcement officers had to kill a would-be intruder at Mar-a-Lago. You'd think FBI would be involved in that, you know, identifying the perp, subsequent investigation. We should just say this guy was a Trump supporter who was unhappy with the Epstein files. Just throwing that out there as well as what we know initially, obviously, more. investigation needs to be done, not by the head of the FBI, because he's hung over in Milan, but we'll have to wait for more info. I'm sure there are other things out there we don't know about.

Could he get ahead of this sort of threat by maybe working on the Epstein files themselves? And maybe, I mean, because it could be there are some criminal indictments to be made, or at least investigations of other people in the Epstein files who are obviously co-conspirators. It does seem, again, Latvia is able to launch some criminal investigations against people. Prince Andrew has been locked up in the Tower of London. Like other countries have done this, but it's Cash who hasn't been able to get it done. It's very strange.

Also, correct me if I'm wrong, Tim? Yeah. Didn't somebody in the administration initially try to pretend that Cash wasn't over there? Not pretend. That's not quite right. The spokesman Ben Williamson, who's a longtime mega hack,

he is now, yeah, Cash is whatever, PR guy. And I believe it was Ken Delanian over at MS now, who reported first that Cash was going to go over there for the hockey game. You want to go over with the hockey game. And Williamson indignantly posts about how, no, no, no, no, no. He has real business over there. There are security meetings he has to do. You know, there's a lot worth of their threats, you know, any gathering of this nature. Right.

So they didn't deny that he's going to be there, but they said that it was not actually because he wanted to bro out with the hockey guys. but he had very serious meetings. And then the video of him shotgunning the beer emerges. And it's kind of like oopsie-dupsy on that. I mean, oops. Yeah. Right. Where does MS now go to get their apology?

Is anybody going to ask the FBI spokesman about this? Yeah, they asked. They asked, you know, whatever. I forget what exactly. They said, excuse cash for love in America, I think was the, it was basically the, yeah, it was basically the spin there. So that's what we got with cash. Let's go through some of things that we mentioned that he was, you know, abdicating while he was throwing down in the locker room.

I guess we should start with the Iran war because it seems like that is happening imminently. Here's one little piece of evidence we have for it. Trump was up late last night, bleeding, as usual. There was one particular bleat I found interesting. It was a video of Life, Liberty, and Levine. And I want to play a little bit of that for you. need to comprehend what we're dealing with. That regime needs to be eliminated to save our children and grandchildren from having to deal with it.

That regime needs to be eliminated. There's Mark Levine, not very popular on the NatCon right, I will say. Maybe enemy number one. You can know that because it's like, man, you're like voice. He's a late night Fox news show on the weekends now. I don't know. I mean, you know, criminology here. It seems like if the president of the United States is posting video,

of, you know, his favorite news anchors talking about regime change. It kind of seems like that's where his head's at to me. Well, it seems like he's trying to warn off some of Maga, who is not happy about the prospect of, right? And so he's, you know, because the way things work is everybody gets right with the policy once Trump does the policy. And so what he, his role is here is to make clear to people what he wants to do, right? And so this way he can try to make people like Tucker and others who might be skeptical about attacking Iran, try to get them to get their religion now because he knows that once he drops bombs, they'll get on side less or more or they'll go quiet, one or the other. Do you think that's going to work in this one? It depends.

You can envision ways on which things go really pear-shaped and some of the more Israeli skeptic members of the Maga. right, decide like, F this. Like, I'm just going to say this is bad. But it have to go pretty pear-shaped, I think. You know, like it would have to involve, like, the deaths of Americans. And they'd have to be, like, combat deaths. They couldn't be Iran launches a retaliatory strike and cutter, and somebody's killed on a base in Qatar. That would not be enough, I think. They could- That wouldn't be enough, you don't think? I think they could stomach that. They could just be like, well, it wasn't really a combat death. I mean, they didn't put boots on the ground in Iran. and they could talk themselves out of it.

I mean, this is their question, right? Is Trump committed to going forward? We have three other data points in his attempts to saber-rattle, right? We have Greenland, Iran, one, and Venezuela. The difference between the two in which he went forward with his promised military action was that he moved assets to the area beforehand. He didn't move any assets to like the North Sea, right? didn't put a carrier group off the coast of mainland when he was pretending like he was going to invade it.

In the case of Venezuela and the first to rant strike, he put a bunch of assets there. Like that costs a lot of money. It takes time. I mean, once you go to that trouble, I feel like from his perspective, not going through with it, feels like backing down. Yeah. I think he probably feels like he has to do it. I was pretty convinced. You talk about this with Michael Weiss on Friday.

the financial times sort of criminology of the Iranian mullahs and like what their thinking is. I found that reasonably compelling, actually, that they think that their position will be stronger after a kinetic conflict than it is now. But the other thing that that is suggests that he is interested in going forward is that he's already having members of his regime admit that there is an Iranian nuclear program. And this is 30 weeks after the declaring that the Iranian nuclear program was completely and totally obliterated. That was the phrase. Yeah, Whitkoff, Steve Wickoff, his buddy, the Outerboro Real Estate guy,

who's the only person for all negotiations, says around a week away from having a bomb, which is pretty shocking. A week away from having a bomb. You know, I remember some of us saying about the strike, like, okay, well, it seems to have set the nuclear program back. And if there wasn't significant blowback from it, then like that's basically okay. That's not a terrible outcome.

But we shouldn't pretend that the nuclear program is gone because that's not true. And the government lying to us about this is itself very concerning. And I remember getting my knuckles wrapped by some anti-ante. It's about, no, what do you talk about it? It's gone. They've been set back years upon years upon years. It'll be decade before. Okay.

Well, 30 weeks. We are 30 weeks out. and they are evidently fully reconstituted and now just a week away. I think I want to call it Kameniology. Instead of criminology. Khamianology? That's nice.

Can I ask one other question of you, though, Tim? What do you think the Levin broadside on this means? And when he says, I forget what he said, the exact construct, was it leadership or regime that he said needs to go? Let's just let's do it one more time. Let's just let's do it over time. We need to comprehend what we're dealing with.

That regime needs to be eliminated to save our children and grandchildren from having to deal with it. Regime needs to be eliminated. So the regime needs to be eliminated. And, I mean, there are three options, right? The first option is a limited strike in which Trump then says, again, hey, we totally destroyed it for real this time. Now it's really double completely obliterated. Yeah, right. Another is decapitation where you eliminate, like,

like the top five molas, right? And you put your own Delci Rodriguez in. And the third is a regime change. Regime change suggests something much broader than decapitation. Like it isn't enough to say that like we're going to swap out the mullahs for the IRGC. We are getting an entirely new governing construct. And it is interesting that Trump chose the Levin quote, which is about regime change. But of course, that's probably giving Trump too much credit.

He just thinks, like, oh, I got to find somebody on our side who is in favor of this, and I'll puff them up. But I don't know. What do you think is the most likely thing here? Yeah, I assume they're thinking about number two. I assume they're thinking about number. Just based on Venezuela, just, you know, past performance is the best predictor of future results. But this is not what you're supposed to say as a content creator. But, like, I don't actually understand what they're doing.

I truly don't. I mean, like, there are some theories. you know, that people would throw out the, you know, the Epstein theory. Oh, he's doing anything, it's a wagging the dog, anything to distract from domestic problems. Okay, I guess. I don't know. Trump's really good at distractions, though. I feel like he could come up with other ones besides war with Iran.

There's an Israel theory. Like, BB's just dog walking them, just like putting them on a leash and walking around the neighborhood. Yep. That seems like the most coherent of the various theories. That's, yeah. There is, like, what, that there are some people inside the administration that really want this. Like Pete Hegseth is

chomping at the bit for a war. I just don't think Trump listens to any of those people, really, except Marco maybe, but Mark, I think Marco's pretty focused on Cuba and decaptated Cuba, right? So, like, I don't want to be a conspiracy theory. The Israel, pushing him into this

is the theory that makes the most sense. Or also, like, maybe it's just machismo, and Trump is just like, the Ayatollah won't do what I say, and so I have to bomb him. It's a little confusing, because If he had a mandate for anything, it was basically the deportations and not going in Middle East wars. Like, those were the two things that his base was most excited about.

So, like, what's he doing? Yeah, I think the Netanyahu answer is probably most likely. I mean, honestly, if Trump needed distractions, he just pick a fight with, like, the U.S. women's hockey team. Right. Right. Like, you could do that this week. It would get even more clock cycles. Then, you know, you just call them a bunch of...

Woke, yeah. I don't know. Call them trans or something. Woke trans, something or another, right? And that would be fine. And he's got a state of the union tomorrow. And, like, he could put anything insane in there. He doesn't see.

Right. He can make, he can make any news he wants, right? He could call AOC a man. Yeah, right. I mean, we'll see whether or not it's real. I mean, the New York Times reporting today that he is eyeing an initial large strike, but then like being part of a partnership with Israel that is a much larger force. That's interesting.

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because we were chatting about this, we were driving around Minnesota and Uber. How do you think that it's best for Democrats to deal with this? Like the situation is a very, you know, it's precarious, right? Because like, on the one hand, like, you know, Israel has been an ally. You can travel freely. You know, I can be gay in Tel Aviv and I can't really. And, you know, Abu Dhabi. But Israel's been a long time ally that were attacked on October 7th.

there are a couple people that were a little on the left who were a little too excited about the Tucker Huckabee interview for my taste. You know, it's like, wait a way, like on the one hand, Tucker is a Nazi anti-Semite. On the other hand, he was really good at pressing the Israeli ambassador with some hard cues. I'm like, okay.

So, you know, it's a dicey situation, but like the more Trump sidles up to Beebe after October 7th, I think the more power this gives and the more energy this gives, and there's already a lot of energy to kind of like the anti-Is Israel left in the Democratic Party.

And so I don't know. I'm wondering how you think like Democrats responsibly navigate this. Can we talk about this under secret podcast rules? Sure. I mean, I can't help if somebody clips it. But, yeah, I'll keep it. I don't mean that. I just mean for the listeners.

So what I mean is for people who don't listen to the secret show, first of all, shame on you. But secondly, the rules Sarah and I operate under the secret show is we have discussions about things we are not sure about. And we will often say, like, what about this? Does this sound like a good idea? Does this make sense? And then we'll kick it around for 40 minutes and either not come to a conclusion or two weeks later, we'll be like, yeah, actually, that was wrong. I'm working through ideas with you here, Tim. Yeah, please, let's do it. So Donald Trump has created a real innovation in American statecraft. Prior to Donald Trump, the way American foreign policy, policy worked was that America has national interests, and these national state interests governed

our foreign policy. And so that would mean Israel was our ally, not because we liked Israel, but because Israel was a key country in the Middle East. The Middle East was an important region of the world. We had leverage over Israel, and yes, there's a moral component to it, et cetera, et cetera. Sure. But, you know, this is, it's all about state interest and it was important for America. There was also some of the more abstractions, as Marco calls them. Sure. Just, you know, form of government.

Right. And those are the nice things we tell ourselves about America, right? But that was part of it, though. It was not, it was not 0% of it. Not 0%. But again, again, history of foreign policy is that the determinative things are really about interests. And, you know, you can overlook dealing with not nice governments, like the Saudi government, because national interest dictated, right?

You got to do business with bad people because this is what the country needs. Trump has inverted that. American foreign policy under Trump starts with the president's political interests and then conforms the national interests to those. Political and financial interests, we should say. Correct. Correct. Sorry.

Sorry. And so a government, which is nice to Trump, like Buckele in El Salvador, gets American foreign policy on its side, regardless of whether or not is in America's interests. Right? It's like the opposite of America first. It's not. It's just Trump first. I mean, Hungary and Mark has tripped to Hungary at Slovakia is the prime example of this, right? Like, yeah. I mean, like, it's a much better national interest for us to be, you know, good, good relations with Denmark and Germany, but we're not. We're in deals with Slovakia and Hungary instead. So, Trump has done something similar with Israel, or rather Israel has done something similar.

with Trump. Israeli foreign policy for the last eight years now has really operated in a way in which they took for granted that a Democratic president would honor the American Israel Alliance because it works in America's national interests, but that they would have to politically be useful to Trump in order to secure Trump's help. And what that did was, especially in after the October 7 attacks, when Joe Biden was trying very hard to hug BB Netanyahu and help Israel however he could. At the end of the day, they thought they would do better under Trump, and the Trump would be more useful to them. And so they undercut Biden. And the government of Israel played favorites.

It was in favor of the Republican Party. And I don't want to say it meddled in the election because that's not. Biden was frankly more favorable to them than a lot of even past Republicans were. I mean, Biden did more of what they wanted than Reagan did. And I'm not saying they meddled in the election, but that Israeli policy was geared towards we would like to make things difficult for Biden and put the Democrats in a difficult position because we would rather the Republicans win the presidential election. And I think that Democrats need to establish some deterrence going forward and to assure,

for the long-term good of America, assure regimes that have done that sort of calculation. that they don't get to have it both ways. They don't get to assume that a Democratic president will be favorable to them. And so undercut Democrats and try to help the authoritarians who are trying to do a way of liberal democracy in America. And so, for instance, I have long thought that a Democratic president ought to make an example of Bukali and ought to come to power and say, you and El Salvador, we are going to do everything we can to make your life. hard until this guy is gone. Again, just talking out loud, Tim, is not advocating. I'm just asking.

Just from a game theory perspective, shouldn't Democrats take that approach to Israel and the Netanyahu regime? Not that they're hostile to Israel, but they're hostile to the Netanyahu regime and say that America will go back to being allies with Israel when the government of Israel no longer attempts to curry favor with the authoritarian attempt that was ongoing in America? Yeah, I mean, I think that there's a way to frame that same position up that's not just about like sticks for bad prime minister, though as satisfying as that might be because B.B has been a horrible prime minister. But look, just going back to your original frame, there's a lot of warning of Israel

about this, about like the behavior after October 7th. Obviously, they had to defend themselves, but the scale of it and how that was turning off the world community. And they made a decision, which maybe was a rational decision. I mean, I'm about to do David Frum's podcast. David Frum would say this was a rational decision for their own security, which is to say, I don't care about what the world thinks. We need to protect ourselves from these threats. Maybe that was a rational decision.

But like, there were a lot of efforts during that period to say, hey, if you keep going in this way, like you're going to ostracize the world and alienate the world. And you combine that with this Tucker interview with Huckabee, where, you know, I thought that the most newsworthy answer of it, the most interesting answer was where Tucker is talking about, okay, well, if Israel has a biblical right to this land, why don't they have a biblical right from the Nile to the Euphrates,

which is kind of like a bilacude version of from the river to the sea, from the Nile to the Euphrates. Right. And Huckabee's like, that would be fine if they did. And now that's not the U.S. policy stated, but my understanding, talking to my, you know, friends who have done work over there is like that that clip is everywhere in the Middle East. now. So anyway, my point is just simply that like, as long as BB is in there, you know,

saber rattling, I don't see that's in the national interest. And then from a political standpoint, just circling back to the original question for the Democrats, to me, like, I think my secret podcast, you know, we're thinking this through position on this is I was watching an old Ben Shapiro interview from like 10 years ago where he was doing this from a fiscal conservative standpoint and from like an Israeli protection standpoint. And he was being a pro-Israel guy. And he said basically, I think the U.S. should, Israel needs to be independent of the U.S.

like, not allies, but like financially independent. Like the U.S. should stop giving aid to Israel. Right. Because he saw, I guess, give him one cheer for Ben Shapiro. He saw this coming, right? Which was like that there would end up being resentments and, you know, that would fray the alliance. And it's like what, and Israel has enough resources and they shouldn't require this.

Now, they're complicated things about what type of aid we give and all that. But, like, I just think that to me, like, that's a safe democratic space is to just fall back on that and talk about the way that BB has, you know, frayed the alliance and say, look, you know, this is not about trying to turn Israel into South Africa or whatever. This is about saying Israel's got to stand on its own from an aid perspective if they're going to, you know, prosecute wars in the manner in which they're prosecuting them. I mean, that's America's position with NATO. Like if it's okay to take that position with NATO That is currently the American policy towards NATO I want to sort of try to insulate myself a little bit Somebody somebody in the comments

From the live show where I said something like this said Oh, so you know Israel isn't a perfect democracy But you know JVL you're sounding like you hate Israel You know isn't America imperfect too And my response to that is yes, I actually feel very similar to Israel and the Israeli people as I do towards America and the American people in this moment, in that the American people have chosen an illiberal anti-democratic regime. And until the American people rectify that mistake, America is just doing bad things all the world over.

and I really hope that, for instance, the Europeans and the Canadians resist us and are able to establish global security without us. And by the way, if I was a podcaster in Canada. Same thing, right? If I was a podcast or Canada, I would be like, yeah, I don't think Mark Kearney should be giving military assistance to the Donald Trump regime. That would be my position. Not that they are that we need it, but to play out that counterfactual.

Like, I don't know. Like the Netanyahu regime has been, I don't want to call it a criminal regime because I'm not Why not? Not great. But from the perspective of American democracy, the Netanyahu regime has been firmly on the side of Donald Trump against. And again, this is historically bonkers. Because the way historically foreign policy works is, you with your allies always take pains to make sure that you have deep ties to both sides of the aisle because you recognize that the other side will have power at some point. And so you want to be on good relations with them.

You don't take sides between the parties. You don't do things to try to make one party's life difficult than the others. Right. This is, again, it's just foreign policy 101 all the way up through 2020. And that is not how they have conducted their foreign policy in Israel. Behave in the comments of this. Javier, what are your comment rules on the triad once comments have to be? So they should be kind, necessary, or true, at least.

two of those three things and hopefully all three, right? The best comments are kind, necessary, and true, but every comment should be at least two of those things. Yeah, I take necessary feedback on this. It's complicated, not ad hominem. All right, delete me makes it easy, quick and it's safe to remove your personal data online at a time when surveillance and data breaches are common enough to make everyone vulnerable. Delete me does all the hard work of wiping you and your family's personal information from data broker websites. Delete me knows your privacy is worth protecting, sign up and provide them with exactly what information you want to delete it. And their experts take it from there.

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bulwark at checkout. That's joinedeletme.com slash bulwore code bulwark. Speaking of the bad things the United States is doing in the world, and why people shouldn't give us aid. The Atlantic has a new item on the next step of the dismantling of our foreign aid. So there were some groups, you might remember. So USAID gets shuttered, basically. And there's outrage over various things.

And it's the way Trump administration works, you know, like a third world to banana republic. You know, a few programs got saved here and there because, you know, either there was a bad news story that freaked them out about it or there's a friend. Trump has a buddy that's on the board of it or whatever. There was a mega church. Yeah, there was a mega church. Somewhere there was a Texas megachurch that gave, you know, was working with some aid program and they freaked out and so they were able to get, right? Yeah, that's how it is.

Well, those programs that survived, they're on the chopping block now. Slated for cancellation. Internal State Department email obtained by the Atlantic said the administration will end all humanitarian funding. It's currently providing as part of a responsible exit from 16 countries. I'm not going to go through all of them, but just here's one example. We can eliminate all aid to Somalia, for example. Hundreds of health and nutrition centers were already shut down last year,

according to Doctors Without Borders, in one regional hospital, just to give an anecdote. Doctors Without Borders reports that deaths among malnourished children younger than five increased 44%. Some of those hospitals were still getting aid, and then that aid is set to be cut. So there we go. Yeah, two things here. So you had two things happening when USAID was, was fed into the woodcheper. You had half of the Trump administration saying,

yes, we did it. We killed the whole thing. And then you had other people like Marco Rubio saying, nothing has changed. All we've done is shifted it in more responsible ways. Do you remember this? Yeah, sure. Yeah.

All the critical aid is still happening. That was just waste, fraud, and abuse, right? And now we have, you know, you wait one year and then, like, see, we can get rid of even this other stuff that we said we could save. It is interesting that the American foreign policy now is both, we don't want any Somali immigrants to America. And also we don't want to help make things better for Somalis in Somalia. Those things would seem to be intention, right? If you, you know, if you are interested in controlling immigration flows, one way to do that is to help the on the ground situation in the sending countries so that people don't.

feel like they need to leave. Yeah. Just saying. There was a thing, one of the UGov polls recently, I did a tryout about this, where Americans were being asked what we need to spend money on. And a large plurality said, oh, the country should be spending a lot less money. You know, we just spend too much money in this government. We got to cut spending.

And then it asked people, just individual programs, should we spend a little bit more? a lot more, a little bit less, a lot less. And on defense and Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security, large pluralities or majorities saying lots more, need to spend lots more on these things. The only line item they tested that people said we need to spend less on. Was there a second one? Oh, what was the second one?

Yeah. I don't. The second one was ICE. Oh, ICE. That's right. Yeah, it shows you how, you know. But it was far. Sometimes reality can break through to the bulk.

Yeah. And foreign aid is like 1% I think, one and a half percent of total spending. Like it's a very, very small part of government spending. And it is a place where you just get enormous ROI because, again, nations have interests. When you spend foreign aid, you're not just like helping people on the ground. You're also establishing dependencies from other governments on hours. You are spreading influence and our ability to influence events on the ground elsewhere. It is part of our intelligence network.

I regret to inform you that not every worker in there doesn't work for the CIA, right? I mean, this is part of our intelligence gathering apparatus. And to be able to accomplish all of that in the way that we do, and also it holds our adversaries a bag. It prevents China, for instance, from spreading their influence across the gold. And so it is a bargain at thrice the price. And we're just not going to do that because it goes to black people. Right? Yeah.

I mean, I just don't see any other way to see this except that it's racism. Is that too reductive? No. And it's also part of this. There is a nationalist fervor. Look, I understand the argument that like we should take care of ours. Like, there are elements of the America first part that I get. You know, I was ranting over the weekend about the, you know, this stupid thing where Jeff Landry

my governor is like, we're going to, we're sending this ship to Greenland. You know, it's a health ship to Greenland. And I'm like, wait a minute. We have terrible health outcomes in Louisiana. One of the worst in the country. That is a take care of our people first mindset that I think would resonate across left and right. And so I do think that there's some element of that.

Like that is something that resonates, you know, it is up to responsible leaders to like make the case to people that you just made that it's like, okay, hey, you know, there's some benefits this is the tiny part of the budget. We do have fiscal problems. This isn't going to help it. Like, we got to find other ways to whatever, you know, either grow GDP or cut or tax people which are less popular. So we're just not really in a moment where a lot of people want to do the hard thing, you know. So I think that there's a racism element to it, but there's also a decadence. So that should appeal to you. Well, you know what? You got me. I'll go with that. See, the secret podcast rules. I've changed my, I've changed my view right here. Great. I love that.

Other ways in which we are harming our, what should be, relationships that are in our national interests that serve our people, that benefit everybody, that lift all boats, is the tariff conversation. We talked about this a little bit with Michael Weiss on Friday because we're right as we were taping the Supreme Court overturned the tariffs. There's been a bunch of fallout since then. Hours after the court decision, Trump announced a new global tariff rate of 10%. He had a big temper tantrum at the press conference. Me and Sunny Bunch did a really, I think, funny, you know, kind of video over the weekend that just judged his performance, you know, kind of like using WWE and movie aesthetic rules. Because he had a very temper tantrum, the lighting was interesting. Anyway, he has this temper tantrum.

He announces 10% global tariffra. This was invoked using a never-before used authority that's under some 1974. Right. Yeah. It's for 150 days, right? Yeah. You get 150 days. On Saturday, he reconsidered that.

And he said, you know what? So you just said it by 1%. No, 5%. We went back and looked at the, and we blew the dust off the trade act of 1974 and looked through it. And we're like, you know what? We can do 15. So let's just go ahead and do 15.

15 is the maximum. So let's increase by 50%. We got 50% increase on the thing I just announced 48 hours ago. Correct. Yeah. So that's what he did. Let's do this and be legends. Yeah.

This morning Monday morning, he probably did this. the court has also approved all other tariffs. I don't think that's exactly what happened, but I think that what he's saying is the tariffs that didn't fall under the AEPA, you know, tariffs, the court did not challenge those. I don't know if they approved those, but they didn't challenge them. They didn't overturn them. And so what's Trump going to do?

This is in his own words. These other tariffs, quote, can all be used in a much more powerful and obnoxious way. And so he intends to do that. He tends to be more obnoxious in using the other non-emergency tariffs and putting those in place, harming our allies. The Europeans

are pissed. Because a lot of them because of the deals, remember all the deals? I forget what it was. 84 deals in 50 days, whatever it was supposed to be. Some of these countries have cut deals that were under the 15 percent rate. And so they're pissed. And they're like, what the fuck? You know, there were some

economists out there that were saying, you know, this could be a big favor to Trump. You know, they'll overturn it. It'll bring some certainty back to the marketplace. That doesn't seem to be what's happening. No. And this is interesting because it really freezes economic activity for at least 150 days. And 150 days from now, we will be awfully close to the midterm elections.

I haven't done the math in my head, but we'll be just about there. And you can't make plans. If you're a business who touches at all on, you know, international trade. You're a small business or you are somebody who is making capital investments because you're a big business and you're reliant on, you know, parts or Silicon from someplace else. You can't go making those plans because there is a huge difference between 10% and 15%. Right. It's 50% difference. Here, look at me doing math. And it is amazing. that we live in a world where the president does something as unhinged as this.

And nobody blinks anymore. Nobody goes, oh, Jesus, we got to get this. Somebody should do the 25th Amendment. We should, we should impeach him. This is insanity. This is a guy running around our house lighting fires. Instead, everyone's just like, yep, just Trump being Trump. In many ways, he had another, another truth social.

tweet over the weekend where it was like, I have the power to destroy everything. You know, I can, do you remember this? I can destroy the country. He was talking about other countries. Yeah, you're talking about other countries, but it's a funny quote from to say, I can destroy the country. I do expect us to see that quote in some midterm ads from the Democrats. I sure think so too. But he's not wrong, right? And this is, this is the like, you can just do stuff. Right. This is all the people like, when I say, got to demolish the ballroom on day one, and people like, oh, but you can't because then, I'm like, no, you can just do it.

And then move on the next day to something else, right? I feel like that is one of the lessons of the Trump administration. You can just go do the things you want and who's going to stop you. It would be nice for people to do good stuff, you know, to just say, hey, I'm going to do this and it's going to help people. It might ruffle a few feathers. We're just going to do it. And then we'll see how it plays out in the courts.

And it's not my preferred way of governing. You know, the nice way of government would be to go, you know, a bill becomes a law. You know, yeah, go through the committee process. You know, you negotiate. It comes to the floor. It passes. You know, then you get to execute it without, like, random interest groups suing you all the time and preventing you from execute. Unfortunately, like, we've created a Rube Goldberg system that makes all that impossible.

Now, Congress doesn't want to legislate, you know, the people, the only people that do have agency are the people that sue everyone once they. once they sign a law to stop things from happening. And so, unfortunately, this is like a real lesson if we ever get out of this mess. You're describing a sclerotic system which no longer functions. Right. And so, and this is, I mean, Sarah doesn't like to hear this. Sarah really doesn't like this. But if you look at our system and you decide that it is too sclerotic to function

and that it can't actually work anymore and a bunch of the things that we thought were guardrails were actually just the honor system and a bunch of other functions that were built in by the Constitution turned out not to function at all. Like the 25th Amendment doesn't work. The impeachment clause doesn't work. And then the only actual guardrail on things is kind of like the heckler's veto on like random good shit we want to do. Like if three people show up to a city council meeting, like we don't end up getting to

right. Like it's broken on both sides. Right. And so if that is the case, then you can, can do two things. You can just say, well, maybe it'll resolve itself someday. We're just going to keep going. Or you can look at systemic change. And this is where I think, I mean, if you want things to get better and different, you have to look at systemic change. And that's where I get to my like, got to add a state or two, got to expand the Supreme Court, got to do things differently.

The thing is the just do stuff, as you say, that works for destroying things. You can tear apart. It doesn't work for building things, really. I mean, not, it works for building like buildings, right? But it doesn't work for like standing up new spending, right? When you are creating programs, those things really do, for the most part, need to go through a legislative process. And so if that doesn't really work anymore, although I don't know. I mean, Joe Biden did it.

then it just turned out that people didn't like it, that Joe Biden did the things. I think there are two theories of the case, right? One is that we're totally in a vibes placed politics, right? And it's like it doesn't actually matter that Joe Biden did anything and results don't really matter because people care more about whatever is in their social media feed, telling them why things are bad.

Or, you know, there is like the other theory of the case, which is that, like, Joe Biden didn't take enough credit for shit. And it didn't go fast enough, right? Like, it took years to go through the, you know, the red tape and that he wasn't selling it. Like, we don't really know. I'm not really partial to either side. Like, I literally think it could be either. Like, that maybe Joe Biden would have gotten credit if you would have done, you know, been better at touting himself and been better at building things faster.

Or maybe we live in a society where truth is fake and nobody knows. Speaking of that, let's go to AI where everything's going to get worse on that front. I just have one clip. Okay, then we'll get, then we'll finish with Minnesota. But I had to play this clip for you in particular. So Sam Altman, and he was responding to somebody who was concerned about the amount of energy consumption that the data centers are, kind of grinding through. And his answer to that was pretty telling, I think. Let's listen.

One of the things that is always unfair in this comparison is people talk about how much energy it takes to train in AI. model relative to how much it costs a human to do one inference query. But it also takes a lot of energy to train a human. It takes like 20 years of life and all of the food you eat during that time before you get smart. So the fair comparison is if you ask Chattea question, how much energy does it take once its model is trained to answer that question versus a human? And probably AI has already caught up on an energy efficiency basis measured that way. Seems like Sam Altman likes his machine more than he likes humans. It seems like there's no actual value to human life

other than what it can produce. And the ones and zeros of what it consumes versus what it produces, that's how Sam Altman sees human life. This is a guy who watched The Matrix and thought it was like Neo was the bad guy. Right? This is a guy who watched The Matrix who's like, that horrible disruptive human

has fucked up Agent Smith. How dare he? So the Matrix is a tragedy I mean just on a Com's perspective it amazes me that he could give that answer

right can you can you imagine well I think it speaks to a bubble I guess it does I think it speaks to the bubble you're in honestly right like you're in such a thick bubble where you're on other people who are AI pumpers and VCs

and you know people who think that that I don't actually really value human life. A lot of them are like socially awkward and strange and like don't, you know, have real friendships. Right. Like I just think that it speaks to the I mean, it's a comms thing. Yeah. But I think that

you can only say that if like you are in a social environment where like that kind of talk gets rewarded. Right. Where it's like, oh yeah, well, you just have to think about the efficiencies. Right. And everybody thinks it. I mean, it's also It's also crazy. Energy can neither be created nor destroyed. This is, you know, laws of thermodynamics. But humans are, as they are growing up, creating value and that value gets transformed to things like extracting energy from matter, that sort of thing is what I'm getting at. AI is pure consumption. The extent to which these guys seem to think that it is impossible for them to be regulated is a little scary to me. because I wrote about this a couple weeks ago, we could choose to just not allow this shit.

I mean, this view that once the technology exists, it's impossible to stop it and put the toothpaste out. That's wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Right? You can make a bunch of legislative choices where you say, this shit isn't allowed. Or it's not allowed in this context,

where it's not allowed in that context. And the idea that, well, AI will just replace the entire middle class and there's nothing to do about it. I don't understand that because if we were headed towards something like that, it would seem to me that in a functioning democracy, the people would simply vote to say, no, we're not going to allow that. You can't have AI automation doing these, these, these, these, and these tasks. And the way you do that is you create ways of which relying on that creates legal liabilities for corporations.

And it's all pretty achievable. and we ought to be doing it and it seems insane to be sitting back and just being, well, I don't know. They're creating God. And then once they have Dr. Manhattan,

we can't stop. Yes. Yes, you can stop them. This is why this clip is so important to me, right? Because it plays into that regulation question. Right? It's a question of, does human life have any intrinsic value at all?

Like, I'm not a total anti-AI Ludite, right? I'm like, could this technology serve us, humans, the ones that created it, and help us flourish broadly, not just like the 11 dudes on the spectrum who are going to make a trillion dollars, right? Like, but everybody, all people. Like, can AI, can this product help people flourish? And I think the answer to that is yes, right? Like, if you talk to like more normal people who are pro-AI like Mark Cuban or whatever. I have some disagreements with him.

We hash this out on the pod. But like he talks about that and those terms. It's like think about the medical innovations and the entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship, the things that, you know, young people, you know, how they can now build stuff for themselves. And, you know, like, there are ways he could talk about this that puts it in the context of, okay, you know, this technology can maybe make human life more enriching, right? but the concerning thing is that it seems like all the people in charge of it don't give a fuck about that and actually dislike humans and don't care about humanity at all and that is pretty alarming I mean Alton is not that far from Agent Smith when he is talking to Neo in the Matrix and saying that humanity is a virus remember he's like oh you right gross and I don't like to touch you

yeah that's how he treats the sister yeah the whole thing is insane and I I think there is probably some space for a Democrat to really demonize these companies and run on a platform of, and by the way, we're going to make these fuckers work for us. And that's a good platform, right? That's what I'm saying. That's not an anti, that's not like a Luddite, like, oh, you know, we shouldn't invent new things. We shouldn't grow and build. No, it's like, they work for us. They're stealing our data, you know?

Like the government, we pay the government. We can take back control of our own destiny. Much more on that another time. Okay, we're already going long. Good show, long show. But I want to talk about Minnesota. Bill and I talked about this a little bit yesterday, and I kind of already gave my lessons learned,

one of which was that I was very much focused on the political victory, which is real, by the way. There was a real political victory there, all credit to the humans that were flourishing in Minneapolis and the community and the way they organized together. But like it's hard, I think, for good reason. Like the people in Minnesota can't focus on the political victory because they're still in the middle of an occupation.

And I think the extent of that was made very real for me when I was there. And you wrote about this a little bit yesterday. So I want you to talk about that. Yeah. It's, uh, it's worse than it looks from afar, I think. At least to me, it struck me as worse than I expected it to be. I don't know about you. If your, your thoughts were the same.

Oh, significantly. I mean, I, and I, and I, thought it was bad. But yeah, worse than I expected. Yeah, no, same. Like I, you know, I'd written a bunch of hair on fire things about how dangerous this was and it was an occupation and this was the government waging war on the citizens. And yet when you get there, you realize how deep you are to Anne Frank territory. So I just want to talk about one thing. Governor Waltz talked about a network of doulas who are organized to go and do secret home births for women need to deliver. liver baby, but can't go to a hospital because the hospitals are basically honey traps that

DHS agents take out. I mean, on the one hand, just sit with that for a moment, that people have to give birth in their homes in secret because if they were to go to a hospital to have their baby, masked agents of the state would abduct them. This is not like a, oh, if we're not careful, we get to the handmaidens tale someday. This is real. This is lived reality right now. This is the country you live in.

It's there. You may not have it in your neighborhood, but, you know, this is not like a little shanty town somewhere. This is a major American city. They've got a bunch of professional sports teams. But then the other part of that is, okay, so they're now having kids at home. How is the record keeping working on that? Right? Are these kids getting birth certificates?

Are they getting citizenship? Is the idea that they will then try to claim citizenship for the kids later? It's federal government going to oppose that. Right? You see, like, you are... This one thing creates all sorts of other problems because it really is something like ethnic cleansing. I'm sorry. I don't mean to sound like an insane person.

Maybe I do sound like an insane person. But that's what this program ultimately is about. It is white nationalism. It is ethnic cleansing. and it's happening, and I don't think that the American media can cover it. So when I wrote about this over the weekend, I was pretty angry that the national media seems to have decided to let this all go. But as I thought about it over the weekend, the media, when we talk about it, has finite capacity,

right? There are only so many story segments that CNN or ABC News can run on a given day. Like, you can actually count them up. You can say, look, they have space to run 125 segments or something like that. The New York Times can only fit six stories on the front page. And for the rest of the paper, they have a big newsroom, but not an infinite room. It's not an infinite number of monkeys sitting in an infinite number of typewriters. They can only produce so many pieces of journalism.

And the president is trying to go to war against Iran. He is going to give a state of the union address. He is changing tariffs by the day. just physically you cannot keep up with all this stuff and also keep covering what what is going on in Minnesota. And so the burden for that really falls to the citizenry. Like there are 340 million of us. That is an infinite, but it's a lot. And if the American people can be infinitely concerned about this and keep this top of mind, that is kind of what needs to happen.

And I don't know what to do except do my little barbaric yelp and try to shine lights and try to keep reminding people. But back to decadence, if some sizable majority of the American population can't keep this in their heads or don't understand what's happening, then what the fuck does it even matter? Right? Well, honestly, though, this is why the op is important. Like, really. And I think back to the right Thompson nod. I just, I don't know. I was so struck by this when he was talking about his mom posting on Facebook.

And she lived through the civil rights era in Mississippi and shows of Mississippi. And he's saying, they're like, why are you doing this? Like, people are going to come to your, like, you're going to get yelled at at the bingo game. She's like, I lived through this once and I was silent. I'm not going to be silent again. And I was like, I thought that was really powerful. And but it's also like, right. I mean, it's a small thing.

But in Minnesota, there's just a cycle to this, like how, news gets followed and covered, right? And Trump understands this, like, in a deep level, being a tabloid guy from the 80s in New York, right? And it's like, okay, I'm going to end this story line, and haven't been an apprentice person, right? It's like we're going to send in a new guy, you know, we're going to tell them to chill out a little bit. You know, they're going to now send the agents, disperse them, and they'll be out in different communities instead of in one community where they can get videotaped. And we're going to send ships to Iran and, whatever tariffs people start talking about something else and that's right like and that's what's

going to happen naturally for all the reasons you laid out right and that is why it's just so critical for folks like us but for the people of Minneapolis and others and folks who are in other communities to keep yopping right because they were on the run on this politically like what they were doing in Minneapolis was not popular and it was not popular because it was documented and it was documented because people were organizing and shouting about it and so I Like, that stuff works and matters. And they are changing their tactics, but, like, the program is continuing. And anyway.

Democratic polls have the capability to keep this elevated to. Yep. Right. I just don't see why every Democrat, the country, isn't just talking about this constantly. I understand it's not a kitchen table issue. It doesn't have to do with affordability. Kind of a kitchen table issue if you are having a secret birth in your home. And, like, that's relevant.

I believe people, your family's probably talking about that at the kitchen table. Yeah. But I don't know. I mean, can you imagine like trying to, if you're an undocumented immigrant and you have a kid and the kid should be a U.S. citizen, but you had to do it at home. And like, I think the Trump administration is going to let you get citizenship for that kid. I mean, they're trying to undo birthright citizenship anyway. Or even if I kind of hate doing the undocumented thing because it like gives too much to them. I assume, I don't know this for fact, but at least one of those people were like, we're,

legitimate assailies, right? Like, you saw this all the time. It's people that did, it's not people that swam across the Rio Grande and like, whatever, were smuggled in by cartels. It's like people that came to the country, went to a port of entry, you know, claimed asylum, have been doing their check-ins as they're supposed to. They've been doing, you know, what everybody says that they should do. Like, wait in line, follow the rules.

All that stuff. And, yeah, and these guys are just treating them, you know, like they're criminals. And you can get swept up and sent off to Texas. in 24 hours and once you're gone, you're on, right? And maybe a court somewhere, if somebody knows you've been abducted, then maybe a court somewhere eventually six weeks or six months from now will force the government to let you go. Okay.

I mean, I'm not sure what to say to that. If you think that that answer for living in America is a sufficient one, then I don't know what to tell you. We went way along. We're just going to leave it with that. I'll leave him on an uplifting note. Bill Crystal said he's excited that I was replacing with JVL because he's going to seem chipper by an optimistic. So he gets a lot of feedback from people and say that he's a little too dower and negative.

And so it feels like next week by comparison to JVL, he'll be the upbeat one. So you can get more of being JVL on the next level. Tomorrow we're going to do a pre-State of the Union show with Sarah. We talk about non-state of the Union stuff. And then I'm going to do a state of the union live stream. after tomorrow night on YouTube. I am not going to do that. And we have the regular Bullwark podcast tomorrow.

I don't know who that guest's going to be, but I'm sure they'll be good. So no shortage of content for you all. Hope you enjoy it. JBL, thanks for doing substitute teacher duty. And everybody else, we'll see you back here tomorrow. Peace. The Bullwark podcast is produced by Katie Cooper

with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brow.