The Bulwark Podcast - Mark Hertling and Ruben Gallego: A Rush to War

Episode Date: March 3, 2026

The facts on the ground and the ludicrous statements speak for themselves: The administration inadequately planned for the execution of this war. That's likely why six service members were killed in an insufficiently protected facility. It's why our embassy in Riyadh and our consulate in Dubai were hit with drones. And the administration clearly does not have an exit plan. Venezuela had Trump thinking this could be a cakewalk, but in the Middle East, circumstances can change in a heartbeat. Plus, Israel's role in pushing for the military campaign, Marco's effort to pawn off responsibility for the war, and Gallego's endorsement of Graham Platner in the Maine Democratic Senate primary. Sen. Ruben Gallego and Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling join Tim Miller.show notes Pre-order Hertling's new book, "If I Don't Return: A Father's Wartime Journal" Watch The Bulwark’s LIVE coverage of the Texas Senate primary on Substack YouTube Carol Leonnig's reporting on the firing of FBI agents with Iran expertise  Tickets for our LIVE show in Austin on March 19: TheBulwark.com/Events.

Hello and welcome to the Buller podcast. I'm your host Tim Miller. We got a double header for you today in segment two. Senator Ruben Gallego has been on fire on social media about all this. I wanted to grab him and talk to him about how the Democrats should deal with the Trump-Iran war news. And tonight for the political junkies, we'll be live on YouTube and Substack as the Texas Senate primary results come in. I guess there's some Texas House Racist Demometer as well. So come check us out on your platform of choice.

But first, he's retired U.S. Army Lieutenant General. He served as commander during the surge in Iraq from 2007 to 2009. He writes to Military Affairs for the Bullwork, thank God. And he's the author of a new book. If I don't return a Father's Wartime Journal. It's released next week, but it's available for pre-order now. I'll put the link in the show notes. You go pre-order that book right now.

It's Mark Hartling. How you doing, man? Hey, Tim. It's good to be with you. And thanks for hawking the book for me. I need it. It's wonderful. I was paging through it last night and this morning.

And it's not, we'll get into the book at the end, but it's nice. It's one of these books that's like, my attention span as being negatively impacted by, you know, the internet, by my Twitter addiction, et cetera. And I read way more books in a year in the past few years than I have recently. So the nice thing about your book is it's one of those. You can just kind of pick up and do a couple chapters in the middle, you know? You don't have to commit to the whole. How many pages is it? 325, I think, something like that. You don't have to commit to the whole 325. You learn some life lessons along the way if you just pick up a couple chapters.

We'll get to that. We'll get to it. But first, we've got to do more podcasting. I think the first question is, do you have any more clarity today that we did yesterday on what exactly it is that we're doing here? It seems like we have some mixed messaging coming out of the White House. No, it's actually getting worse from what I can tell. There's more messaging of exactly what the. end state is. And that's important to the military commanders. I mean, you know, if you say regime

change or regime decapitation or take out their Navy or destroy all their ballistic missiles, you have different planning cycles. I think that the military operational campaign is really going toward destroy as much stuff as possible within the country. But, you know, the Israelis, I think, have maybe even a different mission set based on their actions. They are looking at true decapitation. without any kind of thought about what comes next. They just want to destroy all over rounds leadership, kill all of them, and destroy as much stuff as they can

as long as the Americans are hanging on. And what's interesting, Tim, I heard this morning that the Iranian leadership is now calling this, a war without rules, a game without red lines, and a contest of endurance that they think they can win over the, the United States because they know how quickly we get fatigued and tired of the news cycle.

So we'll see how that works out. To your point about the different goals and missions, I'm from about Israel, as we're coming on, so this is developing right now. We've news that the Israelis struck the meeting of the Iranian Supreme Council where officials were gathering to choose a new Supreme leader. So I mentioned on yesterday's podcast that Trump had told, I believe he told the New York Times that they had two or three people in mind, you know, for the Delci-Rider. of Iran. And then by the time you talked to John Carl of ABC, a few hours later, he realized that

we'd killed all of the potential folks that we had in mind for the next phase of the regime. Now it appears that Israel is, you know, expanding their operation to seems like kill anybody in any type of leadership role in Iran. And that is important in that, you know, you can speak to this. But knowing what you're going for matters. And if the obvious, objective this was a Venezuela style campaign, and that's what the U.S. wanted, and the government officials told us it was, right, that they had a goal of, you know, having some continuity. And I was on a podcast yesterday with the MAGA guy. I was debating him. And that's what he was saying. This is like Venezuela. This is like Venezuela. Well, if that is our goal, but then Israel is out there

just killing everybody that could possibly take over because they're not interested in that. They're not interested in continuity. Like, it seems like that's a pretty important tension. is. And I'm also struck by what you just said about the MAGA guy saying it's just like Venezuela. Because harkening back to Venezuela, we didn't know what they were trying to do there either. Right. I mean, was that regime change, counter-narcotics, you know, counter-terrorists, you know, what was it? They finally snatched one guy. And my take of Venezuela right now is it's not a whole lot different than it was before Maduro left. It's still kind of a corrupt society. There's not a whole lot of changes taking place. They still have the same security forces.

And in transferring that to Iran, what's interesting to me that I don't think most American politicians understand is their leadership isn't based on personalities. It's based on institutions. And as long as they can maintain institutions, and that's what this Majlis, this coming together to take a vote on the new supreme leader, was all about. I mean, they all sit around a room, sometimes on the floor, but it always has rugs and kind of a centralized. a bunch of chairs around one big meeting space. And they make decisions based on who's got, I'll use the Arab term, not the Persian term, Wasta. Who's got the most Wasta, the credentials, the CREDS? And it's a fascinating dynamic that's very different from taking a vote for the people you think you will have as your leader in the United States or most Western societies.

On the mixed messaging, we're getting it out of the administration as well. I was watching J.D. Vance last night on Fox. And he, it seemed like at least recognized that there is some miscommunication here and really tried to focus his message on obliterating Iran's ability to have any kind of nuclear ambitions. And he's saying that was the objective what he was saying on Fox. Heng sat yesterday morning during his press conference was not that explicit. And, well, actually, why don't you just talk about what you saw yesterday from Heggseth as he was trying to explain what the military objectives were yesterday?

Well, his was sort of a, it was an unbridled presentation of more sycophancy toward Trump, but also the dynamics that he's shown with his knife hands and, you know, the kinds of things that a squad leader does to a group of six or seven soldiers, you know, you're going to do this. today. And it's embarrassing for someone who's in that kind of a leadership role to do that kind of harangue. But his comments, I mean, he started off by saying we didn't start with regime change. That's not what we're going to do, although the regime has changed now that we've killed them all. So he kind of countered the president's message, earlier messages. And then he said, we're, and let me see if I can remember, I wrote it down, but he said, we're going to destroy their naval capability. We're going to make sure that they can't defend with conventional weapons and missiles, what they've been defending, which is their creation of a nuclear capability, and we're

going to destroy their nuclear capability. So that sounds like nothing but kinetic strikes with a kind of amorphous political outcome. So he's talking from the standpoint of a tactician and not connecting the tactics of the strikes to what the overarching requirement is from the civilian leadership. And maybe that is the clarity at this point, which is that they're kind of in YOLO mode and don't care what the next leadership of Iran looks like.

One of the things J.D. Van said last time on Fox was, we would love it if someone came to power in Iran that was willing to show respect to the U.S., but ultimately whatever happens to the regime in one form or another is incident. It's incidental. All JD cares about is that somebody respects him. Respect my authoritai, but it's incidental who is there. That's one step below the knife hands of do this, which is what Hegsef always does. Hey, here's what I wrote it down. I wanted to pull it up,

but here's what Secretary of Hegsa said. His objectives, this is what he said in order, destroy the Navy, their drone capability, and their offensive missiles. The Iranians can't have nuclear weapons, and they can't use conventional umbrella to protect their nuclear ambitions. Those were the three things he said. Okay. That's, you know, a kinetic strike package. Here's what we want the military to do. But there's nothing beyond that.

And that's a pretty big mission set. Because when you're talking about the size of the country of Iran, those ballistic missiles are warehoused everywhere and a nation that's three times the size of Texas. So when you're talking about planning. aircraft or Tomahawk missiles into those locations, you're spread out over literally almost the eastern United States from Missouri to the east coast. So good luck with finding all of them, although they now have said there's been over 2,500 kinetic strikes from aircraft and missiles. It's still, there's probably a whole lot left that they haven't reached. And most of them

are underground and buried in mountains. That takes to another thing that there's been a lot of conversation about over the last 24 hours to get your take on, which is the munition stockpiles. And to your point, if the objective is that broad and sweeping and the territory is so large, obviously it's going to take a lot of material from us. And so there have been some conversations that there are shortages. Trump bleated about this last night from his social media account. And I'm going to read some of what he wrote. The United States munitions stockpiles have at the medium and upper medium grade never been higher or better.

at the highest end we have a good supply but are not where we want to be sleepy joe biden spent all of his time in our country's money giving everything to pt barnum of ukraine zelensky in parentheses hundreds of billions of dollars worth and he didn't bother to replace it translate that for me okay what he's saying is we evidently gave up every one of our or most of our military supplies to ukraine that's not true. There's a certain stockpile of weapons that we sell or give to foreign governments. It's called FMS, foreign military sales. That is separate and distinct from the things that we have in stock to contribute to every one of our contingency plans as long as you're conducting sort of a risk mitigation of, hey, if we're fighting now in Iran and we're using a lot of stuff, how is it affecting the contingency plan for, let's say, North Korea or China, China. And there are guys in the joint staff. I was the guy at one time when I was a young Brigadier General. They kind of raised the flag and said, hey, we're using too much ammunition in Afghanistan. And if we move to Iraq, we're not going to have enough for that. That happened in

2003. And we're going to put great risk on all of our other contingencies if something flares up in Korea or in China or in Russia or any other place. So there are literally, bean counters, as they call them in the Pentagon, saying how much stuff do we have? I would say from the very beginning of President Trump's statement that we have a whole lot of stuff at the high and upper end level. I'm not sure what that means. I mean, there are precision weapons and they are accounted for by type. And I don't think he can say that because we have been using quite a bit over the last couple of years. And we've been especially using a lot, if you're talking $2,500,000, strikes in a four-day period, which we've conducted, that's a whole lot of precision weapons.

And Tim, I'll say one more thing. I'll give you a little military tip. I'm watching on the news, the films that they're showing, you know, what we call in the military war porn. You know, you're watching all kinds of things exploding. I saw this morning the Department of Defense released some films of precision missiles hitting trucks. Now, it's great war porn because it hits right in the middle of the truck and it blows up. But I don't think I'm going to waste, unless it's a very valuable target and you know what's inside that truck, I'm not going to waste a, you know, a $100,000 missile on a $10,000 truck that really isn't all that effective.

So what they're striking is also important. There are things, now I'm really going to get geeky on you. There are targeting plans. That's what you're here for. Yeah, there are targeting plans that say, hey, today, we're going to wake up. We're going to climb in our airplanes, and we're going to hit this target that the intelligence guys have told us is very important. That's called a kinetic strike package, where you know where you're going, you know what the

mission is, you know what you're going to hit. There are other things called TSTs, time sensitive targets, where a pilot is flying around the area and he sees something on the ground like an air defense piece of equipment. He radios back to headquarters, hey, I've just gotten this target. I need to hit it. So you go in and hit it. It's a target of opportunity, basically. Most of the packages, I think, that they've conducted in the first three days are those

kinetic strike packages. That's what the chairman described yesterday, that they have targets for the B1 bombers, the F-22s, the F-35s, all the different aircraft are hitting different types of targets. And they're all very well synchronized. But they're all using precision weapons that are very expensive. and they're running low on an operation that we hadn't planned for. The other piece, I'll say, is the defensive weaponry. What that means is the Patriot missiles and the THAAD missiles,

which are two air defense units. We have scattered those batteries, the units that operate those missiles all over the Middle East to defend our allies, the Gulf states. They are firing those things like crazy, because incoming missiles, incoming aircraft, they're striking and hitting down. A patriot missile cost about a million and a half dollars a piece. So when you shoot that thing, the chiching goes up in terms of the cost. They're spending real scratch.

And they are very hard to reproduce. There's not a large stockpile of those, as we saw during the Ukrainian war. So for the president to say we've got a whole lot of things that we can continue to use, that could be true. I haven't been in the Pentagon for 10 years. I doubt it, but they're using quite a bit of them on a daily basis. And this takes us to the thinking about going into the war and the timing and the preparation and ensuring that you have that kind of material.

And it's related to one of the things that they were telling us at the start, which was that there was some type of imminent threat that required the action at the time that it came. And Marco was asked about that yesterday. and his response has created a lot of a stir. So I want to play that for you. There absolutely was an imminent threat. And the imminent threat was that we knew that if Iran was attacked and we believed they would be attacked,

that they would immediately come after us. And we were not going to sit there and absorb a blow before we responded. Because the Department of War assessed that if we did that, if we waited for them to hit us first after they were attacked. And by someone else, Israel attacked them. They hit us first. And we waited for them to hit us, we would suffer more casualties and more just.

And so the president made the very wise decision. We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action. We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces. And we knew that if we didn't preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties and perhaps even higher those killed. And then we would all be here answering questions about why we knew that indeed. That's crazy to be. Not to be a pedant, but it seems like the imminent threat came from Israel.

if you just take them at their word, right, that they were saying that we had to do this because we knew Israel is going to attack and that the result of Israel's attack was going to be that our troops were at risk. It's amazing. When I heard him talking about that yesterday, I thought to myself, oh, okay, so Israel caused all this by saying they were going to attack. And as a result of that, we have a preemptive response to some other nation attacking that could cause a regional conflict. Okay, got it, Marco. That makes no sense at all to me. I don't understand that. And he was talking so fast and with a dry mouth. And for folks who don't understand military operations, what he was saying was ludicrous. You know, there was a great debate in 2003 in the U.S. military about preemptive strikes. And it's a moral issue. Do you strike first when you think someone is going to come after you? And in that case, it was Iraq. But now we're talking about a preemptive strike based on another nation going to war and putting us in the crosshairs. It doesn't make sense to me. It's not part of our, you know, existential approach to providing security for the United States. Also, the other nation we're working with.

So it seems to me that if we needed more time to prepare, which we're to get to here in a second, that we could have asked for that. I don't understand what we had to be responsive to Israel's chosen timeline, that Israel isn't even making the case that they were under an imminent threat. I noticed you mentioned that Marco's the dry mouth. Does that say something to you? It tells me he was nervous. I mean, you look for body language. It was the same thing he had when he gave the response to the State of the Union address a couple years ago when he reached out water. So it is a indicator of nervousness.

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So I want to talk about the preparation why this, and obviously it matters because the rationale for the war matters and whether we did it, according to Marco's own words, because we felt like we had to because of Israel. That matters. It also just matters as the type of prep that we could do in the region. There are two things that jumped out to me on this front. One is, so we've learned a little bit more about the six casualties. six U.S. service members were killed.

They were all in a makeshift operation center in Kuwait. An Iranian strike hit that operation center. There's no warning. There's no siren that went off. You know more about this than me. So I guess as an amateur, I look at this and say, well, man, couldn't we have done more to solidify and protect our makeshift operation centers if we were picking and choosing the time that this was going to start. Maybe that's not right. I don't know. What's your reaction to that?

And what is a makeshift operation center? Yeah, well, what this was, it's in a place called Shweba, which is in Kuwait, and it's right on the port. And the operation center was literally the administrative base. So it has a finance center, a personnel center. You go in there and sign in and sign out. And it has a theater, an expeditionary support command. And that's a fancy. term for a bunch of logisticians. People that drive trucks, provide oil, provide ammunition, provide stuff for a unit. That port at Shweba has a theater, it's called a theater support command, the first theater support command that is always there. And they rotate both active duty soldiers and reservist and National Guard into that location. I'm not sure which National Guard

was there, but the majority of the forces in that are National Guard or reservists. And what they do is they support the warfighter out of a base that's right next to a port. So as people come in and equipment's delivered, they're the ones that are driving the trucks, given the fuel, those kind of things. When Secretary Hegs says that it was a fortified operation center, I don't think he really knows, that doesn't define what it was. I've been there. I've been to the first theater support commander, that area.

And what it is is not a tent. It's like one of those temporary aircraft shelters. And inside there's a bunch of people on computers and typewriters and just processing stuff. So it's a command post like we have on the bulwark where we talk about things. That's a pun, I guess. But fortified means it probably has a fence around it. It's a building that's made out of tin that's insulated. It has some tents nearby.

There's probably some sandbags around the tent. But when you say fortified, you think of this grand fort with large boulders around. It is not that. No, defenses. Well, and it does have some defenses. I mean, at the port, there are types of small weapon system that can shoot down incoming aircraft. But at Shweba, there's a way. never used. I mean, you know, since the Gulf War, this has become an administrative logistic

area. And an errant drone or missile got in there and killed six people and wounded a whole lot of others. By the way, there are many of those all over Kuwait. This isn't singular. And I'm sure right now the commanders on the ground in there are really reassessing, you know, how to protect some of those temporary facilities from drone strikes and missile strikes. And I guess the other thing that folks have been saying is that what has been able to get through the defenses is the drones more, the Shadda drones in particular. You know, we've seen obviously this big change over in Ukraine about the type of war, the type of what's kind of getting through into Kiev and what's being intercepted.

Is there anything that can be learned from that or, you know, kind of lessons at this point about how things are changing. Yeah, well, I mean, our military has taken a real close look at that, and we're garnering information from the Ukrainians, which is extremely valuable. And when we've cut ties with Europe to the degree we have, it's a whole lot harder to get that information to improve our forces. But when you're talking about the Shahed drones, they come in a variety of sizes, techniques, approaches, uses. Some are reconnaissance, some drop bombs, some shoot missiles. Some of them have ranges of 1,500 kilometers, which is about 1,000 miles. You know, the drones that hit the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh really surprised me last night

because Riyadh is in the center of the Saudi Arabian desert. And those drones came from Iran. So that's a pretty long distance and unobserved. Some of the Shahid drones are flying low. They're at maybe 300 to 500 feet. Some of them are up to 30,000, 60,000 feet. Some of them have wingspans of eight feet. Some of them are jet-propelled and have wingspans of 20 feet.

But this is a product that has been developed by the Iranians. They have sold them to the Russians to great effect in Ukraine. And it's going to be something that it's a poor man's approach to attacking bases. So you can either spend, you know, a million dollars on a cruise missile, or you can spend $5,000 on a small ship. or $10,000 on a large shehead, it goes underneath the radar in many cases and it can attack bases and you can't afford, as I was saying before about the Patriots and the Thad missile systems, you can't afford to shoot a $2 million patriot missile at a $20,000 shahed drone.

One other thing just as kind of relates to the timing and Marco's point about how we felt like we had to do this is, you know, the evacuation and what's happening and the kind of the chaos and region. Obviously, this is something that you had to deal with. You coordinate, you know, defense military coordinates with state and, you know, you don't want to tip off the enemy, but you also want to make sure people are protected. Well, yesterday, the Assistant Secretary of State sent out a depart now, all caps memo telling Americans in 14 countries that they should use available commercial transportation to get out of that country due to serious safety risk. A couple hundred thousand Americans live in these 14 countries. It includes

Egypt, which is pretty far from this war at this point. I don't know what that tells us something that they're doing that. It includes a bunch of countries where the airports are shut down, there aren't, you know, there aren't commercial airport opportunities in UAE, Kuwait, and some of these countries at this point. You know, it kind of reminds me of the Afghanistan thing. one of my criticisms of Biden, which was like, I feel like we could have done more to warn people to get out. Obviously, there's a risk profile associated with that, you know, the more we're doing that, the more Iran can prepare or the more the Taliban could prepare in the Afghanistan case. So talk about like that and kind of balancing those considerations. Yeah, there's a mission

set for military commanders called Neo. It stands for non-combatant evacuation operations. I had to prepare and almost execute one of them when I was commanding in Europe to a country I shall not name. But when we first started planning for it, we estimated from the State Department. There were about 10,000 American citizens in that nation that we would somehow have to plan to get out. The thing about the contention between the military and the State Department, the military says, hey, I've got a mission to do to get 10,000 soldiers out of here. We've got to start doing it right now. Well, the State Department will say, no, no, no, no, no. You're not going to do that because that's going to cause a whole lot of turmoil

and people are going to think the government's exploding and things are falling apart. So, no, you can't make that announcement. So the military has to plan sort of undercover to get boats and ships flowing in and airplanes, you know, the civilian airplanes coming in to pick people up. And it's really hard, especially in big countries. The one I had, we estimated there were 10,000 American citizens. there. By the time we were done with the planning and almost into the execution of that mission, there were 120,000. So imagine trying to get 120,000 Americans out of a country from a military

standpoint. That's what happened truthfully in Afghanistan. There was a lot more than could be handled. When the State Department puts a warning out like that, it causes turmoil in the local government saying, hey, the Americans are leaving, the Brits are leaving, you know, all the the Westerners are leaving, what the hell's going on? And they start panicking. So you have to try and avoid that. So normally the State Department folks wait until the very last minute to do that. But it's part of a plan.

It's part of a coordinated plan. And when you're doing an evacuation after a war started, you're asking for trouble. That should have been part of the pre-conflict plan. But Tim, this gets to the point of there was a whole lot of hubris. in our government in terms of this attack plan against Iran. I think the president was enamored by what happened in a very precise and surgical strike in Venezuela, and he thought he could do the same thing in Iran. And it's a different country with a different approach, with a different population and a different

geography, and it's a whole lot further away. And the Middle East, by nature, is extremely complex. Anything you plan to do will fall apart in a heartbeat. And I think a lot of people were saying that before this all started. We're seeing great big things happening right now because of a lack of planning and an understanding of what the true mission was. And I guess that's the point about the evacuations, right? It's like, you know, nothing's going to be perfect in any of these situations, right? It's hard to plan for all the contingencies.

But we got to do this on our terms. And if Iran decided to bomb bottom. Bahrain or Kuwait to one of our bases randomly and we're figuring out how to scramble. That's not what this was. Like we were planning it. Okay. I want to get to your book. Anything else I haven't asked you just about kind of what you're seeing in the short-term

horizon here? Obviously, a lot of this is unpredictable. Yeah, I just think the biggest thing we ought to focus on right now is the timelines. You know, the president's been all over the place. Three to four days, five weeks, six weeks. We could stay longer. We need to ship more forces there. So there's an ever-increasing timeline.

on the part of the United States. And the Iranians are basically saying, you know, we can outlast them. We can go 60 to 90 days and continue to harass not only the United States in Israel, but all of the Gulf states. That's going to be an interesting proposition to watch. One of the things that Iraqi told me one time when I was trying to pressure him to do something when I was in Iraq, he looked at me and he said, general you got to understand because i was tapping my wrist i was saying hey we only have till

tuesday to do this and he said generally you have to understand you may have the watch but we have the time and it was kind of an interesting lesson for me to learn all right guys we're getting happy on the podcast today we're talking about war we're talking about journaling for your kids when you're scared you might not come back home to them and uh maybe you aren't the journaling type but one thing you can do to protect your kids is get life insurance. Thankfully, we've got select quote for you. For over 40 years, select quote has helped more than 2 million Americans understand their options and get the coverage they need over $700 billion in coverage and counting. As a broker, their mission is simple to find you the right insurance policy at the best price. They take

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If I don't return. The basis of the book is this journal that you were writing during Gulf War I. And I was kind of surprised I'd seen the log line for it, which was, you know, you had been told that half of your, well, is it half your battalion? Half our squadron, yeah, cavalry squadron. Yeah, half your squadron was likely to die in a mission in Iraq. And I had assumed it was in second Iraq war because in my mind, I was such a, I was a kid, I was a baby, you know, during Iraq War I.

And in my mind, like that was a very, you know, cut and dry mission in and out, not a lot of risk. We dominated them. You know, that's sort of what it is in the mythos of it now. And so I was interested to start reading it. Yeah. That, you know, this journal was from that first world where we really didn't know a lot. And you kind of went in expecting it to go worse than it had. So anyway, talk about that a little bit.

We were told it was going to be a bloodbath. You know, we were going into Iraq in 1990, the late 1990. And we were facing Saddam Hussein, who had just, he had the fourth largest army in the world. He had just fought an eight-year war against Iran. He had used chemical weapons on his own citizens and the Kurds in Halabcha. So when we got the intelligence estimates, as soon as we were told, to deploy. The Intel chief told us, hey, you're in the cavalry squadron, which is something that's out front of the rest of the division. Our job was to find the bad guys and then pass him to the

tanks. And he said, the cab is probably going to have sustained 50% casualties. So my major brain at the time, as well as some of our other soldiers said, wow, that's a coin toss flip of whether or not, you're going to come home. So my wife and I had two young sons at the time. We had an eight-year-old and a 10-year-old. And my thought process was if I don't come home, what can I leave my boys that will help them grow to be men? And I have it right here because I have the book and the record. This was the book that I kept with all the journal entries. You can kind of see it where I just started writing about life before the war started, before we were crossed into Iraq from Saudi Arabia. And there were all different kinds of subjects that I wanted them to know about,

you know, love, emotions, fear, friends, friendship, you know, those kind of things. So every day I would pick a subject and write a page of here's what you need to know as young kids. Then the war started. So the middle section of the book is about the war itself. And then the end section is what it was like after the war while we were still out there for a long time. And that book came into this. So every day in the book, or in the journal, it starts with a date in 1991, has a subject, goes for a page, and our youngest son found the journal a couple of years ago, and he typed it up as a gift to me, gave it to me a Christmas, and said, Dad, my brother and I knew what you were doing. You were preparing us if you didn't come home.

It was obvious in the pages that you were trying to teach us life lessons. He said, but you did come home, and now you have five grandsons and two grandchildren. granddaughters, why don't you write more for them on what you've experienced since 1991? Well, that's 35 years of experience, both in the military and in cable news and in healthcare and at the bulwark and in teaching in college. The original journal has the original entries that are short, and then it has an explanation of what I've learned about those same kind of things like friendship and love and emotions and fear since then. And so it was an easy book to right because I had an outline already. I just followed what was in the original journal.

I want to learn a little bit more about just kind of thinking back to your headspace when you're writing this at the time, you know, because it kind of scrambled my perception of that first Gulf War, right, a little bit, right? Because it's like, yeah, this was also not a war that, you know, was about some urgent, imminent threat to our country and our safety. Right. And here you are, right about my age now basically with two young kids you had to be thinking man i don't know there in the pages it doesn't there's no like bitterness really showing and at some point i would think that you would be feeling like i can't believe that this is going to be a coin flip situation for my life over kuwait and i'm just wondering kind of like how you are processing that and thinking about it

and compartmentalizing it when you are initially writing the journal when you think about what a soldier does, when you sign up in a professional force and you take that oath to the country to protect and defend the Constitution, which means obeying the order of the president, too, you realize that there might be an unfortunate situation where you're going to have to put your life on the line and sacrifice for that country. So it's part of your duty requirement. And that was one of my transformations, Tim, to be honest with you, because during that conflict with two little boys, I was thinking, oh, my God, I'm not going to come back. back. I'm never going to have a beer again. I'm not going to ride bikes with my kids and my wife.

And you know, you think those kind of thoughts and it's all directed inward about you. You know, I want to come back. I don't want to die. Yeah. But in later deployments to combat, as you assume more responsibilities, that changes because, and I talk about this in the book, when I went back to Iraq in 2003 and then again in 2007, I was a one-star general, then a two-star general. and I had X number of forces. In 2007, we had 30,000 Americans in our unit. So those were people I was responsible for. And it wasn't so much about me.

It was bringing them back. In fact, right before we deployed, I had a young woman come up to me. She was a sergeant, and she had never been to combat before. And she had the same experience I was having in 1991 because she came out to me and she said, sir, are you going to bring us all home? And boy, that was a punch in the gut because I realize, man, I'm responsible for bringing them all home.

And I know that's not going to happen. The chance of going to war, someone's going to get killed. So that's a tough question to answer to a young soldier who's going off to combat for the first time. So those are the kinds of things I talk about in the book. You know, my publisher last week, Tim, told me, he said, you know, this isn't a war book. He said, this is a book about family and about love and about leadership. And he says, and then after all those things, it's a book about war. So, yeah, it was a fun book to write.

It's also about growth. Look, your career at that point was much more honorable than mine was. But, you know, when I wrote my book, it was, trust me, it was. When I wrote why we did it, but I had to like, I went back and reread a lot of the stuff that I was doing earlier in my political career when I was a Republican, right? And I had to think about it. Like, what was my mindset at the time? Why was I doing it? You know, there's certain things I reread. They're embarrassing, obviously, or certain things that I have different, obviously have different perspectives on now. I'm wondering how that was for you. I mean, like, looking back on, like,

the journal of your younger self. And you mentioned a little bit of it right there about how you kind of went from focusing so much inward to focusing more about other people. But were there other examples of, you know, kind of growth and wisdom gained? Oh, my gosh. Yeah, all sorts of things in terms of maturity and having a better understanding of life. And that's in the book, too. I try and portray that. And this isn't really a book about me. It's just like you just said, it's about growth. It's about understanding leadership and values and ideology and the Army. You know, I talked about how the Army transformed from 1991 to today. I mean, going across the desert in 1991, there was no such thing as GPS at the time. There were no cell phone. So we were in the middle of this flat desert trying to work our way to figure out where the hell we were using a boat compass and a Loran device that we stole. And one of the towers for the Loran was in Iraq. So we were actually using a tower in a rock to maneuver through 250 miles of desert that were flat and we didn't know where we were.

So that's kind of a evolutionary change. There were other changes like intelligence processing, the use of drones. We had drones in 2007. We didn't in 1991. The dynamics of friendship and what a true friend is. You learn a lot about what a real friend is. And that's one of the first chapters. The emotions of fear and respect for one another.

Cultures. When I first went to West Point, Tim, you know I'm from St. Louis. I had never left the city of St. Louis until I went off to West Point. and my first time on a plane. Since then, I've been to 123 different countries and have tried to analyze cultures in each one of those so I can learn more. And even that's a huge growth requirement, too,

just understanding the people of the globe. You mean, it's a little different going to Saudi Arabia versus like North St. Louis versus South St. Louis. Yeah. The cultural gaps a little wider. A little bit, yeah. And, you know, I did a lot of eating and drinking from my country along the way, too.

So that was kind of fun. Yeah. Like I said, it's fun. It could be, I mean, obviously you could read a cover to cover, but it could be kind of a coffee table book situation where you page through and look at different little nuggets of wisdom. It's a good bathroom book, Tim. Come on, it's a good bathroom book.

I wasn't going to call it a toilet book. It is a good bathroom book. It's a really good bathroom book, if that's the type of thing you're into. I try to keep the bathroom books in my house gay, just as a little reminder for people when they're visiting. But this would be a good bathroom book, especially if you're a military family. All right, but there were two chapters that I was just paging through.

They're kind of funny and relevant to the podcast. So I want to leave us with those. You had a whole chapter on cursing. Yeah. My parents' biggest critique of this program is the amount of cursing that I do. Fuck you. You talked about how cursing kind of makes you feel bad. It makes me feel good.

And so let's discuss. I want to see if I can glean any wisdom from you on the topic of cursing. I think Mark Twain said there's a huge difference between obscenity and profanity. Have you ever heard that statement? Yeah. You know, I have used the F-Bomb more recently. Thanks to me. You're going backwards.

Thanks to the administration, I think. But, yeah, it is an expression of emotional, you know, you're distraught. So you throw something out there. I normally use it at the administration or at St. Louis Cardinals games when they're performing very poorly. The original entry was for our sons. Yeah, it was just teaching. a little bit about language and how you should approach life. I'm glad you brought that one up. The last one I want to start with it, you kind of begin with it, I think, is that I learned about

you that you're a crier. Your wife says you're a crier. I love crying in male tears. I've never made you cry on this podcast. So that feels like now an objective for me going forward, just so you know. Okay. All right. Talk about being in touch with your emotions. Yeah, I'd like to cry. Is that okay? Would you feel comfortable crying on the podcast? No. No, it's just you in the life. That's your private, it's your private crier. Yeah. Well, no, I'm not actually. I mean, I cry at both happy and sad events. When I'm at a wedding of people I don't even know or when I'm at a graduation, high school or college, I think about potential of people. And I get emotional as thinking they've got an entire life in front of them. It's going to be great. And I cry at sad events of, you know,

deaths and people who, you know, soldiers, you know, the six soldiers that were killed that we talked about earlier. I mean, when I heard that, I teared up a little bit because I think, I don't know if I told you this, but I've got a box on my desk right here that I open every morning. And, you know, when I look at those soldiers, I don't cry every day when I look at that, but I do think about what kind of life they would have lived and how because they haven't I have to earn it for them. I have to be a better person because they made the ultimate sacrifice. And I've got to represent them because they were serving under my command. I appreciate that very much. I just turned that a little bit sad, didn't I? No, that's good. I wanted to say that. That's important,

actually. It is a good male message, actually. Crying and being in touch with their emotions is important. And so in a book for two sons, I was making a little joke about it, but it also, I think, is important and meaningful. So I appreciate it, General Hartling. Appreciate so much you're able to add your wisdom to us here at the bulwark. Go get his book. If I don't return a father's wartime journal, link here in the show notes. Appreciate you very much, sir. We'll talk to you soon.

Hey, thanks, Tim. Appreciate it. Up next, Senator Rubin Gallego. All right, we are back. He's a Democratic Senator from Arizona, Marine Corps Combat Veteran. he was deployed to Iraq in 2005 and served as an infantryman. It is Senator Ruben Gallego. How you doing, man?

I guess okay. You guess okay. I wanted to start with that. So I was watching you on Chris Hayes last night. And you got like quite emotional talking about this war with Iran. You got a little bit. And so I was wondering like what is underneath that? Like I want to learn a little more about your experience and why this is.

It's not that hard. Like, you know, my friends died. my best friend died, you know, 23 men of my company died in another war that was hastily decided to go to a war of choice. And, you know, seeing this, our leadership, well, all of them actually lived through this kind of doing the same mistake. And, you know, maybe it's not going to cost, you know, the amount of men it costs in Iraq, but it's already cost six people their lives. And I don't know how many civilians, right? Six Americans, their lives. And I don't know how many civilians all around the world, whether it's Iran, Israel, Sarajeva, Qatar, right?

You know, this is just not thought out. And now I hear more and more that we just decided to do it because we're following Israel. Okay. Like, where is the force protection? Where is the proper ammunition? Where is the exit plan? All these things that they're not even answering right now. And it just reminds me so much of what happened, you know, when I was in Iraq and I just don't want another generation of men and women to be dealing with this. One of the reasons that we reached out, I was struck by your post about this. You've been on fire on social media on this in general. And you do the one thing I've been demanding of Democrats,

which is like, it's you posting, right? Yeah, yeah. Trust me. You sound like you. It's a concentration of my staff. It is me posting, yes. Tell your staff to let the dog off the chain, okay? They have no choice.

Right. Yeah, yeah. Because. No, they haven't had a chance for a while, yeah. Because that is what is required in the year 2026. And you've been talking powerfully about this. And Jim Shooter is a good reporter. I was just.

I kind of contextualizing what was happening right now and did a post about how he had covered the Iraq war. And he was reminding folks that the Iatola and the Iranian regime was involved in a lot of terror attacks that cost our troops during that war. You replied to that, I don't need revenge and I don't want another generation of veterans dealing with the consequences of war in my name. I just thought that was so powerful and important perspective on this. Yeah. Because I hear this other message. And by the way, I'm not saying that Jim was actually advocating for. I was going toward that.

Like, I read it as he was just kind of making information. But what I wanted to make sure the rest of the public understands, and this is also a reflection of not just me, but other Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, like don't assume just because what they did, which is what's awful, you know, and let's be clear, Iranian-backed militias had and were probably given, you know, some very powerful IEDs that killed and maimed a lot of us. And also they traded even with the Sunnis.

I was largely fighting in Sunni insurgents. And knowing now what I know, from what I understand, the intelligence, that some of those IEDs were attempted and were used against us. But also, I talked to my Marines. I talked to the Marines I serve with. I talked to a lot of Afghan veterans. And we know what Iran did. But don't use that as an excuse for us to engage in us, get us involved in another illegal war. Another war that's going to cause more and more people.

Don't do that in our name. Right. And there was another, I can't remember where. it was, but someone asked me about that, but like, how does that make you feel? I was doing another medium and like, well, what it makes me feel personally is, yeah, I hate the fact that Iran killed potentially some of the Marines I served with and other friends that served in the military. But also, when you're a leader, you don't go after other countries and put your men and women at risk for your personal, you know, feelings, right? I need to look out for the better men

of my countrymen, the women and men serving this country. And I'm not going to go to war to engage in revenge, right? There's a lot of ways to do with that. There's a lot of ways to keep our country secure. And sometimes that does involve war. I'm not like a peacnick by any means either. But I also need know that when we're going to do this, when we're going to go to war,

that has real, real consequences. Like when I, you know, I'm sorry, I'm going on my rant, but like I think the morning after we started the war with Iran, my mom was over at my house having breakfast with me. And she commented to me like how scary it was for her, the times that I was in Iraq because especially after a couple of us started dying, you know, there was a lot of questions about whether or not I was still alive. And she said it was a worst feeling in the world knowing that I could have been dead. And she refused to answer doorbell.

She refused to answer the door. She was always afraid Marines were going to show up and, you know, say something had happened to me. Like, it really struck me that like I feel like our leadership had never thought about that. And I don't want people to feel that unless we absolutely need to, unless we know that our security is actually at risk. Yeah, and this goes to the rationale. I mean, Donald Trump literally laid out his feelings as one of the rationales and one of the conversations he's been having with reporters. He hasn't spoken to the American people.

He's calling reporters. And one of them he said, you know, the Ayatollah almost got me, but I got him. And it's like a crazy thing to say, a rationale for this. I swear to God, I thought that was like something from, I don't know if you've ever seen the way I'm going to get you, sucker. I thought that was a lying from that. Like, I was like, when I heard that he actually said that, I was just like, this is just shocking. That's lunacy.

And then, as you mentioned earlier, there's been a lot of kind of conversation about what Marco said. And Mike Johnson said this yesterday, which was basically that like we had to go when we did because we knew that Israel was going to attack Iran. And we presume that Iran was going to then attack us in reaction to that. And so we had to act imminently. So to me, I listened to that, it's like, well, I mean, technically speaking, the impact. imminent threat seemed to have been from Israel, right? If we wanted to take our time, we could have asked them to wait or, you know, we could have done more prep or who the hell knows? A lot of options, a lot of options. Yes, there's a lot of options. I didn't hear like, well, we try to talk to Israel until I'm like,

hey, this is not the right time you do it. This is not the way to do it. This is going to escalate to be on a point of no return. Israel is using our weapon system, using our intelligence, probably using our diplomatic efforts to actually fly over some of these countries. there's a lot of things we could have done to stop Israel from doing a preempt of strike on Iran. And there's a lot of things we could have done to make sure Iran was at least slowing down whatever was, whatever was potentially threatening Israel. But it seems like we just kind of either wanted this to happen or just didn't know how to stop it, which is, which tells me there's just a total lack of leadership at the top. And the total lack of there's just so cavalier now about military, the use of. military power, right? I think they got a lot of confidence with the first 12-day Iran war,

and then their confidence with the Maduro operation that they just thought that this would, you know, be, you know, another cakewalk. But, you know, at some point, there's just only so much munitions we could make. There's so much we had to protect. There's so many, you know, operations we have to worry about that this is going to start costing us. It's going to cost us in manpower. Or it's going to start costing us in munitions. And we had to start pulling them in from other places. Like if I'm South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, I'm going to start getting pretty worried when I start seeing more and more of my, you know, it's actually defensive capabilities that we share with these countries being pulled to the Middle East. As a millennial, you're probably, are you familiar with the Leroy Jenkins meme? Yes.

It's a world of warfare thing where it was basically a player. They're just like, fuck it. Leroy Jenkins. Like I'm going to. Like it felt like that. And you listened to it. I watched J.D. Vance last night on Fox. We've listened to Trump a couple times.

and like they literally don't have an exit plan. Yeah. Like they have different explanations for why we went in, but nobody has an exit. Nobody and they're just like, we're just going to kill a bunch of their leadership and kind of see what happens. Leroy Jenkins. See what happens. Yeah. Leroy Jenkins.

By the way, I don't know if you saw there was an actual radar. If you ever see a radar screen, I guess there was a civilian airplane that tried to do a Leroy Jenkins in the middle of this war and actually flew right through. Like, so. Yeah, no. Like there is like, that's a craziest part about this. And like, it's a very simple thing. things that I, you know, and I suspect what actually happened was that there was some kind of professionals within the Department of the Defense that's like, no, no, no, no, no, you need to do

XYZ. And that's why some of them were removed, by the way. And I think also remember, they've been removing some of the best generals in the country and putting in a lot of sycophants instead. But you need to plan properly. You know, there's, there's a, God, I'm going to mess it up. And some means going to get pissed, getting mad at me. But there's a saying like, piss poor planning predicts piss poor performance, right? They basically did that, right? There is no planning. So you didn't plan for the exit, didn't plan for even the execution. You plan to drop bombs, but you didn't plan what's going to happen when they were able to send back, right? This is why our embassies, by the way,

are literally under siege right now, both by protesters, but also by drones, right? Our embassy in Sadriva is getting hit by drones right now. They didn't harden, for example, the site in Kuwait that's pretty close to the border of Iran. it got hit by drones. All those six deaths came from one drone strike or multiple drone strike, but on one location because they didn't card in these couple trailers, right? This is what happens when you rush to war and when you treat, you know, human lives, our forces, our armed forces, in such a cavalier manner that you don't really worry about their operational security. Speaking of firings, there's another story I wanted to ask you about. Have you seen this story

from Carol Lenig about FBI agents? Cash Patel fired 12 FBI agents and staff last week for their role in the classified documents investigation against Trump. Among those 12 were an elite counter-espionage unit that investigates threats from foreign adversaries, but specializes in Iran. Part of the reason they'd been brought into that classified documents case you might remember is because Trump had Iran war plans in his bathroom at Mar-a-Lago. And so we fired last week. Like, they knew this was coming, I guess.

I don't know. Maybe Bibi hadn't told them yet. But they knew this was coming possibly. And they fired the counterintel. experts on Iran inside the FBI insane. Well, I mean, it's even crazier than that. Like some of the FBI counterterrorism experts are literally at home depots being provisional ICE agents, right?

Or they're at the local, you know, carneseria trying to hunt down, you know, whatever, unfortunately, poor mom that doesn't have her right visa right now. That's what they're using with some of our brightest, you know, and best people. We have ATF agents, right? First of a lot of ATF agents were fired because, you know, there's an element of the White House. It doesn't believe that there should be any type of restrictions on weapons. But there also, there's a lot of ATF agents, the people that we'd be making sure that if there are any Iranian sleeper cells in this country could not get a hold of bondmaking materials or weapons, they're all right now probably like, you know, roaming the streets of wherever it is to try to, quote, unquote, find these illegal immigrants. And I'm not like exaggerating that.

Actually, you know, down here in D.C., I was at dinner with my wife at the Wharf, I think it's called, or the Pierre, I can remember what it is. And sure is shit, there's ATF agents walking around with their flag jackets on. Like, is that really the best use of someone who's probably making close to $120,000 a year? No. But, you know, this is their play, right? And now they're saying, like, well, you need to get, you know, we need to fully fund DHS. DHS is fully funded. They have $175 billion.

They have more money than. than the Marine Corps. You know, but what they're not doing is you're not actually putting them and using them to their utmost advantage. The fact that you don't know that it's called the Wharf, like that is some solid, like you're not a Beltway insider flex there. Like, I don't know what it's called. I don't know what it's called. I don't know what it's called. I don't know what it's called.

I don't know if it's northeast, south. I don't know any of that stuff, you know, just like. I'm a real American. Real America. I want to ask about how the, how Democrats should talk about this stuff. I want to get to immigration next because, you know, not to glaze you too hard, but you did overperform. Kamla by quite a lot in the elections. There's maybe something that can be learned from this.

On the worst stuff, I've seen some. And look, as you mentioned, you're not a peace nick. You are a marine vet. I'm a former neocon. There are certain times where I've, and I have no love for the Antola. Yeah, exactly. There's certain times where I would be supportive of military action on behalf of the Democratic mission abroad.

This is just not that. And I worry a little bit. I see some Democrats, elected officials, doing a lot of caveating. And I'm just wondering what kind of advice you have for your colleagues about how to talk about this. I do everything from a personal experience and probably shoot way too much off the hit. But I think am reflecting what a lot of normal Americans are thinking. They don't necessarily get into this process question, right? What they're thinking is, why is this so important that you're risking my kid's life?

Number two, why is this so important that you're not paying attention to a lot of the problems I have right now in my life? Very simple, right? So I've been of the opinion that, you know, we need to talk about the morality and, like, the distraction. Because that's what people are talking about. They're not talking about war powers resolution, AUMF, all this kind of stuff. They're talking about, like, I'm afraid that my kid's going to get drafted. I've actually heard this. I'm going to get drafted and go to war.

I don't want to even sign my kid up for selective. service now. You know, I'm afraid of my kid who's, you know, in the reserve is going to get called up. I am afraid of my kid that's already overseas is going to get sent into this. Number two, why are we spending all this money? Like they, like all these countries in the Middle East have a lot of money. Why are we spending all this money, right? These are the things that are very simple for people to understand. And I think we should not be afraid to, to communicate that. And people are sick of war, man. They're just so sick of war. It's okay for us to say, like, this is not our war. This is not a timing for us to do this. And like, there is a lot of ways for us

to counter Iran, by the way. And there's a lot of ways to actually counter Iran militarily that aren't, you know, a full-scale war. And maybe there is a long discussion we can have about what that looked like and whether any administration did it incorrectly for so long, perfectly good discussions to have. That's not discussion right now. The discussion is, are we going to engage in war? How does this end and how much is it going to cost me? Same question, but on immigration. I think the last time we talked, Actually, I was talking about how it's a little frustrated that some Democrats were not going to the mat fighting these ice thugs because, you know, concerns about the political elements and the mistakes of the Biden administration at the border, et cetera. So, you know, here we are right now. You mentioned the DHS fight.

How do you think your party should be talking about the immigration issue right now? Well, I think it's very simple. Like, where we are, it's actually where the American public is. They don't like the enforcement they're seeing right now. And look, we have to be always very honest. Yes, the border was messed up. Biden messed up the border. Democrats messed up the border last time around. We should not have had, and you know, I get yelled at this all the time, but we should not have had millions of refugees being able to go to the border and use a loophole to actually cross over to the border, right? That caused chaos. I was at, I'm a border state. We saw it. We saw it all the time, right? That's what the American public wanted to stop, by the way. What they did not want is the chaos to move from the border into our streets. What they did not want is ICE agents, after only 45 days, given a weapon, and be able to roam free. What they not want is racial profiling, especially of minorities, you know, like Latinos and African Americans are being pulled over by these guys.

I mean, in Minnesota, you know, black and Latino police officers were being pulled over by ICE because they haven't to be driving, right? Because these guys want to hit their Miller quotas every day. Yeah. So, you know, we need to be very confident where the American public is. The American public wants deportations of criminals. They don't want the guy who's just working here who just has not gotten the right paperwork, right? They don't want racial profying, and they certainly don't want the federal agents treating U.S. cities like war zones.

And until we get some reassurances from this administration that that's not what we're going to do, and reassurances, I mean actual laws, we shouldn't just give them more money. At the end of the day, again, back to this, my whole thesis, they already have enough money to do whatever they want. And so if we zero out whatever they were going to get this year, they're still going to be able to do it. but morally, we're at least putting a line in the sand saying you're not going to be able to do this. Like right now, they're using this money to buy massive warehouses where they're going to use ostensibly to detain illegal immigrants.

But, you know, with this administration, you just don't know where else you could go. Real quick, for I'll lose you a couple of politics things. You endorsed Graham Platner. This wasn't politics? No, campaign politics, bro. Okay, got it, got it, got that. Dork politics. Okay.

Got it, got that. You endorsed Graham Platner in the main. center. And he's in a primary, Janet Mills, sitting governor. There have been a couple of people nagging you about that, part because Platner has some controversies around the tattoo that he covered up. And he was on some podcast with a guy that does some anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. And Michael Cohen wrote that between your critiques of Marco and endorsing Platner, you know, this leaning into this anti-Israel stuff, how do you respond to that criticism? I guess you just can't appease anybody because like I, like, you know, I also endorsed like Haley Stevens and

Angie Craig, right? And I was accused by the left of being in the pocket of Israel. First of all, explain those three endorsements. I'm picking people that I know can actually win the general election. It's very simple. Janet Mills can't win the general election. It's just how are you going to send an 80-year-old, we just had a whole referendum on that's an 80-year-old candidate to run and say that we need to have that person run against the establishment when this is a change election, right? It's that simple. Like Platner can bring out new voters, can get crossover voters.

Look, and I think the other thing, this is a class issue more than anything else. Platner went onto a podcast where someone's, you know, not on that actual podcast, but later on, did spew some conspiracy theories. There's been a lot of establishment Democrats that everyone loves, I don't have to go to the names, but you could all look it up, that have gone on other podcasts of people that have done anti-Jewish anti-Semitic and conspiracy theories. But everyone's okay with those guys because, you know, they speak well. They're the establishment candidates. They're running for important offices, right? So it's okay for those guys who do try to get crossover, but this guy isn't, right?

This guy isn't allowed to do that because at the young age of 20 something, he got a stupid tattoo with all his Marine Corps buddies, by the way. It wasn't just him. And then proceeded re-enlist twice and then go through a secure background check where three times, They check all of your tattoos when you're doing that to make sure you don't have any extremist tattoos. And nobody in any agency and or in the military said that tattoo that he and his buddy's got was anti-Semitic, right? And so for me, you know, I have lived in the real world. I have grown up as a Marine. I almost got a stupid tattoo, not of a skull and crossbow like this guy, but I almost got a really stupid bullet tattoo on my body.

Didn't do it because to be honest, me and my buddy's got it. way too drunk that night. It was when we got back from my first activation. And so I understand when he said, like, I didn't know what it was. Most people in this world just aren't political. And we want people to get into, to be authentic and actually be able to talk to people and get them to cross over. But I guess they could only be perfect in order for them to do that. They actually can't have lived experience. They can't actually have been stupid at some point. They can't actually have been, you know, a young and dumb marine getting drunk in Croatia. And that's what really, really ticks me off is that, you know, from the get go, as someone who actually has been, you know,

in politics and has been a Marine, has been a young Marine, like, this is one big op that was designed by people that want Janet Mills to win. And they just leaked it and that's it. This guy is an authentic man. You know, he's not anti-Semitic, you know, and more importantly, you know, not more importantly, but just as important is that he's going to win this election. And we need to win elections. We cannot go another four or five, six years, you know, trying to get the Senate back. Like, we need to consistently win because whoever's going to be president in 2028, we need to hand them the House and the Senate. And by us getting someone that's 80, right, 80, will they even be alive by the time 2020 rolls

around? Like, I think that's a legitimate concern. Also, nobody likes finger wagging nags. This is going to be a problem for J.D. Vance next time. And it's just, it's a problem sometimes for those left. You went through this, like some of your text leak about like a joke you made, about Democratic women. And it's just like normal people, every once in a while, say something strange on social media or text jokes to their buddies. Yes, we're idiots. We're idiots.

Well, he's not my buddy anymore. That's the most heartbreaking. One of my best friends from the war, he got mad because I defended Kelly against, you know, the DoD? And it's so heartbreaking. But, you know, yes, people do stupid things. Do you learn from it? You know, are they a part of your character?

They're not. And the other thing, again, I don't understand why I can't basically state. what Marco Rubio has said, what Johnson has said, what Tom Cotton has said, the cause for us to go to war. If we're not allowed to question our foreign policy just because it involves Netanyahu, then I, what's going on here? And like, by the way, like, I'm supportive of Israel and its right to exist. Has the right to exist as a Jewish state. Is it we can't have qualms with our friends. We can't have debate.

We can't say like we don't think that this is good in our national interests. without being accused of being an anti-Semite, then what kind of relationship is this that's being established? All right. Thanks so much, man. I'm way over. Do you have a Texas Senate hot take? There's the elections tonight. So my only take, because I was just there, is that Texas is the Arizona of 2018, where people were stunned by the movement of voters. I think that's actually what's going to happen there. I don't know who's going to win the Senate race. Both of them have different paths to be able to win the general, but the electorate is in the right place. in terms of who they're going to go and vote for. And there's going to be a potential huge stunner up and down the ticket, I think, in Texas come Election Day.

And I look forward to going and campaigning there, too. Thanks, brother. I really appreciate you. Senator Ruben, Guy, I go. Everybody else will be back tomorrow for another edition of the show. See you all then. Peace. What did they say when they shipped you to fight somebody's a Hollywood room?

The Bullard podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing. by Jason Brown.