The Bulwark Podcast - Michael Steele: The King of Debt Is Blowing Up the U.S. Economy

Episode Date: March 27, 2026

In addition to the global energy shock brought on by Trump's war, mortgage rates are surging, and labor costs and prices are rising. And Republicans don't seem to have a plan except to spend more, blame trans kids, and feed Trump's megalomania by allowing him to put his ugly signature on our currency. Plus, JD thinks Americans are stupid, the gap between Bibi's and Trump's objectives vis-à-vis Iran continues to widen, and where is Marco Rubio?Michael Steele joins Tim Miller for the weekend pod.show notes "The Weeknight" on MS Now  JVL's and Catherine's live show Friday on the state of the economy Find your local "No Kings" protest  Tim's playlist

Hello and welcome to the Bullwark podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. Delighted to welcome back. One of our faves. He's co-host of MSNals, The Weeknight, which airs Monday through Friday at 7 p.m. He also was the chair of the Republican National Committee, Lieutenant Governor of Maryland. It's Michael Steele. What's up, baby boy?

How you doing, man? I know it's Friday. It's what we want to end with the fun stuff. So I just want to start with like, you and me have to kind of reflect this morning. I mean, you know, we're out. I got your selection to offer. I'm ready. Okay.

We were never Trump from the jump, you know, and we warned people. We said that we don't think this is going to go well. You can't trust this guy. And I don't know about you, but I was laying in bed last night thinking maybe I was wrong about this. I mean, things are going so well. The economic situation is good. You know, foreign affairs, geopolitics. We're going to have a nice new ballroom.

Yeah. You know, it's a golden age. We get an arc in the middle of the city. I'm loving the arc to Trump. Yeah. I love it. We might get an arc to Trump. Are you starting to have any doubts as well?

Are you just kind of looking at the landscape out there thinking, man, this guy's knocking it out of the park. You know, I thought about that too, Tim, and I've thought about it a lot. And I came to the conclusion that I'm the only one who's got his shit tight. The rest of these motherfilfathers, they don't know. I have no idea what the fuck they think they're doing. but they have ruined a once great party. They are in the throes of taking down a great nation.

We don't need to make this country great again because we've always aspired to be great. That is what's made us great is the aspirations of generations of individuals who wanted to be Americans. And this iteration of the Republican Party, this leadership from Thune, who I always admired and enjoyed working with over the years to Mike Johnson, who was the backbenchers, backbencher. I mean, backbenchers didn't know who the fuck he was. So that you had that. These guys for the grift, the graft, the bullshit, the lies, the culture war that is utterly meaningless, sacrificed a great nation.

And at the end of the day, I put it on us because they are reflection. of who we are, the American people. At least 78 million of us decided let's do this shit again. After everything we knew, after everything we saw, they got hung up on the cost of, you know, a piece of bread or

tank of gas or whatever bullshit they wanted to make up about Joe Biden that they didn't like. Yeah, he was old, but Donald Trump was just as old and actually in worse health. Now folks are sitting there. I go, well, I just didn't know. I didn't,

I didn't realize, bitch, please, we told you ass back in 2013, 14 and 15. We watched Marco Rubio get his ass handed to him on a stage in 2016 by a guy who was at 2% in the polls at the time. So, yeah, Tim, here we are. Yeah, that's cathartic. I got to tell you, though. I'm still in it. That's because I'm high on something. I should sell whatever it is because.

Yeah, that's cathartic to review. I guess I would just say we warned them all, but I don't know about you. I want to come on and just kind of do a victory lap and be like, hell, yeah, I was really right. And I was right. We can just, we just kind of say that. I was right. And I do like to text my mega friends sometimes and remind them that I'm right when I wake up in the morning and I'm feeling a little feisty. It's kind of even worse than I thought.

Like the scale of destruction, we'll start with just the economy, since you mentioned that. People are worried about the cost of bread. I was listening to Christine Lagarde this morning. She's ahead of Europe's Central Bank. And she said this. We're facing a real shock that's probably beyond what we can imagine at the moment. And she lists out helium and all these other commodities. And she basically says she thinks that the markets have not even come close to pricing in,

the damage that's coming, and that the cost of goods globally is going to skyrocket. You would have thought that would have been the one to steal from JV. the one stove that he wouldn't have wanted to touch. You know, like it was the one area where it was like, you know, I can do all this other stupid shit. I can steal money. I can have the Middle Eastern Sharia states pay me off in cryptocurrency. I can make a, my wife can have a coin that we can, you know, rugpole stupid people with.

You know, I can, I can do what I can build my arc to Trump. I can do all these things as long as I don't fuck this one thing up, which is making everybody's lives worse tangibly financially and he's doing it. He's doing like the one thing and he's doing and he's like pressing peddle to the metal on it. It's like 10 more days. We got 10 more days. We're going to keep this thing closed.

No worry here. Ten more days the straight's going to be closed. We'll check in with the April 6th. Why are we surprised? The man couldn't rule. I mean, I'm just surprised because I'm like I thought he was the stupidest guy in the world and he's being even dumber than I expected. There's never been

anything in Trump's business model. that says success. He wasn't a developer. I mean, this was a guy who put his name on other people's shit. And that's what he's doing now. I mean, there's nothing about Donald Trump that was why his daddy told him,

don't go to Manhattan. Stay here in Queens. You can be a king in Queens. There's a TV show. No, there's nothing about him that has ever said, success, university, stakes, casino, properties. I mean, it just, it's all, it all ends in bankruptcy. It all ends in someone else paying the legal bills. It all ends in someone else carrying the full

brunt of his destruction. And what makes it work? This is going to be the case study for sociologists. What makes it work is that I classify him as the PT. Barnum of our day. He knows your sucker and he plays you for one and you allow it to happen. You see it happening in front. You see what he's doing and you're like, yeah, I want that. You want to be a part of that. You look at the people in his orbit who protect him and stand around him and will defend him to the day. And this man don't give two shits about any of them. He will turn on all of them if it meant that he could get one more crypto coin. He get one more side piece, human or otherwise. And the reality, the reality is we fall for that.

We fell for that. Despite the warnings from the, I worked with Trump in 2013. No, this is, nope. Thank you very much. No. This ain't right. This doesn't even pass any smell test in politics or business. So, you know, that's why at the end of the day, it rests back on us when we look for something and we think we find it. And then all of a sudden you realize that ain't it. There is a hubris. There's a pride. There's a whatever you want to call this.

Oh, I just can't admit that I was wrong. No, you can say, I fuck that out. I was wrong as hell about that shit. I mean, come on, Tim. If you are a father of. of a 12-year-old girl. And in 2016, you're sitting there watching a videotape of a grown-ass man who wants to be president, someone that in this country we tend to hold up as a role model example.

And he says he loves to grab women by the pussy. And you're going to say to your daughter, I'm voting for him. Yeah, well, I think he was like that dot that was the guy that got grabbed, I think. You mentioned about how he bankrupted everything. Something I haven't been able to get to this week. There was a report about how the Treasury, we have our balance sheet, is basically insolvency for the country right now.

Country's broke. Treasury 30-year yield this morning is up to, it's about a 5% highest in September. So she's like the cost of everything. I was talking to my friend that owns a local pizza joint down here in New Orleans. I was bumped into on the street yesterday. And he was just talking about the costs and everything. And it's like,

imagine you're a restaurant owner right now. Like you own an actual business. You own an actual business. You dealt with this 2022 inflation shock that was like kind of out of everybody's hands. Probably the Biden administration juice the economy a little too much with the stimulus. But like mostly this was like this external shock from COVID and everybody's trying to muddle through it. Okay. Then Trump gets in.

You get you get this nut punch from the tariffs, you know, depending on, you know, what kind of ingredients you got. Labor costs are up because of a tightening market. They're bragging about how. major cities now a population is down. Net migration is out. They posted a bragging about that this week. So labor costs are up. Your rent and mortgage is up. That was already high.

Interest rates are high. And like those are now going back higher. It was finally coming down. It was like the one thing he was doing to alleviate costs was like bullying the and the economy is so shitty that eventually like interest rates are coming back down. Well, now I expect that up. Interest rates are back up against your mortgage is up. or if you're renting, that person you're renting

from's mortgages up. And now on top of that, it's just like, here we go, global energy shock. Global energy shock. Price, everything's up. Everything's up. We're just at the start of this, but I don't think that people have like just accepted, internalized

like the scale of the economic problem. Can I put an exclamation point with all kinds of, you know, red flags around what you just said. because what makes the description of the economic landscape so daunting is you're talking about right now. If you are a businessman or businesswoman, an entrepreneur, you're going out.

You're looking downstream. You're looking at what you can afford three months from now. And when you see tankers sitting in the straight of Hormuz not moving, when you see supply chains weakening, becoming more expensive for the things you need from tablecloths to the food that you will serve people in your restaurant, all of a sudden you're looking at your margins and you're going, well, in the restaurant industry, the margins are already so paper thin that any type of shock has a direct impact on your ability to stay open and to keep your staff. And so where do you think we're going to be when we get into the throes of summer? Where do you think we're going to be in the fall?

Because all of those are lagging indicators. This isn't, this isn't, you know, real right now. This is all stuff that's going to be coming home to roost in two, three months in the next quarter, in the next two quarters. That's where you're going to run into the shock. It's not like gasoline. And this is where people get confused. Okay, gas prices go up, you know, a dollar today. I mean, you know, a barrel.

You're going to see that the pump tomorrow morning. All right? Even though that gas that's, that you're going to that gas station has been in the ground for 30 or 60 days. you're going to pay the higher price right now. That's not how it works for the restaurant industry. That's not how it works for the retailer. That's not how it works for the wholesaler. Right?

And so because they don't know what that price is going to be because they haven't gotten it off the ship yet. And not only that they don't have a plan. I was laughing this morning. Let me pull this up. They're talking about a reconciliation bill now because that's the only thing they can do where they jam stuff through on 50 votes.

So I was looking in Punch Bowl. like what they plan on putting in that. You know, and given the economic issues that we're facing right now, like you would think that if they were going to jam in one more thing, that they would have some kind of plan to ease affordability costs for everyone. It's the biggest issue everybody cares about. No, here's the list of things that they want to do with reconciliation. They want Iran war funding.

Okay. They want ICE and CBP funding. The Save America Act, which is about trans kids, sports, and making it harder to do mail-in voting. And they're hoping that's a party-line vote. So that's the plan right now. The plan is not, hey, we understand that this war happened and it's causing pain for you. And we're going to, we have this plan for relief, whatever it is.

You know, a lot of different economic levers you could pull. They're saying none of that. No, what we're going to do is we're going to take more money from you. And we're going to put it into this stupid war. And we're going to give it to the ice agents. We already have the largest budget in the world. Right. And then on top of that, we're going to make sure.

we're just going to make sure it's as hard as possible for you to vote and that we deal with the only pressing issue that we feel we need to deal with this year and that's trans. Right, because that is the most incredibly important thing that, you know, the farmer in the middle of Iowa was really concerned about as he's looking at his soy crops with her. It's going to blame it on the trans kids. That's basically what the Republican Party wants you to believe.

Yeah. Let me ask you this. They're going to do that to reconciliation? That's what they're saying. They know that shit don't fit into reconciliation. That's not how reconciliation bill, you just can't shove anything. The parliamentarian is going to lose her mind. Let me see this shift in their mind.

Yeah. So let's just explain this to people's. Okay. So we've had this DHS shut down. For a while now, the Democrats have been offering. Everything's but ice. The rest of it's fun. TSA, FEMA.

Okay. Trump's been saying, not going to do that deal. Not going to do that deal. Yesterday, I don't know. One of his buddies was waiting too long in line. at the Miami airport and called them up on the phone and he was like, fuck it, fine. Okay. So then he changed his mind.

He's like, we'll do this thing Democrats been asking for for weeks. Right. He said he'll do it in an executive order. And then somehow a couple hours later, they're like, whatever, we'll just do it by unanimous consent in the Senate. So that's right. The Democrats have won a second straight shutdown. So kudos to them.

And they've passed that through unanimous consent in the Senate. The House has to deal with that. That's going to be a little bit more complicated. This isn't a congressional nerd podcast. but needless to say, if you're flying this weekend, you're still in a boatload of hurt. We'll see. The House has got to figure this out, maybe probably Monday. Then what's left is the ICE and CBP funding.

And every year you get this thing called reconciliation. We talked about this last year where it's a financial vehicle for funding the government, right? Like you can pick a number and say, hey, we're going to add another trillion to the debt. We're going to put these things in reconciliation. The parliamentarian, as you mentioned, looks at it all and says, hey, is this going to add up to one trillion? And if so, it's a way around the filibuster, basically. You can do it on a party line vote in the House and the Senate. And you're not supposed to do stuff like, you know, the Democrats couldn't have put in,

I'm going to make DC a state inside the reconciliation, right? It has to be a financial, you know, tax and spend type issue. How are they going to get the Save America Act in there as a tax and spend issue? Do they actually care about this? Do they even have the votes for this? I don't even think they have the votes. I don't think they have the votes for it. My point is, I just think it's crazy, given, like, the scale of domestic disruption.

And they're like, we got one card left to play here with our reconciliation. And it's like, we're going to do mail-in voting, trans youth, and funding the mass to ice ducks. That's their agenda. Every last one of them need to be unelected. Folks, there are a threat to everything. I don't mean, look, I don't care what you're feeling are about the country on this day or that day. At the end of the day, you want a country to be there tomorrow. And the fact of the matter is we're not handing that off to our kids and certainly not to our grandkids.

When you have this kind of disregard for the process, the rules, the idea of a Congress that is a check on executive authority, a Supreme Court that is a check on both congressional and executive authority, when all of that is fundamentally of no value to you anymore, This is what it looks like. And I'm telling you, it looks worse. You think Stephen Miller, if he gets his way on this Save America, is just going to stop? You think that son of a bitch is just going to stop when, you know, they have rounded up 100,000 more immigrants? No, bitch, they come in for your dumb ass next. That's the problem.

That's what people are starting to figure out that everybody is on the menu in this world. You know, Donald Trump wants to remake Washington in his image for a reason. He floated shit what a few days ago. He posted a little thing. Well, you know, I deserve a third term because they stole my second term. Bitch you in your second term. What are you talking about? And how dumb are we to fall for that?

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promo code, the Bork. Let's talk about the third term thing for a second. This is Franklin Graham at CPAC yesterday. And I love Donald Trump. Is he perfect? No. But I love that guy. I love him.

And we'll only have one chance at this. We'll never get another president like Donald Trump. Never. And that's why it's important that we do everything that we can to try to get him reelected. Okay, so maybe I'm wrong about this. Okay, so I want to be scared, but I don't know. I look around at this and to me, this is like the last gasp of a dying movement to me.

It's just like, I don't know, the third term stuff a year ago was having me, you know, I was locked in on this. I was like, I didn't even like the jokes. I didn't like the people joked about it. I said, this is unsurious. This guy's going to try. you look around at the wreckage right now. You have this dottering nepo baby evangelical pastor speaking to a to a CPAC that's like totally desiccated run back guy that has sexual assault allegations against him.

Trump isn't even showing up. Trump's joking about it now. It's like, I don't know. I mean, we should be vigilant. But is pointing and laughing at this? more the correct approach or being scared the correct approach right now i think you i think you i think you point and you laugh with fear in your voice because you need to be i mean yeah okay that's cpaq but then there's turning point USA okay which is going to have three times the people showing up

we're going to be much more like rah rah let's go get them you know you know i love the kKK K bullshit. And so I think that you've got to be vigilant about all of it because that's the sucker move to get you to think it's not dangerous. To get you to think the problem has recessed. Look, I grew up in Washington, D.C., and the one thing I learned about cockroaches is that they hide very well, right? You think you've eradicated the problem? No, you haven't. It's still going to be a problem. And it may not rear itself up right now because they know you coming after them. But when the table turns and it's on their turf and it's on their time, it's a different matter. And so you just have to be, you have to be vigilant. You have to continue to use the bud spread.

You know, you have to continue. Now, I'm with you on vision. I'm obviously with you on all that. This movement isn't going anywhere. Just the Trump third term element in particular. I just hit me yesterday. when I watch the Franklin Graham thing because I'm only speaking about my own feelings. You know, you can only know really be sure solipsism. You can only know what's happening inside of you. But when I heard Trump joke about that, when you put the hats on earlier

in the year, I was like, this is fucking bad. This is bad. And I watched that Franklin Graham thing and I was like, this is sad. It's sad. But it's still bad. Because remember, 78 million people put him back in power. What makes you think 81 million people won't give them a third term?

I mean, because I don't know. I mean, I'm just saying. I mean, because they're going to be pissed. Right. But when you live in it, when you create a grievance bubble and you pack as many Americans inside of it as possible, yeah, this is what you get. People want people to put a salve on the pain that they feel. Our elected officials aren't doing that. They're not trying to be honest and say, hey, this is this is the cost of solid.

this problem. These are the things we have to do collectively. Culture wars are bullshit because guess what, immigrants aren't going anywhere. They're always coming. Just like your great granddaddy got here, your granddaddy got here. The next generation is coming. So, you know, you're not going to be able to hide from the world. So why don't we place ourselves in a right way in it as we've always strived to do. No one's having that conversation. So, Till, if all I want to make you as a happily married father, gay man, living in New Orleans, fear, what am I going to do?

I'm going to find the thing that scares you, and I'm going to pick it that. I'm going to go with that. And it could be the assault on, you know, in a reverse universe, assault on the trans community. It could be assault on something. And what do you, you become protective and defensive of that. That's what they do. And what you forget in the process is the us, the U.S. And you're thinking about the me. And that's the America, even in with racism and slavery and all the things.

Black folks learned a long time ago that I have to survive in the us. Okay. All right. Yes, it's about me. But I have to survive. in the us. And you cannot, you cannot give in to this sort of myopic view that it's just my story, my neighborhood, my family when the family down the street is being hauled off by ice. Because it ain't a problem for them to move their ass up the block. Speaking of black folks, trying to manage living in this world, living in this American society, Did you see the Times story this morning about what was happening at the Department of War? I read a little bit to you from that one.

Pete Higgs-Seth dropped two black and two women army officers from the promotion list to be general. One of the black women in particular was a flashpoint. I'm just going to read this directly. Last summer, Hegseth's chief of staff, Ricky Buria, chastised Army Secretary Dan Driscoll for selecting a black female combat engineer, to serve as the head of the military district of Washington. Mr. Buria told Mr. Driscoll that President Trump would not want to stand next to a black female officer at military events.

I don't know why that shocked the shit out of anybody because Donald Trump does, first off, a strong woman and a strong black woman. Oh, hell no. That is not what Donald Trump was. This is Amorosa erasure. This is Amorosa erasure, Michael Steele. And so Donald Trump has no way on this planet is going to stand next to a black woman in uniform at a ceremony and has to salute her and acknowledge her. Oh, that's just not, there's nothing in his makeup that would ever tell you that that would be something he would be for.

So yes, his little, his little pet project in Pete Hick-Seth. is, you know, going to accommodate that. Not what's best for the military district of the District of Columbia, not what's best for the Army, not what's best for DOD, not what's best for that soldier, but what's best for Donald Trump. Donald Trump doesn't want to be reminded of his weaknesses. He doesn't want to be reminded of his insecurities.

He doesn't want to be reminded of his failures, of leadership, in his capacity to be anything other than a racist. He doesn't want to be reminded of that. And he likes the coloring that guys like HECSeth give him to sort of put a veneer on it, to whitewash it. That's why they're taking, you know, black history and stripping it down. We don't want to talk about slavery. So let me find a Negro that's going to go out and parrot that,

Byron Donald's, right? and make me feel good about my racism. So, yeah, I'm not surprised about that. No, not surprised. The bluntness, though, of it is certainly notable. We should say in a major general, Antoinette Kant, as the woman who got her promotion. But now he takes us trying to intervene again.

You mentioned Baron Donald's. He's running against our old friend David Jolly. You and David was Republican, Congressman, never Trump, Erwin, Independent was on MS. Running for governor, Florida. Yeah, running for governor. For the first time, and you know I don't like opium, Michael Steele. You know that I'm raincloud.

I don't, I don't. I get it from you, so it's all good. Yeah, you're not coming to me, okay, if you want to feel like, you know, things are about to turn around any minute right now, okay? This is the home for catastrophize. But for the first time this week when those state legislative races, specials happened in Florida. I started to think.

I started to look at the math. We've now had 30 state legislative seats in a row that have flipped, and they've all flipped from Republican to Democrat. That has not happened since before, and they've been measuring this. Before I flipped them from Democrat to Republican. No, that was the last wave. When you were there in 2010, no, I was about to say, your wave in 2010.

You guys didn't even get 30 in a row. It was, you know, like 27 or something. Your record's been broken. Your records been broken now. So now this is the, this is the longest streak. The flip, the average flip in those Florida districts is in the low teens, which is about what Trump won the state by. Byron Donald's is a very weak candidate in Florida. There's a lot of dissension within the Florida Republican Party, maybe more than any other state,

because there's still the raw feelings about the DeSantis Trump of it all. I think Casey DeSantis was kind of going to be the heir apparent, but the Trump fight cost her that. now you end up with Donald's. Is our guy David Jolly? Is that, is that crazy to think that that is in flight? I don't think it's crazy. I think the trend line speaks to the common sense of it.

I think a lot of voters, look at the end of the day, Tim, you know this very well from your days in politics. As a comms guy, as an operative. The one thing you learn about communication is listening. And Jolly is very good at that. that always has been. Byron is not a listener. And so what is Byron? He's not really a listener. He's not a thinker. He feels the need. He feels the need. He makes a whole lot of white folks feel good about themselves. As I just said, he does not hold the mirror up. He does not reflect back to them

the culture from which he comes to say, this is part of your history as much as anything else. Why are you trying to wipe it out? Let me help you, help you. right? And so the reality of it is that Florida race in Trump's backyard, in his district, legislative district, losing that is a big warning sign for Florida Republicans. It's a big warning sign for national Republicans. And they don't want to listen. They don't want to listen to what the voters are telling them. And in many respects, it cuts along two grains. And, And you know them well. One is still Epstein. Epstein is not just about justice for the victims here, but it's also for a lot of the folks in the Trump orbit. And I'm not just talking about that Maga corner,

but the rank and file Republican who believed that they were going to get to the bottom of this because they were told that. The other is the economic, who believed that their lives, as we started this conversation, discussing would not get worse but better. Their costs would not go up but go down. Democrats appropriately framed that as affordability, right? And the American people and Republicans were still Americans, right, bought that. They also bought that idea of affordability, which is why Donald Trump stopped making fun of the concept because his own base believed in it. They thought, it was a real thing for them because they're looking not just at this before gas prices, they're looking at the grocery bills. They're looking at, you know, how much it costs to put

clothes on their kids' backs. They're looking at this fact that the tariffs were in fact attacks. Yeah. And so, yeah, and Florida is not immune from that. And I think, I think David Jolly has been making a good case. Now that has to translate. as again, you and I both know into how you turn that vote out, right? Sure. And how you sustain the momentum that has been gained on a win like we saw this week, not just in Florida, but in other wins around the country, tapping into that idea.

It'll be interesting to see the turnout of this weekend of the folks on the No Kings rally. The No Kings. You know, what does that look like in a state like Florida? Because that also could be a leading indicator of where, where the people in that state are. Yeah. You look at that Florida, the first DeSantis election,

2018, which is the first Trump midterm. This pulled this out. He beat Andrew Gillum, who had some problems, by 32,000 votes. But for those problems, Andrew Gillum would have won that election.

Yeah. And I think it wasn't like Gwen Graham was in that primary? Someone else probably could have won that election. So DeSantis wins by 0.4%. Now, Florida said so turn. over since then. We had COVID. There were a lot of blue state refugees or whatever

going down to Florida. You know, they wanted to, you know, they wanted to go to their COVID parties and, you know, hang out in close quarters together without worrying about the virus. So, so the makeup of state changed a little bit. Anyway, if you're in Florida and listen to this,

I think that there's been a lot of despair about the Democratic Party's chances there and I think that maybe this is an opportunity to turn it around. We got so kind of fired up about everything that I kind of breezed over the details of the Iran war and what's been happening. So can we just go back to that a little bit? So here's the latest. Trump did announce, as I joked about earlier, that 10-day extension of his deadline for Iran

to open the Strait of Hormuz or face the destruction of its energy plants. That takes us to April 6th. And that's going to move too. That really does matter. And when we had Wysenthal on earlier this week to talk about the economic stuff about this, it's like for every day it's closed. It's like a week. you know, that it's going to take to fix the supply chain stuff. So, and this is just exponential problems. So anyway, 10-day extension. We're moving additional troops into the area.

So it's something to keep monitoring. Israel this morning, right before he came on, said that they vowed to intensify and expand their war in Iran. And then Reuters, right before we came on, has a report saying that we can determine with certainty that we've destroyed about a third of Iran's vast missile arsenal. There's another third we don't know about. and then another third that's buried in underground tunnels and bunkers we haven't been able to get to.

So, I mean, putting that all together, there's been, yes, some degradation of the Iranian capabilities, but maybe not as much as we thought. The gap between our objectives and Israel seem to be wider. How do you get led into a war with a partner you can't control? I mean, the conceit about this war, the lie about this war was told to us within the first 24 hours. by Marco Ruby himself who could not explain with a straight face or with any credibility as Secretary of State what the hell his Department of State was doing, who's been largely cut out of any negotiations. Why is it Mark or you sending Whitkoff and Jared Kushner, Dom and Domber,

choose which is which, right? Yeah, yeah, or corrupt. Dumber and corruptor. Sitting down at a table, what are you negotiating? They're negotiating a land deal. And you've got Bibi Netanyahu sitting there going, yeah, send the pusses in the room. We'll let them divvy up the spoils. But I get off on going after Iran defeating this enemy and blowing the shit out of everybody and killing him. And so call me crazy, call me, call me wrong. But what did you just say the Israeli government announced? They vowed to intensify and expand. And Donald Trump was saying, what, we want to bring it down. We want to de-intensit. and we want to contract because we want the straits of our moves to open.

Yep. Why are we sending? Now, late last night, possibly 10,000 more on top of what's already young men and women who are already being sent overseas. So what are we doing here? And is it your kid? My kids, they pass draft age. All right.

All right. Not my concern in that regard. My concern is for your 18, 22, 20. 27-year-old child, right? Yeah. What are we doing? Why are we allowing this to happen and allowing ourselves to get browbeat into this?

Oh, on top of that, Tim, Russia is helping Iran. The amount of money that Russia is bringing in a day, like when you look at who is benefiting from this war right now, it's the landman characters, you know, people in Midland, they're doing real well. West Texas is doing great. And Russia

they're printing money right now. Their economy was teetering. China has internal capabilities. It is crazy. The Israel thing, I just want to say. And this is a problem with A, not being honest about the war, not selling us on the war,

not explaining what the missions and objectives are. Israel's objectives are clear. Like in that statement where they said they're going to intensify attacks, they said it's because the Islamic Republic has not heated warnings to stop firing missiles at Israel's civilian population. Like, Israel has a legitimate security concern. Like, there can be different views on what their strategy is and whether they're exacerbating it with their own actions, et cetera, et cetera. But like, they have a legitimate security concern.

We don't. So it's obvious, it was obvious from day one to anybody with eyes that eventually, like, we were going to become, come across. loss ways on our missions and objectives because Israel has a legitimate security concern. Yes, they do. And that's intense and short term and real. It's real. And we don't. And we don't.

So it creates an uncomfortable partnership. It creates a very uncomfortable partnership. And in this case, the tail, BB, is wagging the dog, Trump. And that is one of the most obvious facets of this in that we, you look at the situation before, the level of restraint that other administrations, Republicans and Democrats have used in this regard with respect to Iran was justified, right? You just can't go yippikai into the Middle East because of the very thing you just noted about the security concerns being of one nation outweighing the security of the region.

And so there's always been this delicate balance. I know this firsthand. I worked on the original Iranians claimed trombudal at the end of the Iranian hostage. The firm was Surin-Morse back in the early 80s. That is impossible. You were working on that in the early 80s? Were you an intern? I just gotten back from, I just gotten back from the seminary.

And after I left the Augustinians, moved back to Washington, landed at Surin-Morse. and you know who I worked with at the firm? Mark Ginsburg was a young associate at the firm. Jane Frank Harmon was a young partner at the firm. And the former senator of the great state of Ohio, Republic was a young associate at the firm. And I got tasked with pulling the, this had never been done, pulling the initial research on how we frame this,

tribunal to deal with resolution of the issues outstanding regarding the Iranians and the impact that they had on Americans and the claims that Americans had against the Iranians. And I learned a lot about the Iranian people, learned a lot about the government and a lot about the history. And that history is fraught with U.S. intervention. That history is fraught with U.S. playing king and the people having a different idea, which is while we wound up with the Shah. And so when you understand all of that and you look at the buffoons that are now in the Middle East, who don't appreciate that history, who are not coming to the table with the storylines that have held somewhat imbalance how we play ourselves, our role in that region, we are now in a very precarious

spot. And when you have bad actors like China and Russia benefiting, it is not going to be good for us in the long term if we continue down this road. So I think there's a lot to be concerned about here. I think you're right when you say, you know, we're going to get to April 6th and then what? You know, and what does it look like between now and then? You know, it's not just the, it's not just the military, but it's also the economic impact that we're going to have to contend with. We like to be fair and balanced on this podcast. So I do want to play the counter view for you about how we had to do this because the threats were so great. And you should actually be kind of scared if you live in this country right now,

just going about your daily life because the threat was so great from Iran. Let's listen to the vice president of the United States. And it's options to ensure that Iran never has a nuclear weapon. You talk about people who walk into a crowded supermarket and have a vest on and they blow up the vest and a couple of people get killed and that's a terrible tragedy. What happens when what's on the vest is not something that can kill a couple of people but can kill many, many tens of thousands of people. That is the most important American national security objective that exists for any administration at any time is you don't want the worst people in the world to have a nuclear weapon. A nuclear suicide vest in your local Harris Teeter. that's something that J.D. Vance is saying we are concerned about and that's why we're in this war because there might have been an Iranian with a nuclear bomb on their suicide vest. I don't know how that would work exactly. I think that that would be pretty conspicuous.

Okay. I'm sorry, America. This is, this for me is, and I know it is for you, Tim, it is too fucking serious to have such unserious, so, such political. driven such politically motivated and biased assholes running this war and running our country. What the vice president just said was bull shit. It makes no sense. We always live in the fear of someone in a vest. Nuclear or other ones, I mean, take the nuclear shit off the table. That's just crazy.

It's kind of important, though. How is it going to work? They're going to go to Ishtihan and get some new, you know, material, fissile material, put it on their vass, playing us for stupid. They're playing us for stupid. They're mixing these images and sort of creating this space in which this thing could happen. No, that will not happen. Now, if he's talking about chemical warfare, okay, that's a different conversation. But that can happen now. You don't have to go to war with Iran to be worried about that. The fact of the matter is, Iran was at the table negotiating. the Obama and the Biden administration, we had a deal.

Trump took the deal off the table, tore it up, right? Then we were living in the wild, wild west of nothing. Donald Trump, at the coming into a second term, there was the beginning of the negotiation of a new deal. And Donald Trump tore it up. And the key man he put there was a son-in-law who doesn't actually work for the government who is on the take from Iran's top regional rival. Thank you.

So probably not the guy that you want there if you're trying to negotiate. Not the guy you want there in the room. And so to hear him now say this is just mind-numbingly stupid and it's insulting because what this is not talking about in all of that, if everything, okay, Mr. V. I'm going to take everything you're saying as true. A, why didn't you say that on the first day? B, why is your story about why we're there in the first place changed three, four, five, seven times? C, why can't you tell us how this ends? What's your plan to get out? What does that exit strategy look like? D, when you start to implement that, what the fuck are you leaving behind? Right? Because,

like Venezuela, all you did was take out, decapitate the leadership. Like any good little writhing thing on the ground that can regenerate its body and grow a new head, that's what's happening here. You didn't take out the, you didn't take out the guard. You didn't take out the leadership. You didn't, because why that leadership, if you, if you read the fucking intelligence, would tell you that a lot of it is under. ground, a lot of it is dispersed all over the country, just like the damn nuclear weapons you're trying to find. I mean, it just, Tim, what are we doing?

It's good to know they're looking out for us. They just don't want a nuclear weapon on a suicide vest. That's why we're at the war. That's why everybody's paying more for everything. That's why Americans are dying. That's why people in the region are dying. That's why everything's destabilized. Here's a solution.

Yeah. I have a solution for the administration. Stop the war? No. Let's just get rid of all the. all the vests. Oh. Oh, okay.

Ban vests. Vests. Let's ban the vest. That's something to look into. Vest control. All right. While we're being nice to them, one last thing,

and then I'll let you go. Because I do, again, you know, sometimes when you read more Trump-affiliated outlets, they offer these like kind of 4D chess rationalizations for what's happening.

Like I was looking at the free press this morning and they had somebody in the free press talking about people who don't play chess? Yeah, the Iran war, really about China, actually. Now, the administration isn't saying that, but like,

that Iran was working with China, and by closing the straight, we're going to destabilize Asia. And that's going to, it was kind of, it was hard to follow. John is making money here to a fist. Yeah, but that's what, anyway, that's what the Barry Weiss outlet was telling you. So I was thinking about potential 40 chess things that they could be doing. Okay. And I'm sure you saw the news about how Trump is going to put his signature on the dollar.

It's going to be the first time that a sitting, president has signed the bills themselves. This is obviously Kim Jong-un-esque and wrong and horrible. But I'm wondering, they couldn't think about a way to take prices down. But if you have like bonfires of money, right? If people are so upset about the dollar that at scale, they're burning it, then that could lead to deflation. Actually, you could get deflation if you're taking a lot of currency out of the market. And so maybe that's the plan. Maybe we're looking for maybe we're looking for a deflationary thing where he wants the protest. You put his signature on the dollar and people are like, oh, hell no, I just don't just burn this shit.

I'm not, no, I'm not spending, just burn it. Look, if y'all haven't figured out now by now, Donald Trump wants his name on everything because that's what a megalomaniac does. Everything is them and they are everything. If they could redefine the, the laws of physics, literally, they would. All right? And they try politically telling you up is down and down is up. And so it doesn't surprise me. It's like we mentioned before, the damn arc he wants to build in Washington,

what he's doing with the East Wing, renaming the Kennedy Center at themselves. And look at what's happened. Nobody wants to perform at the Kennedy Center. And I guess we can listen to Kid Rock for the next three years. But who, you have three hobos in the audience? I mean, I don't know what you're talking about anymore. Because what Donald Trump is doing, again, he wants his name on a dollar because now when you look, pick at the dollar, you see his signature.

He wants that ugly bullshit signature of his that he never learned how to write cursive, right? Never learned how to actually write his name. So he just scribbles it because he's lazy. You can't even write out your damn name. You can't even write your name out in the way that we can understand what it is. So we have to have to have our brains process the symbolism of your name. Because otherwise, you can't read that shit.

You take someone who has never seen Donald Trump's signature and showed it to them. They go, what the fuck is that? Did the three-year-old get sick? What is that? It's on our money. That's a representative of our fallen empire, though, you know, a three-year-old signature. In so many ways. in so many ways. So yes, put your signature on the damn dollar. I like a good bonfire. I don't mind,

you know, like burning the bills, baby, burning the bills. I got bad news. I just asked Claude if that would work. And I said technically it could reduce inflation. Yeah, but it's inefficient compared to central bank tools like raising interest rates. So I don't know. Probably not going to work. Just an idea though. No bad idea. It's a brainstorm. That's the chairman. Michael Steele. You can catch him at 7 p.m. that's right, in the East. Every week, nice, baby. On MS now. Yeah.

And I hope to see in person soon, all right, sir. You got it, my friend. You take care. Enjoy yourself, the best to the family. Stay out of trouble. All right, back at you. Everybody, have a wonderful weekend. Cheers.

We'll see you on Monday with Bill Crystal. Oh, whoa, I got money to burn. I want to burn it on you. We got one short life. I want to spend it with you. The Borg podcast is brought to you thanks to the work of lead producer Katie Cooper, Associate producer Anzley Skipper And with video editing by Katie Lutz

and audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.