The Bulwark Podcast - Susan Glasser: An Exercise in National Humiliation

Episode Date: August 26, 2025

Some rando far-right social media suck-up, who Trump rewarded with an appointment to his administration, is pushing mortgage fraud investigations of Adam Schiff, Tish James, and now Fed governor Lisa Cook. Trump claims he's fired Cook based on a tweet—but will any institution stand up to these McCarthy-like campaigns against his political foes? Meanwhile, Bolton is being investigated because he went on TV and called out Trump's lies about his embarrassing Alaska summit. Plus, the administration is abusing official resources by having Guard troops just stand around in D.C., Putin wants to devour Ukraine by any means necessary, and we are finding out what it's like to have a live-streaming presidency. Susan Glasser joins Tim Miller. show notes Susan's most recent column Pam Bondi profile by Ruth Marcus Bulwark Live in DC and NYC at https://www.thebulwark.com/p/bulwark-events. Toronto is SOLD OUT

Hello and welcome to the Bullwark podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. Delighted to welcome back, staff writer at The New Yorker, which is a weekly column on life in Washington. She's also a host of the magazine's political scene podcast, co-author most recently of The Divider, Trump in the White House, with her husband, Peter Baker. She was also a Moscow bureau chief of the Washington Post at Susan Glasser. How you doing, Susan? Hey, Tim. Great to be with you. Too much to talk about, I'm afraid. Much to discuss. Where are you coming at us from? You in D.C. right now?

No, I'm with my mom up in Massachusetts, so, you know, escaping the occupied city for a few days. All right. Well, we'll have something to discuss about the occupied city and, you know, the troops hanging out outside Krispy Kreme and Georgetown Cupcake, keeping the people safe. But first, we've got to discuss Lisa Cook. that's just the big news of last night. Trump has posted a bleat, I guess, that he's going to remove the Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook effective immediately. By law, he can only fire her for cause. He is citing accusations that she has two primary mortgages, I guess, though she's not been charged with any crime. Cook has a statement out this morning saying that she is refusing to resign, just going to take him to court. She's the first black woman to be a Fed governor, I think is worth

noting. I think this is of a pace with, you know, your last article about Trump's retribution and the, you know, creeping authoritarian aspirations that he has, but I was wondering your reaction. Yeah, I mean, there's so much to unpack there. I mean, first of all, let's just say that Donald Trump, the first convicted felon to serve as president, his conviction was recently upheld, although the enormous civil fine in a court was struck down. So it's really quite remarkable when he's accusing people of various crimes who have not been charged of them. And I know there's so much to be kind of overwhelmed by, we can tend to forget that. But I, it strikes me. Donald Trump has never fudged a mortgage. I promise. He has never done a

financial filing that was not 100. He's crossed, eyes dotted. I think the through line for me of a lot of these really eye-popping developments of August is this idea of making more on institutions and individuals that challenge Trump in any way and no longer even feeling the need to kind of obscure one's motives at all, right? The explicit link between defiance or political opposition or just simply saying stuff that Donald Trump doesn't like on TV and the idea that you're going to use whatever the powers of the federal government are against that opposition. In this case, it strikes me that his opponent here is not woman. It's an institution. It's the Federal Reserve. Donald Trump is seeking to break this idea of

its independence, as you know, gone after. It's chairman, Jay Powell, again and again and again, threatening, but not yet actually following through on firing him. And I wonder if this is a sort of a creeping backdoor way into finally provoking that full-scale confrontation with the independence of the Fed. I mean, this is like at some level, confrontation with independence of the Fed, and she's just one of the governors. But the law is pretty clear, right, that there has to be a for-cause reason to get rid of her. And this is an extreme stretch on that front, especially since this is just based on an accusation of one guy that we're going to get into in a second. And so that loss of that independence, like we saw an immediate

reaction last night with the dollar tanking, rebounded somewhat, has come back down. I mean, I think that, you know, before we get into just sort of the personnel and the authoritarian way that he's treating federal civil servants, like the economic impact here is not zero, right? On the one hand, again, it's just one federal ward governor. On the other hand, it's sending a really bad signal globally to the markets about the stability of our institutions in this moment. Yeah, I mean, it's a classic example of like, you know, the rule of law. You'll miss it when it's gone. But a million tiny attacks on it, which is the one that really signals the absolute end of it. And I think you've seen the Trump administration on a variety of fronts

attacking this idea that there are rules of the road in our economy, in our civil society. And, you know, many businesses, of course, that's part of what has powered the American economic engine over the last, you know, nearly a century since World War II. And, you know, is this the moment? Is it some other moment? We can't really say, sure. Hindsight will give us plenty of opportunity to say we knew when, but maybe we didn't. But I have to say that it's the basic notion that the president is entitled to be the single decider of everything in this country that is so antithetical to, you know, what you and I saw as a vision of an American democracy. And this idea that you can just take literally a guy

tweeting something, right? So you have an obscure political appointee, you know, tweeting something on a Wednesday. And, you know, a few days later, the President of the United States is firing you for an investigation that has not yet occurred. It's really a remarkable sign of the failure of process, institutions, laws, norms, any constraints on the presidency. That's what all these events have in common. Yeah. The subhead of our morning newsletter this morning is the president who doesn't believe in checks and balances is no president at all. That's not how our system of government is supposed to work, right? It was fundamental to, you know, what was laid out in the Federalist papers, what has, you know, been the model for our government.

And if nobody, you know, from any of the other branches, from any independent authorities can check him, well, then we have to have a different name for it. You mentioned the obscure government official to tweet an attack on her. I do want to mention him briefly here because I think this is a, I don't know what the right word is. He is sinecate for the entire government kind of, or he is certainly a very representative example of, I think, where things are going in the Trump gangster government. The guy's name is Bill Pulte. There's no reason anybody would have ever heard of him. He was a private equity executive before this that had gone MAGA. He was named as the head of the federal housing finance agency, which usually just kind of oversees Fannie and Freddie.

This is not a public figure that you would know about in an other situation. But I don't know if he's been given Cash Patel's enemies list or what exactly is happening. But this one guy has now publicly made accusations of mortgage fraud against Adam Schiff, Tish James, attorney general of New York, and now Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook. He referred all three of these to the Justice Department for criminal investigation. I mean, this is crazy, like a random bureaucrat that has oversight over one, you know, sort of element to the federal government, like taking upon himself to do, I don't know, like a mini McCarthy campaign, like just like singularly targeting the president's political foes

on the narrow question of whether they've filled out their housing paperwork correctly. You know, Tim, I mean, it's a big country, and I think the Trump years are giving us proof that, you know, somebody's going to find a way to market themselves, you know, into Donald Trump's inner circle. And essentially, that appears to be what the case is with this official. There's a very interesting piece in Politico that your team flagged for me that talks about how he even got this job in the first place. Now, of course, there's the usual menu of voluminous contributions to Republican candidates and causes. But he came to Donald Trump's attention by quote unquote Twitter philanthropy. Basically, he said, I will give this person, you know, X thousands of dollars if Donald Trump retweets this, you know, or retrues this or whatever, you know, his social media platform is. And, you know, he now has something like three million followers on Twitter. And so he's a classic example of a non-entity, perhaps in the broader spectrum of American politics, but in this niche world of

far-rate social media influencers, he's managed to parlay interaction with causes and themes that Trump likes into a large social media following. And then all of a sudden, he's in charge of overseeing America's mortgage finance agencies. And by the way, since he got into that post, what has he done? He's pulled a full Trump move and fired the entire board. as I understand it, of both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and appointed himself as the chairman, which really seems literally ripped from Donald Trump's playbook. Yeah. Luckily, I only have one home.

So I'm not too concerned about the mortgage paperwork, but I might be doing a double check. I don't know. If you're in Cash Patel's book, I might do a double check on, you know, with your mortgage lender this morning. Palti posted, I hear Jay Powell is scrambling this morning. He can scramble all he wants, but he might as well be scrambling eggs because the party at the Fed is over. This is insane. This is capo-like threats from a random bureaucrat at the housing finance agency.

And like, I guess it's crazy, it's insane, it's mockable, it's a little scary. But the thing that is the most frustrating about it is like it obviously is going to work, right? I mean, like, this is the playbook for getting inside Donald Trump's good graces and it creates this incentive structure around the entire government where, you know, if you want to see yourself on the path towards the cabinet or the inner circle as, you know, we get into 2027 and 2028, act like this guy, like, you know, finding whatever little fiefdom you have and using it to go after political foes. I mean, look, Tim, we're living in a world where the director of the FBI wrote a children's book

about Donald Trump as a poor persecuted king. And that was enough to get him the job of the FBI. director. So obviously we're living in a kind of crazy alt reality where, you know, individual, let's call them social media entrepreneurs, are finding a way to get to the King's attention. And, you know, the more outlandish over the top and, you know, sort of slavish in defense of Trump or carrying out his feuds, the more power you may accrue in this warped situation, the question for all of this. And I, last night, I really was beside myself because there's so many examples in the last few weeks of Trump really going over the top in terms of challenging

norms and rules. The question for all of this is not about the guys like Pulte who exists, but is there any institution left in our society that can check this? What has happened to our legal system? What has happened to Congress? What has happened to rational actors? And I have to presume that some of them do exist inside the federal government, inside the executive branch. Like, there's a rampage sort of going on here. And the question, I think, is when it all shakes out, are there going to be any institutions that stand up and check this? And so, you know, Donald Trump says he's fired this governor of the Fed. Well, has he? How long will it take to litigate this in the courts? Is this a way that he will then use to say, see my firing of her

and therefore I can fire the chairman of the Fed next. And, you know, it's the events that pile on top of each other. We're only 200-something days into this administration. You know, what are we going to look like when we're a year out, 18 months out, two years out? And the escalation suggests we're going to be in a very different country by then. Yeah. No doubt. The Pulte thing does feel like kind of like a mockumentary version of like a Russia story. So, you know, kind of like for some, random boob, like, gets into the good graces of the leader by just, you know, going after the people that have annoyed him. Can you have a mockumentary inside of a mockumentary? I guess, I think so. I don't know. We'll call Rob Reiner. We'll have to ask the experts on that.

Hey, y'all, I warned you, I warned our Toronto show has sold out. The Canadians love Sam Stein so much that, you know, there are lines around the block to get tickets to it. But the good news is we still have tickets left for our live shows in Washington, D.C., and in New York, coming up in early October. So go get those tickets now at the bulwark.com slash events. I'm missing LSU or South Carolina for you guys. I'm going to be in New York for that. And so assuming that's an afternoon game, I might have a couple of bourbons in me by the time we get on stage on Saturday night. So that one could be a rowdy one. So if you're looking for an excuse to get to the Big Apple, go see a show Friday night, come see us Saturday.

night. Could be a fun little weekend. Go get tickets. Like I said, thebork.com slash events. Thebork.com slash events. See you all soon. To your article in the retribution phase. This is all related to kind of what we're talking about now, obviously. But the Bolton and some of these other situations are more directly, you know, part of Trump's revenge tour. I only get into a couple of the details of the Bolton thing. But at the top level, like, what are your big takeaways from what we saw on Friday? Yeah. I mean, look, Donald Trump isn't hiding it. So we shouldn't hide it either. I mean, there's an explicit link between people who speak out against him and the willingness to unleash whatever powers of the federal government

to go after them. And that's certainly the case in Bolton's situation. It's not like random timing. Remember that John Bolton has been one of the loudest voices out there day in and day out on television in op-eds pointing out the lies and false claims behind Trump's summiteering with Vladimir Putin. And that's the explicit connection in terms of timing with this raid on Bolton's home and office that really, I think, should send a chilling effect and is meant to send, it appears, a chilling effect on all of us. Because, you know, Bolton is one of the people pointing out that, no, not only has Donald Trump not made peace in the war in

Ukraine. But most of what he said about his negotiations with Putin have been proven to be not the case. You know, he's been taken for a ride by Russia. He's humiliated the country, you could argue in many ways, greeting Putin on a red carpet in Alaska, applauding for him the first time that he's been seen by a leader of the United States since illegally invading his next door neighbor. And we applaud him. And we take him at face value. Trump adopts his talking points. He says, oh, a deal is imminent. He says there's going to be a meeting between Putin and Zelensky. And surprise, surprise, Putin is not, in fact, willing to meet with Vladimir Zelensky, never mind to make any concessions of the kind that Trump and his

very credulous envoy, Whitkoff, have suggested that he would make. And so for me, it's very much about silencing a critic. Yeah, no, let's sit on the Putin thing for a second. We'll get back to vaulted because I hear you on the silencing the critic, but I just don't want to let it pass by, the humiliating part, because like, in addition to all the things you said, did you see the press conference on, was it on Thursday or Friday, where Trump had the FIFA head in? And he said, Putin sent him this picture. And he's like rifling around in the drawers, looking for the picture that Putin had sent him. And this press conference is supposed to be about the World Cup? And he picks it up and he says, I have something from a person who I would love to see at the World Cup.

And he takes the Putin picture and shows it around the audience, like it's a prize possession. And then kind of goes on, it's like, I hope he's going to be here. It depends on the decisions. It is so weird. It is so humiliating to use that word that that is where he's at. And then he gets asked about whether he's upset that Putin bombed a building that was like an American company in Ukraine. And he offers like some minor, like, yeah, I'm not thrilled about it. but I'm also not thrilled about this.

It is wild just like the degree to which in the days after Alaska there was a little bit of like suspension of disbelief among people that like maybe maybe this was going to happen. Like maybe something was different. You know, what has happened in the last week and a half, I just think betrays like a total reality, you know, and then connected to John Bolton that he was just out there just explaining to people. Yeah.

I appreciate you saying that to. because the suspension of disbelieve is a very charitable word. There was a lot of, you know, I don't know, is this a family podcast? Can I say bullshit? Yeah, no. You please, you can say bullshit. It was a lot of bullshit. And I will tell you that.

I tried to get Ann Applebaum to cuss two weeks ago, and she only did it in the green room. So I'm happy that you can fill the voice for her. I'll have a word with Anne about that. I mean, it's been a very frustrating time for anyone who has, you know, been observing Russia closely to see the credulousness. And I think it's more than suspension of disbelief, but outright credulousness from so many commentators, including many critics of Trump, who should know better? You know, the coverage, in my view, was a lot of it was really bad.

It was misleading. It took at face value statements from Donald Trump that shouldn't be. I think that, you know, people found perhaps the image of Trump greeting Putin on the the red carpet shocking, but even that, I think, was not covered as a signal event in its own right. And it seems to me that when we look back on this, historically speaking, you know, five years or not 10 years from now, I mean, that is going to look terrible in history. That's going to be the moment that we remember from Alaska. It's not going to be that peace was made. What it's going to be is that Donald Trump greeted the butcher of Butcha with

applause, with literal applause on a red carpet. And so many people said, yeah, maybe he's going to make peace now. Well, first of all, that's not going to happen. And the last six months have been literally an exercise in national humiliation for the United States as if we have no one in our country who is familiar with what Vladimir Putin has been doing for the last 25 years. And we have to send some real estate developer who has no freaking idea by himself without an interpreter to the Kremlin. I mean, so again, I do think that it's hard. I understand there's so many different things that can get one's blood pressure boiling. You know, we can't be on a constant, you know, high boil about every single thing.

But this thing, if you pull back, is worth actually being a lot more clear-eyed about than I have seen from a lot of the coverage. This is the largest, deadliest war in Europe since the end of World War II. Trump has blundered about, inserted himself in the middle of it, with the very clearly stated goal of personal aggrandizement. His goal here is personal aggrandizement. And even that has not produced any results except to reinforce his bizarre public fascination, as you pointed out, with the approval of Vladimir Putin. And, you know, he seems to want him to be his friend. All he wants to do is to talk about, you know, how they have this good relationship. well, I mean, you and I both watch that 12-minute press event or whatever you want to call it in Alaska at the end of their summit where Putin spoke for eight minutes and Donald Trump spoke for four minutes.

They didn't look like friends to me. Well, it looks kind of like a situation where one person was smitten with the other person, kind of. So, you know, we've all been in those situations before. I have to correct you, though, Susan. I'm sorry, because the vice president was pushing back on you in a recent interview on Fox. He said the American media is giving a false image of Putin. He's actually more soft-spoken than you would necessarily expect. He's very deliberate, very careful.

That's what he's absolutely learned. You know, I've actually met Vladimir Putin, and J.D. Vance, as he also admitted in that interview, has not met Vladimir Putin, but he's talked to him on the telephone, is what he said. He's heard him on the telephone several times. I've met Vladimir Putin. In fact, I was in the first group of American journalists, American Bureau Chiefs who met with Vladimir Putin in the spring of 2001 at the Kremlin. And, you know, it was a very revealing episode.

This was a much different leader of Russia, much more insecure, obviously, still making the transition from obscure former KGB official to a leader of Russia appointed by Boris Yeltsin and then elected in March of 2000. And that Putin, you know, was eager to impress Westerners, different than this Putin, perhaps, But when I asked him about the war in Chechnya that he was then prosecuting and remember that war and Putin have gone hand in hand for the entire quarter century that he's been in power in Russia, you know, this man's visage immediately changed. He was a cold-eyed killer then in the same way that he is now nearly two and a half decades later. And I think that for J.D. Vance, who has never supported Ukraine, has always said publicly, since he's begun his political career, essentially that there's nothing for us in Ukraine. It's not our fight. It's not our issue. You know, there's a credulousness that's embedded in this sort of fantasy mega version of Vladimir Putin that is just not borne out by the reality of him or the Russia that he's led over the last couple decades. And right now, he's the most serious threat to European stability that there is. And Europe is our closest allies and partners

in the world. It's just that there's a vision of American foreign policy that J.D. Vance has, that Donald Trump has, that doesn't care about that kind of alliance and partnership anymore. Yeah. That's interesting. And they said you felt like when you first got to meet him back in the early 2000s that he was more insecure. How did that manifest? What do you see has evolved in the two decades. Like, do you observe anything that's notably different or similar? You know, it's interesting that you ask that. You know, this is the subject of the next book that my husband, Peter and I are working on, which is sort of Putin and the five American presidents that he's dealt with. So from Bill Clinton at the very beginning of his tenure all

the way through Trump now a second time. And, you know, there's an old Russian saying that captures some of it. The appetite grows while eating. And so, of course, a man who's had essentially unchecked power over 25 years. has a very different, you know, kind of point of view about what's possible. And, you know, the Putin of the spring of 2001, when I first encountered him, was not in a position to invade Ukraine. He wasn't in a position to work on reassembling parts of the former Soviet Union. Did he have those kind of Russian nationalistic and imperialistic ideology? Absolutely. I think that, you know, his views were not dissimilar.

He's always been a great, a statist, right? He's someone who believed in restoring the power, the untrammeled power of the centralized authority in Russia. So that part was obvious from the beginning. That was his agenda. It was the subject of our first book together that came out in 2005. But at the time, I would say what we didn't get was that Putin's kind of ideology of strongmanism at home, eliminating the kind of national democracy, flawed institutions as they were, you know,

we could see that clearly. What we didn't see is that it would soon and eventually and inexorably translate into going after Russia's neighbors and the other parts of the former Russian Empire. And so is that aggressiveness in Georgia, in Ukraine, restoring Russia's role in the Middle East, which he's tried to do at various points, that's the part that I think is the appetite grows well. eating part of Vladimir Putin. Well, now you've peaked my interest. So I've to ask you one more question since you're working on the book. And then we can save the rest of it for when we get to book time.

But just thinking about it through that arc through that period from like Clinton through now, what are your observations that would challenge like Putin's like claims about the root causes, right? Like now you get into this root cause debate. And I see a lot of people, I guess the word of the podcast is credulous, who are very credulous in this argument on both on kind of like both sides of the argument like even kind of the more lefty you know foreign policy skeptical of u.s foreign policy obviously you see this on the maga right which is kind of accepting at face value that like you know ukraine was wearing their skirt a little

too short and like we did do some things that's tempted Putin so i'm sure even going back through all those remarks from those couple of decades like how do you assess his claim now about the root causes. Yeah, I think this is really important. The real root cause is the breakup of the Soviet Union, which in many ways imploded from within. But for Vladimir Putin, that is the original sin here. It's not about NATO. It's not about anything other than the fact that he considers the breakup of the Soviet Union to be the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century, which is something that he said in 2005. And I think it's a core principle of his. You know, so when it comes to this question of Ukraine and other parts of what was the Russian Empire, and I do say the Russian Empire, by the way, because I think that it's a mistake to view Putin as a sort of neo-Soviet figure. You know, he is not a believer in the communist ideology that had largely disintegrated into empty slogans by the time he became a KGB official in the later years of the Brezhnev era. You know, for Putin, it's really much more an ideology.

that harkens back to the late Tsarist period, you know, the slogan of the Tsars, you know, in the early 20th century, it was orthodoxy, autocracy, nationalism. And that's a pretty good fit, probably not in that order, with Putin's own personal ideology. And sure, he defines NATO and the United States in particular, even more than the NATO, to be kind of the main enemy to use a Cold War era term. But, you know, for Putin, it's about restoration that Russia, cannot be a great state anymore in the future until and unless it's reunited with Ukraine. And by the way, interestingly enough, this was the view of a big geopolitical expert, the late Spigiegnski, who very presciently said in the 1990s after the breakup of the Soviet

Union that Russia without Ukraine could not be a great power. And so I think a lot of that is what's driving this on Putin's part. He's very skilled, very skilled and has people who are skilled around him at creating divisions within the West, creating a narrative in which they are the victims as opposed to the aggressors. But I would just point out one final thing on this point. We could talk about this endlessly. But I lived in Russia and covered Russia for the Washington Post during the 2004 election in Ukraine. So this is years before there was any consideration in a serious way of Ukraine joining NATO. It was four years before there was the famous Bucharest summit of NATO in 2008, where this kind of Frankenstein plan to someday admit Georgia and Ukraine

was discussed. So years before the quote, root cause. And yet it was Vladimir Putin who was very aggressively interfering in Ukraine's presidential election. He sent his top Kremlin political advisors. He personally campaigned right before the election for his handpick candidate, Viktor Yanukovych, Then when the election was determined to be raided, and it brought millions of people in Ukraine out in the streets. And what we now know is the Orange Revolution caused an incredible, incredible reaction on Putin's part, blaming the West, you know, increasing his paranoia. And this had nothing to do with NATO. Had nothing to do with NATO. And it had everything to do with Putin's desire to control Ukraine by whatever means necessary,

including, by the way, in September of 2004, the mysterious poisoning of the leading pro-Western, pro-democracy candidate, Yushiko, who ultimately did become the leader of Ukraine. Okay, that happened before the Orange Revolution. It happened in the middle of a campaign. Clearly, the implication is that the Russians poisoned this Democratic candidate for the leadership. Maybe just had some bad goulash. Maybe it was just a bad luck, coincidence. I mean, it's an extraordinary thing. Can you imagine the poisoning by Russian secret services of the leading presidential candidate in Ukraine? This isn't about NATO. It's not about the United States. It's about Putin's longstanding, decades-long desire to keep Ukraine under Russia's

control by whatever means necessary. That was a fulfilling diversion for me. glad that we did that. But back to John Bolton. I hope it was. I enjoyed it. I know what the listeners. We'll know what the listeners say, but I was, I needed that. Okay. Back to Bolton. I guess I'm just wondering what your thoughts are about. Like, this is just so blatantly like political retribution and intimidation, right? I think that the ramifications of that broadly are more important than like the narrow details of the Bolton case, which I feel like, unless there's some secret out there that we don't know, which would be very shocking to me, seems like a pretty big nothing burger. So I just wonder what your thoughts are about kind of that element of the retribution campaign and what the Bolton raid means. Yeah, I mean, look, you know, Donald Trump

and his then Justice Department tried to stop Bolton from publishing his inside-the-room memoir of the first Trump administration and its dysfunction in 2020, and they failed. They looked into this. They accused him at the time of, doing this in that nefarious releasing of classified information, and it didn't stick at the time. So is this a do-over in effect for Trump and his people now that there's no one there to stop them?

But I do think, again, you go to the idea that we don't even know if there's a there there to any of this. And I keep coming back to this notion that if you're Trump, why have you gone to all the effort to put these extreme loyalists in positions at the Justice Department and at the FBI, if not to use it, ultimately that that's where this is headed. So we haven't seen yet any actual cases brought of this nature, prosecutions, people in jail. Is that where this is headed? I mean, if you give someone a hammer, they find nails, right? They find ways to use it. We know that the hammer is in their hands right now, and I think this is one of many potential examples we're about to see. Yeah, luckily, maybe our institutional bullock will be the grand juries, because you do have to convince a grand jury

if you're going to bring it to people. And there's an interesting time story, either today or yesterday, about how they've impaneled like three grand juries going after, I think it was a woman that was protesting, the ice raids, and I don't remember the exact situation where they, but had some kind of confrontation with the ICE officials, and they wanted to charge her. And they've literally gone to three grand juries trying to get a felony failed, and now are charging her with a misdemeanor. You know, that will also be the case in these Bolton kind of situations. And, you know, it takes us to the Bondi of it. I mean, Bondi's tweet on Bolton, the arrest, was so absurd.

It was America's safety isn't negotiable, as if these documents in Bolton's house are about America's safety. But, you know, your colleague Ruth Marcus wrote a big piece on bonding the DOJ. I'm just wondering what you think about all that. I mean, is there a possibility that this DOJ can be so, like, ham-handed about all this the actual wheels of the justice system will prevent them from being successful in their clear endeavor to go after political foes. Well, I mean, Ruth's piece is a terrific piece, and one of the points it makes is that

Bondi has instilled a culture, a climate of fear inside the Department of Justice with a scale of purges that is really without precedent in the Justice Department of Modern Memory. So, you know, huge swaths of institutional memory are gone. on civil servant career prosecutors, gone, whole offices, decimated, whole capacities lost. So there certainly, you've got to imagine, comes a point at which they're stretched by fighting so many different legal battles on so many different fronts. But at the same time, this goes then to the question of the courts and ultimately, if they're going to stand up or agree with any of these arguments.

And I do find it notable in that respect, Tim, that whatever searches were being carried out of Bolton's home and office, they had been signed off on. They did have a legal warrant to conduct those searches, which means a federal judge had agreed to those searches. On what basis, we don't know yet. And I'm very interested in that question. What was it that proved enough for them to get a warrant to conduct those searches? What is the allegation or what is the evidence that they had then enabled them to do it? And again, a federal judge signed off on this. And so that's a question that I have going forward.

What's remarkable, I think, is that they're getting lawyers to make some of these absurd arguments. You know, another thing we didn't talk about today is that, you know, the return of the Albrego case. You know, remember, he was the detained guy whose situation went all the way up to the Supreme Court who was improperly deported to El Salvador. and then the administration, even after admitting its mistake, didn't want to bring him back. Now they're attempting to send the guy to Uganda, to Uganda, all because his case inadvertently became this public brouhaha. And I just thought, imagine being the federal prosecutor who has to like wake up in the morning and, you know, look in the mirror and say, yeah, I'm going to send this man to Uganda and I'm going to go into a federal court and argue this. And I would

was really actually, before we had this conversation for whatever reason, that's what I was thinking about. Like, imagine being that person. So we have people who are willing to go into court right now and make extraordinary and even absurd arguments on behalf of a very extreme agenda that Pam Bondi and Donald Trump are comfortable carrying out. Yeah, DHS tweeted yesterday, just Uganda man, like, trolling him. It's so... The cruelty is the point. Yeah, even if you oppose, to the policy. The idea that the federal government, like an official federal government agency is engaging in social media, trolling, mocking somebody that they are like deporting to a third country that has not been convicted of anything that they charged and had to withdraw charges

from. And it is a really just grotesque escalation. And, you know, the stuff just kind of starts to get washed. So I'm glad you brought it up. The firing is also. So the DOJ, the sort of scary part of it for me is, okay, so at DOJ, they're washing out all this institutional memory. It's horrible for the lawyers, you know, that have been pushed out of there. You have your morincomies and people of that nature who do real work for the government and should be in there going after bad guys. They're replaced with these hacks that are going to, you know, make these absurd arguments

in front of courts and get denied by three grand juries and go after the Sandwich Man. So you have these hacks that are in there. But, like, that same thing is happening in the DOD, which is a little alarming if there's a real military confrontation that happens with regards to the United States rather than our proxies or allies. But, like, Hags have fired the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency last week, Air Force Chief of Staff got kicked out. These are the latest. There's, like, a ton of institutional memory has gotten washed out of DOD as well. Yeah, that's right. There's been an extraordinary number of what you would call in any other country,

purges going on in the senior levels of the Defense Department that seem designed to replace institutionalists with people who are personally more loyal or perceived to be personally more loyal with the Defense Secretary, the President. It's in effect the politicization of our nonpartisan military of everything. That's perhaps the most worrisome. It might get the least attention because it's a more opaque and less transparent generally operation, the Pentagon But I think it's, if you're looking for something where the red light indicators are really flashing, it would be in what appears to be a very concerted effort to politicize the Defense Department. Because, again, what are you going to then ultimately use that for?

We're seeing what we're going to use it for, which is to turn the military not into an instrument of national security in terms of our international interests, but in terms of against what Trump and Hegeseth consider the enemy within. And I think that's, again, the through line to so many of these developments. Take just one example. The head of the Defense Intelligence Agency fired apparently for the sin of his agency having produced an intelligence assessment that Donald Trump didn't like that said that the attack on Iran's nuclear installation. had not, as Trump claimed, obliterated completely the Iranian nuclear program, but had probably

only set it back by a matter of some months at some of the facilities. That was a very initial preliminary assessment, obviously conducted not by the director of the DIA personally. And yet in the same way that Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics within hours, within hours of having an unfavorable economic report produced. He's firing through Hegeseth, the head of an intelligence agency, because intelligence analysts produced a report that he didn't like. And, you know, again, this is so antithetical. It's the second time this has happened. I just happened with some intelligence officials or lower level, but, you know, people have put out a report about how Venezuela wasn't exactly invading America, which is like not even really an intelligence

They just were stating facts. It's just clear that Venezuela did not have a plot to invade America, and that was enough to have a couple of people pushed out as well. I want to talk about your comment there about what the military is planning on doing, which is going after the enemy within and the expanding militarization of our cities. The National Guard, I Trump said yesterday, and Haguez up was in the Oval, about how they're looking in Chicago. He had this confrontation with Westmore over,

of sending folks to Baltimore. I think it's very obvious that they're going to do this in New York, whether they wait for Zoron to win or try to do it in front of the election to impact it. I don't know, but that I think is the writing is on the wall of that. So I'm wondering, you know, what we can learn. And I guess I said you're out of D.C. at the moment, but you've been there, like about what the vibes are in D.C. right now and like what your sense is, what's happening and what's to come there. Well, Tim, you mentioned, I think, at the beginning of this conversation, the National Guard troops standing outside the Krispy Kreme Donuts. And, you know, if anyone knows D.C., that's, you know, right at the Dupon Circle metro station, I can assure you that, you know, no murders are happening in broad daylight.

And, you know, at the Dupon Circle metro station, you know, maybe if they're there at 4 o'clock in the morning on a weekend or something, but, you know, then the Krispy Kreme Donuts wouldn't be open. And so maybe they don't want to be there at that time. I mean, you know, the point, right, is that it appears to be an extremely performative abuse of official resources to make a political point for Donald Trump to his red state constituency that doesn't know or care very much about D.C. That has believed years of, you know, sort of propaganda that these democratic-run cities are sort of hellscapes of, you know, crime and homelessness and horror. it's so sad and tragic in a way because, of course, nobody is in favor of crime. And I keep reading these political analyses from people saying, oh, well, you know, it's just a classic. This is great for Donald Trump. And he's just, you know, Democrats have walked right into his trap.

And now they're, you know, he's shown how they actually defend crime and they're in favor of all this terrible things. And this is just brilliant politics for Donald Trump. Trump obviously believes that because he wouldn't be trying to do more of it if he didn't think that this. wasn't great politics for him. But it is the height of cynicism. You know, I think it was J.B. Pritzker, the governor of Illinois. He's worried, of course, that the next stop is Chicago on Donald Trump's sort of dictator tour, you know, with the National Guards this summer. But Pritzker pointed out on Monday in a press conference that if Donald Trump actually cared about crime in America, then he and Republicans on Capitol Hill wouldn't be cutting hundreds of millions of dollars in public safety funding from the

Department of Homeland Security, in D.C.'s case, directly cutting funds from D.C.'s budget, which, as you know, has to be approved by Congress because of its unique status. And, you know, again, it's not about crime fighting. It's about political point scoring. And, you know, it's just very tragic. But it's also revenge. I think it's also part of the Trump revenge tour because D.C. probably voted for Donald Trump less than almost any big city in the country. in his first election, I think it would, in back in 2016, I think it was something like 4%. I could get the number wrong, but in the lowest single digits voted for Donald Trump in his first election. And, you know, he sees this is enemy territory.

I know you write a newsletter on life in Washington, but I have to push back. There's another Washington resident who has a different view about what's happening outside the DuPont Circle Metro, and I'd like to listen to it. Overflowing with gratitude, because for the first time of their lives, they can use the parks, They can walk on the streets. You have people who can walk freely at night without having to worry about being robbed or mugged. They're wearing their watches again.

They're wearing jewelry again. They're carrying purses again. People had changed their whole lives in this city for fear of being murdered, mugged, and carjacked. It is a literal statement that President Trump has freed 700,000 people in this city who were living under the rule of criminals and thugs. Do you feel free, Susan?

Have you changed your jewelry? Well, I'm glad that Stephen Miller is so concerned about all of us. You know, as I understood it, Stephen Miller, not a resident of Washington, D.C., and, you know, again, there's a... Oh, is that not true? I thought he lived down there at the new place down by Metro Center. It's a good question. We need to fact-check that. I saw this morning. I don't know that he does actually live in D.C. now in the second Trump term. It's kind of irrelevant whether or not he lives in D.C. I don't want to know where Stephen Miller lives. It's like a dark cloud. You just follow the dark cloud over town and know where he is, I think. Yeah, Tim, it's not irrelevant because he's speaking quite authoritatively about the liberation that he and Donald Trump have accomplished for 700,000 people. It's interesting that Miller believes that's what he's accomplished here.

And he's speaking in a way that, you know, like a lot of what he says, bears little resemblance to reality. Yeah, I guess you're right. I mean, I know that he did live at city center. And you know that the thugs have overrun and control city center. center when you see that there are places like Arctarex there, Brunello Cucinelli, Burberry. Aramace. Air Maze. There's a Burberry's a Chanel.

It's totally lawless there. Nobody wants to wear any jewelry. Actually, if you buy your David Yerman jewelry, they mail it to you from there and kind of a lockbox. I have one final question for you about life in D.C., though. Have you seen the new portraits of Trump hanging on the labor department? I have like this memory of being a child, and my parents, we went to a country, like Central American country, South American country, and it was like you have the pictures of the leader.

It feels like a very un-American thing right now, but in Washington, D.C., of these massive portraits of menacing Trump on, like, the Department of Labor building now. Yeah, that picture really caught my attention. You know, it reminded me, of course, of Moscow, you know, where the gigantic visage of, Vladimir Putin is everywhere and omnipresent. That's the thing about a strong man type leader. He wants his picture on everything. He wants credit for everything. You mentioned my colleague,

Ruth Marcus, his excellent piece of the New Yorker about Pam Bondi. It begins, the piece begins with a remarkable scene in January of this year with the Attorney General of the United States personally entering an office in the Justice Department where she had apparently been told. This is like within, you know, hours or days of the inauguration that the old portraits of the president had not been taken down and the new presidential portraits of Trump had not yet been posted. And this head of an office in the Justice Department is stunned to find the attorney general standing there carrying portraits. She's ripped off the walls. And, you know, not surprisingly, the head of this office is then fired, you know, immediately.

afterwards. This is what strong men care about. They care about having their picture on the wall in every government office. They care about putting their name or their signature on government checks. Remember how Donald Trump did that during the pandemic. They care about having their gigantic portrait hanging on the walls of government building so that people drive around and see them. How long is it until we have the Donald Trump radio with the word of the leader blaring at us at all times. And we kind of have that. I think you had three press conferences in the Oval Office yesterday.

So we're getting close. Yeah, the live streaming presidency, Tim. You know, in the first term, right, it was the constant tweeting presidency. He was kind of a consumer in the first term. Like, he was watching the news constantly and he's live commenting on it. But now he's made himself a full-time character and the reality show. Yeah, he's live streaming the presidency. And you don't have the ability to turn it.

it off. I'm going to try, but you're right. I don't. I'm stuck. That makes me feel sad that I don't have the ability to turn it off. You're right. I don't know if it's stuck. The channel, the remote doesn't work. There's no other channel. Susan Glasser, what a pleasure of having you on the podcast. Thank you so much. My love to the fam, and we'll be having you back here soon, all right? Great to be with you, Tim. But now I'm going to go have a drink. Is it too early to have a drink? No, not in Trump 2.0. You know, it's noon somewhere. everybody else we'll see you back here tomorrow for another edition of the bulwark podcast peace I got a handle on things

I got my prescription I change the channel I stop my subscription I got a handle on things I got my prescription I change the channel I stop my subscription The Bullwark podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.