The Bulwark Podcast - Susan Glasser and Jacob Soboroff: A Dangerous Lame Duck

Episode Date: January 13, 2026

Trump's low approval ratings may be giving people the idea that he is weak and disempowered. But Trump backed into a corner could well be more unconstrained and more dangerous—and it could also fuel his imperialist ambitions toward Greenland, an island he has been obsessed with owning since his first term. Meanwhile, DHS always knew people would die because of their mass deportation efforts and it still wholly accepted the risk of its military-style operations. But the opposition on the street is building. Plus, a year after the LA fires, a look at the role of disinformation in the disaster, the slow recovery, and the lack of emergency planning by government officials.Jacob Soboroff and Susan Glasser join Tim Miller.show notes Tim on the new videos coming out of Minneapolis Jacob's book, "Firestorm: The Great Los Angeles Fires and America’s New Age of Disaster" Susan's latest New Yorker column Friday's episode of The New Yorker's 'Political Scene' podcast Susan’s book with Peter Baker, “The Divider” The National Review piece on Greenland Susan referenced Get 20% off your DeleteMe plan when you go to joindeleteme.com/BULWARK and use promo code BULWARK at checkout. Get up to 30% off OneSkin with the code BULWARK at https://www.oneskin.co/BULWARK #oneskinpod

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Well and welcome to the Bullard podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. Two things real quick. I forgot to mention yesterday on the mailbag. People were waiting for their Monday mailbag. We're kind of rejiggering how to do that a little bit to make it smoother for everybody, both on the uptaken for you guys. So it's going to be back.

Just stick with us. Mailbag isn't going anywhere. I appreciate all your feedback. Also, yesterday on the board takes feed, I did a breakdown of some of the community video and on the ground reporting that we've seen coming up. out of Minneapolis. Shout out, particular to my girl Amanda at Not Turtle Soup on X for some that stuff she's been doing. If you are in Minneapolis, I'd like to hear more of this. I just want to caveat this by saying, real humans are reading these emails. So if folks, and please be

judicious, you know, if you're in Cleveland and, you know, your cousin's friend heard something in Minneapolis, please don't send it to us. But if you're in Minneapolis, I'd love to hear the stories about what's happening on the ground. I've already gotten some pretty harrowing things from friends of the show. So I appreciate that one more time, Bullwark Podcast at theblog.com. We got a double header for you today in segment two. It's my MSNL colleague, Jacob Soberoff. But up first, she's one of our faves. She's a staff writer at the New Yorker. Her most recent book is The Divider, co-authored with her husband, Peter Baker, it's Susan Glasser. What's going on, Susan? Happy New Year. Hey, Tim. Great to be with you. Too bad we don't have anything to discuss.

I know. So we're in the green, we're cutting things to discuss because there's just so much in the news. I do want to start kind of big picture with you. You wrote for the kind of New Yorkers year-end compilation on the golden age of awful about what struck you the most from year one. You know, inauguration is actually January 20th. We're about we're about a week away from a full 365 days. We haven't lived a full 365 days, believe it or not. Thanks for that. 2.0 yet. Yeah. So I just, I kind of want to let you cook. The biggest picture, like, what stood out to you from year one and from where we are right now? Yeah, I mean, look, the power tripping is not subtle at this point. I do think, if nothing else, this exhausting first week or so of 2026 has underscored that Trump, Stephen Miller, they're not sort of hiding it anymore. And, you know, from out of the gate, right? in last year, Trump basically said, I rule unchallenged, I rule unchecked, I'm going to assert

executive power in some kind of massive way. They've now taken that international in a way that I think still seems to shock some people. And, you know, that was my year and takeaway that a lot of people responded to in a gut level, which is that I personally wasn't surprised by Donald Trump's breathtaking assertions of executive authority, but it's still a gut punch for me every day to see the sheer range and number of people who are making this happen. You know, this isn't some guy out there by himself. Otherwise, he'd just, you know, he'd be a dude screaming at the TV in, you know, the men's grill at his country club, you know, that so many people across the country have enabled and facilitated and excused this. And, you know, from the beginning, that's the

phenomena that said to me, America's in crisis. One thing that strikes me to Sam Stein have kind of a running thing where we rank who are the worst cabinet members. And like one of our tensions is that I always rank Rubio and Bessentire. It's like the expectations element of it. I feel like they're getting graded on a negative curve for me. Because it's, I, you know, to your point about all the people that have been involved in his power grabs, there are very few people that anyone even thought were kind of establishment or responsible or adults or however you want to frame it in this administration. But the ones that were in Rubio and Besson are maybe the most complicit behind Stephen Miller in this effort with Rubio abroad and Bessent, you know,

with the economic choices with the tariffs and what we're seeing from Powell with Powell, etc. Yeah, I mean, look, you wrote a great book on the subject of Donald Trump's takeover of of the Republican Party. But for me, and I think for a lot of people, the shock was that it was civil society more broadly and pockets of it that people didn't really anticipate that went along with this. And again, that is the precursor and the prerequisite for the illegitimate seizure of power, right? It is not just the takeover the Republican Party. In many ways, that was sort of the drama of the first term of Donald Trump's presidency was sort of wrapping up the, you know, unconstructed previous regime elements in the Republican Party. But it was the fact that you had

people in academia, in law firms, in pockets of the federal judiciary that people didn't anticipate going along with this in ways that, you know, and yes, I'm talking about you, John Roberts, you know, you are a handmaiden of this just as much as Mitch McConnell. And, you know, look at what happened just the other day. People were stunned that Jay Powell, the chairman of the federal Reserve puts out this video statement on Sunday night. And he's like, hey, you know, this is an attempt to weaponize the justice system against a political opponent here in a policy dispute. And I'm not going to have it. And I'm going to fight it. And contrast that approach to the approach of so many of the people with the most power and influence and capital in our society writ large.

look at that versus, you know, Tim Cook, the leader of Apple. Look at that, you know, who's giving money to Donald Trump to destroy the White House without a complex, without anyone having any meaningful say in it. So I just think that's the story, again, is that it's not just the rottenness of the Republican Party and its enablers, people like Marco Rubio, who told the world that he believed one set of things and then flip-flopped and, you know, is now Donald Trump's, you know, sort of handmaiden. But all these other people. So I, to me, that's, that's going to be the story for the history books.

Yeah. The Powell News is an example of that. We got this just a little bit yesterday, but like, you know, you saw some murmuring in the business community about this. I keep it on Fox. I saw Brett Hume talking about how this is obviously targeting him over the interest rates, which is a mistake. And, you know, some of the Trumpy investment guys, you know, kind of expression. a little concern about this.

But, I mean, not really to the scale of the threat. Thank goodness for Jerome Powell and his onions. He just went out there bluntly and said, like, no, like, they're targeting me and this is wrong. And they're doing it because they don't want an independent Fed. But I think that that story, you know, that you're telling is we're seeing another example of it here. A year and a half ago, if you said, what was a red line?

You know, in 2024, you said to people like, would it be a red line if the president did a sham investigation of Jerome Powell to pressure him to lower interest rates, 98% of people in public life. And I've been like, that's past a red line. And, you know, we saw pretty little on folks actually speaking out on that so far this week, at least from kind of the business community and the Republican side of us. Yeah, I'm so glad that you made this point in because to me, that is one that bears repeating. I, you know, every day I see these, you know, sort of reports from Capitol Hill from the sort of

inside the beltway, you know, or not even inside the, literally inside. the Capitol Press Corps, great folks. But to them, it's like this convulsive thing when two or three or five Republican senators, you know, make sort of bleats of concern about something. And, you know, I think it's quite the opposite. In fact, that it's Donald Trump proving once again his ownership of the Republican Party when these folks have the ability to shut him down. You know, these majorities in both the House and the Senate aren't very big. And yet again and again, he proves that in a competition between Trump and their principles, they're going to still stick with Donald Trump. And I think this also goes to another fallacy that we heard an awful lot of at the end of 2025.

And we don't hear very much of it now just 10 days later with Trump coming out of the gate with all these power moves. But at the end of last year, remember, a lot of the end of the year discourse was, oh, Donald Trump is a lame duck. Look, he's in political trouble. I don't know how low his ratings were. Well, I mean, those are still objectively true, right? Donald Trump is an extremely unpopular president. But my point here is that Donald Trump, the lame duck, people might take from that the impression that he's going to be kind of weak, disempowered, you know, sort of nibble to

death by a set thousand objections in the same way that our political system used to work when a president had abysmal ratings like this. And what I'm focused on is the incredible danger of that moment because Trump is somebody who escalates and put him in a corner, tell him that his power is ebbing, tell him that he doesn't have that much longer on the political stage. And I've always feared that moment a lot. And I think that's what we're seeing is Trump on a power play to show you that actually the greatest danger of all might be Donald Trump, the lame duck, who really is. constrained by the need to win re-election and who's furious to prove his legacy for history. I think that's right. And look, the tail risk of Trump was always that like an 80-aged Trump would start to, you know, start to act even more erratically.

And, you know, one thing that worries me about this, and I'm wondering your thoughts on it. I want to talk about kind of Greenland and Venezuela, but I want to tie together a couple things. He did this post the other day. There's like a fake Wikipedia page that says, like, Donald Trump, interim leader of Venice. his wayla or something like this. And again, it's just a troll. But it raised my alarm bells a little bit because it did make me wonder, is he getting a taste for that? Like this imperialist thing, right? Is he like looking around domestically and being like, this is easier than dealing with Mike Johnson and John Thune and passing something through Congress, right? Like, and, you know,

where in the past you'd been kind of reluctant to do that stuff because his brand was dealmaker, A worry I have is that the Venezuela situation makes him start to think, oh, maybe I can get a couple more of these, you know, before I have to leave. And that threatens whatever, who knows, Greenland, Cuba, other places that are not maybe as much on our radar right now. What do you make of that concern? Yeah, absolutely. First of all, you know, foreign policy is where American president is not just Trump have the freest hand. And so it always was sort of undiluted Trump, you know, it offered him. that instant sort of strong man stature that he craves. It's also for Trump always about

enemies. If they don't exist, he's going to create them. Nothing like a short victorious war to swaddle yourself in the reflected glory of our, you know, awesomely powerful and uniquely capable military, right? And so to me, my alarm bell was Donald Trump theatrically trying to rename the Defense Department, the war department. just a few months into his second term. You don't make a war department unless you're going to have a war, right? And of course, as you pointed out, it's a real war, a big war with a land invasion and stuff. That's just absolutely against Brand Trump. It's something that his MAGA base really would, I think, rise up against. It's certainly something that his vice president, you know, would fight internally, at least tooth and nail.

So it had to be a short, you know, victorious bully boy war, you know, you need a bully. boy war if you're a bully boy. And, you know, so Donald Trump, there's a great line in a Wall Street Journal piece looking at his actions at the beginning of the year from a French member of the European Parliament who said Donald Trump is strong with the weak and weak with the strong. And I think that's, you know, the principle that we're seeing unfold here. But a lot of people who spent years telling us that Donald Trump and MAGA was an America first neo-isolationist movement, I think they do need to reconsider because it's really much more a story about Donald Trump projecting power on the world in the way that he wants to. I, you know, I called it, I think, something like narcissistic unilateralism, you know, in my New Yorker column this week because it's narcissistic.

It's about him. Can we upgrade it to megalomaniacal interventionism? I don't know. Yeah. I mean, look, you know, it's the projection of power based on, you know, the personal. whims of our leader, which, you know, is almost the definition of what America was created to react against, right? I mean, it's almost the definition of the power that we rejected in our founding 250 years ago. Delete me. Makes it easy, quick and safe to remove your personal data online

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The only way to get 20% off is to go to join Deleteme.com slash bulwark and entercode Bullwork at checkout. That's Join DeleteMe.com slash board code Bullwork. That takes us to Greenland because this is the one area where I don't know, I try very hard to guard against, you know, the worst parts of like, you know, buying into every possible theory about like Trump's badness. And and when it comes to Greenland, there are a lot of people out there, even people who are opposed to Trump, who kind of say this one is, this is not real. Like this is just Trump, you know, being Trump. And like, you must have TDS if you think he actually is going to try to take over Greenland. And I don't think so. Like I think he is going

to in some manner. I don't exactly know how it's going to look, but he keeps talking about it. And one piece of evidence for that is your interview with him, your exit interview with him from the first term where that came up. So I want you to kind of both talk about that interview with him in Mar-a-Lago many years ago now what he said about Greenland, but also assess my level of TDS if I think that this is a potential serious invasion target. Yeah, I mean, I think it does need to be taken seriously. And in part, that's actually the reason, Tim, that we asked Trump about Greenland in November of 2021

when we were working on this book, The Divider. about his first term. And it was presented, remember, when it became public in the summer of 2019, as a sort of classic Trump, you know, curiosity, you know, whim, late-night comedians had a field day with that everybody made fun of him. You know, Denmark essentially said, not for sale, thank you, let's just move on. And it played, I think, incorrectly at the time in the summer of 2019 as a sort of like Trump, a man governed by whims and ignorance. So we had been really surprised in doing interviews with so many of Trump's first term national security officials who told us, no, actually, Greenland had been a preoccupation through much of his first term. It just hadn't become public. And that's a reminder, by the way, there's still so much we don't know, not only about what's happening now, but even about what happened in his first term. I mean, you know, the full history of this, the full accounting of Trump has not yet been written. But so we were really surprised to hear so many people say this. talked to one cabinet member who were called very early on Donald Trump going on and on about Greenland

years before it became public and how we wanted to have it. And this cabinet member told us that they literally thought, my God, the president is delusional. He's like, it's a fantasy. It's obviously we're never going to do this. And does he think it's real in his own mind? And again, this is a cabinet member in Trump's first term. So partially we're seeing the difference between Trump's first term and a second term in the sense of advisors who think he's delusional versus ones who are now facilitating his delusions. So we ask him, we fly down to Marlago and the very last question, an hour and half into the interview, they're trying to shove us out the door and we're like, wait a minute, what about Greenland? What about Greenland? And Trump gives us this answer that I think is very

revealing and certainly still applies today. He basically portrays his interest as out of a real estate developer. He says, I love maps. Well, I look at a map and And I see, you know, essentially this is like the corner store that I'm missing in the big development. And I need to have the store as part of my real estate development. He literally said this is a verbatim quote. It's not different really from a real estate deal. And he also mentions how big it is, how big it looks on the map.

Yes. He said, I looked at it on a map. It's massive. We've got to have it. And there are a lot of people now who believe that this entire thing is a creation of, you know, the optical illusion that the Mercator projection makes. I would say in some ways that it's, that it's even more serious than that. Because to me, what it suggests is that there's not really a way for Denmark and Greenland to satisfy Trump's demands, that the national security

factor here is essentially just a stalking horse. There's no amount of national security upgrades or new bases that they can promise Trump that would assuage a man who says, as he told the Times just last week, this is about ownership for me. I can't just lease the damn thing. Ownership is very important because that's what I feel is psychologically needed for success. That's what he said. Yeah, amazing, right, that he would just say it out loud. Classic Trump, you know, psychologically, I just need to own this. And what I think he's saying there pretty clearly in both the interview with me and the one

with the Times last week is this is my bid for immortality. I want to rewrite the map of the world essentially with my name on it. If he acquires Greenland, then every single map, every single Atlas, every single globe in the entire world, you know, it has to be ripped up back to sender, and it has to be redone because of Donald Trump. And I think that's what he's looking for here. He's looking for, you know, William Seward purchasing Alaska, President Jefferson purchasing the Louisiana territory from France in the early 19th century, that this is the level that he is now thinking about. As you know, one of the remarkable things that didn't get enough attention in 2025 was how many times Trump was openly musing about his own legacy, about, you know, heaven. I'm not going to get into heaven. But, you know, this is the frame of mind of a second-term leader pushing 80 years old who's thinking about how many ways can I get myself in the history books here.

And he knows that many presidents don't have that opportunity for long-term glory unless they do something like this. So what percentage chance she put on it when to play a parlor game that he goes for Greenland? Honestly, I think it's a very real chance. And I said 30% on a podcast last week and I got eye rolls. I got eye rolls. Honestly, it could be higher than that, Tim. It could be higher than that. It's not a foreordained conclusion.

But on some level, I think the more Trump might suffer reverses on his other policies, the more likely he is to do something like this because it's something he believes that he has the power to do. And again, that's where those bleeds of concerns from Republicans on the Hill, they don't stop him. You know what would stop him is Congress. passing a law, which there is clearly majority support for in both the House and the Senate, to tell him he cannot do this. And by the way, legally speaking, this hasn't gotten enough attention, but actually he can't do this, even today. The President of the United States does not actually have the power to acquire new territory on behalf of the United States. It takes Congress

authorizing that and appropriating the funds to do so. That was the case with the Louisiana purchased. As I mentioned, it was the case with the purchase of Alaska. And Trump arguably isn't even authorized to negotiate for the purchase of territory that Congress has not authorized the purchase of. And, you know, again, I know it's just one example of the kind of lawless limbo in which we're operating right now. But I'm kind of surprised that it hasn't gotten more attention. There was a piece in National Review last week that made this point. But I haven't seen it break through. I didn't say it was that Andy McCarthy? I think so, yeah. Yeah, probably, yeah. All right, while we're catastrophizing,

There was a New Yorker podcast headline that you were on the podcast, and the headline was something about the conditions for another world war were being created. And I saw that. And I was like, okay. So let's hear about that. And what way are the conditions for another world war being created by Trump's actions right now? Well, look, I mean, first of all, right, you have the destruction of one international order without a durable sense of new institutions that would mitigate against the creation of war. Donald Trump has spoken out very clearly. I'm not bound by any international law. It didn't get a lot of attention last week. But in addition to kidnapping and ousting the leader of Venezuela, Trump had the administration withdraw from something like 60 international organizations, treaties, conventions, and UN entities.

You know, it's the unraveling of the world order is not a byproduct of Trumpism, but he's now actively facilitating that unraveling. He seems to envision a new. world in which he, along with Xi Jinping of China and Vladimir Putin of Russia, are going to sort of divide up the world amongst them. But as you know, both Xi and Putin have designed, as Trump apparently does, to rewrite the security situation and to rewrite borders in their own hemispheres. And that is the precondition for a kind of broader international conflict, is an increasingly anarchic world in which there's no one who has the power to step in and to stop conflicts from

escalating. How seriously are friends in Europe taking this at this point and how much is that changed do you think over the last few months? And this is just kind of a silly, ridiculous headline. I saw you tweet, but it is our world, which is that France will delay this year's group of seventh summit to avoid a conflict with the MMA event planned at the White House on Donald Trump's birthday. So this is kind of. kind of this combination of what we deal with, this like Vipishness versus like the menace, which way are they leaning on that spectrum at this point? Well, look, I actually kind of reject the zero-sum characterization that we're either in Vip land

or, you know, end of the world as we know it land. You know, if you look back at the history of the 20th century, you know, there was endless discussion about how some of the, you know, people we remember as the worst autocrats and dictators were also cartoonish clowns. And I think that's part of the, you know, this kind of signal and the noise problem with dealing with a kind of global disruption like this. Bottom line, Europe has been very, very slow to really take action in some ways, kind of like the Democratic Party here inside the United States. They embraced a kind of existential threat rhetoric about Donald Trump, but very, very slow to follow through on that and to make new Iraq.

arrangements. And in part for some very practical reasons, the truth is, is that Europeans have been extremely dependent on the American security architecture in Europe provided by NATO and weren't in a position to immediately substitute for that. We see that playing out with Ukraine right now. They're desperate to keep the U.S. on side, or at least not an outright adversary of Ukraine, in part because there are capabilities, especially on the intelligence side and with certain weapons that simply cannot be immediately substituted with European ones. I think the threats to Greenland have really caught the attention of Europeans. I mean, a year ago, remember, Trump started doing this in December of 2024 immediately after he had been reelected. And even

then, I was amazed at how cavalierly some Europeans were thinking about this. And I, you know, I was saying back then, listen, guys, you need to take. this much more seriously. I think now they're taking it much more seriously. But again, Donald Trump is really, he has a gift for calling his enemy's bluff, his adversary's bluff. And you know, you might hear some tough statements coming out right now from the Europeans. You have the Danish prime minister saying if he follows through on this, is the end of NATO. You have seven of the leading countries in Europe putting out statements defending Denmark on this one. But let's put it this way. And I heard this from a very senior European just the other day, Tim,

if Germany is forced to choose between Greenland and the future of NATO, including American military bases on German soil like Ramstein, Germany's not going to choose Greenland. And Donald Trump, on some level, knows this, right? He's not, you know, he's not a super sophisticated, deeply knowledgeable guy, but he has these instincts. And his major core view of your The Germans are the best people to look to for the judgments on this. But they are because they would have learned that like once you get one, you want to get the other one, you know, it doesn't stop in the Rhineland. Yeah, that's exactly right.

You know, the bottom line, though, is that as Germany goes, so goes Europe right now. Germany and France are the major players in both NATO and the European Union. And I think Donald Trump believes they're weak. he believes that he can make them fold because they've done so again and again. And that's part of the reason why he's had this lifelong predilection for strong men and, you know, individual tough guys rather than the rubric of alliances and multilateral relationships and partnerships that characterizes, you know, sort of modern Europe's relationship with the United States. Every time this question comes up with the vipishness versus the monstrousness,

I do feel like I need to mention that there's this book, The Diary of a Man in Despair. That was like my main takeaway from that book. It was this guy who's, I don't know, kind of like a Wall Street Journal, Republican figure. And the lead up to, you know, as Hitler is taking power. And the whole time he's like, this clown? No way. You know what I mean? That's like the whole theme of the book.

It's really good. On the V-Pishness beat, though, I do feel like I need to mention since it's happening right now, you haven't seen this, but since we've been on, we have some new decorations outside the White House. Yeah, outside the area where the Rose Garden, kind of paved over. We now have in like cursive cheesecake factory font, the Rose Garden up on the side of the White House. And it is above the Hall of Fame that he put there on that walkway.

It has the picture of the auto pen. So anyway, I don't know. You spent more time there than me since under my candidates won. But I'm just wondering if you have any thoughts. I mean, you know, look, people have long studied the aesthetics of the, the strong man. And, you know, it's like Donald Trump, you and I look at that and we say it's a guide to cringe. Donald Trump looks at it and says, it's, you know, my interior decorating textbook. You know, I mean, you know, he is a sort of neo-Russian oligarch meets Saudi minor Saudi prince, you know, when it comes to his personal aesthetic that he's now applying to the White House.

Meets kind of like only fans model. It's kind of like a tramp stamp a little bit. Like, you know, no, it's really the sort of like, you know, I bought it on the internet because I saw, I mean, I saw it on my Instagram. Yeah. A TikTok marketplace. It's really, I know it's not the most serious thing at a moment in time when, you know, so many real lives in this country and outside of it are being affected by what Trump is doing. But I have to say his redecoration of the White House is a template that helps you understand how much he is anathema to the American system. Remember that the White House is designed in a federalist style, which is essentially neoclassicism, right?

It's all about restraint, order, beauty, harmony, principles of, you know, different wings working in concert with you. other. You know, the basic design principle of the White House and of this country is this notion of things operating in balance and in coherence with each other. No extraneous design. You know, the gold do-dads are, you know, the exact way you know that Donald Trump is opposed to, you know, the foundations of the constitutional order. I know that sounds crazy, but I actually really believe that here's the key moment for me. In I believe 2018, Donald Trump hosts Emmanuel Macron for his first state visit of Trump's first presidency. And one night, they take a helicopter to Mount Vernon and they have a dinner there. And Macron listens as Donald Trump tells him,

yeah, you know, this Mount Vernon, you know, it's a nice place, good views, whatever. But, you know, George Washington made a big mistake here, it seems to me. And the big mistake that Donald Trump thought he made was that he should have called it by his own name. He said, you have to put your names on things for people to know that it's you. So it shouldn't have been called Mount Vernon. I guess it should have been called Mount Washington. Yeah. George, yeah.

That's why he wants to rewrite the map. He wants to put his name on things. All right. I want to end with a couple of corruption items. One serious, one silly. But as we said, they're related. the serious and the silly. This is a story from late last week

I was having a chance to get around to, and that is Trump's old friend Ron Lauder of Estée Louder fame. Ukraine on Thursday awarded a bid to mine a state-owned lithium deposit to an investor group that included Louder, as well as TechMet, which is an energy firm that is partly owned by

a U.S. government investment agency that was created during Trump's first turn as a bunch of Trump friends involved. Louder's also the person that allegedly is like a point of the idea in his mind of getting Greenland. And the idea that they have, Greenland has these rare earths that we need. You know, there's so many examples of this type of corruption. But it's one thing if it's like, you know, Trump's getting a hotel somewhere. Tying the corruption directly to the geopolitical challenges are more than that,

like for these geopolitical fights that we have between with Ukraine and Russia and with potentially Denmark and having like his buddies on the take in these situations is pretty shocking and totally unprecedented, at least of modern times. Absolutely. You know, I'm glad you brought up the louder thing. That was the reporting in our book about who first put the idea in Trump's mind. By the way, Trump lied to us and claimed in the interview in November of 2021. Oh, it was my idea.

It was my idea. But in fact, what we were told very clearly was that it was Ron Lauder's idea. Ron Lauder and Trump, I did not know this until we didn't. did the book, were friends going all the way back to the University of Pennsylvania, actually. So they've been lifelong friends since college. Which is so weird, because you don't think about Trump as somebody that has a lifelong friend. Well, I'm not saying how close they were. That's not clear to me, by the way. That's not clear to me. But it is true that they've known each other going back all those decades to college. And louder, not only put this idea in Trump's head, but Trump was so eager on the

the Greenland thing in his first term, that the very, I think within like the first week that John Bolton became his national security advisor in the spring of 2018, Trump told him about this Greenland idea and said, someone's going to come see you. And the someone was Ron Lauder who showed up in the National Security Advisor's office and said, oh, yes, I'd like to volunteer myself to be a secret envoy to Denmark to negotiate this purchase. Bolton said, no, more or less politely, and we've got this, and then promptly told his aides essentially to create a kind of process that would run out the clock on this one and, you know, try to convince Trump that they were doing something about it, even though they knew that Greenland was not for sale.

So I think it's really, it is very notable that Louder's name now resurfaces in this Ukraine deal. And it underscores a point that it's not just that Donald Trump sees no barriers between his personal financial interests and what he's doing. in terms of the national security of this country, but that there are so many actors around the world who identified Trump as open to this kind of corrupted deal. And of course, they're going to facilitate it. You already saw that in the Middle East last year,

Trump's first trip, a co-mingling of official business and his family being in business, literally, with leaders in Saudi Arabia and Qatar. And, you know, of course the people in Ukraine, They're looking to safeguard the security of their country. And what's the message they've gotten from Donald Trump? Yeah, you know, make me and my buddies rich. And that would be a good thing for you to do.

So are there unlimited people around the world who are willing to facilitate the corruption of the American presidency? Absolutely. We're going to see more and more deals like this, it seems to me. Yeah. And I think it's an ominous sign for Greenland, you know, to have the guy that put the Greenland idea now doing this lithium deal in Ukraine. It means that this idea is in the hopper, and they're all working on stuff such as this. You mentioned the Middle East deal, and I do want to leave us with that. There's a new ad.

I don't know if you saw this, some of the property happening, opening up soon in Saudi Arabia. And I'd like to place some of the advertisement for you. The place to be is Saudi Arabia. Welcome to Trump International. Where di Safar, private, gated, limited, the hottest ticket in town. Inside these gates, the Trump mansions, where winners reside. I swear that's not fake. I swear that's not AI.

The place to be in Saudi Arabia, America first. Anyway, thoughts, Susan? I mean, I suppose AI might have done a slightly more restrained version of it. I mean, you know, if the marketplace here isn't for it, there's a marketplace for it elsewhere. And, you know, I think Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, they're the perfect place for Donald Trump. You know, there's a lot of opportunity for him there. I think you should, you know, maybe consider a change of venue.

I notice that the place to be is inside the gates. It's not on the streets of Riad. It's inside the gates, inside the Trump International. So, you know, it's hard to believe that's real, but it is. That's where we're at. We have a president that's for sale, and he's putting his tramp stamp on the side of the White House. And, you know, it's the golden age, as you said, Susan. So I appreciate you being here to chronicle all of it with us.

Anything else you want to leave us with? You know, Tim, yeah, golden age of awful. I appreciate you sharing that with me. I hadn't seen it. and now I probably can't un-hear it. So thank you so much, as always, for this. Of course. We'll be catching again soon.

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And we're back. He's a senior political reporter at MS now. His new book is Firestorm, the Great Los Angeles Fires, and America's New Age of Disaster. It's Jacob Soberoff. Welcome back, brother. Tim Miller. Good to be back.

Thanks for having me. Dude, your look is fire today. You got that flow going. This is the real, this is the real. me, guys, no hairspray, no pair product. You might hear my kids. I'm in my laundry room. They're getting ready for them. It's nice. You're in your Unit 69 t-shirt, which is nice. Fire Station 69, Pacific Salisades, California. Respect.

The whole thing is good. All right. We're going to get to the book and the fire stuff, but I want to obviously start with what's happening in Minneapolis. And I'm going to, apologies for torturing the fire metaphor at the beginning of your book a little bit. But it does feel a little bit like Minneapolis is this place where there's this low burn of 10, mentions that has been happening and it's like really sparked over the last week and obviously with the execution style shooting of Renee good but you know beyond that you know we've seen escalation from the CBP and ICE officials in the city over the last few days what is your sense and how do you can compare what you're seeing to you're on the ground in Chicago obviously in other other places

and in LA and Charlotte and honestly in the hallways of 26 federal plaza in New York where this is going on every day as well first of all just how horrific and how depraved to what happened to Renee Nicole Good. But I hate to say it, this is exactly how they anticipated that this would go. Tom Homan told me on the second day of the ice raids in L.A. in June that people were going to die because of the tone and tenor of the operations and people's opposition to them. And they knew this. Yet they proceeded anyway with the largest mass deportation effort in American history modeled after a program from 1954 that not only deported immigrants, but also deported Americans. And in this iteration, Trump's iteration,

it is killing immigrants. We've seen people die on the 210 freeway in L.A., in Oxnard, in Chicago. And now it's killing Americans as well. They knew this would happen, and they have moved forward with this anyway. You said it was a slow burn, but it's exactly, you know, it is and has been playing out since the beginning of the summer, but this is exactly how they anticipated it would go. Yeah, that's important, the fact that Tom Homan said that to you and that anticipated that people would die because it is, I think, telling about their reaction to the good shooting, right? There was a way that even if you took them with their word that they thought that it was legitimate,

the guy legitimately feared for his life, I obviously rejected that. I've talked about that ad nauseum, but let's say that they actually legitimately believe that. There's a way to follow up from that that would de-escalate, right? You know, if they didn't want these sort of situations, if they didn't want other people to be injured and potentially killed going forward. Right. Like, we've seen it in the past, right? There's a way for responsible leaders in cities

where there are tragedies like this to try to tamp down, you know, tensions and try to move forward in a way where the community and people that have concerns and also law enforcement. This is what law enforcement agencies all across the country do. They have tactics, practices, and procedures. And by the way, oftentimes they're not followed,

and that's when incidents happen that capture the nation's attention. And you see opposition to, militarized style policing. But this is militarized style policing first and foremost and unapologetically, and not local policing where people have experience in the communities, but federal agents going into local communities all across the country wearing masks, hiding their faces, hiding their identities, oftentimes not declaring what agency they're with and saying anything other than cuss words

of people, smashing windows and indiscriminately grabbing people off the street. this is Greg Bovino's, you know, the chief patrol agent for the border patrol, who by the way, isn't even the chief of the border patrol, you know, but Donald Trump has essentially handed over control of this agency and the culture and the public-facing persona of of it to this guy who's literally going around the country making social media videos about how many people they're grabbing and throwing to the ground all around the country, irrespective of if they're the worst of the worst. And more often than not, they're not. You've talked to many of these people, including Andri. But for me, like Maurice Santay Ramos,

from the Miguel Contreras learning complex, Alejandro Barranco's father, Narciso, the Marine, who was cutting bushes outside of an eye hop, Ani Lucia Lopez-Balozo, who was coming home from Batson College. And to visit her parents, freaking visit her parents on Thanksgiving and was grabbed at the airport by these agents.

And the list goes on and on and on. In Chicago, I met that woman, Marcella, who was going to buy stew for her daughter, ingredients to make a stew, and they snatch them off the street. They're not going after the rapists and the criminals exclusively or first and foremost,

they're going after everybody else. And the snuff films, it's all of peace, right? You know, the films you talk to the social media films, but, you know, the cosplay. And I was hearing from people who have more expertise than I do in military gear, you know, about like the types of stuff these guys are wearing are crazy. You know, it's like the elite, elite special forces.

And bulletproof vests, jeans, bulletproof vests, you know, tactical gear and ski masks, gaiters. Yeah. And like these helmets, like these fancy helmets that, like, only the special ops guys where, you know, and it's all just a show. Dude, I rolled up on a Home Depot here in Cyprus Park in L.A. around the corner from my house in June or July, I can't remember what month it was. And out of the back of a white sprinter van, these guys look like they're about to storm some foreign capital to go get some deposed foreign leader.

It is ridiculous looking. And they're going after day laborers in parking lots of home depots, which connects, by the way, with the fire story. It's like they're going after people here in L.A. that are the ones that are engaged in the recovery from the worst wildfire, most costliest wildfire event in the history of America, who are part of the rebuilding process. And what is the collateral damage? That's sense of callous even to describe it like that.

But people all across the country are dying in these kinds of operations, including Renee Nicole Good. It's hard to judge, right? I'm sitting here in my hole in New Orleans. You know, you're watching social media videos. You know, sometimes it's hard for, I think, a regular person to process. Like, you know, am I just seeing three outlier cases? Is it actually worse?

You know, like, what's your kind of assessment having been on the ground and doing real reporting on this? This is exactly what's happening all across the country. Yesterday in L.A. I came back to L.A. after being in New York last week after we launched a book. And we had a reception last night in Altadena, one of the two communities that burned down. But the thing that people were talking about in Altadena yesterday was that in northeast Los Angeles, in and around the area where we were, there was another ramped up ice enforcement and Border Patrol enforcement operation all day yesterday. even talking about it in the national media.

I was getting texts throughout the day from just friends and people in the community that said they're back. It's going on. And I think I mentioned to Newsom when I saw him a couple weeks ago. December was one of the highest levels of apprehensions off the streets of L.A. and in Southern California than any month since the beginning of the summer. And so this isn't waning. It's growing.

But I will say, as I think is always important to point out, Rachel points out every Monday night, look at the opposition in the streets. People are coming out in a way that we have not seen before in a way that I haven't seen since family separation where the American people and people around the world stopped that policy because there was universal condemnation of the cruelty of it. And I think that people out in Minnesota, thousands of people in the absolute freezing cold all around the country. I think today, Tuesday in Washington, D.C., they're going to protest outside of the headquarters of one of these agencies. The opposition to it is building in a way that I wasn't sure that it would, but it finally is. Right, and it's important. Like, these guys have backed down from several of their policies.

You mentioned the first term family separation. El Salvador prison is one that they backed out, right? So they can be pushed back, but this is all, you know, related. The people in the streets is also why they're escalating, right? Because they're trying to intimidate first. And they make no secret of that. Stephen Miller has made no secret of that. And whether it's Newsom or Pritzker that have talked to about this, they believe that it's

all pretext to invoke the Insurrection Act because they believe that like in L.A., they could say there's violent riotous mobs on the street. And, you know, they use that to invoke Title X of the U.S. Code and they had it back down in LA with the National Guard. But, yeah, Trump has made no secret that he wants troops back on the street. And that's what Newsom said to me. He doesn't believe that it's possible for him to stop it because Trump will find some way to invoke the Insurrection Act to bring the troops back.

So back to the fires. What was I saw that story. I didn't follow it closely where they were doing raids on people that were, like, participating in the recovery. was that in California or is that somewhere else in the West? I kind of forget the details of that story. Oh, yeah. No, I mean, both UCLA has cited research.

Here's the bottom line. 40% of the construction industry in California is, I think, by some measurements, undocumented labor. And we have had the costliest wildfire event in American history, which, by the way, as you read in the book, will never know the official toll as it relates to the federal government's analysis because the Trump administration stopped NOAA from keeping the billion-dollar disaster registry having to do with climate-related disasters. But we know it was three times the size of

Manhattan. 31 people died, maybe as many as 400 if you look at excess mortality, people that wouldn't have normally died during that time period. Two whole communities, 16,000 structures. And it will require one of the great rebuilding efforts, just like it required one of the great cleanup efforts in American history. And who shows up to New Orleans after Katrina, who shows up to the Northeast after Sandy, who shows up after Hurricane Andrew? It's the day laborer. as Pablo Alvarado from the National Day Laborers Organizing Network said to me in the book. He was there last night. I was with him last night.

We were talking about this, as was Lindsay Tislauski from Immigrant Defender's Law Center. So the people that they're targeting who stand in those Home Depot parking lots looking to get an honest day's wage on a construction site somewhere in L.A. are categorically the exact people who would be hired on a day laborer job to participate in these crews. And so it's created a chilling effect. And it is part of the reason, ask Newsom, ask the academics, why the recovery is going so slowly. All right. So to the book and kind of just kind of doing a step back of the fire and you're kind of deciding

to write this. Obviously, this is personal to you, you know, with the fires. You're covering it also. So you're there. You had the mask on, right? And so writing the book is such a different process. I was kind of curious, you know, when you did the step back, if there were things that that jumped out to you that were kind of hard to notice in the moment.

No, so many. It's why I'm so grateful to, I think I have the best job in television because I get to spend so much time of people. I love spending time of people. But in this instance, I was dispatched to watch my hometown burn down, literally watched the home I was born into and lived in until I was five, a carbonized in front of my eyes. And how do you process that in real time?

It's not possible. I tried, but instead I'm just opening my mouth and I'm telling people, what I'm seeing. I mean, for me, I had so many questions. What am I witnessing? How could it have happened? Is it going to happen again? Who's to blame, you know, all of it?

And so that's why I set out to write Firestorm. And I think even though it reads like a sci-fi thriller to some people, it is a minute-by-minute account of what it's like to be. It's very true story in the middle of the fire of the future, a fire that's coming for all of us. And when I say Fire of the Future, that's what I spent this time that it wouldn't normally have. after leaving somewhere on television to spend time with wildlife biologists, national weather service meteorologists, senior emergency management officials from HHS, firefighters from station number 69 and station 23 and station 12 and Altadena,

politicians Newsom sat down one-on-one with me for quite some time in his office to get to the inside story of what happened between him and Trump and Musk during all this. That's what I needed to do. And I think what I learned is that, the flyer of the future is this conflagration, excuse the expression, of obviously climate, the global climate emergency, changes in the way we live, many, many electric car batteries exploded, other things like that, infrastructure. We had a huge, empty reservoir on the Palisades that was part of this story. And in Altadena, there was this electrical equipment

that was dormant that electrified, the spark. And maybe most importantly in the whole story is misinformation and disinformation from the local level, but also particularly as it relates to Trump, in Musk and the stuff that they were spreading, pouring rhetorical fuel on the very real flames of the fire and making it so much more difficult for everybody. Talk us with the story that was about the electric car batteries. And it seems like kind of a small thing. It's just one of those things that when you follow this closely, you see something that, like those of us who are monitoring it from afar.

Like that didn't register on my radar at all at all as something that was contributing. But I'm just kind of curious, you know, what you learned about that. Several times during the fire, you know, you feel covering it. You feel because you're in it, right? and it's a thousand plus degree heat. By the way, I'm a reporter. I had to go home at night. These firefighters are in it, in it.

Eric Mendoza from Station 69, laying on the concrete, because it's the only place that was relatively tolerable to open up his hose and try to fight any structure fire that he could. You're hearing these electric car batteries, these concussive blasts, and they're the batteries of the electric cars. We're the electric car capital of, I think, Americans in California. And what does it mean? mean. It means that firefighters like Nick Schuller, who I was also with last night, and you'll

meet in the book from Cal Fire, our state firefighting agency, will say things to me like, this is the one fire I believe that I was fighting that I kind of thought I might get cancer after fighting it because of the materials that were breathing in this fire of the future. And there's only going to be more of that. You know, I'm not an electric car battery X, but it's not hard to think when that shit is burning up what it means for the lungs of anybody who's around there spending days at a time trying to fight those fires. Yeah. One of the other scenes from the book was the call from Katie Miller, I'd like to talk about.

Stephen's wife. She's a competitor in the podcast space. Her podcast is kind of more like the Hunger Games podcast. I would do it if she invited me on. No, she doesn't have it. She just brings on the leaders of the regime and talks about how great things are going for them. So it's, you know, it's a niche. but she called you at one point while you were there. Talk about that.

Katie and I have been journalist source. I've had a relationship as journalist source since family separation. She was the junior most press deputy for Kirstenielsen. And it was the one that invited me in the facilities. And I wouldn't have been able to cover it. And I'm actually grateful to her had she not opened the doors so that I could see in her expression, basically, of why they did it, what it was like for these migrants to broadcast it around the world. and, you know, they wanted to deter people. I wanted to explain to the American public that, as Adam Serwer said, the cruelty was the point. And when I put out my first book, separated, I detailed a dinner that she and Katie Turn I had in Washington where she said some pretty inflammatory things about what she believed about the separation policy.

And she didn't like that. And she cut off contact with me. We didn't talk again. I don't think for years. And I'm standing in the middle of the fire and I'm getting ready to do a special report for Lester Holt. My phone rings. and I pick it up and then the end of the line, hey, it's Katie Miller.

I was like, what? I honestly had no idea what was going on. I'm in the middle of this crazy fire and Katie Miller's calling me. I said, I got to call you back. And before I could call her back, she texted me an address and said at Stephen's parents' house. You're the only person I know that's in the Palisades. They live around the corner from where you are. Can you go check on it?

And you can imagine, I'm thinking of myself, am I being asked to go to Stedon Miller's parents' house as I'm waiting to go on a special report with Lester Hole? But just like I did for the guy I drove in high school carpool or my own brother, I did. I went and checked on the Miller's house. It had burnt down. And I felt horrible for them. And I sent her a text saying the palisades is stronger than politics with a red heart emoji. And I sent it.

And literally, Tim, within minutes, I noticed both these absolutely crazy tweets or whatever true socials from Trump, spreading conspiracy theories about non-existent, you know, water flow and who's to blame about the fire and how you could put out the fire. And then Elon Musk, her boss, because she was going to be the incoming, I guess, spokesperson for Doge is also. At the time, she was the spokesperson for Doge. And remember, this isn't the transition. So Trump's not the president. He is just, you know, pontificating about the fires that he's watching across the country to shit on news, quote, Newscum and Karen Bass. And by the way, the book doesn't absolve any politician from inquiry about why the fires were so bad.

But what they were saying was absolutely bad shit. and it made no sense. And this is affecting, including, this is affecting everybody in the palisades, everybody in Altadena, including Katie Miller's in-laws. And so I thought about, you know,

do I include this story? You know, it was a private moment. But she's also a public figure. And the irony that the people for whom she worked were, like I said, pouring this rhetorical fuel on the flames of the fire that was so confusing to people when they needed real-time information,

I felt like it was actually critical to include. And it's the reality of being a part of the fire of the future. And even Katie Miller and Stephen Miller's parents got to experience that. That story with Katie of her letting you into, you know, in the first term, you know, the facilities. It's interesting. I just kind of make a connection about, like, why did the administration release the video or it wasn't the administration? Why Jonathan Ross or why did ICE or whoever it was? Like, why did they leak that video of his, from his self-react?

phone where he's walking around the car and talks to Renee good and then and then you kind of hear him say fucking bitch at the end about her. I don't know. I think maybe having covered these people, maybe you have some perspective on that about like what their motivations are for this kind of thing and why it might not seem like what the rest of us would expect. They wanted people to see the cruelty of the separation to what it was like, the reality at the time. That's what they said. I don't know if they used the word cruelty explicitly, but they said they wanted to. wanted people to see what it was like on the inside. And that's why they let us in. And that's why they released, remember, they didn't allow us to bring cameras. They released footage from the

inside. I had a pad in the paper. I still have the notepad that I use when I walk through that facility. They want people to see these videos because, number one, their whole guiding philosophy is deterrence. They think that if other people see videos like this, it will scare people either from coming, because people aren't really coming now. My personal belief is they believe it will scare people into signing up to self-deport from the country because they believe this fate might befall them one day. Do I think they think it's exonerates this officer or is a clear-cut picture? I don't because it's not, I mean, look at it. Like, how could they believe that? Intimiting protesters, I would add, is a part of it. The self-deport, I think, is unimpeachable.

I don't think we do it. That's part of the social media videos. It's part of all that. That's what's coming for you. And I think you're probably right. It's to intimidate, potentially, protesters as well from standing up an exercise in their First Amendment rights. And I think that's so much a part of this, too, you know, that this is, this is constitutionally protected speech. What Renee Nicole Good was doing was to go out there and to do what I've seen in Charlotte, North Carolina, and in L.A. and in Chicago and in the hallways of 26 federal plaza, which is to stand face to face with these men and women in masks and say, whatever you want to say, frankly, as long as you're not, as long as you're not harming them and as long as you're not

violating their rights. And obviously, the administration, is not comfortable with that. That's why from the jump, Tom Homan said someone's going to die because he said they have characterized all these people as radical left lunatics when they're teachers and educators

and people who have everyday jobs doing everyday things that do not want heavily armed mass federal agents on the streets of America, whether it's in Minnesota or any of these places or stining the recovery effort from the fires in L.A.

That is what they are engaged in all across the country. And as Saki said to me the other day, they're making the last lives of local officials dealing with the everyday problems of Americans from coast to coast more difficult because they have to deal with the realities of this. Well, I talked to as Mayor Frye about that. He talked about how the local police in Minneapolis who are so maligned after George Floyd

incident, obviously the cop in question for good reason, are now like overwhelmed, like doing their regular job, but also like taking calls from people who are freaked out about what they're saying with ICE in the city. And if you think they're overwhelmed, when I covered famous separation, inside the Border Patrol processing station in McAllen, it was the Border Patrol agents that were telling me they were overwhelmed. We're strained and we're stressed and we're struggling. We're not social workers.

Why are we tasked with doing this? I wouldn't say that it's a monolith of human beings and opinions inside even the federal agencies. I heard from National Guard troops during the L.A. raids about how deeply uncomfortable people were. It's not a surprise because of the indiscriminate nature of what they are doing, that this makes people who sign up for a career in public service and to help other people. deeply uncomfortable. I want to talk a little bit about lessons learned from the fire, from a firestorm, some of this is fallout that's happened since the book. There's kind of two elements I want to talk about. The first that you already mentioned is the conspiracy theories.

Obviously there are these conspiracies raging, you know, mostly disseminated by Trump and Musk, but not entirely them. And as evidenced by that, I had seen in my social media, there are these horrifying fires right now that are raging in Patagonia in Argentina. Yeah, saw that too. Yeah, it's like 12,000 heckators. One of the areas where this fire is, is like where they've dispels, like massive conifer. It's kind of like if the Redwoods, you know, in California, became at threats. Oh, no, it's horrific, yeah. I just wanted to see what's happening with that before our conversation.

I googled that, you know, Argentina fires. And like literally the first three things that come up are people blaming the Jews and like Israel, I guess Israeli tourists or something. And maybe it does end up being an Israeli tourist, but it's like a former general in Argentina. It's like the Jews did this. It's kind of reminiscent of me of the space of Marjorie Taylor Green and the space. space lasers. Yeah.

Like, at least on that part, on the getting good information side, it feels like it's getting worse, not better, frankly. It's hard enough to get good information from your local leaders. And part of the reason that, you know, people allege so many people died in West Altadena is that the local emergency emerge systems weren't working properly. And so in West Altadena is where the majority of the people died because people say they didn't get evacuation orders. And even though the National Weather Service put out of the state, they were in the state,

this particularly dangerous situation alert, people just didn't feel adequately equipped that this was coming for them. And so on top of that, in L.A., you have Trump and Musk, you know, just exploiting this whole absolutely unprecedented fire, the worst wildfire event in terms of cost in the history of the country for politics. They're talking about DEI. They're talking about mysterious, ridiculous, non-existent sources of water. And actually, Gavin Newsom said to me, and you can read the scene explicitly in the book, that the moment he was sitting in his war room, watching Elon Musk push local firefighters about conspiracy theories related to the water pressure dropping. And they were pushing back on him saying, we're just flowing so much water,

even though that one reservoir is empty. And I don't think they said that explicitly at the time, but this has become an issue in the aftermath. It's like turning on all the faucets in your house. Your water pressure is going to go down. And that's in the Palisades and an Altadena. I tell you all this because Newsom looks up at the screen, and Izzy Gardner's communications director is sitting there and forgive my language, but it's all in the book. He says, Izzy, clip that bitch. Speaking of the clip that he's watching live on the monitor, he says, fuck these guys. I'm not going to take this anymore and I'm going to start to push back. And he credits that moment with literally the whole social media strategy that he has been doing

all since the summer pushing back and punching back against the Trump administration. What he realized is if I'm going to sit there and let them do this, it's going to make everyone's lives worse. And so in that one split second, in this makeshift war room, emergency operation center that he had created in L.A., that is when the social media strategy Gavin Dissom has employed ever since was born and you can read about the moment in the book. Which takes this kind of like my questions about whether there are lessons learned from, it's kind of like mostly Democrats at this point who are like responsible governing party, at least since. And certainly it's Democrats who are the governing party entirely in California. There are all these conspiracies going around about. the water pressure and, you know, we could list all of them. They're also, and at the time I interviewed, like, experts in journals who had been covering this, you know, who talked about how there were, like, legitimate criticisms about, like,

forest management. Of course, right. Yeah. And, and other things about kind of how there was all this red tape and, like, things should have been, you know, fixed and, you know, just normal municipal BS, right? It doesn't seem to me, like, in the fallout from that, like, it seems like there's a lot of excuse making from Bass and all. and wagon circling.

And it doesn't feel like this moment has been like a wake-up call. Like, oh, we've got to be much more efficient and preparing for these things and in cutting out red tape. Interestingly, where I see the wake-up call is in people that are trying to run against her. So there's Jake Levine who was in the Biden administration.

You read about him in the book. In full disclosure, I grew up with him in the palisades and literally drove him in high school carpool. He worked in climate in the Biden administration. He's married to Jackie Alameani, my colleague, our colleague at MS. and has decided to run for Congress to challenge Brad Sherman, the Democrat. So he's primering a Democrat in the wake of the fires because he believes the Democratic leadership

was disastrous in and how the fires were handled. So was Jonathan White, by the way, in Maryland, who is challenging a Democratic incumbent. He's the senior emergency management official from HHS and running, you know, to the left of him to primary him because he has been to every mass casualty fire federally declared in the last five years and says that we're not adequately prepared for these fires of the future and that the leaders. on a congressional level doesn't fully understand it. On a local level, for sure, again, nobody's absolved. Bass was in Ghana. Her deputies knew and were warned. She decided not to come back,

but even if she had, there are questions about the prepositioning of fire trucks in the Palisades. Why weren't they there? Would this reservoir have made a difference? Most people, civil engineers, firefighters say that it wouldn't, but how is it possible that it was empty? Why didn't the mop-up of the first fire that became the Palisades fire, fully extinguished the blaze. And would that have prevented all this strategy? And same deal on Altadena. Like, why were these steel lattice towers that had non-functioning electrical equipment that became electrified still up after decades of not being in service?

It's crazy. And Gavin Newsom said, and again, he's not absolved either. We're going to have a Marshall Plan 2.0 in the wake of the fire to bring LA back. And I haven't seen the Marshall Plan 2.0. I haven't seen a... Yeah, where is that? Exactly. It's kind of crazy how few houses are being rebuilt, actually. Also, I mean, to that very point, 40%, on Altadena, it's 44%, but I think the average is 40% in a study I just saw

are selling their lots to corporate investors, not to locals, because they can't afford it. They want to make money and get out of town. They can't, the insurance premiums are going up. The amount of money they're being paid out by insurance is not enough to rebuild. LA is the most unaffordable city and the most unaffordable state. and so there are a lot of issues. I always say, when this type of stuff happens, it lays bare the fissures underneath society. And in California, this one, affordability and our affordability crisis is top of mind for so many people trying to rebuild.

And also how important the undocumented community is to Southern California, 10% of the population, as many as a million people, huge percentage of the construction industry. Like I said, part of the reason that the system is not working, part of the reason that the rebuilding is not happening in the way that it is showing. It's a great place to leave us because those are probably the two issues that are going to define the midterms. And it is all, you know, undergirding what you're reporting. There's so much other good stuff there. People go get the book. It's Firestorm, the Great Los Angeles fires in America's New Age of Disaster. Jacob, I'll be, you know, I'll be seeing you in little boxes like this on the tube at some point.

I appreciate your work out in the field and keep us posted, right, man. I appreciate you, man. Thanks, thanks, Tim. Thanks always. All right. Thanks so much to Susan Glasser and Jacob Soberoff. We'll be back tomorrow with another edition of the podcast. See you all then. Peace.

I am a lot to. The Bullwark podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brough.