The Bulwark Podcast - Tom Nichols: The Cat Was in the Basement

Episode Date: September 18, 2024

JD Vance thought he had confirmation of his Haitian migrant conspiracy when a Springfield, OH resident filed a police report about her missing cat. But Miss Sassy was just in the basement, safe and sound. More seriously, Vance and Trump want everyone who's not on their team to shut up, so they can rile up their supporters and prime people for violence. Meanwhile, has the MAGA duo become such losers that even Joe Rogan and the bro-sphere have had enough?  Tom Nichols joins Tim Miller. show notes: Tom on Trump using an assassination attempt to inflame politics

Hello and welcome to the Bullard podcast. I'm your host Tim Miller. He's back. It's Tom Nichols, professor emeritus at the Naval War College, staff writer at the Atlantic, author of the Atlantic Daily Newsletter. His books include The Death of Expertise. We'll be talking about expertise. What's happening, Tom? Hey, Tim. What's happening? I don't know. World's on fire. People are losing their minds. Dogs and cats living together. Other than that, just another late, sleepy, late summer news cycle. Not getting eaten, though. And that's where we're going to start the day. I keep wanting to move on from this story, but I just can't when you have this anecdote. This is my favorite story, maybe of the year. I don't know if you've seen this. So in the Wall Street Journal today, a Vance spokesperson on Tuesday.

So yesterday provided the Wall Street Journal with a police report in which a resident had claimed their pet might have been taken by Haitian neighbors. Luckily for the Wall Street Journal, they had a reporter who lives in ohio chris marg i've worked with before so chris marg went to the house of the police report uh the woman's name was anna kilgore he had went to her house yesterday evening she said her cat miss sassy which went missing in late august had actually returned a few days later was found safe in her own basement kilgore was wearing a Trump shirt and hat and said she apologized to her Haitian neighbors with the help of her daughter and a

mobile phone translation app. A beautiful story in Springfield and a disgusting display from the Vance campaign. What do you think about Miss Sassygate? I mean, I actually don't want to move on from now. The one I was getting sick of was whether or not Rich Lowry misspoke himself. Let's not do it. I can't go there. I'm tired of that one. I have my complaints about Rich Lowry, but I don't think he did what people said he did. I have a scroll worth of complaints

about Rich Lowry, and we can just stick to what's on the scroll. The cat story, I was thinking of it this morning because I knew it was coming on here, and I knew we were going to talk about that story. And I couldn't actually find my cat. My wife's away right now. And I couldn't find Lily. And I'm going around the house and I was thinking, you know, if I see one Haitian somewhere, I mean, it's just so stupid. You know, I mean, it's just this insane, you know what it is, Tim, and we ought to call it by its right word. It's a moral panic. Yeah. It's literally the equivalent of a moral panic.

It's like the, it's the equivalent of razor blades and apples. The laced weed. The laced weed was always my favorite moral panic. Once, you know, close your ears, mom. Once, you know, I started the dabbling in college. It came to me very quickly that I was like, you know, drug dealers aren't really in the business of just kind of handing out free drugs to teenagers just for kicks. You know, if they, they're not trying to upgrade the weed to make it stronger. They the stronger material material they're trying to sell that you know for more money that's how drug dealing works right i do like the way you carefully said dabbled dabbled but you know yeah exactly it's like hey wouldn't it be fun to like drive a bunch of my teenage customers on whom i rely for money completely psychotic yeah for no extra income yeah anyway the daycare pan the satanic daycare panic of

40 years ago, which I am old enough to remember that story. I mean, it's, it is literally creating a moral panic in order to motivate and freak out people who, you know, otherwise would be completely ordinary, normal voters who might actually vote on things like who's the better candidate and, you know, things like who's the better candidate and you know things like that and instead what vance and trump are doing is that it's really a way of just shorting out any kind of rational capacity for thought in the voters it's and it's only real if you believe type situation right like it is totally uh you know just don't look at the man behind the curtain here i mean these fuckers the thing's kind of sad i the miss sassy the anna story makes me kind of sad actually well

it's embarrassing you have to feel for the person who says wow i'm the biggest jerk in you know like everybody in springfield ohio knows that i'm a jerk but the the happy ending of the story is that even you know with my trump flag out there i went and apologized which i think is you know really important and nice ending to that story that is the happy ending and this is important anna kilgore did a bad thing we all make mistakes and she apologized she was fooled like this is the thing about that all of this right like it's like jd vance is such a fucking sociopath she was fooled right and these assholes like think that they can get away with this stuff by just being like oh we're just we heard some reports we're just asking questions we're just asking questions yeah we're just advancing this same old wives tale it's been

going around about refugees since the 1970s and just pretending like it's happening now and just pointing our finger at a new group of immigrants. And they're doing it so brazenly that they literally give this material to the Wall Street Journal without even trying to verify it or care whether it's true or not. They end up really humiliating their own supporter. And you know that they don't care. They don't fucking care. They don't care about the Haitians.

They don't care about Anna Kilgore. They don't care about anything. Right. I think the thing about J.D. Vance especially is, you know, Trump, this is going to kill gore they don't care about anything right i think the thing about jd vance especially is you know trump this is going to sound weird and i and i sometimes i've been accused of saying this as a kind of an apologia for trump you know like or or being a trump pronounce that i've always pronounced it apologia is it apologia i don't know now that i'm a podcast host i like to get i've noticed there's certain words i pronounce wrong so i'm just i'm just trying to correct myself but anyway continue well i'm sure our listeners will let us know.

Yeah, 36 years with a PhD and I thought I was saying it right. No, I don't know. I don't know either. But as I, as I was saying, some people would say it's a rationalization for Trump. I do know how to pronounce that one. To say he is just so, he's stunted and so unstable and so emotionally limited. He really doesn't have a firm grip of right and wrong. He is a goldfish, right? He just darts around in a bowl looking for food pellets and he doesn't care who's in his way, what's good, what's bad. The thing that's so horrifying about Vance, he knows and he's hurting the people that he claims to champion. When I first wrote about him three years ago, and I called him an asshole,

which, you know, I think actually he kind of got off easy on that one, is that it was kind of personal to me because I feel like he and I come from, that the people he kind of abuses and uses are our people, my people and his people, white, working class, you know, struggling, not educated, you know, in his case, Appalachia and steel country, in my case, you know, the dying textile industry towns and all that. And I thought, you know, okay, Hillbilly Elegy has this kind of smug tone to it of, you know, look at these stupid rubes who couldn't pull their bootstraps up because their culture is so screwed up. But there was a truth in it. And he was saying something that was at least true and a useful place for a conversation. Now, he treats those same voters, you know,

like cattle. You know, he just extracts a hunk of prime rib or, you know, loin or a filet mignon out of them at will, you know, by pushing their buttons about cats or, you know, whatever he's on at any given moment. And the horror of it is he knows he knows exactly and he doesn't give a shit about these people i mean he just doesn't he is probably the only person who is more of an empty vessel of pure ambition than elise stefanik and that's saying something yeah oh man i mean elise looks downright appealing by comparison to jd i mean churchill next to this guy um jd also uh i just think we should talk about when podcast frequenters are in the news i feel like uh we should mention it your colleague david from and jd got into a feud this is i think

a new thing in our politics we have the vice presidential candidate kind of troll tweeting people from wrote that there's a difference between what trump and vance are arguing and and what their opponents are arguing from rights the upsetting things said by trump and vance are not true the upsetting things said about trump and vance are true trump really did mount a violent coup against the constitution he and his relatives really did take bribes in office including from foreign governments he really was helped into power by russian espionage agencies he really did steal secret documents from the u.s government after his election defeat and vance really did by his own admission create stories for political advantage to put residents of his state at risk

of physical harm jd replies i'd say the most important difference is that people on your team tried to kill Donald Trump twice. Yeah, it's incredible. You know, good thing we're turning down the temperature, you know, and accusing a magazine writer of being on the team that has, you know, tried to kill the former president twice. First of all, as if there's a team that is, you know, team kill Trump or something. Once again, JD Vance knows. Like that this 20 year old in Pennsylvania with like serious mental problems and was apparently from a Trump supporting family is like a big reader of froms, you know, Trumpocracy. I wasn't going to take an ar down to the rally but then boy that

that july issue of the atlantic just spun me right up boy and you know i i heard i heard david from you know i mean it's it's nonsense but it's dangerous nonsense because that's vance you know basically accusing david and anyone you know me, everybody who's not on team Trump of basically trying to get Trump killed just by criticizing him. And I suppose the more serious issue we ought to be talking about underneath all that is that again, JD Vance knows all that what he really wants is for David Frum and you and me and millions of other people to shut up, to stop talking about Donald Trump, because now you notice how the game's being played. Saying anything true about Donald Trump is therefore trying to get

him killed. I have a piece coming out tomorrow about presidential assassinations from the archives at the Atlantic. But I wrote on Monday, people take potshots at presidents and make threats. Gerald Ford almost got, got aced twice in 17 days. You didn't see Ford step up and say, you know, if Jimmy Carter and the Democrats don't stop calling me the guy who pardoned Nixon. And, you know, actually one of the people who went after Ford thought she was not. And amazingly, it wasn't Squeaky Fromm, who was just nuts. Sarah Jane Moore, in later years, when she got out of prison, said, yes, I was obsessed with Vietnam. And I was hoping that killing Gerald Ford was going to spark a revolution. So, you know, there was very clear political content to, you know, I'm going to kill Gerald Ford and there will be a revolution.

And this is payback for Vietnam. And Ford didn't get up there and say, okay, all you protesters, all the people that were, you know, giving me and Nixon shit all these years, stop criticizing me because you're going to get me killed. But Gerald Ford was a real man and a good president. You know, Reagan didn't stand up and say, know thanks tip o'neill yeah you know the commies the marxist commie yeah yeah thanks harvard yeah i mean people at the time were saying reagan is going to get us all killed in a thermonuclear war i mean reagan you know is the most dangerous man alive that's not why john hinkley shot him. And when Reagan talked to the country, gave an address to Congress about economics,

he literally spent like three paragraphs thanking his doctors, talking about a little kid. And then he said, now let's talk about crushing inflation. And that was it. This is really, it's an attempt in the same way that the Ohio story is an attempt to spark a moral panic. What Vance is doing, and boy, I'm so tempted to swear because you started working blue right at the top here this morning. But, you know. Do it.

No, I'm trying to. By the end of this, there probably will be an F-bomb that I can't control. But what Vance is doing is trying to spark another moral panic, which is that America is full of lunatics, you know, who are waiting to kill presidents and presidential candidates based on the say-so of magazine writers like David Frum. And it's an attempt to shut down debate and to stop saying things that are true. And to their credit, you've seen, you've already seen people like David Rothkopf and Rick Wilson and David Frum and others say, you know,

speaking the truth is not endangering your guy. The truth is the truth. Speaking the truth is, I think, Ender Egger wrote this for us in the book, speaking the truth is 100% defense against the charge of overheated rhetoric. Like the truth is the truth and it should be spoken. I actually think it's a little worse than you said. I don't think that they're just trying to spark a moral panic and I don't

think they're just trying to stifle debate. I think that they're actually trying to stir and stoke further division. Cause I think that's how they think that they win, right? Like the idea is if the other side is behind these it's horrific obviously you know crazy people then then there's a stand back and stand by element on our side right it's the stuff that they didn't do i gave and i gave them credit for this because i was worried that they were going to do this after the first attempt

they did not do it at the convention they did not wave the bloody shirt really and i you know there's the trump speech but it was like very kind of low energy and toned down and i wasn't there was not a lot of vengeance for trump at the convention there is increasingly a sense of vengeance for trump and it does tie the behavior station story they do want people to be pointing fingers at immigrants and raising that rhetoric and attacking and criticizing them and blaming them for cat eating like they they want to raise the temperature and they're cloaking this sort of high-minded bullshit and and their and their political end of further dividing and raising raising the temperature well and i think what i what i thought you were going to say is they want to raise the temperature. Well, and I think what I thought you were going to say is that they want to raise the temperature and encourage more threats. And I think that that is part of their

goal to say, intimidate these people, tell them, you know, they're next. Because every time this stuff happens, anybody who works in public media, you know, we get threats. I mean, it just happens. And instead of saying, look, you know, we're, we all have a right to express our opinion. And as you said, the truth is a defense against overheated rhetoric. They kind of wink at the camera and say, no, I'm not, I'm not saying that, you know, Trump's opponents are trying to get him killed. But if you want to reach that conclusion and maybe express your feelings to those people, well, who could stop you really? I mean, on the one thing I'll say this, that Vance

and Trump and everybody else is right. The world is full of unstable people who can be motivated to violence. And I've thought about this as it's not a heckler's veto. What they're really arguing for is an assassin's veto. Don't say anything bad because you will trigger unstable people. Well, okay, that's a good rule of thumb if by bad you mean something literally like somebody saying someone ought to kill Donald Trump. I've seen people say that. I said, look, my early political days were when Reagan was president and people said it all the time. I can were when Reagan was president and people said it all the time. I can remember when Reagan was shot and people saying too bad he survived it. That's on social media after Trump, after the Trump thing, too. And that's bad.

Yeah. Okay. That's overheated. That's un-American. It's unpatriotic. And it makes you a shitty person for saying it. Yes. I don't care if it's Donald Trump.

I don't care if it's Ronald Reagan. You know, you just there it. I don't care if it's Donald Trump. I don't care if it's Ronald Reagan. There are things you don't do. But if the argument is, don't say Donald Trump is a threat to democracy or you're part of the plot to get him killed, that's just an attempt to shut you down and to keep you from saying things that are true and that are within your rights as an American citizen to say. And the other element to the first part of what you're saying

about increasing the threats on the other side is he did this faux machismo thing i don't know if you saw this he had a rally yesterday where he was like was this vance this is jd vance not trump vance yeah yeah he's in michigan i'd like to see an assassin try and get in here yeah oh for god's sake with these 500 patri in here, we'd see what happened to him. And again, like, okay, you know, I understand the impulse there to like put on a brave face and be like, we're tough and we're strong. Like our people are united and we're patriots. But still, it's just like there's a responsibility as a leader in that moment, in this moment to like chill things out right to be responsible to be a grown-up you know and not to you know rile people up and be like oh yeah you better watch out you know one of our guys might might start firing back at you you know because i that can go very bad that notion right because

then you're priming people for violence yeah and I said, months ago, I think what Trump's been doing about the election is to prime people for violence to say, if need be, take guns and, you know, go down to your local election board and, and once again, stop the steal. I mean, this is a guy who has never taken responsibility for what happened on January 6., even though it is his responsibility. I don't think he has any compunction about doing it again. But you're right. You know, to stand there and make jokes about, oh, I'd like to see an assassin get in here. Yes, yes, we get it. You're tough. Okay. I mean, JD is not that tough. Some of the people on there are tough.

But I mean, is that why you're running to show what a tough guy you are? I mean, if there's one word that I think always comes back to me during the Trump era, it's how childlike everything is. It's like you're watching like seventh graders, you know, these aren't adults. This is not, J.D. Vance does not come across as an adult. He comes across as this kind of hanger on of the school bully, Maybe because I grew up in the seventies. I mean, he said he's that kid with the greasy long hair and the jean jacket, you know,

who like is always hanging just behind the big guy in the schoolyard. Or maybe he's Cartman hanging behind the guy in the schoolyard. I guess since I grew up in the nineties, I'll give you a nineties, nineties reference. I've never had the displeasure of shaking his hand, but I feel pretty strongly that, that his hands are like mine. I don't think he's got a lot of calluses you know i don't think that you know this is a tough guy i don't judge him for that i don't judge him for it either but

don't fucking pretend like you're a tough guy there you go that's where i was going oh we have one more jd we've one more jd why don't we just do it now one more jd let's get it out of the way why you do this to me demi sorry here's just a great quote. I just have to share this quote because it was so good. We conservatives rightly mistrust the government to efficiently administer business loans and regulate our food supply. Yet we allegedly believe that it can deport millions of unregistered aliens. The notion fails to pass the laugh test. It's a great point.

And I know who said it. Who did? Who said it? Five- I know who said it. Who did? Who said it? Five-time Jeopardy champion. Who is J.D. Vance, Tim Miller? Ding, ding, ding. That was only a $200 question, though, for you. That wasn't the hardest one.

Was J.D. Vance 2012? He had the blog post deleted because he knew this stuff was going to come back to get him. That's the thing. He's just no. They just know better. They know. Well, and also, can we just point out before we move off this point, how incredibly, you know, ambitious was it to say, yeah, that thing I put on a, when I was in law school, by the way,

this wasn't like, I was like a, you know, like I was really high in the dorm in my freshman year. And I posted this on, you know, can we please take it down? He wrote this as a law student, as a grown man, and had the foresight to say, yeah, this is going to screw me in Republican politics. Can we take it down? So the thing I said that was true is going to hurt me in Republican politics. So can you please take it down? I mean, what a weasel. What an incredibly, I mean, in a way,

you have to kind of admire the hustle, right? You know, it's like, that's pretty foresighted. You know, he looks back, he says, hey, I want to go to work in Republican politics. So I need to not have it out there about true shit that I said about the Republicans. Yeah, it's weasely. Another thing, though, it ties to the to the

count story which we go back to where at the level like it's just nihilism like he just he doesn't care about the people that he's fooling the mega people he's fooling he doesn't care that they might not take the vaccine or that they might have stormed the capital because of his lies or that they might be you know like advancing a lot embarrassing humiliating lies about their neighbors eating their animals like he doesn't care about them he also doesn't care about the Haitians doesn't care if there's some negative consequences and this is what it comes down to like dude knows we know he knows because he wrote about it in law school that like if the government starts trying to deport millions of people there's going to be some collateral damage like there's going to be people

that shouldn't have been deported they get deported there'd be family members that get wrapped up in it there's going to be people you know't have been deported. They get deported. There'd be family members that get wrapped up in it. There's going to be people that, you know, that are, their rights are, are infringed upon. He knows he said it right there. Like,

it's not, you can't efficiently do this. You can't, you know, just get rid of the bad people. But he's like, let's just delete that. He doesn't care.

Like he just says, he doesn't care about that. One thing that, that Vance shares with Trump, he thinks that all people around him are supporting players in the drama in which he is the main character. And everyone is there to help J.D. Vance achieve and succeed and reach his goals. They're just raw material. You know, Haitians, poor whites in Ohio, Republican Party elite, it doesn't matter. They are all there

for the greater glory of JD Vance. And the only sun that should outshine the greater glory of JD Vance is is the sun eater himself, Donald Trump. Because that's that's the just to mix my metaphors. That's the star to which he has hitched his wagon. Can we point out one other thing that's been happening with Vance and these other guys? Please. I'm excited to get to the star sun eater himself, though. But yeah, let's hear. Who is they? Who is they?

You notice that? Well, you know, they now have tried to get, they've tried to silence him. They've tried to kill him. They want to, who the fuck? There it is, sorry, but who the fuck is they? You know, and I mean, it's this incredibly divisive, basically what he's saying, and this is kind of the essence of authoritarian populism. They is everyone who isn't us. You know, all those other people that aren't at this rally right now, they are not real Americans.

They're not really the people. They're not your fellow citizens. They're not your, you know, your friends who disagree with you or your coworkers. They're they. They remind me of this when Vance and Trump do this. They remind me of this crazy uncle I had, God rest his soul, who always used to say, you know what they ought to do? And they did this. And one day, and I don't know, Tim, I don't think I've ever told you this story, but I have told it.

My uncle says to me, they're all corrupt in Washington. They, they're all corrupt. And he was just getting up ahead of steam, right? And he's like, you can hear the engine going, you know, building up. And at the time, I was working in the Senate. And he said, they're all corrupt. And I said, Mark, I said, I, I work in the Senate, I work in Washington. And without even thinking, he said, well, then you're corrupt, too. And you know, it is, it's how it overtakes you. And I just looked at him, I said, you've known me since you were, since I was a baby and you give me money every Christmas. You know, and he was like, well, you know what I mean?

You know, you just couldn't, it was like, and I think, I think that's the state of mind. There's a more serious point under all this. That's, that's the state of mind that Vance and trump want those people in that room they want them to go home turn to their friends their nephews their nieces their brothers or sisters and say you're they you're them and that's extremely dangerous it's again it's it's a piece with what we were saying yeah it's a peaceful thing they want to spark the unrest. They want to spark people, you know, increasing their rage at one another, at the enemy within. You know, Bill wrote about this earlier this week. A phrase that Trump just used, by the way.

Yeah. Yeah. Bill wrote about this earlier this week. The J.D. Vance interview in 21 with James Pogue, which is so good. And, you know, he says that our people hate the right people. And that's what this says. They is anybody you hate. Like they can be different for different people. It can be Haitians for some people it can be

Mexicans for some people it can be Tom Nichols for some people it can be journalists right like it's just can be childless Catholics for everybody anybody you hate that's it they they it's the people about shadowy people behind the curtain it's the military like whatever it's that that's who it is want to learn a new language well the best way is to uproot your entire life drop yourself in the middle of a new country and figure it out from there but if you're not ready for that if you got a volunteer or podcast during an election season you can still learn a language the next best way that's with babble you speak like a whole new you with babble the science-backed language learning app that gets you talking.

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so no pressure. Here's a special limited-time deal for our listeners. Right now, get up to 60% off your Babbel subscription, but only for our listeners at babbel.com slash bulwark. That's 60% off at babbel.com slash bulwark, spelled B-A-B-B-E-L dot com slash bulwark. Rules and restrictions may apply. Let's go to the Trump town hall. Yesterday, Sarah Sanders, a very ozempic-y looking Sarah Sanders. I honor that. I'm just observing. I'm just observing.

A very ozempic-y looking Sarah Sanders last night interviewing Donald Trump in front of an audience. And I thought this answer was maybe Trump at his best. Let's listen to Trump's response to whether or not people leave his rallies. So we do these rallies. They're massive rallies. Everybody loves everybody stays till the end, by the way. You know, when she said that, well, your rallies, people leave. Honestly, nobody does. And if I saw them leaving, I'd say, and ladies and gentlemen, make America great again. I I'd get the hell out. Okay. Cause I don't want people leaving, but I do have to say, so I give these long, sometimes very complex sentences and paragraphs,

but they all come together. I do it a lot. I do it with, uh, Raising Cane, that story. I do it with the, uh, story on the catapults on the aircraft carries. I do it with a lot of different stories. When I mentioned Dr. Hannibal Lecter, I'm using that as an example of people that are coming in from Silence of the Lambs. I use that they say it's terrible. So they say, so I'll give this long complex area for instance that I talked about a lot of different territory. The bottom line is I said the most important thing. we're going to bring more plants into your state and this country to make automobiles. We're going to be bigger than before.

But the fake news, and there's a lot of them back there. You know, for a town hall, there's a lot of people. But the fake news likes to say, the fake news likes to say, oh, he was rambling. No, no, that's not rambling that's genius when you can connect the dots you gotta that's genius tom how many people left during that answer

well a couple of things first of all i am really struck that you're seeing more of it now you know there are there are verbal tells that show when he's really stressed you know like when he's really mad that i mean harris really got under his skin with that thing about rallies and so when he starts doing this there's a lot of them you know and he starts to it's really you know he's really and then of course he imitates somebody else sir people are leaving your rallies um that is trump when he is just freaking out. I think I've been, you know, I'm not a psychologist, but I am an experienced, you know, I think I'm about to complete my dissertation in Trump watching. You're an observer of the human condition.

Or of his condition, whatever we want to call that. The human adjacent condition. The abnormal human condition of whatever Trump's doing. And I think, you know, that's these really stressy kind of like, he's just kind of melting down up there. But these answers that he thinks makes sense, even in defending how much he makes sense, he doesn't make sense. And by the way, from now on, whenever I'm on deadline with magazine and my editor is like, hey, you know, why do I have 3,000 words of gibberish? I'm going to say it's genius. It's not rambling.

It's genius. It's just so complex. It's too complex. It's over your head. It's over your head. And then he comes back to the auto jobs, even being generous to him. The only sense I could make out of that was he was trying to say that people don't leave his rallies, and that he gives very lengthy speeches that he ties them together. He ties the themes together eventually, I guess is what he's trying to say. What came across to me is that

he is deeply stung. And this is his way of doubling down. Like when he got criticized about Hannibal Lecter, his way of dealing with that a normal person would say, you know, I made a joke about Hannibal Lecter. Some people, they just don't get my sense of humor. He'd move on. But instead, Trump being Trump, he has to repeat it and keep trying to like drive home the joke just out of defiance of the people who don't like it. And now no one, like nobody in the audience gets it. Trump himself, insofar as he understands it, doesn't understand the difference between asylums and insane asylums. That's where that came from. But in Trump fashion, if you told Trump tomorrow, stop talking about, because he's done this, right? Stop talking about what an attractive

woman Kamala Harris is. If you told him, don't do that, and if all the newspapers and the Wall Street Journal and Fox, if everybody criticized him for it, that's all he'd talk about, because that's what he does. He has oppositional defiance disorder, and you'd get two hours of how beautiful Kamala Harris is, because he can't help himself. I mean, in a way, you could really manipulate him this way. Hey, Donald, stop talking about how good the economy was under Joe Biden, you know, and he would just do it, you know. I think you might have just given George Conway his next ad for the Golf Channel in Palm Springs, just about Donald Trump. Why won't you stop talking

about how beautiful Kamala Harris is? And you saw it during the debate. I mean, it was amazing to me that you could watch Harris just like opening this bucket of chum and just taking out a big hunk of like fish guts and throwing it in the water. And every single time he jumped out of the water and just grabbed it and wrestled with it. And then the moderators would say, all right, well, now that you've, you know, burned yourself to the ground on abortion, let's move off this issue. And Trump say, no, no, I have one more thing to say about abortion. I have to say it again. I just want to take one small victory lap here, Tim. I said to people before the debate, they were like, I hope she does that. You know, I'm speaking and shut up.

And, you know, I hope that she puts him down and gives him the triple Z snap and tells him to shut up. And I said, I want her to let him talk. Just let him go. He got the last word every time he wanted it. I mean, he interrupted and I went one more minute and you could see Harris to her credit looking over and she was basically like, no, no, please, please go ahead. I'm sorry. Take the floor. He talked, I don't have it in front of me. I think either like nine or 11 more minutes than her, a significant amount of time, significant amount of time. And she was all for, you could just see

her saying, oh no, if you'd like to say one more thing about abortion you know i cede my time to the gentleman from florida you know yeah there were some democrats that were complaining about this i'm with you that was the next day they were like look at the time difference and look at how trump always got the last word it was just like no, no, that was the plan. That was the plan. Trump always got the last word in the sense of Trump always, you know, hit himself in the head with a brick last, you know, but to go back to the point, he can't help it. I mean, it's just, that's what you hear in these winding, meandering things is that whatever he's been criticized about, he has to nurse that injury and talk about it. And it's like these rallies are like therapy for him. Hey, y'all, I'm back telling you about the

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always with energy always i don't want to be boring about it, but there's no bigger subject. It covers everything. If you make donuts, if you make cars, whatever you make, energy is a big deal. And we're going to get that. It's my ambition to get your energy bill within 12 months down 50%. If I can do that, you've done a hell of a job. 5-0. Not 15. 50.

And we've got to work with our farmers. Our farmers are being decimated right now. They're being absolutely, absolutely decimated. And, you know, one of the reasons is we allow a lot of farm product into our country. We're going to have to be a little bit like other countries. We're not going to allow so much. We're going to let our farmers go to work. And I don't know if you remember. I love the farmers because, you know, I had many meetings as president.

Prices are too high. So we're going to constrain supply. That's our plan. We're going to tear off foreign countries and we're going to constrain the supply of food. Is that how supply and demand works? I forget. It's been a while i have always thought that how unfortunate it is that food prices are so high because we allow cheap grapes uh you know in the middle of winter i mean it's he he doesn't understand anything you know i'm sorry literally the first chart it's like i can picture myself in in college you're in the big room because it's the 101 class it's like the first chart here's supply and demand it's like we don't have that we're going to constrain the supply that's our answer that'll definitely lead to lower prices did the guy that took his tests or you know or went to class for him at wharton you know did the guy who sat in class for him at wharton like

tell him what happened in those classes? I shouldn't say. I'm sure he took his own tests, and I'm sure they were terrible, which is why he won't release his grades. But you're right. It's econ 101. But it's also what he was really trying to do. Once again, if we're going to do the kind of exegesis of a Trump statement, he got sidetracked in his brain from here's a grandmother asking me about food prices oh but i have to remember to suck up to the farmers and say something that indicates to farmers how their income is going to increase because i will make food more expensive and they'll be better off oh

but wait this grandmother is still here and she of course will pay those higher prices and so in conclusion libya is a land of contrast you know i mean he does he just his brain i like david brooks's comment about his brain it's like a bunch of fireflies in a in a jar i think of it as a pachinko machine remember those a pachinko machine you drop the ball he's like japanese plinko was this plinko no no no pachinko machine it's like this japanese pin he's like Japanese. Plinko? Is this Plinko? No, no, no. A pachinko machine is like this Japanese pinball where you drop this metal ball and it kind of bounces off all these little spikes. And at the bottom, it ends up in, you know, this many points, that many points. This is kind of like Plinko.

This is like Plinko. The price is right. Pachinko and Plinko. I guess I just never realized that the price is right stole this from Japanese culture. You know, it's like you drop the ball. The ball is a question. How will you lower prices? And it goes, dink, and it might be energy, and then it bounces over to farms, and it might land in, you know, Hannibal Lecter land. You never know, and it's a completely

random thing. Sometimes it pays off, right? Sometimes it goes, ding, ding, ding, and the answer is actually the question that was asked. That's pretty rare. But this is also where I just have to keep excavating the Fran Lebowitz quote. You don't know anybody as stupid as Donald Trump, you just don't. And that's a basic problem. He's not just that he's 78, and that he's declining, and that he has all these kind of narcissistic, you know, twitches, and that he's emotionally unstable. he's also just dumber than a bag of hammers he just always has been well i'm going to challenge that fran levo it's quote let's listen to uh the person that might be the head of donald trump's cdc if he becomes the president

president trump has asked me specifically to do two things one to help unravel the capture of the agencies by corrupt influence. You know, I don't have a post for myself that's picked out. And helping to choose the people who can run FDA and NIH and CDC in a way that restores public health rather than... Can you imagine if you're at FDA or NIH and Bobby Kennedy all of a sudden? I mean, they must be dying. They must be dying. They must be dying. But I'll bring in people to run those agencies like Callie means, like Casey means. You think they're going to, I mean mean they have nightmares about that yeah they should and they should they should they should the one thing all of us agree with

tucker and rfk and tom nichols and tim miller agree on we should have nightmares about that but you have failed in your challenge he is not stupider than donald trump i mean donald trump is even with the brain donald trump is depleted uranium levels of density you know when it comes to stupidity rfk is just bonkers he's he was once an intelligent man who is now just living you know somewhere out in the like the cassini rings in outer space. And Tucker is just pathetic. I mean, Tucker is, Tucker's just, just pathetic, but RFK is not stupid. I would say this though. My one pushback to you on this is if Donald Trump left to his own devices would not, and if he was in charge of the government would not like be,

you know, make rules that would bring back the whooping cough, you know, and RFK if our, with RFK though, that's, that's the objective. Tim, Tim, if, if someone said it's to your advantage and it'll help you win Wisconsin and you won't go to jail, he would hand out live whooping cough, you know, virus. Okay. So let's cut that shit right now. All right. You win. I can see it. Donald Trump's stupid you know two interesting things one is he's saying you know rfk is saying about i'll i'll

take over the nih and you know the people and he's not really saying very much and you can feel you can hear them in the back the crowd's going yeah whoa and they're like it's like dude he hasn't really said anything yet so i know you're trying to maintain your energy here. But you don't have to amen, you know, every article and pronoun coming out of him. And again, it shows you have kind of the syntheticness of this, this movement, you know, this kind of, I don't want to say it's not AstroTurf, but there's a fakeness to all of this of, you know, it's just people who want to hear somebody say something crazy and they don't really care what it is. But interestingly enough, and now I'll throw in a little news tidbit. One guy that doesn't seem to be on board with this as much that you would think is Joe Rogan. Yeah. is uh joe rogan yeah and you know it could be that there's kind of a there's kind of just a line beneath which donald trump not it's not because joe rogan is is like had a dark night of the soul and said am i pushing really bad stuff you know because he doesn't care about that

but is there a moment at which they that these guys that the bro sphere says these guys just aren't cool anymore they're like just they're too stupid they're they're just weird and they're just weird and nerdy like you know i'm sorry but you know jd vance you know i'm going back to vance but i could see rogan going trump you know i went the distance with the guy vance these guys are i can't hang out with these are the loser kids these are you know this is like hanging out with ralph wiggum man you know i can't i can't be a part of this totally and kamala alpha'd him in that debate so hard and the person that's supposed to be the biggest alpha kamala was clearly the alpha she stared him down and on the abortion stuff,

these guys are not evangelical Christians, Joe Rogan and I'll throw in Dave Portnoy over a bar stool. These guys respond to alpha and they, and they also do not want to, you know, have any accidents that where, where they are unable to, you know, have the woman that they had an affair with make the choice that they would prefer.

They're not for either of that. And so it's an awkward coalition. Let us put that more kindly and say, they live the kind of life that their libertarian values are misaligned. That's exactly. Are misaligned from the abortion bounty system in Texas. How about that? Joe Rogan lives in Texas.

I think their libertarian values, there you go, are misaligned from the abortion bounty regime that's been put in place in Texas. So between that and the albinism, it is. There is no way that they're losing him. Okay, while we're on positive, one last thing. There's news. This is the official podcast of Never Trumpers, so we've got to shout out Never Trumpers when they do the right thing. Over 100 national security Republicans for Harris this morning. Many of the names you already know.

But a couple of things jumped out at me. Charles Bustani, former Louisiana rep, pretty conservative. Former rep for Florida, Dan Miller. John Negroponte, no squish there. Bob Zellick. All these weak sisters. Bob Zellick, who was criticizing Biden's economic policy just last year. Then you got my favorite, Christopher Buckley,

son of William F. Buckley, but also the writer of Thank You for Smoking, the film of which was produced by, do you know who? The Trump and Putin, but by David Sachs. David Sachs produced that film. And so that's a nice little poke in his eye. That's great news. And to all the other, all of our friends are on there

elizabeth newman olivia troy everybody kinsinger but uh but it's good bob roberth comstock who's the guy in south carolina too there's a former english bob english english right right right yeah no and i mean you know this is this is the natural i mean the my argument as you well know tim because you know we have been kind of banging the same gong from, you know, in different pitches across the, I don't know where I was going with that metaphor, but you know what I'm saying? We've been hitting that same note. Banging that gong. Banging that gong of saying, look, you know, if you get up there as a Republican and you say, I believe Donald Trump is an existential threat to the Constitution. My question was always to Ed, and therefore what?

Right. And what are we going to do about that? Right. It's the Sean Connery moment, right? What are you prepared to do? You know, and the answer was always, well, you know, you get the John Bolton answer. Well, I'm going to write in Ronald Reagan. Well, that's great.

He's been dead for a while. Yeah. He's not going to be the president, unfortunately. Or fortunately, depending on how you want to look at that. But that was not an answer. And so good on these guys for... Look, it's at the very least good on them for being politically consistent and saying, if I believe this,

then it is obvious that the next step is that. Yeah, our friend Brett Stevens of the New York times seems to be vacillating. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm not happy. Okay. Just pretend I never said it.

Well, no, I can't not. No, no. You said it to take a line from gross point blank, Tim, one of my favorite movies.

No, but you said it. And now I'm left with the aftermath. All right. Let it rip. Oh my God. Well, she hasn't earned my vote yet what i read that whole article i was like well she hasn't really explained you know her trade policy yet i'm like

oh my god and then he and then he says and i thought of you um he's like well you know for many of the never trumpers but trump and i thought of the reason i thought of you was your your great column about actually orange man bad is enough that is actually a good enough and when people are saying to me oh so you're just saying orange man bad yes and that's enough i'm sorry that i don't need to say you need to say more than that no no i don't actually need to say more than that and steven says this whole i mean it really came across to me as like, I don't know, eight, 900 words of, I want to remind you all that I'm still a very, you know, cerebral conservative who cares about trade deficits or something. Well, you know, that's, that's great for, and in 2028, you know, that'll establish those bona fides. But it was just a, it was an article that

didn't make any sense to me other than as kind of performative sort of, oh, you know, I'm not, I'm very independent, and I'm an independent thinker. And especially for somebody living in New York, where he says, well, it doesn't really matter. But there are a lot of people like Stevens taking that position, who do live in places like virginia exactly and pennsylvania and the greater milwaukee you know yeah and i i just i didn't let me put it this way when i saw the head somebody did a screenshot of that page with stevens kamala harris hasn't earned my yet. And I saw that and I thought it was one of those parody headlines. And I thought, no, that's that can't be, you know, it's unfortunate.

We got 50 days when I'm over. We didn't get to Kamala at the NABJ yesterday. I did a video with Sam Stein on that. So also, we didn't get to Donald Trump's interview with conspiracy theorist Wayne Allen Root. So I did YouTubes on both of those. So if you have not gone to the Bulwark YouTube page, go do that. But before I let you go, Tom, we will end on a high note. You have a new cat. You referenced her earlier. Her name is Lily.

You wrote the beautiful piece about Carla. And I believe this cat's Lily, her name maybe has a Carla tribute in it. In keeping with naming my cats over the years from Cheers, Carla Tortelli Nichols, and now I have Lilith Carla Nichols. So Lily for short, and she's about six months old, and she is a murderous little ball of energy. I was just before I came here today to talk to you. I have all these toys and all the little laser zappies and the little automatic things.

And I turn them on and know what she'd rather do is jump out the minute I get out of the shower and grab my ankle because she's a kitten and kittens need to murder things. But she is hilarious and she's quite an affectionate little kitten. You know, we grieved for Carla for almost six months. We just couldn't even look at another pet. It was just we threw away all our pet stuff and we put things away. And then we went to the shelter when it was kitten season and they had just tons of cats that they had to get rid of. And this one jumped up and kind of banged on the window and said, forget about the other ones. I'm right here.

And we said, said okay that's the one that's wonderful well if you lose her for an hour or two she'll probably come back in through the bedroom window don't be calling the police and blaming the haitian neighbors um the yes i'm i start searching for her among the large haitian community of newport rhode island you know good god but yes i have a new kitten and so far she seems safe from being turned into an appetizer

wonderful we appreciate Lily and Miss Sassy and everyone else that got us here thank you Tom Nichols you're the best we'll be back tomorrow

for another edition of the Borg Podcast we'll see you all then peace And then it looks Peter's song Not the same words, don't you feel that wrong? Oh, she came into the bedroom window Like a blue girl, like a blue girl, like a blue girl Never seen a child so hard Whispered words could mend broken hearts The sun is flying on a hurricane Our boys squeal like someone before her

Hey, diddly-liddle Don't believe everything you see Hey, did you hear that? It's only real and look what you see Round and round and round she goes She's as cold as in a movie or a show Little in the back in the very last row And all the show goes on

On and on The Bullard Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.