The Bulwark Podcast - Tracy Alloway and Will Sommer: A Cabinetful of Clueless Grifters

Episode Date: August 25, 2026

Yield curve control has gone mainstream (seriously, just ask the Asheville Beatnik with a message for Scott Bessent), so Tracy Alloway is here to explain the latest economic turmoil to Tim. Bessent��s bond buyback gambit seems to have flopped, but apparently, according to the President, there’s always the option of military intervention to bring the market to heel. In the meantime, consumers are going to pay more interest on everything, and there’s no plan to reduce the federal debt. Then, for some MAGA drama dessert, Will Sommer joins the pod to talk about Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy’s dud of a pay-for-play road trip video series, the Trump/Tucker beef, and the feud between a Groyper-adjacent Undersecretary of State and an anonymous MAGA propaganda account that your tax dollars are paying for.Will Sommer and Tracy Alloway join Tim Miller.show notes: Picture of the Asheville protestor with the yield curve sign Tracy’s Odd Lots podcast Will and Tim’s DC tour Will’s False Flag newsletter on Data Republican Catch Tim, Sarah, and JVL on The Next Level later tonight

Hello and welcome to the Bullwark Daily. I'm your host, Tim Miller. In segment one, we're going to be discussing yield curves and bond markets. And if such matters overheat your brain like they do mine, we're going to do our best to make it fun. And as a special bonus, like it's a gift in segment two, I'm bringing Will Summer on. And we're just going to discuss Maga World craziness, like it's a Bravo show. All right. So you'll get a little bit of brain dessert in segment two.

But first, help us navigate the world of bond vigilantes and Scott Bessens stepping on Rakes. I'm delighted to welcome back to the show, the co-host of Bloomberg's Oddlots podcast, Tracy Allaway. Hey, Tracy. Hey, how's it going? I love that my appearance here comes with a disclaimer. We might fry your brain, but it'll all be okay in the end. Yeah, it's like when Jason Calacanus comes on. I've got to do a big wind up to warm people up at the beginning.

But surely the people love Tracy far more than Jason. I want to explain the impetus for you coming on. I was on social media. And I saw a picture. And on this picture, it was a man. It looks like maybe like a 1950s beatnik kind of. He's in Asheville. He's carrying a walking stick.

And he has a sign for passers by. And the sign says this, Scott Bessent, colon, yield curve control will never work. You gay pedo. And I saw that sign and I was like, I think I'm interested in the message he's sending, but I don't understand it. And I've seen a number of other stories on this.

And I was like, I need Tracy Alloway to come on and explain this sign to me. Like, she is an Instagram finance influencer, and I'm a dummy trying to understand what's happening in the world. Can you do that? I mean, I will do my best. The first thing I'll say is you know that the bond market has become big news when protesters are holding actual signs, screaming about yield curve control, right? We've gone mainstream, finally. This is the moment I have lived for. Okay, so, I mean, where should I even begin?

Let's see. The first thing you need to know is that bond yields, so rates that are paid on U.S. government debt, reached a 19-year high recently, which basically means people are more reluctant to buy U.S. government debt and to finance the U.S. Treasury and all its spending than they have been previously. So there's a little bit of nervousness out there in the market. In general, governments do not really like their bond yields going up for seemingly, no. reason. And then out of nowhere, we had Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent come out and make this announcement saying that in the name of market liquidity, and we can get into what exactly that means, he was going to buy back even more treasury bonds and replace them with short-term debt. And his whole thinking, his rationale behind that was this magic word liquidity, which you can think of as ease of trading in the market or market functionality. But the weird thing was that the market, the U.S. Treasury market was pretty much functioning very normally on that day. And so what most people thought when they saw this announcement was that it's not that the Treasury market isn't functioning right.

It's that the Treasury is uncomfortable with the current price of U.S. debt, and they want to bring those yields down. And so the people that are buying the U.S. debt usually are what? foreign banks, individuals, investors, like who is buying the debt? You named a bunch of them just then, but the interesting thing about the buying base for U.S. Treasuries is that it's changed quite a bit over the years. So it used to be, think about other central banks in the world, like your China and your maintaining stability of your currency. In order to do that, you have to buy U.S. treasuries.

And I'm sure all your listeners have heard about this idea of China holding a big stockpile of U.S. Treasuries. If you're a central bank managing your reserves or your currencies, you will be buying lots of treasuries. Now, alongside that, there's your normal investor, right? Everyone from you and me, if you have a Treasury Direct account, to pension funds, insurers, hedge funds. What's really interesting about the Treasury market in recent years is if you look at the proportion of the different buyers in that buyer base, it's changed a lot. There are far fewer central banks, these big institutional holders that basically have to buy treasuries because of what they're doing with their own accounts. And there are a lot more what we call price sensitive

investors. So think like hedge funds, private investors who are buying treasuries because they think it's a good investment because they like the price. Now, what's happened because of that is the price that they are asking for treasuries, the return for that investment has gone up. And so we've seen the rates on U.S. Treasuries, the yields start to go up more. Basically, you used to have this pool of huge buyers who had to buy treasuries, and now you don't. Now you have to convince them that buying U.S. government debt is a good deal. And as a result of that, we've seen yields start to go up. Investors are saying, actually, this isn't such a good deal unless I get a higher return

in the form of those higher yields. All right. So for the brain fried out there, when you say, the yield is higher. What that means functionally for like regular people is that the interest rate that they're paying on debt is higher, right? So your mortgage rate is higher, your car interest rate is higher. Like that's what it means.

That's right. And the interest rate that the U.S. Treasury is paying to its borrowers is higher. They have to pay more in order to get people to buy the debt. Got it. So back to the sign. yield curve control will never work. Is that true? Did it work?

Did Scott Besson do anything for people by purchasing this debt? All right. So it's sort of mixed up here because Scott Besson is saying one thing. He's saying that he's doing this in order to improve the market functioning, market liquidity. Now, as I said, there were no signs when he announced this that the market was functioning in any disorderly way. It was a very normal, what some people would call a boring day. in the Treasury market, despite that spike in longer-term yields, it had the effect, when he made the announcement, it had the effect of bringing longer-term yields down for like two minutes this lasted.

But when people talk- So if you like in that two minutes, you wanted to get a 30-year mortgage, like you got a little bit better of a deal for like a half an afternoon? You got a lower rate, which is what the Treasury wants to see. So people were encouraged to buy the debt. But on the other hand, so this is where yield curve control comes in. So you bring the longer term yields down and you, well, hopefully don't bring shorter term yields up. But you basically, you're trying to flatten the curve.

Okay. Got it. This is the financing curve of the U.S. Treasury. That is yield curve control. However, as I said, by the next day, bond yields were up where they were before the announcement. And so it really doesn't seem to have worked in this particular time frame, which is why presumably we've seen Scott Besson since come out and start talking about other things that the U.S. Treasury could do, like buy back even more debt, use the Treasury's reserve account to do that.

We had an incredibly amusing clip of President Trump who was asked about bond market intervention, and he basically said the final boss of bond market intervention is somehow military intervention, which I don't think. The ultimate intervention is our military, and if we have to use that, we will. How would that work? Was that just be like, is there a guy in charge of the gun of the bond market and we can just send the Marines in and put a gun to his head and be like, lower the yield? Lower the yield now. You'll be unsurprised to hear that there isn't.

I'm not aware of any president in the history of the United States who has threatened the bond market with military intervention if you take Trump's statement at face value, which, you know, I think mostly we should take Trump's statements at face value. So no idea how that's supposed to work. Hmm. So the old James Carville quote that he used to think that if he was reincarnated, he wanted to come back as presidents, but then he realized he wanted to come back as the bond market, because the bond market can intimidate anybody, including presidents. And that's kind of like where we're at right now. I think every bond correspondent in history has at some point used that quote in a column. They have like sitting on their desk. Right. But the reason is it's true. There are plenty of governments out there that have been toppled by the bond market, if nothing else. you think back, I mean, we have recent examples in the form of Lowe's Trust in the UK who got ousted after going through a bond market crisis. So it can happen. The bond market can be a scary thing for governments precisely because it's difficult to control. It's not impossible to influence, but it's very difficult to control. Okay, so Trump might send in the military, might send in the

Marines to intimidate, I assume it'd be Jews and charge the bomb market. I don't know. I assume that's what hasn't his head, but who knows, what's happening in Trump's brain. Besson has a slightly more complicated plan, I guess, as of yesterday. This was Charlie Gasparino. It's Fox News, business reporter. He wrote this. I'm just going to read it in full because it's hard for me to parse. Treasury Secretary Scott Besson will do whatever it takes to, quote, put the fear of God into the bond vigilantes, shorting the long end of the curve in an attempt to drive the 10-year yield to 5%. Wall Street executives, direct knowledge of his thinking, say that would include buyback, selling short-term debt, possible elimination of long-dated

bonds like the 20-year, et cetera, it's a short-term solution to keep yields from soaring further, strangling growth as the midterms approach, they say. Thoughts. Yeah, so we should be asking the question, why is this a priority for the Treasury Secretary at this particular moment in time? And the truth is that the Treasury market is the benchmark interest rate against which all others are judged. So mortgage rates are priced off of U.S. Treasury.

So if treasury yields are spiking, those treasury rates are going up, so is your mortgage rate, right? Which is probably not what Republicans want to see ahead of the midterms. There's also the question of the relationship between the stock market. So we have all these huge AI companies that are financing themselves selling debt at really unprecedented rates. And their growth also depends on what U.S. treasuries are doing at the moment. They need to be able to fund themselves cheaply if they're going to keep growing, if stock prices are going to keep going up so that Trump can still take credit for the stock market. So everything's kind of interrelated. What you don't want to see is a huge spike in bond yields that not only increases the Treasury's funding costs, but also starts making its way into, I guess, the popular mind in the form of higher mortgage rates and maybe a stock market dislocation.

Yeah. The interesting part of that at the end was the strangling growth. Because the question is, okay, what are the actual ways to get interest rates lower, right? I mean, if it looks like the recession indicators, the Fed will lower rates, here's a crazy idea. I think we could probably issue less debt with something the Trump administration said was a priority at the beginning. They had a whole program around this called Doge that Elon Musk was supposed to be in charge of where we're going to get our books more aligned.

But like, that's it, right? Those are the options? Those are like the real options on the table besides the gimmicks? Policymakers are nothing if not creative. So there are a few more. All right? All right. Let's hear. If you are a government struggling with high debt, how do you get that debt down? Okay, the easiest way is you grow your way out of debt. You grow faster than your stock of debt is increasing. That sounds nice, but, you know, kind of hard to do. That's a great idea. But the problem, we are also doing tariffs. Yeah. I saw that we're rescinding a record number of visas for tourists and businesses from immigrants. Like, we're doing a lot of things to. stifle growth simultaneously. So that option is a little challenging. There's a lot of cognitive dissonance, let's say, in some of these economic policies. So, okay, put growth aside.

Like, we're not going to do that. The second one is you could have higher inflation and you erode away the debt. All right? Like, the value of $100 that you owe from 10 years ago is less than, is a lot less than, you know, the value now. You just eroded away through high inflation. We know from the past six years experience that Americans really hate inflation. Trump was basically, you know, voted in because people seem to really hate inflation. So let's assume that we're not going to do that. The third way is actual fiscal consolidation. So reduce the debt, which you just pointed out.

So raise taxes, lower spending, all that kind of basic stuff. Turns out that's politically unpopular too, right? People don't like to see entitlement programs that they've been paying into for years and years suddenly go away. So that's a tough one as well. And we've seen through things like the one big beautiful bill that Trump doesn't really seem that interested in consolidating debt. And so you're left with, let's see, the fourth and final way, which is what we call financial repression. And this is stuff like yield curve control. It's stuff like finding ways to force investors to hold your debt.

at lower yields. And it can be anything from the yield curve control type stuff that we just described to things like, you know, Scott Besson intervened in the Japanese yen recently, and as part of that, the way he did it was he intervened in the end in a way that discouraged Japan from actually selling a bunch of its treasuries to protect its currency. Or it can be something like, you tell the banks that they need to hold a bunch more treasuries to satisfy regulatory rules. So there's stuff like that that generally falls under the umbrella of financial repression that governments can do. The problem with that is someone is still losing out in that scenario. And it's usually, you know, investors, pension funds, people who aren't earning as high a return on their debt investments as they could be otherwise.

But the reason that governments often like financial repression is because it's sort of politically nebulous. It's really hard if you're an average person on. the street to say that, like, I am losing out because some bank has been forced to hold more U.S. debt. It's much more, I guess, salient to you if you're living through high inflation or if your social security has been cut or something like that. So this is now way out of my depth. I was texting my father this morning. He knows about this stuff.

So I had some dad questions. So I'm coming to you. And is that related to kind of the redemption issue with private credit? Is that like this idea that, you know, investors. like have restrictions now on how much they can redeem? Is that it or is that a different thing? It's a separate issue, but I guess spiritually, it's kind of similar in that you're like, you're forcing investors to hold the debt at prices they wouldn't hold it otherwise.

So for instance, you're telling a bank, you have to hold a certain percentage of your assets in government bonds. And so you build up like a forced buyer base for government bonds at lower yields. and that has the effect of reducing the Treasury's interest rates or interest rate expenses, I should say. All right. So we're going to come back to the interest rates. You're going to Jackson Hole. We're talking about the Fed. Before we do that, I just feel like I have to put a pin on the sign. We covered why yield curve control will never work. You know, it's a little bit, it's a little bit more nuanced than sign man has to say about that. But generally, we kind of covered the way that didn't work. The whole thing won't fit on a sign. But directionally, I think he's probably right. We didn't really cover you gay pedo. Do you know what the accusation is there?

Must be Epstein-related. My opinion is there's plenty to say about the bond market itself without getting into ad homin and an attack. So, you know, let's just focus on the debt mechanics. Okay, that's fun. I'm just as the gay. I felt like I could cover that. We hate gay on gay crime, though.

All right. So you're going to Jackson Hole, where there's symposium on the Fed, what's happening with interest rates. There'll be discussions. back to Tim's dad text. And by the way, I guess I don't want to out them or embarrass them right now in the podcast I'm about to. Trump curious.

I mean, not anymore, really, but, you know, like this is not a lib finance guy. Everything Trump is doing is putting more pressure on inflation interest rates. I've listed out a lot of things that are happening, which is whether that be tariffs, some of the stuff we've been discussing. So simultaneously, this is the disconnect we were talking about earlier. Like, Trump says he wants the interest rates to be lower. Like, wants to point at Kevin Warsh and say lower rates. but like all of the policy choices that he's making are making that more challenging.

Is that a fair assessment of the state of play? I think that's absolutely fair. I mean, inflation has, we've seen signs of inflation building, and a bunch of that is either through tariffs or through the war in Iran, which is pushing up energy costs, which is like the one thing that you wouldn't want to increase if you were actually concerned about bringing inflation down. How do you think Warsh is going to navigate that? I mean, it's sort of like one of these things where it's like,

like, I don't know, maybe they screw it up bad enough that the economy gets into recession and he can lower rates because of that. But, you know, there's other things happening, whether be the AI investment boom, et cetera, you know, things that are like keeping the complicated American economy churning enough that like we're not really getting into recession territory. And so he's kind of stuck, right? Like we have this persistent, relatively low but annoying level of inflation, you know, and policies the Trump's putting in place that are making it worse. And so I think a lot of assumptions are maybe rates even go up, right? Yeah. I mean, all I can say is I'm expecting the mood at the Jackson Hole

Lodge Bar to be more awkward, let's say, than in some previous years. I actually think it's going to be one of the more interesting meetings that we've seen. So Jackson Hole, it's the Kansas Fed's annual symposium. And what it really is is a research conference. So a bunch of policymakers get together and they present papers and they discuss them. But what it's known for is having the Fed chair of the time come out and make a big speech on Friday. And no one really knows what that speech is going to be, although, you know, in recent times we've had Powell who used it as basically another policy speech. The theme of this year's Kansas Fed Symposium, by the way, which no one is talking about, is like financial innovation and payments.

You could just imagine, you could not choose like a less zeitgeisty topic for monetary policy. So just ignore that bit. All eyes are going to be on Warsh. The problem that Kevin Warsh is facing is that he's coming in at a time when inflationary pressures seem to be building when the president has explicitly said that he wants lower rates. And so there's attention there, right?

There's also a tension that Warsh himself seems to have, gotten himself into because in his last press conference, when the Fed decided to hold, he got up and made a very confusing speech for markets about how he doesn't want the Fed to provide as much forward guidance about its future interest rate decisions. He wants the market to kind of be the ball in the game of the global economy. Take the ball and run with it. Don't worry so much about what the Fed is doing. The problem is that now you have the Treasury, which is, you know, trying to manipulate the bond market. And so it's very tough to tell the market, tell investors that actually, you know, like, just go do your own thing, ignore what all the policymakers are doing.

And so what people are going to want to see on Friday is more clarity about how the Fed is thinking about stubbornly high inflation. So, you know, we've had three to four percent inflation for years and years now. That is above the Fed's 2 percent target. People are trying to understand how the Fed is treating the relationship, the trade-off between unemployment and inflation. The market didn't seem to like Warsh's explanation of how he's thinking about that relationship back in July. So this is the opportunity for him to clarify, but it's coming at a time when the Treasury market is explicitly trying to get yields down. And it's coming at a time when Trump has said that he thinks rates are artificially too high. And so it seems like a very, very tough job for

Warsh to kind of thread that needle on Friday. And I suspect what we're going to end up getting is a speech that's basically all about AI and productivity and how that'll lead to deflation in the long term. And so maybe the Fed doesn't have to move that high to curb inflation. Now, I suspect that's going to be his out card, but we'll find out. If you're just guessing Tracy Crystal Ball, you see flat rates, slight increases, like what do you think's coming? Who the hell knows? Yeah, I mean, who knows, right? The problem is. is every time the Treasury is buying back more longer data debt, it's issuing more short-term debt. And so it doesn't want short-term interest rates to go up either, which is exactly what

the Fed would have to do if it was hiking in order to decrease inflation. So I guess we'll see. I mean, again, Warsh is in this incredibly difficult position where he's basically talked about how he doesn't want the market to be interfered with by policymakers. At the same time, that we have the Treasury market very obviously interfering with investors, and we have Trump also, you know, sort of jawboning about interest rates on the other side. So what's your, you know, kind of view about like economy right now, like macro wise? I mean, like you look at it and, you know, I think that there's one, this is one of those things where like Trump is in a similar situation to where like a lot of Biden people were. If you listen to the Trump people talking about

the economy where they're like, you know, I don't know, the market's going up and like unemployment, like ticked up a little bit, but it's still pretty low, like historically speaking. And yet people feel terrible about the economy. Like the persistent inflation, I think, has made it really hard for working class people, people on the bottom, like two quintiles. And, but even like the upper middle class is like costs or expensive. Everything's expensive. You know, I think they are kind of complaining about how much everything costs, you know, boy, first class. plane ticket and a fancy hotel these days, it's costing more than ever. Let me tell you, you hear that complaint a lot. And so, you know, how do you kind of make sense of that, like the,

you know, charts still going up in the stock market with everybody feeling a lot of concern about the broader economy? I mean, in my mind, the big change between the Biden administration and the Trump administration in terms of the economy is what's going on with AI and the hyperscalers. And And it feels like so much of U.S. economic growth right now is being driven by the data center buildout and by big tech, essentially. And there aren't that many people who are enjoying that process or who are winning because of it. Like people with lots of stocks have seen their portfolios go up quite a lot.

That's true. And in fact, there's an argument as well that one of the reasons that U.S. consumption has kept going up, even as inflation, pressure. start to build again, even as gas prices get higher, is because people who have stocks are, you know, enjoying that windfall. But what worries me is the sort of circularity there where big tech is doing well, building out data centers, stock prices go up, the U.S. economy keeps growing, and that then goes back to big tech still building data centers. Like, it feels very circular in a lot of ways. And this might be one reason why the U.S. Treasury and the Trump administration itself is so focused on bond yields at the moment, because a big vulnerability for the AI buildout is those financing costs, right?

Yeah. And so if financing suddenly gets too expensive or becomes unaffordable in some way, then maybe that big AI boom starts to wobble a bit. Maybe stock portfolios start to wobble. Maybe consumption starts to go down. and that's when you get the big, you know, economic hit. I think that's probably what they're worried about. It's kind of circular in two ways, right? Like, it's circular in that, like, the money is being sloshed around as being passed,

kind of a small group of people. And, you know, as you mentioned, like a lot of, you know, the rest of us or the rest of regular Americans aren't benefiting from that or not only seeing the costs. And this partially explains kind of the backlash against data centers. It's also kind of circular in a literal way, like the financing of all this is very start going, like, what's your take on that? Like, as an amateur outsider, I kind of read some of these stories about, like, how, you know, Open AI is financing all of this stuff. And it feels

scummy. Like, it feels like it's unsustainable. It feels very perpetual motion machine to me in the sense that, like, it's fine as long as it keeps going. But what happens when it eventually stops? I mean, look, there's lots to talk right now about hidden leverage of the big tech companies, so balance sheet commitments, borrowings that you can't actually see. And there's a lot of work being done on this now because, again, it's mostly hidden. So for instance, if you're a hyper-scaler, if you've signed a bunch of commitments to build data centers, a lot of those don't actually show up on your balance sheet until the data center is operational. So you have all these forward commitments for data centers, but they're not included in your sort of official balance sheet. So

your financial health looks better than it does if you were to include the like 100 unbuilt data centers that have yet to start operating. And some of those numbers are crazy. But like even the official numbers are kind of crazy. So I really think a lot of people not just, you know, in general, but in finance specifically haven't yet appreciated just how much debt the big tech companies are issuing in order to fund the AI build out. I mean, I, I could throw around specific numbers, you know, hundreds of billions, but all those numbers become really meaningless after a while because they're just so large. But just to give you some context, in the investment-grade corporate bond market, this is where,

like, the best companies of the U.S. sell their debt, blue-chip companies, we call them. The big banks have historically been the predominant issuers in that market. The big banks sell billions and billions of dollars worth of investment-grade debt every year. Within two or three years, the hyperscalers are expected to be as big a proportion of that market as the big banks are. So we're seeing like this revolutionary change in one of the biggest markets in the world in just two or three years. So things are changing really, really fast. Like, again, this is an industry. Think about the big tech companies, the Googles, Metas, Facebooks of the world, whatever. They used to be really cash-rich companies. Companies like Apple had

so much cash, they didn't know what to do with it. And now they're all borrowing in the market to fund this AI buildout. And it's just happened so quickly. I don't think anyone has really had a chance to digest what it means. Altman saw a quote the other day where he started to downgrade, you know, his assessment of his own product, you know, where he's saying that, you know, three years ago, he thought that AI was going to move so quickly that we were going to see all these results unimaginably fast and people weren't ready for it. And he did an interview the other day where he's like, well, you know, now it's going a little slower than I thought, getting through the economy and maybe that can be a good thing. But that I watched that and I was like, it does, that does feel like a risk for the company, you know, because a lot of that, you know, debt and a lot of that investment is based on these promises of this kind of growth that is coming in the future. I'm just wondering if you have any sort of hot takes on that about the AI bubble discourse or, you know, whether, you know, there are any concerns being raised.

about like whether the productivity is going to match the investment debt. This is the great hope of, you know, not just Sam Altman probably, but Kevin Warsh at this moment in time too, is that productivity is going to go through the roof and the U.S. economy is going to grow its way out of all this debt, all the hyperscalor debt, all of that, and we won't have to worry about this anymore. I would say two things. Like setting the technology itself aside, you can have revolutionary technology that ends up being very difficult to monetize. And I think that's what we've seen so far, right? We've had

models coming out of China that are a lot cheaper than the models from U.S. hyperscalers that seem to do as good a job, like pretty close. I know a lot of U.S. companies, they won't talk about it publicly, but if you get them quietly in a bar or something, they'll tell you that they're using a Chinese model like Quinn or Kimmy, because it's open sorts. It's easier to plug in to their particular technology as it exists. And it's a lot cheaper. And so that's the question. Like we're spending a lot of money to develop these cutting edge models.

Are we going to actually be able to get enough money for them in order to pay off that debt and then keep the data center boom and the broader U.S. economy actually going? And I think there's a lot of disagreement on that front still. There's this video of J.D. Vance for a couple of years ago that started going around this past week. I don't know if you saw this on social media, where he was talking about how the U.S. being the dollar reserve currency is actually a resource curse and leads to things costing more. And he was kind of talking off the cuff. So, you know, sometimes there's like galaxy brain analysis of all the stuff that it's hard. I'm unsure whether he even knew what he was talking about.

But there are some worries, right? Like Peter Thiel has talked about, you know, kind of getting off the dollar, obviously a big. influence on J.D. Vance, moving more towards Bitcoin. I did notice this week that Bitcoin is back up, the crypto is back up again, like as kind of U.S. dollar issues arise in the bomb markets. I guess I'm just curious what you thought about J.D.'s comment about the dollar reserve currency being a little bit of a curse on us and whether there are like legit concerns that these guys have like a 40 chess plan for moving us off it. Oh, man.

Okay. I have not seen those comments from JD Vance specifically. But I mean, in general, like the dollar, the exorbitant privilege stuff, has that conversation's been going on for a long time, as has the idea that maybe the world is moving away from the dollar. And I think what we've seen, you know, that conversation, this idea that people aren't going to use dollars as much anymore in the future. it kind of comes into the psychgeist every once in a while and then it kind of flows out.

It's coming back in now, right? So you mentioned Bitcoin going up last week. I'm not sure we can attribute all of that move to the dollar conversation. But we also saw gold start to rally quite significantly. And that's definitely a de-dollarization kind of idea. And I think the basic thinking here is like, well, if you want a reserve currency that's safe for decades, it has been the U.S. dollar, but there are some things that have perhaps dented that appeal. Not all of them have to do with Trump, by the way.

You know, when Biden went after Afghanistan's central bank assets, that kind of boosted the conversation for a little bit. You now have Scott Bessent declaring, I don't know, some sort of economic world war on Iran through sanctions. Every time you get those kinds of U.S. sanctions, you see another bout of de-dollarization. talk. I think the thing that people misunderstand in that conversation, because it hasn't yet happened, the dollar is still the world's reserve currency, a lot of people will just dismiss it as like, oh, no, it's never going to happen. The dollar is so embedded in the fabric of the global

economy that it's just going to be here forever and people can't escape it for the following reasons. But in my mind, like, what we have seen is a sort of slow motion evolution to more of a multipolar currency world where people are looking at alternatives. We do know that more central banks are buying gold instead of dollar denominated assets. So there are hints of it there. I mean, I think they're nervous about what happens to dollar assets in the future. And again, if the U.S. Treasury is experimenting with things like yield curve control, that often means a lower dollar will come about as a result of those policies. Feels like I'd be careful what you wish for situation. Yeah, I think so. All right. Last thing, the favorite thing I like about out

lots is that you do these random things where you bring in experts who like really know a lot about one topic and and you kind of get to learn a lot about that one topic but you know you kind of broaden it out to the broader impact one of my favorite ones recently was the tungsten episode um and how like when there's concerns about uh tungsten mining when there's a rush on tungsten that usually is a precursor to geopolitical instability people should go listen to the whole episode said, but give us the 45 seconds, tungsten. All right. So tungsten is this mineral.

The funniest thing about tungsten, I should say, is it went kind of viral a few years ago among crypto bros, who for some reason got really into buying these little tungsten cubes, sometimes large tungsten cubes. So for instance, if you read the book about Sam Bankman-Fried, the very end of the book is Michael Lewis finding this giant rumored tungsten cubes. that SPF was like rumored to have purchased basically just as a joke. And if you listen to the crypto bros, they said they like tungsten because it had this very heavy material feel.

It's one of the world's, if not the world's densest material. And so if you hold even a tiny cube, it feels like you're holding like, you know, like you want some weight in your hand. Yeah. Yeah, like something physical to offset the ephemeralness of crypto, I guess. But tungsten is also a very serious material. It's used in a bunch of military-grade applications. And so whenever you see demand for tungsten start to pick up, tungsten production start to pick up,

it's usually because people are stockpiling some stuff for military application. And unfortunately, tungsten prices have been rising recently. And it looks like at least one tungsten mine has restarted production because prices are rising. and it now makes finding and sourcing tungsten economical and profitable for them. And if you look at history as your guide, that probably doesn't suggest anything good about the future direction of geopolitical stability. Well, maybe there's one smart person deep inside the Department of War that's doing that, but I've got some concerns to China.

I was watching the Chinese Robot Olympics, and it feels like a little bit more of a long-term view happening over there. I keep joking that my co-host Joe Wisenthalt, so he has a tungsten cube. He lost it and then he found it again and was very excited about it. But I keep joking with him, telling him that he's just going to have to donate it to the U.S. military efforts anyway. So he shouldn't get too attached. All right. We'll leave it there.

That's Tracy Allaway. I appreciate you so much for coming on here and educating us and dealing with my gay pedo jokes and enjoy Jackson Hole. And hopefully we'll catch you. Well, actually, hopefully we won't. you again soon because I usually call you and things are going walkie but I'm sure we will be seeing you again soon. All right. Thanks so much for having me. Appreciate it Tracy. I'm next Will Summ. All right. We are back. He is the author of the must read false flag newsletter. Honestly, if you have not subscribed to the false flag newsletter at the bulwark.com, what are you doing?

It is of course Will Summer. Hey, Will. Hey, thanks for having me. We got to hang out in person for people who miss this. It's the summer. We put out a lot of content and people miss things. Will and I took a tour of DC where we went to kind of MAGA landmarks, places where the aforementioned Secretary Scott Besson got into some fisticuffs at a private club with the Breitbart Embassy. You know, we went to a bunch of places around town, showed people who haven't been to DC what that's like. The feedback was mostly about Will's arms because people got to see Will. Yeah, there it is. Outside of the little box and he's more mussely than people expected. I also noticed that. Go check it out. If you missed it, It was pretty good.

I felt like we left some meat on the bone. I feel like we might have to do another one. What do you think? Yeah, you know, I was thinking like, you know, it's first administration. We didn't go to where the proud boys were supposedly doing Coke and stole a Republican congressional candidate's girlfriend. I think there's a lot of opportunities left over. The masturbating guy on the mall.

Yeah, where he was cranking his hog to the acrobat. You know, we got Scarlet Oak where, you know, the young staffers are getting drunk all the time. So, yeah, a lot of opportunities there. I'm back in D.C. at the end of September. Let us know if you want to see more of that. It's interesting. The Secretary of Transportation, who you think would have more stuff in its plate than us, saying like we're podcasters, did kind of a video series on the road of his own. A road trip was funded by people that he's supposed to regulate and our tax dollars.

He got to bring his whole family. Nice deal if you're in the cabinet. You wrote a newsletter a while back about how, like, they made a big stink about this and then didn't actually ever really put it out, maybe because gas prices are so high. They don't want to draw attention to the fact that regular people can't go on road trips. They finally did put it out. They dumped it on to YouTube, all the episodes in one sitting. If you added up the views of every episode, I don't think it matches the views for our tour of D.C. So they're not exactly lighting the world on fire on YouTube.

But I'm wondering what you, you were one of the few of the proud that watched the series. Anything of note? Oh, it was so good. You guys are missing out. Yeah, so it's called Great American Road Trip. It's very weird, even by kind of like the standards of like a MAGA media artifact. From the promotion, and as you said, this was supposed to come out in June. It came out, you know, what, last week after, I think maybe, my newsletter saying,

look, it's bad for Boeing and all these transportation companies to send the Secretary of Transportation on a trip with his family for a show. But it's way worse if the show never comes out because then they just got free trips for no reason. So it did come out. And I thought it was going to be kind of like, go to the Grand Canyon, go to Philadelphia and see Independence Hall. there's a little bit of that. But a lot of it is just about like interpersonal drama in the Duffy family, down to John Duffy's like 10-year-old kid gets constipation and has to go to the hospital. That sounds like I'm making it up.

There's like a whole episode where he's like, my tummy hurts. And he goes to the hospital. And they're like, does he have appendicitis? No, he's just constipated. I mean, like this is content. Next time you go online and look at how much an airplane ticket costs and then you go to the airport and the lines are really long and then the flight is delayed. Think about the fact that the Secretary of Transportation who should be overseeing all this, that should be their remit. Instead,

was doing a reality show road trip where there's an entire episode dedicated to his child's constipation. Think about Sean Duffy's child's constipation. The next time you're annoyed while traveling, I guess, would be a suggestion that I might have. I mean, we have airports right now that are literally running out of fuel. And Sean Duffy is like going back to his old. real world house on this show, all this stuff. Any other highlights or lowlights? I saw one clip. I haven't watched any.

I saw one clip about how the daughter, they weren't going to let her go to Harvard because she might get the woke mind virus. That was discussed as well. Yeah, it's a funny one there. Like, there are several episodes about where's the daughter going to go to college. And I guess maybe originally that was kind of like the idea for the show is like they're visiting colleges. And then they were like, wait, we hate colleges.

So to be clear, she does not get into Harvard at any point. So it was kind of a fake storyline. line. It was like, oh, I might want to, you know, maybe I want to run for president. I don't know. This is kind of what I told my parents when they wanted me go to Georgetown and I didn't even apply and I went to George Washington. I was like, I don't want to go to Georgetown. Okay. I'm not interested. Like, meanwhile, my 3.3 GPA was maybe the hold up there. Yeah, you know, Georgetown wasn't the place for, you know, a young man with integrity. As Sean Duffy says, they've professionalized corrupting the minds of young women, you know.

So then they go to Harvard and they meet with a. Catholic priests there. This is very weird. He might be like, wasn't this about road trips? And he's like, actually, you're allowed to be Catholic at Harvard. And they go, oh, wow, which is, you know, not that Donald Trump will ever know about this show's existence despite being in it himself. But, like, worry to watch it. He was like, aren't we like trying to crush Harvard?

Why are we saying, like, Harvard actually isn't as woke as you might think? Fascinating program. You guys should feel good with Secretary Sean Duffy at the wheel. A lot of Duffy talked this week. Yesterday we were talking about how he apparently doesn't read. or know anything about what's happening in Canada. I want to move on. We've got some Trump-Tucker stuff I only get to at the end,

but you have a classic Will Summer story. And this is the purpose that you serve in my life, personally. And I hope it's true for other people as well. I received a text from a friend of the show, Chris Krebs, American hero, who's the guy in the first Trump administration, who was trying to keep our elections safe. And then Trump tried to lie and said the elections were stolen. He was like, no, it's not true.

We have a lot of good people working. in the government. Anyway, Chris Krebs texts me, he's like, have you seen the data Republican story? And then sends me like seven texts that are like totally incomprehensible to me about this drama that is happening online. And so I, I message you and I was like, are you following this? You're like, yep, it's my next newsletter. I was like, thank God. Thank God. I don't have to do anything. Will will explain it to me. So the newsletter starts like this. Pro Trump internet sleuth Jenica pounds, better known as data Republican, to her nearly one million followers on X made a grim announcement on Friday.

Deep state operatives embedded within the Trump administration had tried to entrap her into committing treason. Tell us about that. Aminous news indeed. Yeah, so this is a lady named Jennifer Pound. She is, as I said, she's Native Republican. And this is, she emerged during Doge. She has no real, like, expertise with, you know, government data or this.

She's kind of this like wonk figure. And whenever Elon wanted to be like, I'm eliminating USAID, she would produce this AI written summary that would say, actually USAID is a front for George Shoros. And then so, so Republicans were like, wow, data Republicans said so, it must be true. She's wrong, like constantly. She misunderstands basic things. And yet they love her. And so in this case, what happened was Sarah Rogers, the Undersecretary of State for, you know, sort of like public air,

you know, she handles like publicity, essentially. And her big thing is bullying Europe into making it easier for these far right kind of quasi-Nazi Nazi parties to get traction. And so she's seen as very based. Important role. Yes. Well, certainly in this administration.

Very fancy in role. So she secretly approached data Republican and said, look, I've got some documents on like Cuba and like anti-disinformation efforts during the Biden administration. And these things, like really, there's not a real expose here, but what they were trying to do is kind of spin something up. And so they say, let's give it to Data Republican. However, when Data Republican gets the documents, she goes, wait a minute, this says like government document, do not distribute. If I post this, I'll go to prison for treason. And if I hold on to it, I'm participating in the Biden cover up.

So she then turns on Sarah Rogers and says, you were trying to send me to prison. Sarah Rogers is kind of like, we're seeing how the sausage gets made. She has some egg on her face. They start fighting. And this kind of broader feud breaks out on the right. There's an interesting subplot to this, which is that there's several, actually, but the one in particular that's noteworthy is that Jenica, the anonymous date a Republican, who said that the deep state was trying to influence her to get into trouble,

is herself a member of the deep state? It's the plot thickens. Yes. So this is very interesting. So amid this clash, and basically Sarah Rogers is, like it or not for her, aligned with more Nick Fuentes, America First type Gropers. She's represented some of them in court as their lawyer. And so they were- She talked about like the average differences in IQ between racial groups, you know, talked about how Europe's importing barbarian rapist hordes. Like, that's kind of her milieu.

So that element gets really mad at Data Republican. And one of their accounts says, well, this is all really weird because Data Republican works for the Department of Defense. And that was like the first I had heard of that. I think the first a lot of people had heard of that. So then the Department of Defense says, yes, Data Republican is a special government employee, which is the thing where you can work for about a third of the year that Elon Musk was also under without having to go through a lot of disclosures,

divest your holdings, or really like be like an official government employee. So this is very odd. And so since I wrote that newsletter, we've made some new findings. She appears to work for the Department of Defense's thing called like the Office of Administration and Management. So it's essentially like this huge bureaucracy. It's very difficult to know exactly what she's doing there. I asked the Pentagon about it.

And they said essentially like we're not going to say what her job is. Since she took this job in July, she was attacking Driscoll, the secretary of the army, who was opposed to Pete Hegset since taking that job. So it's like was her job some kind of like weird messaging stuff? To be clear, she did not disclose any of this Pentagon affiliation. Even as of Sunday, she said, my only affiliations are, you know, some random thing. tanks, nothing with the Pentagon. So it's very mysterious. And now even her fans are saying, is she the deep state operative? It seems like she is. Just to put a fighter point in this, so we have

an anonymous MAGA propaganda account that is actually a taxpayer-funded person of kind of unknown remit in the government. And the government won't tell us, what this person is doing that we're paying while she's simultaneously advancing like false propaganda about the government's actions. That's a pretty decent summary of what's happening with data Republican. It is, and to add one more, and that the State Department is using to drum up both sort of political ends

attacking people from the Biden administration, and seemingly to kind of like beat the war drums on Cuba, because supposedly these documents were supposed to relate to Cuba. Right. So it's like one person in the government is giving another person in the government information to put out but under their anonymous account. Essentially, this is a sock puppet account, which we use at other. This is like an intelligence tool that is used. Obviously, the Russians use against us.

Sometimes we use it in other countries. But like we're using against our own people. There's like a sock puppet account within the government charged with disseminating false propaganda to influence us. And that was revealed accidentally via a mega feud. Yeah, exactly. And so it offers an interesting glimpse into sort of what's going on here. It makes me wonder what other special government employees are working at the Pentagon. Me too. It makes me wonder what other big X accounts have government contracts or government affiliated. Because it feels like unlikely that it's just Genica. I would say based on this performance, I would not reach first to Jenica. If I was looking for a sort of henchman, I might if I was running propaganda at the Pentagon. God, there might be some other people.

There actually were some, you know, this guy who runs like a shipping news thing, who's like inexplicably also a real conservative activist. He was considered for a special government employee status at the Pentagon. So there have been these like links between right wing media and the Pentagon. It sounds when you put it like that, it sounds pretty nefarious. Yeah. And I think there's a lot more to be discovered. Yeah.

I mean, I don't think that the Department of War, that the government's military should be funding partisan propaganda outlets. to misinform us, the American people. It's not really, I'm against that. Like, in a free country, doesn't feel like that's what should be happening. It feels like we should know who is communicating. That's for the government. And there's a reason why they didn't put this out

from spokesperson from the Pentagon or spokesperson from the Secretary of State, right? Like that, you know, there's a reason they tried to go through a cutout. And it's like, but the cutout is somebody we're paying. Yeah. And, you know, the other thing I would add is that data Republican is she lives in Utah.

She's very, like, sort of homebound. because of some disabilities, as I understand it, or, you know, this is, I suspect, very related to her media role. It's not as though she's, like, also an accountant at the Department of Defense. Right, right. Just a couple other little interesting subplots.

I noticed from your story, I just wanted to raise. She's become such a figure on the right that her mom also has an account, mom of data Republican, and that gets involved. An old, I feel like to call him a nemesis would be to overstate it. A old antagonist of mine, Ricky Vaughn, He also had a sock puppet account named Ricky Bond after the major league character. He ended up going to jail, which I wasn't unhappy about at all. And then is now out of jail.

And I guess he was, he's back in the game. He was wrapped up in this somehow. Yeah, he was represented by Sarah Rogers during his criminal case. And so he's one of these people who's saying, you know, Sarah's so based, you know, boomer-brained, you know, data Republican, you're screwing this all up. Yeah. Sarah didn't nail that criminal case saying he'd. He lost. The one thing I would add about mom of Data Republican, who confusingly also goes by the

handled Data Republican on X. She's very obviously defensive about her daughter. And so she had said to Sarah Rogers, you know my daughter is not, quote, naturally cunning like you, kind of like, you know, what are we implying here? And now, but now that the Pentagon job has been exposed, mom of Data Republican was saying, people on the right act like it's bad to be a Fed. But what is a Fed, an employee of the federal government? which really represents all of us.

In many ways, being a Fed is a good thing. When mom is on Twitter saying their adult daughter is not that cunning, that's probably not a great sign that that's the person you should be using for your subterfuge if you're the government. But we'll continue to monitor the story. I know you will. But I think I'm interested on whether this is one of those things that one string gets pulled out of the yarn ball and all of a sudden we start to learn

that there's a lot more of this happening in the Pentagon. That seems likely to me. Anything else in that for me move on to Trump and Tucker? Let's do it. Okay. Trump said out the following, bleat over the weekend,

which I'm going to read for you guys. Tucker Carlson just met with lightweight former Congressman Thomas Massey and Marjorie Trader Green, losers all. Tucker's views have fallen through the floor and will only get worse. Trump accidentally said something right there, I think.

Nobody cares about him any longer, and that he has become totally irrelevant and happens to be surprisingly a very low IQ individual. It's unusual. Trump usually reserves that insult, very low IQ individual for black people. So that tells you something about where he's going with Tucker.

Tucker could barely get out of college, Trump writes, and maybe he didn't. But only really dumb people can't make it through that wonderful four year time and life. Tucker wants to run for political office, but he should be required to take a cognitive test like me. Tucker is a loser. and always has been.

Marjorie Taylor Brown. We're trying on a separate nickname here. Green turns to Brown under stress. A highly neurotic young woman went from ultra-conservative to a liberal fool all in a matter of weeks because I refused to return her phone calls. Not because I didn't like her just because I had no time. The only chance they have is to join the radical left Democrats

and try breaking into the primary system. To all of them, I say, praise be to Allah. That's the president of the United States, put out that statement. A lot there. I think that the, you know, there's kind of the small ball observation that I have, which is like, if in 2015 you'd show this to somebody and said this is 10 years in the future, they would have said that you had derangement syndrome and we're an insane person and, you know, et cetera. But like this is our life now. People just accept us and move on that our president is a lunatic. He's posting like a crazy drunk uncle constantly on social media. It's hard for me to find this actually because it was like three days ago. And I just scroll through like a hundred. Trump leads, like he's still doing this.

It's a small observation. Big observation is, it seems like they're a little concerned, you know, like to go this hard at Tucker about, like, whether this faction might actually have some juice inside the coalition. It's interesting. It was also, I mean, at this point, it's several weeks since that meeting. So it makes you wonder, has Trump heard something else about Tucker's plans or are they, did they do some poll or, you know, whatever, that has them freaking out so much.

He's really also starting to do that praise be to all. This is not the first time he's done the praise be to Allah thing. I remember the first time he did, it got kind of a pop. But I guess this is just like one of his signatures now. He thinks it's funny. Do we think? It's like, it's like, oh, I'm like making fun of Muslims, but I'm doing it in a little cheeky way. So people can't really accuse me of being a racist, I guess.

Is that what's happening there? Well, I wonder if it's sort of like playing on the idea that he's Tucker Cotarlson, that he's like in Hock to Qatar or other Muslim countries. But then again, Trump flies around on the Qatari jet. So it seems a little unfair to single out Tucker. Yeah. Similarly, I've had a rant lately about how the Magu Republicans are all, like, you know, their big message now for the midterms that the Democrats are socialist.

You can't put the socialist in charge. But, like, Trump is running the most socialist government we've had, certainly in the post-World War II era. And the thing is similar on the Sharia law thing. Like you see Greg Abbott and Ken Paxton and now in Michigan, Mike Rogers and all these guys, you know, fear, you know, make people afraid of Abdul al-Sayed or, you know, the Muslim candidates running on a Democratic sign, talking about how Sharia law is coming to the country. But like, we are totally in league with the actual Sharia law countries.

Like Trump is, Trump's business partners are Sharia law countries. Like the people, I think, most aligned with Sharia as this administration. That's a great point. I mean, there is really, particularly in Texas, such a just rise of this anti-Muslim sentiment. You know, I saw now people are like, they were freaking out because Muslims bought some land in the woods. And it was for like Muslim kids to have activities and to stay during the summer. And they were like, what are they up to? And it's like, well, it sounds like what's called a summer camp, right? It's a camp.

And so this is like. Have you ever watched Wet, Hot American Summer? Yeah. It's like that. Just check that out. But as you said, I mean, it reminds me of when Laura Lumer was very upset about the Qatari jet. And Trump basically said, shut up, I want my jet. And then she said, okay. Yeah. But you're seeing this online, like this increase in anti-Muslim, anti-Islam sentiment, like rising.

Because for a while, I don't know, obviously, like there was a lot of this after 9-11. And just, to be clear, I'm no fan of Sharia law. That's why I think it's concerning that our president is friends with Sharia law dictators. But it was more than that, right? Like there were like these really you kind of bigoted, you know, anti-Muslim efforts, Laura Lumeros point person and that's for a long time. And that went a little dormant, you know. And I think there was like a period of time where like we really saw a lot of anti-Semitism rising

and obviously, you know, a lot of focus on the invaders, the Mexican invaders. But it does seem to me, I don't know, do you feel this way too, like that we're really seeing a spike again in right-wing agitation against Muslims? Very real. And it's surging back. I mean, and I think these, you know, whether it's maybe a reaction to like Zohran Mamdami and Abdul Al-Sayyad in the sense to like other eyes Muslims. But I mean, I do think for the past few years, you know, it was much quieter. And I think also relatedly, I think there's just like a real like hatred. of people like sort of of like brown skin in general. I mean, this is probably an obvious observation. But like there's also like a real surge in hatred of Indians and people in Pakistanis.

And again, a lot of that in Texas. And so these are kind of like the, I would say, I hate to say like the hot. These are kind of like the surging hates, I guess, as the immigration stuff for recedes for now. Hmm. All right. Anything else you're seeing out there? Anything you want to tease us? Any exciting, I don't know, kind of lawsuits or I don't know, any. Arby's in anybody's pants, you know, anything to look forward to?

Well, you know what? Alexis Wilkins, the Cash Patel's country singer girlfriend, is she's on the verge of settling her lawsuit with Elijah Schaefer, a frequent topic of ours on the trio, the kind of the philandering right-wing media bad boy. He had accused her of being a Mossad operative sent to seduce Cash Patel. So we'll have to see. Is she going to get a big payday? Or is she going to, you know, concede and, you know, say, well, maybe he was right to suspect or

whatever. We'll see. We'll be monitoring. That court case, Will will be monitoring, actually. And he'll be briefing me. And we appreciate him for his service. Everybody goes to subscribe to False Flag. Thanks so much to Tracy and Will.

If you want more politics topics, I'll be on the next level tonight. The whole crew is back together. Vacations are over. So come hang out with us in the next level feed. And I'm sure Will will be coordinating a trio video later in the week. So we appreciate everybody very much. Thanks to Tracy and Will. We'll see you back here tomorrow for another edition of the podcast.

The Bullwork Daily is brought to you thanks to the work of lead producer Katie Cooper, associate producer Ansley Skipper, and with video editing by Dante DeChico and audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.