Andrew Egger: Trump’s Travels with Natalie

Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Daily. I'm your host Tim Miller. It is Monday, but Bill Crystal finally gets to go on vacation. The eldest member of the Bulwark team has been the one working the hardest and most diligently this summer while the rest of us gallivant about. So finally he gets a break and sitting in for him is our very own White House correspondent and his co-author on the Morning Shots newsletter. It's sweet Andrew Egger. How are you doing Andrew? I'm great. How are you Tim? I'm doing pretty good. It's good to be back in New Orleans. It's good to be termiteless in the home and you know, we're just pressing forward. We've got a lot to talk about today. You have some bad takes that I hope we have time to get to at the very end. Do you have a couple of good things that you've been really excited about and angered about righteously that I've not talked about on the podcast at all? So I do want to get to those as well. But I want to start on the corruption beat. A couple of things that really caught my eye over the weekend and late last week. The first one is this Trump crypto bank story. This might seem niche, but I just I think that it is the most tangible example of the administration's corruption. And I feel like in the year. I don't know, 2034, when we're looking back on this, I feel like this and the internment camps are going to be the things that we look back on. I mean, who knows what horrors are ahead of us between now and then, but like from the period of 2024 to 2026, like the internment camps and this are going to stand out. Does that feel right to you before I get into the details of the story? Like don't you just think there's so much we don't know on the corruption side of this? Yes, 100%. I think that's right. I mean, you you say like the. It seems niche, but like all businesses are sort of niche, right? I mean, the whole point is that like he is going into these quote unquote niche industries where there's still billions and billions of dollars to be made, and he's getting his beak wet on the powers of the presidency and the access that that that is involved with that. So, yes, I 100% agree that the the broad overarching corruption story is going to be a major, major part of the legacy of these years. So here it is on the bank. So World Liberty Financial, which is the like Trump family's main crypto venture, they have several side ventures in crypto. They have received preliminary conditional approval from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to become a bank. Now, I'm sure we have, you know, really people of high integrity at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Trump administration. A lot of people with deep expertise and no conflicts at all. This what this means is approval means that World Liberty will be able to issue, redeem and safeguard USD one, their dollar backed stablecoin. Jeff Stein, who used to be the Washington Post, now went to notice, will translate that for for people who are not, you know, into crypto world. He writes this. A Trump appointee has approved Trump's personal crypto firm to operate as a bank. This means corporations can conduct transactions using the stablecoin where the Trump family gets a cut. The public will not have to be informed. There's no precedent for this. Think about it this way. It's like the it's kind of like the Venmo now or whatever, where you know, the Venmo company takes whatever, three percent of a transaction fee on certain types of transactions. Now people can make transactions with the Trump coin and get a fee and then they they just get to operate no different than whatever. If you're zelling on your on your Citibank account. Important to note here, Chinese born scammer and current UAE citizen Changpeng Zhao, CZ, of these stable coins in circulation and got a pardon for the Trump administration. The UAE and Pakistani officials have also invested. Pakistan's negotiating the MOU, which we'll get to in a second. Seems bad. I don't know. Seems bad. Yeah, yeah. To me, this is interesting in part because Trump has already extracted enormous amounts of value from a lot of people in and connected to the crypto industry with this exact corporation, with World Liberty Financial. And this now seems to be a way to just expand the net of somewhat extortionary sort of behavior much more widely. Like the idea here is, is if you yourself are already like big in the crypto space, you're probably already kind of all tied up with World Liberty Financial. But now this is just yet another way for unrelated businesses, businesses that are not primarily crypto businesses necessarily. It's just another new place where you, you can curry some level of favor with the Trump administration, get, you know, for, for, for whatever business purpose that you might want. Like you might be a random, you could, you could be any kind of corporation who might have any kind of business before the White House. One really easy way to make Donald Trump look favorably on your business will be to just conduct transactions on this platform instead of whatever other banking platform you, you, you might have been inclined to use. Obviously, I'm sure there are, I'm, I'm not a financial reporter or a financial analyst or anything. I'm sure there are many reasons why you might prefer a longer running, more stable sort of platform with more services on offer, more professionals in the building, all these sorts of things. But this is the, this is the offer that's being made is why not come transact over here? Let me collect your fees and show that you're, you know, a good patriotic corporation while you're doing it. I like the word bribes because that's what's happening here. I mean, they're just bribes happening. I mean, ZZ got a part in, in exchange for purchasing these stable coins. We talked on Friday with Sarah about the thing Joe Rogan was surprised to learn that the Trump truth social, uh, is taking bribes from financial, you know, investors who want early access to Trump's tweets so they can then bet on, you know, the, the reaction in the markets, just, you know, a little insider trading up in the open and like what situation that is not corrupt would make you want to bank with world liberty financial. And like, this is, and it's just, if you just put it that way, right? Like if the whole, if the only point of this is that you're going to be able to do this is like, you're looking for, you know, a vendor with which to exchange, you know, currency. Like there are a million options out there in the world. Like there is absolutely no reason that you would want to go with the company that, that was run by Devin Nunes, that is not stable at all. Right. That's are people that don't have history, you know, safeguarding money. Even if you're going to do it in crypto, even if you're going to buy stable coins, like there are, there are options that are more professional than this, right? Like the only reason to use this is to curry favor with Trump. Yeah, no, I think that's, I think that's basically exactly right. And, and that is a pretty compelling reason for a lot of companies, given how much of the economy right now in large part because of tariffs, but also because of different regulatory decisions and all these sorts of things. So much of the current, currently constituted economy relies on the sort of personal blessing and say-so of the president. So it's a, it's a, it's a pretty grisly situation all around our colleague, Catherine Rappel, or another article. This is, this is a story. I think it's also important to cover the stories where the Trump corruption does not just extend to his personal wealth. I mean, like most of these stories, he is, as you, as you say, getting his beak wet, but he's also looking out for white collar scammers and grifters of all types. And here's one example of it. Catherine wrote about this in a receipts newsletter last week, treasury announced that it's going to stop the government's excuse me, not stop, destroy the government's registry of shell company ownership. This was an anti-corruption database that treasury was required by law to maintain. It actually was signed in the first Trump administration. This, this database, that was a bipartisan effort among the people pushing it were the current secretary of state, Marco Rubio. They're not just going to stop requiring registry. They're going to destroy all the data that it's collected already so that no future administration or any local police department can use it. Tom Malinowski, a former democratic Congressman from New Jersey, who was instrumental in getting this passed initially said, this is like Trump ordering the deletion of the FBI's entire fingerprint database. There were some pushback. I saw it to Catherine's article on, you know, kind of the Winnie the Pooh and the tuxedo, right? The try to the anti-anti's to try to come up with that. They're like, well, you know, this was, this database was a little burdensome on some small business owners, but it's kind of like, I mean, I could see that it probably was burdensome on small business owners. If say like you're a real estate company and you have a million shell companies that you're using to purchase various properties everywhere. And I'm sorry that you have to deal with that. But for like most companies was not burdensome for the bulwark. For example, we're not operating several, several shell companies, you know, it's like a 15 minute paperwork file filing. So I just, I don't really see like any, any reason, well, a, this is illegal and it's passed into law. Like, I don't know why we think the treasury department can just veto it without having Congress veto something that was passed by Congress and signed by the president. But in addition to that, I think that any explanation for this, that is not centered around corruption leaves me a little wanting. Yeah. And, and I mean, this is one of these stories too, where just the, the raw overarching facts of the open corruption of the administration from top to bottom. I mean, it just, it bleeds through everything. And it makes it so impossible to even tease out stories like this, where, where I don't know, maybe, maybe if it were a different administration that was doing this, you know, lawfully, if you're they were actually pushing to overturn the law or something like that, you might be able to put some stock in those sorts of explanations. Again, this is not exactly my area of expertise. I've never drilled down on the second and third order effects of the functioning of this database. But you would have to be so blinkered. You would have to stick your head so deep under the sand to look at a story like this through any other light than the overarching light of the open corruption of the open sympathy, the weird personal sympathy that the president has for people accused of white collar crime, where he just goes out there and he pardons them sort of like out of the goodness of his heart. A lot of the times this just seems to be so obviously of a piece with all that sort of stuff that maybe you can cobble together these post hoc justifications. Maybe there are some businesses out there that will be grateful that did really struggle with these compliance costs. But on the other hand, come on, let's wake up and see what time it is. Blinkered coverage. Blinkered coverage of Trump policy from National Review's The Corner, Andrew. I never, I would never make that accusation. All right, as referenced, today, the Treaty of Versailles to Electric Boogaloo was signed. How many days ago now? I want every listener in their head to think about how many days ago they think it was because it is it's hard to kind of orient yourself in time during the second Trump administration. Okay, do you have your guess? It was 60 days ago. Today is the 60th day, which is when the MOU is set to expire. Important number, yeah. Yeah, I believe it lasted 60 hours, maybe, but it was supposed to last 60 days. The various elements of the Memorandum of Understanding signed with such great fanfare was the immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts, removal of the naval blockade, completely open and demined Strait of Hormuz, Iran was getting an economic reconstruction fund, there'd be a deal on enrichment and nukes. No, no, no, no, no, nothing. None of it. Yeah, we didn't get any of that, it turns out. It is kind of crazy to look back at, you know, the president's tweets right at that moment, you know, the Strait of Hormuz is now open to all, let the oil flow, you know, congratulations to everybody. And like, even then, it was a lot of fanfare over what was essentially an agreement to agree on a bunch of things later. And yes, it did blow up on the launchpad very quickly after that. But it is just sort of, I don't know, we've been at this, we've been in this, for quite a while now, a long, long, long time. And it just sort of seems to keep on persisting. I was rewatching the video of my guy Adam Mochler serving it to Scott Jennings on CNN. This was the video for people who are sickos like me and just consuming way too much internet politics slop. You'll remember this time that Scott Jennings said, get your fucking hand out of my face on primetime CNN. It's kind of had a meltdown. And he was doing, you know, defending the war and condescendingly talking to Mochler about how like, oh, like, oh, you can't handle eight weeks. It's a forever war now because it's been eight weeks. And I just want, there's a deliciousness to watch it now, you know, thinking back to the like Trump fluffers spin when this MOU was happening. And prior to that, J.D. Vance, the vice president talking about how only stupid presidents in the past have got us into, into these wars that, that didn't have, didn't have any resolution. And like, here we are at the end of the MOU period with a war still on ish and nothing to show for it. And actually it's worse than nothing to show for it. And like negative consequences to our troops, to consumers here in America, to our alliances. If you ever roll back the tape on the various kind of moments in the early development of this conflict, just the, the remarkable level of smugness at every moment. Every single stage, like right, right at the very beginning, when we were going over there, when we first launched the war and we were, you know, we had total aerial supremacy and domination. We were blowing up all these military targets and you had all the, all of the hawks who were like, yeah, you know, we should have done this decades ago. You know, it's like USA, USA. And can you believe these, these sort of naysayers and these wet blankets who are like, oh gosh, like what, what, we're at war with Iran all of a sudden? Was, were we talking about this? Are we sure we've really thought this one through? And then they closed the Strait of Hormuz and, and there's all this reporting that they hadn't really thought this through. And, and again, just the smugness of, do you honestly believe that the United States government didn't contemplate the possibility that Iran would retaliate with the Strait of Hormuz? We've known they would do this if we ever did this forever. We've got them right where they, right where we want them. And then like the forever war stuff, again, like we're just like four or five, six weeks into this war and you, and, and the same people are basically like, really, you're out of juice already. You're out of steam already after these amazing victories that we've had and we've got them on the run. And you know, what, are you like some kind of subversive or like, and just over and over and over again, you get to the memorandum of understanding and it's the same thing where it's JD Vance being like, look, I think we all need to put a little trust in the president right now, president deals who has landed the plane on this thing. And like, again, and again, and again, I feel like maybe I'm just looking at different sources now. I feel like a little bit of the smugness has leached away the last couple of weeks, couple of weeks, maybe a month or two here as it really has just turned into another one of these boondoggles with no real way out. I feel like maybe they're not leaning into it quite as much, but I have not seen a lot of, uh, uh, I don't know. I haven't seen a lot of come to Jesus moments about where, where these people were predicting this conflict was going to be at this point versus the boondoggle that we're in right now. Commentary podcast guys. They've seen some things that they don't like. I don't know if they've had to come to Jesus exactly. Um, come to Yahweh, but, uh, yeah, they, uh, I definitely have seen some, just didn't turn out like we'd hoped guys. And so I admire that good commentary people on the other hand, you don't say, but okay, it's good. It's good. I mean, you know, I'm just saying if you miss something that was very obvious, get a little less credit for mentioning it, but I agree. It's good to acknowledge. Good to know. I'm sorry. I was, I was letting bad JV. I'll get in there for a second. You know, sometimes you have to, I still have Andrew Edgar on, you went to church yesterday. You know, I'm trying to, I'm trying to think about my better angels right now. Good for those people who are the few who have admitted that this thing was a total disaster from the start. One thing I've been agitating for is for Democrats to really rub the president's nose in it, you know, about how humiliating this is and how, how much of an affront it is to the country and to the troops that he got into this stupid ass war with nothing to show for it. And, uh, you know, the new hotness, the man that everybody seems to be, getting a thrill up their leg for lately, John Ossoff, uh, did exactly that at a campaign rally over the weekend. Let's watch a little bit of it. There's something uniquely despicable about lying a nation into war, treating citizens as fools and those who serve as pawns. Yeah. The USS Abraham Lincoln, they've now been at sea for 240 plus days without a port call. It's a Navy record. And still, and still, and still they serve with excellence. And still they serve with excellence. While he fruitlessly drains our munitions and oil reserves, the president sleeps through his meetings. He golfs and trades stocks. See, he doesn't want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the Amir of Qatar. Ouch. Ouch. Thoughts? Where did all this Natalie Harp discourse come from all of a sudden? I thought we had done like the Natalie Harp thing years ago. It came from the regime change book. It was all of the mash notes. I interviewed. Maggie about this. When she came on the show, when I asked her, I said that, that her book did something, uh, you know, which I think is important and reporting it changed one of my priors. I had previously thought that Donald Trump was now impotent because he was so old. And I thought that explained, you know, the fact that we haven't had any sex scandals with Donald Trump, his whole life was sex scandals up until now. And, and now the reading the book and reading all the love notes that Natalie Harp wrote to Trump started with, maybe not. Yeah, I'm not going to touch that one. I do think, I do think there is a, you know, things change, things change. You get a little older, maybe, maybe, maybe it's not the physical thing quite so much as it is just liking to be adored by, you know, young, attractive women. Who knows, who knows how it all, how it all holds together. But, uh, I, on the, on the off stuff. Another thing you don't have expertise on that I brought you to talk about whether, when you stop wanting to grab women by the pussy against their will, that's something that Andrew doesn't have. You know, it's hard for you to kind of get your head in that brain space. And I appreciate that. So you can move on from that, but never started, but just as a started, wouldn't know, wouldn't know when to stop, but as a strategic question for us off, instead of putting it as a question, I'm going to put it as a statement that I want you to react to. This is kind of what Sarah and I are asking for. Like on Friday, we were talking about how we want, and there are different ways to go about this. There's ways to go about getting attention in the media about Donald Trump's horrors by being extremely outraged about something. Uh, there is like, there is like actually going to places to advocate passionately. Chris Van Holland, for example, going to meet. with kilmer regal garcia right like there are ways to do it there are also ways to to play this game by saying and doing things that point out donald trump's offenses that that titillate people that draw attention that might get interest from you know people who are not you know reading the news day to day but are just kind of scrolling and clips on instagram they're kind of like what is this trump has a girl named natalie's flying around with it's it's a it's a tactic i think it's a smart tactic what do you think yeah yeah and it's it's interesting too that that was such an applause line even in the room because like on the on the one hand the all the aesthetics of assaf are are like sort of recreating the obama strategy right where it's like these this soaring oratory and these big rooms and like in theory all of that is geared toward like normies and and non-political obsessive obsessives but in terms of the content that it's it's plainly a lot of people who are tracking this stuff online right i'm sure there's a lot of like bulwark people in that audience who are like oh the human printer he went there you know that kind of stuff so it's an interesting combination of things there i had somebody text me the other day who is natalie the human printer and i was like you just revealed you haven't been listening to my podcast hey it's never too late to learn about the human i know it's never too late i'm just saying sometimes friends reveal that yeah their their engagement with my content isn't as fulsome as they might want me to think yeah i'm grateful to us off in one level i do not know i just like as a as a factual matter i don't know whether this is going to be the sort of message and the sort of strategy and the sort of politician that ends up resonating with democratic primary voters uh and just the electorate in 2028 um i can see an argument i've seen a lot of people make the argument that it reads as a little slick it reads as a little bit overproduced it's all very somber and solemn even the moments that are like a little bit of a joke like he himself plays them very straight doesn't crack a smile i can see those sorts of things doing well and i can also see them bouncing off in our in our more irony poisoned age but i but i am grateful i i think it's good that we have a guy who's plainly like pushing this strategy as far as it can go like he he is owning it he is a perfect fit for it he's like a former documentary filmmaker himself like he's he is very suitable to this strategy and to this role and to this lane that he's trying to run in you don't want to end up in a situation where like republicans were in 2024 where it's like oh you know somebody is putting together a perhaps interesting and perhaps plausible alternate narrative to trumpism and his name is ron de sanis and he has all these interesting good things going for him and then it just all falls apart because you are like a bag of oatmeal up on the campaign stage right like it's so it's it's good i i hope we get a lot of good and interesting sort of like successful possible uh avenues to fight against each other in the 28 primary try a bunch of different things i will say this one of my other priors has been updated by this is like this is a 2028 and i'm like oh my god this is a 2028 and i'm like oh my god this is a 2028 speech i mean he is running away with his senate race and this is not to say that he's taking his eye off the ball on that because he's been doing a similar strategy to this for a while now and it's obviously working his opponent is an insane person i did i'll put in the show notes i did a single video on friday i'm going to do it i feel like there's just been so much attention on the hongs and the el sayeds of the world the media and like i think that like the media is kind of bored with like crazy republican story so nobody's going to be able to do anything about it and i think that's what's going to happen even like talks about mike collins like tweeting white nationalist shits and being the nominee for senate in georgia like not in not in a swing state or andy biggs being the key in like one of the key men of the insurrection being the governor candidate in arizona so i'm doing a little series on them you could go live do a deep dive onto mike collins but i to me this sort of stuff is demonstrating is modeling like what a 2028 campaign could look like and like you said whether that's a 2028 campaign or not i think that's a 2028 campaign i think that's a 2028 campaign that is the one that works or that resonates who knows but like it's hard to think about with the value of bringing up natalie harp in the georgia senate race context right like it is good for for narrative domination attention gathering i wish that there were 20 democrats doing this kind of thing trying different doing it in different ways going about it in ways that are authentic to them because i think that that is important for breaking through but it feels very 28 to me yeah and and like look i've covered a lot of senate campaigns this is just not the typical sort of aesthetics that people reach for when they're running for senate it's just small it's a smaller ball sort of thing you want it to seem more kind of personal you want it to seem more like you're in the room like you're standing on the ground maybe at a podium with a bunch of people in chairs or something like that i mean this is this is a specific aesthetic that they have been chasing they've been chasing it for months you know he keeps doing events like this they have a constant drip feed of ossoff you know like like the chia ross caro lighting and he's up there on stage and the cameras the different camera angles are cutting between the shots the hero's shot adoringly it's always on friday nights the campaign events are always on friday nights so it's like you can we can like share the videos over the weekend talk about it on monday like here it is you know extend the narrative every word out of the office is i don't know what you people are talking about i'm running for senate it's all i want to do and it just it it just seems kind of like a lie which is fine but it but yes i'm with you it really seems like they they have their eye a lot bigger than that just a small little note for me i'm out of the pr game i've been out of it for a while but something that i've been on for a while that i was teaching younger pr people and so if you are a pr person that enjoys this podcast in between the terrible powerpoint presentations and and ungodly zoom meetings that you've got to go through let me give you this piece of advice the friday news dump is so wrong now it is opposite and john ossoff's people get that you want things to come out on friday night and and the new media environment because then you're not going to be you know those of us who are who don't put down our phone on the weekends talk about it and share the stuff over the weekends then the monday news shows have to talk about it in the morning they're good tactically he knows what he's doing and um just one last thing it's a clean hit i mean like i saw like peter meyer was out there like i'm tired of this innuendo campaign former kind of congressman from michigan republican guys on cnn a bunch and you see some of this kind of like pearl clutching from the right but it's kind of like trump is focused on golf and the ballroom and it is weird that he has a human printer around that writes him notes and it is weird that when his plane that was a gift from the emir from qatar you know could not defend itself he had to be taken out in a catering truck to a different plane and the people in the truck with him were the human printer and the golf caddy like that's strange that all that is happening while people are jumping off the uss lincoln yeah yeah i i did not think that the story of the catering truck could get any funnier with like donald trump back there you know just sort of like with the chafing dishes but the presence of natalie harp and dan scavino chaperone really really does kick it up to to a new level i'm glad i'm glad we're getting these sorts of details you know there there's a lot of narrative meat left on the bone of trump 2.0 i agree there are a couple times done campaigns i feel like i talk about the concerns about um there's this kind of donut hole middle campaign or that it's an important campaign but i just and they're doing good enough that i don't talk about it and i feel like it's on me because things like the ohio senate race like the ohio senate race is absolutely critical the democrats are going to take back the senate i've been talking about sherrod brown very little because he's just nose to the grindstone running a more typical senate campaign like you referenced earlier you know more localized campaign but he's winning in a state that that trump won three times uh right now if you look at the polls and um there's an interesting ad he put out this weekend going after his opponent john husted over tariffs i've been doing this 25 years and it has never been this hard so many of these things are out of my control and they're at the whim of some bad political decisions john husted has voted 13 times for the war in iran and it's had a direct effect on farmers diesel fuel has doubled since last spring cost fertilizer tripled and john husted supports the president of the united states who's been in power for more than a decade and he's not going to be in power for a decade and he's not going to be in power for a decade and he's not at a certain point it's not just politics anymore when you start taking money out of my pocket it becomes personal i'm sure brown and i approve this message and it was particularly interesting because sherrod brown has been kind of on the pro-tariff protectionist side of the democratic party in his career back when he was in the senate and uh i thought that a it was very savvy strategic move to just go for it right i do like that kind of politics and b could there be a better encapsulation of like how disastrous the trump tariff policy is that even like the pro-tariff democrats are you know if in the past like the anti-free trade or the protectors whatever you want to call them like the day feel like one of their opening ads is talking about how disastrous the tariffs have been yeah yeah yeah and it did it did take them a little while to get there right like all all last year um it kind of felt like or at least maybe not all last year in the in the early part of last year when when the tariffs were going on and like it was just insane and the bond market was going crazy and it was like is the united states going to have to economically decouple from china who knows probably doesn't seem like it should but that's the policy on paper right now as at least as of this moment like all through that like democrats were a little slow to go after the tariff stuff in in part because of this because they have liked protectionist policies for at at some level for a long time and none more so than you know guys like sherrod brown at in in sort of post industrial rust belt ohio who want to see some sort of uh resurgence of of domestic manufacturing, who have a gigantic part of their political brand being, you know, the dignity of work, the dignity of blue collar work, wanting to create a world where people can work with their hands and provide for their families. And now we've had, you know, 18 months of Trump tariff-topia. And it's just, even these guys now see it as a clean hit, because it has just not succeeded on its own terms in any of these ways. I mean, it's been unbelievably chaotic in its rollout. It's been, they have slammed new tariffs on and pulled old tariffs off voluntarily. That's been a large part of the strategy. But then also, you know, some of that's happened to them, because they have gone way overboard with trying to squeeze too many tariffs onto tariff authorities that don't support them. And so the Supreme Court yanked a bunch of the tariffs, and they've had to try to slap new ones on. They've had to refund a bunch of collected revenues back to the companies. And like, it just all has not added up to anything. There's nothing to show for it, nothing to show for it at all. And it's just, you know, it's just, you know, and really, they have just turned the page to different economic matters by now. But I mean, manufacturing has not been coming back, like, to the extent that anybody wanted to. It's interesting that this ad was not about manufacturing tariffs. It was about the impact on farmers who have been, you know, hurt perhaps worse than anybody by all these tariffs. So it's a giant mess, and it's a clean hit. The lack of resurgence of Rust Belt jobs and manufacturing jobs is also, like, the key data point in pointing to this. Like, there's no, like, progress on the horizon. Like, all, the only growth in manufacturing jobs are data center jobs that have nothing to do with the tariffs. Have you heard Trump talk about this, where he will, he will, like, explicitly make this point, where he's like, oh, you know, we've seen, you know, construction and manufacturing come back like we've never seen when you look at factories and also data centers. He connects them on the trail. Yeah, very different thing. You offered a little light media criticism this morning. This is the Egger, Madden rights. section of the podcast. Because our friends over at Politico had this headline. Taco no more how Trump won on tariffs. You laid out, I think, the weakness of the argument of the idea that Trump could have won on tariffs there, just by highlighting all the failures and the fact that even Sherrod Brown is campaigning against it. Like the media, you know, the meta criticism of this is just like the degree to which Trump gets curve graded. Like, the fact that like, this is continuing 10 years in, or maybe even worse, maybe it might even be getting worse than it's ever been the curve grading. Yeah, I just I just kind of thought we were all collectively past being sort of wowed by this gimmick that Trump does where he he proposes something that is ultra insane, like so insane that no human being has ever contemplated it before, like, you know, 40 to 80 to 110% terror. on like, 60 different nations all at once last April, including China, in your massive new tariffs on China. And like, everybody freaks out because that would be insane. And then he says, Well, you know, I've decided to pull back, you know, the the six worst, most damaging, most insane parts of this. And everybody sort of breathes a sigh of relief. And all his boosters are like art of the deal. You know, you he got you again. But like, he didn't do anything. He didn't actually get a win. There's been nothing worse than baseline. Yeah, it's worse than baseline. And the the entire framing of this article is that Trump won on tariffs by not crashing global economy with tariffs, as some people expected that he would and that now when he, you know, continues this, you know, 10% ish on most countries higher some places than others, tariff regime, and the markets sort of tolerate it, that that is like a big victory, but it's not a big victory, unless you're actually getting something from those tariffs, like you're sacrificing a certain number of jobs, you're sacrificing a certain amount of money. economic growth, like what's the payoff, the payoff can't just be didn't crash the economy again today. But like, that's the frame of the article. And I just kind of couldn't believe it. It's the way people get slave to narrative on all this. And Trump and his boosters play into this excellently. And like far too many people just go along with it where it's like, well, you know, the doomsdayers wrong again. You know, like, think about all those people with their hair on fire, the people with the Trump derangement syndrome that said that this was going to crash the economy, well, the stock market's up, so you got to hand it to them. Got to give it to Trump. It's like, well, like, but no, he was the one with agency, he was the one that instituted the policy and said that it was going to bring about a golden age. And it made things worse. On balance. Yeah, yeah. The stock market is way up, by the way, off of the the back of a gigantic AI build out, which may or may not pan out. First of all, like that could end up popping still, I think that the odds of that have come down a lot, because these these technologies just truly are astounding, and do actually have a lot of applications. So I think that they will create a lot of value. But in terms of the present leverage of the market, we could have a bubble pop still on AI. But the other amazing thing about that is that the AI sector, far and away more than any other part of the economy has been exempted from the president's tariff regulations. I mean, we have brought hundreds of billions of dollars of chips into the country, the kind of exact stuff that that, you know, these tariff policies are supposed to help us encourage encourage people to build here. That's the whole point of them is like, that you would put tariffs on these gigantic industries in order to force these companies to build these things in the United States of America. And instead, you know, we have been allowing the economy to pop off of free trade when it comes to GPUs, and other chips that these that these data centers need to function. And that is just so weird, like that we well, you know, the tariffs must not be doing too much damage, because look at that stock market. Well, the stock market is going bananas off of the one part of this that is least affected by the tariffs. So it's just I mean, it's just also stupid. The tariff damage offset by the corruption growth, right? Yeah, that's the working part. The working part of the tariffs is the corrupt part where Trump gives a carve out to the richest people in the country who supported his campaign, and are paying for the ballroom part of it, we're paying for a lot of it and have sucked up to him gratuitously. So there you go. You've covered this a lot. So some people I'm sure have seen this elsewhere. But for the bulwark pod listeners only, I just want you to do a two minute hate on the topic of there's a story going out in right wing media about how in the Fauci diaries, he had said that he was keeping an eye on on whether the the jab had any impact on miscarriages. And this story just totally just explodes in right wing media, Republican senators pushing it, Meghan McCain, I saw for one example, sent a tweet about how she was blaming her miscarriage on this job based on this one story. I mean, this was everywhere. Joe Rogan says he personally knew five women who miscarried after getting the shot. Yeah, yeah. So you are hot on the collar on this. And so why don't you just give us a two minute rant? Man, this is crazy. This is like a greatest hits of like all of the stories that have spiked my blood pressure in the last like 72 96 hours. I hope I make it to our editorial call this morning. Yeah, I mean, it's it's bogus, right? It's it's made up. It's invented. It is. It's it. What they did was these guys have have had a bone to pick with Fauci forever. You know, it kind of seemed for a while like he was pretty low down the target list. But you know, you work through all the other ones. And eventually, it's Rand Paul and Ron Johnson's turn to put some, you know, resistance figure in the barrel to take potshots at they've been they released his diary a few weeks ago, they all kind of pointed and laughed at him about how he was glad he was on shows. This is a bigger thing even than that they released on his text messages, they grabbed one text message from January 2021. Where he you know, before the vaccines had really been rolled out at all. And before there was a lot of data on on how pregnant women would respond. He raised the hypothetical possibility of a theoretical pathway that if these vaccines are giving high fevers, and creating cytokine storms, after after you take them that could in theory be linked to miscarriage. So it's a thing they need to watch out for in the data is essentially what he was saying. This gets immediately blown up and distorted taken out of all proportion. And and turn into a claim that Anthony Fauci knew that the vaccines were causing and would cause miscarriages, that he covered that fact up, and that then he had a bunch of pregnant women get it, you know, without knowing the risks. And it's just, it's just a complete lie and exaggeration of, of what was actually happening on the ground, it gets coupled with a piece of bunk science that came out later, which which Paul and Johnson also turfed up that that they claimed that the vaccine would go on to cause a miscarriage rate of more than 80% in women who got it in the first trimester, which is completely incorrect. It just never happened to be millions and millions and millions of these women got the vaccine under these circumstances. It was never linked to miscarriage, because it just never resulted in that. And also, the CDC was not recommending that pregnant women get the shot at first, for exactly these reasons, because they didn't know yet they didn't have a full picture of the risk profile. So they they didn't recommend it, they waited for some to go out and get it, they surveilled them, they waited for some more to go out and get it, they surveilled them, they got a better and better picture of what the the miscarriage risk and other side effects risk was, which thank thank God was extraordinarily low. The vaccines worked. It was great. We all went back to normal, like the we landed the plane, we landed the pandemic plane. And and five years down the road, we've just hallucinated and constructed from from lies and misunderstandings, a complete revisionist narrative that that slanders people slanders Anthony Fauci. on ridiculous grounds, blames him for a holocaust, holocaust of you know first trimester babies that never happened you can see in the data there was there was no surge in miscarriages that was ever linked to the covid vaccine or that happened at all during this time there was not even like some unexplained surge in miscarriages at this time so it's just yeah it's just a remarkable testament to the power of the right-wing infotainment machine to just gin up anything on anything about anybody and and sort of throw it out there as chum for uh for the piggies and it was it was really appalling to see we're snapping now snaps for andre agar you did another tweet i liked we're moving forward that was good that's all i wanted i went on a twitter bender like i haven't in years the day all this went down i was like i was like reading tweets and getting mad about them and tweeting myself like deep into the night which is like you know i associate that behavior with like 26 year old me i love that yeah no rage tweeting rage tweeting from bed you you know is a concerning sign uh and uh something i try to reflect upon when i do it notice i'm not saying i've stopped doing it but i i try to use it as a side that maybe i should you know read a book the uh other tweet you sent that was good while we're just complimenting you that are uh that just piqued my interest i was like you're gonna have them on the pod and i want to hear andrew tell the story i wanted more it left me wanting there's this discourse you know about whether you know there's some people on the right who are saying there's no actual equivalent to woke on the right-wing he said woke one was crazy there's no equivalent to this of something that you know where the right got all wrapped up in something that caused harms uh this is obviously absurd the entire trump cult is something like uh that would fit the bill there uh times a million and uh god willing sometime in the future there'll be a republican who is in congress right now who is on a sunday show that says trump 2 was crazy and uh hopefully that happens in the future but anyway you pointed out that um you know there's a lot of people who are saying that there's a lot of people who are like you know the delusions around the you know 2020 election fraud did actually have tangible consequences for people some people who got wrapped up in them and you wrote this i have vivid memories of talking to women whose husbands boyfriends had told them in early january 2021 they'd be back in a couple days ended up going and storming the capitol and then got themselves multi-year sentences i just wanted to hear more about that yeah i can tell this yeah this was in in iowa and i can't remember at what point in the primary it was but it was i don't know i don't know i don't know it was it was you know pre-iowa caucuses in summer of 2023 i would guess maybe fall of 2023 and i went to a what was supposed to be a trump rally in des moines which ended up getting rained out and i don't remember exactly what thunderstorms in the area or whatever but but it was canceled at the very last minute so i i was there and there were a whole bunch of people just kind of milling around who had intended to go there and i was just talking to a bunch of them because i had to write some story and i just happened to start talking to this group of women who were it turned out were and had kind of found one another over this insane shared experience of their spouses or boyfriends their their husbands and boyfriends having been j6ers and i just talked to them about the the very strange surreal lived experience of of these people who were not necessarily that political themselves probably pretty conservative uh on in sort of an unconsidered way but were not like obsessives or chunkies and and just the way that they're their people had this is not really the way they put it because they were still more sympathetic but had really just fallen into an internet rabbit hole on this stuff and felt like they were you know had this calling to go out east and help trump you know expose the fraud and and save the country and and then had gotten pulled into the mob i mean these were not like proud proud boys these were not like people who went out there intending to do harm at first but who did end up doing harm i mean they had them on real charges real charges of doing damage and violence you know they could prove in court and that they did prove in court and these guys are serving long prison sentences well we're we're serving well yeah we're at that time serving and that that was why they were there you know they were like you know trump gives us some hope that if he gets back in there he may uh he may let our guys back out which you know i guess good for these women that is what ended up happening i would have maybe moved on if i was them i don't know i know you're in there as a reporter role but i think that you know there might be a chance that they're going to be in there but i think that you know there might be a chance that they're going to be in there as a reporter role but i think that you know there might have been a goodwill hunting situation here with you know you might have wanted to do the robin williams and hug them like it's okay there are other men in the sea you know it was a very strange interaction i mean because because they they had they had become more militant right-wingers themselves after maybe understandably we're like first of all they're like hey we feel like our guys kind of got a raw shake for this they were just caught up in the moment you know that kind of stuff and then also you know anytime they themselves had a chance to do something like that they would have been able to do something like that had tried to like poke their heads up online or anything like that they had been demonized as sort of the you know the spouses of these january sixers and so you could you could sort of see their own sort of unfortunate path to a certain unusual kind of radicalization i mean i don't know there's just so many different kinds of broken people in the trump coalition i'm sure they had that same empathy for the people to get caught up in the moment at kenosha riots etc i'm sure that they had the same this same same empathy applied that's why i'm always like some of the people i've talked to in the past and i've talked to some of the people i've talked to in the past and i've talked to some of the people i've talked to in the past and i've talked to some of the people like the prime example of this was rob portman when he comes out for gay marriage after his son comes out and you know you see on the left i think a valid point is made that's like why do the republicans always only find empathy for these people when it affects their personal lives my response that was kind of like well at least he found the empathy for other people i don't know like that's yeah you can do worse it turns out it turns out you could do worse than unevenly applied empathy and it's being a total sociopath to everybody all that's good oh no no evenly implied empathy where yeah once you fake once you experience it then projecting that out that's better than you experiencing it and only having empathy for the person that and that you knew that was getting screwed over but not everybody else or sociopathy you know it's a sliding scale i have one news item and and we've done your good take so i have your bad take on it i want to end with uh unfortunately i guess you call this a news item some people only get their news from this show so when things happen it's like i guess i should just tell them that this happens donald trump sent a tweet about how much he loves kim jong-un we're having military exercises in south korea today they're ongoing as i think as we're taping right now and uh trump uh said this i am not happy with the fact the united states has long ago agreed to participate in these joint military exercises with south korea they send a sign that is totally inappropriate and hostile to a country that as long as donald trump is a president has been unthreatening and respectful so south korea inappropriate and hostile north korea unthreatening and respectful therefore and based on the fact that it's too late to cancel i instructed pete hegseth to substantially reduce the exercises and then he goes well somewhat unrelated question mark i recently asked the president of south korea if they could join us in the denuclearization of the islamic republic iran and they said no thanks so i guess we're going to punish south korea because they're not getting involved in the stupid war that we started without informing them that is causing real economic damage to their people and instead we're going to cozy up to the dictator running a prison state i think that i mean there's a lot that you could unpack in this statement i think my personal favorite bit about it is that it's too late to cancel you know it's like this has been in the works for for who knows how long but the president is only just getting around to being like oh wait let's not do that one and it's a little it's a little late for that and so well i don't know make it smaller because i've been busy it's like if your kid gets like gets a report card that's really bad on a friday but you had a birthday party planned for them on saturday and it's like you're in trouble mister but it's too late to cancel yeah but he could have before i mean like once he spent his summer doing right i mean he's been working on the reflecting pool and putting his name back on the kennedy center and like all this stuff and it's like he didn't get around to ever telling pete hegseth hey cool it with those south korea you know military exercises but now that they're happening he can't just be like well you know we'll we'll get him next time next year we won't do it he has to make a big weird diplomatic incident out of it so uh so that's not good actually i don't know why i'm laughing yeah well no i mean part of the rationale here is i don't you know he needs he's in the market for some friends and some wins in the foreign policy space and there's a moment where he's talking about all the wars he ended and now it's like well the russia ukraine war is spiraling out of control the iran war and we've got sailors that are like jumping off of ships and we'd like to have no plan mou expired and we've achieved nothing and so i don't know maybe detente with north korea can maybe him and kim jong-un can he can invite him over to the new ballroom maybe kim jong-un can be the one to christen the new ballroom that's something to look forward to did you see that he threatened to bomb oman today or yesterday yeah yeah well i mean it's like okay so i mean he's been uh he's been threatening to end iran over and over the day i came back from vacation the big news of that weekend was that trump was like i'm giving you one more chance before i really we did the big one bigger than anything since world war ii and here we are today and it's like well maybe not maybe not bigger than anything since world war ii in iran but maybe we might just you know throw a little bomb at oman that might happen yemen the houthis an ever-expanding war would be another word for that kind of an ever-expanding war in the middle east that you don't know how to stop if it goes on long enough it becomes a forever war it's like a baby forever right now right prepubescent forever war your bad take which I need to share because some people are mad at me who are listeners and this and you will give them the comfort food that they're looking for there is this geographic engagement bait that goes around that just all of us are susceptible to we're all weak I love maps we're map people I don't know we're all and and I'm weak I know it's engagement bait but I can't help myself and it's like you know they'll divide up a country you'll see this online and it's like you know there'll be a pie or various circles and you'll say where would you want to stay if you had to stay there the rest of your life okay here's one of them there are what looks like nine circles in America and you have to stay within one of the circles for the rest of your life one of the circles New England the other one's the Mid-Atlantic New York City there's the Confederacy Southeast my people you get New Orleans you get Charleston you Florida there's Texas and Mexico there is Arizona California Alaska and Hawaii weirdly you've got Washington Oregon and Northern California that's an appealing one you've got the Plains states with Denver in there at least you get Denver you get the mountains you get the weird one which is E in the middle which is just like Jefferson City and Little Rock I don't know what Branson if you really love Branson and then there is F Minnesota Wisconsin Eastern Iowa Illinois Indiana this was chosen by Andrew Edgar as the easiest choice of your life on social media last week I made fun of Minnesota said that there's no good places to vacation in Minnesota we had at least one person unsubscribe over that I'm just I'm just I'm just having fun people okay um you know it's not for me different things are for different people vacationing in Minnesota not for me some people like it that's good that's that's part of the beautiful society that's sort of the bounty that God's given us I'm a pluralist society in America people like to do different things you know everybody like to do the same thing to be a very boring country even still of all the places to be stuck in America for the rest of your life Dubuque Minneapolis Wisconsin and Michigan I think was a poor choice defend yourself I don't know if you ever spent any time at the Great Lakes the Great Lakes are perhaps America's most underrated region for a billion different reasons I could I could take the easy way out and tell you that this is a very easy circle for me personally because it's a very easy circle for me personally because it's a very easy to loop in basically my entire extended family St. Louis just barely makes it into F eastern Iowa southern Iowa all in circle F I didn't even see that Minnesota was in there I'm sure Minnesota's fine you know that little toe of Minnesota that's there I'd I'd had there but the crown jewel here is is Michigan it's the Great Lakes it's northern Ohio I I don't actually want more people to start vacationing at the Great Lakes because that would you know make it a little bit more crowded and a little bit less crowded so I don't want people to be stuck in there so I don't want people to be stuck in there so I don't want people to be stuck in there and I don't want people to be stuck in there so I don't want people to be stuck in there and I don't want people to be stuck in there and I don't want people to be stuck in there and I don't want people to be stuck in there and I don't want people to be stuck in there and I don't want people to be stuck in there and I don't want people to be stuck in there and I don't want people to be stuck in there and I don't want people to be stuck in there and I don't want people to be stuck in there and I don't want people to be stuck in there and I don't want people to be stuck in there and I don't want people to be stuck in there and I don't want people to be stuck February. Ride it out in St. Louis. You're going to ride it out in St. Louis? I've spent February in St. Louis. It fucking sucks. It's different for you. You're from, I mean, like. I grew up in St. Louis. I grew up in Denver. I made the choice. You have self-selected. You have self-selected for the South. You're just a different kind of person. It's a big country. A lot of different climates. A lot of different regions. Everybody can win. You know, we're not all crowding into one circle. That's not the point of this exercise. Thank God. That's true. There will be some people who have decided to go to the Great Lakes. You're going to ride it out in the Great Lakes. That's Andrew Egger. I appreciate you. Wonderful job substituting for Bill Kristol. I have a little rant that I need to deal with at the end with just me. So I'm going to let you go. The rest of the listeners can stick around with me for a few more minutes. And we'll be talking to you soon. All right, buddy? Thanks, Tim. Always fun. All right. I want to do a little primary talk. I just want to respond to some listener feedback I got that was totally legit before I do the Democratic primary talk. And that was when I came back from vacation. I gave this big monologue at the start that was like, can we keep our eye on the fucking ball, people? I was so annoyed with the. The politicians, the commentators, even some of you lovely commenters who are, you know, so focused on the fight between the moderates and the DSA and the Democratic Party that they've like lost sight of what's happening in the broader war and the real threat that we have in front of us. And so I offered that critique of those factionalists. And then over the ensuing couple of weeks, I've engaged in that and critiqued Democrats and complimented Democrats who are on various. Sides of that, depending on the situation. And I've had some feedback. It's like, Tim, I thought you said we need to keep our eye on the ball and we shouldn't be, you know, criticizing Democrats. And and I think that I thought that was fair feedback. And I just I just want to be a little bit more specific about what I meant and what I'm trying to do on the show. My critique was of people who have decided that their foe within our coalition is the proximate foe they should be focused on. Like if you if you are a politician or a commentator and you are spending. Seventy five plus percent of your time attacking other people within the tent or in the case of third way, spending 15 million dollars going after somebody else within the tent. And like that is your main focus. I reject that. I think that that is a really stupid focus. And I do think that you've lost sight on the true foe. I think simultaneously to that, we all want to win. I don't think like putting your head in the dirt and saying, oh, everything the Democrats do is great. I don't think that helps either in the mission of trying to figure out how to counter this authoritarian movement, right? Like sometimes people on our side screw up. I like obviously the prime example of this was Biden. And I think that there was a lot of people within the pro Biden kind of group that were telling those like Bill Kristol and James Garville and others who were saying he's too old. He shouldn't run again. They're like, shut up. And that wasn't helpful, right? So, you know, like there's balance in all things, right? It's one of my favorite sayings, right? It's like, okay. I think we should keep our eye on the ball. Keep the focus. I think I'm doing that on the show. I always take feedback if you guys think I'm falling down on that. And in addition to that, like we have to also look inside the tent and see where we're making mistakes and try to improve and try to be strategic and try to be smart about how to move forward. And in my view, I try to make suggestions based on strategy that are not always in line with what my priors are on policies. Like I don't, my policy views are not the most popular things. Like I think if a Democratic Senate candidate was taking my views in some of these states, they would probably lose. That's why I'm not running for Senate in Louisiana. There are a lot of reasons, but like I wouldn't win. So I think, I think that just, it's important to kind of be strategic, assess, you know, ways that the pro-democracy movement can improve broadly and to talk about that. And like, that's the other ethos of the show, which is like radical candor, right? Which is like, we know who the bad guys are, but I'm also going to be candid about what's happening and trying to strike that balance. Not always going to nail it 100%. And I appreciate feedback on it anytime. Here's one strategic example I want to talk about. And it is a primary happening tomorrow in Florida. Jared Moskowitz, Senate Congressman, is up for reelection, but he's had to move to a new district. And there's a DSA challenger who is primarying him. And I think that this primary is very unstrategic and misguided. And I've seen a lot of people on the left, like really promoting this primary against Jared Moskowitz and really smearing him. And, you know, spending a lot of effort on this. And I think that, you know, frankly, if it's successful, it will probably cost the Democrats a seat. And let me tell you why. So, I just want to back this up. If you are a single-issue anti-Israel voter, like, you're going to be going for Oliver Larkin, the DSA candidate, against Jared Moskowitz. And that's fine. And you can probably just move on from this and we'll see on tomorrow's show. Like, I don't actually agree with Jared Moskowitz on his Israel position. I've expressed my dissatisfaction with some of his comments on the Iran war, both publicly and privately. And so, I disagree with him on that. And I think that because of my disagreement with him on that, I think that is a big part of why I want to explain to people, like, why I think that it's important that he win tomorrow. Because he is running in a district that Trump won by 9.5%. Jared was gerrymandered out of his seat by Ron DeSantis. Someone on the left, like, to smear him as, like, a pro-DeSantis guy or whatever because DeSantis had hired him to do emergency management in the state. And he did a good job at it. And that's an important job in states in the Gulf South. So, to me, that's a qualification, not a demerit. But Ron DeSantis gerrymandered him out. He could have stayed in a more blue seat. His seat was, like, D+2, I believe, previously in South Florida. But instead, you know, he did not do a better job. He did not do a primary with another Democratic member. He went to a new district that, you know, had a bunch of people that he had not represented before that was a, you know, a Mar-a-Lago district, basically. It's Trump plus 9.5%. It's going to be a tough district to win with anybody. Okay? It's going to be a really challenging district. And Jared Moskowitz was a team player changing to go into this district, this harder district, because he thought, as a moderate, he could win it and his dsa opponent followed him to this district and i gotta tell you it just makes no sense to me there are two other democratic congress people lois frankel and dws who are also pro-israel who are in democratic districts the democrats gonna win no matter what and so if you to pick somebody to fight and you want to be strategic about it and you're on the left and or you're part of the whatever uncommitted movement or whatever is unhappy about how pro-israel the democratic party is like those are two options that are kind of clean right where they could have try married them and and the dsa candidate won they would have likely won and uh you know and there are other examples of this like i didn't really engage in the show even though i'm from denver that much on that uh denver uh congressional district that malakiros won against diana to the gex it's like it's a it's a democratic seat diana to cat's been there forever you i understand why younger people in denver might want a congressperson that more represents their views i think well that's actually been pretty thoughtful on a lot of stuff again we're not going to agree on everything issue wise but like i i i think that people might underrate her and she ends up winning that seat against diana to get and like that's a no harm no foul i think that that's interesting that the people of denver will now have you know canada it's more on the left and like we'll see how that shakes out if she ends up being a bad rep somebody can primary her from the center um that's how democracy works this like is not that like this is a kamikaze primary this is an effort to take out jared moskowitz because people don't like his position on israel and they would be happy to have a republican in the seat instead because the influencer that's running against him is like not going to win that seat i can see the trump won by 10 points with a lot of a lot of jewish people in the district like let's just be real jared moskowitz could win that seat it's going to be tough on him like i said he took one for the team to run there and by the way if you just go outside of the issue of israel jared moskowitz is brings a lot to the table for democrats in the one hand and he's not as anti-left as some of the left people want him to want him to think i mean he was on the medicare for all bill jared moskowitz was on the medicare for all bill uh familiar giant paul's medicare for all pack endorsed him when he first ran and he's still for it still for medicare for all and then in addition to that if you go to the hearings jared moskowitz has been doing exactly what we want democrats to do it's not he's not like you know a john larson or diana to get these kind of older democrats who aren't like up for the moment for what is needed in you know pushing back on the right uh from a messaging standpoint jared's been awesome on this i picked up just a few of my favorites of the highlight reels of him uh in congressional hearings and and doing media and i just want to play that for you really quick well obviously janine piero is hitting the box wine again you've called cory luandowski a special government employee i understand what government means i understand what employee means okay but i don't know what makes him special you attack conservative women and you say that we're either stupid i haven't said anything we keep referring to christine gnome's dog as a dog but actually it was a puppy it was 14 months old uh and so uh and that puppy had a name say its name cricket okay that puppy had a name trump's name appears more times in the epstein files than god's name appears in the book about god okay by the way this is the trump bible move over king james now that the national divorce is happening with with elon musk and i'm a child of divorce okay i mean who's gonna get big balls i'm worried about him in the divorce the children always get caught in the middle i appreciate the the kind words the chairman said about me on newsmax the other day calling me the court jester so thank you my because i'm curious uh and i just i'd like to see you flip to the jared moskowitz section of the binder i'm interested to see what staff provided on the on the oppo on me and because we're in the olympics i'm gonna give it a grade i just want to see how how good it is so give me your best one so there it is i mean he went to war with james comer over the fake biden impeachment nonsense he went to war with christine gnome was probably the best democratic congressman taking on christine gnome and her excesses at dhs he was the point person for trying to strip the 700 million that was going to ice bonuses out of the budget i went after pam bondy judge janine as i just played like this legit dude he's been fighting and um he's gonna have to fight to win a really tough district in florida that election is tomorrow and uh you know if we got listeners in south florida who happen to be in that district my argument is from a strategic perspective and from a perspective hey supporting somebody who's been a team player and who's been legit and doing his job in congress i like jared moskowitz in that race um that's my opinion all right i appreciate everybody very much thanks for checking in thanks to andrew egger for subbing wasn't he great uh we'll be back tomorrow with another edition of the show we'll see you all then the bulwark daily is brought to you thanks for the work of lead producer katie cooper associate producer ansley skipper and with video editing by