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BREAKING: Trump Taps Unqualified Hatchet Man As New Intel Chief | Morning Shots
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All right, I think we're live. Hi everybody out there. I'm Andrew Egger, White House correspondent with the Bulwark. This is Bill Kristol, editor at large of the Bulwark. We write the Morning Shots newsletter every weekday morning, coming to you live on Tuesday mornings to talk about the news. I keep saying it and they keep doing it. We keep getting new news to chew on right as we are going into these Tuesday streams. Great. From a programming perspective, even though the news tends to be sort of crazy, sort of alarming, that is definitely true today because the first thing that we have to talk about this this morning is brand spanking new information from the president. 9:06am about an hour ago puts this up on Truth Social. I am appointing the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency and chairman of Fannie Mae Freddie Mac William J. Pulte to serve as Acting Director of National Intelligence. William has deep experience managing the most sensitive matters in America, the safety and soundness of the markets, over $10 trillion at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, a substantial increase where and where it was just 12 months ago. During this period, he will remain director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency and chairman of Fannie Mae Freddie Mac. Con. Congratulations to Director Pulte. This is amazing. There's so much to unpack here. Let's start with who he's replacing. Right. This is Tulsi Gabbard's spot, former DNI who resigned a little while ago, a week or so ago, supposedly citing, not supposedly citing, citing her husband's ailing health. He has cancer. But who had also been somebody who had been kind of on the outs from the administration for a while, had been crosswise of them over the Iran war over lots of things. The person he is tapping now is, is. I personally would struggle to think of a person who has been sort of a tertiary figure in this administration who would be more alarming in this particular post than Bill Pulte, who has taken this small little post of sort of this backwater administration sinecure of administering Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and has turned that into a launching point from which to send out these sort of creative attacks on many of Trump's personal enem in the government. That has endeared him to Trump and that apparently is what has now given Trump well why not put Bill in charge of our national intelligence, of our intelligence agencies, of our intelligence gathering. So there's a lot to unpack. Bill, what is your first blush response to this guy being the guy? Are you surprised you see it as like a plausible I mean do you buy it has anything to do with with all the money he was managing under Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and how good of a, of a sort of functionary he was in that department. What do you make of I mean
- [03:06]
B
you're right to stress how alarming it is. It's ludicrous appointment this is the Director of National Intelligence. It's ludicrous to make the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency. Whatever. It's not the most important job in the world, but it's a real job. You're just going to double it up and also be Director of National Intelligence. You don't need to spend eight or nine or ten hours a day on that. That's a good halftime job for someone for a 38 year old business person, sort of honestly the son and grandson of someone who made a fortune in residential housing, I guess he served on the board of the Pulte Housing Company for four years. Little unclear what he actually otherwise but he was a Trumpy Republican donor and a Trump supporter and a Trump activist on Twitter. And so he got his wormed his way into Trump's good graces, got the job that you described as head of Federal Housing Finance Agency, which then they doubled him up there as the head of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which is at least related. He's been involved in all kinds of scandals there. I mean including referring for criminal prosecution and opponents of Trump for fake mortgage fraud charges which either were totally fake or could have been handled in a very routine way by paying back your $426 that you got by saying something was your second house by mistake when it was your first or whatever these charges but these were against Trump's key political enemies who he had grudges against. But also it turns out based on my 10 minutes of reading before the show, I mean there are all kinds of other ethics charges against them and claims of illegality. His colleagues don't respect him in the administration. Republican senators have said that they regret having confirmed him. So this is the guy of all people who's put in charge of a kind of important job, Director of National Intelligence. And I'll let you go on more about. I know you've been reading a little more about his background and what his colleagues say about him, but this is Director of National Intelligence. That person has access to real secrets. Right. And real ability to wreck, to do damage to Trump's opponents here at home. He knows nothing about. We know about foreign policy or Trump's opponents abroad. He's going to use that. Gabbard was already doing little bit of that in the election interference sphere. He's going to use. This is totally an appointee to help subvert the 2026 elections and the 2028 elections, I think. Yeah.
- [05:21]
A
So let's drill down on that a little bit. Bill, can you just kind of walk people through? Because, I mean, people here, Director of National Intelligence. Right. And obviously that suggests a certain type of work. Right. But like, what, what is actually the portfolio of this person? And like, why is it usually important that they're someone who actually comes out of the intelligence community themselves?
- [05:39]
B
Yeah, I mean, so when I was in government, there was no Director of National intelligence, as opposed 9, 11 reforms to try to coordinate the products of the different intelligence agencies within the federal government, the most famous being the Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA, to coordinate them more. There was a case that maybe it wasn't such a good idea to coordinate them too much, that you want to have some competing sort of places. That was the case when I was in government. You get a different little intelligent report each morning from the CIA, from the Intelligence Bureau at State, actually from dia, at Defense, Defense Intelligence Agency. There's also the National Security Agency, which does all some of the fancy spying, listening in and looking into things, so to speak, you know, by. With satellites and all that. Anyway, we have a big intelligence community. This is the Director of it all. It's a White House position, it's a cabinet level position, but it's, it's the white. It's the President's own appointee. And so you have the ability to command and information and from subordinates. Now, maybe subordinates will refuse to break the law and give you information they shouldn't give you, but it's awfully risky to put him in charge of that agency. It's got a lot of employees, actually. I think, you know, it's not like a small little 12 person office. I think there are hundreds, maybe even a couple of thousand employees directly reporting to dni. And that obviously is sprawling intelligence apparatus at Fort Meade and Langley, Virginia, where CIA is, and in the Pentagon and everywhere else. So it can be sort of a job that someone takes over and kind of just presides over the intelligence community in a kind of harmless way. You might say, let CIA do their job, let's to National Security Agency do their job. But it could also be a very powerful and very damaging position to put someone like Pulte in. So it's really extraordinary. I mean, the people, and I'm curious to see actually whether even Trump supporters from the first term who had key intelligence positions are going to say, wait a second. I mean this is really, I mean, whatever. You know, this is just so unprecedented. Tulsi Gabbard was already kind of an unprecedented appointee, but she was, I mean, I don't think she was a good appointee, but she had, had, she was interested in foreign policy. She'd been a member of Congress. I think maybe she'd been on the House Intelligence Committee committee. Is that right? I think maybe so. Anyway, it was at least like semi plausible that some member of Congress who sort of agreed one thought at the time with Trump's foreign policy views might be put into dni. Even that was a very bad appointment. It was opposed. I think she confirmed like 50, 50 almost in the Senate, something like that. But the idea that this guy, a 38 year old true, just hack Trump loyalist, is in this job is really unbelievable.
- [08:14]
A
Yeah. And someone who, by the way, Trump may or may not even bother with trying to shepherd through the Senate confirmation process. One of the, one of the key things in that post there is that he's appointing him as acting Director, acting DNI there, which is a growing theme for the President there. I mean, we could throw this tweet up from DJ Judd. With the appointment of Bill Pulte as acting Director of National Intelligence, Trump now has acting officials at nsa, doj, labor and ODNI and the National Archives. It's just, I mean, Trump has been trying, actively trying, and this is true of a lot of lower down posts as well, like different US Attorneys and things like this. He has been trying to run as much of the government as he can through different little back channels that help him get around Senate confirmation for a lot of these people. Even though the Senate did not really present an obstacle to anybody. He wanted to get confirmed early in his second term here. But I wanted to drill down a little bit on this point that you were making. We've already made the point but it really is worth belaboring just what this guy's qualifications are and aren't and what it says about what Trump wants him to do here. It's all, this is not speculation on our part because it's all very easily constructed from stuff that's right out there in the open. Bill Pulte, as director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency and chair of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, he did not distinguish himself as some kind of housing policy guru, right? I mean, he had barely nothing to say about any of this stuff. His one big kind of idea that he sort of was freelancing on, that he went into the Oval Office and pitched Trump on as like, ooh, let's, let's make housing affordable again. We're 50 year mortgages, right? He comes in, he sells Trump on this. Trump sends out some tweet about it, like liking the cut of its jib. Everybody immediately is like, this would be a terrible idea. You would be basically an indentured servant to your bank for the vast majority of this term of a 50 year mortgage. That's the way. And immediately Trump backs away from it. It's never heard of again. But that his kind of one actual housing policy thing, the thing he distinguished himself by doing, the thing Trump liked and the thing that has kept him in good favor with MAGA is riffling through stuff he shouldn't be riffling through the files under his control, all these different people's mortgage applications and the documents and things to go digging for stuff to get back at. Not just Trump political opponents, not just people like Eric Swalwell, the former representative who was one of these guys who came under Bill Pulte's scrutiny, but also like nonpartisan people in government who Trump just wanted out of the way because they were, they were frustrating him for some reason or another. Like Fed Governor Lisa Cook is the most prominent example of that. Not a person who, like, ever made herself a political enemy of the president's, but just somebody who Trump wanted off the Fed, off the Fed board so he could put somebody more malleable in her place and who, you know, Pulte was instrumental in getting the ball rolling for the entire government's attempt to squish her and get her out of the way ultimately. Failed attempt, by the way, but that's the only thing he does. That's the only thing he does here and now when you bring him into this other post, as you mentioned, Tulsi Gabbard had been doing a little bit of this. Increasingly, it was clear that she was completely crosswise from the administration's foreign policy aims. She had been frozen out of, based on public reporting of a number of really important foreign moves. She very famously was tweeting holistic wellness content from a beach in Hawaii as the raid to go get Maduro in Venezuela was being carried out. So she sort of, like, embarrassingly, in retrospect, showed that she had been kind of frozen out of that entire thing. She was not performing the role of the DNI as far as foreign policy stuff was concerned. But what she was doing, either perhaps in compensation for that, to kind of justify her Trump keeping her around, was that she had thrown herself very enthusiastically into a lot of the enemy punishing stuff here at home. Whether that was relitigating the early days of the Russia investigation. She spearheaded a report midway through last year basically saying that a bunch of Obama officials. Actually, the report didn't say this, but when she tweeted out the report, she said this, that they had basically been treasonous in launching that investigation against Trump to begin with. And then in relitigating his claims about the 2020 election, that when there was this FBI raid last year on a Fulton County, Georgia, elections office, Tulsi Gabbard was just randomly on the scene. There she is in front of a bunch of boxes, God knows of what. I assume it's ballots or something. But this is at that Fulton county office where the FBI is carrying out this raid. She's there, and then she gets the president on speakerphone to talk to the guys carrying out this raid to tell him how good of a job they're doing. I mean, she really was this hatchet man type figure as DNI for Trump's domestic enemies. And it is so obvious that that is the thing that Trump likes that Bill Pulte does. And his only qualification for this job is that he is to pursue this fanatically. He's going to pursue it without shame, without even much consideration for whether other people inside the administration think it might be overkill. He famously got in a fist fight with Scott Bessant, the Treasury Secretary, last year because Bessant thought Pulte had been badmouthing Besant to Trump. And I mean, it's just Trump could not ask for a more pliable, willing attack dog, hatchet man guy in this post that has access to a lot of domestic spying type powers. And as we're going into these elections in 2026 and 2028. So I just. I just ranted a lot about that.
- [13:53]
B
That was an excellent rant. And can I just add one point? Yeah. No, it is absolutely true. I mean the best rants are truthful rants, you know, so this is a good. That was a good, a good one. You know, the acting point is just worth stressing for a minute. If you nominate someone for a position they do, you come up for Senate confirmation and that's a little bit pro forma maybe when your party controls the Senate, on the other hand, the minority party gets to ask questions. You put the person on record, you could hold the stuff against him or her. Later on, it does become something of a check. It's a minor guardrail, but it's not nothing. So he's totally avoiding that he can do that. I don't remember the law exactly on how this kind of complicated because he's been confirmed to another position by the Senate. I think it's pretty easy to keep him as acting for quite a while. And he has no intention, I'm sure Trump nominating him and giving the kind of making him answer questions and defend himself and make pledges that he wouldn't do certain things. But I think for Congress, therefore they won't have that check, this kind of check that the confirmation process can be. I think they need to seriously look at this is something I haven't had time to really research in the last hour or so. I'm just going to say it here, Broadway. They need to think hard about the authorities. The intelligence community has the powers it has. And incidentally, one big issue that's literally up this week isn't it is the 702 reauthorization, which again I'm not probably confident to off the top of my head exactly explain. But it's basically the use of information that's acquired by listening into our conversations with people abroad. And so it's legal, at least in principle legal. And then there's a question of how much they can use. Can they do follow up on those things? I mean there are a lot of questions about how much it gets into domestic stuff. Tulsi Gabbard at one point, one could also make about that is why was the CIA head at an FBI operation. Whatever you think of the FBI even going into Fulton County, Georgia, it is like a domestic law enforcement agency. It's allowed to go look at domestic claims of domestic violation of domestic law. The CIA is not supposed to be doing that. So that was already kind of a one guardrail just kind of hopped over. But anyway, I think there's kind of a deal brewing. I think there was a deal sort of bipartisan deal. There usually have been in the past on the 702 things. Intelligence committees in both houses are more bipartisan. And you. You would like to have a national consensus if you're authorizing sensitive uses of intelligence.
- [16:11]
A
Some of it's important.
- [16:12]
B
I mean, I don't mean it's not. It's not, you know, you don't want to cripple our ability to fight terrorists from abroad. And if they're communicating with people here at home, that's kind of important too. But I really now think it's one has to take a real fresh look at that. I personally this guy is in there at the ni all kinds of things that I as a kind of national security hawk and someone who's pretty sympathetic to the intelligence community over the years has been and I think mostly they behave pretty well. I would to rethink what authorities Congress should give. So I think that's another little It'll be interesting to see how many members of Congress decide well what they can do or what they can say about this or whether they should look at some of these authorities. Also interesting to see if whether professionals in that community just say this is intolerable. I mean I just. We'll see. I guess we'll see.
- [17:02]
A
Yeah. Yeah. Just to re emphasize one point you made there about the possibility of there being alarm on the Hill about this stuff, I wanna pull up. I think this was a Politico piece, although I'm actually not even remembering what I screenshotted here exactly 20 minutes ago when we were reading. Yes, it was a political piece. I'm remembering now from late last year. Bill Pulte has parlayed a niche regulatory job into celebrity status within Donald Trump's orbit by becoming one of his most vociferous social media attack dogs. And as we have already discussed by doing this actual weaponization against some of these people. But his antics are aggravating some more establishment figures around Trump. And that also includes some Republican lawmakers who are privately celebrating Besant's move to stand up to him. I think he's a nut, one House Republican said of Pulte, like others in the story, granted anonymity. Of course, you wouldn't want to get carried away. The guy's just a little too big for his britches, said a second GOP lawmaker who sits on House Financial Services. I've got great respect for Bessant for taking him on. There were others in the story. I mean this is just when this is some random housing Policy guy, that they're like, this guy's crazy. He is not up to this job. And now the idea that we would hand, like, all of these spy powers, or at least the supervision of all of these different agencies that control these spy powers over to this guy who, again, I keep saying it, but his only reason for being there is to go out is to weaponize this stuff against Trump's people. He has zero other even alleged qualifications for it, while also supposedly still doing his. His other jobs, by the way, he's still going to be on it, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and, and the housing agency and all that. So. So, yeah, I don't know. Do you have anything else on this guy? I feel like we've kind of covered it. But, Bill, anything else on Pulte before we turn the page and I guess we'll see what happens in the House and in the Senate on this.
- [18:40]
B
I just think there could be more blowback on this than there have been on other outrageous appointments, partly because we're 18 months in and we, unlike when these people were like over at Gavin, were first nominated, we weren't sure how much Trump would go down this path in his second term. I think we now know that in terms of weaponization of agencies of government, from DHS to DOJ to parts of dod. And I wonder whether there'll be a little more of a widespread kind of rebellion on the Hill and then sort of in the broader foreign policy world. A lot of people kept quiet and didn't want to cause a big ruckus 16, 18 months ago. I wonder if that would be different now.
- [19:17]
A
Yeah, I mean, a lot of things are actually different now. I mean, I think we had gotten so used to this world where you could just set your clocks to Republicans in Congress getting up and shrugging their shoulders at whatever Trump had done. And that certainly seemed to be the case last year when he got all these lunatics through the confirmation process in all his Cabinet agencies, Cabinet posts and things like this. As we will talk about in a minute here, I do wonder whether that is actually genuinely starting to change, and in fact, not just starting to change, but that we should actually see that as sort of a relic of a long, long political era that maybe we're kind of coming out of, or at least we're seeing a sort of rocky period in terms of Trump's control over these Republicans in a lot of ways. We'll talk about that in a minute. Before we do that, I want to throw to a quick. I even do that I should say one more time. I'm Andre with the Bull Work. This is Bill Crystal with the Bull Work. We write the morning Shots newsletter every Monday through Friday morning free in your inbox atthebull work.com. you should subscribe to that if you haven't. Let's do an ad and we'll be back in one second.
- [20:21]
C
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- [21:28]
A
It's kind of a bit around here how much Sam loves doing those pocket hose reads. I'd never actually seen one until this minute and was going in with a little bit of cynicism, but actually now that I have watched it, maybe I should get a pocket post. Who knows? We don't need to belabor that. We were gonna start talking about spines and the Republicans who have perhaps rediscovered that they have them. This is a news story that we have been hitting. It's interesting cuz they're kind of rediscovering the spines a little bit at a moment when Trump is asking them to swallow more and more stuff than he almost ever has. Right? Like just like one thing after another after another, completely cutting them out of the loop. The Iran war suddenly coming to them to ask for a billion dollars in this reconciliation bill for funding for his ballroom. And then the cherry on top, which we have gone insane talking about the last few weeks has been this anti weaponization fund, this $1.776 billion settlement fund that stems from his lawsuit against the IRS over the leak of his tax returns, where he was playing both sides of the negotiating table here. Him suing in his personal capacity, while also being the boss of the people he was suing at in the Treasury Department, with the end result that they settled for this, this $1.776 billion that was earmarked for payouts for people who were victimized by Biden era weaponization of government, which could be anybody, right? They sort of steadfastly refused to rule out certain categories of people, like people who assaulted cops on Trump's behalf while storming the Capitol on January 6th. They were all like, well, you know, we're gonna assess them on a case by case basis. And they were saying Republican senators could maybe get some of this money because Jack Smith had tapped their phone records. I mean, it was astonishing. It was astonishing. Astonishing. Astonishing. Abuse of power, abuse of political capital. Just remarkable that they would ever try to get Republicans to swallow this. They're backing off of it. They might not be backing off of it permanently, that remains to be seen. But they've suffered some setbacks in court. On Friday, there were two different judges who, who dealt it two different blows. And on Monday, yesterday, Trump both started telling congressional allies that they were backing off of this fund. And the Justice Department put out this statement, which we'll throw up here. The Department of Justice disagrees strongly with the decision on the anti Weaponization fund put forth by the United States District Court Judge in the Eastern District of Virginia. That is the judge, by the way, who just put a couple week moratorium on any payments into or out of the fund while he started looking at the case wherein the court stated that under no circumstances may the Department of Justice proceed with the anti weapons weaponization fund recently established in order to make up for the tremendous abuse, harm and hate unfairly shown to so many people. This fund was open to anybody who was so weaponized, targeted or persecuted, whether they were Democrat, Republican, conservative, Independent or otherwise. The department will abide by the court's ruling. This is a strange statement in a couple of ways, but one is that it does not actually characterize the court ruling accurately. In fact, it makes the court ruling sound more powerful than it was. The court just said nothing for a bit while we take a look at this. This makes it sound like, like the court had ruled that it couldn't happen at all, which is also what they've been telling congressional Republicans that they would not have it happen at all. So my sort of read of this is that this is them trying to blame the court for what they, for what basically congressional Republicans were strong, arming them into doing anyway, which is to back away from the fund. Other people have different interpretations. What do you think is going on here, Bill?
- [24:59]
B
No, I think that's right. I mean it seems like they want to back away. I think they face the prospect of, of not just of Congress not accepting it, but of Congress acting affirmatively to ban these expenditures and maybe getting a lot of Republican votes and maybe getting a veto proof margin in both houses so that something they didn't want to face. And so they're pretending that the court's requiring them to abandon it when the court was requiring them to pause it. Now, the court opinions also provides grounds for thinking that maybe ultimately the court would go in that direction. But as you say, it didn't. Neither court that was involved definitively resolved anything on Friday. So I guess is it a, I don't know, is it a good sign that Trump's backing off, willing to back off a little bit, or is it a sign of just acceding to this reality, but that should say blaming the court but then chucking ahead on a whole bunch of other things? I don't know.
- [25:49]
A
Yeah. Yeah, I will be interested to see how this actually plays out. I mean, the Senate is at kind of a moment of max leverage right now, right, because they have this bill, this reconciliation bill that they have been considering which they need to pass, at least according to all them. They need to pass it. It will finally restore the funding to ICE and to Border Patrol that they were unable to get Democrats to sign off on months ago at this point. They just haven't had that funding since then. And the strategy was always, well, that'll be fine because Republicans can just come together and pass this party line reconciliation bill that funds those things. But now, if reporting is to be believed, it's like half of Senate Republicans who have a big problem with this anti weaponization fund and they need every single one of them to remain united on this bill to pass it, first of all. And so if there are any of them in there who want to hold out for real language banning this fund, even now, even now that Trump seems to be trying to back off of it, they may be able to actually strong arm the Senate into doing that because there's a big appetite for this. It remains to be seen whether the Senate will let Trump kind of of slink away with his tail between his legs on this one and say, well, he's given us assurances this isn't going to happen. And therefore we don't need to actually pass any legislation making sure it won't happen. At this moment of maximum leverage, I don't know how that's going to go. It seems to me that Senate leadership would be fine with that arrangement with them sort of quietly letting Trump walk it back and basically taking him at his word that he is not going to then just try to resurrect this thing. Obviously, there would still be the legal challenges, but at that point point, the Senate would have maybe missed its one real moment to stop this. But it may still be the case. And I've seen some congressional reporters who think it will still be the case, like Jake Sherman over at Punchbowl, that there's still gonna be enough of an appetite from some of these guys that they will want to put language in this reconciliation bill that says no anti weaponization fund ever, which is new. I mean, that's not the kind of resistance. A year ago, I think we would have seen even what we have today as pretty salutary from Senate Republicans in terms of, at least relative to what had come before and the complete subservience that we'd seen then. But this, I mean, if they were actually to not only walk Trump back on this, but actually slam the door behind him and say, as a matter of law, this fund can't go out, that would be a new development. Right? Am I being too Pollyannaish about this or. I mean, this seems like that would be a real rupture in the relationship that we've seen for so long here.
- [28:29]
B
I think it would be a new development. I think you're being a little Pollyannish, maybe in the sense that Trump has also sort of said, I'm not going to do it anyway. So then Trump will sign the bill and say, well, I wasn't going to do this anyway. And they're not, of course, on the underlying legislation, which as you say, is new funding, additional funding for ICE and Border Patrol. The Republicans aren't adding any of the conditions that some of them vaguely sort of said sounded reasonable way back months ago when this was being debated. So I think. But look, I think you're right to say that it's a moment of rupture may be too strong, but what's the right word? I'm looking, you know, at least willingness to push back. And then let's see how far they do in this case and let's see how far they do in a whole bunch of cognate, so to speak, cases A whole bunch of other cases. Right. That are. Because your other point that Trump isn't in general, despite a slight retreat here, I think you make this point in the newsletter this morning. Trump's forging ahead on all kinds of fronts. Right. I mean, and it'd be interesting to see just how much pushback there is from Congress, as Pete Hegseth is Secretary Defense today, yesterday, I guess, has blocked a whole bunch of promotions, intervening in a very, in a way that Secretary of Defenses haven't and aren't supposed to intervene in the promotion of colonels to one star or one stars, up to two or three stars. These promotion boards, you know, we sort out and it's, you know, it's a tough competition to see who gets these promotions. And the civilian SecDef is supposed to intervene if there's some new information that comes to light or sort of extraordinary events. And he's going through striking a lot of people, disproportionately, minorities and female people he has some grudge against, I suppose. I don't think any of them spoke it up much on anything Trump related, but. And people who seem to be very well qualified and were selected by their peers or by their slight superiors in the general officer corps to move up to these positions of responsibility. So that's just one instance. I mean, Hexa's doing a ton of stuff at Defense. A lot of stuff still going on, as you wrote about last week at ICE with our friend Mark Wayne Mullen, whatever his name is. And so is his name, isn't it? I can never get his name straight.
- [30:32]
A
That's right. You got it.
- [30:33]
B
Confusing. Confusing double first name there. Yeah. And, and anyway. But I think it's an interesting moment. Yeah, it's interesting question how much. How does the pushback get broadened a bit, tie in the senators who he's defeated and who therefore are. You know, it's a YOLO situation for, presumably for Cassidy and Cornyn. And maybe, you know, maybe it is. This next few months will be interesting. I agree with that.
- [30:57]
A
Yeah. Yeah. I think. And I'm a little bit just sort of spitballing here to try to put a frame where maybe no frame exists, but it sort of seems as though he's just getting. He's having less fun in the job. All of his fun little side projects and passion projects and hobbies aren't going very well. Things like the ballroom, things like America 250, things like the Kennedy center. These things keep. He keeps getting frustrated and what he wants to do with all of them Even things like the war in Iran, which like that. It seemed like all last year, he started putting more and more of his sort of just like, macho, I'm the president, bitch, and I can do what I want sort of energy. It had started not going so well in terms of domestic policy, and he had been doing more and more of it in terms of foreign policy and bombing Iran and going and getting Maduro in Venezuela. And then this year, very much channeling that sort of hegsethy like, we're the best. We can sort of bend the world to our will. We're just gonna go over there and raise hell and plant the American flag and have a great time. And that hasn't happened either. Right. I mean, he's very plainly struggling to get us out of this same conflict that he put us in. And I just wanna throw up a couple tweets from the president from the last couple days just to kind of maybe underscore this point of like, how grumpy and just sort of complainy and whiny he's gotten about this stuff. Like, here, I'll just give you this wall of text. We're certainly not gonna read this whole thing. This is like, only about three quarters of this post that he made about the Kennedy center, about his latest legal setbacks. A judge basically said, you're actually allowed to shut down the Kennedy center for two years just because you're mad about low ticket sales and all these sorts of things. And you have to take your name off the building, which, like, big news if you're Trump. He is very unhappy about this. He said, rip his name off the building. He's got 20 days to do so. Even though a large board of some of the most distinguished people in the country voted unanimously to put the name up. I didn't do it. The board did, because they thought it would be good for this dying institution, which was doing record low business and only getting worse. Let me see if I can even find this bit near the bottom there. That is why the Kennedy center will soon be closed, probably never to open again. He's just saying, forget you guys. I tried real hard to fix this institution, and I would have done it, but you wouldn't get out of my way. So forget it. I'm going to burn the. I don't know what he's going to do. He's not going to burn the Kennedy center to the ground, but he's basically washing his hands of this. And he's done the same thing with this America250 thing which you've been writing about. He tried to get a bunch of these artists together for this big party. A bunch of them pulled out and now he's saying, forget you guys. I'm just going to have a big Trump rally. The National Mall. Yeah, here we go. We should have a giant Make America Great again rally for 250 instead of having overpriced singers who nobody wants to hear whose music is boring and yet who do nothing but complain. Cancel it. Just like I canceled my involvement with the failing and unsafe to be in Kennedy Center. He's just. He's taking his ball and going home on so many of these things that were like the fun things for him until like five minutes ago. And yet, like, at the same time, it's almost like he's. He's like channeling all of this, this like black anger and just sort of grumpiness and misanthropy that he's always had, but which is like at the forefront now into doing more and more open weaponization type stuff with guys like Hegseth, with guys like Pulte. I don't know. Am I? Am I? It just seems like he is. He is going into the black pill much more so than ever. And even though the bottom is falling out of his popularity, he's not focused on stuff like how do I win back some of these voters I've lost. He's focused on how do I make. Make more and more people pay so I can feel better about all this stuff that's going badly during my presidency.
- [34:28]
B
Right. And maybe ultimately overcome the lack of popularity by jimmying the rules of how you get to how elections work and how you get to where you get to stay in office or not. So. Yeah, absolutely.
- [34:38]
A
Right.
- [34:38]
B
I mean, you know, I just didn't notice this until you read the second tweet, or truth Social thing, whatever we're calling it. He thinks it's boring, right? These performing artists his people selected would be boring to listen to. Didn't he also use that term, the word boring about the Iran negotiations? Right. In some tweets, in some posts yesterday about it's gotten boring, that just the Iranians just won't come to a deal. And it is kind of insane. You're involved in a rather important foreign policy discussion which would kind of affect the world economy and so forth. Reopen the strait. But it's boring. So I'm not paying attention anymore. But it is that psychologically revealing. I think you're right about that. That he's. He just Hates the. He never has liked the governance part of it much, but it's not going so well. So he likes it even less, both the governance and also some of the performative stuff like the America 250 celebrations which he tries to turn in. Well, is going to turn into Trump250 celebrations in D.C. but a little less successfully than he hoped. And I think a lot of the country is not going to pay attention. I hope they don't. I urged that this morning anyway. So, yeah, I think it's. But I think you're right that the. So it's nice to see him bored in my opinion and nice to see him frustrated. But the price of it could be just an intensification of the real effort to just overturn everything in these next few months. But then in these last two years, I mean the prospect of 2027, 2028, the more you think about where Trump is now, both politically and psychologically is pretty scary for the country, honestly. And also just in terms of the rationality of his decision making, don't you think? I mean, if he can put Bill Pulte into this, he can also launch a war based on, on terrible intelligence and wishful thinking. He already has. But I mean, you know, in other places or you could react to not being frustrated in this war that we're in the middle of by, by trying to take it out on others. I mean, the degree to which we could be in real uncharted water, you know, the kind of Nixon 74 stuff that he, that, that Kissinger and Schlesinger were worried that Nixon would do, you know, as he was drinking too much and being extremely unhappy that he was going to have to give up the presidency. I feel like, like that we're beyond that actually with Trump. But it does make one worry about the country for the next couple of years.
- [36:52]
A
Yeah. Yeah. We are certainly in a heightening the contradictions style era. The great sort of longed for hope of some sort of longtime torch carrying Republicans that maybe there'd be some sort of soft landing out of all of this and we would seamlessly transition into some saner Republican Party. I think there's gonna be some ruptures. I think there's gonna be. Who knows, who the heck knows what's gonna come the next few years, what, what the Republican Party is going to look like a few years from now, but there are going to be some cataclysmic events that reshape the landscape and it'll be in the wake of that. And as a result of that. Whatever comes next comes, but we can leave it at that. It's hard to know how to feel about some of this stuff, right? I mean, I am not above a certain amount of schadenfreude that the guy seems to be actively hating his job of destroying the country. It was worse last year when he was having fun and destroying the country. But I do worry a little bit about some of the uses to which he might put his power as a result of that sort of bleak feeling as well. But anything else, Bill, before we let the good people go? No.
- [38:04]
B
Well said.
- [38:05]
A
All right. Well, we'll call it there. We'll be back here next Tuesday. We're going to keep following it. We'll certainly be following this story of the Anti Weaponization Fund, the story of, of whether Congress will throw up any roadblocks here or there with this nomination of Bill Pulte to dni. Probably we'll have some of that stuff to talk about next week. But who knows, Maybe there'll be as yet undreamt of horrors for us to unpack for you then. So come back and find out. Thanks to everybody out there for watching. We hope you will subscribe to the YouTube channel. Head over to the Bulwark to get Bill and my newsletter in your inbox if you don't yet. It's fun. We think it's good. We like writing it. People seem to enjoy reading it. So you can go. So go get that for free and we'll leave it there. Thanks to you all for watching and we'll see you next time.