Podcast Summary: Bulwark Takes – "Ric Grenell Screamed at Trump’s Gatekeeper. Whoopsie..."

Podcast: Bulwark Takes
Host: Tim O'Brien (Bulwark) with Nicole Wallace
Date: February 13, 2026

Episode Overview

This episode dives into two main storylines driving political conversation:

The Trump administration's failed lawfare attacks against six Democratic lawmakers, the cowardice/timidity of most Congressional Republicans in response, and what it signals about the erosion of democratic norms.
The behind-the-scenes downfall of Rick Grenell, former Trump ambassador and self-styled MAGA loyalist, including an embarrassing temper tantrum that cost him a shot at higher office and left him exiled to a minor role.

Along the way, Tim O'Brien and Nicole Wallace highlight what these events reveal about our political culture, the weakness and complicity of Republican leadership, and the newly emboldened fighting spirit among targeted Democrats.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Failed Grand Jury Indictment of Six Democrats

Tim O'Brien (01:15): Recaps the administration's failed attempt to indict six Democratic politicians in the DMV area, calling it "a disastrous failure" that the grand jury so thoroughly rejected their case.
- Points out the administration is still determined to try again—akin to "thank you, sir, may I have another."
Republican Silence: Noted with disbelief how almost no Congressional Republicans (except for a few retiring or already marginalized) have defended their Democratic peers from apparent political prosecution.
- Quote (02:20): “Can you imagine working with somebody, being a colleague, and having someone try a sham effort to run them out of the company, and then you don't say anything…? That’s not happening with the Republicans.”
Mike Johnson’s Weakness:
- Calls out Speaker Mike Johnson for, in O'Brien's words, "saying they should be jailed for putting out a video where they simply said that members of the military should not follow unlawful orders."
  - O’Brien predicts:
    - Quote (02:56): “This is the beginning of the end of Mike Johnson’s speakership. … He was trying to jail his colleagues, saying they should be jailed…”
GOP Rationalizations & “Both Sides”-ism:
- Dismisses Sen. Thom Tillis’s calls for even-handedness, arguing that the Republican lawfare is dramatically worse than anything pursued by Democrats.
- Chuck Grassley, described wryly as “Grandpa Chuck”, is credited for a rare moment of candor in saying law enforcement should focus on real criminals, not political vendettas.

2. Political Lawfare and Resource Mismanagement

O'Brien highlights a warped federal focus:
- Quote (04:07):
  "If you're a rich guy, you have impunity in this country right now. You can do whatever you want. If you're a crypto scammer, you can do whatever you want… Instead, we have all these law enforcement officers and officials and resources going after nonviolent immigrants and imaginary political foes... it’s embarrassing."
On Speaker Johnson's Motives:
- Jason Crow, one of the targeted Democrats, is quoted:
  - Quote (~06:00, summarized):
    "Speaker Johnson has been very clear that his longtime selling of his soul to Donald Trump is thoroughly complete at this point..."

3. The Rick Grenell Story: Ambition, Tantrums, and Exile

Background (07:08):
- O'Brien delivers a gossipy recounting of Grenell's career:
  - Rose amid the GOP as a rare openly gay figure, but had a reputation for being “a huge fucking pain in the ass for Romney…unappealing to work with… brought nothing to the table, except for drama.”
  - Grenell left the Romney campaign claiming discrimination ("It was all fake drama," says O'Brien.)
Current “Downfall” (10:10):
- A Daily Mail exposé reveals Grenell lobbied hard for a vice-presidential slot or Secretary of State in Trump’s next administration, but torpedoed himself after an angry confrontation with Susie Wiles (a powerful Trump gatekeeper).
  - Quote:
    “He screamed at Susie and told her, you're the reason why we're going to lose this election. He berated Susie because he didn’t get a primetime speaking slot. That’s why he doesn’t have a big job. It’s why he was never considered for Secretary of State.”
- After Grinnell denied the incident, the Daily Mail reports Susie Wiles never confirmed his story, and Grenell abruptly hung up on reporters.
- Now, Grenell’s only role is running the underused “Trump Kennedy Center”—a demotion O'Brien gleefully describes as “fabric coordinator” for armchair upholstery.
  - Memorable Moment:
    “Tough titties, tough break. Hate to see it. Hate it when bad things happen to bad people.” (12:00)

4. Postscript: How Do You Rebuild After Institutions Are Damaged?

Nicole Wallace (12:55): Raises the challenge of restoring trust in political and legal institutions after public crises where juries repeatedly reject government cases.
- Quote:
  “How do you repair the system after they're gone?”
O'Brien (13:46):
- Predicts a “house-cleaning” is needed; warns that hacks and loyalists have replaced expertise throughout government.
  - Notes the mass quitting of prosecutors (e.g., “75% of the Minneapolis U.S. attorney’s office has quit already.”)
  - Observes that the Trump movement is now openly recruiting ideologues nationwide for Assistant US Attorney roles, threatening a deeper institutional rot.

5. Newfound Grit Among Targeted Democrats

Wallace (15:24):
- Describes how Democratic lawmakers like Sen. Kelly, Slotkin, and Crow have become “steelier and stronger and more direct”, their anger fueling a willingness to fight the Trump administration harder than many seasoned observers have seen before.
O'Brien (16:29):
- Sees a new axis in the Democratic party—not left vs. moderate, but “who is ready to fight in this moment ... versus who is not.”
  - Cites how unexpected figures like Kelly have “risen to the occasion.”
  - This “resistance” energy, O’Brien predicts, will redefine internal Democratic debates heading into the next cycle.

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

Tim O'Brien on Republican Complicity (02:20):
“Can you imagine … someone try a sham effort to run them out of the company, and you don’t say anything? … That’s not happening with the Republicans.”
On Mike Johnson (02:56):
“This is the beginning of the end of Mike Johnson’s speakership… he was trying to jail his colleagues, saying they should be jailed for putting out a video…”
On Resource Allocation Under Trump (04:07):
“If you’re a rich guy, you have impunity in this country right now… Instead, we have all these resources going after nonviolent immigrants and imaginary political foes…”
On Rick Grenell’s Fall (10:48):
“He screamed at Susie [Wiles] and told her, ‘you’re the reason why we’re going to lose this election.’ … That’s why he doesn’t have a big job.”
On House-Cleaning Government Institutions (13:46):
“Now this administration has replaced a lot of real expertise with a bunch of hacks … I do think they are going to be putting people in these roles that don’t have the judgment for them…”
On the New Democratic Fighting Spirit (16:29):
“Instead of having a left-right divide within the Democratic party … you’re seeing a like who is ready to fight in this moment versus who is not … Slotkin and Crow and Kelly … arise in the moment.”

Timestamps for Important Segments

[01:15] Grand Jury's Rejection of Indictments Against Six Democrats
[02:20] Tim O’Brien on Republican Cowardice
[02:56] The Downside of Mike Johnson’s "Crimes" Statement
[04:07] Critique of Justice Resource Allocation and “Lawfare”
[06:00] Jason Crow Criticizes Mike Johnson’s Loyalty to Trump
[07:08] Rick Grenell’s History of Office Drama
[10:10] Daily Mail Story & Grenell’s Temper Tantrum
[12:00] Grenell’s Demotion and O'Brien's Schadenfreude
[12:55] Nicole Wallace on Repairing Institutions
[13:46] O'Brien on House-Cleaning Federal Government
[15:24] Wallace: Democratic Lawmakers Growing “Steelier”
[16:29] O'Brien: Democrats’ New Spirit of Resistance

Tone and Style Notes

O'Brien's delivery is informally biting, gossipy, and exudes both outrage and dark humor (“tough titties, tough break”).
The episode blends serious analysis with a sense of relish when political adversaries stumble (“Hate it when bad things happen to bad people”).
Nicole Wallace offers a more earnest, empathetic note, focusing on institutional integrity and the courage of those under fire.

This episode will appeal to listeners interested in the high drama of political infighting, the state of democratic norms in crisis, and the human side of both political resistance and petty downfall.

Transcript

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Tim O'Brien (1:15)

Tim O from the Bulwark here. I just got off with Nicole and I'm usually on with her for the whole hour, but it's a crazy news environment. They kicked me out early. That's some other shit to say. So I'm going to say it here with y' all and you can stick around at the end for our exchange, which is focused on the failed effort to indict six Democrats at the grand jury there in the dmv. And boy, what just a disastrous failure by this administration to go after those six Democrats and like just get resoundingly rejected by a grand jury. Now they're going back for a second bite. I guess this is kind of like a thank you, sir. May I have another situation? It seems like, but we'll keep an eye on that. But one of the things I wanted to get into with regards to that is column by my colleague Joe Perdicone, who writes the Press Pass newsletter. It's her newsletter about what's happening on Capitol Hill. You can get that@theblork.com, you should sign up if you haven't. He talks about just how embarrassingly timid it is that none of the Republicans, basically, with two exceptions, have stood up for their Democratic colleagues who are being targeted by this administration. It's really kind of unbelievable cowardice. Can you imagine working with somebody, being a colleague, and having someone try a sham effort to run them out of the company, and then you don't say anything. I think back to like an 80s movie about a prep school where the dean is targeting a kid inappropriately. What do you learn? What is the moral of all those stories? You stand up for your classmate and your colleague, even if they're your rival or even if you don't like them, they're not in your same group. That's not happening with the Republicans. And Mike Johnson, little twerp, said he basically did think they committed a crime. Which to me, I just think that's. This is the beginning of the end of Mike Johnson's speakership. And that is going to be a really dark quote for him to look back on when he's in the minority, when he realizes that his speakership has gone for good and he was trying to jail his colleagues, saying they should be jailed for putting out a video where they simply said that members of the military should not follow unlawful orders. Members of the military should live up to their oath. That's all they said. Mike Johnson thinks they should be jailed for that. Oh, yeah, okay. Well, we'll see what goes around. Comes around on that. But I was intrigued by Thom Tillis, who's retiring, has finally found a spine. And so he said that political lawfare is wrong, no matter either party. It's like, okay, buddy, let's not. Let's not try to compare Merrick Garland limply going after Donald Trump's myriad real crimes to Donald Trump and Ham Bondi going after Mark Kelly for imaginary crimes. It's not the same thing. But it was interesting in Chuck Grassley's point, here's what he said to Perdicom. I think our law enforcement people ought to be spending their time on making our community safe and going after real lawbreakers. That's an important point, Grandpa. That's an important point, Grandpa. Chuck, the amount of resources that's being spent on chasing after fake crime by this administration at the expense of efforts to go after real criminals is truly mind blowing. They just no longer go after white collar crime at all. If you're a rich guy, you have impunity in this country right now. You can do whatever you want. If you're a crypto scammer, you can do whatever you want. If you're kidnapping Nancy Guthrie. No results on that yet. And yet instead, we have all these law enforcement officers and officials and resources going after nonviolent immigrants and imaginary political foes, Jim Comey and Tish James and the Democrats. It's embarrassing. You have limited resources in any organization. You have limited resources, certainly in federal law enforcement. And they're being wasted by these clowns going on these vendettas, and they're not even succeeding. As I said with Kinzinger today, it's a fucking embarrassment how big of a failure they've been on all of this. So Grassley speaking out of that is noteworthy. Perdicon had a chance to talk to Jason Crowe, who's one of the six Democrats who had been targeted. And here's what Crow said about Johnson. Speaker Johnson has been very clear that his longtime selling of his soul to Donald Trump is thoroughly complete at this point. The. That's kind of a real attack on a supposed Christian. You're not supposed to. I think, like, not worshiping false idols is one of the key tenets. So anyway, Crow goes on. So I'm not going to hold my breath for Congressional Republicans to do the right thing, but I've also been very clear that it's never too late to do the right thing. So none of us are holding our breath, but it is. We'll monitor how long this embarrassment goes on, but it is pretty striking that these guys are simultaneously soulless and incompetent when it comes to their lawfare efforts. I wanted to talk about something else that has nothing to do with the topic at hand, but I'm sitting here, we're friends, and sometimes in the content business, I like to think about this, which is like, you know, three for you and one for me. You know, every once in a while I get to do one for me. I get to do a video about something I really like that might not be the highest or most important thing, but I do it either because it's stimulating intellectually, those are the good versions of the ones for me. Or I do them because I'm a petty bitch who wants to rip on somebody that I really dislike personally. And lucky for you guys, this is one such case. There's a guy named Rick Grinnell. Rick Grenell is a gay Republican. He's kind of like the gay Marco a little bit, but meaner and like. Like less dynamic and appealing, if that's possible. But on his ideological journey, he was like a neocon, basically. I worked for John Bolton and. And then he totally redesigned himself or refashioned himself as a maga, whatever that is. Isolationist Nationalist. So it's kind of fake. Their foreign policy worldview. Their foreign policy worldview is whatever Donald Trump's whims are. But he. So he tried to follow, you know, where the winds were blowing on Donald Trump's whims. And so Grinnell sucks up to Trump, sucks up to Trump, ends up getting a job at the end of the first Trump term, as in the Tulsi role that she has now. And coming into this cycle, he was one of the ones who was sucking up to Trump when he was in the wilderness, didn't go for desanctimonia. So going into this cycle, he thought he was well positioned. The rumors going around were that he wanted to be Secretary of State, but according to this latest story from the Daily Mail, he had even higher ambitious than that. And so I want to talk a little bit about this brutal Daily Mail story about Rick Grinnell and just relish in it a little bit. It is kind of like the National Review. I'm kind of doing this thing for you where I'm going behind the paywall of right wing rags and telling you what's there so you don't have to pay them. This story is by a US Political reporter there, Phil Nido. Good job on this philosopher. The headline is Downfall of Trump VP hopeful exiled to construction job. Filthy message. Oval Office humiliations and tearful feud with Ice Maiden who fucking hates his guts. Caught my attention. But I looked at it, I was like, VP hopeful. I was like, who are they talking about? And they start talking about Rick Grinnell. And I was like, are they talking about Rick Grinnell? Turns out Grinnell was floating himself at Mar A Lago as a potential vice presidential nominee with other campaignmates, which is hilarious. Like, I've known, right, going back to 2012 and the Romney campaign. Let me just tell you guys this fun backstory, you know, you want to stick around, pull up a chair, get a fun backstory. 2012 campaign, Grinnell gets hired. At this point, like having out gay Republicans, there weren't really any. I was at the RNC as a spokesperson. I was really like the most prominent gay Republican that was like actively working for Republicans or some who like retired and then came out of the closet but who are still working. And I was out. Nobody wasn't big, you know, it wasn't a big deal. Nobody made a big deal about it. Romney didn't care. Reince previous was my boss. He didn't care. And Rick gets this job and he immediately becomes a huge fucking pain in the ass for Romney. Because he's a dick and he's been posting misogynistic posts at reporters and popping off and just like being erratic, being an asshole. You know, he was just, he's unappealing to work with. Reporters hated him. He brought nothing to the table, basically except for drama. And the Romney campaign started to think about what to do and so they sort of were pushing him to the side a little bit. They didn't want to push him out because they didn't want the perception that they were firing a gay person. Like they didn't want to seem in a general, by the time of 2012, like views had changed on gays and they didn't want to like be seen as like campaign that was anti gay. And so they're just trying to give more of behind the scenes role. He throws a temper tantrum as a hissy fit about it, quits claims that they were sidelining him because of his sexuality. It's just like it was all fake drama, you know, he just, it was over there. I'm like, I'm, I'm catching strays in some of the articles about him, you know, because they're like, there's another gay guy over here. Like, don't, don't look at me. So anyway, he's just a prick. Fast forward back to the, to the Daily Mail store. I should also mention the Daily Mail, I guess found his Instagram. And there are a lot of not that flattering shirtless photos of him on vacation in the story. So we'll throw a couple of those up there if you close your eyes, if you want. Among the other things that happened here, why he didn't get any of these jobs is that he had another one of his temper tantrums with Susie Wiles before the Republican National Convention. He didn't like his speaking time. Here we go. Let's, let's get the quote here. He screamed at Susie and he told her, you're the reason why we're going to lose this election. He berated Susie because he didn't get a primetime speaking slot. That's why he doesn't have a big job. It's why he was never considered for Secretary of State. So, you know, Susie hasn't really stopped Trump from infringing on any of our rights or sending people to a gulag in a foreign country. But at least she kept Rick Grinnell out of the Secretary of State's job. A funny little tidbit in the story. Grinnell said this wasn't true. Told the Daily Mail that Susie would call them and confirmed that that didn't happen. That call from Wiles never came, according to the reporter. And then the Daily Mail reached back out to Grinnell to tell him that Wiles hadn't called and he hung up on them. So, oopsie, oopsie. Now his job is as he's running the Trump Kennedy Center. Well, he's running to the ground, actually. Nobody will perform there. And Trump has to shut it down for two years. So now his job is, I don't know, bringing some swaths of marble into Mr. Trump to ask him to pick which ones he likes better for the armrests. It's his new job. He's kind of like the fabric coordinator for the Trump Kennedy Center. So good luck with that, Rick. Tough titties, tough break. Hate to see it. Hate it when bad things happen to bad people. All right, I got a little bit more on the other story with Nicole Wallace. Stick around for that. We'll be back tomorrow with another pod of my Mardi Gras shirt. We're in carnival season down here in New Orleans. See you on the parade route.