Tim Miller’s Rage Finally Boiled Over

Summary

Bulwark Takes — “Tim Miller’s Rage Finally Boiled Over”

Podcast: Bulwark Takes
Host: The Bulwark
Featured Voices: Tim Miller, Katie Tur, James
Air Date: May 9, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Tim Miller channels his frustration and outrage over recent developments surrounding voting rights, gerrymandering, and the ongoing dilution of representation in several Southern states. Joined by guests Katie Tur and James, Tim dissects the recent pushback against democratic norms in places like Louisiana, Tennessee, and Virginia. They provide historical parallels, discuss the broader implications for coalition politics, and assess the outlook for the midterms. The conversation also pivots to America’s foreign policy posture regarding Iran and Russia, putting Trump’s seemingly haphazard decision-making in context.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Tim Miller’s “Boiling Over” Rage at Voting Rights Attacks

• Summary:
  Tim reflects on a dispiriting and exhausting week of news and media appearances in which attacks on voting rights, especially in Louisiana and Tennessee, have come to dominate the headlines.
• Memorable Moment / Quote:

  “It is just truly fucking sickening to live in a country where they are going to try to cancel the votes of people here in Louisiana, where they’re going to try to deny the people of Memphis any representation at all… Try to cheat in a way that hearkens back to the ways that they tried to cheat during Jim Crow. And it is enough to spike your cortisol. So to speak.”
  — Tim Miller [01:31]

2. Gerrymandering & Coalition Building: Lessons from Wisconsin and Hungary

• Katie Tur’s Perspective:

  • Katie draws on examples from Wisconsin and Hungary, referencing how long-term, aggressive gerrymanders embedded ruling parties despite changing popular majorities.
  • She observes that “the only answer is to win big enough” to break through skewed systems, albeit acknowledging this is not especially satisfying advice.

  “Those are two places in which the ruling party...came up with this like crazily aggressive gerrymander. It kind of locked them into power...And what happened in that state… they kind of went through the process of building statewide majority coalitions big enough to start to unwind some of that.”
  — Katie Tur [04:54]

• Tim’s Analysis:

  • Describes the situation in Louisiana, where voters had already submitted absentee ballots, but a Supreme Court decision led to the entire election being stopped—effectively “nullifying” tens of thousands of votes.
  • Memphis’ black voters are carved up into three districts (“a third, a third, a third”)—an explicit affront to representation.
  • Both note the coalition needed in places like Georgia: Black voters, ex-Republicans, and dissatisfied rural voters are keys to challenging these systems.

  “How did the Democrats take back Georgia, have a Jewish and a black senator for the first time? It was big turnout among black voters...also included a lot of, like, former Republican voters who were upset about Donald Trump in the Atlanta suburbs…That’s the coalition in the South to win back some of these districts.”
  — Tim Miller [08:03]

3. Broader Voter Disenfranchisement and Urgency for Change

• Context:
  Katie points out that the undermining of representation isn’t just about black voters—it affects people of all backgrounds living in those cities.
  • “There’s a lot of people who should have an investment in this across all kinds of lines…” [07:36]
  • Tim affirms: This is why broad coalitional politics is essential.

4. Iran, Trump’s Foreign Policy, and Limits of Tabloid Politics

• Arash Azizi Segment:

  • James recaps Arash Azizi’s argument: not all Iranian “hardliners” oppose a deal, and their posture is more “hard-nosed pragmatism.” The lack of a clear negotiating counterpart in Iran complicates matters.
  • Trump’s impulsivity is being strategically “waited out” by Iran, knowing he wants a win and may give concessions.

• Quote:

  “Trump is known to give terrible deals...they can look at right now and see that they have leverage and see that Donald Trump wants to get out of this war. And so...let’s wait it out and see how much more we can get out of Trump...”
  — Tim Miller [10:08]

• On Trump’s “Micro News Cycle” Leadership:

  • Trump’s tendency to announce “deals” or ceasefires—regardless of facts—is described as day-to-day “madman, tabloid style” governance.
  • This may work domestically, but doesn’t sway entrenched interests abroad.

  “He does not care if someone says, oh, this is hypocritical or oh, this is in contrast to something you said yesterday, or oh, this isn’t true. He’s trying to win the micro news cycles and try to survive. And...it has worked out in his favor politically...But...these two quagmires...are cases where these little gimmicks don’t really work.”
  — Tim Miller [11:49]

5. Electoral Ramifications of Redistricting for 2026 Midterms

• Discussion:

  • Tennessee, Florida, and Louisiana—all redrawing maps to the detriment of Democrats.
  • Louisiana’s case is especially egregious: absentee ballots cast before the map change are effectively trashed.
  • Tim sees the redistricting as significant but not necessarily decisive; however, it narrows Democratic prospects in the House.

• Quotes:

  “Here in Louisiana...we’ve literally disenfranchised about 42,000 voters...the Supreme Court overturning of the Voting Rights act led to...canceling the House elections. But people had already started voting on absentee ballots. So we’re literally disenfranchising people that have cast votes here in Louisiana. That’s appalling.”
  — Tim Miller [13:21]

  “On net, there will still be more Republican seats... But I do think the Republicans have advantaged themselves.”
  — Tim Miller [15:31]

6. On Reform: End Gerrymandering and Citizens United, Institute Term Limits?

• James’ Suggestion:
  • Suggests amending the Constitution to tackle gerrymandering, implement term limits, and overturn Citizens United.
• Tim’s Response:

  “I don’t know if we’ll agree 100%, but that’s good. We can hash it out.”
  — Tim Miller [16:27]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Tim’s opening rage and context: [00:57 – 03:18]
• Katie Tur on Wisconsin/Hungary & coalition politics: [04:49 – 08:09]
• Coalitional politics in Georgia: [08:00 – 08:49]
• Iran, Trump, and foreign policy dynamics: [08:49 – 12:54]
• Impact of new maps on upcoming midterms: [12:54 – 15:57]
• Constitutional reform chat: [15:57 – 16:31]

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• “It is just truly fucking sickening to live in a country where they are going to try to cancel the votes...”
  — Tim Miller [01:31]

• “Those are two places in which the ruling party...came up with this like crazily aggressive gerrymander.”
  — Katie Tur [04:54]

• “We’re literally disenfranchising people that have cast votes here in Louisiana. That’s appalling.”
  — Tim Miller [13:21]

• “Trump is known to give terrible deals...let’s wait it out and see how much more we can get...”
  — Tim Miller [10:08]

• “He lives hour by hour...He’s trying to win the micro news cycles and try to survive.”
  — Tim Miller [11:49]

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Tone & Takeaways

The episode features Tim Miller at his most impassioned, railing against recent anti-democratic developments and laying out the real-life effects of gerrymandering and voter suppression. Katie Tur’s historical context and focus on coalition building offer both sobering realism and a modest path forward. The segment on Trump’s foreign policy highlights the limits of headline-driven politics in the face of intractable global crises. The podcast closes with a nod to deeper systemic reform, capturing both the frustration and the faint hope animating the pro-democracy camp.

Listeners are left with a clear picture: rights and representation are under severe threat, and only broad democratic engagement—across traditional divides—has a chance to push back.

Transcript

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[Tim Miller]

life Sleep hey everybody, Tim Miller from the Bulwark. Man, was it a long Friday? You know that Adam Star wars podcast? If you missed, go check it out and also subscribe to the feed if you haven't here on YouTube, people are upset. You know, you can just tell how shook Adam was. And he I'm not talking out of school. He admitted that at the top of the pod, just about how dispiriting it is, what is happening with the Voting Rights act combining with other shenanigans in Virginia and elsewhere with regards to the redistricting and the impact on the midterms and beyond. And we worked through it over the course of the whole hour. And then after that I went on to Katie Tur and we talked about it a little bit. And also she had a really smart panel on to discuss the thinking in the Iran war. And we kind of bounced around some of the themes that were discussed on the podcast earlier this week with Arash. It's easy. But then finally, by the time Friday night came around and I was on the Chris Hayes Show, I really do think that my rage had bubbled over and it is just truly fucking sickening to live in a country where they are going to try to cancel the votes of people here in Louisiana, where they're going to try to deny the people of Memphis any representation at all. Deny people here in either Baton Rouge or New Orleans with representation. Try to cheat. Try to cheat in a way that hearkens back to the ways that they tried to cheat during Jim Crow. And it is enough to spike your cortisol. So to speak, but I also think we're going to beat them. I also think we're beat him and it's going to take time. It's going to take work. We're going to beat him and so anyway, wanted to give you guys a chance to listen to kind of my revised and extended remarks from the storyboard podcast after I had a few hours to settle in the old noggin. Up next is my rant with Chris Hayes and the conversation with Katie Cher. Hope you enjoy it. Stick around. We'll be back this weekend. Thanks. There's any news in Iran or elsewhere?

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[Katie Tur]

You know Tim, the two examples that I've had in my head are Wisconsin and Hungary. And the reason I have those two examples in my head because those are two places in which the ruling party in Wisconsin, the Republican Party, came up with this like crazily aggressive gerrymander. It kind of locked them into power for a long time. It even when they were like, you know, losing majorities in the popular vote, they would manage to sort of stay in power. And what happened in that state, Ben Wickler STATE CHAIR they kind of went through the process of building statewide majority coalitions big enough to start to unwind some of that. And we've seen the same thing in Hungary. And it's sort of an annoying answer to be like, well, you just have to win big enough. But I don't see any other answer at this point.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah, well, and yet it takes time. And look, there's still kind of things reverberating from that in Wisconsin now. I mean, the Republicans still in the state legislature in Wisconsin have a disproportionate representation to their vote share. But look, I guess I'll be negative first and then give you what I think the only option out of this is. I shared your rage from the intro. One thing I'd add to it is as courts have canceled two elections, you basically overturned. They've overturned the one election that you focused on in Virginia, but they nullified the votes of about 42,000 people here in Louisiana as well. In addition to that, we should say people had already voted absentee. Where I live in Louisiana, based on the current maps, the election had started, and as a result of the Supreme Court ruling, the governor, by executive order called an emergency, stopped the vote, basically stopped the count. Yeah. So now that's. Now they're going to try to redraw the maps to try to draw out, you know, one of the two majority minority representatives here. So that's happening here and in Tennessee, you know, what is happening is just unbelievable, an affront to the law and the idea that they're cutting up Memphis. It's illegal for them to make a decision based on race, and they just so happen. Cut up Memphis a third, A third, A third. The black voters in Memphis are cut up equally into three districts. Like, how else do you describe what's happening? And in Tennessee now, Nashville and Memphis won't have any representation. So what's that? How do you overcome that with democracy? I understand people who are frustrated with that. I think the opportunity pointing to Hungary and Wisconsin is if people are pissed off enough about this and if Donald Trump keeps screwing up as much as he is, I do expect there'll be a landslide in November, and it maybe won't turn out as big as it could have been because of the ways that they're trying to jerry rig the system. But that is the only way out of it, and that's probably cold comfort for people of Memphis and who aren't going to have any representatives and somebody either here in New Orleans or in Baton Rouge. But like, that's it right now.

[Katie Tur]

Tim, last question here. Just about this sort of coalitional politics. You're talking about Memphis and Nashville, and obviously this is directed at black voters, but there's a lot of non black voters, a lot of white folks, a lot of all kinds of people who live in these cities who are having their representation taken. Like, Nashville doesn't have a congressman. Memphis doesn't. They're trying to get rid of part of Louisiana, like of New Orleans or, you know, and only have, like, there's a lot of people who should have an investment in this across all kinds of lines of difference to be able to have a say for your community.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah. And look, I think Georgia is a good example of this about how to push back against it. You know, I mean, look at the kind of coalition that you're talking about, this coalitional politics. How did the Democrats take back Georgia have a Jewish and a black senator for the first time? It was big turnout among black voters who are upset. Stacey Abrams obviously organizing it also included a lot of, like, former Republican voters who were upset about Donald Trump in the Atlanta suburbs that weren't happy with the way that the party was going. That same coalition's enough to get together and maybe on top of that, reaching out to rural voters and rural white voters who are unhappy with the way Donald Trump screwing up the farm economy. You know, and I wish that there was a more grand strategy I could offer than that kind of just ranked politics, but that's it. Like, that's the coalition in the south to win back some of these districts.

[James]

Tim Miller had a great conversation just the other day with Arasha Zizi, and Arash was saying that he believes that there is more of a desire for a deal from the Iranians and that the idea that that the hardliner, the hardest of hardliners are the ones that are in control is belied by the evidence in front of us. So, Tim, I found that conversation to be really enlightening, and it really pushed back against some of our preconceived notions about the way this war has been going.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah, I agree with that. Look, I mean, Arash, who's from Iran, is so smart on this and has been covering it as a historian. And I think the point that he's trying to make is that the, the now dead Ayatollah Khomeini was simultaneously, like, extremely ideological and extremely Cautious and did not want to be seen to be making any deals with this administration. And that led to this kind of Iran, to the place where they were before this war started. And that this new regime, like when people say hear hard line, they might think of it kind of in the theocratic sense or they might think about it in the negotiation sense. But I think that his point was, you know, maybe a better way to put it. It's like, I'm paraphrasing, but it's like hard nosed. Right. And you know that they are going to want to be tougher about this and maybe they would be willing to make a deal. The problem with that, as kind of as David Emacius has laid out there is there still isn't like a clear person to make the deal. Right. And I think that while you know that Arash is, I think observations are right about where the Iranian direction he wants to go, you know, nobody wants to be seen as the sop. And I think that they can look at right now and see that they have leverage and see that Donald Trump wants to get out of this war. And so you can be hard nosed and pragmatic and say, well, let's wait it out and see how much more we can get out of Trump, you know, because who the heck knows? Trump is known to give terrible deals. And I think that puts Trump in a very tough situation. And I think that explains in part why, you know, he's calling up Bret Baier saying we're going to get a deal every two days and you know, nothing, nothing is coming because the Iranians see that he wants that deal badly.

[James]

As you were talking about how the president would just post something that he wants to be true every couple of days or call Brett Baer. Here's another version of that. And this is regarding Ukraine and Russia. He took to Truth Social to announce a three day cease fire between Ukraine and Russia. Thing is, Vladimir Putin announced a unilateral cease fire himself a couple days ago to celebrate victory day in Russia when Russia defeated the Nazis. And then Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced one himself. And by the way, they've been fighting straight through it. So how do you see this Donald Trump making an announcement like this?

[Tim Miller]

Yeah. And Katie, you're probably as good a person to analyze this as anybody having followed him since 2015. Like Trump is a day by day, he lives day by day. Like unlike other politicians, he lives hour by hour. Yeah. Minute by minute. Right. He does not care if someone says, oh, this is hypocritical or oh, this is in contrast to something you said yesterday, or oh, this isn't true. He's trying to win the micro news cycles and try to survive. And you know, you have to admit that it has worked out in his favor politically. He's managed to survive. I do think that in particular these two quagmires, the Russia, Ukraine war and the war that he started in Iran, are cases where these little gimmicks don't really work. Like the tabloid politics gimmicks of trying to convince people that something is true for a day in order to win a news cycle, in order to get a good headline on the New York Post. The regime in Iran doesn't care about that. Vladimir Putin doesn't care about that. They have much more deep seated entrenched interests. And I think he's kind of running into the limits of what his kind of madman, tabloid style, can, you know, can get for them.

[James]

So, Tim, when you take this combined and combine it with the other states that we've been talking about lately, Florida redrawing its maps, Tennessee just yesterday was allowed to redraw its maps right ahead of their primary, wiping out the lone Democratic seat out there. Louisiana is in the process. How significant do you think this is going to be for the midterms?

[Tim Miller]

Well, it is going to be significant for the midterms. I'll get to that in a second. I just. It bears mentioning that the grounds by which this Virginia ballot initiative was overturned, you know, not wanting to disenfranchise voters again, I agree that that's a defensible ground in a vacuum. Here in Louisiana, where I live, we've literally disenfranchised about 42,000 voters. We don't know how many exactly because the state won't tell us, but the Supreme Court overturning of the Voting Rights act led to Jeff Landry, the governor, declaring an executive order, declaring an emergency, canceling the House elections. But people had already started voting on absentee ballots. So we're literally disenfranchising people that have cast votes here in Louisiana. That's appalling. And the new Tennessee map that they've drawn is a total, is an obvious affront to the law there, where they're not supposed to consider race. And yet somehow they've divided up Memphis equally into thirds, where, you know, black voters are divided now into three different districts at equal measure. A third, A third, a third. So just truly appalling what's happening in Tennessee and here in Louisiana in particular, the midterm impact is real. I think the Democrats are still clearly favorites to take the House. I think that this gives the Republicans at least a plausible map by which they might be able to protect the House or make the House majority for the Democrats pretty narrow. And so I think it has a meaningful difference. It probably will not be what flips the House, but you never say never in politics. And it's, you know, we don't exactly know what the political environment's going to be this fall.

[James]

What about, I mean, and Jake Sherman and I have been talking about this. When you necessarily, when you redraw these maps and you take one safe Democratic district where you've crammed all the Democrats into it and you've dispersed them throughout the, throughout the state, are there going to be more competitive places?

[Tim Miller]

I do think that there will be some backfiring, but it's, it's kind of like on net, there will still be more Republican seats. You look at Texas as a prime example. The Texas Reid gerrymander was premised on the 2024 election map where Trump really overperformed among Hispanic voters. Now, if the polls are to be believed about just his massive drop of Hispanic voters and not even really polls, we saw it in the New Jersey election, for example, just in highly Hispanic districts in the 2025 governor's election. You know, those maps that they drew to try to benefit them in places like the Rio Grande Valley, for example, you know, will probably backfire. There's a great Democratic candidate named Bobby Polito down there, for example, I think will win one of those gerrymandered seats. So there will be some backfiring some places. I think maybe this is a risk in Florida as well. But on net, I do think the Republicans have advantage themselves.

[James]

Tim, I know you have a really great podcast going right now. I love it. I listen to it every day. And I'm not trying to pull you away from it, and I'm not trying to pull you away from teaching law. But I'm thinking eventually when I retire, I want to change the Constitution and I'm going to need some help. Do you want to join me in this effort to get rid of gerrymandering, institute term limits and try to overrule or get rid of Citizens United? I think we'd all be in a better place. But for those three things, yes, I'm on board.

[Tim Miller]

I don't know if we'll agree 100%, but that's good. We can hash it out.

[James]

Wait, let's try. All right, thank you, guys. Appreciate it. Peace out, James.

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