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- [00:00]
Tim Miller
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- [00:04]
Andrew Egger
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- [00:15]
Ryan Seacrest
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- [00:41]
Unnamed Host
VGW Group void. We're prohibited by law 21/ terms and conditions apply. Hey guys, Tim Miller from the Bulwark here with Andrew Egger, who writes our Morning Shots newsletter which you should check out@the bulwark.com Also White House reporter for the Bulwark. And some stuff happened at the White House today. Trump had a bilap a meeting today in the Oval Office with German Chancellor Friedrich Mertz, newly elected, relatively newly elected. And they talked about a wide range of issues. He likes to turn these things into circuses, as we have. We've seen this circus a few times by now. And there are a few things I wanted to get into with you, Andrew. First, was Trump for the first time really popping off against Elon Musk. And it's made a couple of bleeds like, you know, but he was disappointed, but he really goes after him here. And I want to play the first clip where Trump accuses Elon of something that you and me have been accused of many times having Trump derangement syndrome. Let's watch.
- [01:37]
Donald Trump
Things are happening in this room and I'll tell you, it's not, he's not the first. People leave my administration and they love us and then at some point they miss it so badly and some of them embrace it and some of them actually become hostile. I don't know what it is. It's sort of Trump derangement syndrome, I guess they call it. But we have it with others, too. They leave and they wake up in the morning and the glamour's gone. The whole world is different and they become hostile. I don't know what it is. Someday you'll write a book about it. You'll let us know.
- [02:14]
Unnamed Host
I want to dial in on one part that Trump I think is an Accidental insight here. But before we get to my observation, Andrew, what did you make of Trump's kind of full frontal attack on Elon there in the Oval Office?
- [02:28]
Tim Miller
Oh, man, it's such a rich text. And this is the kind of thing that's been kind of coming. We've been able to see it coming for a little while. You know, Elon has been going off against the big beautiful bill. Obviously, he's no longer in government directly working on Doge, but he had been mostly focusing his fire on congressional Republicans before. Then just in the last day or so, he has really started to turn on Trump himself, actually call Trump out, as truthfully as the kind of the architect and the driving force behind this bill. It was so interesting to see Trump in this meeting because, you know, Trump. Trump has no problem with punching back, obviously has been his main thing forever. But I. But there were. There was like a. I don't know, like a plaintiveness or something almost to it. Like, he almost seemed a little bit forlorn in this particular context, because I think he. He really has really liked working with Elon all this time. And they. He. He has this like, hilarious respect for Elon. As a guy who knows a lot about computers, which. Which Trump himself, you know, does. It's not really his bag. And so he's like, oh, you know, he's the guy who puts the computers in the cars and he can do all that. But nevertheless, I am forced to now nuke him from orbit because he's going after me on the Internet. And he does, as is typical with Trump, he hits you wherever you're weakest. So he hits Elon on a few things that are basically invented, the Trump derangement syndrome and sorts of things like that. But then he also goes after his actual weak spots, like the electric car subsidies and the fact that he. He tried to corruptly, like, get his buddy installed as the head of NASA and stuff like that. So it's all getting uglier than I expected, certainly faster than I expected, certainly between these two guys. And I don't know where it goes from here.
- [04:06]
Unnamed Host
Yeah, the plaintiveness is funny for any elder millennial indie fans out there. It makes me think of the Dandy Warhol song about we used to be friends.
- [04:13]
Tim Miller
Yes.
- [04:13]
Unnamed Host
Lifetime ago. You know, it's like I'm getting a little sad. And Trump doesn't really have real friends, you know, so, like you, I think he imagines. He kind of imagined that Putin was his friend. And this, when you get into this in the second Part of the press conference I want to talk about, he kind of imagined that Elon was his friend because I don't think, you know, part of the sad part of, you know, the fact that he's a 78 year old is a black hole in his heart, which is part of, I think, what allowed him to have this political success. The other side of that coin is, you know, I don't know that he's ever actually achieved a mature male friendship and understand what, what that is like. And I think it's a little different than this, these friendships of convenience.
- [04:49]
Tim Miller
Can I say one, one quick thing on that as well, which is just that I really do think, like, there's something really, really, like deep to that because he's constantly surrounded by these people who are just the biggest suck ups who have ever existed anywhere. And with good reason, because he is unable to actually surround himself with people who don't suck up to him because he kicks them to the curb. But I think he does feel like the absence of that. And that's part of why, you know, guys like Musk and even guys like, you know, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Who he perceives bring something kind of different to the table. They're not just reflecting him back to him. He has that kind of unique sort of respect for them. But then obviously that can only last for so long because they also, as soon as they start going after him for any reason, he is kicking them out to the curb as well. So, yes, it's a sad story.
- [05:32]
Unnamed Host
I've got something breaking for you, Andrew. Just coming across the transom right now as we're taping. Elon has responded to the press conference. He sent out two tweets. This is before I read Elon's tweets. I mean, Sam talked about this yesterday. The most interesting thing about this to me, from just a political strategist standpoint and tactics, is Trump has kind of finally met his chaos agent match. Like, Trump had this big benefit, like always where he's going against these normal politicians where, like, they would attack him in a normal way in a press release or in a press conference. And then Trump would like do unhinged honey badger shit back at them like no politician has ever done. And, like, has no rules and there's no campaign manager vetting his comments. And he's just like, you know, blasting off. And so it gave him advantage, like on both speed and intensity. Just across a couple of metrics. Trump had this advantage, but Elon is like him, like a totally unhinged, insane, Poster. Right. And so here it is, Rail time. Elon Musk tweets, without me, Trump would have lost the election, Dems would control the House, and Republicans would be 5149 in the Senate. Such ingratitude.
- [06:38]
Tim Miller
Oh, my Lord. Yes. They're both. Okay, so this is. We didn't even talk about this, but. But they are now both. I mean, this is the other thing that Trump said. He's like, I didn't need Elon to win Pennsylvania. I would have been just fine without him. So they are really cutting straight to the heart of each other's kind of, like, core grip on the party. Right. And, oh, man, that's so good. I honestly feel like Elon, just as a poster, is more unhinged and more unsane than Trump. He does a lot more drugs than Donald Trump does, and he's way more online, just kind of chronically online in a way that Trump never has been. So. Yeah, look, we've been talking about this forever, right? I mean, we've been saying, like, if Trump and Musk were ever to break up, it would be like the knockdown, drag out fight to end all knockdown drag out fights. Because. Because Elon is not just like a moon to Trump's sun. Like, like almost any of these other guys, Trump kicks them to the curb, they lose their, you know, their lifeline to any relevance in Republican politics, and it's just over for them. Elon has this humongous megaphone, his huge independent platform, all his money, all his companies. He owns Twitter X, as he likes to say. And, and, and, yeah, there's. Who's going to back down. Like, how does this end? I don't know. I don't know.
- [07:47]
Unnamed Host
I want to see a public debate. Bring it on. I want to see it. We'll host it at the Bulwark. Anybody? That will be a ratings bonanza.
- [07:53]
Tim Miller
Yeah. Level playing field. Level playing field. We hate those guys both, so.
- [07:56]
Unnamed Host
Yeah, that's true. Exactly. You know, you can't. You can't call me biased. If it, if it's both of them on there, who would I be biased against? So I want to get you. There are two specific items of this I just want to drill down on. One, as you mentioned, the, you know, this accusation about the fact that Elon's real motive here is the car subsidies. I want to get to that next. But first, I want to talk about something because it goes to the heart of what I wrote about in my book. So I feel like it's the one thing I have Expertise on which is the psycho rationale, you know, the kind of psychology of the Trump enabler. And Trump demonstrates like he's almost there to getting it, but he, like, observed something that I wrote about in the book. He just didn't lead it to the same conclusion that I did. And he says this, okay. He's discussing what happens to people who work for him and then leave the White House. He says they leave and they wake up in the morning and the glamour is gone. The whole world is different and they become hostile. That's actually very insightful. This is true. People do go to work for him because they're interested in the trampings of it. They're either adrenaline junkies or they want to ride on Air Force One or, or they want to tell their friends about how they're this funny story that happened behind the scenes and they're around the President like that is the appeal of going in for Trump. And when that is gone, then people can kind of see a little bit more clearly. And oftentimes not all, many of them will start to change their tune and as Trump says, become hostile, as I would put it. They start to just say the truth and they start to just observe reality. Right. And they start to stop, you know, once the drug is worn off. Like, you know, they're a little bit more clear minded. Right. They don't have this like, buzz of being around all these. Again, this isn't something that appealed to me. But for these people, like being around all the Trump people and these dela celebrities in all the rooms, like. And Trump, like, basically gets, like, he basically clocks them. And Gaylord called this a read. He basically reads the Scaramuccis and musks of the world accurately. I just think he doesn't quite take the very last step to analyzing why it is that they become hostile.
- [10:05]
Tim Miller
Right, right. Yeah. And I think when we were talking about kind of that forlorn edge to it, I think that's part of what's going on here as well, where he's like, man, in my heart, I kind of thought Elon might be different. I thought he might not have been one of these fake friend, striver climbers. But now he's just like all the rest of them. Ah, man. So hard. It's so hard to, you know, when you're at. It's so lonely at the top.
- [10:28]
Unnamed Host
It is lonely at the top. All right, just really quick on this, like, the main accusation that's gonna be leveled at Elon from Trump and from his defenders, and we're seeing some of this from Breitbart and other places is that this is all just because he wants his subsidies for the electric car. Now Elon has pushed back on this again. He's rapid responding in real time. He tweeted essentially that you could keep those. He doesn't care. He's like, he does think it's a little unfair exclamation point that they didn't get rid of any of the subsidies for the oil and gas fol. But this is not actually his rationale. What do you make of that back and forth either on the merits or on just the politics of it?
- [11:07]
Tim Miller
I don't, I honestly don't know. It's so hard to get down inside these guys brains at a certain level, especially Elon. Cause it's never clear like plainly he does have all these business interests and at any point in time he could be trying to tend to any of them. And yet at the same time, the way he has approached politics and has been so hostile to his own business interests in so many different ways, it's been, it's been good for them in a lot of ways. Don't get me wrong. I mean he's gotten the opportunity to really cozy up to power and plainly he's made the most of that. But at the same time, like the way in which he has set Tesla's public brand just on fire in a completely predictable way that has played out exactly as anyone could have predicted. And the way that he has approached, you know, all of these things in such a kind of manic, obsessive, just posting, poster brain, Internet poisoned kind of way, all of that just sort of lends, at least in my, in my view, sort of lends itself to the, the hypothesis that, that really none of this is that all that calculated that he really is just kind of like lashed to his own algorithms. He's getting mad about things he's seeing online and seeing offline and posting about them and then getting mad at the responses to the posting and just, just.
- [12:14]
Unnamed Host
Kind of getting mad about being blamed and being scapegoated with Doge where he's just like, what I was doing was good. It's what these guys are doing that's bad. Why am I getting blamed these gu. Of an interpersonal. I agree with that on the rapid response. Elon Musk, he should be hired the. You know, for one of these committees, you know, one of these political committees should hire him as the rapid response director, a job I once had. False. This bill is never. He's refined to Trump saying that Elon had seen the bill and he just changed his mind over the EV mandate. False. This bill was never shown to be even once and was passed in the dead of night so fast that almost no one in Congress could even read it.
- [12:50]
Tim Miller
True.
- [12:50]
Unnamed Host
So yeah, true. Another. Once again, Elon on the merits on this one. Well, I don't want to seem biased in case we host the debate. I have a lot of issues with Elon. Don't like Elon on the merits of the argument over the bbb. Elon seems to be in the right on almost everything.
- [13:06]
Tim Miller
Can we dwell for one more second on the, on the personal psychology for Elon in particular? Because I think he is going to go thermonuclear on this the more I think about it. Because he, I mean, you put yourself in his shoes. He came into office or into this relationship. He, he did an actual lot of work that Donald Trump is trying to take credit for. He was kind of actually doing all of the Doge stuff, which was horrible, but in his mind was this righteous crusade, unlike Donald Trump. Trump's people always say Trump gave up so much to come into here. Trump still has all of his companies. He's still making money hand over fist in all of these different ways. He's profiting off the presidency in a million different ways. Elon has actually suffered financially a lot from this whole turn in Doge. He has set so much money on fire. He didn't intend to, but that's the way it's worked out. And now he's out of there. He feels like the Doge process is getting totally obliterated by this bill. That's one of the things he's mad about, that they're not codifying his, his, any of his spending cuts and he's having to go back to, you know, now, now, like tend to the ruins of his business empire, such as they are. And now Trump's kicking him on the way out. I mean, like he, he is. And he takes a lot of drugs and he posts on the Internet a lot. So like, who knows? Who knows what? What the future holds. 3:00am Tweets from Elon Musk. But I can't imagine they're going to be boring.
- [14:23]
Unnamed Host
You said something though, that sparked a thought, which is this is something I never would have batted on. Important to have punted accountability. Just from a pure businessman perspective, Trump has kind of out businessed Elon on the grift and the White House. I don't know if they saw it as A competition. But Trump is going to have increased his wealth unimaginably by when he leaves. Like generational family, Trump wealth will be accrued thanks to the grift that he is running right now. Elon, on the other hand, losing money. It is interesting observation. Okay, running out of time. I just want to do really quick on this. Obviously, ostensibly this meeting was supposed to be about international global affairs, since the German chancellor is sitting there during all of it. And I want to talk about one element of an overlapping. Call it an overlapping interest at this point might be overstated. On overlapping. Maybe they not have the same interest anymore in the Ukraine, Russia war, but they both have an interest. And that is Trump's response to. I think this is the first time he's spoken about his call with Putin from earlier this week. And I want to watch that.
- [15:33]
Donald Trump
Sometimes you see two young children fighting like crazy. They hate each other, and they're fighting in a park and you try and pull them apart. They don't want to be pulled. Sometimes you're better off letting them fight for a while and then pulling them apart. And I gave that analogy to Putin yesterday. I said, president, maybe you're going to have to keep fighting and suffering a lot because both sides are suffering before you pull them apart, before they're able to be pulled apart. But it's a pretty known analogy. You have two kids, they fight, fight, fight. Sometimes you let them fight for a little while. You see it in hockey, you see it in sports. The referees let them go for a couple of seconds, let them go for a little while before you pull them apart. And maybe, maybe. And I said it, and maybe that's a negative because we're saying go. But a lot of bad blood. There's some bad blood coming between the two. I have to deal with it. And the Chancellor has to deal with it. It's incredible. The level of. There's a great hatred between those two. Between those two men, but between the warring parties, great hatred.
- [16:43]
Unnamed Host
This is such the wrong analogy here. That is not what is happening. It's not two kids, rough housing. It was one bully, like, coming in and trying to beat the fuck out of another kid. And by the way, the kid that's getting the fuck beaten out of them was our ally and our friend in the friend group. If we want to extend the school torture, this schoolyard analogy. And what Trump is saying is, basically, I'm just gonna go ahead and let Putin keep on doing it. And oh, by the way, that sanctions Bill, that Lindsey Graham and those guys are trying to do in Congress. So he's like, I haven't even looked at it. I'm not for it. So not a lot of encouraging comments there. If you're one of the few, the proud, the remaining pro Ukraine Republicans.
- [17:27]
Tim Miller
Yeah, yeah. I mean, that whole business about, like, you know, maybe once they've, like, had the opportunity to rough each other up a little bit, then they'll be more amenable to talk. I mean, like, that is so ghoulish. I mean, how many years into this are we. I mean, how many. There was a report, I forget who put it out. We wrote about it in morning shots yesterday or the day before. Something like 1.5 million total casualties in this conflict since it was launched. A million Russian casualties. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian casualties, obviously dead and wounded combined. I mean, just the. The grinding human misery of this conflict has been so astonishing, and it's Vladimir Putin's fucking fault. You know, like, he's the one who did it. He's the one who went in and. Yeah, I mean, like, you can talk about the gross moral equivalency there. You can talk about the just so contemptible way in which Trump himself, in his own views on the war, is so obviously sort of mercurial and ungrounded. And. And he, you know, the longer he's off the phone with Putin, the more he kind of like, starts to get swayed around to, you know, the somewhat more pro Ukraine view. And then he gets a phone call with Putin, he chats with him for a few minutes, and he's instantly back to being like, you know, I hadn't thought about it this way in a while. You know, the guy raises some excellent points. I mean, it's just so. And he. And he runs the. He runs our policy. It's so weak. It's so ungrounded. He has. No, he doesn't. He doesn't have deep beliefs. He doesn't even have deep thoughts. Thoughts about the whole thing. I mean, he's just like, oh, yeah, sounds pretty good, Vlad. That's a good point. I guess. You know, the fake news aren't talking about it quite that way over here, so, yeah, it's also ghoulish and gross. I don't know what to say about it.
- [19:04]
Unnamed Host
It's really disgraceful. All right, final thing, this stuff is all happening in real time here. Elon Musk has unfollowed Stephen Miller on Twitter. So that's when, you know, things have gotten bad. Boy, the kids are fighting. Then another interesting sub note of that Stephen Miller's wife left the White House to work for Elon. I'm just going to let people sit with that one for a second and maybe we'll talk about it on tomorrow's podcast with Sam Stein. Andrew Egger, thank you so much for coming on. Hopping on quickly. Everybody else, subscribe to the feed. We'll be back soon.
- [19:40]
Ryan Seacrest
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- [20:04]
Tim Miller
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Unnamed Host
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- [20:11]
Andrew Egger
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