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No purchase necessary vgw group void were prohibited by law 21/tnc supply sponsored by Chumba Casino hey everybody, Tim Miller from the Bulwark. Here it is Sunday, early afternoon. As we are taping this, we are coming down off the no Kings hangover. I woke up this morning to look through the news and there's a lot of insanity and madness out there coming out of the White House. And so I thought I would do just a little Sunday potpourri with you guys going through a few things that are out there since we last talked before the rallies. I guess I want to format this around what is happening on Trump's social media feed because there's something different about this president. Well, many, many, many, many things are different about this president. But one of those is that we get to understand his internal monologue at all times. We you know, there's no like New York Times has to talk to a friend of the president or the chief of staff who speaks on background, who can provide some context on the president's thinking. And maybe that's true or not, or maybe that's spin. You know, that's how things used to work with this president. He just bleats what his thinking is at any given time. And his bleeds this morning were pretty revealing on a couple of factors. The first and most important is the status of the Iran war. So I want to highlight a couple of people that he referenced on his social media feed. Mark Levin and Mark Thiessen. Two marks. Mark Thiessen is marked with C. Levin was interviewing Thiessen about a column that he had written in the Washington Post about how Trump is not losing his nerve in Iran. And Trump also bleed at the column about how he's not losing his nerve in Iran. So in case you had any doubt about his nerve, he's not losing it. Marc Thiessen wrote about that and Donald Trump is bleeding that article. So let's look at the column to get a sense into Trump's perspective. Why did he think this was so insightful? It begins with the Rudyard Kipling quote, if you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you, if you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, if you can wait and not be tired by waiting, yours is the earth and everything that's in it. So that's how Thiessen grandiloquently starts his column. The interesting, the one little passage that he included there that's interesting is the if you can wait and not be tired by waiting, there's some other reporting going up around over the weekend that Trump is getting bored by the war in Iran. And so to me, this was Thiessen sending a message to Trump, treating him like a child, being like, no, patience is a virtue, sir. If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, you will get a reward. You'll get a toy at the end. And that strategy seems to have worked because Trump read the article and was like, yes, I am a great man. Mark Thiessen, thank you. The article, the column goes on to say, I know from well placed sources. Now here we are including the well placed sources. But given that Trump has bleeded the article, given that Trump bleeded an interview about the article, I think it's safe to say that Trump is a well placed source. I know from well placed sources that Trump has never been more determined to see this military campaign through to completion. So that's the first little nugget here. If we're kind of trying to read the tea leaves, what is Trump doing? What is he planning? He's posting this article that he's not losing his nerve. Also over the weekend, 2,500 Marines arrived in the Middle East. So we know that is happening. We know additional troops have been deployed. It's more than 2500 if you include the other Army, Navy, Air Force, et cetera. The other thing that he posted was the Mark Levin show. He was telling his fans on Truth Social, the various Russians and elderly and firm who are stuck on his website of horrors. He's telling them to watch Mark Levin tonight. Life, Liberty and Levin watch that show and it's not a show I usually tune into, but I felt like if the President thinks we should watch it, I guess we should probably watch to see what he's thinking on the war. And I want to play for you. It's a bit long. It's about a minute and a half. So if you can't stand Mark Levin's voice, Mark Levin's whining voice, Micro Mark's whining voice. If you can't tolerate that, you can just press the fast forward 30 button three times and then I'll be back on the other side and, and explain to you what you had missed.
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Troops on the ground. He said no troops on the ground. I don't remember that in any campaign speech either. But why would we need troops on the ground? Well, there's a lot of reasons and we wouldn't need 300,000 of them. It's this uranium, too. We've got to get the uranium. If it cannot be destroyed, if it cannot be altered, we got to get it for the reason I just said, you can make dirty bombs and over time you can still make sophisticated missiles. So you need to get to the uranium. That's why I'm reading in the paper we're talking about the 82nd Airborne. We're talking about these various special forces and the various military services and so forth. He's not talking about sending regular army and infantry in by the hundreds of thousands. The men he's talking about, the units he's talking about, they are specialized. And you know what else I remember from my days in the Reagan administration? Many of them are trained for a moment like this to try and secure enriched uranium. Many have been trained for moments like this. I guess what I'm trying to say is we are in good hands. No, not with Allstate, but with President Trump because he's a man with enormous intelligence, enormous common sense.
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So they're screeching, Mark, talking about why we are going to send boots into Iran, why we're to send ground trips into Iran and we're going to do so to steal the uranium. This is like a national treasure, Nicholas Cage style mission that Mark Levin is pushing on American troops, pushing on Donald Trump, who's obviously watching the show. Trump desperate for anybody to tell him he's doing a good job. He's looked all around the country. The only two people he can find are the Marks, Mark Levin and Mark Thiessen, who have been clamoring for war with Iran for decades now. You could hear there in that interview, Mark Levin's very up to speed on the latest on the strategies and tactics as he was saying that he knows from his time in the Reagan administration that the Marines are ready for a mission such as getting dropped into the mountains of Iran, breaking into Ishtaghan, going underground to get these vats of uranium that other reports say. It's like for each vat, they weigh like 1,000 pounds, 900 something pounds. The vats can be pierced or then, you know, you die. Chemicals go into the air. That would be bad for you. So that's the mission. We got to go into Iran, go into the mountains, go into their nuclear site, go underground, steal the vats of uranium, exfil the vats of uranium while presuming, I presume, the Iranians are shooting at you, and then you take it, I don't know, back to Mar a Lago where you display the vats of uranium, like on the pool deck with the Cougars and have a press conference. I guess that's the plan. That's what Mark Levin is pushing for. That seems unlikely to succeed to me. Been proven wrong before. Not here to, to cosplay a military strategy expert, but just on its face, ex filling the vats of uranium seems high risk. I guess that's just maybe it succeeds. It definitely seems high risk. High risk of casualties. So there we go. That's what Levin is pushing. Obviously there's the Carg island conversation's been out there for a while. JBL wrote about this weeks ago. Now you know about how Trump would try to occupy Cargill Island. But I just think that if you're, if you're reading the tea leaves, in this case, it's not reading the tea leaves, it's just reading the bleats of Trump's internal monologue. You can see they're planning to push forward for weeks ahead and that troops are definitely a strong likelihood. So that's where we are each day this goes on, and each day the Strait of Hormuz is closed. It's just another day where you have massive supply chains, disruptions, things you couldn't even predict, like, like we're in our slack today. I think it was Sam sent a article from an Indian newspaper about how there's restaurants now have a shortage of butter chicken because of some product that is required in that kind of central dish to Indian cuisine. So, you know, like the, obviously that is a small thing in the grand scheme of things, but the disruption, the economic disruption that is happening globally as long as the Strait is closed, you know, is. Is hard to Even wrap your heads around right now, like the scale of it and, and it's going to harm, it's already, is harming basically every American in their pocketbook. And it's going to continue to, to cause greater damage the longer this goes on. So we have a few weeks ahead, at least according to what we're seeing on Trump's social media. I should also say over the weekend that we also learned another thing as we knew this basically, but the Iranians are getting intel and targeting information from the Russians, satellite imagery. And one reason we know that is because of this. We had parked a plane on, on the Jetway, to call it a Jetway when it's a, when it's a military base, you know, the plane, wherever you taxi the plane on the military base, we'd parked a couple planes there and the Iranians yeeted it with a, with a missile. And you can see the damage there. We don't have that many of this type of plane. You know, we talked about Kirtland this week, about all the details, what the implications are, but that was a very expensive attack on our plane as part of this ongoing escalating war in Iran. Another thing that was happening over the weekend. Just want to flag. Trump posted this morning it's Palm Sunday. Happy to Palm Sunday. To all those who celebrate this. It's a letter from Franklin Graham, son of Billy Graham, the right wing pastor. I want to read a little bit of this. The letter came in October, but Trump posted it today. Dear President Trump, this week you commented to the media that you might not be heaven bound. Maybe you responded in jest, but it is an important issue to know for certain that your soul is secure and will spend eternity. The presence of God, the only one who can save us from hell is Jesus Christ. You can't save yourself. I can't save myself. Good reworks, prominent success. None of these get us to heaven. The only way to heaven is through the shed blood of Jesus Christ. God requires us to turn from our sins by faith. Believe in our heart that Jesus came to earth, died on the cross for our sins, and was buried and God raised him to life on the third day. If you accept that by faith and invite him to come into your heart, you are heaven bound, I promise you. So there you go. Trump posted it mostly, I think, to show to people that he's going to heaven. Mike Johnson posted it as well and talked and said, explicitly highlighting the fact that you can only get to heaven through faith in Jesus, which again, in a country that we have separation from church and state is pretty, you know, it's a little much for the speaker of the House and the President to be basically saying to Muslim Americans. I can tell, depending on how you look at it, Catholic Americans, Jews, you can't go to heaven. I mean, literally, that's what Mike Johnson and Donald Trump posted today. Jews, you can't go to heaven. So a lot of conversations about anti Semitism out there, but in the role of speaker of the House, posting that the only path through heaven is through Jesus our Savior, certainly sending some kind of message to the non evangelical Christians, non Protestants in the country. Trump, I think, posted it just because he's like, hell, yeah, I'm going to heaven, bitches. Franklin Graham, he's a holy guy over here, says, I'm going to heaven. You know what else Franklin Graham said? Let's watch this. This is Franklin Graham at CPAC over the weekend.
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And I love Donald Trump. Is he perfect? No. But I love that guy. I love him. And we'll only have one chance at this. We'll never get another president like Donald Trump. Never. And that's why it's important that we do everything that we can to. To try to get him reelected.
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So I don't know if Franklin Graham has dementia. That would maybe explain the fact that he thinks that Donald Trump could run again for office and the fact that Donald Trump's going to heaven and has brought Jesus into his heart. And can we just go back to that for a second? The idea that Donald Trump has really, genuinely brought Jesus into his heart and believes that Jesus rose from the dead after the third day, like, it's absurd. It's ridiculous. Everyone knows that that is not true. Okay? Everyone knows it's fake. Trump's family members wouldn't even say that it was true. There's nobody that would believe that this is actually true. Everyone is doing kayfabe. But Franklin Graham, I guess, believes that Trump really has brought Jesus into his heart and either believes that it's the year 2019 and he can run for president again, or he wants to end American democracy and turn the country into a Donald Trump theocracy, which would be the most amusing and ridiculous theocracy ever in the history of the world. Probably, but I don't know. I'm opposed to that. I think that most Americans are opposed to that. And I think that as the calamity continues to unfurl from this war of choice in Iran, I think more and more people will be stridently objecting to the idea that Donald Trump should be permanent autocrat, permanent theocrat, permanent leader, permanent king of America. That his family has some right, that he has some by right onto the White House. That we should ignore the Constitution, ignore the law and let him rule for as long as he sees fit. I don't believe that most Americans are going to think that. And you know why I don't believe that? Because I was at the no Kings rally in New Orleans yesterday. Good to see everybody out there. It was enjoyable. It was enjoyable to see all the funny signs, but it's also important, I think, for people to register their dissent. And it was happening in places all across the country. I think there's something nice about that federalist about that almost American people in small towns and hamlets, big city rallies, big rally in D.C. we were at the Greenway here in New Orleans and there was a little march around mid city. It's inspiring, it's excellent. And I think what's really telling, when I talked to Ezra Levin who organizes these rallies last week on the channel, he said, notice the difference between the second no Kings and the third and the second one, they there was this big message that these were all antifa, they were crazy, they're going to do violence. It's far left agitators. And then afterwards, Trump was dropping poop from the plane on Harry Sisson and the other protesters, right? Like that was. It was aggressive pushback. Not a lot to talk about at this time. I mean, some of the cable pundits, you know, on the right made fun of the no Kings rallies, but not a lot to talk about it. No clear message. And if you want to know how they had no clear message to combat the no Kings rally, you can just see what the Republican Party put up on social media responding to Tim Walls over the weekend. And there it is. No Queens. So that's the best you can do, calling Tim Walls a homosexual? Oh, oh, that's so funny. That's so funny. Oh, Tim Walls is gay. It's like, well, Tim Walls is a dad with two kids and the person gotten us into this stupid war might be gay. But anyway, it's pathetic, it's sad and it shows you where this is heading. They have no message, they have no negative message that's resonating about the no Kings rallies. And they don't really have a positive message about the second Trump administration right now. They've got no positive story to tell. And so what they're going to do is continue to lash out. They're going to try to turn people against each other lash out, do childish insults and try to delegitimize those who are challenging their lawless and inept administration. And I don't think it's going to work. So anyway, no queens. Oh, such a good one. So embarrassing. So embarrassing. That gets through the approval chain. Chairman of the RNC is like, yeah, let's do that. Let's make, let's do no queens post. Alright guys, good luck. We'll see how that takes everybody else. I'll be back tomorrow Monday with Bill Kristol. As news develops. We'll be here on the YouTube channel. Make sure to subscribe or over on Substack of course can subscribe there as well. We appreciate everybody who wants to support our effort. You can become a board plus member or you can become a member on the YouTube channel would really appreciate it. And I'll see you guys later.
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Date: March 29, 2026
Host: Tim Miller (The Bulwark)
This episode, hosted by Tim Miller, delivers a brisk, acerbic rundown of the current news chaos emanating from the White House, focusing mainly on Donald Trump’s recent social media activity. Miller dissects Trump’s posts about the ongoing war with Iran, unpacks evangelical support (notably a blunt message from Franklin Graham assuring Trump of his place in heaven), and analyzes reactions to the nationwide “No Kings” rallies protesting Trump’s growing authoritarianism. The episode maintains a signature Bulwark blend of sharp political insight, wry humor, and palpable concern over the administration’s actions.
“If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, you will get a reward. You’ll get a toy at the end. And that strategy seems to have worked because Trump read the article and was like, yes, I am a great man.”
— Tim Miller (04:51)
(05:32-07:00)
Miller plays a Mark Levin soundbite, where Levin asserts the need for specialized ground troops to “secure enriched uranium” in Iran—a fantastical mission Miller parodies as a “Nicolas Cage-style” movie plot.
Important Quote:
“We are in good hands. No, not with Allstate, but with President Trump because he’s a man with enormous intelligence, enormous common sense.”
— Mark Levin (06:44)
Miller’s Reaction:
He lampoons the impracticality and risk of sending American troops into Iran to “exfil the vats of uranium”—suggesting even the premise is absurd, bordering on cosplay.
(12:50-13:55)
On Palm Sunday, Trump posts a letter from Franklin Graham, which straightforwardly lays out the evangelical formula for salvation and assures Trump (and followers) that faith in Jesus alone is the “ticket to heaven.”
Letter Excerpt Read Aloud:
“The only way to heaven is through the shed blood of Jesus Christ... If you accept that by faith and invite him to come into your heart, you are heaven bound, I promise you.”
— Franklin Graham (13:20)
Miller notes the not-so-subtle message this sends to non-Christian Americans and questions the propriety of the President and Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, essentially declaring non-Christians can’t enter heaven.
Miller’s Sardonic Take:
“Trump, I think, posted it just because he’s like, hell, yeah, I’m going to heaven, bitches. Franklin Graham, he’s a holy guy over here, says, I’m going to heaven.” (13:55)
(14:08-14:37; 14:37-15:47)
Miller plays a CPAC clip of Graham passionately supporting Trump, then scathingly doubts both the sincerity and the constitutionality of pushing Trump as some kind of national theocrat.
Graham’s Remark:
“But I love that guy. I love him. And we’ll only have one chance at this. We’ll never get another president like Donald Trump.”
— Franklin Graham (14:17)
Miller ridicules the idea of Trump as a genuine Christian or eternal autocrat, framing the whole spectacle as “kayfabe”—political performance—and questions the consequences for democracy.
(15:47-17:50)
Miller reflects on his attendance at the “No Kings” rally in New Orleans and praises the American tradition of grassroots dissent spanning from small towns to big cities. He notes the shift in right-wing response: less direct pushback this time, more embarrassing attempts at ridicule.
Notable Moment:
Republican social media’s “No Queens” insult aimed at Minnesota Governor Tim Walz (16:44)—Miller mocks the childishness and lack of meaningful message:
“That’s the best you can do, calling Tim Walz a homosexual? Oh, that’s so funny. [...] The person gotten us into this stupid war might be gay. But anyway, it’s pathetic, it’s sad and it shows you where this is heading.”
— Tim Miller (16:54)
“They have no message […] They don't really have a positive message about the second Trump administration right now. They've got no positive story to tell.” (17:38)
“Trump, I think, posted it just because he’s like, hell, yeah, I’m going to heaven, bitches.”
— Tim Miller (13:55), satirically distilling Trump’s egotistical response to Franklin Graham’s letter.
“This is like a national treasure, Nicolas Cage style mission that Mark Levin is pushing on American troops, pushing on Donald Trump, who’s obviously watching the show.”
— Tim Miller (07:06), mocking the Iran uranium exfiltration scenario.
“No, not with Allstate, but with President Trump because he’s a man with enormous intelligence, enormous common sense.”
— Mark Levin (06:44)
“We’ll never get another president like Donald Trump. Never. And that’s why it’s important that we do everything that we can to… try to get him reelected.”
— Franklin Graham (14:17)
“No queens. Oh, such a good one. So embarrassing. So embarrassing. That gets through the approval chain. Chairman of the RNC is like, yeah, let’s do that.”
— Tim Miller (17:07)
For those who haven’t listened:
This episode offers a sharp, sometimes darkly funny, and highly readable breakdown of the latest Trump saga—how social media, war, and evangelical fervor are colliding inside today’s White House, all while a new protest movement builds steam across the country.