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Tim Miller
Hey, everybody, it's Tim Miller from the Bulwark. We're here on Bulwark Takes. I'm back. Look at my tan. Look at that tan. Back from vacation. I'm here with producer Ansley, who I think, Ansley, this is correct. You're making your video YouTube debut. You've been voice of God before.
Ansley
That's right. Let's hope I don't break the camera. I don't know. We'll see.
Tim Miller
I think you're going to do wonderful. People are going to be really thrilled to get to know you, Ansley. It's kind of, I think, a little bit of a stereotype of kind of the gay and lesbian.
Ansley
Wait, what's the modern family thing like the one diagram?
Tim Miller
We have a little bit of that. I went on vacation and I totally bubbled myself. I drank rose, I read gay fiction. I read some history too. And I just, whatever, checked out Ansley. Producer Ansley is back at home, still working at the grindstone. Typical hard nosed lesbian. And I appreciated that. And so I thought it'd be fun for her to come up with a little quiz for me of things that happened when I was gone. To see what broke through my bubble, to see how well I know Trump if I can just sense it, if I had to live this stuff, if I can just imagine it myself. And we're gonna try it. We're doing it live. I'm gonna pass the host baton over to her.
Ansley
I've got some politics stuff. Some stuff that was maybe a little less politicsy, that maybe you were less prioritizing and catching.
Tim Miller
I deleted Twitter and Slack and so the only things that bubbled me were assholes that would text me, like my pod bro, text chain. Screw you guys and Instagram. Sometimes people, you know, people post about politics on Instagram. That's tough.
Ansley
So, yeah, that's, that's hard. Okay. All right, let's go. My buddy Claude helped me with this first one, the summarize a news event. So, you know, you know, it's like you never know how much is gonna be real or not. So I'm gonna go sentence by sentence and I want you to tell me if you think like each bit of it is true.
Tim Miller
Okay.
Ansley
So Taylor Farms, you may or may not know, is a major lettuce supplier for Taco Bell and some common grocery retailers. They recall iceberg lettuce from central Mexico after it was linked to a large multi state cyclosporiasis outbreak. Do we think that's real?
Tim Miller
I hope it wasn't from Mexico because I was eating lettuce wrapped tacos, but I'm concerned. It's real.
Ansley
It is real. That is real. Just in case you're wondering. Cyclospora is a microscopic parasite that is spread through food or water contaminated with feces. Infection causes watery, sometimes explosive diarrhea that can last for weeks if untreated, though it's rarely life threatening. Now, we did have some really good headlines for Jonathan Cohn pieces related to the fact that there was a explosive diarrhea parasite going around. So there were some perks to this. But the FDA announced that their positive test result of Taylor Farm's lettuce for cyclospora was actually a false positive and that they had no confirmed positive product tests for the parasite. Real or fake?
Tim Miller
That doesn't feel right.
Ansley
That is true.
Tim Miller
Really?
Ansley
So the weird part is FDA comes out and says this was a false positive, but Taylor Farms didn't resend their recall. So
Tim Miller
what is happening? I don't know. I'm more confused than when we started.
Ansley
Yeah, I know. So everybody else is confused too. And the punchline here is that now the top Dems on the House Oversight Committee, friend of the pod, Robert Garcia, is looking into whether there was a connection between the fact that Taylor Farms donated a bunch of money to Trump and met privately with the White House the night before the FDA named their lettuce as the source and the fact that we now have this false positive test result.
Tim Miller
There's corruption in the diarrhea lettuce.
Ansley
I think there is.
Sponsor Voice
I don't know.
Ansley
I'm just asking questions.
Tim Miller
It seems like there's corruption in the diarrhea lettuce story. So it got weird.
Ansley
It got really weird. And by the way, when there was a lot of lettuce problems here in the upper Midwest, we also had a lot of smoke from the Canadian wildfires. So it was a real dystopian period there. While you were on the beach. Yeah. All right. That was a fun one. That was weird. Which of these weird things is a real thing that happened. A, Trump posted an AI photo of J.D. vance as Judas. B, Trump posted an AI photo of Caitlin Collins as Dylan Mulvaney. Or C, Trump posted an AI photo of James Talarico as RuPaul.
Tim Miller
I'm sad to. Sad to say Caitlin broke through my bubble.
Ansley
Oh, no.
Tim Miller
I don't know how Instagram. I think Caitlin broke through my bubble somehow. So I saw that.
Ansley
Then you know a little bit about the White House Correspondent's Dinner speech, but
Tim Miller
I really don't, actually. You don't? I literally know nothing about the, Like, I thickened my bubble around correspondence material. So even if something, like, appeared on my screen, I just like fucking power scrolls. I know nothing about it. Literally nothing.
Ansley
Okay, great. This will be a great test of like, how well, you know, the Trump insults them. He really. It was like sort of an all time, ugly, gross rant from him in the speech of just like a cavalcade of insults. So I'm going to give you an insult, and I want you to see if you can, like, identify who it might be about. Okay, so what about one of the sloppiest human beings you'll ever meet?
Tim Miller
I'm going to say Chris Christie came to mind initially, but why would he talk about Chris Christie anymore? And so then that makes me think about J.B. pritzker. And so J.B. pritzker.
Ansley
Okay, well, your first instinct was correct. It was Chris Christie again.
Tim Miller
I mean, how did he come up?
Ansley
I couldn't even tell you. Couldn't even tell you. It was incomprehensible to me. And we got down memory lane a little bit with, like, when Obama made fun of Trump at the correspondence center. That was referenced. So maybe we were doing like, a little flashback to the.
Tim Miller
And Chris Christie was the first mainstream Republican to endorse Donald Trump. And it's like, if you listed the people who are responsible for the hellscape that we're in right now, he's kind of the top couple.
Ansley
So, yeah, totally. He's one of my least favorites. Okay. Dumbest man on television.
Tim Miller
Dumbest man on television. You know, my first thing that came to mind is Don Lemon, because he likes to call black people dumb. But Don isn't on TV anymore, and so it's probably not that I think that. I don't even know if. Does he even know the MSNOW hosts anymore? I don't think so. So I'm gonna say Jake Tapper.
Ansley
Okay. Again, like, new rule, you have to go with your first answer. It was Don Lemon.
Tim Miller
Oh, really?
Ansley
And like, yeah, I mean, it just shows you, man.
Tim Miller
I'm fucking mailing.
Ansley
It is though, that, like, he doesn't realize that Don Lemon's not on television anymore. But I guess Dumbest man on Substack doesn't, like, quite have the same ring to it. I don't know.
Tim Miller
Yeah, I guess that was banned on video. Dumbest band on YouTube. Whatever. I mean, yeah, I don't. I think Trump has bubbled himself, like, in the first term. I think he was watching a lot of cnn and I don't think that's happening.
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Tim Miller
a speech self critique. No, Kamala. I would scuff close.
Ansley
Gavin.
Tim Miller
Mmm. Is that true about Gavin? Does he struggle to read speeches?
Ansley
So this is about the.
Tim Miller
Oh, this is about the dyslexia.
Ansley
Dyslexia thing.
Tim Miller
He wants to do a dyslexia joke.
Ansley
Yep.
Tim Miller
Okay. Yeah. I mean, like, the dude is not, like, I really didn't know any of this, but my. My sense he just doesn't have his A game. I mean, like, Trump was pretty good. Like, the insult comedy. You can say what you want about Trump. The insult comedy was never exactly, you know, my bag. He never really made me laugh that much. But, you know, like, sometimes. Sometimes he'd sneak me with something. Like back in 2016, I forget what he said. Something really funny about Rand Paul on, like, the first debate and how. How sloppy he looked and how he's at the end of the row or something. And I did remember catching myself chuckling and then feeling bad about myself for that. And I just. It feels like he's lost his touch a little bit on this. This might be part of the dementia. Okay, what else?
Ansley
Okay, I've got five quotes that may or may not be from the Fauci diaries. Did you hear about this?
Tim Miller
The Fauci diaries only breach my bubble in that people who like Fauci and respect him. On one of my text chains, there was some joking about how Fauci. It's like a little bit of a star fucker, I guess. Again, this is. I don't know.
Sponsor Voice
I.
Tim Miller
This is secondhand because I've not read. Now I'm doing the Trump hands. I haven't read anything. But I guess he was, like, in his diaries, like, he was, like, talking about, like, how, like, if somebody was an A plus dinner date or a minus or like, he's, like, grading, like, the people he's got. Anyway, so there was some teasing or joshing of him about how much he cared about, you know, that kind of stuff on one of my text chains. And then I, you know, I saw that, like, Republicans were, like, yelling at them, but that's all I've got.
Ansley
We've got five of these. I'll try to go through them pretty quickly. First one, Katie Miller and I laugh at each other in the sit room.
Tim Miller
I remember this from when it. From before this. This. This was some. So there were some references before the diaries. This is true.
Ansley
Yeah, that's right. It started this whole thing because he also talked about in the diaries how Katie Miller would call him and ask him for advice about staying healthy while pregnant. And she, like, went crazy on Twitter, saying that basically the whole reason she was chummy with him was that she wanted to keep her enemies close. Like, impossible dude that she was trusting for medical advice was. She was doing that because he was her enemy. Yeah, like performative. He's not really my friend. Signaling.
Tim Miller
Oh, yeah, sorry. The doctor that was helping you with advice when you were nervous and having you were pregnant that you're. When there's a new disease people didn't know anything about. Yeah. You're keeping them close as part of a plot. God, I hate these people. Okay, what else?
Ansley
This gets into more sort of what you were talking about. Julia Roberts is so charming, natural, fun, and amazingly beautiful. When my image came up on the screen, she gasped and said that every time she sees me, her throat gets dry and she gets nervous.
Tim Miller
That's too embarrassing for you to make up, I think. I think that's got to be true.
Ansley
Yeah, that's true. This was one of a few different, particularly female stars that he.
Tim Miller
Diary, I guess. But, you know, act like you've been there before. Chill out a little bit.
Ansley
Okay, here's another one. It would have seemed utterly insane just a few months ago, but I actually think I could run for president and win. Whether I want to do that is another question.
Tim Miller
I'm praying that that's fake.
Ansley
You would be correct. That was my best attempt to, like, come up with something crazy that somebody would say who just sort of had his 15 minutes. Yeah. Not real.
Tim Miller
Okay.
Ansley
Yeah.
Tim Miller
Thank goodness, because I want to like Fauci.
Ansley
Well, it's about to get harder.
Tim Miller
Okay.
Ansley
Intense publicity about me continues with stories of grandmothers who have crushes on me, petitions to vote me sexiest man alive.
Tim Miller
Oh, no. Oh, I'm getting secondhand embarrassment for Anthony Fauci. I guess that's real.
Ansley
Yeah, it's real. Okay, last one. Fauci Madness continues with multiple articles and every sort of paraphernalia and restaurants, obviously.
Tim Miller
Sorry. He wrote Fauci Madness. I don't even want to hear the rest. He wrote that? He wrote the phrase Fauci Madness. Yeah.
Ansley
Oh, my God.
Tim Miller
I just. This is. It's tough, you know, I'm about to say something that I'M going to give a very big wind up to because I just realize it's about to come out of my mouth that it's going to feel very bad. And so I'm not in any way comparing Anthony Fauci. Good man, hero of the AIDS epidemic. Somebody was doing the best that he could and face a very challenging virus that came to our shores. Don't want to compare him at all to the people in the Epstein files. There is this. One of the weaknesses of people in the Epstein files, though, that has nothing to do with the pedophilia because, well, it has something to do with the pedophilia, but it's like, none of these people are pedophiles, right? Some of the people that look really bad in the Epstein files are not pedophiles, are not pedophile protectors or not. Like, whatever. What they are is they're people that are weak and want to hobnob with other famous people. Like, this is just a human weakness. People love to feel important, and you end up getting sucked into bad things when you care so much about that. Care so much. Important. You see this in the files. People are like, oh, I went to this dinner because Epstein invited me. Because it was like, oh, Mel Brooks is going to. I don't want to name people. Mel Brooks. I don't know if he was at any dinners, but these fucking famous directors. Famous people was there. So I'll go. And like, now you're in the Epstein files. It's like, dude, like, you had a little discretion. People really just poor Anthony Fauci, you know, Vanity. Vanity's tough.
Ansley
It's true. That was good. I didn't know how you were going to bring that back around, but. But yeah, that makes sense.
Tim Miller
I brought it up.
Ansley
All right, true or false? Rapid fire. And then we'll be done. Because I think you think you're mostly caught up on the news.
Tim Miller
Okay.
Ansley
All right. True or false? Mitch McConnell offered proof of life by calling into Hannity.
Tim Miller
False.
Ansley
Correct. We just got that second picture. Same pose. Weird.
Tim Miller
Weird.
Ansley
Kimberly Guilfoyle got married in Las Vegas and celebrated with Joe Kent, Tucker Carlson and Thomas Massey. True or false?
Tim Miller
False.
Ansley
So it's false. But the only thing that's incorrect about that is that it was Kimberly Guilfoyle because it was actually Marjorie Taylor Greene who got married in Las Vegas.
Tim Miller
Oh, good for mtg. Mazel tov, mtg. I did not know that she got married. It's too bad Joe Kent was there, but okay, cheers.
Ansley
True or false? Trump imposed Additional tariffs on Canada because their wildfires made American cities smoky.
Tim Miller
True.
Ansley
Yep.
Tim Miller
Really? That really happened?
Ansley
That really happened. Yeah. There was a. We announced new tariffs, and there was contemporaneous reporting from folks that he was. When he discussed the tariffs, he was talking about. About the fact that they had sent their smoke down to us.
Tim Miller
Got it. Okay. That's depressing.
Ansley
Yeah.
Tim Miller
Yeah. Okay, I'm gonna pause here, and I have to chastise you, Ansley. We don't get money from the tariffs. Okay. It's important that as.
Ansley
Wait, I was assured.
Tim Miller
We don't get money. We pay the money.
Ansley
No, no, no, no. Somehow we're gonna get checks, right?
Tim Miller
No, no, we pay the money. So they put tariffs on, and then the variant. Then the people that buy the goods pay more. So, anyway, just FYI on the smoke tariff.
Ansley
All right, last one. Back to Mega World. True or false. RFK Jr launched a new cooking show featuring celebrity chefs called the Real Food Show.
Tim Miller
I mean, that's so stupid. It has to be true.
Ansley
Yeah, that's true. That's what he's doing. He's not taking care of the cyclospora
Tim Miller
lettuce, but he is doing with measles outbreak.
Ansley
Oh, yeah, that too. That little thing.
Tim Miller
Yeah. Hi, Charles. Welcome back to my cooking show. We're gonna make some. I'm gonna get some bear carcass and eat the bear ears. All right, well, that's good. I. I feel like I did pretty good.
Ansley
Yeah, you did. I mean, I. I feel like maybe you didn't. You unbubbled pretty quickly.
Tim Miller
Yeah, well, you know, look, I'm a rapid fire consumer of information, but some of that stuff I did not know. And who the hell knows? It could have been weirder. So we'll see. We'll see what August brings forth. I have to imagine there's some surprises ahead. I appreciate you for grinding this out, though, Ansley.
Ansley
Yeah, of course. I mean, got to make sure none of these weird headlines go unnoticed.
Tim Miller
Appreciate everybody. Let us know what you think about the quiz. Trio's back soon. Speaking of weird stories, some of the stuff I'm hoping Ansley kept out of the quiz because we had to save it for the trio. So we'll be reuniting later this week. Subscribe to the feed. Give Ansley some praise. Well deserved praise from working while I was tanning myself. And we'll see everybody soon.
Episode: We Quiz Tim on the Crazy Stuff That Happened When He Was Out
Date: August 5, 2026
Hosts: Tim Miller, Producer Ansley
This episode is a playful recap and news quiz, featuring returning host Tim Miller fresh off vacation. Producer Ansley puts Tim to the test on political and cultural news he may have missed during his time off. The tone is breezy and witty, with a focus on both the absurdity and gravity of recent headlines.
The episode ends with Tim praising Ansley’s work and teasing future episodes, promising more weird stories and quick-witted analysis.
"Appreciate everybody. Let us know what you think about the quiz. Trio's back soon. Speaking of weird stories, some of the stuff I'm hoping Ansley kept out of the quiz because we had to save it for the trio." – Tim Miller (18:56)