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- [00:01]
Mona Charon
What would you do if you were.
- [00:02]
Tim Miller
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- [00:39]
Hello and welcome to the Borg Podcast. I'm your host Tim Miller. We have an insane week ahead of us. The confirmation hearing of RFK Jr. Is happening as I speak. Cash Patel and Tulsi Gabbard's hearings are set for tomorrow. This pod will be on the normal schedule, but we're doing some special programming to accommodate all the madness, so mark this stuff down. Tonight at 8pm the next level is live for Bulwark members, so keep an eye out for that link. It will be in the podcast feed for everybody on Thursday morning. And then Thursday we're live on YouTube basically all day. Will and Sam in the morning, a little Mona, Cameo, JVL and I in the afternoon. At the end of all of the hearings, we'll have a wrap up with the whole gang for Bulwark plus members only. You can join at thebullwork.com subscribe if you join, you also get this pod ad free and you get a special secret podcast called Just Between Us, hosted by our next guest policy editor at the Bulwark, my friend Mona Charon. Hey Mona, welcome back to the pod. Great times, isn't it? Yeah, it's a golden age.
- [01:45]
Mona Charon
The only thing that makes it bearable is that we have each other.
- [01:48]
Tim Miller
That's true. I'm happy to have you, I guess. This is an announcement for a couple of listeners who noticed the meowing on yesterday's podcast. I have a cat too, so we have each other. The cat that many listeners have been upbraiding me for listening to the cat food advertisement where I say we have a neighborhood cat where we feed and they're like that's your cat now you have to take it in. And while I was snowed out to New York, my family took it in without me. So you know, we have each other and a stray cat. So that's what we got.
- [02:18]
Mona Charon
There is something in the Bulwark water because JBL also got a cat in the last few weeks.
- [02:23]
Tim Miller
So I know astray as well. I don't know, you know, we're just, we can't help the people. So maybe we're gonna help the feline community. All right, you've got a new pod.
- [02:32]
Mona Charon
I do.
- [02:33]
Tim Miller
Mona Charon show. You've had a couple of episodes now, so I wanted to give you a chance to talk about that, what the goal is. And then we'll get into the parade of horrible.
- [02:40]
Mona Charon
Yeah, so the podcast is. I mean, I was reluctant to part with Beg to Differ, which I loved doing. We did that for five years. My great colleagues.
- [02:49]
Tim Miller
That's crazy. It was five years.
- [02:51]
Mona Charon
It was five years. Amazing, right? I know, I know. We've been living in this reality for such a long time. But anyway, so. But I felt like with the election and the new era that we're living in, I felt a strong desire to have a podcast where I can go deeper on some of these issues and talk to the experts and devote one podcast per subject matter or at least per guest and let the guest have a little bit more opportunity. So, yeah, so far we've had two, and I think it's going well.
- [03:24]
Tim Miller
Yeah. And the most recent one, which I was listening to, is Steve Vladek. It was interesting cause he got into sort of the legal questions of it all. And like, there's just so much happening, like right now. You know, we had the article this morning in the blog from Don Kettle, who's like, there's just this high speed power grab. It's hard to keep track of everything. And part of that is because a lot of the stuff is going to get challenged. So I don't know what were your main takeaways for that, that conversation with Steve.
- [03:50]
Mona Charon
I thought it would be useful to just go into like, what is the source of the President's authority? He has Authority under Article 2 as Commander in Chief, for example, and he's supposed to take care that the laws are faithfully executed, which is actually a limitation on his power rather than elaboration of it. But he also has power through legislation. And unfortunately, as Steve and I talked about, the Congress has been shoveling power out the door now for decades. They have been creating agencies, creating laws that give all of the discretion about how things should be done to executive agencies. Okay, so that is a huge problem. Because if you get an irresistible, responsible President, he has already been given vast discretion. So for example, on tariffs, all he has to do is say, well, it's a national emergency or it's a matter of national security, and therefore I have to impose steel tariffs on Canada. Like, you know, that dangerous country to our north, our severe enemy, their beady little eyes Exactly. So there's that. There's the fact that they have given him all of this power. But now, Tim, we are in a totally new world where not only does he. Is he, you know, being incredibly aggressive about the powers that he definitely has, but he is being unbelievably transgressive in seizing powers that he definitely does not have, at least he didn't under our system. And we are at a moment of truth, honestly getting right to the nub of it. Because if there is no resistance in the courts and in public opinion to his attempts to simply rewrite laws, unilaterally decide how to spend federal funds on his own, say so even though Congress has already passed and appropriated funds for a particular purpose, then our republic is, let us say, it's transformed. I don't want to say it's over, but, you know, it's pretty damn serious.
- [06:00]
Tim Miller
I had David French on, I guess, on Friday, I don't know how long beg to differ went. I don't know who I talked to when. But he pointed out that this court, at least the first time through the court's been remade a little bit since Trump's first term with the Coney Barrett seat, but rejected the administration more times than any president had been rejected since, I think, fdr. And so he was maybe a little bit more bullish than sometimes you hear from some of our friends on the left about the fact that that might be the case again. I was kind of wondering what you think, what Steve thought, you know, because there are all of these challenges are going to come down the pike, whether it's. And we're going to get into the offering of severance and the mass firings of people in the administration and the grant freezing, like all that stuff is going to end up the immigration stuff, like all that stuff's going to come their robed desks here eventually. So I'm wondering how you assess that.
- [07:01]
Mona Charon
So there are two aspects of this. First is what will the Supreme Court do regarding these assertions of presidential power? Will they become creative and expand presidential scope as they did with the immunity decision, or will they put their feet down, their collective 18ft, and say, no, no, I mean, you know, we do, after all, other branches of government, and you can't just trample what they've done. So that's the first question. And Steve Vladek was more bullish than some people that are in our orbit about the chances there. He also, along with David French, thinks, look, the court did push back a lot on Trump in the first Trump term. And he does think that there's some spine, some steely determination there. I think it's not too much to say that's his view. I told him, look, I would have said that before the immunity decision, but now my confidence in their fealty to the Constitution has been really badly shaken. That's the first piece we'll see. Will they actually assert the primacy of the constitutional system? And then the second question, which is maybe as big or bigger, is, will Trump obey? He did in the first term. He obeyed the court's orders. If he doesn't this time around, if he. In obedience to what J.D. vance recommended. Right.
- [08:40]
Tim Miller
J.D.
- [08:41]
Mona Charon
Vance said he should just say to the court, you've made your decision, now enforce it a la President Jackson, who probably never said that, but that's. Never mind. But Andrew Jackson reputed to have said, the Supreme Court has made its decision, now let them enforce it. JD Vance said that that's exactly what Trump should do. And, Tim, I don't know what would happen in this country if Trump did that. I don't know. I don't have the sense that people would rise up on their hind legs and say, no, no, no, no, no, no, now you've gone too far. I don't know. What do you think?
- [09:18]
Tim Miller
I'm trying to just think one day at a time. You know, I'm trying to think about RFK today. I hear that now it's hard to just have lived the last 10 days and think that there is a groundswell of people prepared to stand up and oppose Donald Trump if he disobeys an order that's kind of procedural and arcane, that doesn't affect their lives. Right. You know what I mean? Like, maybe there's a certain type of thing, you know, sending the troops in places. You know, I think that there are certain types of things that I think would awaken the American people from their slumber. But on some of this stuff, you know, I mean, and if he says, sorry, I disagree, I can fire people. I can't fire bureaucrats at will. And the Supreme Court says no. And he's like, I'm going to do it anyway. I'm taking away their, whatever, past key codes to get inside the EEOB or whatever office building they work in. It's hard to see mass protests over that.
- [10:12]
Mona Charon
Okay, let me try something out on you.
- [10:14]
Tim Miller
Okay, great.
- [10:15]
Mona Charon
One of the reasons that Biden was a failure is that people wanted him to restore normalcy, and they didn't get normalcy. They felt, yeah, Trump was Reelected to bring prices down and get things under control on the border. But the fact is that the overwhelming.
- [10:36]
Tim Miller
Make sure that prisoners were single gender.
- [10:38]
Mona Charon
Yeah, yeah, right.
- [10:39]
Tim Miller
That was the third item, the border. Making sure our prisons had boys in one prison and girls in the other prison. That was pretty cute.
- [10:47]
Mona Charon
Actually, before that, I'm totally fine.
- [10:50]
Tim Miller
I just. Yeah, that's fine. Well, I'm forward in most cases. I don't know, I think that they're probably. We could probably make some case by case exceptions. But anywho, that was the third prong of his mandate.
- [11:01]
Mona Charon
Yes. Okay. You know, the overwhelming majority of what the federal government does, it doesn't do through federal bureaucrats. It does through contractors. Because actually over the years, like Congress has wanted to hide how much the federal government does. So they mostly do things by doing grants and stuff to private contractors who actually carry out the work of the federal government. Well, when you look down the list of things that are going to be affected by this freeze, this is going to piss off a lot of people. Like, all right, first of all, 20% of Americans get their health care or their services in retirement homes paid for by Medicaid. That's not excluded from this freeze. Right. They only excluded Medicare and Social Security, but Medicaid, 20% of the country, every Meals on Wheels program, every Head Start program, you know, there are a million things that actually will touch people's lives. Now, we don't know how long this freeze is going to go on, but it could be that all of this disruption is going to be perceived as not the dawn of a golden age, but chaos.
- [12:19]
Tim Miller
Yeah, I want to talk about this. So let me just tick through for the people who've decided that they don't want to follow the minute by minute of this and are getting their just afternoon updates here on their Constitutional at the Bulwark podcast. Among the things that you mentioned that have been in these executive orders that have led to this. This chaos and a lot of uncertainty. As you mentioned, this freeze on grants, that was the first day read to be like a total freeze on all spending to all grants with the exception of, as you mentioned, Social Security, Medicare, military. They updated that 24 hours later to, you know, only include. There was like this weird line about like, we're freezing grants to non government organizations that are not advancing the interests of America. It was like a very urbanist sort of sentence, like, okay, well what's that? Who covers who counts in that? You know, so again, so it's still very vague. As part of that, the Medicaid system, I guess payment system was down for a while. I guess that's now back up. Yeah, we also, we just discussed there was a firing of I think over a dozen of the inspectors general. There was the firing of over a dozen people that were a part of the investigations against Trump. There have been some pretty ham fisted ICE raids, including detention of Puerto Ricans who are American citizens that Adrian has been covering for us. Then there was yesterday. This seems to be written by Elon Musk because it like is read exactly the same as what he sent to Twitter employees. It was the same subject line. There's a fork in the road. There's a message to people like, you can quit by February 6th if you want. If you just say resign and we'll pay you a severance. So all this has happened and so there's the question of like, okay, well what of this will actually end up affecting people in a month. Who's to say? Right. Because most of it is unconstitutional or illegal. And the stuff that is legal is written in such a way that it's like we don't actually know how to interpret it because they don't really know how to interpret it. So to circle back to your question, I think the more that they actually do, the worse it is for him. Right. I honestly. Right. Because his best position in all of this is to do put up a lot of smoke and have a lot of people like us clutch our pearls about it and talk about how fascism is coming and then have not that much change in people's day to day lives. And then he's like, see these whatever these crazy alarmists and whatever, the only people for whom lives are really changing are asylees and trans people. Like people that are vulnerable but the vast majority of Americans don't experience it. That is his best position. If they actually do the Russ vote stuff and Meals on Wheels is shut down, I do think the more of that they do, the worse it is and the more then maybe a backlash starts to emerge. That's kind of my view. I don't know what you think about that.
- [15:21]
Mona Charon
So remember in the first term we all talked about how Trump had picked a lock in a sense about American politics. He said, you know, what needs to happen to the Republican Party is it needs to stop all this talk about cutting government. People love their government services. And Trump's great insight was, I'm not gonna cut anything. You can vote for me and you won't have to worry about that. I'm not interested in the budget deficit. Or cutting spending. And sure enough, during the first Trump term, he didn't cut anything and he ballooned the deficit. But now he's brought in these Project 2025 crew and Ross Bott and all of this. And they are fanatics who want to drastically cut government. And so there is, I think, going to be a little bit of a, you know, a little bit of a contradiction going on here. You know, the communists used to say we have to maximize the contradictions of capitalism. Well, we're going to see them maximizing the contradictions within Trumpism, because Trumpism is, you'll never have to feel any pain. I will never cut anything you like. That is coming hard up against this new sweeping. Let's go in there and just set the whole thing on fire.
- [16:43]
Tim Miller
Yeah, they're betting. Sonny Bunch and I were talking about this on Slack. The bet here, and this is from the Elon and Russ vote perspective, is that they can do what Elon did at Twitter and say, we're going to, I'm going to cut a huge part of the staff. And most people won't notice any difference. Like, there'll be some things that are annoying. You know, there'll be more Nazis on the platforms. I don't want to minimize it. Right. The search function won't work quite as well as it used to. You know, but like, all things considered, like, most people's lives weren't disrupted by the fact that some Twitter engineers were cut. The government isn't quite the same as that. Right. There are certainly some parts of the government can be cut where people's lives wouldn't be disruptive. But you're talking about payments to Medicaid systems, talking about who knows what's going to be happening with this bird flu going around like the other services. I got news for you. There are a lot of red state MAGA Americans that rely on various government services in different ways. And I think this, the way in which they're going about this, I think betrays a misunderstanding of something that Trump just kind of got instinctively and that they don't because they have an actual ideological perspective.
- [17:54]
Mona Charon
Yeah, 100%. And I would just add that, you know, it is sort of a staple of right wing commentary, you know, to dunk on, you know, bureaucrats. And I mean, even this goes back decades. I mean, Reagan used to make jokes about federal bureaucrats and some of them were pretty funny. You know, like they were saying, there's so many bureaucrats, like a guy is crying at his desk at the Department of Agriculture and Somebody says, what's the matter? And he says, my farmer died. So that was 40 years ago or more. But the fact is the truth, the dirty little secret of how we do things in our federal government is we actually don't have more bureaucrats now than we had like 40 years ago. We don't have a huge amount of bureaucrats. We do it through private contractors. And you know, maybe some of them are not efficient. I'm sure they're not. Government is never as efficient as a private business by its very nature. And it never will be, no matter how many Elon musks you try to bring in, because the incentives are different. But the fact is you can't just say I'm gonna fire 20% of the federal workforce and then it'll all be leaner and meaner. No, it doesn't just not gonna work.
- [19:04]
Tim Miller
We also just went through sequestration, by the way. You know what I mean? If we're gonna get really nerdy about the budget stuff, like the real budget problems are the big ticket items, right? Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, defense. We already sort of did the. Again, there's more stuff that could be cut, but like the sequestration that happened, you know, 10 years ago sort of covered a lot of the doge. The things that would be under the dogemit. I did want to bring this up. So we both have been kind of dancing around it. I had Chris Hayes on yesterday, I've got my friend Tayron, Tommy Vitor on tomorrow. So I was like, we've, we're sandwich, we got libs all around us. And so I did want your kind of perspective on this. Like, I don't know, my conservative muscles were flexing a little bit when it came to the letter goes out from Elon, or not from Elon, but from Elon. You know, that's saying people, all right, you got to actually come into the office to work. And if you don't want to come into the office to work, then that's fine, we'll pay you an eight month severance and you can leave. And there's a lot of outrage about this. And there's a little part of me that was like, I don't know, it seems like a pretty good deal. It seems like a pretty good deal. I don't know, there are other problems with it, but I just, I'm wondering, are there any of your conservatives muscles flexing when you're hearing stuff like that?
- [20:19]
Mona Charon
100%. Not that part in particular because I don't know, it's very much of a sledgehammer. And you would need to know in particular cases whether these particular workers need to be in the office. I don't know. But I'll tell you, I do not like DEI stuff. I think it is destructive. I think it's a really, really bad idea to encourage people to think in racial terms. Both to encourage, you know, minorities to think of themselves as oppressed and to encourage majorities to think of themselves as guilty. I mean, I don't think that's healthy for society. If I had a magic wand, yeah, I'd get rid of all DEI programs. That doesn't mean I'd get rid of affirmative action. That's different. But DEI is a particular thing, by the way. It also encourages antisemitism in many instances. It's a mess. Okay, but there is a difference between saying, I like this particular outcome or I agree that DEI is very problematic and doing something in a completely high handed, lawless way. If Congress has mandated programs, then you can't just change it. You have to ask Congress to rescind it. By the way, last time I checked, he has control of both houses. Right?
- [21:40]
Tim Miller
Right.
- [21:40]
Mona Charon
I mean, hello.
- [21:41]
Tim Miller
Just do it.
- [21:42]
Mona Charon
So just change the effing law.
- [21:48]
Tim Miller
Yeah, just do it. No, but they can't. They can't because again, it goes back to the contradictions of Trumpism. There's certain stuff that is liked in a lot of this. Yeah, I'm with you. Just so my position is clear on all this. There's some really dumb DEI stuff. We've been covering this. I do think that. And again, it's like terms, what rubric? There's some value in the federal government in certain elements of this. Right. Like the CIA needs people that can speak different languages. Right. The FBI. It should be good for them to have a leadership program for people that come from marginalized communities, from urban, urban centers. Like, like there's certain elements of it that are pernicious and certain that are, that are good. And I feel that way.
- [22:26]
Mona Charon
Absolutely right.
- [22:27]
Tim Miller
Yeah. And I feel this way about the firings too. Like if there were actual smart people and experts, if they're going to do this, how they did it, and you know, the fucking American president or in the Clinton administration or in the. Right. You know what I mean? Like Democrats used to do this, right? They would be like, we're going to bring in experts, we're going to review the books, you know, we're going to look at to see, you know, which of these programs are outdated or not. Or not. Efficient anymore, not working. We're going to offer people severance and let them go. Right? Like, sure. Like, I'm for all of that. Right. I'm for all that. It is that these guys have taken that from us. Because what they are trying to do with this is not actually make the government more efficient. They're trying to bully good and smart people out of the government so that they can replace them with Buckley Carlson Tucker's son or whoever. You know what I mean?
- [23:17]
Mona Charon
Yes, Tim, 100% true. And also, let's recall that the part of the government that they are focusing on is such a small part of the federal budget. I mean, if they were actually serious about cutting spending and we do seriously have a debt problem, hello, then they would be grown ups and say, okay, you know, we got to talk about reforming Social Security and Medicare. But as we said earlier, they're not doing that. They won't do that. And you know, all of this other stuff is just nibbling around the edges. Honestly, if it's a matter of cost savings, I mean, on the matter of policy, it is significant.
- [23:55]
Tim Miller
All right, there you go, people. Sorry, you have to hear about entitlement reform if you're going to come to the Bulwark podcast. All right, you have Tommy tomorrow. Okay, Libs. All right. We're going to do a little entitlement reform once a week. You also wrote this week about birthright citizenship. I did want to just talk to you about that, just briefly, because the way that I was drawn to conservatism, like birthright citizenship was so entwined and kind of like me as an 80s 90s kid growing up, like the conservative worldview, right? It's like this, the shining city on the hill, the greatness of America. We want people to come here. Like, that was just really directly to me, tied with my identification with why this was an appealing movement. And it is now. Like, that part is just gone now. And so I was just interested in hearing you kind of talk about that because I think to some people, particularly younger people, if you're one of those kids at the MAGA TPUSA thing that I went to, the culture is so changed and the rhetoric has so changed around conservative politics that it's probably hard for them to even understand why a conservative would be for birthright citizenship, you know? So anyway, I just wanted to hear you riff on the article a little bit.
- [25:07]
Mona Charon
What I was trying to say is that, well, first of all, throat clearing, there's the whole problem of it being completely unconstitutional to, you know, try to change this via executive order. It's in the Constitution.
- [25:21]
Tim Miller
Did you see. Just really quick on this. Did you see Caroline Levitt yesterday? That is the first press conference.
- [25:25]
Mona Charon
I didn't see it.
- [25:25]
Tim Miller
I gotta give her one thing. She was much better than Spicer. So kudos to you for being much better Spicer. And she also. This will be just for my elder millennial listeners, Mona. So I don't know if you ever watch Cruel Intentions, but she has the Sarah Michelle Gellar vibe from Cruel Intentions just down totally. I will say I don't think that she has in the movie. And Sarah Michelle Gellar had in the cross necklace cocaine that she would do to kind of drive home the point about how to drive home the point about hell fake it was. I'm not accusing Caroline of that. But besides that, she had the whole vibe down. But anyway, she just bluntly was like, yeah, this administration sees birthright citizenship as unconstitutional. It's like what that it's really up is down Orwell stuff.
- [26:06]
Mona Charon
Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. Okay. So first of all, it's completely bogus. And so said a Reagan appointed federal judge. I said this was laughable. But the other part of it, though, is a matter of the meaning of America. And that is exactly what the executive order was labeled, the meaning of American citizenship. They said they were upholding. Actually, they are destroying it. Because birthright citizenship is tied up with the fact that we are a nation of immigrants. We are a nation of people who came here and became Americans. We were something else before everybody except Native Americans came here. And this is not a country of blood and soil. It's not, you know, that we all have the same ethnicity or ancestry or language or color or any of that. It's that we have chosen to be part of this great experiment. And every person who is born here is as legitimate and perfect and pure and American as any descendant of the Mayflower. And that is a very equalizing concept. And it's important, I think, to maintain that, because otherwise we're going to have tiers of citizens, you know, we're going to have the people who can trace their ancestry back many generations, and then they are the real Americans and then everybody else is something else, you know, that is antithetical to my perception of what this country is about.
- [27:45]
Tim Miller
Amen. All right, we gotta move on to the hearings we've got coming this week. I don't know if I've played the ranking game with you. Hegseth's already in, unfortunately, so he's off of the board. We've got Kash Patel, Tulsi, and rfk. If you had a magic wand and you got to protect the country from one of them, who would be first, who would be second, and who would you stick us with?
- [28:09]
Mona Charon
Okay, so Tulsi, I would put at the top that she is the most dangerous because the one thing you want above everything else is good judgment in a post like that where you are in charge of our secrets. And she has shown appalling judgment in her sidling up to a vicious murderer like Hafez Assad, in her defense of Edward Snowden, in her willingness to be a mouthpiece for Putin, such that the TV people on RT call her our girlfriend.
- [28:51]
Tim Miller
RT being Russia Today, the Russia TV station.
- [28:53]
Mona Charon
Yeah, Russia Today. That is who Trump thinks should be entrusted with our secrets. It is like something out of the onion. It is so beyond belief. But because we live in the world, we do. We've had members on the Hill sort of quietly saying, well, I have my hesitations, I have doubts, rather than saying, this is a goddamn outrage. Under no circumstances will she be whatever. But look, I guess we have to take what we can get. We've heard, you know, even Trump, total patsies like Lindsey Graham, express reservations. So let's see what happens.
- [29:37]
Tim Miller
All right, we've got RFK today, as I mentioned at the top. We'll have a live debrief, a TNL live debrief on YouTube tonight at 8pm and you can get that on the next level's feed tomorrow. But I want to just play for you a little bit, maybe a little highlight reel of rfk.
- [29:53]
I think some of the live virus vaccines are probably averting more problems than they're causing. There's no vaccine that is, you know, safe and effective. COVID 19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese. Woman in a van in front of me hit a bear and killed it. Pulled over and I picked up the bear and put him in the back of my van because I was going to skin the bear. Realized I couldn't go home. I had to go to the airport. I said, let's go put the bear in Central park and we'll make it look like he got hit by a plane the next day. It was like it was on every television station. I mean, there's cell phone tumors, but cancer's not the worst thing. They also, you know, it opens up WI Fi radiation, opens up your blood brain barrier. And so all these toxins that are in your Body can now go into your brain.
- [30:58]
Unknown
How does WI FI radiation open up your blood brain?
- [31:01]
Tim Miller
Barri?
- [31:02]
Yeah. Now you're going beyond my, my expertise.
- [31:07]
I love that one at the end. It's beyond, it's, it's beyond his expertise. He floats the fact that our blood brain barriers are being opened by the WI fi. In an interview with that, he's like, it's kind of beyond my expertise. And that's. That sort of sums it up. Right. We just. I have a. Just asking questions. Conspiracist is going to be in charge of the health department of the U.S. i guess.
- [31:29]
Mona Charon
Yeah. Who doesn't believe in pasteurization? You know, we might as well just, you know, go back to the 18th century, I guess.
- [31:38]
Tim Miller
How was life expectancy back then? Was it better or worse than now?
- [31:41]
Mona Charon
Can I see a chart again? It is mind boggling. Rfk. And then the other point, and this was a point that was actually made by the Wall Street Journal, which deserves a proprietary. Having not opposed Trump's election, but they are saying appropriately, that the other angle that you have to pay attention to on RFK is the money angle. That he has been raising all of these conspiracy theories about vaccines, for example, as a way to personally profit, because then he sues the manufacturers and they settle with him. And he's made millions this way. And his cousin, Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg gave an impassioned statement.
- [32:27]
Tim Miller
We actually have a clip of that. Let's just listen to a little bit of that.
- [32:31]
Mona Charon
And Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, agencies that are charged with protecting the most vulnerable among us, is an enormous responsibility and one that Bobby is unqualified to fill. He lacks any relevant government, financial management or medical experience. His views on vaccines are dangerous and willfully misinformed. These facts alone should be disqualifying. But he has personal qualities related to this job, which for me pose even greater concern. I've known Bobby my whole life. We grew up together. It's no surprise that he keeps birds of prey as pets, because Bobby himself is a predator.
- [33:18]
Tim Miller
Whoa.
- [33:18]
Mona Charon
That's amazing.
- [33:20]
Tim Miller
Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln.
- [33:23]
Mona Charon
Yeah.
- [33:24]
Tim Miller
Whoa. She goes on to talk about his drug problems, which. And, you know, says that he got over them, but many of their family members that he exposed to the drugs did not. Talks about his weird animal killing fetishes. And she also gets into the money aspect of it and how he's conflicted the money.
- [33:41]
Mona Charon
And also she points out that while he encourages other people not to vaccinate their kids, he vaccinated all of his own kids. What a piece of.
- [33:53]
Tim Miller
Well, you know, I just want to say I've been keeping a scorecard over here. One full curse for Mona, two near curses, zero from me so far. So I'm just.
- [34:02]
Mona Charon
I give you the times, the times we're living in. It's driven me to this.
- [34:07]
Tim Miller
It does remind me of the. It wasn't included in the mashup, but my favorite Bobby Kennedy is related to him vaccinating his own kids is the time that he talks about how he goes hiking in LA and he goes up to strangers with children and tells them not to vaccinate their children. That is insane. Over the bear killing and the beheading of the whales and all the vaccine. To me, it's just like to go up to a mother with a baby and it cost them about vaccination status for whatever reason. That is the one. To me, that is the worst.
- [34:43]
Mona Charon
Yeah. And by the way, the Bulwark gave a lot of coverage to what happened in Samoa, but people should familiarize themselves with that because he has blood on his hands already. He encouraged this conspiracy about the vaccines being unsafe in Samoa and hundreds, I think, or at least scores of babies died of measles in that outbreak. And it's down to him. I mean. Yeah, that's a great. Thank you, Mr. Trump. That's a great idea for who should be in charge of our health care agencies. Thank you.
- [35:18]
Tim Miller
Well, I'm monitoring closely the senator from my state now, Louisiana Dr. Bill Cassidy. I expect nothing. I expect him to go along and rubber stamp this. But I do want to say, when people are like, there's no other alternative option. Cassidy. In Louisiana, we have a top two primary situation. So it's like kind of a different system where it's a jungle primary. Everybody votes.
- [35:39]
Mona Charon
Oh, that's good.
- [35:39]
Tim Miller
Cassidy voted to convict Trump.
- [35:41]
Mona Charon
Yes.
- [35:41]
Tim Miller
So I think Cassidy is boned no matter what. If it's a straight Republican primary situation, people don't mention him. He is actually free to vote his conscience. He is a doctor. And to me, there is an outside chance. I don't think it's a great chance. There's an outside chance that he could run for governor in three years and get into a top two situation where it's like a MAGA person in him, where he gets a coalition of Democrats and normal Republicans. I wanna say that's a very outside chance. But I don't think he's less likely to win going that route than by trying to MAGA himself after he voted to convict Donald Trump. So Anyway, Bill Cassidy will be watching you.
- [36:17]
Mona Charon
So does the jungle primary system basically amount to the same thing as, like, Alaska, where they have ranked choice voting.
- [36:25]
Tim Miller
Or no ranked choice? It's like California. Everybody runs. All parties run in the first vote. And then the top two, you have a runoff with the top two. So in a place like California, you could have two Democrats. In a place like Louisiana, you could have two Republicans in the top two.
- [36:41]
Mona Charon
Gotcha. But it means that he doesn't necessarily have to be beholden to the MAGA base. Right?
- [36:47]
Tim Miller
Yeah, that's what I'm saying. You mentioned we're chatting on Slack. Anything on the Trump pivot with regards to Russia and Putin and sort of thoughts on that?
- [36:55]
Mona Charon
Trump made a statement about Putin and Ukraine that surprised people because it was kind of tough sounding, whereas he's never sounded like that toward Putin before. And it's just such a window into Trump's soul, because, remember, Trump admires aggression and wickedness. Honestly, when Putin rolled his tanks into Ukraine. And let's not forget, Trump was giddy with excitement over this act of naked aggression. And he called it genius. And he said, wow, you know, this is great. And only later did he sort of try to clean it up. That's who he is. And I just feel that if the war were going better for Putin right now than it is, that Trump would not have sounded the note that he did. But what he is now feeling is disappointment in Putin for not having won.
- [37:53]
Tim Miller
Yeah. The statements coming out of Russia are basically. I think they think they have his number. There was a conventional wisdom that they thought they had a deal, that the deal was that Putin was like, all right, I got this guy and we got a deal. I think they think, no, we can push forward because Trump's not going to find the political will to push back on us.
- [38:13]
Mona Charon
We'll see. That's another area of the contradictions of Trumpism, because on the one hand, he claims no more wars, but then he also wants to credibly threaten other countries. Right, right. And you can't have it both ways. Right. You can't credibly threaten if you say, I will never engage in war. So there we are.
- [38:35]
Tim Miller
All right, everybody, thanks, Dimona. Charon, I already mentioned we got Tommy up tomorrow, and we've got a full slate over on YouTube of live streaming these hearings. Mona will be on for a little while tomorrow. I'll be on a little while tomorrow, so come hang out with us. One more thing. Just as since we've been on coming across here, my colleague Adrian Carrastillo has the story about Trump turning schools into an immigration battleground. It's heart wrenching. So you can go check that out@the bulwark.com thank you Mona. Everybody else, good to be with you. We'll be seeing you around here tomorrow. Peace.
- [39:15]
Unknown
You could have a steam train.
- [39:21]
Tim Miller
If.
- [39:21]
Unknown
You just lay down your tracks you could have an airplane flying if you bring all the sky back all you do is call me I'll be anything you need you could have a big dip up going up and down all around the bench you could have a fun car bumping There's a never ends I want to be why don't you call my name this will be my testimony show me around your fruitcake.
- [40:40]
Tim Miller
Cause.
- [40:40]
Unknown
I will be a honeybee Open up your fruit cage where that fruit that is sweet as can be I wanna.
- [40:56]
Mona Charon
Be.
- [41:02]
Unknown
Why don't you call my name? You better call the stage hammer the.
- [41:17]
Tim Miller
Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.