Sam Stein: The Ridiculously Unserious President

Summary

The Bulwark Podcast – "Sam Stein: The Ridiculously Unserious President"

Date: March 12, 2026
Host: Tim Miller
Guest: Samuel (Sam) Stein, Managing Editor at The Bulwark

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Episode Overview

In this lively and critical episode, Tim Miller is joined by Bulwark Managing Editor Sam Stein for a wide-ranging, incisive, and frequently sardonic conversation about the current state of U.S. politics under President Donald Trump’s second administration. They dig into the Iran war, chaos across the administration, economic and immigration incompetence, and the larger implications of unserious leadership. Along the way, they offer sharp insider analysis, plenty of dark humor, and a recurring focus on the real-world consequences for average Americans.

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Main Theme

The “Ridiculously Unserious” Trump Presidency:
Miller and Stein argue that the Trump administration's response to crises—especially the catastrophic war with Iran—is marked by a lack of seriousness, reckless decision-making, PR-obsession, and leadership vastly disconnected from principle or empathy. The episode's driving concern: The administration is letting personal whims, vanity, and incompetence override policy and national interest, with devastating global ramifications.

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Major Discussion Points & Insights

1. Opening Banter and Family History (01:51–03:19)

• Light-hearted opening as Miller welcomes Stein, who jokes about guest-level “intellect anxiety” after a previous heavyweight guest.
• Stein shares a personal anecdote about his middle name “Irving,” honoring his grandfather, composer Irving Fine.

2. The Iran War: Confusion, Catastrophe, and Chaos (04:10–15:50)

• Key Developments:
  • Major oil disruptions, mass displacement, casualties.
  • The Trump administration and Israel acting as joint war drivers, but with no clear strategic endgame.
  • Trump bizarrely declares victory while fighting continues.
• Dissecting Justifications:
  • Attempts to find any plausible rationale for the war fail. Stein observes: “I suppose I would feel differently...if I understood why we were doing this. And I’m not really sure anyone’s given a convincing explanation for why we’re doing this.” (05:42)
  • Miller notes, “Israel...convinced Donald Trump to do it with them because Donald Trump, like, enjoys seeing things go boom, I guess.” (06:27)
• Neocon Critique:
  • Even traditionally hawkish colleagues like Bill Kristol and Jonathan Last have become harsh critics.
  • Miller on Kristol’s newsletter: “Trump doesn’t know what he’s doing. This is all just about megalomania to that point. It’s like...this is madness.” (10:13)
• Humanitarian Costs – Displacement, Suffering, Atrocities:
  • Any possible aim to help Iranians secure freedom has backfired: “We’re going to end up with a more autocratic regime with a younger, more despotic ayatollah.” (Samuel Stein, 12:01)
  • Catastrophe compared to (and likely to eclipse) the Syrian refugee crisis (14:35).

Notable Quote:

“The Iranian people are seeing their capital city absolutely, you know, bombed to smithereens… Is that really supportive of their rights and their hopes and aspirations?” — Samuel Stein (12:10)

3. Accountability and Truth: Airstrikes, AI, and Presidential Denial (15:50–17:23)

• U.S. bombing of an Iranian girls’ school:
  • Stein: “Every bit of evidence now points to…we fucked up, we did this, we are responsible…it's unconscionable.” (15:50)
  • Trump denies reality and refuses to acknowledge the tragedy—a theme the hosts see again and again.

4. The Cost of War and Economic Fallout (17:23–19:40)

• Financial Impact:
  • The war’s first week: $11.3 billion in costs (over $1.5 billion per day). “Seems not great that once again we’re doing absolutely nothing to care about [debt].” (Tim Miller, 17:23)
• Comparison to domestic priorities:
  • Stein: “If we keep going at this pace for a couple more weeks…it will beat the cost of the Obamacare subsidies we couldn’t afford. Can’t afford. Too expensive.” (18:09)

5. Fertilizer, Inflation, and Supply Chain Mayhem (19:40–23:19)

• “Louisiana-themed fuckups”:
  • Miller dives into agricultural fallout, e.g., fertilizer shortages due to Persian Gulf disruptions, which will spur higher food prices.
• Republicans’ cynical response:
  • Some brush off inflation as the cost of “freedom.” Miller retorts, “You don’t free people by bombing them. That doesn’t work.” (21:56)
• Republican confusion on inflation:
  • The administration had “basically” gotten inflation under control before the war upended progress.

6. Immigration, Labor Shortages, and Culture War Stupidity (23:21–27:41)

• Crawfish Crisis:
  • Miller laments shortage of migrant labor—“Don’t fuck with crawfish, it’s the final straw.”—citing the administration’s draconian immigration shift stalling seasonal work visas. (27:12)
• Broader labor shortages:
  • Fruit, vegetables, and even high-skilled work all hit, while the one group favored is white Afrikaner immigrants—ironically fleeing back to S. Africa over U.S. violence and cost.
• Bipartisan knockdown:
  • “This is a win, win, frankly, for U.S. society….now…we’re seeing what happens when you don’t have this [migrant labor].” — Sam Stein (25:52)

7. Random Administrative Disasters and Non-Serious Governance (27:41–37:56)

• Medical boats to Greenland, bizarre initiatives, lack of follow-through.
• New Secretary of Homeland Security:
  • Markwayne Mullen expected to continue predecessor Kristi Noem’s controversial approach—“new boss, same as the old boss.” (30:55)

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8. Broken Institutions: DHS Shutdown, Congressional Dysfunction, and Cabinet Incompetence (32:45–43:22)

• Funding issues:
  • DHS remains partially shut down; negotiations are stalled.
• Cabinet rankings (see below):
  • The hosts provide an annual rundown, evidencing how incompetence is widespread and institutional.

9. Senate, Corruption, and Internal GOP Drama (37:56–43:51)

• Oklahoma, Texas, and the “Banana Republic” Effect:
  • Open seat in Oklahoma could go to a mega donor; John Cornyn’s desperation to curry Trump’s favor leads him to flip-flop on the filibuster.
• Institutional decay and the old rules no longer applying.

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10. Trump’s Unserious Leadership – Rallies, Vanity, and Loyalty Tests (45:30–58:39)

• Trump’s public appearances:
  • “We have soldiers dying…he was golfing this weekend…then doing the jerk off dance at a rally.” — Tim Miller (45:30)
  • Engaging with celebrities (Jake Paul), trash-talking Obama’s stair-walking ability, obsessing over shoe size and staffers’ appearances.
• The “Loyalty Shoes” Loyalty test:
  • Cabinet members forced to wear special “Trump” shoes—“a little fashy…making people wear costumes and uniforms.” (55:03)
  • Rubio allegedly lied about his shoe size to avoid ridicule.

Notable Quote:

“At some point, you just want to say, please take this job seriously. Just take this job seriously. I just want you to take it seriously.” — Samuel Stein (48:31)

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11. Cabinet Rankings: The Rogue’s Gallery (60:19–71:49)

Format:
Each gives their “worst five” cabinet secretaries—criteria include incompetence, harm caused, visibility, and underlying scandal.

Consensus Picks (with highlights):

• Pete Hegseth — Worst overall; “unbelievably bad.”
• Pam Bondi — DOJ failures, misconduct.
• Howard Lutnick — Ongoing Epstein saga.
• RFK Jr. — Brought back measles, overall disaster.
• Marco Rubio / Tulsi Gabbard — Rubio (Miller): key driver of Iran war; Gabbard (Stein): off causing mischief in Fulton County.

Honorable/Dishonorable Mentions:

• Brooke Rollins (Agriculture): Perennial disaster.
• Scott Besant: For voluntarily collapsing the economy.
• Chris Wright (Energy): Lying about energy markets.
• Lori Chavez Derhammer (Labor): Worsening labor relations, internal scandal.

Notable Exchange:

• Miller: “There are ten possible people for the worst five slots…in any other administration [Brooke Rollins] would be the worst.”
• Stein: “Pete Hegseth…number one, just like last year.”

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “I can’t accept [the war] because it’s hard to understand what any of it is for. That…is one of the primary failures of this administration. And really, Trump, honestly.” — Samuel Stein (08:12)
• “Everything indicates that this is being done, to JVL’s point, by people who don’t really actually pay attention to the details.” — Samuel Stein (12:41)
• “It’s unconscionable. Let’s just be real about this…we are responsible.” — Samuel Stein (15:50)
• “If you bring down gas prices, everything gets brought down. He had this famous thing where he’s like, the cost of donuts depends on gas.” — Samuel Stein, on Trump’s gas-price logic (21:10)
• “Don’t fuck with crawfish, it’s the final straw.” — Tim Miller (27:12)
• “At some point, you just want to say, please take this job seriously.” — Samuel Stein (48:31)
• “There’s something submissive about [the Trump shoe loyalty test]. Deeply submissive.” — Tim Miller (55:46)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 01:51 — Opening banter, who is Sam's family, and anxiety about intellect.
• 03:19 — Building up to Iran discussion (nervousness, perspectives).
• 04:10–15:50 — The Iran war: chaos, rationales, and lack thereof.
• 15:50–17:23 — Airstrikes on a school, AI, and the president’s denial.
• 17:23–19:40 — The true costs: war expenditure and missed policy priorities.
• 19:40–23:19 — Fertilizer shortages, food inflation, cascading economic woes.
• 23:21–27:41 — Immigration failings, labor crisis, "crawfish crisis."
• 27:41–37:56 — DHS shuffle and administrative failures.
• 37:56–43:51 — Congressional dysfunction, Senate seat corruption, filibuster flip-flops.
• 45:30–49:04 — Trump’s unserious public behaviors, rallies, and obsession with loyalty.
• 55:03–58:39 — The “Trump shoes” farce and ongoing problems with sycophancy.
• 60:19–71:49 — Cabinet rankings: a hall of incompetents.

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Conclusion

Tone & Takeaway:
Scathing, sardonic, and deeply concerned—Miller and Stein use humor and detailed analysis to underscore the grave dangers of an administration run on self-absorption, PR, and incompetence. With war, domestic turmoil, and cascading policy failures, the episode makes the case that Trump’s unseriousness is not just embarrassing—it’s actively catastrophic.

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For full coverage and continued analysis:
Subscribe to The Bulwark and check the show notes for year-end cabinet rankings and additional resources.

Transcript

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[Tim Miller]

Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. It is Thursday, March 12th. I wanted to bring you a little comfort food food, a little porridge, a little ice cream, you know, whatever it is that makes you feel good inside. A little crawfish etouffee. And it is my friend and yours, the managing editor of the Bulwark, Samuel Stein. How you doing?

[Samuel Stein]

Good. Every one of those was great. Except for porridge. I don't want to be.

[Tim Miller]

Why did porridge come to mind? I don't know.

[Samuel Stein]

When's the last time you had porridge, Tim?

[Tim Miller]

I can't recall when the last time I had porridge. What's your middle name? I was going to do your middle name. It's Ignatius? No, it's.

[Samuel Stein]

Do we have to?

[Tim Miller]

Ignatius would be Catholic. So it's something Jewish. What's an eye? What's a Jewish eye name for Jewish eye names.

[Samuel Stein]

There's a good story here. It's short. My middle name is Irving. It's named after my grandfather, Irving Fine, who was a famous composer in his day. Tragically died at the age of 49. But look him up. Good friends with Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein. He wrote some great classical music bits. Started the music program at Brandeis. A little Stein family history for you.

[Tim Miller]

Wow. It seems fake. And it seems like your parents are just big Irving crystal acolytes. And we're trying to come up with a different reason. You don't want to give Bill the credit, but that's okay. We have a lot to talk about. You said you're nervous.

[Samuel Stein]

Yeah.

[Tim Miller]

Well, do you want to talk about why before we get into the news?

[Samuel Stein]

So I listened to the. The pod yesterday with Sagar and, you know, I feel like, you know, he's like a seven course meal type guest. He's talking about like Thad missiles, and he's reading the front pages of the Korean press and he's got all these analogies to, you know, world War.

[Tim Miller]

He's doing General Westmoreland spoon bits.

[Samuel Stein]

And I'm like, digiorno's like, you're gonna enjoy it, but you're gonna. It's not good for you. And so I'm a little bit worried. My intellect is not on the level. And, yeah, I woke up a little bit early today in sweats thinking about this.

[Tim Miller]

Here's an important thing, Sam. There's a difference between intellect and wisdom.

[Samuel Stein]

Well, I don't have that either, and

[Tim Miller]

I think that there was a shortage of the latter. But we appreciated him coming on.

[Samuel Stein]

No, he was great.

[Tim Miller]

Let's talk about the news. We're still at war with Iran. We're still climbing the mountain of conflict. We're still having a. What did Trump call it? An excursion. An incursion, I think is what he meant.

[Samuel Stein]

Yeah, he means incursion, and I think he just doesn't. Either he doesn't understand the difference between the words or no one's bothered to correct him, or both. But he definitely means incursion. And he keeps saying excursion.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah, an excursion is like we're taking a short little excursion to the bayou with our porridge. Yeah, some porridge. Yeah. It's not. We're doing an incursion. Okay, so here's the latest from the incursion Excursion Yesterday, Iraq and Oman closed oil terminals after two tankers were attacked and left burning off Iraq's coast. The IEA said on Thursday that the war has caused the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market. 800,000 people were displaced in Lebanon amid continuing Israeli strikes on Hezbollah cargo ship was struck by an unknown projectile near Dubai. There's like a Style section piece about rich people that are never going back to Dubai after trauma they've experienced. Early assessments by the UN refugee agency find that up to 3.2 million people have been displaced in Iran since the war started. We are continuing our onslaught onto Iran. About 1500 people dead there. Eight American soldiers dead. So that's the state of affairs. Donald Trump says we've already won, basically. It doesn't feel that way.

[Samuel Stein]

Yeah. Why does he keep saying we've won? We obviously haven't won. Although he does say we won, but we're also still fighting. He has this weird way of justifying this. I think this is a mess. I mean, it's a mess, right? I suppose I would feel differently about it all if I understood why we were doing this. And I'm not really sure anyone's given a convincing explanation for why we're doing this.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah, generally speaking, like, if you're going to kill somebody, like, it's, it's a good start to like, have a reason.

[Samuel Stein]

Let's say someone said, what is, what's your interpretation of their reason? What would you say?

[Tim Miller]

Like, I would say that Israel feels a real and legitimate security concern.

[Samuel Stein]

Right.

[Tim Miller]

With Iran. They felt that way for a long time. Israel's military has demonstrated like, really impressive capabilities between the pager attack and the first 12 day war with Iran and other. The ability to decapitate Iranian leaders. And, and Israel has a not imminent but like real security concern and they convinced Donald Trump to do it with them because Donald Trump, like enjoys seeing things go boom, I guess. But that would be the reason that I would, I would offer.

[Samuel Stein]

You mentioned Israel like four times in that. And I mean, it's just like.

[Tim Miller]

But like, what else?

[Samuel Stein]

That's the point.

[Tim Miller]

Obviously. Obviously we would not be here if Israel didn't want to. Right.

[Samuel Stein]

Okay.

[Tim Miller]

So just like, that's like not a. It's just like obvious. Like let's say Israel didn't ex. Sure. Let's say that, you know, you know, like that, that, you know, that was entirely.

[Samuel Stein]

Let me try to paint like the most generous reason for this.

[Tim Miller]

Let's.

[Samuel Stein]

This is the most generous interpretation of what we're doing, which is the Iranians posed a regional threat, but also, to a degree, a threat to the United States through ballistic missiles, through their ability to disrupt.

[Tim Miller]

To what degree? To what degree?

[Samuel Stein]

I don't know. To some degree.

[Tim Miller]

Like how many degrees? Like two degrees?

[Samuel Stein]

It depends. Okay, well, we'll. We'll go back to the degrees and that you couldn't live in a world where, you know, they were threatening us like this. And I just. Even that doesn't really make sense because we were living in a world and I thought one of the most interesting rationales was when they. I think it was Tom Cotton. They're like, you know, they've been an imminent threat for 47 years. It's like, yeah, we've lived with this for 47 years. Right? Like we have, and Trump was already

[Tim Miller]

president once during those. Yeah, we lived through.

[Samuel Stein]

We live through with Trump. I guess when I look at what's happening and all the sort of disruption and the loss of life and the tragic killing of these girls in this elementary school and the displaced people and the costs and the trauma and everything that comes along with it, I can't accept it because it's hard to understand what any of it is for. That, I think, is one of the primary failures of this administration. And really, Trump, honestly, because he seems so much more attuned to trying to win some sort of daily PR battle around the war than he is about actually prosecuting it and explaining it to the American people.

[Tim Miller]

To put a finer point on this, both our colleagues William Kristol and Jonathan Last, were smeared yesterday on the podcast as warm, hungering, bloodthirsty neocons, you know, who are to blame for a lot of things. And both of them have newsletters in the last 24 hours about this topic that sheds a little bit of light on, I think, your. Your confusion about what exactly it is that we're doing there. JVL's yesterday was headlined Dire Straits. The Iran War is run by idiots. And I don't want to speak for them, but I think that both JVL and Bill and myself would like, be open to interesting proposals considered on how to help the Iranian people find freedom from a horrific regime. But what they're doing is not that JVL goes in at depth to, like, you know, white papers have been written by experts over the past quarter century talking about, like, how Iran has prepared for this moment and, you know, some of the obvious things that they would do in reaction. And our government seemed to, like, either not know or not care or not think about that or not. Bring in the people who did know when they were making the decisions. Bill writes this morning about how they should rename this epic failure.

[Samuel Stein]

You're not going to read Bill's email headline because it's the perfect Bill email headline.

[Tim Miller]

Sure, I'll read it. Sing Goddess of the Fury of Trump. The wartime president is focused on footwear. It's a classic Bill piece. There's references to Homer and Iliad and Achilles. All in all, though, the summation of it was Trump doesn't know what he's doing. This is all just about megalomania to that point. And it's like if even people that, like, hypothetically could possibly have been sympathetic to the mission are looking at this and saying, this is madness. It's insane. It is done in the most stupid way possible. I think that kind of tells you what you need to know. Yeah.

[Samuel Stein]

And I've seen people say, you know, and I don't want to speak on Bill's behalf. He can do that very much himself.

[Tim Miller]

We'll see him on Monday.

[Samuel Stein]

I've seen people say, well, you know, Bill's just clouded by tds and anything Trump does, he's going to oppose. Like, how could this guy, of all people oppose what's going on in Iran? And I just don't see that. I mean, like, Bill is pretty open minded. I talk to him all the time and I've edited the newsletters he's written about Iran. I think he would be supportive of a war that was based around some principles that he believed in. And this is not that. I think it'd be supportive of a war that was done with proper and professional execution, too. But this is not that either. And just if you kind of narrowly isolate the issue of the Iranian people and this idea that they deserve a government that is more liberal, democratic and respectful of human rights and all the things that I think Bill legitimately believes in. I mean, what about this war has been in pursuit of that? We're going to end up with a more autocratic regime with a younger, more despotic ayatollah.

[Tim Miller]

Or maybe they kill him and see what the next person is. And it's like dealer's choice. We're kind of just, well, we killed

[Samuel Stein]

the people who we thought were going

[Tim Miller]

to be playing go fish for new ayatollahs. Right.

[Samuel Stein]

The Iranian people are seeing their capital city absolutely, you know, bombed to smithereens. They've seen schools bomb. They're seeing their water supply, their oil supply absolutely decimated. They have oil rain coming down from above, like, is that really supportive of their, their rights and their hopes and aspirations? There's nothing that would give you a sense that this is being done for the purpose of helping a beleaguered Iranian populace. And I think everything indicates that this is being done, to JVL's point, by people who don't really actually pay attention to the details. I thought JVL's column was spot on.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah. And I think, again, just to circle back on the Israel part of it, I do think that if you read the press there, like, there's not like a clear end goal, but I think that the people in charge of Israel are kind of happy with any outcome. Like, if it's a weakened Iranian regime with fewer missiles that could, they could shoot at Israel, but a similar radicalism, not great, not the best outcome, but like, still an improvement. If it's total chaos and they have internal fighting and warring, so they're focused on each other, not their neighbors, that's a win. Right. If hypothetically you get somebody who's more moderate and even the best case scenario. Right. Like, so I don't think that they have like a plan for the short sighted though.

[Samuel Stein]

Right. It's like, why would a failed nation state in Iran be a win for the region? I mean, what you'll end up happening is no one who can control any of.

[Tim Miller]

It's at least understandable, though, because they're getting rockets fired at them all the time. You know, I think the point is that, like, Trump is just along for the ride with that. Yeah, but I hear you. And the refugee situation. One thing I didn't get to is saga. I wish I'd got two more because it's something he's good on, but we're spending too much time on the stuff he's good on. I want to make sure we had a little time for me to dunk on him. Is the comparison to Syria, like, Syria is so much smaller than Iran. Yeah. Like just in like, the number of humans that live there. And like the Syrian refugee crisis had ripples throughout the entire world. Yeah, yeah. Still today, like, Syrian refugee crisis explains, like, why Brexit happened possibly. You know what I mean? Like, there's a whole. Yeah. You know, the whole Western world and obviously the Middle east dealt with the ramifications of that. And so if you end up in that situation, that's even like in the ballpark of that in Iran, given the number of people that live there, it's unimaginable.

[Samuel Stein]

It's cataclysmic I mean we're talking not just about refugees. You're talking about famine, disease, the potential for more terrorist attacks, guerrilla tactics that JVL laid out. It's unfathomable to imagine and then just the scope of human suffering is really obvious. Goes underappreciated but we can't lose sight of that.

[Tim Miller]

One more thing just kind of back to we don't know what we're doing and I don't see anything that we're doing helping support making the Iranian people feel like we're looking out for their best interests to the bombing of the girls school. I forget if it was yesterday. The other day there had been some discussion about how maybe it was the AI targeting and Claude that was how that happened. As more reporting comes out and shout out to the remaining reporters were on this beat after places like the Washington Post eviscerated their Middle east reporting you still, we still have the Reuters, the Times, bunch of other places are doing good reporting. What we're learning from them is that it may have actually just been out of date targeting like that the school is near a military base and like this is, you know things had changed in the past seven years or whatever since whatever the targeting they're using just deeply tragic. I don't even know how much what more there is to say about it. And the fact that the President of the United States just continues to lie about it is like fathomable.

[Samuel Stein]

Unconscionable. Unconscionable. Let's just be real about this. Every bit of evidence now points to including our own review. The own United States review preliminary review says we fucked up, we did this, we are responsible. Like whether it was cloud or old data is kind of irrelevant and it's

[Tim Miller]

a little relevant just in the case that it'd be pretty alarming if our new AI Are you saying we're doing hallucinate?

[Samuel Stein]

Does this make the case for. For AI? I don't know.

[Tim Miller]

Not really. It's just like it's good to know that so far like AI isn't hallucinating and trying to kill young girls like that's all it's just a state, it's just a fact that hasn't happened yet. We thought it might have happened so that's the only reason that it's.

[Samuel Stein]

Wow, that is. That is quite the silver lining.

[Tim Miller]

It's a silver lining. Just say like we should know whether the AI, the Defense Department's AI is hallucinating targets as girl school cloud are

[Samuel Stein]

like yeah, Trump should be I mean a normal empathetic human being, let alone president, would say something to the effect of this is a tragedy no matter what. We're looking into it, we're still investigating. But no matter what, it is a tragedy. And it's horrifying to imagine what these families and these people are going through. This president has not even acknowledged that this exists. He's denying reality. What an affront to like basic humanity that he can't even bring himself to just say I'm sorry that this happened. You wouldn't respect someone who couldn't do this in normal life.

[Tim Miller]

Well, exactly. I don't respect him. So that keeps me nice and even. The cost is another thing that we have and there's been some speculation, et cetera. Who can even trust the fucking Pentagon? Who knows. But the Pentagon tells Congress that the first week of the war. So seven days cost 11.3 billion. So about a billion and a half a day. It's pretty significant nut there I think from my perspective. Can we just put on our just cliche hats here? From my perspective, it's somebody who's concerned about the 30 plus trillion dollars that we have in debt. Seems not great that once again we're doing absolutely nothing to care about that. Maybe from you as a former Huffington Post lib perspective, you might look at this and say isn't that about what the Obamacare subsidy is? Time to cost billion.

[Samuel Stein]

If we keep going at this pace for a couple more weeks, I think it's three more weeks. It will beat the cost of the Obamacare subsidies we couldn't afford. Can't afford. Too expensive. Unreal.

[Tim Miller]

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[Samuel Stein]

What is that?

[Tim Miller]

But it is Urea is basically fertilizer. It is kind of natural gas and ammonia and nitrogen and you get fertilizer. I was listening to the Odd Lots podcast. My favorite dork podcasts are Pods Save the World. I usually fall asleep though Odd Lots, which does random economic stuff. Joe Weisental and Tracy Ellery. They've been on the show. Derek Thompson's show. I had him on last week. I found a nerd out on Stuff. Those are some of my favorites. I was listening to the Odd Lots show and I was like, oh, the New Orleans area. I should care about this. The port of New Orleans is the primary hub for storing this fertilizer. It is coming though from the Persian Gulf shock. It's got to go through the strait of Hormuz. 45% of the world's tradable urea comes from the Persian Gulf. China has also has some of the remaining 55% but they have an export ban because China cares about their own people and they they banned exporting of urea so they don't ever have a shortage. So what we're going to see now as we head to the spring harvest is farmers paying more of them have already their fertilizer. But like paying more like long story short, this is just going to lead to additional costs not just in gas prices but in food and grocery prices because a the trucks are now paying higher in diesel, you know, driving the food around the country and the farmers are paying higher in fertilizer because we have a fertilizer shortage. So there's no other fallout from this.

[Samuel Stein]

I was talking with Kathryn Rampel about this yesterday. We did a little thing on the Takes feed. For those who haven't followed. You should check out the Takes feed. The economic ramifications are pretty wild and they're going to get much worse, assuming this keeps going. Because precisely what you said. So much is dependent on not just fertilizer, obviously, but fuel. And Trump himself has been very adamant, like, well, if you bring down gas prices, everything gets brought down. He talked about donuts. He had this famous thing where he's like, the cost of donuts depends on gas. And what's been crazy to me is to watch Republicans in Congress try to rationalize this where they're just like, I think one person, I think I forget who it was, was just like, you know, well, they're all like, freedom isn't free. You should pay a million.

[Tim Miller]

Freedom. Are we fighting for freedom? Like, you can't use the George W. Bush talking points if you're not doing the George W. Bush war. Okay? Like, I'm sorry, Like, you can't do. Freedom isn't free for this. Unless we're fighting for the freedom of the Iranian people, in which case I think people are gonna have to be on the ground. In Iran, you don't free people by bombing them. That doesn't work.

[Samuel Stein]

That's the benign talking point. Someone else was just like, well, these people are kind of poor and they don't really understand how to navigate.

[Tim Miller]

That was Senator Houston, Big race denial against Sherrod Brown, where he was just like, the poor people don't really understand how to manage their budgets at the grocery store.

[Samuel Stein]

I can't believe you said that.

[Tim Miller]

The thing is going to spiral out of control, and it's hard to draw it back. And here's the dark irony of all this is, like, they basically had inflation under control. Obviously, prices weren't going down. And that was a stupid thing to promise because you don't want prices to go down because that means you're in a recession. But inflation in the February was down to basically the target. It was a little. You want 2%? It was 2.8% or something. And housing was the reason essentially, that it was higher. It had almost gotten back to normal. But then they do this war of choice, and it's like, not only has gas prices just skyrocketed immediately, but it's going to trickle down to all the other shit that regular people pay for.

[Samuel Stein]

Yeah, 100%.

[Tim Miller]

On top of that, here's the crisis. This will be the Tim Cook section, because this is a real crisis for me.

[Samuel Stein]

Tim Cook or Tim Cooks.

[Tim Miller]

Me Tim Cook. Not Tim Cook. But sometimes Tim cooks about Tim Cook. I've had a few of those. We have a crawfish crisis in Louisiana, and this affects me personally, obviously, Grocery and gas prices affect me personally, but nothing affects me more than this. I want to read the story from Stephen Markantel and the Advocate. It's spring, and Charlie Johnson's crawfish processing plant in Bowbridge should be humming. His crawfish peeling and cook room is usually staffed by Mexican migrant workers along with a handful of older locals. On a typical day, they'd rotate between Spanish and country music as they work. Some employees have worked at the plant for 14 years and can process 4,000 pounds of crawfish meat a day, which is important because I'm eating, like £5 a day myself. The peel tails are shipped to restaurants and grocery stores. But on Friday, nearing peak crawfish season, typically raucous room is silent and empty. That's because crawfish processors across Louisiana say a shortage of temporary work visas has left them without the migrant labor they depend on, forcing plants to sit idle during the busiest part of the season. It's not like that they were hiring illegals. Illegals. It's not even that. They've broken down the entire immigration system. They don't want new people coming to the country. So we don't have seasonal workers, temporary work visas that we needed to carry out important services like, make sure I can get my fucking crawfish during crawfish season. This is an outrage. And it also, you know, crawfish inflation probably won't affect you, Sam, up in the Northeast, but it will affect me. But there are other examples of this. This is just the one that I care about personally, but where you're not getting seasonal workers. Fruit's going to be more expensive. Vegetables are going to be more expensive. And yesterday it was the thing that maybe I got the most mad about or second most mad about with saga, when we were arguing about this and he was talking about, like, Tim, you're treating these humans like they're utils, and you only care about them for your neoliberal goals. It's like, no, actually, I care about them as individual humans and don't think that we should be shipping them to foreign gulags. And I also simultaneously think that, like, Americans should be able to have cheap, fresh fruit and produce. And if that is supported by, you know, having some temporary migrant labor, then, like, great. Like, what's the. What's the problem with that? Here's the alternative. Fucking Charlie Johnson's crawfish plant is empty.

[Samuel Stein]

And once you go for the crawfish, you've gone too far. Yeah, this is not great. And I don't get sager's point. I mean, this is a win, win, frankly, for the U.S. society. They want the work. We benefit from the work. The American economy clearly benefits more. Click any statistical breakdown of that. And now, anecdotally, we're seeing what happens when you don't have this. So this is holistic, too. It's like across the board. It's not just seasonal workers, obviously. You know, everyone from the seasonal workers who pick your fruit to the foreign PhD students who would normally come and study here are like, no, thanks or we can't get in. And then I saw this morning, the one group that we have been letting in, the white Afrikaners. Did you see this guy?

[Tim Miller]

Oh, I love. This is my favorite story of the week. Thank you for bringing it up.

[Samuel Stein]

The guy comes in. At least one guy comes in. He's like, actually, this is too violent. I'm going back to South Africa.

[Tim Miller]

It's a little too expensive and violent. Too many guns and everything costs too much in America. I'm going to go back to South Africa. Yeah, the refugees, the white refugees that Stephen Miller is bringing in. Look, I've been raging about this administration's immigration policies from the start. And I just. I can't imagine anything that could have gotten me more upset about it. But fucking with crawfish season.

[Samuel Stein]

Don't fuck with crawfish.

[Tim Miller]

It's the final straw. Okay, so I'm going to be talking to my Louisiana neighbors about this impeachment at this point. I mean, impeachment, or at least I mean, Bill Cassidy. Where are you like Bill Cassidy, if you aren't gonna save us from the measles by blocking RFK Jr from running health and Human Services, like, at least you could fucking ensure we have people to work in the crawfish processing plants so we can have our crawfish. At least you could do that, Bill Cassidy. Are you completely worthless?

[Samuel Stein]

Where's your governor? He's, like, too busy with Greenland.

[Tim Miller]

Greenland? Yeah, he's. Where are those boats, by the way? There was a big announcement. Jeff Landry and Donald Trump made a big announcement.

[Samuel Stein]

Oh, yeah, the medical boat.

[Tim Miller]

We're gonna send some medical boats to Greenland. Do we have an update on those boats? Have they made it to Nuke?

[Samuel Stein]

I think we need to do more following up on these random stories. We should just have a feature in the newsletter.

[Tim Miller]

Did you have Edgar email the administration and ask them what the status is on the boats that are going to nuke?

[Samuel Stein]

Great idea. I'm going to do that.

[Tim Miller]

I would like to know about that.

[Samuel Stein]

Okay.

[Tim Miller]

I'd also just like to know generally what they think. And this was a strategic imperative for our safety that we take Greenland. And it seems like we've got our eye off the ball now that we're like raining hellfire down on Iran and Cuba's next.

[Samuel Stein]

Yeah.

[Tim Miller]

So speaking of immigration policy, we have a new secretary of Homeland Security. Great news for everybody. If you're getting bored of Sam, stick around at the end. We are going to be giving you our updated Cabinet rankings, which I know is whatever is the reason why Sam's on the show today. So we can't include Marquane Mullen, former

[Samuel Stein]

Is it really mark quaint?

[Tim Miller]

No, it's been Marquane Mullen, former semi pro MMA fighter, was 30 in his career. One win over Huggy Bear and then two wins over another guy. The same guy in a Tulsa semi pro mma.

[Samuel Stein]

Yeah. What's your fucking record, Tim? Huh?

[Tim Miller]

Well, I got into one fight on Thomas Circle that I think was a win back freshman year of college. And then there was another time when I was trash talking somebody at a bar also probably freshman year of college. I was pretty hot as an 18 year old and it was a bicycle themed bar in Denver and I was trash talking a guy. My friend said we should leave. The guy followed me out and then one of my buddies was a Golden Glove boxer and he smoked him in the face and then I kind of just ducked and so that's another win. So that's like two and oh no,

[Samuel Stein]

that's like half a win.

[Tim Miller]

You didn't end up 2 and oh,

[Samuel Stein]

1.1.5 and oh yeah.

[Tim Miller]

Anyway, they're gonna have to vote. I guess Donald Trump just wants to like name him his secretary. That's not how it works. The Senate will have to approve him, presume he'll get through. But, you know, there's been a lot of focus, I think on the scandals around Kristi Noem and her personal life and her spending and her physical appearance and, you know, the snuff films that she's put out, like all that kind of stuff. But like on the actual policy, there's not a ton of evidence that things are going to be very different. And Adrian wrote about this earlier this week for us. Mark Wayne Mullen said Renee Good engaged in domestic terrorism. He called Alex Freddie Durange. He said the Liam Ramos story was false, said ICE should remain masked. He's called for the National Guard to go into the cities. He's opposed judicial warrants. It looks like there's a review happening of CBP policies and they're instituting a lot of stuff that the little guy, little Miss Vivino had been putting in place. Now they've gotten rid of him. But some of the policies I think are going to be in the new rule book. So there's a little bit of a new boss, same as the old boss, just kind of different face situation here.

[Samuel Stein]

So I guess in one sense the scandals, those sort of high profile scandals involving personality and corruption will be gone. Right? It's not going to be, you know, there's no jets where there's a bedroom that may or may not be for, you know, hanging out with Corey. But on the actual substance, it's very much the same.

[Tim Miller]

I mean, we don't know.

[Samuel Stein]

Yeah, we don't know.

[Tim Miller]

We don't know what Corey's willing to do to stay inside the good graces of the secondary.

[Samuel Stein]

Anything. It takes Corey.

[Tim Miller]

So it's back on Cameo, is he. He's back on Cameo, yeah. Helping people with their poopies, whole thing.

[Samuel Stein]

Well, yeah, but on the actual substance, I mean, look this, and I do think this actually matters because I think my hope and my belief is that a lot of the public revulsion over Trump's immigration policies had to do with how they react to things that people saw with their eyes. So you saw the shooting of Renee Goode, you saw the shooting of Alex Brady, and then you saw Christine Omanich instance saying, well, these rocks of domestic terrorism and so on and so forth. And people looked at like, what the hell are you talking about? Like, this is not. We can see this. You realize there's video footage of this stuff. And if you have someone like Mark Wayne Mullen who is just going to echo exactly that, I don't think it does. It means any sort of fundamental shift in how they're doing this. And we know, and let me just say they, we know that they do want to at least pretend like they are shifting. Right. It's not just that they have sacked Gnome and replaced her, it's that there's leaking of these stories of, you know, their political principles going to the Hill and saying, oh, don't talk about mass deportations. You know, we need to just, you know, sand down the, the rougher edges so they care about this stuff. But this guy is just going to do exactly what Stephen Miller says.

[Tim Miller]

The other thing that's like happening simultaneous to all this is we still aren't funding dhs. I mean, like the DHS has a ton of funding from the last budget in the most recent budget negotiations you know, DHS is still in a partial shutdown, which is affecting airports, affecting fema, affecting other types of security. I have seen some reports of, like, pretty gutted other parts of dhs, you know, things that, that you would think that they should be focused on child trafficking, things of that nature. And so the Mullen confirmation will be happening simultaneously to this debate over whether to fund dhs. I don't see how any Democrats can vote for it at this point. Besides Fetterman.

[Samuel Stein]

Fetterman's already said he'd vote for it.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah. And so how does the logjam break on that? In a normal world, what would happen if we go back to 2013? What would happen in a situation like this is the incoming secretary would make some concessions to the other party and as part of the confirmation hearing, like they would fund the department and confirm that person and they would make some changes. That's not going to happen this time.

[Samuel Stein]

Well, in 2013, it would require, I believe, 60 votes to get this guy confirmed. They changed rules, so now they don't have to make those concessions. And it's not, definitely not going to happen because this administration views any sort of reform as an indictment of something they've done or as an admission that they did something wrong. So if you're like, well, we'll vote for Mark Wayne, Mark Quain, Mullen. If, if you, you know, let's say just throw something out there, institute a, you know, no masking policy for ICE agents, this administration would say no. They would say, absolutely not. You're going to dox these people. You know, we weren't doing anything wrong.

[Tim Miller]

How does the shutdown end?

[Samuel Stein]

I mean, there's been, there's been negotiations happening on the Hill. They don't seem to be going anywhere. There's been an offer from Democrats to fund, for instance, the TSA and all the other agencies other than ICE and cb, that's not going anywhere because that would just isolate it even further. So I don't know. I mean, there was, we had reported that Republicans had been, you know, hinting to Democrats, hey, if we turn against Kristi Noem and we get her out, would that unlock these votes for DHS funding? And the Democrats I talked to on the Hill were like, no, absolutely not. There's nothing. And because of this, because there's no distinction between Christiano and Markway Mullen other than, you know, the 200 million dollar ad campaign with her on a horse and the jet with Corey and all that stuff. Well, I guess that's a distinction.

[Tim Miller]

But Maybe he'll be doing that campaign on a horse too.

[Samuel Stein]

We don't know.

[Tim Miller]

We don't know. Yo, we moved down to New Orleans. The one thing that catches you the most off guard about hassle and cost is the blinds. You know, you go to order some blinds and you look at the ticket number and you're like, really like this, maybe can I live without any blinds? But then the neighbors are going to be looking in and seeing everything that's happening here, so you got to get them. So you might as well go to a place that's affordable and makes it easy for you. And that's our friends at Three Day Blinds. It's 2026. Are your blinds still from 2006? There's a better way to buy blind shade shutters and drapery. It's called three day Blinds. They're the leading manufacturer of high quality custom window treatments in the U.S. and right now, if you use my URL3dayblinds.com the bulwarks, they are running a buy one, get one 50% off deal. If you, like me, are not very handy, they'll do the blinds installing for you. The extra team of three day blinds handles all the heavy lifting they design, measure and install so you can sit back, relax, and leave it to the pros. With three day blinds, you choose from thousands of options that fit any budget or style, plus light filtering and blackout blinds to motorization and smart blinds that work with Alexa. We've been looking at it because for the reason I said at the time, we left a couple windows off of, you know, the blinds purchase. Originally we moved in and now I'm looking at the three day blinds options and I'm seeing some stuff that I'm, I'm really liking right now. Get quality window treatments that fit your budget with three day blinds. Head to three day blinds.com the bulwark for their buy one get one 50 off deal on custom blind shade shutters and drapery for a free no charge, no obligation consultation. Just head to 3dayblinds.com the Bulwark one last time. That's buy one get one 50 off when you head to the number 3D a Y blinds.com the Bulwark. All right, let's move forward to some other politics stuff related to this. Now an Oklahoma Senate seat opens up, right? This is maybe my second favorite story of the week behind the white South Africans going home because America's too expensive and violent. This is from your old pals of Politico, Governor Stitt. The Oklahoma governor who's been kind of unexpectedly just demonstrate a little bit of independence at times from Trump. That's not exactly the state you would have thought to hear that. But boy, this report is. Well, it's discouraging. It's really just reflective of the idiocracy meets corruption of the Trump 2.0 era. Stitt, he's meeting with Trump today about Senator Mullen's seat. Why? I don't know. Who cares what Trump thinks about that seat? He has. No, it's the governor of Oklahoma's job. But I guess you gotta go kiss the ring.

[Samuel Stein]

I think in any administration the president would probably wann have a little bit of say, right?

[Tim Miller]

I guess. I mean we do have a, we do live in a federalist country. Like we don't have a king.

[Samuel Stein]

Yes. Okay. I'm just saying, look, I guess you're still stuck in 18 year old Tim.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah, I am, I am. I need to get my pocket constitution right here. I grabbed, I had, I brought it back up.

[Samuel Stein]

Is that what you, is that what you brought to the fight when your buddy had punched the guy out and you waived the pocket constitution?

[Tim Miller]

The fighting, my fighting happened like right after my pocket constitution face. I think I was like, I might have just did a white lie there to kind of preserve my ego. I think 18 year old was pocket constitution Tim. I think probably 20 year old was pocket Tim. I just did. I was a little embarrassing to say 20, so I said 18. Anyway, I can't find it. I got my podcast featured on here somewhere. But we are still a federalist society. Anyway, Kevin Stitt is considering two people for Mullen seat. His own senior advisor I've never heard of. Or oil magnate and Trump ally Harold Ham, one of the largest donors to Trump Super PACS going back all the way to 2016. Huge supporter, has dumped tens of millions of dollars into Trump in his packs. The idea that this guy gets a Senate seat would be, I mean, third

[Samuel Stein]

world banana republic shit, quite literally buying the Senate seat. It's incredible. And Trump probably would love it and demand in exchange that he like put more oil out onto the market. And you know, if Kevin, if Stitt doesn't do it, do you think like Trump, Trump, you know, takes FEMA contracts away. I mean we're talking the range of possibilities for retribution and grift is incredible in this one. Love it.

[Tim Miller]

We'll keep an eye on it. Simultaneously think about corruption and lack of seriousness and et cetera. We've got John Cornyn down in Texas. You go across The Red river to what's happening there. So the Republican Senate primary went to a runoff. Talarico won in the first round. On the Democratic side, Paxton and Cornyn. Cornyn had won very narrowly. It was a three person race. Hurtin hadn't won, but Cornyn had the most votes very narrowly over Paxton. Trump kind of throws out this trial balloon, basically that says, hey, I'm thinking about endorsing Cornyn. And I think that whoever I endorse, whoever I don't endorse, should just drop out for the sake of the party. Paxton doesn't like that none too much. Paxton says, I'll drop out if Cornyn and the Senate passes the SAVE act, which they can't do without breaking the filibuster. The SAVE act is this kind of preposterous federal crackdown on voting rules in various states. Murkowski said she was against it yesterday because it would make you disenfranchise so many Alaskans. And so that's kind of where things stand in the meantime. Ton of oppo dropping. Like, my MAGA feed is just all corn and oppo. Just about how he's a rhino cuck or whatever. And the polling is coming out showing that Trump endorsement might not even really matter that much in this case because MAGA people want Ken Pexton. So it's an interesting, evolving dynamic. John Cornyn is trying to navigate that and, and get the Trump endorsement and survive, have his political career survive. And he's also a little grumpy about that. It seems like it's kind of getting to him. And here was John Cornyn walking through the halls of Congress yesterday.

[Samuel Stein]

Previously said that nuking the filibuster would be taking a wrecking ball to Senate rules.

[Tim Miller]

Is that no longer true? I said I'd be open to reforms. What would you say to those who

[Samuel Stein]

say you just changed your mind to win the President's endorsement?

[Tim Miller]

I'd say that's not true.

[Samuel Stein]

You also said that if I think

[Tim Miller]

we're through, go away. I think we're through, go away. Hand in the face of the reporter. Didn't want any follow ups on that because obviously that's exactly what he did. Yeah.

[Samuel Stein]

It would be amazing if he was like, like, yeah, that's why I did it. I needed to win Trump's endorsement. I love it, I love it, I love it. Get rid of the filibuster. None of these guys actually believe in it. I mean, come on, do they? They're all willing to throw. Maybe there's like three of them. That are unwilling to change their opinion when it comes down to their own career. But two of them are gone. Mansion and Cinema. I guess McConnell still likes this stuff, but like his career is done anyway. Just get rid of it.

[Tim Miller]

Cinema condemned Cornyn yet? Have you seen it?

[Samuel Stein]

She's a new columnist, right? She got a new columnist gig. I forget it was for some Weird

[Tim Miller]

Al Monitor or something. I don't know, Capitol News, Washington reporter or something.

[Samuel Stein]

Yeah, yeah. Why is she not writing a column about this?

[Tim Miller]

Yeah, I don't know.

[Samuel Stein]

What do you make of it? You probably like the filibuster, right?

[Tim Miller]

I do like the filibuster. I did like it generally. I mean, I always was. I was for the talking. The way that the filibuster has been used is ridiculous. It's like preposterous. It's like, okay, well, wait, now it's a 60 vote threshold for everything like that. Silly and not what it was meant for. I, as somebody who likes drama and speechifying and politics and if somebody feels so passionately about something that they're going to go and try to block it. Okay, great, that's fine. Let's do that. The current system is bad. I'm starting to even evolve.

[Samuel Stein]

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Where's that pocketbook constitution?

[Tim Miller]

Where is the pocket constitution? As I said, maybe it's downstairs.

[Samuel Stein]

Can you find the page? Find the page that points to the filibuster in there. Okay, buddy. It's not in there.

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[Samuel Stein]

They never imagined this shit. Come on.

[Tim Miller]

Thank you note from Pete Buttigieg right there. I can't find. Oh wow. I got Tyler's thank you cards from when he worked in the capital.

[Samuel Stein]

Here's my thank you note from Barack Obama.

[Tim Miller]

Stationary. Got some stationary? Yeah. Okay. It's in here somewhere. Anyway. Yeah, at this point we don't even have a Congress. So like, if getting rid of the filibuster like makes Congress actually do work, then I guess before that, January is

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[Tim Miller]

Trump was back out in the streets yesterday. He's been in his bubble and he decided to go back out, do a rally. You know, the jerk off dance was happening. I go to, we have soldiers dying in the Middle East. He was golfing this weekend. Yesterday he was doing the jerk off dance to ymca and he went to Kentucky for the very important purpose of retribution against Tom Massey because Tom Massey embarrassed him over the Epstein files. And so Trump is there trying to support Tom Massey's opponent in that primary, which we'll be watching. Jake Paul, the MMA fighter was there with like very sweaty armpits, like sweating through his suit. And he went on stage and Trump endorsed him for a future office.

[Samuel Stein]

Am I reacting to that or are we playing a clip?

[Tim Miller]

Yeah, there's no clip. That's just. No, there's no clip. We don't play Trump's voice on here, if at all possible.

[Samuel Stein]

This gets back though, to the first part of our discussion about Iran.

[Tim Miller]

Does it take me from Jake Paul back to Iran?

[Samuel Stein]

I'm gonna get you back there. Which it's very evident that Trump, you know, all he cares about, I mean, this is not a revelatory observation here, but like, it's all, it's all about. Just, he has very little attention span. He just cares about the news headlines and he, he's Just he's doing things that do not in any way signal that he is seriously worried about what's going on in Iran, let alone paying attention to him. He's playing golf. The weird, you know, rally. Jake Paul. I looked at his Truth Social feed prior to coming on here. A lot of it's about oil, but some of it's about Gavin Newsom. I don't know. He had some riff, and I think we're gonna play it about Obama and the stairs on Air Force One.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah, we're not gonna play it, but I'll read it for you. Trump. The only thing I admired about Barack Hussein Obama, which was nothing, actually, but the only thing is the way he was bobbing down the stairs. You talk about unprecedential. He would Bob and I couldn't believe that he made it without at least a noticeable major fall.

[Samuel Stein]

What? Like, where does that even come from? Why did he even bring that up?

[Tim Miller]

I think he's very self conscious about his own ability to walk up and down the stairs.

[Samuel Stein]

Sure, I get it. You don't need to talk about that out loud. But it's not even just Trump, too. It's like, you know, Pete Hegseth, the story yesterday that he kicked out a photographer from the pool because he knew it wasn't sexy enough in the pictures or something like that.

[Tim Miller]

He didn't like his recessed side profile.

[Samuel Stein]

Yeah.

[Tim Miller]

The jawline wasn't strong.

[Samuel Stein]

It's these guys, you want smash, you want to shake them and just be like, yo, there's serious stuff happening now. Please get a grip. Focus on that.

[Tim Miller]

They're not taking it seriously. They're 12. They're 12. And like, literally. And Trump, like, met his favorite WWE personality, reality star, and he was very excited to meet him. He is making bombs go boom. And like that. Is it like this? It's like this is.

[Samuel Stein]

He's, like, excited about an F1 race around Washington, D.C. and Cash Battle has, like, MMA fighters training the FBI. And it's like, yo, it just. At some point, you just want to say, please take this job seriously. Just take this job seriously. I just want you to take it seriously.

[Tim Miller]

I don't. Yeah, I don't know, think that they're capable. So I don't know. Do you have any hot takes on the Matt? Do you think Massie can survive the Trump primary? It's actually. It's a pretty interesting inflection point.

[Samuel Stein]

Yeah.

[Tim Miller]

Because Massie has done thing. He's done it, which nobody else. Is this true? Is it new? Nobody else.

[Samuel Stein]

How would you say Liz Cheney did it.

[Tim Miller]

No, no she didn't. Because I'm about to explain the thing I'm talking about, which is they're going to oppose Trump on a matter of principle. They are going to not waver on it, they're going to campaign on it and they are not going to go full bulwark then because that, because people always say like that's what you're demanding people. It's not, it's not what I'm demanding people, they're not going to be Tim Miller and just shitposting all the time. Like they're not going like kind of give up and basically soft retire. That's what Liz Cheney did. I know we love Liz, but like Liz didn't take that was that Wyoming primary seriously at all. Like she, like she wanted to stay in the race because she didn't want to give up, which was admirable. But like she didn't campaign to win that race. She campaigned as kind of this valedictory, you know, message sending type campaign that like a noble loss. It was like a noble loss type campaign. Like Thomas Massie is trying to win, win. He wants to stay in Congress. He's a libertarian. He's not a resist lib like he is against Trump on the war. He's always been anti war. He cares about the Epstein files. He's always cared about them. He's a fiscal hawk and he's such conservative on other issues. And that's him. He's just going to do it if it works. If it works. And that's what I wanted MTG to do in Georgia. And if either of them would have worked, I think it's a real signal that it's kind of like, like you can see the end, like it's not, we're not anywhere near the end. But you can start to see an exit path off of Trump because he doesn't have that effect over people.

[Samuel Stein]

Yeah, I agree with you 100%. But the flip side of that is if it doesn't work. Yeah, the message that sent's pretty, pretty dark for sure.

[Tim Miller]

Very interesting primary to keep watching. Okay, we are gonna get to the cabinet rankings, but first there are two members of the cabinet. I promise the audience that I will only spend 15 minutes per week maximum on 2028 hot stove. Now my exception to that is if I have a 2028 potential candidate on. Okay, but like we're not going to do like it's too early. No, it's too early. Lot's going to happen. No Sense doing it, but it's a little fun, so we allow ourselves, like a little morsel every now and then. Trump has been pulling Mar a Lago attendees about JD And Marco. The reply, which I don't think should be surprised, given that, like, it's Florida and these are the rich people and they're probably, you know, there's probably a lot of folks that, you know, hate the Cuban commies down there, but overwhelming feedback. Pro markup at Mar a Lago, at the country club, as the rightful heir, not JD and that is not nothing. It's not nothing to me for two reasons. One, one, I always like it when Trump's asking this because, number one, I like it when he creates drama in his own side. And number two, it means that he's not thinking about how he can stay in power. So, like, those are small, very light silver linings, very narrow linings. Like you can almost. It's hard to see them almost, but they're there. What do you make of the polling, the Mar A Lago?

[Samuel Stein]

So my general theory of this is that Trump, Trump will ultimately anoint someone because he wants to be kingmaker. And so there's not going to actually be like a primary is my sense of it. Right. It's like everyone's just going to basically say, well, who's Trump going to anoint? And that person's just going to run and they'll win. So in a weird way, these Mar A Lago sessions where he's asking his buddies, like, who to who they, like, really do matter. Like, they really do matter. And then the other component here is that, yes, it does signal that Trump's not gonna run again. But, you know, is he gonna, like, not to borrow some sort of anti Semitic imagery, puppet master, these people. He's not Jewish.

[Tim Miller]

Or do the Putin thing where you run with me or you run with

[Samuel Stein]

Dimitri, Mitch, Don Jr. Yeah.

[Tim Miller]

Who's the magician.

[Samuel Stein]

And I guess the other thing. And I know this is not gonna

[Tim Miller]

happen, but it is worth, I think, since you're Jewish, I can do it and Trump is a gentile. I don't think that there's any antisemitic subtext.

[Samuel Stein]

I feel fine. I feel fine with this. Thank you for clearing me.

[Tim Miller]

The other thing is I don't want there to be any. But we just wanted to vet it.

[Samuel Stein]

What about Don Jr. I know it's not gonna happen, but where is Don Jr. In all this?

[Tim Miller]

Too stupid. And I think that the idea was that J.D. was the John Jr. Vessel. Right. Because J.D.

[Samuel Stein]

yeah.

[Tim Miller]

So I've asked people like reporters, talked to Robert Draper about it. Love Robert Draper, great reporter, great profile writer. He did a profile recently about kind of an ayahuasca type trip that people should read if they're interested in that. It wasn't ayahuasca. It's a different thing. I can't remember the name of it. Anyway, he is still just from a profile writer standpoint, around the ball in that world. Because he wrote about mtg. He wrote about them and I just was like, I refuse to believe that J.D. vance and Don Jr. Are real friends because Don Jr. Is so fucking stupid. Stupid. And that like this is. JD is like a sociopath that like will. Will pretend to be friends with anybody in order to gain power. And, and I've been sure that they are genuine friends. I kind of don't believe it. I think the JD is like such a convincing sociopath that like he can even fakes people out who are, who are discerning. That said, I think that J.D. was like the Don Jr. Stand in because of their, their friendship.

[Samuel Stein]

Interesting. Yeah, we never talk about Eric Trump either. You know, poor Eric, he seems to

[Tim Miller]

be running the business.

[Samuel Stein]

Yeah, he's making money.

[Tim Miller]

He's all, he's all whatever. And he's robbing people with the various cryptocurrencies. So that's, that's pretty good. And maybe he's the true heir, honestly. Okay, we'll keep monitoring it. I think that the Marco thing is interesting. And I guess lastly before we get to the cabinet ranking, speaking of Marco, the shoes, pictures going around.

[Samuel Stein]

Yeah. What do you make of that? That's crazy, right?

[Tim Miller]

So Trump's been giving them all a certain type of shoe and it's been described as like a light hearted loyalty test, which is a little fashy for me. Like it's like making people wear costumes and uniforms for you is like a little Stalin esque. It's a little, it's not all the way there. Like they're not military uniforms yet, but it feels like a step in that direction. But to me, the funniest part about it, it's like, I think Trump just like guesses what their shoe size is because if you look at the pictures, some of the Marco's shoes are way too big for him. Maybe Marco lied to Trump about his shoe size. Maybe this is probably it. Marco lied to Trump.

[Samuel Stein]

That's probably about his shoe size that happened. Yeah, he's like, he's probably like a seven. But he's like, yeah, give me a nine.

[Tim Miller]

He didn't want to get made fun of. He knew if he told Trump he was a seven, that Trump would walk around all the time and just be like, you know what that means, Mr. Seven over here. So he lies. So he's in these huge shoes. He's like, in these clown shoes. And then there are other guys. I think I forget who it was, who's like, their foot barely stuffs into the shoe, Right. And it's confusing. For starters. Why wouldn't they just buy them themselves? It costs, like 150 bucks. Just get the right size yourself and don't tell Trump or otherwise. Like, the psychological. This was. Andrew wrote about this this morning. Like, the psychological torment. Like, imagine the place you have to get in. You're walking around in clown shoes to make your boss happy. Like, there's something submissive about, like, that. Deeply submissive.

[Samuel Stein]

I mean, so much. There's so much to unpack here. One is, if it were me and Trump was saying, you know, I'm gonna get you these shoes. What size are you? And I know that he equates shoe size with dick size. I'd be like 14, sir. Size 14, Mr. Trump. I know.

[Tim Miller]

Just comes. Then you go buy your own regular correct size shoes. Shoes. Yeah, exactly.

[Samuel Stein]

That's exactly what it is.

[Tim Miller]

And you give the 14s to. Since that's my actual size. Two is

[Samuel Stein]

if you've ever worn shoes that are too big for you, and it has happened, occasionally, you buy a pair of shoes, you wear them like, you wear them once. Ah, this is too big. It's awful. I mean, it's awful. Like, they're falling off. You're, like, scraping the bottom. You're tripping over. Like, these are. Our Secretary of state is doing this on a reg, apparently a regular basis, where he's got to go through life in these oversized shoes. I can't imagine doing that. It's awful. And then third, it's so embarrassing, too, because it's like, do they have to wear these every day? Like, I don't want to wear this. I never wear the same shoes every day. But I guess apparently these guys just show up and like, ah, fuck, I gotta wear the Trump shoes again today. Like, do they. Do they change their suits ever? Like, do they? I guess they have to match. The whole thing's so stupid. But it's very fitting for the Trump era.

[Tim Miller]

I hadn't thought about that. Just how awful it is to slide around the shoes, personally. Is this true? You know how as you get old, you stop growing, but your ears get bigger. And that's especially true for Marco because it's Marco's Pinocchio curse. It's like every time he lies, his ears get even bigger. But for me, I feel like, is it possible my feet are getting bigger? Because it's not been too big shoes for me lately, it's been too small. Every shoe I buy, I've been the same shoe size my whole life, it feels like, and now they're a little tight. And I'm wondering, is it possible? Could your feet grow after four? I'd like, could the doctors weigh in on that? For me, I think it's possible that

[Samuel Stein]

your feet actually go wider. I don't know, maybe my feet are

[Tim Miller]

widening comment on that if you're a foot dog.

[Samuel Stein]

But when you're like me and you're a size 14, you don't know.

[Tim Miller]

It's hard to find shoes. Yeah.

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[Tim Miller]

All right, let's close with the cabinet rankings. Me and Sam been doing this since the start. Just kind of an assessment of. It's sort of representative of where things are going the worst in the administration. It's also an interesting exercise. It shows our differences about where we're coming from. For most of last year, Sam had RFK ranked as the worst cabinet secretary. I was vacillating back and forth between gnomes and besant for most of the year. At the end of the year, Sam realized I was correct and we united on gnome being the worst and we were both ended and we both ended up being right as she's the first one out. The rest of the rankings sam had rfk2hegseth3russ vote 4. We're going to take Russ out for this one. We're just talking about cabinet. We're just talking about secretaries now. It gets too confusing for lumping in the trade rep and the element. I had gnome Rubio, besant vote. So Sam had gnome RFK Hegseth. I had gnome Rubio, Besant as the worst three I want to go through. I'm just going to list everybody really quick.

[Samuel Stein]

How did we do this last time? Did we give grade A's or did we last time?

[Tim Miller]

If people want to go watch the whole 30 minutes. We're already an hour into this pod, so we're not going to. We're going to do an abbreviated version. But you can go look at our year end. We'll put a link in the show notes. You can look at our year end and we went through. We gave everybody great. But we're not going to do that this time. But I'm going to read all the cabinet and what I'm asking for you is to give me like the largest small person. We're not going to impugn many little people, but like the best, like the person who stands out among the Lilliputians.

[Samuel Stein]

Okay, I'm going to go through them and I'm going to tell you my. How about we do it this way. I'm going to give you my five worst. You give me your five worst and then we'll rank them. Okay?

[Tim Miller]

Okay, great. And then. But I also want from you your. If there's a sleeper out there that doesn't make the top.

[Samuel Stein]

I like a sleeper.

[Tim Miller]

Here's the list. I'm just going to read them all really quick. We have Marco Rubio, Scott Besant, Pete Hegseth, Pam Bondi, Doug Burgum, Brooke Rollins, Secretary of Agriculture, Howard Nutlik, Commerce. Lori Chavez Durimmer, secretary of labor, RFK Jr, Scott Turner at HUD, Sean Duffy at Transportation, Chris Wright at Energy, Linda McMahon at Education, Doug Collins, Veterans Affairs. And then I'm also gonna actually lump in there the intelligence agencies, Tulsi Gabbard and John Ratcliffe at CIA. So we'll start with, like, who is. Who's the standout performer for you?

[Samuel Stein]

Stand up performer has got to be. It's. Well, geez.

[Sponsor]

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[Samuel Stein]

It's so tough. Speaking today in this very moment, I. It's got to be Hegseth, right? Hey, it's gotta be.

[Tim Miller]

No, this is your worst.

[Samuel Stein]

The worst of the worst. Is that what you're saying?

[Tim Miller]

Okay, sorry, I thought I meant stand up performer. Let's start compliment. Okay. Yeah, yeah. Start this and then we'll.

[Samuel Stein]

You know, I still feel pretty good about my guy Doug.

[Tim Miller]

I mean, Doug, yeah, with the interior. He is making people, like, do errands for him. I'm gonna throw out a different one. I think there are only two possible choices for the best of the world. And Doug Burgum is one possible choice, and the other one is one I'm going to go with, which is John Ratcliffe.

[Samuel Stein]

Why?

[Tim Miller]

And I'm just grading him. Well, because I'm rating him purely on. You don't know anything about skills. Demonstrate it.

[Samuel Stein]

He's demonstrated no skills.

[Tim Miller]

I mean, we don't know. We successfully kidnapped the leader of Venezuela with no casualties, and that's pretty good.

[Samuel Stein]

I mean, give that to Pete. Give that to Pete.

[Tim Miller]

The CIA, they found the Kameny. They found him.

[Samuel Stein]

Okay.

[Tim Miller]

Okay. So I'm giving it direct list. Sure. We can agree to disagree. Okay, now we'll go to our five worst. You want to go one to five? Let me just.

[Samuel Stein]

Let me. This is the pool.

[Tim Miller]

I have let fall some nominees and then we'll give our.

[Samuel Stein]

This is the pool I have. And I have to narrow it down to five. But in this pool, I got obviously my man Pete Hegseth. Okay. I got Tulsi, I got RFK. I'll never drop him from my 5 ever, even though he'll go up and down. I got Bondi. I kind of have Rubio, but that might be just because we're in the middle of war. And I got Lutnik because we're still in the Epstein saga. And then my sleeper is Chavez Darimur.

[Tim Miller]

Okay. So I would like. Did you mention besant in there.

[Samuel Stein]

No, I didn't even mention. I did not mention.

[Tim Miller]

Okay, so you had rfk. Like, this is pretty great, actually, about how many bad ones are. I'm happy we did it like this because I think that now that means that there are 10 possible people for the worst five slots, because I'm going to add. I think we've got to throw in Besant as a potential nominee. And I'm going to add also Chris Wright.

[Samuel Stein]

Oh, yeah.

[Tim Miller]

Secretary of Energy. I think he should not go without a mention. And I don't know that Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins should go without a mention. I'm not sure. She's always my top five.

[Samuel Stein]

Yeah, she's always been a nightmare.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah, she's been terrible. And she keeps getting worse. And the foreign country is getting absolutely annihilated and all. She. And she's like, grow your own chickens. Like what? Like, honestly, she did have administration. She would be the worst in any other administration.

[Samuel Stein]

She did have the $3 meal.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah, in the $3 meal.

[Samuel Stein]

All right, here's my.

[Tim Miller]

Okay, so there's 10 categories. No, I'm just gonna read them one more time for you so they can make their own in their head. Rubio Besant, Hegson, Seth Bondi, Rollins Nutlik, Durhammer Kennedy Jr. Chris Wright, Tulsi Gabbard. Those are 10 nominees for the top five worst members of the administration.

[Samuel Stein]

This is tough. This is tough. Okay, here it is. My five.

[Tim Miller]

You already have it. You're right.

[Samuel Stein]

I have it.

[Tim Miller]

Because I'm still working somewhere.

[Samuel Stein]

I'll go through this. You work while I go through this. Ah, there's one that I kind of want to swap. Oh, boy. Okay, no swap. Okay. Coming in at number five is Lutnick. I just can't. I can't win because the Epstein.

[Tim Miller]

The Epstein, Yeah. I agree. Nutlik did not make either of our lists in the fall in the part because it was like, he's kind of silly. My rationalization of putting Blessed on over Nutluk. Excuse me. Not in the fall. At the end of the year rankings was the. That, like, I expected more out of Bess. Like, the economic policy was a nightmare. And. And I. Like, I was grading him a little bit on a curve. Yeah. But. But now with the. With the Epstein lies. I do agree. You gotta take a second look at my. So he's five for you.

[Samuel Stein]

He's my five. My number four is Tulsi. What's she doing in Fulton County? Come on. Come on, girl. What are you doing?

[Tim Miller]

Okay, fair.

[Samuel Stein]

Number three, Mr. Measles RFK. And that is a demotion because he has been my 1 and 2.

[Tim Miller]

He's down to 3 now.

[Samuel Stein]

He's down to 3. He's down to 3. I think he's been tamed a little bit, I want to say, so I'm feeling a little bit better about that. Number two is Bondi. Okay. Just because the DOJ is a fucking mess and she doesn't give a shit. And then number one is Pete, and like I said, Chavez Darimer. She is.

[Tim Miller]

She.

[Samuel Stein]

I. She's sneaking up on. On five. She. What she's done is truly incredible. She's like. But it's like, almost like I appreciate the game in a way. Like, she's boozing, like, you know, she's throwing birthday parties for herself now her husband is harassing sexually. Apparently, some AIDS there. I don't respect that. But some of the other stuff is interesting.

[Tim Miller]

They're honestly, like, the reason why she can't make my top five is because you could do. What's the show that's on Apple that has Jon Hamm, where he's, like, a rich guy?

[Samuel Stein]

Friends and Neighbors.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah, Friends and Neighbors. We could do that type of dark comedy about the Department of Labor. The secretary and her husband are both having affairs with different people. What's happening at the Department of Labor?

[Samuel Stein]

What do you think they do when they go home at night and they're talking about work?

[Tim Miller]

I don't know.

[Samuel Stein]

It's really incredible stuff.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah. Okay. This is challenging. Of the 10, I had to cut Tulsi because, like, you cut Tulsi. I don't see how she makes my top five. And she's not doing anything. In the war, she's been sidelined.

[Samuel Stein]

She's in Fulton county mixing shit. What is she doing?

[Tim Miller]

That's not good. But to me, it doesn't seem like she's doing anything. She's doing yoga. She's living the spirit of aloha. She's not in my list.

[Samuel Stein]

Okay.

[Tim Miller]

And at the beginning of last year, she was in my top three. I was very worried about her. Chris Wright, I had to cut. But recency bias. I almost put him in. I wanted to put him in. Yeah, Recency. But he lied about the Strait of Hormuz being opened just long enough for

[Samuel Stein]

some traders to benefit.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah. Lori Chavez Durammer is out, as mentioned. So now that means that I have seven to choose from, and I still have to cut. And I think I have to cut Brooke Rollins, unfortunately. I really want to get her in there. She's been a nightmare, but I got to cut her. I don't know what to do about my top six here, so I'm going to do it live. Number one, I'm gonna go the opposite way of you. Number one is obviously hexa. Yeah, it's just, like, unbelievably bad. Number two is Rubio. So he didn't even make your list. Yeah, but I mean, like, we're only doing this stupidy, stupid wars because of Rubio. Honest. Actually, I'm flipping it for the same reason of bessent and not, like, from the end of the year is the worst now for me and Hegseth, too. Number three, I think you got to

[Samuel Stein]

go with who's getting that rose.

[Tim Miller]

I'm looking at Nutlich and Bondi. I think you got to go with Bondi at three still. She's so. She's failed. Part of me doesn't want to do it because she finally failed at successfully getting anybody but the Minnesota to get serious for a second. And trying to investigate Renee Goode's wife. Yeah, like, all that kind of stuff just totally unacceptable. She's three.

[Samuel Stein]

Pause for a second. I see where this is going, and I don't like this. I know exactly where this is going.

[Tim Miller]

I don't think you do, because I don't know who my fifth spot is. We'll talk.

[Samuel Stein]

I'm gonna be mad. Okay, go ahead.

[Tim Miller]

Fourth is Nutlik.

[Samuel Stein]

Okay.

[Tim Miller]

You can't put Nutlik over Bondi because Bondi's covering up the Epstein files. Lutnik's in them, so I think you have to put him below her. So we've got Rubio, Hegseth, Bondi, Lutnick. In the fifth spot is a competition between Bess and rfk.

[Samuel Stein]

I know where this is going.

[Tim Miller]

I don't know. How do you pick? Besant is overseeing just a totally voluntary collapse of the economy, and he's being so obnoxious about it. RFK has brought back measles. The economy is affecting everybody. The measles are only affecting people in small areas of South Carolina. Don't do it. Don't do it. It. Don't. Don't do it. Rfk. Not Besant.

[Samuel Stein]

It's got to be rfk. Come on.

[Tim Miller]

Okay, we'll put RFK at five. I wish I could do a tie. We'll put RFK at five. So one more time, where were our differences? I had Rubio in there. And I had Rubio, and you had Gabbard.

[Samuel Stein]

So you had Rubio. I did not have Rubio. I had Gabbard. Yeah, that was the main one in terms of who we had versus who we did not have. And then the rankings. I had Hegseth 1, you had Rubio 1, I had Bondi 2 and you had Hagseth 2, I had RFK 3, you had RFK 5, I had Tulsi 4, you did not have Tulsi. You had Lutnik 4 and I had Lutnik 5. There it is.

[Tim Miller]

What a show. Thank you Samstein. That was the porridge that everyone needed after Sager. We'll be seeing you on the Takes feed. Already subscribed to Borg Takes as well. We appreciate you everything you're doing over there managing the Bulwark so I don't have to. And tomorrow we have one of our faves so we'll see y' all then. Peace.

[Samuel Stein]

Had a Clippers game on the court side watch a shoot like a 45

[Tim Miller]

they mad at me too I got

[Samuel Stein]

more fire why these See you go

[Tim Miller]

home Roger Go home Roger in my

[Samuel Stein]

bed I'm a smart guy I ain't with you like a part time nah

[Tim Miller]

hit some I let the Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

[Ryan Seacrest]

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