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- [00:00]
A
Hi, everybody. This is Andrew Egger with the Bulwark. Donald Trump had another one of his famous, infamous, patented Cabinet meeting love fest praise sessions today. And wouldn't you know it, our Will Salatan was good enough to sit through the whole thing, sift the wheat from the chaff, get some of the highlights, get some of the lowlights. He is here to tell us all about how it went down. Well, we've done a lot of these by now, right. We're at sort of a weird place with the President's popularity with the war in Iran. A lot of wheels seeming to fall off a lot of buses right now. Now, you wouldn't necessarily have known any of that from the, from the Cabinet meeting today. Before we get started, we've got a lot of clips here, but can you just kind of tell the people what your broad strokes takeaways were from, from what you saw from the President and his allies this morning?
- [00:45]
B
Yeah. So the, the main wheels that are falling off the bus these days seem to be. Donald Trump's very anxious that he's perceived as falling asleep at Cabinet meetings and other things, which, which he does. He does. Right. So, so I think, Andrew, I think they called this Cabinet meeting in front of the press to show everybody he's hard at work and he's, you know, he's in command. And it kind of showed just the opposite. Basically, this, this was more than an hour of a bunch of Cabinet secretaries doing nothing but sitting around and watching grandpa tell some of his favorite stories.
- [01:17]
A
So let's get into this. Let's do like, why, why, why take our word for it, right? Let's, let's, let's head right into some of the, some of the highlights and lowlights from this Cabinet meeting. And right off the bat, you, you had stressed this as kind of a really evocative illustration going in. But here is a small chunk of the time, the very lengthy period of time that the President spent talking about the renovation of the DC Reflecting pool on the National Mall that he has going. Let's take a listen to that.
- [01:43]
C
That horrible reflecting pond is disgusting. It's filthy, dirty and disgusting. I said, really? I drove down, I said, secret Service, let's take a drive, and we went down. I said, that's terrible. It was built, I guess, a little after the Lincoln war. It's embarrassing. It was so horrible. I never saw anything like. It was filthy dirty. It was biting.
- [02:06]
A
It was Biden. Have you been following this reflecting pool? Little snafu at all. Will, what do you make of all this.
- [02:12]
B
So obviously he's obsessed. Look, we all know Trump's a real estate guy. He thought, I'm building the ballroom, I'm building this and that, I'm renovating this and that. The reflecting pool is his latest obsession. But you can hear all the germ phobia and there's, oh, it's filthy, it's dirty, it's disgusting. And Hussein Obama and Biden, they all, you know, they screwed it all up. So he goes on about this. But Andrew, so I clocked this. I had to clock it because it just kept going on and on. Remember, this is supposed to be a meeting to show that Donald Trump's in charge and the Cabinet's doing stuff. So you've got sitting next to Trump on either side, the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense. Remember, we're in the middle of a war or an excursion or whatever you want to call it. We're all waiting on this. These guys are sitting there for more than an hour, Andrew, the whole Cabinet sitting there doing nothing but listening to Trump talk. And he goes on for eight to nine minutes, depending on how you want to count it. Just on a rant about the reflecting pool. And they all have to sit there and it's all this stuff, it's filthy, it's dirty, it's disgusting, and I'm cleaning it up. I just couldn't believe that this was Trump's idea of how to show America that he's doing his job.
- [03:16]
A
Yeah, well, the President was feeling pretty good for one particular reason, which is that we had some primaries last night. And in fact, this is what he opened up. The, the Cabinet meeting with today was sort of doing a victory lap. Obviously the most, the most notable victory that he notched last night was in the Texas Senate primary where he, he endorsed against his incumbent senator from Texas, John Cornyn. He endorsed Ken Paxton, the very maga, very corrupt, very scandal plagued Attorney General of the state instead. And Paxton romped. He, he won by a lot. But, but that was not all that Trump was happy with. Trump was pretty happy with the slate of primary wins last night. They show that he remains, he retains his sort of iron grip on, on the voting habits of his MAGA base, of the Republican primary electorate at least even as every other part of the country seems to be abandoning him in pretty significant numbers. So let's, let's, let's just hear him talk about that a little bit. This was right at the beginning of the Cabinet meeting.
- [04:12]
C
Last night was incredible. Not only Texas, but so many other Places, the numbers were fantastic. And midterms. I don't care about the midterms. Look what happened last night. That was the prelude to the midterms.
- [04:24]
A
I mean, if you just. Just one thing I will say about this. I cannot think of a better example of the way that this guy's mind, this particular idiosyncratic, very strange mind, works than to say, well, look, I've still got my fastball in Republican primaries. I think we're going to do great in the midterms. This is a prelude to the midterms. The Trump guys won last night. I think the Trump guys are going to do fine for the broader electorate in November.
- [04:49]
B
Yeah. So that second clip, by the way, is him saying, you know, the Iranians think they're going to wait me out because I got the midterms, but I'm not scared of the midterms. Look what just happened. It's exactly what you said, Andrew. He thinks that because I won the primaries, I'm going to win the general token. Not only is that not true, for the obvious reasons, right. He's bragging about taking out John Cornyn, an incumbent Republican senator in Texas, with a different Republican, Ken Paxton. So not only is did he take down an incumbent, but correct me if I'm wrong, Andrew, doesn't Ken Paxton perform worse in general election polling in Texas than John Cornyn by a significant margin? That was my impression. Right.
- [05:26]
A
That's been the case so far. Yeah.
- [05:27]
B
Yeah. So basically, Trump is bragging that because he just put the Republicans in a less electable position in one race, that that bodes well for the midterms. I mean, I don't know whether to say he's dumb or whether that he thinks that all he really cares about is his control over his party. And if in the course of that, he loses a seat for his party to the Democrats, well, that's not his problem. I don't know.
- [05:54]
A
Yeah. I mean, this is not like a Cornyn Paxton video. But just to dwell on this for another second, it's not as though John Cornyn was like a Mitt Romney, Liz Cheney type guy. He's extraordinarily Trumpy, you know, I mean, not like a base figure like Paxton is or like some of these other senators. Not like Mike Lee or something like that. He was sort of an establishment guy. He predates Trump in the. In the Senate by a long time. But like, you know, basically every other senator in the party had gone to. Gone along to get along with President Trump extensively over the years, over and over and over again. Never voted to convict him at any of his impeachment trials. You know, never, never really crossed him on any major pieces of legislation. Trump wanted to punish him for a couple of extremely small slights, like not instantly recommitting to Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential primary. And that's, that's the kind of, the kind of behavior that we are punishing and taking victory laps over right now, even as it is making Republicans chances worse in the midterms. And even as again, basically everybody without an R by their name is abandoning him in droves in terms of his national popularity.
- [06:58]
B
So Trump's saying this with Marco Rubio sitting on his right. Rubio was just a senator. I bet if you looked at Marco Rubio's voting record compared to John Cornyn's, they're about the same. I mean, what is Marco Rubio supposed to do when his boss is sitting there bragging about taking out a Republican who basically votes the same way Rubio does? I mean, it's just, it's really a dilemma for people in his own party.
- [07:21]
A
Yeah, I mean, there are so many of these, of these things. I want to turn to turn to a different thing here because there's so many of these different issues that are like real problems for these guys right now. You know, they're losing support on the war in Iran. They're losing support on affordability. They are. Trump is sort of posting his own way into a candidate quality problem that they're going to have to deal with in the midterms. And yet when you sit here and listen to them talk in these cabinet meetings, it's like they're on a completely different planet. Right. I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's pie in the sky stuff. It's, it's. Yes. And stuff about all these things that are gonna be politically controversial. Like, for instance, here's this next one. This is Pete Hegseth, the Department of Defense Secretary, the Secretary of Defense, I should say, talking about their gigantic eye watering $1.5 trillion defense budget that they're asking for. This is a politically dicey thing to ask for, in part because it needs to be that large to replenish an enormous amount of weaponry that we already spent on this Iran war that we haven't won. And, and maybe walking away from in sort of a losing position. But his sort of like, and that's not all style of talking about it is pretty, pretty great. So let's hear from Pete Hegseth in.
- [08:31]
D
Because of your, the meetings you've held. Defense manufacturers are investing in new plants and new manufacturing, new production lines so that we're getting weapons faster than ever. And then the 1.5 trillion that you've committed to the department going forward, that's a million American jobs. One million American manufacturing jobs.
- [08:49]
A
Wow. That's pretty great. A chicken in every pot. A defense manufacturing job in every family. What do you, what do you make of this? Of this? From the Department of, from the Secretary of Defense.
- [09:00]
B
Okay. Okay. So Andrew, I mean you, you're more of a, you're, you're an actual conservative. Correct me if I'm wrong on the math here. $1.5 trillion of spending on a federal department to get 1 million jobs. That is, I believe, $1.5 million per job. If Democrats did that in any department. Right. That would be, Republicans would be all over that.
- [09:28]
A
Right.
- [09:28]
B
This is just. And remember, the defense budget was a trillion dollars. So this is a 50% increase in one department in one year to do what we're seeing right now, a war in Iran, which was a war of choice. That's a lot of money. That's an enormous amount of money. And for them to be bragging that the return on that is a job for every 1.5 million, I mean, I can show you a long line of liberals and progressives who will find you more efficient ways to get jobs in the public or the private sector than to spend that kind of money to get, to get that kind of return.
- [10:06]
A
I kind of liked what you did right at the top there, which was like, Andrew, you're conservative, you must be good at math. I don't really know what the connective tissue was there. We could, we could stop and unpack it. Not actually all that true. I cannot sit here and do the mental fact checking on whether or not you lined it up properly or not. Maybe Matt, our producer will, will know and he'll, he'll sort of quietly stop us. Maybe we'll have to go back and recut that. Who knows? But we have no time to do any of that right now because we got to keep the, keep the hits coming, keep the good times rolling. So here we are with this amazing again kind of eye watering ask of $1.5 trillion. And then we're going to go from this to fiscal austerity, fiscal responsibility, I should say. We're going to go to the other side of the table, back across to the President, who is then going to begin asking his vice president and his attorney general about his newfound efforts, once again, to sort of rebalance the federal budget by just finding a whole bunch of fraud. So let's, let's talk about that.
- [11:00]
D
Actually, it's one thing to uncover fraud, which we've and that's part of it, but it's also prosecuting the bad guys that are doing it and stopping it from continuing. And so we had a $1 billion fraud, a conviction at trial last week out of Florida.
- [11:17]
B
Yeah.
- [11:18]
A
So there's a couple different things going on here. One, there was a moment that we didn't just play where Trump re brings up this idea that this is great, that we're doing all this because this is how we're going to get federal spending back under control.