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- [00:00]
A
Hey everybody, it's Tim Miller from the Bulwark here with my buddy Andrew Egger. I am hopping on here before they kick me out of this hotel room. So we wanted to go fast on this live. Tulsi Gabbard is out. As our friend Joel says in the comments there, another one has gone. All four women out. Gabbard, Bondi, Gnome. And do you remember the fourth, Andrew?
- [00:27]
B
Oh, I was thinking of the ones who are still there. Sorry.
- [00:29]
A
Chavez, Durammer, labor, out. Lori out. Four women cabinet members, four out. Tulsi has put out a resignation statement, we should say. She cited her husband has a rare form of bone cancer, which does seem pretty, pretty bad. And I think that I'm sure that personal considerations played a role here, but I'm not sure. Played the only role. But Andrew, what is, what's your top research reaction to the news of Tulsi getting the boot?
- [00:58]
B
Yeah, I mean, this is not completely unsurprising. I mean, I guess the news of her husband is unsurprising. But we've been sort of wondering whether there's gonna be some sort of decoupling of Tulsi Gabbard from this administration basically since the beginning of the Iran war. Right. I mean, it's been widely reported that she's been basically sidelined and obviously her whole sort of. Back when Donald Trump was assembling a super team back during the 2024 election where he was bolting on all sorts of new constituencies, he was bolting on the maha people and RFK Jr. The crunchy health folks over as he was preparing to assemble his Department of Health and Human Services. And Tulsi was one of these people, along with the vice president, J.D. vance, one of these people who really represented this sort of anti neo con, sort of isolationist dovish wing of this new MAGA constituency, where she was one of the people who was advancing the argument. Trump's the kind of guy who keeps us out of Warsaw, ends wars, tries to do all of that stuff. That has been a really hard argument to make during the second term because as it has turned out, Trump has actually loved throwing American power around in somewhat smaller ways, or at least in somewhat more limited ways during year one and then obviously in enormously impactful and sort of world altering ways now in year two. Meanwhile, Tulsi has been kind of shunted into this secondary role where rather than her job as sort of the top intelligence chief being having her ears to the ground for all these different conflicts around the world, she has been very much more Directed, internally directed toward running these sorts of anti Trump opponent operations, digging into 2020 stop the steal type stuff and sort of various other acts of Trump era weaponization. And so that stuff's getting less popular. She does not have and has not had the President's ear on Iran. So even setting aside this terrible stuff about her husband's health, it is not exactly a surprise to see her splitting.
- [02:59]
A
Yeah. The other character you mentioned there is Joe Kent. And I guess that's the one person potentially in addition to Tulsi, depending on how much, you know, you take at face value, the statement she put out, who volunteered to leave. And I mean, Joe Kent left on much more harsh terms than what Tulsi had to say. We have the Tulsi statement. Why don't we go ahead and put that up there? You know, she, unlike Joe Kent's, did not like put a long screed there implying nefarious actors controlling the President of the United States. But she is part of, as you said, that kind of wing, that faction of MAGA that seems to be completely sidelined by this administration because of the war in Iran. And I think that's pretty noteworthy. And you combine that with. I remember in the image of Tulsi and J.D. vance sitting at the kids table at the beginning of the Iran war that they put out because people were like, when they were all down at Marlin Lago planning the early days of the Iran war, there was some buzz about like, well, where was the Vice president, where was the Director of National Intelligence? And like they put out this like, picture of them, like, like a V. Fish situation where they were back in D.C. like watching on a little TV while the, while the big, while the decision makers were all down in Florida. And I think that is like, reflective of where we are. And, and really like JD Is like the representative person now left from that faction. And he was always more of a line straddler.
- [04:28]
B
Yeah, yeah. And he can't leave. I mean, he physically can't go anywhere. Right. I mean, he's genuinely stuck there if he wants to have any sort of political future at all. I mean, just to kind of put a fine point on this, Tulsi, she really is, she hails from this sort of like leftish tradition of being extremely sort of skeptical of the Democratic Party getting more sort of comfortable with muscular foreign policy abroad. She's not like a hippie. I mean, she's a little bit of a hippie, a little bit of a peacenik, but she herself is a veteran. Right. She's not like she wasn't going around putting flowers in the barrels of guns or anything like that. But even when she was a Democrat, when she ran for president as a Democrat, this was a humongous part of her brand. And not only a humongous part of her brand, but a humongous part of why she switched over. I mean, the whole narrative of why she became maga, why she became Trumpy, was that she was uncomfortable with this warlike direction that the Democratic Party was going and she was gonna become. She was actually really confident that now it was Trump, now it's Trump and Trump's people and the new look Republican Party that were gonna be this party of rest. And it just has. I mean, like, you can make this argument, you can look at the comparison between her and Joe Kent because it just hasn't panned out that way. Right. Joe Kent is somebody who. There are unrelated reasons why he's sort of like, crazy and probably does not have a super sort of broad political future in the Republican Party or anything like that. I don't know, maybe he will. But as far as the timing of the stuff is concerned, he timed it pretty well. He got out pretty much right at the beginning of this thing, basically saying, I think this is a mistake. I think this is gonna become a boondog. And it has.
- [06:05]
A
Yeah, show me the line.
- [06:06]
B
Right, Exactly. He other. Other than his, like, propensity for, you know, conspiracy theories and screeds on Tucker and all these different things. That part.
- [06:15]
A
But even some of those theories kind of seem to be true. I mean, you know, like, he put out his statement about the way that Israel was influenced the war before we learned that Bibi was in the Situation Room.
- [06:24]
B
Yeah.
- [06:24]
A
And like Trump himself is putting out statements basically saying, like, thank you to the leaders of Qatar and UAE for telling me what to do in foreign policy. And like, the people. I have a 90% approval rating in Israel, so.
- [06:37]
B
Right. I mean, I only bring jokin up in this moment to illustrate that was a moment at which Tulsi could have taken the same road. And it took her a minute. It took her like a day before she basically weighed in and said, Joe, Ken's got to do what Joe Kim's got to do. But I'm with the president. And at that point, she was kind of ride or die. She's like, I passed this exit ramp. I'm going to try to stick it out here. And then the Iran war kept going and kept going and looking worse and worse and worse. And that decision seems not to have aged well. So, again, I. This is all, all of our analysis here is complicated by and has to exist in the shadow of this medical diagnosis that she's saying. It's impossible to say to what extent that is like the straw that broke the camel's back in terms of her being here or whether it really is like she would have stuck it out forever but for this. But it is true that, like, you know, she was taking on water as sort of like a political commodity all. All through this Iran war after that point.
- [07:34]
A
I mean, she was selling no war with Iran T shirts during her 2020 campaign, you know, and then gets totally sidelined. So I don't. Look, I think that this is, you know, regardless of the extent of, you know, the medical diagnosis informing this, like all of the other political factors here show that the isolationist wing of Trump's administration is totally on the outs. And I think that that's a big political loss for, for him and a big political opportunity for the Democrats to try to take back this mantle. And I think that the Democrats, in a ways, unfairly were kind of branded as the, like, warmongering party, you know, because, you know, like, they were, like, pushing back against, like, Trump's, like, most insane isolationist views and conspiracy theories about Ukraine and elsewhere. But now I think there's this opportunity to like, recapture some of those voters.
- [08:24]
B
Yeah, yeah, definitely. I mean, and, yeah, and like the Ukraine stuff and the Russia stuff, I mean, it was like weird little like, oblique scenarios that were not like boots on the ground situations for Americans or anything like that, but did let Trump kind of outfit flank the Democrats to sort of the, ah, it's not our conflict, we shouldn't be bothering about it at all type side. And yeah, that's all scrambled by obviously by Iran.
- [08:46]
A
I have one really piece of good news and one reason I'm particularly happy that Tulsi's on the way out. But we do have to play an ad, and you might be notice I'm sniffling. I had, I had. We're in California. It's a very habanero quesadilla this morning. Breakfast quesadilla, very yummy. But I'm having trouble dealing with the heat. So we're going to watch an ad. We'll be back on the other side for my favorite reason why Tulsi's gone. All right, I promised you my favorite reason Tulsi's gone. We also have some interesting information about her replacement I want to get into in a second. But, Edgar, I like to look on the positive side from time to time, because it's not my usual M.O. and I like to think back to in the early days of 2025. What was I most worried about with the administration? There are two things that really haven't come to pass that I was acutely worried about. One was I thought they would be much better at their revenge campaign going after the enemies list than they are. Cassi seemed to want to do chug beers with hockey players more than he has wanted to put together compelling investigations of Trump's foes. They're falling back on the seashells and sorry that Jim Comey has to go through that, but it's not exactly like Reign of terror type material coming out of the FBI. Similarly, I was worried about the power, the spying powers of the intelligence. You know, that this is a lot of this is black box to have somebody like Tulsi there that had ties to Syria, ties to Russia. You know, we just didn't really know, like, the degree that she might have been in there feeding things to our enemies, spying on Americans. And again, we don't really know exactly what she's been doing. But, like the idea that Tulsi goes from like that, like, kind of scary version of what we could have got to this totally impotent, sidelined national security, excuse me, national intelligence advisor who's like hiding in the corner. Is there like going through ballots from five years ago? It's not great, it's corrupt, it's shameful, embarrassing, but it's not the worst case scenario that we could have had.
- [10:50]
B
Yeah, I mean, certainly, certainly you can imagine worse scenarios. I do sort of see it as sort of a split screen where she genuinely was sidelined and rendered impotent on a lot of this stuff. That was the stuff she would have liked to be doing, like the peacenik type stuff, the sort of anti war type stuff, which she tried to do, if you'll remember, very early in her tenure. I don't remember exactly, it was some video that she cut, basically just sort of talking about turning the corner on this era of sort of global conflict and all these sorts of things refocusing at home. But I do think that what Trump did like her for, and the reason why Trump kept her around until she was wanting to step aside, was that she was just an extremely enthusiastic and pliable and biddable Director of National Intelligence when it came to the stuff that he actually wants to focus that stuff on, which is his political enemies at home and relitigating the 2020 election. And relitigating the beginnings of the Russiagate probe, all of these sorts of things where she genuinely did kind of move the needle for him. Right. I mean, she really, really did comb over a lot of that stuff. A lot of the beginnings of the Russia investigation, she, you know, was. Was doing everything that she could to sort of scoop up stuff muck rake up for in Fulton County, Georgia, when, when the FBI raided Fulton county, she was Trump's point man on the ground there when they. When they raided Fulton County's election office, I should say just six months ago or something, whenever that was. And we. And I. I'm a little hesitant to, like, declare that chapter sort of, like inconsequentially over, because a lot of this stuff is ongoing. Right. I mean, it's possible. It's possible that they just have come up with nothing and they don't know how that they've come up with nothing, and therefore they're continuing to sort of string their people along because they don't know what else to do. Basically saying, yeah, you know, we're going to see arrests for election workers any day now, that sort of thing. But it's also possible that stuff is just really still in progress and they are continuing to, like, lay the groundwork for these sorts of things. And that's something I just don't think we have enough information to know about yet.
- [12:51]
A
All right, well, there's a don't let the door hit you or the good Lord split you element with Tulsi. So we'll see you later. Let's go to her successor now that's been announced. NIT twist in the comments says, glad she's gone. The next DNI will be worse. I don't know a lot about this gentleman, Aaron Lucas. We want to pull up one tweet of his that I think might tell us something. Okay. We appreciate. Yeah. All right. He's very excited about the alien transparency. So did you go deep on the alien declassification documents, Andrew? Were you? I kind of was. You know, I wish that I could. You know, I think people have this perception of me as somebody who's really parting home.