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Hey everyone, it's me, Sam Stein, managing editor at the Bulwark. I am doing a emergency ish recording here on Saturday afternoon. Don't know when this is going to go out, if it's tonight or tomorrow. Either way, figured it was worthwhile to jump on. A couple stories in posts from Trump caught my eye today. All of them fairly ominous, all sort of dealing with freedom of the press, which obviously is sacrosanct for us. The big one came from the New York Times itself. They reported the following. They said that the Trump administration has issued subpoenas. This was was on Friday that they issued these subpoenas to several journalists for the New York Times. The reason they did this, the Trump administration did this, is because the New York Times reported on what they called security concerns involving Trump's new Qatari donated Air Force One. Now if you are forgetting what happened here. Trump had a perfectly serviceable Air Force One. It was admittedly a little old, but instead of updating it, he got a, he got Qatar to donate one to him, which he then had to retrofit so that it was up to security specs. Now the big scandal of this is that under the deal, this Air Force One that Trump was gifted by the Qataris, it's going to go into his museum after he leaves office. But he's still using it now. And they took it out for their first ride a couple weeks ago. They went to Turkey for the G7 and then kind of weirdly enough, they had to take the old Air Force One back. Now, the reporting on this is that Iran was acting belligerently. They're making threats. Part of what happened when Trump's memorandum of understanding fell apart, but it was enough to get the Secret Service nervous that they didn't want him to fly in the Qari donated Air Force One, which is not obviously up to security standards, otherwise they would have used it anyways. The Times reported that this was the case. And what did Trump do? Didn't say good get and say thanks for, thanks for the alert. He subpoenaed the reporters for the records. And this is what the Times reports on itself. The subpoenas, which seek to force the reporters to testify before a federal grand jury in Manhattan on Wednesday, that's just a couple days from now, were an extraordinary escalation in President Trump's efforts to threaten and intimidate independent news organizations. In some cases, the subpoenas were delivered by federal agents who showed up at reporters homes and think about that. They went to the homes of the reporters. This is an intimidation tactic. It's deeply authoritarian. It's a trampling of First Amendment rights, which include the freedom of the press, folks. Anyways, the Times newsroom lawyer, guy named David McCraw, had this to say, quote, the appearance of federal law enforcement agents on the doorstep of news reporters should shock the conscience of any American who believes in the Constitution and press freedom it protects. And he's right, it should shock your conscious. But frankly, it also is kind of par for the course with Trump. This is a administration that has been fairly belligerent when it comes to going after reporters that it doesn't like and trying to intimidate them, or in this case, trying to get their records. And this is a huge, hugely aggressive step of intimidation. And hopefully the Times fight it looks like they're going to fight it. But, you know, Trump's always threatening to sue news outlets. He successfully sued news outlets. Remember, he sued 60 Minutes, which they paid. Sued ABC, they paid. He has newspaper tycoons over and he intimidates them. Jeff Bezos is one of them. This is a pattern, but it's really escalating because this was not the only news that happened today that I thought was really alarming. So Trump was, as usual, on a Saturday, bleeding. There's, you know, I, I can't even count how many posts he made on his Truth Social page. But in particular, again, he went after the New York Times. So the first one is really was kind of alarming in its own right. The second one was more like a stream of consciousness that went on forever, but I'll do both of them. So the first one is he goes after Maggie Haberman. He calls her a derogatory name. I'm not going to repeat it. It's stupid. It's juvenile. She and Jonathan Swan, another Times colleague, have this great book out called Regime Change. It's unearthed a lot of issues in the White House and how badly things are going. So Trump says, maggie Haverman has covered me incorrectly for 10 years. Her book is a joke. 90% of his fake news. She made a living off of her bad reporting. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. He then calls her a loser. He says if she ever wrote the true story about me, it would actually be quite boring, but loaded with lots of success, successes in all caps. And then he had nugget in here, which really piqued my interest, and you'll see why. Also, I just finished a perfect physical at Walter Reed. I do it every six months. And I requested another cognitive test. The only president to do so three times I aced them all. Got every question right. Few people in Washington D.C. could do so, including Mag G and her flunky associate, Jonathan Swan. Well, I, I, the way it reads, I thought he was saying he literally just got another physical and another cognitive test. Because I mean that's literally how it reads. It turned and I was beginning to like, why is he getting yet another one of these tests? How many does he need? Isn't this suspicious? It turns out there's some clarification. He was referencing the test that he got in May. So not he didn't go today. And yet it's still a little bit crazy that he's done three of these cognitive tests. At certain point it begins to raise questions in its own right. Anyways, he was not done. Again, like I said, he put up a really sort of. I'm gonna actually tally how many words here, so bear with me. Let's do this. So he has, this is a 450 word post that he did. I'm not going to read all of it. But again, he goes after Maggie and Jonathan. He, he bemoans the fact that he had to run against Joe Biden and Kamala Harris during the 2024 campaign. He says never happened before. And he says against almost 100 negative press and fake news, all of them will anything that I lose. And especially Maggie Hamon, one of the most unattractive people. Ridiculous. This is the president, folks in the news business and her lightweight assistant, Jonathan Swan. The failing New York Times itself, which spends all of its energy on negative stories about me. All I do is win, often against all odds. But after the big election success, there's no G. He won. He did a great job.