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- [00:00]
Alex Wagner
Hey everybody.
- [00:00]
Tim Miller
Tim Miller from the Bulwark here. I was just on with Katie Tur and our girl Alex Wagner, and we were discussing Donald Trump's latest racist broadside
- [00:10]
Alex Wagner
against Abdul El Sayed, as well as
- [00:13]
Tim Miller
some interesting comments that AOC made on the Sunday shows over the weekend. Just one kind of additional comment to what I said over on Katie T's
- [00:25]
Alex Wagner
show regarding the kind of racist broadsides against Elad.
- [00:28]
Tim Miller
Just for a strategic matter, it doesn't feel like the Trump people have learned anything from the success of Trump in 2015. 16. A lot of the Republicans, my candidate Jeb, but also all of them, Marco, Scott Walker, Rand Paul, they thought the way to tear down Trump was the way to tear down past kind of politicians being like, oh, he had this gaffe about John McCain or oh, there's this thing that this outrageous thing that he said that makes him totally unacceptable to be in office. But each time we did that, that gave Trump more attention and a significant percentage of the Republican base liked what he had to say. And so that gave him more support. And it was this kind of never ending cycle where we thought we were attacking him, but the attacks were helping him actually. And you would think that having been the beneficiary of that, the Trump people would kind of see that how that worked in his favor. And yet they're deploying like the failed Republican establishment playbook against El Said, who is an outsider who's obviously different from Trump in a lot of ways, but like going at him and being like, oh, he said too many nasty things about Israel, that's not going to hurt him. Okay, people, that's already baked in. Okay, people know what else position is on Middle east wars and his skepticism of Zionism and etc. Like if there are some voters out there for whom that's going to be disqualifying, but they already know. And so now what you're doing is like giving him attention. El said, everywhere this weekend he's out on the shows, people are getting exposed to him. Another similarity he has to Trump is that they're good performers on tv, they're compelling to their audiences. I know that Downtown doesn't ever compel you guys, but like there's a certain group type of person that was drawn to Trump. That's why he had a successful fucking reality show. Right? And so El say it's out there, just kind of ripping the COVID off the ball in these interviews. And every time Trump does a racist attack on him, we cover it here he gets asked to do interviews where he gets asked to respond to it, like the attacks are actually empowering him. Sometimes just in life, it's hard to kind of honestly assess your own success
- [02:53]
Alex Wagner
or your own
- [02:55]
Tim Miller
skill set or why you got to a place you tell yourself a story that's different from the real story. And maybe that's the case here right now with Donald Trump, that he doesn't recognize that a lot of his success was the failed way in which the establishment opposed him. And now he is mimicking that failed strategy going after Abdul El Sayed. So we'll keep an eye on it. Much, much more on that with Katie Chur and Alex Wagner on the other side. Subscribe to the fe Please, please, for God's sakes, is Benny Johnson still beating me? This is insulting. Tell your friends.
- [03:29]
Alex Wagner
We'll see you soon.
- [03:29]
Host/Moderator
Joining us, host of the Bulwark Podcast, Tim Miller, Alex Wagner still with us. It doesn't stop there, folks. Donald Trump is in the Oval Office right now. He's talking about Abdul Syed. Let's play it
- [03:44]
Donald Trump
heading into midterms right now. And are Democrats with the candidates they're
- [03:47]
Tim Miller
putting forward, making life easier for everyone?
- [03:49]
Donald Trump
Well, the one thing is we have jihadists being elected all over the place. We whether it's communism, jihadism, it's a lot of friend of mine called up, he said, you know, really, you should use the word jihadist, because that's what's happening. And I'm not sure that anybody, if you take a look at what happens in other countries, I think that's not going to be necessarily the way we want to live. But when you look at the radicalism and the craziness of the candidates and the stupidity of what they're suggesting, let's get rid of the Supreme Court, let's get rid of the presidency, let's get rid of the Senate. They want to get sometimes I'd like to get rid of the Senate, too, but I don't say it and I wouldn't do it. But, you know, they want to get rid of the Senate. They want to get rid of, ideally the House, but they're thinking about maybe keeping the House. You know, isn't that nice? These are people that have been not successful. They're people that have been in many cases, failures. They come from other failed countries and they come here and they tell us how to run our country. They come from places like I won't mention because I don't want to get myself into a controversy, but they come from countries that are he doesn't want
- [05:00]
Host/Moderator
to get himself into a controversy, but he will call them jihadist him.
- [05:05]
Alex Wagner
Well, Abdul Al Said is from Michigan, so there's that. He does not from another country that's invading our country just in the first place. And he's not a jihadist, obviously. I think that should go without saying. I think that. That they're resorting to this kind of rhetoric because substantively, Donald Trump's in a really bad place right now. He has a humiliating defeat he's facing in the war in Iran. The economy's not going well, and trying to paint El Sayed as an extremist or as a communist jihadist is the only play he's got in his playbook right now. And I do think it's a sign of weakness, and I think that the Democrats really should be forcibly pushing back against us. There's some instinct, I think, sometimes to want to play the victim here and be like, oh, this is racist, poor us, and it is racist. And you can say that. But I think in addition to that, it's just, again, totally a reflection of Trump's failure. And Trump wants to act like he's running this kind of all American capitalist administration, and he's not. His administration is all about. Is more socialist than any administration that we've had recently. He's tried to purchase huge stakes in companies. He want. He wants to berate CEOs and make him come there and beg the leader in order for them to get a break, whether it be on the tariffs or regulations. You know, think about what they're doing in the streets. You know, like this idea that they're calling him a Jiada. So we. This administration was the one that had a gulag in El Salvador. This is the administration that has internment camps all across the country. They're the ones acting like the Eastern European socialists and Communists of the 1980s. So I just think that that's the right way for Democrats to push back against them. Abdul Al Said was doing that all weekend. I think he's been pretty talented at that. And if they do that, I don't know that this is going to help.