The Bulwark Podcast

Trump keeps wrapping himself in the American flag while while behaving in a very anti-American way—like threatening to shut down protests at his $45 million birthday parade or giving a highly partisan speech in front of soldiers in violation of military policy.

Where is Obama? Where is George W. Bush? A Marine battalion and the National Guard have been deployed in response to a spark Trump set off by sweeping up people who aren't doing anything illegal besides being present here.

Trump and Stephen Miller wanted a backlash against the immigration raids, because even they know that humans will respond when the federal government is snatching people off the street.

Elon went nuclear, accusing Trump of being a pedo, taking credit for his election victory, and calling for his impeachment. Trump in return may try to destroy Musk's businesses, or worse. While the public feud is entertaining—Thursday was one of the best days for Twitter and Steve Bannon—their meltdown is also frightening.

Trump's and Musk's very public breakup may be amusing, but don't lose sight of the fact that DOGE was a failure—despite what the manosphere says.

Jamie Dimon is spooked about the bond market, business uncertainty about tariffs is dragging the economy, and it seems like no politician will get serious about our nation's debt until it's too late. Meanwhile, Republicans don't even like their own spending bill since they only lie about it—it's just in service of making Trump happy.

Mike Johnson and Russ Vought outright lied on camera about the proposed Medicaid cuts and the impact they would have on millions of Americans. Marco Rubio lied about the children who are dying because of USAID cuts. And Joni Ernst is reimagining Christianity to be about Jesus teaching his followers not to care about the sick and the poor because they're going to die anyway.

The Trump administration is trying to exert ideological control over every knowledge-producing institution in the country. And the assault on colleges is not only about having fewer highly-educated voters, but also depriving Americans of trusted sources of information.

Adam Kinzinger joined Tim on stage in the Windy City Wednesday night to dis Chicken Trump, who's made bitcoin bros, private prisons, his family and friends—and himself—the main winners in his 'TACO' trade economy.

Our VP used to think his path to power was through the ruling class at Yale Law School.

Democrats need vastly more imagination to confront the enormous challenges the country faces politically, economically, and on climate.

Despite our missteps in some of our more recent wars, we were fighting to bring freedom, democracy, and self-governance to others.

Public corruption used to be a congressman hiding $90,000 in his freezer. Now, we have a president taking "me time" to rake in $40 million from a Chinese crypto billionaire who was facing fraud charges under POTUS 46.

Republicans moved at such lightning speed that even they don't know how many people would lose health insurance— or how much they'd be spiking the deficit with their highly risky and big, ugly turd of a bill.

On deportations and on foreign policy, the Trump administration is swapping out American values and violating everything the U.S. has stood for in exchange for kleptocracy and transactionalism with the world's worst tyrants.

One day Trump sounds like Bernie promising the government will provide for everything.

No, the Trump administration is not focused on the forgotten man or bringing industrial jobs back. Instead, the real estate developer is handing out threats left and right—fresh off his Middle East trip, where he scored numerous deals with Islamofascists for himself, his family, and his cronies.

MAGA is having a performative tantrum calling for James Comey to be jailed over a seashell meme because the daily job of Trump's supporters and Cabinet members is to try to warm his heart—that includes Kristi Noem changing her face and Tulsi firing top intel officials because they told the White House the truth it doesn't want to hear.

American taxpayers may have flown Donald Trump to the Middle East, but he's not there to negotiate on behalf of our strategic or national interests—he's on the prowl for goodies, and happy to make policy changes in return.

The five men on the Supreme Court are so easily triggered and seem to be making law based on their emotional needs.

China sounds downright Reaganesque and is acting like a more stable, attractive trading partner than the country that launched a trade war.

Trump can't abide flying around in crusty, old Air Force One. Qatar—funder of both Hamas and the leading U.S. college Gaza protest group—just happens to have a spare, pimped-out 747 lying around, which they'd like to gift to Trump so he can use that instead.

First, the Vatican chose a Bulwark pope, not an AR-15 loving, immigrant-hating pope. Then, in a major blow to Steve Bannon, Trump pulled his nominee for U.S. attorney in D.C.—forcing the avid TV watcher in the Oval Office to turn to Fox News for the 23rd time to help fill his administration—this time with Jeanine Pirro.

Protest is the new brunch again. We're witnessing historic levels of pro-democracy grassroots engagement across a broad-based movement of everyday people.

The Supreme Court is working hard to tend to Mr. Presidential Immunity's wounds because he just can't abide lower federal court judges telling him he can't kick trans people out of the military, or that the 14th Amendment is a real thing.

Because Donald Trump's stupid trade embargo has us reading shipping charts, we now know that 40% of containership traffic between Asia and the U.S. has been canceled.

Trump 2.0 is showing so little concern for his political standing that even Fox made primetime room for Karl Rove to vent about how he's failing at the fundamentals.

Just imagine Fox's histrionics if a President AOC had said that American kids have too many dolls and that she's raising the price on them. Now the supposedly pro-family administration is doubling down on 'just pay more’ for toys, while it waits for China to blink on tariffs.

Marco Rubio was supposed to be one of the only adults in the room, and now he's become a shell of himself executing Trump's unwinding of the US role in the world.

For 80 years, the United States built strong economic, military, and political alliances around the world. But in just 100 days, that trust has been dismantled, and our friends are now working without us to forge new relationships.

The markets may be hanging in there but they also held strong in early 2020—right up until Covid hit New York.

The Trump administration keeps showing it's sooo tough on immigration that it deported three U.S. citizen children, arrested the wife of a member of the Coast Guard because her visa expired, and perp-walked an allegedly immigrant-concealing Wisconsin judge in handcuffs—instead of showing her the kind of deference Trump received over the course of his four indictments.

Since this country's founding, we have been tested. And the Americans before us somehow stood up and fought the good fight.

Donald Trump is trying to foist the worst peace deal in the last 100 years on Ukraine, as he gets repeatedly played by foreign leaders on the world stage.

Trump may be brilliant at assaulting us with his daily distractions, but Democrats need to relentlessly target his corruption because that may be his weak spot.

Trump and the people around him are trying to weaken our constitutional protections like due process.

Republican senators could have insisted on someone who was even minimally competent to run our military, but because of their spinelessness, we've now got a SecDef who can't resist texting top secret war plans.

Sen. Van Hollen showed that Congress actually does have agency, and a federal judge finally scorched the administration in crystal-clear language about how it's violating the essence of our constitutional republic.

The White House is doubling down on justifying its extra-judicial actions around Abrego Garcia by trying to incriminate him in the court of public opinion. But the government still can't take people off an American street and send them to a concentration camp without due process.

Manufacturing orders are down, stocks are down, and mortgage rates are up. But Trump and his family are wealthier than they've ever been.

Trump & company want to turn us into Taiwan circa 1985. But the brilliant minds behind the idea of intentionally weakening the dollar are prioritizing making America a good place to manufacture rather than a good place to live.

We are here: Trump is openly defying the Supreme Court while sitting side-by-side with a Latin American strongman who openly mocked our judicial system from inside the Oval Office.

Trump has effectively imposed a trade embargo on China, which means that after the inventory runs out, American retail will soon dry up.

Just before he paused the tariffs on Wednesday, an unusual spike in activity on the S&P 500 prompted speculation that Trump was orchestrating an insider trading scheme.

The White House is pumping out a lot of happy talk about countries wanting to make deals over the tariffs, but the tumult Trump has created has spread to the bond market.

When it comes to biomedical research, America is already great. We are the world's leader in the field.

Part of the reason for the market bloodbath is because the finance wizzes didn't factor in that Trump would actually do the truly moronic thing he kept saying he would.

It's been great to live in America since World War II, but Trump is in the process of blowing up that whole order.

The market plunge is just pure Trump chaos, and perfectly matches his record as a businessman. From his numerous bankruptcies and many failures—including his airline, his casinos, his university, his water, and his steaks—he's been running one long con.

Musk was so high on his own supply that he thought he and his money were magic—but Wisconsin voters turned out in droves to prove to him just how toxic his brand and DOGE are

The administration admits it mistakenly sent a Maryland father with protected status to the Salvadoran penal colony—but at the same time, it says the federal courts have no jurisdiction over him because he is now in a foreign country.

If Joe Rogan is the voice in the wilderness on the disappearing of migrants to El Salvador, then the Democratic leadership really needs to rethink its cautiousness.

Trump is siccing the thought police on the Smithsonian, he's got an FBI task force set up to protect Elon's car company, and he's turning random tattoos into gang insignia—unless they're on Pete Hegseth.

Trump is creating a permission structure where we lock up people without due process in a foreign gulag—and where masked, plainclothes officers in unmarked cars can grab an international student off the street because of her speech.

No matter how hard Republicans try to spin the sharing of top secret military attack plans on an insecure app, the colossal f***up of an administration that claimed it was rooting out incompetence is plain on its face.

Members of Trump's Cabinet got caught sharing attack plans—down to details of who they were planning to kill, and with what kind of weapons—and now they'll say anything to get out of the jam they put themselves in.

Bill Kristol joined Tim Saturday in Arizona to rip the behavior of our government—depriving even lawful Venezuelan migrants of due process, and shipping them off to a mega-prison in San Salvador where they may be being tortured.

Trump loves to complain about the deep state while Elon claims he's rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse. But government workers are mainly mission-driven and they're not in it for the money.

Trump is a vessel for frustration over the status quo, but he is not a vehicle for a solution—since he has no idea about how to make things better for anyone besides himself.

The Art of the Deal guy gave a master class on how to get worked over by Putin: First, wait around for an hour like an obedient puppy only to have your ceasefire proposal summarily rejected.

The fastest growing demographic class in America is billionaires—we've gone from 500 to 2,500 in the past 10 years. And they know the cheapest, easiest way to get richer: Give a million bucks to Mr. Pay-to-Play in the Oval Office.

Trump is taking liberties with our country's role in the world as a land of hope and opportunity by summarily locking up and deporting law-abiding immigrants—including people with legitimate asylum claims, people here on proper visas, and people with minor errors in their paperwork.

Trump & company aren't even attempting to create a pretext for why they're punishing the free speech of political opponents.

Democrats are stuck with two terrible options: Either facilitating a government shutdown or allowing Republicans to pass a spending bill that would defund D.C.'s police and schools.

Putin has been named a war criminal because of the Russian way of war in Ukraine—bombing Kyiv and other cities, attacking civilians and first aid workers, and destroying infrastructure.

To find out what's really going on in Trumpistan, the AP is out and random lifestyle Instagrammers and MAGA conspiracy posters are in.

This time around, Trump has dispensed with the ribbon-cutting side of being president—he's just not giving average Americans anything to feel good about.

They end up sounding ridiculous whenever they try—like the treasury secretary saying that access to cheap goods is not part of the American dream.

Donald Trump is hurting the American people. The DOGE cuts are not only waging war on jobs, they're also harming the American public and undermining the safety, health, and economic well-being of everyday Americans.

Once upon a time, presidents used to take tough questions from the press, but the current White House occupant can't handle any scrutiny from cantankerous reporters.

Trump is anti-American and seems to hate this country: How else can his behavior be explained?

Trump is trying to chuck the post-WWII order and firmly pivot American foreign policy away from Europe and toward Putin—the poor guy who got dragged into totally-not-a-hoax Russia Russia Russia.

Tim and his "FYPod" co-host Cameron Kasky discuss how Covid helped push Gen Z right. Then, Joshua Rush explains the activist tactics of Gen Z.

Forget the Epstein files hullabaloo. Members of the Trump administration, perhaps at the urging of Barron Trump, seem to have directly intervened to get the travel ban lifted on the Tate brothers, who are charged with rape and sex trafficking in Europe.

The not-so-shadow president's largest Tesla plant is in Shanghai, but the People's Republic of China has the pink slip and can take it back at any time.

Republicans are aiming to gut Medicaid to pay for trillions in tax cuts for the richest of Americans, and they're trying to hide it.

Trump administration lawyers don't know or won't tell a federal judge who is running DOGE because Elon doesn't formally exist as part of the government he is trying to dismantle.

Trump keeps filling out his administration with the unqualified and the inexperienced, including the recent addition of borderline literate hack Dan Bongino at the FBI.

Boos at a Republican town hall in Fulton County, and boos at the White House: We're beginning to see signs of people refusing to be ruled by unelected billionaires, oligarchs and CEOs.

If Marco Rubio was NOT playing the long game masquerading as a patriotic neocon who gets placed in the State Department to then give Russia everything it wanted, what would he be doing differently?

Crypto should be one of the biggest stories out of the Trump administration, but the crypto guys are really good at making it seem more complicated than it is.

Trump is A-OK with all the murder and mayhem Russia has unleashed on Ukraine, and he's making a mockery of all his enablers who claimed he'd do a Reagan-esque kind of deal. Instead, Ukraine wasn't even invited to the "peace" talks, while Trump tries to impose an extortion deal on the Ukrainian people for daring to fight back against the Russian invasion.

Firing air traffic controllers over a busy holiday travel weekend, cutting a veterans crisis hotline, axing and then rehiring people who maintain and keep our nuclear arsenal safe: Musk and his minions aren't trying to "fix" the government.

Unlike the cowardly Republican senators who are rolling over in the face of Kash Patel's bald-faced lies, the men and women of the Justice Department are taking their oaths of office seriously by refusing to comply with a blatantly political order to dismiss corruption charges against New York Mayor Eric Adams.

While Elon claims he's storming the government to cut waste, he's also getting himself a big fat check for $400 million from the State Department for Tesla armored vehicles—though administration officials are now trying to hide the grift because the Trump glow does not extend to the weird dude.

If Republican senators had any shred of dignity left, they'd demand that Kash Patel answer why he brazenly lied under oath to them about the purge of agents at the FBI.

The Democratic Party was made for different times, when rules were followed. But to preserve the basic power of Congress, and to prove that the Constitution is worth the paper it's printed on, the troublemakers in the Dem caucus have to get busy fighting over tariffs and a looming budget deal.

The new administration has been routinely breaking the law, including late on Friday when it announced it was cutting funding for universities doing medical research—specifically in violation of legislation passed in Congress last year.

Partly because of the courts and partly because the White House keeps stepping on rakes or trying to break everything, the Dems who were too chill about Trump pre- and post-election have fully moved into 'threat to the Republic' mode.

After the dumbest member of the Senate, Tommy Tuberville, was able to block military promotions for months during the Biden administration, Dems should not back down from slowing the roll of Kash and the other remaining abominable nominees.

With Elon's 20-something operatives running the Treasury Department, it's hard not to feel that we've been severed from reality and a better Earth someplace else.

If the Chinese hacked the U.S. government the way private citizen Elon has, it would be a major act of cyber warfare. And since Elon is a government contractor, he's now in a position to make policy calls that benefit his own companies and hurt his competitors—following the Russian oligarch model.

The president of the United States is putting his Jan 6 accomplices in charge of the Justice Department and the FBI, and clearing out any officials who would be willing to investigate the administration.

While Republican senators worked to protect Kash Patel from answering some ver-wee hard questions at his confirmation hearing, not one of them had the audacity to suggest that he is the best person to lead the FBI.

Republican senators don't care that Trump's nominees are lying—like Kash pretending he didn't know a Nazi-adjacent podcaster whose show he's been on eight times—because the confirmation process to them is all a game and truth is irrelevant.

Trump is trying to seize powers he doesn't have—like unilaterally rewriting laws and deciding on his own how he wants to spend money Congress appropriated for a particular purpose.

The directives putting a pause on federal grants and the firing of career DOJ prosecutors is about trying to make the entirety of the federal government the tool of the man occupying the presidency.

Gullible Republicans have really been proving what they're made of recently, including Susan Collins, who claims Trump wants to root out corruption, even though his whole life has been a fraud—the water, the university, and "The Apprentice," just for starters.