The Bulwark Podcast
James Carville and Michael Weiss: The Whole Country Could Go Under
Tue, 04 Mar 2025
Trump is anti-American and seems to hate this country: How else can his behavior be explained? The tariffs, the austerity, the threat of a default, along with the corruption and grift— it feels like we're at the beginning stage of something that could go very, very bad. Meanwhile, Trump may not have the cards himself on Ukraine. Europe and the rest of the West have the economic might to continue to back Ukraine. And if that coalition maintains a united front, it would have the power to reject a 'peace' deal imposed by the US and Russia. James Carville and Michael Weiss join Tim Miller. show notes Carville's NYT piece on his advice to the Dems (gifted) Michael's piece on Europe backing Ukraine alone A Cybertruck getting pelted at the Orpheus parade in NOLA Monday night
Chapter 1: Why is Trump considered anti-American in this context?
Hello and welcome to the Bullard Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. It is becoming a Mardi Gras tradition. I'm here today on this Mardi Gras morning with the raging Cajun himself, James Carville, former veteran Democratic strategist, co-host of the Politics War Room podcast. He's also a competitor in the YouTube space. You've had some YouTube videos going mega viral lately, man.
How are you doing? Happy Carnival.
Chapter 2: What is the significance of the Mardi Gras discussion?
Well, thank you. Of course, you know, we love Carnival down here. One of the things that cracks me up is people think it's a tourist event. Where Tim Miller and James Carville go to Carnival, this is 98 percent of the people are within a three hour radius of New Orleans. You know, it's the most organic local thing that exists.
I got to tell you, there were things I didn't even know about until I moved here as a transplant. There are whole parades and some of my favorite events are things that nobody even knows about. You can DM me if you want to know the secret for next year. There's politics in the way of Kind of good fun, good spirited teasing of politicians that you have during carnival season.
There's not a ton of politics, which is nice. It's a nice reason to be down here. One thing that accidentally overlapped into politics last night, the Orpheus Parade, one of my favorites. I was there with my daughter until way too late last night. Beautiful floats. Harry Connick Jr. started it. Bianca Del Rio from Drag Race was the queen of the parade. But they also had Cybertrucks.
And every time one of those things came by, those guys were getting pelted with beads. Oh, wow. I felt so bad for the Cybertruck guys. They were getting booed and pelted with beads. So I don't know that Elon's popularity was too high down at home.
I didn't realize that. I saw it. I just love Harry Conner Jr. And that parade is so good. I'm so naive. I thought RuPaul's Drag Race was actually about drag racing. You know, two guys riding up in a car. And my kids, my two daughters love drag. I mean, they go, they know. I went on some big drag person had a podcast.
I could have been on, I don't know, Taylor Swift's podcast, and there would not have been any more than Froush. But it was fun. It was great. And that's what you love about Mardi Gras.
It was wonderful. We had a good time. All right, we got to do a little politicking. You've been pushing in some of your interviews recently the idea that Trump will collapse. And for some people, it's like, okay, this is resistance nonsense. This is spin. This is bullshit. But here we are, just a few days after you're saying it, this morning as we tape, the market is down.
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Chapter 3: How are Democrats responding to Trump's actions?
It looks like another 600 points. The Dow is down right now, and we'll see what happens the rest of the day. It was down about 1.5% yesterday as well. Very negative response to the tariffs. It's a shit show in Europe. And I don't know. Things look pretty collapse adjacent, I guess. Maybe we're not there yet, but how do you assess things?
Well, I think it's happening. If anything, it's happening somewhat quicker than I anticipated. But let me tell you a real faulty line of thinking. And this is more true of Democrats and people on the left. Something must be done. This is something. Ergo, let's do it. OK, you just can't change. Are you sitting here? We just got to see it and tell you we got to do nothing. All right.
So we're going to do something. I remember when you studied the Bolshevik Revolution, it was, what is to be done, okay? Yeah, ruin the whole goddamn world, you know? But what I'm trying to do is the impulse against just charging ahead With a party brand that's frankly in decline, I would say it's in crisis, you have a chance to build it up.
And by the way, this is a war that's not going to be culminated in a short. The first major battle is going to be the first Tuesday in November of 2026. So let's leave the light brigade in reserve right now. I'm not saying we shouldn't use it, OK? That's my rationale is I just want to tell people, yeah, we got to do something, but we got to do something smart that has a long-term plan.
And that's the business behind this.
All right, let's talk about this. I hate leading off the podcast with maybe a slight disagreement. We can hash it out. So you wrote the column, and you wrote basically this. With no clear leader to voice our opposition and no control in any branch of government, it's time for Democrats to embark on the most daring political maneuver in the history of our party, roll over and play dead.
Obviously, you're being a little cheeky there a little with that phrase. You don't literally mean that. But I mean, I guess my view is that isn't what Mitch McConnell did. That isn't what Trump did. Like when Obama got in, Mitch McConnell immediately tried to make him a failed president.
When Biden got in, Trump immediately started calling him Dementia Joe and saying he was illegitimate and all that. And so I don't know why we couldn't learn a little bit from those guys.
So this is a very different time. This is a time like literally no other because we have a guy in the Oval Office that at best, the best interpretation of him, he's anti-American. I'm beginning to come to the conclusion that he actually hates the country. It's the only thing in my mind that can explain what he's doing. So March 14th, I think, is the debt limit deadline.
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Chapter 4: What economic concerns are discussed?
That really is. There were two things I wanted to ask you about, just like tactically, like what, like where the rubber meets the road on this, on this strategy. So you're not saying that the Democrats should bail them out in, in the March and the March budget. What do you, what are you saying?
All right. First of all, I am convinced that the Democratic House leadership actually has a unified plan to deal with this, particularly on the debt ceiling. And I'm trying to give these guys some cover. I'm trying to say, hey, Hakeem, take your time. I got your back. You know, I know you got a plan because any number of people have called and said, you know, I think we got a pretty good thing.
I think the caucus is is pretty unified on it. And a plan, there's a time to execute it. And I'm just trying to give them cover when they come out. But the reason that the Democratic image is so low is Republicans don't like it, but they never have. I don't like my own party. It lost. Why does a political party exist? It exists to win a fucking election. Well, when you lose it, I'm mad at you.
Yeah.
Okay. And we can't pacify them. You know, they called me and people worked for me, close friends, I'll tell you. How can you say this? This is waving a white flag in front of treason. And how can you do this to us? I'm not saying go. I'm saying it might be mid-March before we really bring, you know, just an artillery in peace and then start firing. Okay. Go ahead.
The Hakeem thing, it's interesting. They might have a plan now. I do think that they were thinking about negotiating. There was discussions of a negotiation and a deal. Then I think the Elon stuff happened with Doge and all the insanity of the last two months. I do think something's congealing.
There's just news this morning that there was a private meeting where Hakeem was asking members if they were willing to negotiate you know, stick with opposing Doge and opposing this, any Republican budget all the way to a shutdown.
I want to interrupt. This is something big on this. Never say Doge. Say Elon Musk Doge. Okay. If you, if you do a favorability, do you feel favorability toward Doge? People say, I don't know. You know, but once you put Musk's name on it,
drops 15 20 points hence the beads getting tossed at the skin chucked at the cyber truck elon musk doge yeah he was asking members right like i had moskowitz on to discuss this and basically the point is even if they wanted to negotiate on a budget you can't do it as long as elon musk is illegally firing people and and shutting down the veterans affairs department as we were reporting on this morning in the bulwark and all the like so you can't even you know
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Chapter 5: How does the podcast address the Virginia governor's race?
And on top of that, we'll get to in segment two, all the Ukraine stuff. It does feel unbelievably tenuous, right? Like we're at the beginning stages of something that could go very, very bad.
Yes, of course. Yeah, it is. And, you know, you have these tariffs of which even if you just think about them, how could they be a good idea? You know, some people say, well, we had a tariff in the early 80s to save the American car industry. It's pretty limited. You have the tariffs against Mexico. Well, Mexico, if you want to send
Ford assembles a plant in Mexico and they send wheels from, you know, their Dallas area plant, do they have to pay 20% for the steering wheel to cross the... I don't know. And then when it comes back, I have no idea. The head explodes. And then when you put on top of this the possibility of a default, it's real dangerous. Now, when I tell the would say about interest rates.
Actually, the yield on a 10-year treasury is going down, but don't understand why that's happening. Investors have no confidence that the economy is going to grow in the next 10 years because of this. And one says, yeah, you might. You know what? Easiest way to kill inflation and to get low interest rates is start a goddamn depression, okay?
Yeah, that'll handle the problem pretty quickly and effectively. Oh, my God. I mean, think about it.
It's ugly. It's really ugly. It's hard being right, James. Well, in case you're wondering if we've got the best and brightest at the tiller here as we face these problems, nobody talks about Ag Secretary Brooke Rollins So it's like maybe you wonder, oh, I know that egg sets the clown. I know some of these other people are clowns. Maybe some of the other people I don't know are better.
Well, here's the agriculture secretary talking about how she thinks people should deal with high egg prices on Fox Business.
I think the silver lining in all of this is how do we in our backyards, we've got chickens in our backyard, how do we solve for something like this? And people are sort of looking around thinking, wow, well, maybe I could get a chicken in my backyard. And it's awesome. I agree. Yeah, I think everyone who isn't a farmer right now wants to be. So you're in the right department, Brooke.
Maybe everybody could just start growing a little farm in their backyard, a little chicken.
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Chapter 6: What are the allegations against Trump's health?
I didn't hear the secretary of agriculture say, well, you could grow chickens in your backyard. Right. Shackler said it.
I mean, yeah, everybody should get them. Yeah, we cut the Medicaid. You're right. Maybe some bartering. I don't know if it helps short term for people on the egg prices right now. And it's going to take a little while. You think the agriculture secretary would have some thoughts about like, you know, the chickens just don't start producing eggs, you know, immediately.
There are a lot of problems with it. Other people have jobs. Working people have jobs.
The problem, too, is if everybody went out and bought a chicken at the same time, the chicken would become more expensive than the egg, okay? And that's something that we need to mull over, okay? Because if you've got to pay a lot for a chicken, then the egg becomes more expensive because I don't think you can have an egg without a chicken, okay?
People have been thinking about this since time immemorial. Is it the chicken or the egg? Yeah. So if everybody wanted to put chickens in the backyard, there'd be a tremendous demand for chickens. which would cause the price of chickens to go up. Now, you would have more eggs, which maybe would cause the price of eggs to go down. There you go.
If I was an economics teacher, I could give an exam on this.
These guys don't seem to really adhere to the supply and demand ethos. It's not your old school Republicans. This isn't Adam Smith here. This is Donald Trump picking winners and losers. I mean, have you been following the crypto thing? They're going to buy a strategic reserve of Bitcoin and Ethereum with our money?
And what it's going to do, it's going to make the crypto go up for a short period of time, of which they're all going to cash in. And one of the reasons I wouldn't, I would always ask people, look, I don't know what this shit is. I ain't buying it, but could it be like what the housing market did in 2008? Could this thing bring the whole fucking thing down? And people say, no, not really.
The risk is now we are assuming the risk. Okay. So if you want to go buy something that ain't worth the shit or you think it's worth the shit and I don't, I don't have a problem with that so much, but now you want me to, No, and people have to understand that. And if they're throwing fucking beads at Cybertruck, you can imagine where they're going to be in two months.
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Chapter 7: Can Europe support Ukraine without the US?
There's a site called Predicted where you can actually bet on the outcome of an election. I think limited in size, but whatever the odds are, take the Democrats in the Virginia governor's race. All right. And if you can get over five or even over seven, take it. So, James, what do you say?
Well, first of all, history augurs that the Virginia governor's race follows the presidential race, with the exception of Terry in 2013. It always goes to the outpouring. Secondly, let's try to estimate the turnout among federal employees, their dependents. OK, the dry cleaner in Arlington, the landscaper in Loudoun County, multiply all of that and try to figure out what that's going to mean.
I'll tell you what it's going to mean. High Democratic turnout, particularly in northern Virginia, like not high, astronomically high. We're not going to lose that. We're not going to lose that.
The last one, you keep mentioning that you think Donald Trump has syphilis. Okay. And we talked about it once. And I just, I got to ask, do you really think he has syphilis? Or do you think, is this a bit?
It's still 70% a bit syphilis. OK, 30 percent of possibility. But there's something I intentionally held this off in the hopes that you would ask me about. On January the 17th, 2017, Keith Schiller and two other goons broke into the office of Dr. Bornstein. who was the GI specialist who was Trump's internist, I mean, I don't know what that means, and confiscated Trump's health records.
We have never seen those health records. Now, maybe there's something in there a little more significant than an enlarged prostate, all right? I'm saying that causes me great suspicion. Why would you send people in to confiscate your own health records And Bornstein said, I felt violated. I mean, he actually, he's deceased now.
So if it's 30%, which I think it is, we know he has unprotected sex with people who had other partners. That's pretty clear.
Okay. Gross to think about that people would want to do that with him. But yeah.
We do know that he had red splotches on his head. I've had 2.2 million hits recently.
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