When it comes to biomedical research, America is already great. We are the world's leader in the field. But the Trump administration is gutting research and innovation on things like cancer, Alzheimer's, and arthritis—and the amputation of our scientific expertise under RFK, Jr. has been about as thoughtful as the tariffs rollout. Meanwhile, when it comes to the developing budget bill, Medicaid is getting some surprising red state support from people like Josh Hawley. Plus, when people willfully choose ignorance as a way to cope with an uncertain world. Professor Mark Lilla and The Bulwark's Jonathan Cohn join Tim Miller. show notes Mark Lilla's new book, "Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know" Mark's website Jonathan on Trump's cuts at child-care programs like Head Start
Full Episode
Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. We've got a two-parter today. But first, I wanted to mention yesterday, many of you emailed me, I appreciate that, about the fact that I guess I said that the Dave Chappelle clip I played was from last week when it was from 2017. So, whoopsie.
I will say, though, the fact that Dave Chappelle was making this very poignant critique of Donald Trump's tariff policy eight years ago, does kind of undermine the arguments from some of the Trump fluffers on Wall Street who were so blindsided by this. The Bill Ackmans of the world. Bill Ackman's out there tweeting about how could this possibly be? It must be a conspiracy.
It must be Howard Nutlick who's long on bonds trying to hurt the economy. No, Trump's been warning you that he was going to do this for a long time now. You just didn't believe him. So anyway, kudos to Dave Chappelle for his 2017 prescience. And one other news item I just wanted to get to before we get to our guests, because I don't think we're going to cover it in either of those conversations.
There's some Supreme Court rulings last night with regards to the kidnappings, deportations, whatever you want to call them, to Secot in El Salvador. The first one was with regards to Kilmer Abrego Garcia. He's this father in Maryland who the government admitted was wrongly sent to El Salvador and
Since the Justice Department lawyer that was making that argument was put on leave by Pam Bondi for, I guess, not being sufficiently supportive of the administration's lawless deportation regime. So anyway, this went to the Supreme Court and John Roberts put a stay on the circuit court judge's order that Abrego Garcia be returned.
Essentially, I think what court watchers are saying, and we'll have more on that later this week, is that Roberts put the stay on there because there's going to be a truncated timeline, which means that the Supreme Court is likely to act quickly in this case. So in the meantime...
abrigo garcia is stuck in a torture dungeon in el salvador so hopefully scotus can act with alacrity on that there's another scotus ruling with regards to the alien enemies act deportations not the one where the justice department admitted they screwed up for all these other folks who many of them it seems like they're very likely they screwed up but the government hasn't admitted it yet and in this case the ruling is mixed it's bad news i mean horrifyingly bad news for the
260, 300 some odd men who've already been sent to El Salvador because the options for relief for them seem to be a stretch, to be honest. Not totally hopeless, but essentially, you know, kind of the court ruled that prospectively in the future, the administration needs to give people that are going to be removed based on the Alien Enemies Act notice and an opportunity for habeas corpus.
I was watching one of the ACLU lawyers who's been really the point on this and says, like, at some level, this is good, at least, that the Supreme Court unanimously said that people deserve due process. Like, we are not, it's not Stalin's Russia quite yet.
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