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. And in the North Carolina Supreme Court race, the Stop the Steal candidate finally conceded to his Democratic opponent seven months late. Plus, Trump is acting like a Soviet central planner, the reconciliation bill fight is starting to look ugly, and the economy proves yet again that it does not lie. Amanda Carpenter joins Tim Miller for the weekend pod. Leave a comment show notes Tim's and JVL's 'Bulwark Take' on the new pope JVL's Triad on Pope Leo XIV Damon Linker's tweet about the elderly Fox viewer Linda McMahon's letter to Harvard Poster in Josh Hawley's dorm room Tim and Sam on Trump's fake trade deal with the UK Tim's playlist
Chapter 1: How did a new Pope affect American politics?
Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. One quick note, once again, for the Bulwark Takes podcast feed. There's just so much crazy shit happening in the world, you know, and I taped a podcast yesterday morning on the protests, which I thought was very cute and important and a change of pace for what we're doing around here often.
And then, you know, two minutes later, we have an American Pope that's crapped on JD Vance. So me and JVL got on our house Catholic, you know, our house Catholic and good standing at least. And so, you know, if you wanted a quick response to what's happening when crazy stuff happens, just go ahead and make sure to download the Borg takes feed.
And if you missed it yesterday, go listen to JVL because he's really great on this stuff. But we're going to do a little bit more on the Pope right here today. For those of you who are patient, who can wait 24 hours in this world, that's a good practice. And we've got a good guest for it.
It's my old friend, a writer and editor at Protect Democracy and contributor to If You Can Keep It on Substack. It's Amanda Carpenter. What's up, Amanda?
Hey, happy Friday. Are we all feeling a little Catholic this morning?
It's Friday. Well, you know, I mean, as a cradle Catholic, I got to tell you, we had some bumps. I had some bumps in the road with my Catholicism, but my little brother went to Villanova. It's an American Pope. I saw multiple tweets about how it's a bulwark Pope because Yes, he was a he voted in the Republican primary in 2016.
We have from the records, but he sent some quite negative tweets about Donald Trump and J.D. Vance. So we have a bulwark pope who went to Villanova, who's American. I don't know. I'm feeling about as Catholic as I've felt in a while. I'm ready to do some hymns from my childhood.
I know, I feel like I should congratulate you and JBL. Although I am sort of like trying to adjust to the idea that we have a Pope who tweets or X's or acts on social media. I mean, it's very cool. I think a lot of people are, you know,
rightly excited yeah and it's so strange it does like bring home just the pope even to me as a as a catholic as a kid it's just it does feel so distant right it feels so distant and holy they're like a creature that's like not quite human like a little bit like mostly human but a little bit not and then all of a sudden you have this pope and like the pictures are going around and it's like here he is at the deep dish pizza joint in chicago
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Chapter 2: Why did Trump withdraw his nominee for U.S. attorney?
They're so up in their heads about everything. It's just it's unbelievable.
They really are. It would be like some lefty posting. It's like, have you seen that this pope is against abortion? It's like, yeah.
Right.
Yeah, bro. The pope is not for, you know, alligator moats on the border. It goes a little bit against what you're going to get.
Yeah. Throwing immigrants in prison. That is shocking. What a shocking statement that, you know, a Catholic.
Isn't a huge fan of semi-autos. Anyway, on from the Pope to somebody a little further from God. We have a new interim U.S. attorney for Washington.
Okay, we got to start with the good news on this. We do not have Ed Martin as the D.C. U.S. attorney. We do not have you go, Ed Martin. That's the second big blow to MAGA this week. Hardest hit, Steve Bannon.
That is true. Eaglehead, a frequent guest on Steve Bannon's show. Somebody, I got to say, we were on this one. People are like, why are you talking so much about this random U.S. attorney? There's so many other bad appointees. I was like, you don't know how bad this appointee is. And he's been horrible. He's everything that you would not want in a U.S. attorney.
Just doing frivolous letters, targeting people for speaking out against Trump. And it's just the utter politicization of a very important U.S. attorney's post.
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Chapter 3: What are the implications of Jeanine Pirro's appointment?
about their DEI program, sending a letter to Robert Garcia because he used a metaphor talking about Elon Musk and how it was like a threat against his safety or whatever, sending the letter to the medical journal because RFK asked him to about how they're being unbalanced, right? Like all these like totally frivolous political attacks that you can do from a perch such as this.
Now, once you officially indict someone, you know, then you need a grand jury, then you got to prove a case. So There are some limits, of course, on your ability to cause problems from a U.S. attorney spot. But I do think that those things we're going to see from her. And we know that because she was on Fox.
And when she was on Fox, she would constantly criticize back during the first Trump administration, Jeff Sessions and Chris Wray and other people in the Department of Justice positions of power for not criticizing. defending Trump harder and not going after his foes and not doing this. And so I think she will see as part of her remit going after Trump's foes, whether she's effective at that,
I'm guessing probably not. But I do think all the time spent on that is time not spent on, you know, this national security stuff and whatever.
Yeah. And definitely, you know, prosecuting terrorists and things like that, that actually, you know, are very quite serious. But one one note on that in terms of Trump looking for people who will do that kind of work for him. I really want to raise a flag on Linda McMahon. Have you been watching what she's been doing? She issued an insane letter to Harvard.
that sounded like some 22-year-old staffer wrote it after just imbibing on Pizzagate Jack for the last five years. I mean, it was really... I really urge people to go read that letter that essentially just accused them of harboring hate in every respect and how dare you let in... Where are these foreign students going from? It's just three pages of going on and on like that. And so...
she is someone I didn't really have on my bingo card of stepping into that role, but she's, she's all in.
Well, she's used to playing a character for the wrestling show, you know, so she'll play the MAGA character. I think that's right. I mean, the Harvard thing, it's sort of similar to the Doge stuff in the sense of, I wonder if you feel this way too. Like, I don't know. You could probably sell me on the fact that, that these universities endowments should be taxed.
Like, you could probably sell me on that. You know, like the idea that, you know, things that were initially nonprofits turned into hedge funds and we should maybe tax them like hedge funds instead of nonprofits.
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Chapter 4: How does the latest UK trade deal reflect on Trump's policies?
He's put in place the biggest tax increase in our parents' lifetime with these tariffs. The biggest working class sales tax increase on everybody that we've seen in this country in a long, long time. On top of that, he said recently that he'd be okay with a top tax bracket increase. Pay up, Donnie. You got lots of meme coin.
Let's see it. So, like...
It's truly wild that like even on the core issue that like you would think that they would maintain whatever traditional conservatism like he is running a government that is far more socialist, far more centrally managed than anything any Democratic nominee has proposed since probably fucking McGovern.
Yeah, but not only that, I mean, you couple in the education and the book bands and we want to get in and see what curriculum you are teaching and what is the, you know, makeup of your faculty in the, you know, the staff room. Yes. And we want to send your children to work in factories and that's how we'll make America great again. I mean, it is really just top to bottom garbage.
Soviet. It's Soviet. Yeah. Central planning. That's totally unbelievable. Just one more thing on tariffs. Potentially, I have a slight cave-in coming on China. I want to contextualize this for people, though. The New York Post reported yesterday that they're weighing a plan to slash the 145% tariff that we have currently on Chinese imports down to maybe as low as 50% to 54%.
That was their report yesterday. Yeah.
I'm not great at math. Is that a lot?
That's a lot.
Is that a big discount?
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Chapter 5: Is Trump's trade policy socialist?
And that's what makes all of this so different in ways that are kind of like hard to analyze because we haven't seen it before. But leveraging the federal government for these propaganda purposes that are meant to split us apart. and make people choose between us and them.
The ads that Kristi Noem is putting out with taxpayer dollars to thank President Trump, that is not an exercise in political persuasion. That is propaganda designed to promote the idea that Donald Trump has gifted this border enforcement upon us or what have you. And I'm getting a lot of these ads on Hulu
weirdly in in part of the tell for me in a way that i think i can explain to other people is that if you see the other ads that are being putting out on the campaign side from chump aligned groups you know people like chris elizaveta running it etc you can't tell the difference you can't tell the difference between what's like a government psa and what is a campaign ad other than
if you would know that Kristi Noem is actually a cabinet secretary. And so I think we really need to have a discussion about how the communication tools are being exploited in ways that are really malicious and go beyond what should be acceptable.
Way beyond. Way beyond.
Yeah, to say the least.
Yeah, I don't know. I guess I've got a month to warm up more birthday parade takes, but just in case I didn't see you between now and then, I wanted to get the Amanda view. I never was the Hill person. You were. We're coming up on this tax cut talk. I don't want to get too excited, but I've seen some things this week that have made me feel like,
It might be possible they bungled us like the big thing. And we'll do a deep, deep dive on health stuff with somebody as we get closer to getting the bill details. But, you know, they get one shot at this because reconciliation where they're going to have to jam through something without a.
the filibuster and they want to extend the trump tax cuts but like 32 republican members it's going to sound familiar to you i bet said they're not going to do it without they're not going to vote for something that increases the debt that is impossible so they're going to have to rationalize this somehow because just extending the tax cuts themselves is going to cost like four or five trillion the moderate sent a letter yesterday i was like oh we're not going to
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