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. Like, the new Syrian president offering a Trump Tower in Damascus: Zap, sanctions on Syria are over. Or the jumbo jet-giving Qataris requesting that Trump go 'easy' on Iran: 'Not a problem, no sirree.' Sorry to all the hawkish Trump voters out there who thought he'd deliver a maximum pressure campaign on Tehran. Plus, Russia's Potemkin peace talks with Ukraine, and another installment from ICE's cold-blooded deportation campaign. Michael Weiss joins join Tim Miller. show notes Details on Qatar's 747 that no one wanted and is now being 'gifted' to Trump NYT on Trump's expensive mini war vs. the Houthis that achieved nothing (gift) Rep. Garcia confronting Kristi Noem about Andry, the gay makeup artist The Triad on the new Afrikaner refugee who has thoughts about Jews
Chapter 1: Who is Tim Miller and what announcements does he make at the start?
Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. I've got a couple announcements and a rant before we get to our guest. On the announcement side, we got something exciting coming June 6th in Washington, D.C. It's Pride weekend. It's World Pride, actually, in D.C.
Chapter 2: What is the controversy surrounding Andre and recent immigration enforcement?
And alongside my fellow gays, Sarah Longwell and John Lovett, we are going to be hosting a live show, fundraiser and protest event. In support of freeing Andre. Andre is, all of you know, is the makeup artist that our government has disappeared to El Salvador. Robert Garcia was yesterday grilling, he's a congressman from California, was grilling Kristi Noem about whether we have proof of life.
For Andre, whether she, who's gone to visit and done pinup pictures in front of the prisoners, was able to just guarantee that at least we know that these people that we've disappeared with no due process are still living. She refused to do that. in a about as grotesque a way as imaginable, though it's about what you would expect from our Secretary of Homeland Security.
So we want to make sure we're bringing attention to this, making sure that it is not lost, that it's not forgotten. And we want to do it at a moment where there are going to be a lot of people in D.C. So if you are a gay, if you're a D.C. resident, if you're a gay ally and want to come party with us, but also be righteous and
And passionate in our support for those we've wrongfully sent to El Salvador. We'd love to see you June 6th, Washington, D.C. Tickets are going to be on sale maybe tomorrow, maybe Saturday. So check out the Bulwark site. Check out Crooked Sites. And on Monday, I'll make sure to give you guys the details once it is fully live.
Also, for some new listeners who want more of my backstory on being a Republican, I did Hasan Minhaj's show. So we're gonna include a link in the show notes to that today. I told you I've been a pod slot lately. I've been out there in these streets doing podcasts. And Hassan wanted to, you know, kind of give me a little shit about my past. And I can take it. I enjoy that.
And, you know, sometimes I get feedback from people who are new to who don't, you know, the Bullock OGs have heard this a million times. But for newer folks who are interested in my trajectory, go check out that. I appreciate Hassan having me on. Also, we're getting into all foreign policy today.
So if you just want some other political hot takes, me and Sarah and JVL were on one last night on TNL. So you can check out the next level as well. One last thing before we get to our guests on the immigration front. I've been meaning to mention this. I want to see which day I tweeted this. It was Monday, and I haven't been able to get to it on the podcast.
I believe I've mentioned on the show the story of Jimena Arias Cristobal. That's a young woman in Georgia, in Dalton, Georgia. who had just graduated high school was brought to this country from mexico when she was four she was pulled over for initially the what the initial allegation what the police told us was that she did not have her turn signal on when she made a right turn
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Chapter 3: What is the story of Jimena Arias Cristobal and what does it reveal about immigration policy?
and then did not have her license on her. They realized she is not documented. They shackled her and sent her to a detention center three hours away in Georgia as they process her for deportation to a country that she has not lived in since she was a very small child. If she'd come in a different year, as she came a little after the time to Georgia,
Qualified for DACA, you might be familiar with that. Folks, you know, we tried to pass the DREAM Act several times, which would have given legal status to people who are brought to this country as children and to, you know, check certain metrics such as not doing crimes, going to school, learning English. Ximena had done all of that.
And we are, you know, I guess, like holding her in a cell for some reason. I don't know what fear of... fear of flight. I don't understand, besides cruelty, why we feel like we need to do that, and then are going to send her back to our home country. The whole story is just sick as it is, that this is what is happening with the country, that there aren't other ways that we can't deal with this.
Obviously, criminals should be jailed, should be sent back to their country. People that came here illegally as grownups, I'm going to have probably more liberal views on that than some others, but I understand that there are going to have to be rules, and some of those folks are going to end up being deported, and that's just the nature of our system. But I...
who's for this besides like Gollum, Stephen Miller and Tom Homan and a few other people replying to me on X who, you know, are trying to get off on other people's pain. Like the idea that we're going to send this young woman who's done nothing wrong back to a country she hasn't lived in because she didn't have her turn signal on is fucking outrageous and it is enraging.
But if you're ready to be more enraged, She actually did have her turn signal on. Here's a press release that came out on Monday from the Dalton Police Department. After a review of the dash cam video of the traffic stop, it was determined that Ms. Arias Christobal's vehicle was similar to the offending vehicle, but was not the vehicle that made the improper turn.
City of Dalton administrator was notified by the police chief that a dismissal for the improper turn citation was in process after review of the dash cam. Great news, I guess. She's not going to get a traffic ticket any longer. Here's the problem. She still remains in ICE detention facing deportation. You just can't hate these people enough, honestly.
It's just like this young woman has done nothing wrong, did nothing wrong. Did not come to this country out of her own volition illegally. She was brought here. She went to school. She's following traffic laws, apparently. And we are sending her out because we want the country to be more like China, I guess. We want to be more like some authoritarian state.
And we no longer want to be a place that welcomes folks. from around the world who are looking for opportunity, as we've been for the entire history of the country. That is, unless you're one of the 59 white Afrikaners who we're going to bring in, one of whom, you should check out JBL's triad from yesterday, has a lot of very nasty things to say about Jews. So, I guess...
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Chapter 4: Who is Michael Weiss and what is his background in foreign policy?
I love that. Other than myself, that is. I love that. Hopefully you can have some gossip for us for the podcast. I was watching the news this week, and I did have one big picture question before we started kind of getting into the details. I wondered if you, at any point this week, have started to think to yourself – This is all too stupid. Maybe I shouldn't have been a foreign policy journalist.
Maybe I should have just been a shepherd or something, you know, pursued a different passion.
Chapter 5: How is Donald Trump’s Middle East trip characterized in terms of bribery and foreign influence?
My alternate blue sky livelihood would have been raising Shetland sheepdogs in some like English shire. Probably why I came back to London to escape the, what is it? The moronic inferno. Was that Saul Bellows term for the United States? That's what it would become. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, no, look, as much as everything is just incredibly stupid, it also makes sense in a weird way.
I mean, I was thinking about this. So Trump goes to the Middle East. Everyone he's meeting with has been in power forever or will be in power forever. They've had eight years to take the measure of this guy, and they've realized – Oh, OK, so he's not an American president like we're used to, where we have to barter about strategic and national interests and there's some horse trading and all that.
We just have to bribe him like we would anybody in our part of the world. And, you know, it's very clever of the Qatari's to give a 13 year old.
jet worth $400 million, but which will require years of refurbishing, which includes, by the way, cleaning out the spyware that I'm sure the Qataris and probably the Russians and the Chinese and the Iranians have been placed in it, and then installing all the kit that the Americans will require for intelligence collection. And that's going to cost a billion dollars.
So in other words, Donald Trump takes a bribe by a foreign power, which will cost the US taxpayer $600 million. Wow. It's pretty incredible, like a masterstroke of statecraft. And then you've got Ahmed al-Shara, the jihadi president of Syria, former jihadi, who says, well, why don't you just build a Trump Tower in Damascus? And lo and behold, sanctions are magically lifted. lifted.
And Trump is not only posing with this guy, who is a top operative of Al Qaeda in Iraq, and then the Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi's lieutenant who was dispatched into Syria to set up the ISIS franchise there, or the ISI franchise there, which became ISIS. But it was on the US terrorism list up until very recently.
And then Trump not only poses smiling with the guy, but says, oh, yeah, he's quite attractive. He's charismatic. He's a real fighter. And You know, like he's just met like Muhammad Ali or something. It's just, you know, it's transactional. It's like so cosmically narcissistic. But I guess this is just the way the world works and everyone's figuring it out.
Yeah, so this is the question about the way the world works. Just really quick, a quick aside of the Qatari plane because I haven't had a chance to get to this. David Frum plugged this. I didn't realize this. That plane's actually been for sale since 2020 and nobody would buy it. So it was also a nice, easy bribe. And the other thing I didn't realize is that
The royal family also offloaded a jet to Turkey, to Erdogan in 2018, and that jet was even fancier. So we're getting sloppy seconds when it comes to the bribes. The Winnie the Pooh and the Tuxedo MAGA guys have looked at this Trump trip, and they've tried to fashion onto it a much more sophisticated explanation for what's happening than what you just laid out, that he's easy to bribe.
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Chapter 6: What are the implications of Trump’s dealings with Syria and Qatar on U.S. foreign policy?
But it certainly looks to me and to Middle East watchers like where things are headed with respect to Iran's nuclear file is JCPOA 2.0.
Which is the Iran deal for the non-acronym listeners.
Yeah, I mean, I can only imagine like the group therapy bills being sustained by AIPAC and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the guys have been like angling for maximum pressure.
I've got a good quote for you on this this morning before you go down this route because I've been wondering when we're going to hear from Tom Cotton on this because he's got to be really upset. I'm sure we'll be hearing from him any minute. Here's what Trump said. Talk about Qatar. Nobody is going to break that relationship with Iran.
Iran is lucky to have the emir of Qatar because he's actually fighting for them. He doesn't want us to do a vicious blow to Iran. He says, you can make a deal. Iran should say a big thank you to Qatar. That's just Trump basically saying that because the Emir gave me this plane and because we're doing these deals, I'm just going to chill with Iran.
Yeah, and the Iranians are dangling hundreds of billions of dollars, if not trillions of dollars of trade deals that could commence with the lifting of Iran sanctions, which they're hoping that will happen if they cut a deal. I could see how optically people would say this is the end of the neocon world order, but let's look at the other side of the ledger.
It was Obama and the progressive realists who said, Well, actually, you know... taking out Bashar al-Assad would be a major own goal. We don't have any strategic interest in Syria. We want to recalibrate with Iran. In other words, create a kind of equilibrium between the Shia hegemon in the region and the Sunni-led Gulf Arab states, principally Saudi Arabia.
I mean, Obama was on record with Jeffrey Goldberg and others saying pretty much that, a strategic realignment of America's priorities in the region. But Syria was always kind of the... obstacle to this, right? Like we kind of supported a Syrian insurgency, but didn't give them enough weapons and certainly didn't support them to overthrow the regime.
We wanted to apply a sufficient amount of pressure to get Bashar al-Assad to negotiate his removal, but really the fundamentals of his Baathist regime would stay in place. And up until the end of the Biden administration. I mean, Brett McGurk was the biggest, most vocal proponent of keeping Assad in place, lifting sanctions on Assad's regime.
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Chapter 7: How is Trump’s relationship with strongmen and autocrats analyzed?
I mean, Trump was touting, the White House was touting, let me pull this up here, the Trump effect, all caps, They'd secured $1.2 trillion in Qatari investment in the U.S. I mean, the Qataris have a $300 billion GDP. They're the 55th largest GDP in the world. Why are we bending the knee in front of this tiny regional Middle East autocracy?
For Donald Trump to be the last man in Washington, D.C. to be bought by the Qataris... I mean, that's worthy of a Joseph Heller novel or at least a Netflix limited series, right? I mean, that is the most hilarious thing in the world.
The Wall Street Journal, everybody's writing pieces now about Qatari influence peddling and how they purchased universities and institutions and massive lobbying campaign. And all they had to do is give this guy a jet, an old jet that nobody else wants to buy. It's utterly hilarious.
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Chapter 8: What psychological insights explain the attraction of MAGA supporters to authoritarian regimes?
And, you know, it's interesting to hear somebody like Steve Witkoff, who very sort of nakedly says, oh, we'll get the Iranians to do a deal because Donald Trump can bend anyone's by force of his own personality. I mean, that is what you say of a totalitarian tyrant, right? That he is so charismatic and he embodies capital H history.
And he's in this place for a reason, almost a divinely anointed position. Everyone must submit. Everyone must do his bidding. And, you know, one of the things we've also seen, and I keep telling my Ukrainian friends, this is actually no. Donald Trump can be resisted. He can be told no. He can be wrangled with and fought.
And he usually caves because after a while he gets bored and frustrated and exasperated. Look at the Chinese. Look at the whole tariffs regime he's trying to put into place.
I slipped there by saying that Trump got prostate in front of MBS. That was maybe a Freudian slip. Well, you did say that he was tossing MBS's salad. So I think we know where the metaphoric language is here. Yeah, prostrate is the word I was looking for there. You know, it's not just Trump that likes the accoutrement of all that. It's a good insight. It's also his fans. You notice on social media,
He's in the UAE this morning, the UAE Sheikh Mohammed. Welcome, Tim. And it's kind of this royal greeting. They've got the drums, the drums and all of the just the kind of shit we don't do here. It's a little gauche. Right. But all of his super fans are posting about like, look how hard this goes, like Trump in the Middle East.
You know, I mean, some of them like Trump himself, some of them want the actual autocracy part of it. You know, they want to have total control and not want to give control away. They don't want liberal democracy. Yeah.
And some of them just, I think, although just kind of like the big daddy kind of gaudy, you know, elements of this and feel like that, that is like what is strong, not, not, you know, the, the trappings of a liberal democracy. Yeah.
I mean, what do these regimes do to lure people, particularly the prototypical MAGA acolyte, sort of either low tier or middle tier, is, you know, the failed political operative or the wannabe journalist who started a blog, which said that, you know, January 6th never happened or was an FBI conspiracy. Now they're running... important agencies in the state.
They're all losers and failures who have made the show. And one of the reasons they made the show is exactly this type of regime or this type of political element, usually foreign powers, and it's not just in the Middle East. I mean, look at Hungary, look at Russia, look at these other countries where, you know, populist or even pre-populist dictatorships have formed.
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