Trump tried to pencil out literal words in the Constitution and then freed 1,500 violent insurrectionists—while the media attempted to normalize it all. Meanwhile, much attention is being paid to Elon's salute, and not enough to the facts that he has an office at the White House, he's a government contractor, and paid a quarter of a billion dollars to get Trump elected. Plus, other Trump executive orders were pissy and petty, the 80s can no longer be called the decade of greed after Monday's Hunger Games vibe, and the Democrats are going to have a hard time resisting a risky 'eat the rich' path. Tom Nichols joins Tim Miller. show notes Tom's piece from Monday on the police responding to Jan 6 Tweets about the price of eggs v attending the inauguration, which Tom referenced LAST DAY: Make The Bulwark your home for coverage of Trump 2.0. Get 2 months FREE on an annual subscription of Bulwark+ now for exclusive content, ad-free commentary and more:
Full Episode
Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. There are 1,460 days left in the second presidency of Donald Trump. We have survived day one, which was a shameful and epic sham that was best summed up by the snapshot of Trump forgetting to put his hand on the Bible while he repeated an oath to the Constitution he had no intention of upholding. Who to discuss such a farce with?
Obviously, the podcast house curmudgeon, Tom Nichols of The Atlantic. New audio book out about the death of expertise. Think we can throw some dirt on the expertise grave. Tom, how are you doing? Hanging in there.
You know, yesterday was everything we expected it to be and then some. But, you know, we've got to be measured and parcel out. Do we? Well, I mean, in the sense of we've got to parcel out our outrage over time so that we don't burn out.
All right. You parcel because I am just about ready to stroke out today. I have such a lengthy list of of things to do old man yell at cloud with you about the Google Doc, this amount of scrolling required to get to everything we're not going to be able to. Because as far as I'm concerned, basically every single person involved in yesterday brought shame on themselves at some level.
I think the only honorable choice was to abstain or protest. So Karen Pence and Michelle Obama, shout out to you. But given like the extent of my rage, I can't really decide where to start. So I'm giving you dealer's choice. What set you off the most?
yesterday either in the inauguration itself or the other actions that came after um the pardons i thought the inauguration dare i say it was low energy you know the first time around he tried for sweeping he let stephen miller or whoever writes this clunky prose to indulge himself the first time this time around it was like a rally talk You know, we're going to call it the Gulf of America.
And, you know, I don't agree with Hillary Clinton on much. But when she sort of had to look down and laugh when he said that, I was kind of right there with her. I thought, you know, as you say, it was a shameful exercise. When I looked at this whole group of potential nominees, I thought, what a difference from eight years ago. I mean, this is now just...
I mean, this is now the Z list finally has made it through all the gates and there's nobody to tell them that they can't be secretary of defense or secretary of HHS. I mean, that was all stuff I expected. I mean, it was depressing to see it. But then the pardons, which I think were, you know, you knew he was going to do some of this.
Even I was surprised at the breadth of the pardons, including the people who got years for violence. against police officers and people who were locked up for a seditious conspiracy. I mean, it really said to you that the rule of law, if not dead, is now under every bit of the assault that we've all been warning about.
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