They end up sounding ridiculous whenever they try—like the treasury secretary saying that access to cheap goods is not part of the American dream. At the same time, Trump’s circle of plutocrats don't seem to mind that the stock market is tanking. And while the administration is cutting Ukraine off from US intelligence to serve up an unjust peace, the Pentagon is on a CTRL-F "gay" delete rampage. Plus, Dems need to skip the kooky TikToks, and the SpaceX rocket explosion was only one part of Elon's very bad day. Tom Nichols joins Tim Miller for the weekend pod. show notes Tom's piece about Dems acting too normal (gifted) Tim's interview with a reporter in Ukraine Clip from French senator's speech calling out Trump and Elon MAGA hat guy thinking he's gone into the lion's den at Disney World Debris from the latest SpaceX rocket explosion reentering the atmosphere over the Bahamas Tim's playlist
Chapter 1: Who is Tom Nichols and what are his recent insights?
Hello and welcome to the Bullard Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. It is Friday. We have survived another week, barely, and I am here with one of your faves, Professor Emeritus at the Naval War College. He's a staff writer at The Atlantic. His books include The Death of Expertise, which has an updated and expanded edition. Go get it. It's Tom Nichols and maybe Cat Lilly. We'll see.
How's it going, Tom?
Good, Tim. Lily's sitting right here. She's waiting for her. She's waiting for her close up. So we may have a Lily sighting. All right.
So somehow I went back and looked at the archives. Time is a flat circle. I feel like I'm living a lifetime every day. I also feel like I'm hearing from you constantly and all your various platforms. And so I was like, when was Nichols last on the pod? And it was the day after inauguration. Oh, yeah. That was a real upper for people. So it's been six weeks since then.
And I wanted to start by just kind of asking you your biggest takeaways from this interminable six weeks. What has surprised you? What has outraged you most?
I think a lot of things have not surprised me because we lived through the first term, but also because he's doing what he said he would do. He's trying to get even and get revenge and troll the country with this bizarre slate of cabinet officials and letting Elon Musk loose on federal workers who were just trying to do their jobs. I think the speed with which
He betrayed Ukraine was a little bit surprising. I thought he would sort of ease his way into that with, you know, Kellogg over going overseas and doing something shaky at the negotiating table. I didn't expect him to basically like just reorganize American foreign policy into a de facto alliance with Vladimir Putin.
Yeah, well, that's a good place to start then. There is the frog boiling element of this. It's hard to say what is surprising. I guess I thought that the Elon element has been a little bit more surprising to me, just how much he's run roughshod over everything. And I think the way that he's fucked up the economy was a little quicker than I expected. But I don't know.
This is something that Nicole and I talk about a lot. Nicole Laws and I talk about it. We were the only ones that took him seriously, it seems like. There were a lot of people that were his supporters that didn't really expect him to do all the things. And so there hasn't been anything in particular that shocked me. But like you, the speed of some of it is... That surprised me.
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Chapter 2: What are the current dynamics of Trump's administration?
I'm Greek Orthodox. We don't do that.
I'm Greek Orthodox. You guys don't do that. Not like Marco with the biggest ashes I've ever seen on his head talking about how Donald Trump has moral authority. That was significant. Yeah. I'm like, hey, I get it. I did the ashes. And with big ashes on his forehead talking about the moral clarity of Donald Trump. Luckily, we have confession.
So you can get the ashes, lie about Donald Trump, then go back to confession. It's a full day. Here's the ball sacks on Ukraine. And you tweeted about it, but I want to get you going a little more. He writes, interesting historical analogy. The Korean War was another three-year war with tremendous losses on both sides. It was largely stalemated.
The American client, South Korean leader Ri, wanted to keep fighting. Eisenhower made him sign the armistice. Great leadership. Tom wrote, a dumb comparison, but naturally attractive to dilettantes. So please, please extend those remarks.
I mean, right. With that, by unanimous consent, I'd like to revise and extend my remarks. You know, Sacks is just, I mean, Sacks and Vance, and they're all part of this small circle of plutocrats who have convinced themselves that they are deep thinkers, that they are, you know, deep thinkers.
geopolitical thinkers when in fact they are you know exactly like you know again the kid in your dorm at 2 a.m who says you know i i think or cliff claven at the end of the bar well uh let me uh let me explain to you how uh ukraine works here diane that's a good cliff claven Thank you. Well, you know, I'm from the area. It was such a dumb analogy.
For one thing, thousands of Americans were fighting and dying in Korea. Hello. My snarkiness and sarcasm fail me. So let me go into a more serious professor mode.
I also believe, just as one other thing, just throwing it out there, that there was this kind of security guarantee as part of that stalemate. Something that we weren't going to do. We were going to steal their rare earth minerals and then not give them a security guarantee. So there were some other differences.
Let's count all the ways in which David Sachs was wrong. For one thing, Stalin and Mao cooked up this war.
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