Felon 45 didn't even really like being president and no one is taking his ludicrous tariff plan seriously—but Republicans can't stop tripping over each other to show him their fealty. Plus, Putin's desperate trip to North Korea, Netanyahu shows his ingratitude to Biden, the national debt keeps growing, and Trump's fond memories for his glory days on The Apprentice.
The Bulwark Podcast
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Tim Miller and guests discuss the latest political news for the flagship podcast of the Never Trump movement and the reality-based community. Every weekday we provide insightful analysis, political hot-takes, an unabashed defense of liberal democracy and long-form interviews that cut through the "both-sides" BS. Plus a few laughs to help you wash down the crazy.
An ad-free edition is exclusively available for Bulwark+ members.
Tim Miller and guests discuss the latest political news for the flagship podcast of the Never Trump movement and the reality-based community. Every weekday we provide insightful analysis, political hot-takes, an unabashed defense of liberal democracy and long-form interviews that cut through the "both-sides" BS. Plus a few laughs to help you wash down the crazy.
An ad-free edition is exclusively available for Bulwark+ members.Listen on
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Adam Kinzinger
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Expecting an intellectually honest conversation from a Republican (even a good faith one like Kinzinger) about tax cuts being the true culprit of our national deficit is a lot to ask for even from The Bulwark. You will need to go to Robert Reich’s Substack for that discussion.
So Kinzinger thinks Trump's tax cuts for corporations and the top 1% were great, but then whines about how terrible it is that interest in the debt exceeds defense spending? He sounds like an idiot.
Of all the things I’d expect Adam to know, the number of us deaths in WWII is one of them. Russia surpassed US WWII deaths in Feb when they crossed 407,316.
Of all the things I don’t expect Adam to know is how the national economy works inc the participation of federal spending and deficit.
But, boy, he sure speaks so confidently about both topics.
Three things struck about this pod with Tim and Adam. The first is that Tim said he misses the sparring matches in political conversations. Next Adam who voted for the worst tax cuts in the history of the United States that added 8T to the debt that continues to compound on the interest and gave massive tax breaks to the top 1% and a huge corporate tax cut that did not lead to job growth. Lastly Tim who has repeatedly bashed Trump and the Rs on this very topic did not say a freakin thing when debt discussion started. Come on Tim. Is it because he is part of the Bulwark team now? I was ready to throw my phone through the wall.
Talking about getting the debt down and neither party has put forth any proposals to do so. WTF. It’s called raising taxes on the wealthy, i.e. over $400,000 and raising the corporate tax back up to 26% and letting the Trump tax cuts expire. Biden has mentioned that a 100X! We cannot run our country which needs increasing defense budgets to build up our shift to China security in SE Asia, afford Medicare and SS as more boomers retire and fund technology so the US can dominate the world in all things tech and climate if we don’t have more revenue coming in. Trickle down economics does not work. Let me repeat it does not work. Those policies along with union busting and NAFTA destroyed the middle class. Allowing corporations to merge and monopolies to form has resulted in inflationary pressures etc etc etc. To say that neither party has put forth policies is such an easy throw away line and Adam who is still a staunch republican needs to open his eyes or get off The Bulwark. Tim you had someone to spar with and you flat out chickened out!
And Adam had the gall to say it was a good bill and it was like Paul Ryan this, Paul Ryan that.ike wtf does Paul Ryan know about anything, much less responsible fiscal policy.
Oh yeah let's bend the debt trajectory by making life tough on the evil old people who live too long and are filled with medical issues so that we can save on Social Security and Medicare. It's long been a dream for some people to do so but this is where I'm not a moderate. The people who need those two programs the most are the people who have been low income throughout their working lives. They probably don't have fat and volatile 401 k's tucked away to help them in old age. No thanks. Let's talk about how to get more money into those systems instead of cutting them or making them difficult to access.
Trump essentially did that with his weak Covid response: A lot of American seniors died, and it saved SS and Medicare a LOT of money.
There are two ways to get more money into the system. 1) To have listened to the early warnings 50 years ago and raised taxes a little bit. 2) Raise taxes a LOT right now.
There are no other choices available. Now that the Boomers are entering the most expensive years of life, it's far too late. But don't worry, we still won't do anything, we'll just keep giving out funds until the whole thing crashes and burns, and thus leave younger generations holding an empty bag. Because that's the easiest thing for the general public to do.
Comments around 7:45 remind me of several 2016 articles saying that Trump would hate being president. I too thought that he'd hate the responsibility if not the authority. Until early in his term it became painfully obvious that his many protectors assured him that they would shield him from all responsibility accountability. Oh, they'd grant him all the authority, but that coincided with their own desires, so for them it was a no-brainer. But apparently he did much prefer his job as a reality show star, and, as many others have since claimed, his interest in becoming president was not so much for the added authority, but to keep out of jail. While no one would rather see him rot in jail more than I do, I am also used to "picking my battles," such as in a half century of voting for the candidate I least disagree with. On that note, I'm not sure it's possible, but I'd (grudgingly) support a one-time immunity if he agrees to drop out of the election and agree to never again run for public office. They could sweeten the offer with an "Apprentice" reboot.
It wouldn’t be enforceable, that promise. The only legally enforceable way to keep him out of politics would have been impeachment. Which we tried, a couple of times.
My take on the whole legal prosecution/immunity thing is that he was always bent on revenge anyway, and that these prosecutions are not really liberals and democracy defenders trying desperately to stop an autocrat, so much as ordinary law enforcement doing its job. It would, in fact, be corrupt and political for the administration to try what you’re describing.
On the other hand, by simply doing nothing and letting the justice system do what it’s supposed to do, Democrats have raised the stakes, and the gauntlet, far beyond what they otherwise would have been.
Trump is now a convicted criminal. He is going to be limited, in his choice of staff, to civil servants and lackeys with no problem taking lawless orders from a convicted criminal. In order to accomplish even a tiny fraction of what they want, even if they win, MAGA is going to have to go the route of maximum pain, maximum grind, maximum chaos, for themselves and their opponents alike.
Some would face that possibility and fear for the future. I see it as the only way out, which is through. And heck, if Trump loses (as he should; convicted criminals and the most powerful office on Earth do not mix), even better.
Not to sound all paranoid, but:
I would be cautious before casually assuming that when Trump says he’s “dealing with Afghanistan” or otherwise doing president-y things as a private citizen, he’s being delusional, or crazy, or bullshitty.
We have precedent for presidential candidates engaging in pre-election foreign policy subversion of the incumbent in the past. Nixon, and even Reagan, come to mind.
Trump, as a former president and the head of a large international business (albeit a failing one, which makes him all the more dangerous), almost certainly has backchannel communications to the very top of the Saudi and Israeli governments. He is likely to be at least attempting the same (as best he can) with others, up to and including Russia and China themselves.
This is not spoken aloud on respectable outlets, but it needs to be. We’ve had more than enough past and prologue dealing with this criminal not to presume these things are going on.
From Trump’s own perspective, he would be “weak” and a fool not to try such things—and countries that stand to reap a windfall from a revolution in foreign policy from the world’s superpower would feel themselves weak and foolish not to abet it.
Arguably, they’ve reaped a windfall already from such things. The world has lost a fair amount of faith in American reliability due to Trump’s post-election-defeat actions alone; they’re already anticipating and hedging against chaos in America following a Trump win; they’ve seen us let our ally in Ukraine nearly fall, for the sake of a few phone calls from an indicted criminal who’s not even president anymore. And who, by the way, probably still is hiding classified documents he stole.
It’s not implausible to think Trump, for all his addled, delusional narcissism, really is conducting some “shadow president” treasonous crap from Mar-a-Lago, while we sit here and scoff at the crazy old man “play-pretending”. Yet another thing about 2024 Trump we should take, though not literally, quite seriously.
Tim, Don’t trip over yourself when you’re talking with Adam Kinsinger. Yes, he rose above almost everyone in his party over the insurrection which is more than admirable. But going forward he has too much Republican baggage to leave behind in other areas that we have to be mindful of. The tax cut support is just bullshit. I wonder how he feels about the George W Bush tax cuts of 2001?
I hate Kinzinger. This hypocrite has the audacity to talk about the debt when literally 5 minutes before he said he would support the tax cut to his death, the same tax cut that added trillions to our national debt. What an asshat... I have no idea why the bulwark went and got this guy
What really chaps my ass is that Tim didn't call him out on it. He didn't call out his BS. Usually Tim is amazing at catching ppl talking out of both sides of their mouth.
I guess you can't hold your own to account. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Good thing they didn't ask your opinion, I like Adam, but, he is a conservative, and just like there are things we will always approve of, there are things they do,,
Just a different perspective
I read Adam a lot, and I doubt he wants to hurt other people...there are ways to do both thise things
Here's a constructive idea. Instead of impugning motives, you suggest that I ask that question next time.
Adam K is ok- he has a specific experience & history. He’s a person who has demonstrated some honor in his commitment to the oath he took. He’s not the brightest star in the Bulwark firmament as far as being an intellectual. He’s akin to click bait.
No Ukrainian war videos because we focus on weather in US too much. Thanks Adam K miss you as real an American politician who cared.
There are some telegram channels that make “faces of death “ look like tender loving care by comparison
Concur re the debt concerns
On the topic of the debate I would just say it’s gonna come down to the moderators Having some balls to push back.
When he starts spouting off about winning 2020 winning Wisconsin Biden Weaponized government
They need to have back check in real time And call that fucker out when he starts lying
Kinzinger worried about the debt… so worried that he voted for the Trump tax cut that exploded the debt. Please quit your bullshit.
Wow, the people on here who hate anyone who doesn't agree with them is staggering
We need two views for a bunch of reasons...youdon;t have to agree, but attacking people for not being you is uncivil and pretty anti free speech and thought
I’m sorry that you think anyone who points our rank hypocrisy is being hateful. I don’t know what to do with someone so childish who thinks it’s anti-free speech to ask for consistency in words and actions. Especially from someone who 100% had a hand in exacerbating the thing they’re complaining about. Voting to explode the debt (not for pandemic relief of a war but for a tax cut) and then complaining about the debt is the definition of bullshit.
After traveling through Texas and Louisiana for a month, I can testify that Walmart IS MAGA America’s store. Don’t expect the Buc-ee’s CEO to be on board for Biden either.
He's an entertainer, as Adam said. He's literally never been successful at anything else in life. I believe him when Adam says he doesn't want to be President again. He's running simply to stay out of jail. The first run for President was a lark to parlay into another game show or something on TV. The dude is sad not to be hosting his game show anymore. It'd be sad if he wasn't such a disgusting sack of shit.
Kinzinger was in favor of trumps tax break but now decries the deficit? Did I miss something?
It wasn't Trump's tax cut. It was Paul Ryan's tax cut. Trump just signed it, as any Republican would have done.
As Kinzinger stated clearly, he voted for it for the corporate tax reform part. That was an absolutely necessary reform, and it was long overdue. Economists had long since come to a consensus on how corporate taxes should work, and the rest of the world had reformed their corporate taxes accordingly. The US was the last holdout. Our corporate tax rate was the highest in the world, and corporations were beginning to relocate out of the US to avoid it.
The personal income tax cut was not part of Ryan's original vision. It was added as a necessary sweetener to win over enough Democratic votes to pass the package. It would have been a better bill without that part.
Than kyou Bruce, I was getting frustrated by those attacking Adam , he is a good guy, I don't need him to think like I do to like him
Thank you for the clarification!
I know the tax cuts are expiring in 2025 so I did a quick Google search and thought this report was informative. The Brookings Institute is variously labeled as nonpartisan, liberal, conservative.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/what-will-happen-to-the-trump-tax-cuts-in-2025-and-how-will-they-affect-the-national-debt/
The Brookings piece gave a lot of topline numbers, but did not answer the questions I had as an economist, so I looked elsewhere. The key thing I wanted to refresh my memory on was which parts of the 2018 reform were permanent. As I suspected, the corporate tax reform was permanent, while the personal income tax rate cuts expire.
My biggest frustration over Democrats' tax rhetoric is that they always conflate corporations with "the rich", even though about 60% of US households own stock, either directly or indirectly through mutual funds and retirement accounts, and 37% of all US stock ownership is in retirement accounts. Cutting the corporate tax rate helped to shore up a lot of government and union pension funds. Raising the corporate tax rate might make for good populist rhetoric, but it's bad policy.
I would be happy to see all of the cuts to the personal income tax expire. They were unneeded, and they add to the deficit. But neither party wants to just let them expire. Biden wants to preserve them for every household making less then $400,000. We will never balance the budget by taxing only the rich. We need an anti-populist party that will tell voters the truth, unlike the Democrats and Republicans, and force voters to choose between higher taxes and dramatic reductions in popular programs, instead of pretending that federal largesse is free.
A lot of rich people do not pay taxes. But raising tax rates does NOTHING to change that. When you raise tax rates, you extract more revenue from the people who are already paying their share. If you want to get revenue from tax shirkers, you have to close their loopholes and tax shelters.
Thank you again for your professional knowledge and perspective. Let’s hope we all survive the trump insanity so we can return again to informed political differences and productive compromises!
Ha! I came on here to write the same thing! Doesn’t make any sense.
"Reagan proved deficits don’t matter" -Dick Cheney. Stop pretending Republicans are the party of fiscal responsibility.
If you tell the truth you never have to remember anything.
Practical advice for anyone may not use the Bible as an owner’s manual.
Where are the show notes? That closing song is too good.
Laura, just in case you haven't seen Tim's playlist:
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0dApY6YT48kTh6j9xFDQch?go=1&sp_cid=90f369bc60a409fd28c5569dfb574025&nd=1&dlsi=769afa568444438f
Wow, I'm a 62-year-old man who listens to classical music, and even I knew that was Britney!
It's Britney Spears, lol.
Britney and a team of writers and producers. I like Otto Knows doing his own stuff. https://youtu.be/I6P7lgfo9Gk?si=qGWarI5PYI_KyDZs
Related content, I just watched this interesting PBS show about the language of cults. https://youtu.be/3ZGTT_Vy_Bw?si=ra9gyS5Z1RzPynSU
Thanks for the link!