Jeffrey Goldberg: Trump Doesn't Believe in America
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Sponsored by the Coalition for Medicare Choices. Learn more at MedicareChoices.org. Hello and welcome to the Bullard Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. I'm delighted to be here today with Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, host of Washington Week on PBS, his new book on heroism, McCain, Milley, Mattis, and the Cowardice of Donald Trump. Welcome to the Bullard Podcast, brother. Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Well, I'm having you actually for two selfish reasons. Number one, next week we're together at the Atlantic Festival, which I was happy to be invited to Thursday, September 19th and 20th at the Wharf in D.C. if people want to come. Speakers include Kentonji Brown-Jackson. Nice advertising. I like that. Did we pay for that advertising spot? No. Oh, wow. We're getting to that next. Thank God. And so this is my question. All right.

I think I have more Atlantic writers on this podcast than any other outlet. God bless you. We're always pushing subscriptions. I'm just wondering. I feel like I need to start getting a VIG, though, or something. What are you, Mr. 10%? Yeah. I'll do 8%. What about your partners in crime? Yeah. Sarah can get in on that. We'll see about everybody else. They'll get something from you? Yeah.

A little walking around money. You know what you get by being, you get the world's greatest minds. You get access to the world's greatest collective of writers and thinkers. That's what you get. All right. Well, the Atlantic is essential. And I tell people to subscribe all the time. And my favorite guests are from the Atlantic, but I'm just hoping to get a little bit of a,

Just a little throwback. You want a little something in your stocking? Yeah, just a little something. I don't know. Just send me a nice mug or something. A little taster. A little taster. You just want to wet your beak. Exactly. I got it. Man, the book, I want to get into the book, but it's, I think, timely to have you on today. You're writing a book about heroism and cowardice. The big news item of the morning is that Donald Trump, who would not look...

Kamala Harris in the face during their first debate, he was so scared of her, has announced that there will be no more debates. He claims that he won the first debate dubiously, and now he says he won't debate her again. I'm wondering if you had a reaction to that.

Yes, I do. I think, you know, the issue of whether he why he didn't look at her. I don't know if that's fear or a kind of contempt. I don't know how to interpret that. Obviously, maybe it's contempt with the underlying fear, a little bit of contempt, a little bit of fear. You know, it's so obvious it barely needs stating. There's a part of him that knows things that are true and he knows that he got bested by

by Kamala Harris. And, you know, I try to avoid all the, you know, the shrinkery here with Donald Trump, but a woman of color, a black woman, you know, besting him in a verbal battle that probably doesn't sit that easily with him. And so of course he's going to spend, it's totally inevitable that he's going to spend it and say, I won. Why do I have to do it again? I saw his truth social post on that. A champion boxer doesn't go have a rematch or something like that.

I mean, I guess it makes sense from the campaign perspective, right? Do not put him in a room with a woman who triggers him. Not only her presence triggers him, and she has become the world's leading expert on keyword usage for

for triggering. It was amazing. I mean, you could play, you could have a bingo. I'm sure you had this kind of, I was jotting down every triggering word, you know, from crowd size to John McCain. It was, it was brilliant. And inheritance was my favorite one. Yeah, yeah. It was brilliant. Yeah, yeah, exactly. He might know, there might be some part of his brain where he knows that

I am Donald Trump. I am very easily triggered. This woman triggers me. I can't get in a room with her. But his campaign certainly knows that, and I can't imagine that they think it would be a great idea to go back into that triggering situation again. All I would do if I were Kamala Harris in the next debate is let's go through the crowds one by one. So the inauguration, the Park Service says –

You know, I don't know. It was sort of an amazing thing to watch. I mean, we all have our triggers, right? I'm sure you have your triggers. But you also try to impose some verbal self-restraint. The only thing for me, and I assumed he was going to do the second debate, and I don't think it's out of the question yet that he changed his mind. Donald Trump is a fickle man. Maybe. It is so weak. And Tim Alberta, for you guys, wrote a really transgressive,

piece about what the Trump campaign, Las Vidas and Wiles and Trump saw as the frame of the race when Biden was still in was just this Trump strong alpha strong mental fixture problems, Biden weak, dithering old man that can't. And then it switches to Harris and that frame doesn't work anymore. But even still, like they have this instinct, they want to be alpha, they want to be strong to just say I'm too wimpy to go up against her again. And

You know, I mean, there was the Congressman Mike Collins tweet was like, you'll know who lost when you see he doesn't want to do a second debate. Doesn't his manhood get in the way eventually of being too scared to see her again? Well, just as he can get goaded in the room with her, he'll be goaded for the next month or however long it takes by people saying precisely what you're saying, which is like a real man would go debate Kamala Harris. And maybe that will move him back. Remember, you know, as Tim said,

noted in that Atlantic piece and Tim and others note, you know, this is not a case where there's a campaign managing a candidate. There's a candidate and then there's this completely separate entity called a campaign and they operate on different tracks. And so you're probably right. In fact, we should not be surprised by a post in a week or two or a phone call to Fox and Friends

Where he says, yeah, I'm going to debate. I'm going to let's I'll call her and we'll do it now, you know, or something like that, you know, or meet me in the alley at midnight kind of thing.

So to the book, which also relates to all this stuff, I was going through it. I think this is essays that you've written before kind of put together into this frame about people have shown political heroism and people who haven't, specifically Donald Trump. But I was intrigued. The first story that is mentioned in the book is about my friend, Lindsey Graham. He called McCain's Sancho Panza. Sancho and I had an encounter in the spin room, right outside the spin room the other night, where he was very upset at me.

purple face screaming about how I should be ashamed of myself. Maybe you should, but not for your politics. I don't know. I don't know. I can't comment on the other part. You're onto something, but we don't need to go there. How you live this line down was in a conversation he had with you in 2018, where he says, essentially, Jeff, if you know about me, you know that I need to be relevant.

Like, really, that just says everything. All of the other rationalizations, everything else is just like ornamentation on that underlying element. And I do think that is true of Lindsay and true of the other enablers that you write about. Yeah. You know, his transformation is extremely surprising because I was a close observer of the McCain-Graham relationship. I mean, I knew Senator McCain previously.

pretty well relative to, you know, a lot of people. So I knew by extension, Lindsey Graham pretty well, who's, you know, funny, charming, delightful, cutting, you know, fun to be with as opposed to most senators, whatever the two of them, you know, together were a great team. It never struck me a 20 minute long joke that like had me and Jeb just like in tears in the darkest day of the campaign. The man can spin a yard. No, no, no. He's extraordinarily talented. And, um,

I told this story the other night. I haven't mentioned it in a while. I just have this image. I was flying with them.

back from the Munich Security Conference, you know, a dozen years ago, government plane, small plane. And there was some one sort of couch and Senator McCain is the older senior person on the plane, got the couch and he was lying down on the couch. And we're sitting around talking and Lindsey Graham decided to lie down and he, he, he, he, he stretched out on the floor right next to the couch, put something under his head and, and

I just had this image of like Lindsey Graham at John McCain's feet, basically. And that was their that was kind of the relationship. So my definition of manhood, let's just go there, is if someone insults your best friend and mentor or your wife, for that matter, putting the Ted Cruz overlay on this, like you don't.

Forgive. You don't forget. Or at least, you know, maybe you forgive and move on to some kind of neutral position, but you don't forget. And I just don't understand for the life of me how after the horrible things that Donald Trump said about John McCain and did to the McCain family in the time of the funeral.

Right. Ordering the flags back up, you know, refusing to support a funeral of a national hero. I don't understand how Lindsey Graham can act like of the boats, the moving of the John McKinney, USS McCain, moving the USS John McKinney. I forgot about that one. Unbelievable. Right. I just don't get how forget man, how a person, how a grownup, how somebody with self-respect can just hop on board the train. I mean, Lindsey needs, he needs relevance and he needs a misadventure.

mentor, a father figure, something. Anyway, it's just sad. I think you hit on the answer. I don't think he has self-respect. I think that's it, unfortunately. No, and I guess to be in politics, you have to swallow a lot of stuff that other people successfully avoid in life. But man, oh man.

How you can go with that. He explains everything about, you know, Ann Applebaum, one of the many other talented writers at the Atlanta, you know, talks about complicity as the dominant theme. Most people make themselves complicit. Most people aren't brave dissenters. We celebrate dissenters after the danger has passed, after the dissenter is gone. But that's just pure complicity. The other story, central story, really, that underpins the book and kind of your work along these lines was

For listeners who don't know, you're the one that originally broke the story about Donald Trump calling dead soldiers suckers and losers. It was referenced in the very first debate, and it's still extremely relevant to this day, especially after what happened at Arlington. To me, always the other anecdote in that story that gets lost, I think, just because suckers and losers is so easy to kind of remember and grab onto, was the conversation with John Kelly, the chief of staff.

well, he might've been secretary of Homeland security at the time of this conversation. He was DHS. Yeah. I, the Arlington, the other Arlington story. So he's there at Arlington and where Kelly's son, Robert is buried. And Trump says, I don't get it. What was in it for them? Yep. To John Kelly, whose dad's son is there. You know, John Kelly now is acknowledged as publicly. So I can talk a little bit about John Kelly in this context. Um,

Here's one of the most interesting things about John Kelly. John Kelly was driven so mad by Donald Trump in the White House when he was chief of staff for that year or more that he was chief of staff that John Kelly would leave the White House, drive to Arlington and sit by his son's grave. His son was a Marine captain killed in Afghanistan in 2010, I believe. He would just sit by the grave and watch.

Until he calmed down and recognized that whatever sacrifice he's making to serve his government and his country by being in the White House, by trying to control the chaos of the White House, it was not a sacrifice as great as his son, as that of his son.

And so he would go there to sit, just drive across the river, go there and sit for a while, then go back to the White House and say, all right, I can do this for another day. The other thing about John Kelly that I don't think people know is that John Kelly was

as a young man, had bone spurs in his feet. You know this story? I don't, actually. John Kelly had bone spurs. Okay. Real ones. He had bone spurs, and he went, when he got called for the draft, he went to the draft board, and the doctor said, well, you have bone spurs. You can't serve. And John Kelly asked the doctor to lie so that the Marines would take him.

John Kelly said, don't worry, I can fully function as a Marine. Just say that it's not so. Please, please let me go to the Marine Corps. There's your bone spur dichotomy right there. And the character difference between

the two men, you know, and John Kelly was always in a pedagogical frame of mind when he was around Donald Trump. I'm going to teach him. Remember, this is, you know, John Kelly, who also taught him who were the good guys in World War I and World War II when Trump did not know. Did Trump not know who the good guys were? Or was he just, you know, kind of... Well, I mean, maybe there's a historical knowledge issue. No, no, no, no, no. He literally, he literally, this is another story that gets lost in this welter of stories. He literally...

said on the plane ride over to France for that now famous cemetery catastrophe when he wouldn't go, you know, and he called them suckers and losers. He asked John Kelly, who were the good guys in World War I? And Kelly answered, said, Mr. President, the good guys in any war are the ones that America is fighting with.

as an easy lesson, here's a heuristic, here's an index card. Remember, if we're on their side, that means they're the good guys. Okay. I mean, it's pretty, again, pretty easy to be president in that sense. Just remember that. So, you know, he brought him to the cemetery and he's trying to explain sacrifice and service. And Donald Trump is not capable, as we've seen time and again, of understanding people who do things for selfless reasons. The reason he thinks, well,

Anyone who goes to the military is a sucker is because if you're talented, you should be able to make some money somewhere. Right. Famously. And this, again, was in that story, that 2020 story. He said to a group of military cabinet officials after Joe Dunford, the former chief of staff, Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marine four star left the room. He said, that guy's pretty smart. Why did he join the military?

You know, and as that conversation unfolded, the subject came up of what Joe Dunford, as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, made, what he earned for a living. And John Kelly just toying with Donald Trump like a cat with a mouse at this point. Cat now is a new triggering word, I guess. I shouldn't bring up cats. Said, what do you think he makes?

I mean, can you imagine a president doesn't know what the salary range is for the people who work for him? But whatever. What do you think he makes? Trump settled on three to five million dollars. And then John Kelly said, I think the number was like 189 or something like that. One hundred. And Trump couldn't imagine. He couldn't imagine why anybody would do this. And this is like this is a it's a failure of imagination. It's a failure of character that he doesn't all of this, all of these feelings about Trump.

people being suckers, people being losers. And remember, it's not just military people he thinks are suckers and losers, right? He thinks most people are suckers and losers. It all comes from, well, if you're not scoring, then you're losing.

He also doesn't like just under or think that America is of any significant value and worth fighting for. Like this, that's like the other big lie, but his patriotism or whatever, like he doesn't to understand the sacrifice means that you have to understand like you're sacrificing for something that is a value, which is, you know, the American ideal. And he doesn't give a fuck about that. Like he really does. He doesn't think America is really any different from Saudi Arabia, except we just like have more money. He has no higher value.

belief system or moral belief system or look, you know, this is why, you know, this discourse around undecided voters is so amusing to me. It's like, what don't you know? And I'm not saying that to people who are voting for Trump. I'm saying you're undecided. You literally can't tell the difference between these two people.

Really? It's all there. It's all in the record. He doesn't believe in America. He doesn't believe in service. He doesn't believe in selflessness. He doesn't believe in democracy. He doesn't believe. He doesn't care about the Constitution to the extent that he knows what's in it. I always think that we need to work consciously to renew our sense of surprise. He's been with us for so long.

That every so often you should sit back and sort of look at a compendium of things he's said and done and say, how did politics in America go so thoroughly off the rails that this is the three time now candidate for one of the two major political parties? Sorry. I mean, it's just like I do this. I do this reflection like every like every other day. Sometimes I'm in the shower and I'm just like, what in the fuck? Yeah.

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protect yourself with a 30-day free trial at lifelock.com. Use promo code news. Terms apply. So one of the things that makes me think that, what in the F, is one of your other people that you feature, Jim Mattis, who I have a lot of respect for his service, but I was reading one of the segments you had about him and there was one line that struck me. You were interviewing him, I think it was in 2019, and kind of the

The subtext, I guess, was that you felt a little flummoxed or wondering why he wasn't speaking out more against Trump in that election. And he said to you that there's a French saying about devoir de riz-a-ire, which is the duty of silence. When Trump was president, commander-in-chief is president, you have a duty. But the thing is, Trump's not president now. Why are we still being devoir? Yeah.

I've thought a lot about this, and I understand the impulse, the frustration on the part of anti-Trump people, Millie, Mattis, Kelly, and so on, not to get involved. The thing that I'm trying to put myself in their shoes, the thing that you really have to focus on is that there is a profound allergy to partisanship.

That is cultivated in senior officers, right? By the time they get to positions that matter in a strategic way or in a policy way, colonels and so on, you know, they take huge pride in the fact that no one knows what party they belong to. Some of them don't vote because they don't want while they're active duty because they, they don't want to think about the qualities of the commander in chief. They just want to follow the lawful orders of a commander in chief. I get it. I actually do.

get it. I also recognize as a journalist and a journalist who's read a lot of books about the Trump years that the experiences that a lot of people who served in this administration had worked their way into books and journalism and other, you know, so it's not as if we don't know what it was like inside the Trump White House. I don't know what

What it would mean if the 10 senior most recently retired generals in the American military stood at a press conference and said this man is a danger to the republic. I would assume it would move some people, but not a lot of people get moved anymore. But I understand that.

the ferocious desire on the part of general officers not to engage in partisan politics. That feels like a military defense, though. Not really a Madison Kelly one. Well, yeah, Madison Kelly both joined politics. They went into politics. I get your point. But you know what? I mean, you never leave the Marine Corps. Right. You know, I mean, these men started at 18. Ingrained. It's ingrained. And by the way, why?

We want it ingrained. I mean, look, the cosmic irony, one of the many cosmic ironies of January 6th, right, is that in American popular culture, I'm thinking back all the way to like seven days in May and that kind of thriller. In American culture and fiction, the coup, the coup attempt was

It was always going to be the crazy general, strange loving and, you know, whatever. In January 6th, we had a situation where Milley and others were protecting the Constitution from the civilian. It's the flip of what we always expected. And the reason we expect it is because we have, you know, you look around the world and you look at hundreds of military coups over hundreds of years and you just expect, you know, that no general is going to be impervious to that temptation. But, you

They just pray for a day when they don't have to be engaged in these kind of conflicts. I think, you know, I don't want to get into a defense of their behavior. I understand both sides of this argument, but it's not a sign of a healthy country when the generals are...

telling you what to do politically. That is true. I would say that we... But we're not healthy. We're not a healthy country. I know. As I was saying that, I was thinking you're going to say, well, the horse is out of the barn. I don't know if you noticed. Yeah. Okay. Well, you know, here we are. I was listening to another interview you did recently where you talked about the bias towards coherence of the media. Not a problem at the Atlantic or the Bulwark, but I was enjoying... There's an Orlando Sentinel headline. Oh, yeah. I saw that. Earlier this week.

yeah, headline, Trump threatens to jail adversaries. Simple. It is factual to what he posted. It doesn't contain editorializing. It isn't biased. It's just the headline says what he said. And sometimes you're like, is this that hard? And I think that is the frustrating thing. I hate to do media criticism because it's silly. There's so many media outlets and people have good days and bad days. But the fact that that Orlando Sentinel thing was so

just crystal clear made you think we could do this. Like other, other places could do this, right? Yeah. Yeah. We do it. We're a magazine. It's a little bit different, but yeah,

Bias toward coherence is different than sane washing because the neatening up of Donald Trump's quotations, some of those quotations don't indicate insanity. They just indicate they can indicate ignorance, prejudice, whatever. It's not just it's not just sanity that's being washed out or imposed on Donald Trump's ideas and views.

thoughts and speculations. But what we do, and I've been trying very deliberately to do this, is when he talks about sharks and batteries, we should cover that. If a former president, current nominee for president, really feels that discussing whether it's better to die by being electrocuted by a boat battery or eaten by a shark, I think we should know that. And the rule, the ironclad rule here, and you'll see why it's so obvious that we should do that. If Kamala Harris was

spent 10 minutes of a speech talking about sharks, batteries, windmills, bacon, and Hannibal Lecter. I have to assume that somehow the grandees, the potentates of the Democratic Party would find a new candidate. And certainly the Today Show would talk about it.

Because they feel like, what's happening with Kamala Harris? No, and this is the, you know what it is? It's the hard bigotry of no expectations. When you have no expectations of someone, you don't hold them to a standard. It's completely understandable, but you have to differentiate. There's Donald Trump, for whom we have no expectations. But there's the Republican nominee for president.

for whom we have to have, structurally, we have to have expectations. And so, fine, Donald Trump always says this is not an argument against covering it, it's an argument for covering it. Yeah, and I think that this focusing on the incoherence

and talking about it is an uncomfortable place to be for a straight news journalist right and i do understand this i understand that that actually that was the case a little bit with the biden stuff too or like how do you put into a story that like he seems to be declining a little bit or he seems to be a little bit more less forceful or coherent than he used to be but i want to credit cnn because i was watching this clip where they showed his 2016 answer on immigration and in the debate versus hillary versus the one he gave

And the debate versus Kamala Harris this week. And the 2016 answer also was Trump being kind of racist and whatever. But it was like, we need a wall because drugs are coming across the border and crime is a problem. And there's some bad hombres coming in and people kind of, you know, tacked onto the bad hombre line in that debate. But yeah, but that's kind of a fun. That's like actually interesting political discourse. Yeah, it's kind of funny. Controversial, but it's kind of like, oh, OK, he's creative with language or something at the very least.

You can make up something. Yeah. And you can understand it like a regular person who doesn't watch Fox or read the Atlantic or whatever. Somebody who's just a sports viewer that just tuned in for the debate could understand his argument. It was coherent.

His argument with Harris in the debate where he starts talking about the cat, he doesn't even set it up. It's not like, oh, we have a problem at the border and people are coming into the border. Now we have an influx in a city and there have been some reports that one of the – that would still be a conspiracy theory, but it would be coherent. He wasn't coherent. He's just like, they're eating the cats and they're eating the pets. World War III is coming. He was all over the place. World War III was coming. I don't know if you noticed this, but I'm sure you did. Three or four different mentions of the end of the world are World War III. Yeah.

And sometimes you always wonder when people are overly apocalyptic, are they conflating their own inevitable demise with the world's demise? Right. But to your point, it's obvious to everyone who listens to Donald Trump over the years that his vocabulary is dramatically diminished.

His access to words is dramatically diminished. That's why his cat and dog discourse sounded the way it did. You're right. You know, it's interesting. We just ran a piece on this the other day, fascinating piece, just about why the person who's presenting himself to the public would have difficulty passing a cognitive test at this point. Yeah, the repetitive speech piece. It was good. We'll put it in the show notes. It was really good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was very interesting. And I'm more comfortable than I used to be as an editor of

publishing, you know, informed couched speculation about a person's mental or physical or cognitive health. And by the way, too, okay, this is like the baker praising his own bread here, but you know, Mark Leibovich, another of our stellar cast of superheroes here at the Atlantic was one of the only writers who

over the last two years saying, Joe Biden seems pretty old. Anybody notice? And then, boy, would we get, you know, shit for saying that. And it's like, I don't know. You know, I have eyeballs. I can watch him walk across the stage and say, that guy's pretty old. A lot of this is just going back to your original point and what the Orlando Sentinel did to its credit was stated plainly what was observably true.

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Protect yourself with a 30-day free trial at LifeLock.com. Use promo code NEWS. Terms apply. On the cats and dogs thing, we got to get to a person that is mentally coherent and capable, but is still advancing these conspiracies, which in some ways makes it worse. And that's J.D. Vance. Before that, I need to, you know, because this is a real journalistic outfit here as well, I do need to make a correction on yesterday. I was talking about this.

The thing that underlined this story, like the thing that kicked this all off was this horrible accident in Springfield where a Haitian immigrant crashed into a bus. The bus tipped over. And that's where Aiden Clark died. I read the comments from his father yesterday, which are just unbelievably brave. But I mentioned on yesterday's podcast that the bus driver was Haitian. It was the driver of the car that crashed into the bus. So I want to correct that. But J.D.'s been the one pushing this.

And there was this interesting post that Carl Quintanilla put out that I had forgotten about, which was J.D. wrote this in 2016, around the time that he wrote that also great Atlantic piece about how Trump is heroin. He wrote, Trump makes people I care about afraid. Immigrants, Muslims...

Because of this, I find him reprehensible. God wants better of us. And here we are today in Springfield. There's bomb threats and Haitian immigrants feel afraid. And J.D. Vance is the one doing it, not Donald Trump. Yeah. You know, I doubt Trump's also doing it. But J.D. Vance is the one that's no. But you're right. Right. You do have. I think we all have higher expectations intellectually, cognitively for J.D. Vance. Right. Right.

Obviously a very smart person. One of the sub tragedies of all this is that all of this noise and all this malevolent carnival that surrounds all of these issues keeps us from talking about real things, which is.

the difficulties and opportunities towns and municipalities have when immigrants come. And they're fascinating and important policy discussions that should be held. And we should hear a wide range of voices from the people in Springfield who say, oh my God, these Haitians are great. They fill my church on Sunday and they work in our factories. It's like, and they're incredibly industrious and they just want to make it here.

To the people who are saying, you know what, it's overwhelming our town and its resources. And the goal of the anti-Trumper should not be to make believe that everything is perfect. The goal should be to say we have serious policy issues around immigration, crime, economics, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But all of that gets lost or is pushed away by the sort of xenophobia and the racism and the cats and dogs discourse. And it's just not...

away a functional country should be. And you're right. We can't lose sight of the fact that these law abiding in the main, obviously, when we know that immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than native born Americans, that these immigrants in Springfield, some of whom I'm sure are criminals, but most of whom are not, you know, are now frightened after coming here in order not to be frightened. Right. And it's just, um,

It's not a good situation, Tim. It's not a good situation. No. So J.D. is participating in the thing that he said that he finds reprehensible. He said that God wants better of us, but I guess he doesn't want better of him. So he's wrong on the conspiracy mongering morally and factually. He's also wrong on the policy. I want to play you a clip of J.D. Vance on CNBC talking about immigration's impact on our country just earlier this week.

We are the most prosperous country in the world.

We have the largest economy, the greatest research universities, the most powerful military. We are the most prosperous nation in the world. Also, immigration is deflationary. Yeah, of course it's deflationary. I mean, it keeps wages in check because you have people who are willing to do jobs that native born Americans don't want to do.

I mean, talk about a fact check. He's fucking awful. Also, his tone is just... He's so smug. I say this as the grandson of...

of two people who my grandfather and grandmother met, believe it or not, in a thermometer-making sweatshop in Brooklyn. Wow. And I once joked to my grandfather, I said, what was your job? To carry buckets of mercury around? He goes, actually. I mean, it's like they came, they did the jobs nobody in their right mind would want to do. What are we even talking about? I mean, it's what he's saying is detached. It's unmoored from reality.

observable history and observable current reality doesn't mean they're not tons of problems fine sure can you imagine a bucket of mercury by the way yeah i'm just thinking about how ill-suited i would be for that job explains why i used to used to have a head right here you know they had thank god i lived in a time where podcast hosting could be a job because that was a mercury mercury bucket holding i don't

I don't think air conditioning and chairs. That's what I say are two, two great work inventions. Sure. 42. I would have seen if I was, if that was my job. So you talked to a lot of foreign leaders also, and JD Vance, the choice of JD Vance, it was very telling about what to expect from Trump, particularly,

with regards to Eastern Europe. So I want to play a clip from J.D. Vance talking about how he thinks Donald Trump would end the war in Ukraine. And then I'd like to end with you just talking about the policy generally and how worried people are about a Trump-Vance ticket in Europe. So let's listen to J.D.

So I think what this looks like is Trump sits down, he says to the Russians, the Ukrainians, the Europeans, you guys need to figure out what does a peaceful settlement look like? And what it probably looks like is something like the current line of demarcation between Russia and Ukraine that becomes like a demilitarized zone. It's heavily fortified so the Russians don't invade again.

Ukraine remains its independent sovereignty. Russia gets the guarantee of neutrality from Ukraine. It doesn't join NATO. It doesn't join some of these sort of allied institutions. And I think that's ultimately what this looks like. Well, you know, there is a reason that Donald Trump, when asked the easiest question of the debate, do you want Ukraine to win, couldn't answer because they don't want Ukraine to win. It's just so interesting to me

that he doesn't want Ukraine as an ally of the United States. I'm actually, to go back to a word, I'm actually flummoxed by that because I don't understand the impulses. I would understand the impulses if American troops were on the ground fighting for Ukraine, but they're not. We have come upon a pretty decent formula for

for supporting a beleaguered democracy fighting an authoritarian giant, which is to say we provide weapons and materiel and intelligence and you guys do the fighting. And by the way, if you do the fighting well with what we're giving you, then our troops in Europe won't have to go and physically defend our treaty allies from further Russian aggression.

advances. And by the way, by the way, if you're interested in building America's manufacturing base, I know this is not a popular argument with progressives, but I don't care. The money that we're sending to Ukraine is actually stuff that we make in our factories, right?

right, in Pennsylvania and Ohio and Alabama. What did you think if J.D. Vance was authentic in his views about rebuilding those parts of the country he would care about? No, no. I mean, it's not an argument. Like, you shouldn't make weapons just to make weapons and send them to bad people. Fine. I get that. The cause is good. It's like a virtuous cycle. Like, we're giving them the weapons. We're buying the weapons for them that they then use to push back

an imperialist advance by Russia that is protecting our treaty allies across Europe, to whom we promised after World War II that we would participate in your defense. I don't know. I don't know. I don't get it. I just don't get it. It's alarming. Concrete. Well, rare concrete policy proposal. We know what they want to do. Mass deportations, give part of Ukraine to Russia and ensure that Ukraine's not our ally anymore. And tariffs. So that's it. That's their policy.

agenda. Tariffs will pay for all of it. Jeffrey Goldberg's got to get back to editing America's Best Political Magazine. I've got a little candy for you guys on the other side. We didn't make it through all the J.D. Vance clips. I've got my favorite one that just me and you, the listener, will get to talk about. So stick around for that. Thank you very much, Jeffrey Goldberg, and my love to all our friends at The Atlantic. We'll see you next week at the festival. Thank you. All right, y'all. That Jeffrey Goldberg is great. That is a pretty good magazine. But I do have to say, as good as The Atlantic is,

The best daily newsletter out there in America is my colleague Jonathan V. Last Tryout. I know sometimes people are like, who's JVL you keep mentioning? That's JVL. He writes a tryout every day. It's really good. Really, really good. It's always interesting. And so if you haven't subscribed to The Bulwark Plus, sometimes his newsletter is behind a paywall. So you can check it out in the free trial. You go to thebulwark.com slash free trial. But I want to talk about his newsletter from yesterday because I just can't help myself. It's too delicious. J.D. Vance, weird podcast host.

frequenter. Another one of these old podcast videos was surfaced the other day. It was on this podcast called Viva Fray, like some kind of Canadian, a MAGA Canadian, which is a pretty weird combo. And JD, like a stoned freshman at the SAE frat house in a SEC school, starts vamping about what he thinks about American culture and life. And I want to just listen to a little bit of it.

But Mike once told me that American history is it's a constant war between northern Yankees and southern Bourbons where whichever side the hillbillies are on wins. Right. And and that that's kind of how I think about, you know, American politics today.

is like the Northern Yankees are now the hyper woke sort of coastal elites. The Southern Bourbons are sort of the same old school Southern folks that have been around and influential in this country for 200 years. And it's like the hillbillies have really started to migrate towards the Southern Bourbon instead of the Northern woke people. It's just like a fundamental thing that's happening in American politics.

Lay off the bong, bro. I just, in case you missed it, because, you know, he's trying to color it in some highfalutin language. What he's saying there is that we're still in a continuation of the Civil War.

Something that I reject. Like where there, where we have, where there's some, I guess some underlying cultural cold war happening between the Yankees and the, and the Southern Bourbons. I don't know where we, then the hillbillies are in the middle ground. Remember there's a whole part of America that's, that's been added to the country since, since all of this. I just, I don't know where Colorado, where I fit in this imaginary kind of game of risk he's playing. But the interesting item there is that he sees himself as,

representing the hillbillies, and he sees them as aligning with the southern Bourbons, the same people who have been around for 200 years. I guess he's talking about the slave owners there. How you get yourself into this place where you are creating an imaginary culture war, an imaginary war within our country that you see as a reanimated version of the Civil War, and then determining that you are on the side of

of the slave owners. I just don't know how somebody that went to Yale and married an Indian immigrant gets there in their head. And it's like, that is the side of the righteous now because the Yankees, I guess, are the woke childless cat ladies that I don't like. It is nonsensical. It's not even really representative to defend the South here for a minute. Obviously, a lot of the Southern states have voted red, but

most of the Southern bourbons, like the big Southern cities are democratic now. Like is Atlanta, who are the Southern bourbons in Atlanta? I guess J.D. Vance doesn't count Atlanta because there's so many black people there as part of the Southern bourbons. Maybe Atlanta is now with the Yankees. It's hard to get inside his head and understand that, but I think it's extremely revealing. He's sitting there, by the way, in that interview, there's the mega Canadian blogger or vlogger. And then the other guy, Robert Barnes is Alex Jones's lawyer. So,

He goes on a podcast with like a really gross. If you go look at this Viva Frey guy's Twitter feed and it is just despicable. You would never spend any time with this person. If I was invited to go on his podcast, I would only go so that I could just insult him to his face.

But JD Vance gets like chummy with this guy who's just posting all kinds of like conspiracy mongering and he's all the hits anti-vax and racist stuff. So it's him, it's Alex Jones's lawyer and it's JD and JD is spinning a yarn about how he sees himself as like the leader of this hillbilly movement towards the neo-confederacy.

It's a choice. It's a choice. Donald Trump chose him to be his VP pick. And I think that we have seen now the manifestation of what it looks like when the Republican Party puts a ticket forth to people that have completely ensconced themselves in this, I'll say the word, weird and racist, like MAGA, online, bro bubble. It does not yield coherent results.

policy or results yields the presidential candidate shouting on the stage about killing the cats and killing the dogs thanks to svp thanks to svp there's reporting we've got a great story from marco puto on this and joe perticone on on how laura loomer has been influencing trump this morning in today's bulwark you should check out nbc as a story where there are people that are on the trump team saying that this is jd's fault jd was the one that pushed the cat and dog eating

and abducting. We can't forget the abducting element into the Trump campaign. And it's all, it was all there. It was all there. It was like, you choose a guy that wants to go on a Canadian mega blog with Alex Jones's lawyer and vamp about being part of the Neo Confederacy. And, uh,

you know, the result that you get is a screaming old man on stage talking about immigrants eating dogs. So, that's what I'll leave you with for the weekend. Great week. Great week for the country. Great week for Kamala Harris. By the time we see you on Monday with Bill Kristol, I'm sure we'll have some polling data. We'll get to see, you know, what the impact is. We've seen some national polls that have Kamala Harris edging up a little bit. We'll see if that trickles down to the state's

And I hope everybody has a wonderful September weekend. We'll see you all on Monday. Peace. Civil war is over. And the war won't end until we can live together. We made my car underneath the country. Dream is still alive. Nearly a lifetime. But that never dies.

We live in the city of dreams We drive on this highway of fire Remember this, oh, favorite We live in the city of dreams We drive on this highway of fire And find it cold

Remember this, our favorite time. The Bullard Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.