Tim O’Brien: A Clown Rodeo

Welcome to the Bulwark podcast. It is June twenty third. Wow. Is it really June twenty third already? June twenty third two thousand twenty three.

And we have so much to talk about. So welcome back to Tim O’Brien senior executive editor of Bloomberg opinion and the host of the new podcast crash course. So Tim, welcome back on the podcast.

It’s always a treat Charlie. This is fun.

Okay. So you have a new podcast because this is what America needs. It needs another podcast, Tim, really.

You inspired me, Charlie. Mine’s a weekly and it’s about business and political disruption. So that’s the crash. And then the crash course is what lessons can we learn from that stuff?

You had a great one about the whole indictment with George Conway. We can talk about that. So I want you to sort some things out for me. You have been covering and writing about Donald Trump for decades now. So I’m obviously gonna be very interested in getting your sense of where his head is at.

Oh, I think we kind of know. The Republican field continues to grow. I’m sort of scratching my head about this. Donald Trump has this dominating lead in the polls, and yet we had another announcement yesterday, Will Heard, former congressman from Texas. And now we’re hearing that Florida senator Rick Scott, is thinking of running, which seems to be on no one’s agenda at all.

I mean, it’s like there is no groundswell of support. So are these candidates seeing something that we’re not seeing or is running for president kind of just a new branding thing these days as opposed to those good old days when people ran for president because they thought they might actually be elected president.

Yeah. That latter point is so important and interesting, Charlie Sykes, because sort of emblematic of the celebrities of presidential bids, which obviously — Yeah.

—

Trump did that in Spades, but it happened Will Saletan. And it’s happened in little bits and drabs in the past, but now I think candidates see it as a way to essentially create a broader awareness of who they are even if they’re not serious candidates. So I think that’s one piece of it. I think the other is that it’s a reflection that DeSantis isn’t necessarily the designated competitor against Trump anymore. There’s a little bit of weakness around DeSantis Trump’s had his own travails, obviously, with the law.

And so I think you have people just throwing their hats and doing but some of it’s ridiculous. I mean, you know, Chris Christie’s out there on the periphery. I I’d put him in the same category as Rick Scott. You know, Heard has jumped in. There’s an interesting thought around whether or not the GOP is really embracing diversity now in terms of its slate of candidates it puts up.

But I feel like it’s been is does Nikki Haley and Will Saletan Tim Scott get them there when the lower reaches of the party all are still not completely diversified, but there is a tense to get there. But it just all feels to me like a clown show, like a clown rodeo, you know, right now in the GOP with everyone held hostage to Trump.

Well, we will get to the clown rodeo in the house of representatives in a moment. So Heard is the latest, you know, Republican candidate, and And he said yesterday, he went on CNN and he said he’s not gonna sign that RNC pledged to support the nominees. He said, I’m not going to support Donald Trump, and then he was asked, did Trump betray the nation if the allegations against him are true? He says one hundred percent he did. So —

Yes.

— good on will heard Although, I’m still wondering what exactly he thinks his lane is. And by the way, I just wanna push back a little bit. Maybe Chris Christie has the same shot that Rick Scott has, but he and Wilhart are clearly running different sorts of campaign. I have no freaking idea what kind of a campaign Rick Scott would would run except, you know, make Medicaid fraud great again or something like that. But they are doing something that is at least somewhat interesting that they’re taking very direct very uncompromising shots at Donald Trump.

And thank goodness for that.

And Christie is relentless. And, you

know, in Christie, you know, he is one of those veterans of the Trump universe, you know, one of the planets floating around the Trump’s son who has pandered to Trump and then met a critic of Trump, pandered to Trump, and now he’s a critic again. You know, it it’s hard to tell when Chris Christie is motivated by principal resentment or just raw egocentrism when he does things. That was certainly his legacy as governor of New Jersey.

So it’s all all of the above. Right? Yeah.

It is all of the above. And I think it is useful that he’s calling Trump to test involved faced ways because not enough people the GOP are doing it, obviously. And he’s a pox. Trump is a disease. And he’s not a conservative.

You know, he’s an anarchist. And people have to think of him as an anarchist who is not interested in policy or dialogue. He just wants to break things.

Well, I mean, speaking of which, let’s talk about clown show that we had in the House of Representatives this week. I mean, this seems a little bit redundant. But in season three of this particular sitcom, to have Lauren Baubert and Marjorie Taylor Green yelling at each other, calling each other what little bitches on the floor. I mean, to say it’s mean girls I think is unfair to the mean girls. It’s sort of, you know, Viper on Viper.

And then, of course, you have this weird kabuki dance where Lauren Bobert wants to force a vote on an impeachment of Joe Biden, which is plagiarizing Marjorie Taylor Green’s demagoguery on it. Kevin McCarthy derails that, but then throws the deplorables the bone of censuring Adam Schiff. So What is going on here other than the clown card dysfunction on full display in Kevin McCarthy’s house of representatives?

Well, I mean, first and foremost is that Kevin McCarthy is not in control of his caucus. And I think there was never much hope that he would be. He got the speakership by essentially allowing the Maga right to define the terms of his speakership. And I think there was this myth around the debt ceiling negotiations that, oh, look, you know, Kevin McCarthy can be a parliamentarian and he can get things done. And that lasted for about thirty seconds.

Yeah.

And now you’re back to all of the inmates running the asylum. And he lacks the character and the spine and the vision to be able to manage and effectively govern a caucus like the one he has. And so you get these perversions of the political process. You get Adam Schiff being, you know, censured, you and almost find a massive amount of money. You get Lauren Bobert who I don’t think could get out of a grade school civics class standing on on the floor of the house and calling for the impeachment of Joe Biden.

And the soap opera and crazy cart amusement of it aside, it doesn’t reflect well on us in the world does not reflect well on where we are in terms of having a functioning democracy in the Trump era, which we’re very much still in. And I think it also shows and it’s akin to the question you asked earlier about why are these various candidates throwing their hats into the race. Is people are, again, elected to congress, so they can have a stage to act out their fantasies or their neurosis. Rather than to get the people’s work done. And that’s a bad place to be.

And I think it comes out of a long anti government tradition in the country that’s kind of reached a bad logical extreme.

You put it somewhat delicately. But, I mean, the reality is, and we need to come back to this is the people like Learn Baubert and Marjorie Taylor Green are just not very smart. I mean, they’re without principle, but They’re just dumb.

It’s so painful. It’s so painful to hear them speak because they are. They’re flat out ignoramuses

they are. And everything sort of comes back to this that we joke about this is idiocracy, but it is. Just look at at all of this.

Matt Gates, Jim Jordan, cut from the same cloth.

All of them though. Yeah. And it’s going to get worse. So on this impeachment, though, this was really weird. So Lauren Bober, tried, you know, single handedly to drive this impeachment resolution.

And according to the AP, this caught Republicans off guard, many of them viewed it as a distraction from their other priorities like investigating hunter or something. I don’t know. She wanted to charge Biden with high crimes and misdemeanors over his handling of the border with Mexico. And apparently, she was trying to use house rules to force a snap vote on on the impeachment. I mean, no hearings, no nothing.

She wanted to vote right then and there. And so even Kevin McCarthy went, okay, that’s probably imprudence. So they had a vote yesterday. Two hundred and nineteen to two hundred and eight to send her resolution to committee for possible consideration where it may go nowhere. I mean, but that is just kind of an amazing moment.

So

And what is the crime or the misdemeanor around a policy screw up or debate at the border?

It doesn’t matter for these folks because they’ll come up with something. It’s like we’ll have the what is the Alice in Wonderland thing? You know you know, sentence first trial afterwards or something like that, so they don’t matter.

Well, it works for them too, though, Charlie. I mean, it’s yes. They’re stupid. Yes. It’s nonsensical.

But they also know that it scores points with their constituents.

Yep.

And that it is a useful demagoguery to engage with in order to make Biden weaker heading into twenty twenty four.

So the big question is, do they put off the Biden impeachment vote for now, you know, while they, you know, hard right is clamoring for action? But What do you think? Do you think they’ll be able to hold the line or will Kevin be forced to have this vote? At some point, If Trump down in Mar a Lago begins rattling his chain more loudly, will Kevin McCarthy just have to say, okay, screw everybody expects us to impeach Biden. That’s what we do now.

Let’s do it.

You know, if we get to that point, we have lost the argument and lost the court because it would simply show that the Congress and its legislative and committee processes are now hostage to Vaudeville and cage matches. And it could happen because I think that’s the era we’re in right now. But we’d have to really grapple with how to fix that if it does.

Well, isn’t that already happened? What was the shift central all about?

Well, it was, again, it was an attempt, I think, to get the idea of Trump and Russia center stage again by flailing him publicly for being a leading voice on the issue of whether or not the Trump campaign and Trump advisors colluded with Russians in twenty sixteen. And it would be very hard to prove a criminal conspiracy existed. Around the fact pattern that exists around Trump and Russia, but there’s no question they were in communication with Russians and their agents and that they were receiving pervoined email from hackers that were working on behalf of Russia, etcetera etcetera. And I think the hearings themselves public portion of some of the hearings around that actually vindicated Schiff, but the net result was to treat him as a miscreant.

But why did they spend so much political capital on it? I mean, obviously, this is going to help Adam Schiff in the Senate bid in in California. This seemed like either just throwing a bone to the far right or once again doing Donald Trump’s bidding because it’s kind of seemed out of left field to do something like this to spend this much time on all of this. Censchers are are not that common in the house of representative. So At least on the surface, it kind of looked like, okay.

We’re not gonna impeach Joe Biden, but how about if we, you know, set Adam Schiff on fire? Well, that satisfied the Orange God King. The Orange Coligula at least for now. And we like him off Right?

Think of the people who haven’t been censured when you look at the fact that Schiff was.

Oh, good. Yeah.

You know, the kind of other behavior that’s been tolerated and then Schiff gets sent

Paul Gossar. George Santos votes on this.

Yeah. Yeah. That was Santos not you know, censured yet and Adam Schiff is.

Because irony has been beaten to death by hammers.

Yes. And again, Kevin McCarthy, you know, has has a rubber band instead of spine in his back. I think that though there is a method in the madness, again, and I think it’s akin to all of these public acts of bravado and SCorn, which it works for the GOP right now. To be anti anything Democratic party

— It does. —

and anti Democratic in terms of the democracy. But also, I think that there are certain posters children that work especially well in that pantheon, AOC is one for them, Biden is one for them, and Schiff is clearly one for them. And so to tee up Adam Schiff and turn him into a public pinata, simply because it gets emotional traction with their constituents is useful for them.

Well, and of course, they’re also going to continue to pivot to a hunter. I don’t want to spend a lot of time on this because I don’t know much about it. But the big story over the last twenty four hours has been this IRS whistleblower, the IRS agent who told Congress that, you know, Hunter Biden had invoked his father in a business deal. This is the New York Times report. The lead IRS agent investigating whether a hundred Biden committed tax crimes told Congress that his team uncovered evidence that mister Biden had invoked his father who was then out of office, while pressing a potential Chinese business partner in two thousand seventeen to move ahead with the proposed energy deal.

And these agents are also saying that they thought that they The investigation had been slow walked by the Department of Justice. Given the obsession with Hunter Biden, this just strikes me as and we’re going to hear a lot more about this. This feels like it’s gonna, you know, pour kerosene on the fire. So strap in for all hunter all the time. Thoughts,

And let’s remember Donald Nixon and Roger Clinton and Billy Carter and Billy Carter. And you know, all of the other embarrassments the presidents have with relatives who are out of control and try to monetize the fact that they’re their relative is in the White House. Let’s also remember this began with the Burisma investigation into whether or not there was an actually broader form of malfeasance and that Joe Biden was tolerating corruption in Ukraine when he was vice president for his son to get business contracts over there. That was what spawned most of this. And that went nowhere as an investigation.

I think what we’re left with now is a possible gun problem. And some tax problems, which he should be prosecuted for if there’s meat on that bone. But I don’t think any of it ultimately rebounds back on Joe Biden.

And that’s the key, isn’t it? I mean okay. I think we can stipulate that Hunter Biden has had some issues that there’s a Bill Sleezey streak

through very much so.

He was a cocaine addict or a crack addict and, you know, behaved in reckless ways.

Takes too many pictures of himself in bathtubs. You know, I don’t do that.

It’s just so bad. No. It’s Take

the camera away from them.

Right. Here’s a life hack. Do not take pictures of self naked when you’re when you’re taking a bath. I just wanna put that out there. But it comes back to the question of can you actually tie Joe Biden to any of this?

Okay. So Hunter was clearly trading on on his name, but it’s certainly not clear that they have any evidence that actually puts Joe Biden in the room or in the loop here. This one communication that they’re citing invoking his father is while he was, you know, addicted. And again, I don’t I don’t know. I’m not making judgments on all of this, but Now the fact that he invokes his father’s name does not mean that that his father was involved.

Now if he was, it’s a very serious problem, but I think we’re a long way from that. And again, That is the key. You have a sleazy son who’s got a lot of problems, but does that implicate the father. And I would say at this point, show me the evidence.

Yeah. There’s no evidence of that. The other thing to remember too is the last time, you know, this came up during the twenty twenty campaign. And Biden, I think, to his credit, brought up the fact that he was his son had struggled with drugs, and he had disappointments in his son, but he loved his son, and he was gonna stand by him. And that actually played well with voters.

And there’s a possibility that the hunter issue could, you know, humanize Biden in the race if it doesn’t spill into incriminating Biden.

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Okay. Couple more things wanted to run past you before we get to what’s going on inside Donald Trump’s head. The no labels group, you know, continues to raise question. This is this apparently well heeled organization that is playing with the idea of a third party bid. It’s sort of not clear exactly when they would run, what their circumstances are.

But any case, the latest story is that no labels declines to reveal just who is funding third party bid. So no transparency, please. We are no labels. So given the fact that Donald Trump, I think, can plausibly Possibly, win the twenty twenty four election, a third party bid seems more dangerous than usual? What are your thoughts about this?

What is going on with the no labels folks?

Well, I mean, I think it this is hardball trench warfare in electoral politics. And I think at this point, there is no third party effort that’s actually going to get meaningful national traction. It’s too hard to get on the ballot. Republicans and Democratic operatives in, you know, in both parties at the state level, control the machinery that determines who does and doesn’t get on ballots. I think that’s always been one of the hurdles for any third party movement.

If they were a legitimate third party movement, I think they would have formed quite a while ago. If they were legitimate, they would have no issues about being transparent about who is behind them, and they won’t be. So if there’s an irony that no labels has no transparency, you don’t need a label when you’re not really telling people who you are. You know, I don’t think they are independent in the classic sense of what that means from a policy prescription. I think they are a torpedo aimed at trying to tear off independent and moderate voters from Biden.

Because I think that in twenty twenty four, if it’s Biden versus Trump, that’s where the the match Will Saletan, is around that voting block. And Trump convinced enough of them in twenty sixteen voters now since then have have learned who Donald Trump is. He’s lost every federal referendum since twenty sixteen.

Mhmm.

And I think this is Ralph Nader in Florida in Bush V Gore. That that’s what no labels wants to be at the national level right now. And I think, you know, they’re in in the given that, you know, this is fifty cuffs, there’s a lot of efforts underway already to disqualify them from ballots and mount legal challenges to their slate, they’re gonna have to can you head with that too.

You mentioned other spoiler races. We now have Cornell West running on the Green Party ticket. And Will Saletan.

The Green Will Saletan.

Yeah. Another one of the Putin stooges out there. Useful idiots. Am I being too blunt today? She is gonna be running his campaign.

There are a number of Democrats to think that, you know, that poses a really significant threat to Joe Biden, because all you need is to draw off, you know, three, four percent of sort of the hard left vote, and that could flip some states like my own home state of Wisconsin. What do you think?

Don’t leave RfK junior off that list too. You know?

I have this on my note, Nick.

You know, maybe Susan Sarah Longwell run too. Just to, you know, just you know, again, this is I think people who are putting it is the left equivalent of some of the people on the right we mentioned earlier in the show. These are people putting their own egos and need to be in the center ring of the circus ahead of so sobriety and a serious sense of purpose.

Okay. Now my head is hurting because you you mentioned the name that I was gonna ask you about next r f k junior.

Or as Donald Trump calls him JFK junior.

Yeah. I know. Well, he’s worse than people think he is. I mean, he’s a conspiracy theorist. He’s a crackpot.

He’s a Putin Stuge. He’s the new darling of the right. I’m looking at a picture here.

He’s a horrible public speaker. You know, he may have had the Kennedy flare at one point, but that’s long ago.

Something gone there. So there he is with Roger Stone and Mike Flynn and all of those other Steve Bannon is giving him a tongue bath every week, tucker Carlson loves having him. My god. And yet every time he opens his mouth, he says something that is certifiably batshit crazy. There’s a story out now that he says that Russia acted in good faith in invading Ukraine.

I mean, just to set that aside of the crazy things. But So what is this about?

I mean Trump made this okay. This is the kind of stuff Trump said. I mean, every time Trump opens his mouth, he says the most ill informed bonkers things. He can’t talk about policy or reality because he doesn’t read. And he’s got a low IQ.

And RFK Junior is another version of that.

But, obviously, there’s an audience for it. I mean, so Donald Trump is low He doesn’t read and everything. And he believes, you know, things, you know, tin foil hat conspiracy theories. But apparently, right now, there are tens of millions of people that go, that’s plausible. That could be true.

Right?

And they can check-in on it in-depth on their social media feeds, whereas a generation or two ago, the media gatekeepers would not have let that stuff get into the public dialogue. And there’s a virtue into freer access to the public dialogue. Your shows an example of it, I think. But the downside is that it is easy to sway the masses by appealing to their emotions and their hatreds rather than a higher sense of purpose. And that’s what our f k junior is doing.

You know, you and I both thought a lot about how things have changed in the last few years, you know, what has broken in American politics and American culture. And I think, you know, this is certainly one of them is that these crazy ideas out there have constituencies because they have platforms. And if somebody wants to believe that, you know, the government is, you know, implanting things in your brain or or some such thing or, you know, that they’re turning frogs gay or, you know, Alex Jones Dairy, they will be able to find confirmation of that. And I was talking to a Republican politician who, you know, has tried to walk the line, tried to appease, you know, the the MAGa type, but tried to, you know, not go completely crazy. And he said, what’s impossible is that people you’ve known for twenty years will come up to you and they will have these incredibly insane theories.

And you say, where do you get that from? And they will say, what? You don’t read, you know, rising tiger eagle patriot dot com. And here’s this video that, you know, conclusively proves that x, y, and z, and how do you answer that stuff? So the crazification of our politics has accelerated and the fact that Robert f Kennedy Junior is even remotely being considered as presidential candidate.

He won’t win a nomination, of course. Is I think it’s kind of a kind of a marker of how crazy it’s all become and how how in fact the the information pool has been so thoroughly polluted and distorted.

Well, remember that you know, he had already gotten traction as an anti vaxxer

—

Yeah. — long before COVID came along. He got traction with junk science because of social media. I think it’s a logical leap from there to politics. I mean, we are surrounded by an ocean of misinformation, masquerading as credible takes on reality.

Yeah.

And we can’t put that back in the bottle. And the only thing that’s going to change that is for the electorate to become more sophisticated. But that’s going to take, I think, like, a generation. And a lot of things could get burned down between now and then.

No. I think that’s exactly right. Let’s talk about Donald Trump, and you’ve been writing about him for more than twenty years. You wrote Trump nation, the art of being Donald, which was published in two thousand and five, which is like in the distant mists of time now. Right?

I mean, it’s like before the before times.

I was a research assistant on the first biography of him by Wayne Barrett in nineteen ninety two. That’s how I first got exposed to Donald Trump. It’s thirty years. I mean, I’ve done a lot of other things, but I I feel like he’s the ghost of Christmas past, the evil ghost of Christmas past. You know, every time you think you move on, you hear the chains up in the attic.

There’s this myth around him that he lives beyond the reach of the law and that he can’t be held accountable.

Yeah.

And I think that’s simply because federal law enforcement never got serious about him until he president. For good and bad reasons, you know, white collar criminals often get by with stuff blue collar criminals can’t. But I think he has never encountered the kind of serious prosecutorial force bearing down on him that he is experiencing right now. And I think he’s in trouble, and I think he’s scared.

Okay. So you are uniquely qualified to answer this question, which is that, okay, what is happening with him. I think there are a lot of things about Donald Trump that have always been present. He’s always been a con man. He’s always been a bullshitter.

He’s always been Donald Trump. I mean, he is who he is. And Everything that’s happening now is a reflection of everything that we’ve always known about him. But you wrote about him twenty, thirty years ago, I’ve watched videotapes of him where he’s still Trump, but he’s somewhat more coherent, somewhat more Well,

he was he was just younger and less stupid.

Okay. But he has he gotten more stupid over time? Is he decompensating? What do you see happening with him? With his psyche?

I don’t think he’s king lear if Kinglier also never read and was happy to run around the Heather in the thunderstorm, screaming at anything that came by, and also at social media newspapers and radio and TV to blast his eccentricities and inanities out to the world. This is a very deeply narcissistic, deeply bent person who’s been given far too much power and credibility because he struck a nerve around real issues and chose to sensationalize them in the most grotesque of ways. Racism, bigotry for starters, but he’s also polluted our national security discussions. He’s also polluted our policy discussions, a balance between private enterprise and government purpose. And at the end of the day, he’s a performance artist who is very good at tuning into the proclivity of the audience and then exploiting them.

So he’s a joke, but the joke’s on us.

So you commented on your podcast with George Conway that the indictment the Mar a Lago, a document indictment is potentially the most devastating legal action that this human wrecking ball has ever faced. You know? And you point out that there, you know, maybe, you know, multiple motives behind him taking those documents including money because he thinks about how much money he can make and also concerned about the historical record. But but still we keep coming back to Having taken them, he had multiple opportunities to give them back and he chose to defy the subpoena He’s making no bones about it. He was on with Brett Bear, basically confesses.

Yes. He had the documents. No. He wasn’t going to return them. So what’s the motive for basically saying screw it?

Even if my lawyers are telling me to give it back, I’m keeping this stuff.

Do you know the movie finding NEEMO? Don’t know if you remember it, but

I do. I watched it recently.

Okay. So remember the seagulls, the seagulls are flying over the coastline. They’re counseling, my mind. Mine.

Hey, mind, mind, mind,

mind, mind, mind, mind, mind. That’s basically we could call that a flock of trumps instead of a flock of seagulls. Because everything is his his his his his. Mhmm. And somehow, he couldn’t distinguish between the custom scale model of Air Force one and nuclear documents that were in those boxes, and he equated both as things that he should get to keep.

I think part of it is just he wants to say he can do whatever he wants Ron DeSantis he’s been seven years old, he’s been able to do that, insulated by wealth, then by celebrity, and then by the presidency from the consequences of his own actions. He’s never been called to heal. So he’s just saying, yeah, I did that. And I’d do it again. That’s how I roll.

But again, he is playing with fire here. And I think he may have wanted to sell those a bag of cash to Donald Trump of any size is always spectacular and he saw Jared Kushner and Steve Mnuchin monetizing their time in the White House within twenty seconds of leaving Washington to the tune of billions of dollars. And I think he wanted some of that for himself. I think he wanted to possibly have information he could use to blackmail other people because that’s also where he lives. He’s like a mob boss.

But I also just think he had his his short fingered, small handed grip on that stuff and wasn’t going to let go because of mind, mind, mind, mind, mind, mind, mind,

I also think of him as gollum from Lord of The Rings My Precious.

Yeah. Charlie, how many, like, gross movie references can we I

don’t know. Let’s just

keep going. Is perfect. Let’s Gollum is perfect.

Let’s go. We could spend the whole podcast.

Yeah. I guess that makes you and me Frodo and Bilbo or something in all of this.

I’ll be Frodo. You can be Bilbo. So okay. So we’ve talked a lot about his, you know, his connections with Russia, you know, the business he’s done with China. But it does seem like the real nexus for Donald Trump and Cash is the Middle East with the Saudis and this deal in Oman that he recently cut.

There were reports that Jack Smith was looking into some of those ties. We don’t know whether there’s anything there. But it’s certainly suggestive also in terms of Donald Trump’s endless projection and the way that he’s passed it off to the republican party, the obsession with hundred Biden’s business deals leaving that aside. Pales in comparison to what Jared Kushner is pulling up. And what Donald Trump seems to be very interested in, which is to make as many partnerships with Middle Eastern, you know, mob bosses that he possibly can to cut these kinds of deals.

I mean, that seems to be a target rich environment.

That’s how he saw the entire presidency. He ran for the presidency as a marketing event. He walked into the White House trying to figure out how he could monetize his new standing in the world. He was pursuing a real estate deal in Moscow while campaigning, which goes a long way to blaming why he fond over Putin. Everything for him is about how can he manipulate a situation to get attention or to get money and it’s not about anything else.

So let’s talk about Jack Smith’s indictment. You and and George Conway were impressed by it. I thought compares that there’s more Hemingway than Faulkner, the way that he tells the story. But also, Jack Smith is not Bob Mueller, is he? I mean, he he clearly has learned from that.

Yeah. And Bob Mueller was Hamlet. And and I think he was someone who did not have direct take on who Bill Barr and Donald Trump were in are when he got appointed a special counsel. And I think his report was Yomen’s work. It was full of evidence that should have been followed up on and he lacked, I think, the kind of sense of purpose you needed to see that across the finish line Jack Smith is cut from a different cloth.

And I think he’s very tactical and strategic and that indictment is clear and it is bulletproof and it is, you know, it’s a speaking indictment that putting Trump on notice and his lawyers on notice and the jury on notice that what is in that document has a lot of clarity and it’s damning.

You made a very interesting point that that I haven’t heard elsewhere. You say that it’s weird that Trump did not distance himself from his aid, Walter Nada, the former naval officer who’s been pulled into the Maga world. What do you mean?

Well, because he’s always said other people to take the fall for him, whether it was Michael Cohen or his own children, or any number of legal advisers. You know, he is a dumb man, but he is street smart about his own survival. And He was not going to put himself in harm’s way if he could have others pee, crash test dummies for him. And he failed to do that here. Walt Nouda is now testifying against him, but also Walt Nada testified that Trump himself was orchestrating everything.

Trump didn’t have layers of deniability built into this, and that’s gonna really really hurt him in court.

So at the beginning of our conversation, you said you thought that Donald Trump was afraid. Talk to me about that a little bit. You’ve noted that, you know, Trump watch Jack Smith on television. He studies the people he fears and the people he admires and envies. What what makes you think that he’s rattled by this?

Because he’s publicly saying Jack Smith, I’ve watched him really closely and and he’s a loser Ron DeSantis is what he’s been saying. And this is a witch hunt, his typical attack line. And he wouldn’t be taking to the airwaves to comment about Jack’s Smith and letting people know that he’d watch him closely unless he wasn’t alternately fascinated by Jack Smith and afraid of him. And Jack Smith is untouchable. Trump cannot get to Jack Smith.

That’s gonna scare him. Donald Trump can’t get top tier legal representation because one, he never pays his lawyers in the end. That’s out in the market. So he ends up usually with second tier lawyers. Habba, she has a small New Jersey firm that basically does real estate deals and represented a parking garage operator.

Correct. And now she’s on TV talking about, you know, national security investigations and state secrets. Everyone around him is in over their head, the people he would need to sort of bail him up aren’t present, and it does not look good for him.

So, you know, Alina Haba is saying that Trump should take the stand in federal court because he’d be a fantastic advocate for himself. Yeah. Just do it. So Tim O’Brien, thank you so much. It is always great to have you.

Tim is senior executive editor of Bloomberg opinion host of the new podcast crash course. And the author of the two thousand five book Trump Nation, The Art of Being The Donald Tim. Thanks so much for your time this morning.

Charlie, now you have to come on mine.

I will definitely do so.

Alright. Thanks for having me.

And thank you all for listening to this weekend’s Bulwark podcast. I’m Charlie Sykes. We will be back on Monday, and we’ll do this all over again.