Hello and welcome to the Bullwark podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. It is Monday, January

the 12th. And so we have our editor at large, Bill Crystal. Bill, something has been in the water

the last nine days. I don't, you know, it kind of felt like the, the beginning of the administration was like this, you know, where Trump was doing all kinds of crazy shit, you know, in quick succession.

And it's not as if it was not crazy, you know, towards the end of the year, but it did feel like he was losing a little steam, you know, maybe grandpa was losing, you know, the verve for some of this. But,

man, between what we've seen in Minnesota and Venezuela and then the big news from last night,

which is that the administration is investigating Jerome Powell now, the Department of Justice,

as being a Jerome Powell.. The Department of Justice has been in Jerome Powell.

It's we've wretched things up. Yeah, I was thinking about that. I guess the last two, three months of the year, Trump seemed a little bit on the defensive. And he was some with Epstein and other things.

They didn't do well in the government shutdown. The Democrats did pretty well, very well in the

November elections. And then the stuff he was doing was bad, the Kennedy Center kind of thing and all

that, the East Wing, but it was more performative, you might say, than serious. I do feel like the

last 10 days we've seen real accelerationist authoritarianism in foreign policy, obviously,

with ICE, and now with Powell.

And I'll just add to that list, the Epstein file.

I mean, they were pretending at the end of last year

they were going to release them. They were, they were

redacting a lot of stuff. It was a little very slow.

But now they've just, I don't know,

I guess they've just decided they don't even have to

pretend to be obeying a law that Trump himself signed a couple of months ago. Accelerating is a key word. I got to Texas running for a friend saying the accelerationists are winning within the MAGA side of things. And that is, yeah, I think that's correct and ominous. Well, let's start with Powell and then we'll kind of go through all these things individually.

So what we learned last night is that federal prosecutors are investigating federal reserve

chair over the central banks, multi-billion dollar project to renovate its headquarters.

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