Hey, everyone. It's me, Sam Stein, managing out the bulwark. I'm joined by Ben Parker, who is...

Hey, Sam. How do I even want to describe you, like a Swiss Army knife of the bulwark?

Wow. Thank you.

Managerial capacity. Reporter extraordinaire today, for those who are joining us.

Reporter, occasionaire, yeah. Okay, fine, whatever. Ben's got a hot scoop that we're going to be talking about.

It is Donald Trump putting his name and face on something new. This time, your U.S. passport. If you're getting a new U.S. passport or a renewed U.S. passport, congratulations. You're going to get one with Trump's face on it. Before we do that, and before we dive into it,

a sort of programming reminder forever on who is watching.

We got live shows coming up. with Trump's face on it. Before we do that and before we dive into it, a sort of programming

reminder forever on who is watching. We got live shows coming up May 20th, May 21st out in

San Diego and Los Angeles. Tickets are hot. You got to get them. Go to bulwark, theborec.com

slash events for tickets. If you're out in the area, definitely would attend. All right, Ben, let's talk about this thing because I'll kind of pull back the curtain a little bit. We were working on this for like a couple weeks, right? Like we got the tip, like, I forget how long ago the tip came in. Yeah, so we got, we had obviously two sources on this story, good journalistic etiquette, right? First one came in a while ago.

So we've been kind of waiting on to see if someone else could confirm this for us. That happened pretty quickly. And yeah, you and I've been working on this story. So the last night this morning kicking it around seeing, seeing, you know, seeing if we can make a work. All right. Before we get to the drama, because there's actually like real, like,

insidery drama about how the White House and the administration

handled this when we went to them for comment,

and we'll save that as sort of the dessert for this. Let's talk about the substance here. So what is the actual redesign? The redesign is of the inside cover of the passport. So this is where normally you get classic sort of, you know, patriotic Americana stuff. Right now, if you

open up your passport, the inside cover has Francis Scott Key and the Star Spangled Banner, and the

back cover has the Voyager spacecraft. The new design, which the State Department says is in honor of the

250th anniversary of American independence, is going to have Donald Trump's face. Specifically,

it's going to have that like one eye cocked scowling portrait he took right when he was inaugurated.

You got that old Trump. How do you, how do you describe the face?

Like the scowly, you know, it's a lot of the mugshot he took, right? Like it is the the same face he made in the famous Atlanta mugshot. Yeah. So that's going to be on the passport, along with his signature in what else? Gold. I mean, not actual gold, like gold color. Yeah, okay. Why are they doing this? Their reason is to celebrate the 250th anniversary of America. And I guess the way they want to celebrate it is by replacing, you know, just general patriotic stuff about America with stuff specifically about Donald Trump, which has as far as we can tell, never been done before.

Yeah, we were looking into this. We're trying to figure out if there's ever been a case where a president sitting has put his face on a passport.

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