Tom Nichols: A Farce and a Sham

The Bulwark Podcast

The Bulwark

Politics, News, News Commentary

4.6 • 8.9K Ratings

🗓️ 21 January 2025

⏱️ 60 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Trump tried to pencil out literal words in the Constitution and then freed 1,500 violent insurrectionists—while the media attempted to normalize it all. Meanwhile, much attention is being paid to Elon's salute, and not enough to the facts that he has an office at the White House, he's a government contractor, and paid a quarter of billion dollars to get Trump elected. Plus, other Trump executive orders were pissy and petty, the 80s can no longer be called the decade of greed after Monday's Hunger Games vibe, and the Democrats are going to have a hard time resisting a risky 'eat the rich' path.

Tom Nichols joins Tim Miller.

show notes

Tom's piece from Monday on the police responding to Jan 6
Tweets about the price of eggs v attending the inauguration, which Tom referenced
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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to the Bullwark podcast.
0:10.1	I'm your host Tim Miller.
0:11.3	There are 1,460 days left in the second presidency of Donald Trump.
0:16.0	We have survived day one, which was a shameful, an epic sham that was best summed up by the snapshot of Trump
0:22.3	forgetting to put his hand on the Bible while he repeated an oath to the Constitution.
0:26.3	He had no intention of upholding.
0:27.8	Who to discuss such a farce with?
0:31.5	Obviously the podcast House Cremudgeon, Tom Nichols of the Atlantic, new audio book out about
0:36.7	the death of expertise.
0:38.0	Think we can throw some dirt on the expertise grave.
0:42.3	Tom, how you doing?
0:44.3	Hanging in there.
0:45.8	You know, yesterday was everything we expected to be and then some.
0:50.8	But, you know, we've got to be measured and parcel out well i mean in the sense of
0:58.1	we've got to parcel out our our outrage over time so that we don't burn out all right you parcel
1:04.2	because i am just about ready to stroke out today i have i have such a lengthy list of things to do old man
1:14.0	yell at cloud with you about the Google Doc, this amount of scrolling required to get to
1:19.0	everything. We're not going to be able to. Because as far as I'm concerned, basically every single
1:23.2	person involved in yesterday brought shame on themselves at some level. I think the only honorable
1:28.3	choice was to abstain or protest. So Karen Pence and Michelle Obama, shout out to you.
1:34.0	But given like the extent of my rage, I can't, I can't really decide where to start. So I just,
1:38.4	I'm giving you dealer's choice. What set you off the most yesterday, either in the inauguration itself or the actions that came after?
	...

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