Wes Moore Calls Out Trump’s Lies (w/ John Avlon)

Bulwark Takes

The Bulwark

News, Politics, Society & Culture, News Commentary

4.7 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 29 August 2025

⏱️ 11 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Maryland’s Democratic governor Wes Moore is not known, exactly, as a brass knuckles guy. And when Donald Trump won office in the fall of 2024, he didn’t plan to become one, even as he recognized that life would become much harder for Democrats like himself. But recent events have tested Moore’s approach. It’s not just that Trump is now threatening to withhold bridge funds for his state because Moore pushed back on Trump’s criticism of crime rates in Baltimore. It’s a series of other decisions, too: from the denial of disaster relief for Maryland flooding, to the DOGE cuts impacting Maryland’s federal workforce, to the decision by the president to stop the FBI from relocating to the Terrapin State.

In an interview with The Bulwark—parts of which we are teasing now—Moore delivered some of his sharpest pushback against Trump to date, accusing him of being motivated by pettiness and partisanship. And he outlined how Maryland has responded creatively to the challenges Trump has posed.

John's full interview with Governor Wes Moore drops Sunday morning. Don't miss it!

Transcript

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0:20.0	Hey everybody, it's Sam Stein. editor at the book. I'm joined by my bud, John Avlon, who is coming fresh from a interview with Westmore, Governor of Maryland. We're here to talk about that. And I guess sort of just how Democratic governors are handling Donald Trump in this moment. John, thanks so much for doing this. Really appreciate it. Totally, man. Just to tee up the audience, we're going to give them a little bit
0:41.1	of a clip, a preview clip of your interview. The full thing is coming out on Sunday. What time,
0:46.5	roughly? Six a.m. is when it posts. All right. Nice. Okay. So tell me about Wes. How did it go? What did you guys talk about? I know this came in the midst of this kind of
0:58.6	tension he has with Donald Trump, where Donald Trump is going after him, threatening and on bridge money. Just give us the lay down here.
1:05.8	Yeah. So, you know, Westmore is a very engaging, high energy kind of earnest guy, and he's really been rolling
1:12.2	up his sleeves as governor, first elected office, running for reelection right now. But we had
1:18.9	scheduled this a while ago, but in the last couple of days, he's been in some very public tiffs
1:23.4	with Donald Trump on social media. Trump at one point in one of his interminable cabinet meetings saying he called him
1:30.5	the greatest president of my lifetime, which then the tape existed.
1:34.9	The tape did exist, yes.
1:36.3	So we have the receipts.
1:38.3	And spoiler alert, Trump lied.
1:42.1	But what he told me was is that, you know, Trump has been incredibly petty in ways that hurt the people of Maryland, right?
1:50.7	So, I mean, denying FEMA funding for flooding in major disasters. There's a fight over the FBI building, which had been authorized by Congress and then was rescinded.
	...

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