Welcome to the Bullwark podcast. It is Friday. It is Friday, July 21, 2023. And I'm just looking back on this last week.

I just, what a shit show. I'm sorry to get us the explicit rating in the first 30 seconds of the show, but what an amazing week.

And we are joined by my colleague, Will Salatana, who's been, we haven't had this live conversation because we've been doing your amazing special series of podcasts on Lindsey Graham, but I had to get you back on for this week.

So happy Friday will. Thanks, Charlie. In Tim's honor, I needed to get a pearl necklace, but I don't have one. So I'm just going to have to try to be half as witty as Tim.

Well, okay, at least half as we do. Okay, as we're beginning this podcast, we have some breaking news. Judge Eileen Cannon has set a date for the Mar-a-Lago document trial May 20, 2024.

So Donald Trump did not get his wish that the whole thing would be delayed until after the election, but once again, we're seeing how awkward these trial dates are going to be because, I don't know, but you will, I'm just assuming that by May 20, the Republican nomination will be all done.

I mean, just imagine that scenario. If you're a Republican, again, assuming that we're dealing with a rational political party, which seems to be a huge fallacy here at that point, Donald Trump will either, you know, have sewed up the nomination, or we'd be pretty much cooked, won't it?

I would guess so, just because I'm thinking back to 2016 when Trump first ran, and that was over basically the beginning of May, that was the Indiana primary Ted Cruz drops out and Trump at that point is the de facto nominee.

So, you know, obviously Trump's been president since then, and that makes it even more likely that he probably he would have wrapped it up if he's going to win it by well before this trial.

I had a moment of naivete. Again, this week, I can't shake it. I need to get over these sorts of things, but I saw on social media reports that Donald Trump had posted something on truth social.

He's been making veiled threats about what would happen if he is arrested, or he's jailed. I mean, went on one show and said, you know, it would be very, very dangerous, eject, Smith tried to throw me in jail.

He's put out leads where he's talked about death and destruction. And then there's this report. And I honestly thought that this was either a spoof, or maybe it was just AI generated that it could not possibly be true, but this is something that Donald Trump himself put out.

Now, this week on truth social, I mean, play there's a lot of music in the background, but I think you'll be able to pick up the language here.

If you fuck around with us, if you do something bad to us, we are going to do things to you that have never been done before.

Okay, in case you missed the light, if you ever round with us, that's real. Now, the little bit of context here, apparently that that's audio from 2020 where he was talking about what it would do to Iran, but I don't think that there's any ambiguity about why he would bleed it out now in this particular context.

Well, I mean, I think it's been established that Donald Trump is probably every defense attorney's worst freaking nightmare, but it seems as if he is almost on a daily basis escalating, not just the attacks on the prosecutors and the criminal justice system, but also the threats of violence, which in the context of the looming indictment for his role on January 6 is really quite an extraordinary moment, isn't it?

Yeah, I mean, when Trump sends these messages out, you know, we're going to stick it to them that we're going to hurt them. You can tell these sort of talking to his crowd, like liberal tears, we're going to hurt the lips, we're going to hurt everybody who's against us.

I feel like saying to him, Charlie, what's that line? I'm right here. We can hear you. You're speaking exactly, exactly. Yeah, hello. Do you understand when you say, yeah, yes, so we're going to do things that have never been done before.

Okay, you know, I always think back to the way Trump walks around mystified about having lost the 2020 election and what he says is, look, my poster told me, if I got to 65 million, I had to win, right?

And we got to like 75, how could we have lost? And the answer is that 81 million people came out to vote against him. How did that happen? Because he says crazy shit like this. He scares the hell out of people. And we can all click on this, right? We can all hear it.

But as you point out, this is directed toward his base. And he knows what he's doing. It does strike me when I was thinking about, you know, how absurd Congress looked at this week, whether you're talking about the RFK, you know, festival of that shittery or Marjorie Taylor green brandishing dick picks of Hunter Biden. This actually happened in real time.

Or Kevin McCarthy's latest apparently these things are scheduled now, but Kevin McCarthy's latest gravel to Donald Trump when Donald Trump was mad at him because he said something on television. So he had to promise, you know, the Orange God King that he would expunge the impeachment, which of course is not a thing. You know, what they all have in common to your point is it's all fan service. They're all just talking to their fan base. And I mean, why are they having hearings?

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