Amanda Carpenter: Audit the White House

**Tim Miller** (0:12)
Hello, and welcome to The Bulwark Daily. I'm your host, Tim Miller. We are taping The Next Level today before we're going to get primary results. So doing big picture politics over there on The Next Level feed.
AOC's woke one reflections, and maybe some hints about what's in the future for her. We'll talk about AOC and a bunch of other stuff. We'll go check out The Next Level and then on tomorrow's Bulwark Daily, we'll do a recap of the South Carolina primary, Lindsey Graham's sister, the craziness in Wisconsin. We'll cover all that tomorrow. But today, my former colleague always like having her back. She's now a writer and editor at protectdemocracy.org. There's a sub stack as if you can keep it. And next week, she'll be participating in a live webinar co-hosted by ProtectDemocracy and Vox on threats facing the midterms and the structural reforms needed to renew our democracy. We'll put a link in the show notes to that with more details. I know a lot of you care about that. It's obviously Amanda Carpenter. What's up, girl?

**Amanda Carpenter** (1:07)
Hey, good to see you. Happy to be back. Hope you're having a good summer. Everything's going well, right?

**Tim Miller** (1:12)
You know, besides the world, the world's gone mad, but my summer is good. You're looking good. You're looking refreshed. You know, summer vacation, little sun kissed. We've got much to discuss today, but I think we have to start with baby Trump hiding in the catering cart.
People that missed this, John Hudson over at the Washington Post had the scoop on this. Everybody remembers the story when Trump was over in Turkey and he had his new Qatari hand-me-down plane, but it didn't have the air defenses. So he had to fly back allegedly on the old Air Force One, and he threatened to sue the New York Times over their reporting on this. Well, it turns out the New York Times was wrong, but not in the way that he said.
He wasn't even able to fly out on the old Air Force One. They were so concerned about the Iranians shooting down our planes, that they took Trump out of the old Air Force One, hid him inside a catering cart, took him to a different plane. He flew out of Turkey on a different plane. You might remember this kind of weird thing where all the reporters had to put the shades down on the plane when it was leaving Turkey. Maybe something related to baby Trump hiding. But I don't know, a lot of layers to the story. Amanda, what was your reaction?

**Amanda Carpenter** (2:35)
Yeah, you are right. There's a lot of layers to the story. Number one, the idea of using the press as a decoy. But it strikes me as the most important is how badly is this war going, right? Like Secret Service doesn't take the president off a plane for no reason.
He hid in a catering cart, which is embarrassing. This isn't like Taylor Swift going underneath a stage and trying to hide from fans.

**Tim Miller** (3:00)
What I learned from my text change yesterday, apparently she sometimes leave her house hidden in a luggage cart. That's something that she did. I received a text like, this is a Taylor Swift ass move. I don't follow all of her decoys, but yeah.

**Amanda Carpenter** (3:12)
But that's fun because she's evading fans. This is not fun because Trump, our president, is evading assassination attempts. So that seems extremely serious. And I just look at what's going on and how they downplay the deaths. The stories last week about how we don't know how many munitions we have at hand because apparently people are afraid to tell him that we are running low.
You look at the attack where they tested the water sources in Minnesota, and Trump tried to cover it up and somehow blame Tim Walls for attacking his own water supply, which doesn't even make sense. And so what I'm most concerned about is what is the straight story about our status with this war? I think we can all agree it's not going well.
We appear to not be accomplishing the goals that they set out. The Trump sons are making billions off it in these shady contracts. But actually, what does it mean for our national defense and the safety and security of the president? It seems to be not good if he had to go into a catering cart and hide from people and keep this information from the public for, I don't know, has it been two or three weeks?

**Tim Miller** (4:19)
Yeah, well, I think a little longer. Time's a flat circle in the Trump era. I think we should just kind of do our service as former Republicans, Amanda, as people who have been on Fox News before.