Ben Wittes: Talk About America in Decline

**Tim Miller** (0:13)
Hello, and welcome to The Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. Delighted to welcome back to the show editor in chief of Lawfare, senior fellow in governance studies at Brookings. That's very serious work. His substack is dog shirt daily. He is in a what? What shirt are you in, Ben Wittes? Is that a dog? What animal?

**Ben Wittes** (0:31)
It's a kind of cubist dog shirt.

**Tim Miller** (0:34)
A cubist dog shirt. Where does one acquire it?

**Ben Wittes** (0:36)
Yeah, it's kind of like Picasso.

**Tim Miller** (0:38)
Okay. Where does one acquire a shirt like that?

**Ben Wittes** (0:42)
Well, the thing is, if you buy enough dog shirts, then you get advertised to on Instagram whenever somebody releases a dog shirt in the world. The speed with which I get notified is really impressive.

**Tim Miller** (0:59)
There is a single lady in Bangladesh who just has your number. If I just print a new dog shirt, this one gentleman in America is sure to buy it.

**Ben Wittes** (1:12)
That's correct. She's right.

**Tim Miller** (1:14)
I'm happy about that for you. And for her.
We have a lot to discuss. I'm going to start with this because this is a real news story that I think very much encapsulates where we are at. I think that many people wouldn't have believed, would have said I had TDS if I told you this was happening a couple of years ago. The president of the United States had to take two Air Force Ones to the NATO Summit in Ankara, Turkey. That is because the nation of Qatar gifted him his preferred Air Force One and he wanted to ride on that fancy one. And simultaneous to that, he started a stupid war in Iran that has created some lack of safety in the region. And so he had to fly the old Air Force One there to get him out of Ankara, Turkey, safely.
And the new Air Force One, and the new Air Force One, I guess, does not have the anti-aircraft safety tools that the president would want.

**Ben Wittes** (2:22)
But it's fancy, it's got, as the president said, it's got luxury like no one has ever seen before.

**Tim Miller** (2:29)
Really?

**Ben Wittes** (2:30)
That's what he said.

**Tim Miller** (2:32)
It was a hand-me-down from the nation of Qatar, which is kind of like a minor Sharia law Petra state.

**Ben Wittes** (2:39)
That's right. But it's good on the bling.
And I always thought, I think I wrote a column about this at the time, that the plane was accepted, that I objected to this deal because the president was getting a used secondhand plane. And I thought there was something genuinely weird about that. Look at the hand-me-down plane I got from the Emir of Qatar.

**Tim Miller** (3:07)
Yeah. I mean, talk about American decline and decline being a choice. And this is what kind of broke the country we are now. We're taking hand-me-down planes. And then even still, you and me, the taxpayer, had to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to retrofit the hand-me-down plane.

**Ben Wittes** (3:22)
To make it not usable to get the president to and from Ankara.

**Tim Miller** (3:28)
And then you and I then also had to pay for both planes to fly to Turkey. It's a truly preposterous situation. The administration wouldn't admit this is what happened. They said that they brought the two planes because they wanted to show off the new one to our troops stationed in Europe for now. Trump's also threatening to take them out of Europe.
That is an obvious lie based on the fact that the president didn't fly on his preferred plane.

**Ben Wittes** (3:56)
Look, I think, you know, this is one of those things. Trump lies about everything all the time except his emotional state about which he is incapable of being dishonest because he just kind of wears it on his sleeve. And he has been nothing but honest about this plane, which is, they gave me a really cool plane and I want to use it and I'm going to keep it. And there's been nothing but transparency about that. And as a result, everybody kind of looks and says, well, there's not that much to see here. And the point that you just made, which is that Air Force One is not usable to get the president to and from safely, a NATO summit somehow gets lost in it. But, you know, that is the reality of modern America. And by the way, a kind of metaphor for Trump's larger presence at the NATO summit, which, you know, the New York Times ran a long story about, which I think is basically pretty accurate about there being two summits. One is, you know, Trump, as you would say, bleeding, only their bleats are in speeches, right? And just this kind of Trump show and attacking our allies. And the other is the actual NATO summit, where, you know, European NATO allies are kind of getting down to business, doing a lot of work planning for a post-America security environment. And, you know, what is a better symbol of this than the president flying in on a cuttary bling jet that he can't safely fly out on?