Derek Thompson: The Party of Vicemaxxing

**Tim Miller** (0:13)
Hello and welcome to The Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. There is so much political news on this Tuesday. We've got primaries tonight in Iowa, big Senate primary, California, governor and mayor's primary, also New Jersey, Montana and New Mexico.
Right as we started taping as well, Donald Trump appointed his director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency and chairman of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Bill Poulty to serve as director of National Intelligence. That's right. Bill Poulty, the hack grifter that used to be like the rich guy that gives away 500 bucks to people on Twitter if they follow him, the same guy who was digging into the mortgages of every opponent to Donald Trump, who went after Tish James and others based on their mortgages. He is now going to be the DNI.
He has no intelligence experience, no experience at all. I think it is pretty obvious why Donald Trump is putting somebody who has shown complete unapologetic shamelessness in going after his foes in a position will have access to a lot of material that will allow him to go after his foes. It's extremely alarming. So we'll get to Poulty, we get to the primaries and a bunch of other stuff on The Next Level, which will be out here later on Tuesday. So make sure you're subscribed to the Next Level feed. But on this show, we'll bring back a longtime tech culture and political writer at the Atlantic. He's got his own sub stack now. He's those to Plain English. He wrote some books including Abundance. He's got a new book coming out. It's Derek Thompson. What's up, man?

**Derek Thompson** (1:56)
What's up, man? Great to see you again.

**Tim Miller** (1:58)
Good to see you. I want to start with one of the other news items then we'll kind of take through some of the stuff you've been covering yesterday after we taped the administration said that they're going to drop the thug fund, the slush fund after a couple of court rulings against them.
Minor good news, I guess, that the administration is following court rulings now. They had some pushback from Republicans on the Hill. We don't really know, is the immunity part of the deal gone? Is Trump going to go back and try to get another deal? There's some unknowns, but I'm wondering what you make of the pullback on the slush fund.

**Derek Thompson** (2:35)
It's incredibly welcome. I feel complicated about the fact that the justice system, the court system seems to be the one bulwark, so to speak, against Trump's immorality.
It's every time he overreaches.
The Republican Congress doesn't step up. The Republican Senate doesn't step up. Republican commentators, I suppose, object when it's the war in Iran. I've actually been very interested to see how much objection there's been among some of the top podcasters and commentators about the war in Iran, because typically this man has just been allowed to do whatever he wants. But over and over again, it's been the court system that provides any kind of blockage, any kind of limitation, any kind of constraint on someone who is so unlimited and unconstrained in his clear interest in being a dictator and being a king. I mean, there's just no question to me that if that third branch of government didn't exist, that Trump would be slashing the federal workforce more. He'd be cutting programs even more that he thinks are a part of the woke mind virus. He would be creating slush funds of not 1.8, but $10.8 billion, $100 billion for his friends, his thugs and people who he believes have been either heard by the Democratic Party or who he thinks can bend the knee and he can get something out of them. So it's the same story over again. You know, this happened with the tariff policy where Trump was just essentially, and I think what did I call it at one point, like the way they treat the law is as kind of like a control F monarchy function. Like they pull up all of the laws and all of the regulations and they essentially do like a control F function to see like what kind of esoteric law they can use in order to sort of wrest kingly powers themselves. That's what they were doing with the tariff rule. That's what they were doing with this $1.8 billion slush fund. And again and again, when there's constraint, it's constraint that's imposed by the courts. So it's not so much that I think the courts have this like uniform system of moral excellence in American politics. But to date, it is the one, I won't use the V word again, but the one ability we have to stop the president from essentially being a king. So to that extent, yeah, it's welcome news.