Michael Weiss: The Clown Car at the Pentagon

**Tim Miller** (0:12)
Hello, and welcome to The Bulwark Daily. I'm your host, Tim Miller. We've got a double header for you today. In segment two, I've noticed a little bit of a gap in the political commentary at Marketplace. The Democratic consultants that get called to go on TV and talk about politics are people from the Clinton Bush Obama era. We love them all. A lot of experience, a lot of judgment comes from successful presidential campaigns. But I'm getting a little long in the tooth. A lot of things are changing in politics these days. Then the younger people who talk about democratic politics are mostly like 23-year-old Instagram influencers. We honor Instagram influencing.
That's a noble profession. That's a noble pursuit.
It isn't a lot of experience in the field. Between now and the midterms, once a week I'm going to bring somebody on who's actually doing campaigns in the Trump era on the democratic side and chat with them.
We're bringing on my old friend, Rodericka Applewhait in segment two. She's unbelievable. Please stick around for that. But first, I've got an exciting announcement. He's an old friend. He writes at foreign office on Substack. But I'm pumped to reveal to you right now that he's the co-host of a new Bulwark podcast, Reporter and the Spy, with Mark Polymeropoulos, which is going to be launching soon. It's Michael Weiss. We're officially colleagues and buddies and life partners now.

**Michael Weiss** (1:36)
Common law marriage has been sanctified. That makes Mark my side piece, which is I think what his wife already calls me.

**Tim Miller** (1:44)
That sounds right. The great news is now that you're officially in the fold, we'll have the budget to get a high-quality blackout blanket for the birds.

**Michael Weiss** (1:53)
The birds are covered in a blanket. My daughter decided these are her pets, but they're moving into our bedroom.
I now have dog, fish, and birds surrounding me at all times. In the house. In the house. Okay.

**Tim Miller** (2:07)
We might have to get you in office. We'll see how well the podcast does in the ratings.

**Michael Weiss** (2:10)
I'm getting highfalutin already. Okay, cool.

**Tim Miller** (2:12)
Do you want to give people, if we'll get to the news, what's the pitch? What's the elevator pitch?

**Michael Weiss** (2:17)
The podcast? Yeah. So basically, Mark and I have been friends and he's been a source for my reporting for a long time.
We talk all the time about the state of the world, national security, spy stuff, war, and I thought it would be fun to click record on some of these conversations just because he brings a perspective that's obviously different from my own, but parallel to my own. I mean, doing the work of journalism, I liken it to being a case officer, right? You get to know people, you cultivate them, you get them to tell you things that they otherwise might not want to say, and you advance an agenda.
In my case, what's in the public interest? In his case, national security and the great state of America, and making it great again or keeping it great. I don't even know what stage we're in now. But anyway, yeah, it's a fun one. The way I see it is akin to, there was a great conversation between John Le Carre and Ben McIntyre in The New York Times at the height of the Trump-Russia saga. I thought it was the best thing I'd read about it. I'm like, that's what I want to do, right? A historian, reporter, talking to a practitioner. And it's sort of like talking shop, but as I say, from slightly different perspectives.

**Tim Miller** (3:30)
I love it. All right. It's going to have its own feed soon. I'll make sure to announce that for everybody so they can subscribe to it. In the meantime, there's going to be some rogue YouTube episodes. But it will be up this fall. I'm pumped. All right. To the news.
Dan Driscoll, Army Secretary, has resigned. This is interesting for a couple of reasons. I'm not usually covering random, what would it be, HR moves inside the military on this podcast. But this is relevant for a lot of political reasons. He's been a foil of Hegseth for a while. He's an old friend of JD Vance.
He's been at the center of a lot of the turmoil behind the scenes in the White House. According to The Atlantic, when he went to inform Trump that he was leaving, Trump was surprised to hear how many generals and other top officers had been fired, pushed out or passed over for promotion under Hegseth. Not surprising, he's pretty focused on the marble and the new ballroom, not on this sort of material. The Army now has no secretary, no deputy undersecretary, no chief of staff, no senate confirmed top general, no confirmed army general in charge of operations, or confirmed commander of army troops in Europe.