Michael Weiss: The Vice President Is Looking Pretty Stupid

**Tim Miller** (0:13)
Hello, and welcome to The Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. We got a double header for you today in segment two.
Maybe the dreamiest congressional candidate will be joining us, so stick around for that, particularly if you're on the video podcast. But first, slightly less dreamy, but charming in his own way. He's on Substack at the Foreign Office. He's the author of ISIS, Inside the Army of Terror. He's an editor at The Insider, a Russia-focused independent media outlet. It's Michael Weiss. How are you doing, handsome?

**Michael Weiss** (0:43)
Slightly less dreamy, Michael Weiss. That's got to go on a business card.

**Tim Miller** (0:47)
Slightly less dreamy. I mean, have you seen Sam Forstag?
My stars.

**Michael Weiss** (0:53)
No.

**Tim Miller** (0:54)
He's running in Montana.

**Michael Weiss** (0:55)
Oh my goodness. Okay.

**Tim Miller** (0:57)
It's more for your wife anyway.

**Michael Weiss** (0:59)
How many Chalamets does he get in the Tim Miller scale of dreaminess?

**Tim Miller** (1:03)
Yeah, well, not. He's not even on the Chalamet scale. He's not even on the, he doesn't even make the cut. That's not my.

**Michael Weiss** (1:10)
Not your cup of tea.

**Tim Miller** (1:11)
Yeah, not my model. Exactly. But just objectively speaking, this is a man, like Chalamet is a wee lad.

**Michael Weiss** (1:21)
My wife was walking behind him in Central Park. Oh, god, jealous. His legs, she said, are basically the size of toothpicks.

**Tim Miller** (1:30)
All right, Michael, don't get me excited this early in the morning.

**Michael Weiss** (1:32)
What did they say? The camera adds like 100 points of testosterone. Yeah, I mean.

**Tim Miller** (1:40)
Okay. I'm getting Verklempt.

**Michael Weiss** (1:42)
Speaking of testosterone.

**Tim Miller** (1:44)
Hot and bothered yesterday, lack of testosterone. Trump has got what you set up the substack. Looks like the deal that is emerging, the MOU, is quite some more even worse than something that Trump called the worst and dumbest deals ever made being the JCPOA.
Why don't you just talk about what you know at this point? We haven't actually seen the text of the deal, which I was telling in its own right. The White House put out a Talking Points paper. I really enjoyed the first sentence of the Talking Points, which is, this is great for the American people who are concerned about being nuked by the Iranians.

**Michael Weiss** (2:22)
This is great for the American family, actually.

**Tim Miller** (2:25)
Family, yeah. If you're a family in St. Charles, Missouri and you were worried that the Iranians might put a nuclear warhead onto a ballistic missile and fire it at your farmstead, then you can just sleep easy tonight. That's point one.

**Michael Weiss** (2:41)
It says they're going to feel relief at the pump and at the grocery store. I'm not sure why the grocery store factors into Iran and the settlement of the war.
We don't know a heck of a whole lot because, as you say, the US has refused to release the MOU. JD Vance has described it as about a page and a half. Let's just back up a second and underscore, this thing is not a peace agreement. This isn't any treaty or some lasting term sheet. This is basically an agreement to extend the ceasefire for another 60 days and to spend another 60 days trying to get to something more substantive and permanent, including on the nuclear issue and including on presumably war in Lebanon, a whole sort of basket of interrelated things. What do we know about this thing based on what JD Vance and Jared Kushner told reporters on a background call yesterday? I wasn't on the call, so I'm not bound by any background covenant here. I just had a transcript of it leaked and I could just tell you what JD and Jared said.

**Tim Miller** (3:49)
Now, it's interesting that Jared was on the call.

**Michael Weiss** (3:51)
Yeah.

**Tim Miller** (3:52)
Does he have a job? What is his job exactly?

**Michael Weiss** (3:55)
He's plenty potentiary of the president for multiple portfolios. He's doing Ukraine stuff.
He's doing leverage buyouts with the Saudis. He's up to his eyeballs in geopolitical diplomacy and it sounds like big business. That's probably one of the reasons why he's selling this thing.

**Tim Miller** (4:17)
I think that's a news story that somebody that doesn't work for the government who doesn't have a security clearance is briefing the press on background without their name attached. Not only that, but- It feels like that's actually a bigger news story than this bullshit spin that he's offering on background. That's just one guy's opinion.

**Michael Weiss** (4:31)