Podbit · The Bulwark Podcast
Trump visited the Teddy Roosevelt Presidential Library and spoke to an AI hologram of Roosevelt. The contrast was devastating: Roosevelt fought Gilded Age billionaires, created national parks, and championed immigrants. Trump enables oligarchs, guts environmental protections, and deports immigrants. Susan Glasser calls them near-polar opposites.
Where this was said
At 14:40 · chapter starts 10:30
Building on the corruption discussion, Tim Miller notes that the Supreme Court's rulings this week — also discussed in a prior episode with David French — removed the last of the post-Watergate restrictions on unlimited unaccountable cash flowing to parties and candidates [1] — Susan Glasser "Post-Watergate campaign finance laws effectively gutted: The Supreme Court this week eliminated the last meaningful restrictions on unlimit…" 10:24 . Susan Glasser extends the analysis: the court has also gutted the independent agencies that predate Watergate and trace back to the New Deal. She describes the court as a 'far-right radical court' rather than a conservative one, and notes that where Trump and the justices' ideologies align, he has been upheld; where they diverge, he has been narrowly checked. Both Miller and Glasser grapple with the demoralizing implications for the pro-democracy movement: rules keep getting broken, which radicalizes some toward abandoning the rule-based approach entirely. Tim Miller also flags Kash Patel's failure to disclose a six-figure Bitcoin stock purchase tied to a DOJ-contracted company as another corruption data point in a week already saturated with them.
Susan Glasser argued Democrats failed to restore democratic guardrails even when they controlled the Senate and House at the start of Biden's presidency, suggesting rhetoric outpaced action.
FBI Director Kash Patel failed to properly disclose a six-figure purchase of stock in a Bitcoin-fueled business intelligence company that holds contracts with the Department of Justice.
Factories that replaced coal engines with electric ones in the early 1900s got only 6% efficiency gains. Those that redesigned their entire factory around electricity got a 3x productivity improvement. Swapping AI tools into your existing structure will give you 6%. Rebuilding around AI will give you 10x.
Lebanese terrorists backed by Iran were holding American hostages throughout the Reagan presidency. Reagan had loudly campaigned against negotiating with terrorists — putting him in an impossible position that his team quietly decided to ignore.
During the Iran-Iraq War, the US openly supplied Iraq with weapons, training, and intelligence. At the same time, Oliver North was secretly funneling missiles to Iran. The US was playing both sides of a shooting war.
Oliver North traveled to Iran under the alias 'William P. Goode' with a fake passport. CIA Director William Casey allegedly gave him cyanide pills so he could kill himself rather than be tortured if captured. He returned safely and the deal moved forward.
The Pentagon sold missiles to the CIA for $3,700 each. The CIA sold them to Richard Secord at cost. Secord sold them to Iranian middleman Ghorbanifar for $10,000 each. Ghorbanifar charged Iran even more. The profit — including $3 million in interest in one Swiss account — was diverted directly to fund the Nicaraguan Contras.
America secretly transferred 2,000 missiles and missile parts to Iran in 8 shipments over more than a year. Only 3 of 7 hostages were released. Three more were taken. The net result was zero freed hostages and a full-blown constitutional scandal.
On October 5, 1986, a CIA Contra supply plane flew a weapons drop at 2,500 feet in broad daylight. A Sandinista soldier shot it down. The only survivor, Eugene Hasenfuss, had borrowed a parachute from his skydiving brother. He was captured, paraded in front of cameras, and told the Sandinistas everything he knew.
The CIA supply operation used a front company called Southern Air Transport, widely known to be a CIA cover. Crew members of the downed plane carried their Southern Air Transport employee IDs in their wallets. One also had a business card directly linking him to Oliver North's office in Washington.
When the scandal broke, Oliver North and his secretary Fawn Hall conducted what became known as a 'shredding party,' destroying a day's worth of documents. The full truth of Iran-Contra may never be known because of what was fed through that shredder.
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