This episode was recorded on May twenty first, before Trump picked his running mate jd Vance.
Can I just tell you it's even more cowardly than that, though, because they might tell you that they're scared of violence, and maybe there's a fleeting thought of that, but it's like they really just are scared of criticism, like they don't want to get yelled at in the airport, Like literally, it's more of that. The more acute concern is I don't want to be walking through the airport with my wife and have people be like you're trader, you suck.
I'm John Cipher and I'm Jerry o'she.
I served in the CIA's Clandestine Service for twenty eight years, living undercover all around the.
World, and in my thirty three years with the CIA, I served in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.
Although we don't usually look at it this way, we created conspiracies.
In our operations. We got people to believe things that weren't true.
Now we're investigating the conspiracy theories we see in the news almost every day.
We'll break them down for you to determine whether they could be real or whether we're being manipulated.
Welcome to mission implausible.
I don't think you've ever seen me like this.
I'm super excited to bring on Tim Miller to the show, John and Jerry. I've been telling you how excited I am to talk to Tim, because Tim, you're like this almost non existent thing. You're someone in politics who has somehow maintained I think, many of your core principles, but has actually adjusted to realities on the ground by speaking truth to power. How do we introduce you? I mean, you had a variety of roles in Republican politics. Do you want to give us a quick highlight?
Sure?
I appreciate that very much. I'm doing my best. It definitely strayed for a while, and I'm doing my best
now to be the shepherd. And yeah. So I was a spokesperson for a bunch of Republican presidential campaigns as McCain first in Iowa and then Huntsman and then Romney after he beat us in twenty twelve, and then I was the RNC spokesperson for a while during the Romney campaign, and then I was Jeblish's spokesperson in twenty sixteen, and then after he lost, I was invited to be the spokesperson for a group called Our Principal's Pack, which was
a proto Lincoln project. One of the main differences, though, was every member of that pack except me and one other person, ended up supporting Donald Trump in the general election after we failed, which was pretty strange since the only principle of Our Principal's Pack was that Donald Trump was not acceptable. So that was the beginning of my disillusionment, I think. And yeah, that takes me to now. I'm
out of that game. I'm in the media business. I host the Board podcast and happy to be here with you guys.
Yeah, and the Bullwark, Well, you guys do a lot of conversations that are I think, just vital for this time. It's a weird island of stability. I live in Vermont, where we have weirdly a functional bipartisan legislature with a reasonable Republican governor. And I live in an island. And then I walked the Bulwark, and I pretend every now and then that I live in a world of rational discussion.
The Vermonck governor is like the Bulwark mascot. He's like Scott one left. Yeah, he's the only one left.
Yeah.
Yeah, So we're obviously going to head towards the fact that literally, to have a job as a Republican today, you have to actively profess belief in a conspiracy theory.
That's the anti that's the answer to san poker.
Yeah, why don't we start there? Can you walk us through what is going on in the Republican Party?
Yeah, tell me you guys, maybe Jerry and John, we can offer the psychological analysis of what it is of this dominance play I guess by Donald Trump because I think a lot of it is instinctual with him more
than a strategy. I think to be backed into this just because he was a child, you can't accept that he lost, right, But as he consolidated power following January sixth as all these weak quizzlings like Lindsey Graham and Kevin McCarthy lost their resolve and kind of went down to pay homage to him in order to rationalize another term in twenty twenty four, the big lie that he created because he was a manchild needed to become real because that was the central argument for his candidacy, that
these people stole this from me, that they stole it from you. By extension to the MAGA voters, and now whatever the country's going to shit or whatever the argument is as a result of this theft, and I need to be restored back to power and in order to rectify that great crime. So if you're in the conspiracy, if you're in the world where you believe the conspiracy, like that is the framework, and that was a framework
that gave him total control over the party. It was impossible for Ron Decantis, even had he been a more charismatic candidate, to undermine that core argument. If the voters believed this, that Trump was robbed and everything was great under him, and if it would just be fixed, if we got him back in there, then what was the point of going for a discount Trump? So it was really the central rationale of his decision to run again for president, with I think a subrationalf trying to stat
of jail. Much Now there's no room within the party to run counter to that, and so there are two lovers to this, like one at the candidate lever. The voters are holding the candidates accountable, not Trump, right. Voters want candidates that are totally loyal to Trump, and the best way to demonstrate whether they're loyal is whether or
not that they will state this lie. And then at the staffing level, I think Trump looks back at twenty sixteen and thinks that his main flaw is that he had too many people around them who weren't loyal, and obviously Mike Pence in the end being the prime example, but there have been many examples, and so this time they are, you know, rectifying that I look back in twenty sixteen to twenty and I see a lot of mistakes, but they look back and they see this one mistake,
you know, that they did not have loyal people around them. And so that now is part of the RNC staffing. We've got Lara Trump there, you know, as a co chair making sure that people stand line.
Can you make that explicit? Like if I wanted a job at the rn C today, what would I have to do?
I mean, I haven't gone through the interview process. I don't know for sure, but you know, basically the reports are from people that were, you know, because what happened was so a bunch of people got fired and they're interviewing to be rehired, and during that process, reports which I have no reason to doubt, said that they were asked about their views about the twenty twenty election, and
so is every employee asked about that. I don't know, but the signal is put out right, like there is a there's an environment within the building that's this is not something that you speak out about. There was like an early kind of like an embryonic example of this when Trump was still trying to figure all this out and like how much he could control. The RNC was
in twenty sixteen. This is a lifetime ago. A lot of people might not remember this because it feels like Trump's owned the party for so long now, But in early twenty seventeen, the RNC still was a lot of like my for old friends, right, like literally is like my co workers. So it's people that worked for Mitt
Romney who was not Maga ideologues. And so there were some of them that got fully on board with Trump, and then there are others that just kept their job and said, oh, whatever, I'm an institutionalist, we'll ride out this wave. So one of those people, a friend of mine, was at the committee, and various times Trump would be like, do some lie, like, oh, we had the biggest inauguration effort or whatever, and then reporters would go to the rn C and say do you know the RNC spokesperson,
do you agree with us? And my friend who is over there in the communications department set on calls that they would suggest that, okay, we don't need to weigh in on this one, we don't need to go along with Trump's lies on this one, like let's just stay out of it. And that happened one time, and the people like okay, And then it happened another time He's overruled,
and having another time he was overruled. And then after the third time, he got a phone call from Jared Kushner who was just like, hey, man, do we have problems. I hear that you've been expressing on conference called some concerns about the message here, and like my friend shut up eventually found a new job and was replaced with I don't know, some maga maga, you know, maga bought. But that all takes time, right, Like it takes time for everybody to get churned out, and like the people
who won't go along get turned out. The people who were establishment before, like at least stephonics switch sides, and then the new people coming in or all maga, and so there is like this slow rolling process of vetting to make sure people are on board. And now we're in the final formation of that where the RNC is literally asking people about this, maybe not every higher but enough hires that the word is out that you can't
undermine them. And then at the candidate level, like I said, voters are voting for this, and then on the outside you have the Heritage Foundation that's now preparing for if Trump were to win. They are doing like these massive social media vets, massive deep dives and real social media. And the craziest example that I've heard is somebody who's like, oh, somebody who's liking Tailor Swift posts. Then they threw the person out because it was like, now, okay, that's a
sign that they're too. Is that an old wife? I don't know. That's like word of mouth directionally, that's what's happening. Like they are vetting potential appointees for twenty twenty five and going through their social media history and making sure there's no apostasy against Trump and obviously that they're not undermining the big live about twenty twenty Yeah.
Tip. The impetus for this particular topic was a guy the named of Charlie Speace and our Republican National Committee.
Layd Charlie is my lawyer for a while.
Top Flight Guy was hired in March by the Trump and the Trump team, and just a couple of weeks ago in May he resigned. And according to the Post and sources, and he's not denying it, it was he basically said, I don't want to lie. There's no evidence that Trump won twenty twenty. Show me the evidence and I'll say it, but I'm not gonna lie about it. And essentially he said the Emperor has no clothes and
he was pushed out. And the question I have for you and for everybody else is where does party, loyalty and cultish territory begin. Right, fealty to the great Leader. John and I in our past lives we dealt with a lot of dictators. Kim Chung un now is the great comrade. Every birthday the entire country swears a loyalty oath to him. Where they all lie, right, They all say that he's the greatest leader ever, that North creates the gariest country ever, and they all know it's not true.
But where's your sense of like where this it becomes like really poisonous and concerning into cultish territory.
Yeah, I think we're already deep into the kool aid brother I don't know, yeah, or past the point of no return on where it gets into cultish territory. The Spee's incident is interesting and very telling. Charlie, like I said, was one of Jeb's lawyers. He's one of the two most prominent Republican lawyers. I just want to use this moment to say the most prominent was a guy named Ben Ginsberg, who also did the right thing and now is being a grandfather and quit this bullshit because he
couldn't take it any more. Long time ago, Charlie tried to walk the line and occasionally he would speak out, not much. He wouldn't troll people. It was like when it was assd One Tenant Seapack on a panel. You know, he was on a panel, and he was up there and he's like, I bet you're you guys are gonna boo me. But I just I don't think that. There's just not a lot of evidences happened. He wasn't rebuking them and mocking them or anything. He was just giving
the facts. And he gets any ut bood. But he gets this job. I suspect, and I don't have first hand information about this because they paired him with Christina.
Bob, who is, Oh, she's good.
Yeah, she's an insane person and she's like a lawyer slash TV person. It's like a crazy version of Andrew Weisman. And so she gets hired and they're like, Okay, we also need a real lawyer for to hire this person. So I think that they thought that they were getting the best of the both worlds here a little bit, like Charlie can do the real lawyer ring, she can be the front woman for all the MAGA stuff. We'll
get a little bit of both. And it's telling that, like it didn't take very long for like the credible person to be the one that got flushed out. In a healthy culture, it would have been Christina got flushed out, right, But that's not how it works in an environment like
the culti environment that Trump has intentionally cultivated. And also just I should have mentioned spies didn't even publicly say anything, right, Like it's again, it would have been one thing if it was like Spees was on t Fox and he gets blindsided by a question and he speaks some wrong speak about the fake election. Lie right, and they're like, all right, buddy, you're out. That's how what happened. It was private. It was like they felt like they couldn't
trut him because of private comments. That's even more chilling to me.
And according to the Post, it was they went back to comments that he'd made years ago. They were basically telling, you need to rebuke those comments, you need to walk those back.
Let's take a break, we'll be right back.
And rebec.
Now, Tim, when you were a staffer, I mean, you know, there been changes of the guard.
I remember when George W. Bush came in.
There's a bit of tension with his dad's old cronies. The Romney crue wasn't exactly the same as the W crew. And you know the Dancy has had the same thing. The Hillary and Obama people had to learn to get along. And so how did that work when you were in that world? Like I'm assuming if you're an old George W. Person, you can't start saying Romney sucks.
It's an important point. There's a certain amount of tention to Korum de Deli. So for example, I was neither because I was coming in when this was happening. But you know, at the RNC there was an old gard when Romney won the nomination in twenty twelve, it was a lot of old Bush people and then you know some just kind of establishment Republicans that have been in the building forever, and there's always a little bit of tension.
The RNC chairman at the times Ryan's threevious, right, like thinks that he should get to do what he wants and book himself for what he wants. And now it's kind of like, well, we got to make sure that we're not out of line with what the nominee says. So you have to take a little bit more of a back seat, set your ego at the door a little bit to be like, all of that is just like healthy management of relationships that you have any time that,
like two groups are merged together. If there's a new boss that comes to town, sometimes you got to change, you know, the what processes because this boss likes to do it like that. That's to me, that's a pretty standard in a category difference from what we're talking about.
John, Can you think of any countries that you maybe spent some time in where a similar cult of loyalty was forced upon a nation.
I just think Russian speak. I don't know.
Yeah, it feels almost more Third world to me than I don't know, I don't know what you know.
How I see you brought it up when you first talked about it, that a lot of this is Donald Trump's personality, and to me, this is really just gangster behavior. You got to make sure the people around you are complicit, that they've committed crimes too, so you have them by the ball and the old saying. Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. Once you're in the conspiracy and you've lied for him, then you're
at his beck and call. We see this now with the vice president, people who are trying to line up to get the vice president position. What do you think the twenty twenty four vice president litmus test or loyalty tests going to be? Is it visiting the trial and smearing the judge? Yeah, big lies and undermining the justice system.
What do you think?
It's just like Pence hangs over it so much, this idea that oh if only Mike Pence had done the right thing, and Pence wasn't a Trump guy like that was a straight deal with the devil. Two ways. It was a transaction. You're going to give me your little kind of religious fairy dust here and bring the evangelicals on board, and I'm going to give you a spot than the National Party, where Pens haveve lost a lot of altitude. His political career was kind of trying to
go down. This is a different animal than that. Like Trump doesn't need to cut a deal with the evangelicals. Trump thinks he's winning. So when you think about his psyche here, it's not oh, I need to bring on somebody because they can help me with hispanics or something. He wants to bring on somebody that he knows is going to go down with the ship with him. And to me, that explains the cartoonish, absurd little apprentice vice president that we've seen on cable news the last few weeks.
These guys, it's almost like the more they embarrass themselves in defense of him, the more that's evidence that they'll be able to be trusted. That's like the interesting psychological kind of question here is does he feel like just saying it, saying the lie is enough.
He heeds a true believer, or does he need a truth, we said in Russia to Jo Palese.
Yeah, not just a what's a show Palese an ask licker.
Oh that's what you call me.
And there are plenty of those, Yeah, there are plenty of those, the bad kind. You know, nothing wrong with nothing wrong with that, but uh, plenty of the bad kind out there.
We're talking here about the RNC and litmus tests are loyalty tests. When John and I were in the Agency, when we our very first day, we took a loyalty oath, and that loyalty oath was to the Constitution and to the ideals within that Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. If and when Trump comes to power, he's talking about things like I want to be a dictator. On the first day, he's talking about mass firings of civil servants.
It's all about personal loyalty. And he's several times, according to media, he's intimated and said before that he's going to bring in the Insurrection Act on the very first day, the Interaction Act from eighteen oh seven. There's no court oversight of this. He can just do it. And so you know, all terrible conversations go back to Nazi Germany, but I studied in Germany, right, and this is a
history major. Hitler famously was elected, right, he was elected chancellor, but Hindenburg was the president, and Hindenburg was going to make sure he didn't do anything crazy. The day Hindenburg died to August nineteen thirty four, I think it was that very same day, Hitler demanded and got the German army to swear an oath of loyalty to him, not to the people or the fatherland, which is what it had always been up until that. And a year later
he made all civil servants swear loyalty to him. Right, So we're talking about a guy so far in the RNC who's talking about intense loyalty to him. We're talking about a guy saying he can launch the insurrection at misfiring of civil servants weren't sufficiently loyal and issues with the military, which he's already had.
There some things that we know, right, and I'm interested in your personality assessment using your guys expertise, because there's some things we know. If he gets back in there, we know that it's little Himmler Stephen Miller will try to do a very draconian immigration regime, and life's going to be very bad for undocumented immigrants in the country. Whether there's really camps, or whether there's really a wall,
whether there's really buses, or whether it's child separation. Exactly what it looks like, I don't know, but it's going to be really bad that we know, and that will have some fascist echoes for sure. We will know that he will completely take over the Justice Department to make sure that he's not held accountable for any crimes. And we know that they'll help harden people that do crimes on his behalf. And that's pretty dark. Those are all three, like really dark bad things that we know are going
to happen no matter what. Okay, getting to the nightmare scenario is now we get into stuff that's okay. Does he want to go further than that or does he want to just ride on Air Force one and make sure that he's never going to jail again golf or does he want to like have an American whatever Mussolini and I just I don't know. On the one hand,
it doesn't matter at least for our election purposes. I always say to people, like, if you think that the latter is a two percent chance that's still way too high. We haven't had anybody that was a two percent chance in any of our lifetimes. Even if you just think it's a two percent chance, that's way too high, I
just done it. Part of me kind of thinks that, like, he's lazy and he just wants to stay out of trouble, and there'll be some dark shit that happens, and like in the end, if he feels like he's protected from JL hell golf. But I'm certainly not fucking confident about that. I definitely think that there's a nightmare scenario that is way darker than that. And I think that just the baseline scenario that I brought up at the top would have been unthinkable ten years ago.
Is the Republican Party dead? Is the old Republican Party dead? Is there any life left? Like in the States, And the reason I asked, I'll just read an article and washing him post today about a real local political build in Idaho between the extremist micro Republicans and those Republicans that are hoping to save whatever is left of the traditional conservative Republican Party.
The things are ugly in Idaho. The Republican is not going back in the way of we were talking to Greener about how great John McCain was. John McCain's not walking through that door like John McCain and eight ran on believing in climate change. We should do stuff about it.
Immigrants should be welcome. I like, whatever you didn't like about his views on various conservative matters, if you're a liberal listener, like you know, he was a mainstream center, classically liberal, center right Republican, like that person is not
coming back. The best hope I have is that, like if Trump just went away, I feel like the party would morph into kind of like a JD Vanceism, and maybe JD would not feel quite as much pressure to do the as much conspiratorial shit without Donald Trump hanging over his head, and then it ends up looking more like a European conservative party, like a blood and soil populist. I think that there are a lot of these the old Republican types who are just voted at the voter level,
not at the cannon level. The voter who are just like, okay, as long as the Democrats are putting up Josh Shapiro's and Question Whimer's, that's fine with me. Like it's maybe not, maybe we don't agree on everything, but like that's fine. So some people do that. I think some become true swing voters. An analogy I often uses the Perro voter. The pro voter like didn't have a major party candidate. They Buchanan in the Republican primary for little while, then
they voted for Parrot for little while. Then they had nobody for a while, and then they had Trump. I think that like the old school Republicans are just got at for a while, like that, they maybe have a candidate that they like in one party in one stayed one primary, but they're more they turn more into the swing voters. And that's one option. And then I think that some of them are just their identity is so attached into being a Republican that they morphed into this
uglier thing. That's the sad part. I think you definitely get some of those. So I think it ends up dividing up. And so when people are like, oh, it'll the party will break up and then something new will come, I don't know if that's quite right. I think that it'll end up just dispersing between the three options.
A court mystery for me is why people want their jobs so much senators and congressman. I don't even get that. It doesn't seem like that great a job. I've had some pretty great jobs, none of them would I have lied for or.
But being an R and C staffer is it that awesome? Does it pay a fortune?
Like?
That's the part I don't get. Don't people look at like Paul Ryan and others and know like you just end up back home, like trying not to look at your kids in the eyes because what you've become.
I've had a lot of these conversations at the staff level. I have to just say I am with you on the candidate level, like I do not understand Marco Rubio's calculus. So you want to be Donald Trump's secretary of state and see you can fucking flame out and who knows have to be there justifying why we aren't doing anything as Putin invades Georgia. I do. I've talked a lot of the staffers though, so I do feel like I get it, and I think that there are a couple
of categories. Number One, at the scariest part about all this is that the youngest staffers want this. They're the craziest. That is, if you're twenty five, Like, you don't really even remember Mitt Romney. You know, if you're twenty five, you were thirteen during the Mitt Romney Obama campaign. You've chosen to be in Republican politics because you're into the Trump shit. You're kind of like into the fascy stuff at some level. So the youngest staffers are they're doing
it because they're into it. That's the scariest part. The oldest types that like rationalize all of it. It's like anything else in life. Man, how many conferences have I had with people like my kids are in high school, I got three college tuitions coming up I gotta pay for. I'm just trying to keep my head down, keep doing this job. The middle ground folks, I think are the toughest because they need to have the courage to say, no, I'm going to go away from this. I'm going to
start another career and it's going to be fine. And I'm thirty and I got plenty of time. But some of them are like, ooh, that seems scary. Oh it's better just to go along to get along. Maybe this ll end sometime. And there's another category I guess of people that they're getting awesome jobs because they wouldn't have had them.
Before, right, because people like you left competitive.
Man, I have young Democrats to come out to me. They're like, man, I want to work for Abgail Spanberger or a lista slock In or like one of these less more like one of these up andcoming people. But there are a million young Democrats who are smart and talented, went to great schools that want these jobs. It's very competitive.
So we need, like Sean Panner, someone to take over our party.
Yeah, exactly, if you want to go work for you know, fucking Lara Trump, the line is short, and so you can go get a job that you never would have had for Mitt Romney or George Bush. And that kind of ambition side of it also drives a bunch of us.
All right, we're gonna get right back into that, but first let's hear this all right, back to the show. So in Iraq, I had the experience of talking to former Bathists and there was like the real interesting Saddam Bathists like that, like basically his relatives, and they were just obviously all in. There's down at the bottom. There's just if you went to college, you had to be a Bathist. If you wanted to teach kindergarten, you had
to be a bathist. They didn't really count, but there was like that third and fourth level where there were like managing directors of some factory, or like an associate dean of Baghdad University or something. I felt, this is a feeling that looking in their eyes, these were hollow They're mostly men, These were hollow men, and that I felt I saw a pain and a kind of something pathetic in them. And I mean that in the technical sense of the word that I don't feel like I see that much in.
The United States.
These were people who had compromised at a deep level and knew it, and now the bill had come due. You've worked with regime stooges.
All over the world.
I think I could argue you both were regime sto officers. Am I picking up on something you've seen like around the Kremlin or old Afghan folks or in Africa?
The average person is sort of a coward and go along to get along and just find the path of least resistance. I think what we're seeing now and I would guess and I'd be just going to hear timsats on this is I think some of these politicians are now afraid of the voters. They're afraid of the violence. Yeah, they want to suck up to Donald Trump because they're ambitious, but they also are afraid of saying the wrong thing because the nut jobs is going to be coming after
them and their families forever. And so in this that sense, the cowardly thing to do is just lie and get along.
And can I just tell you it's even more cowardly than that, though, because they might tell you that they're scared of violence, and maybe there's a fleeting thought of that, but it's like they really just are scared of criticism, Like they don't want to get yelled at in the airport, like literally, it's more that, like the more acute concern is I don't want to be walking through the airport with my wife and have people being like you're a trader, you suck. I just don't have a lot of sympathy
for the violence side of it. I think that's a real potential threat out there. But really, is Ron Johnson really acutely scared that someone's going to come to his house? I don't know, more scared than a poll worker who lets to go to sit at the polls all day or somebody like anyway, I don't know.
So for Saddam's guys or people like that Mcgabi's guys or North Koreans, it's partially that. Yeah, I think they're genuinely afraid that if they speak out, that'll be the end of them and the end of their family. So for guys like in Saddam or Mugabi's guys, they're genuinely afraid for themselves if they step out a line, physically afraid, but also afraid for their families. But the regime doesn't just frighten them, it also gives them something. So Saddam
they had the big lie. The big lie was that Sunnis are the majority, right, and they demonstrably weren't. They're only like twenty five percent of the population. But the Saddam claimed they were the majority, and therefore they had to stay in power. And the other thing is he gave them was a sense of nationalism, like we're the greatest, right, Adam. You've seen a lot of the Saddam's propaganda, you know,
we're the chosen ones, Bagdad. And the time of the glories of the Arab civilization when we look at parts of the US today, it's like they're also giving that sense of we're the best, we're the majority, and that's also demonstrably not true. Ye.
By the way, you talked about the Sunni Saddam loyalists. The guy who ran my house when I was in Iraq was from a Shia Saddam loyalist family too. Yeah, And I was looking for a security guard and he said, oh, get my uncle, he's great. And his uncle came up and we found out that his uncle moved from Nadjeff to Baghdad because he was being hunted by Shia death squads because he was a Saddam loyalist Shia.
So I was like, oh, that's a great security guard. Yeah.
Yeah. Can I just say nobody in Congress is worried about the Shia death squads right from exactly, I'm like a little bit less sympathetic. I get in trouble sometimes on panels like on this, but I'm just like, I just don't sympathize for this. With that, I think that there are a lot of people that are in greater threat.
The right wing off and talks about cancel culture and a mob and this and that, but we've seen. If you don't play along, if you don't mimic the lie, Liz Cheney loses your job, Adam Kinzinger's and Chris Christie's, the Mitt Romney's and Will Hurds. Yes, if we're going to talk colarities, and that's not the biggest deal in the world, but you do get kicked.
Out, the whole thing is just inverted. It's all Orwellian. It's like the best thing that can happen to you in Republican politics is to get canceled for saying something offensive.
Right.
Then they'll be like, oh, welle is me The left is coming for me? Like the last person to get actually canceled in Republican world for saying something far right with Steve King a long time ago. So yeah, I mean that all is just a farce.
If I was an intelligence officer for another country, this is such ripe hunting grounds. You have some huge number of people in what may be the ruling party who feel a sense of shame, who feel they're being forced into weird positions like how would you look at this if you or a spy for one of our adversaries.
That's how we spent spying during the Cold Wars, you're looking for those people who know that they're lying, and they're ashamed or embarrassed by it, and it has affected them or their family or their career in some way. You get a long and you can go fine for a long time, lying and supporting the regime, but at some point you realize the regime is corrupt and they don't really care about you, And so they thought that being the smartest and they if they followed the rules,
they would succeed in their family succeed. At some point in that career you realize the whole things are farce and it's all corrupt and it doesn't work. And those are the people you're looking for, the ones that finally broke and are willing to admit, at least to a foreigner who can keep it secret, that they don't buy it anymore. And those are the people who become our spies. Yeah, but I don't know if these politics and it cares
what our politicians think about things. They don't have the secrets. It hasn't infected. I don't think the institutions terribly yet. But if Trump wins and if the loyalty tests worked way down through the FBI and the CIA, in the State Department, all this kind of place Justice Department. There's going to be people there who have those kind of feelings that foreigners will be looking for.
If two grooms show up for this wedding on January twentieth, right, if Trump says he wins and Biden says he wins, regardless of who Biden wins and Trump says, no, no, I didn't, You're going to have divided loyalties once you no longer agree on the peaceful transfer of power and legitimacy. Now you've got a problem with military officers and security services. Right, are you serving the correct president? And so you know
that is vulnerability. I think that Russians and others would take regardless of who eventually wins, Right, I mean, if Trump says he won, and he shows up to be you know, tries to shove Biden out of the way to get his hand on the Bible to swear in, there are going to be people who are saying, no, he's right, And I think that the Russians are going to go after those folks.
How many Michael Flynn's do you think we got in the military right now? The Michael Flynn thing was extremely alarming. He was a national security advisor to Obama and to go full red pill and now, I mean he like fully believes all of the conspiracies about the elections in Russia and Ukraine and the corrupt Ukrainians and Biden, everything,
you name it. When you talk about that nightmare scenario, that's the worrying thing, Like, how many of these guys in those positions either believe this or willing to pretend they believe it because they have resentments about liberals or something. I don't know.
That's a serious concerns, but in the military and positions of power like that tremendous concern I mean, I know Mike Flynn, I know fairly well. He's sort of the Peter principle at work. People have forgotten what that is. You know, you rise to your level of incompetence. And so he got promoted to a point where he was a complete failure as the director of DIA. He got fired. But then his ego or whatever couldn't handle the fact that he was pushed out and had to come up
with alternative reasons. Oh, it was because Obama didn't like me, because I was going after terrorists or something. He made up a lie that he needed for his own ego to believe. And of course then when he gets fired again from the Trump anddministration, he's got to double down. And at the same time he's looking to make as much money as he possibly can. In fact, he was working for a while for a crystal group where I was for a while, and he was doing everything he
could to make money. So he's working for Russians in Egypt that were doing nuclear power, and he was he went to Moscow to do things, and the Turk was the Turks, yeah, I mean, and so all of those things come about.
The only thing he was going to do for the Turks was kidnapped an American CITI and non American soil.
But yeah, not just the military, but I think there's real concern talking to colleagues who are out now, to be very clear, not nobody on the inside, but among formers, there's real concern that CIA and FBI and DOJ could be weaponized. We've always pushed back on that. We've always been a political, nonpartisan, served Democrat Republican administrations as best we could, but we've always taken a pride in trying
to push back now always successfully. What differentiation us from like Russians and North Koreans is their security services are there to protect the regis and ours isn't. Ours is there to protect the constitution, and we're not there to protect any particular president. Especially with the FBI, that could that could change if you had the wrong.
People in there.
I did a lot of reporting of the Trump organization because at the New Yorker my job was covering Trump's business side. I talked to a lot of people who had worked there for many years. Most of them thought he was kind of an idiot. And I think it's not much of an organization. It's more a platform for people to run their own scams and deals. But way one lawyer explained it to me is when you're hired, he gives you a little test and he asks you
to do something an ethical or maybe illegal. Yeah, and then he but the guy said, if you don't do it, they still need lawyers to like write contracts and just do the business of a business. And so you he wouldn't fire you. You were allowed to stick around. And then he had his little cronies, Weiselberg and Cohen and whatever, and you knew who the inside guys were, but you thought they were jokes and lame.
With regards to that. He didn't like to fire people.
He is a coversal column. Yeah, yeah, there's a story.
And the story is your boss comes to you and he gives you a package and says, this package has to be to that factory in one hour. And you're like, yeah, that factory is seventy miles away and the speed them it's fifty five. And he says, I need you to get that package there in one hour. So so you're telling me that if I break the law, I get caught, you'll back me, and you know, and he just looks at you and he says, yeah, never mind, I'll find somebody else.
So excited for the moral of the story here, do you do it or not?
But the other part of the moral story is he's going to find somebody else to do it, and that guy may get the promotion and you may not.
Tim This has been bleak, joyful conversation.
I do like that you left the possibility that it's only going to mean the deep destruction of two or three major American institutions.
Yeah, all right, so you left us on an optimistic.
Yeah there you go. Yeah, I tried it to be full resistance Peorn. Maybe he'll just take over the Department of Justice and be a soft autocrat and be mean to migrants, and then he can be replaced.
We hope that the incompetence takes over.
There's a lot of incompetence, but.
That's upon me all the true believers. Now that's what we need to be incompetent. If they bring in true believers who are good at what they do, it can cause a tremendous damage. But if he brings in the true boobs that you can't do anything anyway, then think they'll survive it.
Tim, thank you so much.
Thank you, guys, Real Pleasure.
Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O'shay, John Cipher, and Jonathan Sterner. The associate producer is Rachel Harner. Mission Implausible. It is a production of Honorable Mention and Abominable Pictures for iHeart Podcasts.