Republicans Have No Response To No Kings Protest

Hey everybody, Tim over the bulwark here. It is a Sunday early afternoon as we are taping this, uh, we are coming down off the no Kings hangover. Uh, I woke up this morning, uh, to look through the news and there's a lot of insanity and madness out there coming out of the white house. And so I thought I would do just a little Sunday potpourri with you guys,

uh, going through a few, uh few things that are out there since we last talked before the rallies. I guess I want to format this around what is happening on Trump's social media feed because there's something different about this president. Well, many, many, many, many things are different about this president. But one of those is that we get to understand

his internal monologue at all times. There's no like New York Times has to talk to a friend of the president, to the chief of staff who speaks on background, who can provide some context on the president's thinking, and maybe that's true or not, or maybe that's spin, that's how things used to work.

With this president, he just bleats what his thinking is at any given time. And his bleats this morning were pretty revealing on a couple of factors. The first and most important is the status of the Iran war. So I want to highlight a couple of people that he referenced on his social media feed, Mark Levin and Mark Thiessen, two Marks. Mark Thiessen is marked with C. Levin was interviewing Thiessen about a column

that he had written in the Washington Post about how Trump is not losing his nerve in Iran. And Trump also bleated the column about how he's not losing his nerve in Iran. So in case you had any doubt about his nerve, he's not losing it.

Mark Thiessen wrote about that and Donald Trump is bleeding that article. So let's look at the column to get a sense into Trump's perspective. Why did he think this was so insightful? It begins with a Rudyard Kipling quote, if you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you, if you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, if you can wait and not be men doubt you, if you can wait and

not be tired by waiting, yours is the earth and everything that's in it." So that's how Thiessen grandiloquently starts his column. The interesting, the one little passage that he included there that's interesting is the if you can wait and not be tired by waiting. There's some other reporting going up around over the weekend that Trump is getting bored by the war in Iran.

And so to me, this was Thiessen kind of sending a message to Trump, treating him like a child, being like, no, patience is a virtue, sir. If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, you will get a reward. You'll get a toy at the end. And that strategy seems to have worked because Trump read the article and was like, yes, I am a great man. Mark Thiessen, thank you. The article, the column

goes on to say, I know from well-placed sources. Now here we are including the well-placed sources, but given that Trump has bleated the article, given that Trump bleated an interview about the article, I think it's safe to say that Trump is a well-placed source. I know from well-placed sources that Trump has never been more determined to see this military campaign through to completion.

So that's the first little nugget here for kind of trying to read the tea leaves. What is Trump doing? What is he planning? He's posting this article that he's not losing his nerve. Also over the weekend, 2,500 Marines arrived in the Middle East.

So we know that is happening. We know additional troops have been deployed. It's more than 2,500 if you include the other, you know, Army, Navy, Air Force, etc. The other thing that he posted was the Mark Levin show. He was telling his fans on Truth Social, the various Russians and elderly and infirm who are stuck on his website of horrors,

he's telling them to watch Mark Levin tonight, Life, Liberty and Levin, watch that show. And it's not a show I usually tune into, but I felt like if the president thinks we should watch it I guess we should probably watch to see what he's thinking on the war and I want to play for you it's a bit long it's about a minute and a half so if you can't stand Mark Levin's voice

Mark Levin's whining voice, micro Mark's whining voice, if you can't tolerate that, you can just press the fast forward 30 button three times and then I'll be back on the other side and explain to you what you had

missed.

Troops on the ground. He said no troops on the ground. I don't remember that in any campaign speech either. But why would we need troops on the ground? Well, there's a lot of reasons and we wouldn't need 300,000 of them. It's this uranium too.

We've got to get the uranium. If it cannot be destroyed, if it cannot be altered, we got to get it. For the reason I just said, you can make dirty bombs, and over time you can still make sophisticated missiles. So you need to get to the uranium.

That's why I'm reading in the paper, we're talking about the 82nd Airborne, we're talking about these very special forces and the various military services and so forth. He's not talking about sending regular army and infantry

in by the hundreds of thousands. The men he's talking about, the units he's talking about, they are specialized. And you know what else? I remember from my days in the Reagan administration, many of them are trained for a moment like this to try and secure enriched uranium. Many have been trained for moments like this. I guess what I'm trying to say is we're in good hands.

No not with Allstate, but with President Trump because he's a man with enormous intelligence,

enormous common sense. So they're screeching Mark talking about why we are going to send boots into Iran, why we're going to send ground troops into Iran, and we're going to do so to steal the uranium. It's like, this is like a national treasure, Nicolas Cage style mission that Mark Levin is pushing on American troops, pushing on Donald Trump, who is obviously watching the show. Trump desperate for anybody to tell him he's doing a good job. He's looked all around the country. The only two people he can

find are the Marx, Mark Levin and Mark Thiessen, who have been clamoring for war with Iran for decades now. You could hear there in that interview, Mark Levin's very up to speed on the latest on the strategies and tactics as he was saying that he knows from his time in the Reagan administration that the Marines are ready for a mission such as getting dropped into the mountains of Iran.

Um, breaking into Ishtahan, going underground to get these vats of uranium that other reports say it's like for each vat they weigh like a thousand pounds, nine hundred something pounds. The vats can be pierced or then you die. Chemicals go into the air, that would be bad for you. So that's the mission.

We got to go into Iran, go into the mountains, go into their nuclear site, go underground, steal the vats of uranium, exfil the vats of uranium, while presuming the Iranians are shooting at you and then you take it, I don't know, back to Mar-a-Lago where you display the vats of uranium

like on the pool deck with the cougars and have a press conference. I guess that's the plan. That's what Mark Levin is pushing for. That seems unlikely to succeed to me. Been proven wrong before. Not here to cosplay a military strategy expert, but just on its face, exfilling the vats of

uranium seems high risk. I guess let's just, maybe that succeeds. It definitely seems high risk, high risk of casualties. So there we go. That's what Levin is pushing. Obviously there's the Carg Island conversation that's been out there for a while. JBL wrote about this weeks ago now, you know, about how Trump would try to occupy Carg Island. But I just think that if you're reading the tea leaves, in this case,

it's not reading the tea leaves, it's just reading the bleats of Trump's internal monologue, you can see they're planning to push forward for weeks ahead, and the troops are definitely a strong likelihood. So that's where we are. Each day this goes on and each day the Strait of Hormuz is closed, it's just another day where you have massive supply chain disruptions,

things you couldn't even predict, like, like we were in our Slack today, I think it was Sam sent a article from a Indian newspaper about how there's a restaurant now have a shortage of butter chicken because of some products that is required and that kind of central dish to Indian cuisine. So, you know, like the, obviously that is a small thing in the grand scheme of things, but the disruption, the the obviously that is a small thing in the grand scheme of things.

But the disruption, the economic disruption that is happening globally, as long as the straight is closed, you know, is it's hard to even wrap your heads around right now, like the scale of it. And it's going to harm. It's already is harming basically every American in their pocketbook.

And it's going to continue to cause greater damage the longer this goes on. So we have a few weeks ahead, at least, according to what we're seeing on Trump's social media. I should also say over the weekend that we also learned another thing. We knew this basically, but the Iranians are getting Intel and targeting information from the Russians, satellite imagery. And one reason we know that is because of this. We had parked a plane on

the jet way. Do you call it a jet way when it's a military base? wherever you taxi the plane on the military base, we parked a couple planes there and the Iranians yeeted it with a missile. And you can see the damage there. We don't have that many of this type of plane. You know, we'll talk to Bar Kurtling this week about all the details, what the implications are, but that was a very expensive attack on our plane

as part of this ongoing escalated war in Iran. Another thing that was happening over the weekend, I just want to flag, Trump posted this morning, it's Palm Sunday, happy to Palm Sunday to all those who celebrate this. It's a letter from Franklin Graham, son of Billy Graham, the right-wing pastor. I want to read a little bit of this. The letter came in October, but Trump posted it today.

Dear President Trump, this week you commented to the media that you might not be heaven bound. Maybe you responded in jest, but it is an important issue to know for certain that your soul is secure and will spend eternity in the presence of God. The only one who can save us from hell is Jesus Christ. You

can't save yourself, I can save myself. Good works, prominent success, none of these get us to heaven. The only way to heaven is through the shed blood of Jesus Christ. God requires us to turn from our sins by faith, believe in our heart that Jesus came to earth, died on the cross for our sins and was buried and God raised him to life on the third day if you accept that by faith and invite him to come into your heart you are heaven bound I promise you. So there you go. Trump posted it mostly I think to show to people that he's going

to heaven. Mike Johnson posted it as well and talked and said explicitly, you know, highlighting the fact that you can only get to heaven through faith in Jesus, which again, in a country that we have separation from church and state, it is pretty, you know, it's a little much for the Speaker of the House and the President to be basically saying to Muslim Americans, depending on how you look at it, Catholic Americans, Jews, you can't go to heaven.

I mean, literally, that's what Mike Johnson and Donald Trump posted today, Jews, you can't go to heaven. So a lot of conversations about anti-Semitism out there. But in the role of Speaker of the House, posting that the only path through heaven

is through Jesus, our Savior. Certainly sending some kind of message to the non-evangelical Christians, non-Protestants in the country. Trump I think posted just because he's like, hell yeah, I'm going to heaven, bitches. Franklin Graham, he's a holy guy over here, says I'm going to heaven. You know what else Franklin Graham said?

Let's watch this. This is Franklin Graham at CPAC over

the weekend. And I love Donald Trump. Is he perfect? No. But I love that guy. I love him. And we'll only have one chance at this. We'll never get another president like Donald Trump. Never.

And that's why it's important that we do everything that we can to try to get him re-elected.

So I don't know if Franco Graham has dementia. That would maybe explain the fact that he thinks that Donald Trump could run again for office and the fact that Donald Trump is going to heaven and has brought Jesus into his heart. I think we just go back to that for a second. The idea that Donald Trump has really genuinely brought Jesus into his heart and believes that Jesus rose from the dead after the third day, like it's absurd. It's ridiculous. Everyone knows that that is not true.

Okay. Everyone knows it's fake. Trump's family members wouldn't even say it was true. I mean, there's nobody that would believe that this is actually true. Like everyone is doing kayfabe. But Franklin Graham, I guess,

believes that Trump really has brought Jesus into his heart and either believes that it's the year 2019 and he can run for president again, or he wants to end American democracy and turn the country into a Donald Trump theocracy, which would be the most amusing and ridiculous theocracy ever in the history of the world,

probably. But I don't know. I'm opposed to that. I think that most Americans are opposed to that. And I think that as the calamity continues to unfurl from this war of choice in Iran, I think more and more people will be stridently objecting

to the idea that Donald Trump should be permanent autocrat, permanent theocrat, permanent leader, permanent king of America, that his family has some right, that he has some byright unto the White House and that we should ignore the constitution, ignore the law and let him rule for as long as he sees fit.

I don't believe that most Americans are going to think that. And you know why I don't believe that? Because I was at the no kings rally in New Orleans yesterday. Good to see everybody out there.

It was enjoyable.

It was enjoyable to see all the funny signs, but it's also important, I think, for people to register their dissent. And it was happening in places all across the country. I think there's something nice about that, Federalist about that almost, American, people in small towns and hamlets, big city rallies, big rally in DC. We were at the Greenway here in New Orleans and there was a little march around Mid-City. It's inspiring.

It's excellent. And I think what's really telling, I talked to Ezra Levin, who organizes these rallies last week on the channel, he said, notice the difference between the second No Kings and the third.

And the second one, there was this big message that these were all Antifa, they were crazy, they were gonna do violence, it's far left agitators. And then afterwards, Trump was dropping poop from the plane on Harry Sisson and the other protesters. Like that was, it was aggressive pushback. Not a lot of talk about it this time.

I mean, some of the cable pundits on the right made fun of the No King's Rally, but not a lot of talk about it. No clear message. And if you wanna know how they had no clear message to combat the no King's rally, you can just see what the Republican party put up on social media responding to Tim Walz over the weekend. And there it is. No Queens.

So that's the best you can do. Calling Tim Walz a homosexual. Oh, Oh, that's so funny. That's so funny. Oh, Tim Walz is gay. It's like, well, Tim Walz is a dad with two kids and the person that's gotten us into this stupid war might be gay. Um, but anyway, you know, it's pathetic. It's sad and it shows you where this is heading. They have no message. Uh, they have no, you know, negative message that's resonating with the no Kings rallies and they don't really

have a positive message about the second Trump administration right now. They've got no positive story to tell. And so what they're gonna do is continue to lash out. They're gonna try to turn people against each other, lash out, do childish insults, and try to delegitimize those who are challenging their lawless and inept administration. And I don't think it's gonna work.

So anyway, no queens. Oh, such a good one. So embarrassing. So embarrassing when that gets through the approval chain. Chairman of the RNC is like, yeah, let's do that. Let's make, let's do no queens post.

All right, guys, good luck. We'll see how that takes. Everybody else, I'll be back tomorrow Monday with Bill Crystal as news develops. We'll be here on the YouTube channel Make sure to subscribe or over on sub stack. Of course can subscribe there is what though we appreciate Everybody who wants to support our effort and become a board plus member. You can become a member on the YouTube channel Would really appreciate it

Would really appreciate it And I'll see you guys later.