Stephen Miller Goes Off The Rails Raising Major Alarm Bells At WH

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0:32We are back with one of our favorite guests, David Rothkopf. How are you? I'm good. How are you? You know, I'm just, you said I was on your podcast last week. You dangerously tiptoed into saying you kind of felt a little bit of hope. But as a Jewish person, you're not supposed to say that, right?

0:53David Rothkopf:No, no. I immediately left the podcast and fell down the stairs. But I mean, you know, that's what happens. Right. Right. But, you know, I mean, it's because the election results were a little hopeful. There was a there was another one this week with Little Hopeful in Florida with the performance of Agnes Nixon. You know, this freaked out, of course, everybody in the Democratic establishment who are like, oh, no, now we've elected somebody who thinks everyone should have health care. Oh, my God. All right. Let's let's take a gander at John. Ossoff. He has been attacking Trump. And to me, it's such an easy thing to do, but he seems to be rising up and attacking Trump better than any other Democrat right now.

1:38And of course, he brought up Natalie Harp, who I call the bunny boiler, a la the fatal attraction film, where Glenn Close boils the kid's bunny. So he brought up the bunny boiler, Natalie, right? And MAGA is having a stage five meltdown. The White House is having a stage five meltdown. And he doubles down on it. He goes on Lawrence O'Donnell last night with a blowtorch and he continues attacking MAGA. Play the clip.

2:05David Rothkopf:Lawrence, it's been amazing to watch this White House meltdown over this all week. And about Natalie Harp, these White House staffers are adults, public officials paid by the taxpayer with immense power in positions of public trust. And whether it's Natalie Harp printing out Donald Trump's daily dose of delusion and flattery, or Peter Navarro steering taxpayer-funded loans to Trump family investments, or Pete Hegseth diluting the president daily into deepening this quagmire in the Middle East, no one cares about their feelings. David. Love this guy. I love this guy. I've been on podcasts with you before in which when he was sort of just emerging in this voice that he has adopted, I was calling him Purple Mom Donnie because, you know, he's got that kind of vibe that Mom Donnie has, but he's in a purple state.

3:08David Rothkopf:So how much better is it, right? You have a 39 year old guy who actually knows how to communicate, who is not pulling his punches, who's willing to fight, who wants to end fascism, who wants to help what is happening for people. He's doing it in Georgia. He's going to win again by a substantial amount in Georgia. And he has taken it to him. And, you know, immediately you've got all these other Dems going, oh, soft pedal and soft pedal. Forget it. He's the future. Turn the page, whether it's him or AOC. If you're looking for the people who are actually speaking truth to power and who understand the zeitgeist right now, you've got to go to people like Osso.

3:51David Rothkopf:And, you know, he's saying, I'm not thinking about the presidency, which he shouldn't. He should think about winning. But he is definitely going to be near the top of that list of candidates or at the top of that list of candidates. And I am 100 percent for it because, you know, he is, you know, he is in the in the last question you talked about, you know, Democrats turning on the progressives. He's the guy who can bring it all together. He's the guy who can frame it in the terms of a big red southern state and in the terms of people who are under 40 all at the same time. And that's that's the sweet spot for me.

4:33I completely agree. I mean, this guy, the more and more he speaks, I love that he is centering the corruption. And it's so easy to pick on these people because they're so immature and idiotic. But also, we need to keep talking about because we've all been talking about Natalie Hart for months. And now the mainstream media is talking about her because of John Ossoff. He brought it to the mainstream. But I think it's fun to talk about these things as long as we don't get distracted by them, because the real story with Natalie Harp is national security. This woman is with Trump at all times. We know this because his tweets that come out at three and four in the morning, there is proper spelling and proper grammar, which we know from 2016 he was incapable of doing on his own.

5:20So she's with him all the time crafting these things. So God only knows what she knows. Maggie Haberman says Natalie was a channel for foreign leaders to reach Trump. Let's play the clip.

5:33David Rothkopf:I can't some other way. She has a channel by which he reaches people he sees on television who he likes what they are saying or that he will just send out notes to. She is with him so much of the day during those meetings. And she is talking to him throughout the evening about social media posts. So she is a specific channel of information, but she is one that he considers very important. And so do other people outside the White House. You know, David, you're a national security expert. What would the Republicans be doing if the roles were reversed here? If Obama or Biden had a 35-year-old aide that was by their side all of the time with zero national security clearance?

6:13David Rothkopf:Well, they'd be freaking out. But, you know, I mean, that's what they should be doing, right? Because we've seen this movie before. Jared couldn't get his clearance. Ivanka couldn't get clearance. And Trump said it's OK. We've seen how Trump treats national security, operational security, you know, when he stored top secrets, nuclear secrets in the bathroom at Mar-a-Lago. I, you know, I got to say, the Natalie Harp story scares me. And I think Bunny Boiler is a good way to refer to her. You know, the sort of lurid, you know, is she or isn't she story, I'm not that interested in. The fact that she's clearly out of her gourd, that her brother is out there saying she's sending the love notes and she's obsessed and she's hiding out in the back of an SUV in order to get into the president's motorcade or their video of her running across a golf course to catch up with him.

7:11David Rothkopf:She's nuts. She is a bunny boiler. But on top of that, she has no security clearance. And she is the person who's closest to the president of the United States all the time. And we know the president of the United States kind of likes our enemies better than he likes our allies. I mean, we saw earlier this week him say that, you know, he didn't want to support South Korea and military exercises we have with South Korea because he has a good relationship with Kim Jong-un. Yeah. You know, and, you know, it's like, holy shit. If you had said at any point in the past 80 years, 60 years, 50 years, let's just say after the Korean War, where American soldiers went and died, that an American president was going to say, I like the North Korean guy better than I like the South Koreans.

8:01David Rothkopf:It would have been the end. They just would have pulled the plug. They would have taken him out of the White House, maybe in a catering cart. And that would have been it. Right. Right. But so it's this combination. She has no security clearance. I guarantee you that dozens of other people in the White House or in the Trump higher ranks don't have a security clearance. You think Jared has one now? He's not even doing his financial disclosure. And he's at the pointy end of the spear for most of our big negotiations. You think Steve Witkoff has one? So anyway, the point is there are a lot of people around him who don't have security clearance.

8:38David Rothkopf:He doesn't care. He likes the bad guys better than he likes the good guys. And on top of that, he's going nuts and she's nuts. I mean, what could go wrong? So speaking of nutty people surrounding Donald Trump, no one in my mind is more dangerous or evil than Stephen Miller. Stephen Miller is a special kind of crazy, but also I think that a good line of attack on Stephen Miller is the Republican argument about women being in politics is, oh, they're emotional. Women are too emotional to be in politics. And I don't know if you've seen Stephen Miller speak, but he is the most hysterical, histrionic, emotional thing I have ever seen in my life.

9:20And here's a clip of him in absolute hysterics on Hannity. Play the clip.

9:27David Rothkopf:It seems like the legacy media will never tell the story about the crazy left or what the president does. Why? Because the legacy media, Sean, is fundamentally corrupt. They are an extension of and arm of the Democrat Party. Honestly, Sean, the media, the legacy media like CBS and ABC and NBC and every other legacy outlet exists to serve and advance the interests of the Democrat Party. Throw in New York Times, throw in Washington Post, throw in The Atlantic. They should all be required to register as a Democrat political action. I've heard enough. all of these things are now owned by MAGA people.

10:12All of the media is now owned by MAGA people. I mean, CBS is run by the Ellisons and Barry Weiss. You just don't get any more fascist than that's a trifecta of fascism, Larry and David and Barry. I mean, it's unbelievable the lies. David, what's your take on all that?

10:31David Rothkopf:It's exactly the same as your take. He is, you know, he's frankly, he's run out of things to say, right? So what he's doing is he's repeating old things, which are no longer true because the Ellisons do own CBS and the Ellisons are on the verge of owning CNN. And, you know, ABC did before they showed a little spine this week, did bend the knee and settle a suit with Trump over the George Stephanopoulos thing. And the Washington Post is owned by Jeff Bezos. And, you know, the legacy media right now is owned by right wing Republicans for the most part. And the ones that aren't, you know, the New York Times, which occasionally does some good reporting, is bends over backwards so much to both sides, everything that you got to ask yourself, where are you actually hearing the unvarnished truth?

11:24David Rothkopf:And I think that's the bigger issue. The bigger issue is the White House lies all the time. The right-wing media lies all the time. The White House has launched a campaign against anybody who has a narrative that's different from theirs, including in academia. They don't want them teaching history they don't believe in. They want to change the history that you view at the Smithsonian. There is this massive effort to lobotomize the United States of America. And there are very few places, present company excluded, where you can turn to actually get the truth. And so at the moment, we have the biggest number of information tools at our disposal.

12:06David Rothkopf:The whole Internet, AI, everything is out there and AI is producing slop. We have all this stuff out there. we're getting stupider as a country and that's how you end up with a guy like Stephen Miller who I'm sure sleeps upside down hanging from a rafter and drinks the blood of insects because he is you know some strange creature from a horror movie all by the way as he's trying to get over the fact that his wife dated Eric Swalwell which is a whole other story oh yeah I mean what what's her story. Anyway, the point is, of course he's crazy. The problem is, and this is a big problem, Janet, I don't think we talk about it enough.

12:52David Rothkopf:Donald Trump is old. He doesn't like doing the presidency. I mean, you saw him yesterday walking around the South Lawn of the White House going, and over here we have granite that's going to last a million years. And you're like, isn't there a war going on? Isn't the economy going to shit? Aren't there things for him to be doing it. You know why? He's doing it because he doesn't like doing it. So what happens when a president is in decline and he doesn't really want to do the job? It gets sloughed off to somebody else. And we've seen it. I wrote a thing about this for the Daily Beast last week.

13:26David Rothkopf:You know, when Woodrow Wilson had a stroke, his wife became the acting president. When Franklin Roosevelt was in his decline, there was a little group around him who did the president stuff. When Eisenhower had multiple heart attacks, same thing. When Reagan was in his decline because he had been shot and he had dementia and stuff, they wouldn't even ask him questions after midnight. Same with Nixon when he was drunk. And this is where we're getting, because that's why the Stephen Miller story is important, because Trump's checking out. So who's doing the job? Who is the effective president of the United States right now?

14:03David Rothkopf:They call Stephen Miller the prime minister. Yeah. Right. And so, you know, you got to think, holy shit. You know, Trump is, you know, I don't know, getting fitted for whatever that apparatus he keeps in the back of his pants is. And and and and so, you know, Stephen Miller is like checking the boxes on the memos going, yeah, attack this and round these people up and, you know, destroy the constitutional rights of these people. And so, yeah, he's crazy, but he's dangerous. All right. It gets worse. So your area of expertise is foreign policy. It gets worse. Everything that you just said, and then I have something else for you.

14:47Here he is. The propaganda involved in this clip that I'm about to play, it goes hand in hand with the unraveling that they're doing. They're rearranging the government. I heard Ruth Ben-Ghiot the other day say that this is they're setting it up like a mafia style government. You know, that Trump is the mafia boss. But they have to propagandize to their base. And a lot of the lies that the Republicans have very successfully landed in flyover America is we're great with the economy, trickle down economics. These billionaires are the job creators. They are better than you. Poor people are lazy. And we're so good on national defense.

15:28We are incredible. We love the troops. We are the most patriotic. We hug American flags and we are incredible with foreign policy. And they have landed that long before Trump walked in and inherited this because people that I know that are Republicans, just all of the things about the economy that you and I talking about them tanking it. They always end up starting wars that are based on lies and all of this shit. But middle America believes the Republican Party is best at this. And here is Stephen Miller continuing this same propaganda that started long before the Trump regime. I mean, every Republican presidency always is dunking on.

16:03We're so awesome at all of this shit and they're really terrible at it. Here's Stephen Miller with another meltdown. Play this clip.

16:10David Rothkopf:President Trump has been in office in his second term for a year and a half and has solved problems that plague this nation for decades, generations or even longer. I mean, just go through the foreign policy piece here. He's completely rebalanced our trading relationship with Canada. He has protected American manufacturing and essential supply chains from China. He has completely rebalanced NATO and ensured that other nations pay their fair share.

16:39What planet is he living on? The Canadians fucking hate us right now because of him.

16:45David Rothkopf:And you know how hard it is to get a Canadian to hate anything.

16:51David Rothkopf:They're predispositive. They're sitting there having Tim Hortons donuts and a beer and they're like fine with the world. And we have somehow alienated them, our closest friends on the planet. but it's all because of what you're saying here. And it really, really gets to me because, frankly, if the average American flyover American, American anywhere, read a 900-word history of the past 80 years, they wouldn't believe anything the Republicans said. Because as we said before, when there's a recession, when the jobs aren't being created, when the stock market goes down, when the deficit goes up, it's Republicans.

17:29David Rothkopf:When we are fighting a stupid war badly, it's the Republicans. Who got us into the Iraq War, the biggest foreign policy disaster that we had seen prior to this? Republicans. Who turned them into never-ending wars? Republicans. Who turned the defense budget into this giant sponge sucking up the resources of the United States of America so that we don't have the money for schools or hospitals or the other things we need? Republicans. Who warned us about it? Well, as it happened, that was a Republican too. Dwight Eisenhower in 1961 said the military industrial complex is going to eat America alive if we don't control it.

18:09David Rothkopf:But nobody listened. You know, this is the problem Americans don't understand. And on defense right now, let's think about it or foreign policy right now. The trade policy of this administration is insane, is going to be reversed, has cost this country hundreds of billions of dollars. and is going to continue to until this guy is gone, because he's just, you know, he's obsessed with the trade policies, the tariff policies, sit down for this one, of William McKinley in the 19th century. That's who he's modeling his trade policies after. But as bad as all that is, blowing up NATO is worse. He didn't get people to pay.

18:54David Rothkopf:He's destroying it. He's cutting back gun resources. He has alienated our NATO allies. Now, where has he gone with that? Well, let's go after the Asian allies. He said he is not participating in the military exercises with the South Koreans because they didn't support his stupid, fucked up war with Iran. So our alliances in the East, our alliances in the West, they're falling apart. Well, what do you add on top of that. Pete Hegseth, okay, our frat boy defense secretary, is the worst person who has ever been responsible for the U.S. defense community ever. He has fired people with experience because they were women or they were people of color.

19:35David Rothkopf:He has dumped programs that helped elevate people because he thought they smacked of DEI. It's a story today where they shut down a program to help us develop and be in the lead on drone technology because they wanted to go backwards to old school ways of fighting wars. You've got people on the USS Abraham Lincoln eating bowls of mold for breakfast because they don't have the food. And on top of that, the way they fought this war is we've depleted all of our reserves of precision weapons, of the weapons we would need to fight the next war. And guess what, folks? It's not going to be fixed tomorrow.

20:17David Rothkopf:They're going to announce a bunch of contracts and say, OK, we've got this going. It's going to take years and years and years. And it's why Trump can't escalate with Iran. And, you know, small consolation, perhaps, in that. But putting carrier task forces out at sea for 250 days means, and everybody in the Navy knows this, means that they then have to go back for 17, 18, 20 months, two years to get put back into combat-worthy shape. And so the way he has mismanaged this war means that for the next several years, because of the weapons, because of the wear and tear on our systems because of the reallocation of assets.

21:09David Rothkopf:We had one carrier battle group off the coast of China. It was the USS George Washington. Where is it now? It's replacing the Abraham Lincoln in the Persian Gulf. So you've got this incredible mismanagement. And then on top of that, as if it weren't enough to enter a stupid war, lose the war to Iran, lose our strategic advantage, blow up the global economy, destroy the morale of the American troops. Now Trump has got the Republicans on the verge of saying, yeah, let's have a$1.5 trillion defense budget that Pete can handle. Pete, who a story this week said he can't go on a fucking trip without his wife because they're afraid he's going to go on a drunken bender.

21:55David Rothkopf:You know, this is the guy who's in charge of one point five trillion dollar budget, which is all full of programs that are so crazy, like Trump battleships that, you know, the Navy realized they didn't need battleships anymore after the 1940s. 80 years ago. But Trump has this golden dome project that no expert I know thinks will actually work and it will cost hundreds of billions of dollars. This is a waste of money, but combine this waste of money with the big, beautiful bill and the tax cuts for billionaires, and that's how you get the deficit. Overspending on bad things. And what the people who are listening to this get for it is no healthcare subsidies, shut down Veterans Administration's hospital, shut down rural hospitals, shut down schools, shut down program for disabled kids, shut down.

22:59David Rothkopf:So we're losing services. Billionaires are happy. Defense contractors are happy. Our enemies are happy. And we and our allies are holding the bet. Okay. Two follow-up questions to that. Number one, how big of a favor is Trump doing for our adversaries, Putin and China, by dismantling all of the power that the United States had, as I think Susan Rice calls it, the suicide of a superpower. He's dismantling all of these things. You have the vice president talking about how great it is to devalue the dollar. You have Donald Trump kissing up to all of our adversaries. You have China and Russia now suddenly doesn't have to spend that much money to position themselves in a better place than we are.

23:54And secondly, with like Pete Hegseth and all of these people, do you think the 2028 nominee should go full tilt? We're going to investigate every single one of these people and we're going to investigate Pete Hegseth for war crimes, for all of the people that he killed in the Caribbean, for the triple tap. We are going to investigate thoroughly every single person in this regime for war crimes. and we make that a part of the campaign? Or do you think the Democrats are going to do what they always do? And it's like, oh, we just need to bring people together. We need to overlook all of this. So two-part question.

24:28I know it's loaded.