Speaker 1: Pod Save America's brought you by simply Safe. Summer is here,
Speaker 1: which means cookouts, pool parties, and wondering if your packages
Speaker 1: will still be there when you get back from vacation.
Speaker 1: Or you could skip the worry altogether with simply Safe.
Speaker 1: I set up with simply Safe. It's easy to do,
Speaker 1: Customize it to your home, comes in the mail. You
Speaker 1: can set up in a matter of minutes. You have
Speaker 1: to drill or anything. It's very easy to do. Then
Speaker 1: the app is great, easy to use, and the customer
Speaker 1: support credibly reliable.
Speaker 2: Gives you a peace of mind.
Speaker 1: With simply Safe, kept your package safe. That's right, that's right,
Speaker 1: you kept my package safe.
Speaker 3: Man's it's all there.
Speaker 4: It's all there.
Speaker 1: With simply sayfe there are no long term contracts between
Speaker 1: translation fees. They earn your business by keeping you safe,
Speaker 1: not by trapping you in a contract. You can customize
Speaker 1: your system to fit your needs. Then it ships fast
Speaker 1: directly to your door. The app guide it's set up
Speaker 1: is simple and there's no drilling requirement, so you can
Speaker 1: install and arm your system in under an hour. Simply
Speaker 1: Safe is more than just a security camera. It's a
Speaker 1: comprehensive system of sensors and indoor and outdoor cameras twenty
Speaker 1: four to seven professional monitoring. Over five million people value
Speaker 1: and trust simply Safe with their home security every day.
Speaker 1: Right now, our listeners will get fifty percent off a
Speaker 1: new system when you sign up for professional monitoring in
Speaker 1: your first this free Just visit simply safe dot com
Speaker 1: slash crooked. That's half off at simply safe dot com
Speaker 1: slash crooked.
Speaker 4: There is no safe like simply Safe. Start your morning
Speaker 4: with the news that matters. Every day, NPR is Up
Speaker 4: First brings you the three biggest stories in under fifteen minutes.
Speaker 4: They go into what happened and why it matters. It's
Speaker 4: short and thorough, fact based and personable with national and
Speaker 4: international news and one easy listen. Listen to Up First
Speaker 4: from NPR wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 3: Welcome to plod Save America. I'm John Bavora, I'm John Lovett,
Speaker 3: Tom Mevi Tour. On today's show, we'll talk about the
Speaker 3: latest developments in the on again, off again war slash
Speaker 3: peace deale with Iran, which seems to be playing its
Speaker 3: hand better than master negotiator jd Vance. We'll also get
Speaker 3: into the Reflecting Pool drama which has gone from farce
Speaker 3: to fascist as federal agents start arresting people Trump's accusing
Speaker 3: of phantom vandalism. Plus, the President unveils his new Katari jet.
Speaker 3: Bill Poulti officially takes over as acting DNI. It appears
Speaker 3: that the outgoing dn I might have been under the
Speaker 3: influence of a cult leader. And we'll talk about the
Speaker 3: potentially criminal lobbying campaign behind Trump's decision to spring a
Speaker 3: convicted fraudster from jail. Then New York Times reporters Maggie
Speaker 3: Haberman and Jonathan Swan talked to Tommy about their explosive
Speaker 3: new book, Regime Change, which is full of fascinating revelations
Speaker 3: about Trump's second term White House. Did you think better
Speaker 3: of Donald Trump after reading?
Speaker 4: Yeah, he's just misunderstood and guy, he's just doing his best.
Speaker 4: You know, he's got a moral core.
Speaker 3: This is good.
Speaker 4: Now, it's a really good book. I would like spent
Speaker 4: the day just inhaling it. And even for secos, I
Speaker 4: guess that follow this stuff closely. You learn a lot
Speaker 4: about the process, the kind of narrative around how these
Speaker 4: decisions actually got made, what it's really like in the
Speaker 4: Oval office.
Speaker 3: It's really really good. Yeah, as someone who doesn't read
Speaker 3: books but is also a sicko. Think I'm gonna read
Speaker 3: this one.
Speaker 4: You're gonna like it, you know, like it?
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a patriot. All right. Let's talk about how
Speaker 3: the Memo of Versailles is holding up. As of this recording,
Speaker 3: both the US and Iran are now saying that the
Speaker 3: peace talks in Switzerland are going well and that they're
Speaker 3: making progress, though it certainly didn't seem like that. Over
Speaker 3: the weekend, the ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon briefly fell apart.
Speaker 3: Iran announced it close the strait again. The US said
Speaker 3: that wasn't true, and then Trump demanded that Iran rein
Speaker 3: in Hesbola or the US would resume bombing for good measure.
Speaker 3: He also threatened to take over the Strait of horror
Speaker 3: moves and sees twenty percent of the oil that passes
Speaker 3: through it, which is something that he can definitely do. JD. Vans,
Speaker 3: who Trump has generously made the face of America's surrender
Speaker 3: to Iran, cited three points of progress on Monday. One,
Speaker 3: he said the US and Iran agreed on measures to
Speaker 3: keep the straight open. Two, they agreed on a mechanism
Speaker 3: to diffuse flare ups between Israel and Hesbola. And three,
Speaker 3: he said that Iran has agreed to let international nuclear
Speaker 3: weapons inspectors into the country for the first time since
Speaker 3: Trump tore up Obama's Iran deal, though we haven't seen
Speaker 3: confirmation of that yet from the Iranians. In exchange, the
Speaker 3: US has agreed to waive sanctions on Iranian oil for
Speaker 3: sixty days, first time we've done that in like four decades,
Speaker 3: So congrats to Iran. Trump got asked about all this
Speaker 3: at a signing event in the Oval on Monday just
Speaker 3: before we recorded, where he showed off his absolute command
Speaker 3: of what's going on.
Speaker 5: If they're or with iransom could cause a worldwide depression.
Speaker 5: As you noted, mister President, are you willing to risk
Speaker 5: economic catastrophe and strike Iran?
Speaker 6: Well, not the way I'm doing it. It's not going
Speaker 6: to cause depression.
Speaker 5: Yes, if they don't abide by the well, nuclear.
Speaker 6: Weapon supersedes depression. Depressions, real bad nuclear weapon will cause depression.
Speaker 3: If the Iranians won't use profits from oil sales to
Speaker 3: rebuild their.
Speaker 6: Military, well they're not supposed to be doing that, so
Speaker 6: i'd will say. But they're supposed to use money to
Speaker 6: buy food for the people, because right now that people
Speaker 6: are very hungry. As long as they respect us, we're
Speaker 6: going to be fine.
Speaker 3: What do you think You think they're going to use
Speaker 3: all that money to buy food for their people? Oh yeah,
Speaker 3: and then show us nothing but respect.
Speaker 1: For sure, there's nothing. There's nothing to stop them from
Speaker 1: using the money to buy whatever they want with it.
Speaker 1: There's not that's not part of the deal.
Speaker 2: There's no deal. There's nothing you.
Speaker 3: Wanted to say that we're we're actually going to benefit
Speaker 3: from this because if they buy food, they're going to
Speaker 3: buy food from us. And so really the money fight
Speaker 3: that's way back to us. That's what's actually waking about.
Speaker 2: It's crazy you enjoyed dunk a use over there.
Speaker 3: I mean, who doesn't want them? Now, Tommy, what do
Speaker 3: you make of the latest developments? Are we in a
Speaker 3: are we in a better place, a worse place? The
Speaker 3: same place? Too hard to tell?
Speaker 4: I mean, per that reporter's question about could the ongoing
Speaker 4: closure of the straighter Humus lead to an economic calamity
Speaker 4: and you know, like famine in places like Africa, I
Speaker 4: think we're in a worse place because over the last week,
Speaker 4: Iron has signaled that they are willing to happily close
Speaker 4: the street or Humous again, or at least announce it's closed.
Speaker 4: And I think what folks have to remember is like,
Speaker 4: this is not a valve that goes on and off.
Speaker 4: This is a bunch of economic decisions made by shipping companies.
Speaker 4: So we're thinking of our cells. We have these giant tankers.
Speaker 4: I could send it to the straight door moves. I
Speaker 4: could send it somewhere else if there's a three percent
Speaker 4: chance it gets stuck in there for a couple of
Speaker 4: weeks because the Iranians fire off ballistic missiles or something
Speaker 4: worse could happen, they get shot at, you know, like
Speaker 4: that's that's a big capital expenditure that could go to
Speaker 4: the bottom of the ocean for them. And so I'm
Speaker 4: worried about this, just kind of bumping along in an
Speaker 4: unsettled fashion for a while, and worried about ongoing high
Speaker 4: energy prices, and worried about the shortage of fertilizer shipments,
Speaker 4: which are already going to show up too late to
Speaker 4: hit a lot of crops and are going to lead
Speaker 4: to lower yields and less food for people in higher
Speaker 4: prices and more hunger and then the like whatever this
Speaker 4: mechanism is to solve the you know, flare ups between
Speaker 4: Hesbola and Israel. I don't buy that for a second.
Speaker 3: Is it like a deconflicting cell.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's probably like a conference call. But like again,
Speaker 4: the Israelis, they're not pulling troops out of Lebanon. They
Speaker 4: if like they're occupying six miles of territory into Lebanon,
Speaker 4: Hesbel is going to attack them, the IDF will respond,
Speaker 4: and then it's going to lead to these events.
Speaker 3: So I just I don't feel great about it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I would say we're better off in peace talks
Speaker 1: than we were when there were no peace talks. We're
Speaker 1: better off not being a war than we were when
Speaker 1: we were at war. We are worse off than we
Speaker 1: were before the war started, and we are worse off
Speaker 1: than we were when there was the JCPOA in place.
Speaker 1: All these hawks who are trying to find their way
Speaker 1: to justify supporting this deal or not being as critical
Speaker 1: of this deal, I'm just waiting for something to happen
Speaker 1: in which Iran has conceded more or given more than
Speaker 1: they did under the horrible, unacceptable, worst.
Speaker 2: Deal in history made by Obama.
Speaker 1: I'm waiting for one thing where they've given given up
Speaker 1: more because as of right now, how different would it
Speaker 1: look if Iran had said we are shutting the strait
Speaker 1: of horror moves unless until you negotiate a better deal
Speaker 1: with us, like we are going to like you know
Speaker 1: what I mean, Like we had not launched a war.
Speaker 1: But Irana just said we're closing the strait of hormones
Speaker 1: unless you give us a bunch of until you give
Speaker 1: us a bunch of concessions. I don't know how much
Speaker 1: different would look than this, right.
Speaker 3: I mean, I saw that Steve Rantner on Twitter said
Speaker 3: that the oil waivers could bring them ten billion dollars
Speaker 3: in sanctions relief.
Speaker 4: Just from not just oil sales, right from all the Yeah, right,
Speaker 4: there's a sanction, there's sixty day sanction to waive around
Speaker 4: oil sales. Those sales could be up to ten billion dollars.
Speaker 3: Well. Also, he noted that in the JCPOA, we didn't
Speaker 3: give any sanction of relief until they allowed the inspectors
Speaker 3: into Iran. We have, you know. Bessent sort of posted
Speaker 3: today that there was the sanctions relief has happened, although
Speaker 3: they asked Trump about that, then he's like, I'm not sure.
Speaker 3: I have to check in on that. And they haven't
Speaker 3: allowed a single weapons in specter into the country, nor
Speaker 3: have they even confirmed what jd Vance said about this,
Speaker 3: that they are willing to do so.
Speaker 4: And the devil is the details there. I remember the
Speaker 4: JCPOA had lots of IAA access and inspections, but the
Speaker 4: Republicans were mad that they would have to give twenty
Speaker 4: four hour notice for certain sites like snapped inspections. Like
Speaker 4: he is to be able to go to wherever you want,
Speaker 4: whenever you want it, so you can't move shit around. Look, yeah,
Speaker 4: I'm like love it. I'm like glad we're in talks.
Speaker 4: I'm glad there's not an ongoing conflict. The devil is
Speaker 4: in the details here. And also we're still sending like
Speaker 4: these hapless idiots like Jade Vance and Steve Wikoff and
Speaker 4: Jared Kushner and the Iranians are sending nuclear experts who
Speaker 4: have nothing better to do and nothing but time to
Speaker 4: grind them down. And they also know that Trump doesn't
Speaker 4: want to go back to war and has given up
Speaker 4: all his leverage, which just doesn't make me confident that
Speaker 4: we are going to get a better.
Speaker 3: JCP away again.
Speaker 4: I want the warover. I'm not some hawk attacking him
Speaker 4: for the right here, but just sort of like realistically
Speaker 4: looking at the setup now after the war started and ended,
Speaker 4: and now we're here, like Trump's leverage is just gone.
Speaker 4: He's given the sanctions relief, the threat of military action
Speaker 4: is gone. I just don't know how you get to
Speaker 4: a better deal to anyone. Happened to catch jd Vance's
Speaker 4: interview with Russ Doutwitz. Pieces, Yeah, when they talked about this,
Speaker 4: and it was interesting because a lot of the things
Speaker 4: Evan said as people who don't want the war to
Speaker 4: go on like us. I was like, oh, that that's good,
Speaker 4: you know, that's a good case. But where he really
Speaker 4: stumbled or I think just lied, was talking about the
Speaker 4: jcpoa like at one point he's like, the difference, the
Speaker 4: real difference between this deal and the Obama deal is
Speaker 4: the Obama deal just let them have all this enriched
Speaker 4: uranium that now this deal we're going to get to
Speaker 4: take away. That's like literally, I thought I was gonna
Speaker 4: I was gonna text you, but but I feel like
Speaker 4: I'll ask you here on the pot was like didn't.
Speaker 4: Didn't They didn't They enrich all the uranium. After he
Speaker 4: pulled out of the deal under the JCPOA, they shipped
Speaker 4: out ninety seven percent of their stockpile. I went to
Speaker 4: Russia where they disposed of it. Under this deal, are
Speaker 4: talking about down blending and insight and keeping it in
Speaker 4: the country, se the opposite of what he said.
Speaker 3: It's ridiculous. Ross did not press him on that. So
Speaker 3: we've talked a lot lately about how Republicans are coping
Speaker 3: with this. They continue to be all over the map,
Speaker 3: from kissing Trump's ass to threatening new wars to open revolt.
Speaker 3: Let's take a lesson.
Speaker 7: If we have inspectors going in there, and if that
Speaker 7: straight is open for business and yet all is flowing,
Speaker 7: then I think it's very clear the United States will
Speaker 7: have won this conflict.
Speaker 8: If this deal fails, President Trump is going to take
Speaker 8: the Straight of Horror moves over by force. The United
Speaker 8: States will control the Straight of Hormuz, will charge your
Speaker 8: fee for all those who go three through to pay
Speaker 8: for the operation. And if Iran contests control of the
Speaker 8: Straight of Horrm moves by the United States will obliterate them.
Speaker 9: I would not support the Republican Party. There's no chance
Speaker 9: I would support the Republican Party. How could I or
Speaker 9: any American voters support a political party that's not loyal
Speaker 9: to the United States, that puts the interests of a
Speaker 9: foreign country above those of its own citizens. Like, So, no,
Speaker 9: I'm out, and if I'm out, then I think a
Speaker 9: lot of other people are out.
Speaker 3: Well, Okay, so Tucker is out, Lindsey Graham's threatening to
Speaker 3: take over. The Straight of Horror moves completely, and Jim Comer,
Speaker 3: the head of the Oversight Committee, he thinks that if
Speaker 3: the Strait is open and we get inspectors in there,
Speaker 3: we have won the conflict. What do you guys think,
Speaker 3: are the fractures here getting getting worse getting better?
Speaker 1: Yeah, the Strait is open, as that's a victory, even
Speaker 1: though it was not something we had to worry about
Speaker 1: until they started the war. Inspectors back in as you
Speaker 1: had under the old agreement that they tore up. The
Speaker 1: thing that I saw that I think is the most
Speaker 1: alarming our is the cope by the Iran Hawks, who
Speaker 1: are also apparajects, trying to get behind what Trump is doing.
Speaker 1: And you saw Hugh Hewitt and Mark Levin doing this
Speaker 1: kind of like forty Chess, basically saying the political calculus
Speaker 1: is that in order to prevent Republican losses and deal
Speaker 1: with the fact that the country has not been persuaded
Speaker 1: to be in favor of this war, you have to
Speaker 1: get into negotiations and punt because then after the election,
Speaker 1: then you can get back to bomb to bombing. Well,
Speaker 1: you know, Hugh Hughett called it clarity and then and
Speaker 1: then also said, I assume if Marco Rubio is seeing
Speaker 1: what's happening here, that he would not go along with
Speaker 1: a deal that doesn't treat the Iranian regime like the
Speaker 1: threat that it is, and he would resign.
Speaker 3: Yeah, usually he's pretty vocal and matters of conscience like this.
Speaker 1: But but I do think it points to what some
Speaker 1: of these hawks are hoping, which is that they can
Speaker 1: prevent the worst political blowback from the war, get cast down,
Speaker 1: and then go back to being bellicose regime changers once
Speaker 1: the midterms are behind us.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Like, ultimately, like guys like Linda Graham is always
Speaker 4: going to he's just going to get in line because
Speaker 4: that's what he does.
Speaker 3: And you know, he's talked in.
Speaker 4: Articles before about all he cares about his relevance, and
Speaker 4: he wants to be up Trump's ass and get to
Speaker 4: play golf with him and be in the room. And
Speaker 4: he knows that Naga wants him just to be with
Speaker 4: Trump on everything. So I think, like the I think
Speaker 4: the elected Republicans will get in line. I think the
Speaker 4: Hawks will get in line and like kind of just
Speaker 4: keep their powder drive for another day. Ironically, Iran has
Speaker 4: more of a complicated system with factions that might oppose
Speaker 4: a deal, like the IRGC, like they're going to be
Speaker 4: out there loudly advocating against a deal. There's a bunch
Speaker 4: of nationalists sort of like forever getting whip up. I
Speaker 4: think they can rightly say, like why make a deal
Speaker 4: with the Americans?
Speaker 3: They just reneg on them.
Speaker 4: They pull out, and the next president will pull out anyway. Tucker,
Speaker 4: who knows what his incentives are these days, and he's
Speaker 4: got an audience, City's building and maybe a presidential run.
Speaker 4: Guys just ask why does face the Nation book Lindsay Graham,
Speaker 4: He's like one of their most booked guests. He disgraced
Speaker 4: himself when it comes to the Iraq War. He was
Speaker 4: catastrophically wrong about Iran there in that clip he's threatening
Speaker 4: to have Trump do something militarily that we all just
Speaker 4: watch Trump fail to do, which is defeat the Iranian
Speaker 4: regime militarily and then take control of the strad or Moves.
Speaker 4: If that was on the table, we would have done that.
Speaker 4: So why do we book this man on television just
Speaker 4: to like spew this hawkish bullshit? At what point do
Speaker 4: you get discredited and no longer invited on to face
Speaker 4: the nation or at least be in the penalty box
Speaker 4: for maybe a couple weeks.
Speaker 3: I imagine when they're doing their booking, they're just saying, Okay,
Speaker 3: we need we need the administration mouthpiece, perspective and guying
Speaker 3: to tie on a Sundad because if we can't get
Speaker 3: Trump or JD or something, we need someone who's going
Speaker 3: to spout that whatever was about that line.
Speaker 4: I guess how are the pro Trump hawks feeling?
Speaker 1: You know, go to Lindsay Graham, who's basically proposing that
Speaker 1: the US take over the straight up from Moves. I
Speaker 1: assume there'd be some sort of like maybe you have
Speaker 1: Disney help and do some sort of fast pass situation,
Speaker 1: going to use a genie apt to get through.
Speaker 3: Yeah, begs the question why haven't we done that already?
Speaker 4: It was on the table, he would have done it. Yeah,
Speaker 4: but now we're going to go back and take twenty
Speaker 4: percent of aggregate oil revenue from this.
Speaker 3: Like, what the fuck do you.
Speaker 1: Remember every time where we were begging Europe to help
Speaker 1: us do something we didn't need their help to do,
Speaker 1: which is retake the straight up from moves, which we
Speaker 1: never did.
Speaker 4: It's just like, it's so fundamentally unseerious and he's such
Speaker 4: a discredited individual, but it speaks to how war is
Speaker 4: covered in Washington, where like the hawkish view is the
Speaker 4: serious view, and these are the very serious people who
Speaker 4: talk about serious things in the Oval Office, And if
Speaker 4: you're anti war or you say like we should be
Speaker 4: pro diplomacy, you are not booked on these shows or
Speaker 4: treated seriously.
Speaker 3: And it drives me nuts. Well, you know who's not
Speaker 3: buying all those shit voters? Yeah, CBS, the same CBS
Speaker 3: that had Lindsay Grammat has a new poll out on Sunday.
Speaker 3: A huge majority of people support ending the war, roughly
Speaker 3: eighty twenty, but by similar margins they think we have
Speaker 3: not stopped Iran's nuclear program for good created a better
Speaker 3: situation for arounds people or installed a regime that's friendlier
Speaker 3: to us. In other words, most voters are familiar with
Speaker 3: the reality of the situation. Just saying true things American voters,
Speaker 3: So what a guess, got it big pictures. Seventy percent
Speaker 3: of people say the war was not worth the cost,
Speaker 3: only thirty percent say it was only one poll, but
Speaker 3: lots of good data, good questions in there. What jumped
Speaker 3: out at you, guys.
Speaker 1: One thing was just a thing about what Tucker Carlson
Speaker 1: was saying there about being out and the other kind
Speaker 1: of people that would be at You would think that
Speaker 1: the kind of America First MAGA crowd would be more
Speaker 1: skittish about continuing the conflict. But it found that among Republicans,
Speaker 1: sixty forty one to end the conflict now rather than
Speaker 1: continue until Iran gives up more. And it's a small difference,
Speaker 1: but actually fewer MAGA reps.
Speaker 3: But that Yeah, but you said America First, which is
Speaker 3: telling that's not America Maga is MAGA is what whatever
Speaker 3: Trump wants. I'm good with.
Speaker 1: Well, that's what I mean, right, that the people that
Speaker 1: you would think would be the America First sort of
Speaker 1: that were against these kind of interventions because they're behind Trump.
Speaker 1: It's their job to be supportive of Trump. There's no
Speaker 1: they're not brooking as much Tos sent here. I mean,
Speaker 1: I would say even the fact that sixty percent of
Speaker 1: Republicans want to end the conflict now even fifty six
Speaker 1: percent of MAGA Republicans like does tell you how unpopular
Speaker 1: this is. But I think there is striking that you
Speaker 1: don't have a bigger break among people that would have
Speaker 1: considered themselves more aligned with Tucker.
Speaker 10: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, mean you get seventy percent of the country saying
Speaker 4: this was not worth the cost. I mean that is, uh,
Speaker 4: you don't get seventy for much. You don't get seventy
Speaker 4: for much. I too love it. I was kind of
Speaker 4: like struck by the splits within MAGA, the fifty six
Speaker 4: percent saying end it now, forty four percent continue to
Speaker 4: get more from Iran, keep fighting to get more from Iran.
Speaker 4: But then you know, they did like kind of an
Speaker 4: intra MAGA self identified MAGA poll and ninety percent of
Speaker 4: like the NAGA people pulled to the deal is better
Speaker 4: for run. Nineteen percent of all Republicans said the deal
Speaker 4: was better from Iran. So it just I don't know
Speaker 4: it It speaks to the way the failure here has
Speaker 4: broken through to even the kind of cult members, the
Speaker 4: Maga cult members, And I think it tells you something
Speaker 4: about wars and how they end up being damaging for presidents.
Speaker 4: It's like presidents are actually often not You don't get
Speaker 4: hurt politically if you kind of bump along, but if
Speaker 4: you end a war and are perceived to have lost
Speaker 4: the war, I think voters will punish you. It seems
Speaker 4: like we're seeing the beginnings of that for Trump.
Speaker 3: One number that stuck out at me. It could be
Speaker 3: a problem for them, in a problem for the administration
Speaker 3: in the coming weeks and months. There's a plurality. Forty
Speaker 3: two percent think gas prices will go down in the
Speaker 3: next few weeks, and there is an expectation you can
Speaker 3: tell in these polls that they think it is over now.
Speaker 3: Things are going to get better financially economically, and that's end.
Speaker 3: Maybe that happens eventually, but I think it's going to
Speaker 3: take a bit of time. Just because the price of
Speaker 3: oil is falling doesn't mean the price of gas will
Speaker 3: as well. And you know, you're seeing like I think
Speaker 3: this poll has like his approval rating take up a
Speaker 3: point from last time, which is you know, like margin
Speaker 3: of error mean meaningless. But overall you've seen some you know,
Speaker 3: last week, I'd say maybe the generic ballot got like
Speaker 3: a point closer to Republicans too, So there might be
Speaker 3: some expectation around the war ending that relief is coming
Speaker 3: that I don't know if Trump is actually going to
Speaker 3: be able to deliver on, which is certainly something to
Speaker 3: watch for, which is.
Speaker 4: Why I think he's giving like this sixty day immediate
Speaker 4: license to the Iranians to sell oil and gas because
Speaker 4: they're just trying to flood the zone and get prices
Speaker 4: down as fast as they can. I agree, it's an
Speaker 4: open question about how quickly gas prices come down and
Speaker 4: whether they come down to where they were, and whether
Speaker 4: that's kind of how.
Speaker 2: People are anchoring this in their mind.
Speaker 1: But yeah, but there's you know, gas prices aren't just
Speaker 1: determined by the amount of oil that Iran lets do
Speaker 1: the Straight. And by the way, it's not as if
Speaker 1: the Straight is back up to where it was before
Speaker 1: there's so much less traffic through there. But if you
Speaker 1: have Iran, I think immediately saying we are going to
Speaker 1: close the Straight again to Sig, I think purposely right
Speaker 1: to whether whatever the inciting cause to signal. But at
Speaker 1: any moment, we can shut this thing down again. That
Speaker 1: that is our power and we plan to use it.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: How is that going to give anybody confidence that prices
Speaker 1: going to be reliable, that oil will be reliable, that.
Speaker 2: You can count on prices coming down.
Speaker 1: I just a Trump threatening them thre I need to
Speaker 1: kill the negotiators.
Speaker 2: I mean like, we're just.
Speaker 4: Just millennial you know, locker room talk, it's called it.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Positive America is brought to you by a ZipRecruiter. Whether
Speaker 4: you own your own business or in a position to hire,
Speaker 4: you want to find people who are as excited about the
Speaker 4: work you do as you are. Ziprecruiters a new feature
Speaker 4: that quickly lets you see the most interested in qualified
Speaker 4: candidates first, so you meet the right people faster. And
Speaker 4: now you can try it out for free at ZipRecruiter
Speaker 4: dot com, slash cricket, zip precruiter smart matching technology connects
Speaker 4: to you with qualified candidates instantly. Candidates can tell you
Speaker 4: in their own words why they're interested in the job.
Speaker 3: No wonder.
Speaker 4: ZipRecruiter is the number one rated hiring site based on
Speaker 4: G two. We use ZipRecruiter here Cricket Media, We've hired
Speaker 4: a bunch of great people. It made the process way faster.
Speaker 4: You get great candidates almost instantly. It helped you sort
Speaker 4: through them quickly. You can find folks who are actually
Speaker 4: interested in the job and not just applying to a
Speaker 4: million jobs. So we highly recommend it. Use ZipRecruiter and
Speaker 4: find enthusiastic talent fast. Four to five employers who post
Speaker 4: on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day.
Speaker 4: Now you can try it for free at ZipRecruiter dot com.
Speaker 4: Slash crooked at ZipRecruiter dot com slash crooked meet your
Speaker 4: match on ZipRecruiter.
Speaker 1: Podsave America is brought you by hymns. D is way
Speaker 1: more common than most guys think. Millions of guys deal
Speaker 1: with it at some point, and that's exactly why hyms
Speaker 1: offers a straightforward way to handle it. Hyms connects you
Speaker 1: with licensed healthcare providers online, giving you simple access to
Speaker 1: legitimate ed treatment options from home. No awkward appointments, no
Speaker 1: pharmacy lines. Just complete a simple online intake and a
Speaker 1: provider will review your information to determine if treatment is
Speaker 1: right for you. If prescribe, your treatment ships directly to
Speaker 1: your door in discrete packaging that includes Sildenafil, also known
Speaker 1: as generic for Viagra available through hym set up to
Speaker 1: ninety five percent less than the brand name version, and
Speaker 1: if that option isn't right for you, there are additional
Speaker 1: treatment options available so you can find what works best
Speaker 1: for your body. It's straightforward, transparent, and designed to make
Speaker 1: getting care feel easy. To get simple online access to personalized,
Speaker 1: affordable care for ed, weight loss and more. Visit hyms
Speaker 1: dot com slash cricket that's hymns dot com slash cricket
Speaker 1: for your free online visit hymns dot com slash Crooked.
Speaker 1: Prescription required see website for details and important safety information.
Speaker 1: Soil dentifhil is the generic version of viagra. Viagra is
Speaker 1: a registered trademark of Viatrice Specialty LLC. Hymns is not
Speaker 1: affiliated with or endorsed by Viatrice.
Speaker 6: All Right.
Speaker 3: We briefly discussed this on Friday's Pod. But Iran isn't
Speaker 3: the only war Trump's last. Lately, He's also been defeated
Speaker 3: by the Algae in the Lincoln Memorial reflecting Pool. Turns
Speaker 3: out Trump's mar Lago pal who got the no bid
Speaker 3: contract for fourteen million dollars in counting to renovate the
Speaker 3: reflecting pool. A fellow convicted criminal by the name of
Speaker 3: John Kafaro. Have you seen this guy's picture? Incredible?
Speaker 4: Yes, I recommend everyone google right now John Kafaro. Find
Speaker 4: the photo of him in the eighties wearing the double
Speaker 4: breasted suit is I can't say, is it a comb
Speaker 4: over or a hair piece unclear?
Speaker 2: I don't know. It looks like he's trying to kill
Speaker 2: the aristicats.
Speaker 4: He pleaded guilty to bribing James Traffick.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he's that's who it. Wow, I saw.
Speaker 2: Those guys both that amazing.
Speaker 3: Convictions campaign finance bribery. Yeah, this is the guy that
Speaker 3: got the no big contract or the he So he
Speaker 3: didn't seems.
Speaker 1: Like when he gets mad, h his uh, his shirt
Speaker 1: rolls up like what's that thing called when you have
Speaker 1: a tuxedo? Say, yeah, the tuxedo front.
Speaker 3: It looks like that probably happened when he found out
Speaker 3: about the alogy. So John Kafara didn't do the top
Speaker 3: match work he's known for, and now they have to
Speaker 3: drain the pool and start from scratch. The president per
Speaker 3: usual is blaming everyone else, including reporter John Carl of
Speaker 3: ABC News quote dirty cop James Comy and other alleged vandals,
Speaker 3: five of whom have apparently been arrested, including a former
Speaker 3: Olympic canoer who says he was just reaching into the
Speaker 3: pool to feel the detached liner.
Speaker 2: Seems like he was up the up the reflecting pool
Speaker 2: without a paddle.
Speaker 3: This guy. Trump threatened the rest of us with a
Speaker 3: ten year prison sentence for the destruction or even the
Speaker 3: attempted destruction of such things, which he said, quote will
Speaker 3: be fully enforced naturally. Trump got a lot of appropriately
Speaker 3: skeptical questions on this and the Oval on Monday. Here's
Speaker 3: what he said.
Speaker 5: Are the contractors who did the initial work with a
Speaker 5: reflecting pool, are they to blame for the current condition?
Speaker 4: Or is it.
Speaker 6: Vandals? You know, we have one hundred and we have
Speaker 6: a I think two hundred and ninety three hundred foot
Speaker 6: slip right through it. Probably a box cutter or a
Speaker 6: knife of some kind.
Speaker 5: The National Guard and police have been all over the mall.
Speaker 5: How would these vandals have gotten so close to do
Speaker 5: something like that?
Speaker 6: Do you have these I mean we didn't have We
Speaker 6: didn't have a lot of them.
Speaker 10: Then, who would think that somebody would go into a
Speaker 10: pool and take a knife and start cutting it?
Speaker 6: A proof of that? Yeah, I have a photos. Well
Speaker 6: let's put it this way. When you have a three
Speaker 6: hundred and fifty I think it's three fifty fifty three
Speaker 6: hundred fifty foot slid from one end to the other,
Speaker 6: you think that's proof. You think that's where has it
Speaker 6: been down there today?
Speaker 11: Looking for that slip that you mentioned?
Speaker 6: What you'd have to do is see the parks dequirement.
Speaker 6: They'll show it to you.
Speaker 11: Curious about this situation is we stood here with you
Speaker 11: in April when you first revealed the plans. I said,
Speaker 11: what in April you showed us pictures of what you
Speaker 11: were going to do. You said you had a guy
Speaker 11: who was going to do it in a week for
Speaker 11: about a million dollars.
Speaker 6: Well it's yeah, okay, read brock Hussein Obama. Have you
Speaker 6: ever heard of them? He spent two years and over
Speaker 6: one hundred million dollars. I spent two months maybe less,
Speaker 6: and I have a better product. Now I can't help.
Speaker 6: But if somebody goes in where the knife and starts
Speaker 6: hacking it up, and we also have pictures of it.
Speaker 6: You know that's the right time you'll see it. You'll
Speaker 6: see it in court.
Speaker 3: So pissed, find the guy who did the slit?
Speaker 4: Yeah, with the box cut there like it's a reflecting pool,
Speaker 4: Muhammadatta just also horizing.
Speaker 3: I wonder where someone could have possibly gotten the idea
Speaker 3: to use a knife to cut the reflecting pool. Might
Speaker 3: have a clue here, Let's watch.
Speaker 6: This will last for at least fifty years. You'll never
Speaker 6: have a leak. It's very straw.
Speaker 2: You couldn't if you had a knife.
Speaker 10: I don't want to give anybody ideas if you had
Speaker 10: a knife, you can't even cut it.
Speaker 6: So powerful powerful.
Speaker 3: Rubber, powerful rubber, powerful rubber not so powerful. So I
Speaker 3: feel like this went from mostly funny to fairly alarming
Speaker 3: now that they're trying to arrest random scapegoats just because
Speaker 3: Trump can't admit he fucked up. What do you guys
Speaker 3: make of this whole situation?
Speaker 1: So you make a big deal about how you're going
Speaker 1: to finally fix the pool because rock Custine, Obama and
Speaker 1: Joe Biden couldn't do it, You're the only one who
Speaker 1: has the ability to do it. You do a no
Speaker 1: big contract for a guy who is the crony picture
Speaker 1: in the crony entry of the dictionary.
Speaker 2: You declare victory.
Speaker 1: Then all of a sudden, the allergy is coming back,
Speaker 1: and so you have your people lie about that. They
Speaker 1: post pictures saying that it's better that this is not real.
Speaker 1: It's perfect, it's perfect, it's perfect. The lie draws more
Speaker 1: attention to the story, so reporters start covering it. Okay,
Speaker 1: because you hyped it up so much and are lying,
Speaker 1: the media is making more of an issue of it.
Speaker 1: So you start blaming saboteurs, even though they don't seem
Speaker 1: to exist. That generates only more coverage. Now you're arresting
Speaker 1: random people for checking out the mess that you've made.
Speaker 1: Now you've turned what was a silly and ultimately small
Speaker 1: story about a pool renovation into gross incompetence, corruption, and
Speaker 1: rising fascism. So there's even more coverage.
Speaker 2: And then you clear that. Then you declared that the
Speaker 2: media is obsessed. Why is the media so obsessed with
Speaker 2: what's happening to the reflecting?
Speaker 1: Well, well, maybe you said you went and held up
Speaker 1: a picture about who you were the one that was
Speaker 1: going to fix it, and then turned it into just
Speaker 1: an example of every aspect of the lying, the lawlessness,
Speaker 1: the corrupt deals that you're making, the incompetence. You've just
Speaker 1: turned it into a perfect metaphor of everything you've done
Speaker 1: wrong in this administration.
Speaker 2: So yeah, people are gonna cover it.
Speaker 4: I'm still in the mostly funny camp. Jim Comey at
Speaker 4: his house, like cultivating sea monkeys in the backyard, releasing
Speaker 4: them into the reflecting pool.
Speaker 3: That's funny.
Speaker 4: Like John Cafaro having a company called Greenwater Services.
Speaker 3: That's some funny shito.
Speaker 4: Obviously, it's bad that they're arresting this random Olympian man
Speaker 4: who was just biking around and accusing of sabotaging. Like
Speaker 4: you watch Janine Piro ranting away and Fox about this stuff,
Speaker 4: and we're all used to seeing her, you know, like
Speaker 4: six chardonnaise deep, just kind of like doing a primetime
Speaker 4: and then you remember, oh wait, this woman can issue
Speaker 4: the penis. That's actually a little scary. It's bad, but
Speaker 4: I think all of this will probably go away because
Speaker 4: obviously this is just algae grows because it's sunny and
Speaker 4: it's hot in the pool and there's water in it.
Speaker 3: It's and we're talking about it, and it sounds like
Speaker 3: they just they just did everything wrong. They did a
Speaker 3: bad job, is the other thing. And they spent a
Speaker 3: lot of money on it. Also, like none of these
Speaker 3: people are going to jail because like all of this
Speaker 3: is gonna get laugh out of court. Tmz tmz DC
Speaker 3: was down there all day today and I have all
Speaker 3: this footage of people being like arrested, detained, and these
Speaker 3: people are like you can see on foot on camera,
Speaker 3: they're just like look, some of them are just looking
Speaker 3: down to take pictures and like seven like there's like
Speaker 3: park police, there's DC, They're all it's complete madness. It
Speaker 3: is just it is a lie on the level of
Speaker 3: like now we're back to like Sean Spicer and the
Speaker 3: inaugural crowd. It's like, you know who cut the three
Speaker 3: hundred foot slit in the reflecting pool. Fucking no one
Speaker 3: because that it just did not happen because you you
Speaker 3: look at the reflectable there is no slit visible. Reporters
Speaker 3: have looked even since he just said that, so it's
Speaker 3: it didn't happen. It's impossible to do that three hundred feet,
Speaker 3: that's the size of that's the size of a football field.
Speaker 3: Someone's gonna take a box gutter and could have slit
Speaker 3: the size of the football field, and no one's gonna
Speaker 3: pay attention to that. No one's gonna see that. They're
Speaker 3: not going to be seen. Also, even if they did,
Speaker 3: wouldn't cause the algae wouldn't cuss the problem. Also, you
Speaker 3: spend fourteen million dollars on a reno that can be
Speaker 3: undid with a box cutter. But also what kind of
Speaker 3: renovation is that?
Speaker 1: It's also not a there's chunks of it floating up
Speaker 1: all over the fucking thing. I'll just been grown since
Speaker 1: last week. It's what everybody said would happen. I just like,
Speaker 1: obviously this is very silly. But now we're at the
Speaker 1: point where they got federal cops patrolling the National Mall
Speaker 1: to arrest people who are going to point things out
Speaker 1: that embarrass the deer leader. It is it is, you know,
Speaker 1: the ballroom and now this. These are perfect metaphors for
Speaker 1: what this administration has done. I think it's the kind
Speaker 1: of thing that'll stick with people, in part because it's
Speaker 1: also stupid that this is what's taking up the president's
Speaker 1: time and.
Speaker 3: Even if no one was paying attention to it, probably
Speaker 3: still taking up his time.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Well, he's the reason we're all paying attention.
Speaker 4: The reason we're all focused on this, he drove his
Speaker 4: ass down to the reflecting pool. Like this all started
Speaker 4: with him doing a drive by the thing. They're gonna look,
Speaker 4: they're gonna build a wall around this thing too. They're
Speaker 4: gonna have to cover it.
Speaker 10: They are.
Speaker 1: They're gonna cover it up so people can't take photos
Speaker 1: of it, the same way they built that giant wall
Speaker 1: around the renovation of the ballroom because they didn't want
Speaker 1: embarrassing photos of the ballroom. Like this, it's not going
Speaker 1: to go away. They're reflecting pools just there. It's a
Speaker 1: big part of the National Mall. It's eight acres big,
Speaker 1: it's massive, and it is not going to be fixed
Speaker 1: for a long time.
Speaker 2: They don't know how to fix it.
Speaker 3: And look, we know how serious this administration is about
Speaker 3: punishing people who destroy federal property. It is just something
Speaker 3: that they have cared about for a long time.
Speaker 2: Take it very seriously, Take it very very very seriously.
Speaker 3: Every single person who did that on January sixth completely free, pardoned, commuted,
Speaker 3: And now they're just arresting random people, which is which
Speaker 3: is fascinating. He's also now saying that his people are
Speaker 3: dumping fertilizer in there. They're dumping first vandals are dumping fertilizers.
Speaker 3: So they got that through the strait and now here
Speaker 3: we go. Now they got now they're dumping it in there. Yeah.
Speaker 3: The Komi thing, for those who didn't pay attention, is
Speaker 3: someone h there was some vandalism where someone on the
Speaker 3: lawn did like an eighty six forty.
Speaker 1: Seven unrelated to the unrelated to the reflecting point forty
Speaker 1: seven in grass truth at it.
Speaker 3: And so Trump thinks that because Komi did that with
Speaker 3: the shells or took a picture of the shells and
Speaker 3: posted it, which he is now also being prosecuted for,
Speaker 3: that someone was inspired by that to box cut his
Speaker 3: reflecting pool. One of the stupidest fucking things. We've covered
Speaker 3: a lot of stupid stories. Yes, is this is going
Speaker 3: to be a This is a chapter you're gonna want
Speaker 3: to come back to. Yeah, when the Trump story is
Speaker 3: we'll probably forget about it by the end of the
Speaker 3: Trump administration. But the reflecting pool, this is one of
Speaker 3: the dumber ones.
Speaker 2: I don't know that.
Speaker 1: Look, I think it's going to be in the ballroom
Speaker 1: category because this is just going to be something for
Speaker 1: months and months now they got to drain it again.
Speaker 2: It's not like their plan work the first time.
Speaker 1: They got a better plan this time because apparently the
Speaker 1: ship they put down on the floor that reflecting people
Speaker 1: didn't work. It's so, is it the same jack off
Speaker 1: that's going to be doing the next round?
Speaker 2: Is so are they.
Speaker 4: Getting a new contract of blue rubber floating in their
Speaker 4: footing pool just nuking it with chemicals?
Speaker 1: Well so bunny, because when the whole thing started, they
Speaker 1: were like, it seems kind of strange'shiring just like a
Speaker 1: pool guy.
Speaker 4: It's like, nah, he's got it.
Speaker 6: Well.
Speaker 3: It's also funny that last time we recorded, I think
Speaker 3: the Department of Interior was just posting fake pictures of
Speaker 3: the pool as blue and saying everything's great, And so
Speaker 3: they thought that was their plan for all. They were
Speaker 3: just gonna AI either way through it. And I guess
Speaker 3: now they're like, all right, the AI stuff didn't work,
Speaker 3: so now we're gonna have to blame some fake vandals
Speaker 3: and now we're gonna so.
Speaker 1: We're not that far away from like the government posting
Speaker 1: great news. Everybody gases down to eleven dollars a gallon,
Speaker 1: you're all getting more chocolate this week, your chocolate rations
Speaker 1: are up.
Speaker 3: So one renovation that did go well for Trump this
Speaker 3: week the brand new Katari Force one that he'll be
Speaker 3: flying around in and ultimately taking with him when he
Speaker 3: leaves the White House as a parting gift. The government
Speaker 3: won't say how much we all paid to retrofit the
Speaker 3: new plane, though the Secretary of the Air Force set
Speaker 3: in a hearing last year that it would probably be
Speaker 3: less than four hundred million dollars. Privately, the Air Force
Speaker 3: said it would use some of its nuclear modernization funds
Speaker 3: to pay for upgrading the plane, because why do we
Speaker 3: need those? And sure enough, a month later there was
Speaker 3: an unexplained nine hundred million dollar transfer from a nuclear
Speaker 3: account to an unnamed classified project. They are called the
Speaker 3: Plane project classified, which is why they're not revealing any
Speaker 3: if the costs. Not that Trump wants you to think
Speaker 3: this thing was done cheaply. He's actually proud of how
Speaker 3: much money it costs.
Speaker 10: Here he is now this plane was transformed into a
Speaker 10: flying White House at a level of luxury that nobody's
Speaker 10: ever seen before, probably even almost outside of an aeroplane.
Speaker 6: It's nobody's ever seen anything like this.
Speaker 1: Nobody's ever seen anything, not even it's nicer than any
Speaker 1: room outside of an airplane.
Speaker 2: That's all but a very small set of rooms.
Speaker 3: There's also there's still another two air Force ones on order.
Speaker 3: This is just what the Pentagon is calling a bridge aircraft.
Speaker 2: Well, he's gonna steal it after that's this is the
Speaker 2: bridge one, because is when he takes to go. Is
Speaker 2: the the go one. This is the dog gonna take
Speaker 2: with him.
Speaker 3: How old do you think this one pulls?
Speaker 4: I mean I talked to Maggie and Jonathan Swan about this.
Speaker 4: In their book, they report that Katar initially wanted to
Speaker 4: be paid one hundred fifty to two hundred million dollars
Speaker 4: for the plane. Oh and then suddenly the plane was
Speaker 4: a gift. And they report that the idea for making
Speaker 4: a gift was quote generated at the potus level. So
Speaker 4: it's just part of this ongoing corruption story. I think
Speaker 4: this has really become a monument to the corruption, and
Speaker 4: it really broke through in the moment. And I do
Speaker 4: think this is a big problem for him politically, to
Speaker 4: the extent that he cares. I mean, it is a
Speaker 4: problem for him politically, But like one of his superpowers,
Speaker 4: as we all remember, is that the years of branding
Speaker 4: on The Apprentice and with the Art of the Deal
Speaker 4: was that he was a brilliant businessman and he was rich,
Speaker 4: and he didn't need this job, and he had all
Speaker 4: the money he wanted. This was really a sacrifice was
Speaker 4: coming into government and this the plane. The narrative around
Speaker 4: the corruption has really pierced that narrative, and you would
Speaker 4: think he would care, but then we watch him do
Speaker 4: like a rollout of his corrupt gifts, very proud, where
Speaker 4: he does remarks and like a stage photo op.
Speaker 3: So you think the Katari's are feeling like they got
Speaker 3: their money's worth.
Speaker 4: Yeah, or this worked out great.
Speaker 3: You think they give this free airplane and look what
Speaker 3: they got. They got round blowing their shit up and uh,
Speaker 3: their economy in trouble because of the war in the
Speaker 3: Middle East. The Trump caused, I don't know if they
Speaker 3: feel like.
Speaker 1: They got sitting there next to JD doing track changes
Speaker 1: in the fucking document. No, no, no, we can't do that.
Speaker 1: They're not doing that. They're not doing that. That that
Speaker 1: that that the uh it is like, you know, it's
Speaker 1: interesting the difference between term one and term two with Trump, right,
Speaker 1: because term one, like he felt like he got all
Speaker 1: the kind of he gets all the prestige and benefits
Speaker 1: of being present. He loves having that plane, and he
Speaker 1: would do speeches in front of the plane.
Speaker 2: He loves doing that.
Speaker 1: And it was always such a bummer to have Trump,
Speaker 1: you know, garner the prestige of the White House right
Speaker 1: like he had that power behind him, which he which
Speaker 1: he did, uh, and and that included Air Force one.
Speaker 1: It was like, oh so, just so, you know, sad
Speaker 1: to see a Donald Trump representing our country on that plane.
Speaker 1: And now we're gonna have this new version of the
Speaker 1: plane that looks different and it's actually his plane that
Speaker 1: he's taking with him. And so now whenever he gets
Speaker 1: off the plane, we're gonna have this little symbol of
Speaker 1: corruption behind him in every shot. And he's gonna still
Speaker 1: use it like he did the old one, but they
Speaker 1: were behind him. Is the proof that he is the
Speaker 1: most corrupt leader on earth, maybe the most corrupts certainly
Speaker 1: the most corrupt president in American history, right there on
Speaker 1: the tarmac.
Speaker 3: What do you guys think of the red, white, and blue.
Speaker 4: I kind of like it.
Speaker 2: I don't like it. Yeah, it looks pretty cool.
Speaker 4: I mean the old version I like the old version too,
Speaker 4: like the Robin z egg blue on the bottom, and
Speaker 4: like you know, that was also a little piece of history.
Speaker 4: I mean that was redesigned with by JFK in nineteen
Speaker 4: sixty two. He also spent a bunch of time, like
Speaker 4: personally with a designer named Raymond Lowie, like redesigning the
Speaker 4: look of Air Force one. And Trump just sort of
Speaker 4: trashed that as he's trashing the Kennedy Center and renaming
Speaker 4: that and all these other monuments and institutions. So it's
Speaker 4: a piece of a puzzle. But yeah, I mean aesthetically
Speaker 4: it's like it's a sick plane.
Speaker 1: As far as Donald Trump being in charge of any
Speaker 1: kind of design, I feel like he did. He didn't
Speaker 1: fuck it up too badly.
Speaker 2: It looks good.
Speaker 1: I could have passed. No, I thought it could have.
Speaker 1: We'll see what the inside looks like. Yeah, we haven't
Speaker 1: seen the inside yet.
Speaker 3: I saw a few pictures.
Speaker 2: I haven't. I haven't seen the I just saw the outside.
Speaker 3: I think it's just bigger and bigger.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I will say the one thing that is incredibly
Speaker 1: ugly is they have instead of the kind of classic
Speaker 1: American flag on the back, on the tail, they have
Speaker 1: a waving American flag like cheap paint, Like it looks
Speaker 1: tacky and it.
Speaker 2: Doesn't fit with the design.
Speaker 3: It does fit with his design, yes, which is that
Speaker 3: makes okay good? At least there's some Trump on there.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So instead of having just sort of a classic straight
Speaker 1: American flag as you would, that's not waving because it's
Speaker 1: not a fucking flag. It's a painting of a flag,
Speaker 1: so you don't need to paint it waving. They painted
Speaker 1: the cheesy waving thing on it, which looks like ass.
Speaker 3: I'm surprised he didn't put his name on it.
Speaker 4: I am too busy again. In the Maggie and Jonathan's book,
Speaker 4: they talk like, there's the scene where Caroline Leavitt walks
Speaker 4: into the Oval office and Trump is personally super gluing
Speaker 4: some little gaudy gold thing onto the mancilpiece. He's so
Speaker 4: personally engaged and invested in this stuff because.
Speaker 3: He's a bored old man, has no interest in governing.
Speaker 3: It's just like, why couldn't he go into It's interest
Speaker 3: in using the governing to make money for himself and
Speaker 3: his friends and to settle old scores. An interior that's it.
Speaker 3: An interior design that's his hobby in golf.
Speaker 1: Yeah, at least like Howard Hughes had the decency to
Speaker 1: lock the door and fill the jars with piss Like
Speaker 1: this guy's just got It's just a different kind of
Speaker 1: of kind of old craziness of like putting your name
Speaker 1: on everything, putting gold on everything.
Speaker 4: The question of what does Katar think they got a
Speaker 4: good deal here is an interesting one because remember, in
Speaker 4: the first term, Qatar was briefly like blockaded by all
Speaker 4: the other countries in the Gulf, and then ultimately that
Speaker 4: deal was mediated by Jared Kushner. And interestingly, that mediation
Speaker 4: happened right around the time when the Kataris, I think,
Speaker 4: finally came in and bailed Jared out for like the
Speaker 4: six six to six Park gave or whatever real estate
Speaker 4: deal he had done that went terribly south, because they,
Speaker 4: you know, did the biggest real estate investment in Manhattan
Speaker 4: history right.
Speaker 3: Before the financial crisis.
Speaker 4: So it's interesting, though, these guitar is tiny and super
Speaker 4: isolated and pisses all its friends off through Al Jazeera
Speaker 4: and its foreign policy choices, and I think they wanted
Speaker 4: to get well with Trump. But then of course the
Speaker 4: Iran stuff kind of complicates the Ledger here on whether
Speaker 4: this worked out well.
Speaker 3: And look now they gave a plane to one president.
Speaker 3: Now the expectation is gonna be that every American president
Speaker 3: gets a plane.
Speaker 1: For I know, here's a plane. If you do as
Speaker 1: a favor and stop causing foreign policy disasters that lead
Speaker 1: to our hotels exploding, that would be great, if you
Speaker 1: could just we gave you the fucking planet. We got
Speaker 1: a rosewood on fire here. We're trying to convince people
Speaker 1: that it's awesome and no big deal that we're this
Speaker 1: close to these two iran.
Speaker 3: And As aren't doing it we need.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Jesus Christ, you know, yeah, the gay people can't
Speaker 1: hold hands. But we got a fucking four seasons going.
Speaker 1: Can you help us out.
Speaker 3: Trying to build an even taller building.
Speaker 12: Yeah, Patzi America is brought to you by Helix.
Speaker 4: Sleep is I think maybe the most important thing in
Speaker 4: my life. When I get a good night's sleep, I
Speaker 4: feel great. I'm ready to tackle my day and better
Speaker 4: at work, better at being a parent, better at working out,
Speaker 4: better at eating everything. And when you get a bad
Speaker 4: night's sleep, it sucks and you feel and your body hurts,
Speaker 4: and you're just not as ready to live.
Speaker 3: How about that?
Speaker 4: Now I was ready to be alive.
Speaker 3: Love it now.
Speaker 4: One important part of getting a great night's sleep is
Speaker 4: having a great mattress, and Helix will deliver one right
Speaker 4: to your door with free shipping in the US. How
Speaker 4: do you know which mattress is right for you? And
Speaker 4: take the Helix Sleep quiz and you get matched with
Speaker 4: the perfect mattress based on your personal preferences and sleep needs.
Speaker 4: They have over twenty mattress models so you can find
Speaker 4: the perfect model for you be happy with. Helix Guarantee
Speaker 4: offers a risk free customer first experience designed to ensure
Speaker 4: you're completely satisfied with your new mattress so you can
Speaker 4: rest easy with seamless returns and exchanges. Plus, Helix offers
Speaker 4: a one hundred and twenty night sleep trial and limited
Speaker 4: lifetime warranty. We have a Helix mattress at our house.
Speaker 4: It is unbelievably comfortable. We actually have it in the
Speaker 4: guest room, so whenever folks come and stay with us,
Speaker 4: they'll always say, what a comfortable bed, What a great
Speaker 4: night's sleep? And we say, you know what, Helix, I
Speaker 4: can send one to you tomorrow. Go to helixsleep dot com.
Speaker 4: Slash Crooked for twenty percent off site wide, twenty five
Speaker 4: percent off Lux mattresses, and thirty percent off Elite mattresses.
Speaker 4: That's Helix Sleep dot Com slash Crooked for twenty percent
Speaker 4: off site wide, twenty five percent off Lux mattresses, and
Speaker 4: thirty percent off Elite mattresses. Helixsleep dot Com slash Crooked.
Speaker 1: Poddave America is brought to you by Smalls. Smalls makes
Speaker 1: fresh human grade food for cats. It's made from the
Speaker 1: same stuff you or I would eat, but formulate it specifically.
Speaker 2: To help cats thrive.
Speaker 1: Cats are obligate carnivores, you need lots of I don't
Speaker 1: know what an obligate.
Speaker 2: Carnivor eve just a carnivore?
Speaker 3: What a what a helpful description?
Speaker 2: Yea, I guess we're we're we're we're what is it
Speaker 2: called a multivor?
Speaker 3: What is what a humaniverse?
Speaker 1: We're not omnivore. That's our omnivore. That's wrong omnivore. I
Speaker 1: love being omnivore.
Speaker 3: The multiverse pluma.
Speaker 1: I don't want to be an obligate carnivore like one
Speaker 1: of those meat people from YouTube The.
Speaker 2: Little King over here.
Speaker 1: Those meat people are just their faces are bright red.
Speaker 1: You can see every vein in their body like I've
Speaker 1: never felt better.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't know that. You know what feeling better
Speaker 2: is back in your cat.
Speaker 1: And the point is your cat got I keep that
Speaker 1: cat healthy, and that means meat. Both cat food out
Speaker 1: there uses meat byproducts and cuts their food with cheap grain, filler,
Speaker 1: artificial ingredients. Basically, it's full of stuff that isn't great
Speaker 1: for your cat, just so the big pet food companies
Speaker 1: can save a couple of dollars. Smalls is different. Their
Speaker 1: fresh recipes are over eighty percent animal protein and they
Speaker 1: never use fillers or artificial ingredients. Their food is so
Speaker 1: healthy that eighty eight percent of cat parents say that
Speaker 1: after feeding Smalls they notice that their cat has better digestion,
Speaker 1: softer and shinier coats, I spom and have more energy
Speaker 1: to play. Because it's actually good for cats. If you
Speaker 1: want to invest in your cat's health, Smalls is giving
Speaker 1: you sixty percent off your cat's first order, plus free
Speaker 1: shipping and free treats for life. When you go to
Speaker 1: smalls dot com, slash crooked your life with a cat's life?
Speaker 1: You know good, honestly good question smalls dot com slash
Speaker 1: crookeet that's sixty percent out of your first order, plus
Speaker 1: free shipping and free treats for life when you had
Speaker 1: to smalls dot com slash crooked.
Speaker 3: All right, you get a chance last week to talk
Speaker 3: about the latest with the Bill POULTI saga. Well, surprise,
Speaker 3: this corrupt moron has now taken over for Tulsey Gabbert
Speaker 3: as the acting Director of National Intelligence, a development that
Speaker 3: both Democrats and Republicans had tried to avoid. As Senator
Speaker 3: Mark Warner explained to Tommy, the original plan was to
Speaker 3: immediately confirm Trump's permanent pick for the job, federal prosecutor
Speaker 3: and former SEC Chair Jay Clayton. But Trump got wind
Speaker 3: of that and announced that he was pulling back Clayton's
Speaker 3: nomination until Clayton's replacement at SDNY is approved by the Senate,
Speaker 3: all but ensuring that Paulty gets at least some time
Speaker 3: on the job. Why do you guys think that Trump
Speaker 3: didn't want his own pick? Jay Clayton confirmed as soon
Speaker 3: as possible he did pick him.
Speaker 1: Was it hard to be inside of his mind? I
Speaker 1: think there's two things going on. One is the maschinations
Speaker 1: around Faiza and getting the SDNY confirmed, who is a
Speaker 1: former federal prosecutor but also his personal lawyer at I
Speaker 1: think Solomon Crsullivan and Cromwell, I think is where he is.
Speaker 1: So he sort of wants to get one of his
Speaker 1: guys in at SDN Y fine. I think also, Uh,
Speaker 1: Bill Poulty can do a lot of damage being d
Speaker 1: and I for a couple of weeks, get some get
Speaker 1: some good, get good good political prosecutions going if he wants.
Speaker 1: That's what he did when he was going through the
Speaker 1: mortgage documents, uh and trying to find ways to go
Speaker 1: after uh Comy and Tiss James and all the rest.
Speaker 2: So uh yeah, let's get it.
Speaker 1: He gets it, you know, get your fingers into the
Speaker 1: all the intelligence you want for a couple of weeks.
Speaker 2: That's valuable.
Speaker 3: Apparently, someone a source familiar told CNN just before we
Speaker 3: recorded that Paulty is going to start carrying out firings,
Speaker 3: that the deep state firings have begun, and that part
Speaker 3: of it is to I guess, get him in there
Speaker 3: so he can fire a bunch of fucking deep state people.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So Mark Warner, when I talked to him, was so
Speaker 4: concerned about Bill Poulti's accessed information or being in the
Speaker 4: job even for a minute, that he was basically ready
Speaker 4: to unanimously con just like confirm Clayton by UC just
Speaker 4: like push him forward and get it done. I think
Speaker 4: that Trump's weird gambit here is like he's mad that
Speaker 4: Republicans told him no about anything, so he's going to
Speaker 4: just freak out and decide to change the kind of
Speaker 4: up the ante. I think he genuinely seems to think
Speaker 4: that he can use the bypart is in desire to
Speaker 4: pass a very important intelligence collection program as a way
Speaker 4: to shoehorn in the Save Act and get that done.
Speaker 4: Which is there crazy bill to like tackle the made
Speaker 4: up problem of non citizen voter registration just doesn't happen.
Speaker 4: But then with perspective Pulty like, I think the question
Speaker 4: is does he want him to root around intelligence information,
Speaker 4: find stuff about his enemies and then refer to the
Speaker 4: dj or do something with it, or does Trump just
Speaker 4: want a purge of d and I employees. I don't
Speaker 4: really get why he couldn't have had Telsea Gabbert do
Speaker 4: a polled purge of dn I employees.
Speaker 3: Also seems like Jake Clayton would be happy to do
Speaker 3: that too. Jake Clayton has not some like like, yeah,
Speaker 3: he's better than Bill Poulty, but he's been very loyal
Speaker 3: to Trump.
Speaker 4: He's very mad. I do think he's a serious person,
Speaker 4: who's you know, serious prosecutor was you know, uh was
Speaker 4: the sec. Yeah, you know, so he's like had big
Speaker 4: jobs and hopefully like brings some relevant experience to this job. Plt.
Speaker 3: He's obviously a clown. Speaking of Toolsy Gabbard, did either
Speaker 3: of you guys read the insane Washington Post story about
Speaker 3: the uh, the the cults she grew up in that
Speaker 3: maybe still controls her wild wild story.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's one of those things where because it's coming
Speaker 1: out after she's gone, it's like, oh, well she shouldn't
Speaker 1: be dni well and she's not. But man, you kind
Speaker 1: of the thing that I took away from it is
Speaker 1: one of the things about Tulsi Gabbard. I think that
Speaker 1: is she's just a puzzle. She's just kind of confusing
Speaker 1: figure her.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's like a few more pieces went into place
Speaker 3: after that story.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but like it was always like, wait, she you know,
Speaker 1: she introduces Bernie at the convention. She used to be
Speaker 1: seen as on the left. She was anti war, had
Speaker 1: this strange refusal to criticize Asad then goes in this
Speaker 1: Trump direction. It was all just confusing her. She was
Speaker 1: ideologically confusing. And then you dig into it and there's
Speaker 1: this collection of memos. First of all, you've never seen
Speaker 1: anything like it, just random. There's collection of memos that
Speaker 1: seem to be from this figure, the sort of religious
Speaker 1: leader inside of her life. These kind of like harsh,
Speaker 1: like insulting directives coming all the time in her direction.
Speaker 1: What she should say on television, what bills she should
Speaker 1: intu do, is how should she talk about certain issues?
Speaker 1: They deny that it's him. There's a lot of denials
Speaker 1: in the thing. But there's also references inside of these
Speaker 1: memos to his own life that don't refer to anybody else.
Speaker 3: And also she said, there's like they matched like what
Speaker 3: she actually said on TV and the legislation she introduced,
Speaker 3: and they match exactly to all these memos with this
Speaker 3: person was telling her to do these things. Yes.
Speaker 1: And then on top of that, you have this collection
Speaker 1: of people. It's all this sort of strange bit of
Speaker 1: it's very cultish. It's also very like ham fisted and
Speaker 1: silly and amateur that they have a collection of people
Speaker 1: running dummy accounts to comment under articles on Hawaii newspapers
Speaker 1: about Tulsi, and there's like on Twitter and all the rest.
Speaker 1: It's this little kind of ramshackle, small operation. And then
Speaker 1: at one point, which I thought it spoke to the
Speaker 1: kind of I don't know what kind of like master
Speaker 1: plan they thought they were implementing that that once Trump
Speaker 1: started running, There's one of the notes says something along
Speaker 1: the lines of it, it's a shame you're not running
Speaker 1: because he's doing what you were gonna do. It's like,
Speaker 1: be president, are what are we talking about?
Speaker 3: She?
Speaker 4: I mean, she ran, and she thinks apparently thinks the
Speaker 4: D and I as a platform to run again and
Speaker 4: wants to try. And it's apparently the thing that she
Speaker 4: and Trump had gotten in fights about because you know,
Speaker 4: remember she put out that weird video after getting back
Speaker 4: to Hiroshima talk about nuclear annihilation. It was like, clearly
Speaker 4: the context was in the midst of both the Putin
Speaker 4: and Russia talks but also the Iran negotiations, and Trump,
Speaker 4: I guess yelled at her about it. I mean, my
Speaker 4: reaction to the story was somewhere to yours love it,
Speaker 4: which is like she's such a bizarre character, and like
Speaker 4: maybe this helps us understand this fucking weirdo, that she
Speaker 4: was just taking a literal direction from a cult leader.
Speaker 4: I hope it will get her out of politics forever
Speaker 4: and that she will not run for president again apparently,
Speaker 4: Like I think, was it Roger Stone or Steve In
Speaker 4: one of those guys thinks that she could actually run.
Speaker 4: But it's fucking it's crazy. And this person with the
Speaker 4: Director of National Intelligence like sort of speaks to the
Speaker 4: utter failure of vetting.
Speaker 3: For any of these individuals, yeah, or the success of
Speaker 3: the vetting, because it seems like this is who he
Speaker 3: wants to stack his administration with. You got RFKGI conspiracy
Speaker 3: theorist kooks. I mean John Swayne who wrote the story
Speaker 3: he said with this with his Washington Post colleague Aaron Schaeffer,
Speaker 3: I compared Gabbard's remarks in thirty two TV interviews but
Speaker 3: between twenty fourteen and twenty sixteen, with the talking points
Speaker 3: memos intended for them. This is what the cult leader wrote,
Speaker 3: although he didn't sign his name to them, but they're
Speaker 3: all from the same person. On twenty four occasions out
Speaker 3: of the thirty two, Gabbard us language in the memos
Speaker 3: almost verbatim. So this is like her entire congressional career,
Speaker 3: She's just going on TV and saying the war. I mean,
Speaker 3: this is like, this is like a right wing conspiracy,
Speaker 3: but it's real what they think of, like you know,
Speaker 3: like democrats being controlled by global forces. Like here's Tulsi
Speaker 3: Ga just going on TV introducing legislation that this random
Speaker 3: cult leader told her to.
Speaker 1: What's funny too, is they're trying to now say they're like, oh,
Speaker 1: this is just anti anti Hindu bigotry, when I say,
Speaker 1: there's nothing, there's nothing Hindu going on. And and then
Speaker 1: there's the one line that I thought was greatest. There
Speaker 1: was some line that was this was the one said,
Speaker 1: no matter how much you basically to paraphrase it, don't
Speaker 1: worry no matter how much you fuck up tomorrow.
Speaker 2: I love you.
Speaker 1: And Krishna loved you, which I do really appreciate. There
Speaker 1: was one memo that I thought was very funny because
Speaker 1: it was it was very uh. It was about some
Speaker 1: statements she gave a leave after the State of the Union,
Speaker 1: and it was actually had some like very good advice,
Speaker 1: which was something along the lines of like, hey, you
Speaker 1: just gave a generic, boring statement. You sound like a politician.
Speaker 1: If you have nothing to say, don't say anything. But
Speaker 1: you only have something to say if you're prepared.
Speaker 3: Let's this, let's get this guy in a democratic campaign.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you can't do worse. That's worse than a lot
Speaker 1: of the guy. A lot of consultants we've got going by.
Speaker 4: The range of the advice was funny. It was like,
Speaker 4: introduced this exact policy, and then some emails would be
Speaker 4: like stop doing the weird eye thing.
Speaker 3: Yes, then doing it?
Speaker 6: You know what.
Speaker 3: I read that and I was like, she does do
Speaker 3: a weird thing. Yeah, he was something.
Speaker 2: There reminded me.
Speaker 1: There was I remember there was somebody when I was
Speaker 1: working for Hillary at some point uh uh, she went
Speaker 1: to the floor to speak on the Senate floor by
Speaker 1: some issue, and one of the consultants accidentally respond replied,
Speaker 1: all meanting this and send the note to just one person,
Speaker 1: And the email just said something like how could you
Speaker 1: let Hillary go out there looking like shit like that?
Speaker 3: She was on the report.
Speaker 2: No Hillary, but the whole staff was.
Speaker 6: We all know.
Speaker 2: I wasn't. That was early in my days.
Speaker 1: I was not on a small email chain about Hillary
Speaker 1: in the no, no, no, I don't think she was.
Speaker 3: I don't think she was the one person would have
Speaker 3: been vaporized.
Speaker 1: Yeah, just sort of blipped out of existence.
Speaker 4: I mean maybe we all need like a cult leader
Speaker 4: in our lives, given unvarnished feedback.
Speaker 3: You know that is true, for.
Speaker 2: That's the memos come out.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they are. You can subscribe. Speaking of corrupt coons,
Speaker 3: we should talk about the wild and infuriating New York
Speaker 3: Times story that shed's new light on why Trump may
Speaker 3: have freed a convicted fraudster named David Gentile less than
Speaker 3: two weeks into a seven year sentence after Gentile stole
Speaker 3: over a billion dollars from what the Times calls thousands
Speaker 3: of mostly mom and pop investors. The commutation also meant
Speaker 3: Gentile no longer had to pay as much as fifteen
Speaker 3: and a half million dollars in restitution, while apparently, according
Speaker 3: to Ken Vogel at The Times, a couple of Trump's
Speaker 3: political appointees killed an early stage investigation by the office
Speaker 3: that prosecuted Gentile into how the clemency came about, including quote,
Speaker 3: jailhouse communications where he discussed making over two million dollars
Speaker 3: worth of payments to secure his freedom. The Times reported
Speaker 3: that one of the people who communicated with Gentile in
Speaker 3: prison and quote came under scrutiny by investigators was Reverend
Speaker 3: Frank Mann, a retired Catholic priest from Queen's whose friends
Speaker 3: with Trump and spoke at his inauguration last year. Wild
Speaker 3: What do you think is this the kind of thing
Speaker 3: democrats should investigate if they take Congress or does this
Speaker 3: fall into the category of things we can't really do
Speaker 3: much about because the pardon power is absolute.
Speaker 1: Oh, we've got to This is some of the most
Speaker 1: brazen corruption of the administration. And by the way, like again,
Speaker 1: a lot of there's going to be a lot of
Speaker 1: people that say we shouldn't be looking backwards. But one
Speaker 1: of the reasons we're gonna have to look backwards is
Speaker 1: that we understand what we need to do to fix it.
Speaker 1: And I like pardon reform, some kind of constitutional amendment
Speaker 1: is going to be on the table for how to
Speaker 1: protect our democracy. So I think we absolutely should be
Speaker 1: investigating this. One other reason to do it is there
Speaker 1: is daylight here between Trump and some of the people
Speaker 1: around Trump. Like if you notice the Caroline Levitt statement
Speaker 1: in that article says something like the idea that people
Speaker 1: would be trying to profit off of clemency is like
Speaker 1: repugnant or something to that.
Speaker 3: Effect, and at least cut Trump in.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, let the man get his beak wet, all right.
Speaker 2: He's got a lot of it's got a lot of renovation.
Speaker 1: He's got to do a lot of interior decorator, He's
Speaker 1: got a lot of expenses, a lot of renovation projects.
Speaker 1: But so there's also apparently in this story, according to
Speaker 1: the story, after the reports that this retired priest had
Speaker 1: taken cash, Trump called is true because cuarly, Trump, on
Speaker 1: his word, had commuted this guy's sentence. And there's one
Speaker 1: point in the story where it seems as though this
Speaker 1: former priest accidentally but dialed the reporter and left a
Speaker 1: message while he was talking about meeting with Trump and
Speaker 1: having lunch with him. So I do think we should
Speaker 1: be investigating this. I do think there's just an incredible
Speaker 1: amount of corruption going on around Trump around related to
Speaker 1: these pardons and commutations.
Speaker 3: When you love to hear the conversation between Trump and
Speaker 3: the priest when he asked him if it was hi, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: if he took any money, I loved it.
Speaker 4: I mean, Trump is immune from prosecution around the pardons,
Speaker 4: but the people selling pardons are not, so we should
Speaker 4: absolutely investigate the hell out of it and see if
Speaker 4: we can bring some of them to justice. And also,
Speaker 4: I think stories like this where you've got this corrupt
Speaker 4: guy who what defrauded one point six billion dollars worth
Speaker 4: of money from mom and pop investors is how it's
Speaker 4: described Like this directly connects the corruption to how it's
Speaker 4: hurting you. This is like kind of the exact sweet
Speaker 4: spot of the messaging. And again, good my facts. When
Speaker 4: I read this, first thought was like, oh, this is
Speaker 4: going to end up in a John Austin absolutely probably
Speaker 4: was already there like a video. Yeah, and then you
Speaker 4: know you heard this, you read this one, you read
Speaker 4: about this, and then you know again to talk to
Speaker 4: Maggie and Jonathan about this, but just all the examples
Speaker 4: of corruption, and Jonathan's.
Speaker 2: One was like they're.
Speaker 4: Very serious journalists, right, Like I'm trying to fuck around
Speaker 4: and they're just being you know, telling me just the.
Speaker 3: Facts of the reporting.
Speaker 4: And Swan like looks into the camera and he's like,
Speaker 4: I think we know about one percent of the corruption
Speaker 4: stories of that's actually happening here. So just the avenue
Speaker 4: is for investigative reporting, lawsuits, congressional oversight. Like, there's a
Speaker 4: million stories like this that we do not know that
Speaker 4: we are going to have to try to find out.
Speaker 4: And that's the only way I think that the Naga
Speaker 4: cult will ever realize that this man was taking advantage
Speaker 4: of them and harming them.
Speaker 3: By the way, doesn't take a leap of faith to
Speaker 3: believe these stories, like, oh, you think that a bunch
Speaker 3: of criminals, people who were convicted of crimes, including the
Speaker 3: President and this and this guy that he's setting commuted,
Speaker 3: You don't think that he was selling. He was in
Speaker 3: jail and thinking to himself, how do I get out? Well,
Speaker 3: I gotta have Donald Trump do it. Who can get
Speaker 3: to Donald Trump? Well, someone that maybe I can pay,
Speaker 3: Maybe this friend who's the Catholic priest whatever, and the
Speaker 3: retired Catholic priest who just happens to be Donald Trump's buddy.
Speaker 3: Of course this happened, what are you talking about?
Speaker 1: And by the way, the story inside of this, like
Speaker 1: the retired priest cleaned up the gravesite of Trump's parents
Speaker 1: then sent the picture and that's what gets him invited.
Speaker 1: The whole thing reeks the whole thing just it's this, like,
Speaker 1: what are we talking about?
Speaker 3: It is the culture that Donald Trump created when he
Speaker 3: got to the White House and basically was like, Oh,
Speaker 3: I'm going to just pardon anyone who I want to pardon,
Speaker 3: and doesn't matter what kind of crime you committed. January
Speaker 3: sixth rioters, people who've defrauded people, whatever. He be like,
Speaker 3: if you can curry favor with me, and you know
Speaker 3: me and you're connected to me, you get a pardon.
Speaker 3: So of course an entire industry is going to spring
Speaker 3: up of people who sell access to Donald Trump for pardons.
Speaker 1: Cause that's why wouldn't you if your course, you're in jail,
Speaker 1: you know you're being in jail for ten years, and
Speaker 1: then all of a sudden, this glimmer of hope opens
Speaker 1: that if you get this money to some schmuck around Trump,
Speaker 1: some lobbyist or consultant around Trump, that that that you
Speaker 1: could potentially get out, He'll you'll walk away.
Speaker 4: It literally was just I'm gonna say, Sam bankerfree is
Speaker 4: like openly lobbying Trump for a pardon Tomorrow.
Speaker 3: Is gonna be like I saw the guy who used
Speaker 3: the box cutter on the pool.
Speaker 4: I will bribe you, sir. But also when the president,
Speaker 4: when the president United States takes a plane from the
Speaker 4: Katari government or sells half another signal crypto company and
Speaker 4: a secret deal to an Emoradi backed investment firm, everyone
Speaker 4: around him sees that, and that you know, approach to
Speaker 4: governing filters through everyone else and they're all thinking, how
Speaker 4: do I get mine?
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I also will say too that you know, there's a
Speaker 1: I think there's sort of this sort of like fatigue
Speaker 1: and you're like, wow, any one of these scandals would
Speaker 1: have defined a previous administration. But like Trump, we get
Speaker 1: we sort of get glamored by the ways in which
Speaker 1: there's always a new scandal and a new controversy. But
Speaker 1: this is also this is Republicans in Congress because if
Speaker 1: the reason it got to this point, the reason we
Speaker 1: have this level of corruption, is because there have been
Speaker 1: multiple scandals which if they had marched to the podium
Speaker 1: and say this stops today, it could have stopped, and
Speaker 1: they chose not to.
Speaker 4: They are responsible for this.
Speaker 3: They are the ones that are enabling this every day. Yeah.
Speaker 3: The corrective for this in the Constitution is of course impeachment.
Speaker 3: And you know there's obviously going to be a question
Speaker 3: if Democrats take Congress back to impeae Trump, because it's
Speaker 3: obviously not going to go anywhere. There's part of me
Speaker 3: that thinks, like you just do it as a matter
Speaker 3: of fact, like, hey, look at all this corruption. If
Speaker 3: Republicans actually voted to convict part of what we want
Speaker 3: to do is get some of this money back for
Speaker 3: the American people that he stole from the American treasury
Speaker 3: and from the American people. We don't expect Republicans to
Speaker 3: actually vote for this, but we want to go on
Speaker 3: record and realize that, like this is the president committed
Speaker 3: a bunch of crimes, stole a bunch of money from people,
Speaker 3: Like you have to make a big deal of it.
Speaker 3: I don't know. I'm still thinking about it, like I don't.
Speaker 3: It is hard to go to that path because it
Speaker 3: takes up a lot of oxygen. But again, when someone
Speaker 3: when a president does kind of this kind of thing,
Speaker 3: when he abuses the pardon power, when he's this corupt
Speaker 3: when he's stealing from the American people, the remedy in
Speaker 3: the Constitution is to impeach the guy. And if you
Speaker 3: don't do that, then you know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and by the way, both impeachments were vehicles to
Speaker 1: educate the country.
Speaker 2: We learned a lot in those.
Speaker 3: Case those why did it work?
Speaker 6: Well?
Speaker 1: Well, the hearing you know, the yeah, and then even
Speaker 1: the January sixth hearings that came later I think were
Speaker 1: really important. No, they did not work, because here we are.
Speaker 1: But I do think like at a certain point, yes,
Speaker 1: there will be strategic argument against that. I get that,
Speaker 1: but like, man, have we done a lot of overthinking
Speaker 1: about strategy to end up in this place too?
Speaker 3: Yeah? All right, now, you guys get to hear when
Speaker 3: we come back more about all of Trump's machinations in
Speaker 3: the second term. When Tommy talks to Maggie Haberman and
Speaker 3: Jonathan Swan right after this Potsive America is brought to
Speaker 3: you by cook Unity. I love cook Unity And I
Speaker 3: just had a meal last night. What did I have
Speaker 3: last night? I had the Thaie beef curry. It was
Speaker 3: with rice. And who knows what I'm going to have tonight.
Speaker 3: Maybe it's like a good chicken dish they gave me. Anyway,
Speaker 3: I've used Coomunity for years, long before they were ever
Speaker 3: a sponsor. It's great. It's the first chef led meal
Speaker 3: delivery service that makes your meals and small batches inside
Speaker 3: local micro kitchens across the US, not factories, so every
Speaker 3: dish arrives with the kind of freshness you'd get at
Speaker 3: the restaurant itself. Meals from Michelin starred chefs, James Beard
Speaker 3: winners and Food Network stars. Go to cookmunity dot com
Speaker 3: slash crooked or use code crooked before checkout for fifty
Speaker 3: percent off your first week. Every Cookmunity meal is handcrafted
Speaker 3: by chefs in local micro kitchens, not mass produced in
Speaker 3: large facilities. Fresh, never frozen, and can be refrigerated f
Speaker 3: forro up to seven days. Cook Unity uses real culinary
Speaker 3: talent cooking in real kitchens, not a brand slapping a
Speaker 3: chef's name on a factory product. Cooke Community works with
Speaker 3: some of the best chefs in the country to bring creative,
Speaker 3: delicious meals to your door. There are hundreds of dishes
Speaker 3: to choose from, and the menu is updated constantly. Taste
Speaker 3: what happens when real award winning chefs make fresh, small
Speaker 3: batched meals just for you. Go to cookunity dot com
Speaker 3: slash cricket or into code cricket before check out to
Speaker 3: get fifty percent off your first order. That's fifty percent
Speaker 3: off your first order by using code Cricket or going
Speaker 3: to cookunity dot com slash crookeet.
Speaker 4: Today, I am thrilled to be joined by the authors
Speaker 4: of the new book Regime Change Inside the Imperial Presidency
Speaker 4: of Donald Trump. Maggie hereman Jonathan Swan. Great to see
Speaker 4: you both, Thanks for having us, Thank you for doing this.
Speaker 4: So first of all, congrats on the book and forgetting
Speaker 4: this thing into the world. I know a staggering amount
Speaker 4: of work went into this book. I think you wrote
Speaker 4: you have over a thousand interviews. That is remarkable, and
Speaker 4: the result is just this incredible page turner that provides
Speaker 4: a level of insight into how Donald Trump operates and
Speaker 4: how this administration works that I just haven't found everywhere else.
Speaker 4: And I'm a I'm a total sicko, and I follow
Speaker 4: this for a living, and I follow these people for
Speaker 4: a living, and I was learning a lot. And I
Speaker 4: know you both are sickos who follow every move of
Speaker 4: this president. Maggie, I know you have the good fortune
Speaker 4: of getting to know him back in New York a
Speaker 4: long time ago, so you guys know the subject as
Speaker 4: well as anyone. So my first question is just a
Speaker 4: general one, which is, for both of you, what's the
Speaker 4: top line takeaway for you in terms of what do
Speaker 4: you think is changed from Trump one point zero to
Speaker 4: Trump two point zero? And then after that, I was
Speaker 4: hoping you both could just sort of tell us about
Speaker 4: the experience of bringing this reporting to Donald Trump and
Speaker 4: having to interview him about it.
Speaker 3: Why don't we start with you, Maggie.
Speaker 13: Sure.
Speaker 6: So.
Speaker 13: One of the things that we tried to convey in
Speaker 13: this book, and I think we did, Tommy, is that
Speaker 13: this is just a fundamentally different term than Trump won.
Speaker 13: This is a very different presidency. This is not twenty
Speaker 13: seventeen anymore. This is not people who this president had
Speaker 13: never met before, serving not just throughout this administration but
Speaker 13: in his White House. This is a group of people
Speaker 13: who are deeply aligned with him, who had spent many,
Speaker 13: many years thinking of some of them, not all of them,
Speaker 13: but thinking about how they could use the levers of
Speaker 13: power for a specific agenda. Trump himself has been thinking
Speaker 13: about various aspects of this presidency, one of which he's
Speaker 13: been very open about, which is retribution. And you are
Speaker 13: seeing a president wheeled power in a way that is
Speaker 13: fundamentally changing the way people look at America around the
Speaker 13: globe the way Americans interact with their president, and certainly
Speaker 13: not in our lifetime that we've seen this. I'm not
Speaker 13: sure there has been something like this. And we tried
Speaker 13: to show additionally to his unique qualities, never admitting defeat,
Speaker 13: never having any shame, refusing to be thrown out of
Speaker 13: the arena, the various factors outside of his control that
Speaker 13: added to that. But he is coming back to what
Speaker 13: had came back to Washington with a very, very different climate.
Speaker 13: It was a completely cowed Republican Congress, tech leaders, count donors,
Speaker 13: law firms who were facing threats of executive orders, media
Speaker 13: companies that were concerned about being targeted by the government.
Speaker 13: And he has very happily wielded that power.
Speaker 14: I agree with everything Maggie said. It's really hard to
Speaker 14: emphasize sufficiently how different this is from term one. It's
Speaker 14: almost unrecognizable in the way he's operating as president. And
Speaker 14: I'll just give you one kind of other way to
Speaker 14: think about it, which is in term one, he was
Speaker 14: quite reactive to domestic politics. He you know, the polls
Speaker 14: were down. He will be reactive to that stock market.
Speaker 14: You know, what's it doing? Today, What did he last
Speaker 14: see on TV? And I still think that's a lens
Speaker 14: through which people are viewing him this term. I still
Speaker 14: see a lot of kind of commentary that kind of
Speaker 14: analyzes him through that term. Look, it's not binaries or
Speaker 14: black and white. It's not to say he doesn't care
Speaker 14: at all about those things in the mid terms, but
Speaker 14: he cares far less Donald Trump this term. We picked
Speaker 14: this up pretty early in our reporting, and it became
Speaker 14: very evident when we sat down finally across from him.
Speaker 14: He views himself and is trying to create this for
Speaker 14: himself as a capital g great man of history, as
Speaker 14: a sort of Napoleonic figure. And he literally handed us
Speaker 14: this two page document when we were there with him
Speaker 14: in the Oval office, which he said was written by
Speaker 14: a historian, and it compared him to what he described
Speaker 14: as the quote unquote top ten, Mao, Stalin Hitler, Alexander,
Speaker 14: the Great, Genghis Khan, Attila, the Hun, William the Conqueror,
Speaker 14: the Tamalay, the Caesars, the Caesars So and you know,
Speaker 14: I'm not sure that most American presidents would be happy
Speaker 14: about being included in that company. He was relishing this comparison.
Speaker 14: It wasn't a moral comparison. There was actually very almost
Speaker 14: no mention of morality or values in this document. It
Speaker 14: was purely comparing them on the metric of power. And
Speaker 14: the assertion that this quote unquote historian made was that
Speaker 14: Donald Trump is the most powerful man who's ever existed
Speaker 14: on the planet because he's in charge of the United States,
Speaker 14: the most powerful military it's ever existed, the most powerful
Speaker 14: technology that's ever existed, but that he's also that he's
Speaker 14: willing to use that power. And you know, as peculiar
Speaker 14: as the source of this information was, it actually turned
Speaker 14: out not to be a historian. It was Gary Player,
Speaker 14: the golfer's for for Mechadic. But setting that aside, the
Speaker 14: thesis actually was not so dissimilar to the reporting that
Speaker 14: we had been doing, which is, this is a president
Speaker 14: now who is willing to take enormous risks, enormous risks
Speaker 14: on the global stage, whether it be going in and
Speaker 14: snaw a sovereign head of state out of his bedroom
Speaker 14: in his pajamas without even talking to Congress, whether it
Speaker 14: be starting a new war in the Middle East without
Speaker 14: even talking to Congress, starting a trade war against the
Speaker 14: whole world, which he did last April. He wants to
Speaker 14: put his imprint on the world and this country and
Speaker 14: build monuments to himself. And he's far less concerned about
Speaker 14: whatever the latest polls are, or the midterm elections or
Speaker 14: the future of the Republican Party than he is making
Speaker 14: Donald Trump a capital g great man of history.
Speaker 4: Wow, Gary Players, Caddie, what a okay, hot start, guys,
Speaker 4: this is That's an amazing anecdote. Okay, So there's so
Speaker 4: much I would ask you about. I personally think for me,
Speaker 4: the corruption has been the most shocking part of the
Speaker 4: second term. We could go to the list. There's the
Speaker 4: stock trades. There's the people trading on the Maduro operation
Speaker 4: on Kelshi. There's the secret half a billion dollar sale
Speaker 4: of the crypto business to the Amorati backed firm. There's
Speaker 4: the pardons. There's the jet. The list literally goes on
Speaker 4: and on. But I want to focus on the jet
Speaker 4: for a minute because you report in the book that
Speaker 4: Katar initially wanted to be paid between one hundred and
Speaker 4: fifty to two hundred million dollars for the plane, but
Speaker 4: then suddenly the plane was a gift, and you said,
Speaker 4: the idea for making it a gift was quote generated
Speaker 4: at the potus level. And I was wondering if you
Speaker 4: could unpack what that means a little bit, and then
Speaker 4: just your sense of Trump's general mindset about using his
Speaker 4: office to make money and how that mindset has sort
Speaker 4: of extended or not to his family, his staff and
Speaker 4: the people around him.
Speaker 13: Is so working backwards on that one, Tommy on the
Speaker 13: Katari jet, and that was really the first Neon sign
Speaker 13: example of what we saw with this president. Outside of
Speaker 13: the crypto business which came into existence in twenty twenty
Speaker 13: four during the campaign, that alone was a norm that
Speaker 13: was completely shattered. We've not seen a president do something
Speaker 13: like that before. It speaks to a mindset that is
Speaker 13: across this government. It is certainly clear for this president,
Speaker 13: and it is clear for members of his family that
Speaker 13: they feel like they gave up a lot. I mean
Speaker 13: they openly say this, we gave up a lot because
Speaker 13: the Trump ran, we were under investigation. We lost lots
Speaker 13: of money, We lost you know, golf tournaments at our
Speaker 13: clubs and so forth. And there's no laws prohibiting this,
Speaker 13: and there's nothing that stops this. And Trump openly said
Speaker 13: this to some of our colleagues earlier this year actually,
Speaker 13: and he also said, you know, nobody cared that he
Speaker 13: was trying to adhere to some guidelines. There were people
Speaker 13: who cared. It just didn't violate laws, and presidents or
Speaker 13: exempt as most people know from ethics laws in a
Speaker 13: different way. So this jet was initially described by we
Speaker 13: actually I think we're the first people to write about
Speaker 13: the fact that they were thinking about this jet. Suddenly
Speaker 13: there was this memo, this joint memo from the DOJ
Speaker 13: and the White House Council, and it was that there
Speaker 13: was nothing that was going to prohibit the government from
Speaker 13: accepting this jet and then it being transferred over to
Speaker 13: the Trump Library. It is true there have been times
Speaker 13: in history of this country when the Defense Department has
Speaker 13: accepted gifts right in the forms of plane or aircraft
Speaker 13: or whatever, not usually quite like this. And yes, this
Speaker 13: was an older jet that the Katari royal family had used.
Speaker 13: It was not brand new. They, according to our reporting,
Speaker 13: did initially want to sell it, and then it suddenly
Speaker 13: became a gift and generated at the post level. In
Speaker 13: our understanding was it was conversations that people close to
Speaker 13: the president were having with counterparts elsewhere as to how
Speaker 13: to acquire this. I think there is still a lot
Speaker 13: to be learned about how it happened. But remember the
Speaker 13: President described this as a free jet, that this would
Speaker 13: no tax payer money would go to it. In fact,
Speaker 13: it has cost several hundreds and millions of dollars in
Speaker 13: taxpayer upgrades to make it safe for President's It's just
Speaker 13: got delivered in recent days. So that was one example
Speaker 13: that made clear that we were just in a very,
Speaker 13: very different world. It took months of reporting by the
Speaker 13: Wall Street Journal to uncover that secret sale of a
Speaker 13: forty nine percent stake in the Trump crypto company that
Speaker 13: they have with the Whitcoff family too. I think it
Speaker 13: was an emiati Royal backed company, Royal family backed company.
Speaker 13: There are other deals that the Trump family is engaged in,
Speaker 13: and again the posture has been nothing prohibits this, We're
Speaker 13: allowed to It's so latent and on a scale we
Speaker 13: have just never seen before. There have obviously been accusations
Speaker 13: of self dealing from presidents in the past, this is
Speaker 13: unlike anything that I can recall seeing and really being
Speaker 13: written about in modern history at any rate. And I
Speaker 13: do think that the public is starting to pick up
Speaker 13: on it that is puncturing something that he had been
Speaker 13: able to hang on to for a long time, which
Speaker 13: was the sense that he is a successful businessman. He
Speaker 13: didn't gain anything from this. There is a recurring theme
Speaker 13: and it's hard to ignore.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and Jonathan, I mean staying on this corruption piece.
Speaker 4: We've heard about the ballroom, We've heard about the arc
Speaker 4: to Trump, the pack fundraising. You guys do a bunch
Speaker 4: of reporting on the Trump Presidential Library Fund. You in fact,
Speaker 4: you report that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik personally donated twenty
Speaker 4: five million dollars to the Trump Presidential Library Fund, and
Speaker 4: that this donation came after reports about Lutnix kids maybe
Speaker 4: making money off of administration policy in a way that
Speaker 4: was deemed unsavory in the press. I'd love to hear
Speaker 4: more about that. And then also, can you talk about
Speaker 4: you know, it sounds like Eric Trump is leading a
Speaker 4: very aggressive effort to raise money that includes individuals like
Speaker 4: Mohamma bin Salman, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, sovereign
Speaker 4: wealth funds in the Gulf, just sort of blatant conflicts
Speaker 4: of interest.
Speaker 3: I'd love to hear more about it.
Speaker 14: People around Trump have described to us that they want
Speaker 14: to raise two billion dollars for his presidential library. And
Speaker 14: if you've seen it, it's essentially a tower that looks
Speaker 14: like the Freedom Tower that sort of tow is a
Speaker 14: of the Miami skyline. It in no way is it
Speaker 14: a presidential library. And you've seen like the montage if
Speaker 14: you go in there and there's like as you it's
Speaker 14: like a gold statue of Donald Trump and restaurants and
Speaker 14: god knows what else. So the reason we found about
Speaker 14: the Howard Lutnik example is in the Oval office, Trump
Speaker 14: brings it up that there was something that Howard said,
Speaker 14: and Trump said, this is in front of a group
Speaker 14: of people, basically something to the effect of the only
Speaker 14: reason I put up with Howard's bullshit is he gave
Speaker 14: me twenty five million dollars. And you know what Trump
Speaker 14: just the way he talks, and you know, and and
Speaker 14: other times you say, you know, Howard's so great. I
Speaker 14: just asked him for the money and he immediately gave
Speaker 14: it to me, or some version of that. But what
Speaker 14: we also found is that people around Trump, Eric Trump
Speaker 14: and others have been approaching and discussing with golf monarchies
Speaker 14: funding this library, and often the trail heads back to
Speaker 14: the golf. You know, this is what makes a lot
Speaker 14: of this so remarkable is you have an administration that
Speaker 14: is conducting foreign policy dealing with the golf, I mean,
Speaker 14: selling chips, highly advanced chips to the Emirates at the
Speaker 14: same time as the Emirates are putting two billion dollars
Speaker 14: into the Trump and Witcoff family crypto business. You have
Speaker 14: the Katari Jet that the Trump family business doing all
Speaker 14: kinds of deals in the Middle East, and then the
Speaker 14: business of state. It's just one giant, you know, playground
Speaker 14: really with no borders between well put it, let's just
Speaker 14: say it's very hard sometimes to delineate the borders between
Speaker 14: official business and private business, and so that it's almost
Speaker 14: impossible to cover because I truly think we only know
Speaker 14: one percent, maybe five percent of what's going on. And
Speaker 14: this is a story that are colleagues have done phenomenal
Speaker 14: reporting on, people like Eric Lipton the Wall Street Journal,
Speaker 14: and now this. You know, we've done this, you know,
Speaker 14: modest part of it that we've tried to contribute in
Speaker 14: this book. But my Lord, like we have I don't
Speaker 14: think we really have a concept of the breadth and
Speaker 14: depth of this yet, I really don't know.
Speaker 13: And one thing to tell me that I would just
Speaker 13: add is that figure two billion dollars. It's double to
Speaker 13: a presidential library that I think you might be familiar with.
Speaker 13: And our understanding from our reporting is that that's not
Speaker 13: a coincidence. President Trump has never stopped being very focused
Speaker 13: on President Obama, but he was also, in our reporting
Speaker 13: found delighted that President Biden is having a very hard
Speaker 13: time fundraising, and that just made him want to do more.
Speaker 13: But to Jonathan's point, the models that they have for
Speaker 13: this library, it's a hotel, is how it's conceived. And
Speaker 13: they are also still planning on taking Skutari jet with them.
Speaker 13: I don't know what that looks like for air Force
Speaker 13: one for another president in two and a half years.
Speaker 13: But Jonathan is right that there is a there is
Speaker 13: a lot more to be learned here where we don't
Speaker 13: pretend to think we have covered the waterfront.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean the crypto transactions alone, are you know,
Speaker 4: you can't possibly follow who is buying Trump coin or
Speaker 4: Milannia coin on any given day. I mean, the opportunities
Speaker 4: for corruption are just staggering.
Speaker 3: Maggie.
Speaker 4: One thing that reading the book really helped me understand
Speaker 4: in a new way was just how chaotic the management
Speaker 4: of the country. And then Trump's own time when he's
Speaker 4: in the Oval Office really is. You describe Trump's time
Speaker 4: in the Oval Office not really as a day that
Speaker 4: is structured with meetings, but more like kind of a
Speaker 4: rolling bull session with some advisors whoever's in town visiting.
Speaker 4: You guys report on the scene where like there's some
Speaker 4: poor NSC goons in the corner trying to get signed
Speaker 4: off on a classified program. On the other side of
Speaker 4: the office, someone's on speakerphone from mar A Lago. The
Speaker 4: fucking decorator walks in with like rug samples. There's thing
Speaker 4: that blows up the whole conversation.
Speaker 13: The pavers for the Rose Gardens.
Speaker 4: Tell us about like paint us a picture of what
Speaker 4: it's like inside the Oval Office and how decisions are
Speaker 4: getting made.
Speaker 13: Yeah, look, I mean we describe, as you say, this
Speaker 13: setting and it's we're describing sort of an average day, right,
Speaker 13: And you could take any given moment over the course
Speaker 13: of the last seventeen months, whatever seventy and a half months,
Speaker 13: and one meeting collides into the next. And Trump often
Speaker 13: invites people in to take part in other meetings.
Speaker 6: You know.
Speaker 13: One example of that in the book is the meeting
Speaker 13: where Laura Lumer is listing people at the NSC and
Speaker 13: elsewhere in the government who she is telling the president
Speaker 13: or against him, and Scott Perry, the Congressman, comes in
Speaker 13: for a separately scheduled meeting, and then they start talking
Speaker 13: and then and so there are constant scenes like this,
Speaker 13: and it has just become very familiar to everybody in
Speaker 13: Trump's world. It's how he functioned at mar A Lago,
Speaker 13: It's how he functioned at Trump Tower. Some of this
Speaker 13: was the case in Term one is it is much
Speaker 13: more expansive now in terms of how the government is
Speaker 13: being managed. What was really striking to us, and we
Speaker 13: do describe this and the reporting in the book is
Speaker 13: just how small a group of people running this government is.
Speaker 13: If they are there's a there's a handful of people,
Speaker 13: and at their agencies at the State Department, at the Pentagon,
Speaker 13: at the CIA, at OD and I. You can go
Speaker 13: down the list, and if they are not people leading
Speaker 13: those agencies are not in the room with the president,
Speaker 13: if they're not in the Oval office, they often don't
Speaker 13: know what's going on. You know, one of the things
Speaker 13: that we talk about a lot is the fact that
Speaker 13: this administration makes a show of transparency, but they actually
Speaker 13: are quite good at keeping secrets when they want to
Speaker 13: and prefer it. There is a great deal that is
Speaker 13: kept secret, so much so that in the lead up
Speaker 13: to the Iran war on February twenty eighth, the Energy
Speaker 13: Secretary and the treasure Secretary had not been part of
Speaker 13: most of the meetings. The two people who would be
Speaker 13: impacted by a global energy crisis the most in this
Speaker 13: government were not part of it. Because this government is
Speaker 13: also very paranoid and worried about leaks. And that's also
Speaker 13: why you see the situation room is the way it
Speaker 13: is so often.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and it's probably not gonna be helped by your
Speaker 4: book because we're all reading about the big freak out
Speaker 4: about you know, everyone wondering about your sourcing, which I
Speaker 4: will not ask you to comment on. But Jonathan, related
Speaker 4: to the kind of management question is just the picture
Speaker 4: you paint of how Trump gets information. For example, you
Speaker 4: guys report that Trump was kind of largely oblivious about
Speaker 4: this massive fight within MAGA that is erupted over US
Speaker 4: support for Israel, and that anecdote really shocked me because
Speaker 4: I mean it seemed like everyone was talking about and
Speaker 4: reporting on it, and usually he has a pretty good,
Speaker 4: you know, sort of antenna for the base, and it
Speaker 4: made me wonder about his information diet generally, which you guys,
Speaker 4: I think describe as information from Fox News and then
Speaker 4: positive news printed out by a staffer named Natalie Harp.
Speaker 4: Can you tell folks who Natalie Harp is and sort
Speaker 4: of more about this information diet and whether does any
Speaker 4: news break through to Donald Trump that is factual but
Speaker 4: bad for him at this point.
Speaker 14: Yeah, it's quite as black and white as that, but
Speaker 14: it's not far off what you just described. Natalie Harp
Speaker 14: is a young woman who has worked for Donald Trump
Speaker 14: for a few years. Used to be an anchor on
Speaker 14: o An, which is a far right network. She one
Speaker 14: story that Maggie and I broke, and it's mentioned in
Speaker 14: the book. She's basically the most devoted, let's say, to
Speaker 14: Donald Trump, more than anyone we've ever seen. She writes
Speaker 14: him these She has written him numerous letters that she's
Speaker 14: left for him, including one that says you are all
Speaker 14: that matters to me, or some version of that. Raised
Speaker 14: the eyebrows of the Secret Service during the campaign, some
Speaker 14: of these met letters that were left in some of
Speaker 14: his private quarters, and she's just totally devoted him. In
Speaker 14: Oval Office meetings, she sits on the chair the side
Speaker 14: of the room with her laptop open and Trump they
Speaker 14: call her the human printer. So Trump basically just says, Natalie,
Speaker 14: get me this, or he's, you know, google this. We
Speaker 14: have a scene in the book where during the trade
Speaker 14: war or lead up to the Liberation Day, where he
Speaker 14: declares a trade war against the whole world, where he's
Speaker 14: just not believing the trade and up the deficit numbers
Speaker 14: that Howard Lutnik is giving him, and he says, Natalie,
Speaker 14: google me the real numbers. So she's you know, furiously googling,
Speaker 14: you know, And of course the real numbers don't exist,
Speaker 14: because what Secretary Lucky Dick had given him were actually
Speaker 14: the real ROAs. So that's who she is. His information
Speaker 14: diet has constricted, there's no question. In Term one he
Speaker 14: was scrolling Twitter a lot more, which just gave him
Speaker 14: much more exposure to just random things that were coming
Speaker 14: across the transom. He still does watch MSNBC, as you've noticed,
Speaker 14: when he rages against Joe Scarborough and Meeker, and you know,
Speaker 14: he'll still watch CNN and you know, but it's really
Speaker 14: Fox all the time and that whole world of the
Speaker 14: Manisphere podcast. He exploited that to his advantage very effectively
Speaker 14: during the campaign, but it wasn't like he was ever
Speaker 14: a consumer of it. Like Donal, Trump doesn't sit there
Speaker 14: listening to like Theo Vonne and Joe Rogan and Tucker
Speaker 14: Carlson's podcast. They might as well not exist. He'll occasionally hear,
Speaker 14: oh yeah, Joe Rogan's been criticizing you, but he's not
Speaker 14: tuned into that. He's just watching Fox and hearing largely
Speaker 14: from people who support him. You know, the patio Mara
Speaker 14: Lago is full of flatterers who are coming by you.
Speaker 14: Great job, You're doing an amazing job. Mister President. And
Speaker 14: his staff are people who largely believe in him, like him,
Speaker 14: not people like the first term who thought that he
Speaker 14: was dangerous or somebody that needed to be rained in.
Speaker 14: That's just not the dynamic at all. So and then
Speaker 14: he's got you know, outside people like Boris Epstein, who's
Speaker 14: his personal lawyer and enforcer, who you know, he is
Speaker 14: so positive to Trump that Trump even jokes about it.
Speaker 14: You know, he'll tell aids like, oh, I get indeted,
Speaker 14: and Boris tells me it's the best news ever. So
Speaker 14: that's I mean, that's the environment. You know, presidents always
Speaker 14: exist in a bubble, but this is a really thick bubble.
Speaker 14: This is an almost impenetrable bubble that Donald Trump exists in.
Speaker 13: He's also much less willing to believe the bad news
Speaker 13: is the other piece, frankly. I mean, people will bring
Speaker 13: him information and say things like, you know, we've always
Speaker 13: heard him say some version of you know, to Jonathan's
Speaker 13: point about you know, bring me the real numbers, the
Speaker 13: those pull numbers are fake, you know, the real ones
Speaker 13: are you know, Trafalgar or whatever, something that he considers
Speaker 13: to be more in line with how he sees the world.
Speaker 13: But it is hard for people who are trying to
Speaker 13: tell him that actually there are other things happening to
Speaker 13: get through to him that way. And just one addition
Speaker 13: to Jonathan's point about how often Fox is on Fox
Speaker 13: is far less critical just in the may of him
Speaker 13: than it was at various points in Turn one. Not
Speaker 13: you know, Fox was obviously not MSNBC, but he received
Speaker 13: more criticism on certain shows than he does it all
Speaker 13: now and that has an impact too.
Speaker 4: So that sort brings me my next question about the
Speaker 4: lowest moment. It wasn't a moment, It was the lowest
Speaker 4: several months, which was their handling of the Epstein files
Speaker 4: and mishandling of the Epstein files. I just want to
Speaker 4: get your read on how and why you think they
Speaker 4: mishandled it so badly? Is this because there's no good answers?
Speaker 4: Trump was really good friends with Jeffrey Epstein. He was
Speaker 4: for decades. He was a total creep at the time.
Speaker 4: Maybe like there's not great.
Speaker 3: Way to spin that.
Speaker 4: Did they misread the politics and not listen to the
Speaker 4: more online people like jd Vance who were warning them?
Speaker 4: And then relatedly, I mean, you guys have these incredible
Speaker 4: scenes in the situation room where Trump's team is trying
Speaker 4: to figure out how to do damage control for him,
Speaker 4: but the story keeps getting worse.
Speaker 3: We see the doodle that.
Speaker 4: Is in the Wall Street Journal that he put into
Speaker 4: the birthday book for Jeffrey Epstein. Did anyone you talk
Speaker 4: to say to you, like, you know what? It was
Speaker 4: personally pretty upsetting and demoralizing to learn that this guy
Speaker 4: we worked for was actually part of this cabal that
Speaker 4: we had promised to take down during the campaign.
Speaker 14: Well, I think at the start of all of this,
Speaker 14: the first thing to understand is that from a staff
Speaker 14: point of view, you're limited in what you can do
Speaker 14: when the person you're working for, the president, wants it
Speaker 14: all to disappear. He wanted this whole thing to disappear.
Speaker 14: I mean, he didn't want transparency, didn't want all this
Speaker 14: stuff to come out, and he would get snappy when
Speaker 14: people brought it up in his presence. So what the
Speaker 14: staff did was they had these conversations largely away from
Speaker 14: Donald Trump. They had them in the Situation Room for secrecy.
Speaker 14: You know, as you know Tommy from your time in
Speaker 14: the this is one of the most guarded rooms in
Speaker 14: the government as a national security command center. Essentially that
Speaker 14: they turned into a sort of Jeffrey Epstein crisis response center.
Speaker 14: And these are the top officials in the government sitting
Speaker 14: around the table trying to craft a pr strategy. What
Speaker 14: was evident to his staff very early on was that a.
Speaker 14: Donald Trump's name was all over these files. I mean
Speaker 14: the New York Times we found more than thirty eight
Speaker 14: thousand references to Trump and his family and places like
Speaker 14: Marra a Lago in these files. But it was also
Speaker 14: just a sense of not knowing really what was out
Speaker 14: there and not being able to have these candid conversations
Speaker 14: with Trump. I do think one thing you said is true,
Speaker 14: which is early on senior people on his team underestimated
Speaker 14: the political salience of this issue. And remember, for a
Speaker 14: lot of them who've gone through all kinds of scandal
Speaker 14: and crisis with Donald Trump, from their point of view,
Speaker 14: this is just another one. Why would this be different
Speaker 14: from you know, Access Hollywood or you know, go down
Speaker 14: the list. But it was, and it was very frustrating
Speaker 14: to Trump himself because he's so used to telling his base,
Speaker 14: think this, do this, and it shall be done. And
Speaker 14: this was this issue where, perhaps because some of his
Speaker 14: own people had helped, you know, whip up the hysteria
Speaker 14: and conspiracy about Epstein, the base just wasn't listening. The
Speaker 14: base just refused to kind of take direction on that,
Speaker 14: and it just hung around. And one thing we obtained
Speaker 14: in our reporting for the book is private focus group
Speaker 14: research that Trump's team did this year, not last year,
Speaker 14: this year, almost a full year after they first tried
Speaker 14: to start dealing with the Epstein thing. Epstein was still
Speaker 14: cutting through in these focused groups to an alarming extent
Speaker 14: for Trump's team. So, you know, all these meetings happened,
Speaker 14: but it was a turning point. I think we can
Speaker 14: now say with some level of confidence. Last summer is
Speaker 14: when Trump's political fortunes really started to decline. And one
Speaker 14: of Trump's advisors compared to Biden's decision to withdraw from
Speaker 14: Afghanistan as sort of the moment in the Biden had
Speaker 14: been when you start to see, you know, it's not
Speaker 14: dissimilar with with Epstein, and it's still a problem even
Speaker 14: to this day politically.
Speaker 4: Maggie, you know, you guys have reported on a bunch
Speaker 4: of folks of US reported on Trump enjoying to compare
Speaker 4: and publicly rank Rubio versus ged Vans. But you guys
Speaker 4: write that even early on, like back in twenty twenty one,
Speaker 4: I think that Trump's aids notice he had more personal
Speaker 4: chemistry with Marco Rubio than Advance. Now, Vance obviously wages
Speaker 4: a prett effective charm campaign. He goes from calling him,
Speaker 4: you know, comparing him to Hitler, to getting on the ticket.
Speaker 4: You write that Trump was impressed by Vance's intellect and
Speaker 4: good looks going to take issue with the part of that.
Speaker 4: But whatever, is this an endlessly fun parlor game and
Speaker 4: way to torture these guys or is he really trying
Speaker 4: to kind of constantly focused group and figure out the
Speaker 4: future of NAGA.
Speaker 3: How do you view it?
Speaker 13: A couple of things, But one is you mentioned the
Speaker 13: JD Vance criticism of Trump and the Hitler comment, which
Speaker 13: I think was made in a text exchange with someone.
Speaker 13: It's not like Marco Rubio was exactly subtle about Donald Trump.
Speaker 13: They ran against each other. There was a whole you know,
Speaker 13: Genitalia adjacent whatever on the primary debate state Oh sorry,
Speaker 13: it was just Genitaliam.
Speaker 4: Sorry, it's a literal dick measuring contest that are round.
Speaker 13: So I'm just gonna leave it there with you, Tommy. So,
Speaker 13: I think that a couple of things. One, as you
Speaker 13: know very well. The second that somebody who is in
Speaker 13: office and is term limited, which the president is. Despite
Speaker 13: all of the conversation around this, once they endorse somebody,
Speaker 13: they stop being quite as relevant and their lame duck
Speaker 13: status starts to increase. Donald Trump is not exactly somebody
Speaker 13: who is going to disappear quietly into that good night
Speaker 13: as we've been saying throughout this episode number one. So
Speaker 13: he's in no rush for that because he sees this
Speaker 13: as his party and his movement for a variety of reasons.
Speaker 13: I do think it is fun for him. I do
Speaker 13: think he enjoys it. As long as he has been
Speaker 13: in politics, he has done this. He did this with
Speaker 13: Mike Pence and Newt Gingrich and Chris Christie in twenty sixteen.
Speaker 13: In the immediately in the lead up to when he
Speaker 13: announced that it was Pence, he was still leaving the
Speaker 13: idea open that it might be Chris Christy, still which
Speaker 13: he'd already offered it to Pence. So yes, there is
Speaker 13: the game aspect of it. It's hard to look at
Speaker 13: the existing fundamentals of the modern Republican Party and the
Speaker 13: MAGA movement and not see how JD. Van is still
Speaker 13: very much the prohibitive front runner. Now, obviously lights can change,
Speaker 13: but I also don't think that Donald Trump is going
Speaker 13: to completely defy reality if that's where it's going. But again,
Speaker 13: these predictions are not worth a whole lot. I do
Speaker 13: think we will continue to see much more of this's
Speaker 13: going forward, but it's totally.
Speaker 14: On an interpersonal level. It's just it's totally bizarre. I mean,
Speaker 14: we have a lot of this in the book. But
Speaker 14: we have a scene in the book where Rupert Murdoch
Speaker 14: comes to the White House for dinners. We're sitting on
Speaker 14: the same table as Trump in the Blue Room of
Speaker 14: the White House, and JD. Vance and Marco Rubio are
Speaker 14: at the table, and Trump right there with the both
Speaker 14: of them at the table, asks Rupert Murdoch to assess
Speaker 14: each of them, and Murdoch gives Marco Rubio a much
Speaker 14: more hearty, you know, endorsement than Vance. I mean, this
Speaker 14: is what Trump is subjecting his vice president too. I
Speaker 14: think the only thing we can confident of is that
Speaker 14: he's not going to make it comfortable or easy for him.
Speaker 14: He's just going to keep doing this. It's just who
Speaker 14: he is.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think the quotes you have is Murdock says
Speaker 4: I think JD. Has the potential to be great, and
Speaker 4: of Rubio, he says, Marco is brilliant. So that, yeah,
Speaker 4: that'd be tough to hear. Uh So, Jonathan, I've tracked
Speaker 4: the Trump foreign policy closely. I just find it particularly
Speaker 4: interesting and since the beginning I've been trying to understand
Speaker 4: the emergence of Steve Witkoff, who, for the listeners is
Speaker 4: like Trump's real estate and golf buddy turned diplomatic envoy
Speaker 4: for for everything. This anecdote from the book blew my mind.
Speaker 4: So you have this scene where witcough is, I believe
Speaker 4: in Moscow meeting with Vladimir Putin. The anecdote goes like this,
Speaker 4: what are you drawing, Sir? Wikoff asked Putin held up
Speaker 4: a piece of paper in thick, looping penstrokes. It said
Speaker 4: three plus two, which is shorthand for the territorial framework
Speaker 4: that wick Cooff had discussed with him. Three oblists Russia
Speaker 4: would keep out right and two where the fighting would
Speaker 4: freeze in place.
Speaker 3: Quote.
Speaker 4: Can you can you sign that for me and I
Speaker 4: can take it home? Witkoff asked. Putin signed the drawing,
Speaker 4: and Wikoff brought it home, where he had it framed
Speaker 4: in black with tope matts. So two questions for listeners, like,
Speaker 4: basically what Wikoff is asking to be framed? There is
Speaker 4: a piece of paper that would memorialize an agreement that
Speaker 4: would be capitulation for the Ukrainians. And I think a
Speaker 4: lot of people would argue validates Putin's decision to invade Ukraine,
Speaker 4: which led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.
Speaker 4: Why would Wikoff want that?
Speaker 3: In your view?
Speaker 4: And then, more importantly, what do you make of Witkoff's
Speaker 4: emergence and his motivations, Because by all accounts, he seems
Speaker 4: like a very nice man, one who seemingly is in
Speaker 4: over his head, understandably by the way I think anyone
Speaker 4: would be in his position. But also it's hard not
Speaker 4: to see his son's role at world's liberty, financial the
Speaker 4: crypto business, and worry about conflicts of interest and corruption.
Speaker 14: So Steve Wikoff has no before this term, had no
Speaker 14: diplomatic experience full stop, no foreign colicy experience full stop.
Speaker 14: There is a commonality at the most senior levels of
Speaker 14: Trump world, which is a contempt for subject matter expertise
Speaker 14: and subject matter experts. Jared Kushner would often to others
Speaker 14: speak with contempt about you know, people who've worked on
Speaker 14: Middle East deals forever, and there's a feeling from these
Speaker 14: guys there always has been that they have fresh ideas,
Speaker 14: fresh answers, private sector thinking, you know you've heard, you've
Speaker 14: heard all of this before. Trump again, Trump feels comfortable
Speaker 14: with Wikoff saw him as a deal maker, thought that
Speaker 14: he could bring home a quick deal with Putin. Trump
Speaker 14: thought it would be very easy to end this war.
Speaker 14: When he was saying twenty four hours it actually in
Speaker 14: Trump's mind, I don't think was that much of a
Speaker 14: rhetorical flourish. I think he genuinely thought he could end
Speaker 14: this conflict very quickly and has been quite frustrated that
Speaker 14: it hadn't that it hasn't been that Witcoff hasn't been
Speaker 14: able to bring home a deal. Wit Coough, from what
Speaker 14: we can gather from his colleagues, views the conflict, there's
Speaker 14: not really a sense of Putin as a villain and
Speaker 14: an aggressor and Ukraine as a victim. It's actually, you know,
Speaker 14: we have a scene in the book where Trump is
Speaker 14: with his inner circle in the Oval office hashing out
Speaker 14: you know, supposedly going to hash out the Rushia Ukraine policy,
Speaker 14: and Keith Kellogg, who is his original envoys, dutifully giving
Speaker 14: this presentation which he spent all this time on. Unbeknownst
Speaker 14: to Kellogg, Trump already had a back channel set up
Speaker 14: with Witkoff. He had told Kellogg about that he's doing
Speaker 14: this presentation, and during the presentation, Trump is interrupting him
Speaker 14: by saying things like the only good thing about Ukraine
Speaker 14: is the women they keep winning Miss Universe. Zelensky's terrible,
Speaker 14: He's destroyed his country. So the animist, when the animus
Speaker 14: comes out, it's almost never against Putin, it's almost always
Speaker 14: against Ukraine and Zelensky. And I think Witkoff saw his
Speaker 14: his job as bringing this conflict to an end, but
Speaker 14: really viewed those leaders on on a flat plane without
Speaker 14: really making moral distinctions. I mean, we have another line
Speaker 14: in the book where he tells Pusan that, you know,
Speaker 14: Russia's good at a lot of things, but they're really
Speaker 14: bad at PR as as if the Kremlin's main problem
Speaker 14: was a PR problem. So that's the mindset. And you know,
Speaker 14: he goes and meets with Putin on his own. He
Speaker 14: really doesn't use staff like someone in that role would
Speaker 14: normally use staff. And as a result, there have been
Speaker 14: times where there I think there's been miscommunication and misunderstandings,
Speaker 14: and you know, it turns out diplomacy is complicated and
Speaker 14: this conflict was not easy to resolve, and in fact
Speaker 14: it's still raging on many many twenty four hours after
Speaker 14: the initial twenty four hours when he was going to
Speaker 14: solve it right.
Speaker 4: Well, I think we'll down the road, maybe we'll learn
Speaker 4: more about this, whether there's a corruption piece of this
Speaker 4: to the Wickoff story. But listen, you guys have given
Speaker 4: me a lot of time on an unbelievably busy week.
Speaker 4: The book again is Regime Change, Inside the Imperial Present
Speaker 4: and See of Donald Trump. I cannot recommend it highly
Speaker 4: enough to our audience who are desperate to try to
Speaker 4: understand Donald Trump the man, this administration, the decision making process,
Speaker 4: and also just to I think we even read things
Speaker 4: that we knew again but in a way that puts
Speaker 4: together the whole scene and helps you understand all the
Speaker 4: different motivations and people involved. And it's an extraordinary piece
Speaker 4: of work. So congratulations to both of you for forgetting
Speaker 4: this thing done and out into the world, and for
Speaker 4: talk with me today.
Speaker 3: Jonathan, Maggie, thank you so much.
Speaker 13: Thanks Tommy, thanks so much.
Speaker 3: That's our show for today. Thanks to Maggie and Jonathan
Speaker 3: for coming on. Everybody check out Regime Change. Dan and
Speaker 3: I will be back with a new show on Friday.
Speaker 3: Positive America is a Crooked Media production. Our show is
Speaker 3: produced by Austin Fisher, Saul Ruben, McKenna Roberts, and Faris
Speaker 3: Safari with re Jerlin, Elijah Cone and Adrian Hill. Our
Speaker 3: team includes Matt de Grote, Ben Hefcot, Jordan Kanter, Charlotte
Speaker 3: Landis Krol pel Avive, David Tolles, Mia Kelman, Ryan Young
Speaker 3: and Naomi Single. Our staff is probably you Younis with
Speaker 3: the Writers Guild of America East