Trump’s Made for TV Occupation of D.C.

Today's presenting sponsor is Simply Safe Home Security.

There's a lot of performative, tough on crime talk out there, that's for sure.

Simply Safe Home Security actually is effective against crime.

Their Active Guard uses smart tech and live agents to proactively deter criminals, not just react once they're already in.

I think John Lovitt set up a SimplySafe himself.

You bet I did.

He feels confident.

He looked confident.

I feel confident.

It's really easy to do.

You can customize it for your house or apartment, and you can count on it.

It works.

It's really reliable.

The app was great.

The customer support was always there.

I just, it gives you peace of mind.

Yeah, ever since you put that in, you're like the cock of the walk.

That's right.

I'm the cock of the walk, Tommy.

Most security systems only take action after someone breaks in.

That's too late.

Simply say, if you knew, active guard monitoring, outdoor protection helps stop break-ins before they happen.

If someone's lurking, just being real creepy, like an RFK kind of at the gym shirtless, in jeans, leathery, benching, agents talk to them in real time and they say, hey, stop it.

Turn on spotlights.

They call the police.

They can proactively deter crime before it starts.

Named best home security system of 2025 by CNET, 4 million plus Americans trust SimplySafe.

Ranked number one in customer service by Newsweek in USA Today.

Monitoring plan started around $1 a day, 60-day money-back guarantee, no contracts, no hidden fees.

Visit simplysafe.com slash crooked to claim 50% off a new system with professional monitoring plan and get your first month free.

That's simplysafe.com slash crooked.

There's no safe like SimplySafe.

How many discounts does USA Auto Insurance offer?

Too many to say here.

Multi-vehicle discount, safe driver discount, new vehicle discount, storage discount, legacy discount.

How many discounts will you stack up?

Tap the banner or visit usaa.com/slash autodiscounts.

Restrictions apply.

Welcome to Pod Save America.

I'm John Favreau.

I'm John Lubbett.

Tommy is on vacation.

Special assignment.

Yeah, he's checking out the Epstein stuff.

He's going to figure out.

He's going to

find the answers.

Yeah, that's right.

He's

digging down the court files in Miami.

Yeah, down there with a magnifying glass and a black light.

Oh, God.

Sorry.

That's not good.

On today's show, we're going to talk about Trump's upcoming summit with Putin in Alaska, his latest comments on Gaza, J.D.

Vance's attempt to pin Epstein on the Democrats and predict indictments over RussiaGate.

And then Lovett talks to the New Yorker's David Kirkpatrick about his investigation into the full extent of Trump's corruption, which has so far made his family more than $3 billion richer.

$3 billion.

And that's conservative.

And that's conservative.

Holy shit.

But first, here's how the White House kicked off the week.

The President of the United States has responded to an attempted D.C.

carjacking that targeted the 19-year-old Doge staffer, known as Big Balls, by deploying 800 National Guard troops across Washington and federalizing the city's police force.

That is a thing that actually is happening in America right now.

Doesn't matter that violent crime in D.C.

has dropped to a 30-year low.

Doesn't matter that the 5,000 troops Trump deployed here to Los Angeles in June had basically nothing to do but stand around and look bored.

The purpose of ordering our own military to occupy our cities doesn't seem to be about fighting crime, but about getting headlines that Trump is fighting crime and as always, owning the libs.

This was clear from the president's Monday morning announcement in the White House briefing room where he was flanked by half his cabinet, who apparently had nothing better to do than focus on the follow-up from a carjacking in a city of 700,000 people.

Here they are in all their glory.

Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged out maniacs and homeless people.

They love to spit in the face of the police as the police are standing up there in uniform.

They're standing and they're screaming at them an inch away from their face and then they start spitting in their face and I said, you tell them, you spit and we hit.

And we're getting rid of the slums too.

We have slums here.

We're getting rid of them.

I know it's not politically correct.

You'll say, oh, so terrible.

No, we're getting rid of the slums.

Let me be crystal clear.

Crime in D.C.

is ending and ending today.

They will be strong, they will be tough, and they will stand with their law enforcement partners.

This is nothing new for DOD.

In Los Angeles, we did the same thing.

I can't touch you if you're 14, 15, 16, 17 years old, and you have a gun.

They go to family court, and they get to do yoga and arts and crafts.

Sounds like Delaney Maxwell's facility in Texas.

Yeah, it's yoga and arts and crafts.

Yeah, at the beginning of that sentence, I can't touch a foot.

It's like, wait, where?

Oh, the different story.

We're humbering a different story.

Yeah, it's hard to, it's confusing that with you spit, we hit.

Right.

Yeah, for sure.

It's a lot going on there.

Also, I just,

the Attorney General of the United States saying, I am going to end all crime.

Crime is ending in D.C.

Crime is ending.

Thanks, Pam Bondi.

So, what do you think about this?

It seems as if Trump has the legal authority to do this because D.C.

is technically a federal district, and D.C.

Mayor Muriel Bowser conceded as much in a press conference later on Wednesday.

But is this a wise move?

Is this a way to fight crime?

So first of all,

so Bowser is like striking a kind of conciliatory posture, which

seems like what she's been doing quietly because Trump refused to even criticize her.

He actually spoke well of her and saying though she was failing on this issue, she's a good person, which is more than he would say about most Democratic mayors, I think.

So there's also seems like she doesn't have much of a a choice.

Right, yes.

I mean, look, we can, there's

the fact that the president can call something an emergency and that unlocks all these powers and who decides what an emergency is is completely subjective is a huge problem.

It's a huge problem across a whole range of issues.

That's like the shape of a lot of these things.

That's the shape of him invoking the Insurrection Act and a whole bunch of other abuses of presidential authority.

But yes, he's saying the law is clear.

He can say it's an emergency and then he can take over the police.

So there's two big pieces to this.

There is the deploying of the National Guard.

That doesn't look that different than what Trump did in Los Angeles, except

D.C.

is a federal place that has tons of federal law enforcement, military facilities, all kinds of president's in charge of the National Guard in D.C.

Yes.

Well, and also that there's just tons of presidential police departments.

The Veterans Affairs has a police department and Secret Service is running our service.

So it's just like unlike other cities.

But the other part of it is declaring that Pam Bondi is now in charge of the Metropolitan Police Department.

And I think this gets at the uncertainty about what happens next, because how are we meant to know what Pam Bondi is going to do when she's running a local police department?

She doesn't know what she's going to do when she's running a local police department.

She has never done it before.

And she didn't know she was going to do it till this week.

Look, you got a lot more eyes on all those Epstein files now.

She's got a lot more, she's got a lot more hands in the D.C.

police force.

They're going to be working round the clock because there's more pages for them to look at yeah no more no more shifts walking around the block we should say yeah there's the there's the uh the home rule act was passed a long time ago that gave dc you know certain sort of privileges and and an autonomy right and in that legislation there is a uh a provision that says okay in times of emergency the president could federalize the police force in dc for 48 hour periods

because it's like supposed to be for like there's like you know overwhelming violence or rioting, whatever else.

And then apparently, if you federalize it for longer than 48 hours, every time you re-federalize it for another 48 hours, you have to like send a message to the relevant committees in Congress, which I'm sure they'll get to that, right?

Yeah.

And then there's also, I believe after 30 days, Congress might have to approve it, but we're a long way from that 30-day period.

Okay, Pambondi, you're now basically the police chief.

of the District of Columbia.

What are your thoughts?

Like, like, you know, I know what Donald Trump's thoughts are.

They're not tough enough.

They're not violent enough.

They're not knocking heads together.

They're letting everybody get away with stuff.

And we got to be tough like we used to be tough.

Okay, that's something you can say in a campaign speech.

You're running the police department.

The police department in D.C.

doesn't have enough officers.

That's something that they've talked about publicly.

Are there specific issues you'd like them to address?

When you say you want them to be tougher, presumably continuing to follow the Constitution will have to happen.

But they don't know.

They have no idea.

So

I think it's like hard to predict exactly what this will actually look out, how different it will look than just the,

then DC looked yesterday.

But what I go to is

this is for headlines and not just for today, right?

So what are the headlines they want in the next couple of days and weeks?

And I think it's them, they want to show people being arrested.

They want to show bodies on the street.

They want to see military National Guard members standing in front of buildings.

And then I think they want to show like homeless encampments being torn down.

And then they want to declare victory of some kind.

And so that to me is what comes next.

Does it have any actual impact on crime in DC?

Who fucking knows?

But like, they don't have a plan for anything other than a series of photo ops over the next couple of days.

And even if they don't get those photo ops, I mean, we know from experience here in Los Angeles that it doesn't really matter to Trump whether he's got the photo ops are that's cherry on the cherry on the cake, right?

But if he doesn't have the photo ops, then, you know, know, a month from now, he's just going to say, oh, and then we, we took over D.C.

And have you seen it lately?

It's beautiful.

It's beautiful.

That's right.

That city was dying.

We saved this city.

And everyone's going to be like, look, no one's going to ask him, well, what about the crime statistics?

There's a lot of arguing about the crime statistics, right?

But let's just take them at their word that they want to fight crime in D.C.

Right, sure.

So like, if you want to fight crime in D.C., if the crime rate is not declining fast enough for you,

there's a whole menu of options that they could have picked from, right?

Trump's acknowledged in the press conference that there's enough police that should be able to handle the crime.

So I don't know why you're adding a bunch of troops, military, that are not trained in law enforcement.

They are trained in sort of combat overseas or defending the homeland or doing various other tasks that National Guard do in the United States.

Law enforcement isn't necessarily one of them.

There's some courts that could be filled with more judges or prosecutors so they could get the cases done faster, right?

Like that's a challenge that Judge Janine could fix in her new role.

Sure.

She's also complaining about

the way that they treat juvenile offenders who commit violence or have guns.

Like that, again, that is a

if that's a problem for you, that's something that you could address with legislation.

None of this is Pam Bondi becomes the police chief and we send out the National Guard.

Well, the other, yes.

Also, it was, what, two or three years ago that Congress rejected a reform law from D.C.

because they wanted to not allow them to do certain kinds of

legal reforms and criminal justice reforms in D.C.

Like this has been like a roiling topic.

So now Pam Bondi is in charge of the Metropolitan Police Department.

There's going to be a couple hundred members of the National Guard.

They also are saying that they're going to involve all these other federal police agencies that exist.

An incredible bit of coordination that has to happen now, an incredible logistical feat of figuring out how to involve and track police in doing local law enforcement, which this administration is known for.

So Pam Bond.

Logistical planning.

Yeah, and so Pam Bondi, who was a prosecutor and became a state attorney general and then a lobbyist for Qatar and a Kuwaiti company and some others,

and now is the attorney general, like, okay, like, well, this is a very big logistical challenge for you.

I guess you're going to be working around the clock on this.

Well, good thing she's got the help of Pete Hegseth and the military and Janine Pirro, a couple of Fox hosts to the rescue.

Yeah.

Doug Bergam was up there because I guess Interior has some.

Well, no, Interior has law enforcement.

They all have law enforcement in D.C.

It's just Cash Patel's there.

We already have FBI agents on the streets in D.C.

over the over the weekend.

They deployed some federal law enforcement.

Cash Patel said something I think that was not that because that didn't seem like particularly helpful because he talked about how crime rates were dropping during the press conference.

He's like, hey, you're not on book.

But the, yeah,

I can't, like, so yes, they were, they're turning this carjacking, which is terrible, and there are carjackings in DC, and that is terrible, into like an inciting incident to do this.

But I, they must have been wanting, this must have been what they've been wanting to do.

I don't, what I can't- You don't think the show of force was just for big balls?

I don't think it was.

I look, I think big ball, look, I think big balls maybe got things rolling, you know, but I, I don't, like, was this something that they were planning to to you in a couple of weeks moved it up?

Was this always happening anyway?

Was this like, who knows?

Yeah, I know.

Cause, you know, the, the first thought for a lot of people were, it's a distraction or whatever.

And then, you know, a White House official tells Playbook, no, no, he was driving around the city and he, cause he complains about the graffiti too, as well as the violence.

And he was just like, no, we got to clean this up, which honestly, I'm willing to believe because he's a, again, he just a visual learner.

He's a, he's a visual learner.

He's a, he's a TV guy.

For sure.

He likes, you know, he probably watched cops a lot,

right?

And he sees crime and he's like, oh, crime's bad.

We got to do this.

And then, well, why isn't crime falling fast enough?

Why isn't crime eliminated?

He's like, well, there's a lot of cops.

No, I don't want to hear the explanation.

We just need more force.

More force, more people.

I do think the implications of this and the potential consequences are far beyond just cleaning up crime in D.C., which is like,

I don't know if you saw like Greg Sargent at the New Republic got a hold of some memo that was floating around the Defense Department that was like, yeah, DHS is going to need a lot more deployments like they had in Los Angeles of the military to really take care of this political priority for the president of immigration.

So one implication, one consequence of this is now there's just going to be, you're going to get more ICE raids, more raids of people like we have here in Los Angeles.

And like we don't, and stuff we don't even know, right?

You have a bunch of people walking around with fucking guns militarized in Washington, D.C., who don't necessarily know what they're doing, who don't necessarily have an objective.

And I don't know.

I think putting more guns around the street with people who don't really know what they're doing is probably not the best way to achieve public safety, but who knows?

Yeah, so I think there's one part in this press conference where he talked about how, you know, it's just starting in D.C.

They're going to go from D.C.

and then go elsewhere.

And it

like, look, it's a small thing, but, you know, Trump saying, I'm ordering all the states to lower their flags for the Pope, too.

Well, you're not in charge of them.

And so for Trump, who does, who either chooses not to know or doesn't know about the distinction between a city like DC and

what it would mean to have federal officers in Chicago is saying, oh, we're going to do this everywhere, right?

And then you look at what they did in Los Angeles, which, again, is because he wants the headlines and he wants the attention.

And so he puts some National Guard troops there and some Marines at federal buildings in Los Angeles.

But if what he wants is to be policing a whole city, right?

Like,

it's not hard enough for him to do that if he really really wants to do that, right?

We have benefited from the fact that he has a short attention span, and this is more

about a show of force than force, right?

But if you really wanted to guard every federal building in Chicago, when

in Portland, there was some question about where there was federal jurisdiction, right?

Is it just on federal property?

I was like, well, no, you have to be able to guard federal property, which means it extends beyond federal property.

You have to be able to investigate beyond federal property.

So it goes beyond federal property.

It's not hard to imagine imagine them deciding that every post office, every federal building, every courthouse, every customs office, every place where you get your passport renewed, those are all federal buildings all throughout every major city in this country.

And then all of a sudden they're deploying National Guard there.

Oh, and they're detailing people from Veterans Affairs and from the Interior Department and all these places.

And all of a sudden, there's all kinds of police throughout a city, right?

That is not impossible.

And so all of this, every, like, do I think that's what they're planning to do?

I don't know.

They don't really plan.

These people are kind of improvisational.

But like, that is a step.

That is a step they could take.

And so they start with this because they can get away with this.

He sees what the press looks like.

He sees what the attention looks like.

And I do worry that they're going to enjoy the stories and attention and press they get from this.

I do.

And I realize that, you know, calling out hypocrisy is just like fucking spitting in the wind at this point.

Sure.

You spit it, we hit it.

It's you.

You spit it, it hits you in the face.

But like, do we think this is a tough on-crime president?

This is a president who doesn't like crime.

He's very anti-crime, right?

Criminal conviction himself, pardoned a bunch of people who in D.C.

attacked cops, attacked cops in D.C.

I guess we, I guess we went through this once before.

There was a big crime scene in D.C.

was when a bunch of people attacked the Capitol and attacked cops.

And one of the people who screamed at the time that the cop should die was caught on camera saying that.

Kill him.

He said, shout out to him.

Kill him.

Kill him.

He's in the Justice Department now.

He's a top official in the Justice Department, in the Trump Justice Department.

So I don't know if it's that Trump doesn't like crime so much as he does.

He's fine with crime if it's committed by people who are his pals or himself

or his followers.

But crime that's committed by the libs

or Democrat-run cities or people who look a little crimy.

They look crimy for sure.

Look a little crimy.

He's not going to tolerate that.

For my friends, everything.

For my enemies, the law.

And look, again, it's not Trump.

Trump has enabled.

Like, the fact that there has been so little outcry or the fact that they have put a person at the Justice Department that shouted, kill cops at the top of his lungs is,

you know, I don't care for it.

There's a lot of like, oh, this is what the White House wants us to be talking about, wants everyone to talk about, which I get.

I don't know.

What do you think?

How do you think Democrats should respond to this one?

You know, I'll tell you, I'll tell you what's a crime.

This big, beautiful bill.

Yeah, man, it sucks.

He's the assignment editor for the world, it's the most powerful person in the world, and he's doing terrible and dangerous dangerous things with his power, and we have to talk about it.

The answer is not to try to pivot to a different topic.

It is to be persuasive, interesting, believable, trustworthy to others who are persuadable on the topics as we start to build a larger story about why Donald Trump is such a threat and why we are a better alternative.

I also think you can't just write this off as another distraction because most people who don't pay close attention to politics are like, oh, oh, there's crime somewhere.

Crime is bad.

We like when there's less crime.

And it seems like Donald Trump wants to throw more resources at the crime.

And I think you've got to tell people, like, no, no, no, that's not what's happening.

If, like, what the conversation you and I just had, yeah.

Like, if he wants to fight crime and do more to crime, there's a whole bunch of things he could do.

This is not that.

This is putting a bunch of people who aren't trained in law enforcement throughout the city so he can exert more control.

Yeah.

And it's also just like

this is a distraction, it's not an argument, it's not anything, right?

Because some people will be like, Well, and I know that people felt like that about LA at times, right?

Because people who weren't living here, when all of this went down, would be like, Well, were the riots really bad?

Was there a lot of violence?

And we're like, No, there wasn't.

But if there was, people would be like, Well, maybe then maybe the troops are good to like calm down the violence.

It's like, no, no, no, this is a whole fucking made-up thing.

Yeah, I just,

this is a distraction.

Feels like it's from another era of Trump politics, and

it's also just

a conversation among a bunch of people who are not distracted and are aware of the threat, right?

Like it's like I'm not distracted, you're not distracted.

The people seeing these articles about distraction are not particularly distracted.

I suppose if you kind of, I don't know, steer the ship of the great 100,000 talkers that were all surrounded by the 100,000 people that are part of these kinds of debates, you shift it, and they, what, they talk about what Trump's doing a little less, talk about Epstein and tariffs a bit more.

That's going to affect what?

Local news coverage and TikToks that'll reach people who are going to find out that Trump federalized the police.

I just,

everything's a fucking distraction.

We're a perpetually distracted society.

I'd say it was going to land with people when in a couple of weeks or a month, there's a bunch of stories about the National Guard not knowing what they're supposed to do, and Pam Bondis run the police force like an incompetent mess and crime's not going down.

And then someone gets arrested who didn't do anything.

Like, then everyone's like, oh, he's fucking incompetent, and he did this for some other reason.

Like, then we're going to be able to show what's wrong with it.

Yeah, I'll also say this.

The Attorney General of the United States just made a huge promise that she's going to end crime in the District of Columbia.

They now own this.

They own the challenges

of running a police department in a city and stopping crime, where even the best, smartest, most compassionate, far-reached, forward-thinking department will struggle against the reality of a city and life in a city, and the people that commit crimes in it, and the people that live there, and all the challenges that go along with it.

But they claim they have some superpowers.

Great, because in a couple of weeks, there will still be carjackings, there will still be challenges, there'll still be crimes, and petty crimes, and sexual assaults, and robberies, and all the rest.

Because,

like, they're authoritarians, but they're not all-powerful.

And we have to, I think, that to me is like a lever for us, which is just, all right, you're going to do this?

Yeah.

You're going to, you're going to be the ones.

Pam Bondi, you've cracked it.

You've cracked the code of crime in America.

Great.

Potsi of America is brought to you by Acorns.

What has stopped me from investing in the past?

Not knowing how to do it, feeling like it was hard, like it was friction, like you had to call a guy with a blue shirt and a white collar in Manhattan to do it.

Wow.

You know?

But you don't need that.

You just need Acorns.

They make it easy to start investing like an expert, even if you're an expert at something else.

Acorns, the financial wellness app that helps you invest for your future, save for tomorrow, and spend smarter today.

Acorns makes it easy to start doing more with your money.

In fact, you can start automatically investing with just your spare change.

You don't have to be a finance whiz.

Acorns puts your money into an expert-built portfolio to make sure you're investing wisely, not wildly.

Plus, Acorns can support your money goals in life, a new car, a first home, investing for your kids, saving up for retirement, and so much more.

Acorns even has a checking account that automatically invests for you, an emergency fund that grows your money, money, and it's all easy to do.

Look, investing, there's no better time to start than now.

If you do it early, you will really benefit in the long term because of compound interest, because the markets tend to go up over time, and because you know what, if you put like 10, 25 bucks a month away, you probably won't miss it, but it will matter a lot for you down the road.

Sign up now and Acorns will boost your new account with a $5 bonus investment.

Join the over 14 million all-time customers who have already saved and invested over $25 billion with Acorns.

Head to acorns.com slash crooked or download the Acorns app to get started.

Paid online endorsement compensation provides incentive to positively prone acorns, tier 2 compensation provided, nesting involves risk, acorns advisors, LLC, and SEC registered investment advisor, a few important disclosures at acorns.com slash crooked.

Hi there, it's Andy Richter, and I'm here to tell you about my podcast, The Three Questions with Andy Richter.

Each week, I invite friends, comedians, actors, and musicians to discuss these three questions.

Where do you come from?

Where are you going?

And what have you learned?

New episodes are out every Tuesday with guests like Julie Bow and Ted Danson, Tig Nataro, Will Arnett, Phoebe Bridgers, and more.

You can also tune in for my weekly Andy Richter call-in show episodes where me and a special guest invite callers to weigh in on topics like dating disasters, bad teachers, and lots more.

Listen to the three questions with Andy Richter wherever you get your podcasts.

So Trump took questions after his announcement, and lots of them were about his big meeting with Vladimir Putin that's set for this Friday in Alaska, the place from which proto-Trump politician Sarah Palin could see Russia from her doorstep, thereby bringing the stupidest era of American politics full circle.

We're right back there.

Trump is theoretically looking for a deal to end the war in Ukraine, though he'll be doing so without Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky, who isn't invited to the Putin meet-cute and will apparently get a readout later on the potential fate of his country.

Zelensky is understandably ripshit about this, though I'm not sure why, as Trump's negotiating prowess was on full display at Monday's press conference.

But they've taken some very prime territory.

They've taken largely ocean, you know, in real estate we call it ocean front property.

That's always the most valuable property.

If you're in a lake, a river, or an ocean, it's always the best property.

Well, we're going to have a meeting with Vladimir Putin, and at the end of that meeting, probably in the first two minutes, I'll know exactly whether or not a deal can be led.

There's going to be a lot of swapping.

There's going to be swapping.

They're going to be changing.

They like to call it change.

Changing, they like to call it change.

Yeah, there's another lines.

There's another quote where he said, it's very complicated.

We're going to get some back.

We're going to to get some switch.

There will be some swapping of territories to the betterment of both.

He also said, I'm going to get everybody's ideas.

I'm talking to European leaders.

I'm talking to President Zelensky.

I go into that thing fully loaded right up there, and we're going to see what happens.

Yeah, Zelensky, the EU, Laura Loomer.

Yeah.

No bad ideas in a brainstorm when it comes to

borders of Ukraine.

Yeah.

Asking a question in the briefing.

Whoever.

He's going to take all ideas from people at Mar-a-Lago that happened to be at the shrimp station at the same time.

So with Tommy out this week, you finally have the chance to sling that take you've been working on about the fate of the Donbass.

All right, yeah, no, that's right.

But before I let you cook on that,

the meeting with Putin, it's already being covered through the prism of whether, you know, President Art of the Deal can...

pull another rabbit out of his hat.

It does feel like the most important question, though, is not whether he can get a deal, but what kind of deal he's willing to make.

What do you think?

Yeah, so first of all, it's hard to know because he said virtually everything a person can say about the situation.

I think J.D.

Vance sat down with Barta Romo, and we're going to talk about some of the other parts of it, but he talked about this, and I do think he is the

like, you know, the

first intellectual Zamboni among equals.

And like, what he says, I think, is like kind of the most, the most intellectualized form of Trump's brain at times.

And

when you watch Vance talk about

first of all, there's that inherent kind of moral, it's just like morally vacant.

Like, look, these are just two countries that have been fighting and they both want to get out of this thing, which is so despicable.

Like, this is Russia invaded Ukraine.

You know,

both Trump and Vance tend to say a version of,

you know, I believe Ukraine wants peace.

I believe Russia wants peace, right?

And Vance then does an aside because he's very smart and he carefully says, look, we all condemn the invasion, almost as an aside, right?

But then he makes the point about the U.S.

not wanting to fund Ukraine, not wanting to support Ukraine, wanting to push it back onto Europe.

And he makes this outrageous claim, which is that the fact that Putin is willing to meet with Trump is some kind of breakthrough, right?

Which is so embarrassing.

The president of the United States, you're calling it a breakthrough that you got a meeting.

You scored a general with Putin and now like all of a sudden, that's an impressive feat?

The guy's a fucking fugitive from the ICC for war crimes related to kidnapping 20,000 Ukrainian children, not to mention the torture, rape, slaughter of thousands and thousands and thousands of Ukrainians that Putin ordered.

And he's coming to the United States.

And look, it's like, it is important to talk with even murderous tyrants if we're trying to end a war.

But like,

Putin's pretty psyched he got the meeting.

Right.

Like, so this is not like a, this is a, this is a big win for Putin.

And so he, so he describes Trump getting the meeting as some kind of a win, which is very embarrassing and wrong.

And then

part of the explanation for what made it happen is because of the pressure that they've applied to Ukraine, right?

All of which has made,

like, sort of made

is a signal to Putin that his antagonism is effective.

It weakens Ukraine's position.

That's all.

Saying you're going to, that if you don't get,

if you don't strike a deal soon, we're going to pull all our support and let Putin Putin's tanks roll across Europe finally the pressure we needed to get both sides to the table so the whole thing is just it is strategically incomprehensible it's like morally empty and the end result is they would like to validate this whole idea of the US has been getting ripped off and we're sending all this money overseas and so they'd like to stop doing that he wants to say how he wants a deal.

He wants to be the deal maker and the peacemaker.

And

beyond that, they don't seem to have very many equities in the actual,

like the actual outcome of the conflict, what happens to Ukraine, what happens if we live in a world where a country like Russia is rewarded for what they did.

They're apparently floating some kind of a deal where like, ah, it's just a Donbass,

which Zelensky has to, of course, reject because it is a victory for Russia in this conflict.

And then all Vance can come up with this some version of, look, nobody's going to like the deal.

That's the thing about a compromise.

I mean, just think of it from Putin's perspective, right?

He, so he's lost about a million Russians in this war.

His economy is in the shitter.

He's an international pariah.

And now he gets to go into this meeting with Donald Trump,

who he knows by now is easily manipulated through flattery.

has the attention span of a fucking fruit fly, probably can't locate Ukraine on a map, let alone freelance about its territorial sovereignty.

Sure.

So he's got this meeting and now he's going to be able to sort of set the terms of this or at least influence Trump's thinking.

And what's the worst that can't what's the worst he thinks can happen, right?

Which is like Trump walks away and he's either like, at worst, Trump's probably like, ah, you're on your own.

I tried something and I can't get a deal.

I'm not dealing with this anymore.

I'm out.

We're out.

Which, by the way, is just what he's saying.

He said before.

Which is what he said before.

And I'm, and I'm, sorry.

He's also said,

Daniel Dale, remember our friend Daniel Dale at CNN, that, that

of the

fact checker.

Of the cataloging of the lies.

You know, Trump didn't just say one time offhand,

I'm going to end this on day one.

He said it dozens of times.

He said it at least 50 times.

I'm going to end this war on day one.

So Putin knows he's horny for a deal.

And as already said repeatedly, I talked to both sides.

It's so complicated.

You guys figure it out.

Maybe the Pope can deal with it.

Remember that?

Remember when the Pope was going to deal with it?

And it's just like,

what do Trump and Vance and the rest of them think?

Do they really think that if you give Putin some territory, who knows how much of the Donbass he gets or how much of the territory he currently occupies he gets, right?

If you give him some territory, after three years of losing this many soldiers and this, like he's just going to say, I'm out.

That's great.

I'm happy with a few provinces in eastern Ukraine.

And now I'm just going to shrink back and just sort of, you know, try to rebuild at home.

Like, that's it.

They think that's gonna be it.

Well, I don't understand.

Well, and look, the whole

thing.

And, like, he like, if he, if he dares to invade Ukraine again to restart the war or to invade some other neighbor in Europe, like, who's gonna stop him?

Is Trump?

Trump going to stop him?

You know,

a friend of mine would say, and this is Glib, but whatever.

Tommy's not here.

That you can think of a parking ticket ticket as a punishment, or you can think of it as a fee.

And if you say, if you invade a sovereign country on a completely bullshit pretext, which by the way, you know is bullshit because you're claiming it's for some kind of your national security and for your protection.

Meanwhile, you've put your whole fucking army into this country.

You're not defending the border with Finland.

You're not worried about your neighbors to the west.

That if you do that, if you launch a war that leads to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people,

that you kidnap tens of thousands of children, you cause all this death and destruction, and your punishment is you keep a third of the territory you took.

What does that say to the rest?

What does it say to Ukraine in the future?

What does it say to other countries in Europe?

What does that say to China about Taiwan?

What does that say to the world about what borders mean?

We haven't even talked about security guarantees as part of the deal either, which no one seems to be floating, at least

not in a real way so far.

And it's like, so, you know,

is there a scenario where Ukraine gives up some territory in exchange for like a security guarantee from the United States and NATO or Europe or whatever, the EU?

But that's not even being discussed right now.

It's just like, you get,

like the quote that you said,

we're going to swap territory that's mutually beneficial.

Is Ukraine getting a few Russian cities?

Yeah, what are we talking about?

What are we talking about?

What are we talking about?

It's almost like Trump is confusing his meetings.

He's confusing his meetings with Witkoff about some future fucking deal.

Because witcoff's got the port he's got the middle east portfolio and he's got the russia portfolio he's got one icon fugitive and another one

it's just unfucking real uh speaking of which trump did not get any questions on uh israel at the press conference but he did do a brief phone interview with uh barack ravid at axios where he publicly responded for the first time to netanyahu's new plan to occupy all of gaza over the objections of his own military leadership trump told ravid that he had a quote good call with Netanyahu on Sunday and that he doesn't think Hamas will release the hostages unless something changes.

Then he added, quote, I have one thing to say.

Remember October 7, remember October 7.

What do you think is going on here?

Is Trump just trying to wait this one out too?

And Bibi certainly seems like he's trying to wait out everyone.

Do you feel like attention is waning?

So

what Trump says at the end there, remember October 7th, remember October 7th, that is Trump seeing the politics of this shifting, that

the absurdity,

the evil farce of saying you're going to what?

That you're going to give notice to people in Gaza City and then you're going to occupy Gaza City, a city that we have now and see photos of, is in ruins, that you're going to take this territory where the military has told you there's no further military advantage here, that

you've leveled most of this country.

The city you're going to occupy is in ruins.

ruins, ruins.

It's an evil joke.

It's indefensible.

And so when Trump says, remember October 7th, remember October 7th, he's seeing that this does not seem justified.

And people have,

we are so far from where this conflict began.

It seems so disconnected from it.

And that is true.

The only hope has to be, if this is a hope, that

this is

some kind of threat as part of a negotiation or a potential negotiation about some kind of a deal.

Witkoff went to.

What's the threat?

That

if you don't return the hostages,

I'm going to take over the entire Gaza Strip.

I'm going to occupy Gaza City.

I'm going to make everybody that's now in Gaza City leave Gaza City.

Where are they going to go?

Fuck knows.

And that because there apparently was some kind of proposal presented by Qatar in Egypt today.

There's a discussion of

all or nothing, that's a quote, deal.

Witkov went into one of the aid distribution sites last week.

So, like, there's, there are still apparently conversations happening.

But the other side of this is, as many have pointed out, the Times reported this in their big

reported investigative piece into this, that Nanyahu has been reluctant to talk about after the war.

That in Israel right now, this is the reporting today that

obviously Palestinians would be

killed and harmed

by any kind of occupation, but Israelis do not understand

what the rationale would be for prolonging the conflict and occupying all of Gaza.

It's all, it doesn't seem to be any way of getting any kind of hostages back.

So the whole thing seems,

it's just senseless.

Well, and I think the IDF objected to this in part, or senior leaders in the Israeli Defense Forces objected to Netanyahu, according to reporting, in part because they think like, oh, this, why wouldn't they kill the hostages?

Like, the hostages would be in danger in such a military occupation or another military offensive like this.

And then you just really, like, with every development, you realize, okay, Netanyahu, he doesn't really,

his first objective is not getting the hostages back.

His first objective is not a ceasefire, certainly.

His objective is to completely eliminate Hamas, as if like that's a thing that you can do, and destroy Gaza, control Gaza, and doesn't seem to care much at all about the starvation acts like it doesn't exist.

And for Trump, Trump's just like, okay, well, you know, first I saw the images of the starving kids in Gaza and I didn't like those images.

But then one U.S.

official told Axios that Trump was moved by the video released by Hamas of an Israeli hostage digging his own grave.

Quote, it influenced the president and he is going to let the Israelis do what they need to do.

Once again, just very easily manipulated person, Donald Trump.

He sees images of starving children.

He'll have a day where he says, oh, yeah, that's bad.

We should fix that.

But then, you know, he forgets the next day and the Israelis were like, yeah, what about this hostage thing?

Okay, well, then now I care about this.

This is how we did it.

By the way, they were like, oh, we're going to surge aid finally.

Remember, last time we talked about this, they were going to do some pauses in the fighting so that people get more aid.

Where's that?

Has that worked out?

It hasn't worked out.

No.

In fact, a 14-year-old boy was killed by an airdrop, killed by the airdrop.

So they're still doing airdrops.

They're trying to surge more aid in there.

Not really working.

It's still a trickle.

Huckabee, our fucking ambassador to Israel, said that the plan to take over, to fix the aid situation, the food situation, is to

increase the number of Gaza Humanitarian Foundation sites, the GHF, from four to 16.

So this organization that wasn't working at all, that was a complete fucking disaster.

We're just going to have some more of that instead of actually changing it and letting the UN in.

I mean, it's a disaster.

I saw, so

there are some conservatives or people trying to defend Netanyahu and Trump

in saying, oh, all these people are saying that AIDS trucks aren't being intercepted.

But look at these stats.

So many AIDS trucks are being intercepted.

And Trump's former envoy to the region was asked about this.

And

if there is not enough food, If people in a place do not trust that there will be enough food,

people, not Hama, people, try to to get as much, they storm the trucks.

They try to get the food.

Now, when this U.S.

contractor backed by the IDF is doing this, they like exert order and control and it's led to people being killed.

But what UN

aid trucks have done is they just step back and they let people take the food.

And

I've seen some people saying, oh, that's the rationale for why they've cut off aid because some of that aid is being interdicted by ordinary people, people with guns, potentially Hamas.

But that is not an argument for starving people to death.

That's an argument for flooding an area with aid.

Because if there is enough aid, if there's only so much,

if there's only enough to feed a precious few people, people with guns may get that aid.

But even experts in this say there is an answer.

And the answer is to flood an area with aid.

Because if people can count on it, count on it again and again, all of a sudden there is not this sense that it must be stolen, that it must be grabbed, that it must be taken.

I mean, it's all a fucking joke at this point, the excuses on this, because more aid is trickling in now.

It's not really having an effect.

more people are dying of starvation.

The IDF just killed a bunch of journalists over the weekend who they say are actually Hamas the whole time, even though they've been covering the war for two years.

No real documentation of that.

And unfortunately, I think that the folks leading in the polls after Netanyahu are

not, you know, they're not dreaming of a two-state solution either.

So, not great.

Pod Save America is brought to you by Article.

We love Article.

They have great stuff.

We have great furniture around the office from Article.

They have great outdoor furniture.

It looks great.

It's comfortable.

It's durable.

Article makes it effortless to create a stylish, long-lasting home at an unbeatable price with a curated range of mid-century modern, coastal, and scandy-inspired pieces.

Article products are designed to shine on their own or pair seamlessly with nearly any other article product.

This thoughtful design approach makes it incredibly easy to mix and match, helping you create a space that feels cohesive and stylish.

Every piece is chosen for its craftsmanship, design, and lasting value.

Article carefully curates its collection, selecting only high-quality, meaningful, and enduring pieces.

Article offers fast, affordable shipping across the U.S.

and Canada with options for professional assembly if you prefer a hands-off experience.

And if you prefer a hands-on experience, call Tommy.

Have questions or need help with your design choices.

Article's customer care team is available seven days a week, offering knowledgeable support and even free interior design services to help you get your home just right.

With Article's 30-day satisfaction guarantee, you can shop with confidence, knowing that if you're not completely in love with your new furniture, you can easily return it.

This peace of mind ensures you can invest in your home without hesitation.

Article is offering our listeners $50 off your first purchase of $100 or more.

To claim, visit article.com/slash crooked, and the discount will be automatically applied at checkout.

That's article.com/slash crooked for $50 off your first purchase of $100 or more.

Hi there, it's Andy Richter, and I'm here to tell you about my podcast, The Three Questions with Andy Richter.

Each week I invite friends, comedians, actors, and musicians to discuss these three questions.

Where do you come from?

Where are you going?

And what have you learned?

New episodes are out every Tuesday with guests like Julie Bow and Ted Danson, Tig Nataro, Will Arnett, Phoebe Bridgers, and more.

You can also tune in for my weekly Andy Richter call-in show episodes where me and a special guest invite callers to weigh in on topics like dating disasters, bad teachers, and lots more.

Listen to the three questions with Andy Richter wherever you get your podcasts.

So one topic the Trump White House wants to talk about even less than Ukraine or Gaza is, of course, the Epstein scandal, which they are still working diligently to cover up with arguably some success.

J.D.

Vance seems to be in the middle of a hard-hitting media tour right now.

Yeah.

He's been sitting for a series of adversarial interviews with fearless journalists journalists like former Trump staffer Katie Miller, the gateway pundit.

He did one with a gateway pundit.

I didn't catch that one.

Didn't catch it.

And, of course, Maria Bartaromo, who did ask Vance and Epstein question on Fox this Sunday, here's what he said.

We know that Jeffrey Epstein had a lot of connections with left-wing politicians and left-wing billionaires, and now President Trump has demanded full transparency from this, and yet somehow the Democrats are attacking him and not the Biden administration, which did nothing for four years.

Give us some clarity on this meeting that is reportedly happening or happened last night at the White House about the Epstein files and how you're communicating the Epstein story.

So I've seen so many different fake reports about this.

So let me set the record straight.

There was no meeting at my house last night.

There just wasn't.

Was there a meeting at the White House?

We did meet at the White House yesterday, but not at the time that they said that we were going to meet and not about the subject that they said that we were going to meet about.

Ooh, that was a technicality.

What do you think?

Why are Democrats suddenly attacking Donald Trump over this, who called for full transparency?

It's this whole,

I don't wish it on anyone to go to watch this entire Bartaromo interview.

You don't have to and you shouldn't, but there is something about watching, like

watching him, like he had, this is his move.

It's his move when he's talking about gerrymandering.

It's like, what are we meant to do?

We, these innocent Republicans, simply put upon by these Democratic politicians and their gerrymandering schemes.

Yeah, there's like the anti-anti-Trumps online.

There's like this brand of sort of right-wing pundit that for a while their whole argument was like, well, I didn't want to support Donald Trump, but what were we supposed to do?

The Democrats are so extreme and mean and nasty that they have just pushed us

into his arms.

Yeah, that's a good idea.

That's a J.D.

Vance.

That is sort of like that's like the intellectual defense for this kind of like Republican radicalism is

that we have, and by the way, like, you know, it's not just in politics, right?

Like that is the argument that you see around, like, well, they lost the culture war, right?

There's gay marriage, and there's trans people now, and, you know, American Airlines makes their logo the pride flag every June.

Like, we lost.

Why?

We weren't fighting hard enough.

And so that's what this is, right?

And so

when he gets to Epstein, right,

what's the actual current real, truthful situation with whatever we're going to call the Epstein files, whatever that means?

Donald Trump and a bunch of right-wingers playing off a conspiracy online, which has some truth to it, by the way, promise to bring full transparency to this story.

They get into office and they discover that in some ways what they were promising was overblown, but in one important way it wasn't.

There are powerful figures in the Epstein files.

Their names are Donald Trump, among others.

And so we know that Donald Trump's name is in the Epstein files, that that was told to Donald Trump.

And so in the interim between Pam Bondi saying the files are on my desk, the list is on my my desk, I'm going to release it, and her saying there is no list, and Cash Patel and Dan Bongino doing interviews saying he killed himself and there's no they're there,

somebody told Donald Trump that his name was in the Epstein files.

And that's why it stuck.

That's well, it's also just like, why are Democrats attacking Donald Trump who's called for full transparency?

Okay, the whole thing started when a bunch of MAGA influencers were attacking Donald Trump and were demanding full transparency.

And Donald Trump can call for full transparency all he wants, but you know what?

He is the president and he has the power to actually be fully transparent by releasing the fucking files.

So it's like, what are you talking about?

It's just, it's, it is the ease with which he lies now.

I guess he's all, I mean, he's all, but like, I feel like J.D.

Vance has become, and we'll see it with the next clip too, he's become even more comfortable just like doing this sort of pathological dishonesty bit and where he's like, it's not only that he lies, but like, how dare anyone else criticize them?

Yeah, it's the, it's the, that laugh when he laughs there about the question.

It's the laugh of, I know why you're asking, because the world is an unjust place, and here we are just doing our best every goddamn day.

It's, I, because part of it too is it's, it's, yes, he will just lie flat out, but it's that he's creating like unverifiable kind of miasma of of like a narrative that is not rooted in reality.

There's no, it's not an actual, like, you can't put put it to a fact, right?

There's no fact that's true or false.

It is a kind of manufactured worldview to which he's kind of fitting together different pieces of fact or half fact or lies from time to time that's like unverifiable.

But it's the cockiness of it.

And it is interesting because it is something that Rubio goes to as well.

And I do think there's something about the like.

It's like the tension between their view of themselves and what they've become, right?

Like that's where, like in the delta between those two things, that's where that tone comes from.

Yeah.

And it's like the one real solid belief they have is, well, the left is awful.

Right.

Right.

And so like everything else is justified because I know that they are awful.

Right.

It's like, it's like they've, they've slid down the moral, the moral, like the side of the moral slope and they've, they've bounced and they're bouncing against the rocks.

And the last tree they can grab onto before they fall down into the shoals is like that the left sucks.

Well, it looks like we're not getting full transparency when it comes to the at least the secret grand jury testimony testimony in the Epstein case.

A federal judge on Monday, as expected, declined to release the testimony in the trial that led to the indictment of Ghillane Maxwell.

What wasn't expected, though, is the judge's candor in explaining why he declined to release these files, writing in a scathing opinion that the Justice Department's argument that releasing grand jury materials might reveal new information was, quote, demonstrably false, and that, quote, the government's motion for their unsealing was aimed not at transparency, but at diversion.

Can't imagine why they'd want a diversion, but maybe it has something to do with stories like this.

On Friday, Epstein's longtime butler, who worked for the sex trafficker for 18 years in his Paris home, told the Telegraph that following the 2016 election, Epstein told him Trump offered the sex trafficker a job in his new administration.

So, you know, that's just, that's just one butler.

Who knows?

That's just one longtime butler.

What job do you think Jeffrey Epstein would have done in the White House?

I mean, you know,

honestly, honestly, like,

it's a name that could have been floated for Secretary of Treasury at the time.

You could have seen him doing that.

Yeah.

Export, import, bank, commerce, something.

Yeah.

I don't want to have this.

No, there's a lot of jobs that would be very bad.

Very bad.

Just to be clear, bad.

Here's the bigger point.

No grand jury transcripts.

No transcripts yet of Todd Blanche's interview with Glene Maxwell that we were told that they were considering releasing to try to tamp some of this down.

We're not getting those, even though we were also told, by the way, that Maxwell told Blanche everything was good with Trump.

I never saw any misbehavior by Trump in my time.

And of course, she's very credible and, you know, would never lie.

And no release so far of all the files that are out that we know are there with Trump's name redacted that he knows about because Pam Bondi told him about.

So is the cover-up succeeding here?

I don't know.

I mean,

it is ongoing.

I don't I guess it, you know, it it succeeds until it fails, I suppose.

Every secret,

until you reveal a secret, you're keeping it.

Yeah,

the Blanche

interview is the one that's sort of confusing, right?

Like,

if, as we've heard, I think it's via ABC News, that

Maxwell said she never saw Trump do anything wrong,

like what is keeping them from releasing the what is in the first of all.

What were those interviews about?

What did they ask about?

What names are in there?

What are they concerned about if they release it?

What information

do they not want in the public?

Because otherwise, I think we'd already have it.

It's like, I have no fucking idea because who knows what the context of the conversation was about.

What was the ins and out?

Like, are there parts of it they want to redact, either for reasons they will claim is for privacy or because there are parts of the conversation that would be embarrassing to the administration?

We just don't know.

Now,

one part of this, like, look, like

we're all conspiracy theorists now, fine.

But a lot of the material that the Justice Department is sitting on is about terrible crimes against kids, right, that they can't release and shouldn't release.

And so,

like, that should never be released, right?

You shouldn't, like, you shouldn't, we do not need to publicize these, like, the, the aspects of these crimes that that would be

victimizing again to people that were hurt by Epstein, Maxwell, and others.

Fine.

Agreed.

But it is shocking that given the fervor around releasing something, given the attention that has gotten, given the fact that they promised already that they haven't figured out how to get some new information out there.

I mean, all Bondi was able to release was stuff that was basically already public.

That was what was in binder phase one.

When she put out binder phase one, in her mind, there must have been a, like, I don't know how far ahead it got, but you don't put out phase one without at least having conceived of what phase two was meant to be.

One would think, but, you know.

Who knows?

So it is, it is strange, but they can't, they're not getting away with it because there's too many many other parts of this to come.

There's going to be congressional investigations.

There's, by the way, like, you know, more and more, like that butler who we hadn't heard from before, there's more reporting coming out of the Times.

There's just a lot of attention on this.

And by the way, like.

the influencers on the right or the like apolitical, kind of more conspiratorial influencers that were talking about this forever, they're still talking about it.

Yeah.

Like there was a Rogan the other day was saying, like, do they think we're babies?

Like, do they think we're children?

Because they're trying to to make us look past this.

So they can't just make it go away.

One of the proposals that CNN reported on was maybe Todd Blanche should sit down with Joe Rogan.

I'm like, that doesn't seem like a good idea if you're at the Trump White House.

I mean, I'd like to hear that.

No, for sure.

I bet they shot that one down.

I bet that's not a...

I think they are just waiting out everyone's attention span, which you don't have to wait long.

in this country.

And yes, Congress is going to come back to this when they come back from break, but from recess, whatever you fucking call it.

But I don't know, you know, at one point, Trump can make a call to James Comer or Jim Jordan or whoever the fuck it is and be like, hey, let's not keep pushing on this.

You know, like, and they've got other things to think about, and they don't, they don't like the political, you know, discomfort around this.

So I don't, like, I am more pessimistic than I was about the staying power on this just because,

you know, it's dragged on over a month and

they control the federal government with an iron fist, and they're going to be able to bury what they want to bury.

Yeah, we'll see.

Look,

Mike Johnson sent Congress home early in July rather than deal with a vote.

But that doesn't mean the vote isn't coming.

I mean, Roe Conna doesn't care what Trump says about this, and Thomas Massey doesn't care what Donald Trump says about this.

So that means the issue isn't dead.

But yeah, like even listening to Vance in that interview saying, like, I see no problem with James Comer looking into Democrats.

So then all of a sudden it becomes the

get them all in there.

Let's get Bill Gates up in here.

Let's get all these people here and try to make fools of them.

And then all of a sudden,

they want to make some Democrats feel squeamish about it.

Well, J.D.

Vance and Maria Bartiromo then, they went on the well-worn pivot from Epstein to Obama.

Sure.

And so J.D.

Vance doubled down on Tulsi Gabbard's attempts to blame Obama officials for the investigation about Russia's interference in the 2016 election.

let's listen.

What they basically did is they defrauded the American people in order to take Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign talking points and turn them into intelligence by defrauding the American people, defrauding the intelligence agencies, lying about what the intel said.

They would take something

that supported a Hillary Clinton campaign talking point and they would overemphasize it and exaggerate it.

They took anything that actually contradicted that narrative and they buried it deep.

And through that, they actually laundered Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign talking points through the American intelligence services.

That's a violation of the people's trust.

That's a violation of what our intelligence services should be doing.

And I absolutely think they broke the law and you're going to see a lot of people get indicted for that.

That is, I, I don't know if you were as, as, as deeply triggered by that answer as I was.

I started tweeting about it last night because I was like, I cannot, I know that there's been a lot of lies.

J.D.

Vance has said a lot of bad things.

He's pissed me off like that to me because like he, the guy fucking went to Yale law.

He's got a law degree.

There is no way that he believes what he just said there.

There's no way he believed that.

Unless he just has not looked at any of the details of anything, which I also don't really buy.

So, yeah, so you see him struggling, first of all, in how to tell this story, right?

Because just very, like, what is he talking about?

It's impossible to know.

If you don't know this, the ins and outs of the story, it's impossible to even understand what he's talking about.

But just as quickly as possible, the gist of it is.

Tulsi Gabbard put out a dumb report

that is not true.

Basically, it's in the report that says after Donald Trump wins the election,

Barack Obama and the deep state colluded to sully that victory by

telling the country and the world that Russia interfered in our election to help Donald Trump win, but did not actually mess with any vote totals.

And also did not allege any collusion in that intelligence assessment between Trump and Putin.

And so

after the election, Donald Trump has has won Barack Obama, not for his own benefit, not for shits and giggles, but to warn the world about what has happened, that, hey, Russia is interfering in our elections in these ways.

It may happen in your country too.

It could happen here again.

We all need to step up how we respond to this because this is a legitimate threat.

That is then ratified, not just by Democrats and intelligence officials, but by Republicans, including the committee led by Marco Rubio, the intelligence committee, saying that the conclusions are fair and fairly reached.

That is what this is about.

And now, J.D.

Vance is somehow claiming that

the release of this information, which was based on an assessment by the intelligence community that the Republicans said was fairly reached, is both an attempt by the intelligence to defraud the country, but also to put Hillary Clinton to

I don't even understand what he's trying to say, that it's then laundering into the intelligence campaign it's it's it's such fucking nonsense that he obviously like to defraud to defraud the American people of what what are we defrauding them of they went to the they went to the uh went to the polls first of all not knowing that there was an FBI investigation of Trump's campaign just the one of Hillary because guess what the Obama administration made damn sure that that didn't leak out because they were worried that for that it could be taken politically so voters went to the polls not knowing there was an investigation into the turns out there were plenty of contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia.

And

they also went to the polls already knowing, by the way, that Russia had hacked the DNC, which, by the way, this Trump administration, Tulsi Gabber, all the rest of them, admit that Russia did interfere.

What they're pissed about is that the Intel said that they interfered with

the hope of helping Trump, which in 2018, Putin said, yeah, I wanted Trump to win.

He just admitted it.

So it's like, what are we talking about?

But But then, okay,

all right.

Let's say, let's say, let's just say, you know what?

In some ways, that was exaggerated.

It wasn't.

It just simply wasn't.

That's not true.

Even Vance has to kind of walk his way back to, he says they defrauded the country.

He says they exaggerated.

And then he has to add on at the end, oh, and absolutely, I believe they broke the law.

Never says how, never says why.

And I believe indictments are coming, which is also, by the way, like, you're the vice president of the United States and you are predicting indictments.

Or do you know them from your meeting?

Or do you know them from your meetings that you're not supposed to be having?

Unfucking believable.

It is wild.

I'm like, how can you do it?

Like, you know the law.

You are familiar with the Durham investigation, no doubt.

You are familiar with your buddy Marco's investigation, which contradicts everything you're saying right now.

Also,

another tell in this is Barta Romo, after that, says, and was there an impact?

Basically, she has to, she's basically saying, but this was, even she is sort of like, but this was after he won and became president.

So, what do you, what do you what is, what are you talking about?

And, and so then he has to kind of make some sort of claims that, oh, absolutely, like that the presidency was harmed because of the Russia hoax, because he had to fight two fronts at once.

He had to run the country and be dealing with the ways in which the Department of Justice was distracted.

It's all just like fundamentally, right?

Like, it's like just a kind of like trick that like they're acting as though this happened before the election, but it didn't, but it didn't.

And so they have to claim like, oh, telling us about this after was some terrible crime.

He is

just deeply dishonest and very comfortable with being deeply dishonest.

And it's really,

I also think part of it is just, you know, you watch these interviews and I think people like J.D.

Vance are like, oh, this must be cool for Trump.

Like he spent all these years just only doing these interviews with friendly outlets and he never has to get challenged.

And if JD Van sat down with like any other, any real journalist for five minutes, the whole thing would fucking come apart.

Marco Rubio just did some another friendly interview about whatever.

No one asked Marco Rubio in that interview because it was some MAGA person.

No one asked him about his committee's report on this because Marco Rubio couldn't answer that question either.

These people, if they got in front of a journalist for five fucking minutes, the whole thing would fall apart.

It's but they're just they've become lazy even even in their lying because they don't, you know, they don't have to worry about it.

Yeah, but like it's it's with Vans too there's such a

it is the like kind of that like kind of self-righteous and smug tone in it because does he believe he's lying yeah oh for sure he has to he has to and there's some there's some things I am willing to believe that someone's like oh I didn't even know I was lying because they're so like you know they've gone down the rabbit hole but this one you even and again it's a complicated story but you don't have to go too far down the rabbit hole to know that what he said was bullshit right i just i i like and he was was around for all of this.

He was, he was a political junkie for all this.

It's, there's something about, like, Vance specifically.

Maybe it's just the fact that he's younger than us.

That's part of it.

Or that he is like a kind of, like,

someone who had like written this book that had like gotten him all these credit and all the rest.

Yeah.

It's that there's something about him where like

I like, I remember when I went to college and like I went to.

for some reason, a rural sports college.

I don't know why I made that choice, but I remember feeling like, oh, I got to learn the language of this place a little bit.

Like, I don't fit in here.

I don't know how to do this.

I got to like learn the language of how to fit in with a certain kind of person that went to private school.

Like there's a lot of different kinds of people, Williams.

But like, you know, like the kind of like, a kind of a fancier person that I grew up with, like the kind of, there's a breeziness to it, like a way people that grew up around wealth, with wealth, whatever.

And like you learn that, and I see in Vance somebody that like

is a student of people and like learn the language of success, right?

Like comes from this rural place that comes from a totally different environment and then kind of learns the language of a place like Yale and becomes really good at it.

And then I see him do this with Trump again.

And I see him take on this persona so fully as someone who's so good at figuring out how to fit in with a group of people.

And I just can't tell how much of like, you know, you wear the mask, the mask wears you, like how much of it has, how much of the, how much of it has seeped in and how much of it is he just performing and he's going to be the best boy in the world.

I don't know.

I don't know.

Yeah, I mean, it's

either way, it's pretty gross.

Yeah.

Okay.

When we get back from the break, you'll hear Lovett's conversation with the New Yorker's David Kirkpatrick about his incredible investigation into Trump's grift.

But two quick things before we get to that.

Big news, cricket subscription content is now available on Substack.

We're coming to Substack.

That's right.

If you're already a friend of the pod, don't worry.

This won't change anything for you.

But if you love using Substack and preferred the experience there, you can now find us there too.

When you subscribe on Substack, you'll unlock ad-free episodes of your favorite cricket shows, plus exclusive content like Polar Coaster.

As you know, subscribing on whatever platform works best for you is the best way to support what we do here.

Now you've got one more way to do that.

Visit cricket.com/slash friends to learn more.

Also, come see Love or Leave It live on stage this Thursday, August 14th at Dynasty Typewriter.

We have a great show this week.

We have Ron Funches, we have Tom Papa.

In the coming weeks, we've got some amazing guests lined up.

Here's the thing.

Here in Los Angeles, it's four-year consideration season, right?

That's when all the actors are out there trying to get their Emmys, and all their, all the, all the, all the performers are out there kind of, uh, and the directors and the writers are trying to kind of get attention for their incredible

PR firms, and they're like, Why'd you put me on this podcast?

I'm telling you, I'm telling you, the yeses we get during this time of year, ah, wow, fantastic.

Grab tickets now, crooked.com/slash events.

Pod Save America, brought to you by Armra.

Why are elite athletes, business moguls, and high performers using Armra colostrum?

Armra colostrum is nature's first whole food with over 400 bioactive nutrients working at the cellular level to build lean muscle, accelerate recovery, and fuel performance, all without artificial stimulants or synthetic junk.

Whether you're running a business, training hard, or just want an edge, Armra optimizes your body for peak output.

Probiotics and other supplements are touted as a gut health solution, but most products on the market are dead before they even reach your gut.

Armor colostrum naturally fortifies your entire gut wall system and optimizes your whole body microbiome, which helps guard against irritants that can trigger digestive issues and compromise your immune system.

Research has shown that colostrum also helps to enhance nutrient absorption.

Let ArmoraColostrum help you reach your goals by providing lean muscle building and fueling better performance and faster recovery.

Four out of five calves can't be wrong.

Colostrum bioactives have also been shown to reactivate hair follicle stem cells and activate collagen production, promoting hair growth and enhancing skin radiance.

You ever seen a bald cow?

I don't think so.

Why?

Because they're getting all that colostrum.

I think I told you that my brother-in-law was telling me he was getting sick all the time, and then he started taking armor colostrum and he said he hasn't gotten sick since, even with small kids in the house.

So it sounds like it really works, whether you just want an edge.

Sure, fine.

We're working on a special offer for our audience.

Receive 30% off your first subscription order.

Go to armor.com slash crooked or enter crooked to get 30% off your first subscription order.

That's ARMRA.com slash crooked.

Hi there, it's Andy Richter, and I'm here to tell you about my podcast, The Three Questions with Andy Richter.

Each week, I invite friends, comedians, actors, and musicians to discuss these three questions.

Where do you come from?

Where are you going?

And what have you learned?

New episodes are out every Tuesday with guests like Julie Bowen, Ted Danson, Tig Nataro, Will Arnett, Phoebe Bridgers, and more.

You can also tune in for my weekly Andy Richter call-in show episodes, where me and a special guest invite callers to weigh in on topics like dating disasters, bad teachers, and lots more.

Listen to the three questions with Andy Richter wherever you get your podcasts.

Crypto, real estate deals, watches, club memberships, corporate shakedowns, Trump's corruption is brazen, it's staggering.

But in a story out today, the New Yorker's David Kirkpatrick has done what no one has been able to do, count it up, to tell us just how much Trump has profited from the presidency.

Here to walk us through the most brazen examples is David Kirkpatrick.

Thank you for being here.

It's my pleasure.

All right, welcome to the pod.

Let's start with Mar-a-Lago.

You estimate that

Trump has made $125 million

from how he has exploited the club.

What changed since he, from before he was president, and even in the years since his first term?

Well, first, I should say,

I'm not using the word corruption here.

When he took office in 2017, President Trump, through his lawyer at a press conference, promised that he would not do anything that could even be perceived as exploiting the presidency.

In fact, that was his justification for this arrangement where instead of selling or getting rid of his business empire, he gave it to his sons temporarily while he was in office.

And what they said at the time was, if someone else owned our brand name, that person might crassly exploit the name and demean the presidency.

You can trust us not to do that.

So I'm not saying that any one of these things is a quid pro quo, but he's exploiting the presidency for money.

Now, in terms of Mar-a-Lago,

what we're talking about there, that's the one place where in 2016, in testimony that Trump was involved in, he said that the the campaign had made that the best year ever for Mar-a-Lago, according to the manager there.

And if you look at it, you can look at his financial disclosure forms and see the revenue go up through the roof while the costs stay mostly the same during his years in the White House, preparing to come back

and then back at the White House, because that's a place where he's got a club selling access to himself and his circle.

And I hear you on the distinction about profiting off the White House and whether there's any corrupt outcome of that.

We can leave that to other.

You are cataloging the profiteering.

I'm cataloging the profiteering.

Another example is in hospitality, $105 million

from

deals in Saudi Arabia, another $40 million you're estimating from a deal in Vietnam.

What are those deals, and why are they so interested in doing them with Trump and his family?

Aaron Ross Powell, well, there you got two different different baskets.

You know, Vietnam, which is a

more isolated situation, obviously that's a country which is its future hinges on U.S.

trade policy like nobody else, right?

High tariffs on China mean more business for Vietnam.

High tariffs on Vietnam, where a third of their economy depends on exports to the U.S., would be a disaster.

So as Trump's on his way back into office, the head of the Vietnamese Communist Party flies to New York and while here oversees a new deal for a giant golf resort.

We're talking about a facility three times the size of Central Park.

My estimate for their profits there is probably pretty low.

In the first three months after the deal was announced, he said in his financial disclosure forms that he'd received $5 million from that venture.

So I'm just guessing that the next 10 years are going to be at least as much per year as that was over a matter of months.

That's probably quite conservative.

On the other side, these Saudi deals around the Gulf, beginning in late 2022, when Trump had declared his candidacy and was the presumptive Republican nominee, this Saudi company began doing a series of five mega-hotel or condo deals,

golf resort deals around the Gulf with

the Trump organization,

which really, there's no way to explain that without his political career.

It's just it's not something that would have happened to the Trump organization.

And I extrapolated from some of their previous hotels and golf courses and other ventures to try to estimate what those would be worth.

And

I put them together because they are kind of at the border between how Trump used to make money and how he's now making money, which is something that you explore in the piece.

That a lot of the way in which Trump had made money up to and through The Apprentice was by licensing his name.

right?

Putting his name on stuff that other people ran, and it was kind of pure profit.

But in the last couple of years, as he's figured out ways of making money off of being president, he's ventured into new and uncharted territory for his businesses.

And of course, there's no better example of that than crypto.

You estimate that they've made $2.37

billion.

through these various cryptocurrency schemes.

There are so many different ones, and they actually intersect with some of these other businesses as well.

But can you just talk about how Trump went from how someone who was, as you describe in the piece, quite skeptical of crypto, described it semi-jokingly as a scam or that it looks like a scam

to something of a true believer, at least in terms of his policies?

You know, so the family has offered two different stories about that.

Eric Trump, who's the face of the business now, talks about it a lot.

And he always tells the story like this.

After,

well, he doesn't tell it quite like this.

What he says is, we were blackballed by the big banks.

What he leaves out is they were blackballed by the big banks after the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

So he says, we were blackballed by the big banks, and it was political bias against our political philosophy.

And that led us to love crypto as an alternative to the big banks, and even as a kind of means of revenge against the big banks.

Trump doesn't tell the story that way.

He's a little vaguer about it.

It's clear from his statements that it wasn't until 2024 during the campaign when big crypto donors were donating to him in crypto that he started to get on board.

And around that time, first of all, they started accepting donations in crypto.

An old friend

named Bill Zanker, who people might know from the Learning Annex, his previous business, got him into selling these NFTs, which are kind of digital cartoons of Donald Trump.

And when he did that, he started getting paid in crypto.

So from that point on, he's got an incentive to try to talk it up.

And that's around the time when

Donald Trump's interest in crypto begins to take off.

So

you are documenting the money.

But throughout, you are noting that there are obvious questions of conflicts of interest of whether or not this has meant there has been undue influence from people that have invested with Trump or helped Trump put together these kinds of crypto businesses.

Can you talk about Justin's son,

how he went from being somebody under investigation to somebody who was a guest of honor at Mar-a-Lago?

Justin's son is a really interesting case, right?

If you're hunting for a quid pro quo, Justin's son is as close as you can get.

So the sequence of events is

the Trump family sets up a company called World Liberty Financial, which is going to be a crypto company.

They start raising money for that

in mid-2024, before the election.

Not much interest.

Then Trump wins.

After Trump wins, Justin's son makes two investments that come to a total of, I think, $75 million.

And that $75 million

for other people interested in crypto is kind of a green light, and they all pile in.

And around inauguration day, a ton comes in.

And shortly after inauguration, they've raised $550 million.

And what happens when Trump becomes president?

The SEC drops its charges

against Justin Son for a variety of infractions, evading money laundering laws, paying celebrities to hype his crypto,

selling crypto to Americans when he should have been barred from doing so because they're not registered securities.

All of this is going away.

They don't drop it.

They pause those charges to negotiate a resolution.

Now, that said, the truth is,

the Trump administration dropped everybody's charges, right?

The SEC just stopped pressing charges against crypto.

So you can't say it's a handshake deal and because of the $75 million he got off.

But the sequence of events there there is certainly provocative.

And I should correct myself,

you know, my bias.

It wasn't Mar-a-Lago.

That dinner was at the Virginia, in Sterling, Virginia, at a different Trump club.

I got the club wrong.

Now, there's a connection here to Trump media.

I didn't know this, and I was confused by it.

So

there's a complicated transaction that leads to Trump media and True Social and the ownership structure.

But I was hoping you could explain this part of it.

Last year,

Trump Media lost $400 million.

In each of the past four quarters, it brought in about $1 million or less in revenue per year reporting.

There is no plan for True Social to be profitable or how it would be turned into a sustainable business.

And yet,

True Social is sitting on a vast, vast sum of liquid assets.

I believe the number was was $3.1 billion in liquid assets, which is both cash and cryptocurrency.

How does a money-losing venture that only has about a million dollars in revenue per quarter end up sitting on billions and billions of dollars?

Yeah, I almost had to pinch myself when I figured that out.

I mean,

it's a crazy amount of money.

In short, here's the deal.

So Truth Social is not really a business.

It's not, you know, we don't know, there's no convincing plan for it to make money.

Trump Media Technology Group, right, the parent company that owns Truth Social, is basically a meme stock, right?

It goes up and down without any regard to fundamentals, based only on what people think about Donald Trump.

So, Devin Nunes, the former congressman who runs that company now, had the bright idea to basically sell shares at their high meme stock inflated price and to take that money and pile up some cash and then buy Bitcoin.

So they've done a few transactions recently in July.

They did a big one where they sold shares to 50 big investors, shares mostly some

convertible debt that could be converted into shares at this high meme stock price.

Those investors can then sell that out to retail investors and they take the money and they buy Bitcoin.

So they've taken this

crazy, irrationally priced stock that mostly reflects, you know, Trump supporters' opinions of Trump, and they've swapped that for an actual liquid asset, cash and Bitcoin.

Now, you might say, well, Kirkpatrick, how can you call this $3.1 billion?

That's just the price of Bitcoin today.

It could fall tomorrow.

Be that as it may, there is an actual market for Bitcoin.

If you wanted to turn around and sell it tomorrow, you could sell it.

You know, when they were out of the market in July buying Bitcoin, they picked up $2.4, $2.3 billion of Bitcoin, and it didn't really move the price.

So that's a liquid market.

Yeah.

And this is

a group of people uniquely positioned to affect the price of both their own stock in their company and the cryptocurrency market more broadly.

We've seen that.

We've seen they have the ability

to move these markets.

I mean, you talk about an example that was

with a bit more detail, but that was known at the time, which is that there were these transactions around the Melanium meme coin right before it launched, right?

Like there is just so many opportunities here that wouldn't be cataloged exactly in your accounting, where there's opportunity for profit just in the ability to kind of play with the moving prices.

Yeah, meme coins.

They're not a security.

They don't even pretend to be a security.

There's no police.

There's no reasonable expectation of fairness or transparency.

You know, there's no such thing as insider trading in a meme coin because there's no pretense of fairness.

I mean, you can almost, you know, you get what you pay for.

It's true in one of his,

in one of the crypto conferences that I watched, Donald Trump Jr.

actually said that for crypto enthusiasts, the good news now is that the people who are making the rules are themselves invested in crypto.

You know, in the American system,

it's acknowledged that there are going to be elected officials who have businesses on the side.

You know, the founders were farmers.

And so we require disclosure.

So in fairness to Donald Trump,

he's not lying about it.

I mean, it's true his family's in crypto now.

So

there are a bunch of other parts

that you're looking at here.

You have

you go into

Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law's

business interests with the Saudis and the raising of billions of dollars in private equity.

But you also talk about Don Jr.'s company that he's a part of called 1789 Capital.

There's something that's confusing

about all of this, which is they are seemingly frantic in trying to find ways to make money off of the presidency.

It's not just true social and Trump media and the way it's trying to make money

and amass a crypto fortune.

It's not just the crypto investments separately.

It's not just the Jared

deal with the Saudis.

It's not just the other kind of real estate deals that are bringing in north of $150 million.

There's also this sort of ticky tack stuff.

going out and trying to get 500 grand for a social club, selling hats to compete with his own campaign.

How do you explain the fact that

there are schemes that are, there are nine-figure schemes, eight-figure schemes, seven-figure schemes, and even six-figure schemes?

Like, how do you explain the willingness to fight for a hat sale from their users, their supporters, while at the same time shooting for the moon

with these billion-dollar crypto moves?

I'm as puzzled as you are, right?

I mean, Donald Trump is the first to tell you that he and his family are very, very rich.

And I would think that if my father was president for four years, I would take that as a good time to refrain from making money in ways that would embarrass him.

And, you know, licensing their name for a phone company that's going to sell, you know, Trump

cell phone subscriptions, I do find it puzzling.

And I, I, you know, I went into this thinking, you know what?

The people who really don't like Trump are going to be disappointed in me because they imagine that he's stealing, actually stealing vast sums, which is definitely not happening.

But by the end, I had to say to myself, like $3.4 billion

and so fast, you know, it's one thing after another.

They're really not slowing down.

And I don't know why it is that they seem so almost desperate.

for money.

You know, if we go back to what you were saying before, in the arc of things, Trump was a medium successful, but very high-profile builder.

He was a great reality TV star, right?

And when he was a great reality TV star, that's when he got into the licensing business.

And for a while, he was able to sell just the right to use his name, the right to use his name to sell a steak or a piece of pizza or sheets or something,

or the right to use his name on a hotel, you know, abroad or a golf course.

As the apprentice ratings started to come down, that whole apparatus did too.

In a way, he needed a new show, right?

He needed something else to keep his name in the public eye, to keep that machine running.

And that's where the presidency came in.

Why now?

Why in the second term, there's such a greater desperation to cash in on that than in the first?

You know, it's very speculative.

You do wonder about the enormous legal verdicts that he faces.

You know,

88 million that he owes Eugene Carroll, if that's not overturned on appeal.

500 million he owes New York State because of the fraud case there, if that's not overturned on appeal.

As much as they talk about their money, that's a pretty big hole for the Trumps.

So it might be, well, anyway, here I'm speculating, but you get the idea.

Yeah,

you talk about how he had to sell some of his holdings.

at a certain point and that he may not have been that that he may have been in a pretty tough position coming into this second term but that still doesn't that that look the the rapaciousness is what it is but

it is strange the watches the sneakers the the kind of hats that siphon from the campaign the like the smaller moves to like take advantage of his biggest supporters while at the same time these sort of huge real estate transactions that could be worth 10 100 times anything that they could get um from moving a bunch of hats around it's they they Maybe it's just the thrill of the game.

Well, you know, a more charitable way to put that is, you know, if they, if he and his family see themselves as business people, they're going to stay in business.

And that means, you know, doing the deal to license the Trump Bible, the Trump guitar, and so forth, the Trump NFTs.

At the end of this reporting, like, what was your sort of takeaway from how quickly we became inured to this staggering amount of profiteering?

You know, the joke a few years ago that they made Jimmy Carter sell his peanut farm.

You make reference to the $400,000 some odd dollar donation to the Clinton library over that became a controversy around the Mark Rich pardon.

And yet now we have just brazen and open profiteering, conflicts of interest left and right, and

it's only speeding up.

And it's become a kind of part of our daily understanding of how Trump works, even as we think about the fact that he's about to go meet with Putin and Zelensky and his intersecting personal interests there.

Like, what did you take away from all this once you got to that number of 3.4 billion?

You know, one of my old bosses used to say, you know, a billion here, a billion there.

Sooner or later, you're talking about real money.

And I think to a certain extent that just the number of digits that we're talking about kind of goes over people's heads.

And the other thing about Trump is, and this is maybe his genius, as I say, he's not hiding any of this, right?

He holds his head high.

He pursues all these money-making ventures like it's something that he's proud of, which I think leads people to believe, you know, there's nothing wrong with that.

How people are going to feel about that in the long term, though, I think remains to be seen.

And one reason I thought it was worthwhile to do all of this math is to try to make it a little bit more concrete and tangible.

You know, maybe you're right.

Maybe it turns out we were all wrong for decades to think that Americans did not like profiteering off the presidency.

Maybe Americans, in fact, don't care about that.

But it might also be that people just didn't understand it concretely enough.

And over time.

And over time, they will.

So I'd say the jury is still out on that.

Last question.

What was the hardest number to figure out?

Like, what was, what was the, what was it, what was a part of this where figuring out exactly how much they were making was actually pretty difficult?

Well, in a lot of these things, I'm extrapolating, right?

A lot of the, where I'm trying to value how much they're going to get from their, their five new deals in the Persian Gulf or their new deal in Vietnam, I've got to go and look at an existing property.

I've got to figure out what they've declared in terms of revenue, what the profit margin is on that, and then multiply it across the the new venture.

So that's complicated.

And I'm not saying that's science.

You know, if they want to come forward and tell me, no, no, David, here actually is what we're genuinely going to make, I would welcome that, but they're not going to do that.

The one that was the toughest, honestly, is Vietnam.

This vast complex, 54 holes of golf, a hotel, residences, all in one big

area, three times the size of Central Park, in an economy where the golf industry is growing really fast, the whole economy is growing really fast, very hard to extrapolate.

I came up with an estimate of $50 million over 10 years.

That's almost certainly low, but I just, that one's a jump ball.

That's the hardest one to come up with.

Plus, we like, you know, there's the minibar money.

That's hard to figure out in advance.

You know, they don't even know what they're stocking it with.

Exactly.

And the other one, the Trump Media and Technology Group money that we talked about before, I just couldn't believe it.

You know, when I realized that they'd sold this overvalued meme coin stock and then bought Bitcoin and hoarded cash, I just,

it's an incredible kind of alchemy to have $3.1 billion in liquid assets on their books when their business is failing.

Right.

And

a business that could only exist because he is president and using it to put out statements and trying to get his people to use it, coins that could only, you know, profit coins that could only exist because his name is attached to them, a market that, because he is the president, has great influence over.

It really is like the intersection of all these different ways in which,

in the second term, Trump has realized he was unfettered and able to kind of

once he threw off the shackles of expectation and shame and previous rules and norms, and he was free to do all of these different things.

In the first term,

people were pretty upset about people staying at Trump properties properties and the profiteering off of Trump properties.

And I was surprised to learn that by your reporting, it turns out they might have been losing as much money from people who didn't want to stay at a Trump hotel as they were gaining from people who were trying to curry favor.

And that we were just so, we were focused on that, we had absolutely no idea what was to come.

Yeah, I think that's right.

In retrospect, that looks quite overblown.

Now, you know, some of my critics from the left will say, well, well, Kirkpatrick, don't be crazy.

You know, all those people, Rudy Giuliani buying his $30 martinis or whatever, that was helping Trump.

I mean, still, even if it was just reducing his losses, that still counts.

But, you know, if we're going to be fair, he did,

anybody in the hotel business in Washington, anybody who's familiar with the performance of that hotel will tell you it's done better as a wall of Astoria under Biden than it did as a Trump hotel under Trump.

And it's just not only indisputable, but it's also sort of intuitive.

You know,

if you're a foreign leader from, say, a European country who doesn't want to get caught up in an influence scandal, you're not going to stay there, even though the location is superb.

You know, as a Waldorf, it's a great place for a British prime minister to stay.

But would a British prime minister have stayed there when it was the Trump Hotel and Trump was downstairs at the bar with Rudy Giuliani?

No, no way.

Yeah, you got to, you know,

it was attracting an unsavory element.

David Kirkpatrick, thank you so much.

The story is out today,

carefully cataloging and estimating just the vast sums of money Donald Trump has made off the presidency.

Thanks for being here.

My pleasure.

That's our show for today.

Thanks to David Kirkpatrick for coming on.

Dan and I will be back with a new show on Friday.

Talk to everyone then.

If you want to listen to Pod Safe America ad-free or get access to our subscriber Discord and exclusive podcasts, consider joining our Friends of the Pod community at crooked.com slash friends or subscribe on Apple Podcasts directly from the Pod Save America feed.

Also, please consider leaving us a review to help boost this episode and everything we do here at Crooked.

Pod Save America is a crooked media production.

Our producers are David Toledo, Emma Illich Frank, and Saul Rubin.

Our associate producer is Farah Safari.

Austin Fisher is our senior producer.

Reed Sherlin is our executive editor.

Adrian Hill is our head of news and politics.

The show is mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick.

Jordan Cantor is our sound engineer with audio support from Kyle Seglund and Charlotte Landis.

Matt DeGroote is our head of production.

Naomi Sengel is our executive assistant.

Thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Haley Jones, Ben Hefcote, Mia Kelman, Carol Pelavieve, David Toles, and Ryan Young.

Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.

Hi there, it's Andy Richter, and I'm here to tell you about my podcast, The Three Questions with Andy Richter.

Each week, I invite friends, comedians, actors, and musicians to discuss these three questions.

Where do you come from?

Where are you going?

And what have you learned?

New episodes are out every Tuesday with guests like Julie Bow and Ted Danson, Tig Nataro, Will Arnett, Phoebe Bridgers, and more.

You can also tune in for my weekly Andy Richter call-in show episodes, where me and a special guest invite callers to weigh in on topics like dating disasters, bad teachers, and lots more.

Listen to the three questions with Andy Richter wherever you get your podcasts.

Did you know 39% of teen drivers admit to texting while driving?

Even scarier, those who text are more likely to speed and run red lights.

Shockingly, 94% know it's dangerous, but do it anyway.

As a parent, you can't always be in the car, but you can stay connected to their safety with Greenlight Infinity's driving reports.

Monitor their driving habits, see if they're using their phone, speeding, and more.

These reports provide real data for meaningful conversations about safety.

Plus, with weekly updates, you can track their progress over time.

Help keep your team safe.

Sign up for Greenlight Infinity at greenlight.com/slash podcast.