How Trump Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Bombing Iran

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Welcome to Pod Save America.

I'm John Favreau.

I'm Dan Pfeiffer.

I'm John Levitt.

I'm Tommy Vitor.

Dan, as our special Middle Eastern war correspondent,

thanks for flying down for this.

I'm the Richard Engel of this podcast.

That's what we always say.

Later in the show, we're going to talk about the latest on Trump's deportation regime, as well as our final thoughts on Tuesday's big primary in the New York City's mayoral race.

But obviously, we'll start with Iran.

And by the way, you should all check out the excellent Pod Save the World bonus episode on this topic that Tommy and Ben recorded Sunday.

Hey, thanks.

Yeah, it's a good primer.

Here's my take on where we are as of late Monday afternoon, and then you guys can all jump in.

On Friday, Trump ordered the U.S.

military to bomb Iran without consulting Congress, which the Constitution says is the only branch of government that can declare war, without consulting our allies who are in the midst of pursuing a diplomatic solution with Iran, and without making any case at all to the American people, most of whom have been telling pollsters they're against military action, and many of whom voted for Donald Trump based in part on his promise to end forever wars in places like the Middle East.

Trump ordered the attack anyway, saying it was to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, even though his own intelligence director testified that there was no indication Iran was building an actual nuclear weapon, so there was no imminent threat of attack to the U.S.

But on Saturday night, we learned that American B-2 bombers and submarines struck three of Iran's nuclear sites, though after Trump spent a week posting about how he might bomb Iran, it appears the regime may have removed a few bombs worth of nuclear material from the sites before the attack.

So it's still unclear how far Iran's nuclear program has been set back.

On Monday, Iran launched a retaliatory strike on the U.S.

military base in Qatar, but thankfully the missiles were intercepted and there were no casualties, partly because the Iranians notified Qatar about the attack ahead of time to avoid further escalation, which Trump thanked Iran for in a truth social post after calling the response, quote, very weak and urging Israel and Iran to end the war.

All that said, U.S.

military bases throughout the region are still on high alert, and the Department of Homeland Security has issued an advisory warning of a, quote, heightened threat environment here in the United States.

All right, let's stop there for a minute.

Tommy, what's your reaction to Iran's attack on our military base in Qatar and to any of the developments since you guys recorded on Sunday?

Well, there's some literal breaking news happening right now.

Apparently, Trump just tweeted that Iran and Israel have agreed to a ceasefire that will go into place six hours from now.

So it's 3.09 p.m.

Pacific Pacific time.

Oh, wow.

And then I guess after like 24 hours, there will be an official end to the conflict.

So that would be good news.

Yeah.

That's a big deal.

The strike we saw today in Qatar, it did seem like designed in a way to allow Iran to save face and hopefully de-escalate, which I think is backed up by this Trump news we just learned.

I mean, they reportedly gave Qatar a heads up that the strikes were coming, which allowed the base to be evacuated and also made sure the missile defense systems were ready.

It reminded me of the Qasem Soleimani strike response, which back in 2020, Trump ordered the assassination of Qasem Soleimani, the head of the IRGC, which is a big, powerful military intelligence organization in Iran.

And the Iranians fired 12 ballistic missiles at a base in Iraq.

It was pure luck that no one was killed, but 100 service members got brain injuries, but Trump basically used that as a moment to de-escalate.

Someone I was talking to today who recently left the Pentagon said he thought this war was likely to end soon because both the U.S.

and Israel were running very low on the interceptor missiles that are used to knock down Iranian ballistic missiles.

And so the Iranians are also running low on their weapon stockpile.

So it's kind of in everybody's interest to wind this thing down.

That doesn't mean that Iran won't conduct terrorist attacks down the road.

It doesn't mean Hezbollah won't do something or the Houthis do something on their behalf.

It doesn't mean they won't mess with oil supplies.

It doesn't mean they won't conduct cyber attacks or, in the long term, go for a nuclear bomb.

But it seems like good news that this conflict might be ending.

Dan, love it.

Initial thoughts?

Are you guys ready to give Donald Trump the Nobel Peace Prize?

I mean, who among us isn't ready to give him the Nobel Peace Prize?

Pakistan and us so far.

That's right.

I think in Tommy's right, this seems to be a response designed to avoid escalation.

And you can see how everyone in the political conversation is going to look at this and say, see, Trump was right.

He was able to launch these attacks.

We don't have a full damage assessment, but he clearly did damage to their nuclear program.

And therefore, this, and no American source members lost shots, this was fine.

That is just, you can't judge these things in the short term.

When you launch an attack on a Middle Eastern country based on faulty intelligence, you open Pandora's box.

So we're going to have to, like, this is going to have consequences down the line.

It could be a terrorist attack.

It could be the use of their proxies somewhere around the world.

It affects our relationships in the world.

It affects U.S.

standing in the world.

We know that

their program is

not destroyed.

It's delayed.

And when eventually we're going to have to go back to the table with Iran, what impact are these strikes going to have on our ability to get a deal?

Why would Iran trust us to make such a deal?

Because we came out of the last deal and we launched these strikes.

So before anyone either hands him the Nobel Peace Prize or says that Trump was right or everything worked perfectly, you have to judge this over the medium and long term.

You can't do it in like a 48-hour politico playbook news cycle.

Yeah,

Donald Trump, someone has zero credibility as a negotiator.

He has terrible judgment.

He has no attention span, no curiosity, surrounded by sycophants and kooks.

And then he's going to be the one that cuts the Gordian knot of the Middle East.

And so you get, it's not dissimilar to the cycles we've gone through where they all claim victory when they get some sort of trade deal after putting on and then removing tariffs, claiming, oh, there, you know, there's Trump again, getting another great deal.

And there's no

There's no first of all, there's no sense that hey, did we pay any price for the credibility we lose?

Right?

Does it matter going forward that the president said you have two weeks, we won't do anything for two weeks, and then had apparently already decided to go through with this?

What is the U.S.'s word worth in the future?

What is the cost of just occasional bouts of American chaos in the world, right?

What happens when someone doesn't want to de-escalate?

What happens when Trump's TV-based image of how the world is meant to work doesn't go according to plan in the short term?

What happens then?

Yeah, it seems like it also encourages other countries to lie too.

Like,

why would we believe Iran if they're like, yeah, we're agreed to a ceasefire, we're done.

If, from their point of view, if they just saw Donald Trump lie to them and to the world about this.

Let's talk about the back and forth over just how much damage was done to Iran's nuclear program.

So, Trump said on Saturday night that all three nuclear sites had been, quote, completely and totally obliterated, which is an opinion apparently not shared by the military or intelligence services in the U.S.

and Israel, who've said the facilities have been heavily damaged, but not totally destroyed.

Trump is very mad about the coverage on this.

He posted on Monday that,

quote, the fake news won't admit that the sites have been totally destroyed because they're trying to, quote, demean him,

which he blamed on, quote, Allison Cooper of Fake News CNN, dumb Brian L.

Roberts, chairman of Concast, and Johnny Carl of ABC Fake News.

Tommy, what do we know so far about the damage to the facilities and whether Iran may have moved any of its uranium stockpile before the attack started.

It's funny that he's mad at reporters for accurately quoting his Secretary of Defense and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs in his entire

background quotes from officials to the Times on this, but also just a very public statement by his.

They all were like, hey, it's going to take some time to assess it.

We don't know yet.

Like that was what the chairman and Hegzet said.

It's sort of this like strange situation where like you have Iran's leadership wanting to seem for a domestic audience to claim to have done something to push back what the U.S.

did,

even if what they did wasn't to, you know, something that had actually no sort of negative consequences.

And at the same time, Trump just wants for his domestic audience to hear that it was obliterated, regardless of what actually happened.

Yeah.

I mean, what we know is like anything that was above ground is decimated.

Anything that was below ground, we're just not going to know for a while or maybe ever know.

A lot of the infrastructure they were targeting are these things called centrifuges that you use to enrich the uranium to like a level of purity that can be used for a weapon.

Many of those were at the Natan site.

It sounds like the Israelis were able to take out most of those because people think that if you cut off the power supply to Natans, it would cause them to spin out of control and just break.

But then they had thousands, like 3,000 centrifuges at the Fordo facility, which is the one that's buried deep underground and required the bunker busting bombs.

We just don't know if like the bunker busting bombs were able to take those out.

And then on top of that, there's reports that Iran moved some of its uranium stockpile from some of these sites before the bombing happened.

So they have 408 kilograms of uranium rich to 60% purity, which is very close to weapons grade.

You need 90% to be weapons grade.

That's all unconfirmed, but like you're seeing all these background quotes from Israeli and U.S.

intelligence saying we don't know where that material is.

I assume like the Mossad clearly has the entire Iranian government wired, right?

So like those guys were watching these sites to see if stuff was getting moved around.

Yeah, definitely.

It's Short Straw who's driving that truck

out of Fordo.

Yeah, exactly.

But like, you know, they say you can fit, you know, this kind of material in the trunk of a car.

So, you know, like that gets you to the longer-term fear with this way to go after Iran's nuclear program, which is that I suspect that Iran will withdraw from the NPT, the treaty that prevents the spread of nuclear weapons.

They'll likely kick all weapons inspectors or nuclear inspectors out of the country, and then they could use that nuclear material that we no longer know where it is to make a bomb.

And you're also seeing people say, again, in background quotes, like we maybe need boots on the ground to verify whether the stockpile was destroyed.

And

that would be a big deal.

Aaron Trevor Brandon, it feels like misplacing a stockpile of highly enriched uranium is probably something that we want to keep an eye on.

Yeah.

But so I think that some officials said that there were trucks spotted outside Fort Odris like a couple days before the strike, which is why people think that they moved the enriched uranium.

Any of you uranium enrichment experts want to offer a take on what might happen to that loose fissile material?

I would just don't think, obviously, they tried to move it.

Trump told them that he was going to bomb there for like two weeks.

It's like, why?

And if you can move it in the trunk of a car, you would try to do that.

You would not just leave it and just wait for the bomb to fall on it.

I also said that there's another nuclear facility that the inspectors haven't been in because

the Iranians were telling them it's not open yet.

It's not officially open yet.

Well, it's not ready.

Well, you want to do it a few days.

We're in previews.

We want to preview.

We're still making some changes to the second act.

Yeah, well, the chef's got to get the menu, really.

We're just doing a soft opening.

Yes.

And you're also friends and family.

There was a U.S.

official quote in the New York Times saying the biggest threat to operational security in this whole operation was Donald Trump's tweets.

Yeah.

Obviously.

Well, so bigger picture, Tommy, like what would success look like for a strike like this?

I mean, what probably happened is that the strike set back Iran's nuclear program a few months to a few years, meaning they blew up a bunch of infrastructure that'll take a while to rebuild.

But we just don't know because if we don't know where this 60% enrich uranium stockpile is, or if they have covert enrichment facilities somewhere, or whether they blew up Fordo or not, it's just really hard to judge success.

And there's also just the fact that Trump has never articulated a goal for himself, right?

Like J.D.

Vance says we're at war with Iran's nuclear program, but not at war with Iran, much like Japan was at war with Pearl Harbor in 1941.

The Trump lackeys were out on the Sunday show saying this isn't regime change.

And then Trump's tweeting, why wouldn't there be regime change?

Netanyahu seemingly does want regime change, although maybe the ceasefire indicates otherwise, but he was, you know, picking off military and political leaders and encouraging the Iranian people to rise up and throw off their government.

So there's all this uncertainty around it, which again is why you want a diplomatic solution to these problems over the military, because under the JCPOA,

Iran was prevented from getting a nuclear weapon, and

there's a verifiable inspections regime to ensure that was the case.

And that will likely not be an option anymore.

Right, and that's not an option.

And so, if that's not an option anymore, then you have to ask yourself, and I know you guys made this point, Tommy, on Sunday's pod: like, why wouldn't Iran at this point race to build a nuclear weapon?

Because now there's no inspectors, there's no cameras, there's no inspection regime, and they know that

if they

go the diplomatic route, they can't trust the United States, they can't trust Israel, we might go in there and bomb them again.

So to protect themselves, you would think that it's in their best interest to try to race to build a nuclear weapon with the enriched uranium they have, trying to get new centrifuges and whatever else.

Yeah, I mean, look, Muar Gaddafi and the Libyan government gave up their nuclear program, and he ended up getting bombed by the US and NATO, dragged out of a drainage dish, sodomized with a knife, and then murdered.

So you look at that example.

Yeah, then you look at North Korea and how it's going for them, and you think, hmm.

Ukrainians also gave up their nuclear program, and look what happened to them.

So yeah, the incentives are not great on this.

So when Dan and I recorded Friday's show, the White House had just announced that Trump was going to take two weeks to decide whether to strike Iran based on the hope that a diplomatic solution might be reached before then.

As we've talked about, that was just a ploy to trick Iran, apparently.

The Times has a detailed story about how Trump had already arrived at a final decision to strike.

Per usual, the president was, quote, closely monitoring Fox News, which was airing wall-to-wall praise of Israel's military operation and featuring guests urging Mr.

Trump to get more involved.

The Times also reports that then he was telling people, he's like, I just keep getting calls from people that's saying the Israeli operation is going so great, you got to get more involved.

Everybody's telling me I got to get more involved.

So that led him to start publicly musing about bombing Iran, which is apparently one of the reasons the Air Force had to send a decoy mission of several B-2 bombers westward over the Pacific, even as the real mission was about to take off.

And

yeah, the one military advisor said the biggest threat to OPSEC, which is the planned operational security, was the president of the United States.

Good stuff.

What should it look like when an American president makes a decision like this?

Is it usually just you just watch Fox, you get sort of jealous that the Israelis are getting praised for their operation.

You jump in, you lie about it, you don't really take your intelligence director's testimony to Congress very seriously,

and then you just do it without consulting Congress or seemingly any lawyers in the White House or allies.

I mean, it's easy to laugh about the things in the story that like Trump's watching Fox News.

He's meeting with Steve Bannon.

He's just getting calls from like random Palm Beach real estate developers with advice on what to do here.

But what's kind of stunning by that story is what's not in it, right?

There is no discussion of Trump or his advisors meeting with the lawyers to figure out what the legal basis for this is.

There's no gathering of his allies to try to build an international coalition to do this.

There's no like game planning what happens if things go wrong.

There's no discussion of the economic consequences if Iran were to close the Strait of Horbus.

It's really just like fly by the seat of your pants governing.

And it's like we've all come to accept that as somehow normal way of doing business when it's absolutely fucking insane.

And it's sort of like we don't know what's going to come next, as we said, but the fact that we're here and

this has not yet spun out of control based on Trump's process for getting here is kind of stunning.

Yeah.

And then and then their public rationale, right?

Like, look, I don't know how much better it was to have presidents who were going to step beyond their constitutional authority, but have very, very smart lawyers create the rationale to justify it by like bending the meaning of words, which both Democrats and Republicans have been doing for 50 years.

But at least there was some assertion of a rationale

or a sense that I have authority as president because there is an imminent attack.

And here you have

some claim that the threat was imminent, but then they're basically also saying at the same time that the reason they decided to do this is because they hit some arbitrary negotiation mark and the Iranians weren't, and the Iranians weren't negotiating in good faith.

And so we decided to act, which is not, which is basically admitting that there was no change in the program itself to justify it.

And so like what I

we can debate the particulars of this and the result of this, but

to me, like what I, when I first saw all this unfolding over the weekend is to me, I put it in the context context of Donald Trump

taking what has become a job that is already way too powerful and finding ways to push the bounds of presidential authority even further in ways that are dangerous, not just because he's Donald Trump, but because this job has become one in which they can justify or rationalize any use of presidential authority now, both domestically now and internationally.

That to me is what is so scary about this, because they're not even pretending to have a real justifiable presidential authority as commander-in-chief for doing this.

It seemed like there was no process for a debate.

It was like old school crossfires.

Like Mark Levin from Fox News is pro.

Steve Bannon is con.

Tulsi Gabbard, the head of intelligence, is iced out because she tells Trump the truth and not what he wants to hear.

And Pete Hegseth is iced out because he used Signal one time.

Literally iced out.

Yeah.

And like, it sounds like it was the chairman of Joint Chiefs, Raisin Kane, the head of CEMCOM, J.D.

Vance, John Ratcliffe, and Trump just kind of like deciding whether to bomb Iran.

It's just like.

We're not going to Congress.

We're not going to the UN.

We're not doing anything.

Yeah, the fact that

he didn't go to Congress at all, didn't consult.

And apparently the Gang of Eight

didn't even brief the Gang of Eight or didn't brief the Democrats on the Gang of Eight.

There's some reporting that

they briefed some of the Republicans.

Afterwards, though, right?

Yeah, I think they briefed them afterwards.

And I saw Seth Moulton, Congressman from Massachusetts, say on TV that he has heard that Fox News was briefed ahead of the Democrats as part of the committee.

Right.

And I don't even think, like, I haven't heard any of them make the case that there was an imminent threat of attack, right?

Like, they're saying there's an imminent threat because, you know, the uranium has become highly enriched.

But,

you know, as Tulsi Gabbard had testified, our intelligence showed that the Supreme Leader had not authorized the actual weapons program from being.

to be restarted, that there was no intelligence that they're actually building a weapon because there's a difference between highly enriched uranium and actually turning it into a weapon so

when is the last time a president has uh like ordered strikes when there was no imminent threat nothing happened even in libya right there wasn't there was there's an imminent threat there was an imminent threat or consulted with allies i mean i guess we consulted with israel but like the europe part of this is also kind of crazy that our european allies were literally trying to do diplomacy while this was happening so part based on the president's word it certainly seems like a violation of the un charter

And I know.

Shut up, your ass, nerd.

Yeah, forget about the international community, international law.

It also seems like it might run afoul of U.S.

law

and war powers of the president.

I don't know.

Yeah, look, there's no effort to go to Congress, no effort to go to the UN, no effort to sell the American people on the necessity of the war.

I mean, look, we know the U.S.

intelligence assessment is that Iran has not made a decision to get a nuclear weapon.

They haven't since 2003.

Maybe there, now there's some reporting or rumor that maybe the Israelis passed along some new intelligence, but I don't, I don't, no one's seen that.

They've not described it to us.

The last time a U.S.

president made the case for war based on intelligence passed along from a foreign government was the yellow cake that came from Niger that ended up in Bush's State of the Union speech, which was total bullshit.

That came from the Italian intelligence service, and it was also based on an assessment by the British intelligence service, and it was just wrong.

It was all based on forged documents.

So

we just don't know.

Like, that's the the crazy thing.

Like

this moment has such 2003 vibes, like Inda Club is on and hey ya is on the radio, right?

We're all intrigued by this MySpace thing.

But in that case, like at least Bush tried, not at least, Bush tried to sell the case for the Iraq war.

He did it in Congress.

He went to the UN.

The Trump people just skipped that part.

I mean, it's obvious what happened here is that there are people within the government, and both parties, frankly, have been wanting to bomb Iran for a very long time.

And this was the best time to do it.

Right.

I mean, like the headline in Shane Harris's piece, I think, is exactly right, which is Trump didn't change.

The intelligence didn't change.

The situation just changed.

Like this was the opportunity to do it because Iran was weaker than has been in any time recently.

So they did it.

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So we don't know what else Iran might do to retaliate and hopefully, you know, based on the news of this ceasefire,

hopefully nothing.

But there are a few big concerns out there still.

Terrorist attacks against Americans abroad or at home.

Cyber attacks against the U.S.

Closing the Straits of Hormuz, which would disrupt global oil supply.

Trump, at least this morning, seemed concerned about this last possibility.

On Monday, he directed the Energy Department to, quote, drill, baby, drill, and then posted the following, everyone, keep oil prices down.

I'm watching.

You're playing right into the hands of the enemy.

Don't do it.

Aside from from the fact that the small thing, but the energy department doesn't drill.

The interior department drills, nor do they drill oil immediately.

Yeah, the energy department get their hard hats out.

They get out there.

It's so

God.

It's just amazing how stupid this all is.

Like everything is so stupid and so dangerous.

But it was like, to Dan's point,

they make this decision to do this, right?

You know, Donald Trump cares about what things look like on television, but the world, world, but like the world exists and continues, and he's not in charge of what happens after.

He's not in charge of the macroeconomic forces that happen after.

You can't bully Adam Smith into keeping oil prices down or from like individual traders from assessing risk and volatility based on this.

He's not in charge of that, right?

He does this based on images and what the images are going to look like.

But war

is the thing even autocrats can't control.

They are not in charge of what happens because he's not in charge of whether it's what Iran does in response or what an oil trader somewhere does, looking at the futures market.

So it's like this incredibly silly thing of like, I'm watching you.

What are you watching exactly?

People responding in the world to what you're doing.

You're not in charge of them.

You can't threaten them.

It's a bunch of individuals making decisions.

Yeah.

Tommy, why do you think that Iran didn't try to just close the Straits of Hormuz?

I mean, it hurts them as much as it hurts anybody because they're trying to move oil through the strait as well.

I also think like, let's say that the Iranian Navy started mining the Strait of Hormuz.

I think that, you know, our Navy would blow them out of the water.

So it probably wouldn't last very long.

Who knows?

They still might try to do it.

Yeah.

And of course, the risk of the cyber attacks, the risk of the terrorist attacks is still very much alive here.

One of the big questions, of course, is what the actual goal of American involvement is and whether Trump wanted to go full John Bolton and demand regime change.

Trump's advisors were out in force on the Sunday shows, assuring everyone this isn't what we're in it for.

Let's listen.

This mission was a very precise mission.

It had three objectives, three nuclear sites.

It was not an attack on Iran.

It was not an attack on the Iranian people.

This wasn't a regime change move.

We're not at war with Iran.

We're at war with Iran's nuclear program.

This mission was not and has not been about regime change.

So then, as he always does, Trump undermined all of these statements a few hours later by posting, It's not politically correct to use the term regime change, but if the current Iranian regime is unable to make Iran great again, why wouldn't there be a regime change?

And then Miga, Miga, Miga, what do we think?

I think it's Miga.

Miga, working with Miga?

That's his new thing there.

So obviously Trump seems to have

make Iran great again.

Crap.

Yes.

Right, right, right, cool.

Got it.

Yeah.

Oh, he spoke to me.

He did say that.

He did say that in the statement, yeah.

Trump seems to have backed away from this statement with his latest post calling for an end to the war, potential ceasefire now.

But what do you guys make of all this?

Like, was he just trying to say that he hopes the Iranian people will overthrow the Iranian regime, or is that too generous a reading from me?

I did not take it, honestly, as him undercutting what people were saying.

I took it as his kind of negotiating over countertops style, saying to

the Iranians, I will go this far.

I think it was that I took it as just trying to say, who knows?

I'm willing to, I'm crazy.

I'll go all the way to regime change.

If I have to, to, I don't want it.

It's not politically correct.

Nobody's going to want it.

But hey, if that's what it takes, that's what it takes.

I took it as bluster in the middle of this moment, hoping that it would de-escalate.

That was my honest reading of it this morning.

I read it like you read it.

Which maybe probably is too generous, but sort of this idea, like, ha, what if I could use my powers of immense persuasion to convince the Iranian people to put on some red hats and overthrow their leaders.

Because without any of their internet access, they're just, they're waiting to hear what Donald Trump has to say.

And when he tells them to rise up, they're going to be like, Trump told us, let's do it.

It's not a well-thought-out notion.

I'll admit that.

Yeah, they're looking for

videos from Bibi Netanyahu and Trump before they decide what to do.

I also suspect that he's susceptible to arguments from people about how historic it would be for a regime change in Iran.

It's like, sir, this is just like Reagan taking down the Soviet Union, sir, blah, blah, blah, shit like that.

The counter-argument is like, okay, you have regime change that leads to chaos.

It leads to civil war in Iran and a migration crisis that would make Syria look like nothing.

Do you want that?

That's probably more.

Yeah, like, what are the odds what you get is better than what you have?

Pretty low.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No, we have a good track record of bringing democracy to place.

Maybe this will be the one.

This will be the exception that proves the rule.

We have trouble bringing it to America.

Yeah, I was going to say, yeah, they came back to bite us.

So we spent a lot of time last week talking about the intra-maga rift over Trump getting us involved in another war, but so far, the anti-war wing of the Republican Party, as it may be, your Steve Bannons and your Tucker Carlsons, have been mostly quiet in response to the strikes over the weekend.

People like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gates have been leveling most of their frustration at the pro-war faction, not Trump himself.

Charlie Kirk posted a poll on Sunday asking what his followers think.

No results as of this recording, but we will certainly keep you updated.

So far, the only Republican in Congress who criticized Trump's decision to strike was Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massey, who told Fox News on Sunday, I feel a bit misled.

I didn't think he would let neocons determine his foreign policy and drag us into another war.

Trump responded with a lengthy diatribe on Truth Social where he called Massey a grandstander and a bum and then promised a primary challenge against him, which one of Trump's super PACs is now helping to make happen.

How serious do you think the super PAC thing is in scaring off other potential defectors?

I think that the billionaire funded Trump Super PACs to fund primary challenges to anyone who votes against him.

That thread has been there since the beginning.

It's one of the reasons why Joni Ernst flipped on P.

Tech Seth.

And so I don't think this is any different.

Massey is probably more politically insulated than others.

He has an independent political identity, but this is what is keeping a lot of people in line on the nomination votes.

We'll keep people in line on the big, beautiful bill coming forward.

So, I don't think this is new.

This is unique to it's a new way to do.

It's like David Hogg with more money, you know?

Yeah,

sure.

Sure, no, I'm sure he appreciates that comparison.

Just put that in his marketing materials.

It wasn't surprising to me to see Trump go so hard against Massey, not just because I think Trump is genuinely annoyed by the fact that he's got this guy criticizing him on this and being a vote against the bill, but Massey's problem is that he's been alone, right?

Like, why not go after Massey?

He's not bringing anybody with him right now to go after the big, beautiful bill.

And so he's like, you know, it's not just that he's opposed, that he's weak.

He's going to make an example out of him.

I do think it's like, you all, look what I can do to this guy.

So

no one's step out of line either on this or on the bill in Congress or on anything else.

Literally anything.

But what's ironic about it is that he's already consolidated, right?

Like, what, two people voted against the bill in the House?

One of them was Massey, a couple of present votes.

He's already got it.

Yeah, they're all already scared shitless of a Trump-endorsed primary challenge.

Yes, a super PAC like ups the stakes, but I think like the Trump endorsement will be the problem.

I like don't really expect the Trump kind of mega pundit political class to leave him.

Like I suspect that Tucker Carlson and MTG and Steve Bannon, while they sincerely oppose the war, will find something new to be mad at Democrats about and just focus on that.

The question is, what about the first time voters who voted for Trump because they watched him on Joe Rogan and now they listen to like Dave Smith, the comedian who said he should be impeached, or Theo Vaughan, who had Rokana on the other day making the case for why the war was bad, or watch Tucker's content about what a bad idea with this would be.

Like, will those people decide they don't like Trump over the policy?

Will they decide they were lied to?

Right.

There's like kind of two pieces of this.

There's like the policy is bad, or hey, this guy lied to me.

I think it's the latter more than anything else, which is if you are a lesser engaged first-time Trump voter, how you get to voting for Trump is a relatively complicated calculus.

You need, because you're not an idiot.

You know that Trump is kind of a moron.

You know, you probably, you probably don't love his insurrections.

You don't love the fact he's been convicted of crimes.

But you made a couple of, you made some rational choices of reasons why I support him.

One of them is you thought he'd be better in the economy.

Maybe you have concerns about immigration and the border.

And the other one is that he is, quote unquote, anti-war, like Donald the Dove in Maureen Dowd's very infamous column from 2016.

And when you violate a core part of your political identity, you turn those voters off.

And those voters either step out of the electorate because they felt they were lied to, or they become people who will vote for a check on Trump in 2026.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: I think it really depends on what happens from here on, right?

If this ends with these strikes, I think a lot of those people will come back to Trump and say, you know what?

He said he was going to do targeted strikes.

That's what he did.

Caused the whole situation

to de-escalate after, and there's no boots on the ground.

Like, I think one lesson.

You could even get some of them being like, I was wrong.

Absolutely.

I thought it was going to be a drag dead thing, but

Trump's right again.

We should always know that Trump's always right.

I think what Trump, like, look, there's always this debate about, is it a war or not?

And I think in Trump's mind, he looks at like the last few conflicts we've been in, and war means boots on the ground to people.

And I think he took from the Soleimani

strike and what happened after, I think he's trying to make that happen here, which is as long as it's targeted, as long as it's short, as long as there's no boots on the ground, you pay no political price and you look kind of tough.

And people move on and forget about it.

And I think that's right.

I also noticed today that Fox is softening up the ground to absolve Trump of any responsibility should there be a terrorist attack in the United States because of this.

They were talking about how the, you know, the Department of Homeland Security has issued a warning and there's been some talk of like sleeper cells, Iranian sleeper cells here being activated.

And then Bill Megulin, who's the immigration reporter for Fox,

said, well, there's also been

something like 750 Iranians who were released into the country under Joe Biden.

So you can tell,

even if something like horrible happens, God forbid, you can see they're immediately going to go to, oh no, that wasn't Trump, that was Joe Biden's immigration policy.

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So the Democratic response to Trump's strike has been predictably more negative.

Many Democrats in Congress are upset they weren't consulted or given any notice that Trump had decided to launch an attack.

They're pointing out that Congress has the authority to declare war, not the president.

There are different legislative efforts to rein in Trump's military action, including one by Thomas Massey and Rokana.

Chuck Schumer's trying to get a vote on the issue as soon as this week.

So we'll see where that goes.

AOC, among other Democrats, did write on Twitter that Trump's move was, quote, grounds for impeachment.

Obviously, that's not going to happen anytime soon.

What do you guys make of the way that Democrats have responded so far?

No, I mean, like, I think some Democrats have been great.

I think Rokana has been great.

Tim Kaine has been a really principled leader on this kind of set of issues for a long time.

He's trying to repeal the AUMF.

I wish AOC didn't say the impeachment thing.

I think it just kind of like muddles the debate and gives them something to caricature.

I think the congressional leadership has been terrible.

Before the war started, Chuck Schumer was accusing Trump of tacoing on Iran, like basically calling him soft.

Hakeem Jeffries was asked about Rokana's bill today, and he said, quote, haven't taken a look at it.

The bill is three pages long, pretty big font.

So, you know, like there's kind of two categories of response from Democrats.

One is Congress should have voted on this first.

And I think that's great, and that's important, and everyone should make that case.

And I realize I'm a hypocrite for working for Obama, and the Libya conflict was not something that was congressionally authorized.

But I think more generally, what I want to see from Democrats is to forcefully argue that diplomacy was a better way to solve the problem.

The Iran nuclear deal, the JCPOA, worked.

It was working when we pulled out of it.

When Trump pulled out of it, Trump's own staff wanted him to stay in the JCPOA.

They said it was in our national security interest.

They testified before Congress that Iran was in compliance, and then he pulled out of the deal, and then Iran started enriching uranium and funding more money for their proxy forces, and that's why we got to the war.

And so a diplomatic deal is how you permanently solve the problem.

Bombing Iran is a temporary solution with all kinds of secondary and third-order impacts that we just can't predict.

And I think we need to make the case that diplomacy is better and fight for those agreements when we

cut them, like Obama did in 2015.

I went back and looked at some of the votes that the Republican House led when President Obama announced military involvement in Libya and started the bombing campaign in Libya.

And you had all these House Republicans say that the president had no right to do this without congressional authorization.

You also had 70 Democrats.

join in that vote, right?

One of whom was Chris Murphy.

Another was Tammy Baldwin, who was, I think, really consistent on this.

And I want to hear more from Democrats who are willing to say, hey, we have allowed presidential authority to go way too far.

The problem with Donald Trump being president is not just because of his, you know,

his flaws and criminality, it's because he's in a job that is way too powerful and that both parties contributed to making more powerful.

When President Obama sought congressional authority for military strikes in Syria, he said, I don't need to do this, but it's just something I want to do.

And that was wrong.

It just was.

It was the wrong thing to say because it made it as if that there's this sort of, we live in this perpetual gray area where what the president can or cannot do is a kind of complicated and divine bit of religion that only the lawyer priests can help us figure out, and they can disagree.

But now it's like we need to start having a kind of clear position about the need to limit presidential authority over time, even when there are moments where Democratic presidents have not wanted to cede that control.

And I think it starts with Democrats who've been consistent all along, and even some maybe that who haven't been, being willing to say the president cannot start

wars without first going to Congress for approval, unless there is a clear imminent threat that Congress has been notified of.

Yeah, I do think you've got to lay out sort of conditions for that because you can see, forget about which party does it.

The president does need to reserve some ability to act quickly.

Of course.

I mean, that's what the war's part of the power is.

You have powers.

Right.

That's what I'm saying.

I think then the question is like,

what is exact, under what exact conditions?

What are the exceptions here and there?

But like, yeah, the fact that we just have just been just dragging this along without clarifying it since 2001, at least.

Well, and before, but by the way, also, the other side of it is true, too.

All these Republicans that were in Congress were like, Barack Obama is exceeding his authority.

They voted no.

But what they didn't do, I think this kind of speaks to the problem and the way in which Congress has become so feckless and useless, is after

the House votes to say Barack Obama doesn't have the authority to do this or shouldn't have the authority, or we don't approve of this, they then had a vote on funding.

But they didn't want to to do that, right?

They didn't want to actually go the next step of actually asserting their power.

And Congress is afraid to assert its power, which is dangerous when the president isn't Donald Trump.

It's even more dangerous when it is.

Fan.

Tommy, you said it feels like we're in 2003.

And some of the members of the Democratic Party have been 2003 for 22 years now because there is this learned helplessness on national security issues, this idea that if it's national security weeks, we must begin every sentence about this with this long-winded caveat about how Iran is bad and can't have a nuclear weapon.

As if if you don't spend upwards to 30 seconds making that point, you will be declared a member of Hezbollah tomorrow.

And it's just like be forceful and strong and unequivocal about why what Trump is doing is wrong, why the process under which he is doing it is wrong, why he is rushing into military conflict in the Middle East based on manipulated intelligence.

Like we have been down this road before.

There are consequences to it.

And just make that case.

It's not as hard as we are making it every turn.

Yeah, under the War Powers Act,

the president can authorize the use of force if you're if the u.s faces attack or an imminent attack and in this case that's just clearly not what was happening that's not the context and i agree with you love it i mean it we the the president should have to go to congress and what is so hard about this is often the congress doesn't want the vote they do not want that's the problem

trying to get a vote on syria and they were like no we don't want that on our records they don't want this vote they don't want to be on cowards but but and but it's like that's the politics that that's why the president shouldn't be able to do this because the the the Congress doesn't want to get behind it

because they don't want to lend it democratic legitimacy because they know the American people won't have their back if this thing goes south because American people don't want to be involved in foreign wars.

They're also cowards because it's not just that they don't want to help.

There is partisanship there as there was with the Syria vote, but they're so afraid of being wrong.

Because if you're wrong on a war,

it defines your career, right?

There were a bunch of people who wanted to run for president in 1992, who had voted against the First Gulf War, who thought they could not run because of that.

Exactly.

A bunch of people in 2003 who wanted to run for president in 2008 voted for the Iraq War, even though it was a wrong idea and ended up being wrong there and paying a price for it.

Yep.

Well, there's also the, you know, and it's applied to domestic politics here too, but the Bill Clinton line, like it's better to be strong and wrong than weak and right.

And I think, especially in matters of foreign policy and national security, that is on the minds of Democrats.

I don't even think.

That's a misreading of even of what Bill Clinton said, too.

I know, I know.

But that's how Democrats have thought since 9-11, right?

And, but I even think that, like, you don't need the throat clearing of we all know the Iranian regime is dangerous and blah blah blah.

I think it's like we don't want them to have a nuclear weapon.

We don't.

That's a goal that we share.

What's the best way to do that?

And this is to your point, right?

The best way to do that is to have a bunch of inspectors in there to make sure they're not enriching more uranium or moving stuff around.

Now we don't have fucking inspectors in there.

Now they're going to have a chance to,

we can't bomb them.

We can't like bomb the knowledge of how to create a nuclear weapon out of Iran.

It's a country of 92 million people.

We can kill a bunch of scientists.

We can bomb a bunch of facilities.

But like at some point, these people are going to keep trying to build a nuclear weapon.

So what is the best way to prevent a nuclear weapon?

Diplomacy is the best way.

War is a stupid way to, bombing is a stupid way to solve this problem long term.

I think they don't believe that.

I think the reason that part of why, to Tommy's point, of why they're not going to, I don't think they believe that.

I think they are conflicted on the policy.

They don't want to talk about it.

They don't want to take a position.

But I think they are conflicted on diplomacy versus, well, maybe these strikes could help, and maybe that.

I think that there's a genuine lack of assuredness about the policy.

I even think there, though, it is a

short-termism, which is a big Trump problem, but I think it's also a Democratic problem.

It's a political problem, right?

Which is they can convince themselves that, yeah, the strikes can help in the short term, which by the way, they may, but long-term solution, like if you really believe that, then come out and say, fucking great, strikes are the way to go.

And this is for the next 10, 15, 20 years, this is going to protect us.

There are three possible results here.

One is Iran ends up with a nuclear weapon.

The second is we have a diplomatic deal to prevent them from getting it.

And the third is a war regime changed in Iran so the people in charge of Iran are not people who want a nuclear weapon.

Those are the three options.

And what happened here didn't change those three options.

It may even make the diplomatic solution harder in the long run.

Oh, definitely.

100%.

There's no diplomatic solution.

Who are the Iranians going to trust?

Us?

The Israelis?

The international community?

Nobody.

And also just a big picture on the Democratic Party.

For a long time, we were viewed as the anti-war party.

Now we are not, right?

That's partly because of votes on Iraq.

It's partly because of Joe Biden's handling of Gaza.

It's partly because of Joe Biden's support for Ukraine, which I think was the right thing to do, right?

But we have to get back that mantle.

And I think

we're in this moment where there was a lot of concernation, including on the far right, about Trump going to war with Iran.

We have to provide a clear alternative.

We can't just be like the wishy-washy, silent people in the middle, or else the pro-war people are the only ones making an argument.

But that's, and that's why I think, you know,

politics or policy, you've got to make the argument for diplomacy first and war as a last resort, which is a very simple argument that Democrats have used to make all the time.

The other thing that happened in Iraq is you had a lot of Democratic politicians voted for the authorization to go to war in Iraq.

And then when things went south, would say, well, you know, I voted for authorization because I thought George Bush would handle this well, but then he just didn't handle it well.

And like, I don't want to hear this now where they're going to be like, well, Trump, the strikes were fine.

The initial strikes were fine.

And so I supported that.

But then, you know, Trump prosecuted the war wrong.

And then all this stuff went south afterwards.

And so

I'm going to step away from that.

Like, no, no, no, no.

If you don't speak out now, you fucking own it.

Well, that's the worst thing is that other than Fetterman and maybe a couple handful of others, no one's actually supporting the strikes.

They are just like in the mushy middle of they're going to be wrong no matter what the outcome is because they didn't pick either way.

They just unless there's a vote, unless there's a vote in Congress on the, unless one of these resolutions gets a vote in Congress, which we'll see.

But that was, I mean,

that's even an afterwards thing because we're not in a real war power situation because

you have 60 days of conflict and then you have 30 days to get out.

Unless there are more ongoing strikes, we're not going to be in that situation.

It's going to be over one strike that happened.

But like in 2003, a lot of the argument the Bush administration was making before the vote for authorization is you need to give me this authorization so that I have negotiating power.

Right.

And I think, look, I think some people knew they were voting for war.

I think some people genuinely convinced themselves that they needed to give Bush that authority leading up to it.

And I think you could see the same thing happening here, right?

With a bunch of people voting, but claiming it is because they want the U.S.

to have the strongest negotiating posture.

But by the way, I don't even think we're going to get to that because at this point, they're going to all claim the vote's moot if Trump isn't pursuing long-term military action, which means Donald Trump will have shown that you can just bomb a country.

You do not need to claim the threat is imminent.

The president has this kind of limitless, he is an imperial president abroad and then he is an imperial president at home.

Speaking of which, let's turn to Trump's other military campaign.

The 4,800 troops were still deployed here in Los Angeles, ostensibly to protect federal buildings from unruly protesters who haven't been seen on the streets for over a week.

The military also has been supporting ICE agents who are still out there arresting, assaulting, and detaining anyone they deem suspicious, including undocumented immigrants with no criminal records, legal residents, even U.S.

citizens.

In just the past week, we've seen videos of masked agents tackling and arresting an American citizen who had been filming ICE agents dragging a man out of a truck after smashing his window with a baton.

We also saw graphic footage of ICE violently assaulting a landscaper in Santa Ana, who turns out to be the father of three U.S.

Marines.

There's another Marine veteran whose wife was detained while she was still breastfeeding their newborn.

There's a six-year-old girl in Chicago who's essentially been orphaned after her mother was deported to Honduras.

A guy was mistakenly arrested and detained twice in the same week, twice in the same week, detained and then released, despite having been granted asylum years ago.

That was just a mistake.

And the list goes on and on.

ICE's own data shows that less than 10%, less than 10% of the nearly 200,000 people who've been detained this year have been convicted of violent crime.

The director of one immigrant rights group told the New Yorker that his organization has received around 4,000 calls just this month, in June, about friends or loved ones who've just disappeared.

No idea what ICE has done with them.

Do you guys think these stories are breaking through or are we in a situation where people are getting numb to this and we've just moved on?

They are breaking through.

Right.

And there is evidence that in the polling data, using G.

Elliott Morris's approval tracking, on June 5th, Trump's approval rating on immigration was five points above water.

Today, it's two and a half points underwater.

What happened in L.A., the protests, these video,

the true success of the mostly peaceful protests in LA is people paid attention to what ICE was doing.

These clips are going viral.

People are seeing them.

This is supposed to be Trump's best issue, and he's underwater on it.

And there's been a pretty hard shift over the last couple of weeks.

So this stuff is breaking through.

You saw like a clip going around of Joe Rogan talking about the fact that they're going after people at Home Depot, that they're going after people that are just trying to work on construction sites and saying that that's not what we voted for, right?

That's not what people thought they were voting for.

That's not what he said he was going to do.

And then you see kind of two responses to that.

Some people say, actually, this is what you voted for.

And then other people, I think, more helpfully saying, you're right.

You thought he was going to deport criminals, but he's not.

He's going after people that are just trying to earn a living.

And I do think that matters.

Yeah.

It's another example of an issue where Democrats, I think, were scared.

At first, maybe they still are scared.

But when we made an argument, it seems like we're actually having some success here.

And yeah, I think the Rogan thing was important.

I mean, that's that is this conversation breaking through to an influential audience, to an influential person who is a huge audience, and saying, I don't think anyone would have voted for this.

And to all the progressives out there, don't scold people like that.

You did know where you're like, don't do that shit.

Let's create a context where we welcome people back into the fold and we don't make them feel stupid for voting for Trump last time.

Like, come on, let's build a coalition here.

Well, also, like, they were, you know, Trump lied to them and he said all he talked about, right?

Like, yeah, if you went into into his policy page somewhere, you'd find that he was going to just deport everyone.

If you knew about Stephen Miller, if you knew anything about Stephen Miller and that he was going to be in the administration, you'd know that he was going to deport anyone they could.

But if you just listen to fucking Trump on the stump throughout 2024, you'd think it was just the worst of the worst, violent criminals.

And he's going around saying that he wants to protect dreamers and he wants to staple fucking green cards onto people's diplomas and all that kind of shit.

So like, yeah, people were lied to.

Should they have, you know, thought better of it because they shouldn't shouldn't have trusted Trump?

Yeah, of course, but whatever.

We're trying to build a fucking coalition here.

And for the most part, this didn't happen in the first term.

Right.

Well,

the other part of it too is Trump didn't just lie throughout the campaign.

He's lied in the last week and a half.

He's been posting every kind of position he could possibly take.

Gets a call from his ag secretary telling him about the problems it's causing.

Next thing you know, he's saying, oh, we don't want to go after people that are just working hard.

The next day, Stephen Miller and Christy Noam are back at the sticks, and all of a sudden, the deportations are back on.

I do think that the fact that people are filming some of these these deportations is what's really what's going to help horrifying it's it is horrifying and that the the guy they arrested at the home depot right down the street from here in hollywood uh which is when they raided and he was in american city he's 37 years old and they thought he was an undocumented immigrant who was just another day laborer at the home depot and he was working at home depot but he's a doc he's getting his doctorate uh based on his skin color they thought yeah at a college right here and he was like what the fuck are you doing as he's like you can see him him, he's filming it.

And also, the guy that they dragged away, who probably wasn't, you know, an undocumented immigrant, sitting in his truck, smashing the window and frightened at his face, and then dragging him out.

And then, when the guy's filming it, then they tackle him, and then they're bragging about how many they got today.

How many bodies do we get today?

31.

Oh, that's amazing.

We got 31 today, and they say, Oh, Trump's really riding us on this.

So, like, this is the fucking incentive here.

I want to see Democrats make a bigger deal about ICE agents wearing masks.

I know know there's a bill in the California legislature that would ban mask wearing of ICE agents.

The fact that in this country, a plainclothes cop can run up to you with a mask on, tackle you, and throw you in an unmarked van is insane.

With no warrant, no identification.

And I...

We were talking about this on Friday's pod, and I was like, there's going to be, you know, how do we know it's not just some criminal with a mask on pretending to be an ICE agent?

And then after we recorded, CNN said there's actually been a rise in impersonations, people impersonating ICE officers and just trying to round people up.

And then on top of that, you can't trust the Department of Homeland Security to tell you accurately what they're doing, when they're doing it.

They're lying all the time.

The spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security just lies and on your constant basis, Christy Noam lies, Christy Noam's boss lies, obviously.

So these people show up, they're wearing masks, then they drive off.

Then the department claims they were never there to begin with.

It's on fucking video that they were at Dodger Stadium.

So the guy in Santa Ana, the landscaper, it was interesting watching how this unfolds with the Department of Homeland Security.

So there's video of him getting just the shit beat out of him.

They're tackling him.

They're pepper spraying him, right?

And then a bunch of like right-wing accounts started saying, oh, they didn't show the whole video.

He was actually attacking the federal agents with a weed whacker.

Well, what was actually happening is he was, you know, weed whacking the lawn, doing his job.

Then they started chasing him.

They also asked him, like, to

answer their questions.

He didn't have to, because you don't have to.

That's part of the law.

So he started, then they start chasing him.

He's running away with the weed whacker.

And then they're all like, see, see, this is proof that he was attacking them with the weed whacker.

And I'm like, these crazy fucking right-wing accounts, what is this?

Then I see today, Department of Homeland Security tweets the same thing.

And they're basically just basing their explanation for their arrest and detention off random right-wing Twitter accounts.

That's what we're doing now.

Then you have Stephen Miller posting something like, oh, there are more undocumented people in LA than we ever thought possible, getting all these free services and

parasites on our economy or whatever way he's saying it.

When what you're talking about are people that just work in this city,

just working every day, really hard fucking jobs, often with

paying into Social Security and paying taxes that they can never recoup the benefits of because they're not citizens.

And then they're being like kind of chased down the street in this terrifying way.

And so the ramifications for Los Angeles is like most people are going about their days.

Everything seems normal.

But these immigrant communities, especially communities with a lot of undocumented people, they're terrified.

They're afraid to go to work, but they have to work.

They don't know what to do.

They don't know how to live

day to day because there is this capricious threat looming over the city.

All so that Stephen Miller can hit some imaginary quota set by Donald Trump to hit a number about criminals, of which there are not nearly enough to capture to hit these numbers.

Yeah, and that tweet that you mentioned was in response to a post by the city of Pasadena that they were canceling public programs because people were too afraid to leave their houses in Pasadena.

And so Stephen Miller takes that as like, well, there must be more, must be more illegal aliens than we thought.

So there was a development this weekend in the deportation story that's probably gotten the most national attention.

On Sunday, a federal judge denied the Justice Department's request to hold Kilmar Obrego Garcia in custody while he awaits trial in his federal human smuggling case.

Judge Barbara Holmes' order was pretty forceful in its criticism of the administration.

Basically, like the case that they've brought, the criminal case is

it's got contradictory evidence.

Some of it seems like not even possible that it's that it's true at all.

Of course, we know that a prosecutor in Tennessee resigned because they didn't think that this case should be brought.

The judge also acknowledged that Abrego Garcia will likely stay in custody regardless of what she rules, either because of the Justice Department's appeal or because the Department of Homeland Security will just launch new deportation proceedings against him to keep him in custody.

So, you know, there's a difference between immigration court and immigration legal system and then the criminal legal system.

So he can't be held by the criminal justice system, but he can still be held in detention and immigration detention.

DHS spokesperson, the one that lies all the time, Tricia McLaughlin, reiterated in a post on Twitter Monday, quote, we have said it for months and it remains true to this day.

He will never go free on American soil.

And then on top of that, just before we started recording, the Supreme Court issued a 6-3 order allowing the Trump administration to deport migrants to countries other than their own, including extremely dangerous places like Libya and South Sudan, at least while the case is still being heard.

That could come back to the Supreme Court later, this case.

Yeah,

why would you want to stop grabbing people and then sending them to South Sudan?

Why would you need to put a hold on that while the case is running through the system before they've even ruled on the merits?

Why would you want to put a stop to that?

What could go wrong doing that?

Why would you, what's the difference?

South Sudan and Libya, a place that's famously easy to return from.

Yeah, and safe.

What do you guys make of all these legal developments, aside from them being fucking awful?

I mean, it was interesting that the judge just shit all over the government's case in the Abrego Garcia case.

I mean, they said they give little weight to hearsay testimony, especially hearsay testimony from currently detained people that are cooperating to get an early release from prison, which was obviously the case when we sort of first read the indictment.

And then the judge

pointed out, as you mentioned, that the testimony provided by the cooperators said that Abrego Garcia would drive from Maryland to Houston and back three to four times a week with his kids in the car to smuggle people, which is, she said, borders on being physically impossible.

That's what it was.

It's got 12 hours away.

A lot of coffee to be driving thousands of miles all the time.

Yeah, it didn't make sense.

Yeah, so it's like the government, like, they're obviously prosecuting Abrego Garcia because they view his case as kind of like the marquee case, underpinning the credibility of their entire sending people to El Salvador Gulag nightmare policy.

And clearly, it's unraveling.

And I think they understand that that would sort of unravel their whole argument around immigration.

Well, and

they're trying to make a public case here, right?

Because so the government had some options with Garcia, right?

Obrego Garcia.

They could have said, okay, well,

we can deport him to any country but El Salvador.

So we're going to try to deport him to a third country.

They decided not to do that.

They could also say, we want to go back to immigration court and undo the protection or try to fight to undo the protection of deporting him to El Salvador and then see if they could win that case and then deport him to El Salvador again.

Their argument would be, you know, the gang that they were worried about attacking him no longer exists in El Salvador.

They didn't do that.

What they did is they just made up an entire case calling him a sex trafficker, a drug trafficker, smuggler, all this kind of shit, because they need, in the public's mind, to have people believe that he is a really really bad guy.

They can't just say, okay, you know what, we made a mistake sending him to El Salvador, putting him in prison.

We'll just deport him somewhere else, which they could have tried to do, but they are trying to prosecute a fucking phony case just to make people believe that he's an awful person.

And to make everything that Trump...

Christy Noam, Stephen Miller, J.D.

Vance, Marco Rubio said be true when it's obviously not true.

It is just, as we live through it, like remarkable how much of what is, like, how much of fascism is a group of fucking assholes using ad hoc rationales to cover their mistakes and previous incompetence.

Like, how much we're living in this sort of doom loop of them being kind of feckless and cruel and then coming up with some new, ridiculous power grab or like

criminal complaint or stretching of the law to justify it in hindsight, like over and over and over again.

Yeah, well, because they know that they don't have a legal case to stand on on a host of things.

And so all they care about is trying to prosecute their case in the court of public opinion.

That's just like, that's what they've learned.

That's what Trump learned when he was charged himself criminally.

Yeah.

And then just to bring it back to like what we watched over the weekend with Iran is you have J.D.

Vance go on television and say, yeah, no, I know people don't want conflicts in the Middle East,

but previously, We had dumb presidents.

And now we have Donald Trump, infallible, God-sent, Donald Trump.

Everybody knows makes a lot of fun.

And now we have a president who's going to make a decision on war and peace based on what he saw on Fox News.

And so

that's.

Yeah, like, so everybody makes fun of Mike Huckabee for sending that insane and unattained text message to his daughter about like Donald Trump being like God's chosen one, saved it, butler so that he could, I guess, bring about the rapture.

But like J.D.

Vance is doing an intellectual version of that, basically saying that we need to trust Donald Trump because he has this wisdom.

And like so much of what the administration does is basically try through legal legal means, illegal means, lying, deception,

this ridiculous case, they deported someone and then decided to charge him criminally, ridiculous, is to kind of continue to kind of create the image of Donald Trump as this perfect god-sent figure.

And like the scary thing is not, obviously it's scary that they're doing it.

I think they're starting to believe it.

I think J.D.

Vance is starting to believe it.

Nobody's sold his soul for power more thoroughly than that guy.

I mean, J.D.

Vance in 2015 would despise J.D.

Vance of 2025.

Like he knows damn well that it it wasn't an issue of dumb presidents sending people to dumb wars.

It was dumb wars being waged for dumb reasons.

No, no, no.

Church Ebby Bush would have been kind of dumb.

He was, of course, dumb.

Two things can be true.

We didn't even get to talk about J.D.

Vance's trip to L.A.

on Friday when he came here to L.A.

to do an RNC fundraising retreat and then tacked on a photo op at the federal building that the Marines are guarding for no reason because of protests that were gone a long time ago and then kicked out local press.

never let him in didn't didn't let local or state california press in there and then called senator alex padilla jose padilla and accused him of theater accused him of theater jd vance who came to la just to do a to to throw on a photo op so he could yell about uh you know ice raids and protesters that don't exist called him fucking jose padilla the guy he served with the entire time jd vance was in the senate one of 99 other colleagues of J.D.

Vance.

Unfucking real, that guy.

Yeah, J.D.

Vance, man, theater.

That was his calling.

That's really, you know, theater is what he's doing.

Theater is what is in his heart.

Theater makeups was on his face.

Yeah.

I also, I mean, Jose Padilla was

post-9-11 accused of having a dirty bomb, held as an enemy combatant, denied a trial.

So, yeah, pretty, pretty insulting mistake beyond just getting the name wrong.

Ridiculous.

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One last thing before we go.

Tuesday's Election Day in New York City.

The mayor's race has been pretty fascinating.

A lot of abundance discourse, a lot of interesting conversations about anti-Semitism, about Gaza, ranked choice voting,

socialism, Andrew Cuomo.

Yep, those are the topics.

Those are the questions.

Was there anything else?

So we've got four non-New York residents sitting here.

Love it, I like to think.

I know you like to think that you're in the park at some point.

Who wants to weigh in?

Any final thoughts on the race?

Love it, what about you?

You talked to Mamdani and Brad Lander.

Yeah.

I came away from a the conversation with Mamdani being really impressed.

You know, a lot of the debate and public debate has been around the top level

sentence on these policies, free buses, public grocery stores, freezing the rent.

When you talk to him, he's just really smart and has, I think, sophisticated views on how to answer some of the critiques from the right.

or even from the center left of those policies.

And you think, well, how could somebody who's 33 succeed as mayor?

Well, he's really fucking smart and, you know, can build as clearly able to build a following and build a campaign.

So that to me was really interesting.

Then talking to Lander, what jumped out at me is, first of all, Brad Lander is also a really smart guy and it's really interesting to talk to.

But Lander made this really persuasive case about why Andrew Cuomo would fail as mayor.

And I realized in hearing it, it was like the most persuasive case I'd heard and the only, like, and actually the only time I'd heard it, because Cuomo is this, you know, he has the the controversy around the nursing homes and writing a book during the pandemic he's a sexual harasser he his decisions may be

basically personally responsible for Democrats don't have the house he's a bully he doesn't seem to want the job maybe he wants to run for president like there's a lot of re a lot of corruption around him and there's all these different reasons to not like Andrew Cuomo but a lot of them don't really get at the core of whether he will succeed or fail as mayor in doing the things he has claimed he was going to do.

And it kind of, it's a similar, we were talking this before the show, that it's a little bit like the Trump problem of like, when somebody got so many problems, did anyone really drill down into the cleanest case for people that are open to Cuomo?

And the fact that Brad Lander's case was the best version of it I heard made me, made me nervous.

I think if you look at this race from afar, like we, as you said, we are not New Yorkers.

We don't live there.

We don't have to live with the consequences of decisions.

We don't have a vote.

We're not like dialed in on like policies around trash containerization and all the the other things that like really matter when you live in the state which is what like a mayor's job is because this race has been about all these big things you said and i just saw a clip where they asked uh mamdani and andrew cuomo their response to the strikes in iran

which is interesting i guess but totally it's not never gonna be part of their job right and i watch what's happening there and whether you you like him you don't like him you agree with his policy you don't agree with his policies you're concerned about democratic socialism or you love democratic socialism you have to admit that what mamdani has done is to build a very inspiring campaign that has energized young people for a mayoral race in a way in which no one has seen in a very long time.

And people are excited about politics.

And while that's happening, to have, like you have seen this panic among the Democratic establishment, not just in New York, but outside of New York.

You have the, you know, there was a headline in Politico over the weekend, which is centrist Democrats freak out about New York mayoral race.

You have all these centrist Democrats saying, you know, this is going to cost us racism.

We can't have a Democratic socialist.

And our friends who we like and respect and work with, at Third Way, put out this memo about how radical Democratic socialism.

They're not taking a position on the race, but they're saying how bad Democratic socialism is.

Jim Clyburn, who's reaching down from South Carolina to endorse Bill Clinton.

Bill Clinton, who is a New York resident, endorses Andrew Cuomo.

And you have former HUD Secretary.

Who's former HUD Secretary?

But you have that, we are creating, once again, the Democratic establishment is circling the wagons.

You have a super PAC funded around the worst candidates.

Well, of all.

I'm going to get to that.

I'm going to get to that.

They're circling the wagons.

They have a super PAC funded by billionaires, including Michael Bloomberg, who's put in more than $10 million in the super PAC, running just non-stop negative ads against Mom Donnie.

They had a mailer that did not go out, but leaked out, or they darkened his beard to make him look more nefarious to do that to the potential first Muslim mayor in New York City.

And if you're a young person and, you know, we're all having this conversation, like, how do we get young people to like to stick with Democrats?

How do we win them back?

And then every single time there's a candidate they get excited about, the Democratic establishment, some members of the Democratic establishment and billionaires get together to try to torpedo that candidacy.

Like this is not exactly how history went, but imagine you're a 30-year-old in this country, right?

In 2016, you supported Bernie Sanders.

The entire establishment supported Hillary Clinton, including the people who worked at the DNC during the primary.

In 2020, Bernie, you sort of support Bernie Sanders again.

He is on the cusp of victory.

Everyone else drops out and endorses Joe Biden.

Everyone goes and votes.

They all go and vote for Joe Biden to get him elected, in part because they believe that Joe Biden will be one-term president.

They are begging someone else to run against them or for Joe Biden to step back.

He doesn't do that.

And then here, once again, they are inspired by a candidate and people from the Democratic establishment.

If you live in New York and you want Brad Lander or someone else, that's fine.

But to do that is bad.

To do it for Andrew Cuomo is really unforgivable.

Like this isn't, you're not doing it for another good Democrat.

You're doing it for someone that the entire Democratic Party leadership, including the president of the United States at the time, wanted to resign from the governorship because he sexually harassed 11 women.

He abused his power.

He was involved in this nursing home scandal.

And everyone's getting behind that.

You would rather, the idea that we are more scared about a Democratic socialist as the mayor of New York than Andrew Cuomo with his record of corruption and sexual harassment is insane to me.

DOJ, Biden's DOJ, found that like he sexually harassed, he was accused of sexually harassing 13 women.

This was in the Department of Justice report.

After there was an Attorney General report about it,

he doctored a report about nursing home deaths.

Then they later found out that he undercounted them by 50%.

Like, this is not some like, oh, is he a little skeezy?

No, this is like bad shit.

I mean,

one of Cuomo's former top aides, Howard Glazer.

Did you see this tweet?

A grim and joyless campaign as befits a battle for a prize never wanted, one long viewed with disdain and contempt as a trifle that only lesser men would debase themselves to see.

I asked ChatGPT to like give me some Yates.

Yeah, it was a little overwritten, but it got to

what bothered me a lot about the Cuomo thing is the guy didn't really campaign because he feels so fucking entitled to the job.

Like you don't like Mamdani, then you know, make a case about his policies and how they would affect people.

Andrew didn't do interviews.

You know, we reached out.

Everyone reached out.

He did.

He wasn't doing interviews for this campaign.

Didn't really campaign.

Then you see Mamdani just like literally walking the length of New York City trying to talk to voters and meet people all the other candidates trying to take campaigning seriously and Andrew Cuomo is just like no I'm I have I have the name recognition I got the money people know me I'm owed this job it's you know it's a step down from governor but whatever I'll take it like that's the kind of person

the person you want fucking running your city it's the definition of entitlement like I look as a general matter I opt out of New York City politics because I live in Los Angeles and every other reporter lives in New York and they talk about it all the time and I feel like they got it covered we got enough issues that said yeah, we got some issues here.

That said, I like watching that Mamdani video this morning of him walking across Manhattan, like it gave me Obama 2007 kind of feels and brought me back to what it was like to be young and inspired by a politician.

I was talking to someone who works on the campaign who told me that they just like decided to do it one day and then did that the next day.

You know, it's like a campaign that's nimble and fun.

It seems exciting.

It's like a group of people you want to be a part of.

But I share Dan's utter disdain with the established coming down on behalf of Cuomo.

Like of all the people to pick, he's such a scumbag and such an asshole and such a bully that to rally around them.

It like, like, I think if Mom Dani loses, like, it would be valuable for folks who are in the DSA to look inward and evaluate policies that maybe didn't work for them electorally or just like

right in, but they will absolutely have every right to be furious at the Democratic Party for backing someone who is actively shitty.

Not an alternative, just like a bad guy.

Yeah, I think, I think they will say Democratic Party, it is worth saying that like you've had, you know, Lander and

Mamdani cross indoors.

You have

had Adrian Adams and Establish him as well.

Yes, yeah.

And like, and it's disgusting.

It's disgusting.

I do think that like, this was something that came up when I talked to Mamdani, is I said, like, what he said at the beginning of his campaign is, because Cuomo jumps in, rock is at the top.

Mandani's like, the more people get to know the myth of Andrew Cuomo, the better I'll do.

And I think that's like been totally true.

He's been proven absolutely correct about that.

And there's like a lot of misinformation, a lot of propaganda, a lot of hateful stuff that has nothing to do with the job that is going to cost Mandani in one way or another and could cost him the race.

But I also think sometimes like, okay, there's a myth that people are enamored of with Cuomo, right?

Something about toughness and competence and like what it means to that what you want in a leader, right?

And it's absolutely true that a lot of that's a myth and a lot of his toughness is bullying and shit that'll make him a worse mayor and unable to do the job.

But at the same time, I think sometimes we don't do enough to say, hey, what is it that people want in that myth?

And how can we be sure that we're convincing people who want that version of leadership that we have that toughness, even as we have more compassionate and generous and like empathetic policies?

And I sometimes think we don't do that.

I think sometimes on the left, there's a little bit of the left can't fail, can only be failed.

And that's not to say if this does, if this, if Cuomo wins, that that's not a despicable

outcome of a lot of like unfairness in this process.

But I do think I want that too, because like I want, like, I don't want Andrew Cuomo to be the next mayor of New York.

I think it's fucking awful.

There's a fundamental question electorally for candidates like Mom Dami is can they do well enough with black voters to win the core of the Democratic primary the most important electorate in every Democratic primary around the presidential primary and particularly in New York and can he do well enough to win and that increasingly Hispanic working class voters as well I mean just working class voters in general and it has become this irony right that more progressive candidates DSA candidates

you know they their policies are fighting for the working class.

But in this country, the working class Americans, first white, then now black and Hispanic, are, you know,

voting more conservatively.

So, yes, I, I, I totally agree.

Well, it's within the context of a Democratic primary, obviously.

And Bernie had shown some success with Latino voters.

We didn't get a full test of it, but it showed some success with it.

AOC obviously has.

There's, you know, we'll, there's some, we'll see how this plays out.

And it's going to probably matter a little bit borough by borough for Momdani.

But the thing that has prevented if Bernie could have done just a little bit better with black voters in 2016 and a lot better with them in 2024, he could have been the Democratic nominee.

And that has been that just for progressive candidates, that's why Obama succeeded,

was the first progressive anti-establishment candidate to win a Democratic primary because he could get the college-educated support that is very important in Iowa and New Hampshire and also do very well with black voters.

Well, just for the purposes of a thought experiment here, I do think it's worth separating out the style of politics from the policy, right?

Because we could have a whole debate about like what issue positions and policy positions can win a general election.

Like, do I think a DSA candidate could win a national election or an election in a purple state?

Maybe, but I don't think so, right?

But if you have, like, I think that our party, you have to have people running for office in our party who campaign like Momdani's been campaigning, who run a campaign like that, who are like meeting people all over the place, who are speaking to people's concerns, who are, like you said, Love it, like the strength I think people are looking for is fight on behalf of people who need a fighter, right?

And to constantly be making about the people that you want to represent.

And I don't think we've seen that.

If there is a, you know, non-DSA

in some purple states or even nationally, like center-left candidate who campaigns like Mondani's been campaigning, that person could be president.

And if there are people, if there are schmucks like Andrew Cuomo out there who the party is going to continue to coalesce around because, you know, on paper, they might be, you know, highest name recognition and have these, you know, moderate credentials or whatever else, but they suck, then, you know, we're going to keep losing.

I could scream about this for an hour.

On my flight here, I pounded out a message box.

It'll be in your inboxes tomorrow on this thing because I'm so mad about it.

It's so selfish.

It's so stupid for people to anyone outside of New York to panic about who the mayor of New York is politically.

Like, we had a lot of problems because Eric Adams has been under indictment for a year.

Is that really, that was a huge, was that a huge problem for House Democrats in 2024?

No.

But also, like, there's something so

there are other candidates, right?

Like, there's Brad Lander, Adrian Adams, Elnor Myrie.

They're like, they're like, they had platforms.

They're, you know, they, they're between them basically, you know, progressive-wise, right?

Like, you had, like, a range of options.

And some of you ended with this sort of like super polarized vote, right?

And the fact that all this money decided to get behind Andrew Cuomo because they were so afraid of Mom Donnie when they, they could have supported Adrian Adams, right?

They could have done it.

There's a lot of things that could have been different about this.

So there's a way in which it's sort of like a unique situation, a uniquely frustrating situation for voters

who maybe aren't as far left as Mom Donnie, but don't want to have a sexual harasser bully in their job.

Yeah, for sure.

But

one reason I think it concerns all of us, even though we're not deep in the New York City mayor's race, and like you said, I don't think this one mayor's race has an effect on the party writ large.

A similar dynamic is what I worry about heading into 2028 again.

And it's not necessarily going to be like Cuomo, right?

But just this, these candidates that either look good on paper or the establishment feels comfortable with or who have name recognition or for some reason they think is like that's the safe choice.

And I don't know that that's necessarily the best way to try to win an election anymore.

So we'll see.

All right, that's our show for today.

If you live in New York and need help figuring out where and when to cast your ballot, go to votesaveamerica.com slash vote.

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

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