Trump Torches Every Ally

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Welcome back to Pod Save the World.

I'm Tommy Vitor.

I'm Ben Rhodes.

Ben, we have yet to hit 150,000 subscribers on YouTube.

So I'm going full Trump BLS data truther, and I'm firing our producers and whoever our YouTube rep is.

If you don't want those people to have that kind of calamity, you can

prevent it easily by hitting that subscribe button.

When the chips are down, you got to blame everyone but yourself.

That is a lesson of the

20,000.

Yeah, we are actually very close.

In all seriousness, just like subscribe to Pod Save the World on YouTube.

Subscribe on your podcast if you want, because it helps us a lot.

And if you're casual, just kind of dipping in, it doesn't cost you anything.

And also, it helps us surface our content in the algorithm over there on YouTube.

But also, Ben, this whole BLS

conversation about Trump firing like his data, the statisticians, it brought me back to our time at the White House and the amount of time we spent freaked out about the Greek debt crisis.

How many meetings were you in about that?

When it was like, Mr.

President, sir, an asteroid is about to hit the planet and explode us in the form of this Greek debt crisis.

It was like seen as catastrophic.

Yeah, I always tell people that the thing that would surprise them is that in the first Obama term, I think there were more meetings about the Eurozone/slash Greek crisis than any other foreign policy issue.

Yeah.

People forget that foreign policy and economics are not separate.

You know, they overlap.

Yeah, like for those not familiar with this, the Greek debt crisis, it was seen as maybe about to take down the

Eurozone.

Yeah, the Eurozone, if not the global economy.

And basically the gist of what happened was in the 2000s, like several subsequent Greek governments systematically lied about the size of their country's budget deficits and debt.

And then, when the truth was revealed in 2009, it created this debt crisis that spread across Europe.

It impacted the entire global economy.

The Greeks needed like three bailouts, and they put in place all these harsh austerity measures that led to basically a decade-long recession, the rise of all these far-right parties, all this political instability.

Like it was a huge deal, which is why nerds like us, when you see Trump firing like the statistician at BLS, it makes you worry a a little bit.

Yeah, if you're not making decisions based on like math and data, you're likely to make mistakes.

Yeah, big time.

Also, Argentina had a few issues here too.

Yeah.

And now I will say that there was another side that was always interesting, like because the Greeks kind of got treated like shit by the Germans and kind of...

Yes, Uncle Merkel.

The Argentines got scammed by a bunch of American like hedge funds, right?

So there's always like,

there was bad math in both directions on these things.

Yeah, bad math, bad actors, all the above.

Anyway, nice trip down memory laying there.

On today's show, we are going to talk about the ongoing humanitarian crisis of Gaza, an effort to broker a permanent end to the war, and how it all of a sudden, well, not all of a sudden, but it's quite clear to me now, Ben, that Netanyahu and Trump are on like totally different pages on both accounts.

I mean, the question, I guess, is whether Trump is going to do anything about it.

Whether it matters, yeah.

Yeah, whether it matters.

We're also going to talk about violent settlers in the West Bank, how they are enabled by right-wing evangelicals in the United States, some major internal Israeli political struggles.

Then we're going to talk about Trump's tariff war of words with India and how it's bound up with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, how the trade war is upending the economies and politics of smaller countries like Lesotho and Switzerland.

We'll talk about internet access in Russia, a major court verdict in Colombia that will have massive political implications already has, and why El Salvador is officially now a dictatorship.

Yay.

I mean, he's been calling himself a dictator for a while.

yeah, he's a Bukele's happy, I guess.

And Ben, you did our interview.

What are folks going to hear this week?

So, I talked to Ellie Schlein, who is a member of the Chamber of Deputies in Italy, but she's also the leader of the Democratic Party, which is the opposition party in Italy, has some

things in common with the U.S.

Democratic Party beyond a name, which is getting clobbered by right-wing, you know, neo-fascists.

But Ellie has really revitalized the Democratic Party that was very much on its back foot after Maloney won.

They

performed far better than people thought in the last European parliamentary elections.

She's kind of breathed life into them.

She's moved them to the left, taken progressive positions on things.

She's a younger woman leader.

So we talk about

what's the state of the battle against the far right, not just in Italy, but across Europe.

We talk about what Trump's tariffs, how they're impacting things in Italy and in Europe generally, what Maloney's getting out of her bear hug of Trump, which is not much given the tariffs and other things.

So if you want a perspective of, I mean, we hear a lot about what's going wrong on the global center left or progressive left.

I think Ellie Schlein is a good example of what might go right, of someone who's like taking principal positions, finding innovative ways to fight back, has some good ideas both in the policy and the political space.

So it was a great conversation.

I had it.

I was in Italy for this fellowship that Gizindar Dern, Friend of the Pot, has for female politicians.

Ellie Schlein had been in that last year, so she's kind of part of this network.

But yeah, people should check it out.

It's really, if you want to, it's a little hope, right?

It's a little like, we need there's some good leaders out there, there's some younger leaders out there, there's some women leaders out there that we should get behind.

I like to learn about new young, exciting progressive leaders globally.

And also, it's nice when foreign political parties align their names with ours.

Like, it always sucks when you're trying to read about some

liberal party.

It's like right-wing fascists.

Like, wait, how did this happen?

Yeah.

That doesn't make any sense.

Okay, well, definitely stick around for that and also subscribe to Pate of the World on YouTube for more great interviews.

All right, Ben, should we start in Gaza again?

I feel like this is

going to be where we're at for a while.

So last week, we talked about how the world had finally woken up to this horrific, extreme humanitarian crisis in Gaza that resulted from Israel blockading all aid from entering Gaza for several months.

And then they took responsibility for aid distribution away from the United Nations and put it into the hands of this organization called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, or GHF.

And those catastrophic decisions led to widespread starvation and the death of at least 859 Palestinians who were killed in the vicinity of GHS distribution sites, often by IDF soldiers who just shot at them.

So Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Denyahu tried to say there was no starvation in Gaza.

He was literally gaslighting us, but even Trump wasn't buying it.

So that still, like this week, leaves us with these two urgent, massive problems.

Like, first, the need to drastically increase the amount of humanitarian aid into Gaza.

And second, the need to figure out a way to end the war, specifically pressure Israel and Hamas to end the war.

On that second point, Ben, Trump's special envoy for seemingly everything, Steve Witkoff, golf buddy, is now articulating a new approach to negotiations with Hamas.

Here's a clip of some leaked audio from a recent meeting Witcoff had with families of Israeli hostages.

The president, my president, President Donald Trump,

who I can promise you cares as much about your children, the people who are alive and the people who are not alive, he cares as much about your children as he would about any American child that was in there.

So I can tell you emphatically that it is his mission statement that everybody comes home.

He now believes

even too, that everybody ought to come home at once.

No piecemeal deals.

That doesn't work.

And we've tried everything and that's part of it.

You're supposed to try everything.

But now we think that we have to shift this negotiation to

all or nothing.

Everybody comes home.

And we think it's going to be successful and we have a plan around it.

So what he's getting away from there is a deal that's like get bring back 10 hostages in exchange for a 60-day ceasefire and instead go into an all-or-nothing approach, like get everybody back and the war.

But at the same time, Witcoff is saying that to hostage families, Netanyahu, according to Israeli media, is giving up on talks and taking the opposite approach, which is preparing to expand the war and fully occupy the Gaza Strip.

So these reports came shortly after Hamas and another terrorist organization called Palestinian Islamic Jihad released truly awful videos of two hostages.

Both these men are like dangerously emaciated.

They're begging for help.

One said he's being forced to dig his own grave in the video.

It's like it's horrifying.

For context, Ben, like the IDF already controls 75% of Gaza.

The majority of 2.2 million people in Gaza now live in tents in southern Gaza.

So this is the IDF moving into either turf they had previously occupied or just not gone into yet because they were concerned about the risk of IDF operations killing some of the remaining hostages.

Another just sticking point for context in the previous talks has been Israel's demand that Hamas disarm and give up control of Gaza fully as part of any deal.

That demand was endorsed by all 22 members of the Arab League, but you can understand why for Hamas that would be a non-starter.

So, Ben, a lot of wind-up there, but this just, it feels like a huge potentially inflection point to me.

Like, Trump either can pressure Netanyahu to cut a deal and kind of make good on Steve Witkoff's word there that he actually cares about getting these hostages home, or what else is going to stop Netanyahu from just expanding the war, permanently occupying the Gaza Strip, and this thing just going on in perpetuity.

Aaron Ross Powell, yeah, this has been the status quo ante for a long time, which is essentially that Hamas's position in these negotiations has been that the hostages will be released, but the war has to end completely.

And Netanyahu's never been willing to say that the war will actually end.

You know, he wants to make a deal, get some hostages out, and then continue to prosecute the war.

And

when Witgoff says, like, we're done with this piecemeal piecemeal approach, well, no, the piecemeal approach was Netanyahu's because he didn't want to envision an end to the war in Gaza because the war in Gaza is kind of tied up in his political survival.

And it's also tied up in, you know, what is a pretty clear ambition on the Israeli right to use this war to displace people out of Gaza, to ethnically cleanse some or all of it, and to take that land.

They say that.

What Hamas did in Palestinian Islamic Jia did in releasing those videos is horrific.

It doesn't in any way justify the perpetuation of this war, which is what you hear from some other people.

I mean,

the fact of hostages doesn't require you to starve hundreds of thousands of people.

What do you make of the timing of the release?

I think Hamas,

I don't think we really even understand what Hamas is anymore.

You know, I mean, their leadership has been wiped out.

I don't know if it has centralized control.

You know, I don't know if one person who's negotiating even can reach back in.

I mean, because the reality is, and this is one reason of a million that I think the war should end, is that there's not much more Israel can do military.

First of all, the military operation is not about rescuing the hostages, and it never has been.

And they're proving that.

They're now conducting a military operation that's about occupying Gaza.

But

like, I think with Hamas,

they are a shell of what they he's not destroyed them.

He's not destroyed all their military capability.

But the idea that Hamas is going to pose some huge threat to Israel if they stop bombing Gaza and starving kids is just not true.

Well, and just to backstop you on that, I mean, it's not just Ben Rhodes saying that.

It's 600 former Israeli security officials wrote an open letter to Netanyahu urging him to end the war.

It said in part.

Including every former head of the IDF and the Shinbat, that's the internal security officials.

Three former Mossad heads, five former heads of the Shinbat, three former military chiefs of staff.

And some of the quotes from the letter were that Hamas, quote, no longer poses a strategic threat to Israel and that the IDF, quote, has long accomplished the two objectives that could be achieved by force, dismantling Hamas's military formations and governance.

The letter also argues that the only way to get the hostages home is through negotiations.

Yeah, I mean, which is so self-evidently obvious to anybody looking at this.

There's just, Netanyahu is completely out of any justification or rationalization for what he's doing, other than if the

rationalization is we want this land and we want these people out and we're going to do whatever.

You know, like that's sometimes you have to look at what their actions are and actually listen to what they say because some of them will say this out loud.

They are now focused on reoccupying Gaza, displacing people, probably annexing and settling some land

and continuing the project of so-called greater Israel, right?

West Bank, Gaza, who knows, maybe parts of southern Lebanon, southern Syria being a part of Israel, right?

So that's what's happening.

And so what the disconnect in the Trump policy and the Witkoff

is that Trump,

everything is short-term.

It's like, let's get to a hostage release or let's get to a ceasefire.

But there's a structural problem of what BB and the Israeli right is doing that he's just not

reconciling himself to.

And Witkoff, let's just

name, we actually had some nice things to say about him early on when he got that first ceasefire.

What is this guy's result sheet?

You know, like Gaza, Ukraine, like

Iran, Remember that?

He was going to do the Iran deal.

Like,

where is this deal making Steve Witkoff?

You know, other than his son making, you know, billions of dollars in crypto investments with the Trump kids,

what is Witkoff really delivering here?

Not a lot.

And the other, a beautiful painting, I guess.

That's right.

Putin did a nice painting.

That's right.

The other just sort of, there's one other note: there's apparently reportedly a big break between Netanyahu and the current IDF chief of staff, who Netanyahu hand-selected about the idea of expanding the war because the IDF is so strained after conflicts, not just in Gaza, but also with Iran.

Reservists don't get called up.

And meanwhile, so now he's saying he's against his own IDF person.

He's firing his attorney general.

It's a mess.

But also, so like on this aid piece, I mean, there was a report just before we started recording in Axios that Witkoff and Trump discussed plans for the United States to, quote, take over the humanitarian relief effort in Gaza.

Other Gulf countries would contribute funds, like Jordan and Egypt would be involved somehow.

But this quote from somebody to Axio said, the starvation problem in Gaza is getting worse.

Donald Trump does not like that.

He does not want babies to starve.

He wants mothers to be able to nurse their children.

He's becoming fixated on that, the official continued.

I don't believe that.

It's such a bunch of bullshit, you know?

Like, like, because if he really cared, like, you just call it Bibi and say, like, I'm cutting you off, you know?

Like, or like he went out and cursed Adam on Iran.

Like, you just, like, you keep hearing how much he cares about this, and he's not doing anything.

And because the problem is not the, the,

this is what drives me nuts.

The problem is not a lack of food or money.

You know, like, there is plenty of food in that part of the world.

Much of it is sitting in trucks.

Like, it's just weather can get in.

We don't need, yeah.

Sure, the Gulf countries can write checks.

Like, they will.

Like, it doesn't matter how much food you have if it's not allowed to get to people.

Like, that's the problem.

That's right.

I mean, there's sort of two parts to the problem.

One is like, clearly, the Israelis have an on and off switch when it comes to allowing aid aid in, right?

They can blockade them when they want and they can unblockade the blockade when they, when they feel like when the pressure gets too great on them.

But second, I mean, it's it's quite clear that Israel has to fully abandon this GHF system and go back to the UN system because the transition to this hybrid GHF fake fucking Israeli US carve-out

backed by a security contractor system has been part of the disaster.

And now, like, for a couple of reasons, like, first of all, it's just like an extension of the IDF and has way less capacity than the UN did, right?

There's just like exponentially fewer distribution points.

Also,

getting to these four sites in southern Gaza has led to these massacres.

And third, at this point, like the famine is so far along that they're distributing the wrong stuff.

Like, I was reading about how the GHF is still distributing like regular dried food to people, but these are like starved, people starving to death.

They need heavily fortified, specific types of food.

You can't give someone like a bag of lentils, especially when they don't have fuel, shelter, a kitchen, clean water, right?

Like none of severely malnourished kids can't eat the stuff the GHF is distributing.

They also need health care.

And so, you know, there just has to be like a fundamental change in how they're doing business.

Look, the provocative thing I'll say here, and this is when people...

Some people start disagreeing, is GHF is doing what it was intended to do, which is to starve the Palestinians.

I mean,

how else

Israel is somehow capable of having a pager operation that minutely targets every member of Hezbollah or pinpointing a general in an apartment building in downtown Tehran, but they can't deliver food into Gaza?

You think if Israel really wanted, if the Israeli government really wanted people in Gaza to have food,

that that operation would look anything like this Potemkin GHF nightmare?

If that's not true, like prove me wrong.

You know, like, if you think that Israel's earnestly been trying to feed the people of Gaza through the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which, like, George Orwell couldn't have invented a better name.

It's like the Ministry of Peace in 1984.

Like,

if that was a sincere effort that, after months, has just proven to not work, then, yeah, tomorrow they could just say, we're going to let the trucks in, we're going to let the UN.

You're right.

Like, you have to return to the system that works in distributing aid.

And that's the UN system.

Even if the U.S.

is quote-unquote coming in to take it over with the Gulf countries, they're going to need that UN system to deliver the aid.

We tried building a pier under Biden.

We tried GHF.

We tried airdrops.

Let's just go back to driving trucks into Gaza and having hospitals and distribution centers.

And

because if not, then

it gets awfully hard over time to look like your intent is to not harm these people.

Yeah, and also, I mean, Israel made an enormous strategic error in going to this blockade strategy and the GHF strategy because they wanted to, they said they wanted to disempower Hamas, right?

They said Hamas was systemically stealing the food and reselling it, and it was giving them power and funds.

But

the impact has been the opposite.

I mean, it has like trained the world's attention on what's happening in Gaza.

It has led to massive outcry at the Israeli government's policy.

It's led to countries like France and the UK and Canada to start talking about Palestinian recognition.

Like it's been enormous backfiring.

And so, you know, also the part of this negotiation we just mentioned was this demand that Hamas lay down arms, like disarm, stop being in charge of Gaza.

And I like, I can understand that.

I understand how Israelis want.

But they're never going to do that.

They're just never going to do that.

Of course, they're not going to do that.

We have to get past that.

But this is what drives me crazy about it: is that precisely like

Israel rightly is like, these people are terrorists, and they're terrorists that

you know don't accept the basic rules of how things should work and you know want to massacre people and they're they're they're religious extremists too if that's true and and that is true of course that kind of organization isn't going to like voluntarily disarm and and surrender like that precisely because of their ideology they they're never going to do that and so if you're setting as your conditions for ending the war something that you know will never happen you're setting the conditions for the war to never end.

And that is the loop that we're stuck in.

And the majority of Israelis back

cutting a deal to get the hostages home, even if it means ending the war and they just have to go down that path.

How are they getting out of this war anyway anymore?

Like, they, I mean, like,

the really telling point, I mean, there have been a few, but one was after Sinwar was killed.

Because that would be the inevitable point to say, we took out the whole leadership of this group.

We've, you know, dealt it these huge blows, and now, you know, we can, it's not a strategic threat, as literally Israeli security leaders say.

But

that's when this, you know, the tell about this war being more

being about more than just Hamas is the fact that it never ends.

Yeah.

Another big issue has been the West Bank violence.

A couple weeks ago, we talked about violence at the West Bank and the murder of a 20-year-old Palestinian American from Tampa in the West Bank.

I believe there still has not been an arrest in that case, despite one stern tweet from

U.S.

Ambassador Ambassador Mike Huckabee.

This week, another American died because of settler violence.

Qamis Ayad, a father of five who had lived in Chicago, died of smoke inhalation after settlers set fire to cars and homes in his village.

His family believes that tear gas was also fired by the IDF, and that was a contributing factor.

Last Monday, an activist and father of three named Aouda Hathaleen was shot in the chest by a settler.

He helped make the documentary No Other Land, which won an Oscar last year.

This story is awful.

A settler was driving a bulldozer in this Palestinian community.

It damaged the main water pipe that was used, so this villager asked him to stop.

The driver got out, knocked him down.

Palestinians started throwing rocks, and it prompted this other settler, Yanon Levy, to come out with a gun and begin firing sort of like at random all over the place, which killed Hathalene, who was just standing a ways away.

And this settler who fired the shot had been previously sanctioned by the U.S.

under the Biden administration for settler violence.

Those sanctions were removed by Trump in January.

Thank you, Mr.

Trump, for that.

This guy, this settler was detained.

He was charged with negligent homicide, but then released on house arrest on Friday.

Since then, the IDF has arrested five of Hathalene's family members who were at the scene at the time.

They still have not released his body, even though an autopsy was done.

And the women of the village are on a hunger strike until he has returned.

So just, again, summarize, the murderer was released on house arrest, and there's been no accountability.

So all of this is a bit of context, Ben, just to get at the ways Republicans and evangelical Christians in the U.S.

are propping up and supporting these violent settlers.

So Mike Huckabee, who we just made fun of, the current ambassador, U.S.

ambassador to Israel, supports the settler movement.

By the way, if you want to waste 15 minutes and get yourself really mad, you should read the puff piece profile of Huckabee in the Times.

Yeah, what the fuck was that?

Like,

it was so weird.

It was so weird.

I was like, what am I, is this like Newsmax?

Like, it was a weird thing to read.

Yeah, it's like like in this moment of this horrific humanitarian crisis, you're doing this kind of like gauzy.

It's like a beat sweetener with Mike Akabita.

Yeah, you're quoting his like 2008 campaign manager talking about what a rock star Mike was when you visited Israel with him.

So bad.

But anyway, sorry.

In addition to that, though, Mike Johnson, the speaker of the house, is in Israel right now.

He's visiting an illegal settlement in the West Bank.

His trip was organized by a woman named Heather Johnson.

She leads a group called the U.S.

Israel Education Association.

Johnson is a self-described, world-renowned speaker on the Jewish-Christian relationship in modern Israel in biblical prophecy.

In English, that means she's a Christian Zionist who believes she's helping facilitate unfolding prophecies, prophecies like the second coming of Jesus Christ.

Jews like you, Ben, being converted

or burning.

The Jerusalem Post quoted Johnson as saying, quote, Judea and Samaria are the front lines of the state of Israel and must remain an integral part of it.

This was Speaker Johnson.

Even if the world thinks otherwise, we stand with you.

So, Ben, Speaker Johnson's visit, he's clearly there, like kind of reacting to the pledges from France, the UK,

Canada that we mentioned earlier to recognize a Palestinian state.

But in practice, he's just propping up like right-wing, crazy, violent extremists.

Yeah, the Judean Samara, you know, people should know that that is basically saying there is no West Bank, there is no Palestine, there are no Palestinians.

Jude and Samarra is the term for basically the Greater Israel that encompasses the West Bank, to Jude and Samara being like these biblical lands of Greater Israel.

So that's literally Mike Johnson endorsing the annexation of the West Bank as part of Israel.

How could he say there is no Palestinian, by the way?

That was a while back.

Yeah, I mean, this is a limit.

I mean,

we always have the debate about genocide.

This is

erasure.

I mean, like, you're saying that these people don't exist.

They happen to live in a place that's not theirs and need to leave.

Like, so

that's at least

erasure of Palestinian identity from American politicians like Mike Johnson.

And I think what's important for people to realize, probably people who are listening to this podcast, or maybe where your algorithm has you on Instagram or X or wherever you are, TikTok, it's a reminder that actually, even if it feels like there's this mass movement of opinion against what Israel is doing and in favor of humanitarian assistance and movement towards Palestinian recognition, that actually

really fucking, the actual most powerful people in the world, Donald Trump and Mike Johnson, people like that, are actually fully on board with this project.

And we have to remind ourselves of that, right?

Because

of all the images you consumed last week, of all the celebrities, all the statements, the image of Mike Johnson, you know, saying Jude and Samara is probably the most important thing that happened.

There's the Speaker of the House, right?

And also there's some recent polling.

There's a conservative group called the Vandenberg Coalition, but but they released an August poll about like Trump voters' foreign policy views that found 83% of respondents said they believe Israel has the right to defend itself and that the U.S.

should support Israel's efforts to that end.

So like, to your point, it does, like, look, it's been a sea change recently.

I'm really glad to see people caring and paying attention.

But like...

Republican voters, especially evangelicals, are hardcore in support of Israel.

Yeah.

And some of that's because of like this deep multi-decade commitment in building this kind of evangelical bridge to the Israeli right and the settler movement.

And part of that's just like, Palestinian lives don't really matter.

They're brown people.

And part of that's like, whatever Trump's for.

You know, there's still these multifaceted, now there are cracks, right?

And, you know, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Tucker Carlson and

Joe Rogan and Steve Bannon.

And like, so you're starting to see signals.

The question is, you know, everybody focuses, it's interesting, everybody focuses on the Democratic Party in Israel,

understandably,

given that the Democratic Party has generally been home to Jews and our politicians look like hypocrites.

But there might be an interesting

fight beginning to brew on parts of the fringes of the Republican coalition.

Peel away 20%.

Yeah, and that would make a big difference.

Yeah.

Well, on the Democratic side, in Congress, Representative Rokan has gotten over a dozen House Democrats to back recognizing a Palestinian state.

That's a good thing.

I did notice, Ben, that when Canada started talking about recognizing a Palestinian state, Trump took to Truth Social to threaten them.

He wrote, wow, Canada has just announced that it is backing statehood for Palestine.

That will make it very hard for us to make a trade deal with them.

Oh, Canada.

So I guess trade deals are now about

Israel.

I mean, I read that and I was like, is that America first?

No.

Like, it's America first.

So you, let's get this straight.

Like, you

have to...

pay more,

pay higher prices because we're going to tariff, you know, lumber from Canada because we don't want Canada to recognize Palestine?

Like, that's an America-first foreign policy.

Yeah, and also for about 10 hours yesterday, it seemed like getting FEMA funds was predicated on support for Israel.

That was odd.

Opposition to BDS as a requirement to get FEMA assistance, also not very America-first.

Like, so there is a glaring, I mean, not that there's a tremendous amount of ideological coherence to everything Trump does, but there is a glaring contradiction between his kind of America-firstism

and his position on all things related to supporting the Israeli right wing.

And similarly, we'll get to this on tariffs too, like

and Russian nuke subs.

I mean, this is not exactly like a guy that is

extracting the United States from international conflict.

He's just getting us either deeper into existing ones or creating new ones himself.

Yeah, he's like literal Twitter fights are leading to submarine deployments, seemingly.

So that's, yeah, you're right.

We'll get there.

We'll get there.

But

yeah, sorry, we'll get there.

I'll save my takes because I've got some sizzling hot ones.

I'm excited to hear these.

Just two final kind of internal Israeli kind of political matters.

First, on Monday, the cabinet voted to fire the Israeli Attorney General.

So

Netanyahu, who hates her, the Attorney General, albeit she opposed his judicial coup in 2023.

You know, for those who were not paying attention then, there was Netanyahu's attempt to gut the independence of the Israeli judicial system.

system and take control of it.

She also blocked Netanyahu's attempt to fire Ronan Barr, the head of the Shinbet, their FBI equivalent.

This all sounds so familiar.

I know.

Barr had also been investigating Netanyahu's aides for corruption, and then she oversees Bibi's corruption trial.

For now, that firing is frozen by the Supreme Court, but we'll see what happens.

But it's a big data point.

I'm sort of the Netanyahu as authoritarian leader, selfish political actor sort of docket.

Also, Ben, we've talked a lot about this crazy, truly extremist far-right minister named Itamar Ben-Gavir, who's the national security minister currently.

Earlier this week, Ben Gavir took a visit to the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, which the Jews call the Temple Mount.

It's a holy site for Jews and Muslims.

And there's a long-standing agreement that Jews can visit but not pray there.

So, of course, Ben Gavir's office released a video of him praying there where he said, quote, in his prayers, quote, it's important to convey from this place that we should immediately conquer Gaza, exercise our sovereignty there, and eliminate every last Hamas member.

So, Ben, in normal times, like those actions, those comments from Ben Gavir would be viewed as kind of the most dangerous possible political incitement.

In the past, things he's done has been seen as precipitating wars, basically.

It seems like in this case, his entire goal is kind of just to blow up any hope of a ceasefire deal.

But Jesus Christ, man, like it's

a bad thing.

He's messing with like the deepest chords.

And once you start, you know,

weaponizing the holy sites in that way, you know, when he says every last member of Hamas, he means every Palestinian in Gaza because Ben Guevir draws no distinction between an ordinary Palestinian civilian and Hamas.

And it's just, again, a reminder of who's actually in the driver's seat.

It's still these people in the driver's seat.

Yeah, this is a man sanctioned by Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Norway, and the UK.

Yeah.

Israeli minister.

I mean, you know, he's a terrorist.

I mean, he was convicted,

you know, if you find that offense.

He was convicted by Israel of terrorism-related offenses.

Like, this is who's in charge.

Yeah, he used to be banned from Israeli political life in part because he used to have a photo on his wall of a man named Brute Goldstein who murdered 29 Palestinians who were praying at a mosque.

So that's the kind of guy we're talking about.

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Okay, let's turn to tariffs, especially the Twitter tariff war between Trump and

India, because I think we're used to like kind of the flailing, you know, tariff by tweet policy, but I was sort of surprised to see India get pulled into the crosshairs given the stakes here.

So, just to rewind the tape a bit, Ben, last week Trump announced a 25% tariff on India.

He said he's angry about trade barriers and also suggested that he would add some sort of additional penalty because India was buying or selling military equipment with Russia.

This 25% tariff is supposed to go into place on August 7th.

But since that additional, you know, sort of threat, Trump has been popping off on India for buying Russian oil and gas.

This is from a Truth Social post on Monday.

Quote, India is not only buying massive amounts of Russian oil, they are then, for much of the oil, purchased it, selling it on the open market for big profits.

They don't care how many people in Ukraine are being killed by the Russian war machine, end quote.

Pretty incredible if he just figured that out, Ben.

India responded by calling Trump's tariff threats unjustified and unreasonable.

The Russians said, quote, attempts to force countries to stop trade relations with them are not legitimate.

So, Ben, Trump went on CNBC Tuesday to try to kind of smooth things over.

Let's listen.

So, India has not been a good trading partner because they do a lot of business with us, but we don't do business with them.

So, we settled on 25%, but I think I'm going to raise that very substantially over the next 24 hours because they're buying Russian oil.

They're fueling the war machine, and if they're going to do that, then I'm not going to be happy.

So, India and China have long been the largest purchasers of Russian oil since the Russian invasion.

I guess he's just figuring that out.

Trump has also announced that August 8th is the new deadline for Russia and Ukraine to figure out a ceasefire deal.

Putin is trying to tap Malong, as Trump would say, by saying he'd consider a meeting or having Dmitry Peskov as a spokesman say he'd consider a meeting.

But I don't know, busy month, I guess.

Ben, I thought Trump and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi had kind of a romance going.

Where do you think this turbulence is coming from?

I don't know.

It's peculiar to me because clearly Trump is not just decided to...

I mean, the one thing we've always said about terrorists that I think if you want to hold on to one truism, it's that they're never going to go away.

That Trump likes to turn the dial up.

He likes to focus on a different country every week.

And he decided to focus on India.

And them buying Russian oil and gas is not some new thing that just popped up.

I mean, he would have been aware of this in January, February.

He would have been aware of this on the original Liberation Day.

And so he's kind of grabbed onto this as one of the reasons why he's hammering them with tariffs.

There's a number of things that are notable about it.

One is, just so people know, like,

and the Biden people have said this, like, they, they kind of gave India pass in part because India, remember, there were price caps set on how much you could pay for Russian oil and gas.

And the Indians are actually like paying at that price cap.

So it was a lower price point.

You know, ideally, you'd want them to not buy any, I guess, but they have hundreds of millions of people that need electricity and they can buy this oil and gas cheap.

You know, and they thought they were doing that as part of a U.S.

strategy.

And so now they're being punished for having kind of agreed to do that.

It's also like Modi

could not have gone more out of his way to be a buddy of Trump's.

Remember the Howdy Modi rally where Modi basically endorsed Trump's re-election in 2020?

I will say there's a whole bunch of constituencies in the United States that falsely thought that Trump was their friend.

Some is this kind of pro-Modi Indian American community that is lo and behold finding that Trump is not a reliable friend.

You know, Modi's finding that Trump is not a reliable friend.

I don't know what he's doing.

I mean, I think

there are a lot of trade barriers that India has, and you want to negotiate your way through those, but you're not going to do that overnight because it's a big, complex economy.

The one other thing I want to say about this, so it's really worth putting a pin in, is we are now fighting with the Chinese.

We are fighting more with the Russians.

We're fighting with the Indians.

We're kind of trying to humiliate the Europeans.

Constantly, yeah.

Who we are, like, where are the friends?

Like, this is a recipe for the rest of the world to literally gang up on us.

I would have at least thought you tried to hug India into your team, right?

You know, if you want to stand up to the Chinese, like, fighting all of them together seems like a really dumb strategy.

And I think Trump was complaining about like agricultural import barriers in India, but like, that is not a place where Modi can give.

Like so many of his constituents are living on the edge of poverty because they are farmers.

And if all of a sudden more U.S.

agricultural products are flooding into India, that will be devastating for him.

It will be devastating for the economy.

I mean, you'll remember years ago, there was this strike among farmers that basically shut down India.

The most dangerous moment Modi's had as prime minister.

You've got hundreds of millions of people who rely on agriculture.

Many of them are subsistence farmers.

And so if you are demanding that the Indians allow all these agricultural products to flow flow in from the U.S., those people are going to fucking strike again and shut the economy down.

So this is what happens when you try to negotiate trade deals in 30 days, 90 days.

Like India is not going to be able to do that.

And they must just be so confused.

Like, what is this guy mad about?

This is a completely random aside, but something made me think of it.

Did you see that Sean Duffy, the transportation secretary and now acting NASA administrator, announced plans to build a nuclear reactor on the moon?

No,

I somehow missed that.

They want to do some sort of like 100 kilowatt nuclear reactor on the moon by 2030.

It's so funny to have your acting, acting, the guy who has no idea what he's doing, Road Rules guy, acting administrator, announcing massive like budget cuts over at NASA.

They're firing, they're doging all these people, but also they want to build some nuclear reactions.

No Medicaid, but we'll put, you know what, one of my problems is with the Trump cabinet is that I, A, I kind of miss a decade of pop culture when we're in the White House.

But B, I never watched like Road Rules or

The Duck family or whatever that one was.

I didn't watch Duck Dynasty.

Like, like, and these people are all in the cabinet now.

I know.

Like, because everybody's like, oh, Sean Duffy, Road Rules.

I'm like, well, I didn't watch fucking Road Rules.

You got to go back.

I mean, there's a lot of people from the movie.

There are a lot.

Reality.

They're all like Fox.

It is.

It's weird.

All right.

That was a random thing.

Another trade thing we wanted to have.

Well, we should be aware if we're going to have a nuclear plant on the moon.

It seems like a big deal.

I don't want to put nukes on the moon.

Also, I don't know.

I don't understand power generation, but maybe let's try solar.

Yeah.

It feels like you have good access.

I'll do anything to not use solar.

I know.

All right, Ben.

So remember in Trump's joint session speech?

That's the state of the union.

You could forget.

But we call the joint session when it's the first time for reasons I've heard.

Forgetable speech.

Says Dorky.

In that speech, Trump made fun of an African country named Lesotho.

He called it a country, quote, nobody has ever heard of.

So a few weeks later, on Liberation Day, Trump once again decided to kick the shit out of Lesotho by slapping them with with a whopping 50% tariff.

And everyone is like, what?

Why?

Why are we doing this?

Because this is a tiny, landlocked country.

It's home to like about 2 million people.

Many of them live in poverty and is the furthest thing from a threat to the U.S.

economy or to U.S.

manufacturing jobs.

So why are we like tariffing the life out of them?

And Trump's goons at the time pointed to the U.S.

trade deficit with Lesotho to justify the tariff rate.

So the U.S.

imported...

Insane.

They have no money to buy anything from us.

Yeah.

So we import like 235 million dollars worth of goods from them mostly textiles we in they imported like three million dollars worth of u.s stuff which again is not surprising they don't have money to buy our stuff right it's an impoverished country so ultimately trump ends up well fast forwarding a bit he ends up slapping a 15 tariff on lesotho which is not insane like 50 but it is still enough to do enormous damage to their economy but some of it was already permanently done right because the threat of the 50 tariff uh all kinds of other cuts just like kind of cratered their industries and made companies look other places for textiles.

And so

the textile industry is the largest industry.

It employs over 30,000 people, many of them women.

It's like clients like, you know, Levi's, Walmart, et cetera.

And so.

You have

these companies in Lesotho being crushed.

And you also have countries with more like diplomatic clout taking advantage of the tariffs that Trump's putting in place on others to poach business.

You get scammy lobbyists going to countries like Lesotho and trying to demand millions of dollars to pay for lobbying.

And so, before the tariffs, I mean, Ben, do you want to explain how the African Growth and Opportunity Act, which is about to expire, had kind of helped these smaller countries export things to the U.S.?

Yeah, no.

I mean, the United States deliberately, through the African Growth and Opportunity Act, AGOA, set up these kind of trade preferences to try to create economic growth by getting rid of barriers for them to to sell goods into the United States, for the U.S.

therefore to provide investment.

And the idea was if these are growing economies, it's going to be good for them.

You know, it's going to lift people out of poverty.

But ultimately, it's also going to create markets.

The way that you actually address in the long term the trade deficit issue in a place like Africa is you need places like Kenya and South Africa to become

rich enough and have a middle class.

To have a middle class that suddenly they're also consumers and then you have a more

mature trading relationship.

So you have to kind of help them develop to the the point when you have a more mature trading relationship.

And cutting them off.

And by the way, what China's answer to that is that we're just going to pour money into your country and build stuff and build infrastructure, which they actually like better, you know, than these kind of, you know, negotiate, because they had to agree to a bunch of other steps in order to be a part of the African Growth and Opportunity Act.

They had to kind of make changes and reforms and kind of set up economies that plug into our capitalism and stuff, right?

So it's not like we didn't get anything out of this.

Chinese come with no strings attached and they just build infrastructure and like maybe pay some people off and they're

making investments.

And so I think what's so horrific about this is,

first of all, you're right.

Lesotho can't compete because

they can't hire the fake lobbyists that get them out of jail.

But they're also not big enough, like as a textile industry, like Bangladesh will be hurt a lot by terrorists, but there's such a big infrastructure of textiles that it's hard for big companies to just move operations out that you know it's easy to close up if you're looking at where can we cut costs and not want to pay tariffs you just start with the smaller countries who are also the countries that are more vulnerable to the uscid cutoff yes and so we are doubly fucking these countries over in ways that will lead to like death and

poverty and disease.

So this is something that is not a small stain on the Trump administration and the country.

This is the bigger point I wanted to get at because we've kind of moved on from the Elon Doge madness and the devastation of USAID, but the impact is still rippling out.

On top of that,

the tariff craziness and the letters, they're kind of like one-day stories now because it happens so often.

But in a country like Lesotho,

it is going to cause irreparable damage.

I was listening to the BBC Global News podcast a couple of days ago.

They did this story about trying to combat child sex abuse and trafficking in Kenya.

And they were interviewing this woman who'd been a sex worker for 40 years.

And now she's like dedicated her life to taking in young girls who escape this fucking evil trafficking.

And this woman, like, in addition to taking in these girls, she tries to provide HIV-AIDS protection to people in the community, like mostly condoms.

But now all the condoms are drying up and about to be gone.

And the people who were employed by USAID to do that work are about to be unemployed.

So this whole community is just absolutely devastated because we pulled the rug on them.

Yeah.

And it has it has political impacts too, because like the people I've talked to over the years in Lesotho are kind of, you know, there's a king there.

You know, shocker, he's not the best, most benign leader.

And he's an autocrat.

There's a lot of corruption.

And

what happens when you withdraw, you know, when industry dies up like this and revenue dries up and USAID dries up, like the place becomes more autocratic, right?

There's less resources that are more under the control of the bad guys.

And then there's more of a black market.

There's more criminality.

There's more human.

I'm not saying all these things are necessarily definitely going to happen in Lesotho, but I do think across all these countries that are being hurt in this way, the worst actors tend to benefit in a weird way from

this kind of economic collapse or this kind of withdrawal of international support.

Yeah.

It's great work, Mr.

Trump.

Sort of related story, I mean, also in the barrel this week, Ben, is Switzerland,

which got completely hosed with a 39% tariff rate last Friday, one of the highest in the world.

Only Laos, Myanmar, and Syria are higher.

I think they have 40 to 41%, which is a very weird list, by the way.

I don't understand why that we're tariffing Syria at 40%.

But anyway, so what happened here with Switzerland?

It seems like it was a lethal mix of Europeans thinking they were negotiating in good faith and Trump's complete and total economic ignorance.

To back up, so the Swiss have been negotiating for months with the U.S.

trade rep Jameson Greer, Treasury Secretary Scott Besson.

I think their goal was to land at like a 10 or 15% tariff coupled with a big investment, $150 billion investment by the Swiss into the U.S.

Were these fake announcements of the Swiss.

Yeah, these fake announcements.

Trump thinks it's like a sovereign wealth fund for him.

But then on Thursday, the Swiss president,

Karine Keller-Sutter, had a 20-minute call with Trump that went terribly.

And per usual, Trump got fixated on the U.S.

trade deficit with Switzerland.

Trump did this this phoner interview with CNBC.

He talked about a lot of crazy shit, but this is the part where he started ranting about Switzerland.

It's time that they pay up, and they have to pay up.

We couldn't afford to have the deficits.

Look, I did something with Switzerland the other day.

I spoke to their prime minister.

The woman was nice, but she didn't want to listen.

And they paid essentially no tariffs.

And I said, we have a $41 billion deficit with you, madam.

I didn't know her.

I said, we have a $41 billion deficit.

And

you want to pay 1% tariffs.

You wanted 1%.

I said, you're not going to pay 1%.

So after that very happy call with Trump, which I think this all happened coincidentally on Swiss National Day, the country got hit with a 39% tariff.

A Swiss tabloid called this Switzerland's biggest loss since 1515 when the French beat Switzerland in the Battle of Marignano.

More on that in a bit.

So, but Ben, to just explain to listeners why we have a trade deficit with Switzerland, it's because of of gold.

Switzerland refines about a third of the world's gold.

They export it in the form of gold bars, most of which goes to New Jersey.

Under the bed.

Yes, right under the bed, in the closet, in the vest.

But gold makes up two-thirds of recent Swiss exports to America.

It's exempted by tariffs.

Their second biggest export is pharmaceuticals, which Trump has been making a lot of noise about, too.

Last week, Trump sent letters to 17 pharma companies, two of them Swiss, demanding lower prices.

But the administration has yet to set a tariff policy on drugs, so pharmaceuticals pharmaceuticals are still tariff-free.

But after this just weekend of, you know, what the hell is going on in Switzerland, the Swiss president had to hop on a plane to Washington to try to fix the damage and get a more attractive offer.

But like, none of this just seems like a good way to run a railroad.

It kind of gets back to your question at the top, like, who are our allies again?

I mean, are you really

worried about the Swiss?

I mean, when you look out at the world, this is not the country that you should be stressed out about.

They've got Alps, they've got cheese, they've got a lot of money.

It's fine.

They're a small country.

Where is this all going?

Because it's clearly not going to end in Trump's presence.

There's endless tariffs.

These countries are going to take, the Swiss do have, in case you weren't aware, like a relatively healthy banking sector that is like strategically important.

I'm sure Donald Trump probably likes it too.

Yeah, I mean, but

they could take that and

deal deal with the Russians or the, you know,

we are just creating so many incentives for these countries to literally, yeah, maybe they'll fly to the U.S.

and they'll promise to invest $1 trillion in the U.S.

economy and it'd be some fake announcement to get the terrorists down, but then they're going to fly home and just start really aggressively working to figure out how to be...

like treat us like some like the drunk that like they don't want to allow into the into the the neighborhood you know Well, it also just they might fly home on an F-35 because in 2021 they agreed to buy 36 F-35s at a price of $7.5 billion, if not more.

Yeah, well, so it seems like they're doing some pretty good investing in all the things Trump wants.

Yeah.

There's no logic to this.

I mean,

Lesotho, India, and Switzerland, the three countries we've talked about, like have nothing in common, and they're totally different reasons.

You know, with India, it's like he's now mad about them buying Russian gas.

Lesotho, it's like a trade deficit that makes no sense.

Like Switzerland, I don't, you know, like none of this makes sense either mathematically or politically.

No, it's idiotic.

But the Battle of Merignano, French versus Swiss.

So you get some storied kind of old school programs, like

a Big Ten matchup.

The Battle of Merignano was the last major engagement of the War of the League of Cambrai.

which was part of the broader Italian wars from 1494 to 1559.

So I I think this is sort of like a bowl game in the old school BCS process.

I'm just trying to make sense of any of this and work it in somehow.

Well, I just, you know, the only good thing that came out of it is maybe the Swiss were like knocked back on their ass and like didn't get to be the kind of like major Catholic power in that part of Western Europe.

But like

whatever sent them into neutrality, like neutrality worked out pretty well for the Swiss.

Like

they kept their head down during those two world wars that happened last century.

Got some of that chocolate too.

All right, we're going going to take a quick break.

But as we mentioned last week, Ben,

Crooked Media, Votes of America, we're hosting our first ever Crooked Con.

Crooked Con is a chance to join America's smartest organizers and least annoying politicians to strategize, debate, and commiserate about where we go from here, hopefully up.

We will be in Washington, D.C., November 6th and 7th.

It's going to be amazing, starting with the Potsdam of America live show at the Warner Theater on Thursday, November 6th.

Then on Friday, November 7th, we'll be at the Wharf, joined by some of the smartest, most influential names in politics politics for a full day of conversations, workshops, live pods, interviews, conversation.

We're trying to build a big democracy movement here, Ben.

I'm going to be there.

And we need to talk about it.

I'm going to be a crooked con.

You're going to be there, and it's going to be fun.

I think it'll be a really good time.

I actually think like

politics in the online world feels so terrible whenever I get together in person with people.

It's fun.

Yeah.

So go to crookedcon.com.

crookedcon.com for tickups, lineup announcements, much more.

And we have a discount code that you can use to buy your November 7th ticket early.

It's freedom and content.

So that's the code crookedcon.com.

Freedom and content is the code for getting tickets early.

Discount tickets are limited, so act fast.

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Okay, well, we've talked about Russia a bit.

Let's talk about internal Russian stuff.

We've always talked about the war in Ukraine, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but it's been a while since we talked about the political climate inside Russia.

And this story caught our eye.

So it's about online freedom in Russia, Ben.

A lot of this came from a recent New York Times piece.

And then there was a really interesting broader report from Human Rights Watch on internet freedom in Russia generally.

So I bet a lot of listeners think like Russia run by a dictator, Vladimir Putin, he probably cracks on on all news and information like they do in China or North Korea.

The reality is much more complicated than that.

Before the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, there were censorship rules.

There was like data monitoring and storage requirements for a lot of companies.

But Russians themselves, they could access Western news sites.

They could use social media sites like Facebook and Twitter and YouTube.

Some websites were blocked, but internet savvy Russians would use a VVN.

Yeah, they just figured it out.

Things changed a lot in 2022.

By like March of that year, I think Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter were all blocked, as were some Western media sites.

But YouTube was widely available.

Telegram also remained widely available.

But then recently, the Russian government has cracked down even further.

YouTube has been throttled.

Russians are being forced to kind of squeeze into using a domestic competitor.

And that's a big deal because Russian activists like Alexei Navalney used YouTube to gain big followings and disseminate really powerful information about government corruption.

I remember you flagged some of those videos for me back in the day of like Navalney's guys flying drones over, you know,

Putin's literally billion-dollar Black Sea palace.

Those videos got millions and millions.

Millions of views.

And they're incredibly well done and savvy and like spread like wildfire.

More subs than we have.

Yeah, thank you.

We got to correct that.

And so as of this time last year, I think an estimated 79% of Russians over 12 used YouTube monthly.

So it was like, you know, spread everywhere.

So killing it would be a big deal.

The Times also dug into how the Russian government is now building out like a state-approved set of apps that can be more easily monitored.

One is a messaging app.

They're calling Macs.

Starting in September, smartphones sold in Russia will be required to pre-install Macs.

Ultimately, Putin seems to want Macs to be like kind of WeChat in China, which combines messaging, social media, payments, government services.

I guess there was a new law mandating that the Russian government services be offered via Macs somehow.

I'm not sure how that works.

This sort of seems like a signal that Russia might ban WhatsApp, which has 100 million monthly users in Russia, and maybe Telegram, although the Russian government,

they kind of like Telegram.

Telegram be hard for them.

Yeah, they spread their shit on Telegram too, so we'll see.

But VPN use is still prevalent, but the government is taking steps to crack down on VPNs.

They're banning them.

They're telling Apple to stop allowing VPNs in the Apple store in Russia.

They're banning VPN ads.

You can't learn about new VPNs if you're a Russian citizen.

And now a new law is penalizing not just sharing, but also searching for quote-unquote extremist content like stuff produced by Alexei Navalny's organization.

So it was just sort of an interesting window into Putin's brand of authoritarianism.

It's not like totalitarian.

People can still get information if they want, but the question is like, is it too scary to try?

Do they maybe not want to really know the truth about the war in Ukraine?

And then the online walls are definitely closing in here.

Yeah.

I mean, it's interesting because it's kind of like if the Chinese have the extreme example, right?

In China, essentially, anything that is online, you know, you have to assume is subject to potential surveillance, right?

Which creates a self-censorship, right?

You know,

you don't know what is being watched, but you assume that it can all be watched because it's funneled into these platforms that the government has entry into.

And also, there's a heavy degree of censorship.

So you can't learn about certain things, but you can learn about the great wisdom of Xi Jinping, et cetera.

What's interesting here is that Putin is kind of creating a model that is moving in that direction.

Again, you can have the illusion of connectivity, right?

You can go to a website where there's news.

You can do stuff on Telegram.

But what's happening over time is the surveillance capacity is increasing.

demonstration cases, right, of people being punished for stuff online starts to circulate.

That leads to self-censorship, where people just aren't going to say things, not just online, but also on even things like Telegram, which is ostensibly encrypted.

And because there's less and less platforms, it's easier to monitor those platforms, bully those platforms, et cetera.

Especially with AI.

Yeah.

And AI, because AI, as we've talked about, like, I used to think, well, it's not like the Chinese government can read everybody's text.

Well, the AI can, you know, so like AI can filter through everything.

I hate to say this, but it's worth watching what's happening in Russia because it's not inconceivable that you start to see similar approaches here.

And I mean, what we've seen is this playbook, right?

Migrate from Russia to Hungary to the U.S.

So I'm not suggesting we're going to wake up tomorrow and it's going to be like that, but

the American right pays attention to this playbook that Putin runs.

And you might start to see some aspects of it start to pop up here, right?

Preferred platforms, and you already do, like, there are preferred platforms and there are platforms that are bullied.

There's monitoring of social media.

Like, it's now U.S.

government policy that you have to monitor the social media of like students who are coming here and things like that.

So there's a creeping,

you know, there's a creeping prevalence of some of these tactics here.

And so unfortunately, we may not be, you know, if the Russians are getting closer to the Chinese, we may not be there.

But I wouldn't be shocked to see some of these practices start to creep in here.

Yeah.

Also, this is a random aside, but it's kind of funny that Warner Brothers destroyed one of the greatest brand IDs ever in getting rid of HBO and renamed it Max, and that's also the Russian messaging app.

I mean,

if you want to watch good content, it's still the Conan O'Brien hot ones rant about the HBO Max name change.

What an episode.

Full send from that guy.

I salute you.

I do too.

All right, let's turn to a couple stories out of Latin America.

So, former Colombian president Alvaro Uribe was found guilty of bribery and procedural fraud.

The gist of the case goes back a long time, but just the gist of it is that a lawyer working for Uribe tried to bribe a former paramilitary member to retract testimony where he said Uribe founded and financed a paramilitary group in the 1990s.

This case, this verdict, is an enormous deal for Colombia.

Uribe was president from 2002 to 2010.

He's a towering figure in Colombian politics.

The case has been going on for over a decade.

It started after Uribe accused a leftist senator of slander after the senator brought witnesses into the Congress to testify about Uribe and his brother forming this right-wing paramilitary group in the 90s.

But the broader roots of the conflict go back to the 60s, internal battles in Colombia between the Colombian government, Marxist guerrilla groups, right-wing paramilitary groups, drug cartels, others.

So, Ben, do you want to just sort of sound off on why this is such a big deal?

Yeah, it's a Uribe is the absolute dominant figure in right-wing Colombian politics of the last 25 years, right?

And,

you know, he was president for eight.

You know, during that time, he took a very hard line against the FARC.

That was the, you know, originally a left-wing insurgency that had been fighting in a civil war for decades.

And he kind of has roots, you know, if a lot of American politics often have these left-right conflicts, the Colombian right has these problematic roots of paramilitaries, death squads.

So you had the Colombian military fighting the FARC, but you also had these kind of vigilante paramilitary right-wing groups that guys like Aribe were kind of swimming in the same pool as.

Uribe, after 2010, he's he's succeeded by his defense minister,

Santos, who won a Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating a peaceful end to that conflict.

Uribe came out against that peace deal.

He went full Bolsonaro, right?

He became Trumpy.

He was tight with like right-wing Colombians in Florida.

And he was constantly at odds with the increasingly left strain of Colombian politics.

So the current Colombian president, Petro, he's kind of emblematic of the Colombian left.

Uribe is emblematic of the Colombian right.

Always a whiff of corruption around this guy.

Always a whiff of being invented paramilitaries.

So I have not delved into the details of the case, but this is not, it's not a surprise that this would happen in the sense of him potentially being connected to these things.

What is clear is that Lula in Brazil with Bolsonaro and Petro in Colombia with Uribe don't give a fuck.

They're going for accountability.

They don't give a shit who they're going to piss off.

They're not worried about Trump.

And this is a big, you know, fuck you to Trump in some ways because I don't think Trump's like buddies with Iribe, but but that's his guy.

You know, if he is a guy in Colombia,

it's the Bolsonaro of Colombia, right?

For sure.

So it's also Petro saying, I'm not afraid of

getting randomly tariffed over this, you know, because I think this guy should be held accountable.

Yeah, I mean, on July 28th, Marco Rubio tweeted, quote, former Colombian president Uribe's only crime has been to tie

buddies with the Rubio.

And defend his homeland.

The weaponization of Colombia's judicial branch by radical judges has now set a worrisome precedent.

So once again, they're coming down hard on efforts for accountability.

Aaron Ross Powell,

coincident only when it's left-wing leaders in charge of the countries, right?

So, and I think, like, this lawyer, like, I think they got him on tape trying to get these paramilitary groups to retract.

And for people wondering, like, hey, why would you want to start a right-wing paramilitary group?

Well, in 1983, a rebay's father was kidnapped and murdered by the FARC.

So, that's probably the origin story.

So, like, there's some depth here to this.

And by the way, if you were like, well, what do you care about this?

Well, the United States poured billions and billions and billions of dollars into the war against the FARC.

We set up this school of the Americas in the South that was like training people that also were accused of human rights violations.

There's plenty of rabbit holes you can go down on this one.

But Uribe,

you know,

was like guys like Rubio love Uribe because he's kind of the their kind of right-wing guy, like, you know, takes, you know, no quarter with the left and hates the Cubans.

And, but, I mean, who believes Marco Rubio when he's weighing in on democracy issues and anywhere.

He's a clown.

We'll get to that in a minute.

But he's a shitty archivist, too.

Terrible archivist.

Burning emails.

Bad Kennedy Center boy.

Yeah, where are the Epstein files, Marco?

We should put a pin in this, but I was reading some interesting reports about how Colombian mercenaries are popping up in Sudan because they're getting hired by the UAE to fight on behalf of the RSF in the Sudanese civil war.

So it's like these conflicts spill out globally over decades.

There's all these guys.

Look, the FARC became also just narco-traffickers, too.

It's not like they were good guys on the left in that war.

No, they weren't pushing for Medicare for all.

It may have started about Medicare for all, but it became down something else.

Every good movement ends up in drugs.

But these guys in Colombia fought for decades in these shifting insurgencies, and they pop up everywhere.

It's like the South Africans who were fighting all these wars on behalf of the apartheid regime.

It does show you you create this class of people that that's what they know how to do.

Yeah, not good.

Let's also just check in on Trump's closest ally and prisoner Pen Pal in El Salvador, Nae Bukele-Ben, because last Thursday, legislators in El Salvador abolished presidential prison terms, which will potentially allow Bukele to become the self-professed world's coolest dictator that he wants to be for life.

The National Assembly, where his party, Bukele's party, holds its supermajority, also extended presidential terms from five years to six years.

So Bukele was first elected in 2019.

He won re-election last year.

We've talked about him on the show many times.

He's,

for a period, was quite popular, the most popular elected official in the Western hemisphere, because of his effort to combat gangs and gang violence.

Those efforts included cutting secret deals with gangs to get them to try to reduce or hide their violence, and then declaring what he called the state of exception, which allowed the government to suspend civil liberties, round people up indiscriminately, throw them into prison, and never even charge them with a crime.

And there's many of them are still rotting there.

More recently, Bukele has used that power to crack down on journalists, human rights groups, a group called Crystalsol, where a friend of mine named Noah Bullock works and now was forced into exile.

And not long ago, Ben, you know, it's worth noting, Bukele was beloved by many people in Silicon Valley because he embraced Bitcoin.

Most recently, Bukele cut that disgusting deal with Trump where about 240 men from the U.S., mostly Venezuelans, were sent to El Salvador and left to rot in this nightmare torture prison.

They've been, you know, there's been a deal cut to get them out.

But we recently learned that one of the men sent there by Trump, by Stephen Miller, by Marco Rubio, a brave freedom fighter, was this makeup artist named Andri Hernandez-Romero.

Andri was tortured and sexually assaulted by prison guards.

So the U.S.

government paid for this to happen.

So, Ben, this like

just fast track into authoritarianism was not just predictable.

It was, I think, predicted by many experts, by us on this show.

I've not seen a lot of outrage from Rubio.

I'm actually seeing the opposite.

I'm seeing people like Matt Gates

sharing Bukele clips where he's bragging about how he doesn't care if he's called a dictator and calling him a transformational leader.

It's kind of like willfully ignoring what the Israeli right says when they announce that they want to ethnically cleanse Gaza.

And I mean, this guy announces he's a dictator.

He announces the human rights abuses that he wants to carry out.

He announces that he wants to quash dissent.

And then the same people that like, if Nicolas Maduro says those things, you know, we put like a $25 million reward on his arrest and sanction everybody in the country.

And this guy we call like a great friend, right?

I mean, it just

points up the absolute absurdity.

Like, hypocrisy is like the point now.

You know, it's like we want to show that we have complete double standards, that all we actually care about is whether you align with our sometimes sadistic priorities, like deporting people to be tortured in Nai Bukele's prisons.

I mean, the question question I have is just like how sustainable the act is there

because

the sugar high of like driving down violence is now going to lead into the hangover of corruption, human rights abuses, consolidation of power.

We've seen this movie before.

I think one constructive thing I'd say for Democrats is to connect some of these stories.

There are some really interesting left-wing leaders in the Western Hemisphere right now.

And I actually recently had an opportunity to meet like a cross-section people.

First of all, one of the things that stood out to me is Claudia Shanebaum was like a hero of everybody I knew.

She's wildly popular.

Like, people, we need to talk to this lady.

Like, people need to talk.

Do we get her on the show?

She's doing interesting things.

She's like a, you know, Zoron Mamdani.

She's got interesting policies and political strategies, right?

Like,

you know, Lula and Petro are kind of the old lions down there in Colombian, Brazil.

Even though he's kind of nearing the end of his term, I like Gabriel Borich in Chile.

Yeah, I do too.

There's like a very cool, multifaceted Latin American left that, you know,

like

that we should, you know, as Democrats and progressives should be building deeper connections to.

And, by the way, should be sending the message that, like,

someday, Democrats, I think, are going to be back in power, you know, and hey, Nai Bukele, we're not going to forget like what the fuck you did

in torturing people and trolling, you know, people here who care about that.

Um, so, you know, we have to have a long memory, too, like the right does on some of these things.

Amen.

Two quick things.

Finally, the first one is, it's former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau dating Katy Perry.

I have two friends in my life.

I'm on like a three-person

text read with who are completely obsessed with this story.

And so I've been able to follow every social media spot, you know, spotting.

And it is a remarkable journey back in time to like the late Obama second term world when like Justin Trudeau and Katy Perry were like ascendants.

They both have roots in a very high amount of popularity in a very particular moment.

You just said ascended, but she did go to space recently.

That's true, but that seems like it was part of her highest type of descent.

That's true.

I don't know what do you think comes down.

I mean, there's a question of whether it's real.

Yeah.

And then what your take is about it.

I don't really have a take.

I think they were photographed having dinner, maybe walking a dog.

He went to her concert.

They had a cocktail, too.

I think.

I think there's a cocktail as well as a dinner.

Yeah, what did he get?

When did he break up with his wife?

That was a couple years ago.

That was like while he was prime minister.

And was kind of, you know,

I don't know what's going on there.

Yeah.

Apparently, his dad, Pierre Trudeau, dated a bunch of celebrities, including Barbara Streisand.

Well, yeah, and I was going to say, I mean, Justin Trudeau was, you know, had a bit of a reputation when he was younger for getting out and about.

And yeah, his dad was a famous, did we say womanizer?

I don't know what to say.

Yeah, I don't know what he did.

When Pierre Trudeau was prime minister, they called it that, you know.

But yeah, I don't know.

I wouldn't bet on this one sticking necessarily.

Okay.

I'm just going to say.

The Orlando-Bloom relationship probably lasted longer than the Justin Trudeau.

Right.

I feel like that ended pretty recently.

I think they announced its formal end.

I'm actually up on this Katy Perry news.

You'll see

when your daughter gets a little older, I know everything about Katy Perry, Sabrina Carpenter, that's good.

Chapel Ronin, like, yeah, Taylor Swift, obviously.

I'm just checking in on this, Rachel, these days.

All you're going to listen to in a few years is that collection during Billie Eilish, you know, like

artist TK.

Finally, Ben.

So we have some amazing producers on the show.

Michael and Saul and Alona's on Baby Leave, but she will be back very soon.

They are obsessed with briefings by the State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce, who somehow made a living as a radio host TV person, but just can't talk.

We need like a dedicated weekly segment on this.

I think we're treading that direction.

So, this is a super cut they put together.

Ben and I have not seen this before.

We're watching this cold.

So, we're going to kind of just watch and react in real time.

We're going to leave the mics open here and just see what Tammy Bruce had to say.

Speaker Johnson was in the West Bank, which he referred to as Judea and Samaria, and said that it rightfully belongs to the Jewish people.

Is that official U.S.

policy?

And if it's not, what is U.S.

policy towards the West Bank?

Well, I have said this about other diplomats who've spoken their minds, including Ambassador Huckabee.

Certainly

that's not...

If there's a policy in that regard, you would hear it from me.

But it's not the opinion of the U.S.

government?

Well, I'm not going to speak about

opinion of the government.

As a reporter, how do I know if he's just expressing his opinion about the settlement being part of Israel and when actually this is a policy?

So you want.

So we're getting into a little bit of a conspiracy dynamic here.

It's not your question.

There's a circumstance under which the State Department would countenance

destroying unspoiled food for some reason.

Well, I

again don't know of all the circumstances.

I consider that

there could be a reason of all the things that exist around the world.

So, you know, there's

that's our opinion regarding the bill.

We also

can I say that

I think that's as much as I can say in that regard.

I

that's as much as I can say today.

You can say more Tammy.

Yeah, stop the fight.

So it seems like there were two main things there.

It was Mike Huckabee like endorsing settlements.

Again,

you have an entire team that works for you when you're the State Department spokesperson or the White House press secretary who figure out what stories are in the ether, what you're going to be asked, and then prepare responses for you.

Seemingly they just kind of skip that step there.

Also, the fact that this administration is destroying unspoiled food that could go, that was supposed to go from USAID to, you know, starving kids all around the world, and they're just like burning it is such a scandal.

Not enough people are talking about it.

But there's things I don't.

Yes, that's the important point, but I'm going to be pettier here on this.

Please, the petty section of the show.

First of all,

as I understand it, right, she was a Fox News host and she had like a radio show.

Yeah.

And did she not speak?

Did she, because I didn't consume that show, but I didn't either.

Did she speak on the show?

Because she seems like someone who has a hard time literally getting words out.

But then the other thing I don't understand about some of these people that go in is why did she want to be the State Department spokesperson in the first place?

I don't know.

Because she clearly, doesn't seem like she's having fun up there you know like it doesn't seem like you know i i mean she could have just had her radio show where she yelled about these things like

you want to have fun and like you know if if if i was a right-wing you want to go on the trips by the way in the meetings and you could have fun as a right-wing troll like just argue with them and not just kind of hemming and hawing and ah and who speaks for what and by the way mike johnson's not like a diplomat like he's a member of congress like these and these aren't trick questions like what would what's our opinion about the west bank you know you made a good point there which is that if you're a spokesperson in the Trump era, you should just go in and attack.

Like, Carolyn won't love it.

You know, I get where she's coming from.

I don't like it.

Like, Tammy Bruce is kind of trying to treat it like the old school serious way where she attempts to answer the question in good faith and do policy, but no one...

No one's expecting that from you anymore.

I mean, I guess like credits are for trying, but she's not very good at it.

And how are you not prepared?

I mean, you used to prep people.

These are questions you know you're going to get.

Like Mike Johnson, we talked about this on the you know mike johnson goes there and refers to jade and samara like you're she seems like shocked to be asked these things what did she think that she's gonna get asked it's baffling it's baffling and like that's a hard that's a notoriously hard briefing room and to your point of why would you want that job like did she watch any of matt miller's briefings like that was that place is brutal is matt lee still there i love that guy there the ap guy yeah i think so yeah they have a they have a notoriously um curmudgeonly tough uh and relentless ap reporter reporter who just hammers you.

Yeah, he, I did that.

I briefed in front of him a few times, and he just like,

you know, when you went up against him, it was like trying to like drive on Dennis Rodman.

You're gonna get hacked, you're gonna get crushed, you're gonna get crushed, and he was gonna block the shot and kind of mock you in the process, which again, I respect.

Okay, that's it for our Tammy Bruce section.

Thank you, Tammy, for everything you're doing.

When we come back, you'll hear Ben's interview with Ellie Schlein about fighting the far right in Italy and trying to bring back the Democratic Party.

So, stick around for that.

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Ellie Schlein, thanks so much for joining us.

Thank you.

It's a pleasure.

So I want to start by asking, you know, from the outside,

when people look at Italian politics, Prime Minister Maloney looks like a very strong figure.

She has a big presence on the international stage.

But I wonder if

here in Italy, where you see that there might actually be some vulnerabilities.

Is that the case?

Is the image she projects the image that people are consuming in Italy?

Or are there some vulnerabilities where she may not be meeting people's aspirations?

It's true that Meloni is still strong in the polls, for example.

But I think that there are a lot of vulnerabilities because in the end, if you ask around if people are off well today after three years of her government, they would say no.

And they will say no because this government of Giorgia Meloni for three years in a row has done nothing for the cost of living, for example, has done nothing for the low wages.

We have in Italy among the lowest wages in the European Union.

So our point is

what is the situation of the Italians today after three years of her government?

Is it better or is it worse?

And the answer would be definitely worse.

So how, why is she so strong?

Because as the right wing is doing also in other countries, they are very good not at answering to people's needs, but at pointing out an enemy every day.

And usually it's the same enemy.

Immigrants,

LGBTQI communities, for example, or journalists.

judges, the European Union.

So everything that is not working in this country, according to Meloni, is somebody else's fault.

And everything that works is for how she's doing in government.

But this, after a couple of years,

will stop working.

I mean, she still says that if we have problems and people face problems in accessing healthcare, for example, it's the fault of the previous governments.

But the truth is that since she was in government, she's cut down the resources for the public health system.

So you have to imagine that today for an Italian that needs for example a normal examination, medical examination, you can wait up to one year and a half.

And this is something that also the voters of Meloni feel on their skin.

So this is something on which we are insisting a lot.

Wages, the cost of energy.

In Italy we have the highest energy bills of the whole European Union and it is not to be like that.

But the point is that Meloni does not have the courage to address the extra profits that the big companies of energy production and distribution are making and that is hampering all the other industries, businesses and families in the country.

So yes, she is strong because every day she builds a communication in which they distract the public opinion by pointing the finger at some enemies,

some scapegoats to

blame for what's not going well in the country.

But in the long term, this is not working.

And we can see it already.

When we build an alternative progressive coalition in the local election or regional election, when we stick together, we win.

So they are strong, but they are not unbeatable.

This is my point.

And we will not beat them.

by running after them on their agenda.

So we will not beat them by copying their issues, for example, on security and migration.

We need to force them on the ground where they feel less comfortable, which is social justice.

On social justice, we see that they suffer because they're not answering the needs of people.

If you think about her most famous speech in Spain a couple of years, she said, I am Georgia.

I'm a woman, I'm a mother, I'm a Christian.

And I say, good for you.

But how does this help Italians that cannot afford their rent or that cannot pay for their bills?

So this is the point, social justice, on which we are insisting to rebuild credibility and to regain the trust also of voters who voted for Maloney the last election.

It's interesting because we see a similar dynamic across Europe in the United States in the sense that you have far-right parties that make elections about identity, about immigration, about a sense of security, even though they don't necessarily have the answers on these cost of living issues that people are concerned about.

It feels like, though, where they've been successful, including here in Italy, is making the elections about the issues that they want them to be about.

And social democrats, progressives have had a hard time making the elections about issues that are actually usually more important to people's lives.

How do you

shift the conversation in the way that you're talking about?

What can you do differently?

Is it a matter of political communications, tactics, coalition building, persistence, new policies?

Like, how do you shift the basis of an election from those identity issues to those social justice, cost of living type issues?

You have to insist and hit like a hammer every day on these important issues for

everyday living of Italians.

That's how, in a difficult situation, we shifted the debate on minimum wage, for example.

Italy does not have a law on minimum wage, despite the fact that, as I said, we have among the lowest wages in Europe.

There are 22 countries in the European Union that already have such a law.

And we have built a coalition of the opposition forces supporting a law that, in a way, strengthens the role of the trade unions and collective bargaining.

And we saw the difficulties of Giorgia Meloni because she did not even vote against our law.

She tried to kill it and, you know, put it aside in the parliament because she knows that in Italy 70% of voters are in favor of such a law.

But we have to hit every day because it's also true that the right wing has invested a lot in communication and media.

In Italy they now control public media and they have transformed the public television in a machine of propaganda of the government.

And at the same time, they own a lot of private media, both television and newspapers.

So it's even more difficult for us to set the agenda in the country.

So we have to insist every day on minimum wages, access to education and healthcare, and the cost of energy, which is a problem both for businesses because they lose competitiveness.

If you think about it, our businesses

pay an energy bill that is three times higher than the businesses of the same sectors in Germany, in Spain, in France.

How can you live like that?

So it's both a problem for businesses and for families.

So on these issues, I see that Meloni, even if she is proud of her ideas and position, is hiding.

She's not telling the

truth to the country.

So I'm mentioning this as an example of a right wing that is very strong and proud on identitarian issues, but then runs away when they have to face the cost of living, the everyday problems of Italians.

Yeah.

Do you, you know, we,

I'm a member of the Democratic Party, shares a name with yours.

We have this constant debate in the United States too between kind of the center left and the left.

And

at a time when people are frustrated with the political establishment, and the far right has succeeded in demonizing the political establishment and kind of tying it to the center left, you know, there are arguments from the left that

you need to move away from those policies.

But then there are arguments from the center left that if you move too far to the left, you'll lose people in the middle.

Is there a similar dynamic here in Italy?

I followed the party a bit.

It seems like you've moved it in a more progressive direction.

Is that a matter of policy or is it more a matter of being more willing to fight for your principles?

It's the same debate

we have been seeing in Italy for the past 15 years, I think.

And that is also one of the reasons why I decided to run as secretary of, as leader of the Democratic Party, because we had lost our identity completely.

And we were coming from years, difficult years, of

large coalition governments, big coalition governments, where obviously from the outside some political forces, let's say anti-system, would say, see, there is no difference between

the left and the right.

So the first thing we needed to do is to rebuild credibility and identity on our core issues.

which are also the values of our constitution.

As I said, the main platform of our party is insisting on healthcare because it's the number one worry of Italian citizens.

At the same time, about wages and working conditions.

Think about all the young people that have precarious jobs.

If you have a job that lasts just for six months and you don't know if you have it the next day, how can you build your future?

How can you create a family if you're willing to do so?

The right wing

has been,

let's say, effective in telling the country that the

most important problem was migration.

And they have been talking about an invasion that is not even there.

But they, in a way,

created the idea that was number one priority of the country.

for 10 years they have insisted on migration but they have not seen the migration outside of the country of these young people that has done have done sacrifice to study here but then with low wages and precarious jobs they have to go elsewhere to build you know a dignified future for them and for their families yeah so what I'm saying is that we need to be radical in our beliefs and

credible in our ideas.

That means also renewing our parties and pushing for a new generation of young female and feminist feminist leadership, I would say.

So this is part of the job we are doing.

At the same time, we have to be very clear on the issues that are discussed at dinner in the families in Italy.

What we are saying is that

when you lose track of the difference, of course you also lose votes.

And we needed to re-establish a progressive agenda for the party.

And this is interesting because when I won the primary election, it was after the defeat in the 2022 political election.

And after the defeat, when Giorgio Meloni won the election and went into government, our party was going down to the lowest in history, 14% in the polls.

And then when we started rebuilding credibility on work and healthcare, after one year, we managed to win the European election with 24%.

So this is working.

It's still not enough.

We also have to build a credible coalition with other partners, but this is working because people feel that we are honest in what we're trying to do and what we're trying to say.

Yeah.

On foreign policy, you know, at a time when Germany had an election, Emmanuel Macron is nearing the end of his term, it seems like Maloney has

tried to position herself as a European leader who has a relationship with Trump.

She came to the Trump inauguration.

She's been to Mar-a-Lago.

She's kind of in this

collection of kind of right-wing, I'd say autocratic type leaders globally.

On the one hand, I guess she can tell Italians, hey, look, I have a relationship with Trump.

I'm raising Italy's profile in Europe and on the world stage.

On the other hand, I can't imagine Trump is that popular here, particularly given tariffs and other things.

I was recently here and I had to buy some Italian wine before the tariffs went into effect.

But how do you look at that?

Is it a vulnerability or strength that she is so close to Donald Trump?

It is unfortunately a vulnerability right now.

According to the polls,

Italians do not like President Trump.

And what he's doing is already damaging our economy.

And it's not only since he signed the tariffs in April.

It was even before, because the announcement of the trade war that

is threatened towards Europe has already started damaging the economy because of the uncertainty.

So we have 58% of our businesses who stopped.

their investments because they don't know what's going to be tomorrow.

And in all these months, Meloney was not even able to criticize her friend Donald Trump.

And it's not the only issue in which we see that she is damaging the national interest because of her political alliance with Mr.

Trump.

We've seen this on terrace with the silence of the government.

Not only the silence.

There was a vice prime minister who said that tariffs are an opportunity.

Just to give you an idea, the biggest organization of businesses in Italy said that even if they stop at ten percent, it would mean twenty billion less in exports

next year for Italy, and it would be the risk of losing one hundred and eighteen thousand jobs.

So it's not only silence, it's also complicity, okay?

And we have seen the same when Donald Trump forced the European Member States to raise the military expenditure to 5%

in the framework of the NATO alliance.

And only the Spanish government, led by Pedro Sanchez, said to Trump, no, I want to stay in the NATO alliance.

I can guarantee that I will reach the capacity targets set by NATO.

But our military said that we can do that without rising the military expenditure to 5% because that would be the end of our economy, that would be the end of our social welfare, and that would mean today only buying more military equipment from other states like the US of Trump.

Whereas what we need in Europe is obviously in this new geopolitical scenario, Europe needs to provide for its own defense and security.

But it's nonsense to strengthen 27 different national armies instead of coordinating them, strengthening interoperability, making joint research and joint procurements and going towards a common European defense.

So you see, it's interesting because now with

President Trump, it's even clearer that the right-wing nationalists are strengthening each other with the same rhetoric of hatred and walls, okay?

But in the end, they would be enemies on the opposite sides of the walls that they want to build at any any border.

So there are contradictions and there is room for us to explain that we as progressive have much more in common in terms of values and policies that we're pushing.

For example, on housing, we are facing similar challenges in terms of housing in all the member states of the European Union.

On terms of wages, again, education, okay?

We have much more in common, but we have to strengthen up our networks because you can name them in any any country, and you cannot name the progressive in any country.

Well, yeah, I mean, that is the last thing I wanted to ask you.

And I should say, as someone who worked in US national security, 5% is a crazy defense target, kind of arbitrary.

It was bizarre to me to see people pledging something that they're not going to do that makes no sense.

But I wanted to ask you, on your last point, there's clearly a sense that there's a very networked far-right globally.

And it manifests in common political strategies, convenings,

media, online strategies.

If you're a progressive anywhere in the U.S.

or Europe or even in other parts of the world now, you kind of feel like you're up against not just the right-wing party in your country.

You kind of feel like you're up against this global wave that is crashing over us.

What can be done, obviously the most important thing is winning elections.

You have to think about building a party and then building coalitions that can ultimately win an election in Italy.

That's job one.

But

what can be done to form some greater sense of solidarity and coordination and common strategy and common momentum, really, among...

progressive parties, center-left parties, so that we're not all alone in our countries, you know, fighting this machine, that there's a sense that we're all together helping each other.

That we're all overwhelmed in a way.

Exactly.

We're creating our own momentum and our own wave that can spread across borders.

This is an important mission for all of us.

And it's an obsession for me personally because I was a member of the European Parliament before being the leader of Partito Democratico in Italy.

Look, I think that we cannot and must not leave internationalism to the nationalists of the far right.

This is what is happening.

We have common values, common policies we're pushing, common solutions.

For example, when Trump decided to build a wall on the border with Mexico and Orbán did the same at the border in Europe,

they strengthen each other.

And

the way

that Trump's wall and Orbán's wall strengthened the rhetoric of Meloni and Salvini in Italy, why don't we build the same when Pedro Sanchez rises minimum wage of 50%

and helps all Spanish workers

facing inflation in the last years in the middle of the war, the energy crisis, the climate crisis.

We have to use and say the same words and also set the same agenda.

And I think that since we have our networks, because for example we are part of the party of European Socialists,

why don't we organize a rally on the same day in our 27 different countries?

Why don't we do the same with the Democrats abroad?

Because we are facing the same wave of extreme right.

Look, think about what Miloni is doing in Italy.

To sum it up, she is cutting down healthcare.

She is cutting down public school.

because they are cutting 6,000 teachers in public school in Italy.

She is blocking our proposal on minimum wage and making the work, the jobs in Italy more precarious.

At the same time, she has built, spending 1 billion euros, an empty jail in Albania to deport migrants.

How is this helping Italians pay their bills?

There is no way.

But if you look what is happening in the US, it's quite the same.

In the first 100 executive orders of President Trump, there was nothing on wages.

And he's doing the same to deport migrants by also violating fundamental and human rights.

So they are doing the same things, they're all of the same.

But we have to have the same answer in terms of social and climate justice.

And the things that progressives are doing, because they are doing, and this is working in some countries, must at the same time and in the same way strengthen the others.

So it's about you know, organizing, networking, strengthening our network and also

showing that we share the same values and we are a team, we are a family and we can do it by organizing together.

We cannot be, we would say, an Italian provinciale.

We have to, in a way, learn a lesson from what happened in the last years in the strongest mobilization that we have seen, for example, on climate, Fridays for the Future.

or other organization

and also the feminist movement they were effective in setting the agenda of the governments because they have from the start thought of their mobilization

like of something that could go beyond every border.

That was the strength.

On the 8th of March, you see

mobilization of

organization for gender equality in all the different states.

And this is working.

And without the climate organization and mobilization in those years, we would not have today

some climate policies.

The Green Deal, for example, the investment on renewable energies.

So this is working and our political forces should aim at doing exactly the same thing.

Organizing, mobilizing together and showing that we have the same agenda on social justice and climate justice.

And that would strengthen each other and in a way respond to that right-wing wave with a stronger progressive wave.

Well, I love ending on what is both a fighting and optimistic note.

Thanks so much for joining us.

I really enjoyed the conversation.

Thank you.

Thank you.

It was a pleasure.

Thanks again to Ellie Schlan for doing the show.

And

man, Tammy Bruce, still stuck in my head.

We just listened to that, so it's still fresh.

We're going to make, we have to,

people on the Discord,

if you've made it this long, you're probably on the Discord.

Come up with a name for a weekly segment.

You know, there we go.

Tam.

Tam Cam.

Tam Cam.

That's taken.

The Bruce, whatever, you know, like, you know.

Bruce is loose.

Yeah, yeah, whatever.

Four workshop days.

Four workshop days.

Okay.

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