Trump’s Shocking Ukraine Reversal

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welcome back to pod save the world i'm tommy vitor i'm ben rhodes ben have you seen the reports that someone is calling around impersonating marco rubio yeah i did i saw that today.

I was going to flag it for you.

Then I

figured you saw it.

I love it.

I guess they contacted three foreign ministers, a governor, and a member of Congress by sending AI-generated voice and text messages.

And I was just wondering, how do you think you train an AI to sound like Marco Rubio?

Do you just feed it like hour after hour of like cuck videos and stuff like that?

And why Marco Rubio, right?

Of all the people?

It's just kind of funny and perfect that it's him.

That's the guy that got nabbed by some, you know, some anonymous hacker type guy with some pretty rudimentary AI.

Yeah, like, I think we're all going to get got by AI sooner or later, but it is funny that there was a signal account with the display name marco.rubio at state.gov.

And it got all these people like, I don't know.

I'm guessing that's not his email address.

It's just somebody with a good sense of humor that they chose Rubio.

That's what I appreciate.

Is it someone out there who's like, you know what?

I could do any one of these guys.

Let's take Rubio.

He's the biggest lightweight among them.

Yeah, let's have a a good time.

Yeah, like Hegseth is almost too believable.

You know, he's assuming he's drunk again and signaling you.

Anyway, we got a great show for you guys today.

We are going to talk about Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu visiting Washington again.

We'll talk about all this hope and sort of pre-trip signaling that Trump was going to push him for a ceasefire in Gaza with some interesting new polling about how Democrats view support for Israel or support for the Palestinians.

We're also going to talk about Trump's head-spinning policy change when it comes to providing weapons to Ukraine, the latest kind of naive, idiotic commentary from him about Putin.

And then we'll talk about the latest news on tariffs.

We were supposed to have a bunch of big trade deals done by today.

We'll update you on whether that happened and what Plan B and C looks like.

We're also going to do some Iran updates, including Tucker Carlson's interview with the president of Iran.

We'll explain why there's a growing border crisis in Afghanistan, some big news about the Dalai Lama and who comes next to the reincarnation.

We'll update you on some just crazy stuff happening in Thai politics and then the latest awful U.S.

immigration policy news.

And then, Ben, you did our interview today.

Yeah, I talked to Jason Crowe,

who is

on the Armed Services Committee.

He's a congressman from Denver, veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, and just one of the better guys up and coming Democrats.

He's actually in charge of recruiting candidates for the DCCC.

So we talked about Iran intelligence.

We talked about what Pete Hegseth is doing to the military.

We talked about what worries him in the Big Beautiful Bill.

He was pretty chilling actually on the ICE funding among other things.

And we talked, you know, really interesting about where the Democratic Party needs to go on the issues that Worldos care about.

It's a pretty wide open slate.

And let's just say Jason Crow agrees that wherever we go, it's not going back.

So we definitely agree on that.

So it should check it out.

We covered a lot of ground.

We're not going back.

That's a slogan from the past.

You know, I really like Jason Crowe.

I think he's a good guy, a principal guy.

It's an important conversation.

And Ben,

I didn't realize until like a couple of days after the big, beautiful piece of shit bill passed that when fully funded, ICE will now be a larger force than like the Israeli military and a bunch of militaries in Western Europe.

So that is pretty unnerving.

Yeah, yeah, it is.

And Crow was pretty chilling about it

because it's also like with purpose, right?

I mean, they're building a network of concentration camps across the country, right?

And they have basically more money than they could possibly spend.

And as you know,

particularly when militarization is involved, if you lot the money, it tends to get spent.

So it's very worrying.

Yeah, when you're a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

When you're in a military, everyone looks like the war on terror.

It's not good.

All right.

Well, let's start with our first story, which is Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu's visit to Washington again.

So this is his third visit since Trump took office.

Netanyahu arrived at the White House with his lips firmly puckered.

Here's a quick clip from his little press avail with Trump before their dinner Monday night.

I want to present to you, Mr.

President, the letter I sent to the Nobel Prize Committee.

It's nominating you for the Peace Prize, which is well deserved.

And you should get it.

Thank you very much.

This I didn't know.

Well,

thank you very much.

Coming from you in particular, this is very meaningful.

Yeah, I'm sure the Nobel Committee is

very

swayed by an indicted war criminal.

So, anyway, Netanyahu is also visiting Capitol Hill on Tuesday.

He's going to be back at the White House again Tuesday night for more Gaza talk.

On the Hill, he's meeting with Senate Majority Leader John Thune, Chuck Schumer, a bipartisan group of U.S.

senators who all apparently just don't care that Netanyahu has been indicted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes.

In advance of Netanyahu's visit, the Trump team was spinning to reporters about how tough he was going to be on Netanyahu, how he was going to push him on a Gaza ceasefire deal.

Nothing has materialized as of this recording.

It's 2.13 p.m.

Pacific on Tuesday.

It seems like if there is no deal, it will be for familiar reasons.

Hamas wants to permanently end the war, while Netanyahu just wants a temporary ceasefire and hostage release deal.

And it's just hard to square that circle.

Also, Ben, I mean, at a cabinet meeting on Tuesday, you had Steve Witkoff saying they were in proximity talks, that they had had resolved all but one issues, that he expects maybe some news by the end of the week.

I don't know.

We'll see.

Meanwhile, though, in Israel, Israel Katz, the Israeli defense minister, announced that he has ordered the IDF to prepare for the construction of what he called a humanitarian city on the ruins of the city of Rafah in Gaza.

So Katz's plan is to move 600,000 Palestinians into the area and then prevent them from leaving.

This is phase one.

And then I guess phase two is to eventually force all 2 million Palestinians into this tiny area of the Gaza Strip before implementing a forced emigration plan.

So, in other words, a full ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip, which is a crime against humanity.

It feels like the, or at least felt like going into this visit, the Trump administration was kind of trying to cook up yet another narrative that the Israelis have agreed to a peace deal, and the only impediment is that Hamas won't take it.

Therefore, they're at fault for the war continuing.

That kind of blame game is a tougher sell when the defense minister is simultaneously pitching a plan to ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip.

But I don't know.

Do you have any hope of some kind of peace deal coming or ceasefire at least coming out of this strip?

I mean, very little.

I mean, this depressing thing about this, Tommy, is that, gee, we've seen this play before.

Joe Biden ran it a bunch of times.

Joe Biden used to love to say that the Israelis had agreed to a ceasefire when they hadn't.

I mean, they just hadn't.

They're the ones continuing the war.

And look,

the idea that they need to continue the war, for what purpose?

Hamas is not posing some threat to Israel right now.

They're just not.

If you're convincing yourself of that still at this point, they're not like fighting back.

There's not like a necessity to cut off assistance.

And there's certainly not a necessity for this kind of...

clear in the open planning for ethnic cleansing.

So if the idea is that we want to just have a ceasefire, get the hostages back, and then resume the ethnic cleansing and the bombing and the killing and the war crimes, that's not agreeing to a ceasefire.

That's just not what that is.

And they did the same thing Biden did to kind of message this

visit through,

but there's nothing there.

Now, I hope that they get a ceasefire.

I hope that there's some

lull in the fighting.

I hope the hostages are returned.

But there's just so much cynicism piled on top of cynicism here.

And then, meanwhile, they're just telling us out loud that they're literally going to build camps in Gaza for these people and then move them someplace else.

That is the definition of ethnic cleansing.

So, I don't know.

I will say on the Nobel Peace Prize, I don't know if Bibi listened to our last podcast, Tommy.

I don't know if that, you know, he was.

I'm guessing not.

Maybe the Intel guys.

I don't know if he slid into the comments, you know.

But I mean, it is, there's just something

so

cynical about kind of essentially trolling any morality, right?

When Trump says this means something coming from you, he's talking to an indicted war criminal who has been responsible for the deaths and maiming of tens of thousands of children in Gaza.

And, you know, whatever you think of the Israeli

strategy, they've launched wars in

more countries than I could count now in the Middle East.

And so

down is up, you know, black is white, truth is lies.

I mean, that's all you can take away from this facade.

And actually, and we'll talk about the Democratic Party, the fact that this kind of gets treated normally and there's bipartisan people meeting with Netanyahu and even

a lot of the tone of the media coverage is it's like a, here's the Israeli prime minister coming to meet to consult on Middle East issues and just kind of no

basis for evaluating how extreme what's happening is.

You know, I think that's going to make people cynical on the left and the right, for that matter.

I totally agree, man.

We'll get into that in a second.

I mean, yeah, one interesting note just on this ethnic cleansing plan.

I mean, this would have been unthinkable to say out loud two or three years ago, even if people like Itmar Ben-Gavir wanted to ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip.

But I was listening to this Ha-Aretz reporter talk about how when Trump first kind of outlined this ethnic cleansing plan, like kind of like Gaza becoming a resort town, it really did just open the floodgates of Israel and allow the political space for every minister in the Lekoud party or to the the right of Lekud to adopt this position too.

Ben, it's also just remarkable to me, like the volume of coverage about

anti-Israel comments made at the Glastonbury Music Festival last week as compared to the amount of coverage of Israel Katz outlining a plan, the defense minister outlining a plan to ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip.

It's just, it's glaring and shocking, and I think speaks to some of just how broken the conversation is around this stuff.

No, we're still talking about, you know, Bob Villain, like two weeks after the fact or whatever it was.

And it's the same thing, by the way, that happened with the protest at Colombia.

Like it was convenient for people to talk about this.

But if you, what is more important in the world today?

What Israel's doing in Gaza or like what Bob Villen, somebody that nobody had heard of, outside a pretty small circle of people, said in kind of the second stage at Glastonbury?

I mean,

the people that want you to be focused on that, I mean, some of them have earnest, you know, concerns about it, but a lot of them are just people who want you to focus on that so they're not focusing on Gaza.

Yeah.

So, you know, we talked about Glasgow last week and just sort of and what it says about the shift in support for Israel among young people in particular.

CNN highlighted some numbers from Quinnipiak polls that sort of put some data behind this conversation.

So voters were asked in a couple of surveys if they sympathized more with the Israelis or the Palestinians.

In 2017, Democrats said they sympathized more with Israel by 13 points.

Today, Democrats sympathize with the Palestinians by 43 points.

So that's a 56-point swing.

The change was even greater among Democrats aged 18 to 49.

They swung 71 points towards being more sympathetic with the Palestinians.

So this is a political sea change.

But like we were just saying, like...

People in Washington have not caught up with it.

Like establishment Democrats have not caught up with it.

That's why you end up with someone like Andrew Cuomo running this hard, like pro-Israel campaign against Zoron Mandani and really like actually probably motivating his voters more than he helped himself.

Yeah, and it's deeply unhealthy for Democratic leaders to be this out of touch with their own constituents, their own voters, the people they need to mobilize and appeal to on a pretty fundamentally important issue.

It's just not healthy.

The same, let's just say it too, it's true of kind of a lot of the people that work in foreign policy and national security.

They don't look at actual public opinion.

They're constantly still looking to like very small numbers of people who are kind of the arbiters of opinion on these matters, right?

That nobody else listens to.

If Democrats care about young voters, if Democrats care about seeing authentic, this is a way to turn those people off.

This is a way to make them cynical.

This is a way, and it's not just about Israel.

You can't just get a pass on this.

And this is what drove me nuts about the reaction to kind of the uncommitted movement, right?

It was like

inconvenience.

You know, why are these people inconvenient us by caring about what's happening in Gaza?

They're not going to believe you on healthcare and other things if they think you're full of shit on this.

And that's what I think people have to realize, that there's a cost to this.

And the last answer is that if you think you can continue to take money from APAC, you know, whether you're Hakeem Jeffries or Chuck Schumer or whomever, AIPAC is part of the constellation of forces that have delivered this country into the hands of Donald Trump and Steve Miller.

And you cannot give them a carve-out.

And we need to have this fight as a party because these are the wrong people to have under your tent.

I'm usually a big tent person, but the kind of people that are supporting Bibi Nenyao and Donald Trump, I don't want them, like, you know,

my leaders of my political party, like cozying up to those people.

Yeah, and AIPAC spent the last few cycles basically funneling money to upfront organizations that primary progressive Democrats.

I mean, it's really infuriating.

And Ben, so we're talking about this like sea change in public opinion on the left.

There's something very interesting happening on the right as well.

Like, I don't know how closely you're tracking this MAGA revolt over Trump's DOJ saying Epstein didn't, Jeffrey Epstein didn't kill himself, but I've been consuming a lot of right-wing media about it.

And in all these conversations, it's just like it's taken as an article of faith that Jeffrey Epstein was a Mossad agent or maybe a CIA agent, but probably Mossad, probably both.

And some of these guys are even saying that like the release of this DOJ memo saying Epstein didn't have a client list was timed for Netanyahu's visit.

And so, like, look, I raise this.

I've been consuming this stuff because it's fun to watch like Cash Patel and Dan Bongino get crushed by the MAGA right

for coming out and saying, actually, Jeffrey Epstein did kill himself.

No, there is not a client list.

When those are the guys who are like fanning the flames of this conspiracy for years and years and years.

But there's a serious point here, too, when it comes to U.S.

support for Israel, because like this Epstein stuff is just another data point that is driving negative views of Israel on the far right.

In this case, it's like weird and kind of specious and unfair, maybe, but it dovetails with the conversation around the war with Iran.

And I just think it's like it's going to have a political impact, and none of it bodes well for strong US-Israel ties over the long term.

Yeah, again, if you are, you know, someone who's

more supportive of Israel

than we are

on certain things, what I would say to you is if you criminalize, and that's actually what's happening, right, kind of just criticism of the Israeli government, right?

If you just try to banish it from the mainstream, because in some cases, literally, by statute, you say it's against the law to boycott

Israel or

at least we're going to shame people who criticize Israel.

Zoran Mamdami is like not,

we're going to denaturalize him because of his views on Israel, those kinds of things.

You're going to drive the criticism of Israel to the darker spaces.

If you cannot have an honest and open discussion of things like Gaza in mainstream spaces, it's going to migrate to conspiracy theory spaces, to the darker sides of the right and the left.

That's what's happening, you know?

So, one reason to have healthy criticism as part of how you discuss these issues is to prevent

pushing it to the fringes like this.

Yeah, and look, just to tell myself a little bit more, because I'm a weirdo and a sicko, I watched the other night like a two-hour debate.

You're an enthusiast.

Dude, you're not ready for how fucked up this is.

I watched a two-hour debate hosted by Alex Jones on InfoWars between Dinesh D'Souza and Nick Fuentes.

Nick Fuentes, for those who don't know, is this 26-year-old young guy, like straight up anti-Semite, neo-Nazi, like really, really bad, scary dude.

But my takeaway from watching this, first of all, it was incredibly

like it was, it was not an ugly debate.

It was very history-focused and substantive, and like they treated each other respectfully.

And the fear, my, the scary thing I took away from it was that Nick Fuentes, despite having like vile, extreme views, can be really compelling and convincing sounding.

And I think when someone like seems like they know their history,

seems like they're rational and reasonable, suddenly it's a lot easier for them to launder like deeply anti-Semitic, fucked up views kind of like into the mainstream.

And I think that like when people like Charlie Kirk and other kind of more,

they're not like mainstream Republicans, they're mainstream MAGA type influencers type, like kind of look out at the landscape at the competition, it is that fringe far right that is the problem.

It is not the kind of, you know, normy Dems who are left over in Washington.

You know, that, well,

like, it's funny.

I had a thought that going to Nick Fuentes and Alex Jones and Dinesh Jesus's, like, kind of skipping from the marijuana to the heroin.

But then to like actually extend the metaphor, because it actually works.

If you make the marijuana illegal equally to the heroin, then you make people think, well, like, if I criticize Israel, you know, I'm already out of bounds.

So I'm going to go all the way over here.

And that's what I mean by creating a space.

You have to create a space where you can have an actual open discussion, or else people are going to be like, well, wait a second,

I'm not finding this here.

Maybe I can find it there.

And then that's when you get into conspiracy theory and ethno-nationalism kind of views.

And that's when shit gets real dangerous.

And the guys guys who were having this debate, like Jones and the two panelists, were saying explicitly what you were saying, which was this debate would be kind of banned anywhere else, which is why we're having it here, which is why I bet they did big numbers.

But anyway, I'm bogging us down.

I'm sorry with my freakish

content consumption.

So, Ben, last week we talked about this.

Pentagon sort of surprise announcement that weapons shipments to Ukraine, including air defense missiles and precision munitions, were on pause.

And there's a lot of weirdness around it.

Like the State Department was reportedly caught off guard by it and not informed.

The move seemed to contradict statements that Trump had made like just days before at the NATO summit.

Here's one example from the NATO press conference that I think stuck out to a lot of people.

It was a back and forth with a Ukrainian reporter.

Where are you from?

I'm from Ukraine.

So my question to you is whether or not the U.S.

is ready to sell anti-air missile systems Patriot to Ukraine.

We know that Russia has been pounding Ukraine really heavily right now.

Are you living yourself now in Ukraine?

My husband is there.

Wow.

I can see you're very, you know, it's amazing.

And me with the kids, I'm in Warsaw, actually, because he wanted me to be.

Is your husband a soldier?

No?

He's.

He's there now?

Yeah.

Wow.

That's rough stuff, right?

That's tough.

Let me just tell you, they do want to have the anti-missile missiles, okay, as they call them, the Patriots.

And we're going to see if we can make some available.

They're very hard to get.

We need them too.

We were supplying them to Israel, and they're very effective, 100% effective.

Hard to believe how effective.

And they do want that more than any other thing, as you probably know.

That's a very good question.

And I wish you a lot of luck.

I mean, I can see it's very upsetting to you.

So

say hello to your husband, okay?

So it's like kind of like the closest Trump seemed to ever get to empathetic there.

But so, Ben, after this announcement happened, you know, Politico initially pointed the finger, and as did a lot of people on Twitter, at the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, this guy, Eldridge Colby, and said he was responsible for the decision.

They reported that he was concerned that our weapons stockpiles were running dangerously low, and which is something I've actually heard from other defense experts.

But NBC said the move was actually a unilateral step by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, even though a report by the Joint Staff on Weapons Numbers found that some stockpiles of these high-precision munitions were at lower levels than we want, but we're not at like critical minimums yet.

Apparently, though, this is like the third time Pete Hegseth has ordered weapons shipments to be paused, only for those decisions to be almost immediately reversed by Trump.

So something weird's going on.

On Monday, though, Trump said we'd be sending more weapons to Ukraine, saying they have to be able to defend themselves.

They're getting hit very hard.

This change of heart followed a call Trump had on Friday with Zelensky, where Zelensky said afterwards it was the best conversation he's had with Trump, that it was maximally maximally productive.

And then I guess Trump had spoken to Putin the day before, got nowhere, and said publicly that he didn't make any progress with Putin.

So, and by the way, a couple hours after that conversation, Russia launched its largest aerial assault, I think, ever on Ukraine.

I think this was on July 4th.

So

for those who keep score of these things, Trump is currently down on Putin.

Here is what he had to say about Putin on Tuesday.

We get a lot of bullshit thrown at us by Putin for you want to know the truth.

He's very nice all the time, but it turns out to be meaningless.

Who could have predicted that except for everyone who's ever

Yeah, so Ben, I've been talking to some defense geeks for a long time who are genuinely like sincerely concerned about the U.S.

stockpiles of interceptor missiles in particular, mostly for the Patriot system.

Because between U.S.

weapons shipments for Ukraine, support for Israel against Iranian ballistic missiles and drones, and then U.S.

intercepts of missiles fired by the Houthi rebels in Yemen, Yemen.

We are burning a lot of these suckers and we just like don't have the capacity to replace them that quickly.

So there was some honest concern.

The Houthis are ramping up, by the way.

I think they sank a ship on Sunday and they killed two sailors in a separate attack on Monday.

So that threat's still out there.

But I'm just wondering, what did you make of how this all went down?

Like, is this really Hag Seth freelancing?

Did Trump just decided he cared at some point?

Like, it's just, it's so incoherent, and I can't wrap my head around it.

Well, I think, look, first of all, I'm glad that these shipments are resuming, particularly for things like the Patriots and the anti-aircraft.

You know, that saves lives, and that's the only thing that they have.

Otherwise, they're kind of defenseless against these Russian bombardments.

People should know this is not like some big new shipment.

This is just kind of continuing the pipeline of stuff that was already allotted for Ukraine.

And yeah, maybe some of this was his, you know, peak at Zelensky.

Some of this was being concerned about the drawdown because we have shoveled so many of these things out the door to Israel or had to use them in the Middle East.

The two things that stand out to me, the first is we've talked a lot on this podcast about how weird it is that they have no National Security Council, right?

Marco Rubio is currently the Secretary of State and the National Security Advisor.

The NSC has been downsized dramatically, the people that would normally coordinate the different agencies of the government.

Seems like wonky stuff.

This is what we mean.

There's no process here.

There's nobody running a process.

It's like one guy decides to pause stuff, another guy decides to resume it.

Like you get a sense that there's a handful of people with power,

Eldridge Colby, and then there's Pete Hegseth, and then there's somebody sitting at the White House,

and there's not people sitting around a table working this through a process to make decisions.

And this is what that looks and feels like.

And we'll get to it on tariffs, too, because that feels the same way.

It's all episodic, it's all ad hoc, it's all short-term, it's all tactical, it's all about, like, how do we feel today about things?

How are we going to get through next week?

That's not a way to make a strategy.

Whatever you think about Putin, he has a fucking strategy that he's been implementing for years, right?

And you're not going to combat that week by week.

And that leads me to the thing about Trump.

I mean, it's Flabbergasting that he can just, it's obvious Putin lies to you.

Like, Donald Trump's the last person on earth who realizes that a lot of what comes out of Vladimir Putin's mouth is bullshit.

That's been clear to everybody.

And I don't do this that much, but if any other U.S.

president had spent five months after saying you'd end this thing in 24 hours, just wasting everybody's time, right?

Like, think of all the things that failed here, right?

The ceasefire, the one-month ceasefire, the three-day ceasefire, the negotiations in Istanbul.

What did we get from that other than the US apparently making a bunch of concessions to Russia for nothing in return?

And now we're right back where we started.

And the thing is, just resuming weapons shipments doesn't really matter if the Ukrainians don't know what they can count on six months from now, one year from now, at the negotiating table.

So, yeah, this is like a

half step in the right direction, but this is not like inspiring a lot of confidence.

Yeah, I hope it represents a bit of a sincere and broader change in terms of Trump's views on the matter and like that he's not just primarily angry at Ukraine.

I do worry that this is going to be kind of like another log on the fire that's burning in kind of the right-wing NAGA world of all the things they're mad about, right?

Because they've decided that Ukraine is evil and that this was going to lead to World War III in part because Trump told us all these things.

Told them that.

Yeah, so who knows?

It is a no-brainer to give defensive weapons to Ukraine.

You read these, like I was reading a first-hand report from a journalist the other day, kind of like how for a while in Ukraine, people from eastern Ukraine would come to Kyiv because it was just so much safer because of missile defense systems.

And now people are getting killed far more regularly.

They just have far less layered defense.

People are, you know, high-rise buildings are getting hit all the time.

Innocent people are dying.

There was a poet who wrote this famous poem about how it just sort of felt like they all circled up when the missiles were fired.

And, you know, it was only luck that saved you.

And then that person was killed in a strike that hit a cafe, I think.

So it's just a tragic, awful situation.

Hopefully Trump is fucking wising up here, but I don't know.

You just can't tell.

And just like, you know, it's like we were talking about in Gaza.

It's kind of been normalized, right?

Oh, here's it's the biggest war in Europe since World War II, you know, and it's just something that's happening, and they're just firing weapons.

I mean, we will, you know, there's Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, like the BRICS summit with everybody yucking it up, and you know, Trump's talking to Putin on the phone, even if he's saying he's full of shit.

Like,

we've learned to live with way too much risk and war and violence.

And we have to kind of keep our antennas up that that's not normal, right?

Like, a war in Ukraine is not normal, bombing Iran is not normal, like hundreds, if not thousands, of war crimes in Gaza, not normal.

And, you know, Putin is counting on grinding people down into just accepting that he can continue this thing as long as he wants.

Yeah.

Okay, we're going to take a quick break, but as you probably know, Republicans in Congress just passed one of the cruelest and least popular pieces of legislation in history.

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All right, ben, so this episode comes out on Wednesday, July 9th.

That date was supposed to mark the 90 deals and 90 days deadline that the Trump administration set to settle the global trade war that they started.

Trump has now, of course, delayed his own deadline again to August 1st out of the deal.

So Trump says he has preliminary trade deals done with the UK and Vietnam,

but those are mostly just kind of like sort of political agreements, the devils and the details, and the details are not done.

But it gets way more complicated from there.

So Trump threatened new tariffs on Monday.

Basically, the old tariff rates on 14 countries.

On Truth Social, Trump released these letters he had written to each country that were clearly thrown together at the last minute.

For example, the letter to Bosnia and Herzegovina misgendered the president.

Not sure that was proofread well.

At a cabinet meeting Tuesday, Trump also said he was going to impose a 50% tariff on copper and then a 200% tariff on pharmaceuticals, but those might not go into place for 18 months, which is, again, confusing.

Trump also picked a fight with the BRICS countries.

It's a Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, as well as the UAE, Egypt, Iran, and Ethiopia.

He posted a truth social message that said any country, quote, aligning themselves with the anti-American policies of BRICS, end quote, will get additional 10% tariff with no exception.

So it was just a mess.

Here's Trump kind of ranting about these BRICS countries earlier today at this cabinet meeting.

Because BRICS was set up to hurt us.

BRICS was set up to degenerate our dollar and take our dollar as the standard, take it off as the standard.

And that's okay if they want to play that game, but I can play that game too.

So anybody that's in BRICS is getting a 10% charge I thought BRICS was you know I said this about a year ago and it largely broke up

but you know there are a couple that hang around but I thought it largely broke up BRICS is not in my opinion not a serious threat but what they're trying to do is destroy the dollar I think he talks about like a band that broke up which absolutely did not happen

I think I think it's mostly now that they're like currently having a meeting and they're like disagreeing with us bombing Iran like whatever so look guys if this segment has you confused join the the fucking club.

Uh, none of this makes sense.

The best example of why this process makes no sense and is so stupid is South Korea.

The U.S.

signed a free trade agreement with South Korea in 2012, and Trump just put out a letter that he says he's going to slap them with a 25% tariff.

Like, make it make sense.

So, Ben, sports fans may have heard of Red Panda.

Do you know what Red Panda is?

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, guy, right?

She's a Chinese-American acrobat.

She rides on an eight-foot-tall unicycle.

She like juggles these bowls and flips them up with her feet and catches them on her head.

Pretty badass.

Trump's trade trade policy right now to me is like Red Panda style.

Like

it's cool.

It could work for a minute.

It's distracting for a minute, but Red Panda recently fell and broke her wrist.

And so I think that's what's going to happen to Trump here eventually.

That is my metaphor.

There's so much just bullshittery here, too.

I mean, I do think with the Bricks, too,

first of all, you know, Trump likes to sound like smart about stuff, like,

but you can almost always tell that like one person got to him was like hey these bricks countries you know what that's about that's about a bunch of countries that led by china that don't want us to to have the dollar be the reserve currency anymore which by the way is something that anybody who's ever like paid any attention to a bricks meeting has known for like a decade and he comes out and says it like he's you know dropping some like penetrating insight, right?

What about his buddy, Modi, right?

Like, isn't he best friend?

Like, what does he think the fucking I is in BRICS, right?

It's India.

Like, like, your good friend, Narendra Modi, you know?

So I don't, I probably couldn't even name the countries in the acronym.

An acronym, by the way, was coined by a Golden Sachs analyst, right?

So hardly started

in the way that Trump said.

This tariff stuff is the only thing that Trump cares about is that he has the power and the capability to turn the dial up and down.

He loves the attention.

He loves the corruption potential.

Part of what happened in that Vietnam scenario is that, lo and behold, a $1.5 billion golf course was approved during an Eric Trump visit to Vietnam right after the suspension of tariffs.

He loves being the center of attention.

He loves, you know, the Bricks are having a meeting in Brazil, so he's going to, you know, grab the, you know, the camera and put it on himself.

Like, a lot of this is just about that.

It's about like, I control this.

I can make this pain go up, go down.

And I think what people have to realize is a lot of these countries, almost, I think, too much, you know, including in Europe, they kind of kiss his ass a little bit, like, you know, to try to avoid the tariffs.

But what they're going to be doing behind his back is all kinds of planning to de-dollarize.

What Trump is doing, far more than anything the BRICS have ever done, Trump is putting the dollar as a reserve currency at risk.

Because who the hell wants their entire economy tied to the currency of a country led by a complete maniac who's just weaponizing tariffs on every country in the world?

Like, he's far more disruptive to the U.S.

leadership of the global economy than like a BRICS meeting is.

Yeah, him and the Republican Party's policy of just ramming like $6 trillion worth of debt through Congress.

I mean,

and by the way, the only way you're going to finance that debt is to hope that the BRICS countries continue to buy our treasuries

and the Japanese continue to buy our treasuries.

He's threatening 25% tariffs on Japan that recently said for the first time, like, hey, we might have to go away from the dollar here.

If you want to look for a reality check, I mean, kind of nerd out here a little bit, but watch the bond markets, right?

Because the stock market continues to like snort whatever white powder is making them think that this is all okay.

The bond markets are not.

The dollar is down more than it has been in a very long time.

Like 10% or something.

Because people are like, I don't want to put my stuff in.

And by the way, if the bill comes due, I think what Trump is just hoping is that the bottom falls out after he's gone.

But at the rate he's going, like, you know, it may not be the next Democratic president.

It may happen, you know, sooner than that.

Yeah, it's

not a good good setup.

But yeah, so I think the BRICS meeting, they criticized U.S.

policy on Iran.

So that brings us to some Iran updates, Ben.

So over the weekend, you and I both were reading these, I think it's the Times and the Post, Washington Post, dug into something we had talked about on the show the last couple episodes, which was this surprising bizarre Israeli strike on even prison in Iran.

This prison is this notorious hellhole torture chamber where Iran often houses political prisoners.

So, the Israeli Defense Ministry said the goal of the strike on Evan Prison was to target government repression bodies in the heart of Tehran.

But these, you know, the reporters who dug into the impact found it did the opposite.

The Times found that the strike on the prison angered Iranians, including dissidents, and that the attack killed or wounded, quote, visiting family members of prisoners, social workers, a lawyer, physicians and nurses, a five-year-old child, teenage soldiers guarding the doors as part of mandatory military service, administrative staff and residents of the area.

Again, I think the strike happened at like noon, so it was during visiting hours.

The death toll stands at 79.

That is almost certainly an undercount.

But it seems like a pretty catastrophic mistake if the idea was to foment regime change or turn people against the regime.

In other news, Ben.

Tucker Carlson, who's been a vocal opponent of war with Iran, spoke with Iran's president, Masood Pezeshkian, in an episode of his podcast that was released on Monday.

It was about 30 minutes long.

There wasn't a ton of groundbreaking stuff.

I thought this was probably the most interesting revelation to come out of it.

Let's listen to a clip.

Do you believe the Israeli government tried to assassinate you?

They did try, yes.

And

they acted accordingly,

but they failed.

So I take everything he says with a bit of a grain of salt, but it wouldn't surprise me at all if there was an attempt to decapitate the leadership of Iran, even though that's that's long been seen as a taboo in war.

But Ben, I mean, I think like my biggest reaction to this whole thing was how annoying it was to have people attacking Tucker Carlson just for conducting the interview.

Like I'm not a Tucker Carlson fan, but like the idea that we can't interview people we disagree with is so annoying.

Like you and I, you and I watched and excerpted and made fun of Tucker's interview with Vladimir Putin because the substance of it was bad.

But like the fact,

I will defend to the death his

ability to interview people we find odious, just as we would like defend the right for diplomats to talk to countries that we disagree with.

Otherwise, how are we ever going to learn, like abridge our disagreements or learn more about them?

It's just such a fucking stupid, stupid argument that drives me crazy.

Yeah, no, and look, I mean,

it's not the first person that's interviewed an Iranian foreign minister.

I mean, I remember, you know,

both Rouhani, the president, and Zarid, the foreign minister, did multiple interviews with like major U.S.

media outlets in the bomb years, and we weren't upset by it because it actually was kind of helpful to see what their message was.

It's actually, you learn, you know, even if you don't like them, you kind of learn, like, oh, what are they serving up?

Like, what's their message, right?

Like, you kind of learn what their strategy is, you know.

So, look,

I do think that

it connects to the Avon Prison thing, though, because there's this kind of weird sheen on how this war is being presented.

Like, we just bombed these nuclear sites.

Many people were killed, you know, far more by Israel in its bombing.

And the Avon Prison thing, you know, Nilo Tubrizi, who's on this show a couple weeks ago, did participate in that Washington Post investigation.

The Times Run is great too.

People should check it out.

Why would you bomb?

the place where the dissidents are.

It's not like a prison break bomb.

It's not like you're precision blowing up a wall so they can escape.

Like they're literally bombing.

Yeah, these are big bombs.

They're literally bombing the.

So what it tells me is that there's always been this kind of faux bullshit, like we stand with the Iranian people, like MO from the hardliners in Israel and the United States.

And it used to drive me nuts that those people come after people like us, you know?

Because you don't care about the Iranian people.

You want to use their suffering to justify what you want to do militarily against the Iranian government.

That is what's happening here.

Why does Bibi Nanyao, when he gives speeches to the Iranian people,

he gives them in English?

He doesn't give them in Farsi, right?

Like, or even in Hebrew, right?

It's for Americans and,

you know, Western journalists so they can say, see, look, we actually stand with these people.

That's not what's happening here.

Even if you support, even if you hate the regime, this only strengthens the regime's position.

And by the way, gives them like a pretext to crack down more and more on people.

And again,

to come back to the Tucker thing, it's the absence of an ability to kind of speak openly about this, like,

leads to bad outcomes.

And this is one of them, where it's like, you know, it would have been a much bigger story a few years ago if you bombed Avon prison and killed potentially at least dozens, if not hundreds of people there.

And now it's this kind of side note to, you know, debating whether or not, you know, how much Trump obliterated like a couple sites.

Yeah, I just,

the debate, like the platforming debate is so stupid.

It drives me crazy.

And it happens in everything, too.

You know, every, like everything is debated about that, you know.

Yeah, and it's just like, it is censorious.

It is anti-free speech.

I regret that the Democratic Party has embraced it at times.

And it's like, why, why is like ICC indicted Bibi Netanyahu allowed to go on five Sunday shows a week?

But like, you can't interview the president of Iran once.

Why not?

It's newsworthy.

It's interesting.

Maybe he'll say something that provides an opening for diplomacy and finding middle ground.

Often,

those sorts of signals are sent in public remarks because they're hoping they'll be picked up when there isn't a diplomatic relationship.

So this shit just drives me fucking crazy.

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All right, Ben.

So, one, you know, the war in Iran is also exacerbating this border crisis with Afghanistan.

So the Iranian government says that there's about 6 million Afghans who live in Iran, but 4 million are undocumented.

The New York Times reported that since March, over 800,000 Afghans have returned home to Afghanistan.

This came after Iran announced that all migrants and refugees had to leave Iran by July 6th.

But on top of that, Afghans were getting increasingly blamed for economic and social problems in Iran, and then there was this conflict.

So meanwhile, as we've discussed on the the show before, Pakistan has been conducting its own campaign to expel the three and a half million Afghans living there.

That's leading to thousands of families crossing basically every single day into Afghanistan.

Like one day last week, I think there were 30,000 people who passed through in the day.

And all of this has led to people arriving who are exhausted, hungry, they have no money, they have nowhere to go, and they're landing in border towns that are not even close to equipped to handle that many people.

And then plus, I mean, we shouldn't probably don't have to say this, but Afghanistan is having its own humanitarian crisis.

There were decades of war.

Then there was the U.S.

canceling aid for Afghanistan.

There's ongoing sanctions by the West and the U.S.

in particular.

And the U.N.

warns that this many returnees could destabilize Afghanistan and the region.

And again, like, you know, while life could be awful for women, for example, in Iran, life under the Taliban is going to be even worse, especially for women who are forced to travel alone because the Taliban will not let them move freely or work.

So it's just like another example of a truly awful man-made crisis that is getting next to no attention.

Yeah, and like the two things that add to that are one is that it shows you how much all these different things connect, right?

I mean, you have like bombing in Iran, you're going to drive people back in Afghanistan.

Like you've got a complete mess and dysfunction in Pakistan, same thing.

But the other thing that really worries me, and I mentioned this to Jason Crowe because he served in Afghanistan and cares a lot about this.

We are about to be deporting a bunch of Afghans who are in this country, right?

Including people that worked with the U.S.

military, including people who are women's rights advocates, including people that worked with USAID, you know, people who didn't kind of get fully naturalized or get their status fully in order.

But, you know, a lot of those people that a lot of people helped get out in that chaotic evacuation are kind of here and they're ripe.

You know, they're the kind of people that have been targeted by ICE.

And I cannot think of anything more chilling than someone that worked with the United States for all those years or believed the things we told them about values and came to the United States and came here expecting that they were going to be resettled and now being risked at being put on a flight to God knows where, you know, if not back to Afghanistan, you know, to South Sudan or somewhere, right?

So it's just another reason to keep some attention on trying to protect at least that population of Afghans who are here.

Because right now, things are so bad in Afghanistan, it's just like whatever individual you can help,

that's one less person who's kind of dealing with this absolute nightmare.

All right, yeah, we're going to talk about some more terrible immigration news in a minute, Ben, but let's bounce around a bit first.

On Sunday, thousands of people braved monsoon-like rain and turned out to celebrate the Dalai Lama's 90th birthday in Dharam Shala, India.

I bet it was a rager.

That's the location of the Tibetan government in exile.

So in a video, the aforementioned spiritual leader of the Tibetan Buddhism announced that the centuries-old tradition of his form being reincarnated after his death will continue.

That is very important to the Dalai Lama's followers because the Chinese Communist Party claims they alone have the authority to approve the next Dalai Lama.

But this time, the Dalai Lama says the identity of his successor will come with preconditions, including the child must be born in the free world, and the office of the Dalai Lama will have, quote, sole authority to recognize the future reincarnation.

So we we don't have time to go through all the history here, the long history of China and Tibet sort of conflict, but a bit of recent history just for context.

So the Dalai Lama fled China in 1959 after the Chinese military brutally crushed a Tibetan uprising.

He's lived in exile in India ever since.

The Chinese government views the Dalai Lama as an enemy.

He's called the Dalai Lama a separatist, a wolf in monks' robes.

They've instituted this regime of just far-reaching repression and indoctrination of people in Tibet.

And the question of reincarnation and succession for the Dalai Lama is especially important when you understand the history because in 1995, after the Dalai Lama identified a six-year-old boy as the chosen reincarnation of the Panchen Lama, who is seen as the second holiest figure in Tibetan Buddhism, the Chinese government disappeared the child and his family and installed their own pick.

And so this six-year-old kid and his family literally haven't been seen since.

So Ben, you know, the U.S.

and I think, you know, Western countries generally now have so many issues with China that Tibet has really kind of fallen way off the front page.

But I wonder if you think that'll change if Beijing tries to appoint the Dalai Lama's successor and then bully the world into following along with it.

Because there still is, like, I think Richard Gere was at this Dalai Lama's birthday party.

There is some like, you know, lingering

memory of how important this issue was for many, many years.

I mean, the sad truth is probably not.

You know, the, and look, anybody that's kind of so frustrated with the U.S.

right now that they're tempted to kind of, you know, start being sentimental about the Chinese Communist Party should just look at Tibet, where essentially not only has there been this erasure of the Dalai Lama, but they've really, you know, repopulated parts of Tibet.

tried to eradicate the use of Tibetan language, culture, and, you know, literally trying to,

some Chinese party functionary is going to pick the next Dalai Lama.

I mean, how cynical do you get here?

I do think, and it's something kind of sad about it because, you know, I met the Dalai Lama a couple times.

And like, you know, let's just say there's not many people you're in a room with where you're like, oh, well, that guy's guy lives up to the billing, right?

You know, like this guy, truly spiritual, holy, good person.

Him

in his later years in this kind of isolation is kind of a sad commentary on how far we've come from, like, you know, he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 89 when things were looking like history was moving in one direction.

And Trump should have got it that year.

Now, what I will say is that I think that if the Chinese mess with the succession, which they probably will,

I think it'll rekindle.

First of all, there'll probably be a reaction in Tibet,

and the Chinese will be nervous about that, and they'll, you know, probably crush it.

But we've seen this before, like, and tragically, sometimes it involves self-immolations too.

But I also think that,

you know, Dalai Lama Cluy chose to do this.

He didn't need to do this.

And I think he sees it as an effort to kind of keep this flame alive.

And I do think enough people will care that there will continue to be this movement of a Tibetan exile community, a Tibetan exile spiritual community.

And yes, that spiritual community has made inroads into cultures around the world, too.

So the hopeful point I would make is that you're not going to extinguish this.

The flame will pass to somebody else.

It's just maybe a while

China's changed enough that that flame can get any traction inside of China.

Really tells you everything you need to know about that government, that they took a six-year-old boy as a political prisoner and just disappeared him for 30 years.

And they bully you the hell out of governments to not meet with.

I mean, you remember this, like,

they really, you know, they'll use all their muscle to, if you meet with the Dalai Lama, suddenly you're cut off from China entirely.

Like you're pretty penalized for years.

Creepy betted.

Yeah.

All right.

Switching gears a little bit.

So crazy shit has been happening in Thailand, and our incredible producer, Michael, will probably quit if we do not tell you about it.

So buckle up.

No, I'm kidding.

This is actually a legitimately really crazy story.

And so just to set the stage a bit here, so Thailand and Cambodia share a 500-mile land border, which has been disputed since 1907, thanks to French colonial boundaries drawn by the French.

Again, thank you.

Colonizers.

So fast forward to late May, Thai and Cambodian troops shot at each other in a disputed area of the border, and a Cambodian soldier was killed.

Both sides blame the other.

Since then, there has been this escalating tit-for-tap between the two countries.

Cambodia has banned produce, media, and fuel from Thailand.

Thailand has blocked tourists from entering Cambodia.

That was a particularly big blow to Cambodia's lucrative casino industry, which Ben, I think you and I spent some time in together back in the day on an Obama trip.

And

it's a weird spot.

And then both sides have shut down some land crossings.

So that's obviously bad.

But the story heats up when Thai prime minister Peitung Taran Shinawat had this ill-fated and unfortunate phone call with former Cambodian leader Hun Sen in an attempt to ease tensions.

So we talked about Shinawat last year when she took office.

She's part of this Thai political dynasty.

I think her dad and aunt also served as prime minister.

She is very young.

She's 38.

She's the daughter of a billionaire.

She is not remotely qualified.

She has a degree in hotel management.

So in this 17-minute call, the Cambodian side recorded it and then they leaked it.

And in the call, she called Hun Sen uncle.

He was like an old buddy of her dad's.

And she talked about how, quote, the other side, in other words, the Thai military commander who has been handling the border dispute, quote, just wanted to look cool and said things that are not useful.

And when this leaked, it really, really pissed off like everybody.

It pissed off her coalition.

It pissed off the Thai public.

They did not take kindly to her deferential tone, the disparagement of her own military.

And despite a lot of groveling, there was a public apology that she was trying to spin it and say, look, I'm just being

conciliatory to the Cambodian side as kind of a negotiating tactic.

She is now in a full political crisis.

The second largest party in her governing coalition pulled out, leaving them with a tiny majority.

Then last week, she was suspended from her job by the Constitutional Court pending an ethics investigation.

And the government is already on, I think, its second caretaker prime minister.

So it's a total mess.

One of the big questions here, Ben, is whether Thailand is vulnerable to yet another military coup.

There have been at least 12 since 1932, and it runs in the family.

I mean, her father was removed from office by a coup in 2006.

I think a coup followed her aunt's removal from office by the Constitutional Court in 2014.

So, all of which is to say Thai politics, never boring.

Never boring.

Like, there's layers of this that are really interesting.

So, let's start on the Thai side.

Because, yeah, Thoxon, her father,

you know, really rich guy, but a populist rich guy.

He gets ousted by the military.

Yingluck, who is his sister, the aunt, we went to Thailand and, you know, Barack Obama met her, you know,

during press conference, things like, seemed like things are going great.

And then the military put her on a plane to London, I think, you know, like two years later, right?

So military coups coups can happen with regularity.

And there was this kind of strange deal, remember, between the Thai military and the kind of Thoxan dynasty to kind of let him return, let her

take power.

But it was always kind of tenuous.

And part of what was creepy about the deal is that they completely sidelined the one hopeful, progressive, younger political party in Thai politics.

So

if you're wondering who the good guys are, the good guys are the people that kind of got muscled out of the picture by

no one mentioned before.

Yes.

The good guy.

Yeah.

And so, like, nobody's that sympathetic to the military here, even though she handled this poorly.

People always also forget Thailand is a treaty ally of the United States.

Now, I don't think anyone's expecting we're going to come to their defense on the Cambodian border dispute.

But the problem here is that

you just don't want the military to be.

I mean, part of what she was probably indicating is that maybe the military is ginning this up because they want to kind of reassert their position at the vanguard of nationalism.

I will say also, Hun Sen,

really creepy guy, like not a good guy.

Like,

like this history goes all the way back to Khmer Rouge.

He's quashed the opposition.

Not a lot of good actors in this.

What you would like to do, though, is obviously calm down.

You don't want like a border dispute in that part of the world.

You don't want violence in that part of the world.

And you would hope that there's some process to maintain a civilian government in Thailand.

But yeah, this has the rumblings of a situation that will probably not lead to better outcomes in either Thai or Cambodian politics.

Yeah, and also watch what you say on an open line.

Never good.

Yeah,

everybody should be learning that lesson.

I mean, Marco Rubio,

watch who's sliding into your signal messages.

Your TMs.

Final story, Ben.

So let's just end on some immigration news before we get to your interview.

So on Monday, the Department of Homeland Security terminated yet another temporary protected status designation, this time for Hondurans and Nicaraguans.

This comes on the heels of the administration's efforts to get rid of TPS for migrants from Venezuela, Haiti, Afghanistan, Cameroon, Nepal.

So a U.S.

district judge blocked the DHS termination for Haiti last week.

So we'll see how long that lasts, though, given that the Supreme Court has ruled in Trump's favor over and over again on immigration.

For example, allowing the administration to end TPS for Venezuelans in May and letting them deport eight men to South Sudan.

just last week, as you mentioned earlier, only one of whom is from there.

So lots of terrible stuff happening on this front.

But the people impacted by this,

rescinding the designation for Honduras in Nicaragua, so it's estimated to be about 72,000 Hondurans and 4,000 Nicaraguans.

They will now have 60 days to comply with the termination.

Luckily, about, I think, 21,000 Hondurans and 1,100 Nicaraguans have green cards, so hopefully they won't be affected.

But and then there's also some of them are being encouraged to use like this self-deportation app, which gets you a free plane ticket and like $1,000 cash if you leave.

But Ben, just like stepping back, if you believe the State Department, they have a travel notice up that says Nicaragua and Honduras are not safe places to visit because of crime, limited health care, sliding democratic norms, corruption, and repression.

And then the most recent Human Rights Watch World report for Nicaragua says that President Ortega and his wife are seeking to consolidate power, overhaul the government, and have, quote, expanded the use of forced exile and citizenship revocation as a way to target critics.

But we're still going to send all these people back to their home countries anyway.

in addition to those political and safety considerations that make this just a gross, shitty thing to do, the decision just is unbelievably cruel given the history, because TPS was granted to Honduran and Nicaraguans in 1999 after Hurricane Mitch tore through Central America.

It killed over 11,000 people and was just devastating.

I think 7,000 people died in Honduras.

A million were displaced.

So it just decimated these countries.

And so, you know, I think the critics of TPS would say the T and TPS stands for temporary.

And sure, that's fair.

But like what we're talking about doing here in practice is expelling people from the country who have lived in the United States for over 20 years.

They have jobs, they have families, they're part of communities.

There was a guy, you know, who had worked in construction around New Orleans for two decades who told a Fox affiliate, basically, if I lose my TPS, I lose my dream of becoming a commercial pilot.

Like, because you can't get hired if you aren't in good legal status.

So we're just like, we're, we're, we're, we're creating these nightmare scenarios for all these people who are in the country legally, trying to do the right thing, responsible parts of communities.

Like, I don't think the Republicans, like, whenever some horrible immigration thing happens, will be tweet like, I did vote for this.

Like, I don't think anyone voted for,

you know, a Honduran whose home was destroyed in 1998 to be sent home in 2025.

Like, it's just like completely unnecessarily cruel.

Yeah, I mean, one thing about the Trump administration, you have to,

there's that, I think it's that quote attributed to Stalin, right?

You know, one death is a tragedy and, you know, whatever, however many million is a statistic.

Like Trump wants to numb you with this, the scale of this.

Think of how many...

absolute human tragedies are unfolding before our eyes.

Like people who've been here for decades, who are good members of the community, who give back to the community.

Not only are they going to be subject to the kind of terror of being returned to places that they don't know, where they're losing their dreams, where they could be subject to violence or have no means of making a living, but think of all the people that they'll be separated from, maybe family members or maybe just people in their community, the ripple effects of this.

The other thing that Bear is saying is, yeah, Hurricane Mitch may have been the proximate cause of TPS, but American fingerprints are all over how messed up Central America is.

You know, I mean, these are the places where the United States was backing death squads, right?

These are the the places where we were meddling in politics.

And so that bears in mind too.

This didn't just happen out of nowhere.

Like, you know, and frankly, a lot of the best immigrant communities in the United States come from these places, you know, like El Salvador, like Vietnam, you know, where frankly, you know, we had a complicated history, but the only positive that came out of it is like people made something of themselves in this country.

And just to try to wipe that away

to me is like a real tragic loss for this country, even if it's a big win for Stephen Miller.

So we really just do need to keep the attention on this because this is not normal.

And the only political point I make, and I hesitate to make it, but

some of these communities,

because obviously I deal with this on Cuba, right?

The Cuban Americans supported Trump.

And now, like, there's a Cuban American that died in an ice facility, and they're deporting people back to Cuba.

Same thing with Nicaragua, where a lot of people didn't like Daniel Ortega.

Well, now they're sending people back to Daniel Ortega.

A lot of Venezuelans, you know,

the Republican Party has been selling you a fiction that they cared about the Venezuelan people or the Nicaraguan people or the Cuban people.

They didn't.

They used it as a wedge political issue in places like Florida to call Democrats weak or to call Democrats communist.

What they're doing now tells you everything that they actually believe about those people.

Yeah, it's cruel.

It's stupid.

It's unnecessary.

I think it's going to hurt our economy.

It's politically unpopular.

PU had a poll last month that found 59% of voters opposed ending TPS for immigrants who fled war or natural disasters.

That's exactly what we're talking about.

Like, you don't find very many issues that poll at like 59, 60%.

I mean, that's like overwhelmingly unpopular.

Joe Rogan and Jon Favreau agree about it.

Yeah,

right.

Stephen Miller might like, you know, sit in his sad little cuck chair at night and like get off to this stuff, but this is the second cuck comment I've made.

I'm really out of control.

But no one else wants this to happen.

And it's just, it's wrong, and we should talk about it.

We should not be scared if I talk about this.

No, we should not be scared to talk about this because it's both the right thing morally and politically.

You made this point, just end on a lighter note, because we needed a little levity here.

Steve Miller is 39 years old, and

he looks literally like the emperor from Star Wars.

Fascism ages you, man.

He looks like a 133-year-old man who's just being eaten alive from the inside, right?

I know it's better to not be cruel, you know?

It's better for your health.

Yeah, look, I know I got some bags under my eyes after I crossed the 40-Mendoza line and with two kids, but boy, when I read that he was 39 years old, I could not believe it.

He looks like a 59-year-old man and you know, the

39-year-old dead soul in a 59-year-old man's body.

Dead eyes.

Fucking worst.

Anyway, that's it for the new section of the show.

But stick around for Ben's interview with Congressman Jason Crowe.

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I am very pleased to welcome to the podcast Congressman Jason Crowe from Colorado.

He is from the 6th District there.

He serves in the Armed Services and Intelligence Committees.

He is a veteran of both Iraq and Afghanistan.

He is somebody that you should know and pay attention to.

So, Congressman Crowe, thanks so much for joining us.

Thanks, Ben.

Glad we could put this together.

Thanks for having me.

I know.

This is great.

Well, we'll have to make this a regular appointment.

So there's a lot to cover.

I want to start with the

bill that just passed.

I hate to

it feels weird to be a grown-up and call it the big, beautiful bill,

or even call it one of the pejorative stuff.

Yeah, what do we call it?

Yeah, I know.

I know the piece of garbage that just passed.

But

so much focus, rightly so, on the inequality, on the Medicaid cuts, on the harm it's going to do to Americans.

I think

probably less front of mind for people, though, is that there's a bunch of dimensions where this is potentially dangerous for our foreign policy and our global competitiveness.

I mean, I could run the gamut from our long-term fiscal health to our ability to compete with China

to the strange fixation on missile defense.

But I just want to start by asking you to frame for people

kind of a national security or foreign policy or your competitiveness argument against this massive bill that just passed Congress.

Yeah, well, I mean,

the energy production tax credit rollbacks, the wind and solar tax credit rollbacks, are probably one of the largest national security strategic blunders that we've seen in years, if not a generation, right?

At no point in American history has there been a closer tie to our ability to produce quick, clean, safe,

low-cost energy, and our ability to have economic and military might than at

this point in American history, right?

You look at AI, you look at the data centers, you look at the new defense systems that are in development or that we're fielding right now,

extremely energy consumptive, right?

So that tie is very, very close.

And China knows it.

China is doubling, tripling down on this.

They've actually last year, they produced more wind and solar than the rest of the world combined.

They are investing in this very heavily because they know this to be true.

So the rollback is going to be really, really devastating for the production of energy that we're going to need for both economic and military might.

There's just no other way to put it.

Yeah, I'm going to ask you a follow-up question about this because I kind of can understand something about the Trump administration, which is on the one hand, they talk a lot about China and competing with China, but they also talk a lot about critical minerals and the kind of supply chains that are necessary for clean energy and the kind of technologies of the future.

And yet at the same time,

they're doing these massive, massive cuts in clean energy and this kind of bizarre effort to kind of bring back coal, right?

And whether you look at that from a climate change perspective, an energy cost perspective, or a national security perspective, it doesn't make sense.

How do you square the fact that they're talking about the supply chains for things like batteries and solar power while they're cutting the investments in it?

Do you see the internal inconsistencies that I'm struggling with here?

Asking me to square any of the inconsistencies in this administration is

quite a task and,

frankly, impossible in a lot of respects because you just can't.

The way that I make some sense of this is that there is an internal ideological battle happening within this administration between what I would call defense hawks, traditional

conservatives, which is a small and dying faction of mega world,

and then the isolationists, those who are more focused on the culture war aspects of this.

And it's that wing that won out on this renewable energy rollback, right?

That wing that basically just said,

you know,

this is liberal progressive energy, right?

Renewable energy, wind and solar, even though, I'll say, even though Texas,

a red state, and most of these large projects are actually in red states, Republican governed states.

So senators voted for things that are going to roll back hundreds of billions of dollars of projects and cost tens of thousands of jobs in red states.

wanted these tax credits and advocated for it.

But, you know, that mega

ideological wing, which won out this battle,

is prevailing more and more.

And we're seeing this.

I mean, it is a dying faction, you know, these kind of national security hawks of the Republican Party.

There are very few of them left at this point.

Yeah.

Well, actually, that's a good transition to, I wanted to ask you about Iran, where the national security hawks were able to, at least for a couple of days, get Trump to obviously bomb Iran and its nuclear facilities, although then he kind of abruptly halted that bombing.

I want to ask you about the intelligence piece of this, though, to start with, because you sit on armed services.

I'm sure you're supposed to be privy to briefings about

battle assessments, damage assessments of the Iranian nuclear program.

Obviously, this is a hugely consequential action, but it all depends on how far we set back the Iranian nuclear program, whether that's sustainable, whether they decide to go covert and develop their own nuclear capability without anybody being able to get access to their facilities.

And

Trump said it was obliterated after really clearly lying about the fact that

there was an imminent weaponization and he kind of forced Tulsi Gabbard, his DNI, to take back their own assessment that they did not think Iran was weaponizing.

The question I want to ask you is, how do you trust the information that you're given as a member of Congress?

How should we trust what is told to us us publicly when it is so clear that they are essentially directing intelligence agencies to give them the information they want?

And there was even a story that Tulsi Gabbard has fired intelligence officials who won't kind of bend the facts to fit their narrative, and that she is hoping to get access to emails and chats of people in the IC and use AI to see who's weaponizing intelligence.

I mean, this does not seem like people trying to get the facts, right?

So, how do you, as a consumer of intelligence, how do you deal with that?

Yeah, I'm asking myself myself that.

Actually, it kind of goes to the core, one of the core questions of how long will the professional civil service be able to hold out in this administration, right?

And whether this is the IC, whether this is DOD, whether this is EPA, whether this is FAA, you have these lifetime civil servants,

spies, intel analysts, air traffic controllers, weather forecasters, you fill in the blank.

And

of course, if their intelligence doesn't meet the narrative, if it doesn't match what the public narrative is for Donald Trump and MAGO world, then they come under fire.

And that's, of course, why in May, Tul C.

Gabbard literally fired the acting chair of the National Intelligence Council, because they came right out and they said there is no evidence that shows that the gang Trende Aragua is controlled by the Venezuelan government.

Gabbard and Gabbard's chief went back to the chair of the NIC and said, this does not match what we're saying, what the president is saying.

So why don't you take another look at it and

rewrite it?

Which, of course, they did not do, and they lost their jobs.

So that is my question: is

how long can they hold out?

I mean, we're an eighth of the way through this administration, right?

And you all look at what's happened so far.

And, you know, you fast forward another six months, another year.

It could be a dire, it could be a really dire position where the information that we're getting on Capitol Hill or that people are getting downrange

in the COCOMs are not getting good information.

So what I'm doing is I'm looking at changes.

Right now, I have a pretty good steady flow of regular

CIA wires.

We get our weekly brief, members of Congress that sit on the Intel Committee, we fly in every Monday.

We have hot spots, we get our briefing book, we read through all the briefs for all the major conflicts in the world.

We take deeper dives in areas of special interest.

I've taken special interest in covert action programs and a variety of other

counter-terrorist things in Russia-Ukraine.

So we take a deep dive there.

So I'm looking for changes and I'm looking for shifts and I'm looking for

who changes and who is doing the briefing to.

And

right now, that seems to be holding.

And I hope it can hold longer because I'm worried about it and deeply worried about it yeah i mean i just to play this out um

you know

it's hard to believe that if six months from now right the assessment is well actually the iranians you know they they took their fuel and some a handful of advanced centrifuges and they kind of went off the grid with them and you know you know

it doesn't seem like you know it seems like trump would rather have the narrative be that these strikes solve the problem obliterated the facilities than he'd want people to give him bad news right?

Or give Congress

bad news.

So I guess to your point,

if you start to see that the kind of, whether it's Iran or any other issue, that the people are changing and the news is always good for Trump, you know, then do you think there's a capacity to come out and kind of blow a whistle and be like,

hey, we see what you guys are doing here?

I think so.

I mean,

to the extent that the law matters for this administration, which also is an open question, there are special and certain laws just for the IC that allow whistleblowers to come forth to Congress, actually.

So there's a whole different whistleblower system, as you're well aware from your time in the administration.

So protecting that system is going to be really important and maintaining a whistleblower capacity is going to be really important.

But there is a truth here, right?

I mean, Iran

either will or won't reconstitute its program, right?

The three facilities that hit either were obliterated or they weren't obliterated.

And Israel has a dog in this hunt too.

And

if Donald Trump says that they were obliterated and doesn't want anybody else to say differently and he's willing to move on,

Israel, if they're not obliterated, is probably going to speak up and take action as well.

So I see there being a potential wedge between Donald Trump's narrative and what Israel wants to be able to do here and many other countries, by the way.

I mean, again, as you know well from your time negotiating these agreements, pretty much nobody wants Iran to have a nuclear weapon, right?

Including China, including Russia.

Nobody really wants this to happen.

And

we know we have a pretty good sense for what Iran is doing.

And we also know that you can't bomb your way out of this, which is why you helped negotiate that agreement, because unless it's permanent, and unless it's verifiable, we will always be doing this, right?

We will always just be playing the game of whack-a-mole and bombing them every six months or a year or 18 months, if that's the strategy, if that's what you want to call it of this administration.

Yeah, yeah.

I want to come back to that at the very end on the Democratic Party on Iran, but I do want to ask you just two more things about Trump, because knowing your personal expertise in history, right?

So you're a veteran.

And

when you look at Pete Hexeth and what he's doing at the Pentagon,

how concerned are you that

the combination of the changes they're making at the kind of general officer level on down,

the cultural kind of uber MAGA, you know, Hegsethian

approach to things, right?

Donald Trump, you know, military parades, everything Trump says is right, and the deployments to the U.S.

military, right, in the United States?

Like I'm from Los Angeles, like the military is in my streets, literally.

How worried, what are you seeing, you know, about, and how worried are you about the,

you know, because people always thought the the military would be the, the last, you know, the hardest nut to crack for Trump, right?

It's the biggest, you know, most entrenched kind of bureaucracy that there is.

There's millions of people in it.

But are you worried that they could be trying to remake the military and Trump or Hegseth's image and that that might open up the door to the use of the U.S.

military in the United States in ways that we've not seen before?

Yeah.

Well,

a couple of things.

Number one, the way that Pete Hegseth operates his leadership style, again, if you want to call it that, even in Donald Trump, is completely antithetical to everything I learned in the military, right?

This notion of servant leadership, you know, from day one of boot camp, when I was a private and then when I became an officer, it's drilled into you.

It's servant leadership.

You know, when you're a paratrooper, you jump out of the plane first and then your soldiers follow.

You

eat last, you go to sleep last,

you suffer with your soldiers.

You know, this administration and the,

you know,

what the message they send over and over again is the rules don't apply to me, right?

They apply to everybody else, but not me, whether it's SignalGate, whether it's

kicking out trans members from the military, restrictions on women in service, and on and on.

It's truly abhorrent stuff.

And, you know, you look at my own combat experience.

You know, I went to war three times in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Afghanistan, and it was that experience that underscored for me the importance of protecting civilians in conflict zones, the importance of diplomacy and humanitarian aid, and all of the tools in our toolbox as a country, not just military power.

And frankly, the inherent limitations.

of military power.

Those are the lessons that I took away.

And I see what's happening now that basically the only thing that does matter is hard power and military power.

It's a recipe for disaster and it's not going to end well.

And then you add on top of that, you know, per your previous question, you know, I went to war in Iraq based on politicized intelligence.

You know, we spent 20 years in the war and terror

and a good chunk of that in Iraq, trillions of dollars, thousands of U.S.

soldiers' lives, hundreds of thousands of other lives ruined

because

politics was driving the intelligence.

Yeah.

Yeah, well, and to just kind of tie it together to one other issue I know you care a lot about, which is Afghans

or Iraqis that serve with us who are in the United States.

I had the kind of haunting feeling that you could have the U.S.

military deployed in support of ICE raids, as is the case in Los Angeles, that are going to roll up Afghans who are here without permanent status and try to send them back to Afghanistan.

I mean, is there anything that can be done to protect particularly

people like from Afghanistan and Iraq who, you know, served with the U.S.

military or supported the values that we were standing for there?

Well, we're, I mean, there are in action quite a few Republicans who are still involved in this issue.

We started in 2021, we started the bipartisan honoring our promises working group in Congress.

There's a number of Republicans that we continue to work with who served with Afghans during the war or whose families served with Afghans who are working with us to push back on this and try to protect them on an individual basis.

So there's that piece.

But then

to go back to your point about the use of military domestically, obviously a big concern of mine.

But what keeps me more awake at night is the provisions of the

Big Beautiful Bill, if you will, Donald Trump's disaster bill last week.

This is really what keeps me awake.

That bill

just tripled the budget of ICE.

And in one fell swoop,

it gave it a budget that is now bigger than the FBI, the DEA, the ATF, and Customs Service combined.

It made it the largest law enforcement entity in American history,

bigger than the U.S.

Marine Corps.

So they're going to hire loyalists.

They're going to hire.

they're going to create this ICE force

almost from scratch.

And it's going to have

very broad jurisdiction and authorities within the United States.

It's going to be tens of thousands of new agents.

And it's going to have unbelievable amounts of money, including large incarceration camp, an incarceration camp system around

the entire country.

That is scary as hell.

Yeah,

that's kind of the ultimate manifestation of the kind of darkness that we're dealing with in this period.

And I want to ask you one last question that should be the beginning of a conversation, Jason,

which is essentially about the future of the Democratic Party on these issues, right?

Yeah.

So I noticed in the Iran debate some of the old kind of left-right cleavages in the party between people who were opposed to the strikes or opposing them on their unconstitutional grounds, as you did, or that they were not the best way to solve the problem.

And then maybe people who weren't necessarily supportive, but who just were very quiet about it, including some of the leadership in the party.

And look, to be blunt, like these issues often get pretty intense, obviously, around Israel and Gaza or Israel and Iran.

I think also traditionally they've been on defense, they've been on China.

And it's usually framed as a left-center difference.

And frankly, it could bring in the border and refugees, right?

Some people who want to be more welcoming of refugees.

Some people want to take a harder line.

It feels like Trump is scrambling all this anyway, right?

I mean, in part because what he's doing is so extreme that everybody opposes it, like the ICE

money you just talked about, but also because he doesn't fit naturally in an ideological spectrum.

So, you know.

You're involved in leading candidate recruitment, for instance, for the DCCC, the Democratic Congressional Committee.

And you're someone who's navigated, I've noticed, over the years, you know, between these different wings.

You know, you don't have to be just, you know, dogmatically this way, progressive or centrist, just trying to find things that make sense.

How do you think about this?

How do we take what is kind of a blank slate after Joe Biden, I think, of what the Democratic Party stands for on foreign policy and try to both build consensus, but also consensus that isn't just like, hey, let's run back the tape to the rhetoric about American exceptionalism and

act like it's permanently the 90s.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, there's a couple of ways I think about this.

One One is

that

Americans want something different.

And if Democrats are not serious about that

and honest about that, if our solution is, hey, we're just going to fight back to Trumpism and we're going to try to preserve institutions as they are and we're going to build what once was, that will be

a massive failure.

We will have missed the point.

We will have not heard America, which is telling us very resoundingly that we want a new foreign policy vision and national security vision.

So that it has to look different, has to feel different, has to deliver differently.

So that's A.

And

this is Democrats' opportunity to say,

you know, we don't want everything to be destroyed and torn down, but that is what Trump is doing.

So if they're going to dismantle this system, then now we have the opportunity to build something new, right?

What What is the new progressive vision for national security and foreign policy for America that delivers for American people, that communicates with them, that has an ecosystem and an infrastructure that looks more like the American people rather than

the same people over and over again

making policy in this town,

which are great people.

A lot of them are great friends of mine and they're really smart people.

But listen, the sad reality is, and I'm running all around the country doing this recruiting, helping candidates, campaigning, doing this work.

And I can tell you, people are pissed off.

They think the system has failed them.

They don't want to go back.

And

they want it to look and feel and be different.

And they want some different people doing it too.

So we have to learn that lesson.

And then the second piece is

the two camps, the camps who are, you know, the one camp that is willing to allow

unbelievable presidential power, right?

We're in an era of the height of presidential power versus the camp that says, no, Congress is going to take it back, right?

So that's this whole different way of looking at the Iran thing, right?

So much of the rhetoric around the Iran strike is, was it obliterated?

Was it not obliterated?

Was it successful?

Was it not successful?

Well, that lens is a might makes right lens.

Yeah, it was illegal, right?

Like, you start with that, right?

It was illegal.

Yeah, right.

Like, I mean, so much that it was frustrating the hell out of me because it was like, wait a minute, all we're talking about is was it successful or not?

Because

the assumption is if it was successful, then it's okay.

No, it's not.

No, you shouldn't do things that aren't necessary that are illegal, even if they blow some things up.

You know, I mean, right.

And I've been pretty consistent about this, you know, that for over 20 years now, Democrat and Republican-controlled Congresses and Democrat and Republican-controlled administrations

have allowed war powers, have allowed immigration authorities, have allowed all sorts of things to go outside of the control of Congress as our Constitution divisions.

And I'm, you know, me and Tim Kaine and others are like, no, it's time to take it back, right?

We're not going to allow that to happen anymore.

And the reason you have 20 years, sorry,

I'm on my soapbox here, but the reason you have 20

years

is you get 20 years of a war that should have ended much sooner.

We spend $3 trillion,

thousands of lives, lost credibility, lost opportunity is because we stopped having a debate.

We financed it with debt.

Congress literally took one vote the entire 20-year period, and it stopped.

And, you know, I get jazzed about it because obviously I went and I fought in those wars and I saw people give their lives in these wars and it should have ended much much sooner.

And if Congress were involved in the way that our Constitution envisions, I think it would have.

Yeah, no, and not to mention the fact that the extraordinary immigration sanctions and other powers that were kind of accumulated in the war on terror, that's what Trump is using right now.

People should know that for everything from tariffs to deportations, it's all these extraordinary, you know, declarations of national emergencies, you know,

all these things that he's doing are kind of part of this infrastructure of presidential power so i i i i want to leave it there but you'll have to come back to talk more about this i think this is a great starting point though which is one way to think about it is before we start solving what our china policy is let's just agree on maybe we should actually have checks and balances in a congress that reins in the out-of-control executive because frankly you'll get more progressive outcomes as you say um if you don't concentrate power like this but jason crow i want to thank you so much it's a wide-ranging conversation uh we'll have much more to get to.

And we'll have to have you, obviously, back on before the midterms

to talk about kind of where this is all going as a party.

But thanks for your work on this and for joining us.

Yeah, thanks, Ben.

Good chatting.

Thanks to Congressman Crow for joining the show.

Ben, thanks again to you for podcasting Late from Europe.

Yeah, I'll be back.

Back in the studio next week, you know.

Well, I'm excited to see you.

Bring me some Chateau Neuf de Pap.

I will.

I will.

It's on my list.

Order a case, my friend.

You will not regret it.

All right.

Talk to you guys soon.

See ya.

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Our executive producers are me, Tommy Vitor, and Ben Rhodes.

The show is mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick.

Jordan Cantor is our audio engineer.

Audio support by Kyle Seglin and Charlotte Landis.

Thanks to our digital team, Ben Hefcote, Mia Kelman, William Jones, David Tolles, and Ryan Young.

Matt DeGroote is our head of production.

Adrian Hill is our senior vice president of news and politics.

If you want to get ad-free episodes, exclusive content, and more, consider joining our Friends of the Pod subscription community at crooked.com slash friends.

Don't forget to follow us at Crooked Media on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter for more original content, host takeovers, and other community events.

Plus, find Pod Save the World on YouTube for access to full episodes, bonus content, and much more.

If you're as opinionated as we are, please consider dropping us a review.

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

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