Trump’s Peace Prize Pipe Dream

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Welcome back to Pot Tate the World.

I'm Tommy Vitor.

I'm Ben Rhodes.

As folks watching on the YouTube know, Ben is currently zooming in from some sort of hammam,

a sauna, maybe a banya.

It's a nice wooden aesthetic.

That's why you need to subscribe to Pod Save the World on YouTube.

I'm basically zooming in from the Grand Budapest Hotel.

I'm somewhere in the former Austro-Hungarian Empire and enjoying myself.

So, yes, there is a sauna here, but I'm not in it right now, but it just looks like that.

You gotta find a Habsburg somewhere.

Ben, I would recommend that you maybe stay overseas and not come back because thanks to Trump and Republicans, 17 million people in this country are going to lose health care.

Our debt is going to explode because we're giving tax breaks to the richest people in the country.

The U.S.

government is going to fuck over clean energy producers for absolutely no reason and no one seems to care.

Yeah, I have to say that as bad as things are, they look even worse from outside the country because it doesn't make any sense when you're not like in the belly of that beast.

And to your point, Tommy, like one of the things I learned in all my years in government and since is that nothing is more important to America's position in the world than what we do in America.

It's not the foreign policy.

It's kind of what we're doing.

And stacking up trillions of dollars in debt and passing bills that lead to the deaths of thousands and thousands of Americans and gutting clean energy when the Chinese are like racing ahead.

None of that makes a lot of sense.

And it makes even less sense when you're looking at it from the outside in.

So I don't know.

I honestly, I mean, I can't think of a worse bill in my life than this.

No, can you?

No, no, truly.

And Dan said the same thing today.

I mean, yeah, China installed more wind turbines and solar panels last year than the rest of the world combined.

Why?

Because they understand that climate change is a real thing, but also because all of the industries of the future are insanely energy dependent.

Like all the AI stuff that we're talking about, all like those companies aren't going to be able to exist here in the United States if they can't get enough power.

And yet we're gutting tax credits for clean energy.

I mean, until the 11th hour bend, Republicans wanted to slap an excise tax on solar and wind energy projects that the estimates were would have increased the cost of your energy bill for your average consumer by up to 20%,

just because they wanted to do a favor for some like coal lobbyist or something.

Yeah.

I mean, we know that they are in bed with the fossil fuel industry, but the thing that gets me is that like part of this is also just the libs care about climate change, so we're gonna get rid of that right but these people i mean to just stay on the china point for a second china has spent over a decade reorienting their entire economy around clean energy around technological inputs for ai around supply chains for critical minerals and

We are look at the same people that love to talk really tough about how they're going to stand up the Chinese Communist Party are literally ensuring that the United States is not only unable to compete, but we're not even like in the conversation.

We're moving in the opposite direction, right?

Never mind what this is going to do to human beings in the United States.

It's hard to explain to people outside the country why you would cut off food assistance, why would you cut health care, why you would cut USAID, like why America seems to be in this kind of nihilistic, vengeful place.

And that's not a, I mean, it's not a good look.

Let's just put it that way.

No.

Hey, by the way, USAID is now officially dead.

There was a study in The Lancet, this respected medical journal, that estimates that USAID saved 92 million lives from 2001 until 2021, and that destroying it could kill 14 million people between now and 2030, 4.5 million of whom will be kids.

under five years old.

So that's what our government is doing.

They're passing a gigantic tax cut for the richest people on the planet, and they're throwing poor people off of Medicaid at the United States.

And then Elon Musk, who now apparently hates this fucking tax bill, couldn't see this one coming somehow, despite being, you know, the smartest person in the world, him and his Doge guys decided to kill off USAID, which, if you want to be really outraged, Ben, read the Washington Post story about all the babies in Sudan who are starving to death because Elon decided to tweet, we spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper.

Could have gone to some great parties, did that instead.

I guess the ketamine wore off a little too quickly and you decided to kill kids abroad.

Yeah.

And I think what we have to focus on here for a second is that the principal experience of the United States government that

hundreds of millions, if not billions of people have around the world, is USAID, right?

If you are living in large parts of the world, you are living on nutrition assistance from USAID, vaccines from USAID,

PEPFAR program for HIV AIDS from USAID, or even just, you know, lifelines for journalists from USAID, right?

All of that has been completely cut off for no discernible reason other than the whims of Elon Musk and Donald Trump coming in and kind of wanting to stick it to people because it's not any meaningful savings in the federal budget.

People that work on foreign policy, right?

People like yours and my former colleagues, like sit around and they debate whether or not

the strike blew up the facility at Fordo in Iran or what assistance we should provide to Ukraine.

And then we wonder why it is that most of the world does not agree with American foreign policy, why most of the world doesn't want to get on board with supporting Ukraine or pressuring the Iranians over their nuclear program.

This is fundamentally so much more important than anything else that has happened in recent years in U.S.

foreign policy.

This is pulling the rug out from these people in ways that are going to cause millions of deaths, including the deaths of children.

And then they're looking at us from the outside and saying, oh, not only do these people not care about people around the world, they're ripping healthcare away from 17 million Americans themselves.

What is going on in the United States?

Who is running this country, right?

What are the priorities of the people who are running this country?

And I think we have to just level with people.

Like one of the things we said after Trump was elected is like, we can't promise you that it's always going to be good news, but we can promise to tell you the truth.

When you stack up the USCID death today and this bill passing today, it's a pretty good emblem of who is running this country and what kind of message we're sending to Americans in the world about our priorities.

And it's not good.

And

everything we're going to be doing for the rest of our lives is kind of climbing out of this hole that we're currently descending into.

Yeah, it is.

Not to start on a dark note, but I mean, like, let's.

Yeah, yeah, that's the typical light banter you're used to at the top of the show here.

Yeah, no, it's a terrible week.

So

the Knicks still don't have a coach.

I mean, we can banter about that.

There you go.

Yeah.

There you go.

Well, some say getting rid of Tibbs was,

you know, reversing an atrocity.

Kind of a sense of anyway.

We're going to talk about the latest data about the impact of U.S.

and Israeli strikes on Iran and the impact it had on Iran's nuclear program.

We will talk about a fascinating profile of Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, who is apparently far more delusional than I thought possible, Ben.

We'll talk about the latest news about Trump's cruel immigration policies.

Israeli Prime Minister Bibinetan Yahoo is headed to DC again.

So we're going to talk about Trump attempting to interfere in his corruption trial, the latest from Gaza, violence in the West Bank.

We're going to update you on the latest from Ukraine, evaluate whether the peace agreement between the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda is Nobel Prize worthy.

There's some hope out of Hungary we'll get get to.

We'll tell you all about a new vacation destination.

And then, Ben, I was supposed to talk with Senator Mark Warner today about all things Iran, but then he was literally up all night voting on this Republican tax cut monstrosity and had to cancel, which I totally understand.

But rain check for him.

Yeah,

understandable rain check, I have to say.

The one thing I should add this part of the world, too, is that we could banter about quickly is the Jeff Bezos wedding was getting a lot of coverage out here.

And talk about kind of embarrassing, you know, like you're an American traveling around Europe, right?

And literally, the top story is just like all these kind of lame influencers like descending on Venice.

So I don't know about that.

It's well timed for the tax bill, I guess.

Big takeaway from that, right?

Yeah, that guy needs a tax cut.

Big takeaway from that to me was when you have that many celebrities at a wedding, it says to me that you don't have a lot of real friends, but who am I to judge from afar?

So, all right, Ben, let's turn to Iran because we are slowly learning more about the impact of the U.S.

and Israeli strikes on Iran Iran over the past couple of weeks.

According to Iranian state media, the official death count is 935 people.

Now, obviously, we take Iranian state media with a grain of salt.

They also don't distinguish between military and civilian casualties.

But the count I just read includes 38 children and 132 women.

And we also just, we know for a fact that entire apartment buildings were flattened when Israel targeted certain Iranian generals and scientists.

So there certainly were civilian casualties.

Iranian state media also reported that the IDF airstrike airstrike on Even prison killed 71 people.

That strike still baffles me, Ben.

I mean, I guess the goal was like somehow free the political prisoners trapped there.

But in practice, it killed inmates.

It killed people in surrounding buildings.

It killed some relatives of inmates who were at the prison because they decided to conduct the airstrike during visiting hours for some reason.

Separate from that, the Washington Post reported that U.S.

intelligence intercepted communications between senior Iranian officials who were talking about the strikes on Iran's nuclear infrastructure and remarking that the impact wasn't as bad as they'd expected.

Now, we don't know who these guys are.

We don't know how credible this intelligence was, but just another data point as we kind of try to add all this up and learn more over time.

Trump's official position is still that Iran's nuclear program was totally obliterated.

Most others have a more nuanced take.

Here's International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Rafael Grossi on Face the Nation Sunday.

Here's a clip: The capacities they have are there.

They can have,

you know, in a matter of months, I would say,

a few cascades of

centrifuges spinning and producing enriched uranium.

Or less than that.

But as I said,

frankly speaking, one cannot claim that everything has disappeared and there is nothing there.

It is clear that there has been severe damage, but it's not total damage, first of all.

And secondly, Iran has the capacities there, industrial and technological capacities.

So if they so wish, they will be able to start doing this again.

And here's friend of the pod, Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy, talking to reporters just moments after he was briefed by the administration on the impact of the strikes.

What President Trump told the country is that those

that Iran's nuclear capability was obliterated, and it just was not obliterated.

As open reporting has suggested, these strikes did not destroy all of their rich uranium.

It did not destroy all of their centrifuges, and it certainly didn't destroy their knowledge.

And so it stands to reason that they can reconstitute their nuclear program within months.

And what are we going to do?

We're going to carry out these massive $100 million

strikes every three or four months?

No, you need a diplomatic agreement.

And these strikes ultimately set back those diplomatic conversations.

So, man, I think the most honest answer is we don't know for sure yet what the impact of the bombing campaign was.

That is why, as Grossi says over and over and over again in that interview, IAEA needs access so they can do inspections so we can learn more.

But everyone who isn't Donald Trump seems to acknowledge that it wasn't totally obliterated, that we don't know where all of Iran's stockpile of enriched uranium is, and that we assume that Iran also has stockpiles of centrifuge equipment and other specialized gear that will allow them to resume their nuclear activities if they want.

So this is, again, this is so frustrating because Trump is taking a victory lap.

The press is reporting on these strikes as if war is a quick and easy solution to this problem.

When in reality, it's just the story is not finished.

Yeah,

two things.

First, I do want to come to the civilian casualty point.

And the point I want to make about this is that whenever you hear Bibi Netanyahu talk about kind of extending a hand to the Iranian people or trying to help the Iranian people, you know, overthrow a regime that is bad to them,

that is complete and utter bullshit.

The only audience for that is a American audience, right?

The only audience for that is kind of the bibi netanyahu chorus of supporters in the U.S.

Because, number one, he gives those speeches in English.

But number two, if you actually wanted to help

people who wanted to deal with the Iranian regime, you wouldn't kill people in Avon prison with bombs.

You wouldn't kill civilians in apartment buildings.

And frankly, and we heard this from Nilu Tabrizi last week, but I've heard more over the last week and talking to people.

I've talked to some people who have family and friends in Iran.

What they've said is, predictably, the regime has cracked down hard on all opposition over the course of the last week.

Extremely hard, yeah.

They've rolled up people, the gains that the women life freedom movement had made, including women walking around with their hair covered, those are at risk.

So put aside any of the sanctimony about how we're coming to the aid of the Iranian people.

This basically guaranteed a crackdown on the Iranian people by this regime.

Second thing is on the nuclear program, we have to call what Trump said for what it is.

It's a lie.

It's a complete and utter bullshit lie that this program was obliterated.

I don't know exactly the state of the program.

I do know it was not obliterated.

Donald Trump is not deep underground in Ford able to see what happened to that facility.

He's not able to see what barrels of highly enriched uranium might have been moved someplace else.

He's not able to see what scientific capacity still persists in Iran.

He's not able to see what the uranium supply chain is in Iran.

He's lying to you, right?

And the U.S.

media reports it as a, well, Trump says it's obliterated and some other people said it's not.

It has not been obliterated.

And we did this assessment back in the Obama years.

This is open source that even if you had a much more successful bombing campaign than even this one, right?

One that was more than one day, the most you could set back that program by bombing it is about a year.

And I don't even think Trump did that.

Now, we won't know what the U.S.

intelligence assessment is for weeks or months because you have to gather everything you have in your toolkit to figure out what you can put together here because there are no inspectors on the ground.

But we can't trust what the Trump intelligence community tells us anymore because we've seen him, as we've talked about on this pod before, we've seen him demand the intelligence community give him the answer he wants.

So the long and short of this thing is we don't know the damage it was done.

Probably it set back this program by like a few months.

It may have incentivized the Iranians to go underground, try to develop a crude nuclear device with the enriched uranium they have, with the centrifuges they have, with the knowledge that they have.

Look, if Trump can...

steer this into some diplomatic solution that gets inspectors on the ground and gets verifiable limitations on the Iranian nuclear program, that's a different conversation.

All we know now is that this killed a lot of people.

It

empowered the worst aspects of the regime that is cracking down.

And it didn't deal with the nuclear program in a comprehensive way that diplomacy can do.

And that's just the reality of this thing.

Yeah, and Trump keeps saying that Iran is exhausted and they don't even want to think about trying to reconstitute their nuclear program.

That is a view that is not shared by anyone else, including his biggest cheerleaders, people like Lindsey Graham, who is like, oh, I know this story isn't over.

I know they'll keep going after it.

You know, Netanyahu is not suggesting that Iran is ready to give up its nuclear programs.

Like that piece of, you know, he's talking about this like he's permanently solved the problem, which is just utter nonsense.

But Ben, I mean, speaking of demanding intelligence match Trump's personal views or, you know, political needs, an interesting subplot that came out of this Iran debate has been the complete and total marginalization of Tulsi Gabbard, Trump's director of national intelligence, who came into the administration as arguably its most high-profile anti-war voice.

Now, The Atlantic had a fascinating story last week about how Tulsi is now on the outs with Trump, who has even mused about eliminating the DNI position entirely.

But Ben, maybe the most shocking part of this story is that, yeah, we all knew Tulsi was a weirdo, but she's a political survivor, you know, like someone who's figured out a way to become a cabinet secretary from backbench Democratic congressperson.

Like that's an impressive, you know, political path.

But she apparently has mused to people that she thinks the DNI position could be a stepping stone stone to another presidential campaign, which is just like absolutely delusional.

I've never heard anyone suggest that this job is a stepping stone like that.

A couple other highlights from this story, Ben, an anonymous Trump ally said Gabbard was, quote, a non-player and that they want to call someone to influence Trump.

They don't even think of her.

It's rough.

That talked about that bizarre, strange-to-camera nuclear annihilation video that we played on this show a couple of weeks back, which we still haven't really had explained to us, but it talked about how Trump basically basically yelled at her in the Oval Office.

And then a former deputy director of the CIA in the early 2000s, John McLaughlin, said Gabbard is weaponizing intelligence in the name of combating weaponization,

which is something we've also talked about here.

So a lot of folks are noticing just how much she's kind of sold her soul.

So, Ben, I mean, again, like this administration is chocked full of people who sold their souls.

Look at JD Vance, who,

you know, ran about, you know, fighting for Mima and PPA in 2017, attacked efforts in Congress to rip health care away from people through Medicaid cuts and now calls taking insurance away from millions of people immaterial.

That was his tweet today.

But Tulsi is up there because it really did seem like the one thing she really sincerely cared about was keeping the United States out of wars in the Middle East.

And now she is part of this propaganda effort that made it happen in Iran.

Yeah, that's right.

And I think, look, beyond the, it's kind of funny to think of the DNI as a stepping stone to the presidency.

I mean, it'll only be pretty hardcore worldos who are familiar with like Jim Clapper and John Negroponte and

even our good friend.

All the political people in the world.

Even our good friend Avril Haynes, who would never claim that she's going to be president of the United States, not exactly a stepping stone to the presidency.

Never want to try, yeah.

Put aside the fact that it's a pretty important job, right?

The reason it was created was to coordinate the entire intelligence community, all these various agencies, all their budgets, all their information, connecting the dots.

Remember that if you're around back in the 9-11 days, the DNI was there to make sure that, you know, if there's information in the CIA and the FBI and the NSA, it doesn't get like stovepiped.

It gets connected so we can uncover plots and things like that.

That's clearly not happening, first of all, right?

But this is a really important point about the Iran thing, because Trump is trying to pretend like on the one hand, he quote-unquote obliterated the Iranian nuclear program.

On the other hand, it wasn't a real war.

It was like a quick war, right?

Because he stopped it pretty quickly.

Look, he just bombed a country of over 90 million people that the United States has not directly attacked before.

That's going to have a tale that lasts a generation.

It may flare up again.

We may have to go back in there and bomb those Iranian nuclear facilities again if he keeps listening to Lindsey Graham and Bibi Nanyao.

Or the Iranians may hit back at us in six months or a year or two years.

Or the Iranians might pop up with a nuclear weapon.

We cannot allow them.

And and this is where the Democratic Party's kind of unwillingness to speak with one voice against these strikes is a really dumb mistake.

We cannot allow him to act like he didn't just do what he just did.

All these people like Tulsi Gabbard and all these MAGA people that say that they're against forever wars were proven to be full of shit.

Like they did the thing that

not even Barack Obama and Joe Biden for all the

military actions they took, this is the one that they restrained Israel from doing.

this is one that they didn't do so like she cannot claim anymore to be this person who's against forever wars who's against you know the united states starting new wars in the middle east she's a part of that and all of them are and we have to kind of continue to remind people that these people were lying to you about wanting to keep the united states out of conflicts in the middle east i mean and also to people who are listening like what can iran do about it so in 2020 when trump assassinated Qasmuq Sulmani the head of the IRGC the Iranians decided they were going to try to return the favor and assassinate top American officials who were associated with or kind of like driving that policy for that assassination.

We recently learned the Washington Post about four days ago published a report that said in 2022, the Iranians figured out what hotel in Paris that Mike Pompeo was staying at, and they tried to assassinate him there.

And Pompeo apparently barely escaped.

We don't know all the details because obviously obviously he doesn't want them out there for ongoing security reasons, but it does speak to their capacity and their long memories and the desire for vengeance from a country when you repeatedly kill its leaders or bomb the shit out of its nuclear program.

That's right.

The taillisting could be long.

And the only other thing I was going to add, Tommy, is that there are currently 40,000 Americans in the Middle East, service members, right?

There are aircraft carriers there.

We have a much bigger presence there than we should otherwise have because of this Iran strike.

So even though we're not like in an act of war with the Iranians, we are spending billions of dollars.

We have tens of thousands of Americans there.

We have aircraft carriers there.

We are not pivoting to Asia or all the things that we talk about that we want to do.

Okay.

So this is still having an impact on our foreign policy and it is militarizing our foreign policy in the Middle East and is keeping us enmeshed in the conflicts there.

And Tulsi Gabbard is a part of that.

Yeah.

And it's crazy that we still have 40,000 U.S.

troops in the Middle East.

It's time to start winding down some of those missions.

Ben, while we're talking about sort of Trump policy, we should just quickly point out that the Trump administration just ended temporary protected status for about 500,000 Haitians in the United States.

These are people who, the deportations could start as soon as September 2nd.

So the White House is now trying to claim it is safe enough for people to return to Haiti, but that is just unmitigated bullshit.

Over 1,800 people were kidnapped in Haiti, and over 8,000 have been killed since March of last year due to this ongoing gang violence.

Gangs and armed groups control 85% of Port-au-Prince, the capital city.

Government services and security has just all but collapsed.

But again, this is part of this policy, this immigration policy from Stephen Miller, which is basically treat any migrant in the cruelest, most inhumane way possible in an effort to scare others.

And that includes sending people to some of the most dangerous countries in the world, which in this case is Haiti.

But in other cases, they're talking about sending people to places like Libya or South Sudan, even if they are not from there, don't know the language, have no ties, have no way to survive.

It's just, it's some truly evil stuff.

Yeah, I mean, the first thing is that these people were here legally, right?

Temporary protected status means that you were here with a legal status in the United States.

But Tommy, my question for you is: what do you think is more dangerous, right?

To be from Port-au-Prince, where you have like this immense violence and complete breakdown of governance, or to be a white South African farmer.

Yeah, right.

You know, I mean, that tells you that gives away the game.

Clearly, right?

That gives away the whole game.

Yes, that's absolutely right.

It's

the most racist policy imaginable.

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All right, Ben, so let's pivot back to the Middle East, much like this White House is doing.

So because Washington is like a magnet for the the shittiest people in the world israeli prime minister bibi netanyahu is heading there on monday july 7th to meet with trump again i'm sure it'll be a very subtle victory lap about iran there we'll also probably talk about expanding the abraham accords middle east peace whatever else um in the lead up to that meeting though uh trump has decided to take up the cause of interfering in netanyahu's various corruption trials um here is a message he posted on truth social over the weekend this is a quote it is terrible what they are doing in israel to bib netanyahu how is it possible that the Prime Minister of Israel can be forced to sit in a courtroom all day long over nothing, cigars, Bugs, Bunny doll, etc.?

It is a political witch hunt, very similar to the witch hunt that I was forced to endure.

The United States of America spends billions of dollars a year, far more than on any other nation, protecting and supporting Israel.

We are not going to stand for this.

So it does sound like he's now conditioning military aid on Netanyahu getting off for these various corruption charges.

For those who don't know what he's talking about, Netanyahu has been on trial since around 2020 for all kinds of different corruption instances.

It includes taking hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of gifts, including champagne and cigars, in exchange for political favors.

He is accused of offering to harm this one Israeli news publication in exchange for favorable coverage from its rival publication.

He's accused of offering to help a telecom company with some sort of regulatory relief in exchange for good press coverage.

The owner of the telecom company owned some news outlet, and basically that was the deal.

Like, I'll help out your phone company if you give me good press in your news outlet.

Netanyahu's goal here has just been delay, delay, delay these trials.

He often asks to delay proceedings for national security reasons.

Surprise, surprise, that delay was granted after Trump's tweet.

So then, I guess, just stepping back, like, I am very used to after many, many years of Trump, watching the worst people in politics win and get away with terrible things.

But, like, if Trump somehow manages to get Netanyahu a pardon via Truth Social, I'm not sure I can do, I can do this anymore.

Like, I think I might just like call it a day.

Yeah.

I mean, the funny thing is that, like, you get these impressions that Trump doesn't really like Netanyahu, right?

Like, he's dropping F-bombs, telling Israeli pilots to turn around in the air, and he's like frustrated.

But this kind of, you know, gives away the game, right?

Because what he does like is corrupt autocrats like himself, you know, like Trump.

I mean, whether, by the way, whether it's Bibi Bibi Nanyao or Eric Adams in New York City, right?

Like if you have been guilty of crimes

and you have autocratic tendencies, Trump's going to come to your defense.

Yeah.

Sympathy for them, none for the Haitian people who are being massacred in Port-au-Prince.

Or the people of Gaza, or the people of Iran.

I mean, that's the thing is,

like, the timing of this Iran strike, right, was not, as we've talked about, because of any imminent threat from the Iranian nuclear program.

It's been pretty clear to, and this is what a lot of Israeli political observers who still have some impartiality will say, is that Netanyahu has been perpetuating both the war in Gaza and escalating the war in Lebanon, the war in Iran, in part because it guarantees his political survival.

It keeps his coalition together, keeps him in power.

If he's not in power, like Trump, he could go to prison, right?

Well, that's the kind of thing that appeals to Trump.

So here you have Trump, like literally interfering in the Israeli political process to put the thumb on the scale for Bibi because he doesn't like to see an autocrat held accountable for his crimes just like he didn't want to be held accountable for his crimes.

The two things that Bibi Nanyao and Donald Trump have in common is that they're autocrats and if they weren't in power, they'd be in prison, right?

And that's the basis of this entire alliance here.

And, you know, Bibi's going to fly over to the U.S.

He'll do a huge victory lap in Iran.

He'll echo Trump's claims that the program was obliterated.

He'll act like this was Winston Churchill 2.0 when they don't have any evidence to back that up.

The only other thing I'd say is that this idea that it's just cigars, I mean, you made this point.

Yes, there are a lot of gifts, including tawdry gifts like cigars.

It was also the corruption of the entire Israeli political process on things like media licenses, right?

So this was about someone weaponizing power to not only enrich themselves like Trump does, but to

intimidate the media like Trump does as well.

So these are people following the same playbook, and they want to give each other immunity for pursuing that autocratic playbook.

Yeah, that's exactly right.

So, let's talk about Gaza because presumably it will be a conversation when they get together.

But Trump's statements about Gaza lately have been completely divorced from reality.

He told reporters that there could be a ceasefire in about a week.

That seems nuts.

I mean, Gaza has faced some of the heaviest Israeli bombardment since the war started in recent days.

And the New York Times reported that there's been no progress on ceasefire talks.

On Sunday, the IDF announced one of the largest evacuation orders since the war started back up in March.

There were massive strikes in that area since, including one on a beachside cafe in Gaza City that killed over 40 people.

And according to the CNN, this cafe was a well-known spot for students, journalists, and remote workers.

I don't know if you've seen the images from this strike, Ben, but they're fucking horrific.

The Guardian cites Israeli officials who say that this seized territory in northern Gaza is meant to act as a bargaining chip in negotiations with Hamas.

The IDF chief of staff seemed to signal last week that the military was close to reaching its goal that they'd set back in May of controlling 75% of the Gaza Strip.

And on the humanitarian front, I mean, the Gaza Health Foundation, the GHF, that Israeli U.S.

kind of business venture that is supposed to replace the UN to do food distribution in Gaza, is still just an unmitigated disaster.

There are still people starving to death.

The distribution points have become death traps for Palestinians.

The UN estimates that around 580 people have been killed at these sites since GHF operations began.

Haaretz ran a devastating expose, quoting IDF soldiers who said they were ordered to fire on unarmed crowds of Gazans as a means of crowd control, even when those people pose no threat.

They counted at least 19 shooting incidents at GHF sites, including the use of grenades, artillery, tank shells, drone strikes.

Haaretz also reported that the death hole in Gaza could be approaching 100,000 people, which is well above the 56,000 figure from the Gaza Health Ministry that you always hear derided as Hamas numbers.

Just worth noting that there's now a couple pieces of more academic literature or attempts to look at, do studies to figure out the death toll in Gaza that find numbers that are much higher than the Gaza Health Ministry.

So, Ben, I think the question is, just stepping back, like Trump is obsessed with getting a Nobel Peace Prize, right?

We'll talk about the DRC-Congo deal that just got done that he thinks merits him getting one.

He said that, you know, negotiating a ceasefire between India and Pakistan should get him a Nobel Peace Prize.

The question is, does he think a Gaza deal would warrant a peace prize?

Because we don't really hear him talk about it in this context, which makes me just wonder, does he care?

Is that not part of the calculus?

Because he is sadly the only person, I think, who has the leverage to force Netanyahu to stop fighting, but he is still not using it.

Yeah, I think what was really telling is that when Trump did come out and say and dropped that F-bomb and said, Israel's got to cut it out, turn the pilots around that we're going to bomb Iran, Israel stopped, right?

So,

and by the way, just so people know that we're equal opportunity critics here, the same would have been true of Joe Biden.

If Joe Biden had said, you know, I'm cutting you guys off if you don't stop in Gaza.

He is not doing anything to stop.

what Bibi Ninya is doing in Gaza.

In fact, he went along with this Potemkin, you know, aid distribution mechanism that turns out, based on Haaretz's reporting, is in part just a death trap for Palestinians to get picked off in the inevitable mayhem that happens when you have starving people

choke pointed to one aid distribution point.

Trump could stop this if he wanted to.

If he did the same thing that he did on Iran and said, cut this out.

I'm cutting you guys off if you don't stop it.

He's not doing that.

He's just not doing that.

And clearly, he doesn't see any humanity in the people in Gaza, right?

Like

his only plan for Gaza that he's ever articulated has math ethnic cleansing as its basis, right?

Move them out and we'll rebuild the Gaza Strip.

The other thing that I'm very curious to see how it plays out, Tommy, is that he clearly wants this Abraham Accords white whale normalization between Saudi Arabia and Israel.

But Saudis have been pretty clear that they can't do that absent a Palestinian state or like a very credible pathway to a Palestinian state.

And yet they kind of keep talking themselves into the belief that this is going to happen.

I mean, you and I were going back and forth on this kind of strange Jerusalem Post report of Bibi and Trump and Ron Durbert and Marco Rubio like celebrating that this is going to happen.

I mean, I see no pathway forward here other than the continued annihilation of the people of Gaza and just no plan for how to deal with that and no regard for the fact that this is the biggest humanitarian catastrophe in the world today and in any recent times, and Trump is doing nothing to stop it.

Yeah.

And also, like, meanwhile, been in the West Bank, Israeli settlers are completely out of control.

And this is part of a trend that has been worsening since the October 7th attacks.

Just for reminder for folks that the West Bank was captured by Israel in 1967, and Israeli settlements in the West Bank are considered illegal by the international community.

But just in terms of the recent events, so on Wednesday of last week, over 100 settlers attacked the Palestinian town of Kafar Malik with Molotov cocktails and rocks.

They set homes and cars on fire.

And then Israeli troops responded to the scene by opening fire on Palestinians, killing three.

The IDF alleges that the Palestinians were throwing stones at them and shooting at soldiers, but we don't know.

The IDF also arrested five settlers.

And then on Friday, dozens of settlers attacked some IDF soldiers in that same area.

And a teenage settler was wounded in that fight.

And then on Sunday night, a demonstration outside an IDF base near Ramallah turned into a riot with settlers swarming the base, setting fires, attacking soldiers, and vandalizing property.

So you have violent settlers now attacking the IDF.

Since October 7th, close to 900 Palestinians have been killed, and thousands were wounded in the West Bank, but there's almost never any accountability for that kind of violence.

The New York Times put it, an Israeli rights group that examined more than 1,600 cases of settler violence in the West Bank between 2005 and 2023 found that just 3% ended in a conviction.

But this settler violence against the IDF did get Netanyahu's attention, who said, quote,

No functioning country can tolerate violent anarchistic acts such as burning of a military facility, damage to Israeli military property, and assaults on security personnel by the country's own citizens.

And then far-right lunatic politician Itzmar Ben-Gavir called the violence against the military base a red line.

And I guess, you know, interesting that that's where he drew the red line, Ben, not murdering, you know, innocent Palestinian people.

I mean, no surprise.

Again, this is a guy who literally is a terrorist sympathizer, who used to have a

photo of a Jewish mass murderer of Palestinians on his wall.

But, you know, it's interesting when these guys reveal themselves.

So, Ben, you know, listeners to this show know that we were very hard on the Biden administration's Gaza policy in particular and his handling of the relationship with Netanyahu.

However, this is an area where Biden did do some stuff, took some important steps, like putting forward this executive order that allowed the U.S.

to sanction people involved in or supporting settler violence.

Trump revoked those sanctions on his first day in office, and I think is generally seen as a friend or fellow traveler of the settler movement.

So it is a good example where the Trump policy has gotten worse.

Yeah, and I think what people have to understand about the settler violence is, you know, we occasionally, there's there's an incident that is so bad that it gets our attention, but this is entirely systematic violence, right?

This happens on a regular basis all the time.

And look,

most of the time, as you mentioned, there's total impunity to this, right?

They'll go, they'll kill Palestinians, they'll burn Palestinian homes, they'll harm Palestinians, maybe they'll get arrested and then they'll get released, right?

And so

there's no surprise, really, that they feel the impunity to even go after the IDF, because that's the kind of climate that has been created, the kind of lawlessness that's been created in the West Bank.

And sure, this got the attention of the Israeli authorities that they attacked the IDF, but it doesn't get their attention when they killed 900 Palestinians, you know.

And I think the thing to watch here is whether or not in the next three and a half years, which we have left of Trump, you know, hopefully, it's just that,

whether there's a move to annex the West Bank, whether this kind of mixture of BB's politics and the settler violence and the growth of settlements leads them to say now is the time to just try to annex the West Bank and displace the Palestinians from this part of their land as well.

And the only other thing I'd add to the Trump part of this is that, look, in addition to revoking those sanctions, his ambassador in Israel, Mike Huckabee, refers to the West Bank as Judea and Samarra.

Those are the Israeli terminology for what this land is.

Basically, Mike Hockabee says, this is not the West Bank.

This is not Palestinian land.

This is not occupied land.

This is part of Greater Israel.

And that creates a climate of impunity from the United States of America.

When the ambassador over there, and by the way, he's not doing it because

he's doing it because he's an evangelical Christian, right, who believes that

we need

Israel to control all this land so that

the second coming can happen and they can be converted to Christianity, right?

So this is.

Yeah, he's a big big friend of the Jews until he's not.

Until the rapture happens, right?

But this is all a climate of impunity, right?

And Trump is feeding into it.

Yeah, Mike Huckabee is a total fucking weirdo.

The text that he sent to Trump that then got published about how he was like God's servant on the earth and bomber on was one of the weirdest things I've ever heard.

What was creepier, by the way, Tommy?

I want to ask you, the Mike Huckabee thing saying that he was God's servant or Mark Ruta calling Trump daddy

in the text or whatever the thing you said.

Yeah, Mark Ruta, the new head of NATO,

that broke through to like normies in my life.

People who are like, did you see this thing about that guy that called Trump daddy?

And I was like, yeah, it's honestly, it's way worse than you think.

It's worse than you think.

Yeah.

It's sadder than you think.

You know, Ben, you know, you make a really good point about this West Bank settler violence

rarely getting attention.

You're right.

This instance got an attempt, made a lot of news because you had settlers attacking members of the IDF.

It rarely

makes news when it's just, you know,

settler on Palestinian violence.

One, it is worth just sort of considering that in this sort of next quick mention, which is

some comments made at the Glastonbury Music Festival in the UK got a lot of attention.

For those who don't know, it's like kind of like a Coachella-style music festival in the UK.

Iconic, really famous, looks super fun.

One of the artists performing, this guy, Pascal Robinson Foster, who's part of a punk rap duo, Bob Villain, led the crowd in a death to the IDF IDF chant.

And this happened as the BBC was live streaming.

Also, the Irish band Kneecap performed.

They led chants like Free Palestine, as well as chants against British Prime Minister Kier Starmer, who said they shouldn't be performing at Glastonbury at all.

So the Trump administration has already moved to punish

Bob Villan, the band.

They revoked their U.S.

visas so they can't tour.

Obviously, I do not condone chanting things like, you know, death to the IDF.

That is hate speech.

That is inciting violence.

And it's it's not even remotely helpful to the Palestinian cause since, you know, every defender of this war will now point to that to suggest that like, you know, kind of the Israeli government is a real victim here and not the people getting bombed in Gaza.

But apparently the police have opened a criminal investigation into both bands, which seems, was surprising to me when I read it.

And there's all these recriminations at the BBC for not cutting the live stream.

And like, on some level, I get that.

Like, you know, it's fair to ask why was there no one with sort of like an editorial eye on the proceedings that might like cut away to a different band or why was there no 30-second delay.

But I think that conversation is really missing the broader point of just how far gone Israel's reputation is with a lot of young people everywhere.

And that doesn't mean that it's okay to chant, kill the IDF, but like

it suggests.

how far the Overton window has moved.

You know what I mean?

And just how radicalized young people are against this war.

And I don't know, I guess I'm more surprised that people are surprised by that than almost anything else.

And again, like, I don't condone that speech.

I don't think it's helpful.

It's obviously hate speech, right?

Like, fuck that.

That guy's an idiot.

He did not help anyone in Palestine or in Gaza by chanting that stuff.

But like,

that's probably a sentiment shared by a lot of young people.

Yeah, no, we should come back to this because, look,

I don't claim to be a Bob Villan fan.

But

and look, the hate speech is the point, right?

Like death to anybody's bad look.

But I think people are missing, like, if there's still people that are listening to us who are mad at us for our takes on Israel, I ask you to consider from your own perspective, which is that young people on the left and the right don't understand what the fuck is going on in Gaza, like, and see it as totally indefensible.

And these efforts to kind of quash any discussion of it only only make that worse, right?

Because there was a lot of heavy-handed tactics in the UK leading up to Glossenberry, like to, you know, the BBC is not going to play kneecap set, or they named this one organization that had vandalized a couple of, you know, military hardware as a terrorist organization.

This is driving young people to Bob Villain, to kneecap.

Yeah, I never heard of Bob Villain until I read all these reports about people being mad about this.

Dude, my, I mean, not to betray my own algorithm, but my Instagram is full of like, you know, the kneecap set, you know, like, and, but also, like, I was watching like Theo Vaughan interview Thomas Massey, right?

The, the kind of, you know, Republican, right, who's been against support for Israel.

And he was asking in this kind of befuddled way, like, hey, what do we get out of all this?

billions of dollars you give to Israel, right?

I just think that you're making a big mistake if you think that you're going to like, I mean, just to name somebody like Jonathan Greenblatt, who loves to like the head of the ADL, who loves to police anti-Semitism and loves to call people who criticize Israel anti-Semites, he may think that he can like, you know, try to intimidate certain mainstream media, right, on this stuff, but they're you losing young people across the board here, right?

And now, fundamentally, they're losing young people because of the conduct of what Israel is doing in Gaza.

But these, this idea that you know, we're just going to shut everybody up is not the way to

deal with young people.

Yeah, Ben, Jonathan Grieblatt actually wrote an op-ed in the New York Post calling a bunch of critics of the war with Iran anti-Semites.

He included me in there for suggesting that the Israelis dragged us into the war, which for those who have eyeballs and who have been reading news reports about what happened know that Netanyahu started a war with Iran knowing that Israel did not have the military capabilities to take out Fordo, their most important nuclear site, and needed the U.S.

to do it, which Trump then did.

So I don't know.

I'm not entirely sure what is anti-Semitic about that.

It's more just sort of stating the obvious.

But my response to him is, this is a very naked attempt to silence your political enemies by weaponizing the charge of anti-Semitism.

And when you do that, you set back very important, sincere efforts to combat anti-Semitism in this country and around the world.

And that is a shame because the ADL is an incredible institution.

It's been around for over a century.

They've done historically important work in this country.

And when you make it this cheap political hackery, you are harming it and you are harming the goal of the organization.

And that's terrible.

Can I tell you one story that might make you feel a bit better, Tommy, about this?

Back in 2015 during the Iran deal debate, Obama was making this argument that the same people that got us into war in Iraq were trying to get us to go to war in Iran, right?

And Jonathan Greenblatt had just taken over the head of the ADL, and he wrote an op-ed basically accusing Obama of being an anti-Semite for making this argument.

Now, the funny thing about this is the piece that Obama was referring to was an op-ed written by John Bolton, who, spoiler, is not Jewish, which had the headline, bomb, bomb bomb, bomb Iran, right?

Like the Beach Voice song.

I remember that piece.

And so I had to brief Obama, like, hey, like, the head of the ADL is

like suggesting you might be anti-Semite or we're all anti-Semites for making this argument.

And Obama was like,

on what basis?

And I think Greenbott had said something like they were dog whistles.

And Obama's like, I think I know dog whistles.

You know, I hear them a lot, right?

So anyway, it's not just you.

He's been playing this card for a decade now.

Okay, we're going to take a quick break before we do two very important things.

First, the Supreme Court is unloading just a deluge of crap on us, and it's hard to keep up with.

If you want to learn more about what they're doing, check out Strict Scrutiny, host Melissa, Leah, and Kate.

They break them all down for you, all the cases in the most digestible way possible.

They start with the Machmood versus Taylor case, which is the case about whether parents can opt their kids out of lessons involving LGBT-inclusive books.

And don't miss their episode on birthright citizenship, that decision.

It's in your feed now.

Tune into Strict Scrutiny wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube.

Also, Republicans in Congress are maybe a day or two away from passing their big, beautiful bill for good and turning it into law.

It's going to take away health care from millions of people.

It's going to give billionaires another tax break.

It's going to rip away food assistance from needy people.

It is an unmitigated disaster.

We still have a little bit of time to call our reps and spam them on social media.

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All right, a few more things from us, Ben.

So, a quick update on the latest in Ukraine, where according to the Wall Street Journal, the front line of the war now stretches 750 miles from the northeast to the south of the country.

Russia has started a summer offensive.

They've amassed 50,000 troops near the Sumi Oblast in the northeast.

Russian troops outnumbered Ukrainians three to one in the area, which is quite ominous.

A Ukrainian soldier told the Wall Street Journal that Russians are losing around 300 to 400 soldiers a day and that, quote, their numbers are a big problem for us, but though not enough to overrun us, but let's hope that that holds.

The Washington Post reported that the Russian military, despite outnumbering Ukraine, has still had lots of self-inflicted wounds that are hampering its progress.

There's corruption, supply shortages, bad intelligence, bad training.

A Russian general and deputy defense minister was just convicted of corruption and sentenced to 13 years in a penal colony.

So that's sort of an example how the fish rots from the head down.

Russia claimed to have captured the entire Luhansk region, one of four to legally annexed back in 2022.

If that is true, it would be the first time that they have had complete control over one of those four regions.

So that would be a big milestone for Russia.

As of this recording, there's been no comment from Kyiv on the status, so we'll see.

But throughout all of this, Russian missiles and drones have not let up.

An overnight barrage going into Sunday reportedly included over 500 drones and missiles and other new records.

So any hope of sort of supply shortages from the Russian military have not borne out.

And a New York Times headline on Sunday about the war Swisset et al., which was under a drone swarm sky surviving in eastern Ukraine.

On top of that, Ben, you know, the Financial Times, Christopher Miller, friend of the pot, has been on the show a few times, wrote a piece about how the Russian FSB intelligence service is recruiting Ukrainian teenagers to spy for them and conduct sabotage operations within Ukraine.

A Ukrainian official told him that 25% of the 700 people they've arrested for espionage, arson, or pipe bombs that were directed by Russian intelligence were under the age of 18.

Sometimes it's like kids thinking that they were playing like a scavenger hunt-like game with a financial reward.

So they end up like, you know, taking a picture of some military site, uploading it to Telegram, thinking they're going to get some cash, and then they get arrested for it.

The UN Human Rights Office said Sunday that civilian deaths had increased 37% from December 2024 to May 2025 compared to that same timeframe the year before.

Ben, I think a lot of that probably speaks to the fact that they're just running out of air defense systems.

I mean, we saw how magnificently those Patriot systems and the Thad and PAC-3 systems performed in Qatar and supported the Israelis.

That has been missing in Ukraine.

So a completely depressing update, Ben.

No real end game in sight here, but

an enormous ongoing conflict.

Yeah, no, and

Russia pressing its advantage, right?

Five months after Trump said he'd end the war, and their advantage being this war of attrition where they just have more people of throat, this thing, and a bigger defense industrial base.

The only thing I'd add to that update, Tommy, is that we did have this NATO summit last week, right?

And the Europeans...

who did not exactly equip themselves with glory here were so busy calling Trump daddy and promising to spend 5% of their budget on defense.

We'll see if they actually do that.

What was lacking out of that summit was any plan to support Ukraine.

Like normally, like a NATO summit would be a place where you get together and be like, what's the next package of defense support for Ukraine?

What's the next package of patriots for Ukraine

so that they can deal with this air defense issue?

What's the plan for the peace process, right?

If Trump is Mr.

Peacemaker, you would have thought that he would have gone to the NATO summit to talk to Ukraine's other key supporters and Do Zelensky himself about, you know, what the status of these negotiations are.

And it was striking how

that didn't really seem to be a big issue there.

It was like NATO was just trying to survive Trump showing up at a summit.

And

that's a bad sign, right?

If you don't have any ability of the Europeans and maybe the Americans to coordinate some defense support or some diplomatic support for Ukraine, then they really are just kind of out there on their own, you know, getting a trickle of support from the Europeans and maybe every now and then a delivery from the U.S., but nothing like what they used to get against a Russia that clearly feels emboldened.

That clearly feels like they're pressing the advantage.

And so, yeah, it's a pretty tough situation right now.

Tough situation.

And he didn't end the war in 24 hours.

So

no Nobel Prize there.

Let's jump continents to Africa, though, and talk about what Trump has dubbed dubbed a, quote, wonderful treaty between the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda, which was signed on Friday at the White House.

So this deal was brokered by the U.S.

and Qatar.

It's another data point for our future segment about their kind of interesting role in the world lately been, though I think the U.S.

effort built off of some recent previous work by the UAE.

But tension and fighting between Rwanda and the DRC goes back decades.

We won't get into all of that.

But the kind of recent history that's worth talking about is, you know, in late 2021, this rebel group backed by Rwanda called M23 entered into the eastern part of the DRC and started taking territory.

In early 2025, M23 captured major cities in eastern Congo with the help of an estimated 7,000 Rwandan troops with them, like on the ground.

Leaders in the DRC saw this invasion happening.

And at the same time, they saw Trump staff screaming at Zelensky and trying to ram this minerals deal down the Ukrainian president's throat.

So the folks in the DRC decided to offer up something similar, which is basically try to give the U.S.

access to their rare earth minerals in exchange for some sort of U.S.-backed security guarantee.

Fast forward to last week, that kind of mineral-focused deal is basically what they signed in the Oval Office, and it included the foreign ministers of the DRC and Rwanda.

But there's a number of problems with this agreement.

First of all, there's just no real detail out there.

It's very, very thin.

Both sides agreed to respect each other's territorial integrity and stop fighting, and then to facilitate the disarmament of rebel groups within the two countries.

They are also supposed to create some sort of like joint economic and security agreement to facilitate the extraction of these minerals.

But M23, again, which is that rebel group backed by Rwanda, is currently occupying huge swaths of territory in the Congo.

They weren't part of this agreement, and there's no guarantee that they will abide by it.

In fact, there's reports that M23 has been setting up like what looks like basic kind of governance structures.

Like they're collecting taxes, they're vetting local leaders in Congo and this in this area they're they're occupying.

So that makes it sound like they're there for the long haul.

Human Rights Watch also reported that there's already been violations of the agreement.

So again, we'll have to watch closely.

But more broadly, Ben, I mean, having the U.S.

having commercial interests in a region hardly has guaranteed peace in the past, right?

Like Russia had commercial interests with Ukraine.

The U.S.

did business with Russia and Ukraine.

That didn't prevent the war there.

So finally, there's also the little detail, Ben, of something like 80% of the Congolese mining sector is currently owned by China.

I guess the U.S.

could invest in new areas or take ownership of smaller mines, but the Chinese are going to have a say here.

So, Ben, I don't know.

It seems maybe a touch premature to demand a Nobel Peace Prize for this one, but what did you make of it?

Yeah, I mean, look, I guess it's like small progress here, but this is such a Trump thing.

Because this didn't solve any underlying problem.

This has been a 20-year on-again, off-again war in the Congo that has claimed millions of lives.

It didn't resolve the status of M23.

The thing that I don't understand, Tommy, too, is that like the Ukraine deal, like when are those minerals actually going to see the light of day in the U.S., right?

Yeah, good question.

These countries are kind of playing, they're kind of playing Trump, right?

Like

they tell him he's going to get minerals.

And yeah, the Chinese own the mines.

The Russians are in the DRC.

Like, I'm not sure they're in a hurry to provide the U.S.

with those minerals.

It's like he gets some kind of announcement, some kind of headline about peace and minerals, but let's wait and see whether the peace holds and whether the minerals are delivered.

And that's not a basis for lasting peace.

He has no genuine interest in the livelihoods of the people in the DRC, right?

He just kind of likes the idea of having an announcement made at the White House and he gets to say he got some minerals.

What I don't understand about, I mean, again, to be fair, like, sure, it's good that the Rwanda and the government of the DRC are talking to each other, but let's not pretend like this is a durable change in their relationship, right?

Now, what I don't understand is this Nobel Peace Prize obsession, right?

Because this is like the most globalist award possible, you know?

I mean, I don't know if this is because Obama got it.

Like, I don't,

and these are

kind of ceasefires that the well, the thing is, the U.S.

government, like,

Trump lifts these things up.

Like, the U.S.

government routinely negotiated or mediated ceasefires around the world on an annual basis, you know, as did other countries for years.

This guy's obsession with the Nobel Peace Prize is,

like, for all the work he's done to try to dismantle what Obama did,

his inferiority complex kind of like is so on display on this particular issue, you know?

Yeah, this it is very weird.

It's an obsession.

Also, he keeps sending out businessmen to cut what he calls peace deals which are really just sort of temporary ceasefires i mean this one was negotiated by um uh bullos whatever uh tiffany trump's father-in-law tiffany's like yeah yeah yeah it's just a business guy going uh to africa and trying to extract resources from them that's that's hardly a novel approach to the continent also ben there there are all these rumors that um uh paul kagame is in bad health.

Like he basically disappeared from the news for like three weeks and his plane was spotted in Germany.

And there were all there are all these rumors that he was really, really sick and getting treatment.

So if he dies, it kind of feels like all bets are off, not just for this ceasefire deal, but for what happens in Rwanda going forward.

Totally.

I mean, the totally dominant figure in Rwandan politics since the Rwandan genocide in the early 90s.

And,

you know, there'll be huge vacuum because Kagame didn't really groom any, you know,

succession plan, right?

He's kind of one man, one rule.

So

look,

modest step forward here but like there's a lot of issues to be dealt with in rwanda in the drc with respect to these minerals and you know the people that have a better plan for the minerals are the chinese who've been you know building mines there for years now you know not not and and actually what's interesting about um tiffany's father-in-law's role is that he's close to the Qataris, he's close to these,

to the Gulf Arabs.

So it is worth coming back to the fact that these people are in the middle of a lot of these deals.

And that's that's an interesting development here.

And it's a very trumpy development.

Yeah, very interesting, very trumpy.

I also just double-stamp what you said, which is: look, the Rwandan genocide killed an estimated, what, 800,000, a million people when these extremist Hutu militias massacred Tutsis and other moderate Hutus.

So, any sort of cessation of violence in this region is a very good thing and something we should be happy about.

But, yeah, it's hardly a permanent peace deal.

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Ben, a bit of good news.

So, despite Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban's best efforts to ban it, organizers of the Budapest Pride rally estimated that as many as 200,000 people turned out for the event over the weekend, up from 35,000 last year.

So back in March, Parliament passed a law framed as a child protection measure that makes events that depict or promote homosexuality to minors illegal.

This bill was explicitly aimed at banning Budapest Pride, and it enabled law enforcement to use facial recognition software to identify and fine attendees.

But with the support of Budapest's liberal mayor, the celebration went on without police interference, attracting not just LGBTQ folks, but also people who are just worried about the breakdown of democracy and free speech under Orban.

Even sweeter was Orban is behind the polls to opposition leader Peter Magyar, and there's a chance he could lose in the general election next year.

Now, I don't want to get ahead of myself, but we all are allowed to hope.

And so, Ben, there's, of course, like a weird Trump angle here.

I just wanted you to hear how State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce, who is an out-gay woman herself, described the administration's view on this, these huge protests.

Let's listen.

Mr.

Orban, who, of course, is a close ally of the president, tried to ban a pride parade this weekend.

Tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of people came out.

Does the U.S.

have a view on that?

Do you think that it's justified to ban an LGBTQ pride parade?

Well, you know, when the Vice President or any of us speak about the nature of policy or I think what's important regarding freedom of expression,

that's our plan and what we feel is important to convey.

And then what countries do is their business.

Events happen all over the world, as we know, every day, which the United States has no comment about.

And we have nothing to add on this matter.

But again, I think it's about what

countries do, the choices they make with their nations, and what citizens do and how they respond to that.

Nobody talks about the events that we don't talk about.

Ben, do you have anything more cogent and coherent to say about this massive anti-war one pride rally?

Look, I think this is a huge, huge deal for a couple reasons, right?

One, just the pure solidarity with the LGBT community there, like the refusal to, you know, accede to Orban's command that this not go forward does show like, you know, a really inspiring level of solidarity with LGBT rights.

I also think, importantly, what the people in Hungary understand is that this effort to stigmatize LGBT people is part of a playbook that Putin pursued, right?

So, Putin, in his effort to kind of cast himself as the leader of the kind of reactionary forces, the kind of Christian forces against the decadence and corruption of the West, you know, he really went after LGBT people, LGBT rights.

He, you know, cracked down, obviously, on anything like a pride parade, but he also cracked down on, you know, passed these laws that persecuted essentially people for trying to indoctrinate people into LGBT ideologies.

And so what the people of Hungary are saying is we see the playbook you're running, right?

And we're not going to go for that.

And so not only is this an act of solidarity with that community, it is saying like, hey, we see where you are on the playbook you're running, where you are on the Putin playbook, and we're going to come out.

200,000 people in Hungary is a shit ton of people, okay?

And that was a massive embarrassment to Orban.

It revealed him to be totally feckless.

He commanded that something not happen, and then it happened bigger than it has ever happened before.

And I think there's a big lesson for Americans in this too, which is that when you have an autocrat who controls the media, who controls the judiciary, who's able to ram laws through, you can show him to be powerless if you show up in the streets in big enough numbers.

And so hopefully this is a sign that Orban is on his way down in Hungary.

Hopefully Peter Maguiar, who's not exactly a progressive, but he's much better than Orban, can oust him.

But also, I think it's a lesson for the rest of us that when all else fails, you know, show up in the streets because that can show the fecklessness of an autocrat.

Yeah, well said.

Finally, Ben, some of our listeners might still be hoping to plan kind of a last-minute summer getaway.

If you like sand, surf, and brutal repression, we've got a new option for you.

North Korea recently unveiled a new seaside resort.

It features water parks, high-rise hotels, and room for

almost 20,000 Yes, that's a big resort.

Kim Jong-un personally cut the ribbon on what they're calling the Kalma Resort, which state media called a national treasure-level tourism city.

It opened on July 1st, but only for domestic tourists for now.

But given its proximity to an international airport and the fact that the ribbon-cutting ceremony was attended by the Russian ambassador, North Korea clearly has its eyes on some international clientele.

In 2024, Ben, a top UN human rights official, described life in North Korea as stifling, claustrophobic, a daily struggle, devoid of hope.

Kind of sounds like being a Democrat in Washington right now.

But if that sounds good to you, consider a visit.

Ben, I would say, I want to get your take on this.

I think there's a one in five shot that Trump or J.D.

Vance visits this resort before the end of his second term.

Thoughts?

Oh, I think so.

I mean, this is kind of like Trump Riviera vibes.

And yeah, like you made the serious point, which needs to be made, which is that in a country where people are starving, like, you know, beachfront resorts are not the best look.

I will say that the Worldos need to go watch some of the YouTube videos of this because,

you know, Kim Jong-un looking at things is always interesting to watch.

So good.

This is incredible because the video, there's like a two-minute video that they play, the propaganda video that they put out, and it kind of starts with him watching, observing.

like some people going down a giant water slide.

Did you see this?

And the funny thing about this is, first first of all, I'm wondering about the guy on the water slide because he's supposed to be like having fun, right?

He's supposed to look like he's having fun.

But you know, if this guy makes a wrong move on the water slide, it's not going to damn well for this guy.

But then the other thing is they had so little content to fill this video that

they came back to the guy on the water slide again.

Like they played it multiple times, you know?

I'm watching it right now.

So it just didn't look like there was a lot going on at this beachfront resort.

Do you see the guy on the water slide?

I was Watching the guy on the surfing thing who bit it like four times in front of Kim Jong-un is probably terrified he's going to get whacked up.

Totally.

Totally.

But they have to have smiles on their faces.

And there are all these people out there.

It's just bleak.

It's pretty dark.

And it does have that kind of 70s communist resort vibes, right?

Like the big white hotel that is probably 90% empty at any given time.

I do wonder.

Not even finished.

Can you imagine?

I would love to go to this place for for a day.

Not that I would because we'd end up being imprisoned and Trump would have to get us out of prison.

But can you imagine just walking down to breakfast at that hotel?

Who's going to be seven minders?

And Russian spies and Chinese

business people.

And

I mean, I can't imagine.

Someone needs to make a television show about what happens at this place because

I would watch that.

It would be absolutely fascinating.

My fear is that some

very

dumb young American tourist is going to end up there and get in deep, deep trouble.

But a story, an anxiety for another day then.

One thing can be done.

And then Trump will get him out of prison and demand a Nobel Peace Prize.

Again, again.

One thing I just saw per our Ukraine conversation, the White House confirms it has halted weapons that Ukraine was scheduled to receive, including PAC-3 Patriot missiles, 155 millimeter artillery rounds, GMLRS, Stinger AIM-7, and Hellfire missiles.

So that is not only air defense, but also offensive weaponry there and a huge, huge deal, I think, for the Ukrainians to lose all that.

And why would you, I mean, like, put aside the hellfires and, you know, we support Ukraine, this halting of defensive weapons, right?

Like, like, that's going to lead to Ukrainian civilians dying.

I mean, how, how can you justify that?

You know, no doubt.

No doubt.

All right.

Well, that is it for us this week.

Thank you all for listening, and we'll talk to you soon.

We promise to be in slightly happier moods next week.

Yes, we will.

Yeah, it will be dark this week, sorry.

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