Tracking Trump's Global Grift

Save the World is brought to you by Fast Growing Trees.

Did you know that Fast Growing Trees is the biggest online nursery in the United States with thousands of different plants and over 2 million happy customers?

They have all the plants your yard needs, like fruit trees, privacy trees, flowering trees, shrubs, and so much more.

Whatever plants you're interested in, Fast Growing Trees has you covered.

Find the perfect fit for your climate and space.

Fast Growing Trees makes it easy to get your dream yard, order online, and get your plants delivered directly to your door in just a few days without ever leaving home.

Their alive and thrive guarantee ensures your plants arrive happy and healthy.

Plus, get support from trained plant experts on call to help you plan your landscape, choose the right plants, and learn how to care for them.

I'm going to take you guys behind the music for a minute.

I'm in a studio.

There's four of us here.

50% of the office already has used fast-growing trees.

One person here has a Makrut lime leaf tree, which is not only beautiful, but can be used in cooking.

We got a ficus fig.

Very exciting.

And also, we we are getting shipped to us as we speak a brand new gorgeous tree for the crooked media offices.

So I don't know, like, how often is it that you're in a room where half the people is using the product you're talking about?

It's a rare thing.

It's why you should try it.

Their 14-point quality checklist ensures you're getting the best quality plants possible.

Each plant is cared for individually based on their needs, from watering routines to the amount of sunlight, giving your plants the care they deserve from the time they start growing to when they ship to your home.

This spring, they have the best deals for your yard, up to half off on select plants and other deals.

And listeners to our show get 15% off their first purchase when using the code World at checkout.

That's an additional 15% off at fastgrowingtrees.com using the code WORLD at checkout.

FastgrowingTrees.com, code WORLD.

Now is the perfect time to plant.

Use World to save today.

Offer is valid for a limited time.

Terms and conditions apply.

Welcome back to Podcy of the World.

I'm Tommy Vitor.

I'm Ben Rhodes.

We are talking to Ben.

I'm talking to Ben just hours before the Knicks and the Pacers.

I may have just been looking at Nick's Twitter.

Well, yeah, game four, the Eastern Conference Finals.

Depending on how things go, I think this section could sound really fun, or it could be as awkward as the conversation between Emmanuel and Brigitte Mecron after she slapped the shit out of him while it was in Vietnam.

Way to bring in the world of content.

You following that story?

Yeah, I'm following that story.

I mean, I will tell you after game one, when the Knicks blew somehow like a 12-point lead in two minutes and like 900 things had to happen for that to happen,

I actually just lost consciousness.

You went dark for a while.

I fell asleep on a hotel bed with all the lights on, fully clothed, and I don't even remember falling asleep.

It was just like my body couldn't handle what had just happened and just shut down.

Emmanuel McCrone, on the other hand, looked like he wanted to shut down, but then he realized he had to walk down the stairs of the plane.

Could you imagine here

the head of state that awful, whatever that was happens, and you turn and look and you realize there is a press corps standing there watching?

Well, that's the best for people I've watched is this video where Brigitte Macron clearly like smacks Emmanuel Macron as he's like about to get off his plane in Vietnam.

And the funniest thing is when he realizes that the camera's caught it, because

he just like ducks out of the way and then he pops back out like, hey,

this is terrible.

And like, I think they tried to lie about it and say it wasn't true.

And then they were like, oh, it was a friendly tip.

I don't know, man.

Not great.

I mean, a little karma coming back to the colonizer there in Vietnam.

I mean, that's kind of what went through my nerdy mind.

Yeah, if that's fair.

Also, just, you know, have your arguments before you land, I guess, would be a point, too.

We have a great show for you today.

We're going to talk, go deep.

on the international corruption that is driving so much policy behind the Trump administration.

We're going to give you a quick recap of Trump's crypto bribe dinner.

Sounds like a good time, Ben.

We'll talk about a major restructuring of the national security staff and reports that the administration is pausing all student visas.

Then we'll talk about the horrible murder of two Israeli embassy employees in Washington, the bizarre origins of an almost certainly disastrous new plan to distribute humanitarian aid in Gaza.

The latest chapter in the ongoing saga of Putin making a mockery of Trump's peace efforts in Ukraine, why North Korea's Navy is having a rough week, Japan's rice crisis, and more.

And Ben, you'll hear my interview with Congressman Jim Himes from Connecticut.

He's the ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee.

We talk about Tulsi Gabbard and her firing intelligence officials who won't change their views for political reasons.

We talked about this weird report in the Guardian this morning that a Pentagon leak investigation ordered by Pete Hexf might be based on an illegal NSA wiretap.

Yeah, a little alarming there.

Yeah, good time to have him on for that.

We talked about how the war in Gaza is fueling extremist groups that threaten America and a lot more.

It's fun to do just like a tour of the region with someone who's pretty well read into a lot of information.

And no lack of

adjacent stories here.

No, no, right on.

There's a lot going on.

All right, Ben.

So listeners to this show know that we believe that corruption is kind of the first, second, and third most important story of this administration.

It's the thing driving it.

Yeah, we've definitely been on that beat.

And it's a rich beat.

There's a lot of avenues to cover.

So the New York Times reported out a bunch of new details about just one piece of the corruption pie that I think was really instructive in terms of helping listeners understand how the grift works and what the impact is on our national interest.

So here's the gist.

So last week, Eric Trump, he went to Vietnam for a groundbreaking ceremony for a $1.5 billion golf development project.

The plan includes villas, 36 holes of golf, there's theme parks, there's a big like commercial zone.

The times meant they reported that they erected a tent for a groundbreaking ceremony that had a golden facade.

I thought that was a nice gaudy touch.

So according to this report, Vietnam has ignored at least a half dozen legally required steps in the development process to fast track what is usually a two to four year process in just three months to accommodate Eric Trump's travel schedule.

The Times says that Vietnamese officials, both publicly and privately, say they hope this golf project will be seen as a gesture of goodwill to help them build better ties with the U.S.

and with Trump.

And Ben, this is one of my favorite details.

Last week, we talked about Trump flipping out on the president of South Africa about a law that allows the South African government to expropriate land from farmers without compensation.

This story says that the Trump company is pushing ahead with this golf project in Vietnam that will displace hundreds of farmers who were told that they at best should expect to get about half the value of their land in compensation.

So he's doing exactly what he claims is a problem in South Africa.

And this isn't the only project.

There's also a skyscraper going on in Vietnam.

And so the point is, like these foreign officials, they do not see any distinction between Trump's business interests and U.S.

interests, nor should they, right?

I mean, it's sort of like that's the whole deal.

And this is also happening all over the world.

Just a couple examples.

There's a half a billion dollar hotel project in Oman, a half a billion dollar Trump tower in Jeddah, another half a billion dollar tower in Riyadh.

There's a half a billion dollar Trump tower in Dubai, a $3 billion golf and villa project in Qatar.

That was just announced in April.

There's nearly $2 billion worth of development happening in India, $1.4 billion.

That's the Jared Kushner Hotel in Albania.

There's a $500 million hotel project in Serbia.

This doesn't even get into all the money the Saudis are pouring into the Trump properties here by hosting golf tournaments.

So, Ben, it's a little tedious to go through all of this,

but I just thought it's critical for everyone to understand

the mindset of these foreign officials who think their focus right now is on putting money in Trump's pocket.

It's not about constructing deals that would normally be viewed as being in the U.S.

interests or advancing U.S.

policies.

Yeah, I think what's hard for people, understandably, is that we're accustomed to corruption being

something that a politician kind of skims off the top, right?

You know, like you get a side payment, or even in Trump's first term, like, well, you know, they're staying in his hotel rooms, and that kind of pads the bottom line.

And

I think where this is different is that the corruption itself is the entire point of the enterprise.

It's not like an add-on, right?

It's actually the foundation of the entire presidency.

That's why Eric went to Vietnam.

Yeah, and because to give you an example of this, if you take this Vietnam piece, Trump puts 46% tariffs on Vietnam, and then he pauses it.

And in the pause, they don't agree to, you know, buy a certain amount of American products or, I don't know, whatever the thing is that might in some way benefit Americans.

They agree to do this.

They agree to put billion-plus dollars in the Trump organization.

And that's the point.

It's using the policy of of the United States, in this case tariffs, to extract an enormous amount of money in the context of like an individual company like the Trump organization.

And

that's how it works.

And so no Americans benefit.

I mean, like what is so outrageous about this is Trump's supporters are like, well, he needed to give himself leverage, right?

Trump is finally leveraging our status in the global economy to get a better deal.

He's just leveraging things Americans built.

Like the reason that America has a huge economy and leverage is not because of anything Donald Trump did.

It's because of what generations of Americans did.

And he's just leveraging it to get money, to just get money plowed in the Trump organization.

The second point is these are all kind of autocratic countries, right?

Notice you didn't say, you know,

yeah, the UK or Canada or Botswana, right?

These are rich autocratic countries where they can do this, where they can basically like, yeah, you know what, how we're going to deal with Trump.

We're just going to throw like a billion here, two billion here, and just kind of get through this four years with all of our interests taken care of.

By the way, it's not a lot of money to them.

I mean, it's a lot to Vietnam, but for Qatar, Saudi Arabia,

this is nothing.

This is a routing area, right?

And the last thing is that Vietnam is an important country.

It's a really important country.

It's a big country in Southeast Asia that is like kind of a swing country between the U.S.

and China.

And we're just treating it like a piggy bank for the Trump organization.

And so there's something so diminishing about it for the United States, that we're now just another thuggish, autocratic country playing by these rules in ways that don't serve our own people.

But like

it is ultimately fundamentally what this presidency is clearly animated by.

Yeah.

And to a lesser extent, this is happening on behalf of Elon Musk and Starlink.

Like ProPublica had a piece out about how the Trump administration is pushing countries to make deals with Starlink, the Elon Musk satellite internet company.

And that includes putting extreme pressure on very poor countries in Africa like Gambia, where according to this report by ProPublica, the local telecom infrastructure is like 20% of all tax revenue for the country.

And it's a huge source of jobs and infrastructure.

So if Starlink puts the local telecom companies out of business, that's a huge problem.

But also, even if Starlink is better or cheaper or faster and a good deal for people in the country, if it becomes the only game in town, they all know that Elon can then jack up the price or threaten to pull out or do all the shit he did to Ukraine in the days of the war.

So sure, they're advancing a U.S.

business, but doing so in a way that's like predatory.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: And they're advancing, and this is a common thread with Trump, despite what he says about

bringing jobs back to the industrial Midwest.

That's not happening, first of all.

None of these U.S.

businesses are

broadly benefiting American people.

So first of all, you and I think it's grotesque that we treat foreign countries like this and foreign publics and the same, you know, Gambia will kill USAID, we'll mess up their economy, but we'll care about Starlink.

But the thing is, like even these deals he's announcing, right?

So that big deal we talked about last week, the AI deal in the Gulf, there's not like the OpenAI, Starlink, these are not countries that are opening like the assembly line in, you know, Michigan.

This is going to benefit a small group of really wicked people.

Yeah, how many people work for Starlink?

I mean, it's certainly not like GM back in the day, right?

And so that's what's so like even further maddening is that even when he can kind of say he's going to bat for some U.S.

company, he tallies up some huge number.

Because I also don't believe the investment numbers.

The Saudis are saying, we're going to invest $500 billion in the U.S.

economy.

No, they're not.

They're going to invest a lot of money in AI in the Gulf, you know?

And yes, some of that money is going to be invested in U.S.

companies, but it's going to pad the bottom line of like Sam Altman.

It's not going to

benefit broad-based prosperity in this country.

And

this is where the gap between like the division in the Democratic Party between foreign and domestic kind of messaging has got to go away.

Because you cannot explain to Trump people, their voters, why they're being screwed by Trump without explaining this stuff to them, that he's basically leveraging the entire power of the United States to enrich himself and a very small number of people at their expense.

Yeah, who are his donors?

Yeah.

And also, yeah, those golf investment numbers, they're completely made up.

Like, they're not going to do a trillion dollars worth of investment on the bus.

They want to give him the press release and then they'll do whatever they do.

Also, interestingly, Ben, I saw the BYD, which is a big Chinese electric vehicle.

company, they're kind of going hard at Elon now.

They cut prices by 34%.

So they're going to try to just kill Tesla sales in China, the Middle East, and Europe.

So it seems like maybe you could imagine a scenario where the Chinese are working with them to create some leverage of their own.

And you could imagine a scenario where, again, this stuff doesn't become manifest like tomorrow, right?

So it's not like, oh my God, all of a sudden the whole global economy is rewritten away from the United States.

But these are the kinds of things that are happening on a daily basis, right?

People are like buying different cars.

People are adjusting their supply chains.

You think that Vietnam is going to use the golf course to get Trump off its back, then it's probably going to cut a bunch of trade deals with China.

And so Trump gets to look like strong.

Like, I, I don't know, you know, I bullied, because they'll come up with some other thing.

They'll say that they're going to buy more rice from the U.S.

Well, no, but what they want, what the Trump administration wants is for Vietnam to crack down on Chinese companies that are basically using them as a middleman

to export Chinese products into the U.S.

Right.

They're not going to do that.

Does anybody believe that they're...

And by the way, the people in the U.S., this is important, and it kind of sets up some of the stuff we'll talk about the NSC later.

The people in the U.S.

government who have to be expert enough to follow the commercial behavior and practices of Vietnam over a period of years to determine if they're a pass-through for Chinese goods, they all got doged.

Like, there's no experts in the government to even do the things that they, they use this language to justify what they're doing, but what they're doing is for entirely different purposes.

Yeah, good luck, big balls.

Yeah, yeah, big balls is not like you could evaluate the inputs into certain Vietnamese products.

Yeah, cotton from Xinjiang that's like picked with slave labor.

Yeah, good luck.

So, So the other piece you guys know that Ben and I are obsessed with is the crypto piece.

So last week, Trump hosted a dinner for 220 of the biggest buyers of his meme coin.

This was at his golf club in Virginia.

The top 25 biggest buyers got to attend a private reception and a guided tour, I believe, of the White House itself.

NBC News reported that the attendees spent a combined $148 million

to be there.

And remember that in addition to Trump's family holding about 80% of the Trump coin supply, they get paid fees every time it's bought or sold.

And the estimate is that they've made more than $324 million on meme coin trading fees alone.

So the event itself sounded like a weird combination of like shitty, ostentatious, and douchey.

Like Lamar Odom was there for some reason.

Yeah, yeah.

An attendee told NBC News that he saw 16 people wearing a Richard Mille, Richard Millie watch.

I had to Google what that is.

Apparently, these watches cost at least 60 grand and up to several million dollars.

So it was just like that kind of guy.

The number one holder of Trump coin is a Chinese crypto CEO named Justin Sun, who we've talked about.

He has openly been buying Trump's crypto offerings to make an SEC investigation of his company go away.

The foreign policy piece of this, though, Ben, is Bloomberg estimates that all but six of the top Trump coin holders are foreign nationals.

These are foreigners pouring money into his pocket.

So again, like it's so, the corruption is so...

brazen and massive that it feels like we're kind of screaming into the void.

It did make me happy, though, to learn that Trump only showed up for 23 minutes, that he didn't talk with anyone, that he didn't take any pictures.

One attendee told NBC News that the food sucked and the only drinks offered were water and Trump wine.

And this guy apparently was, he told the NBC that he was driven to the event by his dad in the Lamborghini, which is just a weird thing.

Good thing that guy was probably hopped up on ketamine.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Or something.

I just need water.

Also, Ben, since this event, the price of Trump coin has tanked.

It went from $16 on Thursday to $1,285 when I wrote that sentence today.

Tonight, Tuesday, May 27th, JD Vance is headlining a political fundraiser in Vegas for Trump's Super PAC.

Guess how much it costs to attend?

For the super PAC?

$10,000.

$1 million.

Imagine.

I'm glad this time I low-balled it.

Remember on the executive orders, I highballed it?

So

I just want you to imagine for a second, you go to a Las Vegas, you spend a million dollars, and your boys are like, what'd you do?

And you're like, I saw J.D.

Vance fucking speaking.

Yeah, dog.

This is the night before the Bitcoin Bitcoin 2025 conference.

Don Jr.'s there.

Eric, David Saxwell there.

It's just like, it's like,

it's this same core group of people.

Yeah, look, this is grotesque.

It's the most open form of corruption because they, by design, have deregulated.

And again, people should know.

They basically...

neutered the SEC from investigating any crypto.

So there's no government oversight of anything that happens in the crypto space.

It's Wild West.

They can do whatever they want.

These crypto people think their interests overline with Trump's.

They don't because they're making a mockery mockery of crypto.

They're just kind of showing what utter fucking bullshit.

These people in the crypto space spent years telling us this is about like anti-authoritarianism and everything.

No big libertarians.

It's the ultimate form of authoritarianism, the ability to be this corrupt and pay powerful people to get what you want.

And that's all that's happening.

So there should be a fucking reckoning, by the way.

Like if I'm the Democrats, like one of the things I'm doing is I'm keeping score.

Absolutely.

And look, we'll be lucky enough that we have an election in three years.

But I mean this, like instead of being worried about the crypto people dumping some money on you like they did to Sherrod Brown and other Democrat politicians, I think it's got to be the opposite.

It's got to be like, we are going to break these fucking people.

We're going to regulate the shit out of this bullshit financial instrument, the Trump coin.

Trump coins worth 0.00.

It's worth nothing.

It doesn't exist in the world, right?

So that pisses me off.

Then we talked about how this is...

just further undermining the dollar too.

Creating parallel financial systems undermines the currency that most Americans have to use, which is the dollar, right?

And you're creating companies that provide bank-like services without the regulations that protect you with banks.

Yeah.

Yeah.

If you think there's not going to be some bubble, I mean, this is how you get depressions and stuff.

I don't like big banks either, but if you think the dude driving his daddy's Lambo with a million-dollar watch is going to like take good care of your investments,

you get the wrong idea.

Just look at the people walking into that dinner and tell me that you trust those people with anything other than being extras on the next season of White Lotus.

Okay.

Dad, you see the story about the new DC club for like the MAGA losers.

It costs 500 grand to get in.

I thought you'd love this.

David Sachs is like a founding member or investor or something.

And this is a quote, I think, attributed to him in The New Yorker.

We wanted to create something new, hipper, and Trump-aligned.

It was described as a sanctuary where members won't have to encounter, quote, a fake news reporter or anyone else, quote, we don't know and we don't trust.

These losers are just building bunkers for themselves that cost half a million dollars.

I'm gonna, I want to speak directly to our audience, Tommy.

And I want to say this to you.

You're all probably listening.

This is horrible.

I want to assure you that no amount of money,

no amount of crypto grift is going to fill the deep and bottomless hole in all of these people's souls.

No.

Like these are, like, Eric Trump is not going to be a happy person who receives the love and intimacy that he has longed for since childhood.

That hug.

Because the Vietnamese built a tent for him with gold on it, right?

The guy whose dad drives the Lambo is not going to

prove his business chops because he purchased.

These people are not, like, this is not the path, you know, like not to get all serious.

But like, I honestly, I just think this is just, this is just like, like,

people, like, David Sachs is someone who so clearly hungers to be taken seriously.

And, and he's just behaving like a high school 17-year-old who got to control the seating chart at lunch one day.

Yeah, and maybe the punishment is them creating a club where they all have to hang out.

Just so we can do a little equal opportunity criticism, I did just want to offer a quick boo and hiss to Senator Corey Booker for voting to confirm Charles Kushner to be the U.S.

ambassador to France.

Those who don't know, Charles Kushner is Jared Kushner's daddy.

He went to jail after pleading guilty in 2005 to 18 counts, including tax evasion, illegal campaign contributions, and witness tampering.

He had hired a sex worker to seduce his own brother-in-law, had their tryst secretly recorded, and then sent the tape to his own sister to try to intimidate a witness.

Booker claims he voted for Charles Kushner because of the family's work on criminal justice reform.

Yeah.

Seems far more likely it's because they've been longtime friends and donors.

But like, this is not a person who should be representing the United States at any mission.

I don't care if it's like a...

a fake ambassador job where you're not doing high-stakes diplomacy.

Like this is embarrassing for the United States.

And embarrassing for the Democratic Party.

And like Corey Booker, it's frustrating because on the one end, he can stand up for like 29 hours and or whatever it was and show that he gets it.

And the other end, he does this that makes it seem like he doesn't get it at all.

You know, like

you put a stamp of approval and normalization on any of this stuff, or if you look like, well, I'm just going to vote this way because this guy was a donor and gave you some line about

how he is a champion of criminal justice reform, like then you look no different than the other side.

Yeah, it hurts your credibility.

And again, Corey Booker knows better.

He's shown that he knows better.

So he can do better.

Good guy, great senator, terrible vote, and not going to give him a pass on it.

Ben, another big story that happened right before Memorial Day weekend was the Trump administration announced a major restructuring of their national security staff.

So they're going to cut the size of the NSC from about 350 members to about half of that and then transfer some of the NSC's authorities to agencies like the State Department or Department of Defense.

It doesn't sound like most of these people will get fired.

Most people at the NSC are detailed there by other agencies, so they will likely just return home to the CIA or Department of Defense or wherever they were from.

But Ben, far more important and interesting to me is it sounds like they are just kind of wholesale doing away with the NSC process.

So the way that used to work is let's say the president wanted a new approach to dealing with North Korea.

You would start by having the senior director for Asian Affairs bring together representatives from all the relevant national security agencies.

They work up proposals.

When those are ready for prime time, they get sent to the deputies committee.

They convene, meet on it, do a bunch more work.

And then the deputies send it up to the principals committee.

That's the cabinet-level grouping of the NSC.

And then the president ultimately has a meeting with his entire national security team where they make changes, they greenlight whatever it is, they reject it, whatever.

And yes, Maybe that can be a little bureaucratic and slow at times, but I would argue that it was a pretty good way to force debate and hard thinking and kind of, I don't know, it was just a good process.

Like I actually thought the NSC process should have been replicated in other parts of the U.S.

government, but apparently it's all gone.

And this quote is from Axios, quote, that's the bottom to the top approach.

That doesn't work.

It's going away.

A senior White House official said.

All those things feeding up to the principles are the unnecessary piece.

That same official says that that process might have been needed in the past when there were interagency turf wars, but Trump's team all knows each other really well.

They love each other.

So that's no longer an issue, according to this person, which is very funny since Mike Waltz, a national security advisor, has gotten knifed and pushed out of his job.

And Pete Hexeth can't seem to win a turf war within his own department.

But Ben, I mean, what do you think?

Like, it just seems like they're setting up all foreign policy to be done by presidential fiat, which maybe is inevitable with Trump.

But like, I don't know, it just seems destined to end badly.

It is.

And again, just to build on what you said, like the, because the NSC was a little too big, right?

I don't think you need 300 plus people there.

For us, it was even bigger, right?

It was like 500.

Yeah,

it got too big, but

you focused on the right point, the process, right?

So the beginning point, before you get to that deputy's level, right, you have something called the Interagency Policy Committee, which is usually run by like a senior director at the NSC.

And that's the person in charge of Europe or Asia or a functional issue like counterterrorism.

And they coordinate the different agencies.

And people may say, well, why does the NSC have to do it?

Because apparently they're moving that to the State Department.

Well, actually, because in today's world, like most issues have huge cross-cutting aspects.

You know, the treasury has to be at the table because there's an economic component, right?

The intelligence community is usually at that table.

The military has to be at the table.

If there's a military equity, there are some countries where the Commerce Department has to be there, technology is involved.

And the point is that only the White House can coordinate and facilitate, as you said, this kind of debate and bottom-up

expertise that informs policy.

And they're just doing away with that.

I don't think,

by the way, like they're clearly not trying to empower the State Department.

No.

Because they're in the process of just destroying the State Department too.

Like they're chasing people out of the State Department.

They're firing people.

They're

elevating

ideologues in their 20s.

So the two things I take away from this are your point.

They basically want Trump to decide like what he cares and Steve Witkoff and a small number of people.

And then the U.S.

government is just this kind of instrument to act on Trump's, the announcement he wants to make or the trip he wants to take.

And that's it.

That is very dangerous because it's also how you make just massive mistakes.

I mean, I've been doing some like Vietnam reading again.

This is how we get into like Vietnam, right?

Nobody listened to the experts out in the government who are like, hey, this is not actually like a communist movement.

It's a nationalist movement in Vietnam.

Well, you know, it would have been good to listen to those people.

There will be things where they wish that they had like, listened to experts because it gets them in trouble.

Or like pre-Iraq war when nobody knew the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite.

Yeah.

It might have been good to run that one down.

Yeah, you want those people.

But the other thing that I take away from it, Tommy, is that they just probably don't give a shit about 90% of the world.

Because

a lot of the stuff that really runs through the NSC is actually the kind of, you know, what is our relationship with like Indonesia, like a big, important country?

We need some people sitting thinking about how are we like selling more stuff, making trade agreements, like trying to get Indonesians to see things our way in Asia.

Like the president doesn't get involved in that, but you want someone at the NSC coordinating everybody.

They care so little about most of the world that this means I think we're just actually going to be absent from most of the world, too.

Yeah, and I think they also view this in terms of just power structures and that the NSC, if it was strong, would compete with people over in the West Wing, like, you know, Stephen Miller, Susie Wildes, and other political hacks.

And also, they just view every

non-personally vetted human being in the building as a risk of leaking.

You know, like the Alexander Vindmund kind of

whistleblowing.

They just think that that's what the NSC is.

Yeah.

And I do think that I'm glad you mentioned Steve Miller because I think he's actually a key part of this.

I think he is kind of a shadow national security advisor.

Remember, Trump said he was more powerful than the National Security Advisor.

So he doesn't want to manage a staff of 250 people.

He wants like a rump group of loyalists at the NSC.

And really, you're right.

It's the decisions are Trump, Miller, Witcoff.

Maybe they'll let Susie Wiles in the room every now and then, a handful of other people.

And actually,

instead of a staff being a resource to him, it's either something to be afraid of, as you said, or it's just like a burden.

I don't even want to go through the process.

I want to do something tomorrow.

I don't want to

go through a week.

Yeah.

One other thing from the Trump world we want to talk about, Ben.

So Politico is reporting that the Trump administration has ordered U.S.

embassies to pause scheduling interviews for student visa applications and that they are weighing requiring all students to undergo social media vetting.

This seems like it's just an extension of the Trump administration's effort to punish anyone who has been critical of the war in Gaza.

So I don't know.

I mean,

these were early reports.

I'm not sure that this is enacted yet.

It sounds like this was part of a cable that Rubio sent out on Tuesday.

I think this would be enormously damaging to the U.S.

if we stopped being a place where all the smartest people in the fucking world want to go to college and potentially move and live and start businesses and create economic value.

But also, Ben, just a huge congrats to Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk and all the tech geniuses who voted for Trump to get us free speech and to get him to prioritize the top performing immigrants for their software engineering roles.

I think that's going really great.

Congrats to you guys.

Yeah, this is

another one of these things.

It's even if they don't do the worst version of the rule, like if you are a foreign student thinking about where you want to go to school next year, why would you try coming here?

You know, like, especially if you're Muslim or you know, you're brown or black.

Oh, you have anything on social media that is critical of Trump or the Free Palestine or whatever the thing is.

And so

we won't know.

I'm very very curious calendar year

um you know next academic year i think we're going to see this precipitous drop in foreign students no matter what trump does because they've made it look so miserable and dangerous to be here or to get here yeah the irony of this whole thing is that trump's whole you know tantrum about tariffs is about trade deficits there's almost i can't think of any industries that is more of a net trade surplus for the United States than higher education.

Over a million foreign students come here every year and put a tremendous amount, tens of billions of dollars into the U.S.

economy, right?

So that's before you even get into their capabilities.

Then,

as you said, these people tend to be some of the best and brightest from their countries coming here to do research here that benefits Americans and American universities and American research institutes and American companies.

They're going to go someplace else.

They're going to go to China.

They're going to go to Gulf.

They're going to go to Europe.

They're going to go to India.

Like that is going to have a long-term consequence on the United States.

At the same time, by the way, that they're getting me the Department of Education, so they're trying to make Americans dumber.

So we're not going to be able to patch the gaps in our own education system with foreign students or illegal immigration.

So this thing is like not a secondary issue.

It's like a headline issue.

Because if we cease to be the destination for international students, it's both going to be a massive economic hit, but it's going to be a huge long-term hit to the United States as a research and innovation hub for the world.

Yeah.

And remember that, you know, as part of his effort to court all these kind of like MAGA curious tech bros, Trump went on the All-In podcast in June of 2024, and he told them that we should make it easier for international students who graduate from top U.S.

colleges to become citizens.

Derek Thompson resurfaced this quote the other day.

Here was what Trump said.

It's so sad when we lose people from Harvard after they graduate.

He said, I think you should automatically get, as part of your diploma, a green card to be able to stay in this country.

That is going to end on day one.

And so all the, you know, Chamoth was like, that's fantastic.

David Sachs was like, that's great.

They assumed they had like,

you know, high skill pilled Trump when it comes to immigration.

And now he's just doing the exact opposite.

He is driving the smartest and best performing students away from the United States.

Great work.

Yeah, which will just be, I mean, like, you know, so much of our history, you know, would Einstein come here today?

Like, he'd be looking, he'd be checking other places.

You know, not that he was a student, but the number of people that came here to do work, to study, to research, it's incalculable, the economic benefit that's at the United States.

And for Trump, there's such a corrupt short-termism

that this is really important to contrast with his quote-unquote gold card.

Remember, he's like talking about selling $5 million for a gold card.

Well, that's like some oligarch from Russia or some Saudi prince or something that can just make a one-time payment of $5 million.

I would much rather have the kind of lifelong relationship you develop with an international student who comes here, creates things here, builds things here

found things here look at who runs tech companies in this country right the so many of them are immigrants and this is just massive massive cell phone imagine if einstein was in your class sit next to that guy you know

cheat off that homework yeah

not even for a second uh if you want to fight the monsters behind all these terrible policies ben on june 6th john lovitt is teaming up with the bulwarks tim miller and sarah longwell for free onjury which is a fundraiser at world pride hosted by crooked media and the bulwark at the lincoln theater in washington Washington, D.C.

They're going to be celebrating Pride and, most importantly, raising money for the Immigrant Defenders Law Center, which is the group representing the makeup artist and actor Andre Hernandez-Romero and many others who are disappeared to El Salvador with no due process.

Before the live show, Votes of America will join forces with the human rights campaign for a protest at the U.S.

Supreme Court.

To bring more attention to this important cause, get your tickets and RSVP for the protests at crooked.com/slash events.

Podse of the World is brought to you by Manakora Honey.

Are you looking for something simple and delicious to add to your wellness routine?

I am.

You know, I've been trying to shift to a little more,

drink less coffee, drink more tea.

And there's nothing to make, dude.

A little honey in the tea is really nice.

It's really good.

And Manakura, that is the perfect dash of sweetness for your tea.

Manakora honey is rich, creamy, and the most delicious honey you've ever had.

It's ethically produced by Manakora's master beekeepers in the remote forests of New Zealand.

Manakora honey contains powerful nutrients to support immunity and gut health.

The bees collect the nectar from the Manuka tree in New Zealand.

The nectar is packed with bioactives and the honey that is produced has three times more antioxidants and prebiotics than your average honey.

A special antibacterial compound called MGO also comes from the nectar of the tea tree.

Manikora third-party tests every single harvest for MGO and makes these results available through their QR system.

It's a game changer and all you need is one heap teaspoon each morning to get the most out of the amazing bioactives in Manuka.

It's a honey with superpowers.

Now it's easier than ever to try Manakora honey.

Head to Manakora.com slash world to get $25 off the starter kit, which comes with an MGO 850 Plus Manuka honey jar, five honey travel sticks, a wooden spoon, and a guidebook.

That's ma Nukora.com slash world for $25 off your starter kit.

Thumbtack presents.

Uncertainty strikes.

I was surrounded.

The aisle and the options were closing in.

There were paint rollers, satin and matte finish, angle brushes, and natural bristles.

There were too many choices.

What if I never got my living room painted?

What if I couldn't figure out what type of paint to use?

What if

I just used thumbtack?

I can hire a top-rated pro in the Bay Area that knows everything about interior paint, easily compare prices, and read reviews.

Thumbtack knows homes.

Download the app today.

All right, Ben, so we wanted to talk first about the horrific shooting of two Israeli Embassy employees in DC last week.

Yaron Lashinski and Sarah Milgram were a young couple leaving an event at the Capitol Jewish Museum when they were shot by someone named Elias Rodriguez, who told the police, quote, I did it for Palestine.

I did it for Gaza.

U.S.

officials are investigating this crime as both a hate crime and as an act of terrorism.

I just wanted to say this is fucking evil.

It's unjustifiable.

Obviously, this person thinks he did it for Palestine.

I think it's pretty much

unequivocally true that it will set back the movement to end this war and that extrajudicial vigilante violence is stupid and we should not celebrate the people who do it.

I don't care if you think Luigi's fucking hot and has great abs

or you think a causes rice.

It's like not one life is going to be saved because this idiot decided to shoot people in Washington, D.C.

And I also don't think that we as liberals and Democrats are going to win an escalating war of vigilante violence.

So it's just a horrific story,

absolutely tragic.

And

yeah.

Yeah,

it's the worst possible thing for the cause that he claimed to be representing.

I mean, so it's first and foremost a human tragedy.

Two young people had a whole life in front of them, no longer have that life in front of them.

That's like the most important thing, and that's like the horror of what happened.

It's also to your point, like vigilante justice, like this is not

the worst thing you could do for the thing you claim you care about, you know.

Um, so it's wrong, it's stupid,

it's horrific for everybody involved.

I think that

the tragedy of what we're seeing in Gaza,

we've had, you know, it's interesting, like we made some points earlier on in the war, right, about Hamas, where we're like

this is a radicalizing

violence, right?

That essentially like what Israel was doing was going to further radicalize Hamas over time.

That pisses everybody off because

people, you know, will say, don't justify what Hamas is going to do in the future by what Israel is doing.

And then other people say to us, essentially, don't reduce kind of Palestinians to people who can be radicalized because it plays in.

So I'm naming the awkwardness of the conversation that we're about to kind of have here.

I just, I'm just saying analytically, like violence tragically tends to beget violence.

And none of this is leading anywhere good.

It's all the more reason that like we should want an end to all violence.

You know, that includes obviously horrific murders like this, but it also includes the war in Gaza itself.

It doesn't, and there's a kind of awful discourse where

what's happening in Gaza is no more like...

right or wrong the day after this happened than it was the day before.

And that that you see unfortunately social media brain kind of pushes people in those directions.

You can accept this as a horrific, evil tragedy that happened and realize that it kind of does not really interact with the horror of what's happening in Gaza

and hold those two thoughts at the same time.

I don't understand why people can't hold two thoughts in their head at the same time.

It's like, I think killing innocent civilians is wrong at any point.

I don't care whether it's this crazy shooter in D.C.

I don't care if it's Hamas.

I don't care if it's the IDF.

Like, you shouldn't just kill innocent people.

It's not going to advance your cause.

It's not going to end the suffering that you want to suffer.

I talked with Congressman Himes about this horrible combination we're seeing, though, of just like day after day after day of horrific violence in Gaza, coupled with the fact that there is no political track to create a Palestinian state and the hopelessness that creates and what people sometimes do when they feel like they have no hope for a future.

And that's the thing.

The only last thing I'd say about this is like to take it to Bibi Nanyahu and the Israeli political leadership that that is doing this in Gaza.

They're not making, part of what their argument is always, we're here to make Israel safer and Jews safer.

This is not doing that, you know?

And

again, that doesn't mean it's right that bad things might happen, like this horrific thing that happened.

It just means that you have to think about...

the tale of what's happening in Gaza is going to be decades, if not hundreds of years.

Like it could end up being that scale of event that sticks and just

walk back from the precipice.

You know, they should have done it already.

But anyway, this that's why I think people feel both the pain of what these young people lost, but also a sense of foreboding, you know,

that this violence, we're tolerating way too much violence around us.

Yeah, no, I mean, I remember talking with you on the show even in the just early weeks after October 7th, knowing that there was going to be a sustained and absolutely brutal conflict.

But if you had asked me then whether it would still be just a full-scale war, May 27th of 2025, I never would have guessed this has gone on this long.

And that's partly why you can't even begin to ascertain the tale of this.

Well, not even a war, really, because I just don't think, I don't see much evidence that Hamas is like fighting back.

No, I don't either.

So it's basically

just a killing zone in Gaza, which is going to lead other people to say, we're going to fight back in other places.

And

that's what history shows you.

It doesn't make it right.

It just makes it what we learned from history, that people will lash out

in other ways and other places.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: On the ground in Gaza, there is this new Israeli-American plan for humanitarian aid distribution that has created a huge uproar.

The idea is to replace the UN and other independent and experienced aid organizations with this new organization called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, or we'll call it the GHF for short, which only came into existence in February.

So the GHF is structured to use armed American contractors to secure what they're calling hubs in Gaza through which aid will be distributed.

Israel claims this plan will prevent Hamas from intercepting aid intended for the civilian population.

There's currently four hubs, three of which are on the southern end of the strip, which immediately creates a huge logistical problem because most of the population of Gaza is concentrated in north and central Gaza.

And to get to the hubs in the south, Palestinians are going to have to cross Israeli military lines with no assurances that they will not be shot at, no assurances that they'll be allowed back.

There's reports today that at least one person trying to get assistance was arrested by Israeli forces.

So they're not going to trust this process, people on the ground in Gaza.

And you are asking a starved, battered population to make physically a long trek to get food to survive, which will just be impossible for the elderly, the sick, the disabled, for children.

And this plan de facto puts the Israeli government in charge of deciding who gets aid and who does not.

And it dovetails with Israel's stated claim of displacing the population of Gaza into the southern end of the strip.

So the GHF has claimed that it has plans for more hubs to be put in place in the north, but nothing about this organization smells right.

On Sunday, Jake Wood, the executive director of the GHF, he resigned, saying in a statement, quote, it is clear that it is not possible to implement this plan while also strictly adhering to the humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence, which I will not abandon.

He resigned shortly after the New York Times reported that this isn't some neutral, independent organization, that it was actually first proposed and developed by Israeli officials just a few weeks into the war.

The Times piece also highlights there's this one American contractor, a former CIA operative named Philip F.

Riley, whose company Safe Reach Solutions is the primary contractor securing the hubs.

According to the Times, Riley helped train the Contras, right-wing militias fighting Nicaragua's Marxist government back in the 80s.

He was also the CIA station chief in Kabul after the U.S.

invasion.

And there's also some weirdness around the funding of GHF.

Like it got seed funding from some non-Israeli businessman and a hundred million dollar donation from an anonymous Western country.

So like no one knows where this money's coming from.

So Ben, the operations commence on Monday.

On Tuesday, there's already reports of Israeli gunfire after crowds of desperate people like broke down a fence to get to the aid.

The IDF is firing warning shots in response.

Like this seems like it's just going to be a logistical disaster and it's already a disaster when it comes to trusting this organization's independence.

Yeah, I actually went down a rabbit hole with this organization, including its branch organizations like

SRS, Safe Reach Solutions.

And then I kind of stopped myself because I'm like, what am I doing here?

Because let's take a step back.

First of all, this is what happens when you

wage war on, delegitimize, attack organizations like UNRWA, organizations that know how to deliver aid.

It's the same thing that was so dumb about that peer, right?

Like, let's just drive some vans in

let's just drive some trucks across the border and give it to the aid professionals and they'll give it to the people.

Like, you know, I'm not a humanitarian aid specialist, but that seems like better than building a pier.

Well, in this case, it's even more cynical because if I'm look, I have enough information.

I don't think they want to give any aid to people in Gaza.

I think they want to be able to say they have a plan to give aid to people.

They're going to call it the, you know, GHF.

They're going to enrich some people who are like private security contractors and not give people aid.

And then they're going to kill Palestinians and starve Palestinians and have houses collapse on Palestinians and and have them walk and die on the way to get to these things.

This is a plan to kill more Palestinians, not to save Palestinians.

And like we just have to start, like,

I don't know what else to think about these things that keep getting presented to us.

Because if you're telling me that the rational way to save Palestinians is to make GHF and like pay some fucking

in southern Gaza while you're getting rid of UNRWA and you're getting rid of people who actually have the relationships and expertise to feed people, I'm not going to give you the benefit benefit of the doubt anymore.

And they just want talking points to say they have a plan so that they can, when they get asked why aren't you giving aid, they can talk about this.

Like that's, I know that's cynical, but I don't know how else to think about it.

No, look, I have no doubt that Hamas was stealing aid and then reselling it.

But one way to combat that is to flood the Gaza Strip with enough humanitarian supplies so that the prices aren't astronomical and they can't make a huge profit off of it anymore.

I also think long-term, this is part of this broader project to undercut the existence of UNRWA, which not only provides humanitarian relief in Gaza, but also fundamentally takes care of Palestinians as they seek the right to return to land where they were displaced from over the past several decades.

So that is an ongoing Netanyahu project.

Also, Ben, you know, you sort of alluded to this earlier.

People get mad at us in the show when we

accuse the Israeli government of war crimes or ethnic cleansing.

And, you know, it's often, you know, I get this all the time on Twitter and shit.

It's like, oh, it's because you hate Israel or it's because you're an anti-Semite.

But I think it's harder to make those rejoinders when the person making the allegation is a former Israeli prime minister.

This is a clip from Ehud Olmert from CNN a couple days ago.

Particularly in the last few days was the statements made by Israeli cabinet ministers, the leading cabinet ministers, that say we should starve Gaza.

What is it if not a war crime?

I mean, how can a serious person

representing the Israeli government

spell it out in such an explicit manner that we should starve Gaza, that there should be no

supply of basic

fundamental humanitarian needs to a couple of millions people living there?

There are

terrorists that we need to fight, but this is not a war against Hamas.

This looks more and more like a political war of the Israeli prime minister and the cabinet and the group of thugs which are now representing the Israeli government inside Israel and across the world are committing actions which can't be interpreted in any other way.

Pretty clear.

Now, he is wildly corrupt.

He's a convicted criminal, but I think he's telling the truth.

Well, you know, Bibi would be.

Yeah, and there's something sad about it, like the criticism, because

take UNRWA.

There are people, I think, in the Israeli government that went UNRWA out of the way for the reasons you said, that they're too tied in with the Palestinians.

Their existence legitimizes the idea that there's such a thing as a Palestinian refugee, which means that that person has a home that they're supposed to return to.

But then what they do is they take the people in the United States, they say, they go, all these people are Hamas and they're all terrorists and it's not safe for them to give out the aid.

And you have, by the way, we've talked to some of these people, They're like nice European people, right?

Like, and then you get these people online who think, genuinely believe that we're idiots, you don't understand, UNRWA is terrorist.

They have no fucking idea what they're talking about.

Like, what do you know about what you're talking about?

You are being used.

You are being played.

You are being played in the most cynical way possible because people are telling you that unless you call like...

people like us anti-Semites for criticizing the murder of children in Gaza, like we don't understand that UNRWA is full of like tea seething with Hamas.

Like, you don't know that.

You've been told that by people that want you to believe that.

There's 13,000 UNRWA employees in Gaza, or at least there were.

Is there some subset of that group that hates the Israeli government?

Yeah, of course.

Certainly.

Could they be in Hamas?

Very, very possible.

It also could be that they are extremely angry about being bombed.

And that they would really like to just do the job of giving people food.

Yeah.

I'm not excusing any connection between UNRWA employees on October 7th.

That should be investigated.

Those people should be prosecuted.

I'm sure they're being targeted by the IDF as we speak if they're still alive.

But the idea that that makes it okay to cut off the sole means of distributing aid to every single human being in the Gaza Strip is insane.

And give me a break.

It's horrible what some people did with an UNRWA.

Are we going to apply the same standard to the IDF?

Because we

like one person does something in an organization of 13,000 people and we're all supposed to like just banish it from existence.

Meanwhile, I don't see any accountability on the other side for anything.

Yeah, I saw a great interview that Faroz did, our guest last week.

He was on a Channel 13, an Israeli, very conservative news channel, who were kind of making the talking point you always hear about,

well, the IDF had to bomb a hospital because there was Hamas infrastructure beneath it.

And he was like, well, Netanyahu had a prostate operation.

He was in the hospital for a couple of days in Israel, presumably directing the government, making war plans, making decisions about the conduct of the war.

Would anyone then argue that that makes that hospital in Israel a legitimate target for a month?

Absolutely.

It only applies in Gaza.

Posse of the World is brought to you by SimplySafe.

Each day you make countless decisions, but one of the easiest and most important is securing your home with SimplySafe.

The moment you arm your system, you know your family and everything you've worked for are protected.

Whether you're stepping out for the day or setting in for the night, that small action delivers something priceless, peace of mind.

You can focus on what matters, rest easier, and go about your day knowing SimplySafe has your back in a crisis.

As you guys know, John Lovitt set up a SimplySafe system all by himself.

It works perfectly.

It's got top-of-the-line sensors.

You can turn it on and off from your phone.

You can protect your home from far away or while you're laying in bed at night.

It can protect against burglaries or floods or fire or anything you need.

And with SimplySafe, millions of Americans enjoy the new standard in home security and greater peace of mind every time they arm their system, when heading out in the morning or when they lock up each night.

Traditional security systems only take action after someone has already broken in, and that's too late.

SimplySafe's active guard outdoor protection can help prevent break-ins before they happen.

If someone's lurking around or acting suspiciously, these agents see and talk to them in real time, activate spotlights, and even contact the police, all before they have a chance to get inside your home.

No long-term contracts or cancellation fees.

Monitoring plans start affordably at around $1 a day, 60-day satisfaction guarantee, or your money back.

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

That's simplysafe.com slash crooked world.

There's no safe like SimplySafe.

Next level pet people will do anything for their dogs.

That means treating them with next level protection from parasites.

With NextGuard Plus, a Foxeloner moxodectin and parental chewable tablets.

NextGuard Plus chews provide one-and-done monthly protection against fleas, ticks, heartworm disease, roundworms, and hookworms, all in a tasty, beef-flavored chew.

Used with caution in dogs with a history of seizures or neurologic disorders, dogs should be tested for existing heartworm infection prior to starting a preventive.

Ask your vet about NextGuard Plus Chews.

A quick update then, just on the Trump incoherent, feckless, and failed effort to end the war in Ukraine.

So per usual, there's sort of two core elements.

The first is is Trump complaining on Truth Social, usually mostly about Zelensky, or at least more Zelensky than Putin.

And the second is Russia launching massive airstrikes and massacring civilians in Ukraine.

Here's a clip of Trump talking to the press about the war in Ukraine and about Putin on Sunday.

I'm not happy with what Putin's doing.

He's killing a lot of people, and I don't know what the hell happened to Putin.

I've known him a long time, always gotten along with him.

We're in the middle of talking, and he's shooting rockets into Kiev and other cities.

I don't like it at all.

President, what do you want to do about it?

I'm surprised.

I'm very surprised.

We'll see what we're going to do.

What am I going to tell you?

You're the fake news, aren't you?

You're totally fake.

I don't like what Putin is doing, not even a little bit.

He's killing people.

And something happened to this guy, and I don't like it.

Yeah, Putin

just started killing people.

He just figured this out.

I mean, how weak does he look?

He looks fucking pathetic.

I think Russia, right around that time, he was either before or after those comments, Russia launched its largest ever drone and missile attack on Ukraine, largest since the full-scale invasion started.

The Ukrainian Air Force said Russia launched more than 350 explosive drones and at least nine cruise missiles.

Trump then said Putin had gone absolutely crazy.

That's a quote.

To which the Kremlin responded that Trump was showing signs of, quote, emotional overload.

Then on Tuesday, Trump Truth, quote, what Vladimir Putin doesn't realize is that if it weren't for me, lots of really bad things would have already happened to Russia.

I'd like to know what he did.

Yeah.

So he's like, he's playing with fire.

So like,

it's just, he looks so pathetic there.

The only good news for the Ukrainians, Ben, is that German Chancellor Friedrich Mertz announced that Germany will give Ukraine the Taurus missiles.

That's their long-range missile.

They also announced that the

Ukraine's allies would remove all range restrictions on arms they're supplying.

I don't, some of the reporting suggested that includes U.S.

supplied weapons, which would surprise me that Trump would cream light that, but interesting.

I don't know.

I just, it's just, you made the point.

Like, Trump is the most thin-skinned person in the world.

He takes every slight so personally, and Putin just humiliates him over and over again.

And I think if there's something that we've learned about Putin's intentions, which is not surprising, is that Putin, you know, some people are like, well, will he see Trump as an opportunity to work with Trump to kind of get what he wants?

Or will he see Trump as an opportunity to completely humiliate the United States?

Like, I think he would be more than happy to have Donald Trump end up hating him because because Donald Trump is going to prove his point that he's made his whole life.

These people are corrupt.

They're no different than anybody else.

Look at this fucking guy.

You want to put him in charge of your security.

Like, so I think what Putin is doing is intentionally humiliating Trump to both get more land in Ukraine, to get the better deal whenever there is a deal in Ukraine, but also to intentionally make Trump look like a fool.

And Trump looks like an even bigger fool.

And he's like, ah, he can't do that.

And then it's like, what are you going to do about it?

And he's like, fake news.

You know, like, I mean, screaming at Jeff Mason.

which is funny if you know Jeff Mason.

He's like a nice Reuters guy, like Fedora.

Yeah, Reuters.

Um, anyway, it's it's it's just sad.

And Ukrainians, you can tell all their eggs are in the European basket now.

Yeah, they're just, I, it's hard, you almost don't see Zelensky unless he's flanked by like Donald Tusk, Friedrich Mertz, uh, Emmanuel Macron, and Kier Starmer.

Truly, it's like you'd think those guys are like his bodyguards.

Yeah, he's always with a half-dozen European leaders.

No, I think you're exactly right.

Like, he'll string Trump along.

Putin knows that Putin's going to die in office and that Trump will be gone and will probably probably be gone in four years.

And you're right, though.

Over time, the humiliation of Trump becomes the humiliation of a country and a system

that could put someone like that in charge.

So great work, everybody.

Ben, last week was also a tough time to be a senior leader in the North Korean Navy.

This comes after a 5,000-ton destroyer capsized at launch, like its christening ceremony, due to, quote, absolute carelessness, according to Kim Jong-un, who watched it all happen live.

He also said the wreck, quote, brought the dignity and self-respect of our state to a collapse.

Over the weekend, North Korea detained three officials from the shipyard where this destroyer was built, the chief engineer, the construction head, and an administrative manager.

Ben, can you imagine?

Okay, so like there's this, they're trying to slide this giant brand new destroyer into the water.

There's a tower kind of like viewing area set up, which presumably is Kim Jong-un.

And then like...

He loves a good viewing camera.

Yeah, there's like 4,000 fucking generals whose job is to clap as loud as humanly possible and like show their love for him.

Imagine watching this thing tip over and just collapse and sink and knowing like how fucked you are.

I feel genuinely bad for those guys.

I will say the useful thing about it

other than being good for content is sometimes and I fall into this trap too.

You make the mistake of

building up.

some people you know it's look kim jung-un looks like he's been on a bit of a roll you know like he got all this aid from russia like

His boys are getting some reps in Ukraine.

He's flying around looking at stuff.

He's advancing his nuclear program.

He's sitting on top of a completely absurd, corrupt system in which shit like this happens.

The ships don't work.

So we do just remind ourselves,

the South Koreans look a little nutty right now, but like

I'd much rather have their carts than the North Koreans.

This is not a system where this guy flies around, stands on platforms.

Wasn't there like an account that was like Kim Jong-un looks at stuff?

Yeah, that's a great account.

Well, some of the stuff he's looking at doesn't work.

Yeah.

It's interesting that Kim, he's much more likely than his predecessors to talk publicly about these kinds of disasters, which is interesting.

Maybe he just kind of like understands the modern age, which has used...

He's a modern man.

Yeah, he used everything to his advantage.

The journal reported the Trump administration is considering withdrawing about 4,500 U.S.

troops from South Korea and sending them to other places in the kind of Indo-Pacific area.

That sounds like a very bad idea.

That's what I was worried about.

It's like, because then you're green letting Kim Jong-un to do some stupid shit in South Korea.

Yeah, I assume we'd still have, what, 21, 22,000.

But yeah, it does sound like it could be the beginning of a process that would freak everybody out.

Freak everybody out, drive the South Koreans to the Chinese, like, you know, freak out the Japanese.

Like, if like five years from now, like, Japan and South Korea have like nuclear weapons, like this would be like the...

beginning of that slide.

That's true.

Yeah.

The beginning of the DVD.

Over in Japan, there's a very different crisis.

They're calling it the rice crisis.

The price of rice has basically doubled this year in Japan, and they're even tapping into government resources and can't bring this price down.

I guess they have like a, like we have like the SPRO, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

They have like a rice version, which is pretty sweet.

Among the reasons cited for the shortage are, and the price increases are panic buying fueled by internet rumors of some kind of mega earthquake, people globally substituting rice for wheat because of shortages resulting from the war in Ukraine,

and then a booming tourism sector and lots of, I assume, Americans coming over and wanting sushi and rice and everything else.

All of this is important, though, to explain how a joke about rice cost the Japanese farm minister his job.

So he was at a fundraiser, this farm minister, Taku Ito, he joked that he never needed to buy rice because his supporters sent him plenty of it as a gift, which prompted widespread outrage across the country.

Opposition parties threatened a no-confidence vote against him, so he resigned, which made me just think, Ben, how cool it must be to have a political system where leaders still felt like a sense of shame and that all worked

there's possible the the possibility of being shamed still exists and in Japanese culture I think it's like particularly acute um

I

will say like a couple thoughts on this I mean the first thing is

like

Japan needs to give itself like a little bit of a break here.

You know, like there's some externalities here.

You got tariffs.

You got like all these factors.

Like, let's get through the rice crisis here.

We don't, you know,

we can do this.

We can do this together.

The other thing, like, weirdly, this made me think about,

and this is the benefit of doing this podcast for a few years, because there'll be stories like this, and then they'll kind of come and go, do you remember to cite Japan's like, you know, historic adversary when the Chinese foreign minister just disappeared?

And nobody, I still don't, you can't figure out what happened to that guy.

Like, like, I was just, when I saw this thing, one day he was just gone.

He's just gone.

Was that the one who was thought to have been having an affair with a reporter who had worked in America or something?

So the theory was he like impregnated or had an affair with like a reporter in the U.S.

It was embarrassing and they just disappeared him.

Anyway, in the Japanese culture is a little different here.

Obviously, this is a guy like stepping down himself, but it just brought to mind.

It's tough, you know, sometimes to be a foreign minister.

Yeah, that's a tough gig.

I do think they can solve this one.

I mean, I think they had a bad harvest because of hot weather.

There's obviously the rise in demand we talked about, but also they have like policies that they could just get rid of.

Like, I think they've paid farmers to reduce rice acreage to keep prices high and avoid overproduction.

I think they probably have some restrictions on imports that they could get rid of.

I actually have one substantive thing to say about this that is useful, which is when I was in Singapore, I was at this climate change kind of conference where they were giving awards to people.

Pro or anti-they were against it.

And these are people that were like coming up with new ways of dealing with climate change.

And one way is that they invented a new way to make rice.

How?

Because rice creates a lot of methane, right?

Because of the way you harvest it and all the water you use and stuff.

And so these people basically developed

a new way to make more rice with far less methane emission.

That's cool.

Takes less land.

But the problem is, like, rice farmers, like everybody else who've done things a certain way their whole lives are like, they don't want to change, right?

So I mean, I'm not.

Saying I know the intricacies of the Japanese rice market, but part of this is as there's more demand and they just need to produce more rice.

I mean, like, shit, people weren't eating sushi in this this country like that much when I was a kid.

No.

Like, I can't imagine that.

When it became a thing, like the 80s?

It started to be, but now it's just like normalized.

It's everywhere, right?

I mean, think how much rice that is.

They got to probably come up with some new ways to produce the rice.

Yeah, there's probably

a lot of pelt-up demand just from U.S.

Okay, so sushi began to achieve widespread popularity in the U.S.

in the mid-1960s.

Huh.

Mainstream breakthrough came in the 70s and 80s.

Yeah, yeah.

I can see that.

Now we all just love it.

I get these Japanese rice.

I get this fancy, these big bags, but they're expensive.

Are they?

Do you notice a difference?

Yeah, it's better rice.

Do you have a rice cooker?

No, but I do the thing.

And now I wash the rice, like I wash the starch off, and I'm pretty like...

I've had some people be like, I can't believe you don't wash your rice and all this stuff.

So now I wash it multiple times.

Not me, man.

I'm a quinoa guy living in a rice world.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Final story, Ben.

Coco Ben's.

Honestly, we have frozen stuff in the freezer that you can just nuke in two and a a half minutes, and then your kids are full.

Final story, this fun one from our buddies in New Zealand, where apparently a humble cookie tin plays an instrumental role in keeping their democracy going.

So, this is called the biscuit tin, as it's known there.

It is used to determine what bills are taken up by New Zealand's parliament.

Basically, they tally a list of proposals one through 90, then place bingo tokens labeled with those numbers in the tin, shake it up.

Whatever's picked gets added to the parliamentary agenda.

The tin has a faded label that reads members' bills.

It was apparently bought by a staffer at a Wellington supermarket in the early 90s.

Most bills never enter the tin.

They go through like the ruling party's legislators, but every two weeks they set aside time for the biscuit tin, which I don't know, man.

I genuinely read about this and was like, that's a pretty cool idea.

I imagine the U.S.

version, you know, 50% of the time, you will have the most hateful shit imaginable by some awful Republican.

But imagine if Congress every couple weeks had to vote on a minimum wage increase or committing to not cut Medicare.

I feel like that would be better than whatever we're doing now.

It's a lot better than having like Mike Johnson and a rules committee, you know, drafting a big, beautiful bill.

Yeah, at 4 a.m.

behind closed doors.

Yeah,

I like this approach, biscuit tin.

I mean, I sent you...

I mean, not to, because I love New Zealand.

I love people from New Zealand.

But the other parliamentary tradition that I flagged for your attention was this idea of drinking out of a boot in the Australian parliament.

I forgot you said.

So we could do both, right?

We could take this from New Zealand and the drinking out of a boot from Australia.

Well,

we got to cut that into the YouTube video right here.

Yeah.

There's a dude that literally just drinks like a beer out of a boot to finish his

current time in Congress.

It was like his second term.

It was like the end of his second term, and all of a sudden he just pulls off his shit,

dumps a beer into it, and does a shoey in front of everyone.

I love New Zealand, Australia.

And I love, I don't even understand the internal rivalry, which I'm sure is like really fucking intense.

So I want to know more about that, like the New Zealand versus Australia rivalry.

Kyle McGinn, an outgoing state MP from Western Australia, he performed a shoey, a celebratory ritual, at the end of his farewell speech in the Western Australian Parliament.

Western Australian Parliament.

So maybe we should be looking at the Western Australian Parliament.

Yeah, these are my people.

Specifically, yeah.

I've never done a shooy myself that I recall.

I think I did a shooy in college, but I mean, it's a little hazy.

Hannah's friends, she's from kind of rural Maryland, and they would chug out of a duck.

It was like a duck decoy.

You just kind of carve a hole in it, fill it up with beers, and just hammer it.

That's kind of fun.

Yeah, it's a lot.

It was a good time.

Okay.

Jim Hines.

We're going to take a quick break.

When you come back, you'll hear my interview with Congressman Jim Hines about tons of stuff.

So stick around for that.

Potsy of the World is brought to you by the Council on Foreign Relations.

Tackling climate change requires that everyone, not just the experts, can understand the enormous economic, national security, and humanitarian effects of a warming climate.

The Council on Foreign Relations partner with Coursera, an online learning platform to make climate literacy a reality through a new three-course series.

Whether you're a student, future climate czar, or just someone who panic scrolls wildfire maps, this is for you.

You'll even get a certification in climate literacy from the Council on Foreign Relations that you can slap on LinkedIn, which is basically the adult version of a fridge magnet.

Put that on your LinkedIn.

No, seriously, you can add your certification right to your profile.

Go to cfr.org slash Coursera Climate to enroll today.

That's cfr.org slash Coursera Climate.

At Girls Junior, Latefords, get the bag.

Build your own bag after 8 p.m.

for $5.99.

Get a Cali Classic single, fries plus chicken stars.

Or get a spicy chicken sandwich, onion rings plus chicken stars.

This deal is stacked.

Don't hit the sack.

Hit the drive-thru.

Build your own bag.

Just $5.99.

Only a girls Jr.

You build it, you eat it.

Order your bag on the app and unlock even more Burgers Insides.

Available for a limited time at participating restaurants.

Tax not included.

Price may vary.

Not valid in the offer discount or combo.

See ya for details.

My guest today represents Connecticut's 4th Congressional District and is the ranking member on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

Congressman Jim Himes, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me.

Thank you for doing this.

So on Tuesday, The Guardian reported that a a Pentagon leak investigation ordered by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth may have been based on an illegal NSA wiretap that was conducted without a wiretap, without a warrant, I should say.

Do you know,

Hegseth is using the existence of this leak investigation to fire several of his top aides.

Do you know anything about these reports?

And if true, can you help us understand the implications for the intelligence community and for civil liberties generally?

Yeah, sure, sure.

So,

you know, and I'm reading the same Guardian article you are, but as somebody who's been sort of kicking around the intelligence community in an oversight role for more than a decade, I can tell you that there's almost certainly nothing to that.

You know, the NSA is not allowed to surveil people inside the United States full stop.

And I mean, from the chief of the NSA right on down to the person who started yesterday,

they know what a very, very serious legal issue it would be if that were to change.

And then, of course, you've got an additional layer.

You know, it would be bad enough, obviously, if the NSA turned its surveillance capabilities on U.S.

persons or inside the United States, but then to do it around public officials.

So anyway, the NSA, I know, would

never do that.

I think the people that would be involved in the technical aspect of that, right up into whoever ordered it, would have understood that they would be looking at jail time if anything was even remotely like what we're hearing about in the Guardian.

Look, I think my analysis is,

you know, first of all, it's interesting, right, that these firings at the top of the Pentagon required some sort of explanation because to get back to the NSA,

when they fired General Tim Hawk, a widely respected director of the NSA, there was no explanation given.

And, you know, that was a serious blow to the NSA.

And now they sort of feel obligated to say, oh, well, it might have involved leaks and making up this wild stuff about the NSA.

I think the story here is just what a snake pit it is inside the Secretary of Defense's office at the top of the Pentagon.

So we don't think they're planning illegal NSA wiretaps on Signal somewhere where you feel like that's not likely?

I think it's almost certainly not true.

Again,

we could spend the next hour talking about the violations of law.

This is an administration, by the way, that understands the urgency of reauthorizing a controversial surveillance tool that the NSA has.

This is FISA 702.

Some of your listeners will be familiar with it.

It is a program that

by law must be targeted at non-U.S.

people outside of the United States, but non-U.S.

people outside of the United States periodically email or text with people inside the United States.

And that's what generates the controversy there.

The administration understands it's probably our most valuable intelligence tool.

And they understand that if the NSA were ever involved in any of these kinds of shenanigans, that tool would go away on their watch.

And that's not something I think that they would risk.

I also wanted to ask you about some recent reports and decisions made by the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard.

So, just a little backstory for listeners: the National Intelligence Council produced an assessment that concluded that the Venezuelan government was not directing or controlling the gang Trende Aragua.

This is important because that assessment undercut the legal basis for Trump's invocation of the Alien Enemies Act, which they've been using to deport Venezuelan citizens.

The Alien Enemies Act allows the executive branch to deport foreign citizens if their government has declared declared war on the U.S.

or is engaged in a, quote, predatory incursion into U.S.

territory.

So according to these reports and some emails that have been since released, after reading an early version of this assessment, Tulsi Gabbard's chief of staff, a guy named Joe Kent, emailed the analysts in question to say, quote, we need to do some rewriting so that, quote, this document is not used against the DNI or POTUS.

Kent wanted the intelligence community to write something that was more politically useful for Stephen Miller at the the White House is sort of the takeaway here.

However, the final intelligence product still contradicted Trump's assertions about the Maduro government directing Trenda Aragua, and Gabbard later fired two top officials at the National Intelligence Council.

What was your reaction to reading about that whole saga?

Well, you told the story exactly right from start to finish.

You know, how the administration is relying on this 1798 act,

you know, how the courts have never really determined what a predatory incursion is.

But, you know, the Trump administration and their infinite wisdom at least understand that that probably means that Venezuela should be directing this gang.

And by the way, we should say gang members who are here illegal should be deported, but they should be done.

They should be deported legally through the due process that we have set up to make sure that people's civil rights aren't violated.

But you told the story exactly right.

And, you know, it's there for everyone to see.

And I'll tell you, my own journey was a tough one because I saw that report in early April.

and I read it and I said, holy smokes, the intelligence community is saying that there is no relationship, no directing, no proxy relationship between Venezuela and

TDA.

And the administration is saying otherwise, including, by the way, the DNI in a tweet was saying, you know, there's a connection here.

The president said it.

And presumably they were going to say it to the Supreme Court.

That led me, by the way, to say, you know, to go to the leaders in Congress and say, how do we make sure the Supreme Court actually sees what the intelligence community believes here, which contradicts the president and the director of national intelligence?

So that was ugly until, of course, that report was declassified and everyone can read a redacted version.

But to really zero in on what's problematic here is,

you know, I'm not surprised that Donald Trump lies about it.

That is what he does.

He's been elected a number of times, even though Americans know that he does not tell the truth.

To see the director of national intelligence, my former colleague Tulsi Gabbard, lie about this in the context of a report that contradicted what she was saying was hard.

And then, and here's the nub.

You know, Joe can, and, you know, he's going to say, well, Democrats, you know, he responded to this by saying, Democrats want to shelter Trende Aragua by deflecting and distorting the truth.

But you got the line exactly right.

In order to

make sure that this report not be used against the DNI or the president, that is anathema, anathema to what the intelligence community as a whole and certainly to what the leaders of the IC must be doing.

The IC must report the truth full stop, not try to alter the truth, not try to make

political protection for somebody.

And the reason that matters, the reason that's essential is that the last time we saw something of this magnitude, where the White House and senior political figures stepped in to slant, shall we say, intelligence, 4,400 Americans died in Iraq, not to mention hundreds of thousands of Iraqi, because the Cheney vice presidential office and the George W.

Bush administration decided that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Turns out they weren't.

And in fact, the CIA and the intelligence community did not really believe that they were.

But Dick Cheney and his people put pressure until you have then director of CIA, George Tennett, saying the case for weapons of mass destruction is a slam dunk, his words, because he was bowing to the pressure from the White House.

And as a result, we have 4,400 dead American troops for a war that was fought on false pretenses.

So this stuff matters.

And again, you know, Joe Kent can say all that he wants to say about how much he hates Democrats and stuff, but the phrase that this not be used against the director or the president shows that he is beyond disqualified from a senior role in the intelligence community.

Yeah, and by the way, I believe he has been nominated to run the National Counterterrorism Center.

So not only is he politicizing intelligence, but he is also stupid enough to put that sentence in email, which in my book is Two Strikes.

But I mean, look, I'm not a big Tulsi Gabbard fan, but if you take her at her word, her kind of political origin story is someone who served in the military, saw the war in Iraq, felt like it was a disaster, saw all the politicization of intelligence that you just referenced, and wanted to change course and not get into regime change wars and not ever let that happen again.

And for her to

preside over...

Look, the Iraq war was obviously a greater disaster in terms of the outcome, but in terms of just blatantly politicizing intelligence and dictating the product for solely political reasons, what Kent is doing in this email, I think, almost seems worse to me.

And it was just shocking given what her professed motivations are.

Yeah, yeah.

And I served with Tulsi Gabber, didn't know her terribly well.

But let me say this, and I'll say this about President Trump as well.

It's hard to look back on the last generation, looking at the Iraq war, looking at the Afghanistan war, the failed nation building that we tried for more than a decade there, going back to Vietnam.

the mistakes, the strategic mistakes America makes are mistakes of overengagement militarily.

We thought we could turn Vietnam into a democracy.

We thought we would turn Iraq into a democracy at the point of a gun.

We thought that Afghanistan, we could grow this medieval society into a New England.

You know, we make that mistake over and over again.

And Tulsi Gabbard, I know this from when she was in a political role, sort of disagrees with that.

That's what led her to go see that terrible dictator of Syria, Bashar al-Assad.

You know, I i don't think that was done out of uh any malign motive i think she genuinely wanted to in whatever weird way she thought she could accomplish it avoid another middle eastern war yeah right so that instinct is not a bad instinct but here's the point here's the point when you take a job as director of cia or director of national intelligence you set aside your policy beliefs you put those things in a freezer and you put that freezer in the basement and you lock that thing up because the intelligence community is not about policy it is is about providing, you know, using the $90 billion-ish of resources that we provide to the intelligence community, the president and other policymakers with the very best information that we can get so that they make good decisions.

So there is no room for policymaking.

in the intelligence apparatus for obvious reasons, right?

And so that's bad enough.

And I, you know, I hope that Tulsi understands that.

But then to use your office, and remember, he's chief of staff to Tulsi Gabbard for political protection for political figures.

Again, that, you know, who knows what the United States Senate will do.

Every once in a while, a few Republican senators, you know, search around for a few hours and find their backbones.

But I mean, if they can look at those emails that Joe Kent sent, and by the way, it's more than just the phrase that you outlined.

It's a constant and repeated attempt to bring up the failures of Joe Biden, to put this in the context of an open southern border.

It is blatant politicization of intelligence.

So, I mean, if a few Republican senators can, you know, do the profoundly unnatural act of finding their backbone, this guy will not be confirmed in the role that he's been nominated for as chief of the National Counterterrorism Center.

Yeah, I hope they will dig deep into whatever information they can find about this whole affair.

I do want to turn to the war in Gaza.

So in July of 2024, Brett Holmgren, who was then a top intelligence official at the State Department, said about October 7th, quote, it was and is and will be a generational event that terrorist organizations in the Middle East and around the world use as a recruiting opportunity.

In March of 2024, Evreel Haynes, who is then Biden's director of national intelligence, said, quote, it is likely that the Gaza conflict will have a generational impact on terrorism, end quote.

If you fast forward to today, things are worse for civilians in Gaza.

They are still being slaughtered every single day by airstrikes.

People are starving to death because Israel is blockading humanitarian aid.

And then on the political track, not only is there no hope of a two-state solution, there is now a plan backed by the United States to ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip and displace everyone there to Libya.

What are you seeing in terms of the impact when it comes to terrorist recruiting?

And how much are these threats being directed against the United States given that we are fully backing the Israelis in this war?

Yeah, yeah.

So let's take up both those questions.

First, the terrorism question.

Look, the numbers speak for themselves.

You know, Hamas has been able to, not entirely, but has been able to largely reconstitute the personnel that it has lost in this war.

Not entirely, let's just throw a number out there and say two-thirds to three-quarters of the manpower that they have lost to Israeli military activity has been reconstituted.

Why?

Because there's an awful lot of young men in Gaza who see the devastation that has been visited on their communities.

Yes, by Hamas, and let's start with that,

but then subsequently by the Israelis.

And this is a story as old as time, right?

You know, there were probably as many terrorists or more terrorists in Afghanistan after we left than there were before we left.

Because when you blow up a village, which inevitably you do when you're taking, you know, substantial military activity, there are brothers, there are nephews, there are people who will then take up arms.

So, yes,

this

righteous action, and I think it has has ceased to be righteous, that the Israelis took in response to October 7th has turned into, at least inside Gaza, a recruiting tool.

Now,

there's a larger strategic question here, which is if you're the leadership of Hezbollah and Hamas, most of whom are dead now, but the replacements, and you say to yourself, gosh, if we could go back and do October 7th again, would we do it?

I suspect there would be a great deal of disagreement on that question, right?

Because Hezbollah and its leadership leadership has been decimated.

Same is true of Hamas.

And so I think the strategic question is different.

But, you know, look, terrorism requires one angry person to do a terrible thing, as we saw in Washington, D.C., where one radicalized,

you know, horrible person murdered two innocent employees of the Israeli embassy.

Whether you want to call that a terrorist act or not, terrorism at that level is not hard to do.

So let me come back to the larger strategic focus.

I don't think anybody on October 8th

believed that the Israelis should do anything other than to visit retribution on Hamas

for the appalling attack of October 7th.

But as you pointed out, we have now gotten to a place, and I was in Israel two months ago, three months ago with the prime minister, where the prime minister, I think, sees his role now as the obliteration of all of Israel's enemy.

I think it's sort of a cathartic thing that he will do to make up for the attack that happened on his watch.

And you're exactly right.

The plan to level Gaza with the idea of either voluntarily or involuntarily moving those, I mean, let's just call that what it is.

That would be a war crime.

It would be a crime against humanity to displace.

It is the definition of ethnic cleansing.

Now, you know, I trust the Israeli people and Israel to not go that far, even though the prime minister may want to.

But even today, where we have wildly inadequate humanitarian aid moving into Gaza, that too is a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention.

And it needs to stop.

It needs to stop both for the way you frame this question,

the anger and the rage and the terrorism that it will generate, but it needs to stop for moral reasons as well, which is, you know, it is time for the civilian population of Gaza to stop paying the cost for the hideous acts of Hamas.

It is time for the prime minister to say, now we think about how we rebuild this society on a trajectory

to someday live at peace with the state of Israel.

I mean, so American law prohibits arms sales to countries that restrict humanitarian aid.

U.S.

laws restrict U.S.

weapons sales to countries that are committing war crimes or weapon sales sales to foreign military units credibly implicated in gross human rights violations.

I don't see anything classified, but I see lots and lots of horrific images and videos and news reports on social media that suggest to me that Israel is committing war crimes constantly, that clearly they're restricting humanitarian aid and doing a number of things in contravention of U.S.

law.

But the Biden State Department told us over and over and again that that was not happening.

And the Trump administration is continuing the Biden policy of just full-throated support for the Israeli government in this war.

Were those assertions that Israel was not committing war crimes, were those accurate in your view compared to what you've seen both in intelligence and in public reporting?

You know, with hindsight,

you know, we all saw the video of the uh what looked like, and I'm going to say what looked like,

the murder of the Red Crescent workers,

you know,

and then the cover-up, where we never would have known about that murder had a phone not been found on a dead body.

The killing of journalists, which,

again, I'll be careful here

because I don't like forming conclusions without good facts.

Because there's a long history of the IDF acting carefully and legally.

I think that the Biden administration was stuck in a paradigm that Prime Minister Netanyahu has now sacrificed because there have been enough incidents starting with the horrors visited upon the civilian population to the killing of the world food Jose Andres people to, and it goes, the list goes on and on and on, where sadly,

And this comes from somebody who has traditionally been a very strong supporter of the state of Israel, where we can no longer take it for granted that the IDF is acting first and foremost in a humanitarian way with a constant reference to the laws of armed conflict.

And so that's a long-winded way of saying Joe Biden did not use the leverage that he had to force a change in Prime Minister Netanyahu.

Now, I'm not sure that he could have succeeded.

Netanyahu is on very literally what I think as he or his people regard as a mission from God here.

It's a mission of, you know, as I said,

maybe reparation for what happened on October 7th on his watch.

But I do think in retrospect, it's fair to say that the Biden administration did not use the full leverage that it has.

And I say that sadly because

while I do think that the current president will

do what he can to stop another war in the Middle East, and now I'm referring to the possibility of an Israeli attack on Iran,

he will continue to not use leverage to try to get the prime minister.

He will continue to give the prime minister anything that the prime minister wants, even as it becomes increasingly clear that the Prime Minister has a very dark vision for Gaza that is not consistent with the laws of armed conflict or humanitarian law.

You mentioned a possible conflict with Iran.

I mean, I think to their credit, the Trump administration has now engaged in several rounds of talks with Iran in hopes of securing some sort of deal to prevent a conflict and also prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.

It does, though, seem like there is an internal fight within Trump's team about whether they would be okay with a deal that allows Iran to have some very limited amount of uranium enrichment for civilian use to generate nuclear power, essentially, or whether they've fully drawn a red line that will, and are demanding that Iran have no enrichment program whatsoever.

Do you have a sense of what the accurate position is given the kind of competing news reports?

And what do you think is the right answer here, policy-wise, just in terms of like efficacy?

Yeah, yeah.

So,

you know,

this is very very technical stuff, but if you are acting in good faith, as I think the Obama administration was, you can put in place the safeguards to make sure that Iran is six months to a year away from having the capability to put together or use a nuclear weapon.

That is technologically feasible.

And in fact, that's where we were once the JCPOA was signed.

Now, you know, the American right and certainly Prime Minister Netanyahu didn't agree with that.

But as a technical matter, it was true.

So, you know, can you, and I understand that it's the position of the prime minister that Iran can have no enrichment capacity, but technically speaking, it is possible to make sure that enrichment that is done is done to a level and in a quantity that cannot be used for a nuclear weapon.

And so long as the

ability of inspectors to go in and confirm that stuff is, that is a technically feasible thing.

Now, we're not in a world, I think, today where technically feasible is what matters.

Based on my contact with the Israeli prime minister, I have very little doubt that he is hell-bent on going to war with Iran.

Again, I think this is as much cathartic for October 7th as it is anything else, because, you know, an attack on Iran's nuclear sites will set them back, no question about it.

You can destroy enough stuff so that Iran is now a year, 18 months, two years away from being where they are today, which is pretty close to the capability of having a nuclear weapon, but it doesn't end it.

And what have you done in the meantime?

You have united a fractious Iranian population behind a profoundly unpopular regime because you've attacked their country.

You have probably unleashed a staggering

amount of volatility into the oil market, which translates into

pain at the pump for an awful lot of Americans.

And you've probably unleashed the Iranians' desire to conduct terrorist attacks around the world.

So, you know, I think that's where the prime minister is right now.

And I think he's probably paying a very dangerous poker game with Donald Trump.

Because again, I'm going to credit Donald Trump here.

I think Donald Trump is is

allergic to kinetic conflict, particularly in the Middle East.

But what's going to happen is Israel is going to tell a story, or I should say the prime minister is going to tell a story about how any enrichment capability at all means that there's a bomb in the future, means that Tel Aviv is under a mushroom cloud.

And by the way, so is New York City, Boston, Los Angeles.

We saw this in the run-up to the Iraq War, right?

We saw the, you know, then Bill Crystal and the neocons tell a terrifying story to the American people.

I think this is what we're going to start to see pretty soon, driven by the prime minister's desire ultimately to at least get a green light from the United States to attack Iran.

Anyone who wants more information about Netanyahu's credibility on this subject should look at his testimony before Congress, I believe, about the Iraq War and just how wrong he was then, and then maybe compare that to what he's saying now about Iran.

Thank you for letting me skip around a little bit.

I know we're getting short on time.

Last couple of questions.

So the Trump administration, their Ukraine policy is incoherent at best, right?

I mean, Trump has been hammering Zelensky over the weekend.

He decided to yell at Putin on Truth Social again.

In your estimation, what happens to the Ukrainian side if things just kind of continue steady state as they are now?

Will they just continue to lose territory?

Like, do you have a sense of whether intelligence, U.S.

intelligence support to Ukraine could get cut off?

Yeah, you know, if the status quo is maintained, if nothing changes from today, where the Europeans and the Americans continue to provide weapons, continue to provide intelligence support, I think the situation on the ground largely remains the same.

You know, we sometimes underappreciate the extent to which the Ukrainians have actually grown their own homegrown capacity to make stuff and to learn things.

You know, they're producing unbelievably capable drones.

By the way, we can learn a lot.

The Pentagon can learn a lot from what the Ukrainians have learned about drone warfare, something that, you know, until very recently, nobody in the Pentagon was thinking all that hard about.

But so, you know the sad fact is that with no change you know will the russians pick up 100 yards here 100 yards there yes you know will it be a slow and grinding war for many years until you know the russian people have finally had it years down the road yes that's a that's a really ugly capacity the alternative of course is two alternatives number one let's finally give zelensky you know unfettered access to weapons that can reach deep into Russia, right, to turn the course of this war around.

Not that Zelensky is ever going to push the Russians back to the pre-conflict borders, but so that Putin finally realizes that we are there for the long haul and that this is going to be a losing venture for him, whether it's two, five, or 10 years down the road.

The alternative, of course, is a really ugly one, which is that the United States, that Donald Trump just gets sick of this, you know, marches away.

You know, the

40% of the Republican conference in the House and then in the Senate that continue to support Ukraine aren't enough to provide weaponry.

And now the Russian incursion into Ukraine picks up speed.

And, you know, do the Russians ultimately get to Kyiv?

No, I don't think so.

You know, the Ukrainian people are going to, you know, go into caves with rifles before they give up their country.

But Putin will have learned that the West does not have a backbone.

And though he's in a lot of trouble now, five years from now, when he's got some domestic crisis and he decides he needs to invade a piece of Poland or Moldova or Estonia or Lithuania, he'll do it.

He'll do it because he will have learned that the West, courtesy of Donald Trump, doesn't have the traditional commitment to democracies and stability in Europe that we did since 1945.

And one worrisome sort of subplot of this war is you're seeing Russia and North Korea get closer and closer.

North Korea is literally sending troops to fight.

on the battlefield against Ukraine.

And then the Russians are reportedly providing some sort of military tech to North Korea in return.

Do we know what that is?

And how worried are you about that kind of changing the security situation for our allies in South Korea, Japan, and also, you know, for us in the U.S.?

Yeah, we are seeing things

that

would suggest,

and I should be clear that I'm not current on the intelligence in this area, but we're seeing things, capabilities out of North Korea, missile capabilities.

You know, as much as it was crazy to watch this new battleship fall over on its side in North Korea, We're seeing military capabilities that certainly look like they were provided by the Russians.

And surprise, surprise, right?

I mean,

North Korea has lost hundreds, if not thousands of people in a conflict that they have no, you know, no particular reason to be involved in.

And so, of course, there's a price for that.

And of course, that price is in all likelihood going to be some combination of oil, commodities, and military know-how.

So yeah, that's a pretty ugly story because

we always wonder whether North Korea is a deterrable country, right?

You know, the leader there is,

you know, particularly odd and ornery and prone to unpredictability.

And so, you know, upping his capabilities, as the Russians almost certainly are, is not a happy thing for the region.

No, not good.

Also, I would not want to be the North Korean general in charge of that ship launch.

Final couple of arrests there.

Yeah,

I doubt the caliber of the legal representation.

Those arrested are

no, no.

Kim Jong-un, I believe, is known to fire anti-aircraft guns at people he doesn't like.

Last question for you.

There's been simmering tensions between China and Taiwan for a very long time.

The date you often hear from military officials testifying before Congress about when the PLA, the Chinese military, might be prepared for some sort of operation against Taiwan is usually 2027.

Is that timeframe still right to you?

So very, very good question.

It's really important that we remember exactly what 2027 was about.

2027 is the date, and this was a couple of years ago, that President Xi ordered his military command to be ready to invade Taiwan by then.

Now, remember, that's an order, and this is an unpracticed military, hasn't fought a conflict since the 1970s.

They've watched very closely the Russian failure in Ukraine, right?

And remember, what the Russian, the experienced Russian military didn't do was try to cross 100 miles of blue water.

And so just because the president ordered the PLA to be able to take Taiwan in 2027 doesn't necessarily mean they're going to have the capability, which, by the way, doesn't mean there's any room for complacency there.

My own view, and there are people smarter than I am on this who disagree, but my own view is that the risk of an invasion is so huge.

so unpredictable that it's going to be more a sort of you know heating the frog in the pan slowly kind of thing you know take an island that is just off the mainland that belongs to taiwan put a naval blockade you know, just to raise that temperature

to try to, again, boil the frog without it jumping out of the pan, because, you know, Xi is very conscious of the capabilities of Indo-Paycom and the U.S.

military in the region.

So I personally am much more focused on this.

You know, is there a blockade?

Are there islands that are taken?

Are there provocations that are set up that allows China to say they need to start flying their military aircraft over the island?

That's frankly what worries me most right now.

Yeah, I think that makes a a lot of sense.

Well, Congressman Himes, thank you so much for being so generous with your time and doing this tour of the region.

I really appreciate it.

Yeah, absolutely.

Thanks for having me on.

Thanks again to Congressman Himes for joining the show.

I'll be out next week.

So you'll be getting a heaping dose of Ben.

And my guy, Ali Velshi, who people may remember, he guest hosted when you were out once before and was just like, I mean, this was like the kind of chemistry that

Kat and Jill and Brunson have on the pick and roll.

Like, you can just step in, you know, and get it done.

I was going to say Sidney Sweeney and whatever that hot guy is.

No, Ali's so smart.

No, he's a great dude.

And when you remember, I've hosted an episode of Hot Save America with him, and I was like, oh,

this is what a professional looks and sounds like.

Well, that's

the same thought.

He was so prepared.

And I was like, this is not his main job.

He was just smooth, like, just spoke with authority.

No ums, no likes.

Yeah.

Just

good at it.

Okay.

Slayed it.

Well, I'll be off for a week and then I'll be back, but I'm very excited to listen to that.

So talk to you guys soon.

Podsape World is a crooked media production.

Our senior producer is Alona Minkowski.

Our associate producer is Michael Goldstein.

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

Say hi, Ben.

Hi.

The show is mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick, Jordan Kanner is our audio engineer.

Audio support by Kyle Seglin and Charlotte Landis.

Thanks to our digital team, Ben Hefcote, Mia Kelman, William Jones, David Tolls, and Molly Lobel.

Matt DeGroote is our head of production.

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

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

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

On New Year's Eve, 1969, three men snuck into Chip Yablonski's childhood home and gunned down his family while they slept.

They killed them.

They killed them all.

Chip was convinced that the president of the United Mine Workers, one of the most powerful labor unions in America, was behind the murders.

And I'm saying, hang on, you son of a bitch, because I want you to get your just desserts.

Listen to Shadow Kingdom wherever you get your podcasts.

Friends of the Pod subscribers can listen to the full season of Shadow Kingdom right now.

Join FriendsoThePod at crooked.com/slash friends or subscribe through the Shadow Kingdom Apple feed.