Con Man Air: Trump’s Middle East Cash Grab

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Welcome to Pod Save the World.

I'm Tommy Vitor.

I'm Ben Rhodes.

Don't smile at me that way.

Smile at him.

This is one of the best

days of my life in the last 45 years.

You hurt Jason Tatum.

We did not hurt Jason.

He tore his Achilles.

It was dirty, pool.

No, it wasn't.

It's fine.

It's a terrible injury, though.

Yeah, I felt bad.

It was like one of the greatest

passive.

I mean, I felt bad mainly because you want to beat the team full strength.

Yeah, that's where we were at by the fourth quarter.

I also like Jason Tatum.

I feel like he's gotten kind of a bad rap.

Catches a lot of shit.

People say he doesn't have aura.

They think he sometimes doesn't seem like he wants the ball at the end of the games.

Maybe we jack up too many threes.

All of that.

You know, there have been times when it's true, but also he won an NBA final.

He did.

Now very well.

He's no Jalen Brunson

who wants the ball in every clutch situation and tends to hit the shots.

But, you know, we're still rooting for him.

We wish him the best.

Can I just, I want you to know who you're hurting with this.

This is an amazing clip I saw released on Twitter, Ben.

This is a guy named Frank Murray, president of the Iron Workers Local 7.

He's talking about Kilmar Obrego Garcia.

Listen to this, man.

Listen to your hurting who you're hurting.

It's time for us to stand up for our brother Kilmar and for all the people that have been unjustly deported.

Bring our brother Kilmar home.

My name is Frank Murray.

I'm the president of Local 7 Iron Workers here in Boston.

That is the best Boston accent I've ever heard.

I don't know Frank Murray, but I love him.

It's better than Matt Damon and Ben Affleck and Goodwill Hunting.

He's wearing a socks hat in this video, too.

Of course he is.

I just sit at home watching clips of drunk Knicks fans on 7th Avenue.

Screaming bing bong.

Yeah, so that's basically what I do at night these days.

Okay.

Well, you know, we got different things going on,

but we have a great show today.

We do have a good show.

We're going to talk a lot about President Trump's first foreign trip.

He's going to, he's in Saudi Arabia.

He's going to Qatar.

He's going to the UAE.

There's a big announcement, some big news on Syria policy that we're going to dig into, Ben.

We're going to talk about how the future of AI policy kind of looms large in the background of this trip.

We'll, of course, talk about corruption.

We're also going to cover what this trip tells us about Trump's relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu and the latest news on the Iran nuclear talks.

Then we're going to talk about why Trump caved to China in the trade war, what scared the administration into getting involved in diplomacy with India and Pakistan to stop the fighting there.

Hope for a possible meeting between Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky and President Putin this week.

That would be big.

We'll see, yeah.

Yeah, we'll see.

We'll talk about the new Pope, what he means for America and the world, how our immigration policy here in the U.S.

somehow got more racist.

And then you're going to hear my interview with Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy about the historic corruption happening in plain sight during Trump's trip, what it means for U.S.

foreign policy and what Congress can do about it.

Chris Murphy always brings the takes.

He does bring the takes.

Lethal efficiency.

I also, it was a tight interview.

I love that for you.

It was like 19 minutes.

I do appreciate, though, that he was saying, you know, before we started recording that for a while, it seemed hard to get people to pay attention to the kind of crypto corruption piece.

But obviously, when you gift someone someone a $400 million airplane like Qatar just did, suddenly that's focus on.

Again, I'd like to say that this is a beat that we've been on for a while.

And the reality is, yeah, sure, the plane is attention grabbing, but the $2 billion gifted to Jared Kushner, the hundreds of millions of dollars in crypto.

I mean, I know you covered this with Chris Murphy, but it's useful that a plane can encapsulate things, but that is kind of the tip of the iceberg here.

It's definitely the tip of the iceberg.

You do sort of sometimes need

an image or an object or a video clip, you know, like John Edwards getting his hair cut or, you know, whatever the kind of political moment might be to focus on.

Boy, that was a callback.

Yeah, that will.

From someone who worked for John Edwards.

That one hurt.

That cut deep.

All right, Ben, let's take into this trip.

So this is Trump's first official foreign trip.

I say official because he did go to the Pope's funeral, but that doesn't count because it wasn't like what they planned to do first.

As we record, Trump is in Saudi Arabia, then he goes to Qatar and finally the UAE.

Listeners may remember that Trump's first foreign trip back in in 2017 also started in Saudi Arabia, but then he went on to Israel, he went to Italy for another meeting with the Pope.

I think the G7 was there, and then to Brussels for NATO meetings.

This is just a tour of Gulf monarchies.

Yeah.

His favorite places on earth.

Not a democracy in sight, not a voter in sight.

And it probably tells you everything you need to know about the way Trump is trying to kind of reorient our foreign policy or realign the United States globally.

More on that in a second.

So Senator Murphy will get into the bonanza piece that was kicked off by the Qatar Es giving Trump a 747-8 that he's going to pretend to use as Air Force One and then take with him after he leaves office.

That's the best part.

Well, let's just talk about that for a second.

I want to get to the Syria piece.

But like the idea that you could take a plane from a foreign government and use it as Air Force One is so just ludicrous on its face.

Like the security considerations alone are just, it's unworkable.

It's unfeasible.

Yeah, I think that the...

point of this trip, though, is that the corruption is like a feature, not a bug of the entire Trump administration.

And I will give credit where it's due to the Gulf Arabs.

They get that.

They get it.

Like, so they're not pretending, they're not trying to hide the ball here.

You know, the Saudis are writing checks, the Emiratis put a bunch of money into Trump coin, the Qataris are gifting a plane.

They understand exactly who they're dealing with, you know?

And so it's hard to hold it against them, you know,

when Trump is just essentially making the United States and its foreign policy for sale.

And so you have to think of this corruption not as like a few bad actors or not as some side deal.

Like this is core to the Trump presidency here.

And that's what is on flagrant display.

And yeah, Air Force One, it's hard for me to even get my mind around,

you know, the security issues, obviously, but also just a sense of

it's not the, I mean, I remember I wrote about this in my first book, Tommy.

It's not.

like the plane of an individual.

It's the plane of an office.

I mean, I remember being on Air Force One the first time, and it was like the president's 15 minutes out, the president's five minutes out, the president's on board.

And then Obama comes on board.

They don't say even President Obama.

It's like it's the office of the presidency's plane.

And then I remember I had to do some remarks, and I went to use this.

Remember those giant computers that were like nailed down in the back of a desk in the back?

And I booted up, and there was a set of remarks on the desktop that were George W.

Bush's remarks delivered after Russia invaded Georgia.

Oh, wow.

And it was a very like.

It's probably like the last speech someone edited on the

summer.

It was a very humbling experience because it definitely reminded me that I was like a temporary employee on this plane, you know, that it wasn't mine, obviously.

It wasn't even President Obama's, right?

And, you know, that's kind of missing, obviously, in the Trump conception of the presidency.

Yeah, was Trump going to like uproot the White House, put it on

blocks, roll it away?

Probably would if you could.

Yeah, he could chill try.

Yeah, it's absurd.

It's outrageous.

But let's start with the trip because there was a big announcement about Syria policy that Trump made in his speech earlier today in Riyadh.

Let's listen.

I will be ordering the cessation of sanctions against Syria in order to give them a chance at greatness.

So it's quick there.

It was a lot of applause.

You got like 45 seconds of applause.

Trump also told reporters that he's going to meet with Ahmed Al-Sharra, the new president of Syria, while he's in Saudi Arabia.

I think Rubio is going to meet with the Syrian foreign minister later this week in Turkey, if Steve Wickoff will let him.

We don't know all the details for how the sanctions relief itself will work, like if they're lifting sanctions, if there's just a pause on them, if they're going to ask Congress to do something.

But either way, it's a very big deal.

We've discussed on the show many times the fact that these sanctions were put in place to punish the Assad regime and that keeping sanctions on the people who deposed Assad is madness.

And it was destined to destroy the country or prevent them from getting off their feet economically.

So I think Trump deserves a lot of credit for for this decision.

It was politically difficult to take sanctions off someone who admits he was part of al-Qaeda and ISIS at one point.

You know that Netanyahu probably hates this decision, but it's unequivocally the right thing to do.

Ben, your thoughts on this policy change and just the itinerary for this trip generally.

First of all, the applause is interesting because people clapped for about 25 seconds and then Mohammed bin Salman stood up and everybody else in the room stood up.

I mean, this is a royal court, right?

Like everybody's watching and if that guy stands up, you have better get your ass up and pick up, you know?

That was the bones off.

So that was interesting.

And I think clearly MBS was one of the Arab leaders who were pushing for this decision too.

So it kind of further reinforces his doubt.

That said,

it's exactly the right decision.

It's hard to overstate how impossible it was going to be for Syria to have any chance at viability as a state with the continued sanctions.

We've talked about this.

You just cannot attract any investment, any reconstruction funding, anything whatsoever, if businesses are worried or foreign governments are worried that that money could get entrapped in sanctions or could be seen as a sanctions violation.

And so this opens the door for Syria to have a chance.

And

it's so clearly the right decision.

People may...

start to think that we harp on Joe Biden, but I don't know why Joe Biden didn't do this.

Like,

this just shows you, too, like, I don't, like, I don't like Trump's motivations for lots of things he does, but he's one thing you will say is he's not like tied to this like constant fear of

some

bad faith, right-wing attacks.

Yeah, bad faith, right?

Well, bad faith, right-wing attacks, or kind of stupid, you know, blob type, well, we don't do this, so we must leverage the sanctions for blah, blah, blah.

You know, no, sometimes you just have to try something different.

And continuing to sanction a country because of the sanctions you've been put in place for the dictator who's no longer there makes no sense.

Now, we'll see how this goes.

We don't know if Ahmed Al-Shara is going to end up governing in an inclusive way.

We'll see.

But I mean, as we've said about this topic in the past, you can always put those sanctions back in place if they do something terrible, you know.

But why not test and see if this new government can deliver on some of its promises.

They have huge challenges, not the least a largely destroyed set of infrastructure.

They have Israel like bombing and occupying parts of their country.

So this gives them a chance.

And hopefully, what this can also do is unlock a ton of money from the Gulf, right?

I mean, if the Gulf Arab states, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE want to plow money in there, that's all to the better.

That's a good way for them to spend their money.

The one thing I'd say about the itinerary is you're right, it's just the three Gulf countries.

And first, that is the world that Trump likes.

And yeah, we talked about the corruption piece, but even just in terms of things.

Yeah, transactionalism.

He likes transactional foreign policy.

There are no rules.

There's no rules-based order.

There's no norms.

There's no values proposition.

We're just dealing with wealthy countries that can invest in things and can move things quickly.

And Trump likes that.

I will say,

and we'll allow ourselves to do the what if Obama did this, you know, or what if any Democrat did this.

I remember Obama's first trip to the Middle East.

We went to Saudi Arabia and Egypt, and I'm still hearing from AIPAC about how we didn't go to Israel.

Look, they are cutting Israel out of the Iran talks.

They clearly made this decision, which Israel wouldn't like on Syria because Israel is bombing this government.

They aren't going to Israel on this trip.

So I don't think that means that Trump gives a shit about the Palestinians.

He doesn't.

But it does mean that he isn't going to check everything with Bibi Netanyahu first, which, by the way, Joe Biden also did.

So

I just, we can be unburdened by that kind of foreign policy.

Yeah, I want to dig more into this Israel piece because I agree with you.

It's really interesting.

Like, yeah, I like tweeted something

praising Trump's decision, and people were like, well actualing me being like, oh, Al-Shara offered to build a Trump tower in Damascus.

I'm like, that don't give us a shit.

But wouldn't you?

I mean, if you wanted to get sanctions for your country, like, I'd be offering to build fucking whatever.

I don't think this is why Trump made the decision.

I agree with you.

MBS and all these golf Democrats clearly push hard for this decision and clearly push for it to be announced during the Riyadh portion of the trip.

Al-Shara did just meet with Emmanuel Macron in Paris.

So I think there will be a lot of global support for this decision.

Ben, this is another clip from President Trump's speech today, though, that I think kind of made both of us perk up.

Ben, it's crucial for the wider world to note this great transformation has not come from Western intervention, Nullis, or flying people in beautiful planes giving you lectures on how to live and how to govern your own affairs.

No, the gleaming marvels of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were not created by the so-called nation builders, neocons, or liberal non-profits like those who spent trillions and trillions of dollars failing

to develop.

Kabal,

Baghdad.

In the end, the so-called nation builders wrecked far more nations than they built, and the interventionalists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves.

They told you how to do it, but they had no idea how to do it themselves.

So to your point earlier, I do like that Trump not only doesn't give a shit what the neocons and the blob think, he views it as politically advantageous to slap them around regularly.

So applauding that.

I do think, you know, we should probably be honest that part about not giving lectures to foreign leaders, the Americans not giving lectures, is probably Trump just saying, I don't give a shit about human rights.

You don't give a shit about human rights.

We're not going to talk about that today.

And the fact that human rights is totally off the table was hammered home by like the CEO guest list, which included the, you know, Elon Musk, the head of BlackRock, the head of Amazon, the head of NVIDIA, Sam Altman from OpenAI, Reid Hoffman.

Because, you know, you and I are old enough now to remember the 2018 Saudi Davos in the desert conference right after Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince, had ordered the execution of a journalist named Jamal Khashoggi and this international effort to isolate MBS and the Saudis.

And that's gone.

Yeah.

It's just off the table.

Look,

first of all, it's kind of funny when he says cabal for Kabul, I guess.

Struggling with some words.

Internationalist.

But let's put that aside.

So you meant Jew?

Yeah.

I mean, here's the thing about Trump.

I obviously share a bunch of his views about the pointlessness of American military intervention in Iraq, about the kind of corruption and cluelessness of aspects of the military intervention in Afghanistan.

I do work with liberal nonprofits, and I'm not aware of the trillions of dollars that the liberal nonprofits have.

I don't have that much money.

It'd be nice if we did.

But I'll say this.

While I share some of those critiques, he's missing the fact that there's an alternative between essentially, you know,

neocons or whatever you want to call them, who want to kind of think that they can engineer Middle Eastern politics from the U.S.

military, and like a Mohammed bin Salman who, you know,

let's face it,

why is there marble in Saudi Arabia?

It's just because there's a lot of oil in Saudi Arabia.

It's not like he discovered some ideas that a lot of printing money, right?

There's a third way, which is like Arab peoples themselves making decisions, not Americans showing up there and not like just a small number of really rich people making those decisions.

And by the way, that doesn't have to look like yours and my exact view of democracy, but what continues to be missing from this is the participation of people in these countries in some fashion, right?

It may not be multi-party elections next year, but by any stretch, you know, it's not like the people in Saudi Arabia have a lot of say in what goes on in their lives.

And so we shouldn't let the Emiratis or Qatar.

Exactly.

So we shouldn't let his

accurate disregard for American interventionism lead you to believe that the only alternative is a bunch of, let's face it, a bunch of fucking white American CEOs and, you know, a bunch of royals sitting around and deciding everything themselves either.

There needs to be a voice for people in these discussions in this part of the world.

And that's missing.

And the fact that you have Elon Musk there and Sam Altman and all these other people, you know,

that's not out of some earnest interest in the human well-being of the people of the Middle East.

That's because they want some of this money.

Purely financial.

Yeah, I mean, so President Biden put in place global restrictions on the export of AI, artificial intelligence chips.

So he allowed unlimited AI chip sales to about 18 countries, like allies like the UK and Germany.

And then he blocked sales to China, Iran,

sort of enemies.

And then all other countries, including the Saudis, the UAE, and Qatar, had caps.

I believe all those countries want to get rid of those caps.

And that's probably the kind of thing you would imagine Donald Trump trading for, say, a nice new airplane.

Yes.

And look, this is a really interesting issue.

And, you know, I've I've mentioned this before, full disclosure, I've done some work over the years for Microsoft, which is obviously involved in this.

I think there's somewhere in between what Trump is doing and what Biden was doing, right?

Which is that Biden was putting like really tight restrictions on the export of any any American AI technology.

And I actually think that in the long run, that was kind of futile because we saw, I mean, in China, right, with DeepSeek, that we put all these restrictions on chips going into China, on technology going into China.

And guess what the Chinese did?

With a lot less money, right, like a few tens of millions of dollars instead of tens of billions of dollars, they were basically able to take some of the open source models that were released, right?

So Facebook released its Lama AI model.

So we kind of look at that, reverse engineer it.

All you need is a little bit of computing power.

You don't need massive GPUs.

And lo and behold, they put out a deep-seek model that is pretty comparable in quality to most of the American AI.

So I think it is a futile.

task to suggest that we're somehow going to build some giant wall around AI because smart people can just figure it out when they kind of look at what is already released and what is available.

And I frankly think that if we build too high a wall around American AI, like, well, then the rest of the world's just just going to buy Chinese AI.

Like, I truly think that's where this would go.

Now, the flip side is you can still try to put some guardrails about how it moves out in the world.

Like, the first stuff that moves out is the software and then the applications, and then you allow kind of training runs on these models to take place in different places.

There's something in between just allowing as many chips

to flow into anywhere in the world and restricting it totally.

And I think I land in the middle of that space.

Trump, probably because

he's getting huge investments from these countries, seems like he's moving the other direction.

Yeah, you're a third way guy.

Yeah, I'm a third way guy on this one.

So, Ben, you noticed you mentioned that Trump is skipping Israel on this trip.

That has increased this chatter about a rift potentially between Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Nanyahoo.

And as you mentioned, when you look at some of the recent moves out of the Trump administration,

it sort of seems to be the case, right?

I mean, there's just the existence of the Iran nuclear talks led by Steve Witkoff is going to piss Bibi Dan Yahoo off.

Witkoff, who is also, you know, he's just like the emissary doing everything around the world, he also reportedly told the families of Israeli hostages that Israel is not willing to end the war and it's prolonging the fighting despite there being no security upside, which is unequivocally true, but a tough thing to say.

According to BBC, Witkoff orchestrated the release of Adan Alexander, this final American hostage who was released a couple of days ago, the final American being held in Gaza.

And he did it via a back channel with someone talking directly to Hamas.

And I guess the Israelis didn't learn about it until Sunday night.

The Axios just reported that the Israelis didn't learn about this from the White House, but from their intelligence services.

My guess is Qatar might have been that.

My guess is I don't know, but I mean, I've got to say that there's not a lot of addresses to go to.

It's not that big of a secret.

The Trump ceasefire agreement with the Houthis only requires the Houthis to stop firing at U.S.

ships, not at Israel.

There's talk of cutting a civilian nuclear deal with the Saudis outside of an agreement to normalize relations with Israel.

There's some NAGA Republican types that are fighting these crazy efforts in Congress to criminalize boycotts of Israel in the United States.

So, you know, at the end of the day, these guys are both right-wing autocrats.

Like, I'm sure they'll bash things up by hating on some third group somehow.

But it is fascinating to watch Trump ice out Netanyahu a bit here.

And it does, you know, again, I don't want to pile on, but it does annoy me that the Biden administration never told BB to fuck off, and Trump's doing it over and over and over and over.

I mean, one Trump advisor described Trump's treatment of Netanyahu as, quote, one notch above the Zelensky meeting.

Yeah.

And

the interesting thing is Netanyahu is nowhere to go, right?

Because he's not like he's going to go embrace Democrats.

You know, that's, it just shows you

like he has one play to run in American politics, and it's to like the right-wing the Republican Party.

And all of a sudden, like, Trump is self-interested and doesn't really give a shit.

And if you're at like the, you know, Foundation for the Defense of Democracies or one of these kind of right-wing, anti-Iran, pro-Israel think tanks, like

you don't really know what to do.

You know, like, who you're mad at, right?

Because they can't pick a fight with Trump because there's no, again, there's nowhere else for them to go.

So it's an interesting dynamic to watch.

Again, like, at the end of the day, I think what it could get you is, like, hopefully an Iran deal, which rationally avoids like a major war over the Iranian nuclear program.

I don't think it's ever going to lead anywhere good for the Palestinians because I don't think Trump gives a shit about the Palestinians.

I mean, unless, you know, again, the Arabs decide to push him harder on that.

Well, Wickhoff met with Netiyahu on Monday.

Israel is now sending a delegation to Qatar for negotiations this week.

Trump reportedly wants to announce a deal on his trip.

I mean, that's just, it's not going to happen.

And also, Bibi has set a deadline for the end of this week where, you know, he's claiming that he'll have the IDF conduct a ground invasion unless there's a hostage release or some deal is cut.

But I just saw a report back in Al Jazeera that Netanyahu told a bunch of wounded Israeli soldiers that there's, quote, no way Israel will stop the war in Gaza, even if a deal is reached to release the hostages.

He said, quote, we'll take them and then we'll go in, but there will be no way we will stop the war, end quote.

Yeah, but

Israel's going to be like increasingly isolated.

I mean, they've already lost global public opinion.

I guess I'd say this to some of the kind of people who've been dead enders in supporting Israel's horrific and morally abhorrent and strategically disastrous Gaza policy and somehow think that, you know, that Trump maybe is good on this issue or something.

I mean,

part of what this shows is the whole focus on anti-Semitism on American campuses as a means of like, you know, quashing these universities and deporting people that you don't like is fucking bullshit, you know?

Like, like Trump doesn't believe that.

He's just using that as a vehicle to break universities he doesn't like and to deport brown people, you know?

And so this actually proves what a lie it is that

their policies are rooted in some like, you know, across the board embrace of Netanyahu's agenda.

No, they embrace it when it's convenient for them, like when they want to deport people in this country.

And, you know, they could kind of care less when it comes to some other things Netanyahu is is doing.

So I just think this is, you know,

if you don't see that this is leading towards the wholesale isolation of Israel going forward, you're just not paying attention.

Yeah, also, like, for 18 months, anytime you tweet or criticize the Israeli conduct in Gaza, the rejoinder is always: well, if Hamas released the hostages, the war would be over.

And now Netyao is saying, actually, that's not the case.

That's just not the case.

It's never been the case.

It's never been the case.

And it's been so obvious.

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so ben iran is is as always looming large uh behind the scenes on this trip not just because trump is pissing them off by floating the idea of renaming the persian gulf uh to the arabian gulf do you support this idea

I don't.

You were telling me you loved it.

I told you that the Pentagon used to always call it the Arabian Gulf

when we were in the situation meetings.

And it had to do, but what?

Like, so like the Pentagon has already decided it's the Arabian Gulf.

They didn't do Gulf of America, though.

No, that's true.

So over the weekend, there were some U.S.-Iran talks in Oman.

The results seems to go very differently, depending on who you listen to.

Steve Witkoff called them encouraging.

The Iranian foreign minister said the conversations were, quote, difficult but useful.

Ahead of the talks, here's what Witcoff had to say to Breitbart.

The Iranians cannot have a bomb.

And they have stated back that they don't want one.

So we're going to, for the purposes of this discussion, accept them at their word that that's actually how they feel.

If that's how they feel, then their enrichment facilities have to be dismantled.

They cannot have centrifuges.

They have to downblend all of their

fuel that they have there, send it to a faraway place.

But an enrichment program can never exist in the state of Iran ever again.

And that's our red line.

We're never doing a JCPOA deal where

sanctions come off and there's no sunsetting of their obligations.

So

that doesn't make sense.

That was a mismatched procedure in JCPOA.

We believe that they cannot have enrichment, they cannot have centrifuges, they cannot have anything that allows them to build a weapon.

So the Iranian foreign minister had this to say on Iranian state TV, quote, enrichment is an issue that Iran will not give up and there's no room for compromise on it.

However, its dimensions, levels, or amounts might change for a period to allow confidence building.

He also said, quote, contradictory positions taken by the U.S.

in the media is not acceptable to us as they do not help negotiations.

CNN quoted an Iranian source who also said the American side is basically not ready for meaningful technical and political talks, adding that the U.S.

gives, quote, short and general answers to questions, ignores main proposals, and constantly changes its position throughout the negotiation.

So let's decode those statements quickly.

Listeners might remember a few weeks back, Witkoff did an interview where he said, Iran can enrich nuclear material to a level of 3.5%.

Why does that matter?

Natural uranium has a small amount of fissile material in it.

That's the material that you can split with a nuclear reaction to create energy.

Nuclear scientists enrich uranium to get higher concentrations of fissile material for different purposes.

So 90% enriched uranium is considered weapons-grade.

20% enriched can be useful for research and medical purposes.

3.5% enriched uranium is used for nuclear energy.

So in that quote, Wickoff was saying Iran can enrich uranium for civilian nuclear power plant use.

But after he said that, Wickoff got smacked down.

He had to walk back those comments and say, what I meant was Iran can have a civilian nuclear power infrastructure, but they have to purchase their uranium from a third country.

They can't enrich it.

So that's, I think, what the Iranians mean when they're calling out contradictory positions taken by the U.S.

and the media.

Ben, do you believe the Iranians when they say say that having the enrichment capacity is a red line for them?

And if so, why do you think they feel that way?

Because you hear like the Marco Rubios of the world argue that no country in the world has an enrichment program without a nuclear weapons program too.

You can have a civilian nuclear program and just say purchase enrich uranium from Russia, right, to fuel it.

So, first of all,

I believe the Iranians, having lived through the Iranian negotiations on the nuclear program, first of all, the Breitbart interview is very triggering to me because Breitbart, I mean, must have written hundreds of articles.

One trillion articles.

One trillion articles just savaging the JCPOA before, during, and after it was concluded.

And now they're like just credulously probably sitting there and like kind of regurgitating what Steve Wickhos says.

I also hate that he puts this emphasis on like they've committed to never developing nuclear weapon.

That text was in the JCPOA.

I know.

They never, and that was permanent, by by the way like it was a permanent commitment I remember to never build a nuclear weapon and and everybody's like how can you take Iran at their word and there's Wickoff being like and I believe them you know like he just he literally said that's almost sweet he's like they told me this they told me it seems like you know what are you gonna do um

and and so uh i don't know it drives me fucking nuts um that's first thing second thing is wickoff has been all over the map because he doesn't know anything about this like Ernie Moniz was the Secretary of Energy for the Obama administration, was in the nuclear talks.

He's a fucking nuclear physicist.

So he could literally sit down and like understand exactly what he was talking about, these incredibly detailed things.

And we've talked about the Wickhoff rolls up at these talks with like one guy with him.

And now he's got Michael Anton, this kind of like right-wing intellectual speaker running running the technical talks.

Like I didn't run the fucking technical talks in the Iran nuclear deal.

So there's just clearly nobody on the U.S.

side who understands this technology.

And the Iranians like have a bunch of smart guys who work on nuclear programs who are like showing up to like design.

I mean, because this is what I remember about the Iran nuclear negotiations.

We were literally designing a nuclear program that we could live with, right?

Like what constraints, what could they do, what couldn't they do?

These guys are just, you know, they want a deal, so they'd probably be happy with the JCPOA.

Like Witcoff and Trump would be happy if they like enriched only at a very low percent, shipped everything out of the fucking country, had this kind of symbolic enrichment capability that is only useful for like medical isotopes or something, like it's totally anodyne, and they can just say they're done with this.

And whether it's five years ten years jcpoa's toughest restrictions were 10 years maybe look at 11 years and they can say it was tougher than obama that that should be good enough for them but they're in this bind because all these you know people

all their dumb politics like oh we got to say no enrichment i just don't think the iranians would accept that they've invested too much in this program there's pride involved in it there's a bit of a hedge involved in it because they've seen the u.s pull out of these deals in the past so they don't want to like dismantle their whole program and that said that like there are other countries that don't have nuclear weapons that have, like, they keep repeating a talking point that's not true.

And now, granted, it's countries like the Netherlands and stuff, but it's just not true that no country with a domestic enrichment capability also doesn't have a nuclear weapon.

It's a big Rubio talking point.

He says that all the time.

Yeah, J.D.

Vance says it too.

And it's just, it's, it's, it's not true.

Now, the reason Iran

is an outlier is because they cheated on the nuclear proliferation duty.

They built these enrichment facilities in secret, which was pretty suspicious, right?

So I don't know.

I think there's a deal on the table for the Trump administration if they're willing to live with some modest Iranian enrichment capability.

There's probably a deal that they can say is like in some way tougher than JCPOA, even though it wouldn't really be any different.

And frankly, it's just whether or not they're going to face down their politics with Netanyahu and some right-wingers in Congress.

Yeah,

you could tell they want a deal.

They just want to get something to do.

Well, and they just want to get it off the table, you know.

Understandably, yeah, rightly so.

I get it, I appreciate it.

All right, so listeners of this show know that we've been eagerly watching Trump's flailing tariff announcements and seeming effort to tank the global economy over the last few weeks.

There was a big development over the weekend, Ben, during talks between the U.S.

and China in Geneva, Switzerland, where both sides agreed to a drastic reduction in tariffs for about 90 days.

So the U.S.

tariffs on Chinese stuff will go from 145% to 30%.

Chinese tariffs on U.S.

stuff will go from 125% 125% to 10%.

According to a bunch of news reports, pressure from industry groups, especially automakers in the defense industry, got Trump to cave.

I think in particular, they put a freeze on the export of rare earth magnets, which are critical for both the technologies and cars and weapons and all sorts of things.

According to the Financial Times, Treasury Secretary Scott Besant also had a secret meeting with his Chinese counterpart about three weeks ago.

So I would imagine that kind of plowed the fields that were announced this weekend.

So, Ben,

I guess like in 90 days, Trump could decide to rev things back up and we could be back in a tariff war.

But it just seems like there's just no doubt that he fully capitulated here.

Like the Chinese conceded literally nothing.

Nothing, nothing.

Retaliatory tariffs.

Absolutely nothing.

The Wall Street Journal editorial page wrote the following sentence.

Rarely has an economic policy been repudiated as soundly and as quickly.

Anything jump out of you at this mess?

Well, it's very Trump-like in the sense that he got absolutely nothing, and they said it was like a deal.

It's not a deal, first of all.

I mean,

there's no substantive change beyond the kind of fluctuation of these tariff rates.

The Chinese, as we talked about, were just better positioned to win a trade war.

They had a monopoly on these rare earth materials.

They can absorb more pain.

They've kind of invested for the last decade in clean energy and technologies.

They have more geopolitical support in lots of the world, particularly given what Trump is doing.

So they had a better hand, even if they have some economic weaknesses.

If you look at Trump, though, first of all, the insanity of this is there's still 30% terrorists, right?

So it's not like it's all the way wound back.

It's just not as insane as it was.

post-Liberation Day week when he was just like tariffing on true social.

So there's still going to be economic impacts that are negative.

There's still going to be price increases.

There's still going to be disruptions.

And the trust of the rest of the world world is already broken because they just don't believe that Trump is a predictable actor.

And I have to say, like, I don't believe, you know, I think Trump, Scott Besson, is like useful to talk to markets.

Like, he's literally there to speak to markets.

Yeah, just to whisper to Jamie Diamond.

Oh, yeah, he's just whispering in Jamie Diamond's ear.

But I actually don't think he's the real decision maker here.

It's Trump and like some of the Yahoo's around him.

And so I think, you know, at a certain point, he'll probably dial these things back up again, dial them back down.

Like, he likes to control the volatility.

He's like a child with a toy.

Like he likes to be the one who controls volatility in the markets.

So he's decided after the post-Liberation Day fiasco to dial things back.

He'll dial it up at some point.

Do I think he's going to like structurally arrange some deal that's going to remake U.S.-China trade relations?

Absolutely not.

And that's what was proved to be completely bullshit.

Yes.

The idea that this is going to like compel China to make all these, remember fentanyl?

Where's fentanyl in this thing, too?

Like there's not, there's none of the things you talked about are in this at all.

No, and apparently the Biden people actually had cut a pretty impactful counter-fentany deal with the Chinese right at the end of the administration.

It's like the Chinese are like, what, you know, why are you ignoring that?

We actually did something on this.

I mean, yeah, I agree with you.

I think Trump clearly views tariffs as like his first, second, and third favorite tool in his toolkit for every situation.

So I assume he'll slap tariffs back on all kinds of countries.

I do think that like everyone is wondering, like, do markets matter?

Do headlines matter?

And the answer is yes.

Like, he did did not like the stock market crashing.

He did not like every CEO calling him, telling me you're going to kill my business.

Like, I think it really did matter.

And so he blinked.

And even, like, I think Republican members of Congress, I'm sure, calling him being like, I'm not going to be able, I'm going to vote against this.

I mean, it is worth putting a point on the fact that this was one of the most catastrophic announcements early in the presidency ever.

Like, he rolls up Liberation Day and all the big charts and everything.

And just look at the climb down.

And there are no deals.

Even this UK trade deal, I couldn't describe to you what that trade deal is.

It's so magic.

It's so meager.

It's the kind of thing that would normally be announced by the deputy U.S.

trade representative in an article that only appears in a three-paragraph notice in Bloomberg News.

And they're trying to treat it like it's some huge trade deal.

Yeah, they're trying to amp it up.

They did like a stupid phone call with Kier Starberg.

They did it on the day there was a new pope announced.

Yeah.

Sorry, Pal.

I don't think it's going to lead the headlines.

One thing that was a big deal was this ceasefire between India and Pakistan, Ben.

That's a good transition.

Thank you.

Last week, the tensions between India and Pakistan...

It was like just short of open warfare between these two nuclear-armed militaries.

Folks probably remember the conflict started when terrorists killed 26 people, mostly Hindu tourists from India, in India-controlled Kashmir.

India vowed to retaliate against these terrorist groups that are based in Pakistan and against parts of the Pakistani security state that support these groups.

The fighting escalated fast.

It included airstrikes deep into Pakistan.

The Pakistani military said they shot down at least one Indian jet.

There were Air Force dogfights.

The Pakistanis launched this volley of like several hundred drones across the border.

So it got really scary.

And for a while, the Trump administration was just completely chucked out.

They were making comments like these from President Trump and J.D.

Vance.

It's a shame we just heard about it just as we were walking in the doors of the Oval.

They've been fighting for a long time.

You know, they've been fighting for many, many decades

and centuries, actually, if you really think about it.

No, I just hope it ends very quickly.

What we can do is try to encourage these folks to de-escalate a little bit, but we're not going to get involved in the middle of war that's fundamentally none of our business.

So, according to a bunch of media reports,

this became our business, Mr.

J.D.

Vance, after the administration learned that India bombed an area near the headquarters of Pakistan's Strategic Strategic Plans Division, which oversees their nuclear arsenal, the New York Times estimates they have about 170 nuclear warheads sitting in Pakistan somewhere.

That's a big deal because if Pakistan thought that airstrike was intended to take out their nuclear command and control capability, that could lead to them doing something really fucking scary.

The Times pointed out that there were reports in Pakistani media that Prime Minister Sharif had called a meeting of the National Command Authority, which is the group in Pakistan that makes decisions about the use of nuclear weapons.

So pretty terrifying.

Either way, Trump's team, they got into gear.

Vance called Prime Minister Modi in India.

He warned about escalation risk.

Rubio called his Pakistani counterparts.

Trump called nobody.

But he did front-run both parties and announced the ceasefire deal on Truth Social, which the Indians then initially denied.

So it was a mess, but like good outcome, at least for now.

Ben, what did you make of how all this went down?

And do you think there's any hope that Mr.

Big Boy, SmartyPants, JD Vance might learn that actually diplomatic intervention to prevent wars is a good thing?

First of all, this was pretty scary because they, in the past, you know, they've, they've lobbed, you know, missiles at each other.

Sometimes they've literally like just bombed dirt and said that that was, you know, that they hit something that they didn't.

But they were hitting military targets.

And this was starting to feel like it could become an actual war, not just like skirmishes on the line of control with episodic strikes.

And so that's scary.

And that, by the way, is

still something that happened and that could flare up again if there's another incident.

I have to say, and look, this is not us just kind of hating on the Trump administration.

You heard us give credit in the same podcast on Syria.

The way they handled this was fucking atrocious because they did not negotiate this ceasefire.

I just, like, they lobbed in the calls that anybody would lob in.

Like, any U.S.

administration.

At bare minimum.

Any bare minimum.

why would you not make those calls what else are you doing you're the secretary of state it's your job it's your job i mean i know you got to take a break from being the archivist and the you know whatever the hell she is doing a lot of filing national security advisor but sure he's lobbing in calls and then jd vance like who has this kind of intellectual isolationist worldview which makes no sense in an actual world where if there's a nuclear exchange in india and pakistan like the global economy collapses and there's tens of millions of refugees and maybe a nuclear winter over like a big chunks of the world so like yeah it matters to us And so then these guys, they lob in like the pretty routine calls.

Trump doesn't even call, right?

And then they get wind of the fact that the Indians and Pakistanis themselves are probably like, oh shit, we're getting pretty close to the edge here.

Like let's have a ceasefire.

They announce this on Truth Social, like clearly without clearing it with it.

Because if it was a U.S.

brokered ceasefire, like we all know what that looks like.

Their joint statements all go out simultaneously from the U.S.

and India and Pakistan.

There's a plan.

They're negotiated.

Instead, he fucking truths it, and the Indians are like, what the fuck is this?

The Indians insist, by the way, that their challenges with Pakistan are a bilateral issue and it's nobody else's business.

Nobody else's business.

So Trump announcing that he brokered a ceasefire really pissed them off.

And

why does that matter?

I think it matters because if there's a next time, they're kind of not going to want to hear from us because they don't trust us, right?

Like these things, everything is so short-term and transactional, Trump.

And how can I get attention?

So look,

it's not a good outcome.

It was a bad outcome for a few days there.

It was scary.

Like people,

like actual people died in these exchanges of fire.

It was a bigger conflict than they've had in recent years.

And am I glad the U.S.

got involved?

Sure.

But like, so were a bunch of countries.

By the way,

the Qataris were involved, as they normally are.

The Turks were involved.

Other countries, you know, the Brits were lobbing in calls.

And I just think it's not a good look for them to treat everything, including potential war between India and Pakistan, as just some vehicle for Trump to truth something, you know, because that, again, that people aren't going to want to let us into their business if that's how he's going to go about things.

Did you catch any of the clips from like various Indian TV stations about the conflict that were going around on social media?

Yeah, yeah.

Really wild stuff.

Indian TV is pretty wild.

Man, the amount of like

Like the nationalism is getting stoked from just every single corner in both of these countries now.

And it comes from Modi directly, but it comes from every TV network.

There was one clip that was going around where it was just like

the like, you know, the sound when there's like an inter, like an, if a, if a nuclear strike was coming, like the kind of siren you would hear was just running in the background of the entire clip.

It's like very, it's like incitement.

Yeah, and look, I get that there's a lot of

hate.

But thousands of years of hate.

Yeah, millions of years.

But the dehumanization in both directions is dangerous because that's how you end up just killing lots of people.

Like, if you consume Indian television and Pakistani television, you're kind of conditioned to see these people as like subhuman enemies.

And that, and I'm not absolving ourselves from this.

The right-wing media treats a lot of people in this country as subhuman, too.

But I just think that that is a dangerous dynamic to just consider.

Take time.

No, I saw an Indian reporter bragging about how he had not interviewed any Pakistanis for the duration of the conference.

It's a great way to understand what the fuck is going on.

Who does that do for anyone?

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

But before we do, we want to let you know that Amanda Littman's new book, When We're in Charge, The Next Generation's Guide to Leadership, is out now.

It's an amazing book, Ben.

Amanda shares what it's like when a new generation steps into power, not just in politics, but in business, activism, and everyday life.

It's a manual for leadership on your own terms.

No fluff, no bullshit, no losing yourself in the process, just real tools, honest lessons, and the kind of clarity that today's leaders need.

We want to help Amanda get on the New York Times bestsellers list.

Let's go.

It's a big deal, right?

Yeah, we love Amanda.

Get your copy of When We're In Charge at crooked.com slash books.

You can get it there now or wherever you get your books.

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One war that President Trump has not ended is the war in Ukraine been.

So that said, the Russians and Ukrainians are maybe going to have their first direct talks since the start of the war this Thursday in Istanbul.

What happened here is the Russians proposed having talks in response to demands that they implement a 30-day ceasefire.

This is their way of kind of evading that request.

But you were hearing this from Kyiv, from Trump, from Europe, lots of places.

On Sunday, Trump decided to endorse this idea, truth, and quote, Ukraine should agree to this immediately.

At least they will be able to determine whether or not a deal is possible.

And if it is not, European leaders and the U.S.

will know where everything stands and can proceed accordingly.

Have the meeting now.

All caps, three exclamation points.

It's not clear if Zelensky is going to show up in Turkey regardless, or if he's only going to go if Putin goes.

But, you know, Zelensky also was like, I'll go.

Also, Trump, you should go.

Like, he's trying to make this a big thing.

The Russians have been coy about what Putin is going to do.

Dmitry Peskov, Putin's spokesman, said, quote, as soon as the president considers it necessary, he will announce it.

But ever mindful of the moments where he could get big ratings, Trump said, I'll join.

Like, I'll fly to Istanbul.

I guess, like, you know, I'm already in Europe.

Why not?

Already over the Atlantic, rather.

So, Ben, I guess I would argue there's two theories I've seen.

Like, one is by endorsing the talks, Trump undercut his own demand for a ceasefire.

I get that.

On the other hand, talking seems potentially positive.

In a less positive category, though, NBC News reported that Steve Witkoff, the envoy for everything, relied on a Kremlin translator in his three conversations with Putin.

On previous episodes, we've talked about Witkoff raw dogs these meetings without experts, but not having your own translator is insane.

He's like, what are the odds that this translator is like intelligence operative?

98, 99?

150%.

Yeah, first of all, just side note, like big week for Turkey here.

I know.

Because obviously they are huge supporters of Al-Shara and Syria and have been advocating lifting sanctions.

They're somehow hosting these meetings, like the PKK is disbanding.

Oh, yeah.

So Erdogan, you know, beside from being a total autocratic creep who locked up his biggest opponent, you know, his foreign policy is having a pretty week.

Look,

this does feel like Trump, I am on the kind of side of people that feel like this was a bit of a rug pull on Zelensky because, you know, he had Kirstarmer, Mertz, the new German chancellor, Macron, and I think Donald Tusk from Poland in Kyiv for like show show solidarity.

And it felt like Trump didn't like

the fact that the attention was no longer in him.

So he's like demanding this meeting happen.

And I think Zelensky then kind of called the bloff and was like, okay, fine.

I'll show up.

But, you know, like, Zelensky is so fucking sick of the goalpost moving on him.

And so he's like, fine, I'll go to Turkey because

you didn't think Putin would go.

And so we'll see what happens now.

Did you see the literal Russian disinformation going all over social media, especially on Twitter, where people were trying to claim that Mertz had like cut up a line of cocaine and had it on the table in the train on the way to Kyiv.

And then there's like, there's clearly a napkin on the table and like a piece of string that's attached to a folder.

So like Mertz covers up the string because he's just like reaching for his file folder.

And then Macron grabs a napkin that he'd like balled up and he hides it.

And people are like, oh, that was the bag.

Can you imagine?

Wait, wait.

Two people less likely to be doing lines on a train than Kier Starmer and Friedrich Mertz.

Macron, I bet he gets down.

Let's just take a minute and imagine if that did happen.

How fucking awesome it would be if, like, if like, you know, Mertz, Friedrich Mertz's new chancer is just like ripping lines.

And then Macron comes in.

He's like, hey, can I get a bump?

Who starts that conversation?

Kieran Starmer's like, yeah, anyone got a bag?

What are they doing?

Oh, God.

So many people were sharing it.

Anyway, continuous.

I'm glad that happened because, you know, that's why the internet is still a decent place sometimes.

I just think that Trump is

literally like a machine gun dropped on the floor with these negotiations, right?

He'll be fixated on something.

Remember the ceasefire?

Remember the 30-day ceasefire?

Yeah, what happened?

And each time Ukraine is the one that accepts it, right?

So Ukraine accepted the ceasefire.

Putin wouldn't.

Each time he throws these things out, and it's always Ukrainians who he acts like are intransigent, who are the ones who are like, fine, we'll do it.

And Russia, Putin, never fucking does it.

Ever, right?

And meanwhile, they're still like grinding away Ukraine.

So I don't know what it's gonna take for i mean i i don't think trump cares but i do think that the good thing that you're seeing is that like you know zelensi's kind of got this click of europeans who have his back who are from like pretty big countries with some real militaries although not nearly as real as the united states i mean that's the best card he has to play is to hold those europeans together behind him and just trying to stay like if not ahead of trump like only a half step behind him um until it becomes more and more apparent that like putin is just just not the one who's serious about ending this war.

Yeah.

And, you know, if you get down, you guys get a little bump from your mouth.

Yeah, yeah.

Just have a good time with that.

That's incredible.

I was reading this incredible story in the Wall Street Journal about how there's such an excess of cocaine that the cartels are even better funded.

So, you know how the cartels have those kind of like

DIY submarines they take from

Columbia up around to somewhere else in Central America?

Now they are literally driving these sort of like, they're not fully submerged.

They're like mostly submerged in with like a little, you know, they're kind of at the waterline.

But now they're taking these

submarines all the way to Europe.

They're like, they're like driving them to like Spain.

It's crazy.

It takes like 30 days.

It's a wild story.

Great story in the journal.

Anyway,

you know, good day, good, good time to be into Coke, I guess.

Two more big stories.

Unless you live under a rock.

In which case, credit to you.

And thanks for listening.

You probably heard that they selected a new pope.

Last week, Ben, you and I talked through the favorites to become the new pope according to the betting odds.

And boy, was that wasted.

I have our man

on the card.

Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, now Pope Leo XIV, had something like 0.3% odds, according to Polymarket.

It's almost like the Mavericks getting the number one pick in the

flattery.

How'd that happen?

You think it's rigged?

I think it's rigged.

Because the Luca trade?

Yeah.

We'll get it to that later.

Pope Leo, as he's called now, is from Chicago.

According to the New York Times, Pope Leo has Creole roots from New Orleans.

I think his grandfather was from Haiti.

Super interesting guy.

He spent two decades working in Peru as a missionary, a parish priest, and eventually as bishop.

Then Pope Francis named him to this powerful Vatican position overseeing the appointment of bishops around the world.

But Ben, do you know who did predict this?

My boy, Steve Bannon.

Listen to this.

I thought you were going to say Stephen A.

Smith.

No.

Did he predict it too?

No, no, I didn't.

This is Bannon from about a week ago.

I do think one of the dark horses, and I think unfortunately, he's one of the most progressive, is Cardinal Prevost.

I don't think he's getting enough play.

He is certainly on the short list.

That's my boy Steve.

It's funny that he sounds like he's betting on it, like on FanDuel.

Like, you know, he's not getting enough play.

You know,

out of action on Prevost.

So, banning aside, what do you think it means, you know, just for the U.S.?

We got an American Pope.

Yeah, look, there have been a zillion takes, a zillion Chicago memes.

But look, to take a serious note, I mean,

What's interesting about the United States, and I always try to say this to like some of my friends overseas who, you know, it's easy to look at the United United States and just see Trump or just see our shitty, stupid ass foreign policy over the years or just see like some soulless capitalism.

It's a reminder this is like a big, diverse country with many different people.

And I like the fact that Pope Leo is going to be the most prominent American in the world.

I mean, I guess together with Trump, but he'll, you know, God willing, be there after Trump.

And that's a totally different kind of America.

That's a guy from humble background, a guy who made his life about missionary work in Latin America, a guy who speaks four or five languages, a guy who cares about social justice.

I know

White Sox fan, like underdogs.

Knicks fan.

Apparently, he was tweeting about the Knicks or something.

I mean, it's a Nova Knicks guy.

I mean, for those not in the know in the World O community here, we've got Jalen Brunson, Mikel Bridges, and Josh Hart, three Villanova alums, former national champions, and we know, it's been confirmed, that the Pope is aware of the Nova Nix, at least, right?

Because he's a private Villanova grad.

It is weird that he went to an American college.

I mean, I made this point to love it.

It's probably inappropriate.

But there's definitely some seven-year-old lady who went to Villanova who's like, oh my God, I banged the Pope.

I did.

Right?

No.

What do you mean?

This is before he became a priest.

Oh,

he wasn't like celibate.

I don't know.

I don't know anything about that.

I've been awesome.

Look, you know, I'm talking a copy of that.

What's the seven-year-old dude talking about in the group chat?

I don't know.

Well, you know, that would, you know, that would make for a good, good story.

That's a good sitcom.

Yeah, it's a great sitcom, actually.

Like the Pope Before, you know, celibacy.

But anyway, put that aside, I like that this guy's going to be a different face to the world for the United States.

It also seems like he's very much cut from the Francis cloth.

He's a progressive.

He cares about that part of Catholicism that is actually about what...

Jesus talked about, like helping the poor and social justice.

That's a good part.

It's kind of interesting to me that at a a time in which the world is swinging pretty far right in its politics in a lot of places like the catholic church is becoming this more progressive institution swinging less i'll take it you know like uh so i i just think it's better news than just the chicago piece of this you know no uh i'm happy for mike o'neal um our friend but it like it's also just like a it's a reminder that the united states is big and complicated and and it's the country that could produce trump and it's the country that could produce this guy you know and and i hope that people bear that in mind as he's spreading this message of a more kind of progressive view of social justice.

Yeah,

I don't really think about the Pope often, but Pope Francis and now Leo XIV, it's something to be excited about.

Yeah.

Could have been a lot of work.

And I hope he speaks, you know, like I know they're sometimes reticent, but I mean, there's a lot of shit going on that, you know, if the Pope wants to speak out, all the better.

Stay active.

Stay active on Gaza.

I hope he continues what Pope Francis does on Gaza.

Steve Bannon later said, quote, the conclave that elected Pope Leo was more rigged against Donald Trump than the 2020 presidential election.

Is that a real quote?

Yeah.

Pope Leo's brother also says he served on the same Navy ship as Steve Bannon, like back in the 80s.

Isn't that crazy?

What a coincidence.

Well, that, I mean, we could make a whole series.

We'd start with the Villanova party scene and on to the Bannon ship.

That's a.

Okay, we'll talk about it for that.

We'll talk about that.

The brother did seem to really like his 15 minutes.

Yeah, I know, he's out there.

He's having a good time.

I forgot to ask Chris Murphy about this, but apparently Pope Leo retweeted Chris Murphy in 2017.

It was a tweet about the Las Vegas shooting.

Man, Murphy's going to heaven now.

Yeah, that's a big deal.

If the Pope retweets you, I think that's your ticket's bunched.

And the last Pope Leo, it was during the Industrial Revolution in the late 1800s, and he was known as the Pope of the Workers.

I did like what the Pope said about it.

He chose Leo because the last Pope was a time of rampant capitalism and inequality.

And now, you know, that like, so he's, you know, he's thinking about the right things.

He's taking on economic issues, social justice.

We like him.

A good, good working class, you know, like he's going to stop giving tax breaks to the companies that ship jobs overseas.

You know,

deep cut.

Okay.

Final story for us.

So as listeners know, there's been a horrible sea change in immigration policy under Trump.

We recently learned, it was today or yesterday, that the Department of Homeland Security is terminating temporary protected status for people here from Afghanistan.

That means 9,000 Afghans could be deported back to the Taliban regime.

These are presumably people that helped the United States military during the two decades of war there.

So this is truly disgraceful.

There was a report the administration was planning to send migrants to Libya.

Hard to imagine a less safe place.

Luckily, a judge blocked that plan.

But the administration is having talks with officials in Rwanda about sending migrants from the U.S.

there.

Thank you, Boris Johnson and the Tory Party in the U.K.

for that terrible idea.

At the same time, the U.S., though, is welcoming quote-unquote refugees from South Africa as long as they're white.

Here's Trump talking about what's happening in South Africa and why he's welcoming these folks here from earlier this week.

But it's a genocide that's taking place that you people don't want to write about, but it's a terrible thing that's taking place.

And

farmers are being killed.

They happen to be white, but whether they're white or black makes no difference to me.

But white farmers are being

brutally killed, and their land is being confiscated in South Africa.

To be clear, there is not a genocide against white farmers in South Africa.

South Africa is a very, very violent country.

Many farmers live in the middle of nowhere.

They're at risk from violence because the cops can't get to them easily if you live in the rural farm.

But there's no data or evidence to suggest that this is a systematic racial thing, let alone a genocide.

Also, white South Africans are far better off financially than black South Africans.

White people are about 7% of the population, but they own between two-thirds and three-quarters of the land in South Africa.

They are exponentially wealthier on average than black South Africans.

We should also just be honest, like, we're talking about the descendants of colonial settlers that set up the apartheid system and government actions that are now trying to create a bit of equality for black people who are just brutally oppressed.

I'm not suggesting that means these white farmers should be subjected to violence or any kind of harm, but the fact that they're getting special treatment by the U.S.

as refugees, given the history, is pretty disgraceful.

Ben, I remember you and I talked about this in

like 2018, because Trump started tweeting about it.

He saw a segment on Tucker Carlson about white genocide against South African farmers.

He demanded Mike Pompeo do an investigation that resulted in nothing because there was nothing to do or investigate.

But I don't know.

It's just like, I've just been thinking about what

an immigration policy that is this overtly racist, what that message that sends to the world.

Yeah, this is a really important story, and I'm glad it got a lot of attention.

I hope it continues to get attention because it kind of gives away the whole game.

First of all, if on its face,

their argument for letting in, not like airlifting these white farmers from South Africa, their argument is an argument for why there should actually be a refugee program.

In other words, if Trump is legitimately concerned about people facing threats of violence and political persecution, there are about 9 million communities around the world that you would put ahead of these white South Africans.

By the way, at the top of that list would be Afghans who, if they get sent back to Afghanistan, could be be disappeared by the fucking Taliban, right?

So the first thing is, like,

it's completely absurd on its face.

And if you actually cared about what Trump said, you know, you're going down the list, people from Sudan, people from Afghanistan, people from,

you know, any,

unfortunately, a lot of Myanmar, like all manner of places.

It also bears saying that the Afghans who came in under TPS, like some of the other people that had TPS revoked, did not come in illegally.

Like they were following what they thought were the rules under their temporary protective status.

All that said, I think what's important here is it gives away the game because it does reveal the fundamental white supremacy that is embedded in the Trump Project.

And look, we, you know, I know it's not post-George Floyd anymore, but this is, how else do you explain a situation in which they want to send pretty much

largely, if not exclusively, black and brown people to places like Libya and Rwanda while welcoming planeloads of white people from South Africa to the United States.

That's like this is the Stephen Miller, Tucker Carlson worldview where we're going to reverse quote-unquote great replacement.

We're going to like push black and brown people out of this country and we're going to become the safe haven for white people.

This airlift of Elon Musk's from Africa is absolutely ridiculous.

And it kind of cuts against decades and made me think, Tommy, like

our former boss, like Barack Obama, his father came to the United States and an airlift of students from Kenya that were coming here to be educated in the United States.

Like, that's who we used to be, you know,

60, 70 years ago.

Like, we've gone backward, we've gone way backwards here, you know?

And so I just think this is like a, this isn't just like a kind of, you know, weird sideshow.

This is like pretty elemental to the project here.

And it's a, it's not even a dog whistle.

It's like a pretty,

I don't even know, it's just like a cry to his base.

Like, look, we're letting in the white people and we're kicking out the brown people.

And, and I don't know, like, sometimes like you got to call out what it is.

And this is a kind of white supremacist immigration policy.

Yeah, it's weird.

It's like dog whistle became the thing we would talk about all the time, but it's, you're right, it's not a dog whistle, it's it's a policy

welcoming white people, sending black people to countries they were never from.

But also, the language involved, like the term white genocide, it's far-right propaganda.

It was popularized by a white separatist, literal neo-Nazi.

It's been used,

it was, you know, the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017.

There were signs about white genocide.

The Tree of Life synagogue shooter talked about white genocide or the great replacement theory.

Like it is a, it's usually deeply anti-Semitic.

It's usually the Jews who are conducting the white genocide in these twisted right-wing worldviews.

And these theories, this propaganda has been used to

defend violence.

Yeah.

And the president of the United States saying it, it's like you can't kind of understate what a big deal that is.

Yeah, and it does make you wonder like who is in his ear about this.

It's got to be Elon.

Well, there's a lot of South Africans.

It's

like David Sachs, Elon, Peter Thiel.

There's a whole PayPal mafia as all.

I'm telling you, man, like the white South African

internationale is nothing to sneer at.

I mean, like, and they have their, you know, I mean,

sins of the fathers don't always pass on, but sometimes they do.

And these are people that came out of apartheid, came out of, they're nostalgic for that, you know.

I mean, they used to complain about it.

What happened?

I mean,

yes, are there flaws in like land redistribution in like Zimbabwe in South Africa?

Sure.

But to your point, I mean, Mandela, like, they like held back the money.

You know, like these people were allowed to keep their farms, you know, like there's crime, sure, but there's, there's all kinds of crime in South Africa.

It's a lot more dangerous.

This is just, this is, ugh, it's gross.

I think

when it comes to the murder rate, the murder rate in South Africa is just shockingly high.

And that's a universal problem.

It's high for black people.

Exactly.

Exactly.

It's a universal problem.

I think in terms of land redistribution, I think one of the things that I think led to Trump really freaking out about this was a law that was passed that said the government could expropriate land from people without compensation.

But we talked about this at Pate America on Monday.

A lot of experts say it was just kind of clarifying rules that were already in place.

And when you read deeper into this, most experts say actually the

sin is that South Africa has done very little to reduce racial inequality since the end of apartheid.

Yeah, exactly.

Like, in fact, you know, and people basically hate the government because it's been corrupt and sclerotic and incapable of delivering on the promises.

Yeah, and I'm sorry, like, these people built their estates on like a complete white supremacist system of apartheid.

And like,

they've,

I don't know, the fact that these are the people that you look out at the world and you see these people as the vulnerable people in the world, given all the places where there are people who are actually vulnerable, and we're sending people back to those places.

Um,

it's, it's a real stain.

It's real fucked up.

Imagine this happening in like 2016, Trump articulating some of these things.

Like, the reaction would have been pretty much.

Much bigger.

Yeah, that's the thing.

The frog has been boiling for a while here.

Yeah, we're just toast.

Okay, we're going to take a quick break.

When we come back, you're going to hear my interview with Senator Chris Murphy.

We are going to talk about all the avenues for corruption that are happening as we speak, as Trump visits these Gulf autocrats.

So stick around for that.

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Senator Chris Murphy, welcome back to the show.

Hey, man, thanks for having me.

It's great to see you.

So we're talking on Tuesday afternoon.

As we speak, President Trump is in Saudi Arabia.

He'll go on to Qatar, then the United Arab Emirates.

A lot about this trip is unusual, but I really want to talk with you about why it presents a truly unprecedented opportunity for political corruption.

Just a few examples for for listeners to kind of set the table.

Qatar is apparently giving Trump a 747.

There is an Emirati-run investment firm that recently announced they will be buying $2 billion worth of a Trump family cryptocurrency for no discernible business reason.

Trump's real estate business is working on a luxury golf course in Qatar, residential towers in Saudi Arabia, a new Trump hotel in Dubai.

Jared Kushner has gotten a bunch of money from all of these governments.

Senator, it's genuinely hard to just keep track of all of this corruption, let alone make sense of it.

But what is your sense of like, what is the other end of the deal?

What are these countries getting from Trump in return for these giant favors?

Yeah, you're being generous.

It's not an opportunity for corruption.

It's like corruption right in front of us, right?

Quint pro quo is being announced as Trump is touring the Middle East.

I mean, first of all, it's just so unbelievably brazen.

Trump is going to these three countries, not because they are the three most important countries in the world, not because they're our three most important allies, but because they are the three countries that are willing willing to pay him.

These are the countries that are willing to just hand him cash.

So he's going to the region to collect.

Another example of the brazenness, part of the deal that you just, part of the corruption you just talked about is this UAE investment in a Trump family crypto business.

It's a $2 billion investment.

And

the Trump entity is essentially just acting as a bank.

So it takes the money, it gets to invest that money, and it's so much money, $2 billion, that they can make hundreds of millions of dollars a year just on the investments.

But the entity is not just the Trump family, it's the Trump family and the Witcoff family.

So it's Trump, it's Trump's kids and the son of the Middle East envoy.

Just to like make it perfectly clear that when you're dealing with world liberty financial or whatever the hell it's called, you are definitely dealing directly with the people who make the decisions on U.S.

Middle East policy.

Okay, so what's on the other end of this?

Every single one of these countries needs something, and they need something immediate from the United States.

The UAE wants the United States to relax our restrictions on semiconductor sales to the UAE.

And Trump basically announced as soon as the crypto deal was set that he was ready to do that.

The Saudis want a nuclear deal with the United States that is better than every other country's nuclear deal.

In particular, they want to be able to enrich uranium in Saudi Arabia, which would allow them a pathway to a bomb.

Qatar just sort of wants to make sure that they don't get cut out of the deal.

What happened during Trump's first term was that the Saudis and the Emiratis ganged up on the Qataris and the United States backed the Saudi play.

So the Qataris are willing to give Trump whatever he asks for because they just want to make sure that they still get invited to these clubs.

But everybody's got an ask and it seems like Trump is ready to fulfill all of their asks because they are doing what is the price of admission in the Trump administration, which is send Trump and his family boatloads of cash.

Yeah, it was greasing them.

The corruption in Trump 1.0, as best we could tell, was like governments renting extra room blocks at his hotels for weeks on end or corrupt real estate stuff.

Trump 2.0 features this kind of novel cryptocurrency element or avenue to buy him off.

How do you think that changes things?

Trump's theory is very different in his second term.

He's essentially testing not just the Republican Party, but the public writ large.

He's saying, if I engage in sort of daily acts of corruption in the dozens,

then is it really corruption?

Or if I'm telling you that I'm stealing, will you just consider that it's part of the price of Donald Trump being president?

I think for a little while, it was working.

I think for a little while, the American people were like, well, I guess we kind of knew he was corrupt and we elected him and maybe we should look the other way.

But as the corruption has gotten bigger, right, as it's not tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars, but it's now billions of dollars, and it's as gaudy as the gift of a gold-plated plane,

I think the American people are just sort of saying, okay, enough.

And a few Republicans are saying, enough.

So it's the size of the corruption, it's the fact that it's all playing out in public, and it's the very transparent way in which he's

operationalizing the entirety of the federal government, including tours of the White House, to prompt people to give him more money.

I just don't think this is ultimately going to

numb the American people.

It was close, but I don't think that's how this is going to play out.

Yeah, that is what has been surprising about this.

I mean, I sort of went into this assuming God only knows what's happening in secret.

God only knows what crypto wallets from Singapore are just firing off money to Trump for whatever deal.

The reality is...

It's all happening in public.

Like he's hosting a dinner for the 200 people who buy the most cryptocurrency.

I think the top 25 are getting a VIP tour of the White House.

Bloomberg News did an analysis looking at the people who own the most of Trump's meme coin, the Trump coin, and the vast majority are from overseas.

So you're right.

It's just kind of, it's so brazen, it's almost hard to know what to do with it.

Yeah, and some of it is playing out in public, but some of it isn't.

I know it's hard to follow for some people.

And I think some of the bet that Trump made was that the crypto scams would be sort of the most opaque.

And a lot of Americans, because they just choose to not want to understand crypto, would look the other way.

But it's really not that hard to follow.

I mean, there's the meme coin and then there's a stable coin.

The meme coin is just this valueless coin that's worth is just dependent on how many people want to buy Trump meme coin on a particular day.

And what we know, as you said, is that it's mostly foreign buyers.

What we know is that Trump makes a bit of money on every single transaction.

So every time a foreign buyer, an oligarch or a Saudi prince buys meme coin, they are sending money straight into Trump's pocket.

And we, you know, and yet we don't know the names of any of these buyers.

So the fact that he's doing it plays out in public, but he is conveniently masking the identity of everybody that buys.

And of course, we just know what's going on.

There are people buying the coin and then going to the White House and saying, hey, I just bought $20 million of Trump coin.

Here's what I need from you.

That's happening with foreign entities.

That's definitely happening with American companies.

If a mayor did that or a governor did that, they'd be run out of town or the state on a rail.

And I think we're going to get to the point where people are that fed up with Trump doing it.

Yeah, I hope so too.

There was some bipartisan movement in the Senate to regulate cryptocurrency.

It fell apart.

I was told by some folks who were working on it that that happened because, in part, because of some of these reports about foreign actors buying huge amounts of Trump's stablecoin, as you mentioned earlier.

A person involved in those talks also told me that the crypto industry dumping tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars into elections, in particular Sherrod Brown's defeat in the Ohio Senate race last cycle loomed very large in the background.

How overt is the threat from the crypto industry to lawmakers that they will primar you or defeat you in a general election if you don't do their bidding?

And do you have any hope that the Senate can get that crypto bill in a better place?

Listen, I don't know how overt it is.

I mean, I've never had one of these crypto bosses or bros come into my office and tell me that if I don't support what they want, they're going to come after me.

But, of course, I'm in Connecticut,

not Ohio.

But you're definitely right that there is sort of in the zeitgeist a fear of the crypto industry.

And I mean, that's unacceptable.

It is unacceptable for any member of Congress to be making decisions based upon what you fear is going to happen to you electorally.

I think it's a little bit of an emperor without the sort of level of clothing that we believe they have.

There's lots of other really powerful interests out there that we piss off on a regular basis, whether it be the oil industry, the pharmaceutical lobby.

They have just as much money as the crypto lobby does.

And we should just tell a story about how the crypto industry is gouging Americans, and we should tell a story about how they are enabling Trump's corruption.

The crypto industry is less powerful if you unmask them for their corruption and their unethical behavior.

On why the crypto deal fell apart, I think there are a lot of complicated reasons, but amongst them, I hope, was the fact that the president was exempted.

So the bill said that members of Congress can't issue crypto coin,

at least stablecoin, which is what the bill was regulating.

But the president could.

At the very moment that Trump was doing the stablecoin deal in UAE, in which Trump was getting a big payoff,

my hope is that we will not vote on that bill, that Democrats will not support any regulation of stablecoin unless it applies the ethics prohibitions to the president.

That seems like a pretty reasonable thing to ask as the president is over there engaged in this gross, gross corruption campaign.

Yeah, that seems like the bare minimum.

So back to Trump.

I mean, it does seem like his kids are the tip of the spear on a lot of the corruption.

The hypocrisy from Republicans, when you compare the comments they made about Hunter Biden to their silence, now it's galling, but it ultimately misses the real point, which is like corruption is bad no matter what, right?

Like Hunter Biden's activities were,

you know, cynical and kind of gross.

But, you know, we're currently watching Don and Eric visit all of these Gulf countries.

They're kind of either going right before dad or they're going right after to collect their real estate deal or whatever prize.

I think Jared Kushner is sitting on $3.5 billion worth of Gulf money in his quote-unquote investment firm.

Surprise, surprise.

Jared just came out of the woodwork to say he was helping plan this foreign trip, I believe.

What do you think the impact is of like the Trump kids and Kushner on the world stage?

Like, what part do they play?

I just don't think we should view the kids as separate or distinct at all from the father.

You know, he says that the kids are running the business and maybe operationally they are making the hour-to-hour decisions, but Trump is still running the business.

So there's just no doubt that he is pulling the strings here.

And of course, we see that on a daily basis because he's using his own social media feed to advertise and to market the business ventures that apparently his kids, not him, are in charge of.

And, you know, I think you saw exactly how it works with that UAE crypto investment.

You know, the Trump kids, along with the Witcoff kid, went over there.

Literally a day later, the Trump administration announced that they were ready to give UAE what they wanted.

And I imagine when he gets to the Emirates, that will be the sort of summation of the corrupt deals.

So the kids

and the father are just sort of playing individual parts, but it's all the same play.

It's all the same game.

Did you see the World Liberty Financial, that's the crypto firm that the Trump kids run?

They released a video on social media of their trip to Pakistan, where they were like met by diplomats.

They had lights and sirens in the streets.

They were meeting with, you know, if not the president, then very senior lawmakers.

Like, again, they're just kind of laying it all out there for us.

Yeah, and it's not, and obviously it doesn't, you know, end with the kids.

Again, Witkoff

is in on this.

His kid

and he are making boatloads of money off of these deals.

Musk is along for the ride on this trip, and you have all this reporting that Starlink is one of the investments you need to make as a foreign entity to even get a foot in the door with the Trump administration.

There looks as if Saudi Arabia is part of this package of gifts that it's giving the Trump cabal is a deal with Starlink.

So you have to pay off Eric, you have to pay off Donald.

You have to pay off the Witcoff family.

you got to pay off Elon, you got to pay off Donald.

And if you do all of those things, then you can ask for something from the American taxpayer.

But what we know is that nowhere in that deal is the American taxpayer.

Nowhere in this deal is anything good for U.S.

security.

The thing they're doing for UAE is a disaster.

They are letting UAE have access to the highest technology micro semiconductors.

We've never wanted to do that because we know that the UAE and the Chinese are super tight and that any technology we give to UAE likely goes straight to China.

So China now will get access to these semiconductors and they will be able to potentially be in a position to lap us when it comes to the future of the global advanced AI industry.

That is something that's really bad for the United States, but it's going to happen apparently only because the UAE met Donald Trump's price, which looks to be about a $2 billion cash payment into Trump Enterprises.

Man, it's amazing.

And by the way, the UAE, I know they have a lot of friends at Washington.

They have an ambassador who's kind of like out and about often at Cafe Milano, et cetera.

But they've also been funding one side of an absolutely brutal civil war in Sudan.

They're funding the mercenary group called the RSF.

So there's a lot of tough conversations we should be having with the UAE that are not about Donald Trump's pocketbook, and there's just no indication that those are happening.

Yeah, and frankly, that we should have been having

during Biden's term as well.

I mean, we were doing deals with the UAE, not corrupt deals, but we were financing the UAE's defense infrastructure while they were fueling this brutal civil war.

So we are going to force a vote.

There is a pending sale of arms to the UAE, and there's no doubt that that will not be fast-tracked.

We will force a vote and a debate on the Senate floor where we will talk both about the way that the UAE is funding the civil war and the worst, both actors are terrible in UAE, but they're funding the worst of the two,

and the way in which the Trump administration is dealing with the UAE are corrupt.

So

we're not going to stand by.

We're going to at least force our Republican colleagues to go on the record on all of this.

That's good.

I think that's important.

So I saw you gave a big floor speech about Trump and corruption this week.

I think that's great.

And you're sort of sounding the alarm.

What else can Congress do, though, if Republicans seem like they just kind of don't care?

They're willing to turn a blind eye.

Yeah, well, I mean, one of the things we can do on the foreign policy corruption is make it clear to these countries that, you know, there are repercussions if you pay off an American president, and those repercussions last beyond Trump's term.

I mean, maybe UAE and Qatar believe that Trump will be president forever, but that's probably not how it's going to work out.

There will probably be a Democratic president and a Democratic Congress, and they're not going to get the same treatment from a Democratic president

if this is the way that they deal with the United States.

So

Democrats need to communicate to these foreign allies that they should get out of this deal with Trump.

They should unilaterally stand down the corruption if they want any long-term healthy relationship with the United States of America.

And then we can just do what I've I've been trying to do, which is mobilize the public.

It is curious and a little heartbreaking that it's taken a long time for the public to kind of reach a level of outrage, but that's kind of because we, as Democrats, didn't talk about it enough.

Like the minute the meme coin was issued on Inauguration Day, we should have been talking about it and very little else.

So I think if we work to mobilize the public around this set of issues with a kind of nasty midterm coming up for Republican members of Congress, it may cause them to raise some objections.

You see Republicans starting to tiptoe into objections, at least to the cuttery plane.

That might be

more likely to happen if we talk about this more in the public and out in the stump.

Yeah, I agree with that.

I mean, the plane is a nice, quite literally bright, shiny object that we can all focus on and talk about.

But the Steve Bannon flood the zone with shit.

strategy from Trump is pretty effective and makes it hard, I think, to fire the right bullet at the same target.

Final question for you.

President Trump gave a speech earlier today in Saudi Arabia where he said he's going to get rid of sanctions on Syria and meet with the Syrian President al-Shara.

I had to say I was

incredibly excited about that announcement from President Trump.

I think it's a politically challenging thing to do to take sanctions off a leader who was admittedly a former terrorist, but it's absolutely the right thing to do if we want this new Syrian government to have a shot of existing.

And by the way, these are sanctions that were all put on the Assad regime, which has now been deposed by these guys.

But what was your reaction to that announcement?

Did you guys have any heads up on it either?

Yeah, there's certainly some commotion that this was being considered by the administration.

I agree with you.

This is a really important move.

Now, there are a lot of announcements that Trump makes that don't end up actually coming to fruition.

So I think we should

pour a little bit of salt on this announcement.

But yes,

we, as unsavory as these characters are, this is not the Assad regime.

And we should give

this Syrian government a chance to show that they are going to build a multi-religious, multi-sectarian society, that they are committed to a relationship with the United States.

And we should just understand that if we're not talking to the Syrian regime, then our enemies are.

The Russians and the Iranians, many others, the Chinese are willing to cut a deal.

So this is important.

We should drop the sanctions, but it probably will necessitate Congress stepping in because some of these sanctions through the Caesar Act are mandatory sanctions.

So if Trump wants to get this done and establish a real relationship or at least a pathway to a relationship with Syria, that's a good thing.

We should applaud him when he does something decent, but he probably needs Congress to step in.

But we'll see if all of his, well, I guess they always do whatever he tells them to do.

So I guess I shouldn't doubt that Republicans who had been...

pressing against Biden releasing the sanctions vigorously will pivot on a dime and all of a sudden announce that Trump has struck a genius move in doing the thing that they thought if Biden did it was going to be a cataclysm for the Middle East.

Yeah, we got art of the deals here.

Senator Murphy, thank you so much for raising everybody's awareness about these issues and for coming on the show.

Great to see you.

Thanks, man.

Thanks again to Senator Murphy for joining the show, and we'll talk to you guys next week.

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