World’s Lamest Dictator Goes to Washington

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Welcome back to Pod Save the World.

I'm Tommy Vitorn.

I'm Ben Rhodes.

How are you liking these in your, I call them IFBs because that's what the TV people call them.

I actually am used to wearing them from when I go on TV, but

there's something about podcasting where I was used to having those big old

camps on, but now I'm realizing that we probably look really ridiculous wearing them.

Yeah.

Maybe it'll be one of those things, like every other technology, where 20 years from now, people look back and they're like, what were those people wearing?

Yeah, what were those giants?

The equivalent of a giant desktop computer or something.

Yeah, we'll have a Neuralink chip in our brains.

This is part of our transition into the digital era.

We're doing more stuff on YouTube.

Thank you to everyone who subscribed.

Thousands of people subscribed to our YouTube on the last episode.

Like I said, then we're trying to build a big YouTube audience for the show and for Pod Save America because otherwise, when people search for content on YouTube, they find TPUSA and the Daily Wire and a bunch of right-wing crap.

Logan Paul.

Logan Paul on Casa.

Yeah, we want them to serve as good quality content.

And we have a good quality show for you today.

We're going to talk about a bunch of stuff.

So President Nayebukele of El Salvador was in Washington.

We're going to talk about his visit and how he has become Trump's.

partner in their broader assault on due process and civil liberties in this country.

Fun one.

We're also going to cover the recent election in Ecuador, why disgraced former mercenary, I guess he's a current mercenary, Eric Prince, keeps popping up in all these places, including El Salvador in Ecuador.

Then we'll get into the latest on Trump's failed effort to end the war in Ukraine, how the administration's talks with Iran went over the weekend, and the fight over how to define success in those talks.

Some reports that the State Department is not content just destroying the US destroying USAID, that they're also going to come for state proper.

And then finally, you'll hear about some elections that we can all get excited about.

And then, Ben, listeners are going to hear my interview with Josh Rogan.

Josh wrote one of the best books about the Trump administration's China policy in the first term.

It's called Chaos Under Heaven.

So we talk about what he learned in reporting that out, all the kind of factionalism in the Trump administration, how Trump is very susceptible to Xi Jinping, who can just call him and flatter him.

And then I asked Josh how annoying he thought you and I were when he was a reporter covering the Obama years.

He definitely thought I was annoying at that time.

Me too.

There's no question about that.

Josh could be a little annoying too, let's say.

Listen, we all were annoying.

Yeah, we're all

annoyed.

We all fight.

We were younger, too.

We all do our best.

But it's exciting stuff.

A good show, I think.

A well-rounded show.

I'm liking these deep dives, too.

I'm excited to dive deep on these topics.

You want to dive deep on Mr.

Bukele?

Yeah, yeah.

Oh, boy.

Okay.

So on Monday, President Trump welcomed the world's lamest dictator, President Naeb Bukele of El Salvador, to the White House.

Here's a little taste of the kind of chummy rapport we were forced to listen to.

He's done a fantastic job, Mr.

President.

It's an honor to have you.

And we appreciate working with you because you want to stop crime, and so do we.

And it's

very, very effective.

And I want to just say hello to the people of El Salvador and say they have one hell of a president.

Sometimes they say that we imprisoned thousands.

I like to say that we actually liberated millions.

So, you know, like, it's very good.

Who gave him that line?

Do you think I can use that?

And in fact, Mr.

President, you have 350 million people to liberate.

But to liberate 350 million people, you have to imprison some.

Taught to listen to.

El Salvador, as listeners probably know, has been at the forefront of the U.S.

political debate over the last few weeks because the Trump administration sent 283 Venezuelan men to El Salvador to rot in its mega prison, the Terrorism Confinement Center.

Among them was a Salvadorian man named Kilmoro Obreco Garcia, whose deportation the Trump administration now admits was done in error.

That's because in 2019, a judge ordered that Obreco Garcia could not be sent to El Salvador because he faced threats from a local gang.

The backstory is years earlier, gang members literally broke into Mr.

Obreco Garcia's family home and threatened to kill him unless his family paid extortion money or turned their son over to a gang to become a member.

So he fled the country at age 16.

But because this administration is filled with malignant idiots, Obrego Garcia was deported to El Salvador and is now stuck in a jail with the exact same gang members who threatened him many years ago.

But rather than use Bukele's visit as an opportunity to fix their mistake and atone for their sins and bring him home, the Trump team doubled down on calling Obrego Garcia a terrorist and on fighting the court order.

Here's a clip of Make-A-Wish Foundation Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, sentient vampire penis Stephen Miller, and President Bukele speaking in the Oval Office.

I don't understand what the confusion is.

This individual is a citizen of El Salvador.

He was illegally in the United States and was returned to his country.

That's where you deport people back to their country of origin, except for Venezuela that wasn't refusing to take people back or places like that.

I can tell you this, Mr.

President.

No, the foreign policy of the United States is conducted by the President of the United States, not by a court.

And no court in the United States has a right to conduct the foreign policy of the United States.

It's that simple.

End of story.

And that's what the Supreme Court held, by the way, to Marco's point.

The Supreme Court said exactly what Marco said, that no court has the authority to compel the foreign policy function of the United States.

We want a case 9-0, and people like CNN are portraying it as a loss, as usual, because they want foreign terrorists in the country who kidnap women and children.

But President Trump, his policy is foreign terrorists that are here illegally get expelled from the country, which, by the way, is a 9-10 issue.

Can President Bukele weigh in on this?

Do you plan to return him?

Well,

I'm supposed to have suggested that I smuggle a terrorist into the United States, right?

How can I return him to the United States?

Like, could I smuggle him into the United States, or what do I do?

Of course, I'm not going to do it.

It's like,

I mean,

the question is preposterous.

How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States?

I don't have the power to return him to the United States.

Okay, so Ben, a couple of thoughts here.

First, just despite Rubio's whining there, the courts have absolutely made decisions that have impacted or constrained U.S.

foreign policy.

The Supreme Court repeatedly ruled that individuals detained at Gitmo could challenge their captivity, for example.

The Hamdan decision said the Bush administration's original military commissions were illegal.

The court recently denied the Trump administration's request to block a $2 billion foreign aid payment.

So this happens all the time.

It happens with Congress, too.

Second, it just it disgusted me watching that to see how much Bukele was enjoying being in the center of like the action and to know that this two-bit autocrat is like helping coordinate an assault on civil liberties of American citizens, which we should get into as well.

Yes, I think that scene is really important.

You guys broke down, obviously, some of the legal questions in this case on Pod Save America, but that was such a profoundly authoritarian scene, both the content of what was discussed and the pageantry and way was discussed that I think we need to kind of pause and kind of fix the camera on it for a moment here.

Because first of all, let's take the language they're using.

Notice the repeated references to terrorism.

This person is not a terrorist.

There's nobody that suggests that this person is a terrorist.

They've claimed based on absolutely no evidence whatsoever that he might have ties to a gang.

But the repetition of the word terrorism is, I think, a really troubling one.

Because if you look at the recent history of authoritarianism, it's, and this is in part to blame the United States given the war on terror paradigm.

Whenever you want to completely delegitimize your opponents and be able to do anything to them, you just call them terrorists.

It's like a dehumanizing thing.

That's right.

And so they're lying.

And this is what Putin used, for instance, to cancel the direct elections of governors in Russia.

It was the claim of a threat of terrorism.

So we have seen leaders, Nenyao has used the threat of terrorism to kill thousands of children in Gaza.

And so I think we should watch that language because it is the language of autocrats and it's the language that they use to claim emergency powers, to do extraordinary things, and to essentially put themselves above any law.

And just for what it's worth, like the so-called evidence that Obrego Garcia was a member of MS-13 is that he was wearing Chicago Bulls gear at one point.

And then some confidential informant said he was a member of the gang in a state miles and miles away from where he lives currently in New York.

He was living in Maryland at the time.

He's never actually, I don't know that he's even been here.

Yeah, he and his lawyers said he's never even been to this place.

So it's absurd.

And the confidential informant thing, too, that's an endless reservoir for them to pull on.

We don't know what they're talking about.

They've not presented that evidence.

That's why you have due process.

So the terrorism thing is one piece of this.

Another is the media.

Just the kind of casual bullying.

And there's another point where Trump says, like, why didn't you tell me a wonderful job I'm doing?

He wants to live in a place where 90% of his media interactions are people telling Mr.

Trump what a great job he's doing.

And then they let one person in, like Caitlin Collins, to then yell at her

to kind of performatively try to humiliate her for their supporters.

That too, deeply authoritarian.

We've seen Putin do this.

We've seen Orban do this.

This is part of the playbook.

Then the Stephen Miller exchange after, God, Make a Wish Foundation Secretary of State.

It's so good.

I'm just jealous.

I'm not going to try.

Actually, one interesting thing about that Stephen Miller clip,

I listened to that late because

I was like traveling yesterday.

I was just deeply alarmed by the kind of pugilism of his voice.

I know, man.

How many times do you think you practiced that in the mirror, too?

And, and also, look, we were, you know, and I certainly was accused of being like a younger person who, you know, talked a lot.

And when I was,

could you imagine calling John Kerry John?

Oh, yeah, calls him Attorney General Pam.

He calls him Marco.

He calls her Pam.

Yeah.

He is so empowered.

He was showing his place in that orbit with his language very clearly.

He is so empowered.

He's calling these cabinet secretaries

by their first name.

He sounds angry.

So that's another takeaway that you have this kind of the chief authoritarian advisor seems kind of uber empowered in that room.

And then the last piece is we just have to continually call bullshit.

There's no difficulty whatsoever in getting this guy back.

I mean, Trump made a whole show in his first term of getting back, you know, hostages from far more difficult circumstances.

El Salvador is a country that we pay to imprison these people.

If Bukele is such a dictator, as he himself says, he should have no problem putting one person from a prison on a plane.

It's completely absurd.

And it was a performance to demonstrate how much they don't give a shit, to demonstrate their disregard for the law, to demonstrate their disregard for norms.

And we should see it as a deeply worrying sign, not just about this case, and not even just about this whole issue of sending people to El Salvador, but just about how far they may be willing to go.

Because if they're going to go full Bukele here,

we could be looking at a real emergency that is already upon us when it comes to where America is on that authoritarian toy book.

Yeah, and just we're getting in bed with a bad dude here.

Bukele's a bad guy.

I was talking to a smart Latin America policy expert today who reminded me that the head of the Salvadoran prison system is currently sanctioned by the U.S.

government under the Magnitsky Act, which means the U.S.

determined that he's responsible for serious human rights violations and or corruption.

It's a guy named Osiris Luna, who was under investigation under a DOJ task force called Task Force Vulcan.

Awesome name for a task force, I thought.

It was launched during Trump 1.0 to go after MS-13.

And what this task force found was collusion between Bukele and organized crime, the same groups that we're now calling terrorist organizations that we need to stop.

And that Luna, the head of the prison system down in El Salvador, was leading the conversations about collaboration between between the Bukele administration and these gang leaders.

The gang leaders, the deal was basically the gang leaders provide political support to Bukele.

And it's not that they reduced the levels of violence.

They just hid the bodies better when they murdered people.

They didn't like dangle them in the streets so it terrified the population.

They like dismembered them and put them somewhere where they couldn't be found.

So they were just disappeared.

And no one really knows the full extent.

of the deal between Bukele and these gangs, but it's clear that he's very worried about this information getting out.

And it's something that's like everyone should just be aware of.

And also, Ben, like to your point about, you know, Bukele's comments there about how, oh, I have no power to let this man out.

Like, the Trump administration is doing the same thing.

Like, the Supreme Court said the U.S.

should try to get Abrego Garcia back.

They didn't say, they're like equivocating and fighting about the word effectuate versus facilitate.

All the Supreme Court is saying, you have to at least try, and they're refusing to do that.

Yeah.

And

just one thing on El Salvador and then on Bukele.

This person cannot be deported to El Salvador.

That was the particular

one country in the world where this person is not allowed to be sent by the United States to El Salvador because of the threat he faces.

And then Bukele,

you know, we've talked about him over the years.

He has, through his massive crackdown and violation of human rights, reduced crime levels, which has drawn him some popularity.

But we should have no illusions about what kind of person he he is.

In addition to just being a brutal autocrat who has essentially dissolved

any semblance of parliamentary government down there, he's been at the kind of zeitgeist of a certain flavor of right-wing authoritarianism that is very Trumpy.

So we used to talk about his crypto obsessions, right?

He was going to be the Bitcoin dictator.

He was going to build a Bitcoin city.

He was in that crypto space hanging out with some of the same crypto people that ended up being some of the biggest financiers to Trump and the Republican Party.

He's been in in the CPAC milieu.

He comes up to CPAC.

He gives these talks about ending globalization.

He sounds like Steve Bannon.

So he's in this kind of right-wing internationale.

And one of the things that's been interesting in watching the Trump administration is how much they've kind of extended that down into Latin America.

We tend to think about it as Putin and Orban and Netanyahu,

and then maybe Modi coming into it, you know, in his own way, Erdogan, but Erdogan is not kind of connected to the right-wing politics in the same way.

But under Trump, what we're seeing increasingly is this kind of, you know, between Melee and Argentina and Bukele and El Salvador, they're building that network down into Latin America.

We obviously saw that with Bolsonaro and Brazil.

We're going to talk about Ecuador.

That has bad historical echoes.

Very, very bad.

Because, you know,

to those of you who followed the history of this, but, you know, the United States and the Cold War backed some pretty vicious right-wing governments, Pinochet in Chile, the military dictatorship in Argentina, and on and on and on.

This is kind of a new flavor of that and connected into this broader right-wing internationale.

And that, to me, is also worrying.

Yeah, me too.

I think this, there's no, the deal between the U.S.

and El Salvador that like governs this detention deal, like it's not public.

The initial reports were that we're paying them about $6 million.

I think for Bukele, the benefit is really the attention into being in the center of the action and showing people back home that he's in the mix.

But I'd like the same general reaction to this scene as you did, which is like

the term like the cruelty is the point has become a very tired cliche.

Trump 1.0, yeah.

Yeah, but like I did watching that, it did feel like the own the libs psychology that animates these guys has metastasized into this administration-wide delight in being cruel to anyone in service of their agenda or in service of owning the libs.

Like we saw this during family family separation in the first term, but that was walked back.

But now these guys are just, they are gleeful about harming an innocent person.

And that was true for Bukele, too.

Well, yeah, I think if there's a Trump 2.0 version of it, it's the authoritarianism is the point.

And so lying about the Supreme Court,

demeaning this individual as a terrorist, demanding that the media tell them how great they are,

they know what they're doing.

The point is to show everybody that they're authoritarians who cannot be shamed, who don't respect the rule of law, and don't care.

And that's pretty alarming, especially given that we're only three months into this.

Yeah, it's fucking April 15th.

Unfortunately, this story gets worse.

So, Trump and Bukele also discussed sending American citizens to El Salvador's prisons.

We've been covering this horrible idea on this show for several months now because Bukele first floated it during Rubio's first trip to El Salvador in like January or early February, I think.

But Trump has clearly gotten enamored of this idea.

He has said he would love to send, quote, homegrown criminals to foreign prisons.

And it gets worse still because, according to Politico, former Blackwater CEO Eric Prince and some defense contractors are pitching the White House on a plan to expand deportations to El Salvador from U.S.

prisons and to designate part of the prison as an American territory to avoid legal challenges.

For those unfamiliar with Prince or Blackwater, Blackwater is best known for this horrible 2007 incident in Iraq where Blackwater mercenaries murdered 17 people at a traffic circle in Baghdad.

And it not only was like a, you know, just a horrific mass slaughter, but also irreparably damaged our relationship with the people and government of Iraq.

So, Ben, I mean, it's just, it's hard to imagine two worse ideas than Eric Prince being involved in like literally anything, but also adding a profit motive to this plan of sending human beings from this

U.S.

prisons to this nightmare.

That's exactly right.

Connecting the profit motive and the kind of privatization of these schemes to the authoritarianism creates yet another additional incentive structure for cruelty for mistakes for scale right like any profit model yeah if there's a profit model and deporting people he's going to want to deport as many people as he can fill up those paints to the brim when you're sending people down yeah and and let's make no allusions about eric prince he wants to be the Pregozin of the United States,

except up until when Pregozin pre-death.

Yeah, he may not want to march on Washington and then die in a fight rush.

Stay out of of that part of the world.

But he wants to have the Wagner Group.

He wants to have

a private intelligence and security firm that is kind of a quasi-extension of the state that is in all these places.

Eric Prince, since he did that in Iraq, he's popped up in places like Libya, Yemen, parts of Africa, where he's been trying to, you know, mercenaries fighting in wars or trying to, you know, run security for mining interests, tried to become the kind of private security force in Afghanistan, all

very Wagner group flavored stuff, right?

And on this one, he may be hitting, you know, gold for him, because essentially, if he can say, hey, I can put together a private security force of people that is kind of blessed by the administration,

questionable legal authorities for how they're allowed to do deportations.

Right, but not subject to the idea of the accountability in terms of Congress or, you know, disclosure laws, et cetera.

That's right.

And what he could do is he could say, I'm working not for, you know, I'm working for Bukele.

I'm working for, you know, the guy we're going to talk about in Ecuador, right?

And so in that regard, he can kind of escape some of the U.S.

oversight.

But if you have the Trump administration paying those guys

who are then paying Eric Prince, everybody's in on the deal, right?

And we've seen this be part of how Trump operates a second time around.

And again, with that profit motive, they have every incentive to deport as many people as they can because that's probably the manner in which they're going to be compensated.

And all of a sudden, you've got a Wagner, just like the Wagner group has been the extension of Russian power in Africa, you've got the Prince version of it being the extension of Trump's interest in Latin America.

It's a really scary thought.

It's really scary.

So Chris Vinholl, Senator Chris Vinholland, says he's going to either try to meet with Bukele in Washington or go down to El Salvador to try to get Obreco Garcia back.

This smart Latin America person I was talking to today said he thinks Democrats should threaten to take action against any government that participates in the extraordinary rendition of Americans and basically say to them, things are going to change in the midterms.

And if you fuck with our citizens, we are going to seek to prosecute any foreign officials who support those illegal actions.

I thought that was kind of an interesting point.

To be like, you can be a friend of America or a friend of Trump.

You decide now, but play the long game.

And then, Ben, it was interesting, just last thought on just observing that scene in the Oval Office.

Bukele has gotten in bed with the Chinese.

pretty heavily since around 2018.

Remember when there was a series of small countries severing their relationships with Taiwan officially?

That led to, I think,

deals with Chinese over port construction, land concessions, et cetera.

Not all of those have gone forward, but the Salvadoran vice president was just in Beijing back last year to celebrate their shared views on democracy.

You didn't hear Trump lecturing him about China.

like we do to you know Panama.

Yeah, because I don't think Trump really cares at all.

He's absent.

That's not what animates him.

What animates him is his own power and authoritarian control over things and having people that will be partners to him in that.

And Bukele is playing both sides, I'm sure, you know, because that's what suits his interest.

To your point, that's all the more reason for Democrats to scrutinize this.

And by the way, I think they should be doing this side point, but Tommy, I was talking to a couple people who work in Democratic politics who are making the good point that whether it's Bukele in El Salvador or whether it's a law firm, get them on what are you doing?

Like, stay after them.

You know, what are the details of your agreements?

Like, what are you doing?

Because you're suggesting the

pendulum swing that's going to come.

You know, we are monitoring what is happening.

There's a record that is being kept of what you are doing.

And if and when the pendulum swings back in this country, we're not going to be the wishy-washing people.

We keep score too.

We're going to start fucking keeping score here.

We're not going to be authoritarians, but we are going to correct some things.

And I think that's important.

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So, Ecuador held elections over the weekend.

A right-winger named Daniel Naboa, the incumbent, won pretty overwhelmingly.

It was about 56% to 44% over his leftist challenger, Luisa Gonzalez.

Naboa ran on cracking down on violence and gang crime.

Ecuador has an astronomical homicide rate, the highest in Latin America, which unfortunately is a pretty recent phenomenon that is tied to the cocaine trade run by transnational gangs.

Gonzalez, the challenger, refused to accept the results.

She accused Naboa of fraud, though she hasn't provided any evidence.

The head of the Organization of American States, which monitored the election, said the results were consistent with what they had observed.

However, you know, Ecuador's elections, they have two rounds.

And in the first round, Naboa only won by about 16,000 votes.

So the margin in the second round being, you know, 11 points or whatever was quite a surprise.

So Naboa is young.

He's 37, I believe.

He's heir to the banana fortune.

He came to power in 2023 in the snap election after a pretty violent election where a candidate was actually murdered.

And he has, since being elected, has declared a state of emergency and deployed the military to try to quell the violence.

He wants to build more maximum security prisons and allow foreign military bases in the country.

All this obviously draws comparisons to Bukele and El Salvador, along with Javier Mile in Argentina.

I make sort of a trifecta of Trump-friendly leaders in Latin America that you were just referencing, Ben.

I think they all attended the inauguration.

Though someone was telling me today that Naboa, for whatever reason, just doesn't have as much juice in the administration with Rubio or with the White House as Bukeley.

I'm not sure why that is.

So, again, Eric Prince is once again part of this story.

In March, Naboa announced a strategic alliance with Eric Prince, who is going to provide Ecuador with some sort of security consulting to the government.

I was reminded by that Rudy Giuliani used to peddle these services in Latin America, too.

The announcement seemed time to bump up Naboa's image as an enforcer before the election, but it didn't include a lot of details.

January was, I believe, the most violent month in Ecuador's history, but Naboa was somehow able to convince voters that his approach to crime was still effective, despite that all happening on his watch.

But here's what Eric Prince had to say about why he was in Ecuador.

This is from a video posted by Ecuador's defense ministry.

Providing the law enforcement and the military the tools and the tactics to effectively combat the narco gangs.

Great intelligence

so that small raids,

very efficient

to put the narcos on their back heels and make them truly afraid of being caught.

Two simple paths.

One, next Sunday, the people of Ecuador can choose law and order and choose Daniel de Boa, or they can choose to make Ecuador to look just like Venezuela, a narco-state with massive drug processing,

with all the criminality and socialism and despair that comes with that.

I hope Ecuador chooses law and order, and we're here to help to combat the gangs and to provide the tools for the government to restore law and order, peace, and prosperity.

Sounded like some kind of banal security advice followed by a political endorsement.

So, Ben, any thoughts on the implications of this election and just like why Eric Prince keeps popping up in the worst places?

Like, I think he's essentially a grifter.

Like, you heard that video.

It doesn't sound like he's peddling.

Like, it doesn't sound like he has real capabilities that he's providing.

He's probably selling his Trump connections generally, but I don't know.

Like, the guy seems to be trying to privatize authoritarianism.

It doesn't seem great.

I think there's a picture coming into focus that is concerning,

which is Naboa is kind of drafting off the Bukele playbook, right?

People want security.

They're fed up with the murder rates.

They're fed up with the cartels.

We should say this is a serious fucking problem.

And part of it is there's kind of a whack-a-mole here, right?

You know,

the Colombians did a lot of work over many years to evict cartels.

They went to Mexico.

Then the Mexicans did operations.

There's still obviously a lot of cartels in Mexico, but some of those Mexican cartels moved some of their shipments and some of their operations to places like Ecuador.

So it's a problem.

And we've also had a Latin America left that has different flavors of it.

And we've seen a kind of more effective governing approach in places like Chile, right, where Gabriel Boric is president, than

the leftist governments in Ecuador recently.

So

Naboa is taking advantage of a bit of a vacuum.

That said, here's what concerns me.

You could see a scenario in which some of the different

instincts and priorities of the Trump administration begin to converge in this kind of access of authoritarianism that they're creating in the hemisphere.

Military bases in Ecuador, what if there's suddenly U.S.

military presence in Ecuador?

What if you've got U.S.

military or intelligence beginning to, as you've pointed out, take shots into Mexico at cartels.

You've got them starting to militarize the efforts against drug trafficking, but probably also against political opponents, let's face it, the Naboa's opponents, Brichelle's opponents, whomever,

in that part of Latin America.

And at the same time, you've got deportation flights coming down.

And maybe you've got prisons in Ecuador like the gulag that we see in El Salvador.

So suddenly, it's not just one prison, you've got a kind of a network of gulags in Ecuador and El Salvador.

And you've got Eric Prince as a connective tissue between it, but you don't even need Eric Prince.

You could be doing this with ICE, you could be doing this with different things.

It's not hard to see what this kind of access of autocrats across the Americas could look like in terms of a militarized war on the cartels that is kind of a war on terror type framework where you can do whatever you want, a kind of militarized network of deportations and prisons.

I mean, that's what it looks like is happening.

And that, you know, that's scary stuff.

Yeah, I mean, to your point

on the problem, we've talked about this in the El Salvador context.

It's almost impossible for us to imagine what it's like living in a place with war zone-like levels of violence.

And political leaders who can promise security and potentially even deliver on it are going to do really well and be really popular.

And that's a big part of Bukele's standing and polling that shows him at like, what, 80%?

But then they're going to overreach.

The problem is that, like, you could say there's a necessary correction, government's going to get tougher.

These guys are going to take it well beyond the cartels to political opponents and deportations.

And that's, you know, that's where it gets.

Yeah, as Noah Bullock, who runs a human rights organization in El Salvador, pointed out to me in my interview with him last week,

you'll have similar levels of support for Bukele as people who say they would be afraid to say if they didn't support Bukele, right?

So, like, you have to understand the context.

But to your point earlier, I mean, you know, the U.S.

used to have a military base in

Ecuador until like 2009.

They got pushed out by Correa.

The Colombian conflict ended.

A lot of the efforts to eradicate drugs in the region completely failed or have been given up on.

So there's this massive excess supply of cocaine coming out of places like Peru and Colombia and getting trafficked to Europe now, into Brazil,

which is growing these local gangs.

They're going from sort of localized

theft to these transnational organizations with millions, millions, if not billions of dollars.

There's a huge inflow of U.S.

arms.

So So you're seeing like really scary, drastic shit happening in approaches from people like Bukele and the proposals from Noboa.

And I agree with you completely that like it's going to end horribly.

And there's a really scary kind of nexus of these right-wing leaders that are growing and their support with Trump is very weird.

But yeah, there's like a real, the drug problem is massive.

Oh, yeah.

And because part of what you have is that the cartels, they have billions and billions and billions of dollars of revenue.

So they can build infrastructure.

Ecuador can be a transshipment point into Europe, you know, and they're controlling infrastructure down there, right?

There's a need to be doing more.

But we've seen approaches, including in Colombia, by the way, where, you know, I'm not suggesting all of what was done in Colombia over the decades was right because there were huge human rights abuses there.

But towards the end, there, you saw this mixture

of going after,

you know, drug traffickers or going after, in that case, you know, the FARC,

but also negotiation, negotiation, also investments.

So, there's ways to have more of a hybrid model, somewhere in between the kind of hands-off approach and this kind of more scary authoritarian approach.

Absolutely, yeah.

And let's be honest with what the practice looked like in El Salvador.

It was just arresting people.

Basically, like individual commanders were told, like, you got to arrest 30 people today.

So, they just swept into village and took people at random.

All right, let's turn to Russia and Ukraine.

So, despite at least three trips to Moscow by Trump's special envoy, the actual Secretary of State, Steve Witkoff, that included a face-to-face meeting with Putin last week, the war in Ukraine is not over.

It's not even close to over.

And to demonstrate to Witkoff and Trump Putin's commitment to peace, the Russians launched a major ballistic missile attack on the city of Sumy on Palm Sunday this weekend, killing at least 35 people and injuring 100 more.

According to CBS News, over the course of the war, there have been 1,700 Russian attacks on schools, 780 attacks on hospitals, and Russia has killed 13,000 civilians, Ukrainian civilians.

But Wickoff says he doesn't regard Putin as a bad guy, so I just wanted to give him that pain.

He did give him that pain.

He did give him pain.

And he prayed for Trump.

So that was nice.

Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky sat down 60 minutes for an interview that aired on Sunday.

In that interview, he invited Trump to visit Ukraine, see the destruction for himself, and essentially said the Trump administration was regurgitating Russian propaganda.

Trump told reporters that the Sumi attack, quote, was a mistake and said it was horrible.

But when answering questions at the White House on Monday during his meeting with Naibukele, Trump was back to blaming Zelensky for the war.

Here's a clip.

Have you spoken to President Zelensky, sir, about his offer to purchase more hatred missile batteries?

Oh, I don't know.

He's always looking to purchase missiles.

You know, he's against, listen, when you start a war, you got to know that you can win the war, right?

You don't start a war against somebody that's 20 times your size and then hope that people give you some missiles.

We didn't give them what we gave.

Remember, I gave them javelins.

That's how they won their first big battle with the tanks that got stuck in the mud and they took them out with javelins.

They have an expression that Obama at the time, Obama gave them sheets and Trump gave them javelins.

And most importantly, you have millions of people dead.

Millions of people dead because of

three people.

I would say three people.

Let's say Putin number one.

But let's say Biden who had no idea what the hell he was doing,

number two, and Zelensky.

And

all I can do is try and stop it.

That's all I want to do.

I want to stop the killing.

Interesting how he started by blaming Zelensky for starting for starting the war.

For starting a war with a bigger country, which is just invaded.

It's flatly untrue and insane thing to say.

And then at the end, he comes around having ranking Putin number one.

But that was like

a compliment.

It was like, I got him number one.

Yeah, he's my guy.

First draft pick.

He's a lottery fan.

Yeah, my first pick is like Zelensky's Blow Biden, even.

I think that was actually an order of who you like.

Just the criticism.

That's well said.

So Ben, two things I've been thinking about.

The first is how and when Democrats can finally try to create a political cost for Trump for failing to live up to his promise to end the war in Ukraine.

Now, remember, he said he would do it in 24 hours.

I think most voters view that as like Trumpy and hyperbole, but now it has been several months and the war is not any better.

And second, I just wanted to highlight some things from this long interview with the Wall Street Journal that Steve Witkoff did.

So in it, we learned that Witkoff has been meeting with foreign leaders alone, including Putin, including the Iranian foreign minister.

He said he prepares for those meetings by calling, by meeting with the CIA and getting a briefing, good.

And then calling Jared Kushner, less good.

But he denigrates the State Department as sort of like, why would I need their experience at all?

And to me, Ben, the kind of Witkoff as this guy who kind of seems like a mark, let's be honest, and pretty gullible, but who also has this huge overlap with Trump in his financial interests when it comes to the crypto business, meeting with Putin one-on-one, like it seems like a huge opportunity for corruption.

Yes.

And, you know, Wickoff's experience is from basically being a super rich Florida guy that hangs out and plays golf and probably does business deals with Trump.

It's not like he has some deep experience in geopolitics other than like taking money from different corrupt actors around the world.

Although one thing actually Josh Rogan told me that I didn't know, you'll hear later, is that Wickoff actually had this existing relationship with Russia through a rich guy who basically makes a bunch of real estate deals.

So it's interesting that there is a bit of an oligarchy highway from Witkoff to the Russians.

Well, yeah.

And again, the one-on-one nature, that almost never happens in foreign policy, in part because you usually want someone in the meeting who can read out other people in the meeting because you would think that the U.S.

government would need to follow up on things.

But this is a total personalization of foreign policy.

It's as if everything just runs from Trump through a personal envoy or emissary in Witkoff to a corrupt autocrat like a Putin, right?

Or like the Iranian foreign minister, whomever it is.

And the U.S.

government is kind of just sidelined from that process.

There's infinite potential for corruption there,

whether they're business deals, business interests.

The way this would work in the kind of corrupt world that the United States has now joined is it could also be a why is he calling Jared Kushner?

Well, maybe it's like, hey, could you make an investment in this thing or in this fund?

There could be other associates, right?

And again,

we don't know this, you know, so like let's be clear.

Um, but but this is kind of how the world works.

You know, you have some other things that you'd like somebody to do, uh, help me out here on this, or like, hey, my buddy has this business here, invest in that.

That's how Putin does a lot of business, right?

And so the corruption thing is a huge, huge risk.

I think the other thing that I'd say about the Russians just humiliating Trump in some ways, you know, 30-day ceasefire, we don't hear much about that anymore.

Yeah, where'd that go?

You know, where did that go?

Ending the war.

And instead, he's blaming Zelensky.

and and the reality is one of the things that trump doesn't understand on russia or china is that these are people that take a very long view of history right so the chinese as i was saying last week you know some tariffs for a couple years it's nothing to these people they think in terms of hundred year increments they see those tariffs as like the opium wars from the 19th century or something and putin whatever you think about his ukraine policy and i hate it it's rooted in like a multi-hundred year version of history right and so who cares if he has some tensions with trump for a little bit these guys are just playing a much longer game than Trump, and he just fundamentally doesn't seem to understand that.

One last thing, and I ask you this, Tommy, like,

why is Zelensky doing 60 Minutes?

You know, like, what, look at that.

I love 60 Minutes, but you know, Trump is suing them.

Trump hates it.

The kind of people that watch 60 Minutes that support Ukraine don't need any more convincing.

I don't know.

Would you be advising Zelensky to kind of maybe stay out of that kind of media for now?

It surprised me, too.

I mean, I don't know that there is any media that would be beneficial with Trump.

Yeah.

Right.

I mean, maybe you could go on a war room pandemic with Steve Bannon.

Well, maybe it's just less is more in this case, you know?

Yeah, no, but I had a similar reaction.

It seemed designed in a lab to piss Trump off.

Yeah, exactly.

You know, exactly.

For what it's worth, European leaders are calling the Sumi attack a war crime.

They've been telling people not to attend the Victory Day celebrations in Russia to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the defeat of the Nazis.

I think it's worth watching if the U.S.

sends an emissary.

I suspect they will.

It'll probably be fucking TV advance.

Also, Wickoff was reportedly going to host Putin's personal envoy at his home for dinner until the CIA and everybody else is like, no, no, no, no, don't do that.

Don't bring these guys into your home.

But yeah, also the last thing that's sort of out there is this minerals deal that's still being negotiated.

It does seem like the terms of it keep getting ratcheted up, the kind of like extortion meter every time we hear about it.

You make that, I mean, it is worth noting.

Can you imagine the amount of listening devices attached to Steve Witkoff at this point?

He just doesn't seem like the kind of guy who's mindful of that.

Yeah, he looks like one of those sharks.

What are those called?

Like

more eels or whatever things that stick to you as you swim around.

It's just like Russian listening devices.

Well, speaking of Steve, over the weekend, Witkoff met in Oman with the Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Arachi.

There were apparently 45 minutes of direct talks, which

is not what the

initially these were advertised as only indirect talks.

So it's interesting that there are direct talks between the U.S.

and Iran for that long.

There were also two hours of indirect talks that were facilitated by the Omanis.

There was supposed to be another round of talks this weekend.

It's not clear if those are going to be in Rome or Oman again.

There's some

discrepancy in the reporting on that.

However, what the U.S.

wants out of the talks is getting muddled.

On Monday, Steve Witkopf was on Fox News talking about the terms of the deal.

Here's what he had to say.

The president means what he says, which is they cannot have a bomb.

The conversation with the Iranians will be much about two critical points.

One, enrichment.

As you mentioned, they do not need to enrich past 3.67%.

In some circumstances, they're at 60%.

In other circumstances, 20%.

That cannot be.

And you do not need to run, as they claim, a civil nuclear program where you're enriching past 3.67%.

So this is going to be much about verification on the enrichment program and then ultimately verification on weaponization.

That includes missiles, the type of missiles that they have stockpiled there, and it includes the trigger for a bomb.

So it seemed like in that clip, Wickoff was saying maybe there's a deal where they can enrich up to 3.67%.

Then on Tuesday, Witcoff tweeted, quote, a deal with Iran will only be completed if it is a Trump deal.

Any final arrangements must set a framework for peace, stability, and prosperity in the Middle East, meaning that Iran must stop and eliminate its nuclear enrichment and weaponization program.

So that to me read like quite a walk back of saying you could do 3.67% enrichment.

Trump, when he was asked about this in the Oval Office on Monday, just sounded kind of pissed off about the whole thing.

Here's a clip.

Iran wants to deal with us, but they don't know how.

They really don't know how.

We had a meeting with them on Saturday.

We have another meeting scheduled next Saturday.

I said, that's a long time.

You know, that's a long time.

So I I think they might be tapping us along.

But Iran has to get rid of the concept of a nuclear weapon.

They cannot have a nuclear weapon.

He can't have a nuclear weapon.

Nobody can have it.

We can't have anybody having nuclear weapons.

We can't have nuclear weapons.

And I think they're tapping us along because

we're so used to dealing with stupid people in this country.

I want them to be a rich, great nation.

The only thing is, one thing, simple.

It's really simple.

They can't have a nuclear weapon.

And they got to go fast because they're fairly close to having one,

and they're not going to have one.

And if we have to do something very harsh, we'll do it.

One of my favorite things on this show is to structure segments to trigger you, and it's working again.

Yeah, I'm not going to rant like last time, but maybe

sober rant.

Don't make promises you can't keep.

So, Ben, we should talk about Steve Wickoff's walk back there and Trump's tone.

It's interesting, though, seeing the public jockeying to try to to define the terms of what a deal could look like.

It started last week or two weeks, whenever the fuck Net Yahoo was in the Oval Office, where Netanyahu was trying to say they have to follow the Libya model, which is the maximalist position you can take on denuclearization, one that ends with Gaddafi

pipe.

Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo

took a similarly maximalist position on Fox News, saying that Iran must fully verifiably eliminate their nuclear weapons program for there to be any agreement.

Again, you have no say.

You don't work in administration, but whatever.

There's also jockeying about what additional issues should be covered by a deal, like Iran's ballistic missile program, support for proxy forces in the region like Hezbollah.

Every Iran expert I've ever talked to

that Iran would never agree to give up all of what it views as its security architecture at once, that being nuclear enrichment, ballistic missiles, and support for the proxy forces in the region.

And that was before

they and Hezbollah were severely weakened by the Israelis after October 7th.

But where do you land?

First of all, I'd love to hear how triggered you are.

And second, where do you land on what is achievable in this deal?

What's a good outcome?

Yeah, well, I'm unbelievably triggered as someone who speaks Iran deal because first of all, what Steve Wickoff said on Fox News was the Iran deal.

That was Obama's deal.

Eminently rigged.

Essentially, the Iranians had to agree to like much less levels of enrichment, you know, only up to like 3.75%.

They also had to agree to ship all their nuclear fuel out of the country so they couldn't build a stockpile of fuel that you need for a bomb.

They had to agree to intense verification of not just their nuclear facilities, but their uranium mines and mills, like where do you get from the raw materials to the centrifuges, all these things put under a verification regime.

And they had to get rid of any plutonium capacity so that there's not a separate way for them to build a bomb.

And they did have to agree to verification around weaponization.

And when we talk about that, it's how do you take nuclear fuel and kind of miniaturize it in a warhead that can go on a missile, right?

Steve Witkoff just described the Iran deal, which I think was a good deal at the time, and I think would be great to have again, you know, and

you can sense their insecurity in saying,

well, it has to be a Trump deal.

Because

we didn't call it the Obama deal.

Like, this is so narcissistic.

You know, it's just trying to solve a problem through an arms control deal.

And I think that is achievable.

I think the Iranis would do that in exchange for for sanctions relief.

And it's probably on the table.

And Witgoff probably met with Arachi and was like, well, this seems like a deal that would get this problem off the table.

It's the same reason we made it.

But then the other thing that is familiar to me, Tommy, is I saw over the last few days the same fucking people, starting with Netanyahu, but also all these like flunkies who have literally these guys.

People think I talk about the Iran dealer.

There is a whole class of people in Washington that, as far as I can tell, doesn't do a single fucking thing except argue against Iran nuclear deals.

And they've been doing it for like 15 years, you know?

I mean, I don't even want to name them because it's not even worth shining a light on it.

But then they all essentially say, oh, you're capitulating.

You have to get rid of every bolt and screw of the program, no enrichment, blah, blah, blah.

And then Witkoff veers wildly in the other direction and comes out and says, no enrichment whatsoever.

That's a huge difference, right?

That's essentially saying you cannot have a nuclear program.

Yeah, we should say low-enriched uranium can be used for domestic

medical isotopes.

You know, I mean,

essentially, nowhere near the scale that you need to weaponize, which is why we were okay with it, right?

It's sure, in an ideal world, we'd like them to have nothing, but you know, that you're in a negotiation.

And so the other couple of...

But you need 90% enriched uranium to make a weapon.

And that's the real concern.

It's this highly, like, I think the Iranians are now sitting on a pretty big stockpile of 60% enriched uranium, which means the breakout time to enrich it to 90% so that it's nuclear, its weapons grade is tight.

It's very tight.

And here's the thing on the missiles, because the other two things that Nanyo always said he wanted in deals, no enrichment, but also no ballistic missiles and no support for these proxies.

No support for proxies is eventually saying, we get to determine your foreign policy.

I wish that they didn't support certain proxy groups.

They're not going to agree to that.

They'll never agree to that.

Maybe if you lifted every single sanction that's on them, they might entertain something, but we're not going to do that.

They're not going to.

But probably not, right?

Because they think that Hezbollah is a check for them against the Israelis.

Now, I don't know if what's happened since since October 7th has made them rethink that proposition, because it seems like Hezbollah folded a lot faster than people expected, and the Israelis were able to bomb the shit out of Iran at any point when they wanted to.

But that is why they won't get rid of Hezbollah.

Yeah,

and it's people in Iraq.

It's a Houthi relationship.

The ballistic missiles, which also came up constantly in the Obama administration, we said what Wickoff said, which is we're interested in the nexus between these missiles and a potential warhead.

Some people said you have to get rid of the whole ballistic missile program.

Sure, that would be great.

Iranians aren't going to to do that.

They don't want to get into like other types of arms control.

I would also add, we just learned in the latest backs and forth between Israel and Iran that we can shoot down those ballistic missiles.

I mean, not all of them, but like the point is the threat from the ballistic missiles is actually not as much as it had been inflated over the years.

All this is to say, I think the original approach is the rational one.

It's probably the deal that's available.

Trump doesn't know any of this stuff.

Like, you notice he didn't mention enrichment.

Part of what drove me nuts is I don't think Trump has any idea what's in these things.

No.

And so I i bet what happened is wickoff told me had a good conversation that netanyahu may have called him or some some proxies for netanyahu called him and said what are you doing or you know and so then he veered in the other direction last thing i'd say tommy too another communications point why is wickoff even talking about this stuff like why is he doing so many interviews why would you go on fox news and talk about like levels of enrichment and then the wall street journal and then i mean just just be quiet just do the talks yeah like get something over the finish line then but like marco rubio did the interviews he clearly has no idea what the fuck is going on so he can't fuck up what he's doing in the interviews because he doesn't know yeah and like i guess they're concerned about losing the base or losing the right wing on this issue.

But like, they come around, they're going to do whatever you say.

It's not 2015.

You know, he's like North Korea numbers to Republicans.

I don't get it.

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

But before we do, I'm very excited to tell you about the next book coming from our book in print, which is called When We're in Charge, The Next Generation's Guy to Leadership by Amanda Lippman.

It's coming out on May 13th.

When We're in Charge is the playbook for anyone who's tired of being told to wait their turn.

You know, Amanda Lippmann.

Yeah, she's great.

Co-founder of Run for Something, an amazing organization that has helped launch the political careers of hundreds of millennials and Gen Zers.

She is now turning that experience into a guide for the next wave of leaders who want to make an impact without sacrificing their well-being.

When We're in Charge is part manifesto, part manual, and exactly what the next generation of leaders has been waiting for.

You can pre-order the book now at crooked.com slash books or anywhere you get your books.

Also, Ben, this month we are offering.

a 30-day free trial of Crooked's Friend of the Pod subscription.

I'm going to get you one, I think.

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We're going a little long, so we're going to move on to another big story, which is the State Department getting gutted.

So there's reports in Politico, there's a report in the Washington Post that say the White House Office of Management and Budget has proposed gutting funding for the Department of State and what remains of USAID by almost half, about 48%.

So the budget would go from $54 billion to $28 billion, roughly.

Some specifics about the cuts and what they would entail.

Global health funding would be cut by 55%.

Humanitarian assistance would go down by 54%.

About 90% of funding for international organizations would be hit.

So no money for NATO, the UN, or international peacekeeping missions.

The administration is also looking at closing down dozens of diplomatic outposts, including embassies in South Africa and the Sahel, consulates in Europe, and several embassies in Oceania.

Where the hell is Oceana?

I don't even know.

Pacific Ocean.

Just Pacific generally.

Who the hell says Oceana?

Nerds.

State Department nerds.

It's probably some weird State Department jargon.

Yeah, and a bunch of our listeners are going to mock it.

Well, it's also like we said, Indo-Pacific after, and we invented a terminology to suit our geopolitical interests.

But anyway.

Yeah, they're also going to get rid of the Fulbright scholarship, or this is the plan.

So, meanwhile, the State Department is also working in parallel on their own downsizing plan, which could involve laying off tens of thousands of the department's 80,000 employees and then closing a bunch of additional consulates and facilities.

It's not clear if Marco Rubio has or will fight these cuts or if anyone cares if he tries.

But apparently, Rubio has until today, Tuesday, to respond to this White House proposal.

Either way, it's not a done deal necessarily.

There's a spokeswoman from OMB said no final funding decisions have been made.

There's also the matter of Congress weighing in and whether they would allow cuts this deep.

In the past, Congress has rejected White House budget proposals, but this is an era of Doge where they just make determinations in the executive branch based on how much ketamine Elon Musk has done, and Congress doesn't really have a say.

So, Ben, you know, the point is, even if this budget is not approved, it's a pretty pretty clear signal that we're retreating from the world.

It's hard to wrap your mind around cuts this deep, but like, what's your sense of the impact that it would have besides like ceding half of the planet to the Chinese?

First of all, you know, the Rubio piece of this, he wasn't behind this.

They had some kind of Project 2025 type guys working on this memo.

Pete and Morocco.

Yeah, it was this kind of blend of Doge and Project 2025, which is pretty on brand for the Trump administration.

And Rubio getting a chance to comment, it's kind of like, you know, little Marco, if you go clean your room, your allowance might only get cut by a half instead of three quarters, right?

So I don't think he really matters in this.

Nor do I.

I mean, a few things that jump out to me on this.

One is the kind of complete potential for the deprofessionalization of the State Department.

So you've already seen people fired.

You've seen people resigning.

There's a...

The Director General of the Foreign Service, this may sound kind of wonky, but basically the person that helps oversee promotions for people in the Foreign Service and who becomes an ambassador and and who goes where.

They elevated somebody who's like wildly unqualified for that job, probably because they're just a younger person.

I think it's one of these Franklin fellows or something.

It's like a MAGA person.

Yeah.

So the point is.

Losing the resource of the Foreign Service,

if we're basically going to look up and the only people left are like MAGA people or people are just kind of hanging on for retirement.

That's all our relationships around the world.

That's all of our built-up expertise around the world.

And like young talent.

And it's also not something you can kind of get back.

No.

That's one thing.

Another thing,

this may seem small, but it really matters to me, and it's not small.

They're basically talking about getting rid of all exchange programs.

Fulbright is the most prominent one, but all exchange programs.

This is a massive shift in how America engages the world.

This isn't just like Americans not going abroad on Fulbright's.

This is how we brought people to this country on either short-term or long-term exchange programs who generally over the course of the last several decades became prime ministers, foreign ministers, CEOs.

Like they're gonna go someplace else you know they're gonna go to China or they're gonna go to Europe or they're gonna go I don't know increasingly to places like Brazil or Turkey they're just gonna go other places and it's the United States kind of divorcing the world saying like we're out we're done here we're literally closing down embassies and it's saying that the cut to USAID the dismantlement of USAID was just the beginning and we're essentially just taking ourselves off the field disengaging the world you know

we already by the way like this is not unrelated from the fact that we're gonna have huge drops in tourism.

Like we are closing up shop here as an open society.

And I think it's a bigger deal than people, I mean, I get why there's still a lot of stuff going on here.

But essentially, like having the budget of the State Department and getting rid of anything.

I mean, you've said this before, Tommy.

This is the last vestige of soft power.

You know, AID, international broadcasting, democracy funding, international exchanges, like just methodically saying like we're done around the world unless it's through the military.

And that's scary.

And it just, you know, again, really does, I joke about it, but

why anyone as Secretary of State, why would you want to go along with this?

And especially like in this moment when the only thing that is a bipartisan consensus in Washington is the need to combat the rise of China.

And we're just like cutting off our nose to spite our face.

We're cutting off all the development.

We're cutting off firing diplomats.

One other thing that would drive me nuts, and

you too, Tommy, Marco Rubio, member back in Benghazi days, was Mr.

Like, we have to increase funding for

diplomatic security.

That's through the State Department, right?

Like the security at our embassies and facilities around the world.

Remember, we used to care about that?

You know what?

I'm glad you mentioned that because you know what was not discussed in the fucking SignalGate text about bombing the Houthis?

Any efforts to protect U.S.

personnel in the region to make sure they were safe.

Anything to buttress embassy security or beef it up or even in military installations.

Just shows how disingenuous that whole line of argument was for years.

Yeah, and it was also just like the most surface level debate about whether to bomb a country I've ever seen.

But don't worry, Ben, the State Department, they have their eye on the ball because a cable went out last Friday to embassies around the world encouraging employees to rat on each other if they hear about instances of anti-Christian bias.

So

eye on the prize.

That's a really matters, yeah.

That's who's getting cut down.

One thing that I didn't, it just broke right before we walked in, Ben, and I didn't really know where to swat in the show.

Literally, I was just looking at Pete Hagseth's buddy.

Okay, so Reuters reported that one of Secretary of Defense Pete Hagseth's top advisors, a guy named Dan Caldwell, was escorted from the Pentagon on Tuesday after being identified in a leak investigation.

He's been put on administrative leave for an unauthorized disclosure.

It's not clear what the leak was, who it was to, but apparently there was a memo on March 21st signed by Pete Hegseth's chief of staff requesting an investigation into some leak of sensitive communications or information.

It's worth noting, Ben, that in Jeffrey Goldberg's story about the SignalGate chats in the Atlantic, Caldwell was named in the Houthi PC small group chat as the defense point of contact, but I don't know that we know more than that at the moment.

Yeah,

and we know that this guy is a classic Hexethian operative.

You know, he

came from one of these astroturf organizations, you know, the concerned veterans of America, the kind of places where P-Tex is like getting drunk and stuff.

I'd really like to know what this is because for the Trump administration to take it seriously, I mean, it must have been a pretty big fucking leak, right?

I mean, these people do not seem that concerned around operational security.

So this is one where we might be talking about it again next week.

Yeah, we should keep an eye on this one.

All right, we're going to do, we're going to close out this episode with a little hope.

Little hope.

A little silver lining.

Hope and, you know, chain, well, hope and continuity.

Hope and continuity.

Hope and continuity.

So it's a little thing, a little silver lining of Trump being a human wrecking ball.

So, and that is the effect that he's having on upcoming elections in Canada and Australia.

It's an anti-Trump effect, if you will.

So both countries have been under liberal leadership.

Polls months ago were showing strong leads for the conservative opposition leaders who railed against wokeness and kind of sounded like mini Trumps.

But thanks to Trump being a belligerent asshole, conservative candidates are doing everything they can to distance themselves from Trump now and are getting hammered in the polls.

A couple examples.

A few months ago, polls in Canada had the Conservative Party up by as much as 25 points.

And Conservative leader Pierre Polyev was expected to become the next prime minister.

Then Trump started threatening to annex Canada and to crush its economy with tariffs.

And as of today, the Liberals have an 87% probability of winning a majority, according to the CBC.

And Kearney heavily wins in opinion polls.

Prime Minister Kearney is heavily winning in opinion polls about when they ask who's going to stand up to Trump best.

So that's good.

In Australia, there's an election taking place on May 3rd.

Similar story.

A month ago, the current prime minister and labor leader, Anthony Albanese, he looked quite vulnerable to a conservative opposition leader named Peter Dutton, who had been in the lead for about six months.

But the latest polls show them going from neck and neck to an actual lead for labor after all the negative sentiment around the 10% tariffs on Australia announced by the Trump administration and then just sort of like the general dumb fuckery of the Doge cuts and more.

So obviously anything can happen between now and the elections themselves.

But it's kind of nice to know that other countries are kind of they see through the MAGA bullshit.

It's not a cult.

Well, because first of all, in many cases, you know, they're, I think the Canadians and Australians are very responsible people on balance.

They're also not living.

I mean, sure they have right-wing media.

They're living in reality land, right?

So they don't have their voters locked in a Fox News dome with like Steve Bannon piping in, right?

So they can.

Gold.

So

one mega point here that we really should watch and come back to is Trump may be breaking the back of the momentum for the far right around the globe.

Because

if these two elections had taken place a year ago, like the Polyev would have won probably overwhelmingly in Canada, or helpfully at least, and Albanese was going to lose to a pretty MAGA-type Conservative Party in Australia.

That's the first point.

Second point is they've also both done really well.

Like Mark Carney came out, you know, elbows up.

Like he's been striking the right tone, the strike mix of like competence and strength, a bit of a formula for how you fight back against Trump.

You know, and Albanese has taken some steps to address some of the issues that were dragging them down, including issues of inflation in Australia.

So we see good playbooks for center-left people to both fight back against Trump and

put something forward that is different.

And so

that to me, those two things, like the kind of global backlash to Trump and like a certain kind of playbook for the center-left leaders, these are real hopeful signs in both places.

Yeah, I mean, it's sort of interesting.

Like in countries where there's just opinion polls, but not an election to kind of, you know, put the rubber to the road, you're seeing the AFD pull ahead of the CDU, the CSU, Uncle Merkel's party for the first time, I think, ever.

In France, you are seeing the far right and Maureen Le Pen's party pulling ahead.

But once candidates can run against those parties' relationships with Trump and be like, I will be the one who is standing up to this malignant narcissist, not it,

it's no longer seen as a benefit to be a candidate that like can ingratiate yourself with America.

It's just a totally different dynamic.

It's shifted the paradigm, you know, and it's both that they don't want the people that seem like they are cozy with Trump, but also they just don't want a politics like Trump.

So even when Polyev distances himself from Trump and says mean things about Trump, it doesn't matter because he presents as kind of Trump light.

And that's a trap that's hard for them to get out of.

And that's a healthy shift in the global political dynamic that Bear is watching.

Fingers crossed for you guys.

Yeah, please.

We love you, Canada.

Please.

No more Ray Wingers.

We can't do it.

Finally, Ben.

Oh, by the way, August's probably in danger too.

I think.

Yeah, but we'll come back to that later too.

All right.

So, finally, Ben.

Sometimes there's a headline that's so good you don't really have to write a joke on it.

This one is courtesy of the New Zealand Herald.

Queensland surgeon fined for sharing photo of patient swastika tattooed penis.

Hmm.

There's nothing good about that, you know?

Like, I just

let's swastika tattoo bad, but also

it's kind of kind of punishment, kind of punishment to that person for getting it in the first place.

Like, I don't know, man.

Yeah, that's a penis tattoo,

suspect.

So there's an orthopedic.

Even Pete Hexeth probably doesn't have one of those, you know?

I don't know.

There's an orthopedic surgeon in New Zealand.

He got fined $10,000 for taking a photo of an unconscious man's anti-Semitic dong and sharing it with some doctor buddies on WhatsApp.

So this headline was from a few weeks ago where they announced the punishment.

I disagree with this punishment.

The incident itself happened back in 2019 when the doctor was treating a man in a coma after suffering injuries from a homemade pipe bump.

Sometimes it's the ones you most expect then.

I think I speak for everyone when I want to know the font size of the swastika and who did the tattooing in the first place.

Like, do we think

crower, not a shower, not see?

I mean,

if you're doing that,

you're probably not working with a lot of material down there.

I'm going to imagine that the tattoo couldn't possibly be that big.

Of all the places.

Because if you're the kind of person that wants to do that on your dong, you're probably not working with a lot of material down there.

And then also, like, I just think, you know, once you've done that, you know,

I think you sacrificed your privacy rights.

So if the doctor wants to dox your dong, like

it's, yeah, I don't think there's anything wrong with it.

As I was digging deeper into this story,

I found there was a program where actually in New Zealand.

I just dug into it.

Dug into it.

There's a program in New Zealand where you can get

extremist tattoos removed at no cost.

Seems like a good idea.

Are there exceptions, though, to the body part?

No, I don't think so.

I think it's sort of a

body part agnostic.

Okay, well, that's it for us in the news section.

We're going to take a quick break and we come back.

You're going to hear my interview with Josh Rogan.

We talk all about his reporting, about the Trump administration's handling of U.S.-China policy, the personalities in the White House who are calling the shots, and lots more.

So stick around for that.

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My guest today is the lead global security analyst for Washington Post Intelligence.

He was also a columnist at the Post and the author of the excellent book, Chaos Under Heaven, Trump, She, and the Battle for the 21st Century.

Josh Roger, good to see you.

Great to be with you, Tommy.

Good to see you again.

So I read your book, Chaos Under Heaven, because I heard Steve Bannon, of all people, call it the best book written about Trump in China.

Then I bought the book.

I read the book.

And what I found was hardly a flattering picture of Trump in China.

Hardly a flattering picture of Steve Bannon, by the way.

But let's talk about the book.

So you have, you paint this picture in the first term of these factions.

There's kind of like a hardline anti-China faction.

There was a Wall Street clique.

There was an erratic Trump who seems easily swayed by flattery or personal requests from Xi Jinping.

Can you talk just a bit about how Trump handled China policy and how it evolved during Trump 1.0 and then maybe what differences you see this time?

Sure.

Well, you know, as you pointed out, in the first Trump term, there were about six factions, but the most important ones were the hardliners.

That's people like Mike Pence, John Bolton, and Mike Pompeo.

Then there were the superhawks, the economic nationalists.

These are people like Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro.

Then there was the Wall Street clique.

These were guys like Steve Mnuchin and Gary Cohn.

And they fought over and over again, and Trump lorded over them like

in a Coliseum.

And different factions won at different times.

But the most important revelation from that book that applies, I think, to Trump too is that Donald Trump is not part of any of those factions.

In his heart,

he is not even anti-China.

He is not a hawk.

He's not a hardliner.

He's not for the Wall Street guys.

He wants a deal.

He thinks Xi Jinping is his friend.

And he thinks that the U.S.

and China have to be friends with each other and that only he and Xi Jinping can pull that off.

And that is the one thing that sort of pulls forward to where we are now, even as we're in a trade war with China that Trump started on a whim,

you know, without any clear plan whatsoever to get through it, and one that Xi Jinping doesn't really seem to be backing down from.

Even in this moment, I'm 100% sure that Donald Trump sees the end of this as a deal, not as the U.S.

versus China, not as a Cold War, not as some sort of

competition for the global world order or whatever it was,

just as a way to get Xi Jinping to get to the table so that they can strike a deal, so that we'll have better trade as far as Trump is concerned, but that the US and China will avoid the Cold War.

That's his goal.

The problem is that all the people who work for him don't necessarily think that at all.

And that's where the chaos is.

It's a never-ending chaos, because as the teams fight each other and they fight for the grace of the president,

none of that gets translated into competent policy.

Very rarely does it translate into

something that advances American interests and values.

But, you know, that's where we are.

That's the kind of chaos that we're looking at.

Yeah, and

that was very well articulated.

And why, like, the last few months have been kind of confusing, because obviously Trump ran against China.

You know, he focused on it a lot at rallies.

You were going to fight back on China.

They're cheating us.

We're going to get them.

Biden was weak, yada, yada, yada.

But it also, it seemed like he was coming in eager to get deals with Xi on a bunch of issues, Taiwan, fentanyl, TikTok.

I mean, it sounds like they almost got

it over the finish line on TikTok.

But in practice, as you noted, there's been this massive tariff campaign and trade war that was put in place way faster than the first term.

In your book, you document kind of the process that led to tariffs on China in the first term.

That took like, what, 16, 18 months or something like that?

Yeah.

So what's the disconnect here?

Why are we moving so much faster at this time when it seemed like he wanted a deal on all these areas?

You know, it's like, Tommy, it's like any big movie that becomes a sequel.

Like in the second one, the explosions have to be bigger.

The plot holes are much bigger.

You know, the writing is worse.

The characters are more canned.

That's what we're seeing.

It's just every sort of, you know, oddity of the Trump first administration is just times a thousand.

So now we just have, okay, well, instead of having a bunch of investigations that lead to a bunch of trade actions, let's just go right to the trade war and skip all of that nonsense and see what happens.

And maybe it gets sorted out in the court or it it doesn't.

But there's two things going on inside the Trump administration that I think are really interesting.

One is, you know, you've got this battle between, you know, what we call the restrainers and the, you know, the primacists

in the MAGA movement.

It's split and they're at war with each other.

And in the middle, you have these people called the prioritizers, the people who are like, oh, well, we should care about China, but we shouldn't care about Ukraine.

So that's how it's shaping up.

You have these three camps, but essentially the restrainers and the prioritizers are ganging up on the primacists and they're getting rid of them and they're using weapons to do it.

And some of those weapons have names like Lara Luma, who will come into the White House and tell Trump, well, all of these NSC Asia officials are anti-Trump, even though that's not true.

And so the China issue has been come completely subsumed right now, right at this moment, by this

fratricide that's going on inside the White House and inside the administration.

So Lara Luma goes into the White House, speaks with President Trump.

All of a sudden, the head guy who's in charge of China, you know, national security and technology with regard to China, David Fife, he gets fired.

And then she accuses Alex Wong, who I think you may know,

who is

a Republican, a patriot, happens to be Chinese, and she accuses him of being a Chinese spy and tries to get him fired.

So even if you're a Chinahawk, even if the people in the MAGMA movement think you're China hawks, they're willing to get rid of the other China hawks just to win their internal war against the people who they think are like traditional Republicans or establishment people people or neocons or whatever.

So you have to understand that

this war is going to go on and on and on until the end of the administration.

And even the most

knowledgeable China officials could be gone tomorrow for any reason because somebody tweeted something that isn't even true.

And then when you think about what Trump's doing, well, okay, now we're going to have a trade war with only China as if that doesn't affect all of the rest of the world.

And

when the two biggest economies in the world have a trade war, every other country is affected.

And the Chinese have a very

determined plan to take a bunch of our allies and even our partners and move them over to the Chinese side of the equation.

We don't seem to have any plan at all.

So on the economic side, people like Navarro are warring with people like Scott Besson and Howard Luttnick.

And you can't even call these guys China hawks or China doves because

They're not even thinking that way.

They're just at war with each other over the policy and trying to figure out what Donald Trump wants them to do.

And what what Donald Trump wants them to do is a moving target.

And so that's a layer of chaos at the professional level and then a layer of chaos at the political level.

And what that amounts to is

my book's called Chaos Under Heaven.

I guess I will have to write the sequel because now we've got chaos inside the building.

Yeah, we're going to need to write that sequel.

I want to ask you about the Chinese plan in a minute.

But I mean, one more question on the personnel.

I mean,

it used to bother me when people would be like,

who's Obama's China czar?

And I was like, I don't know, man.

It's kind of a big relationship.

There's like the military piece, the economic piece, there's trade, there's diplomacy.

So it's like a little reductive.

But

is there a person who you think is kind of like the prime minister of the policy or like the kind of leading voice in terms of influencing Trump right now?

Right.

Well, I mean, we're taping this on a certain day and time.

And by the time it goes on the internet, even if that's an hour from now, everything's going to change.

So I'm going to give you my analysis of the moment.

At the moment, the most important people in the China policy are Scott Besant,

Howard Luttnick, Peter Navarro, and Jamison Greer, our trade representative, in that order.

Now, if you had asked me that a week ago, I would have said Peter Navarro, Howard Luttnick, Jameson Greer, and Scott Besson.

So just in that week, it totally shifted because the policy totally shifted.

And it's definitely going to shift again.

And none of these, I mean, Peter, I guess you could call him a Chinese, but he's writes several books on China, but Howard Luttnick says...

things about our relationship with China that make no sense at all on a regular basis.

And he's the Secretary of Commerce.

That's kind of a crazy thing to think about.

And what are our allies supposed to think?

What's China supposed to think?

Who are they supposed to listen to?

They have the same question as you.

It's like, who speaks for the president?

And then J.D.

Vance and his sort of, you know, rolegarky, the technocracy on all the Peter Thiel and, you know,

they have their own sort of China sort of gang.

And then, of course, you have Elon Musk, and who has an amazingly large interest in China and is uniquely willing to interject himself into all of these relationships and pontificating about Taiwan's future and pontificating about the future of the U.S.-Russia relationship.

So he just has no problem getting in there and using his position as sort of like underboss to shift the policy one way or the other.

So

one problem is that we don't have a lack of a China Tsar, but we don't have a China Tsar.

You could say that about any issue, because if you look at the Russia issue or you look at the Middle East, everyone's just following what the president says and tweets.

And that's just the world that

we're living in, at least for the next couple of years.

Yeah, and from the China side of the ledger, I mean, I would bet that the Chinese believe that they can absorb more political and economic pain than Trump can.

The Chinese Communist Party probably correctly believes that they're going to be around a lot longer than the Trump administration or even maybe the MAGA movement.

They have some clear points of leverage, right?

They're choking off rare earth exports.

If they really needed to fuck with us, they could dump U.S.

treasuries and create some serious economic problems.

I mean, what is your read on China's response so far and

how that signals how hard she will fight?

Yeah, no, I mean, the thing that people need to understand out there is that this is not

a democracy.

It's not a market economy.

China is a socialist country.

And so they can do whatever the government wants and they can shift massive amounts of resources toward whatever effort they want to.

And they don't have to think about the suffering.

It's like, how come Putin can fight a war where he's losing seven to one forever?

It's because he doesn't care about the suffering and money isn't real because he controls the state and all of its industries and all of the oligarchs.

That's how it is in China.

So of course they can last longer than us.

Of course they can suffer more than us.

And of course

Xi Jinping is taking a hard line because he knows that what we're doing is not just about China.

We're burning our relationships with countries all over the world.

That place to China's benefit, we're pushing all of these countries right into China's waiting arms.

Meanwhile, if we think about what we're trying to do, what the Trump administration is trying to do, which is like an industrial policy, like let's take the administration at its word for just one second.

They're trying to shift manufacturing back to the United States.

They're trying to reorder how trade happens.

Whether you like that or not, I think it's kind of not going to happen and not a great idea.

But even if you're for that, They haven't done the planning.

They haven't invested in the ways that would actually make that happen.

They're not, they haven't, you know, they're trying to come up with 90 deals in 90 days.

They should have done that beforehand.

Whereas China has a multi-trillion dollar effort to bolster research and innovation, manufacturing in the high-end, putting a billion people to work, and building the infrastructure of the future and of the future technologies.

And we're, what, you know, destroying a generation of innovation and research at our universities?

For why?

So, because we don't, Trump doesn't like their DEI programs or whatever it is.

So

it's kind of,

you can't overestimate the amount of planning that China's done.

Now, that doesn't mean that they're 10 feet tall.

It doesn't mean that they do everything right.

Sometimes their planning goes terribly wrong.

But in terms of fighting a war over trade and technology, they at least have a plan.

And it's pretty clear we don't.

Because our plan changes every day and the people at the top of the administration have no idea what it is.

They can't articulate it.

They can't even tell us what it is.

And so, yeah, I would say that's bad.

You know, you want to at least have a plan versus a country that not only has a plan, but has

five times more people than us and

an economy that's actually growing faster than ours and

unlimited amounts of money because

it's not a real economy with real money and the government can do whatever it wants all the time.

Yeah, and to your point on them not being 10 feet tall, I mean, they do have some real risks, right?

There's like pretty high levels of regional government debt.

They have a property bubble that is leading to a massive decrease in real estate investment.

They have a their population has plateaued and seems to be decreasing, which will cause some serious long-term problems for the country.

But it seems like Xi Jinping has sort of set this up where he can take all these pre-existing problems and say, oh, this is all Trump's fault.

This is all the trade deal and stoke nationalism.

And

it's not that he really needs a lot of political running room, but it's certainly beneficial for him if he can get his people pissed off at the U.S.

and not at him.

Right.

And not only that, you're right.

Not only that, what they're doing is

they're building all of the capabilities to never have to worry about us ever again.

So we can cut off their technology for now, but once they build their own capabilities, we won't be able to do that.

And, you know,

maybe they were going to do that anyway.

Maybe we were heading towards some sort of decoupling that was inevitable.

But again, maybe we should do it in a smart way.

That's not, I don't think that's a really controversial thing to say.

Maybe we should think about it as we decouple.

And what else is the Trump administration doing?

They're going to tariff semiconductors, but then destroy the Biden administration's chips program, which was all about onshoreing semiconductor manufacturing.

It doesn't really make a lot of sense when you say it out loud.

And so, yeah, I mean, I think China does have its big problems.

And Xi Jinping does have to respond to certain constituencies.

He doesn't have to get elected, but there are other power centers in Beijing that he has to...

somewhat answer to.

So what that means is eventually there will be a negotiation.

And I think that negotiation will lead to a deal.

And what both sides are doing is they're, you know, they're, they're filling their quivers with arrows and carrots and sticks and getting ready for that negotiation.

And I just think the Chinese happen to be doing it more competently than we are right now.

And I'm not, I don't think that's a good thing because I'm for us and not them.

Yeah, I'm an American.

Last question on China.

So it does seem like Trump.

The one area where there's a lot of clarity is he doesn't seem to care much about human rights.

I mean, he infamously told Xi Jinping that throwing a million plus Uyghurs into these re-education camps to be tortured or killed or, you know, what have you was the right thing to do.

I'm less clear on where he stands on defending Taiwan.

I mean, my guess is that he primarily cares about trade and economic issues and kind of doesn't give a fuck if the Chinese take Taiwan or would be willing to trade that for other priorities.

But I don't know.

What's your read on Trump on Taiwan?

You know, when I asked, I interviewed Trump for the

book and he said, well, we're two feet, we're 8,000 miles away and China's two feet away.

And if they attack, there's really nothing we can do about it.

That's what he said.

Okay.

And there's a kernel of truth to that.

I don't think under the current situation or the current plans, we could defend Taiwan from an invasion.

But that's a separate issue.

The point is that he didn't really seem like he would try.

He didn't say that.

But, you know, from all the people that I know who've worked for President Trump, who have talked to him about Taiwan, they all say the same thing.

He doesn't really care about Taiwan.

The bargaining chip thing is like the worst part of it because what if he trades something about Taiwan for something else that he wants, which may not even be in the U.S.

interest it might be you know it could be tick tock it could be you know Trump Hotel Shanghai God only knows so for Taiwan that's an existential problem and they're trying their best to prove to Trump that they're a good ally and you know he just all he did was sort of tell them like you better give us the semiconductors or you know we're going to cut you off so this is a pretty

dire situation for Taiwan and you know this is a part of Trump's overall frame which is that he only cares about big countries he doesn't care about little countries.

He envisions a world where it's basically divided into spheres of influence, where Russia runs its neighborhood, China runs its neighborhood, and we run

Greenland to Tierra del Fuego.

That's why he's doing all of this Greenland stuff and Panama Canal.

You'll hear this in the MAGA world a lot, the new Monroe doctrine, right?

It's like, it's pretending that the world can be divided by oceans, that we don't live in a world that's interconnected the way that everybody knows that it is.

And, you know, Monroe, that was like, again, this is 18th century logic applied to the 21st century.

It's kind of crazy, but that's what Trump thinks.

You know, let China run Asia.

Let

Russia run Europe.

And if the Europeans want to run their little corner of it, fine, but we're not going to help them.

And then we get, you know, Greenland to Argentina.

And I don't think that's going to happen.

I don't think that the world works that way.

But

again, when you're analyzing the Trump administration, it's good to understand what they're thinking, you know, blinkered as it may be.

Yeah, no, I think you're right.

And I just think like there was a long time where people try to sort of see through what they were saying.

It's like, no, I think we should probably take it literally.

I think he means a lot of this stuff.

When he says he wants Greenland, I think he wants Greenland.

Yeah, it doesn't mean it's going to, it's going to ever, ever, that would ever happen.

Act on it, yeah.

Last question, I'm trying to lied.

It's interesting, given how much we talked about COVID for years and years and years and the origin of COVID and, you know, whether it emerged from a cave, from a bat naturally, or whether it was a lab leak.

It's funny that to me that Trump has just completely dropped the conversation.

Like, I haven't heard him talk about the quote-unquote China virus or blame the Chinese for COVID in a very long time.

And I'm wondering if you have a theory for why that is or if maybe I'm just not listening closely enough.

No, I mean, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, one of the very first things he did was to reveal an assessment that actually been completed in the Biden administration that with a low measure of confidence for sure that

it came from the, that it emerged from an accident from the lab.

And he didn't have to do that.

It was one of the first things that he did.

And,

you know, there's no doubt that the issue of the origin of the coronavirus became highly politicized for a lot of understandable reasons.

Because when Donald Trump said it came from the lab, most people were like, oh, that must not be true.

And anyway, here we are five years later.

We still don't know.

And I've always, and if you read my book, you know that I lay out a bunch of evidence as to why it might have come from the lab.

And my argument has always been we should check out the lab and we should investigate it.

And that still hasn't happened.

So I think there is plenty of evidence that the labs might have been involved.

In fact, in the Biden administration, most senior officials that I talked to, people that you and I know very well, told me that, yeah, they think it probably came from the lab.

I just mean it's weird that Trump has dropped it as a rhetorical cudgel.

I think he'll come back to it.

I don't think it's going anywhere.

Yeah.

And I'm with you.

I'm like, at this point, I'm agnostic.

I'm like, I don't know.

I just want someone to tell me.

I found the body of circumstantial evidence that you outlined in your book to be quite compelling.

Early on, I was convinced by all the experts and scientists who told me that was impossible and that it must have sort of emerged naturally.

And now I'm just like, I don't fucking know.

Someone just tell me I don't want to fight about it.

Well, here's the insight that I think you're searching for.

Trump is being nice in his rhetoric to China because he's getting ready for the deal.

And Trump administration officials have told me that he wants everybody not to say bad things about China or Xi Jinping because he wants to get to a deal, even as he's starting the trade war.

And in a way that makes sense, in a way that makes no sense at all, but that's the ground truth.

That makes sense.

What do you make of Steve Witkoff's role in this White House?

He's Trump's buddy.

He's a real estate guy.

He's negotiating with Iran.

He's negotiating with the Russians, the Israelis, the Qataris.

He's got financial ties to Trump and the Trump family through the crypto industry.

Like when he helped broker the Gaza ceasefire, I was like, I don't know, maybe this guy's a voice of reason.

Like three cheers for Steve Witkoff.

But now with some of his recent comments about Putin being a good guy and the fact that he's doing a lot of these fucking meetings one-on-one, it's got my spidey senses tingling here.

The corruption anxiety is pretty high.

But what do you make of him?

You know, Witkoff has more influence than the Secretary of State.

There's no way around that simple fact.

He's in charge of more issues than any other person in Trump's foreign policy.

And, you know,

all you have to do is listen to him to understand that he's learning on the job.

And that's not what you want.

You don't want a guy who has to figure out the history of the issue that he's negotiating on while he's negotiating because he's liable to get it from the inputs that are in front of him.

And in this case, he's getting all his information about the Ukraine war from the Russians.

And it's wrong.

And it's not helpful to have a senior envoy who believes the Russian narrative of the Ukraine war over the Ukrainian narrative because one of them is true and one of them isn't and it's it's a huge problem and you know what people around in the Trump administration around him tell me is that he's learning that he's he's he's figuring it out that he's getting better okay well that's I guess good

but you know maybe you should shouldn't have a person who's not already briefed on the issue negotiating that issue and then not only negotiating that one but all the other ones at the same time and it's pretty bizarre and it's part of the of Donald Trump's again second term sort of rejection of not only the establishment and but the bureaucracy and all of the orders all of the norms all of the things that he instinctually wanted to get rid of in the first term but for whatever reason didn't get around to it all those bets are off you know nobody he doesn't care what the state department's supposed to do he doesn't care who's supposed to be doing what he's got his friends his buddies are going to be in charge of stuff they're going to do what they want.

And if anybody has a problem with it,

they can lump it.

That's the order of the day.

That's how our foreign policy is being run.

Yeah, it does seem like there's all these special envoy rules.

And I agree with you Wickoff seems like top among them.

Yeah, Hillary Clinton had lots of envoys, but they were envoys who knew things about the things they were envoys for.

Right, but even like Rick Grinnell or like Tiffany's father-in-law, right?

Like there's a bunch of just kind of random people kind of cruising around on behalf of the U.S.

Yeah, it's just a cast of characters.

And, you know, Witkoff's an interesting one because, you know, this is kind of doesn't get talked about a lot, but he has a

large, a long background with Russia.

People don't know about it.

He has a partner called Len Blavotnik, who's

a Russian-American who had been previously a partner with several Russian oligarchs.

So he's like a Russian-American oligarch, and they did a bunch of real estate deals together.

And they're linked to Russian oligarchs who are linked to Putin.

So Witkoff has his own path to the Kremlin, independent of anything that has to do with the U.S.

government.

That's how I think he got to the front of the line on the Russia issue.

He's got a bunch of Russian oligarch friends.

And I guess that's a good thing if you want to get to Putin, but it might also have something to do with why we hear Russian talking points coming out of his mouth all the time.

Yeah, no, that's interesting.

I did not realize that.

I mean, I was reading over the weekend that he's had, I think, three meetings with Putin so far, including this one this past Friday.

They took a photo for it.

I mean, clearly the Russians have chosen Witkoff and pushed out some of the more hardline voices in the administration.

Exactly.

That's right.

Final question for you, Josh.

So, back when you were covering the Obama administration

and Ben and I were flaks, did you find us annoying, very annoying, or impossibly annoying?

How would you rank that?

You know, compared to what we're dealing with now, it seems quaint to complain about

the Obama NSC because I thought you guys

did a lot of the things that everyone does, which is to sort of cherry-pick your favorite sources, trying to like, you know, dangle access for good coverage, you know, not lie, but shade the truth in a way that was misleading.

That sounds right.

And, you know, basically dare you to break a story with a veiled threat of like, you know, going public against you and undermining the story.

And then if the story was true, then you wouldn't actually do that because you wouldn't be able to.

But you're kind of like bluffing me all the time to like, do you really have it?

Do you really have it?

Well, okay, if you're going to go with this, I'm not going to confirm it.

You're going to take a big risk.

But I really had it, so I didn't mind, you know?

So all of those things I thought were shady tactics, but compared to what goes on now,

that was that was that was that was nothing.

You guys were consummate professionals compared to the Trump administration.

I love to hear that.

Do you remember we would do these sort of press background calls, and you would start all of your questions?

Thank you for your service.

Well, I still do.

That always seemed to be a little.

That's the first thing I said to Steve Bannon when I said to him, saw him this weekend in LA, and that was actually genuine.

Steve gets that love too?

What the fuck?

Because in the end,

you sacrificed and you worked hard on behalf of this country.

And so when I say thank you for your service, I meant that sincerely, even though it kind of sounded sarcastic.

Oh, I always thought you were being sarcastic, being like

these wannabe, you know, service members.

In my harder parts, I don't know, but I'm sure it was a little bit of, no, but I genuinely was thanking you for your service.

And even the people who I disagree with in the Trump administration or any administration, if you go to work for this country, you deserve our thanks.

And by the way, thank you for your service now because you've turned over to the dark side and become a journalist.

I know you don't think of yourself as a journalist, but that's what you are.

You're a great journalist.

And that's a service to this country, too.

So thank you, Tommy.

Thank you, Tommy, and the whole staff that you've got working there because that's a service to our country too,

as part of the Fourth Estate.

God, he's a good reporter, wrote a great book.

He's good on podcasts.

Josh Rogans, great to see you.

Again, the book is Chaos Under Heaven.

I really can't recommend it enough to try to understand not just this administration's approach on China policy, but also just like the crazy, chaotic decision-making that kind of underpins everything that's happening there.

It's a great read, uh, it's super interesting.

So, sequel is going to be fire.

Sequel is going to be amazing, and uh, I'll, I'll see you.

Uh, I'll read it with you in El Salvador from the uh terrorism confinement center.

So, great to see.

All right, see you, man.

Thanks again to Josh for doing the show,

And thank him for his service.

Thank you for your service, Josh.

Thank you to all the tattoo-free dongs out there.

Yeah.

And

Godspeed Australia and Canada.

Yes.

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