The US and Europe’s Conscious Uncoupling

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Welcome back to Pod Save the World.

I'm Tommy Vitor.

I'm Ben Rhodes.

Welcome to

1930s Germany, then.

Take our off my conversation on.

I'm two-thirds of the way through a three-volume history of the Third Reich.

I purchased it a long time ago.

I started it.

I just.

I'm almost done with the Third Reich in power.

It's excellent.

It is a little too on the nose, I have to say.

The capitulation of all aspects of German society to what they thought was a temporal threat of fascist government.

But anyway,

we could have like a Nazi book club because I've been doing some deep reading.

What else you got?

I still recommend Darkness Over Germany,

which is a contemporaneous account by a British journalist of how Germans were dealing with the onset of Nazi Germany.

Then there's a book called A Town in the Third Reich that's similar vibes.

It's like a reconstruction of how one town dealt with.

Is it like The Town, the famous Boston movie?

I don't know if there's a role for Affleck.

By the way, I should say, I mean, we're still waiting for the sequel to The Town.

They're doing a sequel to The Town.

They should.

I want to know what happened to Affleck.

Wasn't he going down to the Florida Keys or something at the end?

Oh, that's right.

Spoiler.

Yeah, I don't really remember.

Yeah,

we're all in a dark place here, as you can tell, listener.

Yes.

That's okay.

I guess that's usually the humorous banter.

Yeah.

But I guess that wasn't that funny.

No, I thought it worked.

It worked.

It worked for me.

But we got a lot to cover today.

We're going to talk about the three-year anniversary of the war in Ukraine and Trump's efforts to negotiate an end to the war while extorting as much as possible from the Ukrainian government.

We're also going to talk about the results of the German election and what it all means.

The newest addition to the team at the FBI, we're very excited to tell you more about that one.

Then there was Trump's Friday night massacre at the Pentagon.

We've got an update on a bunch of immigration news because it's been hard to keep track of.

We'll tell you about the bizarre collection of international leaders, in air quotes, at CPAC, everyone's favorite conservative political conference, and then the latest news from Gaza and the West Bank.

And then you guys will hear my interview with Zeke Fox.

He's an investigative reporter at Bloomberg Business Week.

We go all into the crypto corruption stuff, Ben.

You're going to enjoy this.

Talk about the Trump coin, Javier Millay down in Argentina.

There's another crypto billionaire type who seems to be paying off the Trump family

to wash in corruption.

I think this crypto beat is going to be an important sub-story.

Not the A story, but it's

right below it, I think.

Yeah, it's where the money's going to move.

If you're a follow-the-money kind of guy or gal, crypto.

Get on the blockchain.

Well, let's talk about Ukraine first because Monday was the three-year anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the full-scale Russian invasion.

According to Ukrainian officials, Russia marked the occasion by firing their largest drone volley at Ukraine ever.

But the biggest threat to Ukraine's future sovereignty now seems to be coming from Russia and the United States, which is a welcome addition for everyone.

There are a bunch of European leaders who flew to Kyiv this week to offer more assistance and moral support.

I think the UK offered $5 billion, Spain a billion.

The EU is reportedly preparing about a $20 billion aid package, but obviously none of that is going to fill the gap that seems to be about to be left by the U.S.

French President Emmanuel Macron traveled to D.C.

to personally lobby Trump on all things Ukraine and pitch an idea for a post-war international peacekeeping force.

Macron said during their joint press conference that a peace deal must, quote, not mean surrender of Ukraine and that it must allow for Ukrainian sovereignty.

Macron also pushed back on Trump's claim that all European aid to Ukraine was just a loan and that they were going to get paid back, whereas the U.S.

is somehow getting screwed.

Here's a clip of that back and forth in the oval.

Will France support the U.S.

being compensated?

I support the idea to have Ukraine first being compensated because they are the ones to have

lose a lot of their fellow citizens and being destroyed by this attack.

Second, all of those who were paid for could be compensated, but not by Ukraine, by Russia, because they were the one to aggress.

Again,

just so you understand, Europe is loaning the money to Ukraine.

They get their money back.

No, in fact, to be frank, we paid.

We paid 60% of the total defaults.

And it was was

like the U.S., loans, guarantee, grants, and we provided real money, to be clear.

Sounded fun.

Yeah.

True, it was fun after the pool left.

Yeah, I just slapped them around.

So, Ben, this meeting with Macron comes as the U.S.

and Ukraine are reportedly close to signing an agreement regarding Ukraine's mineral reserves.

Initially, Trump had seemingly demanded half of the profits from Ukraine, exploiting its natural resources, up to maybe 500 billion, which is all the money we've given Ukraine for the war times two, I believe.

Now it sounds like it's some sort of joint development fund where the U.S.

will also have access to this cash that will later be used for reconstruction.

It's not clear exactly.

It's still, all of it is lacking, you know, what the Ukrainians really want, which is a U.S.

security guarantee.

They're framing this as, well, more economic cooperation between the U.S.

and Ukraine is a de facto

security guarantee because the Russians won't invade if we have skin in the game or something.

It doesn't make make any sense.

Trump basically views this as payback for U.S.

aid, but as Zelensky has noted, payback seems to include a 100% interest rate charge.

In an interview with Russian State TV, Putin also suggested that Russia was ready to work with the U.S.

on extracting rare earth minerals.

And he suggested that the focus of his conversation with Trump and the talks in Saudi Arabia weren't really on ending the war, and then that he was open to this weird idea that Trump floated the other day about a joint 50% reduction in defense spending.

I don't know, man.

It's just baffling.

Everything is confusing these days.

Black is white, up is down.

What did you make of Macron's visit and kind of where they're at on this mineral deal and these floats by Putin about like cooperation on mineral reserve exploitation?

Like, what are we talking about at this point?

I think it's important,

and we will try to do this every week, to kind of step back from all the

strange back and forth day-to-day

and just

look at where we are, which is that all of the discussion right now is about

what Ukraine needs to give up.

Right.

And not Russia, the country that invaded Ukraine.

To us.

I know, yeah, I know that's an obvious point, but

at no point in your winding, and this is through no fault of your own, it's because of Donald Trump, was there any discussion of what is Russia conceding?

You know, even

any bits of the territory that they're currently occupying or trying to annex or returning children that they've kidnapped or paying any reparation.

Like that's all gone.

And all we're talking about is what does Ukraine need to give to Russia in terms of territory and what do they need to give to the U.S.

in terms of these bizarre mineral rights, right?

And this was manifested, by the way, in that UN General Assembly vote where the U.S.

voted with Russia and North Korea and Belarus,

even Cuba and Iran abstained against Europe.

And it's, to be clear, the first time since 1945 that the U.S.

has voted with Russia and against Europe on any UN resolution.

That's where we're at, right?

On this mineral deal,

it's truly baffling that we're spending this much time thinking and talking about something that is clearly manufactured bullshit.

Trump needs to feel like he extracted something from the Ukrainians because of the support we've given them.

Not only is that ghoulish, we talked about that last week, it's not real.

This idea that if the U.S.

has some mineral rights in Ukraine that's tantamount to a security guarantee so Russia won't invade, that makes no sense.

It just is a way for Trump to claim that he won something at the negotiating table from the Ukrainians.

That, you know, let's be clear, if Ukraine is swallowed up by Russia, that doesn't matter.

If Ukraine is a kind of de facto squeezed borderline failed state because Russia is kind of strangling them, it's not like it's going to be some minerals bonanza.

It's not even clear, you know, Trump hasn't even specified like why we need these minerals.

It's just pure showmanship.

And the fact that Putin went in on this, he went in on it because he would like nothing more than the U.S.

to say, oh, sure, we will extract natural resources and minerals from the Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine.

Because if the U.S.

starts doing business in like Luhansk and Donetsk and Mariupol, that is not only recognizing the Russian occupation and annexation of those regions, that's kind of fully legitimizing, normalizing it.

And, you know, suddenly we're doing business in those places.

So I think Macron was trying his best and it was worth the effort to just try to like moderate the Ukrainian.

He loves a diplomatic Hailmary.

Yeah, he loves the diplomatic Hailmary.

He's trying to moderate like Trump's anti-Ukraine position, try to make a better deal on this minerals thing, try to probably just get past this hang-up on minerals and return the conversation to security guarantees.

I'm sure he was there to talk about the potential European force, the French and British and potentially other nations' force that would be in Ukraine on the back end and just try to, you know, dampen his enthusiasm for butting up to Putin.

And we don't really know how that went because Macron can't come out and say if he achieved something because he doesn't want to antagonize Trump and wake up to a truth social tirade.

But it seemed like it helped a little bit.

I don't know.

The terms of this mineral deal are better than the ones that were offered that Zelensky rejected a couple weeks ago.

They were essentially just give us all these rights.

Now it's at least a joint venture.

So Macron does seem to have moved the goalpost a little bit on this.

Yeah, good work, Emmanuel.

Yeah, I mean, just to

go back to your point about like, don't forget the big picture.

I mean, I was just thinking about the United Nations, which was pretty broken, ineffective, kind of a mess like six months ago.

Now,

now that we've just decided to become part of the problem, I mean, I assume what will happen going forward is, you know, Trump will tell Elise Stefanik if she's confirmed.

I don't think they've had a hearing for her yet because they still need her vote in the House to just attack the institution, defend Israel everywhere.

They're pulling out of the Human Rights Commission.

I mean, talk about another, like we talked about last week, Trump turning away from NATO, which was set up in 1949 to deter Russian aggression against Europe.

I suspect the next thing we'll see is the U.S.

just kind of like fully pulling away from the UN or rendering it just useless, even at the Security Council level.

Yeah, it's already been paralyzed at the Security Council level for a while now.

Sorry, I meant at the General Assembly level.

But the General Assembly, you know, I saw some people kind of laughing, rolling eyes about the General Assembly Assembly matters because it is like a barometer of how you're showing up in the world.

It's a global roll call.

Yeah, it's a global roll call.

Where do you stand on these things?

And it matters, you know,

it's one of these things where if it didn't matter, then people wouldn't care so much.

You know, us kind of showing up in the world by saying we're on the Russian side.

Russia wasn't the aggressor.

I mean, that's essentially, we voted against the resolution that specified Russia as the aggressor.

That matters because that tells the rest of the world, you better adjust to that reality.

And And I think what people need to realize is the outcome of that adjustment is not going to be seen tomorrow or two days from now, but two years from now, the world will have recalibrated to that away from the United States.

When Macron goes back to Europe, you know, sure, he might have had to call dear Donald and say nice things to Trump in front of his face, but I'm sure the Europeans are just getting together and we'll talk about this.

And

how do we reorient away from the United States?

And that's happening all over the world right now.

The only other thing I'd say about the UN is, particularly with the destruction of USAID,

who is left to show up in post-conflict zones, to show up with foreign assistance, to manage refugee flows?

It's just the UN system and like philanthropy, basically, you know?

And so the UN really still matters.

I mean, who's left to fight a pandemic?

Who's dealing with bird flu now?

If the U.S.

is kind of totally evacuating that space, the UN system itself matters.

And it's not just what Elise Stefanik might be voting.

It's that I'm sure they'll also be, you know, choking out funds, as you said.

The funding effort.

And so then it's like,

who's paying for these problems that you should care about, again, on a human level, but on a stability level?

Like if nobody is there to manage migration flows, guess what?

There's going to be more migration.

If nobody's there to stop pandemics, there's going to be more pandemics.

So this dysfunction is going to be manifested over time.

Yeah.

One place that reorientation.

away from the U.S.

is happening in real time is Germany.

So Germans went to the polls on Sunday.

They had an election that saw the largest turnout in the country's history.

I think it was about 82% of the population voted.

It's just incredible.

The results were not great, but far from the worst outcome.

So, in the not great category, the far-right AFD party doubled its support from the last election to about 20%.

The AFD, as we've discussed, is seen by many Germans as the heir to the Nazi Party.

They are anti-Islam, anti-immigration, anti-EU, and pro-Russia.

And prominent AFD members have minimized the Holocaust a number of times.

There's also very extreme factions within the AFD that are seen as extremist threats by domestic intelligence.

The left-leaning Social Democrats or SPD Olaf Schultz party had their worst result since 1887, garnering only 16% of the vote.

Democrats feel better.

Yeah, Jesus Christ.

Voters were not thrilled, to say the least,

about the SPT's leadership over the past few years, and they made it known at the voting booth.

It's hard out there for a neoliberal right now, Ben.

So the traditional conservative CDU party got the largest share of the vote with 28.5%, but they fell short of their 30% goal.

Big picture, CDU leader Friedrich Mertz will almost certainly become the next chancellor.

He's going to have to form a government coalition first.

The good news for him is that he can almost certainly do so just by working with the SPD.

That will give them enough votes in the Bundestag to form a government and have a majority.

They will not have to include a third political party, which would have made things more complicated.

Mertz wants that process done by Easter.

So it'll take several weeks at least.

The most interesting though and surprising result of the night was probably the leftist Delinka party, which a month ago seemed like they were not going to get the 5% share of the vote they needed to be represented in the Bundestag, but they ended up with nearly 9% of the vote.

They had a huge surge of support at the end after this charismatic young woman leader named Heidi Reckinesch gave a speech denouncing Mertz for putting forward this hardline immigration measure at the Bundestag that passed with a bunch of support from the AFD.

Ben, just big picture.

What are your thoughts on this result and kind of what it tells us?

First of all, I know you have become like a very enthusiastic observer of German politics.

Did you watch the post-election tradition where they have all the leaders on television?

Yeah, it's the coolest.

Yeah, it's cool.

It's so foreign to me as an American to see them all up there talking.

So like the night of the election, like every leader of the party is like in a joint interview.

Yeah.

It's totally wild.

I love it.

You know, it's funny.

The reason I saw that, I kept thinking those were clips from a debate.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Because I was like, why the fuck are they all together?

It's crazy.

I loved it.

I didn't know that either.

I was totally nerding out on it.

On the election result itself, look, it's bad.

The AFD did well.

I mean, I saw some people on, you know.

social media like being like oh look they failed nobody thought they were going to win right but they got about 20 which is about

yeah it's a fifth of the population.

That's bad.

And it's about where they've been polling.

The good news is the J.D.

Vance, Elon Musk interventions did nothing to help them.

So they were polling there before Elon started weighing in.

So it is a bit of a rebuke to those guys because they were clearly trying to like pump up the AFD.

That didn't happen.

So that's one takeaway.

I think the second thing is now Mertz's victory, this moves into the coalition formation, and we'll just have to see if that goes okay.

They did, as we talked about last week, move so far right on immigration and some other things that that might make it difficult.

But I think in the end, you would expect that the threat of the AFD somehow getting into the government will compel God.

I hope.

You know, I hope so, because you know, hopefully, Mertz moves a little bit too to make that easier to happen.

It's not like he has a massive mandate, he had under 30% of the vote.

The only other things that stand out to me, this left-wing surge is

good.

And notably, actually, the Libertarian Party that blew up the coalition didn't even make it to 5%.

So, you know, nice, well played there, guys.

I will say, like, she proves that maybe standing up on principle attracts some people your way because they got the late-breaking vote.

And message to people.

It's not, this is not even like a left-center thing.

It's just like speaking with some conviction appeals to people.

And I'm glad she's going to clearly be a voice.

And maybe she can be the oppositionist who can gather some intensity.

So it's not just AFD.

So, what you don't want is that there's a big coalition government and all the energy of opposition goes to the right.

Maybe she can capture some of that on the left.

That'd be good.

The last thing we should talk about, though, is that Mertz in that interview said some pretty radical things, right?

I mean, like.

We have a clip of that.

Okay, so let's go to that.

Yeah, so just to set it up a little bit.

I mean, Mertz is an interesting character.

He was been in and out of politics for decades.

He was in the European Parliament, served in the Bundestag for about 15 years, and left politics in 2009 to go make a shit ton of money in corporate law and business.

business.

He and Merkel, Angela Merkel, the former chancellor, were political rivals, which for a very long time was not a good thing for him because she was like, you know, all-consuming political figure.

He describes himself as socially conservative, economically liberal.

He's a big supporter of the transatlantic alliance with the U.S., which is what made these election night comments by Mercks so surprising.

Here's a clip.

For me, the absolute priority will be to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible so that we step by step also truly achieve independence from the USA.

I would not have believed that I would have to say something like this on a TV programme.

But at the latest, after last week's statements by Donald Trump, it's clear that the Americans, at least this part of the American government, are largely indifferent to Europe's fate.

I have absolutely no illusions about what is happening from America.

Look at what Mr.

Elon Musk has done recently in terms of interventions in the German elections.

That is an unprecedented event.

So the interventions from Washington were no less dramatic and drastic and ultimately brazen than the interventions we had from Moscow.

Still seen.

So we are under such massive pressure from two sides that my absolute priority now truly is to establish unity in Europe.

So Benji, in the first term, Trump's first term, I think Europe took kind of like a wait-and-see approach.

I don't know if that's because they were just biding their time or because like the Committee to Save America, the Jim Madison of the world were kind of whispering reassurances to them at the sidelines of the conference.

Now they are just moving on.

Yeah.

Well, I thought that was an absolutely astonishing, you know, albeit maybe not surprising statement from him.

First of all, this is a right-wing guy.

I mean, right-wing for the CDU.

And this is not a guy that seems enthusiastic about Elon Musk.

No.

You know, side note, I hate that this guy who's a white South African guy is like the American that everybody's talking about, but put that aside.

Well, you see, Tesla's down 8% today because they had really weak sales in Europe, in part because of this bullshit.

Yeah, of course.

But he, you know, he's he, this is not a victory for Trump, right?

Trump's party there is AFD.

The Republican Party's sister party in Germany is the AFD.

Let's be clear about that.

So it's interesting to me that even a kind of right-wing center-right politician in Europe is like, you know, stay the fuck out.

I mean, to compare Elon Musk to Russia interfering in German politics is a pretty powerful statement.

And I think what this suggests is there is going to be a rapid realignment in Europe.

Now, how that plays out, we don't know.

But he was indicating essentially that Europe needs its own defense capabilities.

But in a meaningful way, you know, he was talking almost about like nuclear issues.

Germany is obviously not a nuclear weapons power, but Britain and France are.

Maybe some collective security arrangement could be made where they're not relying on the American nuclear security umbrella.

That can become a big conversation.

That's a huge conversation, and it would totally change geopolitics.

If essentially Europe says, we are not going to depend on the United States to be our security guarantee, we're going to be our own security guarantee.

That's going to ultimately mean that not only do they have a stronger defense capability and they're talking about plussing up defense spending across the continent, but they're going to have their own views on geopolitics, on whether it's Ukraine, but it could be other issues as well.

And so I think you should take Mertz's signal as, hey, I'm actually not going to get into bed with these AFD guys.

I want to pull together a German German center, albeit in the right word direction,

that is also part of a European response to Trump and Putin and have a kind of a third way here in Europe, which is a pretty rational thing, but it's an indication of how fast the tectonic plates are moving underneath the globe.

Yeah, I mean, I think the biggest

challenge, obviously, the biggest challenge for Mertz going forward is going to be economic growth.

Germany has kind of stagnated over the last several years.

People are pissed.

Energy costs went up in part because of the Russian invasion.

They also have to figure out an immigration policy that can defang the AFD and the right wing and make people feel heard without emulating them or, as you said earlier, alienating parts of the Social Democratic Coalition in a way that fractures the government.

And like coalition governments are great insofar as they force you to work together with other parties and they force sort of a more moderate government, but that clearly has allowed these populist movements to thrive and grow on both sides.

So we'll see if that, if they can sort of, you know, deal with that and mitigate that risk.

I'm a little worried with Mertz because he hasn't seemed to be the most deft political operator so far.

Like this move in the Bundesague with the immigration proposal that got the AFD support that was seen as breaking the firewall was very stupid and seemingly led to the rise of this far-left party.

Yeah.

And his vote share seemed to suffer because of it.

Yeah, definitely.

But, you know, look.

We're not seeing a CDU AFD government.

So that's nice.

No,

that is nice.

And I mean, I think the challenge to immigration, again, is it's not that the social democrats are super pro-immigration these days.

There's very little of that in Germany.

It's whether or not immigration policy can remain consistent with EU law, essentially.

I think that's a tricky thing you have to manage.

And also, you talked about growth.

Like, guess what's helpful to growth?

Immigration.

So if you just totally shut the doors, like, you know, you have aging populations in Europe, like, how are you going to get growth?

One thing we do know, though, is we've got, you know, barring something strange happening, the Trump term, you're going to have Mertz mertz in germany you're gonna have starmer in the uk because his mandate runs that far you're gonna have macron for the next you know two years two years

and so we kind of know the players actually hopefully we'll have a democratic house at least by the time macron's gone so you kind of know okay it's mertz starmer macrone that's that's not bad lineup um it's you know and it runs the gamut from center left to center right and macron uber centrist you know um so that's what that's what we're dealing with and obviously maloney and plenty of other leaders will be heard from as well yeah decent leaders.

I do.

I just keep seeing in these elections that the youngest people are just saying absolutely not to the established parties.

Like 18 to 24-year-olds or the share of 18 to 24-year-olds voting from the AFD skyrocketed.

The share of 18 to 24-year-olds voting for the far-left party skyrocketed.

So there's just not a lot of faith in institutions and traditional parties.

And look, I'm not.

mocking.

I kind of get it, right?

I mean, imagine you're 18.

You just went through COVID and like this horrible economic crisis and inflation.

Things are pretty awful, but we'll see.

It's a tough, tough political challenge for me.

No, I think the lesson for the center left or the left is

how do you put yourself back on the side of younger people.

It's the same thing we're dealing with in this country.

And it's not some shortcut like we need a German Joe Rogan or something.

Like you need new messages, new leaders, new media strategies.

Like they're in the same boat as we all are.

Yeah, the young leader in the Delinka left party, she blew up on TikTok.

Yeah.

That's how they reached a lot of it.

And she's super compelling and cool tats, you know.

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All right, Ben, let's turn to our growing autocracy here in the U.S.

So Trump's still building out his national security team.

We've talked about Cash Patel, Trump's nominee to lead the FBI.

He was confirmed 51 to 49 by the Senate.

Only Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski could find the courage to vote against someone who's just clearly not qualified.

Patel, you know, he, in addition to just not having the resume you need to run the FBI, he's a January 6th truther, suggests that the FBI actually planned and incited January 6th.

He's been accused of lying and gross incompetence in past government jobs.

We could go on forever about him.

But for that reason, his lack of experience, that is, Patel was expected to choose a career FBI agent to be his deputy.

In fact, that role is always filled by a career person, someone who understands how the building works, that brings institutional memory and operational know-how to the job.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Cash Patel promised U.S.

Senators that he would name a career agent to be his deputy.

So, of course, that did not happen.

Instead, the new deputy FBI director is a guy named Dan Bongino, and he will not have to be Senate confirmed.

Dan was a New York City cop.

turned Secret Service agent who then quit and unsuccessfully ran for office a bunch of times.

He then pivoted to media, hosting a show on Fox News and then a very successful podcast that was primarily about how great Donald Trump is.

And how awful people like you and me are.

Hates us.

Dan actively hates our guts.

And anyone who came across Dan Bongino on Twitter knows that he has like a crazy temperature.

Like calls people commies and motherfuckers and this and that.

And

in addition to, you know, sort of these temperamental challenges, I would say, Ben, this is a clip of how he talks about the FBI on his show.

This one's from 2022.

The FBI is lost.

It's broken, irredeemably corrupt at this point.

The inexcusable raid on President Trump's home was a straw that broke the camel's back.

I mean it when I say it.

It's way past time to clean this FBI house up.

They have burned every last shred of faith and trust freedom-loving Americans had in it.

And to the libs out there, listen, don't even waste your time lecturing me on this issue.

Not a second.

I gaffe you right off.

I pay no attention to you losers, okay?

No one's been a stauncher defender of FBI agents I work with than me.

Go back and listen to my shows, you dipwads.

I was the one defending them all the time.

I've actually been a federal agent.

A cop actually put my butt on the line.

But what the FBI did to Donald Trump, that wasn't law enforcement.

It was tyranny.

So this one is so bad that you almost have to laugh, but it also seems like a genuine inflection point.

Yeah.

Where, I mean, not only are we learning like competence is just not a factor in these selections, it is 100% about political loyalty.

And when you play that out as to what it could mean in a crisis or with just a leader of bad faith like Donald Trump, it's pretty scary.

Yes, it is, Tommy.

I have my

Potse of the World mug full of Diet Cooker.

We may need a second Potse the World and Trump years that is after ours with like

stronger stuff.

Because listeners of this podcast, WorldOs out there, know, like, we were pretty on the nose on some of these people.

Like, we've been monitoring the Cash Patel situation for years.

I did not have this one game down.

This is a real wild card for me.

It's not Dan Bongino, I thought maybe he'd get access to Trump.

You know, as deputy director of the FBI, it's a wild development.

He was voted for Secret Service head.

And that I was like, that freaks me out.

But I was like, oh, I mean, at least he's done the job.

It's a job.

I mean, it's not like you, you know, but yes.

And because first of all, and you made this comment in our text thread and also in PSA, but this is like a pretty rapid, I don't know what else an American slide to autocracy would look like other than what we've seen.

And if you look across the board, Patel, Bongino, Pambondi, Pete Hegseth, you know, Tulsi Gabbard, like this is what it looks like.

This is a bunch of total loyalists, including, you know, some unhinged personalities in the most powerful positions in government.

And just to get a little deeper into this deputy director of the FBI role, this person

is basically in charge of managing, you know, not just kind of the vast enterprise of the FBI, incredibly sensitive investigations.

Like operational detail.

Yeah, like approving very sensitive law enforcement decisions, you know, to go after certain targets or to not go after other targets.

This person negotiates agreements.

When I would interface with the deputy director of the FBI, I was often

the best.

Yeah.

Greatest boss in XI you've ever heard.

And by the way,

going out of limb, not a Democrat.

Not a Democrat.

I don't want to put words in his mouth, but like these are not.

Again, repeating the refrain, like the FBI, this idea that the libs love the FBI, that like wiretapped Martin Luther King.

And

this is crazy, right?

And so he's going to be involved in negotiations with foreign governments.

We talked on this program about like...

the deputies committee meeting.

That's like the situation room meetings on sensitive matters.

The deputy FBI director would be there there if it was a kind of counterterrorism issue, if it was anything with an international dimension.

So this is not a job where, I don't know, he can like

be a public figure.

This is a management job.

And management, not just of like a bunch of thousands of FBI agents and it's sensitive investigations, it's foreign governments, it's the interagency process of the United States government.

I don't even know what it looks like to have Dan Bongino in those rooms.

Literally no exception.

What does it look like?

Can you imagine him rolling up in the situation room or flying to a foreign country to negotiate an information sharing agreement or

deciding whether or not to authorize going after a law enforcement target?

Like, this is.

Dan Bungino is definitely 100% one of those guys who would attack me, would call me a van driver and say, therefore, I wasn't qualified.

Oh, he called me a fiction writer.

Right.

A fiction writer, van driver.

We weren't qualified to be like a spokesman or a speechwriter in the administration because, I don't know, we hadn't worked in the government for 30 years.

And now this guy is coming out of the podcast studio to be deputy director of the FBI.

I'm going to read you a quote, Ben.

Someone with no background as an agent would never be able to command the respect necessary to run the day-to-day operations of the Bureau.

That is from Bill Barr,

Trump's attorney general at the end of his first term, talking about Cash Batel.

Because remember, Trump tried to install Cash Battelle as the deputy director of the FBI.

Bill Barr was like over my dead fucking body.

And now we've got Dan Bongino.

It also did, it just suggests to, I mean, because this, I don't know if this was Cash Patel's idea or Donald Trump's idea, but Pam Bondi clearly doesn't care, right?

She's, you know, like, and you know that Cash Patel,

he works for Donald Trump, and Donald Trump thought it was a cool idea to put Dan Bongino in this job.

Like, he has to say yes.

Like, there is no scenario in which Cash Patel is going to say to Donald Trump, no, I can't do that for you, you know, About anything.

Which every other FBI, I can tell you, in the Obama years, it was largely Bob Mueller, and then it was, God to help us, Jim Comey.

Like they, you know, they didn't take direction from Barack Obama.

I don't think you ever talked to them.

I remember one time, and I don't know the exact circumstance, but I'm going to guess it was either like the Boston marathon bombing or it was like the

cartridge, printing cartridge, you know, the al-Qaeda tried to put a bomb in a printing cartridge.

And Obama suggested to me, like, we needed someone to talk about this on television.

And maybe could I ask if, like, you know,

Bob Mueller or whoever the FBI director is, I was like,

I think I raised it delicately.

Like, hey, would the director be with?

And the fact of the White House even broaching anything is as anodyne as a television interview.

You would have thought I had just like, you know,

torn a copy of the Constitution or something, right?

How dare you?

Meanwhile, these guys are like, you know, if Donald Trump wants somebody to investigate, they're going to be investigated.

If Donald Trump wants somebody to harass, they're going to be harassed.

And as we've talked about before, even if they don't have the goods to put someone in prison, they can ruin somebody's lives with legal fees.

They can, you know, cripple like a business.

They can also look the other way at massive amounts of corruption by what they choose not to invest.

They can look the other way.

And if they look hard enough at you, they're going to find something that they can prosecute you on.

And look, this comes also, as we saw, a purge at the Pentagon last week that gets us into similar territory.

So Trump fired C.Q.

Brown, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

He also fired the head of the Navy, the number two at the Air Force, and the top lawyers at the Army, Navy, and Air Force.

So C.Q.

Brown, the now former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, was only the second black chairman in history.

He was fired because he is black.

Let's just say what happened here.

Pete Hexeth made clear in his book that he questioned whether Brown had only been promoted in the first place because of his race.

He later did a podcast interview where he accused, he said, anyone involved in, quote, DEI woke shit has to be fired.

In the case of C.Q.

Brown, the quote-unquote DEI woke shit was C.Q.

Brown talking about being a black man in America after George Floyd was killed.

That was what happened.

The former, now former chief of Navy operations, Lisa Franchetti, who was fired.

She was the first woman to hold the job.

So, of course, she got the axe.

And then the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Ben, is going to be Lieutenant General Dan Kane.

He is a now retired Air Force pilot that Trump always talks about meeting in Iraq.

The apocryphal tale is that Raisin Kane said to him that he could defeat ISIS in a week when all his other advisors said he would take two years to defeat them.

And Raisin Kane was right.

But Kane doesn't actually meet the statutory requirements for the job because he's a three-star, not a four-star, but Trump can give him a waiver.

So, Ben, I don't know anything about Dan Kane, and I'm not trying to like denigrate us.

Like, maybe he's a brilliant military mind, but what you're seeing a DOD feels similar to the FBI insofar as you have a Secretary of Defense who is not remotely qualified for the job, right?

He was a Fox News weekend anchor.

He now owes all of his loyalty for his entire career is owed to Trump.

You have a chairman who was retired in working in venture capital and now has been brought back to be the chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

And he would not have gotten that job if not for some sort of conversation where there was a perceived loyalty to Trump.

If you listen to Trump tell the story about meeting Raisin Cain in Iraq, he like put on a MAGA hat afterwards.

And it's just,

it's all these people that owe, like they have no independent kind of resume or power structure or reason to be there except for Donald Trump.

And that's just not always the case.

Like Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs in the beginning of Obama's first term, was a holdover from Bush.

Like often these are people that get held over through administrations because you want some continuity.

Do you want to make the the case that the military is apolitical?

But that has just been obliterated.

And now they're all just loyal to Trump.

Yeah, I mean, I think there's, first of all, we should talk about what happened to C.Q.

Brown.

And let's just say the Republican Party has tried to dine out on payons to the U.S.

military for my entire life in politics, and they're completely full of shit.

Because if you refuse to stand up for C.Q.

Brown,

you are refusing to stand up for the U.S.

military and how it operates.

And the idea that just because he is black and happens to have spoken eloquently about it once in a video disqualifies him from serving is an insult to every member of the U.S.

military.

Obviously, it's principally an insult to the

many, many, many black and brown enlisted people that fight in this nation's wars, that carry out dangerous missions that people like Donald Trump you know would never go on.

Right.

But spare me the tributes and the platitudes and the pablum about the U.S.

military.

If you're willing to run a bus over C.Q.

Brown on behalf of Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump and their so-called anti-woke agenda, just sit out the next

fucking veterans and Memorial Day speeches about the U.S.

military because you just insulted every member of the United States military.

Not just the black and brown people, the white people that serve alongside them.

How are you going to have cohesion?

Pete Hegset may like to say diversity is not a strength.

How are you going to have cohesion in the force when you're just sending a message that some people are less valuable than other people in the military?

Yeah, if you're black or you're a woman, you're out.

Guess what?

When you're in the fucking foxhole or whatever metaphor you want to use, it doesn't really matter what color you are.

And you need to care as much about the person next to you, whether they're a woman or whether they're black or whether they're brown or whatever the hell they are.

So

I wish there had been more outrage about this.

I know.

You know, because this is not just going to happen on Friday.

It never happens.

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs always rolls over.

It's not like you come in and you pick your own person.

It's this worrisome thing.

The FBI is worrisome enough.

I mean, they've focused on the most powerful parts of government, you know, law enforcement and violence, the military.

This is the most powerful institution in the world, the United States military.

It is 3 million people.

And to just turn it over and to try to turn it into some MAGA militia, you know, governed by Pete Hegseth is really dangerous and something that people have to watch closely.

I do think on the Dan Kane piece of this, do you remember when Trump insisted on calling Jim Mattis Mad Dog?

He's like, that's not my name.

You're going to like that.

Mattis is like, I don't like that.

I don't know if Dan Kane likes to go by Raisin Cain.

Trump's got this weird thing, like, he wants a general with a nickname and kind of central casting, you know.

So we'll see.

But what worries me the most about this is Pete Hegseth, actually.

This is the guy that's really in charge.

And, you know,

I just, I don't know.

I hope that the military military can be insulated by some degree from political interference.

We'll have to see.

Yeah, I mean, I agree with you.

P.T.X.

is a clown.

He shouldn't have the job.

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs is supposed to be the principal military advisor to the president.

I mean,

you would think you would want the most experienced person you could possibly find in that job.

Therefore, you would want them to be a four-star and maybe a combatant commander or someone who was a service chief.

Dan Kane is not that.

He also sort of a weird resume.

Like he retired as a three-star, but he did this liaison job to the CIA CIA that was sort of confusing.

It was just like an odd resume, right?

It's an odd resume.

I mean, what I found interesting about it, though, is like for the last several years, he worked for our man, Bill Burns, you know?

So

not exactly,

you know, like, so

it's confusing.

It's the kind of resume that, like, I had a

I had a couple people that worked for me, Tommy, and in our little unit of the NSC, right?

I remember there was one guy that it was after you left.

He came to work on kind of that, some of that global information space, and he had like a 15-year gap in his resume.

It was like he signed up to serve, and at the end, and then like the next year before, like point being is that he was up to some

special forces type stuff, I'm sure.

And there's a little bit of that in the Dan Kane resume, you know, which you could look, which you argue is interesting, but we don't know what was, you know, what it was.

That's exactly right.

Like, you could argue on the merits if the process wasn't so weird.

You could argue that a hybrid kind of military, like CIA background actually is kind of

an accurate reflection of the way the U.S.

does, you know, military operations around the world these days.

But it just happens in such a fucked up, strange, hackish way that I don't trust it.

Well, here's the other thing.

The reason they have those requirements about being a four-star is that they want you to have been like a service chief.

Like usually the joint chiefs had run the Air Force, the Navy, the Army, because it's not just military advisor on like policy.

It's also like managing the workforce, managing all these personnel, knowing how procurement is working, right?

And so that's what's missing from Dan Kane's resume: is being in this position of kind of overseeing an entire force.

And,

you know, so who's, but that may be because Pete Hegst thinks that his like woke books or anti-woke books qualify him.

There's actually nobody that means that has experience, you know, like managing this huge enterprise

of millions of people.

Right.

No, C.

Q.

Brown did.

He was an Air Force service chief.

He was deputy CEMCOM, and now he's gone.

Yeah.

Because he gave a speech once about being black in America for five minutes.

By the way, everybody should watch that speech.

It's very good.

It's really powerful.

We're going to take a quick break.

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All right, Ben.

We also wanted to check in on there's this like flurry of immigration news happening every day and trying to follow it beyond just the day's headlines, I think is important.

So last week we saw these reports.

There were 170 Venezuelan migrants flown from Guantanamo to Venezuela.

The Washington Post had a story documenting the horrific conditions on the ground at this Gitmo camp that we've talked about in the past, where the Trump people say they're going to house up to 30,000 migrants.

The conditions we're talking about include solitary confinement, people getting strip searched, people being shackled and caged when they're allowed outside.

And despite the administration's claim that everyone getting sent to Gitmo were the worst of the worst, they're violent criminals, they're gang members, they're murderers, that's just not true.

CNN reported that 51 of the 177 had no criminal record at all.

And then separately, the New York Times had this devastating piece, and the Daily did a version of it that's worth listening to, about a bunch of migrants that had been deported from the U.S.

and were sent to Panama.

These were people from all around the world.

There was a guy from China.

There was a person from Iran who had converted to Christianity.

Many of them were asylum seekers.

And they were all just shipped to Panama.

And then they got locked in these hotel rooms.

They didn't know what was going on.

They couldn't contact anyone.

There was people killing themselves, like absolutely awful.

And basically, what happened was they were offered some sort of opportunity to get repatriated to their home country or their country of origin.

For many, that is an impossibility because they would be killed or put in prison.

And so when they refused, they were sent to this squalid camp by the edge of the jungle near the Darien Gap.

And so, you know, Ben,

I'm sure what's happening, the optics of it, some of the reporting, I bet it is having a deterrent effect.

There are probably people who are like, oh my God, this is like inhuman.

I don't want to go to the U.S.

now.

But more importantly, I think for us is that it's highlighting how difficult this mass deportation effort is going to be.

Because if the government knew where all the worst of the worst violent undocumented offenders were, they would already have been sent home.

But they don't, right?

So what's happening is they're deporting fewer people than Trump wants.

He's going to start pushing them to do more.

They're picking up the wrong people, innocent people often, and they're doing it in like horrible conditions.

And I think tracking this is going to be pretty important because it's, you know, it's illegal in some cases, inhumane in every case, and just worth flagging.

Yeah.

You know, loath to recommend another podcast.

It's not Dan Bongino, but the daily upset on this is really powerful.

And, you know, you make a few important points.

First is,

you know, it's hard to, some countries won't take deportees back, right?

So there are countries like Nicaragua or other countries in Central America that aren't exactly lining up to take back people who have been deported.

What's so powerful about that segment, though, is people from China,

this woman from Iran is a Christian, and that's why she doesn't want to go back.

By the way, what a bunch of hits.

Where's Mike Pence?

Yeah, where's the evangelical Christians

in the Republican Party that

want to stand up for people like that?

There's a human tragedy of just these people being deposited in the middle of nowhere in Panama.

We talked on this podcast several times about the Tory government wanting this scheme to send people back to Rwanda.

This is much, much, much worse.

Like, as grotesque as that Rwanda plan was, it was actually a plan.

It was like sending them there.

And there's like a, this seems like they're just like dumping people off the planes in Panama.

And Panama is so scared to say no because Trump might invade, take the Panama Canal back.

But there's something more fundamental about this.

This is not, if you look at who these people are, this is not like people, you know, coming across the southern border.

Some of these people are people who have very credible cases for political asylum, like a Iranian Christian who's worried that she's going to be killed or imprisoned for her religion.

Through all our ups and downs of immigration,

One thing that's been pretty constant.

The U.S.

has been a safe haven for people who have very credible fears of being killed or imprisoned for their political religious beliefs.

We are changing something fundamental about our identity as a country if those are the kinds of people that we're sending to the jungle in Panama.

You know, this is, again, not securing the border.

This is saying no to dissidents, to political asylum seekers with very, very credible claims.

And we are no longer that country that

has been so beyond enriched.

This is how we got people like Einstein to come here.

Like by having people that had different political or religious views from the places that they're from.

And I think we have to track this too.

Like, how are we changing as to who we are?

And it's certainly going to change attitudes towards the United States.

And those people are going to look to other places to go if they can find other places to go.

And we're going to lose a lot as a country in the long run for it.

Did you see that Eric Prince, the former head of Blackwater, which if you guys don't know, is a private militia force that was accused of all kinds of atrocities in Iraq.

He has reportedly pitched the Trump administration on a $25 billion plan to create a vigilante army to deport 12 million people before the midterm.

So it could get worse.

Well, this is to go back to our banter about Nazi reading.

I mean, one thing that's been missing is, you know, Hitler came to power in part with the support of the SA, these brown shirts, tens of thousands of Germans that terrorize his political opponents, be they communists or Jews or trade unionists.

That's the one thing we didn't have yet.

I mean, we did have Proud Boys and some kind of militia guys.

If we literally, I mean, I'm not exaggerating.

I mean, Eric Prince's proposal is essentially creating some brown shirts, you know, people roaming around American communities, vigilantes, empowered

to seize people.

Do you really trust those guys to like separate violent criminals from other people or frankly separate someone who looks different, who is a citizen of this country?

Especially if there's a profit motive?

Yeah.

Not at all.

If they have quotas, I mean, it's the same, you know, you don't like it when people have quotas get parking tickets.

If these guys have quotas to deport people, it's not going to be good.

Yeah.

Terrible.

Okay.

We have a few more things to get through before the interview.

So, the annual Conservative Political Action Conference or CPAC conference just wrapped up.

This thing used to be like kind of a right-wing fringe that we would all make fun of every year, and now it's just a MAGA base.

Over the years, CPAC has evolved to include more international speakers.

They even hold conferences abroad.

Here's a quick supercut of some of the international voices at this year's CPAC.

Suddenly, post-November the 5th, America is optimistic.

it's upbeat, it's the beginning of the golden age in America.

Ladies and gentlemen, we missed the first American Revolution in seventeen seventy six.

In fact, it was actually a revolution against us,

but we want to be part of the second American revolution.

I envy so much your programme Drill, Baby Drill.

We'll look for one in Europe MAGA and MEGA.

These movements are not only simply slogans.

They represent a vision that resonates urgently not only in the United States but across the world.

When Bill Clinton and Tony Blair created the global leftist liberal network in the 90s,

they were called statesmen.

Today, when Trump, Maloney, Millet, or maybe Modi talk, they are called a threat to democracy.

Shout out to Michael and our team for enduring all those speeches and cutting them down for you.

I think Michael secretly is entertaining.

He loved it.

Yeah, he's laughing over there.

That was Reformed UK's Nigel Farage,

former Tory Prime Minister Liz Truss.

Gosh, she's such a dud every time I hear her talk.

The former Prime Minister of Poland, whose name I'm not going to try, Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fizzo, Italy's Georgia Maloney, and Argentina's Javier Millet.

At the end, they're entertaining us.

Not in those clips, but attending, were Jairo Bolsonaro's son, the former president of Brazil and the leader of the far-right Spanish Vox Party.

Millay not only gave a speech, he hung out with Elon Musk, handed him a chainsaw.

I always remember his thing at all these campaign events.

And then a weird, kind of stone-seeming Elon Musk hung out with the chainsaw and wore glasses and tried to get away from it.

I think it's advisable to not be on ketamine while you're operating the chainsaw.

The whole thing was off.

Notably absent from the proceedings was Jordan Bardella, who's the leader of Maureen Le Pen's far-right National Rally Party.

He canceled his appearance after Steve Bannon gave what I think everyone with eyeballs thought looked like a Nazi salute.

Bannon denied it, said it was a wave.

Clearly, he's trying to do the, oh, I'm just trolling thing.

And he had this to say to a French publication, quote, if he, Bardella, canceled the speech over what the mainstream media said about the speech, he didn't listen to the speech.

If that's true, he's unworthy to lead France.

He's a boy, not a man.

Okay, Steve, some tough talk.

I don't know, Ben, what do you make of this collection of goobers who spoke and what it tells us?

It's a lot of this usual suspects at this point.

It's the usual suspects.

Part of what's so frustrating about this political moment is, on the one hand, I have to acknowledge the very effective, you know, 10-year effort to construct this far-right internationale that they built.

And there needs to be one on the center left to the left.

There needs to be our version of CPAC.

We've needed it for a long time.

I wrote a whole book about this global internationale.

But at the same time that I can see

how they've been investing in shared platforms like this, shared political strategies, shared funding sources, most of them are so fucking mediocre

that it drives me crazy.

So I can see what's really smart about what they've done.

And yet you've got a bunch of goobers like Liz Truss and Millet screaming at the top of his lungs.

I I will say Maloney is an astute politician.

She's done well for herself.

That was actually the smartest clip.

Hey, why can't we be, you know, Bill Clinton and Tony Buller started global progress?

By the way, I go to global progress summits.

Like, they're not quite what the energy is in that room.

Like, maybe we need some chainsaws at the global progress summits.

But

as much as we should laugh at this, because there's an absurdity to it, more importantly, we have to reverse engineer it and have our own.

I agree.

Let's end this by talking about some news out of Gaza and the West Bank.

So, in terms of Gaza,

Ben, last week we talked about this horrible, tragic news about the Bebas family.

Yardin Bebas, the patriarch of the family, was returned in one of the recent hostage release deals.

He was one of the men who looked like a Holocaust survivor because he was so emaciated.

But, you know, we officially learned around the same time that his wife and two small children had died while in Hamas captivity.

Last week, Hamas was supposed to release the bodies of Shari Bibas, Yardin's wife, and their two children, four-year-old Ariel and nine-month-old Kafir.

But the Israeli authorities later determined that the body Hamas said was Shari Bibas was someone else.

Hamas said there was a mix-up of some sort.

They later returned the correct body.

But it is hard to imagine anything more cruel and evil and just its totality than the treatment of the Bibas family, from kidnapping them in the first place, to kidnapping children, to starving Yardin Bibas to the point where he looked so emaciated, to parading the coffins these children were in through the streets of Gaza, and then returning the wrong burden.

Like, the words don't do justice for how fucking evil this was.

An Israeli military spokesman later said that the Bbas boys were killed with bare hands, quote unquote.

Hamas had claimed that the Bebas family was killed in an airstrike.

I don't know that we can prove either of those things.

And I just want to say that it's really awkward to talk about this because

my view on this is I don't need to know how the Bibas children died to know that it was evil and wrong to kidnap children in the first place.

Like obviously if they were strangled to death by a Hamas person, that is like a next level thing.

But like the fact that they were taken is just beyond cruel.

But I just, I want to reflect in our conversation that there is debate and dispute over sort of what the forensic pathologists could know at this point.

But all of that tension brings us to Saturday when Hamas handed over the last living hostages that were part of this phase one of the ceasefire deal.

Israel is supposed to release 620 Palestinian prisoners, but they put their release on hold in protest of the treatment of the Bubas family and these hostages.

Hamas also released this awful propaganda video.

of two hostages who were not set for release until phase two, but they were brought to this ceremony and forced to watch others go free, and then they were begging for their freedom.

So again, just unfathomable cruelty.

Hamas accused Israel of a blatant violation of the agreement for not releasing the 620 prisoners and said there'd be no more ceasefire talks until they were let go.

A Hamas official accused Netanyahu of intentionally sabotaging the ceasefire efforts.

So phase one of the ceasefire ends on Saturday.

The talks for the second phase haven't even started.

When asked about the ceasefire failing and the war beginning again, Trump told Fox's Brian Kilmead that he was basically okay with it going either way.

So Ben, I just wonder where you're at your hope for this thing extending.

I've heard reports that Israeli authorities want to extend phase one rather than like negotiate to phase two, which it doesn't give me much confidence that the war is going to stay over.

But I don't know where you're where you're at on that.

Yeah, they seem to not want to get to the more foundational issues, you know, about the future of Gaza, where there's just these bigger gaps.

They've been better at being able to negotiate essentially prisoner exchanges, because that's where we are now.

There's a ceasefire and then these prisoner exchanges, Palestinians released, and then hostages returned.

That's better than the alternative of kind of return to where we were before.

But it does suggest that they can't really deal with these long-term questions.

And so they may just try to get as many exchanges done without

while kicking the corner.

I will say, like, this is a window into the fact that the current iteration of Hamas remains completely kind of nihilistic and lacking in

capacity for empathy, and you know, not just in what was done to the Bilbas family, but the way in which they managed all this.

I will also say, Tommy, like, as

you know,

seeing the

valuation of human life in the Israeli response to the treatment of this family,

what about the tens of thousands of Palestinian children who have been killed?

And

like,

there is something kind of, I just wish you could extend.

You gotta do both.

Yeah,

I wish there could be empathy in both directions

for children and civilians.

The only other things I'd flag, we have to come back to one more time.

The West Bank, you know, is like, looks like Israel's ratchet up there, but also Syria.

Like, Israel is doing a lot of shit in southern Syria.

Well, just to get a little more deep meat on that, I mean, Israeli tanks have entered the West Bank for the first time in over two decades.

This is this huge operation in Jenin that has displaced about 40,000 people.

Yeah, this is not small.

Yeah, so it's the biggest displacement in the West Bank since the 1967 war.

And Netanyahu was saying the IDF is going to stay there as long as it's needed.

And so further stoking the flames is there was this attack.

There was like three buses blew up in Tel Aviv.

No one died, thank God, but one of the unexploded bombs had a message on it about that talked about revenge for a raid in the West Bank.

And then to your point, I mean, this demand,

Netanyahu was demanding the demilitarization of southern Syria.

There's a question about whether the new Syrian army is welcome in this territory south of Damascus.

So there's a lot, as you mentioned, there's a lot up in the air here.

And

we should spend more time in the Syrian thing when we have more time.

But there's...

This is Syrian territory.

Why is the Israeli?

And nobody, the Syrian government, the new Syrian government has not said anything threatening Israel.

They've actually said they don't honor all these agreements.

I don't think anybody thinks that the Syrian military is preparing to roll into Israel.

In fact,

these are the people, yes, they're Islamists, but they're, I thought we didn't like Assad.

I thought he was part of the Axis of Resistance.

And the one thing I'd say just globally to bring this home is this is what I'm worried about with Trump: is that the complete normalization

of borders don't matter, you know, annexations don't matter,

ceasefires don't matter.

It's going to encourage the more maximalist impulses of everybody.

In this case, the Israeli government, West Bank, and Syria, Hamas, you know, in their nihilism and radicalism, which will may grow, and

everybody else around the world.

This is what a world with no rules might look like.

Yeah, I should mention before since we started recording, and now it seems like everyone's reporting that the minerals deal has been agreed to, and Zelensky's going to come to the White House on Friday to sign it.

So we'll see.

We'll see what's actually in that deal.

Yeah, finally.

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

When we come back, you're going to hear my interview with Zeke Fox about crypto, crypto scams, crypto corruption,

both domestic and international.

So stick around for that.

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Our guest today is Zeke Fox.

He's an investigative reporter for Bloomberg Business Week and the author of Number Go Up Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall.

Zeke, great to meet you.

Hey, great to meet you too.

A big fan of your work, and I wish I better understood your entire area of coverage.

So excited to talk with you today.

I wanted to start with Argentinian president Javier Millé.

We talked last week about how he promoted this meme coin called Libra.

It skyrocketed to billions of dollars in value after he tweeted about it and then crashed because a bunch of insiders dumped their shares in what is in the crypto world called a rug pull.

In the old school penny stock world, would we just call that a pump and dump?

Yeah, I mean,

pump and dump implies crime.

And in the crypto world, we've entered this like new era where, you know, we can do sort of like crime light.

It's not a pump and dump.

It's just like a rug pull.

It's all in the game is sort of their attitude.

Because on these like

new cryptocurrencies, the rug pull, it's not even a question of like, will there be a rug pull?

It's almost like a game where you're just gambling on this cryptocurrency and hoping that you'll sell out a profit.

before the inevitable crash.

Right, right, right, right.

Okay, good.

This is very helpful because you're actually anticipating one of the questions I have for you later.

So back to this Libra coin, 86% of traders who bought Libra lost money.

Total losses were something like $251 million.

Just for our listeners who aren't familiar with crypto, when we're talking about a meme coin, what does that mean?

Yeah, so the original idea with Bitcoin, which is now like 15 years old, was that it would be some sort of alternative to the US dollar.

Like it would be this decentralized digital money, and we would use it for everyday transactions.

And that totally has not come true.

Nobody is using cryptocurrency for regular stuff.

But what has happened is there's been this proliferation of new cryptocurrencies.

And

some of them are like almost like stocks and startups.

Some of them are still trying to be alternatives to real currencies.

And then

at the absolute dumbest end of the spectrum, we have meme coins.

And these are,

the original meme coin was Dogecoin.

And this was, it was created as a kind of parody of the like Bitcoin and what the creators saw as like its get rich quick mentality.

So they said, hey, we've got this new cryptocurrency.

It's represented by this picture of a dog.

We're calling it Dogecoin.

It does absolutely nothing.

We are not saying it will ever do anything in the future.

There's literally no way this could ever actually be worth money.

Now, how would you like to buy some?

And as it turned out, a lot of people did buy some, and people made tons of money on Dogecoin because this became kind of an online craze.

And it turned it was similar to the GameStop and AMC phenomenons in during the pandemic when basically traders kind of

went crazy and pumped up the value of these stocks like way beyond anything that could be justified by their real business.

And in crypto, when you've got like a good story, like, oh, Dogecoin, people got rich on Dogecoin, very quickly there's copycats.

And in the last couple of years, there have just been tons and tons of meme coins.

And what distinguishes a meme coin from other cryptocurrencies is that there is no

promise that it will ever do anything.

There's at best, this is like a zero-sum game where the early people might make money and the later people lose money.

But in reality, it's a game that is generally

rigged by the insiders and that money comes off the top.

And a lot of the gamblers think they're the smart ones who are going to get in early and win the game, but are in fact the bag holders, the ones who are getting dumped on by the insiders.

And that's like, this happens again and again.

And people just don't seem to learn their lesson.

They just seem to sort of like this

meme coin game.

Yeah, well, we all keep going to the casino too, right?

I mean, I get it on some level.

But so thank you for that very helpful explanation.

So after this happens,

the rug gets pulled.

Javier Millay pumps this cryptocurrency.

All these people lose money and they get hurt.

A bunch of his political opponents were calling for impeachments.

There was a judge who threatened to investigate him for fraud.

One of the guys behind this Libra coin said that he was paying off Millay's sister to get him to do things.

He is also associated with the Melania Trump meme coin launch, I believe.

Could you tell us just a little bit about Hayden Davis?

And like, what does it mean to be like the guy who launched some shit coin or meme coin?

And also, I mean, is it a coincidence that this same person is connected with Trump or Malay, or does that suggest some sort of connectivity between kind of right-wing figures in this crypto world?

So, Hayden Davis,

he's 28 years old.

Until recently, he was not like a big-name figure in crypto.

It's actually kind of funny.

This

Malay

meme coin got rugged so quickly, and maybe the right people did not make money on it, that the crypto community is really up in arms, and they're pointing fingers at Hayden Davis.

And what they're saying is, like, you know, all the stuff that we were doing, that's not so bad.

Look at this guy, you know, that coin dropped after like five minutes.

Like, we at least had the decency to let our coin like run for a couple days before we rug pulled it.

So it appears, and like the details of this are all just coming out now, but it appears that he has been behind not just political meme coins, but some other ones that don't involve celebrities, maybe some that involve other minor celebrities.

Basically, it seems like,

let's say you wanted to launch a meme coin, you might not know exactly how to do it.

And

you,

in asking around, would eventually be told, hey, this guy Hayden has done many successful meme coins.

He's the guy to talk to.

He'll set you up with everything.

Now, Hayden has

said

that he denies paying Mule or his sister and that he was doing this only to benefit Argentina's people and economy.

There's been all sorts of

chatter about influencers getting special deals to promote these meme coins to their followers.

There's also

on most of these meme coin launches, people who follow crypto closely can see on the blockchain that there's certain anonymous wallets that are getting in really early, even maybe before the famous person sends a tweet promoting the meme coin and then dumping quickly for big profits.

And so a lot of people are looking for meme coin insider trading.

Like, how are these people getting tipped off?

Are the people involved with creating the meme coin conspiring with other traders to make like extra profit off the launch beyond just selling worthless made-up coins to the public for real money?

Well, I mean, I guess, I, I guess, part of, just to dig in a little deeper, like if you're, and if you're looking to IPO your company and you go to an investment bank, they like do a lot of things for you, right?

They take you on a roadshow, they do a bunch of marketing, maybe some financing, right?

Like there's a whole bunch of services provided that are real.

Does someone like Hayden Davis provide real services besides like he's done it before?

Yeah, like this isn't going to go on the New York Stock Exchange, but you still need to connect with like the crypto exchanges and figure out how to set up your liquidity pool.

Now,

that said,

if you wanted to launch a meme coin, there is a website called pump.fun where you can do it in like 10 seconds.

And so if your goal is only to launch a meme coin for fun,

just you do not need any help.

But if you want to control every aspect of it and maximize your profits, you might want to talk to some weird crypto guy who's done it before and, you know, you heard made X million dollars for, you know, some sealess rapper.

Yeah.

Why, why go to pump.fun when you can find someone who will absolutely rat fuck you at the end of the day?

But I mean, along with something you said earlier, there was this assumption early on that Bitcoin was going to be this thing that allowed criminals to move money around in ways that could not be traced.

But in reality, the nature of the blockchain made it so that there's all these on-chain kind of detectives out there just on the internet who are able to track crypto transactions in great detail by just looking at the public ledger and record.

Can you just give us a kind of like a bit of the 101 on that process and whether that kind of sleuthing could be applied by someone like me who wants to know who was buying the Trump coin, for example.

Yeah.

So

with cryptocurrency,

everyone has their own wallet address.

And these wallet addresses, they don't have your name on it.

You are represented by a 30-something string of random letters and numbers.

And if you don't tell anybody your wallet address, Nobody's going to know it.

And it would be very effective for you to hide your money or to send it around the world without anybody knowing.

Where the detectives come in is that

once they do know that a wallet address is of interest, they can see every single transaction it's ever made with every other anonymous wallet address.

And so there are these crypto research firms.

The best known one is Chainalysis that have built up these really big databases.

that connect wallet addresses with people's identities.

And again, like your average person is not going to end up in this database and probably still could use this for like anonymous crime.

But just the other day,

a big crypto exchange called Bybit was hacked for $1.5 billion worth of Ether.

And so immediately, all of those wallet addresses that receive the hacked money, it's like the die pack went off in the bag of stolen cash from the bank.

Like those are now dirty wallet addresses.

And if you try and send it to another wallet wallet anonymous to clean it up, people can still see that it won't really work.

So it's there are techniques that the criminals use to try to launder their dirty crypto.

But once like your money is kind of identified as dirty crypto, it becomes hard for you to spend it.

Like you might remember RazzleCon, the terrible rapping hacker.

Tell us about them real quick.

So these guys, they previously held the record for like biggest bitcoin exchange heist it turned out it was this couple that lived in a financial district the woman went by razzle con

and she had actually recorded like epically terrible raps in which she talked about like her social engineering skills um

so

they got caught they're i think awaiting prison right now um but they

They stole Bitcoin that at the time they were caught was worth like three or five billion billion dollars.

Um, but they were only ever able to spend a tiny fraction of it because that like,

you know, metaphorical die pack had gone off.

Um, so in the case of like

a Trump coin,

right now, I'll give you an example.

There's a wallet that acquired a million dollars of Trump coin.

possibly before he ever tweeted about it.

And so

that person sold the Trump coin and made about $180 million in profit.

Wow.

And

for me and my colleagues did some digging on this.

Even though you could see this on the blockchain, we weren't able to identify who this person was.

A researcher on Twitter who goes by bubble maps was able to track down through like the person had transacted with some sort of known wallet at some point.

They identified this trader as an anonymous person who goes by Nassim.

And Naseem claims he did not have inside information.

But we still don't know who Nassim is.

So, like this crypto tracing only kind of goes so far.

Interesting, man.

You mentioned this, this news that broke last week of this North Korean hack of and theft of $1.5 billion worth of crypto from this Dubai-based crypto exchange.

In addition to this being just, you know, a massive theft of digital assets, they also somehow managed to steal from crypto wallets that are supposed to be the most secure, right?

Can you just explain what was so shocking about this theft?

Yeah.

So

the exchange said

that they had been holding this crypto in what's called a multi-sig cold wallet.

And

what this means is that it's a little like in the

movie when you need like three people's key to activate the nuclear missile.

These multi-sig wallets will not,

you can't send crypto out of them unless two or more of the people who control the wallet successfully authenticate themselves.

You would think it would be very hard for hackers to get that money out of there.

I don't think it's been revealed

how they did it actually.

In the past, some of these hacks that appeared pretty sophisticated technically, it's turned out that the hackers used social engineering.

Like they, as RazzleCon rapped in one song, spearfish your password, all your funds transferred.

so

I

like

the multi-sig makes it harder, but you would right, right?

If I, if I get two people to open my junk email and install malware on their computer, right, I might be able to steal both of their passwords and transfer this crypto out.

Um,

I mean, it's the amount of money that's there to be stolen is so big that it justifies like a huge amount of effort by these hackers.

And so far with these crypto exchanges, it's just with each of them, so many of them have gotten hacked over the years.

I mean, going back to the original big Bitcoin exchange,

Gox, yes.

Yeah.

It's just

such a temptation that you've got this pile of, you know, billions of

zeros.

Yeah.

Sitting around.

By the way, I regret to inform you that Razzle Khan has been sentenced to 18 months for her her theft of 119,000 Bitcoins.

Wow, that's a lot of money in today's terms.

Holy shit.

Well, another person I wanted to ask you about that is huge in the crypto world is a guy named Justin Sun.

Can you just explain who he is and his connections to the Trump orbit?

So Justin Sun

has been around in crypto since like 2017.

which is a long time

in an industry which seemingly seemingly turns over every two years as like a new set of players is becomes billionaires and then is sent to prison um

he

founded what's called tron which is it's uh one of the most popular blockchains used for like tons of transactions so justin's son is being sued by the sec over the launch of this Tron blockchain and its Tron token.

Now, the SEC is, until recently at least, was suing pretty much everybody in crypto.

And a lot of these cases are just based on the idea that these cryptocurrencies are

unregistered securities.

Like these sales should have followed the SEC rules, but they didn't.

And the Trump administration has said, we're going to drop that type of case.

But the Tron case is a little bit different because the SEC also alleged fraud in the offering, like manipulative trading to dupe the public into investing in this Tron token sale.

So, Justin's son has said that's not true.

He's fighting the case, but recently he did a little something that

might have been intended to help his cause.

So, President Trump now has two or three crypto ventures, depending on how you count.

But his first one was called World Liberty Financial.

He announced this in September.

And the pitch was truly unappealing.

It was some sort of vague crypto platform.

But so with a meme coin,

you don't say it's connected to anything.

You're just like, this is going to be fun.

Buy my meme coin.

People get it.

From the community.

Yeah, fine.

But with World Liberty, they were like, this is going to be a crypto platform.

There's something real here.

We're not really going to say what it is yet.

Also, if you buy the coins, you're not allowed to sell them and you don't get any profit ever.

So

this.

What a deal.

Yes.

And if you buy a dollar's worth of coins, 75 cents of that is paid to the Trumps as a licensing fee.

It was looking like the sale would kind of fail and maybe this thing wouldn't launch.

And Justin's son stepped stepped in.

He bought $30 million of World Liberty coins.

And

he later increased that and bought another

40 or 45 million, I think.

So he kind of rescued the project and was made an advisor to the project.

And a few weeks after his purchase, he was at a crypto conference in Abu Dhabi.

And there he was meeting with Eric Trump, meeting with Steve Witcoff, Trump's Middle East envoy, who's also one of the founders of this World Liberty crypto project.

So it's really like an amazing conflict of interest.

Like here's a guy who's got a serious fraud case before the SEC.

He's got a huge interest in how Trump decides crypto should be regulated.

And he's able.

to just give Trump more than $50 million

and immediately secure a meeting with people who are close to Trump.

Now, I should say he denies that his investment in World Liberty has anything to do with

getting out of trouble, but he also says the SEC case is very unfair.

Very unfair.

Yeah, and so what you described there was you have this failing World Liberty financial offering.

This guy comes in, he puts, I think you said $75 million into the project, rescues the project, but 75% of that money gets skimmed right off the top for the Trump family.

So what's that, Like 56 million or so

directly into Trump's coffers.

The other crypto project we have that we know about for Trump are the Trump coin and the Melania coin.

I think the Times the other day, or maybe it was Coinbase, somebody reported that as of a couple weeks ago, Trump had made over $100 million

in fees from the sale of the Trump coin, right?

Because so they might be holding on to their Trump meme coin stash.

And I think they own something like, what, 80% or something like that?

But every time you buy and sell they get a fee right but that's about right yeah like trump is still sitting on on paper like tens of billions of dollars worth of trump meme coin he could not really monetize that because if he started to sell it would drive the price down but as long as this sort of keeps going and people are uh trading it he can collect fees on it um World Liberty has actually,

since Justin Sun's investment in the success of the Trump meme coin, it's kind of turned around.

And

by my calculation, I think that Trump has made the Trumps have made

at least 200 million off that one.

That's it's remarkable.

I mean, I think what I think the take-home I think I just wanted folks to get out of this interview is a little bit of understanding about the crypto world, but also how much money Trump is making personally off of crypto.

What an unbelievable avenue the crypto world is for corruption and for steering money into his pockets at times in ways that are that can be secret.

And then there's just the broader fact that he's the president of the United States and he's going to make an enormous number of incredibly consequential decisions in the next four years about how crypto is regulated.

So it just seems like this just couldn't

be more fucked up just in terms of a setup for corruption and abuse and fraud at the highest level of the U.S.

government.

But I mean, here we are, I guess.

Well, Zeke, thank you so much for explaining all this to me.

I'm laughing so that I don't cry, in part because I didn't buy cryptocurrency at any point along the last decade.

And that was a real mistake by me.

But thank you so much for explaining it to all of us.

I appreciate it.

You're welcome.

And it's not too late to pick up some Trump coin or world liberty.

You're right.

You're right.

I always hope for a better tomorrow.

Thanks, Zeke.

Thank you.

Thanks again to Zeke Fox for joining the show and talk to you guys next week.

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