Michael Weiss and Jonathan Cohn: Animal House at the Pentagon

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All right, everybody, we got a double dip for you today.

We are going to get nerdy.

We've got my friend Michael Weiss on foreign policy and Jonathan Cohn talking about the breaking news happening on the Hill with regards to,

you know, whatever we're calling the bill, the reconciliation bill, the big turd, the big ugly.

You know how it is.

So I'm excited.

Stick around for both.

Up next, Michael Weiss.

Hello and welcome to the Bullword podcast.

I'm your host, Tim Miller.

We are welcoming back one of our faves.

He's the editor of The Insider, which just won an Emmy on Wednesday, along with 60 Minutes, which still existed last year, and Der Spiegel for their joint investigation into Havana syndrome, which is associated with brain injuries and such.

We're going to talk about that in a second.

It's Michael Weiss.

What's up, man?

Congrats.

Did you get the hardware?

Were you involved to have an actual hardware?

I was talking to the Spiegel guys today, and I said, you know, we don't get to keep the statue, but at least we get the data point on our Wikipedia pages, which in this day and age, you know, I'll take it, right?

You should get a fake statue, I think.

I would get an imitation

gold wrapped in chocolate or chocolate wrapped in gold.

Yeah, that's the statue I'll get.

Yeah, it's cool.

No, we didn't, I had no idea we were even nominated until very late last week and then thought, eh, whatever.

And

Michael Ray, the producer of that segment, messaged us last night and it was just a photo of him holding the Emmy.

So I'm like, oh, okay.

It's a nice way to come home from Berlin.

The birds are awake.

They're congratulating you.

Oh, you can hear them now?

Yeah, the version.

No, that's good.

We had them covered.

The listeners love your little menagerie in the background.

It brings a little joy in the darkness.

I've got to do one thing, though.

Can we just do, we have so much news to cover, but since you got the Emmy for Havana syndrome coverage, I'm like, I'm a little bit of a tin pot conspiracy theorist on Havana syndrome.

So can you give me the one paragraph on it?

Where are you at on it?

Well, I'll give you some news, actually, which hasn't been reported yet, which is even better than the

one-line anti-conspiracy theory pricey.

As the Biden administration was turning off the lights in the White House, they had a meeting at the NSC at which Mahar Vattar, I think the number three guy under Sullivan, was there with some other members of the National Security Council, invited five

very

well-known within the community, the intelligence community, victims of AHI, including Mark Palmeropoulos, who's a good friend of mine.

Love Mark.

Yep.

A guy called, who's in the media as Adam, or known as Patient Zero.

He was one of the first victims hit in Havana, Cuba.

And the NSC meeting, they were brought into the situation room and told, you were right,

quote unquote.

Really?

Yes, and I can tell you not only that, you were right meaning you were hit by a directed energy device.

This is not some sociogenic or psychosomatic phenomenon.

There is evidence that has now come through to the IC, including New Collection, which substantiates the fact that possibly a foreign state actor, no points for guessing which one is responsible for doing this to American servicemen and women abroad.

And more to the point, some of the members of the National Security Council at that meeting drafted an op-ed for the Washington Post, which was cleared and ready to go.

The title of it was We Believe Them, them referring to the victims.

Wow.

And at the last minute, Jake Sullivan spiked that op-ed from being published.

I think Jake wants to go on the pods.

That'd be great.

You'd have to ask him.

Yeah, there's more to come on this,

including things that are kind of kicking around in insider editorial chats, new evidence that we've compiled.

I mean, our investigation took well over a year, and we basically attributed or implicated, I should say, I'm going to be very conservative in my judgments here, my intelligence assessments, because I know we're going to be talking about that in a minute,

GRU Unit 29155, which is sort of the Russians' assassination and sabotage squad.

They were responsible for poisoning Sergei and Yulia Skripol, blowing up ammunition and weapons depots across Europe as far far back as 2011 in Bulgaria and then the Czech Republic a few years later.

And we just exposed them as having had a hacker department that nobody knew about, which was pioneering the kind of hybrid warfare schemes that are now just everywhere and doing it in Ukraine.

So not only hacking into Ukrainian critical infrastructure networks, but recruiting fifth columnists on Telegram, paying them money to firebomb the home of Ukrainian minister or daub graffiti on the walls of Kyiv, basically suggesting that the government is collapsing and the only salvation is Russia.

They were doing this before the full-scale invasion.

So 29155, their remit is explicitly kinetic.

They're not doing pure espionage.

So if they come to town, they might be there to do reconnaissance and they might be there to kind of get a lay of the land, but that means something is going to go bump in the night, right?

So that itself was very indicative to us that if they're in the places where these victims were were hit and we we managed to find two victims who could positively identify known members of unit 29155 in the vicinity where they were one was frankfurt germany in 2014 the other was tbilisi georgia uh just a couple years ago that indicates that there's there's some there there so put a pin in this because i assess with medium confidence that there is going to be more coming to light both at the governmental level but also in the media level in the near future.

Huh.

All right.

Well, we keep an eye on this.

I'm disappointed.

I'm in the market for a conspiracy theory.

I can really, you know, kind of just dig into because conspiracy theories serve you well in the podcast space.

You know, I mean, Joe Rogan is crushing.

You know, there's a lot of people who do very well there.

And unfortunately, I'm, I'm, I,

I kind of, I'm kind of a conventional wisdom type guy, you know, I think which is limiting my ceiling a little bit.

So I'm in the market for conspiracy theories, but I'm happy

for that reporting and for Mark.

It was not so much that I disbelieved.

There was a, I feel like, an extended group.

Like, there was the core five people who were like, something was wrong here.

And then there was

people who were like, I think I have it too.

And that, I think, is what led to me to the tinpot conspiracy.

And believe me, you know, coming at this blindly, if all I had to go on were the messages I received in my Proton mail since I published that investigation, I would definitely be more inclined to suggest that this is tinfoil hat material.

You know, Mossad is zapping me with death rays in the streets of Chicago, this kind of thing.

But I just want to emphasize: not everybody who thinks they've got AHI, which stands for anomalous health incidents, has got it.

The subset we're looking at, it's very small, half a dozen victims.

We have examined their medical records.

They were all diagnosed with traumatic brain injuries.

We have done extensive interviews with them, including with Mark, know their backgrounds, know where they worked, know what they were doing, even if they were under diplomatic cover.

nudge nudge.

And these are not people that just simply concocted a fairy tale, you know, in order to, for what, to maybe eventually down the line, get the U.S.

government to pay them $100,000 when, you know, if they're high-ranking CIA officers abroad, when they retire, they stand to make orders of magnitude more than that going into the private sector.

And many of these people were so badly hurt that they became medically retired.

They cannot function day to day in office jobs.

Some of them wear weighted vests because they have vertigo.

Some of them, including Adam, patient zero, is legally blind in one eye.

Some of them have service animals to get around.

I mean, it's not a joke.

I got to get Mark on the pod now.

I owe him one.

I got to get Mark Mark on the pod.

You should get Mark on the pod, yeah.

I mean,

he's been doing yeoman's work kind of advocating on this issue for a long time.

And, you know, as I said, don't take my word for it.

Biden's NSC.

You were right.

Wow.

And he tweeted that, actually, Mark, last night, alluding to this meeting that was had, which nobody was meant to report on, but there you go.

All right.

Breaking news on the Bork pod.

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All right.

Speaking of Intel, as you referenced earlier, I think that's the main thing to talk about today.

Following the attack on the Iranian nuclear program last week, Trump comes out immediately the day after and says it's going to obliterate it.

It's done.

Hagstath echoes him.

Kane was a little more judicious.

Now, as the days pass, we have dueling reports out there, DA is a report.

So before we get into kind of the meta of all of it, as somebody who

has to work through all this stuff as part of your day job,

what do you assess to be what we think is the truth of the situation at this point?

And the truth might be that we just don't know.

I don't know.

What do you assess is the truth?

I mean, look, I think it's likely that they inflicted severe damage on the physical facilities of Iran's nuclear program.

If you watched the chairman of Joint Chiefs Kane today, his press conference, which followed Hegset's sort of, you know,

we've got a highlight reel from Pete's coming up here in a second.

I mean, it's just like, it's like Animal House has taken over the Pentagon.

It's great.

No, Kane actually went through a very meticulous point-by-point

with video PowerPoint explaining how these massive ordnance penetrators work and why it would not necessarily reflect the extent of the damage underground looking at satellite footage alone, right?

There is very all likelihood that all the centrifuges at Ford O were completely wiped out.

I mean, these things spin so fast, they are in such a sensitive environment, that even taking out the power generators, this is David Albright's hypothesis,

American physicist who studies this stuff more closely than almost anybody, even taking out the power generators and literally forcing the centrifuges to stop spinning at such a high speed, eventually what happens is they hit these resonances and then they crash against the wall and are destroyed, right?

So it's very likely, I would say, Fordot has been damaged to the point almost of disrepair.

It's not operational.

However, the things that we don't know and the things that are going to take time to kind of piece together are, you know, where is the highly enriched uranium that even J.D.

Vance alluded to possibly having gone missing?

One thesis is that it is actually buried under the rubble in Fordeau or in

other nuclear facilities that were similarly bombed, not just by the Americans, but also by the Israelis

before that 10-day-long campaign.

And a lot of this is going to depend on signals intelligence.

So what the U.S.

and its allies, including the Israelis, are collecting from the Iranian side.

Keep in mind, the Iranians are doing their own battle damage assessment.

They don't necessarily know how badly their program has been degraded or destroyed.

So this is all happening in real time.

And you have Donald Trump now in a

sort of

desperate mode to get the intelligence community to ratify his sort of shoot from the hip, shall we say,

bombastic comments

about Fordeau being completely, quote, obliterated.

He's coming out and actually disclosing classified intelligence, again, compromising the Israelis the way he did in his first term in that famous meeting with Lavrov in the Oval Office about

an imminent ISIS plot, which was uncovered by the Israelis and passed to the Americans, which Trump then told the Russians about.

He said that the Israelis have assets in place on the ground in Iran.

Now, that's not such a surprise or mystery.

How is it that, for instance,

I've been able to figure that out from New Orleans?

Yeah, for sure.

You know, I mean, the Israelis kind of came out and said we had a three-story, or the Iranians, I think, came out rather and said there's a three-story drone warehouse in southern Tehran operated by Mossad.

Well, how the hell did that get built without people in place, right?

So you've got now Barney, the the chief of Mossad, saying that there were, quote, hundreds of Mossad operatives on the ground who will remain in Iran for the foreseeable future, which is also kind of a bold statement.

Designed to psychologically vitiate the Iranians, make them go crazy with counterintelligence and paranoia, which they're already doing.

They're arresting hundreds of Iranians.

They accuse of espionage.

I'm sure some of those people, most of those people, in fact, are probably innocent.

But the point is, there was such a high level of infiltration by the Israeli side that there will be, not in the next hour or even days, but weeks and months to come, a much better assessment of the state of this program.

But the fact remains, these massive ordinance penetrators were built for a single purpose, which was to take out Fordot in the event that the United States had a military option that it was going to prosecute in Iran.

So I am a little bit skeptical of people who are saying, well, you know, Trump is saying X, therefore Y must be true.

No, we find ourselves in a situation, and I tweeted about this.

This is a guy who has spent a decade plus

trying to convince the American electorate that the U.S.

intelligence community is fatally compromised, deceitful, ideologically motivated, and nothing that comes out of their mouth can be trusted.

He would rather take the word of Vladimir Putin about what the Russian special services are doing than listen to his own CIA, NSA, and ODNI.

Now all of a sudden he finds himself in a situation where he needs this intelligence community to come out and confirm what is probably true, that the U.S.

military inflicted a great deal of damage on Iran's nuclear program.

But lo and behold, his electorate, or at least the MAGA constituency, thinks everything out of the IC is bullshit.

And here you have Tulsi Gabbard, who was famously anti-intervention, testified before Congress that Iran was not that close to developing a nuclear weapon.

Its program had advanced, but it was still a ways away.

Now completely reversing herself, basically for job security reasons.

I mean, mean, she was.

And she's been banned from, there's a Senate hearing on this today

where they're sending Hag Seth and not Tulsi.

Right.

So, I mean, you know, can you blame people for being a little bit skeptical that maybe she's not telling the truth?

And also, you know, John Ratcliffe, the director of CIA, puts out a statement, official CIA statement, saying, you know, this program has been severely damaged.

Okay.

But then he personally tweets from his own Twitter account, Donald Trump deserves the Nobel Peace Prize.

I mean, this is, you know, North Korean levels of, you know, lickspittle personality cult behavior coming from professionals whose one job is to be completely dispassionate and analytically rigorous, right?

Now they are becoming PR

agents.

Yes, exactly.

So, you know, this is the frustration, those of us who've been saying this is actually how intelligence gathering works, as opposed to what crazies on the far left and the far right have been saying, whether it's about Russian interference in our elections or hacking operations or indeed Havana syndrome and the stuff that, you know, I've spent my career working on.

Now we find ourselves saying, well, you know, this is your bed that you made for yourselves.

Now you'll have to lie in it.

No one's going to believe a word out of your mouth.

Here's a question, and I was talking about this with JVL last night, is

the other element to this is now,

what do you make of this, actually?

I'll just put this question.

Are the U.S.

and Israel now kind of at cross purposes about the Intel assessment?

Because frankly, you know, I've been talking to a lot of military experts.

I'm like, the Iranian nuclear program could not be completely eliminated just from air campaigns.

And that was just the convention, that was just an assessment that everybody had like across the aisle.

Like you could injure it, you could delay it, right?

Like, but you couldn't obliterate it just from an air campaign.

And so Israel, who has an acute security interest here, in the way that we don't, even if you're, even Ted Cruz is like on Fox, you know, like, they might bomb Los Angeles.

Okay, I don't actually don't think that's that's from a movie.

That's not real.

So, Israel, which has an acute security interest in making sure they don't continue to expand the program, will be incentivized to want to potentially do more

military action as new information arises.

Meanwhile, now, in order to

run cover for Trump's bombast, like the U.S.

and our interest is now towards concocting intelligence to make it seem like

everything everything is dandy.

Doesn't that eventually create some issues?

What do you think of that?

Yeah, it does.

And it's not even that the IC is necessarily concocting scenarios.

This might be credible.

This might be rooted in very good human and SIGINT, but nobody's going to believe it because it is being framed as just a public relations exercise.

The reason this is happening, And let's be clear,

the Defense Intelligence Agency, which I'm being generous when I say this, is sort of considered the red-headed stepchild of the intelligence community.

I mean, there's a reason Mike Flynn was the head of DIA at one point, right?

They came out with an early preliminary assessment, graded, quote, low confidence, that said that actually, you know, we kind of nicked it, but we only set the program back a couple of months.

CNN, New York Times, Washington Post, they all ran with this, as any reporter covering national security would do.

If I got my hands on a document or I was read by a source, this is an an IC finding, I would report it because it's newsworthy.

It's in the public interest.

And to the credit of these journalists, because Trump is now going after them, hammer and tong, demanding Natasha Bertrand be fired from CNN, they did frame it correctly.

They said, look, this is a low-intelligence assessment.

It's early days.

There's going to be more as BDAs come in, et cetera, et cetera.

But what happens is, and a lot of this falls to sub-editors and just the nature of a 24-hour digitally driven news cycle, you read a headline that says, U.S.

Intel says, you know, Iran program still doing dandy, you know, not knocked out, just a few months.

And, you know, to the layman, that sounds like, well, this has just been a complete anticlimactic disaster.

I mean, we went to war with Iran and didn't even accomplish our objectives.

No, again, asterisk, asterisks, asterisk.

It all depends on what comes later.

Now, the Israelis, who, as we've discussed, have a very extensive and sophisticated intelligence gathering program such that they have infiltrated the Iranian regime.

And I would rate the Iranian intelligence service probably second in the region, at least up until recently.

You know, they have two interests now.

One, what are the facts?

What actually happened?

Because as you point out, this is an overriding national security concern for themselves.

Two, how can we help craft the media narrative to back up Donald Trump and what he's trying to do, which is to suggest that a military option was successful?

And it's very difficult to parse, you know,

the facts from the bullets.

When we're getting facts and when we're getting facts, when we're getting Donald Trump.

Exactly.

exactly.

I mean, a lot of this will come out eventually.

It also is kind of one of the weaknesses of having just like an insecure, bloviating idiot as the president, right?

Where it's like, and we're going to get into this in the NATO stuff, right?

If like countries didn't feel like they had to rub Donald Trump's belly to make him feel good to get America to be nice to them, then maybe we would be getting more accurate, straight information from countries that are our allies rather than sucking.

Yeah, and you know, Trump has also made himself a hostage to fortune.

So he goes in with a 30-minute military operation, comes out.

I mean, he's, you know, I know everyone wants to call him daddy, but if anybody, if you should be calling daddy, it's the B-2 bombers.

I mean, I've never seen such sort of pornographic exaltation in military hardware in my life.

I mean, everybody's like, oh my God, these planes are amazing.

They're built for this purpose.

And they're done.

And the pilots, oh, the pilots, you know, they're like pole dancing inside the cockpit of the fucking plane.

I mean, it's just, it's obscene, right?

Okay, fine.

So he gets his bright, shiny moment, and then he's like, mission accomplished, we're all done here.

Well, what if it wasn't accomplished, at least to the satisfaction of what he believes is necessary?

Does that mean you're going to do it again?

And thus contradict everything you've just said?

And it puts the Israelis in a bind too, because if they feel there is a need for further military action, either renew

the aerial campaign or a ground operation, I mean, their plan B going forward from even before this, I mean, they planned for this for 20 years, Their plan B in the event that the United States did not do what it's just done was send in a commando team with sufficient air cover, which the Israelis had established with air supremacy after 36 hours of bombing Iran, and try to take out Fordeau from within.

So, you know, you mine the place, you go inside, you just blow the whole thing up.

If they have to do that,

then again, nobody will ever believe a word out of the U.S.

government.

The IC will be completely and utterly discredited.

Again, except maybe this leaker from the DIA or the NSC, whoever, or probably more likely a congressional staffer who got the DIA assessment, who leaked it.

Up will be down, black will be white.

And the conspiracy theory that Trump has been pushing for so many years will sort of become a self-fulfilling prophecy, right?

The IC is now fatally compromised.

And this is going to have detrimental effects not just on Israel, Iran, but on other things like Ukraine, Russia, China, Taiwan, shenanigans that the the North Koreans could get up to.

I mean, you name it, right?

So

he's sort of put himself in a box here, and it's going to be very difficult for him to struggle his way out.

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You've referenced it now as, I believe, animal house and pole dancing.

And so I think we just got to give the people what they want.

Pete Eggseth had a press conference this morning that Donald Trump called one of the greatest, most professional, most confirming, in quotes, unclear why, press conferences he has ever seen.

And so I want folks to judge for themselves a little bit.

Here are a couple of clips from Pete Hag Sat this morning.

How many stories have been written about how hard it is to, I don't know, fly a plane for 36 hours?

Has MSNBC done that story?

Has Fox?

Have we done the story how hard that is?

Have we done it two or three times?

Let me read the bottom line here.

President Trump directed the most complex and secretive military operation in history.

And it was a resounding success, resulting in a ceasefire agreement and the end of the 12-day war.

It's like a combo between an executive producer at Fox

yelling at his underlings combined with Sean Spicer, like a little Sean Spicer.

What's also funny is in Kane's presentation, you know, I mean, this is a very serious guy, as his accomplished military officer.

Despite the fact that Trump refuses to call him by anything except a name.

Amazing King.

Well, he calls himself that, to be fair.

But

you can see the desperation for that sort of cinematic Hollywood quality because he goes, and I just let it be known that in the Air Force base in Missouri where these planes took off, there is no volleyball tournaments and no football on the beach.

It's like, okay, so now we're talking about Top Gun,

which, if you recall, I mean, it was basically the greatest product ever produced, soft power exercise by the military-industrial complex.

Not Air Force, by the way, Navy.

But so, like, you know, they wanted this thing to end with, you know, a shirtless Val Kilmer, high-fiving Tom Cruise on a beach saying, I'll be your wingman any day, man.

You know, like, that's how this is supposed to go.

It's all TV.

It's all spectacle.

It's all pageantry.

And people are like, why is he beating up on BB?

Why is he so upset on the tarmac headed off to the Hague NATO summit a couple days ago?

you know, saying the Israelis and the Iranians don't know what the fuck they're doing.

It's because

he's messing with the script.

This was not the Hollywood ending, right?

Don't screw with my ceasefire, my perfect beautiful ceasefire.

You know, season two's cliffhanger is not yet.

Like, don't get ahead of yourselves here.

This is a guy, look, he's a product of television and the tabloid press, controlling his own narrative since he was, you know, an

outer borough real estate developer desperate to make the show in Manhattan, right?

For him, geopolitics and foreign affairs is the same, is no different.

If it's not sort of tidally written up, like a Netflix series, it's just, it's not worth it.

So anybody who's going to spoil his pageantry is going to come down, he's going to come down extremely hard on it.

Be it the Israelis, the Iranians, or whomever.

You know, I was young.

Bluto, what were the characters' names in Animal House?

I wasn't really a big Animal House man.

Blue Tarski?

Blue Tarski, I think.

Blue Tarski, yeah.

I've watched that movie so many times, and it's actually based on my alma mater, so I should know this.

Okay, well, here's Blue Tarski.

That's a big fail for you, Michael Weiss.

Here's Blue Tarski.

One more clip from Blue Tarski.

He's yelling at his former, I guess, maybe

a sorority, a sorority girl that didn't give him the attention he wanted.

Let's listen.

There were satellite photos that showed more than a dozen trucks there two days in advance.

Are you certain none of that highly enriched uranium was moved?

Of course we're watching every single aspect, but Jennifer, you've been about the worst.

The one who misrepresents the most intentionally

what the president says.

I'm familiar.

I've been a very word about the ventilation shafts on Saturday night.

And in fact, I was the first to describe the B-2 bombers, the refueling, the entire mission with great accuracy.

Jennifer Griffin throwing down at her former colleague there.

It's

a Fox News reporter, superb reporter, by the way, who's had to push back against her own.

Maybe the only good reporter left over there, honestly.

And he's attacking her.

I mean, again, it's playing the man, or in this case, the woman, not the ball, as they say, right?

You know,

if you work in government, especially if you work in the Pentagon and you're waging war, which usually tends to go sideways a bit, or maybe more than a bit, you have to put up with

these sort of critical and in some cases, severely skeptical questions.

And this guy just doesn't want to hear it.

Again, where's my high five on the beach, Jennifer?

You know, I just spiked the ball.

You know, where's my, hey, bro, good shot.

Like, that's what this guy is desperate for.

He doesn't want to hear, gee, maybe, you know, some highly enriched uranium went skedaddling in the back of Toyota Hiluxes at some point.

It's just, yeah, not the script.

He's very emotional.

Yes.

He's very, he's very emotional and defensive and sensitive.

We do honor the pilots here at the Bulwark.

They did great work and we do honor our servicemen and women.

I want to offer you just kind of the biggest picture view of this.

I've got some feedback yesterday from a valued confidant.

I've been deeply torn about the whole thing, you know, and at times I've been wanting to, to look.

I don't, I don't like the Ayatollah.

I don't want Iran to have a nuclear weapon.

I don't particularly think it was an acute national security concern for us in the short term.

It was like an urgent matter.

But at the same time, I've been, you know, even though Pete doesn't want to admit it, like they've been getting credit.

Like people have been, you know, saying this was a good mission, heck of a job.

The feedback I got was that like, really, in the grand scheme of things, like, yes, it was successful.

Like the bombs, like the narrow element of did bombs hit building like and did the building have bad material was kind of a yes that's good yeah like is israel safer than it was two weeks ago yes which is good that said

looked at it from another way it wasn't completely successful and it can't be like you can't just take out iran's nuclear system from the air they lied about it right off the top israel did most of the heavy lifting here and like we did the one thing they couldn't do there wasn't really a great threat to the us acutely and now you could argue maybe the threats are higher.

You're already seeing this.

They're having to take some of their immigration goons at the FBI and SIA and redirect them back towards terror threats.

Trump doesn't have any interest in the long-term goals that might make the region safer.

He doesn't want freedom for people in the Middle East.

He's happy to have other autocrats running places.

And so at that biggest level,

Like, fuck this.

No, it was not a success.

What would you say to that framing of the situation?

Again, you know,

my objective here has been very narrow, which is I want to follow the reporting and I don't want to speculate or even offer any kind of editorial comment.

I don't know if this is going to pay off in the long run.

And nobody does.

And the thing that bugs me is everybody who is extremely sure that Israel and the United States were not going to go to war with Iran, and then they did, then became extremely sure exactly what Iran was going to do in response, right?

And, you know, I was hearing doomsday scenarios, World War III is going to break out.

And what did the Iranians do?

You know, they rocketed our air base in Qatar, giving the Qataris and the United States advance notice.

So we had cleared out most of our personnel and most of our hardware, and everything was intercepted.

It was a damn squib exercise, designed basically to show their people to safe face internally, because this regime has been, I mean, eviscerated.

I think that the one takeaway I think I'm okay in making now is

if there is a positive outcome of all of this, it has to demonstrate that a regime that has been built up both in its own internal mythology and, frankly speaking, in the minds of Western military analysts and subject matter experts for decades as an impregnable fortress, an empire in the remaking.

Qasim Suleimani, and I was susceptible to this too.

Qasim Suleimani, he was a superb intelligence officer and military commander, and he did build an incredibly effective proxy apparatus across the region.

His death, which happened, again, you know, Donald Trump bombed him and took him out when nobody thought anybody, the United States, would ever take out the Quds force commander, I think led was the first domino to fall and to show that actually Iran is quite hollow and it's quite weak.

And obviously October 7th and the sort of multi-theater operations that the Israelis have waged, not just against Hamas and Gaza, but most specifically Hezbollah in Lebanon.

I mean, they neutered Hezbollah

to such a degree that Hezbollah came out repeatedly and said, We will not defend Iran in this war, because they did not come to our rescue when Israel assassinated Hassan Nasrallah, Secretary General, the entire upper echelon command structure of Hezbollah, and then famously with the Pager Mossad military intelligence pager explosions, you know, took off the balls of the middle cadres of Hezbollah.

So Israel has, in the last two and a half years, essentially chipped away at the IRGC's power projection project and really demonstrated in a way that the emperor has no clothes.

Now, that doesn't mean that Iran is not a threat, and there's lots of things they can do.

Yeah.

And just really quick on the Israel thing, though, because I guess that is the point I was trying to make, is that like, what really this was, was Donald Trump watching his stories and like seeing that Israel had been very successful at this.

Correct.

And now coming coming in and being like,

I want a bit of the credit now.

Right.

And it's kind of like, well.

Coming back to the sort of Hollywood

or TV metaphor, I mean,

he saw a fantastic season one series and he wanted an executive producer credit on it.

And the Israelis,

their purpose in going to war with Iran, I wrote a piece about this.

It was one, first and foremost, to try and degrade or destroy Iran's nuclear program, but also to take out their ballistic missile capacity, eliminate all air defense systems, which they've more or less done.

I've seen different projections or assessments that anywhere between 50% and two-thirds of Iran's missile launchers have been destroyed in this 12-day campaign.

That's huge, right?

Because that's the other, their conventional capability was seen to be quite formidable up until recently.

But the second order priority for the Israelis was to telegraph to the United States,

Come on in, the water's fine.

You can do this too.

You know, we've cleared the path for you.

That worked.

Which is basically what what worked.

It was so tantalizing a prospect to Donald Trump that all he would have to do is drop half a dozen bombs and go home that

they played him sort of magically in that way.

We'll see if they can keep doing that.

I think that I guess that's my point, is that that prospect becomes potentially a little more challenging depending on what happens inside Iran in the next little bit.

Yeah, but look, I just want to also emphasize, like, you know, I'm kind of with you on, well, what is the immediate threat to the United States with the state of Iran's nuclear program as it was prior to two weeks ago?

One thing I would push back on is, and we get this wrong a lot, a lot of the commentariat in the United States sees Iran as the best friend we just haven't made yet, right?

Not much like a lot of the commentariat in the United States sees Russia as the best friend we just haven't made yet.

I just want to remind people, Iran has done some pretty horrific things, including, I mean, one of the IRGC generals that the Israelis assassinated was in charge of the Hezbollah project to blow up Jews in Argentina in 1994, the EMIA Cultural Center bombing.

It's pretty horrible, right?

I mean, they were also in charge.

I was probably old, so it's probably easy to target him.

He's probably walking pretty slow.

Yeah, a lot of these guys are, you know, sort of graying manes of the Islamic Revolution, right?

But they're hard to replace for that reason, because they have so much experience.

Leave aside what they've done to Israelis, to Jews, to Americans, what they've done to other people in the region.

including Sunni Arabs in Syria.

I mean, without Hezbollah on the ground, Bash al-Assad's bacon, I mean, he would have been cooked in 2023, 2024, right?

So Iran came to his rescue on the ground.

Russia came to his rescue in the air.

You see how that worked out in the long term after October 7th, when, again, Israel completely destroyed Hezbollah, ran bombing campaigns in Galore for 10 years inside Syrian air space.

Again, another piece of conventional wisdom was the Syrian regime has the most formidable air defenses in the region.

If you want to make an Israeli military officer laugh, tell him about Syria's formidable air defenses.

That was their backyard for 10 years.

And, you know, internally inside Iran, what they do to their own people is pretty horrific, right?

So

I shed no tears for seeing IRGC personnel wiped out.

I shed no tears for seeing Iranian ballistic missiles destroyed.

I think, yes, a lot of sort of variables and...

to coin a phrase, unknown unknowns going forward.

But again, it is a very useful exercise, especially for intelligence gatherers, to see how Iran is able or unable to fight a conventional campaign against a peer adversary, or in this case, I would say a much more superior adversary, which is Israel.

And I think that was part of this sort of exercise here, for the Israelis to demonstrate to the world, this is not a powerful, strong regime anymore.

They are at the most vulnerable, strategically at their weakest that they have ever been since 1979.

And, you know, okay, maybe that was worth the price of admission alone.

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Move on to NATO, really quick.

Um, with the NATO meetings, there are two things I want to talk about.

One is related to this in the Middle East.

One of my takeaways, and I understand that there's not an unlimited number of patriots in the world, patriot missiles.

There are hopefully an unlimited number of people who have patriotism in their heart, but not an unlimited number of patriot missiles in the world.

But watching how easily we rebuffed the fake Iranian attack in Qatar and Bahrain,

my initial response was, again, it's like, well,

weren't those resources better served in Ukraine?

Like, why aren't we helping Ukraine more?

Like, why aren't we helping Ukraine more?

Like, that, like, Russia seems to me to be a more acute threat than Iran.

Neither of them are particularly, but, but it's, there's a war happening in Europe on the European mainland where Russia took out a passenger train earlier this week and a hospital and a school.

And at NATO, Trump, I guess, expressed,

it's always like, Trump expresses openness to everything.

If you're ever like, will you consider this?

He says yes, no matter whether it's a good thing or a bad thing.

But he did express some openness to providing air defenses to Ukraine.

Have you learned anything from the NATO meeting?

Is there any potential cavalry coming for Ukraine?

Okay, so here's the sort of most optimistic gloss I can give you.

Number one, let's start with Lindsey Graham and Richard Blumenthal's

big bunker busting.

The most optimistic gloss you can give me starts with Lindsey Graham.

That's not encouraging.

So this is sort of at Lindsey Graham's expense, but the ending is a little happier than it might seem.

He's been going on and on about this bill, which would impose 500% tariffs on any country that imports Russian oil, gas, uranium, or petroleum products for months now, right?

He's got an 84

Senate member veto-proof majority on board to pass this thing if it's up for a floor vote.

The House usually follows the Senate in this regard.

Why hasn't it been put up, right?

And so the conventional wisdom would have you believe what's because Donald Trump does not not want any.

It's true to a degree.

Donald Trump does not want any sanctions, and he's been very clear about that.

And it's why Marco Rubio publicly says no sanctions, but privately tells everybody we need sanctions on Russia, right?

The other reason, though, and here's where you get the sort of the nitty-gritty of congressional sort of bureaucracy doesn't really come out in the Western reporting, is that the bill was drafted horribly.

And it was so broad in scope that it would be unenforceable.

And more to the point, it actually penalizes European countries that agreed with us when we imposed our sanctions policy to wind down their dependency on Russian energy.

So instead, we're going to beat up the people who said, we agree with you, it's just going to take us time to kind of get our house in order and become energy independent, and put sanctions on them, which makes no sense, especially at a time when the U.S.-European divide is widening and the Russians are exploiting that.

that chasm, right?

I mean, their messaging now is not that the United States is evil.

It's that the Europeans are fascists and, oh, Russia, we are the great ally of the United States in defeating fascism.

Why are they doing that?

Because they see that NATO, that the transatlantic relationship is kind of, it's on the skit.

Right now, there's an effort to rewrite the Graham Bill and tighten it up and make it actually not just enforceable, but really crippling to the Russian economy.

More to the point, if that thing does pass, and again, it's veto-proof.

So even if Trump says, I don't like it, well, too bad.

You've got enough senators who go with it, unless he really applies the pressure and threatens to primary them up.

But 84 is a lot, right?

If it passes, it puts pay to any notion of a U.S.-Russian reset or rapprochement, or I think more ambitiously, strategic realignment with Russia, which has been the real danger.

So let's see.

For me, I'm probably less than 50% this thing would get done, but there is a sort of more nuance here than perhaps comes out in the report.

The second thing I would say is, speaking of this divide between the U.S.

and Europe, I don't like it when NATO's Secretary General calls Donald Trump daddy.

Okay?

I especially don't like it when the White House tweets daddy's home.

Just really quick, just for people who did not, because I didn't see, I was not watching the fucking live press conference.

And so I was like, why did the NATO Secretary call Trump daddy?

And Trump was doing the stupid thing that he's been doing where he's like, Ukraine and Russia are like two kids fighting on the playground.

No, no, no.

Israel-Iran.

Oh, sorry.

This time it was Israel-Iran that were the two kids fighting on the playground?

Yeah, well, same, same metaphor he's used.

And it's like, sometimes you got to let them fight it out, you know, and let them blood each other up a little bit.

And then Ruto is like, well, no, sometimes daddy has to use stern language and tell him to stop.

Daddy.

Yeah.

I was like, you know, dude, you're from the Netherlands.

There are places in the red light district of Amsterdam where you can work through some shit, where you don't have to be referring to the president of the United States as daddy.

But now the White House is just taking this up.

They're tweeting this out.

Maybe the Dutch, the Dutch are so weird with their eat, you know, it's like, like you, I mean, there are two things that I don't like in this world which is that people that are intolerant of other people's cultures and the dutch you know they have a weird culture and it might not it just it might not have translated right daddy might have a different no

well yeah i think there there might be a bit of a disconnect in sort of dutch to english

psychosexual element yeah i mean the dutch language to begin with is is sort of a somebody invented it at three o'clock in the morning with uh pete headsets drinking a hierarchy yeah no we have a n-serious problem we have a ein n-serious problem when the Secretary General of NATO is calling the President of the United States daddy.

However, however, look, let us say, again, I want to inject a little nuance here.

Has it been the case that other allies in NATO have not contributed their fair share to defense spending?

So the benchmark was, I think, 2%, 3% of your GDP has to go to defense.

Donald Trump came in and arbitrarily raised that threshold to 5%,

pulled it out of his ass.

But all of a sudden, everyone at NATO has affirmed that's the benchmark we want to reach, except the Spanish.

Except the Spanish.

No, they're socialists.

And I was just in Spain, and I can tell you.

And Trump also still doesn't understand how the system works.

He keeps being like, why won't Spain pay the 5%?

I'm like, it's not dues, like a country.

It's not dues.

It's a guideline, not a requirement.

But the fact that they've all committed to do this, the fact that across the board, European allies are spending more.

I mean, Germany is now, you know, Schultz, when the full-scale invasion came out, he gave this speech known as the Zeitenwende speech or the turning point speech.

And it was all sort of smoke and mirrors because Schultz was terrified of Russia and terrified, frankly, of his own policy toward Ukraine, which was actually robust security assistance.

The Germans have given more to Ukraine than any country in Europe, and it's not even close.

But in comes the new chancellor, Friedrich Mertz, who's actually putting some flesh on the bones.

I mean, Zeitenwende is now a thing.

Germany is set to spend, I think it's 3.5%.

by 20, just in a couple of years' time, they've committed another $8 billion to security assistance, or 8 billion Euro to security assistance to Ukraine for 2025.

Metz is serious about German national defense and also recognizes the threat posed by Russia.

This is all to the good.

So, if coming away from The Hague is, you know, flattering daddy and patting him on the head and saying, without you and without your brilliant bunker-busting bombs in Iran, you know, we'd all be nuclear ash and we'll do whatever you want.

And if that gets the Europeans not only to spend more on defense, but also and more critically.

Couldn't the Europeans spend more on defense without flattering daddy?

Well, you would think, man, you would think.

I mean,

I don't know.

The energy I was looking forward to shout out to Dutch.

Did you see the queen of the Netherlands?

Like mocking his mouth movements.

Yes.

We'll put a little link for people who need a little joy.

But also, just as a sort of conclusion to that, if it also keeps Trump happy with respect to the transatlantic relationship.

And he said, I think at one point, you know, I came here, like literally before he arrived in The Hague, he was asked, would you enforce Article 5?

And he was sort of like, no, no, no.

Or there's multiple interpretations of Article 5.

No, there's one interpretation.

An attack on one is an attack on all.

We come to collective defense.

Now he comes away saying, well,

the scales have fallen from my eyes.

And these freeloading welfare queens of Europe have flattered me and polished my throne and praised me to such a degree that suddenly, eh, I might actually come to their defense if they get attacked.

It's not great, but given the

low threshold for good news these days,

it's not a bad result either.

And it's cringe to watch this.

Nobody I know in the NATSEC world likes to see the Europeans kowtowing and basically treating Trump like the sort of authoritarian dictator who has led Europe to war time and time again.

But they understand that unfortunately right now, Europe has not got, and not because of a lack of economic capacity, but political will has taken a long time for the Europeans to get to sort of see the

future here.

They have not got the ability to do to stand on their own two feet just yet.

So they have to keep the United States sweet, if only to receive weapons from us, to buy weapons which they can then donate to the Ukrainians, and also to make sure that the messaging on NATO and Article 5 is good.

Are we giving patriots to Ukraine?

According to Trump, he is looking into trying to find more.

They're few and far between, honestly.

This is the problem.

We are looking to source them from other countries such as Israel because

these batteries are hard to find.

So it is tough.

But keep in mind, too, just one last point, if I may.

Trump is dazzled and

completely impressed by the military genius of Israel bombing Iran and taking out their aircraft and air defense systems and ballistic missile launchers in Iranian territory.

Less impressed by Ukraine going into Russia.

with FPV drones and taking out Russia's fleet, or at least part of Russia's fleet of strategic bombers.

So it's the same principle, kill the archer instead of shooting down the the arrows.

But when Ukraine does it, it's a no-no.

When Israel does it, it's, I got a piece of this action myself, right?

Very last thing.

Are we going to have an Abraham Accord expansion?

Why do I keep seeing tweets about that?

Witkoff is teasing it.

My guess, you know, they're trying to work something with the Saudis.

They're trying to work something with the Syrians, to be honest.

I mean, you know, if the former lieutenant of al-Qaeda in Iraq recognizes the state of Israel before Saudi Arabia does, I will, I mean, yeah.

Okay.

Welcome to the Middle East.

We'll keep an eye on that.

Michael Weiss, thank you as always.

Appreciate your judiciousness, your 1980s movies references, and we'll see you soon.

Thanks, man.

Anytime.

Everybody, stick around for Jonathan Cohn.

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All right.

He writes the breakdown newsletter for the Bulwark.

It's new.

You better be getting it.

It is extremely valuable.

It makes me smarter.

He also has books, which include the 10-year war, Obamacare, and the unfinished crusade for universal coverage.

It's my newish colleague, Jonathan Cohn.

How you doing, man?

Hey, I'm, you know, just trying to keep up with everything and decide if I have to republish the book on the 10-year war as like the 18-year war, the 20-year war.

I guess we'll see.

It shows the limits of creating names such as this.

You know, the president has decided the Israel-Iran war is the 12-day war.

We were just talking about that.

Might turn out to be a little longer than 12 days.

We'll see how it goes.

And you and Trump have very little in common, but in this case, maybe you might be learning a lesson together.

Yeah, not that much in common.

But hey, you know, I'll take a lesson wherever I can get it.

So there you go.

One of my favorite quiz questions to ask my MAGA family members is our friends or whoever people I encounter is what is a trait that Donald Trump has that you would want your child to emulate?

You have two children.

Can you answer that?

Do you have anything?

Do you have a single trait of Donald Trump's you wish your child would emulate?

Oh, boy.

A trait of Donald Trump that I, it's, this is, this is hard.

I will say this.

I think something he does well as a politician, which is probably a good thing in life, which is if he's intent on doing something, he doesn't let people dissuade him that easily.

I mean, I think in the reality that we live in, I'd prefer people dissuade him from most of the things he wants to do.

But that ability to kind of block out the noise and believe believe that you're doing the right thing and pursue it, I think is a valuable quality.

And I frankly wish more leaders who I do like and agree with had that quality.

So there you go.

Self-confidence.

Self-confidence.

There you go.

You can put up a little, you know, something in the bathroom, in the guest bathroom, that's like a little affirmation about Donald Trump that your children can admire.

I'm sure they'll be very excited to hear this clip.

All right.

You have a newsletter out this morning called The Big Beautiful Rush Job about the BBB.

You write write that the goal is to start the voting process this weekend and get a bill on Trump's desk by July 4th.

That's eight days from now.

Not nearly enough time for Republican lawmakers to figure out exactly what's in the bill.

Feels like we've been here before.

And that was complicated kind of as you were publishing by this rule from the parliamentarian that says that some of these Medicaid cuts don't fit within the rules, which, you know, we can get into a lot of nerdy stuff about what

the Senate could do about that.

But I guess just talk about the difference between Obamacare and this, because Obamacare kind of had a reputation for getting rushed.

You know, we got to pass the bill to see what's in it, or whatever the famous Pelosi quote was.

Talk about like the comparison between that and the degree with which this is trying, they're trying to jam this through.

Yeah, I mean, there's that famous Pelosi quote that always comes up in these discussions.

And people are like, look, they secretly passed Obamacare.

They crafted it behind closed doors.

Nobody knew who was in it, which could not be farther from the truth.

They spent a year debating that bill.

There were long committee hearings in five, five congressional committees, hundreds of hours of testimony, you know, days and days of floor debate in sort of multiple stages.

It was all sort of, you know, on the front pages, debated for months.

And for better or worse, a lot of the stuff that was said about the bill was wrong or was exaggerated, but there was a lot of discussion.

The death panels?

Did the death panels ever come?

Oh, so that's the best.

Well, no, although we may get some now.

So, you know, stay tuned from this bill, this Republican bill.

For better or worse, the process took a long time.

To the frustration, by the way,

of the Obama White House.

I mean, Rahm Emmanuel was like tearing his hair out because it was taking so long to get this bill through.

And there was like these long negotiations, the finance committee.

The quote that Pelosi gave that everyone used was basically she was saying, look, there's been so much controversy, so much misinformation.

When you're finally done with this bill, people will see that what we're actually doing doesn't match up.

There are no death panels, to take that example.

So that was, you know, a year.

And what are we doing here?

So it was, go back to Memorial Day weekend, the week before Memorial Day, when the House passed their version.

They literally got language out.

They put the language of the final language of the book because they were negotiating quietly what they were going to do and they put it out on a Sunday night.

And then I can't remember if it was Thursday or Friday, they finally voted, but five days, five days.

You know, for a massive tax cut, huge cuts to health care, cuts to food assistance.

By the way, you know,

ripping out a sort of generational investment in clean energy along the way just for kicks.

And now we're over in the Senate and they're doing the same thing.

We don't have final language yet.

Forget the Congressional Budget Office trying to do an assessment of it.

And they're talking about, you know, we're recording, this is Thursday.

They want to have a vote over the weekend.

I mean, that is just bonkers.

And of course, if you go that quickly, of course the public's not going to understand what's in this bill.

Of course, people aren't going to have time to analyze it.

And, you know, honestly,

I'd be shocked if most of the senators and representatives voting on this really know in a kind of deep way what's in this bill.

So let's zoom out and then talk about like what is in the bill and then we can kind of get into the parliamentarian and the wrangling.

It's like super complicated bill by design.

Like they've what they've done is on the certain terms, you know, this in terms of what they're doing to healthcare, they've packaged all these provisions, these targeted things that sound super complicated, repeal the Medicaid eligibility rule and

change.

You don't need to know any about that.

There's like a really simple way to think about what this bill would do, which is it's going to take a trillion dollars out of government health care programs.

So a trillion dollars out of Medicaid.

And out of the Affordable Care Act, Obamacare.

It's going to take a trillion dollars.

That's a lot of money.

You know, people who don't know your budget figures, trust me, that's a big, big chunk of money in the federal budget.

And because they do that, a lot of people are going to lose health care.

You know, there's an estimate from the Congressional Budget Office, 11 million people lose health insurance.

On top of that, we have millions more who are going to have to pay more for health care because they're going to have to pay higher premiums in Obamacare.

They'll have higher cost sharing.

And this is going to hurt people.

You know, we can argue about any of the individual changes here.

This is a good one.

This is a bad one.

This one won't be so bad.

You know, there's room for debate on all this stuff.

But when you take that much healthcare away from that many people, they're going to suffer.

They're going to have higher bills.

People, we're talking about a lot of low-income people, working-class people, some middle-class people.

They're going to have trouble paying their rent.

They're going to have trouble paying their grocery bills.

And they're not going to be able to go to the doctor.

And some of them are going to just go into deeper financial distress.

And some are going to get sick and die.

You know, like a lot of reporters, I've been spending a lot of time interviewing people about this.

Just this week, I was interviewing a woman from Pennsylvania.

She's a home care worker, right?

She cares for an elderly woman who can't get around.

She cooks.

She moves around the bed.

She lifts her into a wheelchair.

You know, she makes $14 an hour, okay?

$14 an hour.

She can't afford health insurance, so she relies on Medicaid.

She also relies on food assistance.

And by the way, Medicaid pays the agency for the care for the elderly that then pays her salary.

You cut Medicaid and it affects her.

She's going to feel it.

You know, she's in her 50s.

She's got, you know, she's got a shoulder thing from all the lifting, right?

She's got some cardiac problems.

And, you know, maybe she gets to find a free clinic.

She can get the basic care, but she can't get to the cardiologist.

She can't get to the orthopedist.

Best case scenario, she's in a lot more physical pain at her work.

Worst case scenario, she can't work.

Worst, worst case scenario, you know, she gets a heart attack, something awful, and she dies.

And that kind of thing is going to happen.

I mean, that is what we're talking about with this bill.

We were talking about this last night at the next level.

I don't really understand why they're doing it.

I just,

I just don't.

I don't.

Can you make heads or tails of this?

I know you've just been like, I guess, let's put it this way: you know, there are

the people on the hill, you know, the congressional guys,

well, you know, have their own self-identity.

You know, maybe they just think government should be smaller, so therefore any cuts, or maybe they feel guilty about how bad this is going to bust the debt, so they feel like they got to do something to save face.

Like, that's all kind of psychological analysis.

But, like, the analysts, like, you like read like the, you know, the conservative analysts.

Like, what is the defense?

I can't even find like a compelling defense of doing it the way they're doing it.

What have you seen anything?

Yeah, yeah, there is.

There is.

So, I mean, I want to acknowledge like there is a like principled conservative argument, right?

And I actually respect people come out and make these arguments.

I think it's important to argue these things in American politics, you know.

And they would say, you know, putting these money, these programs in general aren't that efficient.

We could spend our money better.

We should have a smaller government.

We need lower taxes.

It's better for the economy.

And they think, you know, maybe there are trade-offs.

Maybe some people lose healthcare.

It's worth it in the end.

I don't believe that.

But, you know, that's an argument we can have and we should have.

And that's why we have two parties, right, to make these arguments.

In addition to that, there is a more detailed analytic argument that has been put forward.

There are some think tanks out there that have been making these arguments that basically say, look, there's a lot of fraud.

There's a lot of people on these programs who don't deserve to be on these programs.

They don't really satisfy the eligibility.

And there's there's waste and abuse.

And that these changes in this bill are going to cut down on them.

It will get rid of the people on Medicaid or on Obamacare who don't really qualify, but are getting in because they've managed to deceive somebody.

And then there's a separate argument about, you know, the work requirements is a sort of second set of arguments, which is that we think we should condition health benefits on work, and the work requirements will do that.

And those are sort of the two big arguments.

I mean, there's others, but I'd say those are the two big ones.

I guess my point is that,

unlike some of the other like big changes that have been made, like if you just go back through, go back to, I'm trying to think of another unpopular thing that I was for on the conservative side, the Social Security Privatization Plan.

How about this?

The Social Security Privatization Plan had a lot of, you know, very serious economists, think tank folks who were excited about it and like made the case about why this would be better for the budget long term and why it'd be better for people.

There are a lot of people on the Hill that Like that is not really the case here.

Like you really have to kind of dig through for people.

Do you feel that way?

Or am I just missing it?

Is it somewhere outside of my bubble?

I don't see anybody that's like super excited about this.

There are people that are really excited about the fantasy that it's only waste, fraud, and abuse.

Like that's what I keep seeing, like is the defense of it.

It's all we're just getting rid of the waste, fraud, and abuse.

But like that's not true.

So what about like a defense on the merits of the actual program?

I think you're mostly right in picking up on something real here, which I think speaks to the way this debate has evolved, which is he kind of go back 20 years, 25 years in the healthcare debate, Republicans versus Democrats.

He had a lot of really heavy-hitter kind of economists and analysts, people at places like American Enterprise Institute, where they would advise like John McCain when he ran for president, for example.

There's some very formidable conservative healthcare economists on that side of the aisle.

Thing was, those conservative economists, a lot of them, you know, I think of one woman in particular, her name was Gail Walenski.

She just passed away like a year ago.

Really brilliant woman.

She actually ran Medicare and Medicaid under the, under Bush One, so under Bush 41.

And, you know, really formidable.

But the thing was, like, she didn't hate, like, she wasn't like totally against government healthcare.

And she was, you know, government playing a role in healthcare.

She didn't want to screw the uninsured, right?

I mean, she thought we should do something to cover people.

She just had a kind of conservative, more conservative spin on it.

And I remember when they got to the Affordable Care Act debate, I mean, she interviewed, I remember interviewing her at the time.

She's like, yeah, you know, I don't like it.

I think it's too much government regulation spending, but okay, you know, put me in a room with a liberal economist.

I bet we could figure something out.

Well,

no space for that in the Republican Party of Donald Trump and MAGA.

They just want nothing to do with this stuff.

And so

most of the really sort of serious, who would have been serious conservative intellectuals on this 10, 20 years ago, they're not in the Republican Party anymore.

They're not welcome in the Republican Party.

They're either on an island by themselves or a lot of them have started advising Democrats.

I know this all sounds vaguely familiar.

There are exceptions.

There's this one think tank called Paragon Institute, which is run by a guy who was a top healthcare advisor in the first Trump White House, Brian Blaise.

Very serious guy, knows what he's talking about.

As much as any person or think tank, you know, they've been sort of responsible for putting out the material on this.

So there is.

He's there.

There's a handful of other people you can find in some of these groups.

But for the most part, the really serious people aren't part of the Republican universe anymore.

All right.

Congrats, Brian Blasey, PhD.

I'm just checking him out.

Nice haircut.

I want to talk about two more things for Adelija.

The real effects of what you expect based on kind of what we know about the bill now on people, and then kind of this parliamentary debate that's going to be raging over the next few days.

So just unlike the primary and secondary effects, and you mentioned the anecdote of the woman, what exactly are the programs and the impacts that people are going to feel?

So, I mean, the biggest cuts in this bill are to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act of Obamacare.

And there's sort of two kind of sets of really big.

So one is a kind of whole, you know, there's a lot of new rules for what you, and new procedures for what you need to do to sort of qualify and stay eligible for these programs, right?

More paperwork, which is great.

More paperwork.

It's very conservative.

Right, right.

I mean, you know, we're really.

It's anti-abundance.

It really is.

But that's sort of the point here is that, you know, the sort of the theory of the, oh, we have all this waste, we have all this this fraud, we need to really carefully screen every single person and make them file their income every month, et cetera, to sort of make sure that, you know, we're not getting, you know, somebody, you know, who doesn't belong on the program.

And you can do that.

And look, there are, I mean, any large program, there's people who aren't eligible for various reasons.

And, you know, certainly

there's a good, smart way to avoid that.

But what they've done here is basically say, we're just going to, you know, throw up a lot more paperwork, put all these more procedures.

And we know what happens because we've tried this before.

And

it's obvious if you've ever had to deal with a government agency, you know how this works.

It's just so easy for errors to come up.

The agencies are underfunded, so they can't deal with problems as they come up.

And think of who you're dealing with here, right?

You're dealing with a sort of population.

It's probably a lot of people, seasonal workers.

They have trouble getting documentation to show that they're working.

A lot of people, maybe they don't have great access to technology.

They don't know how to use technology, especially to get to older cohorts.

The polite word in the policy world is friction.

We make, we put friction in the process of getting on these programs.

Really what we want.

We want to make it as hard as possible for people to get health care.

That's great.

More friction in the process.

I mean, yeah, got it.

Literally, that's what we're doing here.

And then there's like straight up cuts.

I mean, this doesn't get enough attention.

I mean, because we've all been, you know, to the extent that people are paying attention, we talk about the work requirements or whatever.

And they're actually like just straight up cuts, especially when you get, you see a really in the Affordable Care Act part where they're sort of changing the sort of the standards for what insurance has to cover or how much assistance you can get through a tax credit.

The formula is tweaked.

Again, it's one of these things that if you look at it, you have no idea.

But you know, it's going to mean if you're, you know, you're a kind of working class, you know, you buy coverage through healthcare.gov and, you know, right now with your tax credit, you're spending $200 a month or something on your insurance.

Well, now you're going to go ahead and to get that same insurance, you'd have to pay more.

Or you can keep paying the $200, but suddenly you're going to discover that like your copay at the pharmacy is like double what it was.

And you sort of pay that.

So that's that's kind of the primary effect the other thing you said um the way the formulas work out they're also changing the formulas for the states in a big way and that is like why you see a lot of like the rural hospitals like freaking out because like that that is another i think real like tangible impact potentially that that folks are going to feel because if there's different formula going to these like states and the states are getting less money well you know that that's going to come out of something yeah and the rural hospital pieces i mean there's a reason we keep hearing about it in the news.

It's, you know, rural hospitals, just the finances of rural hospitals, it's really tough.

It's tough to make money as a rural hospital.

They really become dependent on Medicaid, you know, depending on how these cuts go through.

A lot of them are going to struggle.

We've already had rural hospitals closing.

You're going to see more rural hospitals closing.

And I think this is so important because it shows how, even if you're not on Medicaid, even if you have like good employer insurance, how this can affect you.

So imagine you live in, you know, you live in rural Nebraska or Louisiana or Michigan, where I live, right?

And let's say there's no, you know, Upper Peninsula.

You know, you have one hospital in like a 50, 60 mile radius, right?

So your upper peninsula, Michigan will do my state.

Your upper peninsula is the winter and, you know, you're pregnant, you know, you're due, you know, and suddenly, you know, you got to go in, you know, three weeks early, you're in labor and it's the snowstorm.

And now the hospital that was there isn't there anymore.

They don't do maternity services, let's say, or whatever.

So you can have the best insurance.

You can be very well off.

You can never touch Medicaid or Obamacare.

Doesn't matter.

You still got to drive in a blinding snowstorm, 60, 70, 80 miles,

which, you know, is probably not what you want to be doing when you're in labor, or especially if, you know, hopefully not, but, you know,

you're in some kind of distress.

So this affects everybody, even people who aren't dependent on these programs.

Our minds go to these totally opposite places.

You're in the upper peninsula.

It's a snowstorm.

I'm thinking that like you're down in the bayou

rain and it's like you gotta try to get up to homa um you know you're down there in meadow uh anyway yeah it's uh that's ugly all right so the news this morning was essentially how do i explain this in a way that takes up as much jargon as possible in order to to pass this thing with only 50 votes because there are only 53 republican senators you can't have the 60 you can't overcome the filibuster you can do that through this system called reconciliation most of the big budget and tax bills that have been passed like in my adult life, have come through reconciliation.

And reconciliation comes with certain rules about what can be included in it and what can't.

You know, there are also some rules on

how much can add to the deficit.

This is a little bit easier to get around.

So there's a parliamentarian in the Senate that kind of looks at it and is like, well, this can fit in reconciliation.

This can't.

And there's some news this morning.

The parliamentarian essentially said that a big part of these Medicaid changes cannot be included in the bill, which means that the Republicans are either going to have to say, fuck you, parliamentarian, and vote to overrule them,

or

some of these cuts won't be included in the bill, which

maybe creates political problems.

Is that a good assessment?

That was a really good explanation.

Better than probably what I would have come up with.

But yeah, I mean, basically.

So what are the parts

that are then now going to be debated over?

Like, as far as you can tell?

So there was a piece last night, a big piece that got cut out, which was, I'm not even going to try to explain this one.

This one revolved, like, this is, I literally, when I wrote about this,

I had to put it, I just finally gave up and I put it in a footnote because it was so complicated.

And the footnote was like, I think broke the record for longest footnote in the history of bulwark footnotes.

All the good stuff is in the footnotes on the bulwark.

Just a little bit.

Read the footnotes.

Yeah, you know.

But they're called, I'll just say it has something to do with something called cost sharing reductions.

And if you really care about it, just Google it and parliamentarian, you can read all about it.

But it knocked out about 150.

Well, I don't know the exact number because they don't, as always, these things, you know, they don't say this thing is out and this is how many dollars you lose because it's not always clear.

It's one-to-one, but you know, it could be like $100 billion, maybe more.

And then this morning, there was a whole list of pieces they knocked out, the single biggest one of which was a change to something called provider taxes, which is the thing you were referring to a little while ago, which has to do with how states get money from the federal government and that sort of budget gimmick they've traditionally used to get a little more.

I spoke to some budget analysts this morning as this was breaking.

Their feeling was you kind of put those two together, you're looking at somewhere between $250 to $400 billion in cuts that just got taken off the table.

Now, again,

you know, what do they do?

Do they just overrule the parliamentarian?

I think Trump, just like five minutes before I got on, I think said, like, can you believe the parliamentarian?

You know, it's the deep state, whatever.

I think Thune, who's the majority leader in the Senate, has already said, we don't want to overrule the parliamentarian, although they did it once already for something unrelated a couple of weeks ago with the California environment, overriding a California rule on emissions and cars for pollution.

So they could overrule it.

They could not overrule it and try to reword.

You know, it's a lawyerly thing.

So you can try to sometimes to restructure, reword the provision so that it can get the okay.

They can look for other cuts.

Or, you know, here, I'm just going to throw this out there as a wild idea.

They could just not cut Medicaid as much.

I mean, that's possible.

Well, that'll be something to watch.

So of the total amount of cuts, it's what, like

a third, essentially?

I mean, it's a lot, right?

I mean, we're talking a trillion dollars in total cuts to healthcare, roughly.

So if you're, you know, yeah, I mean, you're somewhere between a quarter and 40%, maybe.

And again, you know, we'll see.

You know, it always takes a few hours for everyone to figure out the numbers, but at least based on what we last heard, yeah.

All right.

We'll keep monitoring.

If they just kind of jam this thing out over the weekend, we will keep everybody posted.

But it's one of these things where, and your newsletter kind of framed it like this about how TV news has like not covered this as much given like the real impact it's going to have on people as compared to you know some of the other things in the craziness of our political world right now and part of it is just because of this like this stuff is like very complicated right like it's complicated to do but of all of the stuff the Trump is doing like it might be the thing that ends up affecting people's lives the most directly.

So we're going to keep working on it.

Jonathan's covering it.

Read his newsletter and we'll be talking to you soon.

All right.

Thank you so much to Jonathan Cohn and Michael Weiss.

We will see you all back here tomorrow.

We've got another doubleheader tomorrow.

It's going to be a good one.

Stick around.

We'll see you then.

Peace.

the

hangers out.

Heading into twilight, spreading out her wings tonight.

She got you jumping off the deck, shoving in the overdrive.

I'm away through

the dangers now.

I'll take you riding

make it lower.

You'll never say hello to you until you're getting on the red line of blow.

You'll never know what you can do until you scared on the line where you gotta go.

The Bullard Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

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