Michael Weiss and Jonathan Cohn: Animal House at the Pentagon

Transcript

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Speaker 44 All right, everybody, we got a double dip for you today.

Speaker 45 We are going to get nerdy.

Speaker 51 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

Speaker 44 Hello and welcome to the Bullwords podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.
We are welcoming back one of our faves.

Speaker 46 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.

Speaker 49 We're going to talk about that in a second.

Speaker 27 It's Michael Weiss.

Speaker 55 What's up, man? Congrats.

Speaker 55 Do you get the hardware?

Speaker 57 Were you enough involved to have an actual hardware?

Speaker 60 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...

Speaker 60 data point on our Wikipedia pages, which in this day and age, you know, I'll take it, right?

Speaker 9 You should get a fake statue, I think.

Speaker 51 I would get an imitation

Speaker 60 gold wrapped in chocolate or chocolate wrapped in gold. Yeah, that's the statue I'll get.

Speaker 60 But yeah, it's cool. No, we didn't, I had no idea we were even nominated until very late last week, and then thought, nah, whatever.
And

Speaker 60 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,

Speaker 62 okay.

Speaker 60 It's a nice way to come home from Barcelona.

Speaker 39 The birds are awake.

Speaker 6 They're congratulating you. Oh, you can hear them now?

Speaker 39 Yeah, the birds are.

Speaker 58 No, that's good.

Speaker 60 We had them covered.

Speaker 47 The listeners love your little menagerie in the background.

Speaker 64 It brings a little joy in the darkness.

Speaker 65 I've got to do one thing, though.

Speaker 51 Can we just do, we have so much news to cover, but since you got the Emmy for Havana syndrome coverage,

Speaker 21 I'm a little bit of a tin pot conspiracy theorist on Havana syndrome.

Speaker 27 So can you give me the one paragraph on it?

Speaker 5 Where are you at on it?

Speaker 60 Well, I'll give you some news, actually, which hasn't been reported yet, which is even better than the

Speaker 60 one-line anti-conspiracy theory Pracy.

Speaker 60 As the Biden administration was turning off the lights in the White House, they had a meeting at the NSC at which Mahar Vittar, I think the number three guy under Sullivan, was there with some other members of the National Security Council, invited five

Speaker 60 very

Speaker 60 well-known within the community, the intelligence community, victims of AHI, including Mark Palmeropoulos, who's a good friend of mine.

Speaker 62 Love Mark. Yep.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 And the NSC meeting, they were brought into the situation room and told, you were right,

Speaker 60 quote unquote.

Speaker 68 Really?

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 The title of it was, We Believe Them, them referring to the victims.

Speaker 60 And at the last minute, Jake Sullivan spiked that op-ed from being published.

Speaker 67 I think Jake wants to come on the pods. That'd be great.

Speaker 70 You'd have to ask him.

Speaker 60 Yeah, there's more to come on this,

Speaker 60 including things that are kind of kicking around in insider editorial chats, new evidence that we've compiled.

Speaker 60 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, and because I know know we're going to be talking about that in a minute,

Speaker 60 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 back as 2011 in Bulgaria and then the Czech Republic a few years later.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 They were doing this before the full-scale invasion. So, 29155, their remit is explicitly kinetic.
They're not doing pure espionage.

Speaker 60 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?

Speaker 60 So that itself was very indicative to us that if they're in the places where these victims were hit, and we managed to find two victims who could positively identify known members of Unit 29155 in the vicinity where they were.

Speaker 60 One was Frankfurt, Germany, in 2014, the other was Tbilisi, Georgia, just a couple years ago. That indicates that there's some there there.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 14 All right. We'll keep an eye on this.
I'm disappointed.

Speaker 53 I'm in the market for a conspiracy theory.

Speaker 73 I can really, you know, kind of just dig into because conspiracy theories.

Speaker 74 serve you well in the podcast space, you know?

Speaker 48 I mean, Joe Rogan is crushing.

Speaker 64 You know, there's a lot of people who do very well there.

Speaker 26 And unfortunately,

Speaker 27 I'm kind of a conventional wisdom type guy, you know, I think, which is limiting my ceiling a little bit.

Speaker 29 So I'm in the market for conspiracy theories, but I'm happy

Speaker 51 for that reporting and for Mark.

Speaker 53 It was not so much they disbelieved.

Speaker 55 There was, I feel like, an extended group.

Speaker 65 Like there was the core five people who was like, something was wrong here.

Speaker 76 And then there was a lot of people who were like, I think I have it too.

Speaker 75 And that, I think, is what led me to the tinpot conspiracy.

Speaker 60 And believe me, you know, coming at this blindly, if all I had to go on were the messages I received on my Proton mail since I published that investigation, I would definitely be more inclined to suggest that this is tinfoil hat material.

Speaker 60 You know, Mossad is zapping me with death rays in the streets of Chicago, this kind of thing.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 We have examined their medical records. They were all diagnosed with traumatic brain injuries.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 And many of these people were so badly hurt that they became medically retired. They cannot function function day to day in office jobs.
Some of them wear weighted vests because they have vertigo.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 38 I got to get Mark on the pod now.

Speaker 48 I owe him one. I got to get Mark on the pod.

Speaker 60 You should get Mark on the pod, yeah. I mean, he's...

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 62 You were right.

Speaker 60 And he tweeted that, actually, Mark, Mark, last night, alluding to this meeting that was had, which nobody was meant to report on, but there you go.

Speaker 67 All right. Breaking news on the board pod.

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Speaker 2 We the people, in order to form a more perfect union.

Speaker 51 All right, speaking of Intel, as you referenced earlier, I think that's the main thing to talk about today.

Speaker 48 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. Hag Seth echoes him.

Speaker 99 Kane was a little more judicious.

Speaker 30 Now, as the days pass, we have dueling reports out there, DIA is a report.

Speaker 31 So before we get into kind of the meta of all of it, as somebody who has to

Speaker 74 work through all this stuff as part of your day job,

Speaker 16 what do you assess to be what we think is the truth of the situation at this point?

Speaker 48 And the truth might be that we just don't know.

Speaker 54 I don't know.

Speaker 65 Like, what do you assess is the truth?

Speaker 60 I mean, look, I think it's likely that they inflicted severe damage on the physical facilities of Iran's nuclear program.

Speaker 60 If you watched the chairman of Joint Chiefs Kane today, his press conference, which followed Hegset's sort of, you know,

Speaker 64 we've got a highlight reel from Pete's coming up here in a second.

Speaker 60 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

Speaker 60 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?

Speaker 60 There is very all likelihood that all the centrifuges at Ford O were completely wiped out.

Speaker 60 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,

Speaker 60 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?

Speaker 60 So it's very likely, I would say, Fordot has been damaged to the point almost of disrepair. It's not operational.

Speaker 60 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, know, where is the highly enriched uranium that even J.D.

Speaker 60 Vance alluded to possibly having gone missing?

Speaker 60 One thesis is that it is actually buried under the rubble in Fordeaux or in, you know, in other nuclear facilities that were similarly bombed, not just by the Americans, but also by the Israelis

Speaker 60 before that 10-day-long campaign. And, you know, a lot of this is going to depend on signals intelligence.

Speaker 5 So what the U.S.

Speaker 60 and its allies, including the Israelis, are collecting from the Iranian side.

Speaker 9 Keep in mind, the Iranians are doing their own battle damage assessment.

Speaker 60 They don't necessarily know how badly their program has been degraded or destroyed. So this is all happening in real time.

Speaker 60 And you have Donald Trump now in a

Speaker 60 sort of

Speaker 60 desperate mode to get the intelligence community to ratify his sort of shoot from the hip, shall we say,

Speaker 62 bombastic comments

Speaker 60 about Fordeau being completely, quote, obliterated.

Speaker 60 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

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 Now, that's not such a surprise or mystery. How is it that, for instance,

Speaker 51 I've been able to figure that out from New Orleans?

Speaker 8 Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 But how the hell did that get built without people in place, right?

Speaker 60 So you've got now Barney, 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.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 They accuse of espionage. I'm sure some of those people, most of those people, in fact, are probably innocent.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 But the fact remains, these massive ordnance penetrators were built for a single purpose, which was to take out Ford in the event that the United States had a military option that it was going to prosecute in Iran.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 This is a guy who has spent a decade plus

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 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...

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 Its program had advanced, but you know, it was still a ways away. Now completely reversing herself, basically for job security reasons.
I mean, she was.

Speaker 48 And she's been banned from, there's a Senate hearing on this today.

Speaker 39 Exactly.

Speaker 65 Where they're sending Hag Seth and not Tulsi.

Speaker 60 Right. So, I mean, you know, can you blame people for being a little bit skeptical that maybe she's not telling the truth.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 But then he personally tweets from his own Twitter account, Donald Trump deserves the Nobel Peace Prize.

Speaker 60 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?

Speaker 60 Now they are becoming PR

Speaker 76 agents.

Speaker 60 Yes, exactly. So, you know, this is the frustration.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 47 The other question, and I was talking about this with JVL last night, is

Speaker 27 the other element to this is now,

Speaker 104 what do you make of this, actually? I'll just put it as a question. Are the U.S.

Speaker 73 and Israel now kind of at cross purposes about the Intel assessment?

Speaker 100 Because frankly, you know, I've been talking to a lot of military experts.

Speaker 23 I'm like, the Iranian nuclear program.

Speaker 48 could not be completely eliminated just from air campaigns. And that was just the convention.

Speaker 70 That was just the assessment that everybody had like across the aisle.

Speaker 63 Like you could injure it, you could delay it, right?

Speaker 27 Like, but you couldn't obliterate it just from an air campaign.

Speaker 9 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.

Speaker 39 Okay, I don't actually don't think that's that's from a movie.

Speaker 54 That's not real.

Speaker 48 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

Speaker 26 military action as new information arises.

Speaker 77 Meanwhile, Meanwhile, now, in order to

Speaker 66 run cover for Trump's bombast, like the U.S.

Speaker 48 and our interest is now towards concocting intelligence to make it seem like

Speaker 48 everything is dandy.

Speaker 10 Doesn't that eventually create some issues?

Speaker 65 What do you think of that?

Speaker 60 Yeah, it does. And it's not even that the IC is necessarily concocting scenarios.
This might be credible.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 You know, the reason this is happening, and let's be clear,

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 I mean, there's a reason Mike Flynn was the head of DIA at one point, right?

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 CNN, New York Times, Washington Post, they all ran with this, as any reporter covering national security would do.

Speaker 60 If I got my hands on a document or I was read by a source, this is what an IC finding, I would report it because it's newsworthy. It's in the public interest.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 Intel says, you know, Iran program still doing dandy, you know, not knocked out, just a few months.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 No, again, asterisk, asterisks, asterisk. It all depends on what comes later.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 One, what are the facts? What actually happened? Because as you point out, this is an overriding national security concern for themselves.

Speaker 60 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?

Speaker 60 And it's very difficult to parse, you know,

Speaker 60 the facts from the bullets.

Speaker 51 When we're getting facts and when we're getting facts, when we're getting Donald Trump, exactly.

Speaker 60 I mean, a lot of this will come out eventually.

Speaker 50 It also is kind of one of the weaknesses of having just like an insecure, bloviating idiot as the president, right?

Speaker 48 Where it's like, and we're going to get into this in the NATO stuff, right?

Speaker 48 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.

Speaker 60 Yeah, and Trump has also made himself a hostage to fortune. So he goes in with a 30-minute military operation, comes out.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 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 players planes are amazing.

Speaker 60 You know, they're built for its 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.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 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?

Speaker 60 And it puts the Israelis in a bind too, because if they feel there is a need for further military action either renew the ground 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 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.

Speaker 60 So, you know, you mine the place, you go inside, you just blow the whole thing up. If they have to do that,

Speaker 60 then again, nobody will ever believe a word out of the U.S. government.
The IC will be completely and utterly discredited.

Speaker 60 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

Speaker 60 the conspiracy theory that Trump has been pushing for so many years will sort of become a self-fulfilling prophecy, right?

Speaker 60 The IC is now fatally compromised and we don't, 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 North Koreans could get up to.

Speaker 60 I mean, you name it, right? So

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 93 So when we talk community, we're talking about an entire ecosystem surrounding this condition, including of course the patients at the center that are all trying to live life in the moment, live life for the future, but then also create a new future.

Speaker 39 Learn more at ms.now.

Speaker 47 You've referenced it now as, I believe, Animal House and Pole Dancing.

Speaker 50 And so I think we just got to give the people what they want.

Speaker 66 Pete Eggseth at 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.

Speaker 21 And so I want folks to judge for themselves a little bit.

Speaker 51 Here are a couple of clips from Pete Hex out this morning.

Speaker 107 How many stories have been written about how hard it is to, I don't know, fly a plane for 36 hours?

Speaker 107 Has MSNBC done that story? Has Fox? Have we done the story how hard that is? Have we done it two or three times?

Speaker 108 Let me read the bottom line here.

Speaker 107 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.

Speaker 3 It's like a combo between an executive producer at Fox

Speaker 26 yelling at his underlings combined with Sean Spicer, like a little Sean Spicer.

Speaker 60 What's also funny is in Kane's presentation, you know, I mean, this is a very serious guy, as his accomplished military officer.

Speaker 3 Despite the fact that Trump refuses to call him by anything except a name.

Speaker 60 Well, he calls himself that, to be fair.

Speaker 60 But, you know, 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.

Speaker 60 It's like, okay, so now we're talking about Top Gun,

Speaker 60 which, if you recall, I mean, it was basically the greatest product ever produced, soft power exercise by the military-industrial complex. Air Force, by the way, Navy.

Speaker 60 But so, like, you know, they wanted this thing to end with, with, you know, a shirtless Val Kilmer, high-fiving Tom Cruise on a beach saying, I'll be your wingman any day, man.

Speaker 60 You know, like, that's how this is supposed to go. It's all TV.
It's all spectacle.

Speaker 70 It's all pageantry.

Speaker 60 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?

Speaker 60 you know, saying the Israelis and the Iranians don't know what the fuck they're doing. It's because

Speaker 60 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,

Speaker 60 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

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 If it's not sort of tidally written up, like a Netflix series, it's just, it's not worth it.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 109 You know, I was young.

Speaker 53 Bluto, what were the characters' names in Animal House?

Speaker 48 I wasn't really a big Animal House man.

Speaker 21 Blue Tarski?

Speaker 31 Blue Tarski, I think.

Speaker 60 Blue Tarski, yeah. I can't, you know, I've watched that movie so many times, and it's actually based on my alma mater, so I should know this.

Speaker 74 Okay, well, here's Blue Tarski.

Speaker 64 That's a big fail for you, Michael Weiss.

Speaker 33 Here's Blue Tarski.

Speaker 46 One more clip from Blue Tarski.

Speaker 51 He's yelling at his former, I guess, maybe

Speaker 39 a sorority, a sorority girl that didn't didn't give him the attention he wanted.

Speaker 76 Let's listen.

Speaker 111 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?

Speaker 108 Of course, we're watching every single aspect. But, Jennifer, you've been about the worst.

Speaker 108 The one who misrepresents the most intentionally

Speaker 111 reported 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.

Speaker 51 Jennifer Griffin throwing down at her former colleague there.

Speaker 65 It's

Speaker 60 Fox News reporter, superb reporter, by the way, who's had to push back against her own.

Speaker 65 Maybe another good reporter left over there, honestly.

Speaker 60 You know, 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?

Speaker 60 You know,

Speaker 60 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

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 You know, where's my, hey, bro, good shot. Like, that's what this guy is desperate for.

Speaker 60 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 not the script.

Speaker 48 He's very emotional.

Speaker 65 Yes.

Speaker 99 He's very emotional and defensive and sensitive.

Speaker 100 We do honor the pilots here at the Bulwark.

Speaker 9 They did great work and we do honor our servicemen and women.

Speaker 75 I want to offer you just kind of the big, a biggest picture view of this.

Speaker 104 I had some feedback yesterday from a valued confidante.

Speaker 45 I've been deeply torn about the whole thing, you know, and at times I've been wanting to, look, I don't like the Ayatollah.

Speaker 37 I don't want Iran to have a nuclear weapon.

Speaker 15 I don't particularly think it was an acute national security concern for us in like the short term.

Speaker 104 It was like an urgent matter.

Speaker 105 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.

Speaker 20 Like people have been, you know, saying this was a good mission.

Speaker 25 Heck of a job.

Speaker 100 The feedback I got was that like,

Speaker 12 Really, in the grand scheme of things, like, yes, it was successful.

Speaker 76 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.

Speaker 110 That's good. Yeah.

Speaker 100 Like, is Israel safer than it was two weeks ago?

Speaker 50 Yes, which is good.

Speaker 37 That said, looked at it from another way.

Speaker 31 It wasn't completely successful and it can't be.

Speaker 109 Like, you can't just take out Iran's nuclear system from the air.

Speaker 48 They lied about it right off the top.

Speaker 51 Israel did most of the heavy lifting here.

Speaker 48 And like, we did the one thing they couldn't do.

Speaker 59 There wasn't really a great threat to the U.S.

Speaker 48 acutely.

Speaker 37 And now you could argue maybe the threats are higher.

Speaker 54 You're already seeing this.

Speaker 48 They're having to take some of their immigration goons at the FBI and SIA and redirect them back towards terror threats.

Speaker 26 Trump doesn't have any interest in the long-term goals that might make the region safer.

Speaker 51 He doesn't want freedom for people in the Middle East.

Speaker 27 He's happy to have other autocrats running places.

Speaker 10 And so at that biggest level.

Speaker 58 Like, fuck this.

Speaker 5 No, it was not a success.

Speaker 48 What would you say to that framing of the situation?

Speaker 18 Again,

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 I don't know if this is going to pay off in the long run. And nobody does.

Speaker 60 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?

Speaker 60 And, you know, I was hearing doomsday scenarios. World War III is going to break out.
And what did the Iranians do?

Speaker 60 You know, they rocketed our air base in Qatar, giving the Qataris and the United States advance notice.

Speaker 60 So we had cleared out most of our personnel and most of our hardware, and everything was intercepted.

Speaker 60 It was a damn squib exercise, designed basically to show their people to safe face internally, because this regime has been, I mean, eviscerated.

Speaker 60 You know, I think that the one takeaway I think I'm okay in making now is

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 Qasim Suleimani, and I was susceptible to this too.

Speaker 60 Qasim Suleimani, he was a superb intelligence officer and military commander, and he did build an incredibly effective proxy apparatus across the region.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 I mean, they neutered Hezbollah

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 Now, that doesn't mean that Iran is not a threat, and there's lots of things they can do.

Speaker 6 Yeah.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 48 Correct. And now coming in and being like,

Speaker 48 I want a bit of the credit now.

Speaker 17 Right. And it's kind of like, well.

Speaker 60 Coming back to the sort of Hollywood, yeah, the Hollywood or TV metaphor, I mean,

Speaker 60 he saw a fantastic season one series, and he wanted an executive producer credit on it.

Speaker 55 And the Israelis,

Speaker 60 their purpose in going to war with Iran, I wrote a piece about this.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 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?

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 Come on in, the water's fine. You can do this too.
You know, we've cleared the path for you,

Speaker 60 which is basically 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

Speaker 60 they played him sort of magically in that way.

Speaker 1 We'll see if they can keep doing that.

Speaker 48 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.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 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?

Speaker 60 Not much like a lot of the commentariat in the United States sees Russia as the best friend we just haven't made yet.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 5 It's pretty horrible, right? I mean, they were also in charge. I'm not really old, so it's probably easy to target him.

Speaker 51 He's probably walking pretty slow.

Speaker 60 Yeah, a lot of these guys are, you know, sort of graying manes of the Islamic Revolution, right? And, but they're hard to replace for that reason, because they have so much experience.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 You see how that worked out in the long term after October 7th, when, again, Israel completely destroyed Hezbollah, ran bombing campaigns, Galore, for 10 years inside Syrian air space.

Speaker 60 Again, another piece of conventional wisdom was the Syrian regime has the most formidable air defenses in the region.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 And, you know, internally inside Iran, what they do to their own people is pretty horrific, right? So

Speaker 60 I shed no tears for seeing IRGC personnel wiped out. I shed no tears for seeing Iranian ballistic missiles destroyed.

Speaker 60 I think, yes, a lot of sort of variables and to coin a phrase, unknown unknowns going forward.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 93 So when we talk community, we're talking about an entire ecosystem surrounding this condition, including, of course, the patients at the center that are all trying to live life in the moment, live life for the future, but then also create a new future.

Speaker 39 Learn more at MS.Now.

Speaker 47 Move on to NATO really quick with the NATO meetings.

Speaker 49 There are two things I want to talk about.

Speaker 48 One is related to this in the Middle East.

Speaker 3 One of my takeaways, and I understand that there's not an unlimited number of patriots in the world, patriot missiles.

Speaker 48 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.

Speaker 112 But watching how easily we rebuffed the fake Iranian attack in Qatar and Bahrain,

Speaker 48 my initial response was, again, it's like, well,

Speaker 53 weren't those resources better served in Ukraine?

Speaker 6 Like, why aren't we helping Ukraine more?

Speaker 2 Like, why aren't we helping Ukraine more?

Speaker 23 Like, that, like, Russia seems to me to be a more acute threat than Iran.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 56 And at NATO, Trump, I guess, expressed,

Speaker 31 it's always like Trump expresses openness to everything.

Speaker 54 If you're ever like, will you consider this?

Speaker 48 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.

Speaker 67 Have you learned anything from the NATO meeting?

Speaker 48 Is there any potential cavalry coming for Ukraine?

Speaker 60 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

Speaker 5 big bunker busting.

Speaker 21 The most optimistic gloss you can give me starts with Lindsey Graham.

Speaker 106 That's not encouraging.

Speaker 60 So this is sort of at Lindsey Graham's expense, but the ending is a little happier than it might seem.

Speaker 60 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

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 62 Why hasn't it been put up, right?

Speaker 60 And so the conventional wisdom would have you believe what's because Donald Trump does not want anything. It's true to a degree.

Speaker 60 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?

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 And it was so broad in scope that it would be unenforceable.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 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 chasm, right?

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 Why are they doing that? Because they see that NATO, that the transatlantic relationship is kind of on the skits.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 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?

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 The second thing I would say is, speaking of this divide between the U.S. and Europe, I don't like it when NATO Secretary General calls Donald Trump daddy.

Speaker 106 Okay.

Speaker 60 I especially don't like it when the White House tweets daddy's home.

Speaker 6 Just real quick, just for people who did not, because I didn't see, I was not watching the fucking live press conference.

Speaker 19 And so I was like, why did the NATO Secretary call Trump daddy?

Speaker 45 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.

Speaker 76 No, no, no. Israel-Iran.

Speaker 63 Oh, sorry.

Speaker 5 This time it was Israel-Iran that were the two kids fighting on the playground.

Speaker 77 Yeah, well, same metaphor he's used.

Speaker 27 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.

Speaker 49 And then Ruto is like, well, no, sometimes daddy has to use stern language and tell him to stop.

Speaker 76 Daddy.

Speaker 60 Yeah. I was like, you know, dude, you're from the Netherlands.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 But now the White House is just taking this up.

Speaker 76 They're tweeting this out.

Speaker 101 Maybe the Dutch, the Dutch are so weird with their eat it.

Speaker 48 You know, it's like, like you, I mean, there, 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.

Speaker 67 They have a weird culture, and it might not, it just, it might not have translated right.

Speaker 99 Daddy might have a different

Speaker 6 meaning.

Speaker 60 Well, yeah, I think there might be a bit of a disconnect in sort of dutch to english language 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 hijack yeah no we have a n-serious problem we have a n-serious problem when the secretary general of nato is calling the president of the united states daddy however however look let us say like 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?

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 But all of a sudden, everyone at NATO has affirmed that's the benchmark we want to reach, except the Spanish.

Speaker 113 Except the Spanish.

Speaker 60 No, they're socialists. And I was just in Spain, and I can tell you that.

Speaker 51 And Trump also still doesn't understand how the system works. He keeps being like, why won't Spain pay the 5%?

Speaker 21 I'm like, it's not dues.

Speaker 73 Like a country.

Speaker 62 It's not dues.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 I mean, Zeitenwende is now a thing. Germany is set to spend, I think it's 3.5%

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 Mertz is serious about German national defense and also recognizes the threat posed by Russia. This is all to the good.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 And if that gets the Europeans not only to spend more on defense, but also and more critically.

Speaker 13 Couldn't the Europeans spend more on defense without flattering daddy?

Speaker 60 Well, you would think, man, you would think. I mean,

Speaker 62 I don't know.

Speaker 13 The energy I was looking forward to shout out to Dutch.

Speaker 45 Did you see the queen of the Netherlands?

Speaker 48 Like, mocking his mouth movements.

Speaker 76 Yes.

Speaker 5 We'll put a little link for people who need a little joy.

Speaker 60 But also, just as a

Speaker 60 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?

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 39 Now he comes away saying, well,

Speaker 60 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

Speaker 60 might actually come to their defense if they get attacked.

Speaker 60 It's not great, but given the

Speaker 60 low threshold for good news these days,

Speaker 60 it's not a bad result either. And it's cringe to watch this.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 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

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 27 Are we giving patriots to Ukraine?

Speaker 60 According to Trump, he is looking into trying to find more.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 But keep in mind, too, just one last point, if I may. Trump is dazzled and

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 So it's the same principle: kill the archer instead of shooting down 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?

Speaker 53 Very last thing.

Speaker 14 Are we going to have an Abraham Accord expansion?

Speaker 104 Why do I keep seeing tweets about that?

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 39 Okay. Welcome to the Middle East.

Speaker 64 We'll keep an eye on that. Michael Weiss, thank you as always.

Speaker 46 Appreciate your judiciousness, your 1980s movies references, and we'll see you soon.

Speaker 60 Thanks, man. Anytime.

Speaker 25 Everybody, stick around for Jonathan Cohn.

Speaker 93 So when we talk community, we're talking about an entire ecosystem surrounding this condition, including, of course, the patients at the center that are all trying to live life in the moment, live life for the future, but then also create a new future.

Speaker 14 Whether it's breaking news, exclusive reporting, election coverage, or in-depth analysis, MS Now keeps the people at the heart heart of everything they do.

Speaker 101 All right, he writes the breakdown newsletter for the Bulwark.

Speaker 45 It's new.

Speaker 14 You better be getting getting it.

Speaker 46 It is extremely valuable.

Speaker 3 It makes me smarter.

Speaker 27 He also has books, which include the 10-year war, Obamacare, and the unfinished crusade for universal coverage. It's my newish colleague, Jonathan Cohen.

Speaker 47 How you doing, man?

Speaker 41 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.

Speaker 33 It shows the limits of creating names such as this.

Speaker 44 You know, the president has decided the Israel-Iran war is the 12-day war.

Speaker 27 We were just talking about that.

Speaker 14 Might turn out to be a little longer than 12 days.

Speaker 52 We'll see how it goes.

Speaker 48 And you and Trump have very little in common, but in this case, maybe you might be learning a lesson together.

Speaker 41 Yeah, not that much in common. But hey, you know, I'll take a lesson wherever I can get it.
So there you go.

Speaker 49 One of my favorite quiz questions to ask my MAGA family members is

Speaker 27 our friends or whoever people I encounter is what is a trait that Donald Trump has that you would want your child to emulate?

Speaker 45 You have two children.

Speaker 6 Can you answer that?

Speaker 19 Do you have anything?

Speaker 32 Do you have a single trait of Donald Trump's you wish your child would emulate?

Speaker 68 Oh boy.

Speaker 41 A trait of Donald Trump that I, it's this is hard. I will say this.

Speaker 41 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.

Speaker 41 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.

Speaker 41 But that ability to kind of block out the noise and believe that you're doing the right thing and pursue it, I think is a valuable quality.

Speaker 41 And I frankly wish more leaders who I do like and agree with had that quality.

Speaker 39 So there you go. Self-confidence.

Speaker 67 Self-confidence.

Speaker 52 There you go.

Speaker 54 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.

Speaker 100 I'm sure they'll be very excited to hear this clip.

Speaker 63 All right.

Speaker 7 You have a newsletter out this morning called The Big, Beautiful Rush Job about the BBB.

Speaker 43 You write that the goal is to start the voting process this weekend and get a bill on Trump's desk by July 4th.

Speaker 28 That's eight days from now.

Speaker 5 Not nearly enough time for Republican lawmakers to figure out exactly what's in the bill.

Speaker 17 Feels like we've been here before.

Speaker 48 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

Speaker 48 the Senate could do about that.

Speaker 27 But I guess just talk about the difference between Obamacare and this, because Obamacare kind of had a reputation for getting rushed.

Speaker 54 You know, we got to pass the bill to see what's in it or whatever the famous Pelosi quote was.

Speaker 49 Talk about like the comparison between that and the degree with which this is trying, they're trying to jam this through.

Speaker 41 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.

Speaker 41 Nobody knew who was in it, which could not be farther from the truth. They spent a year debating that bill.

Speaker 41 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.

Speaker 41 It was all sort of, you know, on the front pages, debated for months.

Speaker 41 And for better or worse, a lot of the stuff that was said about the bill was wrong or it was exaggerated, but there was a lot of discussion.

Speaker 13 The death panels?

Speaker 19 Did the death panels ever come?

Speaker 62 Oh, so it's not a good question. Well, no, although we may get some now.

Speaker 41 So, you know, stay tuned from this bill, bill, this Republican bill. For better or worse, the process took a long time.
To the frustration, by the way,

Speaker 60 of the Obama White House.

Speaker 41 I mean, Rahm Emanuel 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.

Speaker 41 The quote that Pelosi gave that everyone used was basically she was saying, Look, there's been so much controversy, so much misinformation.

Speaker 41 When you're finally done on this bill, people will see that what we're actually doing doesn't match up. There are no death panels, to take take that example.
So, that was, you know, a year.

Speaker 41 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.

Speaker 41 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.

Speaker 41 And then, I can't remember if it was Thursday or Friday, they finally voted, but five days, five days,

Speaker 41 you know, for a massive tax cut, huge cuts to health care, cuts to food assistance.

Speaker 41 By the way, you know,

Speaker 41 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.

Speaker 41 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.

Speaker 41 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.

Speaker 41 And, you know, honestly,

Speaker 41 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.

Speaker 48 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.

Speaker 41 It's a super complicated bill by design.

Speaker 41 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

Speaker 41 change.

Speaker 41 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.

Speaker 41 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. People, you don't know your budget figures.

Speaker 41 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.

Speaker 41 You know, there's an estimate from the Congressional Budget Office, 11 million people lose health insurance.

Speaker 41 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.

Speaker 41 And this is going to hurt people.

Speaker 41 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.

Speaker 41 But when you take that much health care away from that many people, they're going to suffer.

Speaker 60 They're going to have higher bills.

Speaker 41 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.

Speaker 41 They're going to have trouble paying their grocery bills.

Speaker 77 And they're not going to be able to go to the doctor.

Speaker 41 And some of them are going to just go into deeper financial distress.

Speaker 62 And some are going to get sick and die.

Speaker 41 Like a lot of reporters, I've been spending a lot of time interviewing people about this.

Speaker 41 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.

Speaker 41 She lifts her into a wheelchair.

Speaker 41 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.

Speaker 41 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.

Speaker 41 She's got, you know, she's got a shoulder thing from all the lifting, right?

Speaker 41 she's got some cardiac problems and you know maybe she gets confined 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 talked about this last night on the next level like i don't really understand why they're doing it i just i i i just don't i i don't can you make heads or tails of this?

Speaker 47 I know you've just been like, I guess, let's put it this way: you know, there are

Speaker 48 the people on the hill, you know, the congressional guys, well, you know, have their own self-identity.

Speaker 48 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.

Speaker 54 Like, that's all kind of psychological analysis.

Speaker 10 But, like, the analysts, like, you like read like the, you know, the conservative analysts, like, what is the defense?

Speaker 51 I can't even find like a compelling defense of doing it the way they're doing it.

Speaker 65 What have you seen anything?

Speaker 41 Yeah, yeah, there is. There is.
So, I mean, I want to acknowledge, like, there is a principled conservative argument, right? And, and I actually respect people come out and make these arguments.

Speaker 41 I think it's important to argue these things in American politics, you know. And they would say, you know, put in these money, these programs in general aren't that efficient.

Speaker 41 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.

Speaker 41 Maybe some people lose health care. It's worth it in the end.

Speaker 113 I don't believe that.

Speaker 41 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.

Speaker 41 In addition to that, there is a more detailed analytic argument that has been put forward.

Speaker 41 There are some think tanks out there that have been making these arguments that basically say, look, there's a lot of fraud.

Speaker 41 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.

Speaker 41 And there's waste and abuse, and that these changes in this bill are going to cut down on them.

Speaker 41 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.

Speaker 41 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.

Speaker 41 And those are sort of the two big arguments. I mean, there's others, but I'd say those are the two big ones.

Speaker 14 I guess my point is that,

Speaker 48 unlike some of the other 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.

Speaker 99 How about this?

Speaker 31 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.

Speaker 55 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 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 oh we're just getting rid of the waste fraud and abuse but like that's not true So what about a defense on the merits of the actual program?

Speaker 41 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 you kind of go back 20 years, 25 years in the healthcare debate, Republicans versus Democrats.

Speaker 41 You had a lot of really heavy-hitter kind of economists and analysts, people, places like American Enterprise Institute, where they would advise like John McCain when he ran for president, for example.

Speaker 41 There's some very formidable conservative healthcare economists on that side of the aisle.

Speaker 41 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.

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

Speaker 26 And, you know, really formidable.

Speaker 41 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.

Speaker 41 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.

Speaker 41 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.

Speaker 41 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,

Speaker 41 no space for that in the Republican Party of Donald Trump and MAGA. They just want nothing to do with this stuff.
And so

Speaker 41 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.

Speaker 41 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.

Speaker 41 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.

Speaker 41 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.

Speaker 41 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.

Speaker 54 All right. Congrats, Brian Blasey, PhD.

Speaker 49 I'm just checking him out. Nice haircut.

Speaker 65 I want to talk about two more things for Adlerja.

Speaker 48 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.

Speaker 52 So just unlike the primary and secondary effects, and you mentioned the anecdote of the woman.

Speaker 48 What exactly are the programs and the impacts that people are going to feel?

Speaker 41 So, I mean, the biggest cuts in this bill are to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act, Obamacare. And there's sort of two kind of sets of really big.

Speaker 41 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?

Speaker 5 More paperwork, which is great. More paperwork.

Speaker 76 It's very conservative.

Speaker 9 Right, right.

Speaker 67 I mean, you know, we're really anti-abundance.

Speaker 55 It really is.

Speaker 41 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 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 we're not getting somebody who doesn't belong on the program.

Speaker 41 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

Speaker 41 certainly

Speaker 113 there's a good, smart way.

Speaker 59 to avoid that.

Speaker 41 But what they've done here is basically say, we're just going to throw up a lot more paperwork, put all these more procedures. And we know what happens because we've tried this before.

Speaker 41 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.

Speaker 41 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.

Speaker 41 It's probably a lot of people, seasonal workers. They have trouble getting documentation to show that they're working.
You have a lot of people, maybe they don't have great access to technology.

Speaker 41 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.

Speaker 37 Really what we want.

Speaker 102 We want to make it as hard as possible for people to get healthcare.

Speaker 67 That's great. More friction in the process.

Speaker 65 I mean, yeah, got it.

Speaker 58 Literally, that's what we're doing here.

Speaker 41 And then there's like straight-up cuts. I mean, this doesn't get enough attention.

Speaker 41 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.

Speaker 41 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.

Speaker 41 The formula is tweaked. Again, it's one of these things that if you look at it, you have no idea.

Speaker 41 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.

Speaker 41 Well, now you're going to go ahead and to get that same insurance, you'd have to pay more.

Speaker 41 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 have to pay that.

Speaker 110 So that's kind of the primary effect.

Speaker 30 The other thing you said,

Speaker 47 the way the formulas work out, they're also changing the formulas for the states in a big way.

Speaker 68 And that is like why you see a lot of like the rural hospitals like freaking out.

Speaker 48 Because like that, that is another, I think, real like tangible impact potentially that folks are going to feel.

Speaker 48 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.

Speaker 76 Yeah.

Speaker 41 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.

Speaker 41 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.

Speaker 41 We've already had rural hospitals closing. You're going to see more rural hospitals closing.

Speaker 41 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.

Speaker 41 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 Upper Peninsula.

Speaker 41 You know, you have one hospital in like a 50, 60 mile radius, right? So your Upper Peninsula, Michigan will do my state.

Speaker 41 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.

Speaker 41 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.

Speaker 41 You can never touch Medicaid or Obamacare.

Speaker 113 Doesn't matter.

Speaker 41 You still got to drive in a blinding snowstorm, 60, 70, 80 miles,

Speaker 41 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,

Speaker 41 you're in some kind of distress.

Speaker 110 So this affects everybody, even people who aren't dependent on these programs.

Speaker 48 Our minds go to these totally opposite places.

Speaker 51 You're in the Upper Peninsula.

Speaker 26 It's a snowstorm.

Speaker 49 I'm thinking that like you're down in the bayou

Speaker 8 after

Speaker 49 rain and it's like you gotta 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.

Speaker 51 And reconciliation comes with certain rules about what can be included in it and what can't.

Speaker 48 You know, there are also some rules on

Speaker 49 how much can add to the deficit.

Speaker 11 This is a little bit easier to get around.

Speaker 26 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.

Speaker 67 And there's some news this morning.

Speaker 48 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,

Speaker 58 or

Speaker 49 some of these cuts won't be included in the bill, which

Speaker 51 maybe creates political problems.

Speaker 75 Is that a good assessment?

Speaker 41 That was a really good explanation. Better than probably what I would have come up with.

Speaker 60 But yeah, I mean, basically.

Speaker 13 So what are the parts

Speaker 51 that are then now going to be debated over?

Speaker 99 Like, as far as you can tell?

Speaker 41 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.

Speaker 41 This one revolves, 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.

Speaker 41 And the footnote was like, I think broke the record for longest footnote in the history of bulwark footnotes.

Speaker 46 All the good stuff is in the footnotes on the bulwark.

Speaker 51 Just a little bit.

Speaker 60 In the footnotes, yeah, you know,

Speaker 41 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.

Speaker 41 But it knocked out about 150.

Speaker 41 Well, I don't know the exact number because they don't, 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.

Speaker 41 It's one-to-one, but you know, it could be like $100 billion, maybe more.

Speaker 41 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.

Speaker 41 I spoke to some budget analysts this morning as this was breaking.

Speaker 41 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,

Speaker 41 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?

Speaker 41 You know, it's the deep state, whatever.

Speaker 41 I think Blune, who's the, you know, 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 weeks ago with the California environment, kind of overriding a California rule on emissions and cars for pollution.

Speaker 41 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 sometimes to restructure, reword the provision so that it can get the okay.

Speaker 41 They can look for other cuts.

Speaker 113 Or, you know, here, I'm just going to throw this out there as a wild idea.

Speaker 41 They could just not cut Medicaid as much.

Speaker 89 I mean, that's possible.

Speaker 1 Well, that'll be something to watch.

Speaker 72 So of the total amount of cuts, it's what, like

Speaker 68 a third, essentially?

Speaker 41 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.

Speaker 41 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.

Speaker 43 All right. We'll keep monitoring it.

Speaker 12 If they just kind of jam this thing out over the weekend, we will keep everybody posted.

Speaker 48 But it's one of these things where, and your newsletter 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.

Speaker 6 And part of it is just because of this, like this stuff is like very complicated, right?

Speaker 112 Like it's complicated to do, but of all of the stuff that Trump is doing, like it might be the thing that ends up affecting people's lives the most directly.

Speaker 27 So we're going to keep working on it.

Speaker 64 Jonathan's covering it.

Speaker 47 Read his newsletter and we'll be talking to you soon.

Speaker 3 All right.

Speaker 27 Thank you so much to Jonathan Cohn and Michael Weiss.

Speaker 64 We will see you all back here tomorrow.

Speaker 43 We've got another doubleheader tomorrow.

Speaker 64 It's going to be a good one. Stick around.
We'll see you then.

Speaker 62 Peace.

Speaker 62 Riding through the

Speaker 62 hangers down.

Speaker 62 Heading into twilight, spreading out her wings tonight.

Speaker 62 She got you jumping off the deck, shoving in the overdrive.

Speaker 62 I'm away through

Speaker 62 the dangers out.

Speaker 62 I'll take you running

Speaker 62 over,

Speaker 62 make it lower.

Speaker 62 You'll never say hello to you until you're getting on the red line. No, hello.

Speaker 62 You'll never know what you can do until you get it on the line where you get to go.

Speaker 74 The Board podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

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Michael Weiss and Jonathan Cohn: Animal House at the Pentagon

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