Trump Desperate for Strait Allies

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As the around war enters its third week with no end in sight, Trump said a few words about the conflict at the top of his remarks during a White House event about the Kennedy Center renovations where it was clear the president had one thing on his mind. We are pounding that area, that coast, pounding, pounding, pounding, pounding it hard. They took a pounding from Rick. He knows what it is to pound people. He's a little rough with a couple of the people, but that's okay. Dave's survived. I didn't watch that beforehand on purpose. That was great work. Just a masterful supercut there. There was a lot of pounding. A lot of pounding. You know what else is getting pounded? New Supreme Leader of Iran apparently. According to the New York Post. Allegedly. Allegedly. I guess we'll get that. We don't want to slander him. What do you get a lawsuit? Look, he could pound who he wants to pound. I don't care. I gotta say, we got to be low down on that guy's priority list at this point. Yeah. That was the joke. Yeah, we want to wake up first, I think. Yeah, a lot of talk of pounding. Do you think he remembers that Rick Grinnell was gay when he's talking about this? Yeah, when he was saying Rick there, he was talking about Rick Grinnell, who was running the Kennedy Center and then just left. Rick Grinnell is a Twitter troll that became a human, worked in the Intel world for a while, was ambassador to Germany, was the DNI for a while, acting DNI in the last administration, wanted to be Secretary of State, didn't get it, became the head of the Kennedy Center, then got fired from that. Because he was pounding artists? He sees an asshole. As Trump said, he was pounding too many artists at the Kennedy Center. Doesn't seem like he's a people person in that role. So Trump did address the latest developments in Iran, which he claimed has been literally obliterated before brow-beating other countries for not helping the U.S. reopen the Strait of Hormuz by sending warships, even though he said, quote, we don't need anybody because we already won, even though he just sent 2,500 Marines to join the 50,000 U.S. troops deployed in the region. Here's more on all that from our very focused Commander-in-Chief. They have been literally obliterated. Numerous countries have told me they're on the way. Some are very enthusiastic about it, and some aren't. And when we want to know, do you have any mind sweepers? Well, we'd rather not get involved, sir. Who's the ship for you? I mean, for 40 years we're protecting you, and you don't want to get involved in something that is very minor. We attacked Carg Island and knocked it, literally destroyed everything in the island, except for the area where the oil is. I call it the pipes. We left the pipes just one simple word, and the pipes will be gone too. See, Trump Kennedy Center? It's been let go to hell. The bones are potentially something that could be unbelievable. There's never been a paint. I said, someday I'm going to discover a paint where you don't have to actually use gold leaf. Gold leaf is a very, very big and expensive process, but it's a beautiful thing, but not when you use paint. Week three of the war. We are doing Monday morning events about the Kennedy Center renovations, and said a lot more about the renovations than he did about the war itself. His impression of our allies. Like, doi, doi, doi. He later talked about how we have 45,000 troops, and he said, in Japan, defending Japan, South Korea, defending South Korea, and Germany. Which of those leaders of those three countries do you think he was doing the impression of? He definitely didn't want to do. He stopped himself from doing any kind of an accent, which I think is positive. I thought he was talking about Europe and NATO, but I could be wrong. I could be wrong. I think they have some mind sweepers, but it doesn't really matter. I think Chancellor Mertz came out today to say, NATO's not for this. It's a defensive alliance. Why would we send troops to help with you with your war of choice? So maybe he was talking about the Germans, but it could have been Japan. It could have been South Korea. Yeah. So basically what's happened is, reportedly, the Iranians have begun to lay minds in the straight of form moves, although Trump today said, we don't know. They might have. We don't know. We can't tell. We haven't seen anything yet. We're obviously still firing at ships. And so no ships are going through basically right now. And energy prices, I think oil closed. It's still around $100 a barrel today. And so that's the situation right now. So Trump wants to open the straight of form moves, but apparently the US military can't do it ourselves. And so he is begging all these countries to join, but then not begging them. No one has really said yes yet. I haven't seen. Have you seen any time? No, not yet. I mean, and he's doing impressions of them that are not very nice. I think the Iranians are letting through oil that are in their tankers, or maybe even Chinese-owned tankers. So they're letting some oil through. Yeah. I'm sure most of these groups that he's being in front of, they're pissed that Trump started this war, didn't consult them, and now he's saying, hey, can you help us out? And he's also being a dick about it. I mean, again, yelling at NATO, like this is not what NATO is for. They're a defensive alliance. It's also incredibly dangerous. I mean, he says in that press conference that all you need is one Iranian missile or rocket or mine, and you have a catastrophe. And so why would anyone want to participate in that? I mean, we're not escorting ships through the straight-over moves yet. Why would the Japanese or the Germans want to help us out? Trying to build a coalition of straight allies. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It's good. Yeah, that's what the S is for. Yeah, it's hard to figure out where the mines are famously. You have to hover both of the mice button over it, and you'll literally only know if there's one, two, three around you. I just want to, this is beside the point, but it is the idea of Donald Trump, one of the people of the worst tastes you'd ever could imagine, suggesting that the Kennedy Center has great bones when it's one of the most beautiful buildings built in, like probably the last hundred years, beautiful thing that he's planning to destroy. Again, not high on the list of reasons to be bothered by Donald Trump, but I do think it's worth mentioning, especially because it is inconceivable even a couple of years ago, maybe even in the first Trump term, that you would be about a week or so into a war and have unrelated press events related to interior design. You would not typically do that. It would be actually something that I think you'd be kind of a bipartisan uproar about that a president could possibly think it was worth his or her time to be focused on architecture of local landmarks during a time in which we've just lost, what, now over 13 members of the armed forces we bombed a school killed over 175 people, but this is the world we live in. Did you see that he's also considering getting rid of the Ionic columns in front of the White House? Yes, so he prefers Corinthian. He prefers Corinthian because, well, they're godier, right? And I think he doesn't really appreciate the kind of story that the different kinds of columns tell, but I don't think he took our history 101 at Williams College in 2003, so I guess that's probably why. Well, look at us now. We're distracted from the Iran war. Yeah. Anyway, imagine being one of these countries that he wants to get involved in the war. Like today he said they hit Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, Kuwait. Nobody expected that. We were shocked. They fought back. Everyone expected that. What the Iranians are doing is what everyone expected them to do, which is to fire at U.S. military bases in these places to close the Strait of Hormuz. And I don't think most experts I talked to figured that Iran would view this as existential and they would punch back as hard as they possibly could, which probably meant creating an economic cost. And now there's all this reporting that Trump was high in his own supply after Venezuela, and he either dismissed or ignored warnings about how much more complicated an Iran operation would be. And now we're in this mess. And Axios described his staff as having, quote, buyer's remorse, but he refuses to back down. So every step is escalatory. And you're telling like NATO or the Philippines or Japan to jump into this situation? Is that your troops? I got to say too, from just a pure political perspective, can't reflect too well on Donald Trump with the American people that we put out a call for our allies to help us and no one wants to help us. Maybe because he has browbeat all of them, not just in the run up to this war, but on tariffs, on NATO, on everything else. He has basically spent an entire year and many years before that just attacking all of our closest allies. And now he's somehow surprised when they don't come to our aid and for his crazy fucking war plans. Yeah, if he didn't tell us why he was doing this, he clearly didn't tell them either. He had to tell me this point, like maybe the most predictable outcome, like I think you can go back and find papers that say, well, in the event that the supreme leader is killed, Iran would view it as an existential threat and therefore might resort to closing the strait of Hormuzan firing upon other neighboring countries. Like it's sort of just an exercise of what would happen. This is what people said would happen, but completely unprepared for it and going around to talk to allies about how they could help after the fact rather than before. Like, do you guys know about, you know, Leroy Jenkins' is, when I say Leroy Jenkins, does that mean anything to you? Of course. That's what he's doing. It's actually a pretty, Leroy Jenkins going to war with Iran and he ran in there and everybody's like, what's he doing? Like, no, we're not. Yeah, he's expecting everybody to come in behind him. Google, YouTube it. I know he gave no context for you listener, just YouTube it for whenever you're in a second. Yeah. He mentioned Karg Island. Karg Island is where something like 90% of Iranian oil exports go out of, right? And so he talked about bombing the island, all the military installations, not the oil refineries there. So hasn't yet secured any of Iran's nuclear material. He's talked about potentially seizing Karg Island, deploying another 2,500 Marines to the region. It seems like either to take Karg Island or to seize the nuclear material, you would need ground forces, ground troops. Are we getting close to a war, do you think, Tommy, that involves ground troops? If we take Karg Island, they have to have a general who's from Boston and has a really big accent. We got Kag Island. That's beside the point that you were asking about. I find it very hard to believe that the U.S. and Israel, especially the Israelis, would not do something to get the uranium stockpile out of Iran. And I imagine that Trump would prefer the Israelis take the lead on that operation. But I think it would be a major operation that would probably involve both of us, because we're probably talking about two different nuclear sites. I've seen experts estimate that you'd need about 1,000 personnel to secure and conduct the operation at each. You'd need a commando team that's trained in digging up and handling nuclear materials themselves to do the actual removal. You would need maybe an excavator or other earth moving materials or machines to get at the stuff, because it's under rubble, because we bombed it. And then you'd need a bunch of troops to secure a perimeter. You'd need to provide defense against missiles and drones. You would need either to seize a runway or to create a runway to get the shit in and out. And then you would probably have people in theater for a considerable amount of time. This wouldn't be Venezuela, like swoop in, swoop out. It would probably be boots on the ground for a while. So that is very, very dangerous. I think Karg Island is probably a little simpler in the short term, just like to seize the thing. But then you're just sitting there 15 miles away from the Iranian shore and can get fired at. Also, how long are you occupying Karg Island at that point? Right. What's the goal? Is the goal just to cut off all oil and gas revenue in the short term? Is it to just own their oil and gas in the long term? I don't really know. So I imagine there's a, I think there's like a hundred, 99% chance that Netanyahu does something to get the HEU out now, letting the Israelis do it alone. The HEU is the Highly Interest Uranium. Sorry. But what happens if an Israeli commando is captured or taken down? There's ways this gets more complicated. I do think this shouldn't be a problem if whether Israel or the US leads, because according to Trump, we've killed all the Iranian leaders anyway. So what do you think's going on there too? They keep saying, the administration and Trump insinuating that maybe the new Ayatollah is injured, that he might be dead. Trump's like, I don't even know who we would negotiate with. There's no leaders there anymore. It doesn't seem like that's exactly on the level. But yeah, it's weird. They're trying to kind of run him down and suggest weakness, but I don't know what to what end. And they clearly leaked this suggestion that the new Supreme Leader is gay to the New York Post because they were then tweeting about it and kind of taking the victory lap on the story. But again, what's the point of this? So we want a diplomacy and have an off-ramp? It's really hard to know who's telling the truth because you obviously expect the Iranians to lie because it's a regime that might lie. But also everything the Trump administration says. There was also this Axios story that there's a diplomatic channel now between Wittkoff and the Iranians that is opened, and then the Iranians were like, no, that's a complete lie. What are you talking about? And the administration's like, no, they're lying. They're complete liars. And you're like, I don't know. It's funny to think that Kamala Harris and the Trump administration agree that neither country is ready for a gay leader. Do you think that... But even though that's... Sorry, that's not what she was saying. Even though it is what the words meant, but it's not what she was saying. Apparently Iran may be ready. Right. Yeah. That Iran... I had told a Buddha judge. So I'm realizing that I'm gonna have to... Moving the honeymoon from Stray to Hormuz to Carg Island was probably a mistake. Anyway. Yeah, who knows? They're all liars. It's a real rub. I also saw the administration officials told Axios that U.S. involvement could continue until September. That is insane. They don't know. Trump talks about this war like he can turn it off and on. The Iranians have a say. The Israelis have a say. They're 50,000 troops in the region. American troops in the region right now, all of them are in some way exposed. Some of them have been killed. It's not up to him. They also... They're like, well, maybe in a week or two we can get the Navy, can start escorting ships through the Stray to Hormuz. That doesn't seem like an easy mission either. No, that feels very expensive and time consuming and maybe feasible. But there are also the stories about the U.S. Navy escorting ships through the Stray. Say they'll start after the end of hostilities. So what's the point? Yeah, when is the... How are the hostilities ending? Pod Save America is brought to you by Hymns. 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Vance made his opposition known is, quote, skeptical, quote, worried about success and, quote, just opposes the war. Vance was asked about this while standing next to Trump in the Oval on Monday. Here's what he said. Are you completely on board with the current war in Iran? I know what you're trying to do, Phil. You're trying to drive a wedge between members of the administration between me and the president. What the president said consistently going back to 2015 and I agreed with them is that Iran should not have a nuclear weapon. So there's no hesitation given your past statements with the current operation? Well, I think one big difference, Phil, is that we have a smart president, whereas in the past we've had dumb presidents and I trust President Trump to get the job done. So that should do it, huh? It's a two-cube-by-half, I would say, from J.D. Vance. Agreed. Two-cube-by-half and there has been a series of stories about people gunning for Rubio, the real kind of behind the scenes jockeying, people who want to draft Rubio, and I don't know how plausible that really is, but what I take all of it to mean is just discomfort with Vance and the way Vance is just such a kind of like sleazy and like sleazy operator, Trump is a sleazy operator, but not in a way that you like him at the end of it, the way the others do, and so they look to Rubio as an alternative just because like Vance is just so full of shit. First of all, Phil knows what he did there. Phil knows what he did. Phil was being pretty divisive. Every time Vance gets this question, he has to whine and cry about the question itself and the questioner. It's like, I know you're trying to do here, or probably it's like, first of all, that was not convincing. Like I don't, like you could watch Trump's face. I don't think it convinced Trump in that moment that Vance wasn't trying to put some distance between himself and the policy. The idea that Vance thinks he can run away from a policy this consequential when he's the vice president is insane to me. Maybe he thinks he can position himself in 2028 as being less hawkish than Marco Rubio, but like... I don't know how he does that. You're not getting any love from the isolationist wing of the party. Yeah, I don't. Rubio has just as much stink on him, if not more, than JD Vance for this war, for any foreign policy adventure. Rubio is the national security advisor and the secretary of state. He's been one of the public faces, one of the few public faces. No, that's what I'm saying. I think maybe JD could argue that Rubio is more hawkish than he is. Oh, I thought you were saying, sorry, no, no. You were saying that maybe they turned to Rubio. I think only, not because of any kind of policy difference, but because just, they don't like JD Vance. He's just not a likable guy. He's just like so full of shit. Rubio is smart enough to your point to know that there's no way to run away from being tied to this. He's embracing it fully because it's his job to embrace it. I think he's more prone to being it. He has a sort of neocon instincts more than Vance does, but he knows he's got to own this, so he's owning it 100%. The idea that JD Vance is going to be reluctantly the face of the war in Iran. It doesn't make him like to use an old joke. It doesn't make him a better person. It just makes him a worse prostitute. The broader setup here is there's all these stories that Trump is polling everyone about who they like better. Is it Marco or is it JD? He did it to a bunch of donors down in Mar-a-Lago, and I think all the donors in Mar-a-Lago preferred Rubio. Maybe that's because they're in Florida. Maybe it's because they're rich guys. Maybe it's because JD Vance, a prick. Maybe it's because Rubio has been around longer. But yeah, I think they're both covered in the stink of this war, and this opens up a real isolationist wing in the Republican primary next time that could be filled by someone like a Tucker Carlson or like, I don't know, Rand Paul suggesting he might run. The Tucker thing seems to me the most plausible result of this, because you... So let's say the war ends next week or a couple weeks, and it is obviously destabilizing for quite a long time, but there isn't any giant catastrophe with more a ton of U.S. casualties, and we're not there for a year or whatever else. Then JD Vance thinks, okay, well, when it comes time for the primary, it's not really going to get brought up that much anyway, and maybe if I get asked about it, I can say, well, I think everyone knows for sure. Back then, I got some shit for it that I wasn't exactly for the war, and then that's fine. But in any scenario where this is still a problem or where there are real consequences for this war, I think that there is no way that JD Vance or Mark or Rubio are ever going to be able to run away from this, and all the energy, even if some donors like Rubio and some of the party establishment decides to like Rubio, which you could see whatever's left of the establishment, or Vance, all the energy in a Republican primary is going to be for these, the Tucker Carlson, Megan Kelly, anti-war, calling themselves America first, Marjorie Taylor Greene, whatever it is, that side of the party, that's going to be the energy in a primary, and JD Vance is going to get killed, and so is Rubio. Yeah, I don't, even if, look, let's hope this is not something that is dominating the news whatever a year from now, I still think this has such a big, I don't know how these, how JD Vance is going to go around saying he's not for wars in the Middle East after this, because they did, they ran that, that was exactly what they said, and now we're in the middle of it, and I think it's a genuine conviction on the part of a lot of the, not just like the Megan Kelly's of the world, but the podcast, like the kind of big influencers, like a lot of voices on the right, and they're just not going to forget this, or just, it's not going to be able to walk back, and by the way, JD- Political opportunity is just so great. And JD Vance is not going to be able to walk it, like, Donald Trump is going to be around, you think JD Vance is going to be able to successfully run away from Donald Trump, I find that hard to believe. I do wonder there, like the way that Trump was, Trump was like, seemed completely fine there, didn't seem perturbed, like I wonder if Trump was like, well, I made the decision, and if you need it for politics to just, I wonder if Trump is okay with that, is what I was wondering. Like, there's a possibility that it may- It's hard to tell. I can't tell you there. I was trying to watch his face, and it was not clear to me whether he was annoyed or not. I mean, as this thing goes, continues and gets worse, I'm sure he'll get increasingly angry at everyone around him. But if I ran against him, I would say, JD, you can tell us now that you were opposed to this war, but when the chips were down, you were feckless, and then you were silent. Yeah, were you, did you agree with it, or were you just weak and ineffective inside of the administration? And by the way, like, Rand Paul is one thing. If it is, someone like Tucker Carlson, Tucker Carlson is going to rip him to pieces, because he's not going to be able on a debate stage to get away with the kind of hemming and hawing that he's doing in this room. Definitely not. It's going to be over and over again. Were you for it or not? Yeah. Were you against it or not? Now, the smart politics for Trump would be to let JD Vance, like, have that other position, you know? I mean, honestly, even what, even what Trump did there was better to JD Vance than what fucking Joe Biden did to Kamala Harris on Gaza. Right? And according to all the reporting? Privately, yes. Privately. Privately telling her no daylight certainly wasn't great. That's what I'm saying. Like, she could have staked out a position where she voiced her honest criticisms about Gaza. And now we've seen from all the reporting that he didn't want her to do even that. Yeah. Which, just to be clear, was both, you know, that Kamala had agency there too. So Joe Biden didn't make Kamala Harris. No, that is true. But it's interesting. It was interesting to me that Trump is like, let this go and not had a big problem with it. I had the same thought, which is that it is, are we going to be in a situation where Donald Trump gives more space to his VP to operate than Joe Biden did? I think it's possible. So the political blowback over the war is clearly getting to Trump on Sunday night. He falsely accused US media outlets of working with Iran to amplify fake news about Iran and said that those outlets, quote, should be brought up on charges of treason. This was after FCC chair Brendan Carr, who was with Trump at Mar-a-Lago over the weekend, threatened to cancel television broadcasters licenses over their war coverage. Trump then spent his flight home to DC attacking reporters for asking even the most basic questions about Iran. Let's listen. I know what answer question like it's pretty criminal because our media government is with no credibility whatsoever putting out information that they know is false. And it's very dangerous thing. I think it's, I think they can get serious Japanese. Testing we So I mean, it's barely in the news today, but it does seem like the president threatening to shut down media outlets and charge them with treason. Kind of a big deal. Yeah, it seems bad. Yeah, he does that, so it doesn't lead to... No, but Trump does that. He calls people who doesn't like treasonous and says he's going to bring them up on charges. I think the car stuff is more important because the threat itself is enough to try to intimidate people into hesitating. Even if he never acts on it, people knowing that the FCC chair is watching this closely, maybe just worry about a headline a little bit more that seems to be antagonistic to the administration. I think it's really dangerous. Even Brendan Karra said that the government censor speech doesn't like that the FCC does not have a roving mandate to police the speech in the name of the public interest. The idea that he has now made himself the assignment editor and national ombudsman of the media while posting AI meme slop from the White House, that to me is really dangerous and more dangerous than Trump being in a bad mood because his war is going poorly and he doesn't like the coverage because Brendan Karra is thinking about this all day every day. Yeah, I think it's worth remembering how bad the media coverage was in the run up to the Iraq war and how anti-war voices were censored because thinking back to then, the structural setup was, for example, NBC is owned by GE, which is one of the biggest contractors of the Pentagon. Then you have reporters embedded with the US military and their networks booking current and former military guests. You're constantly getting the pro-military perspective from that little silo. Fox News is branding anyone who opposes the war as anti-American, but even MSNBC was canceling their number one show with Phil Donahue because they were worried he was too anti-war. Then you have Judy Miller at the New York Times laundering intelligence for the Bush administration and it's like a bad setup. It's very easy to be pro-wards, very hard to be against these wars. The natural instinct is to be patriotic and there's limitations and coverage that come from logistics and the nature of the Pentagon and how these things work. You don't need to have Brendan Carr running around for the media to be tilted in a pro-war way already, but adding that on top of it, I think is a really big deal and a pretty dangerous development and a sign that he's really flailing and he knows things are going badly. It's also worth pointing out how absurd the complaints are with the coverage here, which is like, first of all, what Trump was talking about is that there was an image of Iranians celebrating the new supreme leader in the streets and it turned out that it was AI and it wasn't that many people. No, that was a, I don't even remember, there's not a lot of US media outlets that were making that a huge thing. He famously cares about accurate crap counts. That's going to say, that was, so that's his complaint. The real complaints are that the media is what reporting, as Pete Hegseth said the other week, that it's front page news that Americans died in a war. That's the complaint now. We're talking about American deaths in war and we're asking things like, hey, how long is the war going to ask? And are you going to send men and women into Iran on the ground and risk their lives? Just like basic questions like that. And he was angry about a headline about a Wall Street Journal story about a number of planes that were damaged by an Iranian bomb and how damaged they were. He's like sort of dancing on the head of a pin. Hegseth, on the end of last week's sort of petulant childish way, was like, I can't wait for David Ellison to take over CNN. Like they're all just petulant. Like with Donald Trump, like in that moment, what he really is saying is you're also fucking negative. You're asking me about all. You're just being negative. You're just supposed to have negative. You're not talking about all the good stuff we're doing. You're bringing up all the stuff that I that is both terrible, but also wounds my ego, the path that Americans have died. That's an insult to me because it makes me look bad because I'm the one who caused those Americans to die, which he did, right? By launching this war, he invited that we're going to be a response and now Americans are dead because of it. It is like to be confronted with that. That's what that's what this is really about. Yeah. I think it's also worth pointing out that like Brandon Carr's threat is completely empty. I mean, he can try, but like from a legal standpoint, first of all, he only has oversight over broadcast licenses for local television networks. And, you know, Brian Stelter and some others looked into this like you, you, you start to try to threaten to take away a local broadcasters broadcasting license because of what, you know, just made up inaccurate coverage, which he can't cite. It's just not going to happen. Now he can still threaten them. And as we saw with the Kimmel thing, like you threaten the local broadcasters and then maybe you get the parent companies, like the ABCs and NBCs to worry a little bit. But like it's the whole thing is just like crazy fucking bluster, but it's meant to intimidate, you know? And I think that's the Trump treason thing is too, because like, yeah, Trump's not going to bring them up on charges of treason, but like, you know, the DOJ has been charging people left and right or trying to charge people left and right. And he also has sued a bunch of people personally. Yeah. I was like, it is, I think it's more than bluster. Like Trump is threatening people. He's threatening people with DOJ prosecution, but then they kind of, you know, we just saw that the prosecution against the Fed chair got thrown out by a judge. They've running into the sort of the brute incompetence of his DOJ. Like Brendan Carr can tie things up. He can get all the affiliates to be worried and get the affiliates starting to be worried that the parent company is going to cause a problem. Like this can be, like we saw that with Kimmel, but like he has a lot of just the threat I think is really dangerous. And yes, obviously you don't need to be like a constitutional scholar to know that the FCC can't decide what the news is on behalf of these organizations, but that doesn't mean he can't do a lot of damage and get the network lawyers to become a little bit less permissive. And then all of a sudden they have had an impact on what we're seeing without us ever even knowing it. Yeah. My only argument is that it's not that it's just bluster. It's that Brendan Carr's threats and Donald Trump's threats are the same level of dangerous. Because like I think that legally Brendan Carr doesn't have as much power as he thinks he is, but the threat from Carr and the threat from Trump, the goal is intimidation and it probably can work. So Trump isn't just targeting mainstream outlets over their Iran coverage. He's pissed at Trump friendly pundits too. One of his deranged Sunday night posts was a lengthy defense of right wing war monger Mark Levin against the right wing pundits who criticized him over Iran like Megyn Kelly, Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens. Trump called Levin's critics, quote, jealous and angry human beings who quote, are not MAGA and quote, will quickly fall by the wayside. The feud heated up over the weekend when Kelly hit back at Levin calling her evil and diabolical. And so Kelly tweeted back at Levin quote, I'm sorry you have a micro penis, but don't drag the rest of us into your drama. Very importantly, Marjorie Taylor Greene jumped in to say that quote, MAGA has been destroyed by micro penis Mark Levin. Is she right? So where did micro penis come in? Like Mark, it's just from- A loaded question, yeah. Right. Well, we know where it ends. We just don't know where it begins. I feel like the whole feud's been inching towards that for a while now. Yeah. Right. I mean, obviously we're not going to dive too deep into it, but Megyn Kelly just as Mark Levin as a micro penis. Not a grower or a shower. This is just the tip of a much smaller iceberg. Right. No, I know. She's- She's just creating a lot of surprising amount of motion in the ocean. Very little friction though. She did, she tried to explain it in a lengthy video. You watched that whole video. I did too. I did as well. I started and I got out. Oh, it's great. Did you want to- Well, the short version, the TLDR is Megyn Kelly was mean to Mark Levin. Well, there is no long version. So Levin called Daddy Trump to send a tweet defending him against the mean woman who's not nice to him, was Megyn Kelly. I think this fight dates back to the last buildup to the Iran War, if we want to get into that. I mean, Levin is very hawkish. He's in favor of bombing Iran. He's very favor of Israel and Netanyahu in particular. Mark Levin, do you guys know that Mark Levin went and sat in the audience at Netanyahu's trial in Israel? Like that's how much of a buddy is. And then Tucker Carlson at the time, this is last June or the run up to the June War, was very against the war. Also not a big fan of Israel. Also not a fan of Netanyahu. He converged into antisemitism. And then so the two started going to war over this policy and then Charlie Kirk gets dragged in, Megyn Kelly gets dragged in. You sprinkle in like a tablespoon of Candace Owens. You got a dash of Ben Shapiro, you know, like a little bit of Nick Fuentes. And now this is just a full on MAGA media war. And there's some polling that shows that MAGA is for whatever Trump is for. And I think that is generally true. But Megyn Kelly and Tucker Carlson, they are attuned to their audiences and they know what is getting downloads and attention and they watch the data. So I don't think they go down this path that they didn't feel like there was an audience for it. And there's also polling that shows that US views towards Israel have changed dramatically since 2023, dramatically, including among Republicans, nine point shift in favorability among Republicans. I think there's things happening under the surface. So Trump might be MAGA and that might be the case for now, but I think this is a fight for the future of MAGA. And there are major shifts happening under the surface. Some of it is foreign policy, like we talked about JD Vance, some of it is support for Israel, but we get to enjoy the fruits of it in the form of a micro penis. Yeah, under the surface and, you know, under Mark Levin's pants. It's really, it's actually like really been popping off. But the, yeah. So your question, Levin, though, basically she says, so he like tweeted about her a hundred times and said all these vile shit about her. And she said, like, you know, I sent a few brushback tweets, as she has wanted to do. And then she said, you know, and I just, then I just decided to just reveal that he has a micro penis. Not that she's like, not that I've seen it myself, but clearly we've all been exposed to it because someone who acts that hawkish and tries to overcompensate clearly has a micro penis. Like that's just something that you know. Yeah. She said, thankfully I've never had to look at it firsthand, but you can just tell. Then she goes, when they go low, we go micro penis. And then she said, so obviously Trump's truth social posts were drafted by Levin and Levin's post thanking the president is equally long. It was the only thing that is. Wow. That's good. Yeah. When they go low, we go small. That's good. That would have been, yeah. And I know, and like Ben Shapiro has been basically challenging Meg and Kelly and others to like denounce Candace Owens, which I don't think she has done. Or at least not to his satisfaction. And so like there is like this, it's a real like. Yeah. And it is, I always say like nothing is more upsetting to a right wing figure than to be treated like a Democrat. It's like the most hard, like they can't understand what's like, what, why are you talking this way about me? I'm not one of those people. You're not supposed to talk this way. And like they can't, it's a shocking experience. That's amazing. Speaking of Tucker, did you guys see that he said he thinks that the administration might charge him with under a fair violation acting as an agent of a foreign power for talking to people in Iran before the war, which he claims they knew he was doing because the CIA read his texts? Yeah. So I didn't watch the whole episode Tucker did on this. He did like a five minute clip that I had watched. It is certainly possible, if not quite likely that if Tucker was emailing with some Iranian officials, that gets picked up by the NSA or somebody and maybe that can get reviewed. I find it very unlikely that the government would then tell him that or that he would have committed a crime in the process. Like I don't get how that's a fair violation or any kind of violation. There's been some other anonymous sources batting it down saying, no, no, no one's going to charge Tucker, which is obviously, I don't want to see Tucker Carlson charged with a crime for simply talking to people and doing journalism. I don't want that to happen. Candace Owen said that if it happens, we ride it down. But where? So I guess, are we joining that as well? First amendment, protect Tracy Town. Yeah, I think that Ben Shapiro feud with Megyn Kelly is that Ben wants Megyn to denounce Candace for saying that Erica Kirk got Charlie Kirk killed. Right. And she won't. Yeah, the Candace stuff on that is. 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The email presented readers with the opportunity to sign up for a, quote, national security briefing membership, which for the price of a donation would send them the president's personal private, quote, national security briefings and unfiltered updates on the threats facing America. That news came after the New York Times reported that Jared Kushner, the president's second choice son-in-law and one of the United States lead negotiators in the Middle East, has been asking governments in the region to fund his private investment firm. Isn't that nice? Kushner's firm reportedly recently met with Saudi sovereign wealth fund, which already contributed $2 billion to the fund at the beginning of the Trump administration and is planning to seek funding from the sovereign wealth funds of the UAE and Qatar. What do you guys all want to start? Fundraising for your PAC off of the death of American soldiers or fundraising for your investment fund off of your alleged role as the diplomat tasked with ending two wars? What's worse? What do you think? Really one of the most disgusting images I think you've ever seen. Shocking. Actually, shocking. He's there in that white hat. There's a literal coffin in that image. They're using the coffin of a dead service member to raise money. Unconscionable in any other era would be a massive ongoing scandal that the president were asked about it. He would immediately say it was a terrible mistake that the person who was responsible would be fired. It would still be a big scandal. There would be apologies. There would be across-the-board condemnation from Democrats and Republicans, but this is just a blip because it's Donald Trump. Yeah, I had the same reaction. It was genuinely shocking how tasteless it was, but also a politically stupid it was. I can't fire that person. It's criminally stupid. By the way, as this is happening, there are go fund me's going around for the families of these dead service members that I don't think Donald Trump is supporting. Yeah, shocking. Anyone want a T.F. on Jared? I'm going to take the over on it, all right? Because Jared Kushner and Whitcoff and maybe the other bozos, real sons, potentially making money on this is the only way I can see to war in Iran, ending with the most recent living Ayatollah in the Oval Office with Trump talking about how beautiful the Strait of Hormuz is and what a beautiful property it's going to be. Actually, I didn't know until Jared showed me how beautiful it is. It's a beautiful place. All I think about is, remember we were talking about the mines? All was all about the mines. The mines is going to be beautiful. It's going to be a fantastic place. We're so grateful to the new Ayatollah for recognizing Israel. It's going to be a beautiful property. The head of the Palestinian Authority will be there too to talk about all the new high rises in Gaza. Well, that's Whitcoff, so that makes sense. So the younger. So yeah, that to me, I'm going to take the over on that one. I think the corruption is good. Yeah. Jared left the administration, started this investment fund, and he raised a bunch of money from the Saudis, billions from the Saudis, a bunch of money from the Qataris and the Emiratis. And that to me felt like kickbacks for services already rendered. And there was all these reporting at the time that the professionals at the sovereign wealth funds did not want to invest with Jared, but they were overruled by like MBS and other political actors. Jared then went into the wilderness for a while. Now he's back. He's doing negotiations with the Russians, with the Ukraine, with ... He's doing stuff in Gaza. Now he's part of the Iran talks. And he said that he would not be making any money off the board of peace. He would not be raising money from the Gulf countries that he's working with. Of course, that was a lie. To avoid conflicts, he said that too. Yeah. Use the words. And now he's trying to get more money for, I guess, for future favors. Also at the same time, I mean, there's all this reporting that the Russians are providing intelligence to the Iranians to help them kill US service members. I saw that the guy who runs the Russian sovereign wealth fund was back down to Miami for meetings with Jared and Wiccoth, presumably at one of their homes. Also we're moving sanctions on the oil, which is going to give them more money. So we're ostensibly funding now both sides of this conflict, not only, and also strengthening Russia and Ukraine at the same time. Yep. And the Emiratis bought 50% or 49% of the crypto company that the Trump family started. So the corruption in the rot is just so deep that I almost wasn't surprised by Jared raising this money, but it's so frustrating because this man doesn't have a government job. He has no official role. There's no oversight. There's nothing. But he's like, out there, briefing reporters as a senior administration official. Yep. Yep. Even though he's supposed to not be having an actual role in the government, except his role is apparently to cosplay, making peace, and then raising a bunch of money for his fund. Good for Jared. Over the weekend, I just was hearing from different people, and I have friends with family in Iran, and they were talking about how they just are waiting for regular updates when the member of their family can get Wi-Fi just to say that he's safe. Right? That's what they're living in between. Thankfully, some members of the family got out before, but now they're always really nervous. They hope everything's okay, and they just wait for when the internet's working to get a regular update. At the same time, I was hearing from family friends about an elderly relative in Israel who is infirmed, and so it is difficult for her to get in and out of shelters when there are bomb sirens that are going off, and that's happening all the time, and it's just really difficult. It's hard on the health. The real-world consequences of this are just nowhere for these people. There's the actual day-to-day, the sheer scale of what they've unleashed, the amount of people impacted by this. The number of people who are getting killed and whose lives have been upended, like the chaos they've unleashed, it just feels so abstract to them even now two weeks into it for Kushner, obviously, for Wittkoff, but for Trump, which is why when he's asked about the dead service members or anything like that, he's almost angry to be confronted by the actual reality of what he's done, because he wants to only live in the fun story version that he's telling himself, but as Orwell had said, as famously quoted by Christie fucking Noam, war is the one thing that intercedes on an authoritarian. The reality of a war, you can't pretend it's not happening, and that's what's happening. The Pentagon's been hiding the true casualty count. We don't really know, but I saw it today at the Washington Post, I think reported that 200 service members have been wounded as well, so there's a lot of people getting hurt. Also, add to your list of real human beings impacted by this war, the 800,000 people who have been evacuated from their homes in Lebanon, because the Israelis are basically telling everyone who lives within 25 miles of the border that they have to leave. Do you see the Israelis announced today too that they're not allowed back? I think what's happening here, I think what's happening in Lebanon is going to go on a lot longer than what's happening in Iran, and that it's going to end with Israel trying to permanently occupy a lot of Lebanese territory. Sounds like they want to if they're not going to let fucking 800,000 people return to their homes. They're just evacuating. Evacuating it in Gaza, and so now they're... Evacuating major swaths of Beirut, which is a huge city. Just using the opportunity of the conflict to pursue their larger purposes. The region which Trump is totally fine with and Huckabee is totally fine with, there's no breaks. Yeah. Hezbollah, obviously, terrible organization, kills indiscriminately, kills Israelis, kills Druze, kills Christians in Lebanon as well. Yeah, the idea that it's strategically smart to undertake this massive operation as you're in the midst of a war with Iran, it feels like a bad idea, and it's just more of a cynical way to use everyone being distracted to do things you always wanted to do. So speaking of corruption, the Times also published a piece over the weekend about the stock trading habits of Senator Mark Wayne Mullen. Trump's picked to replace Christine Ohm at DHS. Mullen reportedly bought shares in Chevron, the only US oil supplier with an active operation in Venezuela, five days before the United States attacked the country and later vowed to take over oil operations. According to the Times, Mullen has become quite the trader, reporting at least 130 trades last year and outperforming the market by 8%. Sure, it's just a coincidence. After selling his company, this is from the Times story too, after selling his company in 2021, Mullen reported fewer than 30 stock trades in 2022. In 2023, his first year as a senator, that jumped to 100. So suddenly, he just is trading a lot of stock these days. His assets originally when he got to the Senate were between $2.8 and $9 million when he first got to the House. Now it's between $29 million and $97 million. Jesus. I guess he did some good trading, huh? Yeah, it's good work, Jude. What do you guys think about Mark Wayne Mullen's? He's got a confirmation hearing this Thursday. It is very tempting, I imagine, for Democrats to focus on this story in the hearing. But what do you guys think? Divide and conquer. I mean, this should be a part of it. Should dig in on this because Donald Trump in the State of the Union, one of his biggest applause lines was banning stock trading. He wants to make it all about Pelosi and her preventing that from happening. Frankly, Pelosi has not been good on this issue. It really sucks because it makes Democrats look bad. But members of Congress should not be allowed to buy and sell individual stocks. It is an absolute no-brainer that they should have their assets in a blind trust or something. They should not be buying and selling crypto. They shouldn't be selling futures or using poly market or Cal-C, the bet on events. I will never believe it's a coincidence that this guy bought a bunch of Chevron stock five days before we toppled the dictator in Venezuela and installed a much more oil-friendly dictator in Venezuela. It was a third party. It was a third party. Sure. If you read that statement, there's definitely... Even if you take the statement as being accurate, which I don't know that necessarily you can, there's plenty of room inside of that statement for him to be doing whatever he wants. They should not be trading individual stocks. None of us should be trading individual stocks because we're not stock traders. The only reason it would make sense for members of Congress to be trading stock is because they have insider information. Even in an example, they were proud of in the story. There was a member of Congress who was on a board and was bragging about the company to everybody on the committee. That's one of the reasons people were buying stock in that. What are we doing here? Chris Collins. And he went to jail. Well, he went to jail. He went to jail for not for that specific thing. No, I was saying... He goes to jail for his charges of insider trading. For insider trading, not the one he was most proud of. Trump pardoned him. Trump pardoned him because he doesn't believe in insider trading. He thinks that's just good trading. And we also have... By the way, God only knows what these people are doing on the betting markets, which we don't have any insight into. Where they're trading with insider information because the only way it makes sense is because these trades on Cal-Chi and Polymarket are because of insider information. So, of course, it should be banned. And by the way, the disclosure rules should be better. Why on earth do we have ridiculous ranges where we find out how much money they have between 9 and 90 million? That is a ridiculous space set up by members of Congress to make it kind of confusing how much money they have and how much money they've made. We should have more disclosure for them, more frequently. There's a whole bunch of reforms that would make this less of an issue. I was over at the Fabros last day today and Charlie had just solved Fermat's last theorem. Oh, okay. And it turns out the previous proof was wrong. So he really actually is the first one ever to solve it. Oh, that's great. I'm glad they finally cleared that up. What is... I can't even remember what Fermat's last... What is this about? A to the n plus B to the n equals C to the n. Because obviously we all know A squared plus B squared equals C squared, but it turns out there are no integers for which anything above 2 can be solved. But the question is, is that true? It wasn't an elegant proof until Charlie started taking high of vitamins, which he loves. And I think the Fabros are struggling to get him to eat those green vegetables. But high as kids daily greens plus superfood is a total game changer for that too. It's basically chocolate milk stuffed with veggies. It's a greens powder that's packed with 55 whole food source ingredients, just one scoop with milk or milk alternative and watch them actually enjoy something that's secretly fueling their growing bodies. I really would like Charlie Fabros to turn his sites on the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics because I think that thing's ready to go. I'm excited for that. Let's challenge the Copenhagen interpretation. We've worked out a special deal for Hyap for their best selling told in vitamin recede 50% up your first order. To claim this deal, you must go to hyahelp.com slash crooked. This deal is not available on their regular website. Go to hiyahealt.com slash crooked and get your kids the full body nourishment they need to grow and to help the adults. Hey, love it or leave it listeners. It's me, the titular John Lovett. I'm here to tell you that I'm coming back to Washington, DC for love it or leave it live at the Lincoln Theater on April 23rd. That's right. Spring in DC is all about cherry blossoms and love it or leave it bringing you a stack lineup of guests. That's what makes it America's number one late night gay live comedy political podcast. We're so excited to be back in DC. It's a tradition now that we come around the time of the correspondent or even though the correspondent or really no longer has comedians, I believe there's going to be some kind of a magician or a mind, mind melder. Yes, a magician. Yeah. A mentalist. A mentalist. Because I guess Trump wouldn't go. Trump is also going. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's a mental case and Trump is also going. Yeah, that's right. Tickets won't last long. They're selling pretty fast. So get yours now while you still can at cricket.com slash events. Very excited for the DC show. Got some big guests. Some pretty exciting maybes. Cricket.com slash events. Calling all daydreamers and date-nighters. Come immerse yourself in the rich culture of Texas. And dig into our mouthwatering barbecue. Trailblazers can explore our natural wonders. And beach lovers will wonder why they've never felt so relaxed before. You're invited to discover experiences you can only find in Texas. Visit traveltexas.com and plan your trip today. Let's Texas. So one kind of fun, kind of pathetic story before we go. You may have noticed the recent trend of Trump just giving random interviews to any reporter who calls him. It turns out there's a reason everyone now has access to the president's personal cell phone number. The Atlantic reported over the weekend and then semaphore followed up as well that Trump's number has become the biggest open secret in Washington with journalists openly trading it among themselves. So many now have access to it and have been using it to regularly call the president. But White House advisors have stopped keeping track of who's calling and according to one White House official, as many as, quote, 10 reporters will call in a matter of two hours. Trump unsurprisingly loves the attention. He apparently has gotten into the habit of keeping his phone screen face up during meetings to just watch the notifications roll in. And roll in. Loves it. Trump aides have said that at the moment they have no intention of changing the number and have no plan to stop more people from getting ahold of it. You guys have it yet? Yeah, yes. Do you have him a call? I got it. You got it? Yeah, I got it from a reporter. Let's call him. I'll call him now. Do we have a plan? What are we going to say? I was just going to call and say Tom Vitor from Patsy of America called on a recorded line. How are you? Great. Recorded line. Oh, that's important. West Palm Beach number. He's so awkward when he calls me back afterward not recording. You think he calls back? I don't think he... No, he just... He's just a receiver of course. This could be the last call. Didn't we prank Rudy Giuliani once? Sean Hannity. Sean Hannity. And boy, he gets the last laugh. Sorry guys. Didn't deliver on that one. You think he's checking his voicemails? Well, I'm sure what happened with me today was I sent two texts to people who I thought might have the number and one of them gave them me the number. Right? I mean, there's been a bunch of news reports. Because of the stories. How easy it is to get it. So maybe today was the last day. But now he's finding out the changes in number. Like when he wrote his emails, we're in that Sony hack. Yes. Yes. Because it sounds like there was one... Someone wrote a piece on this. The Atlantic piece on this made it sound like I think one reporter kind of figured this out early. It was like Garrett Hawke or somebody and got Trump's reaction to something about Biden really... Or dropping out. Biden dropping out really early on and had a scoop. And then every other reporter was like, oh, this dude is just taking calls from Press now. Also, I think maybe next time, love it or I should try it because we have 202 numbers. And so he probably sees 202 and says, oh, it's DC and you don't have a 202. And I'm gonna let it rip. Well, we'll try again. We'll try again. We'll try again. We'll try it once in episode. Okay. Great. I like that. I like that. Just to see. Remember when Biden would do an interview every six months? Tell us what we should ask, everyone. Send in your ideas. Send in your questions. Want to ask the president in case we get him on the horn. Get him on the blower. You know? What gives you hope? I have to... There's a whole story about... The president in three bucks. Yeah, right. How do I convince my relative who loves Trump to not vote for him anymore? Where's the climate pod, you fucks? So apparently like CEOs and cryptobros are offering money for the number. This is the story. Sure, yeah. Like there's a couple other funny parts to it. Here we go. One of them says the administration... So like everyone's calling. You know, they're like, not just the big outlets, but like the smaller outlets, us now, you know? But then it says the administration officials say, sub-stack authors have started to call, forcing White House staff to look up names they don't recognize. That's so funny. Oh no, the sub-stack... Well, we didn't talk about this that today in twice in his two different press events today, he made reference to a former president who he likes, who said he was right to go in to Iran and then he's asked... He said, wish I had done that. Yeah, he said wish I had done that. And then he's asked by Ducey later that day, who are you referring to? Was it George W. Bush? No. Was it Bill Clinton? I'm not saying. But you know it's from these endless... It's from him being on the fucking phone all the time. Yeah, well, I assume that Donald Trump probably called Bill Clinton to commiserate about being unfairly treated over Jeffrey Epstein. 100%. I feel like that's 99%. I mean, it's not Barack Obama. I have a hard time believing it because he also said he's like, someone I actually like, it wouldn't be good for their career. Well, they don't have much of a career anywhere at this point. Well, it's all... I mean, it's four-form present. That's what I'm saying. So we think it's gotta be... Or he often does. He's just lying. He could be making it out. He's made up the story. But I mean, Clinton, Biden, Obama, I do not think Barack Obama is talking to Trump on the phone saying he wished he had bombed Iran. It's not Obama. Don't think it's Obama. So I think it's Clinton, Biden, or Bush. It doesn't make sense for it to be Bush the way he's talking about it. Probably not Biden. So you're really... The Clinton people are saying it wasn't him. I mean... They may not know. They may not know. I don't know if they're... Jimmy Carter? Well, that's huge news. Was there a window where Jimmy C might have said, I wish I'd gone into... I'm not before this current operation. When did Jimmy Carter die? Was it before after midnight hammer? It was before midnight hammer. Do you think peace advocate and Nobel Peace Prize winner Jimmy Carter in his hundredth year got on the phone with Donald Trump and said, God damn it, I wish I fucking bombed Iran? I mean, it did fuck up his administration. It did fuck his whole presidency up. He died in 2024, right? Yeah, it's tough to be. I bet he had a conversation with Bill Clinton where he mentions Iran and in Trump's mind, Clinton said that. And in Clinton's... If you asked Clinton about the conversation, Clinton didn't say that. Well, that's what I would... Two guys that are famously great at remembering what they said. That's what I'm getting at. That's what I'm getting at. Depends on what the definition is. I think... We have just a serious thing about how accessible Donald Trump is because this goes to what we were talking about earlier, which is like, oh, he's calling people treasonous. He is incredibly accessible and I do not think a Democrat needs to be as accessible as this, but man, there is value to having Donald Trump in their everyday communicating nonstop. And whoever we use is going to be somebody that represents us to learn... Man, how much space he has to move because he's out there time after time after time just sort of new layer of paint. You know, just new layer of paint, new layer of paint. And yeah, sure, the windows don't open anymore because they're sealed shut from fucking paint. You can't access the outlets because there's so much paint. Man, do we think it is... It's certainly better for freedom of the press, for sure. It's probably better for the public to have the president be more accessible. I think that the next Democratic presidential should obviously be much more accessible than Joe Biden was. Do we think it has been good for Trump to be this accessible in this administration with his sub-40, his 40% approval rating? I think that he definitely gets a lot of flexibility in Lee Wei for doing so many reps. I think he's figured out how to make scandals go away a little bit faster, not all of them. Epstein didn't go away. He was alive for months and months. It's still alive. I think in this instance of Iran, he's taken like 30 phone calls from reporters and given 30 different messages, so that part has not helped him. Yeah. I also think this is in C at times. Part of his ability to control the narrative is not his choice to be accessible, but his choice to kick out most reporters and not sit down for challenging questions or interviews from many people. Yes, and no, we just watched him get the four hardest questions he could have gotten in any interview. His approval rating is 40%. He's the worst president in American history. I think it does enure him to what the coverage would look like if the space were filled by a voice other than his. I think in ways that are subtle, him being so accessible takes the teeth out of the democratic argument that he's a raging authoritarian looking to squash the free press and destroy American democracy. Being around him all the time, seeing him all the time, I think kind of blunts that a little bit, both for reporters and for Americans. I do. I think we don't know what it would look like for him to not be doing this much, but I don't think the fact that his approval rating is so low is because this doesn't work. Yeah. I think there's a difference between accessibility. I think that because of Donald Trump, the expectation now among both journalists and probably a lot of Americans is that their president will be constantly communicating about everything that happens all the time. I think that if you do not do that as a president, you will get yourself into trouble. I think his constant style of communication is probably helpful. I think being more accessible to reporters here and there is like, I think for him, it might be okay because he's lying about everything anyway and he's screaming at them all anyway, but I feel like the next democratic president doing a 30 interviews a day by phone is not going to redown to their benefit. No. I would say, well, we just don't have a counterfactual because Joe Biden was Joe Biden and before that was Barack Obama who had more of a traditional kind of relationship with the press. I think the answer is somewhere between, is not between Obama and Biden, it's between Trump and Obama as to how much access you'll want. I think the Obama style and someone who is as disciplined as Barack Obama, being more accessible and being a little bit looser is probably the answer. Yeah, look, I think him freewheeling it is probably a net benefit. That said, just like in the Iran context again, he is a big shit right now because despite all this access, he did not prepare the country for what he was going to do. He didn't use the State of the Union to lay out a plan. He hasn't really delivered a speech about what we're going to do in Iran. I think it has harmed him in that he has come away as being unserious when he's doing an event with the MLS soccer team about casualties in Iran and then telling Lionel Messi that he looks hot. That literally happened. Actually, it was the guy next to Lionel Messi. He told him he was hot, I forget his name. I've noticed that the quality of the questions he gets is just lower because he doesn't face all the best reporters. A couple good real reporters and then you'll have Lindell TV or whatever. The way that Sean McCreech asked that question, I think last week about the school in Iran, and just like the way that he, not just the fact of the question, but the way that he phrased the question, you never hear that. Well, I would just say, I thought it was a great question. That is the hardest question I've ever seen a president asked. I don't think you've ever seen a question phrased exactly like that because we've never had a president that... Yeah, we've never. Well, that's what I'm about to point. That is the right way to ask a question of someone so despicable as Donald Trump, but it's hard to find that balance. But to your point, what was that? Friday, Thursday? Right? So we're just saying that it's been a weekend since he was in a full press conference where half the questions were real and serious and tough questions and half of them were full of shit dumb questions from... If you just took the serious questions he's getting, he is taking probably far more serious questions. Forget Joe Biden. Then when Barack Obama took, when Barack Obama was what we considered a very accessible president, I don't think that's true. Serious questions? Who is he getting? I can remember from Trump, you can remember the interviews where Trump sitting down with Tapper, Trump sitting down with Savannah Guthrie, Trump sitting down with 60 Minutes. Those are tough, real, difficult interviews. Peter Ducey is maybe one of the better ones when he's riding, and Caitlin Collins when she's allowed in there. But he does it with a light touch. Right. Caitlin's probably the best one in the press corps. Some real reporters sprinkled in with some very stupid, ridiculous people. Look, I think Sean McCreech's question was great and good on him for asking. I think that used to be the norm. Yes. I remember a month ago, my uncle was a political reporter, and I think it was George H.W. Bush said that the United States should be okay with assassinating foreign leaders, and he and his buddy ran around every event and asked him who he would kill first and why, and just ruin his whole rollout event. That should be where we're at. Yes. When Barack Obama or George H.W. Bush or someone did a press conference, remember, it would be like you would set up the East Room, or you'd set up a space. It was outside of the normal room. You made a moment of it because it was less frequent, and then the questions were all very serious hitting on all the major news topics. Trump breaks that up, and you'd have to do the actual math on the give and takes. But the fact that he is as accessible to the mainstream media as any president we've ever had, that's the truth. All right, well, including Toss, hopefully. Yeah, call me back, sir. Okay. Should I text him? Oh, yeah. Text him. Just to pick on me. I can text him. All right, guys, that's our show for today. Dan and I will be back with a new show on Friday. If you want to listen to Pod Save America ad free and get access to exclusive podcasts, go to cricket.com slash friends to subscribe on Supercast, Substack, YouTube, or Apple Podcasts. Also, please consider leaving us a review that helps boost this episode and everything we do here at Cricket. Pod Save America is a Cricket media production. Our producer is Saul Rubin. Our associate producer is Farrah Safari. Austin Fisher is our senior producer. Reed Cherlin is our executive editor. Adrian Hill is our head of news and politics. The show is mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Jordan Cantor is our sound engineer with audio support from Kyle Senglin and Charlotte Landis. Matt DeGroote is our head of production. Naomi Sengle is our executive assistant. Thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cone, Haley Jones, Ben Hefkot, Mia Kellman, Carol Pelleve, David Tolles, and Ryan Young, our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East. This episode is brought to you by CarMax. Want to buy a car the easy way? Start at CarMax. Want to browse with confidence? Get pre-qualified with no impact on your credit score and shop within your budget. From luxury to family rides, CarMax has options for almost every price range, including over 25,000 cars under $25,000. Want to get started? Head to carmax.com for details and get pre-qualified today. Want to drive? CarMax. Hey, Love It or Leave It listeners. It's me, the titular John Love It. Here to tell you that I'm coming back to Washington, D.C. for Love It or Leave It, live at the Lincoln Theater on April 23rd. That's right. Spring in D.C. is all about cherry blossoms and Love It or Leave It bringing you a stack lineup of guests. That's what makes it America's number one late night gay live comedy political podcast. We're so excited to be back in D.C. It's a tradition now that we come around the time of the correspondent. And even though the correspondent are really no longer has comedians, I believe there's going to be some kind of a magician or a mind melder. Yes, a magician. Yeah. A mentalist. A mentalist. Because I guess Trump wouldn't go. And Trump's also going. Yeah. Yeah. There's a mental case and Trump is also going. That's right. Tickets won't last long. They're selling pretty fast. So get yours now while you still can at cricket.com slash events. Very excited for the D.C. Show. Got some big guests. Some pretty exciting maybes. Cricket.com slash events. You know what I could really go for right now?