Justin Wolfers & Bradley Onishi

This is an I Heart podcast. Guaranteed human. Hi, I'm Molly Zhang-Fast, and this is Fast Politics, where we discuss the top political headlines with some of today's best minds. And a new CNN poll says 60% of Americans believe there's been too little focus on domestic matters. We have such a great show for you today. Think like an economist, Justin Wolffers, talks, consumer sentiment, hitting the lowest, it's ever been. Then we'll talk to author Bradley Onishi about Pete Hagseth and the particular religious influences in his life. But first, the news. So, Molly, I saw a lot of people being very mad about this headline that says, Democrats shut down talk of impeaching Trump this year, and I felt like we should kind of explain to the listeners what's happening here. Yes, so, okay. American voters, Democrat, Republican, but centrist are very mad. They are mad at a number of things. I think the thing they're probably the maddest about is the war, but followed by inflation, the economy, et cetera, et cetera. They are very mad. Now, why are they so mad? Because things are not going the way they wanted. They voted for a change candidate. They got a change that wasn't the change they wanted. It was worse. Democrats have to do this thing now, where they have to be the normal party, but also protect norms and institutions, and also win at the midterms. A lot of people want Democrats to impeach Trump. Now, impeachment is a mass problem, right? You need enough people to vote for the impeachment to start, and then you need a trial that will take place in the Senate, and first you'll have hearings, and then you'll have a trial take place in the Senate, and then you need 60 senators to remove. Now, even at Donald Trump's very worst, you couldn't get 60, not your very worst, but even at the impeachment after January 6th, the impeachment where Donald Trump had his guys flooded the Capitol, even then, you could not get 60 votes to remove, or to make it so he couldn't run again. Had Republicans done that, we would not be in this fucking disaster where I'm right now. Point is, Democrats do not have the votes right now to impeach Trump. It will fail. Do we see, we saw, I think it was 80, said that he should be impeached. They are on the record saying it, and when Democrats win power back in the midterms, they will absolutely impeach Trump. They cannot do it before that, and that's just the mechanics of how the House and the Senate work, and impeachment work, so it just aren't the numbers. So it's annoying. I constantly criticize, and I'm happy to criticize, leadership when it feels like they are not meeting the moment, but in this case, there's just no mechanism for it at this moment. Now, if Democrats win broadly in the midterms and they win the House and they win the Senate, there will be a number where Trump's approval rating will get so bad that even Republicans start breaking with him, and you see that just with the Magal world, right? Like, the reason that Megyn Kelly is breaking with Trump is not because she believes different things now, it's because her people are saying this guy's nuts. This is most apparent in Tim Poole's explanation of his break with Trump yesterday. We basically said, well, my followers aren't buying my coffee anymore, so I guess I'll break with Trump. Right, exactly. No, but that's exactly, and that's why you're seeing all these guys. Did he really say that? He basically was saying it with a sarcastic tone, because that's what he does for engagement, but it was also one of those things that on his show today, he's warming up the audience to that he's gonna break up with Mr. Trump. Yeah, that's why I think that, no one is operating at a good faith here. Like, thinking that Maga has changed their mind because it's a bridge too far, no. They've changed their mind because they have a business model, which has to reflect the views of their listeners, and when their listeners are like, fuck this, they're like, well, maybe we shouldn't support this anymore. So I don't want people to think this is some kind of moral reckoning, because it's not. No, coffee sales are down, and now we have to change the grift. Yeah, and coffee's even gotten more expensive. Well, that's a whole nuanced conversation right there. Okay, but we have other fish to fry, speaking of giant griffs, Palantir, one of the most evil companies our country has ever seen. Trump has manipulated their stock market for their stock gain. Look, man, Donald Trump, he's a full service president. Full service president. He will do all sorts of fake stuff with you, and he will also, you know, you make a donation to him, and he will manipulate the market for you, which is like more than Democrats can say. Look, here is the deal. This stuff is really unpopular, like full-on, full-scale corruption, not super popular. Today there was a piece in the New York Times about how the White House is trying to get the lower downs to stop insider trading on war stuff, which is like such a great, you know, like first of all, you're somebody leaked to that story in the New York Times, which is amazing, right? And clearly those polymarket bets where they're like, you know, the Cal-Chi bets where they're like, you know, America's gonna go to war 20 minutes before they do. Like clearly someone is getting inside information and profiting off of it. And that news came out today at the same time, their boss, Donald J. Trump, perhaps he's part of him, was doing very much the same kind of calculus, but at a much larger scale. Yeah, so look, they're clipped to crats all the way down. And, you know, this is the thing, once you, and this is why like there's so many ethics laws that seemed during like normal Democratic administration to be like completely stupid, like for example, the Hatch Act, right? Like you can't run for office, you know, the campaign arm has to be different than the governing arm. Well, the reason you have all of these things is so that you don't go down with the ship where everybody's trading on the inside information. So this is what happens and, you know, it's totally corrupt, it should absolutely be illegal. And it's also, you know, and it's stock manipulation and a normal person would go to jail for this. Agreed. So every once in a while, we get one of those headlines that we could have written the moment we learned Trump was elected again. This one, RFK Jr. CDC delays report proving the COVID vaccine worked. Sounds like one of those headlines. Yeah, I mean, look, this is so incredibly transparent. I am a little disappointed we don't have this thing. RFK Jr. also doing a podcast. Oh, the voice everyone has wanted to have in their ears for two hours a time. The voice you want to go to sleep to. Oh yeah. That guy. I mean, look, I don't have the best voice either. So I don't. Molly, let's not put you in the league of RFK. Come on. Well, it's distinctly Kennedy-like at least. But yes, this is one of these things where like, so RFK doesn't want the information that the COVID vaccine worked coming out. And this is like such a dumb, you know, it's dumb because right now COVID is not killing, you know, hundreds of thousands of Americans. But the point is that the people who believe the COVID vaccine misinformation also believe all these other bits of misinformation. Like, you know, if you are a COVID truth or you're also like less likely to get the measles vaccine, less likely to get the MMI vaccine, you're less likely to get the shingles vaccine, which prevents dementia. You're less likely, like, you are less likely to go to the doctor. You're less likely to get tested for things. You're less likely to get a mammogram. So we are already this country where like a lot of people die for no reason. And we have now, our federal government is basically involved in a kind of lying about public health and science at a scale that we haven't had since people were just sort of wrong about things. So it's not that it's dangerous or that it's stupid, though it is both those things. It's also just like, it's so pervasive and it's so undermined so much of the kind of, you know, it gets us to this whole world of like post-truth, right? What is true? What is not true? Like, you know, you know that this COVID vaccine saves lives, but because you refuse to release the data, other people don't know it. And so maybe it's not, maybe it doesn't. And that is really dark. And it's in the service of anti-vax and anti-autism because they believe that somehow this is connected to autism, which has been scientifically disproven in every which way to Sunday. The other thing is that like RFK Jr. has such a financial incentive in spreading lies and misinformation about vaccines because of all of his like public health defense organizations. And then all of allies, people also sell supplements. So it's like they are making money on both sides, on lying to you about health. So yesterday there was very, very shocking news as Melania Trump did a press conference that no one was expecting where she did the Bill Clinton version of it, but for the first lady of, I did not have sexual relations with that woman. But this time it was about Jeffrey Epstein. Then what we've seen since then is the Daily Beast on Earth, a year and a half old tape that they've had where Jeffrey Epstein says that he introduced Melania and Trump and that they slept together. There is a wine in the Epstein files that say that. And now it looks there's a whistleblower that Julie K. Brown is discussing that is about to come forward about Melania's involvement with Epstein. Yeah. So I don't know what the deal here is. I've talked to people on oversight and they're going to try to get more information from this because they should, because they must, because she opened the door to it again, which was amazing. But I am very curious to know what Julie K. Brown. Yep. So she has a newsletter up that says, could a former Brazilian model be the whistleblower Melania is afraid of? This is Pedro Zappoli's ex- A strange girlfriend. Yeah, yeah. Who has been deported and the son is here. Okay. So there are a bunch of different theories going around on this. Enemy of the pod, Michael Wolfe, I think that's fair. It's maybe too generous. Who said that I look like Trump. That guy has written a book about Andrew and he believes and is promoting pretty heavily that Melania is in fact doing this to get ahead of the Andrew book. Julie K. Brown has this theory about the estranged wife or baby mother of this guy Zappoli who works in the White House and who was very close friend of Melania and Trump. There are a number of other theories floating around. I think Katie Rogers, who writes for New York Times, had a really interesting thing that she said about Melania, which is that Melania reads a lot of her press and gets very involved in trying to fight back against it, which all of us know is not. I mean, Melania is beyond the pale, but even for normal people, it's not a good thing to do. But if that is true, then it's possible she just stumbled on something and got upset about it. The thing that is worth thinking about is that the White House has said they did not know she was coming forward and that they had no window into it. I have to say so impressed with that marriage and its complete inability to have anything, to have both parties have nothing to do with each other. I mean, I have a lot of respect for the ability of them to just be totally completely, as far as I can tell, not having any kind of communication, which also people noted from the movie where they seem to completely have no idea who the other one is. Can't believe anyone watched that. But yeah, I should say that I have heard tape of Epstein saying this. And it is definitely a thing that Jeffrey Epstein has said that he introduced them. He says it on tape. To Michael Wolff. Yes. And you have heard that tape. I have heard that tape. I used to work at a news organization that was in possession of it. And it's also in the Epstein files. There's widely being shared today a screenshot of the Epstein files where somebody else had said that Epstein had said this. So take what you will of that. There are any number of possible machinations here. So much of our economy. Don't smile at me in that patronizing way. Well, I try to explain. What is an unpatronizing smile? I don't even know how to do that. OK. So I, yeah, there you go. I want you to talk about why these numbers, which are the worst they've been since COVID and the credit crisis. Or they're a little worse. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Are there a little worse than they were during COVID and the credit crisis? Or they're about the same. I can simplify this for you. Good. Would you like me to? Please. The University of Michigan, not me, but my colleagues, has been surveying consumer sentiment since 1952. Oh, it's record low. Sorry. Jesse, just. It is the lowest it has ever been. It just came out with the latest April numbers. So this has got a lot of Iran in it. We don't have many economic numbers that have any influence of Iran, but it's the lowest that has ever been. Korea, Vietnam, global financial crisis, global pandemic, Haramph, it's worse. Why? Yeah. No, good question. So one is the economic reality in terms of what we're seeing from the hard numbers out there is not that bad. We are not in a recession. Now, by the same token, we are actually at war. And that tends to worry me. And so I actually think there's two things going on. One is the pit in the bottom of your stomach. I have a feeling you have it, Mali, I do. My kids do. And I believe your audience does that pit in the bottom of your stomach. That fear. I don't know what's happening next. We're at war and I'm not quite sure why. If you've got a president who one day can seek to overthrow the capital, another day can start a global trade war on a whim and another day invade Iran without a plan. You start to worry about what it is that next year holds. Just think about that pattern, draw the extrapolate a little bit. And so everything feels a little bit more on edge right now. So I think that's a very real thing. And so that's a forward looking thing. So even if the economy today is OK, that feeling in the pit of your stomach is not. The second is actually more about the rage that's coloring your cheeks. I'm just going to stick with very physical metaphors today. But that rage coloring your cheeks is a partisan feeling. I want to give a little bit of background. The reason Consumer sentiment historically was such a useful indicator was because when you ask people how the economy was doing, they would think about how the economy was doing and tell you the truth and answer. Over the last 10 decades, 10 years, sorry, as the American people have become highly polarized, the rise of the magnet movement and so on. Actually, what's happened is the extent to which your report of your feelings about the economy are correlated with your partisan team colors has risen dramatically. And so basically, Democrats hate it when Trump is in power. They like it when Biden's in power. They hate it again now. Republicans are the exact reverse. And the thing I want you to notice here is then it sounds like people are answering the question. Do you like the guy in the White House rather than how do you feel about the economy? Economy, right. In which case this might be a little less informative about the economy. Even if it's very informative about political reality. Right. So this could be like hyperpartisanism and not actual feelings about spending. But this could also be, and you tell me if you think this is right, about an anxiety that the president is a lunatic that we have not had. And like, you might not love Dubya. You might not have clapped for Jeb. But the sense that my man is a complete and unfettered lunatic who had his own people attack the Capitol and who spent Easter tweeting about how he was going to rain hellfire down. That that guy does not make you want to spend money. That guy doesn't make me feel comfortable about the future. Yeah. And that makes me think about the less comfortable, the less confident you feel about the future, the more you got to suck a little bit away. And so there's a word I've been using a lot more often, Molly, which is confidence. And some part of what enrages me about the current moment is I have a set of views that happen to be different than the president. I, for instance, think immigrants are people with dignity. But also, even if we took the president, for instance, as the president likes tariffs, the incompetence with which he executed the trade war, arguably is more responsible for the economic pain that it caused than the reality of the tariffs. And I think you see the same thing right now in Iran, right? They went into Iran without objectives. They went without stocking up on oil before we went. They went without getting Americans out of the Middle East. And they went without realizing there was a choke point called the Strait of Homoes, which is obvious when you look at a map. So, you know, I think there's a, you and I spent much of 2025 talking about the trade war. And every week, if we could bring ourselves to life, we'd find it almost funny about the degree of incompetence. Right. But now we're seeing that brought to a war war. Yeah. You know, we are one of the last reported stories of the week or maybe it was last week, but this week last week, it's all the same. Is that we, it's a year since Liberation Day and we have been liberated from manufacturing jobs, from lower prices. And from any sense that the tariffs help the, at least help manufacturing. Yes. That anniversary, I think, was quite important because it's time to just give up and declare the whole thing a failure. There's not an economic indicator you can point to that says, boy, thanks. I'm really pleased that we had tariffs. I'm glad the U.S. is disengaged for the rest of the world. I'm glad the cost for American manufacturers of importing steel is so much higher. You can't find a factory that was brought on. Sure, you can't find employment growth having risen. You can't find rises in wages beyond very, very small, narrow pockets. They've got a lot of assistance. That's one part of it. But what just strikes me and I can't tell if this is real or the human brain has a tendency to see patterns. But, you know, we said it, you and I went through the first month of that trade war together when we were talking about it. And many of the themes that came up, them feel like they're going, coming out in equal measure as we go through the first one or two months now. Of the war in Iran, the questions of competence, the questions of planning ahead, the temperamental nature of it all, the sense that one man thinks that he has power over something explicitly granted by the Constitution to Congress. It feels remarkably parallel. Yeah. And the thing that is probably the worst part of the whole tariff story, which is in some ways the worst part of the whole everything Trump story is that with the tariffs, the Supreme Court said, no, you don't have the right to do them. And Donald Trump said, OK, fuck you. And then didn't I mean, we have all these. I mean, again, we don't know, right? Because we're going to we're watching it play out. But we have all these companies suing for the money back and Trump is just trying. I mean, it wasn't like he was like, oh, I lost. Let's undo all these tariffs. No, I. My goodness, I can't believe you're going to make me do this, Molly. I think you've been unfair to the president. Well, go. Go, go, go. OK, so just a little bit of scene setting for the audience, first of all, which is, yes, the Constitution gives the power over tariffs to Congress. Right. Congress has the power to delegate that to the president. And historically, Congress has understood that Congress isn't very good at many things. So it delegates a lot to the president. Yes. It delegated limited powers to the president over tariffs. It didn't like and the president gave himself just grabbed a bunch as if they had been given to him and they hadn't paid. That's what the Supreme Court said. Right. They said you were relying on IEPA, its particular law. IEPA doesn't mention tariffs. Yeah. So there's no emergency. Just, mate, what's going on? Right. Would have been that would have been really actually a pretty epic Supreme Court decision. Mate, what's going on? Just leave it at that. Then the president does have an authority explicitly to levy tariffs for balance of payments crises. And that's what the president has levied. Now, there's actually still a funny. So he's going to a different authority and it's one that he may well have. No, actually, it turns out it's one that he may well not have because the United States may have trade deficits, but a trade deficit is not a balance of payments deficit. And if you want me to explain that to you, I'm going to recommend you take a valium first. You won't need the valium. Like, it's really boring. Yeah. So where we are in the tariffs is they are trying to figure out a way to undo them. Companies are suing. Their Trump administration is trying to figure out a way to do them legally, mostly, but things have not gotten any cheaper. Right. So first of all, the first thing the president did was impose this 10 percent tariff across the board. So by the way, it's worth pausing because all the time during the first year we were being told the reason we want tariffs is in order to have bargaining power against individual nations. But if you have a 10 percent across the board, you don't have that bargaining power. And it's not clear that he could levy tariffs on an individual country. So whatever the hell the reason he is that he's doing this is not the reason he gave us for why he was doing it before. The other hilarious and ha ha hilarious, but also hilarious thing. Is he imposed the 10 percent tariff and then woke up the next morning and realized that the statute said he could do 15. So he raised it to 15. He said hereby it's officially from now on. And he truth-socialed that out. And then everyone pretended he never said it. Yeah, well, that was smart. But it's super weird. The president said it's 15. So we're getting the certainty that business craves as the president has literally said the tariff rate is 10 percent and 15 percent. And they're all just fiddling and diddling, trying to figure out what it is that they want to do. That tariff authority runs out in 150 days. So they're not allowed to keep going on this forever. So even if they're allowed, it's not even clear they're allowed. That's that do it. It's promising. Otherwise it runs out in 150 days. The other tariff authorities that Congress, I can't believe you're making me be this boring, Molly. All right, OK, let's talk about something else. Because we it was a sidebar anyway. And if you think you're boring, I just love love love doing ADHD interviews. We just bail out a boring and move on. Yeah, well, we get the idea. I mean, blah, blah, blah. So consumer sentiment down, inflation up, discuss. Right. So today, we got the first hard data from the war and that hard data says prices rose in March. Much of that, the monthly rise in the cost of living was 0.9 percent. So for a month, that's astronomical. Right. We're making for about 2 percent every year. That, of course, is almost all energy costs. So we economists look instead at something called core inflation, where we throw out food and energy and people get very angry about that. But it's for good reasons that I could bore you with. When you look at core inflation, it didn't blow out like that. But of course, the way this works is when you raise our prices, prices of the pump go up, boom, that happens straight away. That's what happens in this month. The other thing that happens, airfares go up pretty quickly. But then it turns out everything through the economy gets transported. Lots of stuff is oil dependent. Lots of farms rely on diesel, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so these costs, it's like throwing a rock into a pond. There's ripples. So we've just seen the first ripple. And the question is, are we going to see this continue to create more ripples so that broader prices that are not directly gas are going to rise? Now, it turns out seeing it, you don't see the second ripple straight away. Right. We've got to wait a few months to find out. So the bad. So that's the trade ripple. Is headline inflations through the roof because of war. That's the oil angle. And the good news is core inflation is not. But it's not really that much good news, because if we were going to see bad news, we wouldn't see it this quickly. Right. And also the fact that oil has moved so quickly up so much is bad news. Period paragraph, especially because we do not have control over the straits of her moose, even though we are technically in a ceasefire where Donald Trump said, you have to give us back control of the straits. And then Iran said, no. No. And then Donald Trump said, all right, I'm going to send America's favorite diplomat, my rich friend, my son-in-law and my vice president, who no one likes over there. Look, the thing I like about him sending Vance over there is that Vance doesn't like war. Right. The thing I liked about the president, I'm going to tell you, I actually had something I liked about President Trump. I liked the fact that he didn't. I'm now using the past tense like war. I thought that was really great. That was the only thing any of us liked about him. Yeah. Yeah. So he's left me a little heartbroken right now. You know, what's funny about Trump on the war is that we all know that Trump doesn't believe in anything and will just do whatever is expedient for him when he can. And yet all of us still somehow thought he wouldn't do war. Right. I mean, it's like it's the proof of the talent of Trump is that even pretty, I mean, we're pretty smart. I'm not the smartest member of my family, but I'm pretty smart and I- Who is the smartest, mom? I think one of the kids probably. I heard one of them is going to Chicago. That's amazing. We don't know yet. But the point is, I do think that when we find ourselves in a situation here where that we, even though we have spent a decade knowing that this guy just does whatever, still thought he wouldn't do war, despite the fact that he had recently gone into Venezuela, kidnapped the president and his wife and put them in jail. Like there is such a sanity bias for Trump. There are a whole lot of other countries he didn't invade and you're not mentioning one of them. That's right. That's right. I mean, it's a good point. But it is like, you do see how you, how being ruled by a mad autocrat does ultimately de-stay. You know, just this, it's like a bias towards normalcy, a bias towards logic that are completely undeserved. I don't know if this is good or bad, if it's meaning defeat or if it's an intellectual breakthrough, but I don't do theories of Trump. No. Yeah. Lots of people will ask me on television, like, what do you think is in the president's mind? And I'll say, that's very interesting, but here's how I think this will play out for the economy. I only look at actions now. Yeah. But you should say, I mean, the theory of Trump, there's no theory. Right. There's no, there's nothing going on inside. So what I've learned from watching is he appears to act in extraordinarily idiosyncratic ways. Right. Someone might want to call that madness. Someone might want to call it evil. Someone might want to call it old. I don't care. I'm just going to call it what it is, which is, is a descriptive term. It's idiosyncratic. Nonsensical. Okay. You are known as the wine mom whisperer. I did not make that term. I just use it. Honestly, that sounds hot. Tell me more about it. We've hit peak middle, peak middle age here. There is a conspiracy going on. I have asked you about this before, but not recently because you, the last time I asked you, asked you about me, about it, you swatted me down. And it made me think that the question might have been stupid, but how cooked are the box? Justin, how cooked are the box? Look, it's a good question because we live in a confusing world. So, and it's confusing because of the lack of commitment to honesty among people who should know better. So let me start by acknowledging the importance of the question, which is there was a long history of when a president or a White House said something, it was true. They may have cherry picked a statistic, but it was true. They've given that up, which means they no longer warrant an assumption that any word they say is true. Now, what's difficult is the White House is a political body directly controlled by, and in many cases, the president is the spokesperson of it. It controls the federal government, which has independent nerds and independent statistical agencies who were paid to and still do tell the truth. So when you hear an economics number, if you hear it from a reputable source or if you go to the Census Bureau or the Bureau of Labor Statistics or the Bureau of Economic Analysis, first of all, just wave and say hi because I'll be there too. All of those numbers are unaffected by partisan biases. Now, again, he didn't say true because measuring an economy is really hard. We don't know exactly what's going on there and there are reasonably, there are reasons sometimes to debate numbers, but it's not partisan bias. It's more statistical methodology that one could use. For those who don't want to engage in questions of statistical methodology, first of all, you're missing out, but second of all, then it's reasonable for you to say if this came from the official statistical bodies, it's true. So the answer is the books are not cooked. The books are not cooked, but the people who try to write the best sellers are. So I want you to, this hot take. Happy Kevin. Happy Kevin, good one. Going, I remember Happy Kevin versus Angry Kevin. No, handsome Kevin. Handsome Kevin. How could you forget? He's so handsome. Whatever. Happy Kevin is not using cooked books is what you're saying. Happy Kevin lies to a degree that no economist in public life ever should and possibly ever has. Okay. But the numbers that he sees are true. Okay. So trust the data even though don't trust the White House. If it comes out of a direct employee of the White House, a cabinet secretary, a staffer, White House press office, there's no presumption of truth that's warranted anymore. And it takes a lot for me to say that. That is not a partisan claim. That's an empirical claim. Right. But the actual statistics that the statistics nerds put out are still honest, serious and better than anyone else has put it out. Okay. So trust the books but not happy Kevin. What you really want is a boyishly handsome economist with an Australian accent. If you can say so yourself. If you can find one of them. No, I've been looking for one. If you can find one of them. No, I didn't say that Molly. Everyone knows you said it. Yes. Is there something you want to say right now Molly? So if you're a wine mom, trust the data. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Then have another wine. Yes. Have another one. Don't, I, as a soberer, I say don't have another wine but this is me. Well, I'm also sober but you know, if you're a wine mom, are you a wine mom? Despite being so like, what do we call you? I'm an athletic brewing. I'm not. Be your dad. I'm just not anything but. You're a lot. You're a lot to many people Molly. You are a nun. Justin, thank you. No, we're not going until you say something about whether I'm boyishly handsome or not. Yes. Boyishly handsome. Okay. And more importantly, correct about a lot of stuff. Are you a cool, that makes. It makes economics fun. Great. That makes you like the census bureau, someone who always tells the truth. Dr. Bradley Onishi is the award winning author of Preparing for War and the host of the Straight White American Jesus podcast. Welcome Bradley. Great to be here. Thanks for having me. So talk to me about, Pete Hanksouth. Go. Now, where to begin? Pete Hanksouth is everything we thought he would be. I remember talking to everyone I could on every channel possible before his nomination and confirmation that we were going to get a man who has bought deeply into a spiritual warfare worldview who believes that returning to Christendom is the mission of the United States military. Somebody who doesn't really want to go back to the 1950s, but kind of wants to go back to the 1650s or the 1150s. We see that not only in terms of how he approaches conflict, war, foreign policy, but we see it also in how he approaches gender and race and sexuality and family. And so we've gotten everything we thought we would. The problem is, is that the stakes are as high as they could be when it comes to a conflict with Iran and he's the one leading our military. So it feels like whenever you hear them talk, mostly Hegses, but other people too, in this world that Hegses really believes on some level that he is engaging in a holy war. Explain. He does. Let's do some Pete Hanksouth spiritual history here. He moved his family from New Jersey, New York to Tennessee to attend a church led by a man named Brooks Poddiger. Now, he did so knowing that that church was part of a denomination founded by someone named Doug Wilson and others. What we know about Doug Wilson and his denomination is that they really do want openly a nation that is a Christian nation and it goes so far as to be a Protestant nation. He said recently, Doug Wilson did on a podcast that processions of Catholic nature would be outlawed in his ideal republic. In addition to, of course, mosques and minarets and good war is and temples and so on. Additionally, Brooks Poddiger, the pastor to whom Pete Hanksouth has looked for spiritual guidance for years now, was on a podcast recently where there was discussion of James Talerico, the Senate candidate from Texas, and him needing to be reborn as a true Christian. And if that didn't happen, the hope that God would stop James Talerico by any means necessary. So for me, what this signals is, is that Pete Hanksouth has bought into a theological worldview that has no room for pluralism, dialogue, negotiation. There is no sense that we live in a multiracial, multi-ethnic, multi-religious democracy. There is only us against them and the us are Protestant Christians for the most part. They're mainly and exclusively white men. And then there's everyone else who doesn't fall in line to the patriarchal and hierarchical vision. And this is what I mean. You know, in the book that I have coming out soon, my argument is like, this is, they don't want to go back to leave it to beaver. They want to go back to medieval Christendom. And so when he talks about Holy War, it's not an accident and he's not cosplaying. This is his worldview down to the core. So I want you to explain what the goal here is. Like, Holy War seems insane. Does he really want Holy Wars? I mean, my man went to Princeton. I mean, explain. He did go to Princeton, but just like half the GOP elite went to Yale Law School, right? So the Ivy League credentials don't seem to help. You know, I think Heg Seth is a lot of things. One of them, though, is a figure that we've seen in American history quite often. And that is the zealous adult convert. Right. This is not somebody who's been at this his entire life, like Russell Vote or other evangelical figures in the Trump administration. This is somebody who found this faith a couple of years ago after three marriages, how many affairs, how many issues with drinking and other things and blah, blah, blah. So what's the point? Zealous converts often are the ones, and I speak as somebody who used to be one of these, who take the worldview to its furthest extent. So what is the goal you ask? Well, the goal in his mind is this. God is supposed to have dominion over every domain of human life. That includes the church. That includes the family, but it also includes the government and also includes every nation. And we as Christians are meant to create and be the representatives of that dominion. So when you fight a holy war, yes, you may accidentally, quote unquote, bomb a girl's school, you may spend a billion dollars a day, you may have the loss of human life. But if you are able to conquer God's enemies, the people who stand in the way of God's kingdom, then you are doing good in the world. And so I think for Hegzeff, there's a very clear and reductive idea of what he wants to accomplish every day. He wants to conquer the world for God. He wants to colonize earth for Jesus. And I'm sure people are out there like, well, come on, this has got to be more complex than that. It's got to be more nuance than that. It's got to be. And I think that we have to come to grips with the fact that we've allowed a man to lead our military who thinks in these binary terms, these either or terms, there's us against them terms and the Christian versus infidel terms. And so that is to me the easiest decoder ring for trying to figure out what Pete Hegzeff is doing on a daily basis when he gets up in front of the cameras. Yeah, it's the convert thing. Donald Trump loves a convert. And I would love you to explain how this squares with Donald Trump and his plan. I think one of the best explanations for understanding Pete Hegzeff's relationship to Donald Trump is that Hegzeff sees himself as the medieval knight. If you think about the medieval knight and the evidence for this is the fact that he has the Jerusalem cross tattooed on his body. He has Deus volt tattooed on his bicep. Those are both medieval symbols and sayings that go back to the crusades. My colleague Brian Kaler has reported and shown us that he also has those symbols on his Bible. The Bible he takes to church with him has medieval crusader symbols on it. So if you think about Pete Hegzeff in the role of medieval knight, the medieval knight had a certain chivalrous masculinity. He was an elevated figure, not a peasant, not an artisan. This was a man of great honor, great courage. And he had a more, in many ways, adventurous life, an exciting life, a manly life in some ways than the king, because he was the one who would ride out on the horse and fight the battles. The one who would go to the Holy Land and try and take it back from the people who are considered the godless enemies of the Lord and Savior. The chivalrous knight is the one who goes and is on the frontier of the sacred violence of building God's kingdom. So it's easy for the knight to bow his knee to Donald Trump. It's easy for the knight to say, I pledge my allegiance to you, even if you are not a dedicated Christian, somebody who reads the Bible goes to church, whatever, because your mission aligns with God's mission. The kingdom you're trying to build, Donald Trump, aligns with God's kingdom, at least for now. So my liege, I bow to you and I will go into the world and I will perpetrate every destructive act I can think of, every form of quote unquote lethality, every disgusting approach to destroying infrastructure or attacking civilians, because in the name of God, that's allowed. There's a permission structure there for those kinds of actions. Use a convert and that is part of his zealotessness. And that is, remember, Donald Trump loves a convert. Donald Trump is a convert, except not really, right? Sort of. Who else you see in this administration as fighting this holy war, like Pete Hexeth? The person we have to point to who's not in the headlines right now is Russ Vote. Russ Vote is a little different than Pete Hexeth. Russ Vote's a true believer. I mean, this is somebody who, since his teenage years, has been on a mission. And that mission includes destroying the government in the name of a kind of unbound executive power. I just would love you to square that with Russ Vote. Has a daughter who has cystic fibrosis. Yeah. So if you're someone like Russ Vote, you're going to most likely have a worldview that says, my daughter has cystic fibrosis and her needs should be met by two institutions, her family and her church. The government has nothing to do with that. The argument they're going to make, and it's not one that I think is very good, is that if everyone had a functioning family quote unquote, and if everybody had a robust church community, then all of the needs for everyone, including those with cystic fibrosis, would be met. Now, we know that's not true. We know, I mean, we can pull out the decades of social science and studies about how infrastructure and social space and needs are met and all of that. But what he's going to tell you is actually by destroying the government, I'm helping my daughter. Because I'm going to get rid of the regulations. I'm going to get rid of the bureaucracy. I'm going to get rid of the red tape. I'm going to get rid of the government looking over my shoulder, trying to interfere with my family and my approach to helping my daughter. And that's actually the best thing for her. Now, does that mean that so many folks in inner city Philadelphia or rural Missouri, or the outskirts of Portland, Maine are going to like fall by the wayside? Because they don't have the resources he has? Yes. And he's going to chalk that up to fallenness, to sin, to evil, and people not obeying God. So to me, that's the true believer mentality that justifies cruelty, that sees pain as redemptive. And so vote is another true believer in this administration for sure. Yeah, it's so interesting. So vote, Hexast, who else? Well, we got another convert we need to talk about. He's got a new book coming out, and that's JD Vance. And so I think what we're seeing now is two strains of American Christian nationalism coming into conflict. Pete Hexath has been rebuffed by the Pope, and we now have reporting that there was, for the first time in American history, a meeting with Pentagon officials and representatives from the Vatican in the United States. And the way that meeting went, according to the reporting, is that the Vatican was read the riot act line by line by the Pentagon. And so there's this sense that Pope Leo's comments about war and having blood on your hands, and God not hearing the prayers of those who perpetrate war, was a direct attack on Pete Hexath and Donald Trump. And the administration and the Pentagon did not like that. However, the man that's caught in the middle of this is JD Vance, a man who converted to Catholicism in 2019, who is a true believer, who is over in Hungary as we speak, stumping for Viktor Orban, talking about how our two countries have a shared Christian civilization and a shared Christian heritage. Many Catholics, even those who consider themselves Christian nationalists, Catholic and Tegrelists, people that we would consider a radical reactionary strain of Catholicism, have called into question the conflict in Iran. People like Sorb Amare, people like Steve Bannon, a Catholic. So there is a fissure here between Pete Hexath's Protestant approach to a Christian military, and JD Vance is all out Catholicism. And it's put the vice president in a place where I think he's trying to figure out how to position himself. I think he's honestly a little bit lucky right now to be in Hungary and not be in front of the American press and have people asking about where he stands on everything. Christian nationalists are clearly a big part of this equation, right? And Israel factors into that because you have that sort of Mike Huckabee strand of this. And I would love you to explain what that is. Yeah, so I think the conflict with Iran is tied into a larger disagreement in the Christian nationalist world about the state of Israel and the United States' relationship with the state of Israel. So you mentioned Mike Huckabee. I would characterize Mike Huckabee as kind of in the lineage of the old religious right, the moral majority. He's an evangelical Christian and he believes that Jesus will return soon. And for Jesus to return, one of the things that needs to happen is for Israel to be a safe and strong place and for it to be able to conquer its enemies. And so for Mike Huckabee, there's a sense that Israel plays a decisive role, not just in foreign policy, but in cosmic politics and the end times. In addition, he believes that Israel has a right to basically dominion over the entire Middle East. He told that to Tucker Carlson. So he comes out of that strain of what I would call Christian nationalism. It's the old school religious right. It's what you might have heard from Jerry Falwell. It's what you might have heard from the likes of the George W. Bush orbit of evangelicals. And you see it in Mike Huckabee. You also see it in some of the new apostolic reformation characters, people who are charismatic, more Pentecostal. The most important figure in the Trump administration in this group is Paula White. Paula White, somebody who believes that Christians should give money to the state of Israel as part of their monthly giving. This is somebody who believes that Israel is anointed by God and that if you visit a church that's part of the new apostolic reformation, there is a very good chance you will see more state of Israel flags than you will see American flags. The dedication to Christian Zionism runs that deep in this space of Christian nationalism. So on one side, we've got the religious right and we've got Mike Huckabee in addition to Paula White and the new apostolic reformation. They are all in on the United States giving everything possible in terms of aid and help and military might to Israel. However, what has happened is the development of an isolationist America first Christian nationalism space. These are folks and there's Protestants and Catholics in this group who really don't see Israel as playing that same role in the end times or the apocalypse as Mike Huckabee or Paula White might say. They don't see Israel in other words as having an end times, exceptional role and therefore they don't see Israel as having a foreign policy, exceptional role. They're going to ask the question like Tucker Carlson has been lately, why would we give as much money as we do to Israel and not to other countries? And in fact, why should we give aid and all billions of dollars to anybody? Why don't we just take care of America first? That's what Donald Trump promised. And so many of the Catholics that I'm talking about, the radical traditional Catholics, they fall into this more isolationist foreign policy. They really don't want a conflict with Iran. Much less do they want a conflict where we're going to support Israel at all costs. Many of them are folks that would say, why are we even supporting Ukraine? JD Vance famously said, I don't really care what happens in Ukraine. And so they fall into that camp. And so there is again, once again, a fissure between these different kinds of Christian nationalists. One group who says support Israel at all costs because that's what God wants. Other saying, no, we're supposed to support America first at all costs because that's what God wants. And there's growing divisions there. And you can see that in the administration. JD Vance on one side and Mike Huckabee on the other. So we saw Pete Hexeth fired pretty much all the women and black people. Is he just racist or is there something else and sexist or is there something else here at play? So let's start with, I think, gender and sexuality. I'm going to talk about Doug Wilson once again. So this is Pete Hexeth's sort of theological mentor. Doug Wilson believes, and these are, this is a direct quote, that women are the kinds of people that people come out of. In his church and in his ministry, he believes women should have no leadership role in the church, in the government, or in the home. When it comes to the home, they are the domestic administrators and executives, but they submit to their husbands in every way. That is the sort of bedrock of the theology of gender and family for the Doug Wilson theological universe. This is a theological universe in which Pete Hexeth is thoroughly embedded. So when it comes to women in combat, when it comes to women in military leadership, to me, there's a very clear line from his theology to his policy. Women are not going to be in leadership roles. Women should not be in combat. And if I had my way, we'd have a men only military, kind of like they used to have in medieval Christendom in the good old days. When it comes to race, there's no denying that there's clear evidence of racism. I think that's something that has a theological root. So again, Doug Wilson and others in that universe have said things like the time of enslavement in this country was the time of the greatest harmony between the races. Pete Hexeth's pastor, Brooks Poddiger, was just on a podcast with a man named Joshua Hames who said, it is not against the Bible and it is not a sin for one person to own another person. This is a direct tie to Pete Hexeth. This is not somebody he used to know. It's not somebody he mentioned one time. This is his pastor appearing on podcasts where people are saying it is not a sin to own another person. So I think there's theological evidence for not wanting black people in leadership. I also think this is a pan maga sort of issue. They have made their hay over the last year and a half on the idea that any black person, any person of color in leadership is the DEI hire, that they were only put there because of Wokeness and Joe Biden and the Democrats who are out to replace white people. So I think that when it comes to the race part, we can see theology. We can also just see a kind of pan maga racism that's been present for the last 10 years of Donald Trump's political career and is raging in Pete Hexeth's leadership of our armed forces. Thank you. It's so upsetting. So upsetting. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And now your moment, oh fuckery. Jesse Cannon. So Molly, this happened after we finished taping the other day, but I couldn't let it slide because it's just so ridiculous and there's so many things that get lost in the news cycle. We're threatening the Vatican. We are not threatening the Vatican. No, no, I am. Don't bring me into this. Me and the American Pope got a bone to pick and a few to break. No, do not get me involved in this. I am a Jew. I did not get involved in this, but I actually really like the new Pope. I think he's great. You'll remember that JD Vance had a meeting with the last Pope and then the next day he died. So do with that information, what you will. Basically, the Vatican has been trolling JD Vance. JD Vance has been, you know, JD Vance saying the Pentagon's policy office chief, Eldridge Colby, had a cardinal, the Vatican's former diplomat to the U.S. at the Pentagon. This was reported by Barry Weiss's Free Press on Monday during that meeting. Colby warned that the U.S. military has the power to do whatever it wants and that the church had better take a side. Okay, so now we have the Pentagon's policy office chief threatening the Pope. Now, I'm sorry, but I feel like you have to work real hard to come to blows with the Pope, the Pontiff, the spiritual leader of all Catholics. I don't know. This seems like it's a really good sign of just how incredibly fucked our administration is. The Free Press, owned by Barry Weiss, also reported citing unnamed sources that he was official raised the threat of the Avignon papacy referring to a nearly 70-year period between 1309 and 1776 when Francis King Philip captured the Pope and following Pope's residing in Avignon, France, as opposed to Rome. Okay, it's not often that I get to defend Christianity or Catholicism, but I'll do it today. What the fuck? I mean, it is so easy not to get into fights with the fucking Pope, you assholes. Thank you. Laser focused on the home economy. That's right. Laser focused on affordability for the American people. That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday to hear the best minds and politics make sense of all this chaos. If you enjoy this podcast, please send it to a friend and keep the conversation going. Thanks for listening.