Bullsh*t Ceasefires Everywhere

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Available everywhere you get podcasts. Starting a business can be overwhelming. You're juggling multiple roles, designer, marketer, logistics manager, all while bringing your vision to life. Shopify helps millions of business sell online. Build fast with templates and AI descriptions and photos, inventory and shipping. Sign up for your 1 euro per month trial and start selling today at shopify.nl. That's shopify.nl. It's time to see what you can accomplish with Shopify by your side. Welcome back to Pod Save the World. I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben Rhodes. Ben, this morning I saw a bunch of coverage of Jeff Bezos kind of buying the Met Gala. And then I read a story about the family that owns Samsung paying an $8 billion inheritance tax bill. And I thought, we could do that. Maybe the Koreans know something we don't. It would be cool to do that. Like you can actually collect money from these people so they don't buy all your cultural institutions. Not that I, I don't know, not that the Met Gala is always my jam, but there's something kind of gross about it. But yeah, it's a little late-stage capitalism, whatever. It's very collapsing Roman Empire vibes. Caligula. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, but yeah, it did make me think like, yeah, remember all that ranting and raving about the death tax and how it will hurt farmers and all this bullshit. And that's just protecting billionaires who pay. Well, he didn't get invited to any of the good parties in high school. So now he has to buy the biggest party in the world for his wife. Honestly, not a bad strategy. It's fun. Also, you buy your way to space. You can do whatever you want these days. I just want to note, because there's a lot of... My algorithm has trained me for Nick's Twitter and absolutely pasted the Sixers yesterday getting revenge for you. Celtics just... But there's a huge divide because Ben Stiller, Nick's super fan, went to the Met Gala. He's getting dragged pretty hard. Why? I give him a pass. He's always there. I'm not mad at Ben Stiller. I will note that Timmy Chalamet went to the game. Oh, I see. Instead of going to the game. Did you also... I also love when Ben Stiller tweeted, well, we got that done. Clearly about the Knicks. People thought it was about the correspondence in our assassination. So this is really fun. So I have a Knicks text thread with my best friends from high school. And it's the funniest thread because it's literally like, we know we're watching the game. So we'll just be like, OG, cat, got it. No context. And Ben Stiller literally tweets like he's on our thread. You have no idea what he's talking about. It's just like, we got it. Oh, we almost had it. And then these MAGA people are like, I can't believe you said we almost got Trump. It's like, you fucking nerds. Just calm down. Not everything is politics. Not everything is politics. Right, even for us. Even us. We like sports. Even these nerds agree. We've got a great show today. We're going to cover all the latest from Iran, from Trump's plan to guide ships through the Cerro Hormuz, and why the administration is insisting that the U.S. and Iran literally firing at each other. They sank a bunch of boats. Apparently, that's not a ceasefire violation. Interesting. Then we'll talk about some newly leaked intelligence about the impact of the U.S. and Israeli bombing campaign on Iran's nuclear infrastructure, or lack thereof, and whether there's any semblance of a plan or an end game for negotiations. We'll dig into the politics back home, some polling data from the Post over the weekend, and then we'll tell you guys what we've heard from people on the ground in Iran. We'll also cover how this is impacting Trump's upcoming trip to China, the latest from Lebanon, and the truly hellish situation on the ground for people in Gaza and the lack of any reconstruction efforts. Then we're going to do an update on the war between Russia and Ukraine, the political situation in Russia, and then we'll have a little fun at the end at the expense of a U.S. ambassador. Ben hasn't seen any of this yet. I don't know what this is. Michael has a sense of humor that usually lands. This will be fun. I'm trusting Michael. Trust. Trust the plan. And then you'll hear my interview with Congressman Jason Crow from Colorado, who you know well, Ben. We talk about Iran, efforts by Congress to force an authorization of the war, his grilling of Pete Hegseth last week. He took an interesting tack, focused on this one really shady staffer at the Pentagon and made some interesting news. Then we talk about Trump's plan to move troops out of Germany because the chancellor of Germany hurt Trump's feelings. Can I just say, because we kick around Democrats as they need to be kicked around a fair amount on not just this show, but I noticed, you know, Ken Martin. Jason Crow is a great dude and like gets it and is taking on Trump on the war in the right ways, is leading the DCCC, the Congressional Campaign Committee candidate recruitment. Anyway, every now and then we need to point out that There's some good Democrats. Yeah, there's some great Democrats out there. It's easier to be mean than nice, but you're right. It's good to do that. Well, unfortunately, the Democratic Party gives us a lot of reasons. A lot of reasons to be mean. And by the way, Ben is actually doing today's episode topless to help us get more views on the Pod Save the World YouTube page. Thank you for your service, Ben. You're looking great. You've been working out. Thank you. Thank you. I've been working out. That's probably a joke, but you're going to have to subscribe to find out. But please subscribe to Pod Save the World on YouTube to ensure you don't miss any pop tops, any bonus episodes we do there about breaking news. Also, you help us displace Ben Shapiro out of the YouTube algorithm and Fox News. You may need to come up with someone other than Ben Shapiro because I noticed the Daily Wire numbers are tanking. Tough. Tough, tough, tough. Turns out just being dyed in the wool Netanyahu supporters. Yeah, it turns out being just pro-war neocon propaganda isn't as profitable as saying Emmanuel Macron's wife has a dick. Really, that's how you kill it in media these days. Maybe we'll get there. We got Candace over here. That's how we get subs. We got Pablo Torre winning a Pulitzer for sports reporting. I was just telling you that. I don't know. We land somewhere in the middle. No, Pablo's the best. Adam, Pod Save America, a while back. Pulitzer Prize winner. Yeah, Pulitzer Prize winner. If you like the work Crooked Media is doing, by the way, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. At crooked.com slash friends, you get ad-free episodes of this show, ad-free episodes of Pod Save America, get great bonus content from Pod Save America. You get Dan Pfeiffer diving deep into polling, and it's really the single best thing you can do to help us grow as a progressive, independent media company. Also, subscribers get early access and discounted tickets to Crooked Con. Another Crooked Con perks, TBD, maybe more topless, Ben, at Crooked Con. Possible. It's the first time you're hearing about this, but there's a movement. Me and Hassan Piker will go topless together. We'll see you as a better body. I think it's probably not me. I think I know who it is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not you, Hassan. Crooked Con. Jordan and our team works out at Hassan's house in West Hollywood. Oh, really? They're crushing burpees and stuff. Socialist burpees. It's pretty cool. Crooked Con, happening November 5th through 7th in D.C. Go to CrookedCon.com for more info. Should we talk about Iran? I think we should. I think we should. Okay. Because somebody has to, you know, wade into the cesspool of lies. Smurass. That emanates from our government. Straight of bullshit. So the big news this week is this Pentagon plan to, quote unquote, guide ships through the Strait of Hormuz. Not escort and defend, guide. It's called Project Freedom. The freedom to get shot at. What happened to Epic Fury? It's still ongoing. It's paused. Because Trump was so happy about that name. Yeah, he did really love that name. Project Freedom. Again, Hegseth says this is a distinct mission from Epic Fury. It's not a naval escort mission. He and Trump also insist that Iran firing at U.S. Navy ships in the Strait of Hormuz, firing at targets in the UAE and Oman at a South Korean ship. The list goes on. It's not a breach of the ceasefire. And CENTCOM also says that U.S. helicopters sinking six Iranian boats, also not a breach of the ceasefire. I guess that probably tells you everything you need to know. Giving the Iranians, I guess, the same treatment they give the Israelis, which they can bomb Gaza and Lebanon with impunity and still say there's a ceasefire. It also probably tells you that Trump does not want to go back to war. Anyway, here is Hegseth talking about this new mission on Tuesday morning in a press event. This operation is separate and distinct from Operation Epic Fury. Project Freedom is defensive in nature, focused in scope and temporary in duration. with one mission, protecting innocent commercial shipping from Iranian aggression. American forces won't need to enter Iranian waters or airspace. It's not necessary. We're not looking for a fight, but Iran also cannot be allowed to block innocent countries and their goods from an international waterway. Iran is the clear aggressor. As a direct gift from the United States to the world, we have established a powerful red, white, and blue dome over the strait. Once again, America is using its strength to lift up others. Iran is trying to subjugate the world. To our partners, allies, and the rest of the world, this is a temporary mission for us. As I've said before, the world needs this waterway a lot more than we do. We're stabilizing the situation so commerce can flow again, but we expect the world to step up at the appropriate time. And soon we will hand responsibility back to you. Giving the world a dumb one. Is it like world be free? Remember that basketball player? He talks about the world like it's a guy, like some guy named world. He's going to step up. Something about the way he talks just annoys the shit out of me. Everything? Everything about the way he talks? It's his cat in the hat, war crime, beat poetry. It just drives me nuts. So CENTCOM says Project Freedom will involve guided missile destroyers, There's over 100 land and sea aircraft and 15,000 service members. They're also like very clearly eager to hand this mess off to other countries soon, Ben. So I imagine they'll be cutting and running. Sure, there are a lot of takers. Yeah, yeah, a lot of it. So Ben, like I'm genuinely confused by the end game here for Trump. Like there's no chance this half-assed plan to like quote unquote guide ships is going to get traffic through the strait back to pre-war levels. I guess we can hand it off to other countries like you said, but like no one has our naval capacity. So I guess, you know, maybe everybody just ends up paying a toll or the straight remains partially closed and it just crushes the global economy. I don't know. So like I'm trying to be charitable here. I'm trying to genuinely understand the strategy for the straight before we get into the nuclear stuff. Do you have any like sense of what they're doing? I think that the fact that we're sitting here, you know, two months into this war and a war that was started again to change the regime and the nuclear program and usher in freedom in Iran has led to Project Freedom to be a GPS service for ships that are already stuck in the Strait of Hormuz. It just shows you the catastrophic error again. There are a number of things that jumped out to me. They are worried about the absence of legal basis. So the reason I think that they're going to these great lengths to call it a Project Freedom and say it's distinct from Epic Fury, is because under the War Powers Act, which they have ignored, that's the act that says Congress must authorize a war, you can kind of get a 60-day period where you're allowed to engage in military action before you really get in trouble. If you're responding to an imminent threat, which Jason Crow kept correcting me on because that there was no imminent threat. Because there's no imminent threat. But because he said when he was on the Hill that it was over because of the ceasefire. So they have to make this seem different. It's interesting that he seems to care about that. That just shows you that he doesn't care about Democrats. That shows you that even Republicans are feeling humiliated as they should by the absence of any congressional authorization. The second thing is, I cannot possibly overstate how insulting their tone towards the rest of the world is. You've done a very good job week after week at detailing these massive shortages that are crippling the economies of countries around the world, leading to severe shortages, making life hell for probably untold millions of people around the world. And so for him to kind of smarmily say, like some trader who just did a line of coke in the bathroom before he wanders out to the floor you know well you guys you know we we don't need this as bad as you do and you better come in here like like what is that for like who is that for like who is the audience for that because if it's the quote-unquote friends and allies he's talking about they have no friends anymore they lost them and and that's not going to make them want to step up you know right and then the last thing is they just fundamentally because they did such piss poor planning about this whole thing and didn't even anticipate that they closed the Strait of Hormuz, they don't even understand that the problem is not that there's a lack of guidance for the ships. It's that there are mines in the Strait of Hormuz, that the Iranians are firing at tankers, that there's a fear factor that no amount of guidance is going to solve. And similarly, if the United States Navy, which is the strongest in the world, can't reopen the Strait, which it has not, no matter what they say, they don't control the Strait. If they control the strait all the ships would get out um it's not like some pickup team of other countries can do it either so he like it's just this kind of weird mix of defense and offensive political messaging with no strategy attached to it yeah and there are there's 20 nearly 23 000 sailors on 1500 or more vessels that are just trapped in the gulf like trying to get out and that that is that's what's at stake right now and rubio also did a briefing at the white house today they did this full court press. There was this bizarre event this morning where Trump was bringing back the National Fitness Award. Remember that thing we did as kids? Noah Syndergaard, the ex-Met pitcher, was there. I was always sad to see. It's always sad when the athletes you like turn out to be mega. Some shredded mega guy. Yeah. He was there. But Trump's talking about blowing up Iranians in front of all these children. So there was that. Then Hegseth and Cain did their briefing. And then Rubio went to the White House briefing room today and was just like a pig and shit. So happy to be there, so excited about what he thinks is his future job. But anyway, Rubio said the blockade is costing Iran $500 million a day. And Trump did this interview with his staffer, Hugh Hewitt, on his radio show earlier this week about oil and gas infrastructure in Iran and said, and they say that in two weeks, when they talk about time, in two weeks, they're going to have a natural explosion of their oil that's going to make it impossible for them to really recover from. So Trump seems to think that if the blockade goes on, it will permanently blow up the Iranian oil and gas infrastructure. And maybe that's his plan to bring them to the table. But again, the Iranians are like, they're not even willing to negotiate about nuclear issues right now. Their offer is a ceasefire from the U.S. and Israel, so also in Lebanon. They want sanctions relief. They want other financial benefits. And then they're willing to talk about the nuclear issues once the war is basically over. And then Trump won't even specify what a ceasefire violation would look like. And like, I don't know if you watch the Kane and Hexeth briefing, but the reporters in that room are such a joke. They were literally asking about whether Iran is using like mind carrying dolphins to attack ships or like kamikaze dolphins. So that's where we're at in terms of the reporting on this. Yeah, I think, first of all, they have no plan. And because when you go to war not knowing why you're going to war, other than the Bibi Nenyao convince you to do it, you don't even really know what you're trying to get in the negotiation. And then they're trying to spin their way out of this. But the reality doesn't allow them to spin it. My only observation I add to this, and it deals with the military, you know, we always have to do a lot. You know, this is kind of throat clearing about how great the military is. And it is like the people in it. You know, a lot of them are wonderful people. Dan Kane has been really disappointing to me. I mean, I texted you. I watched that. He's not as bad as Hegseth. So you're watching and you're like, oh, this guy seems better than Hegseth. But he's gilding the lily. You know, he's more factual in nature. But yeah, it's more factual in nature. There's some tether to the truth. But he gives you kind of a blizzard of very tactical details that add up to no strategy. and and so he but by standing there next to Hegseth and trying to make the military operation seem like remarkably competent he's kind of putting you know he's putting lipstick on this pig and what worries me is it Trump you know look it's always hard to play the game of what does Trump actually believe because everything out of his mouth about this war is a lie or a half truth or, but I do think that they're briefing him. Like the blockade's going great, sir. You know, this blockade is never in the history of blockades. Has there been a blockade like this blockade and Iran is losing $500 million a day, sir. And the, the oil, you know, things will blow up in two weeks, which I think they said that two weeks ago, by the way, quite literally. And I think that they're doing a grave disservice to the country and the world if they're doing that. And I don't know that for a fact, but it seems like that because Trump like just likes to be told how well everything's going. And then he goes out and he repeats it in a dumber version and he amps it up. But I can kind of feel that happening here. And look, just because you can like position ships somewhere doesn't mean you have a good strategy. Doesn't mean that what you're doing is working. And good military advice is going to the president of the United States and saying this is not working. We cannot solve this problem militarily. Like, and that does, I worry that's not happening. Yeah, I mean, a lot of the Pentagon press corps is like, do you have suicide bomber dolphins swimming around the Strait of Romans? What are we doing here? Okay, Ben, as has become our tradition, immediately after we wrapped the show, Donald Trump sent a tweet that, actually, I don't know the implications of this one. Well, the war has ended like several times right after we took it. Yeah, we've had a million ceasefires. The war has ended so many times. Everything's better. So here's what he truthed on Truth Social. Based on the request of Pakistan and other countries, the tremendous military success that we've had in the campaign against our country of Iran, and additionally, the fact that great progress has been made toward a complete and final agreement with representatives of Iran, we've mutually agreed that while the blockade will remain in full force and effect, Project Freedom, the movement of ships through the Strait of Hormuz, will be paused for a short period of time to see whether or not the agreement can be finalized and signed. from President Donald J. Trump. I have no fucking clue what that means. I mean... It means we won, Tommy. I think it sort of means maybe that this whole plan wasn't working for all the reasons we just discussed and were skeptical of. And now they're going to pretend that they're close to signing some sort of real agreement to reopen the street? Yeah, I mean, not to be cynical. Yeah, I'm coming from a cynical place here, too. But perhaps Project Freedom did not succeed in lowering the oil prices. as he might have wanted. And so now we're trying a different tack because all he really cares about is the markets. Yeah, but he's seeming to suggest that they're close to a final agreement. But as we discussed, I mean, the Iranian position was like full ceasefire in Iran and Lebanon. There's an agreement for him to have that involves sanctions relief. Iran, you know, getting a lot and returned for little. And so at some point, one of these will be true. Right. And there'll be a deal in which the IRGC is still in charge of Iran and they get a bunch of money from either sanctions relief or tolling the strait or unfrozen assets in return for some pretty cosmetic nuclear concessions or maybe some medium sized ones like the JCPOA. And maybe this will be the time or maybe this is just another effort to try to lower gas prices. But I don't know, Tommy. Would you put Project Freedom up there with Operation Overlord, the Normandy invasion? Yeah, it's up there. It's just a remarkable success for Secretary Hegseth and folks at the Department of War. One of the greatest 24-hour GPS navigation operations ever launched. Here's your map, Operation Freedom. Okay. Well, we wanted to hop on and just tell you guys that this true social post was sent. The story of this war is Trump just kicking the can down the road for every 24-hour news cycle and market-moving events just to kind of keep the stock market on sides. Yeah, I wonder what trades we'll learn took place right before this. Yeah, I'm sure Don Jr. has a bunch of futures at bay. But, okay, we're going to go back to the regular show, and we're going to talk about the big picture issues, the nuclear stuff, the things that really matter. But another true social post. diplomacy by social media going great well i just i just i'm glad our freedom has been defended like this thank you sir pod save the world is brought to you by acorns there are a million reasons why people talk themselves out of investing it can feel like they don't have enough money to do it they don't know enough information maybe they don't know how but so many it can feel complicated it can feel complicated but so many of us only focus on where our money is today acorns is the financial wellness app that cares about where your money is going tomorrow. Acorns is a smart way to give your money a chance to grow. Acorns is easy. 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Support the show by mentioning us at checkout. Terms and conditions apply. So, again, while the Pentagon is playing Persian Gulf Tour Guide, Trump is trying to spin this mess to the public. Here's a super cut of some of his attempts over the last couple of days, and we'll watch the spin evolve a bit. I did something that was, I don't know, foolish, brave, but it was smart. I would do it again. But I thought the numbers would be much worse. I thought the stock market would go down much more. I thought the oil prices would go up much more. I said, but we have no choice. Whether it does or doesn't, I have to do what's right. We can't let them have a nuclear weapon. We hit all new highs and I said, we have to take care of business because we can't let that happen. So we did a little detour and it's working out very nicely. Our country's booming now, despite the fact that we're in a, I call it a mini war, did a poll on the war with Iran and they said only 32% of the people like it. Well, I don't like it, not like war at all. It's a golden age for America. You know, we hit an all-time high stock market today, despite that we're in a little skirmish, military. I call it a skirmish because Iran has no chance. So to summarize, it's a mini war or a skirmish. The polls are fake, but the stock market is up, so who cares? So more importantly, Ben, there was a report from Reuters on the impact of Epic Fury, the most recent round of fighting on Iran's nuclear program. Reuters reported that U.S. intelligence believes that the time Iran would need to build a new nuclear weapon has not changed since last summer when analysts determined that the previous strikes, Operation Midnight Hammer, had set them back, basically pushed the timeline back to a year. So in other words, like the latest round of fighting has not set Iran's nuclear timeline back any further. Before the war in June, U.S. intelligence said Iran was three to six months away from having enough highly enriched uranium to build a nuke. After the 12-day war, they said it was nine to 12 months away, and now they're still about a year away. So it's not clear that this has done anything on the nuclear front. Of course, we've taken out the U.S. and Israel, taken out a lot of conventional military capacity, killed a lot of Iran's leaders. But that's not what this was supposed to be about. So, I mean, Ben, again, we're not having nuclear talks that we know of, the U.S. and Iran. But the stated positions remain very far apart. Again, earlier this week, Trump talked to neocon fanboy Hugh Hewitt. He told him he wanted all of Iran's highly enriched uranium out of the country. Iran refuses to do that. Trump has said repeatedly that Iran can't do any nuclear enrichment. Iran repeatedly has asserted its right to enrich. Trump wants to cap their missile program. He wants to end their support for proxies. Seems unlikely that the IRGC is going to be down with that. So again, I'm trying to figure out an end game, a path forward, some common ground in these talks, but I'm struggling to see it. I think that the fundamental problem here is we had this debate back in 2015 when the Iran nuclear deal went into effect. And having looked at the problem for years and having gotten the same presentation or a version of it that Netanyahu gave Trump to bomb Iran, When we looked at that, and we also looked at what was possible at the negotiating table, what became very clear is, number one, you cannot destroy a nuclear program by bombing it. You just can't. They know how to do this. They know how to do the nuclear fuel cycle. They have uranium. They have the capacity to build centrifuges that can enrich that uranium. They have the capacity to stockpile it. You can bomb buildings where that takes place, but they can move it around. They can go underground. They've got lots of different scientists. You cannot bomb that out of existence. You could invade the country and fully occupy it and hunt down every last scientist and piece of the program, but we're obviously not going to do that either. So therefore, you can only resolve this issue diplomatically. If you resolve it diplomatically, there is absolutely no way that the Iranian government will ever agree that they do not have the capacity to enrich uranium, that they're going to abandon that in perpetuity. They're just not going to do that. like it would like that to happen. They're not going to do that. And so therefore, all you can do is negotiate some restrictions on their program where they're shipping the nuclear material that they produce out of the country. They're operating less centrifuges and there are inspections. That's the Iran nuclear deal. That's the JCPOA. The only thing available to Trump as an off ramp to this war, potentially, because I don't know if the Iranians are even in the mood to do it, is basically the deal that Obama had that he tore up. And agreeing to that would reveal the absolute fucking insanity of not just Trump, but the entire Iran war industrial complex. You know, all the Lindsey Grahams, obviously the Israelis, obviously the hack, you know, shit posters online who work at, you know, think tanks that had no purpose for existing other than to cheerlead for a war with Iran. Those people cannot admit that they were wrong. And the only way out of this war is for them to, if not admit that they're wrong, tacitly admit they're wrong by essentially trying to pursue a version of what Obama's nuclear deal was. I mean, honestly, I think that's where it is. And Trump, they try all these other metrics, like we blew up some of their conventional military, we killed these leaders, and everybody can see with their own eyes that the IRGC took our best punch and is still standing, that they control the straight-up Hormuz, and that they actually have more enriched uranium in a stockpile than they had the day Trump pulled out of that nuclear deal. And what was this all for? Not just this war, this whole last decade, what was it for? The insanity of it is just apparent, and Trump doesn't understand these things. But I think the core point here is, But absent something like that, this war, like literally there's accomplished precisely nothing and at unbelievable cost. Yeah. According to U.S. intelligence, it's just nothing different. It's just shit. It's nothing because the ballistic missiles, they'll rebuild the ballistic missiles. They'll find a way to do it. They'll produce the ballistic missiles. Or new drone technology. So like this is completely insane that this happened. And by the way, that event with the kids, Trump talked about the power of nuclear weapons. He talked about killing Iranians. He did his whole riff about like trans athletes. And then he said to them, Barack Hussein Obama, have you heard of him? Again, to a bunch of kids. Do you think that set of remarks is going to wind up in your forthcoming book about great speeches? I will say, having spent four years writing a book to try to tell the history of the United States through 15 consequential speeches. That's got to make it in there. Including speeches I don't agree with. You know, the vice president of the Confederacy is in there. Reagan's in there. The degree to which the bar has lowered here in Trump. I will say to people, though, the book is out three weeks from today. Okay. So now we're in that sweet pre-order window. Buy that sucker. If you are planning to buy the book, buying it now helps a lot because if you get some pre-orders, they ship more books at the bookstores and it all works out better. Get them on that list. Where do they go? Just go to Amazon. Want to hit the list. But the reason that's- Wait, wait. Give them a way to buy it. I mean, you can go to Amazon. You can go to Bookshop. Oh, I refined my plug. Always say the battle for American identity. And actually, don't go to Amazon. Go to Bookshop. Go to the Met Gala. Go to Bookshop. That supports independent bookstores. And then I'm going to be hitting the road. I'll be on a book tour. I'm going to be going to like 15 places. So we'll make that available. I will have to say to the San Francisco world, those two in particular, though, because tickets are on sale now. I'll be at City Arts and Lectures on June 9th with Jelani Cobb. I'm excited about that event. I know we got some San Francisco listeners. Got a lot of sub listeners. Great city. OK, so the politics of this are becoming quite clear. And it's a political disaster for Trump. Washington Post had a poll out over the weekend. And some numbers for you, Ben, you tell me if these are good. Overall approval rating for Trump is 37 percent. Approval of handling of Iran is 33 percent, 66 percent disapproved. Approval on inflation is 27 percent. Obviously, that's getting worse every day because of oil and gas prices. Cost of living, 23 percent approval. About 61 percent think going to war with Iran was a mistake. 65 percent aren't confident that will prevent Iran from getting a nuke. 22% think that Trump's actions against Iran are consistent with his promises in the 2024 election. So, I mean, look, all these numbers suggest that they want to run screaming from this thing. I think it was the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump keeps like kind of toggling between wanting to severely punish Iran for not doing what he said, but also worrying about getting pulled deeper into the conflict. I think anyone who's gotten in one of these regime change wars over the last couple decades could have told him that military action was not going to drive political change in Iran. But here we are. Good luck getting yourself out of this one, big guy. He can't get out of it because you can't change prices. You can't change how people are feeling and what they're seeing. I think the other thing from all these clips that stands out to me is that there's a convergence of the extent to which he's out of touch that I think is important. and you're seeing some people on the MAGA right pick up on this, including people like Tucker Carlson, which is that he now is pivoting to the stock market. Well, the wars, we had to do this detour. It used to be an excursion. Now it's a detour. But the stock market's at an all-time high. I think actually that is the precisely wrong message because people are beginning to get wise to the fact that the stock market is completely fucking juice by an AI bubble. And so basically Trump is up there boasting about the fact that a very small number of people are making a bunch of money on an AI bubble, creating technologies that are going to come for your jobs while he's fighting a war that does nothing for you and makes your gas prices higher. And it's going to start to affect things like fertilizer and all these other things that people really depend upon in this country. And so in a way, the war itself, you know, it's pulled back the curtain that the emperor has no clothes. He has no idea what he's doing. He's broken his promises. He never probably believed them in the first place. But also, even his way to spin himself out of it is compounding the error. Because telling people that they shouldn't be upset about high gas prices or a war or the- Or affordability is a myth. Yeah. Made up a hoax from Democrats. Like, what? If your only play is to point to the stock market, that would only make me more pissed. Oh, absolutely. Especially, yeah, you barely own stocks. I mean, most rich people own stocks. Speaking of, we've also been trying to figure out what's going on in Iran, Ben. I mean, our producers have been trying really hard to get in touch with people on the ground. Obviously, that's very hard. There's an internet blackout. There's all these threats from the regime. But just to give you a sense of what kind of conditions people are living under. So one contact we did get in touch with through an intermediary received this text afterward. This is verbatim. Dear citizen, following a review of actions carried out in cyberspace and pursuant to articles of the Islamic Penal Code, your act of approving and publishing criminal content in cyberspace is currently under investigation by the cyber police. Obviously, that person didn't want to talk further. We were finally able to connect with another civilian in Iran, a teacher. We decided not to play the audio of that message because we didn't want to create any risk for this person. We wanted to share some of what was said. They said their ability to teach has been severely disrupted by the ongoing blackout on Internet access. They said even with the expensive VPN services, Internet access is limited and unstable and that people have to spend a large part of their income just to stay connected. There's a type of government provided Internet often referred to the national restricted Internet that gives you some basic access. but it comes with control and monitoring and all sorts of restrictions. And because of that, people don't feel comfortable using it. And overall, just getting online is no longer simple. It's expensive. It's unstable. And it comes with a bunch of trade-offs between access, quality, and privacy. And then they said, on terms of fear of the government, quote, we do not have freedom. We do not have freedom of expression. Even basic forms of dissent can lead to serious, serious consequences. People can be detained or face severe accusations. In my own experience, I have received threatening messages simply for liking a few posts on Instagram. it's not normal that a simple action like liking a post on Instagram can lead to intimidation and make you feel like your own safety could be at risk. So Trump occasionally now will mention the protesters killed earlier this year. He did some weird thing today where he said that 40,000 people were killed by five snipers, which doesn't make a lot of sense. But it's worth noting that he's almost exclusively made their lives worse and deepen the repression that they face from the regime. Yeah. And I talked to someone I know here, a friend of mine whose family is Iranian, and they were describing the circuitous way they have to get news. They can't really be in touch. They hear secondhand. Somebody hears from somebody, hears from somebody. They're okay. But it's just halish. I'm just going to say something to kind of introduce a new idea here, Tommy, which is in the regime, there's nothing to do with the IRGC, the Iranian regime and how repressive they are. We have a deeply fucked up foreign policy because of how routinely we ignore the human cost of all the things that we do around the world. And this war is case in point. The girls school we bombed in the first day is case in point. The other thing I would say though is that, you know, somebody asked me recently, well, what do you regret about the Iran deal? And usually that's like, they want me to say like this sunset clauses should have been 12 years instead of 10 or something. I actually regret when I think, and if I were to make a recommendation for what Trump should do, not that he'd listen to me, let's lift the sanctions on Iran. And I know whatever intern listens to this podcast. Over, yeah. But like, maybe not everything, not the sanctions on the IRGC or whatever, but like, is this helping them? we've had that we've been sanctioning the shit out of this country for 20 years that teacher's life is far more miserable because of it yeah and she's getting repressed more because of our sanctions our sanctions empower the iranian revolutionary guard corps do not listen any longer to these hawks who tell you that the way that you care about human rights is by sanctioning countries and cutting off basic goods and collapsing currencies you know what if you worked in cuba If you lifted sanctions, like, and, you know, try to get something, try to get the nuclear program, do bigger sanctions relief. Yeah. Because I'm seriously trying to solve this problem. It's so incremental and limited. Because you know what? That teacher and all these people in Iran might still be dealing with, like, an intolerable amount of repression, but their lives would be better. And if we think that sanctioning this country or sanctioning this regime is somehow changing it, it has entrenched the worst people in Iran deeper in power. And so this is a bigger conversation we can have going forward. But one idea for Democrats looking for new ideas is, and by the way, because sanctions are hurting people, they're also going to shoot us in the face because the Chinese are going around the world saying, this is why you got to get out the dollars of world's reserve currency. And so what are we doing here? We're acting against human interest and we're acting against America's long-term interest by pursuing these insane sanctions policies on Iran, on Cuba, and all these countries that things just get worse in those countries. Yeah. And by the way, Trump's going to China next week on the May 14th and 15th. I think Iran's foreign minister is there this week to get ahead of that visit. Listeners probably remember that this China trip was supposed to happen in late March, early April, but Trump delayed it to deal with the Iran war. I'm sure this conversation you were just talking about, about how the Chinese can help Iran and other countries get around U.S. sanctions is front and center in that conversation. but despite the delay Trump was like, oh look, we have to delay this trip because then the war will be over and then we can focus on the real things like, no the Iran war has totally overtaken the trip. Trump kind of tried to low-key it today, talk about how nice China has been to him during the war, how they haven't challenged us but Treasury Secretary Scott Besson had a slightly different take earlier this week on, I think he was on Fox News or Fox Business. Let's watch. Let's see if China let's see them step up with some diplomacy and get the Iranians to open the street. You said that twice now. Do you expect Beijing and President Xi to do something with regard to Iran? Again, all I'll say is Iran is the largest state sponsor of terrorism, and China has been buying 90% of their energy, so they are funding the largest state sponsor of terrorism. That's quite a broadside in advance of Trump's trip. Not quite on message there, Scotty. So first of all, Trump says we control the street. right so why does china have to open i don't know i mean first of all there's a cognitive dissonance and and and second of all these guys talk like it's i don't know 1992 or something like china do you think china gives two shits what scott besson says like that like he can order around xi jinping um i mean we're just living in there's a reality in the world and then there's like the trump reality and and and increasingly people aren't even trying to kind of play along with it like they were at the beginning when they were a little afraid of tariffs and things like that. Look, Trump is intimidated by Xi Jinping. You can tell. He's always praising him. He doesn't want to piss him off. He's afraid that he got his ass handed to him in a trade war. And now he's created a huge problem for the Chinese and everybody else because they have supply lines and energy needs that run into Iran. But just hectoring them, I mean, if they were doing smart diplomacy, it's kind of like what I say, just so we can be constructive here. Look, a smart diplomatic effort would be like, look, we fucked up. Let's try to solve this problem comprehensively. You work on the Iranians to kind of open up the strait. We will lift some of these sanctions so that you can buy the oil more easily. And in return, though, you got to get this stockpile of the nuclear material out. And you got to convince them to have the IEA. This is what diplomacy would be. And they're incapable of doing that. But instead, what's happening is the Wall Street Journal reported that China's commerce ministry told companies just not to comply with U.S. sanctions over the purchase of Iranian oil. They're actively telling their companies to ignore us. There have been reports that China may be selling Iran weapons or other dual-use materials. I'm sure they are. And like, you know, like Aldi Vaez, who's an Iran expert who we've talked to on the show a bunch of times, said he's seeing people affiliated with the IRGC saying that Iran has been way too shy about aligning itself with China and Russia. So that's, you know, likely to come. We remember the Chinese facilitated this opening between Iran and Saudi Arabia in 2023. They're also getting very active with Pakistan on the diplomatic efforts to try to end this war currently. So the Chinese are attempting to fill the void in some way. And again, if this war wasn't happening, I'm sure the agenda would be trade deal, Taiwan, artificial intelligence, all these big things. Instead, it's just going to be this. And the Chinese, by the way, they see us confirming all the arguments they've been making around the world forever. That the Americans are reckless, that they can't be trusted, that they overuse sanctions, that they're militaristic. Trump is proving every Chinese argument that has been made in two months. And so they're going to reap a lot of geopolitical gains from this, although they also have economic concerns about the potential global recession that this war could bring about. Interestingly, they have a stockpile of oil that they can ride out for I think something like six months or maybe nine months. They do have LNG issues. And so the Qatar cutoff of LNG, like is that gas field is shut down because the Iranians bombed it, is a problem for them. But it's a problem with the solution, which is in the long term, they're going to want to pull Qatar and some of those Gulf states into their orbit. And I would be shocked if that's not one of the consequences of this war is that the Gulf states that usually looked in the direction of the US are going to be much more open to, look, the Chinese deal is reliable. The terms are, you know, Beijing favored, but we know what the terms are. Whereas with the Americans, we have no idea what the fuck they're going to do day to day. Right. Exactly. So the other front in this war is in Lebanon, and that fighting is just raging between the Israelis and Hezbollah. The Lebanese health ministry said 17 people have been killed since Sunday and over 2,600 since the conflict started. Hezbollah said it carried out over a dozen attacks on Israeli soldiers on Monday. And Ben, I don't know about you, I'm on social media seeing more and more videos of these FPV drone attacks by Hezbollah on like Israeli tanks and stuff. They're basically taking all the technology we saw in Ukraine with like fiber optic drones that can evade electronic warfare defenses and using those in southern Lebanon to pretty devastating effect. The New York Times did like a pretty big deep dive on satellite imagery from southern Lebanon. They found, quote, widespread demolitions have flattened expanses of at least two dozen towns and villages near the border with damage to government offices as well as civilian infrastructure including schools hospitals and mosques Israel defense minister Israel Katz explicitly said this pattern of destruction is following the Gaza models basically And Trump is pushing for talks and ceasefire plans. But neither side seems particularly interested at this point. So not a ton to say new about Lebanon right now, except for it's like incredibly grim and just kind of steady state. I know they're calling it a ceasefire, but it's just an ongoing war. It's insane that they call it a ceasefire. And it's insane that Western outlets like, you know, talk about fragile ceasefires and things like this. The other thing that did you see Smotrich, you know, the finance minister? Yes. Say that he promised his son that he wouldn't destroy all of Lebanon so that his son and his generation could. I mean, this is really psychotic stuff. And look, when I remember they started carpet bombing something in Lebanon, if you posted like, which I did, you know, they're going to do the Gaza model in Lebanon. People would be like, oh, you Israel hater, like, how dare you, you know, and now the Israeli government says, we're going to do in southern Lebanon what we did in Gaza, make it uninhabitable. Because what they're doing, just so people understand, is they're literally making it, they're not just destroying these villages, they're so comprehensively destroying, you know, the farmland, the olive trees, that there'll be nothing to move back to. That's what we mean by Gaza model. It's not just that they're leveling every building. It's that there's going to be nowhere for those people to go back, you know. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Life is a lot sometimes, regardless of what's keeping you up at night or leaving you overwhelmed. It's easy to feel like you have to figure it out all on your own, but you don't have to face these challenges alone. Having someone to listen, to understand, and to support you can make all the difference. That's where BetterHelp comes in. BetterHelp therapists work according to a strict code of conduct and are fully licensed in the US. BetterHelp does the initial matching work so you can focus on your therapy goals. A short questionnaire helps identify your needs and preferences, and their 12 or more years of experience and industry-leading match fulfillment rate means they typically get it right the first time. If you aren't happy with your match, switch to a different therapist at any time from their tailored recs. With over 30,000 therapists, BetterHelp is the world's largest online therapy platform, having served over 6 million people globally, and it works with an average rating of 4.9 out of 5 for a live session based on over 1.7 million client reviews. It's a scary world out there. The President of the United States is threatening to genocide a whole country. You need a therapist. Just talk to someone. Talk to someone about all this stuff and, you know, whatever's going on in your life. You don't have to traverse life's challenges alone. Find the personal support you're looking for in therapy. Sign up and get 10% off at betterhelp.com slash crookedworld. That's betterhelp.com slash crookedworld. This podcast is sponsored by Squarespace. Squarespace is the all-in-one website platform designed to elevate your online presence and drive your success. Squarespace provides all the necessary tools to claim your domain, build a professional website, expand your brand, and facilitate payments, making it the ideal solution for businesses of all sizes. With Squarespace's collection of cutting-edge design tools, anyone can build a bespoke online presence that perfectly fits their brand or business. Start with Blueprint AI, Squarespace's AI-enhanced website builder, to get a fully custom website in just a few steps, using basic information about your industry goals and personality to generate premium quality content and personalized design recommendations. Squarespace Domains makes it easy to find the best name for your business at one fair, all-inclusive price. No hidden fees or add-ons required. Plus, Squarespace provides everything you need to bring more of your dream to life, whether that means building a website, adding a professional email service, or more. Don't wait to claim your name. Invest in your dream domain today. Head to squarespace.com for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, go to squarespace.com slash world. Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. That's squarespace.com slash world. Speaking of Gaza, we should touch base on all things Gaza. Because, you know, last October, everybody celebrated the ceasefire deal brokered by the administration. But unfortunately, it's really been a ceasefire and name only for people who live in Gaza and life in Gaza is hell on earth. So some numbers for you guys. The Palestinian health ministry says that since the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, 823 people have been killed and 2300 have been wounded. Four Israeli soldiers have been killed since the ceasefire began. Only 250 of the promised 600 trucks of aid per day are getting into Gaza. Partly that was the result of one of the two crossings being closed for a long time through the Iran war. The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimates that rodents are swarming 80% of the camps for displaced people. And the World Health Organization reports that there have been over 110,000 cases of disease or infestation due to external parasites. Ben, I was texting with Faroz Sidwa earlier this week. He was, for listeners, he was this heroic doctor who came on the show after he had volunteered in Gaza during the conflict. And he said that the society and the health infrastructure in Gaza is just so thoroughly destroyed that rat attacks on infants are now a major source of morbidity. So kids are getting sick and dying because they're getting attacked by rats. Just imagine your baby getting attacked by rats. The only power comes from generators. There's no grid left. And the reconstruction cost is estimated at $70 billion. And a third of that is needed, like, up front in the first year and a half just to do basic infrastructure and essential services. So basically, the long story short is the place is in this nightmarish limbo. Hamas is not disarmed. They refuse to disarm until Israel withdraws and Trump promises them a Palestinian state. Israel is occupying pretty much half the Gaza Strip. It refuses to let in items that are essential for reconstruction. all the people tapped by the trump administration this like group of you know experts and technocrats to just sit on their ass yeah they're sitting in egypt at a resort doing nothing some of them want to be doing more but they there's just no funding there's no way to do anything the civil police force that they kept talking about none of them have been trained and it's just it was so obvious then at the time and even clearer now that trump and jared kushner and steve whitkoff they only gave a shit about getting the Israeli hostages out. And once that happened, they were like, you know, jobs done. They don't care about people in Gaza. And, you know, the Israelis and Hamas both seem kind of fine with the status quo because it keeps them in charge for Israel. It deals with their kind of security concerns. And the Palestinian people just suffer immensely in, you know, in the meantime. So that's the latest. I mean, just sort of couldn't really be worse. Yeah, I think a couple of things I point out here. First of all, the ceasefire violations that tend to get highlighted are the attacks, the bombing of Gaza and the killing of civilians with violence. But another piece of this is that Israel has just fundamentally refused to let in the aid that it promised to do under the terms of the ceasefire. And so the reason the conditions are so squalid, the reason that life continues to just be just hell on earth for civilians there is at least in part, in large part, that, you know, look, if Israel wanted to let assistance in, you wouldn't have infants getting attacked by rats. You wouldn't have people suffering malnutrition. You wouldn't have preventable deaths. Like this is a genocidal policy like that is continuing. And just because they're not bombing at the same pace that they were before, it doesn't mean that they're just not squeezing and squeezing and squeezing with complete disregard to the loss of civilian life. And the second thing, like I'd say, is when you look back, there's just something ghoulish about the celebration of that agreement. And we were calibrated at the time. But this is like the worst case scenario in a lot of ways. I mean, I guess it could be worse. they could just start bombing indiscriminately at the pace that they were before. But nothing, not a finger is being lifted to help these people. And there's still drone strikes regularly. Yeah. And I'm sure that if you're Palestinian, all you hear is like the buzzing of drones overhead. You know, the fear that that engenders in children is unimaginable to me. And it just shows you that Trump and Netanyahu, they wanted the hostages out. And they kind of just wanted it to be downgraded on every assignment editor's desk around the world. Like the media, it's off the television screens, a little less social media attention on it, you know, like we can all move on. We'll pretend we both pull together this board of peace Gaza reconstruction effort. In fact, nothing will come of that. But Jared Kushner will get to hit up the Saudis on the margins for his investment fund. Steve Witkoff can talk to the Pakistanis about buying hotels in New York and a crypto deal he made with the Trump family crypto business. Right. The president of Indonesia, as we talked about last week, can ask for Eric or Don Jr.'s cell phone number to figure out the golf course deal back home that he's using to grease Trump. Right. It's just like it's grift on the side. Yeah. And that's the last thing I was going to say is like the Jared Kushner presentation at Davos that we spent some time on with this kind of Jetsons, Dubai. Data centers. Yeah. Data centers and high rises. How about tents? and commercial real estate. And it was grotesque at the time. But again, to be constructive, why let him make that presentation at Dava? Stop humoring these people. There's a kind of deference. Jared's here. We have to sit attentively while he gives us the Jetson version of Gaza. It's time for people to start saying no to these people, to start calling bullshit on these people to stop. I mean, if you're the Saudis or Emiratis or whomever is like invested in Jared, how you feel about that investment now with the war in Iran fucking up your economy? Like, you don't need to pay this guy. Like, there's not a requirement that you pay him. Like, I know that, you know, you're doing it to get Trump off your back, but is it working? No, no, it's not. And it is not working diplomatically either. I mean, the next topic for us is Russia and Ukraine, another conflict Trump said he's going to solve in 24 hours that Jared Kushner and Wyckoff were on the case. They've gotten literally nothing done. So later this week, then the Russians are going to hold their annual Victory Day commemoration that celebrates the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II. It usually entails this huge military parade of tanks and other weapons. But this year, Putin is not going to be displaying kind of major military hardware. It could be because, you know, drone strikes could reach that hardware and hit the parade. It could be because I think Zelensky was speculating that the Russian military just doesn't have enough kit to show off this year, so they're not going to try. Putin proposed a ceasefire for the day of the parade itself. That's obviously a bit cynical and self-serving. In response, Zelensky proposed a long-term ceasefire and a lasting peace deal. Don't hold your breath on that getting done. But the casualty estimates are just staggering. So there's a CSIS report from January, from like five months ago, that estimated Russia had 1.2 million casualties from the start of the war through the end of 2025. Ukraine's casualty estimate was about half of that. But again, that was five months ago. And every week, advances in drone technology make life at the front lines more deadly and hellish. So I'm sure the numbers have increased. Ukraine has been able to hit targets deeper into Russia than ever before. And there's been some really interesting reporting about dissent in Russia and security issues in Russia itself. So in mid-April, there was this blogger named Victoria Banya. She posted this 18-minute Instagram video outlining a bunch of concerns and anger at problems in Russia itself. And she directed it at Putin and it went super viral. So the Guardian said it got 26 million views in four days, which is surprising since Instagram is technically banned in Russia, as is criticism of Putin, really. But Banya, she complained about flooding, oil pollution along the Black Sea, this massive cull of livestock in Siberia, which really angered people, internet restrictions. And the government was forced to respond in a real way because she was seen as actually a defender of Putin. Then there was this fascinating report in the Financial Times about how Putin is increasingly paranoid and worried about getting killed or assassinated. They say he's spending more time in bunkers underground, security around him is tighter, people aren't allowed to have phones or internet connected devices near him. Some of his staff had security systems installed in their own homes, which that sucks. The piece also said Putin is almost entirely focused on the war and foreign affairs and just kind of lets domestic stuff languish. So Ben, I think we wanted to raise this because it's been a while. I personally feel guilty every week. We don't talk about Ukraine more because the stakes are just as high. The death toll is just as horrific. But over time, there's always just like a new nightmare that we're covering, like Gaza or Iran. But also there's kind of like an undertone in these reports that maybe Putin is losing his grip on Russian society. The polling is going down. We're sitting in LA. I have no idea how strong or weak Putin's grip on power is. But I don't know, maybe it's wish casting, but maybe there is a sense that the Russian economy can't just sustain this level of fighting casualties for this long. But I don't know. What do you make of these these reports? I think they're really interesting. And we should just say, I mean, for the Ukrainians, it sucks. They're just this grinding front line and this casualty levels is just beyond the immediate human toll. like how that country gets out of this situation and is viable in terms of rebuilding gets harder with each passing month or year. On the Putin piece, you know, he's never as weak as the wish casting sometimes suggests. So back in, you know, 2023, when I was like, oh, Putin's going to fall and the Ukrainians are counteroffensive is going to be victory and they're going to take back Crimea. Like that was serious wish casting. But at the same time, a lot of the issues in this war are ones that are going to get worse with time for Putin. So, for instance, like people from the front, like going, I mean, if you look at the Soviet war, like in Afghanistan, it took years for that war to start to eat away at like Russian society because guys are coming home. They're disabled. Their alcoholism rates are going up. Like it's, you know, there's PTSD. People are, you know, like literally the workforce is being harmed. So if you look at Russia today, for instance, like, yes, they've been able to create a war economy that can employ people and artificially boost growth rates and they can manipulate oil prices. They benefit from the war because the price of oil goes up. So they get a little more revenue. But at the end of the day, they're spending extraordinary money on this. They're losing an extraordinary amount of people. The people that are coming out of this war and going home are probably not OK. So towns, small cities are starting to probably feel, you know, it takes two, three, four, five years. That's how long this war has been, by the way. The Ukrainian strategy of striking these targets like deep into Russia is pretty smart because it's bringing the war home to certain places. It may actually be causing like, you know, demonstrable damage. And they're hitting energy infrastructure and sources of revenue. And the repression, you know, like we make a mistake sometimes of it's like maybe we should know because now we live in a version of authoritarianism that like it's a spectrum. So just because Putin's always been repressive doesn't mean it can't get worse. Right. And it's clearly gotten worse. I mean, Alona's pointed out to us repeatedly that like these Internet restrictions like that fucks up people's lives. You can't call people. People want to be online. People want to be in touch with their family. People want to be in touch with so many Russians are out of the country and they can't be in touch with their family. Businesses rely on the Internet. So I do think that Putin is not as strong as some people project or as weak, but these cracks are starting to show. And it might take time. But at a certain point, the bill is going to come due for this war. Yeah, and there's been some interesting reporting about Putin trying to erase even Soviet history. You know, it doesn't strike me as a particularly – I mean, it's an authoritarian move. It's not the strongest move. There's also been a bunch of reporting about Russian entities, these like kind of fake businesses that get set up, recruiting men from Africa and telling them they can come work at some private security job and sending these Kenyan men to the front lines just to be cannon fodder. I mean, it's horrible stuff. Also, though, just back on the negotiating fronts, I mean, I think the last trilateral talks were in February. And I think I read somewhere that Wyckoff and Jared Kushner, they've been to Russia a bunch of times, right? They'll meet with Putin whenever they can. I don't think they've ever been to Ukraine. And the question is why? You wouldn't go one time to meet with the people, to see the place, to understand the issues? So first of all, two things. Noticeably, that meeting was before the war in Iran. So another casualty of this war is that there's just no attention on Ukraine. I don't have inside information. I have to do all the caveats that we don't know for sure. They want to do real estate deals or mineral deals in Russia. That's why they're there. They don't care for shit about the Ukrainians. They see a bonanza on the back end of this war being solved. Jared and Whitcoff, I think, wanted to do deals in Russia. I don't... Why might I surmise that? One, the guy that Putin started sending to the talks is the head of the Sovereign Wealth Fund. Yeah, that's a big signal. He's not from the foreign ministry. He's from the Sovereign Wealth Fund. Two, in Alaska... He's in Miami, like, jet skiing with them all the time. Yeah. Dicking around. Yeah, dicking around. Two, in Alaska, Putin brought all these people from, like, these various... We're going to do mineral deals and all this stuff. they clearly want to skip ahead to that step. The problem is that the war is going to end first. And three, to your point, why would you not go to the country that's been invaded? Jared and Woodcoff's interest in this, I think, have nothing to do with peace and have nothing to do with making a buck in Russia. And that's fucking disgusting. Yes, yes, it is. And there's a great piece, I think, in the New York Times Magazine this week about kind of the privatization of diplomacy and the way that those two are fusing profit. For example, the Pakistanis did this big crypto deal with the Trump family company. And now, what do you know? They're hosting the talks. Like you and I have laughed on the show about how Trump is always shouting out like the field marshal general in Pakistan is probably like a human rights violator. And it's like, well, we know why. Pretty safe bet. Yeah, pretty safe bet. And calling him by his honorific field marshal. You know, it's like some field marshal. Field marshal. That's a cool title. Is this fucking Eisenhower? Like, don't you break? Okay. So final topic. This one comes courtesy of Michael and our team. So enjoy, Ben. It's a quiz for you. Pop quiz. Oh, no, this is not like a Tim Miller pop quiz. No, no, no, no. First of all, do you know who our current ambassador to both Switzerland and Liechtenstein is? I have no idea, but I'm going to guess. Is it a Kushner or a Woodcoff relative? Let's roll the tape. I'm Callistic. United States ambassador to Switzerland and Liechtenstein. I'm delighted to celebrate National Apprenticeship Week. As U.S. ambassador to Switzerland and Liechtenstein, I've seen firsthand the power of apprenticeships. Wow, amazing star. I just have one comment first. The years or decades could go by and Calista Gingrich would look exactly precisely the same. Brother, that face doesn't tune itself. Whatever they shot into that face, we will be dead, you and I, and there will be a video of her and some Republican administration in 2075 as ambassador to Luxembourg or some fancy European place looking exactly the same. Yeah, she facetunes with a belt sander. By the way, that was Calista Gingrich, former ambassador to the Vatican under Trump 1.0, wife of former Speaker Newt Gingrich. So Calista is now representing our interests in Bern. Remember, she is Newt's third wife. So we met his first wife when he was a teenager. I didn't know this, when she was his high school geometry teacher. It's very Macron. Kind of Macron-esque, yeah. They had Candace on that case. Yeah, Candace. Was she a Rothschild? We'll find out. That marriage ended in divorce after his affair with Marianne, who became his second wife. This is Newt. Newt then had an affair with Calista for six years while he was still married. And he asked his second wife for a divorce shortly after she was diagnosed with MS. So again, good guy. Calista, I think, is 23 years younger than Newt, about the same age as his daughter. And again, we cannot point out enough that Newt was having this affair while constantly attacking Bill Clinton over the Lewinsky stuff. So Newt married Callista in 2000, conferred it to her faith, Catholicism in 2009. So, Ben, to honor her. Where does Catholicism stand on these personal discussions? On this, yeah. A little quiz for you. Okay. One, first question. Like Cash Patel, Callista Gingrich is a noted children's book author. In her seven book series, what animal, quote, travels through time to discover the pivotal moments that have shaped American history? Is it A, Ellis the elephant? B, Newt the narwhal? C, Donald the Dalmatian? D, Liberty the lynx? This is actually just as good as Cash the wizard. What was A again? Ellis the elephant. I'm going to go with the elephant. I'm going to go with the elephant. You nailed it. Yeah. You absolutely nailed it. I think of all the things to choose. These are actually Republicans before they're Donald. I'm bummed it wasn't Newt the Narwhal. So the books are apparently written in rhymes like, after winning the war, Washington would not become a king. He became our first president, and that's a better thing. Could we please get a dramatic reading of these books by Pete Hegseth? Oh, that's a good idea. With an American flight pocket square. It is very fitting. You're right. Question two. Newt Gingrich owed as much as $500,000 to which retailer in the mid-2000s? Was it A, Vineyard Vines, B, Tiffany & Co., C, Radio Shack, D, Rolex? $500,000? $500,000. Because I would say Newt has a taste for the Vineyard Vines, but I'm going to go Rolex. Yeah. So it was B, Tiffany. Tiffany, okay. Hard to spend $500,000 at Vineyard Vines. Very, very hard. That's a lot. That's a lot of white shorts and pink shirts. That's a lot of salmon pants, yeah. We got a clip of this. Apparently, I haven't even seen this. Doesn't that whole thing strike you as stupid? i mean if you're these are stores these are stores that have a wide range of things you can buy she has girlfriends with birthdays what is that him defending himself in 2000 just a quick swerve here like i the fact that this guy was held up as like some intellectual i know you know it's always bothered me like the bar for these republicans is so low yeah yeah uh this is our moral leader in our intellectual moral and intellectual giant so this Tiffany thing came up in his ill-fated presidential campaign in 2012 for the nomination. He also got flack for suspending his campaign to go on a Greek cruise. Do you remember he was like the front runner for a while? I mean, that was a crazy field. It was like Romney, Rick Santorum had a moment there. Thinking back, I can see why Trump mopped the fucking floor with these guys. Because he came in, he was like, I have a personality and a sense of humor and I'm not a loser like these idiots. Last question. When leaving a second wife, Marianne, Newt compared Marianne to Calista saying I can handle a insert luxury consumer good right here Right now all I want is a less expensive good You got the formatting here Yeah So I can handle this luxury thing I need a less expensive thing. Was it, I can't handle a Charmin Ultra Soft right now. All I want is a Scott OnePly. Was it B, I can't handle a Gray Poupon right now. All I want is French's. Was it C, I can't handle Espresso right now. All I want is instant. Was it D, I can't handle a Jaguar. All I want is a Chevrolet. One of those is actually true? Yeah. I mean, I guess I'm going to go D because anyone else is like- Dude, you crushed this quiz. D. Yeah. Chevrolet. Yeah. I mean, he wanted a Chevy. That's a bad thing to say to a human being. I mean- That you're married. I mean, Newt's been in plenty of back seats over the years. I mean, like I- So is Calista. Well, I- Back seat, windows up. This is, yeah. That was a great quiz. Thank you, Michael, for that. That's what happens when you give this guy an hour of free time on the show day. All of a sudden we're doing... No, that was good. It was a pretty like dark, angry run. So we needed that. It's important. We needed that. It's important to have a little fun with you in here. That was good. Okay, we're going to take a quick break. By the way, isn't that better than Tim Miller when he's like, you know, asking you the name of the foreign minister of Liechtenstein? Yeah, Tim thinks, there's people who seem to think that working in foreign policy meant you worked in geography. No, it's funny. The reason he does it is because George Bush got asked the name of the leader of Pakistan. It was Misharov. And Tim thought that that was a dumb liberal gotcha thing. But actually, I'm not sure that was a dumb question because Pakistan ended up being the most important country after 9-11. Yeah, look, I think people running for president, asking them basic civics question is a good idea. I think if you ask Donald Trump how many branches of government are there, He would just flunk a lot of these basic questions, and it would have been useful along the way. But yeah, Tim likes to just torture us when we go on the show. Yeah, he does. We're going to take a break. We come back. You're going to hear my conversation with Jason Crow about Iran, about his grilling of Pete Hegseff, about Trump moving troops out of Germany. So stick around for that. Pod Save the World is brought to you by SimpliSafe. Most traditional security systems on the market lock you into a long-term multi-year contracts with huge cancellation fees. SimpliSafe is different. They earn your trust by providing 24-7 effective professional monitoring that's actually affordable and they do it without roping you into long-term contracts. As you guys know, John Lovett sent up a SimpliSafe system all by himself. 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It's time to see what you can accomplish with Shopify by your side. my guest today represents colorado's sixth congressional district and he serves on the house armed services committee the house permanent select committee on intelligence uh and many other august committees uh jason crow great to see you again tommy thanks for having me back so um the the war powers resolution the the law establishes this 60 day deadline after which a president has to stop the use of armed forces in a conflict or else get congressional approval. Trump's war with Iran hit that 60-day deadline last week, last Friday, but the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, he argued in a Senate hearing that because of the ceasefire, the clock stopped, the, you know, 60 days is not up, and they don't need Congress to act. We should all just note that since that spin, the U.S. and Iran have been shooting at each other in the Strait of Hormuz, with the U.S. sinking a number of Iranian boats earlier this week with helicopters, I believe. What did you make of Hegseth's claim? Well, can we actually just, there's an important step missing here. The 60-day clock is determined on the War Powers Act, which is determined on there being imminent threat. There has to be an imminent threat, and then under an imminent threat, then they have 60 days, and then there's an additional 30 days to conduct the troop withdrawal beyond the 60 days. But they never showed the imminent threat. It's all this much to do about the 60-day thing. We never met the initial threshold, which requires there either be, there's only two ways the president can take our troops to war. One is if there's an imminent threat, in which case they have the 60 days, which they never showed, or there's an AUMF by Congress. Neither of those things are true. So this whole thing from the beginning has been unlawful and without authorization, but more importantly, without actually the consent of the American people, which is really what this is all about. So you're right about that context, and it's important. But, you know, I guess associated with that, like, wouldn't this new military operation, this like, guide mission for boats in the Strait of Homo's Project Freedom, would that also require congressional authorization? Yeah, it would. Well, there are so many things going on here. One is the initial attack on Iran, which required imminent threat or a congressional AUMF of some sort. The second is an ongoing naval blockade. International law and the law of war is very, very clear. A naval blockade and stopping ships from coming in and out of ports is a very clear act of war. And then you add on top of it, Hegseth's claim that somehow a ceasefire tolls the 60 days. There's zero precedent for that assertion, Not to mention the fact that there actually is conflict going on right now. In the last 24 hours, there have been numerous exchanges of fire between the United States and Iranian forces or proxy forces. So the whole thing is a mess. It's convoluted. They keep on evolving and changing their definitions, their legal basis for it, which, of course, is just par for the course of this administration, much like the operations going on in the Caribbean, which use circular legal reasoning to justify. They always say that there isn't an armed conflict. It falls just short of an armed conflict level. But they have to use the military because it is an international armed conflict. So they want to have their cake and eat it, too. So what does Congress do about it? That's the big question here. Like, how can you guys exert some pressure on the administration to change course, to follow the law, to follow the Constitution, whatever? Yeah. But Congress has the power. This is less the story of Donald Trump or any president for that matter. And I'm always really clear that this isn't just something that Donald Trump has abused. This has been abused by multiple presidents, Democrat and Republican, and multiple Congresses have allowed it, Democrat and Republican. This is a 20-year problem in the making. And Congress tomorrow could fix it. We have the authority, constitutional authority, and we can walk in to the House floor. We could take a vote and take that power back tomorrow. Right. So that's what this is about. This is about Congress giving up its power and ceding its constitutional authority. But more importantly, it's constitutional duty. This is more about duty than it is about authority. It's our job, for God's sakes, to actually take these votes and to be held accountable and to appropriate the money or not appropriate the money for all of these things. because the framers knew that presidents will take all the power they're given and use all the power they're given, that the accountability loop is in members of Congress that have to go home to their districts every weekend, every week and stand in front of their constituents and be held accountable for it. So that's ultimately the fix. And this should be the most bipartisan thing in America right now is Congress, because it's been abused by both sides over the years. And because Americans of all stripes, Democrat, Republican, and Independent, want it over. They want no part in this. And they want it to be ended. The other sort of way you guys can get some accountability or oversight is through hearings. There were some hearings last week. You had this extended exchange with Pete Hegseth about a guy named Tim Parlatore, who is Pete Hegseth's private attorney. He was then appointed to a Pentagon job. You pressed Pistol Pete. on parloratory security clearance. You asked him about his foreign clients. He's still in private law practice. Can you explain why you were so focused on this one individual and what you learned in that exchange and how we act on it? Yeah, my singular goal right now is to get Pete Hegseth fired. He has such an extreme danger to our service members, the men and women who I love, who I've served with, who I have a deep affection that come from my district, come from districts around this country. People's sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers. And he is putting these folks at such extreme risk because of his, not just his incompetence, but his cavalier attitude and his unwillingness to actually do the right thing and to run the Department of Defense the way that it needs to be run. So I want this guy gone, which is why I chose a very different approach than I've ever chosen before. I was speaking largely to Donald Trump into the White House when I was questioning. And I was pointing out that in Pete Hegseth, you have a man who publicly professes unfaltering loyalty to the president, kisses his ring, kisses his ass every chance he gets. And yet behind the scenes, he's hiring people who Donald Trump despises, who Donald Trump has called a lawyer who was fired from his legal team, and basically building a fiefdom with these Hegseth loyalists. And at the same time, the corruption, just the extreme corruption of Pete Hegseth putting all these people in place who are making money off of their positions very, very purposefully and intentionally. So that's what I was drawing attention to. There's also been there's been some reporting that Hegseth is increasingly isolated, that he's paranoid about getting fired, that he brings his wife to official meetings, that his closest advisors are this little circle, like Tim Parlatore, Pete Hegseth's brother, this guy, Ricky Buria, who is like a military aide under Biden who stayed on, who's sort of, I think, risen to much higher heights. And that Hegseth is preoccupied with stuff like the Pentagon's chaplain services and not managing the massive workforce. I mean, are you hearing similar things from contacts you talk to within the Department of Defense? Yeah, absolutely. I'm hearing a variety of different things. One strand of things I'm hearing is about the culture of fear and intimidation and retribution. That if you're a senior military officer, you can't give your honest advice to the civilian leadership. You have to show loyalty. How dangerous is that? We're conducting military operations in dozens of places around the world. And our senior military officers don't feel empowered to say if there's something wrong or to dissent. I mean, that is so deeply dangerous. That kind of proves my earlier point. So I'm hearing that. We're hearing rumors that, you know, this parlatory has to be hired by senior officers to get promoted, that, you know, they have to basically pay this guy, which is, you know, part of my questioning. So we need to drill down into that. So if I want to go from a two-star general to a three-star, I have to hire this random lawyer to get a promotion? To do what? that's what we're hearing and that's why i i questioned uh headseth about parlatory i know those are the those are the rumors that we're hearing from a lot of different places and and and what's crazy is that that wouldn't actually surprise me if it were true yeah that uh i mean that's part and parcel to this administration it's happening uh administration-wide in so many different ways you know this pay-to-play politics and it's seeped into well actually seeping isn't the wrong word because that's passive. It's been implemented by Pete Hegseth and the people around him. To put it in terms, Pete might understand. He shotgunned it. So it's down the hatch. He would understand that. He would understand that. Yeah, I bet he funneled it. The administration said the cost of Operation Epic Fury, the war with Iran, is $25 billion. I've seen news outlets estimate that it's much higher. I think CNN said 40 to 50. CBS said closer to 50 billion. What do you think? Did you buy that $25 billion number? Yeah, there's no way that's true. There's no, first of all, even if that's true, that's a lot of fricking money, right? We have people losing healthcare by the millions. I was just in a round table yesterday with some young folks in my district and it was all about healthcare. They're like, my healthcare has gone up. They're now paying $2,000 a month for premiums with a $6,000 deductible and a 20% copay, right? And they're like, we can't afford that, right? So even if it's $25 billion, which it's not, right? It's a multiple of that, two times, three times, maybe four times. It's much higher than that. That is a lot of money, right? We have expended vast, vast amounts of our most exquisite high-end munitions in our stockpiles. There's been tremendous damage done to our infrastructure throughout the Middle East. Let's not forget that a lot of these drones, a lot of these missiles actually have hit infrastructure, defense infrastructure in our bases that's going to be rebuilt. So it's cost a lot of money and it continues to cost a lot of money. This blockade is not cheap either. So that's kind of the biggest point here. Not only are our service members at great risk, and we've lost 13 of them, over 300 have been wounded, but Americans are paying tens of billions of dollars for a war that's going to end poorly yet again without achieving a strategic goal. And they're fed up with it, and they should be. And like, obviously, they're trying to claim that this new guiding operation through the Stradar Homoos is actually a separate thing with a different name. But it's obviously, you know, it's all just part and parcel of the Iran war. How would you designate the cost of that to the war effort? I mean, I think they said like, a bunch of guided missile destroyers are going to stay in the region over 100 air assets, 15,000 troops. presumably that is an enormous cost that keeping all those individuals in theater that would continue to add up every day right yeah this is this is a kind of smoke and mirrors budgeting tactic that they have been using where they say it's really not costing us extra well and and their rationale is it goes something like this that hey we have these ships anyhow and hey they have to be somewhere doing something anyway right and we're paying these service members every month anyway. So let's just take all those normal, it's called O&M funding, operations and maintenance, and we'll just move that money over into this contingency operation, this planning, and we'll call it a wash. It doesn't work that way. Actually doing this comes at some cost. So instead of training, instead of being back with their families, instead of that maintenance that has to be done, instead of the modernization that has to be done, instead of all the multilateral training exercises that we would normally be doing with our allies in other places in the world, we're doing this. There's an opportunity cost to it. And our point is, tell us what that is costing, right? And it's costing extra because, like I said earlier, if you're shooting off munitions in a stockpile and if you're taking damage, that actually is a fixed capital cost. So I'm kind of done. And frankly, we did this under Iraq in Afghanistan stand to for decades. They did the same thing, other administrations, I think that the O&M, and they count it as part of the contingency. So I've been battling that for a long time now. And Americans and taxpayers deserve to know what these operations are really costing, and how much more it's costing. So, you know, that's what we're trying to drill down on. Yeah, seems like the bare minimum of information they should owe us. Finally, President Trump is planning to pull 5,000 troops out of Germany. This is in response to criticism of the war in Iran from Chancellor Mertz, the leader of Germany. What do you think the impact of that move is or will be, and are you concerned about it? Yeah, I am concerned about it, and I'm not presumptively against troop movements. A commander-in-chief should have flexibility to move troops around, to respond to needs, to respond to crises. That is kind of part of the authorization that a commander in chief inherently has. When it becomes our business is when the commander in chief is doing it out of an emotional meltdown or to enact some kind of retribution or vengeance on a political opponent or a foreign leader because he's upset. Then it becomes my business, right? Because he's abusing our military and their families that need to have some sense for how to live their life. He's using taxpayer dollars to do that. So that is the important distinction. The reason why becomes important, because if it becomes a reason that's not acceptable and not in a normal course of being the commander in chief, then it's Congress's job to say, okay, this is a problem and we're not going to use taxpayer dollars to do it. We're not going to mess around with our military and our military family's time and money. And we also have to make sure it's in the best interest of our national security because there is the largest land war in Europe happening right now between Russia and Ukraine. And having a troop presence there is really important to make sure that we're sending the right message against Putin, that we are affirming our commitment to NATO. So that's why we're trying to invoke a legal provision that we actually put into the defense bill on a bipartisan basis last year that says you can't move troops beyond a threshold level unless you have met certain criteria to do so. And so in this case, we're talking about Trump trying to move troops from Germany because of specific comments, but he's also threatened to punish NATO in other ways like pull troops or even bases out of Spain because they won't participate in the war. Is he any close to actually taking those steps? Because, you know, my understanding is we don't have troops in Spain just for the hell of it. It's because, you know, that geography provides some important, you know, capability to United States military. I mean, I remember talking about basing and troops and airplanes and air assets in Spain and Italy a lot during the Benghazi attacks and the follow-up from that because that would have been, you know, sort of the closest team to get to that site on September 11th and actually try to rescue those individuals. But so just move. It's not like you can just move them around like chess pieces. You can just move a bunch of troops from Spain to like Eastern Europe and not have an impact on your ability to fight wars. But is that even being discussed with Congress or is this stuff going to happen? Yeah, well, it's not being discussed with Congress in the way that it should. I mean, this administration is violating a bunch of laws or potentially violating a bunch of laws in the case of the troop levels. Like, for example, like they haven't provided there's a statutory provision in the defense bill that says they have to provide what's called an exord, an execution order, which is the order that starts contingency operations. They have to legally provide every exord to the Armed Services Committee. And they haven't for a year. Right. So they're violating that. But the troop movement thing is an important point. I had an exchange with one of the senior deputy defense secretaries a couple of months ago where he was trying to justify the movement of troops out of Europe. And what they said was, we're going to take troops out of Europe and we're going to move them back to the United States so that we can train more. We can actually train better. And I'm like, well, let me understand this. you're going to actually take troops away from the places where we actually have training grounds, some of the best training grounds in the world, in Europe, where they actually train with our allies, because they're co-located with them, where we can conduct exercises. And we train moving troops around Europe, because movement of forces on rail lines, on highways, and learning how to do that throughout Europe is essential. you're going to take them away from there. We're going to move them back to the United States. And then to actually train them, we're going to temporarily ship them back there and actually do the same training that they normally do. But now we're going to have to move them back to Europe and incur that additional cost. And he's like, yeah, that's our plan. So the whole thing makes no sense. It's more expensive. It's less efficient. It's actually worse training and all being footed by the American taxpayer and the commonality to all of this, all because of Donald Trump wanting to send a message and he's pissed at NATO or certain leaders. I mean, that is the reason behind so much of what's going on. Well, that seems very stupid. Well, look, Congressman Crowe, thank you very much for joining the show today and trying to hold these goobers accountable. And if you learn more about whatever Tim Parlatori is doing or Tagseth or anybody else, please come back and fill us in because it's a bit of a mystery over here and we'd love to get more information. Yeah, thanks for having me back. Thanks again to Congressman Crowe for doing the show and prepare our own quiz for Tim Miller next week. Talk to you soon. Pod Save the World is a Crooked Media production. Our show is produced by Ilona Minkowski, Michael Goldsmith, and Anisha Bonerjee. Our team includes Matt DeGroat, Ben Hethcote, Jordan Cantor, Kenny Moffitt, David Tolles, and Ryan Young. Our staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.