9, 12, 10, 28, 2, 23. This is Deep State Radio, coming to you direct from our Super Secret Studio in the third sub-basement of the Ministry of Snark in Washington, D.C. and from other undisclosed locations across America and around the world. Hello and welcome again to DSR's Words Matter. I am David Rothkoff. I am joined by the oracle, the man who understands Washington better than anybody else. Indeed, the last living person who may actually understand what's going on in Washington these days, Norm Ornstein. How are you doing, Norm? About as well as could be expected. But I will say this, David, I'm doing better than the tankers in the Straits of Hormuz. Well, or by extension, global oil markets, or by extension, global fertilizer markets, or by extension, global markets, or by extension, the global economy, or by extension, all of us who have to deal with the rising prices because, Norm, and it's not often that something happens and you go, oh, no, this is different. You may remember, I did this on a different one of our podcasts yesterday, and I think Riley and Minna were on it. They looked at me via the virtual connection as though I'd lost my mind. But you will remember in the 1970s when there was an oil shortage. We all had to determine whether, based on our car license plate, whether we would go in the odd numbered line or we would go in even numbered line. We couldn't buy gas every day, and you had to wait in a line for an hour or two hours to get gasoline. And gas industry analysts, oil industry analysts now say that the disruption that is underway in the Persian Gulf, in the Strait of Hormuz right now, is the worst ever in the history of oil disruptions. And I just want to give you the opportunity to comment on this. The administration has said repeatedly now that they just hadn't really considered this might happen. So first, of course, I do remember, and I remember that you could buy $5 worth of gasoline, which admittedly back then was about five or six gallons, but also back then, five or six gallons in cars that got 12 miles to the gallon. So it wasn't exactly great. And I remember not only being in those lines, but scared to death that somebody would pull out a gun after waiting for hours, or maybe even seeing somebody try and pull up and get ahead of them in the line. What I also remember with great regret is that back then, one could have purchased an oceanfront beach house in Rehoboth, Delaware, for next to nothing out of the fear that nobody would be able to drive there from Washington or Baltimore or Philadelphia. This is a slippery slope, Norm. This is like, you know, I have said from time to time that this show should be called Alta Cockers or the Fetchocracy, because we could, I mean, I just remember back in the time, think of all the real estate deals you've been offered a show of that would have turned into millions, millions. You know, there's a scene in the wonderful Albert Brooks movie, Defending Your Life, where they go back through his misled life, where his dear friend was telling him, you can get in on the ground floor of Casio back when that was a huge deal, and he turned it down and said it'll never amount to anything. That aside, I want to circle back to something else before I come directly to this, and it's relevant. And that is the deposition that we have now seen of one of these 20-something doge people who used artificial intelligence to eliminate every grant that had a DEI moniker on it in some fashion, which meant that anything that had the word trans, even if it was completely unrelated, meaning that grants that had nothing to do with it were canceled. And this young moron said, well, we were doing all of this, even if we made some mistakes, because it was to reduce the deficit. And then he was asked, did it reduce the deficit? And he said, no. And I mention that because Tom Nichols, of course, had this terrific book, The Death of Expertise, and it's not just the death of expertise, it's the rise of ignorant, destructive morons, which is not just doge. It's also clearly in the intelligence community with Tulsi Gabbard and in the military, as Pete Hegseth has tried to eliminate everybody who would put any legal restraints on him, now absolutely destroying the judge advocates' core and the legal department at the Department of Defense, but also has so stripped the military of people who have any expertise or understanding so that they didn't know what was in at the top of every war-planning strategic process going back over the last 40 years, which is if you start a war in the Middle East and if you conduct a war with Iran, the first thing that's going to happen is they're going to mine and try to close the Straits of Hormuz. And these morons didn't even recognize that this is the sort of thing that could happen. And Paul Krugman has a piece today saying, you know, since our nostalgic trip back to the 1970s, we've prepared ourselves far better for disruptions in oil. We have changed the way in which we get the supply. We've expanded those elements. We've dramatically increased the mileage on cars. We've moved away from reliance on gasoline. He said, so if you hit $100 a barrel, it's a flesh wound in the global economy. But at some point, because of demand, once it hits $150 or maybe even $200 a barrel, as it could well happen, then we're going to get a horrible global reaction in the economy. And even at where we are now, just as you said earlier, David, fertilizer, farmers who've already been hit hard with these moronic tariffs are being hit even harder. And it's not just gasoline for your cars. It's what oil does for so many other elements of our lives and our economy. And these idiots who have no plan going in, who have no plan on how to get out without just declaring victory and leaving a younger, more vicious ayatollah in charge in Iran, are leaving us in this place, a place where, as we saw today, they had to downgrade again the GDP from 2025. As Trump goes out and says, this is the best economy in the history of the world, thinking that his narcissistic, sociopathic words alone will convince people that they're not burning as their pant leg is on fire. Yeah, well, I mean, this is a really, really important point. And I think it's one that's not appreciated because so many people in the media, in the commentary, just accept at face value or with small questions what Trump is saying. I was talking to somebody the other day who knows a lot. I used to be an economic official in the US government, so I have some grasp of how these things work. Somebody described the US economy right now and to a large extent, the global economy, as a recession concealed behind a bubble. And what they meant was that the real data in terms of spending, in terms of inflation, in terms of economic growth, in terms of trade is bad. And we would see it as bad if it were not for the fact that there are a handful of stocks, AI stocks that are largely AI stocks, but essentially big tech stocks that are actually still performing OK and that boosts the markets. But if those stocks, if that bubble bursts, all pretence about the nature of this economy goes away. And indeed, you'll recall Pam Bondi spoke the other day in front of the Congress, and she said, we shouldn't be talking about these issues like my serial obstruction of justice. The stock market's at 50,000. Well, the stock market's now at 46,000, which by the way represents $1 trillion in value having been stripped from the market because of this ill-considered war. And if, in fact, as you say, we have disruptions in food supplies, disruptions in fertilizer supplies, disruptions in the global economy caused by high prices of oil, high prices of gas, et cetera, we could very well be moments away from the bubble bursting and the recession being revealed and the recession actually being revealed to much being much worse than it is. And that has a political ramification, but more importantly, it means people's lives are going to be tougher with each day of the year ahead. So if you think the Persian Gulf is far, far away and just another war in the Middle East, and you're not paying to the rest of the stuff, you're missing the story, which is an affordability crisis on steroids. So my former colleague Kevin Hassett, now the chief economic advisor in the Trump administration, about 20 some years ago, co-authored a book called Dow 36,000 when the Dow was about a third of that, basically saying that we're undervaluing it. And I tweeted the other day, you know, that prediction, Dow 36,000, maybe coming a reality again, 46,000 and heading down. And for all the reasons that you said, but let's add one other element to this because our economic policy is being driven by morons as well. And not just morons, those who are in the pocket of Vladimir Putin, as we saw our embarrassingly vile Treasury Secretary, Scott Bassent, talk about why they were opening up the floodgates to Russian oil so that Vladimir Putin could get a windfall that he could use to kill more Ukrainians. To stay up to date on all the news that you need to know, there's no better place than right here on the DSR network. And there's no better way to enjoy the DSR network than by becoming a member. Members enjoying ad-free listening experience, access to our Discord community, exclusive content, early episode access, and more. Use code DSR26 for a 25% off discount on signup at the DSRnetwork.com. That's code DSR26 at the DSRnetwork.com slash bye. Thank you and enjoy the show. But not just Ukrainians. Not just Ukrainians. I mean, I do think we should note here that we are giving a windfall to Russia as they are providing information to Iran with which to kill American soldiers. So we are paying them even as they are acting actively as our enemy and, of course, as the aggressor in Ukraine. And it's very, very likely with the sophisticated attack that Iran was able to do on our base in Kuwait, where a minimum of 140 of our soldiers were injured, some of them deeply seriously and probably they're covering it up. There may even be more deaths. And that's how we're dealing with Russia. But I wanted to make a larger point, and that is that it's not just about oil. Donald Trump by trying to blow up every alternative source of energy, wind and solar, which provide a large share of our electricity in the United States with the AI groups that you mentioned, forming these AI monstrosities, behemoth plants all over the country, draining a huge amount of electricity. We are likely, as the summer comes, to see blackouts and other kinds of problems. And the price of electricity for people is going to go up substantially, as we have, of course, with the climate change that Lee Zeldin, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, now says is a hoax, meaning that it will be warmer and therefore even more demand for electricity for air conditioning. The degree to which these idiots are blowing up every element of American life and the economy while trying to tell us that it's better than ever is mind-boggling. Yeah. Well, I mean, the reality is this. Donald Trump is waging an unhinged war on your wallet, on everybody's wallet, because of each one of these steps that he has taken. Another thing, well, remember you talked about those big gas-guzzler cars, those were the days when people would like say, oh, American cars, those were the greatest. Well, nobody says that anymore. But Trump is trying to force the US auto industry into abandoning electric vehicles, even as the Chinese announced in the past 24 hours that they now have BYD, the big battery and car producer, has a car that you can charge from 10% to 90% in five minutes with a range of hundreds of miles. The Chinese are light years ahead of us on electric vehicles, light years ahead of us on solar power, light years ahead of us on other forms of renewable power. And each one of these steps is not only damaging to us in terms of the costs now, but Donald Trump is like an asteroid hitting the US economy, and it's an extinction level event for the US auto industry. I mean, maybe they make pickup trucks, which people buy here, but beyond that, they're in deep, deep trouble. We could go down the list in terms of the other damage being done, whether it's not having the best and the brightest come here or the trade wars and the insanity that that has caused $140 billion in illegal costs to average consumers or the costs to our economy of destroying our health care system, et cetera, et cetera. This is a war on individual Americans. And while they feel the pain, the president keeps saying, and the people around him keep saying, everything's fine. It's doing great. Prices are good. Now, isn't this what Biden was accused of doing that made him seem out of touch? Isn't Trump trying to lie to the American people about how well they actually feel? So we see every day more evidence of Trump's mental decline, including confusing his own press secretary with a previous White House communications director, something that resulted in multiple books about Joe Biden's mental decline, but which just gets completely ignored. But there are three terms here that are relevant at the moment. One which I had written about extensively during Trump's first term, cacostocracy. I wrote a piece early in the first Trump presidency called American cacostocracy and a term that was unfamiliar to most Americans, which had been in some ways lost in history, which means government by the worst and most incompetent among us coming. It actually comes from a different route, doesn't it? It comes from the word caca, which means exactly what you think it means. Exactly, exactly. So that's one. The second is kleptocracy, very different from quetschocracy. Kleptocracy is, of course, a bunch of thieves. And we know that this administration, not just for the president and his own family, but for almost everybody else, is all about the grift. And so we saw the worst part of this, possibly the worst in American history, was the United Arab Emirates putting almost a half billion dollars into Trump's pocket through his crypto coin. Trump then reacting by giving access to the most sensitive for national security chips by Nvidia to the UAE, which made their way directly to China, which is now using them for deadly weapons that might ultimately come to be used against Americans. And we know Kristi Noem making away with tons of money. Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, basically the most incompetent and inept, catastrophic puppets out there negotiating deals while they're making out like bandits. Howard Lutnick sending contracts to his sons who've taken over his firm at Canterford's Gerald, and it goes on and on and on. But then we have the third term, which is relevant to what we were just talking about, which is nihilocracy. These are nihilists. They don't have a plan. They want to blow things up. Trump blows up solar energy and wind energy, and it's coming back to bite Americans completely. They blow up our science and research capacity and our medical teams. So research on Alzheimer's, on cancer, going away. They blow up the Centers for Disease Control so that when we get the next pandemic, because they've blown up vaccines, we're going to have nobody able to take care of it. And our task, if we ever, and God knows if we will, given how they're trying to blow up election integrity and elections, if we ever take back this government, rebuilding it after the houses have been burned down is going to be an extraordinarily difficult task. How do you get the experts to come back when they've been out for four years, found other livelihoods, and we're trying to bring them back when they know that maybe in another four years they're going to be out on their ears again. This is worse than we have even been talking about, and God knows we've made it pretty bad. Yeah, I agree with you. I mean, I can compound that. First of all, we don't know. Yeah, do. Yeah, you're just talking about the kinds of apparent corruption or dubious dealings that we can see, right? The big push into cryptocurrency means that a lot of exchanges, a lot of deals are invisible to us. And if somebody gives an airplane that costs $400 million, the kinds of side deals that are being cut with Vladimir Putin as we speak for Whitcoff and Kushner and their friends and their family are likely, in my estimation, to be billions and billions and billions of dollars much that makes all this other stuff look like small change. And one of the reasons for that is that this is how the Trump administration has announced to the world that it is going to do business. It is not small things on the side, and for a lot of foreign countries, they face a choice, which is either play by Trump's rules or you get screwed. You get Trump's like, well, we got to cut this deal or you got to do this for me or you got to give me this award or you're going to have tariffs that are going to cost hundreds of billions of dollars. And so it's bad. And by the way, you didn't also mention a story that was this week about how the Trump kids are launching a drone company with drone technology to do contracts with the Department of Defense. And this is all just going to happen. And it manifests itself in 100 different ways. The Russia example and giving them oil benefits in the middle of all of this is one of the most egregious. But let me take you to another place where I'd love to hear your opinion. Something very strange happened this week, and I don't mean just the weather in Washington whether it was a 55-degree swing from one day to the next. You had the entire range of senators in the United States Senate from the left to the right unite and say there is a housing crisis in America. We need to do something about it. We need to get big financial firms out of buying up markets and pushing up prices. We need to create incentives for people to be able to buy homes. And so they passed a bill. Now the president has said he doesn't want to sign this bill unless the SAVE Act is signed. And he's just going to let it fall by the wayside. Of course, it's got to go through the House. And in the House, it's not clear that Republicans will vote for this bill because it's not clear what the White House wants them to do. And yet this cuts directly to the core issue here, which is affordability. What do you think of this situation and where it's going to go? So if we want to talk about cacostocracy, we could start with Mike Johnson, the worst speaker of the House ever. But it's also a reflection of exactly what you said. The House Freedom Caucus opposes this bill. We're not exactly sure why. One part of it is that they oppose anything that involves government action. Another part is that the bill includes a ban on hedge funds, buying houses, and manipulating the market. Not to have houses for people to live in, but for their own nefarious purposes. But whatever it might be, this notion by Trump that he will not sign anything until the SAVE Act gets through. This push, by the way, that I'm seeing from some Senate Republicans to have Trump come to the Senate, they're saying that because he was a president, he could go on the floor of the Senate or maybe even try to preside, which is completely unconstitutional, to try and force John Thune and the other Republicans to blow up the filibuster to pass this voter suppression bill. First tells us two things, David. One is how farcical their attempt to govern is, how utterly ridiculous it is that you are going to say that you won't sign anything that might improve the lot of Americans while we're going through this crisis until you get this bill. But the other is the threat that this poses, this bill, this SAVE America Act, to the most fundamental element of any small-deed democracy or Republican small-R form of democracy, the vote. They're trying to take away the vote and to take away Americans' most sensitive private information by having every bit of voter information, which includes birth date, address, parts of the social security number, sent to the Department of Homeland Security, which will then use a program devised by DOGE in the Social Security Administration, the same Social Security Administration in DOGE, where you had renegade young people steal all of our social security data and put it on a flash drive to try and give it to a private company that is all about purging legitimate voters. We could go on and on about what's in the SAVE Act. I have a piece that should be out in the next day or so in the New Republic on just what's in that horrific bill, but it just puts all of these elements together, autocracy, kleptocracy, cacostocracy, nihilocracy, and any effort in a bipartisan way to try and solve an urgent problem goes by the boards. Well that's because you're from Minnesota and you're an academic and you taught things and you come up with all these fancy words. And I'm from New Jersey. And in New Jersey, what we'd call this is a fucked upocracy. I like it. I like it. Yeah, because it's everything at once. It's incompetence. It is incoherence. It is greed. And it manifests itself in a thousand, thousand ways. You've got Trump going to Kentucky to attack Thomas Massey for opposing him and saying that Thomas Massey, this Republican member of Congress, is a traitor to the United States. And he literally used the words traitor to the United States because he thinks the United States at this point is him. As Louis XIV once did, he thinks he is the state and that everything is about that in a way that we now must cope with the idea of the divine right of Trump. And it's only getting worse because people like Hegzeff and the secretary of SMARM that you mentioned earlier, Besant and Rubio and others are just, I don't know, he says jump and they say hi, but maybe it's because they're wearing the floor shime shoes he gave them. It's ill fitting floor shime shoes. But we don't see any signs of this slowing down. Quite the contrary, all the polling data suggests that things are getting worse and worse and worse for them politically. And if the SAVE Act doesn't pass, and even if it does pass, the winds are so strong, particularly with these economic winds that what I fear is that between now and November, Trump's life is going to flash in front of his eyes. He's going to say, holy shit, there's no way that we can stop this and I'm going to be impeached in a few months and there are going to be 20 big investigations into what I do in a few months and everything is going to come out. You and I are here at minute 29 and 47 seconds in this podcast and we haven't mentioned Epstein. We haven't mentioned the scandals that are swirling around. What I really fear and I'd be really interested in your thoughts about this is what is this cornered, scared, corrupt, incompetent, Chris Murphy called him senile yesterday, president, do when he faces the looming reality of his own political demise. So I think senile's the wrong term. Demented makes more sense. But before I get to that, since you mentioned Kentucky, I do want to mention one thing that made me feel a little bit better. That is that as Trump was in Kentucky, he gave his full-throated complete endorsement to the former fighter, Jake Paul, for the Senate in Kentucky. Now why did that make me feel better? Because nobody has been a bigger fluffer and licksbiddle to Donald Trump than Scott Jennings, the walking embarrassment who is showcased on a daily basis on CNN. And Scott Jennings has desperately wanted to run for the Senate and get Trump's endorsement in Kentucky. So at least somebody who did everything he could to pander to Trump has now been left by the wayside, and that makes me feel a little bit better. But to get back to your question, and this is what, among other things, keeps me up at night. When Donald Trump is cornered, he is likely to lash out in the worst possible way. And I fear very much if this turns even darker with the economy, with the Epstein files, with the growing evidence that they're trying desperately to cover up credible evidence that Trump raped and treated horribly a 13-year-old back in the day with Epstein, and that Epstein and Trump paid off at least one of these accusers, which tells you, you don't pay somebody off if you're innocent, and that there's a lot more to come out from that. How does Trump react? He declares martial law, he invokes the Insurrection Act, he sends out the military, and we may well see that happen regardless, because it is very likely that we're going to see some sort of really bad terrorist incident here from the Iranian attacks that we're now carrying out in this war. We have sleeper cells we know all over the US, and he'll use that as an excuse to either take over the elections or suspend the elections, or crack down even more. This is not a guy who is going to say, oh my god, I'm losing, I've got to adjust and respond to bad things happening in a positive way. He will do it in the worst possible way. As you know, and we know, he is a malignant, narcissistic psychopath, and that is not the kind of person you want in the presidency. Yeah, and you've just described a number of things he may do about the elections, but he may also throw his opponents in jail. He is likely to launch other wars. Cuba is on standby in Greenland, and other things may take place after that. He may accelerate the speed with which the theft, the corruption is occurring for his family and for others. He may benefit our enemies overseas in other ways. We do have a big meeting with the Chinese coming up at the end of this month, and Trump and the White House already sent a signal that a joint bipartisan congressional delegation should follow it by six weeks into China. Everybody's language sign is a warm, fuzzy, trying to have a positive relationship with China. I personally am an advocate for a more balanced relationship. I am not a China hawk, but how Trump may capitalize on that relationship is extremely disturbing, and if I were Taiwanese, I would be extremely concerned about the conversations that will take place in private. I guess the punchline here as we come to the end of this particular episode is that as bad as things are right now, and we've covered a wide-ranging list of things, we're in the danger zone. In March to November, 2026 is a period of extreme danger, given what we know about this president and how we can reasonably expect events of the next six months to affect it. Absolutely true. Of course, one of the big problems we have, and we see this with the way this war is being conducted, is there is nobody who will have Donald Trump's ear who will try and restrain him in any way from some of the worst, most dangerous, most vicious actions that he could take to save his own skin. Yeah, and there is no better illustration of that than a war with Iran that didn't have to take place where there wasn't an imminent threat, where the president lied about the threat, that now has a dozen countries across the Middle East involved in it, that has now casualties in excess of 1,000, with the six people who died from that tanker aircraft yesterday. The minimum American death toll is 13, but as you say, we don't know what the death toll is because they lie about it. When Pete Hagseth has a press conference today, he doesn't take questions from the real press. He takes them from OAN and literally from Lindell, the pillow guys media. With no photographers because he thinks that the photographers took unflattering pictures of him. Talk about narcissistic sociopath. Well, exactly, but the point is, I think one of the things about this Iran war is that it may have opened a few more eyes to the dangers of cacostocracy, nihilocracy, kleptocracy, fucked-upocracy in action. We're starting to hear reports out of the White House that people are like, guys, this could lead in an even worse direction. I'm not optimistic, but the cracks are spreading also in the Republican facade. There's one other thing that we need to mention before we go, and that gets back to the sociopathy or psychopathy of this man. We're in the middle of a war where Americans are dying, where 170 plus elementary school kids were killed by us. Trump doesn't put the flags at half staff for the Americans who have died in this war, even as he did for Charlie Kirk. Trump's out there at a rally dancing in the middle of a war, a wartime president. While other countries, our allies, stepped up efforts to make sure that their own citizens who were in Middle Eastern countries and under threat because Iran was retaliating against all these other countries in the Middle East, made herculean efforts to get them out. We basically told Americans in the Middle East, you're on your own, and if there are no flights, tough shit. So the fact, which I hope will penetrate more and more people who have been a part of this cult, or at least who have cut him slack and maybe more of the press that continues to normalize the abnormal, will understand that he doesn't care in the slightest about the plight of Americans unless it affects his own skin directly. Very, very grim. Well, we'll be here next week. We're talking about this. We've got a lot of other shows on the DSR network that have been addressing this. So go back, listen to Deep State Radio, listen to the special need to know we did earlier this week, listen to our other podcasts, listen to the daily that we do with the New Republic. And somehow we'll make it through this weekend and into next week. And of course, Norm will be back next week for more perspectives. And I will be here provoking him as I do each and every week. So please, please join us for that for now. Thank you, Norm. Thank you, everybody, for listening. Thank you, Dave. Bye-bye.
