6/11/26: Trump Considered Nuking Iran, Trump Says He Loves Inflation, Morning Joe Vs Platner

This is an I Heart podcast. Guaranteed human. Hey guys, Sagar and Crystal here. Independent media just played a truly massive role in this election and we are so excited about what that means for the future of this show. This is the only place where you can find honest perspectives from the left and the right that simply does not exist anywhere else. So if that is something that's important to you, please go to breakingpoints.com, become a member today and you'll get access to our full shows, unedited, ad free, and all put together for you every morning in your inbox. We need your help to build the future of independent news media and we hope to see you at breakingpoints.com. So to continue to react to breaking news this morning, we have Brandon Weikert, an independent journalist and analyst of the Weikert Report, the Weikert Brief over on Substack. Let me get the name right. Great to see you, Brandon. Good to see you, man. Thank you for having me as always. Yeah, it's our pleasure. Wanted to get you to react to both, Trump has just made some comments on Fox News, but also he put this out on true social. If we could put this back up onto the screen, guys. Here he is threatening to hit Iran again, quote, very hard tonight. At some point, the not too distant future will be taking Carg Island and other oil infrastructure points and assume total control of the oil and gas markets, much like we have with Venezuela. He also called into Fox and Friends this morning and still threatening Carg Island, but saying he's not sure that the country has the stomach for such an operation. Let's go ahead and take a listen to that. Look, my preference has always been take Carg Island. That's been, Brian knows that. I spoke to him a long time ago. Lawrence knows it. I spoke to him a long time ago. I said my preference would be that. I don't know that America has the stomach for it, to be honest with you. You need to make a fortune, but I don't know that America has the stomach. I think they'd like to see us come home, but we did it with Venezuela. Venezuela's worked out great for everybody. We've taken millions and millions of barrels of oil out of Venezuela. We've brought them to Houston and various other places, Louisiana, where we're, you know, refineries that we have that are incredible, they're going 24 hours a day, making a fortune. And, you know, I like that in this case too, but I'm not sure that America has a long time, you know, it's a little longer process, something that's a guarantee if I want to do it. Mr. President. I'm not sure the country has the appetite for it. Does that make sense to you? I understand what you're saying. As good as it is. By the way, as good as it is, that's always been my number one thing, but as good as it is, I'm not sure the country has the appetite for it, and that's okay, I understand that. So Brandon, your reaction to these new threats from the president? Well, it's not just the U.S. military, I'm sorry, the U.S. population that doesn't have the stomach for, what would be an invasion of Iran, Karg Island is technically part of Iran, and to take it quote unquote, you have to put boots on the ground. It's not just the people here who don't want this, it's the American military. The Pentagon has been telling him, Mr. President, we cannot guarantee any semblance of success if we land the forces we currently have deployed to Karg Island. And the president, just like the run up to the war, the president is not listening to his own hand-picked Joint Chiefs of Staff. General Dan Raisin Kane was plucked out of retirement from a very cushy aerospace job, making a lot of money there by Trump to run the Pentagon's military, you know, their JCS. And he has been telling them, Mr. President, this is not gonna work out, and Trump is not listening. Trump doesn't care. He's in full blown LBJ mode. He thinks that landing Marines, that'll do the trick, just like LBJ did in 65, Ho Chi Minh will throw down his guns and I can start building him schools. It's not gonna work. It's not gonna work then. It's not gonna work now because this enemy we're fighting is deeply dedicated to their cause. And, you know, our cause, I'm not really sure what it is. I guess we're trying to make some money. I don't really know what even our cause is here, but we're gonna land troops apparently, because when he says we're gonna take Karg, it's not just a bombardment, all right? He's talking about restarting as that tweet was showing, restarting oil production. Just so everybody understands, Karg is deep inside the Strait of Hormuz. The Strait of Hormuz is locked down right now. The US Navy has barely been able to get any of its ships through there. So in order to land Marines, you're gonna need to have amphibious landers move into the very contested Strait of Hormuz, sit there on load troops and equipment, and it's gonna be Gallipoli, just like in World War I. This is, it'll be our Gallipoli, and it's not gonna end well. And I think the Iranians will probably let them land, because this is the Persian mindset. This is how they, this is what they do. This is what they did to Crassus. They're gonna let them land, and then they're gonna wait for us to unload, all of our stuff gets settled, and then all of a sudden, you're gonna see tens of thousands of shahed drones every day, swarm upon swarm. You're gonna see swarms of missiles landing on these guys. This is gonna be a disaster of unmitigated proportion. So it isn't just a question of stomach of the American people. It's a question of the ability of the US military, which is very limited right now because of the target. And also, by the way, this is coming from a guy, the president, neither he nor his sons have ever served. So they have no connection to what's gonna happen for the families of these troops and these Marines when they land and they get killed. Yeah, Brandon, you're taking this very seriously. And this is the big debate now that we've had. We actually just spoke with Professor Said Marandi from the University of Tehran on the ground in Tehran. He laughed, actually, whenever we read him the Truth Social Post, that he's not taking it seriously. You are. Well, he also said, we want them to come. So you're pointing about the mindset. He said, no, we want them to come. Yeah, he said it at the end. I want them to come. He said, we want them to come. So remember, this is what the North Vietnamese were saying. They wanted, in 1965, an eye of drain, they wanted the Americans to land. They wanted to kill Americans. That's what they wanted very badly. And we gave it to them. And we killed a lot of them. But guess what? We didn't win that war. And yeah, so Marandi, he's on the ground. So he wants us to land. That should give us pause. You don't want to do what your enemy wants. You want to be unpredictable in this way, not the way Trump's been doing it. But you don't want to follow the pattern that they're prepared for. Because that means they've laid enough defenses. I'm taking it very seriously. Because Trump has no idea what the F he's doing. Well, this is the age old question, though. Why don't you think that it's just another negotiating play? I mean, literally the day of civilizations end and end tonight, we have a ceasefire. Now, obviously, the ceasefire was fake. Two days ago, the White House would have called his panicans for saying that. Now, Trump just says it out loud. He's like, it was the most violated ceasefire in history. We agree, sir. We were saying that too the whole time, while you were also denigrating us. But Brandon, walk us through the mindset here, in particular, with the Israel connection, the lobby, and where he's being pushed right now. Well, let's just start with the baseline here. Every aspect of the ceasefire has been a fake lie. It's been a lie. So why assume now that suddenly, oh, now this is going to be the turning of the corner to serious negotiations? It is not. Second of all, the issue here now is the Strait of Hormuz itself. What does it represent? It is basically the jugular of the global economy. It is 20% of the oil, 18%, I think, about 18% of the natural gas, one third of the world's agricultural supplies, notably Urea and fertilizer. All of that's choked up right now, since basically the beginning of the war. Trump knows, because last week Politico reported this. All the American oil CEOs trundled up to the White House on Friday afternoon last week and said, Mr. President, we are reaching bottom of the barrel, beginning as early as July 4th weekend. Happy 250th anniversary, America. And Trump, I think, is secretly panicking, because if he doesn't get the oil flows restored like now, then suddenly all of his BS becomes recognized and the whole economy collapses. And he can't goose the system anymore with all this rhetoric. So I think he's trying very hard to figure out, how do I restore the oil flows so whatever economic pain there is, it's short-lived? And I think his solution here is the insane one. It's, oh, we're going to have to take Carg Island and land troops there and restart the oil, and we'll just intercept all that oil and redirect it, and that'll be able to see control from Carg Island. This is nuts. And also, you mentioned the Israeli connection. What I've been saying this from the beginning, look, Benjamin Netanyahu does not want a deal. And it's not even, I mean, Greater Israel is what they all talk about ideologically in the Likud Party, but really for Netanyahu, it's baser. Netanyahu has to survive politically. He knows if the wars end, then suddenly the legal system in Israel comes for him for all the alleged corruption. And then the political issue start arising because people are going to say, what happened on 10.7? There's never been a proper accounting within the Israeli system for what happened on 10.7. So keep the wars going. Netanyahu wins because he can keep deferring that action against him. Yeah, and he was facing a sort of existential threat politically. Not that we would expect the new government to be really that much substantively different from the way that he's conducted himself. But for him, he is firmly committed, first and foremost, to maintaining his own power and will do whatever he needs to do to blow up a deal so that he doesn't have his own political career destroyed. To your point about Trump's desperation in this moment, which you read as being very much related to potential imminent economic fallout, I wanted to get your reaction to this report from Sy Hirsch, if we can put C3 up on the screen, where he claims to have spoken within an insider source with extensive knowledge who said that Trump has contemplated using a low yield nuclear weapon to destroy some of Iran's underground missile factories. I was told by someone with extensive knowledge of nuclear weaponry. It was a very scary and very serious moment. President was depicted at this point to be desperate not to lose in Iran. His idea was to warn the Iranian leadership. We are very seriously considering such an escalation. I was told the president apparently was talked out of any thought of nuclear escalation. Do you find this plausible? Have you heard any rumblings similarly in this direction? It's funny when your producer asked if I was available today. I was last night. I was going to bring this plane to bring this up, whether you did or not, because this is not the first time the president of the United States, specifically Donald Trump, has, in his two terms, brought up the prospect of using nuclear weapons. If you remember in 2016, and at the time we all on the right kind of laughed because it was Joe Scarborough saying it, but I have the soundbite. I tweeted it recently. Joe Scarborough in early 2016, or I'm sorry, early in the president's first year of his first term, he said that the president was asking his top advisors, why can't we just use nukes to end these problems with all these countries we have? And his advisors baddisoned them at the time we're saying Mr. President. That's not what we use nukes for. So it's very much believable that in his desperation and his naivete, let's face it, Trump is a real estate developer for Manhattan turned reality TV star and playboy. He is not a foreign policy military analyst, and he doesn't have anybody around him this time who actually understands this stuff. He's got all the CPAC rejects. These guys are not able to tell him the truth. So he's flailing. And this is a very scary moment because he's not wrong when he says the low yield nukes would collapse those underground facilities because that's the real problem we're facing. We can't knock those out. And as long as we can't knock those out, they're going to, in Iran, keep popping off your missiles and all this other stuff. But of course, it's also crazy because if you use low yield nukes to knock these things out, you've just basically authorized the world to say, OK, we're going to start using low yield nukes for these tactical situations. What's going to stop Russia? What's going to stop China? They would do it within 24 hours. Within 24 hours, the nukes would go off in Ukraine. Yeah, you know, it's like this is crazy talk. And then also, by the way, we can't write off the possibility that Iran does have some rudimentary nuclear capability. And look, they might have their own Samson option. You know, Israel, if Israel is going to collapse, they have this plan to hit everybody with their nukes before they fall. Who's to say Iran hasn't quietly developed a similar capability? They would be very easy for them to send a dirty bomb, at least, through their proxies in Hezbollah, wherever. And if we nuke them, they're just going to nuke somewhere in Europe or the United States because, hey, it doesn't matter anymore. You know, we can't discount that. This is not the way to go. This is like, we're talking now, you know, talking about Panikin, I would say the Panikin is the guy who, February 27th, everything's going relatively well. And then he decides, oh my gosh, the Iranians are going to get, they're going to end the world in two weeks. Now we got to go to World War III. That sounds Panicky. That sounds like a Panikin. And I would say that the president is right now the biggest Panikin of them all. This sounds like a full domain. It's just, it's literally flailing all around. I mean, yeah, Brandon. Well, because it's not his war. It's this is Netanyahu's war and he's allowed himself to become the junior partner. Right, and you know, kind of zooming in on that. Originally why we had booked you before we knew any of this nonsense was happening. Let's put C1 up here on the screen. You did such a good job of breaking down the NDAA's attempt to further link the United States military and the Israeli military. There's been an update to that, that the Senate also wants to force the United States to share sensitive intel with Israel. Can you break that down for us? Yeah, and I broke that. I actually did a separate post on 622 which is Intelligence Authorization Act. And actually I think the more, because I read Pillar's piece last night, the more I think about it, the more I'm wondering if the NDAA thing was kind of a weird faint. Because the really important thing for Israel is the intelligence access. Yeah, they want the technology and whatnot. That's an added benefit. But Israel needs access to our intel. And the one thing I know from talking to guys like Dr. Michael Schoyer, talking to John Kiriakou, talking to a bunch of people, former CIA hands, is the CIA is very serious about playing keep away. I mean, John Ratcliffe, the director is not, but the permanent kind of bureaucrats in CIA, the lifers are very committed to keeping a lot of the intel they collect away from Israel because Israel will turn around and use that intel to disrupt our operations in order for them to gain some kind of leverage elsewhere. We saw this with Jonathan Pollard. But I think that 622 of the Intel Authorization Act, that already went through the Senate. That May 20th is my understanding is it got out of the Senate. So now it's waiting for the next phases of the legislation process. But nobody really paid attention to it. Everybody was talking about the NDAA, which is why I went back and I see that Paul Pillar went back and was like, wait a second. The bigger issue here is if you fuse, which is what this calls for, the intelligence sharing. So it's basically elevating the Mossad and Israeli intelligence services from what's known as a transactional partner, where it's limited and finite what we give them because we recognize that they're an espionage threat, and you elevate them to a trusted partner on the level of the five eyes. So that's UK, Australia, New Zealand, Canada. And they basically become like one of the members of the Anglo sphere. Now I have my own problems with five eyes going back to Russia gate, but ultimately, ultimately the fact is, I trust the British more than I trust the Israelis when it comes to Intel sharing. I trust the Canadians more than, you know, the Israelis and we now have that DIA report claiming that they are a critical counterintelligence threat, which puts them on the same level as Russian and Chinese intelligence services. And this act by the Senate, if it goes through all the way, and I think it might, because nobody's talking about it except me and you and a couple other people, if this thing goes through, Israeli intelligence is now, it's open kimono for the Israeli intelligence. They don't have to ask anymore, they just gain access. Crazy, crazy to think about and ties the hands of a future, you know, the current executive branch probably doesn't have a problem with this, but ties the hand of any future, you know, because you see the reckoning that's happening with the American public. So talk about why this is happening now. Yeah, and I mentioned that in my essay too, which is that another thing, because it becomes an act of Congress, right now it's an executive agreement, a series of executive agreements between the United States and the Israelis. So if a president wants to say, turn off the spigot a little bit more in Intel sharing with Israel because of how much of a prevalent counterintelligence threat it is, they could do that, no must, no fuss, and the Israelis just have to put up with it until the next president comes in. This Senate Intelligence Authorization Act for next year, if it passes, that takes that capability out of the president's hand, whoever the president is. So you bring up the young people on the left, very much no longer pro-Israel, the young people on the right are very skeptical of Israel now, there's a bipartisan growing consensus that we need to distance from Israel and rethink the alliance. And the Israelis are savvy enough to detect that, and they know that it's the young people, the next generation that's saying this. So they're trying to lock in as much of their alliance with the United States, the 20 year memorandum of understanding for aid, they're trying to do the NDAA, where they have permanent access to the Intel, I mean to the defense base, and now with this, basically the next president, if it's a Democrat especially, because we know the Democrats do not wanna have any real ties with Israel, except maybe Nancy Pelosi's generation, but if it's a Democrat that takes power, that Democrat president now is not gonna have the same freedom of action that the previous presidents had to say, you know what Israel, I don't like what you're doing here, we're gonna turn that spicket of Intel sharing off. It was now gonna be open kimono all the time. Wild stuff going on. Brandon, thank you so much for your analysis on all of these things and reacting so quickly to the news that's breaking this morning. Yeah, seriously man, thank you. It's our pleasure. So in the midst of all of this, Trump got asked yesterday about how this is all working out economically for Americans. There was a very hot inflation report that Emily and Ryan covered on the show, and you will not believe what the president had in response to a question about this inflation. Let's take a listen. We can serve as your president about the latest inflation number which came out this morning. Could that be a number? No, I love it. The numbers were great. You know what, I really love that. I love the inflation. You know why? Because as soon as this war is over, you know, I can say it now, something you didn't know. Do you know we've been taking out millions of barrels of oil. Nobody knows it. You know who doesn't know about it? Iran until right now. We took out the other night 22 ships late at night with no lights because they don't have any radar because we blasted the crap out of it. We took out, that's why oil's $85 a barrel. I mean, you take a look. Remember when I did this, I said, look, the one bad thing will be we hit the best economy we've ever hit. And I said to my people, I had Scott, I had Howard, I had Pete, I had all of them. I had Todd in the room. I said, the one thing we have to do now, we had just hit the highest stock market in history, highest 401Ks in history. Everything was going well. And I said, I hate to do this to you guys, but Iran's gonna have a nuclear weapon very soon. So he literally says the numbers were great and I love the inflation. And then Pivots to talking about this supposed scheme that is getting some small percentage of barrels of oil through the straight up formula center. I love inflation. Somebody can back that up with, what else did he say? I don't care about, I don't think about Americans. Oh, well, we have that. We can do a little trip down memory lane because this is far from the first insanely honest, actually, but disgusting thing that he has said about the finances of Americans. So the latest is, I love the inflation, great bumper sticker for Republicans, I think, going into the midterms. Previously, he said, well, we can't have childcare because we gotta pay for these wars. And also, by the way, I don't think about Americans financial situation whatsoever. This is D1C, let's take a listen. Don't send any money for daycare because the United States can't take care of daycare. That has to be up to a state. We can't take care of daycare. We're a big country. We have 50 states, we have all these other people who are fighting wars. We can't take care of daycare. You gotta let a state take care of daycare and they should pay for it too. They should pay, they have to raise their taxes, but they should pay for it. And we could lower our taxes a little bit to them to make up, but it's not possible for us to take care of daycare. Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things, they can do it on a state basis. You can't do it on a federal. We have to take care of one thing, military protection. We have to guard the country. But all these little things, all these little scams that have taken place, all you have to, you have to let states take care of them, Russell, and you have to do it. When you're negotiating with Iran, Mr. President, to what extent are American financial situations motivating you to make a deal? Not even a little bit. The only thing that matters when I'm talking about Iran, they can't have a nuclear weapon. I don't think about American financial situation. I don't think about anybody. I think about one thing. I don't think about Americans financial situation. It's incredible he even has an approval rating in the 30s at this point. He's really trying to make himself the most hated president, perhaps maybe the most hated person in American history. I think for him, what he just, I think I genuinely think any political skill is gone. I think that this has scrambled him to his core because I think this is the first time ever, very LBJ ask the bullshit master, the domestic political comeback kid, multiple time survivor, got too big for his britches and stumbled into one of the most historic strategic disasters in US history. And then every aspect, in fact, we're gonna talk about Epsin. In both cases, they have something in common. Every single tactic that they tried to use did not work. And there's a reason for it. I think that reality is one of the few times, this is one of the few times reality has truly caught up with him. On the Epsin stuff, it's like, dude, you and your whole administration said you were gonna release them, now you're covering it up. There's just, there's no getting around it. And in fact, as in a preview of the Epsin story, they were like, well, he's bullshitting. I've seen him survive everything. I'm like, well, why can't he survive this? It's like, well, he can't survive it because his name is in it. And he said, I was going to release them. And I think with Iran, he said, I'm gonna collapse him. It's gonna be a great victory. It's gonna be like Venezuela. We're here over a hundred days later. It is a disaster. 13 Americans are dead. The price of, well, I don't need to go through the whole list. So the only way is that you just deny, deny, deny, you attack, attack, attack. And I think that what he has done now has backed himself into this corner where he has to say this type of insane shit because it's existential now for him, for his legacy. By the way, that's terrifying. Because when you start to say things like, I don't love inflation. I don't think about America's financial situation. You are post politics in a way because it's the second term. You have nothing to worry about. He doesn't care about the midterms. And he definitely doesn't care about JD Vance or Marco Rubio. He could give two shits about them. He wants his name on, he wants to face on Mount Rushmore. And if he doesn't carve it there himself, he thinks this is the only way he's gonna get it. Yeah. He wants to leave a lasting mark on the world. And that is driving, I think, a lot of the way that he, whether it's the ballroom or whether it's trying to remake the entire Middle East through threat and through force, that is what he's focused on. And when he tells you, he doesn't think about your financial situation at all. He is being honest, just judging by his actions. I think that is absolutely accurate. Leaves it to Republicans to then go out, oh, no, we didn't mean that. And no, it was taken on a context, blah, blah, blah. So here's the latest iteration of that. And by the way, I called this. The moment Trump said this, I said, Republicans are gonna get asked about this. They're gonna say, oh, he was taken out of context by the fake news media, blah, blah, blah. Let's take a listen to what speaker Mike Johnson has to say. Economist. I knew somebody was gonna ask me that. It was totally out of context. You know what he was talking about. We've got the masses of voters wanna hear right now. No. The president is laser focused on the domestic economic situation. He is working to bring down prices. He is working to get the straight or her moves reopened. We have passed legislation. He's used executive orders to get the cost of living down. Everybody got their highest tax refunds they've had in their whole lives. They're getting a greater paychecks. There's all sorts of great economic indicators, but there's still challenges, gas prices among them. So what he was saying is, it's gonna be great to have that number and compare it to what comes next. When we get these situations resolved, that'll be a fun thing to consider and to compare. That, I mean, we played the whole clip for you. Just so you guys know. I mean, we literally played the entire clip right there. There's no context. He goes on some rant. I love the inflation. Yeah, I mean, he goes on some rant about this like, you know, operation that they're allegedly doing the straight or her moves. He says he's laser focused on the domestic priorities of Americans, one of them being reopening the straight or her moves, which is closed. Why can anyone remind us why it's closed to begin with? I mean, just absolutely insane. And to his point about, oh, well, they gotta go to a big tax refund. We'll put D2 up on the screens. Just the gas price increase alone. Okay, this is what we're not talking about. The groceries and the overall inflation, just the increase in gas prices have now wiped out an entire year worth of wage gains. So, you know, I think that they were really counting on, okay, people are gonna get somewhat larger refunds when they file their taxes. They're gonna be able to process that before the midterms. That's gonna provide us with a political bump and juice the economy, et cetera, heading into this critical political period. That is gone. I mean, the first time you went to fill up your tank during the Iran War, that's basically out the window. So it's preposterous that they're still trying to hang their hat on these, you know, minuscule little refund bumps that they gave to the population. The data tells the devotating story. January, 2025, that's literally when Trump took office. That's how average hourly wage gain is back to. And we know the story of where things continue to go from here. Ryan and Emily broke it down yesterday. Consumer prices are up 4.2%. That's just in terms of the way the labor department and all those other people can configure the data. Now, just think about, we are going, you know, it's June 11th, starting to see a lot of tourists around here in Washington. It's just the beginning. So it's the beginning of tourist season, driving season, flying season, people are gonna go on vacation, July 4th, barbecues, not, you know, not even a month away. They're gonna see the beef prices. They're gonna see the drive, you know, they're gonna fill up their tank. And I think all of those things are going to continue to spiral on top of the already precarious financial situation. And that is just heading into the midterms. And I think on top of it, you see a number of other things, like the corruption. You can't ignore it now at this point. A lot of people can ignore a lot of corruption whenever shit's good. When we're all rich, whatever. Not whatever, but you get what I'm saying. Most people can look away and say, ah, my 401K is high, so what do I care? Well, whenever we're not doing so well, let's put this up here. This, I couldn't, I keep trying to figure this one out. D3, sorry. Trump posted yesterday a troop social post where he said, wow, city was ranked number one in topping M&A advisory market by value in Q1. Congratulations to Jane F and all of her great people. They worked really hard, big comeback for city. This is for Jane Fraser, the chief of Citibank. Nobody on Wall Street has any idea what this is about. Apparently the number of whatever he's citing here is not even true. So, yeah, so the number's not true. Nobody on Wall Street has any idea what he's talking about. It came from somewhere. I just wanna know what money changed hands, what phone call, for what purpose, for what deal, for the Trump family. Is this all behind? It doesn't just happen. It doesn't just happen. You don't just make it to the Trump troop social. It's like whenever he posted about Palantir and then put the stock ticker in there, you're like, okay, all right, I see what's happening there, right? I mean, he's just so out in the open. The whole thing is so out in the open. He just doesn't even care to attempt to hide it at this point with his crypto coin being sort of like the chief money-making scheme. The way his net worth has soared in his second term is just truly a historic cash grab, a historic theft that we are all witnessing. And yeah, when you're doing well, I guess maybe you look at that and you're like, oh, it's not great, but at least, things are going better for everybody. He's profiting the most and his daughter's getting her private island, but I'm doing okay. But when you're seeing going to the gas pump every day, like I cannot afford this and I cannot make rent and I cannot buy a steak anymore or chicken anymore, I'm going to the canned protein section, then yeah, it's gonna hit you a little bit different. And there are some people in the economy, not just the Trump family, who are doing extraordinarily well, which again paints a very frustrating, enraging portrait for your average American. We have this SpaceX IPO that is happening tomorrow. It will start trading and we can put D4 up on the screen here. So it's gonna turn 4,400 SpaceX employees into millionaires. It is likely to turn Elon Musk himself into a trillionaire. Okay, so at the very, very, very top end of the spectrum of the people who are already wildly wealthy or happen to luck out and get in on what is very likely a massive AI bubble, things are going very well. When you look at the stock market, all the growth is concentrated in these few tech stocks that have this valuation, almost everybody acknowledges the SpaceX valuation is absolutely insane when you look at what their actual revenue is coming in and the bet that they're placing here, but they're pushing it out to retail, to make sure that suckers can get in when the price is at its highest. So they're the ones that end up holding the bag, et cetera. If this thing ultimately goes down significantly in value, which big IPOs usually do at least initially. So in any case, you've got quite a portrait being painted for the American people of some people getting a small handful, getting, including our president, getting wildly wealthy beyond anyone's comprehension while you have seen your entire years worth of wage gains eaten up at the gas pump. Yeah, I mean, I'm looking at it right now. The S&P is still up as of today, I think based upon SpaceX expectations. And if I take a look at some of the other indicators, the European Central Bank actually this morning just raised interest rates by a quarter point for the first time, I think since 2025, it's, or sorry, for the first time since 2023, which is crazy. So then consider our own Federal Reserve where the current traders on Wall Street are betting that they're going to increase interest rates here. So we're gonna have high interest rates, high inflation. I mean, both of those, does that, and then unemployment or sorry, the employment because of the way that they measure it and all that, they're making it so that they're gonna continue to try to demand destruction, further exacerbating housing and so much more. But yes, the dual screen of trillionaire, multi, I mean, thousands of new millionaires, this does not even factor in the open AI and anthropic IPOs, which will both be You're also coming. somewhere around a trillion dollars. I mean, between those three, there will probably be hundreds of new billionaires, tens of thousands of new millionaires. And when we say million, we're not talking about like one, two million, we're talking about like hundreds of millions of dollars. So real estate in Austin, San Francisco, LA, New York, it's gonna about to be a bonanza in any of these very high cost living areas. The yacht market is going to explode. Like all, I mean, I feel sick saying all this stuff, but it's true. Like high end hotels in Switzerland and all these other places are gonna be doing gangbusters. But for everybody else, if you're just sitting there measuring how much it costs to fill up your tank, it's getting a lot worse. Yeah, I mean, look, I don't have to tell you what the ingredients for that are societal. The market for luxury mega yachts. No, he's clearly going to explode. And the market for spam, both going to explode, buy some dollar general stock. That's, yeah, it's, look, we already are beyond gilded age levels of wealth inequality. And it matters to people. You cannot have a functioning society. You can't have a democracy when you've got trillionaires running around. I mean, we've already seen this with Elon Musk and the amount of money he was able to casually throw at the Trump campaign and put his thumb on the scales and then be granted dominion over basically the entire executive branch because of the money that he funneled into Trump's campaign at a pivotal moment. You know, we talk about like democracy crisis. There's a lot more to talk about there too, by the way. They're looking at banning mail ballots, making it so the USPS will not deliver mail ballots in states that don't send in their voter rolls to the federal government. But when you think more broadly about the democracy crisis, like you cannot have this level of wealth concentrated, have a Supreme Court that has said money and speech and think that you are going to have any, any small D democratic representation and we're already living that. It's total madness, especially with SpaceX. The ingredients, like you just said, are completely, you know, are all ready to go. We know exactly where, well, I don't know. Let's see, maybe it'll end just like last time. Maybe it will. Okay, let's move on to Epstein. Turning now to Epstein, a lot of Epstein stuff going on in the news behind the radar. One of them though, actually links to the democratic race or the democratic nominee in Maine, Graham Plattner, who was asked, because he's been talking quite a bit about the Epstein files. He's also had his recent sexting scandal. And so morning Joe's, Mika Prasinski tried to link the two in a recent interview. Let's take a listen. Let me ask you this way. Can you just talk about the nature of the sexting in terms of can you call for the release of the Epstein files? And can you call out those who have abused women and not be conflicted in any way? Yes, of course. I mean, I engaged in consensual romantic activities with adults at an earlier part of my life. That seems like a fairly normal thing most people do. Going to an island with billionaires to possibly assault children is a vastly, vastly different thing. So, yeah, kind of amusing, I think, there, Crystal. I mean, can you imagine? You texted someone. You had a consensual adult relationship. Which I'm not condoning. He did it outside of his marriage. But that is not the same as an elite pedophile cabal. Sex trafficking cabal. I mean, it's just horrifying that you, it's insane. And listen, Emma Vigil into it at the sound. Hey, Mika, if you're gonna be the morality police, let's check in on the timeline of you and your co-host's relationship here. I mean, look, people, like, I don't care, live your life. But if you're gonna go out there and, oh my God, you sexted someone, like, shouldn't this be career ending? And isn't this exactly the same as raping a 13-year-old? How can you have any, like, absolute insanity? I don't know what's going on with her. It's kind of interesting, because Joe, I watched the whole interview, Joe was actually seemed like he was sympathetic to Graham. Well, he's always been anti me too, hasn't he? He's always been like a little bit skeptical. I haven't followed his entire trajectory there. He may have good reason for being. Yeah, I was good. But in any case. Just don't Google, no, not gonna say it, just don't Google intern. Oh, I said it, I said it, just don't Google it. Anyway, he's not being a hypocrite here. But he kept saying in the LinkedIn interviews, like, Mika's gonna have some questions for you. So in any case, I mean, just complete absurdity. And I think, you know, just, I didn't get to say my whole piece, because Ryan and Emily covered the Platinum victory. He got Sager more votes than any Democratic Senate nominee in history. I didn't. More. Actually. And there was a whole, oh my God, should he drop out? Maybe Janet Mills is actually gonna win, blah, blah, no. It was a complete and total blowout. Then the other question was, because there was a gubernatorial primary as well, oh, maybe everyone's gonna vote for the governor candidates, but they're not gonna even vote in the Senate, because they're so upset about these allegations against Graham and they're so disgusted that they don't have any other. Nope, that didn't happen either. So it shows you how disconnected that view is from what actual voters in Maine are thinking about all of this and the way that they're reacting. That's crazy. I didn't know that. I actually would be curious to compare that to 2024, like the number of votes for him. And then also to consider like, if just those people show up. Yeah, because it's something funny how small a man is. One with 150,000 votes, that's 70%. It's a small state, small state. Thinking and linking some of this back to Epstein. Let's put E2 up here on the screen. Inside the White House freakout over the Epstein files. So here what we found out, this is a very long excerpt from a forthcoming book by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan. It's basically a tech talk of July 17th, 2025, where what they say, President Trump's top officials filed in the White House Situation Room. What they found is that the most senior advisors had gathered without him to figure out how to gain some measure of control over a very different kind of crisis threatening to engulf the presidency, the Epstein files. 10 days earlier, the Justice Department and the FBI had jointly released a memo that bluntly stated that their review had found no client list of powerful men for whom the notorious pedophile, Jeffrey Epstein, had allegedly procured underage girls and young women. And it was about to get worse. The Wall Street Journal was preparing the article about Trump's relationship with Epstein, including the birthday book. They say that JD Vance took a seat at the head of the table of the conference room and he said, this is a huge problem. A raid around him were the White House Chief of Staff, the White House Counsel, the Press Secretary, the Deputy Chief of Staff, the comms director, the Deputy Attorney General, Todd Blanche, the Associate Attorney General and the Deputy Chiefs of Staff, James Blair, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and FBI Director, Cash Patel, on speakerphone. Quote, the vice president appeared panicked to others in the room. Some senior officials had the impression Vance had bought into the darkest theories about Epstein and a cabal of predators within the country's ruling class. Wiles would then tell others the vice president had proved himself to be a major conspiracy theorist. Another top official said he had been pounding the Epstein issue since the release of the memo and was privately pressing for the administration to release all of the Epstein files. He had even floated to colleagues an extraordinary PR gambit that the White House enlist Tucker Carlson to interview Galain Maxwell in prison because it could help the president if Maxwell was willing to state Trump had not been part of any wrongdoing with Epstein. He believed that all the files should be released. He then got an immense amount of pushback from people who were loyal to Trump. Here, including James Blair, was the Deputy Chief of Staff, White House. He said, with all due respect, the communication strategy of this group got us here. I don't know if that is going to get us out. And if you're gonna go in front of the press, you've got a lot of work to do. He began to ask pointed mock questions demonstrating how difficult a news conference might be. At President's former defense attorney, Todd Blanche had a unique perspective. He was better equipped than anyone else in the room to weigh the ideas around Trump's personal and political interests, and he laid out what's their best option, which is eventually what they went to, to try and unseal the grand juries, to do this interview with Galeen Maxwell. But what they point to very specifically is that many of the people inside of the administration, from Vance, Kash Patel, and Bonjino, Bonjino especially, who at various points screamed at Suzie Wiles. He said that you fucked this up, you covered this up. Many of them all wanted more, either maximum transparency or release. There were two people who pushed, it was Trump loyalists and Donald Trump himself, who was the most opposed at the end of the day to releasing anything, turned it into the quote hoax. And then, this is the true crime in my opinion, is that all of those people, Patel, Vance, all of the others, fall in line after Trump makes his decision. When what we know, at least so far, from what this TikTok of all of the details of this White House Situation Room meeting are, all of them knew this was going to be a disaster, told Trump it was gonna be a disaster, Trump didn't care, Trump covered it up, Trump was dragged kicking and screaming to the Epstein Files Transparency Act. He goes all out, he opposed everything, he denied the obvious birthday letter. Look, we all knew it was real, like come on. And at the time, they knew it was real before they denied it. And then, Bon Gino of all, honestly, probably the worst, because internally, he's screaming and he's losing his head, complaining about the millions of dollars in podcast revenue and how hard it is that he lost by going in the administration. Oh boo hoo. Our heart breaks for you. My heart breaks for you Dan. And how hard it is to not live in Florida, probably is that shit. So in the administration, he's threatened to quit and all of that over this, he's screaming at the White House Chief of Staff, doesn't quit and now comes back, he's on his show and he still defends his conduct from when he's in. So come on Dan. So he lost all of his integrity. Cash Patel, a total joke, even though internally, he tried to push back at least somewhat, vanced all of these other guys, who all were like, oh, it's gonna be a disaster. And then they all have to come out, fall in line and defend Trump because Trump is the one who's either afraid or has covered some shit up. That's it. You cannot read this and not come away with the conclusion that if it were not for Trump himself, that every single other person basically who works for him was willing to go for maximum transparency and for release and they knew it would be a huge political problem for them and they ended up going with it anyways because of Trump. It's very similar to the Iran situation. Well, and there was a big divide between people who were in touch with the online universe and people who weren't. I mean, more or less a generational divide, but yeah, Bungino, Patel, and Vance were the three that are the most internet brained and they were like, this is like, you guys don't get it. This is a problem and you can't just brush it away with your normal tricks. But their sense was like, yes, he can, he gets away with everything. So why wouldn't he get away with this? And they were quite stunned that this continued to be an issue for the base, that this kept coming up in focus groups. And we can put, Mediate did like a, most explosive revelations, blah, blah, blah, from this report and they said, they talked about how Trump braided Charlie Kirk over a like focus group that he had done. I don't remember if we covered that. I know we covered some of the ones that he did like over the Iran war, but apparently Trump was furious that Charlie Kirk had done this, but of course, Charlie being an online influencer himself was very much in touch with the fact like, no guys, this is a problem. This isn't something I can just gloss over and maintain any of my credibility. The second one was Bongino going nuclear overhandling the Epstein files, which we just talked about. This is interesting too. JD Vance tried to broker a sit down with Joe Rogan for Epstein files cleanup. The original idea was that the then deputy attorney general Todd Blanche would go on with Joe Rogan to talk about the files. Rogan apparently talked to Vance and was like, no, this is according to JD Vance. No, I don't want him, but I would accept you to come on. And so JD tried to push himself too. It's interesting to me. But they mixed it. They mixed it. But it is interesting to me how central they saw Joe Rogan being to their like attempt to clean all of this up and like using him as sort of like, how do we get the bro sphere back on board? I know we'll go in with Joe Rogan and then we can launder what a total disaster all of this is. There was another media idea here that I really, really, really wish they had gone through with, which is that JD Vance pitched a Tucker Carlson interview with Ghislaine Maxwell on behalf of the administration. I don't know what he was thinking with that particular idea, but I really wish that that had ultimately happened. Of course, in the end, what they decided to do was Blanche himself interviewed Ghislaine Maxwell with everyone just looked at what came out of that and rolled their eyes. And then immediately she gets moved after she does that and says, oh no, Trump never did anything wrong. Then she gets moved to this minimum security prison where she gets to wander the grounds with her puppy, blah, blah, blah. Right, exactly. No, there's some, I mean, it's absolutely crazy. And the reason why I think it's very analogous to Iran is this is basically how the same thing played out with Iran. Most of the people who worked for Trump were like, dude, this is bad. Though, again, we know this for sure, at least from the TikTok too of Maggie Haverman and Jonathan Swan. They released the memos or basically about how it all went down inside the situation room. JD was like, I think it's a bad idea, but if you wanna do it, I'll back you up. Pete Hegseth, idiot and chief was like, look, whatever you wanna do, rah, rah, rah, I'll back you, you didn't really have an opinion. The chief of staff, the army, the joint chief, he came, Rayzen Kane, Daniel Kane, was like, look sir, very muted about some of the caution, but he had his vice admiral actually do tell him the truth. He was like, no, don't do it. It's gonna be bad. It's all these different problems. Trump listens to basically nobody inside of this in the administration in terms of the White House. He is listening to Mark Levin to BB Netanyahu to that extraordinary pitch that happened, probably in the same situation room, conference room, as we're talking about here. He goes to Netanyahu, he goes with the outside brigade. But in both, the deciding factor in all of this is Trump himself. But the deciding factor is also that all of the people who work for him who know better because they are not the president, they have to fall in line and to support, and not support just be their cheerleaders in the public to maintain any access to the king. And that is the biggest problem with this entire administration. The other character in this is Pam Bondi. Oh my goodness. So you guys all remember the situation with the influencers in the binder, binder gate, where they, you know, Kaia Rychik and all these people, DC Gerardo are posing with their, oh, I got the Epstein files and they're like big smiles on their face. Apparently, according to this, she freelance that whole thing and was like, oh, her and her staff are like, oh, this is gonna be so epic. You'll see, this is gonna be amazing. It happened on a day when Keir Starmer was visiting and Trump was gonna have a press avail with him after that. And they're like, all the questions are gonna be about this, like what are you doing? And then of course, as we all know, the binders turned on to be full of information and was already public. Actually, it was more redacted than what Gawker had published like a decade ago. And so it just ended up being a complete debacle. These influencers who are some of the Trump White House's biggest cheerleaders, they feel like they get completely burned. It's humiliating for everyone involved and no one falls for the theater. But apparently this was all like her and her staff's bright idea and just turns into a complete disaster on every front and further breaks the trust of, some part of the MAGA base that is looking at this, like what are we doing here? Like you're just engaged in a massive, in our face cover up of what's going on. You mentioned when we were talking about Iran before making the connection between these two issues that Trump just can't actually find his way out of, both of them go to kind of like the core brand that he had created. And that's really why he can't wiggle out of it the way he seems to wiggle out of everything else. Being a womanizer and a woman abuser, frankly, is not really counter to his brand. They're like, well, it's messy, but yeah, like that's baked into the cake. I get it. He's, you know, rude and crude and mean and gross and all these things. But when it comes to his own people, this brand that he'd established that he would be the ruffian to come in and overturn the tables and clean up the swamp and expose all of the wrongdoers, this sort of very sort of like Q and on fantasy of what Trump was, the Epstein files, just you could not reconcile now he's doing a coverup. And by the way, he's Jeffrey Epstein's best friend for a decade with this image and brand that he would create. You know, on the war stuff, like from the time that he ran in 2015, 2016, he made central to that his supposed opposition to the Iraq war that becomes central to his brand in the first administration. I would say he took very hawkish and potentially dangerous actions, but he always leaned into this talking point. I didn't start any new wars. When he runs, he goes out and has all of these validators of he's going to be the, this is the peace ticket. He's going to keep us out of any future wars. You know, he's going to be totally different than these neocons that are in the Biden administration, blah, blah, blah, people believe that. And so then when he comes in and starts on his own, you know, of his own volition with no provocation outside of Israel encouraging him to do so, a disastrous Middle Eastern war, there's just no way that you can wiggle out of that, that you can bullshit that. You cannot cover up the reality of how counter that is to what your people thought you were going to ultimately do. Right, yeah, I mean, I think that between the Iran situation and the Epstein situation, again though, what you, I think you also, you have to be honest, like the truth is, is so many of these people took a gamble. They really did. And I believe that this would happen too. They believe that the first term, like with the first term that the advisors, the people there would set policy. Trump has, for some reason, nobody will ever know, has taken a much more like active control over the policy in the second term, but with a way worse direction, with Iran and with Epstein. And it turns out that they've had almost zero influence, to be honest, or counter influence, both on Epstein. I mean, if you think about it, like why did he pick JD in the first place? There's no reason, like why? If you wanted to go this direction, pick Rubio, or pick Doug Burgum or something like that, empty suit. Why would you pick somebody who actually, at least someone had like a belief system? Why did you do it? Now it seems though, as an internal, like keep the guy pissing out of it. What is the LBJ quote? It's like, I'd rather have him inside the tent, pissing out than outside the tent, pissing in. It's like, that's the only reason I can personally, you come up with it. I think it's because he was willing to go out and say, no, I would not have done what Mike Pence did on January 6th. But they all said that. But no, he, I mean, I think that was, I think the fact that, I actually think he liked the fact, that J.D. Vance had been a critic, and that he had been completely cowed, because, and that was willing even to go that far, and say, no, no, I wouldn't have certified the election results. I mean, he had already demonstrated his willingness to basically humiliate himself on behalf of the president. And I think that was the critical piece. And then you've got Elon, who- But it wasn't humiliating, he won election, he became the vice president. It's humiliating to say that you would not have certified the election. I mean, any sort of principle, yes. And he's the sort of principle that he had had previously. He had already demonstrated himself willing to completely and totally abandon. And then you add to that Elon Musk putting in a quarter of a billion dollars into the campaign. And J.D. was his pick, like he wants him in. And I think that's how you end up with J.D. Vance in. I don't think it was as clever or strategic of like, oh, I'd rather have this guy on the inside. But you know, the bottom line is, his learning from the first administration that the problems were when he was reigned in. That was the issue. He saw that as being the core problem in his first administration was that there was any check on anything that he wanted to do. And so between project 2025 and then between his own vetting of who he would bring into his administration, he was gonna make sure that it was all people who would just be yes men, who he could, that he would have the final say that there would be little to no check on what he wanted to do. And that is the primary difference in orientation between the first administration, the second one. He's also older. He's also more out of touch. You know, any sort of like political magic that he had previously, and he still has some of that. But a lot of that touch is gone because he's just been so disconnected from the American people for so long at this point too. I'd have to think about it more because you know, I always thought, I really, I really, look, the Elon thing, I take your point, but one of the reasons that Elon and David pushed him, it had nothing to do with financial. There's no evidence currently that J.D. was some like driving Doge force. As far as I know, he thought it was stupid. But from what I can see currently, he picked him because Elon was skeptical of Ukraine. That was one of the main reasons that David and Elon pushed him. Like there was a real, I take your point on the election thing, you're probably right that at the end of the day, it probably is the one to one thing. Like if you're willing to say it that showed, I just, I have no idea why you would pick somebody who was young, who was in touch, who actually had a belief system on Ukraine, just to bring them in and then have, I mean, like I said, maybe it's a strategic thing, maybe it's a humiliation kink, like I have no idea. But I mean, clearly didn't work. I mean, he definitely likes that. I mean, even Marco, right? A little Marco, right? All these people, he loves the people who tried to stand up to him and then, you know, are completely cowed. Yeah, and he loves the humiliation ritual. RFK Jr., I'm gonna make you eat McDonald's on my plane. I mean, truly, like he enjoys that. And so I think that was actually part of the appeal for J.D., but it has worked out that it has, you know, destroyed him and his ability to be like, you know, a posture as being anything different from what this, the disaster that this administration has ended up being. And Trump doesn't even like him. Trump likes Marco better. It's so crazy. Yeah, well, it's interesting how things work out, isn't it? Okay, thank you to everybody who supports the show. We appreciate Friday's show tomorrow. I'm sure it'll be nuts with all this bombing. So we'll see you then. This is an I Heart podcast. Guaranteed human.