Trump’s Made for TV Occupation of D.C.

Summary

Pod Save America: "Trump’s Made for TV Occupation of D.C." – Detailed Summary

Release Date: August 12, 2025

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1. Overview of the Trump Administration's Actions in Washington, D.C.

The episode delves into President Donald Trump's recent decision to deploy 800 National Guard troops to Washington, D.C., effectively federalizing the city's police force. This move was a response to an attempted carjacking targeting a 19-year-old D.C. staffer known as "Big Balls."

Key Points:

• Deployment Details: Trump justified the deployment by claiming an increase in violent crime, despite statistics showing a 30-year low in D.C. crime rates.
• Political Motivation: Hosts argue that the move appears more as a performative act to garner headlines and assert Trump as a "tough on crime" leader rather than a genuine strategy to enhance public safety.

Notable Quote:

• Tommy Vietor (02:41): "This was clear from the President's Monday morning announcement in the White House briefing room, where he was flanked by half his cabinet, who apparently had nothing better to do than focus on the fallout from a carjacking in a city of 700,000 people."

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2. Analysis of the Legality and Effectiveness of Federalizing D.C. Police

The hosts discuss the legal framework that allows Trump to federalize the D.C. police force, referencing the Home Rule Act, which permits the President to intervene during emergencies.

Key Points:

• Home Rule Act Provisions: The Act allows the President to federalize the police force in D.C. for 48-hour periods during emergencies, with subsequent extensions requiring congressional notification.
• Uncertainty in Leadership: Appointing Pam Bondi as the head of the Metropolitan Police Department raises questions about her qualifications and plans, given her limited experience in local law enforcement.

Notable Quotes:

• Jon Lovett (07:48): "And then he adds, quote, we're going to get rid of the slums, too. I know it's not politically correct. You'll say, oh, so terrible. No, we're getting rid of the slums."
• Tommy Vietor (08:12): "Pam Bondi is now basically the police Chief of the District of Columbia. What are your thoughts? ... is this the way to fight crime?"

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3. Critique of Trump's "Tough on Crime" Narrative

The hosts critique Trump's narrative of being "tough on crime," arguing that the deployment of untrained military personnel does not equate to effective law enforcement.

Key Points:

• Lack of Strategy: Deploying military troops, who are not trained for local law enforcement, may not address the root causes of crime.
• Show of Force vs. Practical Solutions: The emphasis appears to be on creating a visible show of strength rather than implementing sustainable crime reduction strategies.

Notable Quotes:

• Jon Lovett (10:05): "And even if they don't get those photo ops, ... he's just going to say, 'Oh, we took over D.C. and have you seen it lately? It's beautiful.'"
• Tommy Vietor (17:37): "Do we think this is a tough on crime president? ... He's donating pardoned a bunch of people who in D.C. attacked cops."

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4. Potential Expansion of Federal Force Beyond D.C.

Discussion centers around the implications of this move potentially setting a precedent for federal intervention in other cities plagued by political or social unrest.

Key Points:

• Precedent for Other Cities: Concerns that similar federalization could be extended to cities like Chicago or Portland, leading to increased militarization.
• Impact on Local Law Enforcement: Uncertainty about how these federal interventions would integrate with existing local policing structures.

Notable Quotes:

• Jon Lovett (16:47): "They're gonna be deploying National Guard there and some Marines at federal buildings in Los Angeles. But if what he wants is to be policing a whole city."
• Tommy Vietor (21:26): "When in a couple weeks or a month, there's a bunch of stories about the National Guard not knowing what they're supposed to do, and Pam Bondi's run the police force like an incompetent mess and crime going down."

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5. Trump's Summit with Vladimir Putin and Its Implications

Transitioning to international relations, the episode covers Trump's planned summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska, aiming to negotiate an end to the Ukraine war without Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's participation.

Key Points:

• Exclusion of Zelensky: The absence of Ukraine's president raises concerns about the legitimacy and effectiveness of the negotiations.
• Trump's Negotiation Stance: Trump's approach appears inconsistent and lacks strategic depth, raising doubts about the potential outcomes.
• JD Vance's Commentary: Conservative commentator JD Vance criticizes both Democratic and Republican responses to the Epstein scandal, attempting to reframe the narrative to target Democrats.

Notable Quotes:

• Donald Trump (25:02): "We have lines that are very uneven, and there'll be some swapping, there'll be some changes in land... I'm going to know exactly whether or not a deal can be made."
• JD Vance (45:02): "We know that Jeffrey Epstein had a lot of connections with left-wing politicians and left-wing billionaires. And now President Trump has demanded full transparency from this and yet somehow the Democrats are attacking him and not the Biden administration, which did nothing for four years."

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6. JD Vance's Attempts to Reframe the Epstein Scandal

The episode highlights JD Vance's efforts to shift blame for the Epstein scandal onto Democrats, questioning the motives behind the investigations and indictments.

Key Points:

• Accusations Against Democrats: Vance claims that Democrats mishandled intelligence about Russian interference in the 2016 election, alleging a cover-up to benefit Hillary Clinton.
• Critique of Intelligence Community: He suggests that intelligence agencies defrauded the American people by exaggerating evidence to support pre-existing Democratic narratives.
• Lack of Substantiated Claims: The hosts challenge Vance's assertions, pointing out the lack of concrete evidence and the improbability of his claims.

Notable Quotes:

• JD Vance (56:50): "They defrauded the American people in order to take Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign talking points and turn them into intelligence."
• Jon Lovett (61:19): "Tulsi Gabbard put out a dumb report that is not true... That is so embarrassing and wrong."

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7. The Epstein Scandal and the Lack of Transparency

Discussion emphasizes the ongoing efforts to withhold grand jury transcripts related to Jeffrey Epstein, raising concerns about transparency and accountability within the Trump administration.

Key Points:

• Judge's Ruling: A federal judge declined to release grand jury testimonies, criticizing the Justice Department for lacking transparency.
• Speculations on Motives: Hosts and guests speculate that the withholding of transcripts aims to divert attention from the administration's potential involvement or knowledge of Epstein's activities.
• Impact on Public Trust: The lack of transparency fuels conspiracy theories and erodes public trust in the government's handling of the scandal.

Notable Quotes:

• Tommy Vietor (50:02): "A federal judge on Monday, as expected, declined to release the testimony in the trial that led to the indictment of Ghislaine Maxwell... called the government's motion... aimed not at transparency, but at diversion."
• Jon Lovett (64:00): "There is no way that he [JD Vance] believes what he just said unless he just has not looked at any of the details of anything."

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8. Conclusion and Upcoming Conversation

The episode concludes with a preview of an upcoming interview featuring David Kirkpatrick from The New Yorker, who has conducted an investigation into Trump's financial profiteering during his presidency.

Key Points:

• Financial Exploitation: The discussion hints at extensive financial gains made by Trump and his family through various business ventures during his time in office.
• Implications for Governance: The intertwining of business interests with presidential duties raises significant concerns about conflicts of interest and the integrity of leadership.

Notable Quote:

• Jon Lovett (94:31): "How people are going to feel about that in the long term, though, I think remains to be seen."

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Additional Insights

Throughout the episode, the hosts critically assess the Trump administration's actions, highlighting a pattern of performative politics aimed at controlling narratives rather than implementing effective policies. The discussions underscore the complexities of presidential authority, the potential misuse of power, and the ramifications of intertwining personal business interests with national governance.

Notable Quotes:

• Jon Lovett (19:35): "The answer is not to try to pivot to a different topic. It is to be persuasive, interesting, believable, trustworthy to others who are persuadable on the topics."
• Tommy Vietor (87:25): "If we go back to what you were saying before, ... it's very speculative ... how do you explain the fact that there are ... nine-figure schemes, eight-figure schemes, seven-figure schemes, and even six-figure schemes."

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Final Thoughts

"Trump’s Made for TV Occupation of D.C." offers a comprehensive critique of President Trump's recent actions, emphasizing the performative nature of his policies and the underlying motives aimed at solidifying his political base. The episode also sheds light on ongoing scandals, such as the Epstein case, and the broader implications of political profiteering, urging listeners to question the integrity of leadership and the true intent behind high-profile governmental decisions.

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Note: This summary excludes advertisements, intros, outros, and non-content sections to focus solely on the substantive discussions and analyses presented in the episode.

Transcript

[Jon Favreau]

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[Jon Lovett]

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[Jon Lovett]

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[Tommy Vietor]

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[Jon Lovett]

I'm Jon Lovett.

[Tommy Vietor]

Tommy is on vacation. Special assignment. Yeah, he's checking out the Epstein stuff. He's gonna figure out. He's gonna find the answers.

[Jon Lovett]

Yeah, that's right. He's.

[Tommy Vietor]

Digging the court files in Miami.

[Jon Lovett]

Yeah, down there with a magnifying Glass and a black light.

[Tommy Vietor]

Oh, God, sorry, that's not good. On today's show, we're gonna talk about Trump's upcoming summit with Putin in Alaska. His latest comments on Gaza, JD Vance's attempt to pin Epstein on the Democrats and predict indictments over Russiagate. And then Lovett talks to the New Yorker's David Kirkpatrick about his investigation into the full extent of Trump's corruption, which has so far made his family more than $3 billion richer.

[Jon Lovett]

Three billion. And that's conservative. And that's conservative.

[Tommy Vietor]

Holy shit. But first, here's how the White House kicked off the week. The President of the United States has responded to an attempted DC carjacking that targeted the 19 year old doge staffer known as Big balls by deploying 800 National Guard troops across Washington and federalizing the city's police force. That is a thing that actually is happening in America right now. Doesn't matter that violent crime in D.C. has dropped to a 30 year low. Doesn't matter that the 5,000 troops Trump deployed here to Los Angeles in June had basically nothing to do but stand around and look bored. The purpose of ordering our own military to occupy our cities doesn't seem to be about fighting crime, but about getting headlines that Trump is fighting crime and as always, owning the libs. This was clear from the President's Monday morning announcement in the White House briefing room, where he was flanked by half his cabinet, who apparently had nothing better to do than focus on the fallout from a carjacking in a city of 700,000 people. Here they are in all their glory.

[Donald Trump]

Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals. Roving mobs of wild youth, drugged out maniacs and homeless people. They love to spit in the face of the police. As the police are standing up there in uniform. They're standing and they're screaming at them an inch away from their face. And then they start spitting in their face. And I said, you tell them you spit and we hit. And we're getting rid of the slums, too. We have slums here. We're getting rid of them. I know it's not politically correct. You'll say, oh, so terrible. No, we're getting rid of the slums.

[Pam Bondi]

Let me be crystal clear.

[Jon Lovett]

Crime in D.C. is ending and ending today.

[JD Vance]

They will be strong, they will be.

[Jon Lovett]

Tough, and they will stand with their law enforcement partners. This is nothing new for DOD in Los Angeles. We did the same thing. I can't touch you if you're 14. 15, 1617 years old and you have a gun. They go to family court and they get to do yoga and arts and crafts.

[Tommy Vietor]

Sounds like Ghislaine Maxwell's facility in Texas. Yeah, it's yoga and arts and crafts.

[Jon Lovett]

Yeah. The beginning of that sentence, I can't touch a. It's like, wait, where. Oh, the different story. We're covering a different story.

[Tommy Vietor]

Yeah. It's hard to. It's confusing that with you spit. We hit, right?

[Pam Bondi]

Yeah, for sure.

[Tommy Vietor]

Lot going on there.

[Jon Lovett]

Also, I just. The Attorney General of the United States saying I am going to end all crime.

[Tommy Vietor]

Crime is ending in D.C. crime is ending. Thanks, Pam Bondi. So what do you think about this? It's. It seems as if Trump has the legal authority to do this because D.C. is technically a federal district, and D.C. mayor Muriel Bowser conceded as much in a press conference later on Wednesday. But is this a wise move? Is this the way to fight crime?

[Jon Lovett]

So, first of all, so. So Bowser is like striking a kind of conciliatory posture, which seems like what she's been doing quietly because Trump refused to even criticize her. He actually spoke well of her and saying, though she was failing on this issue, she's a good person. Which is more than he would say about most Democratic mayors, I think. So there's also.

[Tommy Vietor]

Seems like she doesn't have much of a choice, right?

[Jon Lovett]

Yes. I mean, look, we can. There's the fact that the president can call something an emergency and that unlocks all these powers, and who decides what an emergency is. Is completely subjective. Is a huge problem. It's a huge problem across a whole range of issues. That's like. That's like the shape of a lot of these things. That's the shape of him invoking the Insurrection act and a whole bunch of other abuses of presidential authority. But, yes, he's saying the law is clear. He can say it's an emergency and then he can take over the police. So there's two big pieces to this. There is the deploying of the National Guard. That doesn't look that different than what Trump did in Los Angeles. Except D.C. is a federal place that has tons of federal law enforcement, military facilities, all kinds of presidents in charge.

[Tommy Vietor]

Of the National Guard in D.C. yes.

[Jon Lovett]

Well, and also that there's just tons of presidential police departments. The Veterans affairs has a police department.

[Tommy Vietor]

Secret Service is running around D.C. yeah.

[Jon Lovett]

So. So it's just like unlike other cities. But the other part of it is declaring that Pam Bondi is now in charge of the Metropolitan Police Department. And I think this gets at the uncertainty about what happens next, because how are we meant to know what Pam Bondi is gonna do when she's running a local police department? She doesn't know what she's gonna do when she's running a local police department. She has never done it before and she didn't know she was gonna do it till this week.

[Tommy Vietor]

Look, you got a lot more eyes on all those Epstein files now. She's got a lot more hands in the D.C. police force. They're gonna be working round the clock. Cause there's more pages for them to look at.

[Jon Lovett]

Yeah. No more, no more shifts walking around the block.

[Tommy Vietor]

We should say. Yeah, there's, there's the, the Home Rule act was passed a long time ago that gave D.C. you know, certain sort of privileges and, and, and an autonomy. Right. And in that legislation, there is a, a provision that says. Oh, okay. In times of emergency, the President could federalize the police force in D.C. for 48 hour periods.

[Jon Lovett]

Yeah.

[Tommy Vietor]

Because it's like, supposed to be for like, there's like, you know, overwhelming violence or rioting, whatever else. And then apparently if you federalize it for longer than 48 hours, every time you refederalize it for another 48 hours, you have to like, send a message to the relevant committees in Congress, which I'm sure they'll, they'll get to that.

[Jon Lovett]

Right? Yeah. And then there's also, I believe after 30 days, Congress might have to approve it, but we're a long way from that 30 day period. Okay, Pam Bondi, you're now basically the police Chief of the District of Columbia. What are your thoughts? Like, I know what Donald Trump's thoughts are. They're not tough enough. They're not violent enough, they're not knocking heads together. They're letting everybody get away with stuff. And we gotta be tough like we used to be tough. Okay. That's something you can say in a campaign speech. You're running the police department. The police department in D.C. doesn't have enough officers. That's something that they've talked about publicly. Are there specific issues you'd like them to address? You know, are they not? Like when you say you want them to be tougher, like presumably continuing to follow the Constitution will have to happen, but they don't know. They have no idea. So I think it's like, hard to predict exactly what this will actually look out, how different it will look than just the, the than, than D.C. looked yesterday. But what I, what I go to is this is for headlines and not just for today. Right. So what are the headlines they want in the next couple of days and weeks? And I think it's them. They want. They want to show people being arrested. They want to show bodies on the street. They want to show. They want to see military National Guard members, you know, standing in front of buildings. And then I think they want to show, like, homeless encampments being torn down. And then they want to declare victory of some kind. And so that, to me, is what comes next. Does it have any actual impact on crime in D.C. who fucking knows? But, like, they don't have a plan for anything other than a series of photo ops over the next couple of days.

[Tommy Vietor]

And even if they don't get those photo ops, I mean, we know from experience here in Los Angeles that it doesn't really matter to Trump whether he's got the photo ops are. That's cherry on the. Cherry on the cake. Right. But if he doesn't have the photo ops, then, you know, a month from now, he's just going to say, oh, and then we. We took over DC and have you seen it lately? It's beautiful. It's beautiful.

[Jon Lovett]

That's right.

[Tommy Vietor]

We. That city was dying. We saved this city. And everyone's gonna be like, no one's gonna ask him. Oh, what about the crime statistics? There's a lot of arguing about the crime statistics. Right. But, like, let's just take them at their word that they wanna fight crime in D.C. right?

[Jon Lovett]

Sure.

[Tommy Vietor]

So, like, if you wanna fight crime in dc, if the crime rate is not declining fast enough for you, there's a whole menu of options that they could have picked from. Right. Trump's acknowledged in the press conference that there's enough police that should be able to handle the crime. So I don't know why you're adding a bunch of troops, military, that are not trained in law enforcement. They are trained in sort of combat overseas or defending the homeland or doing various other tasks that National Guard do in the United States. Law enforcement isn't necessarily one of them. There's some courts that could be filled with more judges or prosecutors, so they could get the cases done faster. Right. Like, that's a challenge that Judge Jeanine could fix in her new role.

[Jon Lovett]

Sure.

[Tommy Vietor]

She's also complaining about the. The way that they treat juvenile offenders who commit violence or have guns like that. Again, that is a. If that's a problem for you, that's something that you could address with legislation. None of this is. Pam Bondi becomes the police chief.

[Jon Lovett]

Right.

[Tommy Vietor]

And we send out the National Guard.

[Jon Lovett]

Well, the other. Yes. Also, it was, what, two or three years ago that Congress rejected a reform law from D.C. because they wanted to not allow them to do certain kinds of legal reforms and criminal justice reforms in D.C. like, this has been, like, a roiling topic. So now Pam Bondi is in charge of the Metropolitan Police Department. There's gonna be a couple hundred members of the National Guard. They also are saying that they're gonna involve all these other federal police agencies that exist. An incredible bit of coordination that has to happen now. An incredible logistical feat of figuring out how to involve Amtrak police, local law.

[Tommy Vietor]

Enforcement, which this administration is known for.

[Jon Lovett]

So. So, Pam.

[Tommy Vietor]

Logistical planning.

[Pam Bondi]

Yeah.

[Jon Lovett]

And. So. So Pam Bondi, who was a prosecutor and became a state attorney general and then a lobbyist for Qatar and a Kuwaiti company and some others. And. And now is the attorney general, like, okay. Like. Well, this is a pretty big logistical challenge for you. I guess you're gonna be working round the clock on this.

[Tommy Vietor]

Well, good thing she's got the help of Pete Hegseth and the military and Jeanine Pirro. Couple. Couple of Fox hosts to the rescue. Yeah, Doug Burgum was up there because I guess. I guess Interior has some.

[Jon Lovett]

Well, no, Interior has law enforcement. They have law enforcement in D.C. it's just.

[Tommy Vietor]

Cash Patel's there. We got. We already have FBI agents on the streets in D.C. over the weekend. They deployed some federal law enforcement.

[Jon Lovett]

Cash Patel said something, I think that was not that. Because that didn't seem like, particularly helpful because he talked about how crime rates were dropping during the press conference. He's like, hey, you're not on book.

[Tommy Vietor]

But the.

[Jon Lovett]

Yeah, I can't. Like. So, yes, they're turning this carjacking, which is terrible, and there are carjackings in D.C. and that is terrible, into, like, an inciting incident to do this. But they must have been wanting. This must have been what they've been wanting to do. I don't. What I.

[Tommy Vietor]

You don't think the show of force was just for big balls?

[Jon Lovett]

I don't think it was. Look, I think big ball. Look, I think big balls maybe got things rolling, you know, But I don't. Like, was this something that they were planning to do in a couple weeks? Moved it up? Was this always happening anyway? Was this, like, who knows?

[Tommy Vietor]

Yeah, I know. Cause, you know, the first thought for a lot of people were, it's a distraction, whatever. And then, you know, a White House official tells playbook. No, no. He was driving around the city and he. Cause he complains about the Graffiti too, as well as the violence. And he was just like, no, we gotta clean this up. Which honestly I'm willing to believe because he's a, again, he just, he's a visual learner. He's a visual learner. He's a TV guy for sure. He likes, you know, he probably watched Cops a lot, right? And he sees crime and he's like, oh, crime's bad, we gotta do this. And then, well, why isn't crime falling fast enough? Why isn't crime eliminated? It's like, well, there's a lot of comp. No, I don't wanna hear the explanation. We just need more force. More force, more people. I do think the implications of this and the potential consequences are far beyond just cleaning up crime in D.C. which is like, I don't know if you saw like Greg Sargent at the New Republic, got a hold of some memo that was floating around the Defense Department that was like, yeah, DHS is going to need a lot more deployments like they had in Los Angeles of the military to really take care of this political priority for the president of immigration. So one implication, one consequence of this is now there's just going to be, you're going to get more ICE raids, more raids of people like, like we have here in Los Angeles. And like, we don't. And stuff we don't even know, right? You have a bunch of people walking around with fucking guns militarized in Washington, D.C. who don't necessarily know what they're doing, who don't necessarily have an objective. And I don't know, I think putting more guns around the street with people who don't really know what they're doing is probably not the best way to achieve public safety, but who knows?

[Jon Lovett]

Yeah. So I think there's one part in this press conference where he talked about how it's just starting in D.C. they're going to go from D.C. and then go elsewhere. And look, it's a small thing, but Trump saying, I'm ordering all the states to lower their flags for the Pope too, well, you're not in charge of them. And so for Trump, who either chooses not to know or doesn't know about the distinction between a city like D.C. and what it would mean to have federal officers in Chicago as saying, oh, we're gonna do this everywhere, right? And then you look at what they did in Los Angeles, which again is because he wants the headlines and he wants the attention. And so he puts some National Guard troops there and some Marines at federal buildings in Los Angeles. But if what he wants is to be policing a whole city. Right. Like, it's not hard enough for him to do that if he really wants to do that. Right. We are, we have benefited from the fact that he has a short attention span. And this is more of about a show of force than force. Right. But if you really wanted a guard, every federal building in Chicago, in Portland, there was some question about where there was federal jurisdiction. Is it just on federal property? I was like, well, no, you have to be able to guard federal property, which means it extends beyond federal property. You have to be able to investigate beyond federal property. So it goes beyond federal property. It's not hard to imagine them deciding that. Every post office, every federal building, every courthouse, every customs office, every place where you get your passport renewed, those are all federal buildings all throughout every major city in this country. And then all of a sudden they're deploying National Guard there. Oh. And they're detailing people from Veterans Affair and from the Interior Department and all these places. And all of a sudden there's all kinds of police throughout a city. Right. That is not impossible. And so all of this, every. Like, do I think that's what they're planning to do? I don't know. They don't really plan. These people are kind of improvisational, but like, that is a step. That is a step they could take. And so they start with this because they can get away with this. He sees what the press looks like, he sees what the attention looks like. And I do worry that they're going to enjoy the stories and attention and press they get from this. I do.

[Tommy Vietor]

And I realize that, you know, calling out hypocrisy is just like fucking spitting in the wind at this point. But you spit it, we hit it.

[Jon Lovett]

It's.

[Tommy Vietor]

You don't remember, you spit it, it.

[Jon Lovett]

Hits you in the face.

[Tommy Vietor]

But like, do we think this is a tough on crime president? This is a president who doesn't like crime. He's very anti crime.

[Jon Lovett]

Right.

[Tommy Vietor]

Criminal conviction himself pardoned a bunch of people who in D.C. attacked cops. Attacked cops in D.C. i guess we went through this once before. There was a big, big crime scene in D.C. it was when a bunch of people attacked the Capitol and attacked cops. And one of the people who screamed at the time that the cops should die was caught on camera saying that kill him.

[Jon Lovett]

He said, shout, kill him.

[Tommy Vietor]

Kill him. He's in the Justice Department now. He's a top official in the Justice Department, in the Trump Justice Department. So I don't know if it's that Trump doesn't like crime so much as he does he, he's fine with crime if it's committed by people who are his pals or himself or his followers. But crime that's committed by the libs or Democrat run cities or people who look a little crimey, they look crimey for sure. He's not going to tolerate that.

[Jon Lovett]

For my friends, everything for my enemies, the law. And look again, it's not Trump. Trump is enabled. Like the fact that there has been so little outcry or the fact that they have put a person at the Justice Department that shouted kill cops at the top of his is, you know, I don't care for it.

[Tommy Vietor]

There is a lot of like, oh, this is what the White House wants us to be talking about, wants everyone to talk about, Which I get. I don't know. What do you think? How do you think Democrats should respond to this one?

[Jon Lovett]

You know, I'll tell you what's a crime. This big, beautiful Bill. Yeah, man, it sucks. He's the assignment editor for the world. He's the most powerful person in the world and he's doing terrible and dangerous things with his power. And, and we have to talk about it. The answer is not to try to pivot to a different topic. It is to be persuasive, interesting, believable, trustworthy to others who are persuadable on the topics. As we start to build a larger story about why Donald Trump is such a threat and why we are a.

[Tommy Vietor]

Better alternative, I also think you can't just write this off as another distraction because, you know, most people who don't pay close attention to politics are like, there's crime somewhere. Crime is bad. We like when there's less crime. And it seems like Donald Trump, he wants to throw more resources at the crime. And I think you've got to tell people like, no, no, no, that's not what's happening. If, like what the conversation you and I just had, which is like, if he wants to fight crime and do more to crime, there's a whole bunch of things he could do. This is not that. This is putting a bunch of people who aren't trained in law enforcement throughout the city so he can exert more control.

[Jon Lovett]

Yeah. And it's also just like, this is a distraction, is not an argument. It's not anything.

[Tommy Vietor]

Right. Because some people were like, well, and, and I know that people felt like that about LA at times. Right. Because people who weren't living here when all of this went down, it'd be like, Whoa, were the riots really bad? Was there a lot of violence? And we're like, no, there wasn't. But if there was, people be like, well, maybe then maybe the troops are good to, like, calm down the violence. It's like, no, no, no. This is a whole fucking made up thing.

[Jon Lovett]

Yeah. I just. This is a distraction. Feels like it's from another era of Trump politics. And it's also just a conversation among a bunch of people who are not distracted and are aware of the threat. Right. Like, it's like, I'm not distracted. You're not distracted. The people seeing these articles about distraction are not particularly distracted. I suppose if you kind of, I don't know, steer the ship of the great 100,000 talkers that we're all surrounded by, the 100,000 people that are part of these kinds of debates, shift it. And they, what, they talk about what Trump's doing a little less, talk about Epstein and tariffs a bit more. That's gonna affect what local news coverage and tiktoks that'll reach people who are gonna find out that Trump federalized the police. I just. Everything's a fucking distraction. We're a perpetually distracted society.

[Tommy Vietor]

I'll tell you what's gonna land with people. When in a couple weeks or a month, there's a bunch of stories about the National Guard not knowing what they're supposed to do, and Pam Bondi's run the police force like an incompetent mess and crime going down. And then someone gets arrested who didn't do anything. Like, then everyone's like, he's fucking incompetent and he did this for some other reason. Then we're able to show what's wrong with it.

[Jon Lovett]

Yeah. I'll also say this. The Attorney General of the United States just made a huge promise that she's going to end crime in the District of Columbia. They now own this. They own the challenges of running a police department in a city and stopping crime, where even the best, smartest, most compassionate, forward thinking department will struggle against the reality of a city and life in a city and the people that commit crimes in it and the people that live there and all the challenges that go along with it. But they claim they have some superpowers. Great. Because in a couple weeks, there will still be carjackings, there will still be challenges, there will still be crimes and petty crimes and sexual assaults and robberies and all the rest of the. Because, like, they're authoritarians, but they're not all powerful. And we have to, I think that to me is like a lever for us, which is just, all right, you're gonna do this. Yeah, you're gonna be the ones. Pam Bondi, you've cracked it. You've cracked the code of crime in America.

[Tommy Vietor]

Great.

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[Tommy Vietor]

So Trump took questions after his announcement, and lots of them were about his big meeting with Vladimir Putin that's set for this Friday in Alaska, the place from which proto Trump politician Sarah Palin could see Russia from her doorstep, thereby bringing the stupidest era of American politics full circle.

[Jon Lovett]

Mm.

[Tommy Vietor]

We're right back there.

[Jon Lovett]

Yep.

[Tommy Vietor]

Trump is theoretically looking for a deal to end the war in Ukraine, though he'll be doing so without Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who isn't invited to the Putin meet. Cute. And will apparently get a readout later on the potential fate of his country. Zelensky is understandably RIP shit about this, though I'm not sure why, as Trump's negotiating prowess was on full display at Monday's press conference.

[Donald Trump]

You know, I'm going to see Putin. I'm going to Russia on Friday. But it's very complex because you have lines that are very uneven, and there'll be some swapping, there'll be some changes in land. And the word that they will use is, you know, they make changes, but they've taken some very prime territory. They've taken largely ocean. You know, in real estate, we call it oceanfront property. That's always the most valuable property. If you're in a lake, a river or an ocean, it's always the best property. Well, we're going to have a meeting with Vladimir Putin, and at the end of that meeting, probably in the first two minutes, I'll know exactly whether or not a deal can be made.

[Tommy Vietor]

There's going to be a lot of swapping. There's going to be swapping, they're going to be changing. They like to call it change. Change. And they like to call it change.

[Jon Lovett]

Yeah, there's another lines. There's another quote where he said, it's very complicated. We're going to get. We're going to. We're going to get some back. We're going to get some switch. There will be some swapping of territories to the betterment of both. He also said, I'm gonna get everybody's ideas. I'm talking to European leaders, I'm talking to President Zelensky. I go into that thing fully loaded right up there, and we're gonna see what happens.

[Tommy Vietor]

Yeah. Zelensky, the eu, Laura Loomer.

[Jon Lovett]

Yeah. No bad ideas. In a brainstorm when it comes to.

[Tommy Vietor]

Marjorie Taylor Greener, borders of Ukraine.

[Jon Lovett]

Yeah.

[Tommy Vietor]

Asking a question in the briefing, whoever he's gonna take all ideas from people.

[Jon Lovett]

At Mar A Lago that happened to be at the shrimp station at the same time.

[Tommy Vietor]

So with Tommy out this week, you finally have the chance to sling that take you've been working on about the fate of the Donbas.

[Jon Lovett]

All right. Yeah, no, that's right.

[Tommy Vietor]

But before I let you cook on that, the meeting with Putin, it's already being covered through the prism of whether, you know, President Art of the deal can pull another rabbit out of his hat. It does feel like the most important question, though, is not whether he can get a deal, but what kind of deal he's willing to make. What do you think?

[Jon Lovett]

Yeah. So, first of all, it's hard to know because he said virtually everything a person can say about the situation. I think JD Vance sat down with Barta Romo, and we're going to talk about some of the other parts of it. But he talked about this, and I do think, like, he is the, like, you know, the first intellectual Zamboni among equals. And, like, what he says, I think is, like, kind of the most. The most intellectualized form of Trump's brain at times.

[Pam Bondi]

And.

[Jon Lovett]

And when you watch Vance talk about this, first of all, there's a, like, that inherent, like, kind of moral. It's just, like, morally vacant. Like, look, these are just two countries that have been fighting, and they both want to get out of this thing, which is so despicable. Like, this is Russia invaded Ukraine. You know, both Trump and Vance tend to say a version of, you know, I believe Ukraine wants peace. I believe Russia wants peace. Right. And Vance then does an aside, because he's very smart, and he carefully says, look, we all condemn the invasion almost as an aside. Right?

[Tommy Vietor]

Right.

[Jon Lovett]

But then he makes the point about the US not wanting to fund Ukraine, not wanting to support Ukraine, wanting to push it back onto Europe, and he makes this outrageous claim, which is that the fact that Putin is willing to meet with Trump is some kind of breakthrough. Right. Which is so embarrassing. The President of the United States, you're calling it a breakthrough that you got a meeting, you scored a general with Putin, and now, like, all of a sudden, that's an impressive feat.

[Tommy Vietor]

The guy's a fucking fugitive from the ICC for war crimes related to kidnapping 20,000 Ukrainian children, not to mention the. The torture, rape, slaughter of thousands and thousands and thousands of Ukrainians that. That Putin ordered, and he's coming to the United States. And look, it's like, it is important to talk with even murderous tyrants if we're trying to end a war. But, like, Putin's pretty psyched he got the meeting right.

[Jon Lovett]

Like, so.

[Tommy Vietor]

So this is not like a. This is a. This is a big win for Putin.

[Jon Lovett]

And so he. So he describes Trump getting the meeting as some kind of a win, which is very embarrassing and wrong. And then part of the explanation for what made it happen is because of the pressure that they've applied to Ukraine. Right. All of which has made. Not like, sort of made, is a signal to Putin that his antagonism is effective. It weakens Ukraine's position. That's all. Saying, you're going to. That if you don't get. If you don't strike a deal soon, we're going to pull all support, all our support, and let Putin. Putin's tanks roll across Europe. Finally, the pressure we needed to get both sides to the table. So the whole thing is just. It is strategically incomprehensible. It's, like, morally empty. And the end result is they would like to validate this whole idea of the US has been getting ripped off and we're sending all this money overseas, and so they'd like to stop doing that. He wants to say how he wants a deal. He wants to be the deal maker and the peacemaker. And beyond that, they don't seem to have very many equities in the actual, like, the actual outcome of the conflict. What happens to Ukraine? What happens if we live in a world where a country like Russia is rewarded for what they did? They're apparently floating some kind of a deal where, like, it's just a Donbas, which Zelensky has to, of course, reject because it is a victory for Russia in this conflict. And then all Vance can come up with is some version of, look, nobody's gonna like the deal. That's the thing about a compromise.

[Tommy Vietor]

I mean, just think of it from Putin's perspective, right?

[Jon Lovett]

He.

[Tommy Vietor]

So he's lost about a million Russians in this war, his economy's in the shitter, he's an international pariah. And now he gets to go into this meeting with Donald Trump, who he knows by now is easily manipulated through flattery, has the attention span of a fucking fruit fly, probably can't locate Ukraine on a map, let alone freelance about its territorial sovereignty.

[Jon Lovett]

Sure.

[Tommy Vietor]

So he's got this meeting, and now he's going to be able to sort of set the terms of this or at least influence Trump's thinking. And what's the worst that can. What's what's the worst he thinks can happen, right? Which is like, Trump walks away, and he's like, at worst, Trump's probably like, you're on your own. I tried something and I can't. I can't get a deal. I'm not dealing with this anymore. I'm out. We're out.

[Jon Lovett]

Which, by the way, is just worth saying he said before, which is what he said before, and I'm sorry. He's also said, Daniel Dale, remember our friend Daniel Dale at cnn, that. That of the bringing out the fact check of the cataloging of the lies. You know, Trump didn't just say one time offhand, I'm going to end this on day one. He said it dozens of times. He said it at least 50 times. I'm going to end this war on day one.

[Tommy Vietor]

So Putin knows he's horny for a deal.

[Jon Lovett]

And as already said repeatedly, I, you know, I talked to both sides. It's so complicated. You guys figure it out. Maybe the Pope can deal with it. Remember that? Remember when the Pope was gonna deal with it?

[Tommy Vietor]

And it's just like, what do Trump and Vance and the rest of them think? Do they really think that if you give Putin some territory, who knows how much of the Donbas he gets or how much of the territory he currently occupies he gets, right? If he gives territory after three years of losing this many soldiers and this, like, he's just gonna say, I'm out. That's great. I'm happy with a few provinces in Eastern Ukraine, and now I'm just gonna shrink back and just sort of, you know, try to rebuild at home, like, that's it. They think that's gonna be it. I don't understand.

[Jon Lovett]

Well, and look, the whole. This is why.

[Tommy Vietor]

And, like, if he. If he dares to invade Ukraine again to restart the war or to invade some other neighbor in Europe, like, who's gonna stop him? Trump. Trump gonna stop him.

[Jon Lovett]

You know, a friend of mine would say, and this is glib, but whatever, Tommy's not here. That you can think of a parking ticket as a punishment or you can think of it as a fee. And if you say, if you invade a sovereign country on a completely bullshit pretext, which, by the way, you know is bullshit, because you're claiming it's for some kind of, you know, your national security and for your protection, meanwhile, you've put your whole fucking army into this country. You're not defending the border with Finland. You're not worried about your neighbors to the west, that if you do that, if you launch a war that leads to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, that you kidnap tens of thousands of children, you cause all this death and destruction, and your punishment is you keep a third of the territory you took. What does that say to the rest? What does it say to Ukraine in the future? What does it say to other countries in Europe? What does that say to China about Taiwan? What does that say to the world about what borders mean?

[Tommy Vietor]

We haven't even talked about security guarantees as part of the deal either, which. No. No one seems to be floating, at least not in the. Not in a real way so far. And it's like, so, you know, is there a scenario where Ukraine gives up some territory in exchange for, like, a security guarantee from the United States and NATO or Europe or whatever the eu? Like, but, like, that's not even being discussed right now. It's just like you get, like, the quote that you said, we're going to swap territory that's mutually beneficial. What is. Is Ukraine getting a few Russian cities.

[Jon Lovett]

Yeah. What are we talking about?

[Tommy Vietor]

Talking about.

[Jon Lovett]

What are we talking. It's almost like Trump is confusing his meetings. He's confusing his meetings with Wyckoff about some future fucking deal because Witkoff's got the.

[Tommy Vietor]

He's got the Middle east portfolio and he's got the Russia portfolio. He's got one fugitive and another one. It's just unfucking real. Speaking of which, Trump did not get any questions on Israel at the press conference, but he did do a brief phone interview with Barack Ravid at Axios, where he publicly responded for the first time to Netanyahu's new plan to occupy all of Gaza over the objections of his own military leadership. Trump told Ravid that he had a, quote, good call with Netanyahu on Sunday and that he doesn't think Hamas will release the hostages unless something changes. Then he added, quote, I have one thing to say. Remember October 7th. Remember October 7th. What do you think's going on here? Is Trump just trying to wait this one out, too? And Bibi certainly seems like he's trying to wait out everyone. Do you feel like attention is waning?

[Jon Lovett]

So what Trump says at the end there, remember October 7th. Remember October 7th. That is Trump seeing the politics of this, shifting that. The absurdity, the, like, the evil farce of saying you're going to what? That you're going to give notice to people in Gaza City and then you're going to occupy Gaza City, a city that we have now seen photos of is in ruins, that you're Going to take this territory where the military has told you there's no further military advantage here, that you've leveled most of this country. The city you're going to occupy is in ruins. Ruins. It's an evil joke. It's indefensible. And so when Trump says, remember October 7th, remember October 7th, he's seeing that this does not seem justified. And people have, we are so far from where this conflict began. It seems so disconnected from it. And that is true. The only hope has to be, if this is a hope, that this is some kind of threat as part of a negotiation or a potential negotiation about some kind of a deal. Witkoff went to.

[Tommy Vietor]

What's the threat?

[Jon Lovett]

That if we don't. That if you don't return the hostages, I'm going to. I'm going to take over the entire Gaza Strip. I'm going to occupy Gaza City. I'm going to make everybody that's now in Gaza City leave Gaza City. Where they're going to go fucking knows. And that because there apparently was some kind of proposal presented by Qatar. In Egypt today, there's a discussion of, like, all or nothing. That's a quote, deal. Wyckoff went and to one of the aid distribution sites last week. So, like, there are still apparently conversations happening. But the other side of this is, as many have pointed out, the Times reported this in their big reported investigative piece into this, that Netanyahu has been reluctant to talk about after the war, that in Israel right now, this is the reporting today that obviously Palestinians would.

[Tommy Vietor]

Be.

[Jon Lovett]

Killed and harmed by any kind of occupation, but Israelis do not understand what the rationale would be for prolonging the conflict and occupying all of Gaza. It doesn't seem to be any way of getting any kind of hostages back. So the whole thing seems, it's just senseless.

[Tommy Vietor]

Well, I think the IDF objected to this in part, or senior leaders in the Israeli Defense Forces objected to Netanyahu, according to reporting, in part because they think, like, why wouldn't they kill the hostages? Like, the hostages would be in danger in such a military occupation or another military offensive like this. And then you just really, like, with every development, you realize, okay, Netanyahu, he doesn't really. His first objective is not getting the hostages back. His first objective is not a ceasefire, certainly. His objective is to completely eliminate Hamas. As if, like, that's a thing that you can do and destroy Gaza, control Gaza, and doesn't seem to care much at all about the starvation. Acts like it doesn't exist. And for Trump, Trump's just like, okay, well, you know, first I saw the images of the starving kids in Gaza and I didn't like those images. But then one US Official told Axios that Trump was moved by the video released by Hamas of an Israeli hostage digging his own grave. Quote, it influenced the President and he is going to let the Israelis do what they need to do. Once again, just very easily manipulated person, Donald Trump, he sees images of starving children, he'll have a day where he says, oh yeah, that's bad, we should fix that. But then, you know, he forgets the next day. And the Israelis were like, yeah, what about this hostage thing? Okay, well then, now I care about this. This is how we do it. By the way, they were like, oh, we're gonna surge aid finally. Remember last time we talked about this, they were gonna do some pauses in the fighting so that people get more aid. Where's that? Has that worked out? It hasn't worked out, no. In fact, a 14 year old boy was killed by an airdrop. Killed by the airdrop. So they're still doing airdrops. They're trying to surge more aid in there. Not really working. It's still a trickle. Huckabee, our fucking ambassador to Israel, said that the plan to take over to fix the aid situation, the food situation, is to increase the number of Gaza Humanitarian foundation sites, the GHF, from 4 to 16. So this organization that wasn't working at all, that was a complete fucking disaster. We're just gonna have some more of that instead of actually changing it and letting the UN in. Yeah, I mean, it's a fuck, it's a disaster.

[Jon Lovett]

I saw. So there are some conservatives or people trying to defend Netanyahu and Trump in saying all these people are saying that aid trucks aren't being intercepted. But look at these stats. So many AIDS trucks are being intercepted. And Trump's former envoy to the region was asked about this. And if there is not enough food, if people in a place do not trust that there will be enough food, people, not Hama people try to get as much. They storm the trucks, they try to get the food. Now when this US contractor backed by the IDF is doing this, they like exert order and control and it's led to people being killed. But what UN aid trucks have done is they just step back and they let people take the food. And I've seen some people saying, oh, that's the rationale for why they've cut off aid, because some of that aid is being interdicted by ordinary people. People with guns, potentially Hamas. But that is not an argument for starving people to death. That's an argument for flooding an area with aid. Because if there is enough aid, if there's only so much, if there's only enough to feed a precious few people, people with guns may get that aid. But even experts in this say there is an answer. And the answer is to flood an area with aid. Because if people can count on it, count on it again and again, all of a sudden there is not this sense that it must be stolen, that it must be grabbed, that it must be taken.

[Tommy Vietor]

I mean, it's all a fucking joke at this point. The excuses on this because more aid is trickling in now. It's not really having an effect. More people are dying of starvation. The IDF just killed a bunch of journalists over the weekend who they say are actually Hamas the whole time, even though they've been covering the war for two years. No real documentation of that. And unfortunately I think that the folks leading in the polls after Netanyahu are are not. You know, they're not dreaming of a two state solution either. So not great.

[Jon Lovett]

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[Pam Bondi]

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[Tommy Vietor]

So one topic the Trump White House wants to talk about even less than Ukraine or Gaza is of course, the Epstein scandal, which they are still working diligently to cover up with arguably some success. JD Vance seems to be in the middle of a hard hitting media tour right now. Yeah, he's, he's been sitting for a series of adversarial interviews with fearless journalists like former Trump staffer Katie Miller, the Gateway pundit. You did one with a Gateway.

[Jon Lovett]

I didn't, didn't catch that one. Didn't catch it.

[Tommy Vietor]

And of course, Maria Bartiromo, who did ask Vance an Epstein question on Fox this Sunday. Here's what he said.

[JD Vance]

We know that Jeffrey Epstein had a lot of connections with left wing politicians and left wing billionaires. And now President Trump has demanded full transparency from this and yet somehow the Democrats are attacking him and not the Biden administration, which did nothing for four years.

[Jon Lovett]

Give us some clarity on this meeting that is reportedly happening or happened last.

[Tommy Vietor]

Night at the White House about the.

[Jon Lovett]

Epstein files and how you're communicating the Epstein.

[JD Vance]

So I've seen so many different fake reports about this. So let me set the record straight. There was no meeting at my house last night. There just wasn't.

[Jon Lovett]

Was there a meeting at the White House?

[JD Vance]

We did meet at the White House yesterday, but not at the time that they said that they, that we were gonna meet and not about the subject that they said that we were gonna meet about.

[Tommy Vietor]

Ooh, that was a technicality. What do you think? Why are Democrats suddenly attacking Donald Trump over this? Who called for full transparency?

[Jon Lovett]

It's this whole, I don't wish it on anyone to go to watch this entire Bartiromo interview. You don't have to and you shouldn't. But there is something about watching, like, watching him like he, this is his move. It's his move when he's talking about gerrymandering. It's like, what are we meant to do? We. These Innocent Republicans, simply put upon by these Democratic politicians and their gerrymandering schemes.

[Tommy Vietor]

Yeah, there's like the, the anti, anti Trumps online. There's like this brand of sort of right wing pundit that for a while their whole argument was like, well, I didn't want to support Donald Trump, but what were we supposed to do? The Democrats are so extreme and mean and nasty that they have just pushed us into his arms. Yeah, that's a J.D. vance thing.

[Jon Lovett]

That's it. Yes, it's very. That is sort of like, that's like the intellectual defense for this kind of like Republican radicalism is that we have. And by the way, like, you know, it's not just in politics, right? Like, that is the argument that you see around. Like, well, they lost the culture war, right? There's gay marriage and there's, there's trans people now. And you know, American Airlines makes their logo, the pride flag, every June. Like, we lost. Why? We weren't fighting hard enough. And so that's what this is. Right? And so when he gets to Epstein, right, What's this, what's the, what's the actual current, real truthful situation with whatever we're gonna call the Epstein files, whatever that means? Donald Trump and a bunch of right wingers playing off a conspiracy online, which has some truth to it, by the way, promise to bring full transparency to this story. They get into office and they discover that in some ways what they were promising was overblown. But in one important way, it wasn't. There are powerful figures in the Epstein files. Their names are Donald Trump, among others. And so we know that Donald Trump's name is in the Epstein files. That. That was told to Donald Trump. And so in the interim between Pam Bondi saying, the files are on my desk, the list is on my desk, I'm gonna release it. And her saying there is no list, and Cash Patel and Dan Bongino doing interviews saying he killed himself. And there's no there there. Somebody told Donald Trump that his name was in the Epstein files and that's why it stuck.

[Tommy Vietor]

Well, it's also like, why are Democrats attacking Donald Trump? Who's called for full transparency? Okay, the whole thing started when a bunch of MAGA influencers were attacking Donald Trump and were demanding full transparency. And Donald Trump can call for full transparency all he wants, but you know what, he is the president and he has the power to actually be fully transparent by releasing the fucking files. So it's like, what are you talking about? It's just, it's, it is the ease with which he lies now, I guess he's. I mean, he's always. But, like, I feel like J.D. vance has become. And we'll see it with the next clip, too. He's become even more comfortable just, like, doing this sort of pathological dishonesty bit and where he's like, it's not only that he lies, but, like, how dare anyone else criticize them?

[Jon Lovett]

Yeah. It's that laugh when he laughs there about the question. It's the laugh of. I know why you're asking. Because the world is an unjust place, and here we are just doing our best every goddamn day. Because part of it, too, is. It's, yes, he will just lie flat out, but it's that he's creating, like, unverifiable kind of miasma of, like, a narrative that is not rooted in reality. There's no. It's not an actual. Like, you can't put it to a fact. Right. There's no fact that's true or false. It is a kind of manufactured worldview to which he's kind of fitting together different pieces of fact or half fact or lies from time to time. That's, like, unverifiable, but it's the cockiness of it. And it is interesting because it is something that Rubio goes to as well. And I do think there's something about the. Like, it's like the tension between their view of themselves and what they've become. Right. Like, that's where. Like, in the delta between those two things. That's where that tone comes from.

[Tommy Vietor]

Yeah. And it's like the one real solid belief they have is, well, the left is awful.

[Jon Lovett]

Right, Right.

[Tommy Vietor]

And so, like, everything else is justified, because I know that they are all right.

[Jon Lovett]

It's like they've slid down the moral, like, the side of the moral slope, and they've bounced, and they're bouncing against the rocks, and the last tree they can grab onto before they fall down into the shoals is like, that. The left sucks.

[Tommy Vietor]

Well, it looks like we're not getting full transparency when it comes to the. At least the secret grand jury testimony in the Epstein case. A federal judge on Monday, as expected, declined to release the testimony in the trial that led to the indictment of Ghislaine Maxwell. What wasn't expected, though, was the judge's candor in explaining why he declined to release these files, writing in a scathing opinion that the Justice Department's argument that releasing grand jury materials might reveal new information was, quote, demonstrably false, and that, quote, the government's motion for their unsealing was aimed not at transparency, but at diversion. Can't imagine why they'd want a diversion, but maybe it has something to do with stories like this. On Friday, Epstein's longtime butler, who worked for the sex trafficker for 18 years in his Paris home, told the Telegraph that following the 2016 election, Epstein told him Trump offered the sex trafficker a job in his new administration. So, you know, that's just. That's just one butler. Who knows? That's just one longtime butler. What job do you think Jeffrey Epstein would have done in the White House?

[Jon Lovett]

I mean, you know, honestly. Honestly, like, like it's a name that could have been floated for Secretary of Treasury at the time. You could have seen him doing that.

[Tommy Vietor]

Yeah. Export Import Bank, Commerce, something.

[Jon Lovett]

Yeah.

[Tommy Vietor]

I don't want. No, there's a lot of jobs that would be very bad.

[Jon Lovett]

Very bad. Just to be clear. Bad.

[Tommy Vietor]

Here's the bigger point. No grand jury transcripts, no transcripts yet of Todd Blanche's interview with Ghislaine Maxwell that we were told that they were considering releasing to try to tamp some of this down. We're not getting those. Even though we were also told, by the way, that Maxwell told Blanche everything was good with Trump. I never saw any misbehavior by Trump in my time. And of course, she's very credible and, you know, would never lie. And no release so far of all the files that are out that we know are there with Trump's name redacted that he knows about because Pam Bondi told him about. So is the COVID up succeeding here?

[Jon Lovett]

I don't. I mean, it is ongoing. I guess it succeeds until it fails. I suppose every secret, until you reveal a secret, you're keeping it. Yeah. The Blanche interview is the one that's sort of confusing, right? Like, what if, as we've heard from, I think it was via ABC News, that Maxwell said she never saw Trump do anything wrong, what is keeping them from releasing them? What is in the first of all, what were those interviews about? What did they ask about? What names are in there? What are they concerned about? If they release it, what information do they not want in the public? Otherwise I think we'd already have it. I have no fucking idea. Because who knows what the context of the conversation was about? What was the ins and outs? Are there parts of it they want to redact either for reasons they will claim is for privacy or because there are parts of the conversation that would be embarrassing to the administration? We just don't Know now, one part of this, like, look, we're all conspiracy theorists now, fine. But a lot of the material that the Justice Department is sitting on is about terrible crimes against kids, Right. That they can't release and shouldn't release. And so, like, that should never be released. Right. We do not need to publicize these, like, the aspects of these crimes that would be victimizing again to people that were hurt by Epstein, Maxwell and others. Fine, Agreed. But it is shocking that given the fervor around releasing something, given the attention that has gotten, given the fact that they promised already that they haven't figured out how to get some new information out there. I mean, all Bondi was able to release was stuff that was basically already public, that was always in binder phase one. When she put out binder phase one, in her mind, there must have been a. Like, I don't know how far ahead it got. But you don't put out phase one without at least having conceived of what phase two was meant to be.

[Tommy Vietor]

One would think. But, you know, who knows?

[Jon Lovett]

So it is. It is strange. But they can't. They're not getting away with it because there's too many other parts of this to come. There's gonna be congressional investigations. There's, by the way, like, you know, more and more like that Butler, who we hadn't heard from before. There's more reporting coming out of the Times. There's just a lot of attention on this. And by the way, like, the influencers on the right or the, like, apolitical kind of more conspiratorial influencers that were talking about this forever. They're still talking about it.

[Tommy Vietor]

Yeah.

[Jon Lovett]

Like, there was a Rogan the other day was saying, like, do they think we're babies? Like, do they think we're children? Because they're trying to make us look past this so they can't just make it go away.

[Tommy Vietor]

One of the, One of the proposals that CNN reported on was maybe Todd Blanche should sit down with Joe Rogan. Which I'm like, that doesn't seem like a good idea if you're the Trump White House. I mean, I'd like to hear that.

[Jon Lovett]

No, for sure.

[Tommy Vietor]

I bet they've. But they shot that one down. I bet that's not a. I think they are just waiting out everyone's attention span, which you don't have to wait long in this country. And yes, Congress is going to come back to this when they come back from. From break, but from recess, whatever you fucking call it. But I don't know, you Know, at one point Trump can make a call to James Comer or Jim Jordan or whoever the fuck it is and be like, hey, let's not, let's not keep pushing on this. You know, like, and they've got other things to think about and they don't, they don't like the political, you know, discomfort around this. So I don't, like, I am more pessimistic than I was about the staying power on this just because, you know, it's, it's dragged on over a month and they control the federal government with an iron fist and they're gonna be able to bury what they wanna bury.

[Jon Lovett]

Yeah, we'll see. Well, they, look, Mike Johnson sent Congress home early in July rather than deal with a vote. But that doesn't mean the vote is incoming. I mean, Ro Khanna doesn't care what Trump says about this and Thomas Massie doesn't care what Donald Trump says about this. So that means the issue isn't dead. But yeah, like even listening to Vance in that interview saying like, I see. Have no problem with James Comer looking into Democrats. So then all of a sudden it becomes the, that's what. Yeah, it becomes a hammer. You know, they're gonna, let's get Bill and Hillary there, let's get them all in there, let's get Bill Gates up in here, let's get all these people here and try to make fools of them. And then all of a sudden they want to make that, they want to make some Democrats feel squeamish about it.

[Tommy Vietor]

Well, J.D. vance and Maria Bartiromo, then they went down the well worn pivot from Epstein to Obama. And so JD Vance double down on Tulsi Gabbard's attempts to blame Obama officials for the investigation about Russia's interference in the 2016 election. Let's listen.

[JD Vance]

Look, of course you've got to have the law follow the facts here. You don't just indict people to indict people. You indict people because they broke the law. But if you look at what Tulsi and Cash Patel have revealed in the last couple of weeks, I don't know how anybody can look at that and say that there wasn't aggressive violations of the law. What they basically did is they defrauded the American people in order to take Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign talking points and turn them into intelligence by defrauding the American people, defrauding the intelligence agencies, lying about what the intel said they would take something that supported a Hillary Clinton campaign talking point and they would overemphasize it and exaggerate it. They took anything that actually contradicted that, that narrative and they buried it deep. And through that, they actually laundered Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign talking points through the American intelligence services. That's a violation of the people's trust. That's a violation of what our intelligence services should be doing. And I absolutely think they broke the law. You're going to see a lot of people get indicted for that.

[Jon Lovett]

That is.

[Tommy Vietor]

I. I don't know if you were as deeply triggered by that answer as I was. I started tweeting about it last night because I was like, I cannot. I know that there's been a lot of lies. JD Vance has said a lot of bad things. He's pissed me off like that to me, because, like, he, the guy fucking went to Yale Law. He's got a law degree. There is no way that he believes what he just said.

[Jon Lovett]

There.

[Tommy Vietor]

There's no way he believes that unless he just has not looked at any of the details of anything, which I also don't really buy.

[Jon Lovett]

So, yeah, so you see him struggling, first of all, in how to tell this story, right? Because just very, like, what is he talking about? It's impossible to know if you don't know the ins and outs of the story. It's impossible to even understand what he's talking about. But just as quickly as possible, the gist of it is Tulsi Gabbard put out a dumb report that is not true. Basically evidence in the report that says, after Donald Trump wins the election, Barack Obama and the deep state colluded to sully that victory by telling the country and the world that Russia interfered in our election to help Donald Trump win, but did not actually mess with any vote totals. And that.

[Tommy Vietor]

And also did not allege any collusion in that intelligence assessment between Trump and Putin.

[Jon Lovett]

And so none. And so after the election, Donald Trump has won Barack Obama, not for his own benefit, not for shits and giggles, but to warn the world about what has happened, that, hey, Russia is interfering in our elections in these ways. It may happen in your country, too. It could happen here. Again, we all need to step up how we respond to this, because this is a legitimate threat that is then ratified not just by Democrats and intelligence officials, but by Republicans, including the committee led by Marco Rubio, the Intelligence Committee saying that the conclusions are fair and fairly reached. That is what this is about. And now J.D. vance is somehow claiming that this, that the release of this information, which was based on an assessment by the intelligence community that the Republicans said was fairly reached is both an attempt by the intelligence to defraud the country, but also to put Hillary Clinton to defend. I don't even understand what he's trying to say that it's then laundering into the intelligence community.

[Tommy Vietor]

It's, it's, it's such fucking nonsense that he obviously like to defraud. To defraud the American people of what? What are we defrauding them of? They went to the, they went to the, went to the polls, first of all, not knowing that there was an FBI investigation of Trump's campaign, just the one of Hillary, because guess what? The Obama administration made damn sure that that didn't leak out because they were worried that it could be taken politically. So voters went to the polls not knowing there was an investigation into the. Turns out there were plenty of contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia. And they also went to the polls already knowing, by the way, that Russia had hacked the dnc, which, by the way, this Trump administration, Tulsi Gabbard, all the rest of them admit that Russia did interfere. What they're pissed about is that the intel said that they interfered with, with the, with the hope of helping Trump, which in 2018, Putin said, yeah, I wanted Trump to win. He just admitted it. So it's like, what are we talking about?

[Jon Lovett]

But then, okay, all right, let's say, let's say, let's just say, you know what, in some ways, that was exaggerated. It wasn't. It just simply wasn't. That's not true. Even Vance has to kind of walk his way back to. He says they defrauded the country, he says they exaggerated, and then he has to add on at the end, oh, and absolutely, I believe they broke the law, Never says how, never says why.

[Tommy Vietor]

And I believe indictments are coming, which is also, by the way, look, you're the Vice President, United States, and you are predicting indictments.

[Jon Lovett]

Or do you know them from your meeting, or do you know them from your meetings that you're not supposed to be having?

[Tommy Vietor]

Un. Fucking believable. It is wild. I'm like, how can you do like, you, you know the law, you know, you are familiar with the Durham investigation, no doubt you are familiar with your buddy Marco's investigation, which contradicts everything. You're right.

[Jon Lovett]

Now also, another tell on this is Bartiromo, after that says, and was there an impact? Basically, she's basically saying, but even she is sort of like, but this was after he won and became president. So what are you talking about. And so then he has to kind of make some sort of claims that. Oh absolutely, like that the presidency was harmed because of the Russia hoax. Because he had to fight two fronts at once. He had to run the country and be dealing with the ways in which the Department of Justice was distracted. It's all just like fundamentally. Right. It's just a kind of trick that they're acting as though this happened before the election. But it didn't. But it didn't. And so they have to claim like, oh, telling us about this after was some terrible crime.

[Tommy Vietor]

He is just deeply dishonest and very comfortable with being deeply dishonest. And it's really. I, I also think part of it is just, you know, you watch these interviews and I think people like J.D. vance are like, oh, this must be cool for Trump. Like he spent all these years just only doing these interviews with friendly outlets and he never has to get challenged. And if JD Van sat down with like any other, any real journalist for five minutes, the whole thing would fucking come apart. Marco Rubio just did some, some, another friendly interview about whatever. No one asked Marco Rubio in that interview cuz it was some MAGA person. No one asked him about his committee's report on this because Marco Rubio couldn't answer that question either. These people, if they got in front of a journalist for five fucking minutes, the whole thing would fall apart. But they're just, they've become lazy even in their lying because they don't, you know, they don't have to worry about it.

[Jon Lovett]

Yeah, but like it's, it's with Vance too, there's such a, it is the like kind of, that like kind of self righteous and smug tone because does he believe he's lying?

[Tommy Vietor]

Yeah. Oh for sure. He has to. He has to. And there's some things I am willing to believe that someone's like, oh, I didn't even know I was lying because they're so like, you know, they've gone down the rabbit hole. But this one you even. And again, it's a complicated story, but you don't have to go too far down the rabbit hole to know that what he said was bullshit.

[Jon Lovett]

Right. I just, I like.

[Tommy Vietor]

And he was around for all of this. He was a political junkie for all this.

[Jon Lovett]

There's something about like Vance specifically. Maybe it's just the fact that he's younger than us that's part of it. Or that he is like a kind of like someone who had like written this book that had like gotten him all this credit and all the rest. Yeah, it's that there's something about him where, like, I. Look, I remember when I went to college and, like, I went to, for some reason, a rural sports college. I don't know why I made that choice, but I remember feeling like, oh, I gotta learn the language of this place a little bit. Like, I don't fit in here. I don't know how to do this. I got to, like, learn the language of how to fit in with a certain kind of person that went to private school. Like, there's a lot of different kinds of people. Williams. But, like, you know, like the kind of. Like a. Kind of a fancier person than I grew up with. Like, the kind of. There's a breeziness to it. Like, a way people that grew up around wealth, with wealth, whatever, and, like, you learn that. And I see in Vance somebody that, like, is a student of people and, like, learn the language of success, right? Like, comes from this rural place that comes from a totally different environment, and then kind of learns the language of a place like Yale and becomes really good at it. And then I see him do this with Trump again, and I see him take on this Persona so fully as someone who's so good at figuring out how to fit in with a group of people, and I just can't tell how much of, like, you know, you wear the mask. The mask wears you. Like, how much of it has. How much of the. How much of it has seeped in and how much of it is he just performing and he's going to be the best boy in the world? I don't know. I don't know.

[Tommy Vietor]

Yeah, I mean, it's. Either way, it's pretty gross. Yeah. Okay. When we get back from the break, you'll hear Lovett's conversation with the New Yorker's David Kirkpatrick about his incredible investigation into Trump's grift. But two quick things before we get to that big news. Cricket subscription content is now available on Substack.

[Jon Lovett]

We're coming to Substack.

[Tommy Vietor]

That's right. If you're already a friend of the pod, don't worry. This won't change anything for you. But if you love using Substack and preferred the experience there, you can now find us there, too. When you subscribe on Substack, you'll unlock ad free episodes of your favorite crooked shows, plus exclusive content like Polar Coaster. As you know, subscribing on whatever platform works best for you is the best way to support what we do here now. You've got one more way to do that. Visit crooked.com friends to learn more. Also, come see Love or Leave It Live on Stage this Thursday, August 14th at Dynasty Typewriter.

[Jon Lovett]

We have a great show this week. We have Ron Funches. We have Tom Papa. In the coming weeks. We got some amazing guests lined up. Here's the thing here in Los Angeles. It's four year consideration season, right? That's when all the actors are out there trying to get their Emmys and all the performers are out there kind of and the directors and the writers are trying to kind of get attention for their incredible turnout to their PR firms.

[Tommy Vietor]

And they're like, why did you put me on this podcast?

[Jon Lovett]

I'm telling you. I'm telling you the yeses we get during this time of year. Fantastic.

[Tommy Vietor]

Grab tickets now. Cricket.com events.

[Jon Lovett]

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[Jon Lovett]

Sure, fine. We're working on a special offer for our audience. Receive 30% off your first subscription order go to armor.com crooked or enter crooked to get 30% off your first subscription order. That's a R M R A dot com crooked cash flow crunch On Deck small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds up to $100,000 right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at on deck.com funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes. Your business loan may be issued by On Deck or Celtic Bank. On Deck does not lend to North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval. Crypto real estate deals, watches, club memberships, corporate shakedowns. Trump's corruption is brazen. It's staggering. But in a story out today, the New Yorker's David Kirkpatrick has done what no one has been able to do. Count it up to tell us just how much Trump has profited from the presidency. Here to walk us through the most brazen examples is David Kirkpatrick. Thank you for being here.

[Pam Bondi]

It's my pleasure.

[Jon Lovett]

All right, welcome to the pod. Let's start with Mar A Lago. You estimate that Trump has made $125 million from how he has exploited the club. What changed since he from before he was president and even in the years since his first term?

[Pam Bondi]

Well, first, I should say, I'm not using the word corruption here. When he took office in 2017, President Trump, through his lawyer at a press conference, promised that he would not do anything that could even be perceived as exploiting the presidency. In fact, that was his justification for this arrangement, where instead of selling or getting rid of his business empire, he gave it to his sons temporarily while he was in office. And what they said at the time was if someone else owned our brand name, that person might crassly exploit the name and demean the presidency. You can trust us not to do that. So I'm not saying that any one of these things is a quid pro quo, but he's exploiting the presidency for money. Now, in terms of Mar A Lago, what we're talking about there, that's the one place where in 2016, in testimony that Trump was involved in, he said that the campaign had made that the best year ever for Mar? A Lago, according to the manager there. And if you look at it, you can look at his financial disclosure forms and see the revenue go up through the roof, while the costs, say mostly the same. During his Years, you know, in the White House, preparing to come back. And, and, and then back at the White House, because that's, that's a place where he's got a club selling access to himself in his circle.

[Jon Lovett]

And I hear you on the distinction about profiting off the White House and whether there's any corrupt outcome of that. We can leave that to other. I, I. You are, you are cataloging the profiteering.

[Pam Bondi]

I'm cataloging the profiteering.

[Jon Lovett]

Another example is in hospitality. $105 million from deals in Saudi Arabia, another $40 million, you're estimating, from a deal in Vietnam. What are those deals, and why are they so interested in doing them with Trump and his family?

[Pam Bondi]

Well, they got two different baskets. You know, Vietnam, which is a more isolated situation, obviously, that's a country which is. Its future hinges on US Trade policy like nobody else. Right. High tariffs on China mean more business for Vietnam. High tariffs on Vietnam, where a third of their economy depends on exports to the US Would be a disaster. So, as Trump's on his way back in office, the head of the Vietnamese Communist Party flies to New York and while here oversees a new deal for a giant golf resort. We're talking about a facility three times the size of Central Park. My estimate for their profits there is probably pretty low. In the first three months after the deal was announced, he said in his financial disclosure forms that he'd received $5 million from that venture. So I'm just guessing that the next 10 years are going to be at least as much per year as that was, over a matter of months. That's probably quite conservative. On the other side, these Saudi deals around the Gulf, beginning in late 2022, when Trump had declared his candidacy and was the presumptive Republican nominee, this Saudi company began doing a series of five mega hotel or condo deals, golf resort deals around the Gulf with the Trump Organization, which really, there's no way to explain that without his political career. It's just, it's not something that would have happened to the Trump Organization. And I extrapolated from some of their previous hotels and golf courses and other ventures to try to estimate what those would be worth.

[Jon Lovett]

And I put them together because they are kind of at the border between how Trump used to make money and how he's now making money, which is something that you explore in the piece, that, that a lot of the way in which Trump had made money up to and through the Apprentice was by licensing his name. Right. Putting his name on stuff that other people ran. And it was kind of Pure profit. But in the last couple of years, as he's figured out ways of making money off of being president, he's ventured into new and uncharted territory for his businesses. And of course, there's no better example of that than crypto. You estimate that they've made $2.37 billion through these various cryptocurrency schemes. There are so many different ones, and they actually intersect with some of these other businesses as well. But can you just talk about how Trump went, from someone who was, as you described in the piece, quite skeptical of crypto, described it semi jokingly as a scam, or that it looks like a scam to something of a true believer, at least in terms of his policies, you know.

[Pam Bondi]

So the family has offered two different stories about that. Eric Trump, who's the face of the business now, talks about it a lot, and he always tells the story like this after. Well, he doesn't tell it quite like this. What he says is, we were blackballed by the big banks. What he leaves out is they were blackballed by the big banks after the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. So he says, we were blackballed by the big banks, and it was political bias against our political philosophy. And that led us to love crypto as an alternative to the big banks and even as a kind of means of revenge against the big banks. Trump doesn't tell the story that way. He's a little vaguer about it. It's clear from his statements that it wasn't until 2024, during the campaign, when big crypto donors were donating to him in crypto, that he started to get on board. And around that time, first of all, they started accepting donations in crypto. An old friend named Bill Zanker, who people might know from the Learning Annex, his previous business, got him into selling these NFTs, which are kind of digital cartoons of Donald Trump. And when he did that, he started getting paid in crypto. So from that point on, he's got an incentive to try to talk it up. And that's around the time when Donald Trump's interest in crypto begins to take off.

[Jon Lovett]

So you are documenting the money, but throughout you are noting that there are obvious questions of conflicts of interest, of whether or not this has meant there has. There has been undue influence from people that have invested with Trump or helped Trump put together these kinds of crypto businesses. Can you talk about Justin's son, how he went from being somebody under investigation to somebody who was a Guest of honor at Mar A Lago.

[Pam Bondi]

Justin sun is a really interesting case, Right? If you're hunting for a quid pro quo, Justin sun is as close as you can get. So the secret of events is the Trump family sets up a company called World Liberty Financial, which is going to be a crypto company. They start raising money for that in mid 2024, before the election. Not much interest. Then Trump wins. After Trump wins, Justin's son makes two investments that come to a total of, I think, $75 million. And that $75 million for other people interested in crypto is kind of a green light. And they all pile in. And around Inauguration Day, a ton comes in. And shortly after inauguration, they've raised $550 million. And what happens when, when Trump becomes president, the SEC drops its charges against Justin sun for a variety of infractions. Evading money laundering laws, paying celebrities to hype his crypto. You know, selling crypto to Americans when he should have been barred from doing so because they're not registered securities. All of this is going away. They don't drop it. They, they pause those charges to negotiate a resolution. Now, that said, the truth is, you know, the Trump administration dropped everybody's charges, right? The SEC just stopped pressing charges against crypto. So you can't say it's, you know, a handshake deal and because of the 75 million he got off. But the sequence of events there is certainly provocative.

[Jon Lovett]

And I should correct myself, you know, my bias. It wasn't Mar A Lago. That dinner was at the Virginia in Sterling, Virginia, at a different Trump Club. I got the club wrong. Now, there's a connection here to Trump Media. I didn't know this, and I was confused by it. So there's a complicated transaction that leads to Trump Media and True Social and the ownership structure. But I was hoping you could explain this part of it. Last year, Trump media lost $400 million in each of the past four quarters. It brought in about a million dollars or less in revenue per year. Reporting there is no plan for Truth Social to be profitable or how it would be turned into a sustainable business. And yet Truth Social is sitting on a vast, vast sum of liquid assets. I believe the number was $3.1 billion in liquid assets, which is both cash and cryptocurrency. How does a money losing venture that only has about a million dollars in revenue per quarter end up sitting on billions and billions of dollars?

[Pam Bondi]

Yeah, I almost had to pinch myself when I figure that out. I mean, it's, it's a crazy amount of money. In short, here's the deal. So Truth Social is not really a business. It's not, you know, we don't know. There's no convincing plan for it to make money. Trump Media Technology Group, right. The parent company that owns Truth Social, is basically a meme stock. Right. It goes up and down without any regard to fundamentals based only on what people think about Donald Trump. So Devin Nunes, the former congressman who runs that company now, had the bright idea to basically sell shares at their high meme stock inflated price and to take that money and pile up some cash and then buy bitcoin. So they've done a few transactions recently. In July, they did a big one where they sold shares to 50 big investors. Shares mostly some, you know, convertible debt that could be converted into shares at this high meme stock price. Those investors can then sell that out to retail investors and they take the money and they buy bitcoin. So they've taken this crazy, irrationally priced stock that mostly reflects, you know, Trump supporters opinions of Trump, and they've swapped that for an actual liquid asset, cash and bitcoin. Now you might say, well, Kirkpatrick, how can you call this $3.1 billion? That's just the price of bitcoin. Bitcoin today, it could fall tomorrow. Be that as it may, there is an actual market for bitcoin. If you wanted to turn around and sell it tomorrow, you could sell it. You know, when they were out of the market in July buying bitcoin, they picked up, you know, 2.4, $2.3 billion of Bitcoin and it didn't really move the price. So that's a liquid market.

[Jon Lovett]

Yeah. And this is a group of people uniquely positioned to affect the price of both their own stock in their company and the cryptocurrency market more broadly. We've seen that. We've seen they have the ability to, to, to move these markets. I mean, you, you talk about an example that was. With a bit more detail, but, but that was known at the time, which is that there were these transactions around the Melania meme coin right before it launched. Right. Like there is just so many opportunities here that wouldn't be cataloged exactly in your accounting where there's opportunity for profit just in the ability to kind of play with the moving prices.

[Pam Bondi]

Yeah, Meme coins are, you know, they're not a security. They don't even pretend to be a security. There's no police, there's no ex, no reasonable expectation of fairness or Transparency. You know, there's no such thing as insider trading in a meme coin because there's not a, there's no pretense of fairness. I mean, you can almost, you know, you, you get what you pay for. It's true. In one of his, in one of the crypto conferences that I watched, Donald Trump Jr. Actually said that for crypto enthusiasts, the good news now is that the people who are making the rules are themselves invested in crypto. You know, in the American system. It's acknowledged that they're going to be elected officials who have businesses on the side. You know, the founders were farmers. And so we require disclosure. So in fairness to Donald Trump, he's not lying about it. I mean, it's true. His family's in crypto now.

[Jon Lovett]

So there are a bunch of other parts that you're looking at here. You have, you go into Jared Kushner, Trump's son in law's business interests with the Saudis and the raising of billions of dollars in private equity. But you also talk about Don Jr. S company that he's a part of called 1789 Capital. There's something that's confusing and you about all of this, which is they are seemingly frantic in trying to find ways to make money off of the presidency. It's not just true social and Trump media and the way it's trying to make money and amass a crypto fortune. It's not just the crypto investments separately, it's not just the Jared deal with the Saudis, it's not just the other kind of real estate deals that are bringing in north of $150 million. There's also this sort of ticky tax stuff going out and trying to get 500 grand for a social club, selling hats to compete with his own campaign. Look, how do you explain the fact that there are, there are schemes that are, there are nine figure schemes, eight figure schemes, seven figure schemes, and even six figure schemes. Like how do you explain the willingness to fight for a hat sale from their users, their supporters, while at the same time shooting for the moon, you know, with these billion dollar crypto moves.

[Pam Bondi]

I'm as puzzled as you are.

[Jon Lovett]

Right.

[Pam Bondi]

I mean, Donald Trump is the first to tell you that he and his family are very, very rich. And I would think that if my father was president for four years, I would take that as a good time to refrain from making money in ways that would embarrass him. And, you know, licensing their name for a phone company that's gonna sell, you know, Trump Cell Phone subscriptions. I do find it puzzling. And I, you know, I went into this thinking, you know what? The people who really don't like Trump are gonna be disappointed in me because they imagine that he's stealing, actually stealing vast sums, which is definitely not happening. But by the end, I had to say to myself, like, $3.4 billion and so fast, you know, it's one thing after another. It's, they're really not slowing down. And I don't know why it is that they seem so almost desperate for money. If we go back to what you were saying before, in the arc of things, Trump was a medium successful, but very high profile builder. He was a great reality TV star, right? And when he was a great reality TV star, that's when he got into the licensing business. And for a while he was able to sell just the right to use his name to. Right, to use his name to sell a steak or a piece of pizza or sheets or something, or the right to use his name on a hotel, you know, abroad or a golf course. As the Apprentice ratings started to come down, that whole apparatus did too, in a way. He needed a new show, right? He needed something else to keep his name in the public eye, to keep that machine running. And that's where the presidency came in. Why now? Why in the second term? There's such a greater desperation to cash in on that than in the first. It's very speculative. You do wonder about the enormous legal verdicts that he faces. 88 million that he owes E. Jean Carroll, if that's not overturned on appeal, 500 million he owes new York State because of the fraud case there, if that's not overturned on appeal. As much as they talk about their money, that's a pretty big hole for the Trumps. So it might be. Well, anyway, here I'm speculating, but you get the idea.

[Jon Lovett]

Yeah. You talk about how he had to sell some of his holdings at a certain point and that he may not have been, that he may have been in a pretty tough position coming into this second term, but that still doesn't look. The rapaciousness is what it is. But it is strange. The watches, the sneakers, the kind of hats that siphon from the campaign, the smaller moves to take advantage of his biggest supporters, while at the same time these sort of huge real estate transactions that could be worth 10, 100 times anything that they could get from moving a bunch of hats around, it seems they maybe just the thrill of, the thrill of the game.

[Pam Bondi]

Well, you know, a more charitable way to Put that is, you know, if they, if he and his family see themselves as business people, they're going to stay in business. And that means, you know, doing the deal to license the Trump Bible, the Trump guitar and so forth, the Trump NFTs.

[Jon Lovett]

At the end of this reporting, like, what was your sort of takeaway from how quickly we became a nerd to this staggering amount of profiteering? You know the joke, a few years ago, they made Jimmy Carter sell his peanut farm. You make reference to the 400,000 some odd dollar donation to the Clinton library over that became a controversy around the Mark Rich pardon. And yet now we have just brazen and open profiteering conflicts of interest left and right. And it signs it's only speeding up. And it's become a kind of part of our daily understanding of how Trump works, even as we think about the fact that he's about to go meet with Putin and Zelensky and his intersecting personal interests there. Like, what did you take away from all this once you got to that number of 3.4 billion?

[Pam Bondi]

You know, one of my old bosses used to say, you know, a billion here, a billion there, sooner or later you're talking about real money. And I think to a certain extent that just the number of digits that we're talking about kind of goes over people's heads. And the other thing about Trump is, and this is maybe his genius, as I say, he's not hiding any of this. He holds his head high, he pursues all these money making ventures like it's something that he's proud of, which I think leads people to believe there's nothing wrong with that. How people are going to feel about that in the long term, though, I think remains to be seen. And one reason I thought it was worthwhile to do all of this math is to try to make it a little bit more concrete and tangible. You know, maybe you're right. Maybe it turns out we were all wrong for decades to think that Americans did not like profiteering off the presidency. Maybe Americans, in fact, don't care about that. But it might also be that people just didn't understand it concretely enough. And over time, they will. So I'd say the jury is still.

[Jon Lovett]

Out on that last question. What was the hardest number to figure out? Like, what was a part of this where figuring out exactly how much they were making was actually pretty difficult?

[Pam Bondi]

Well, in a lot of these things I'm extrapolating, right? A lot of the, where I'm trying to value how much they're going to get from their. Their five new deals in the Persian Gulf or their new deal in Vietnam, I've got to go and look at an existing property. I've got to figure out what they've declared in terms of revenue, what the profit margin is on that, and then multiply it across the new venture. So that's complicated. And I'm not saying that's science. You know, if they want to come forward and tell me, no, no, David, here actually is what we're genuinely going to make. I would welcome that, but they're not going to do that. The one that was the toughest, honestly, is Vietnam. This vast complex, 54 holes of golf, a hotel, residences, all in one big area, three times the size of Central Park. In an economy where the golf industry is growing really fast, the whole economy is growing really fast. Very hard to extrapolate. I came up with an estimate of $50 million over 10 years. That's almost certainly low. But I just. That one's a jump ball. That's the hardest one to come up with.

[Jon Lovett]

Plus, we'd like, you know, there's the minibar money. That's hard to figure out in advance. You know, they know what they're stocking with.

[Pam Bondi]

Exactly. And the other one, the Trump Media and Technology Group money that we talked about before, I just couldn't believe it, you know, when I realized that they'd sold this overvalued Meme coin stock and then bought Bitcoin and hoarded cash. I just. It's an incredible kind of Alchemy to have $3.1 billion in liquid assets on their books when their business is failing.

[Jon Lovett]

Right. And a business that can only exist because he is president and using it to put out statements and trying to get his people to use it. Coins that could only, you know, profit. Coins that could only exist because his name is attached to them. A market that, because he is the President, has great influence over. It really is like the intersection of all these different ways in which in the second term, Trump has realized he was unfettered and able to kind of. Once he threw off the shackles of expectation and shame and previous rules and norms, and he was free to do all of these different things. In the first term, people were pretty upset about people staying at Trump Properties and the profiteering off of Trump Properties, And I was surprised to learn that by your reporting, it turns out they might have been losing as much money from people who didn't want to stay at a Trump Hotel as they were gaining from people who were trying to curry favor and that we were just so. We were focused on that. We had absolutely no idea what was to come.

[Pam Bondi]

Yeah, I think that's right. In retrospect, that looks quite overblown. Now, some of my critics from left will say, well, Kirkpatrick, don't be crazy. All those people, Rudy Giuliani buying his $30 martinis or whatever, that was helping Trump. I mean, even if it was just reducing his losses, that still counts. But if we're gonna be fair, he did. Anybody in the hotel business in Washington, anybody who's familiar with the performance of that hotel will tell you it's done better as a Wall of Astoria under Biden than it did as a Trump hotel under Trump. And it's just not only indisputable, but it's also sort of intuitive. If you're a foreign leader from, say, a European country who doesn't want to get caught up in an influence scandal, you're not going to stay there. Even though the location is superb as a Waldorf, it's a great place for a British prime minister to stay. But would a British prime minister have stayed there when it was the Trump Hotel and Trump was downstairs at the bar with Rudy Giuliani? No. No way.

[Jon Lovett]

Yeah, you gotta, you know, it was attracting an unsavory element. David Kirkpatrick, thank you so much. The story is out today, carefully cataloging and estimating just the vast sums of money Donald Trump has made off the presidency. Thanks for being here.

[Pam Bondi]

My pleasure.

[Tommy Vietor]

That's our show for today. Thanks to David Kirkpatrick for coming on. Dan and I will be back with a new show on Friday. Talk to everyone then. If you want to listen to Pod Save America ad free or get access to our subscriber discord and exclusive podcasts, consider joining our Friends of the pod [e-mail] friends or subscribe on Apple Podcasts directly from the Pod Save America feed. Also, please consider leaving us a review to help boost this episode and everything we do here at Crooked. Pod Save America is a crooked media production. Our producers are David Toledo, Emma Ilick, Frank and Saul Rubin. Our associate producer is Farah Safari. Austin Fisher is our senior producer. Reed Churlin is our executive editor. Adrian Hill is our head of news and politics. The show is mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Jordan Kantor is our sound engineer with audio support from Kyle Seglin and Charlotte Landis. Matt de Groat is our head of production. Naomi Sengel is our executive assistant. Thanks to our digital team. Elijah Cohn, Hayley Jones, Ben Hefcoat, Mia Kelman, Kiril Pelaviev, David Toles and Ryan Young. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America east.

[Jon Lovett]

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