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- [00:00]
Tommy Vietor
Pod Save the World is brought to you by Acorns. I know from personal experience that investing can feel intimidating. You feel like you don't know what you're doing, like you don't have enough money, like you don't have enough time to focus on it. But once you start doing it, you will realize that all you have to do is put away a little bit of money on a consistent basis and it will grow in the long term and you'll be very, very happy with yourself. So many of us only focus on where our money is today. Acorns is the financial wellness app that cares about where your money is going tomorrow. Acorns is a smart way to give your money a chance to grow. Acorns is easy. You can sign up in minutes and start automatically investing your spare money even if all you have is spare change. Acorns grows with you whether you're just starting out or thinking about settling down. Acorns supports your big and small goals across every life stage. The Acorns potential screen shows you the power of compounding and how your money could grow over time. Plus, you can quickly adjust how much you're investing every day, week or month to make sure you're building towards your goals. Acorns is all in one. No more finance apps cluttering up your phone with Acorns. You can invest, save and give your money a chance to grow in one trusted place. Sign up now and Acorns will boost your new account with a $5 bonus. Investment join the over 14 million all time customers who have already saved and invested over $27 billion with Acorns. Head to acorns.com world or download the Acorns app to get started. Paid on client endorsement Compensation provides incentive to positively promote Acorns tier 2 compensation provided potential subject to various factors such as customers accounts, age and investment settings does not include Acorns fees. Results do not predict or represent the performance of any Acorns portfol investment. Results will vary. Investing involves risk. Acorns Advisors LLC and SEC Registered Investment Advisor view important disclosures acorns.com world if.
- [01:31]
Yusra El Bagir
Journalism is the first draft of history, what happens if that draft is flawed? In 1999, four Russian apartment buildings were bombed, hundreds killed. But even now we still don't know for sure who did it. It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories. I'm Helena Merriman and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story. What did they miss? The first time the History Bureau Putin and the apartment bombs. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [02:17]
Tommy Vietor
Welcome back to Pod Save the World. I'm Tommy Vitor.
- [02:19]
Ben Rhodes
I'm Ben Rhodes.
- [02:20]
Tommy Vietor
Ben, we have a five alarm Pod Save the world. Fired. You see that? Trump has threatened to slap a 200% tariff on all French wine. I know.
- [02:28]
Ben Rhodes
There goes the Bordeaux.
- [02:29]
Tommy Vietor
I thought of you.
- [02:30]
Ben Rhodes
I know it's wither. The Bordeaux could finally make me keep my New Year's resolution to drink less.
- [02:35]
Tommy Vietor
Drink more beer, drink more bourbon. Speaking of beer, I just got back from London. What a great city.
- [02:40]
Ben Rhodes
It's fantastic.
- [02:41]
Tommy Vietor
Pop culture is so fun. Just like sitting outside. It's fucking cold as hell. People are ripping heaters sitting outside. Actually less smoking than I expected to see in London.
- [02:50]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah, it's down a little bit, but the drinking is still robust.
- [02:53]
Tommy Vietor
Seemed up.
- [02:53]
Ben Rhodes
So is the calorie count at this pub. Sunday roasts. Those are fantastic. Nothing like tucking into like a giant pie of meat.
- [03:01]
Tommy Vietor
Oh yeah, I had a pie with like mashed and something else that I couldn't even some egg like deep fried in a ball of meat or something like that. It was really good. Although I did get there. I turned on BBC News cause I was like, I don't know, let's see what's on tv. Nigel Farage, right in my grill with what's the name? Robert Jenrick, who just defected to the reform side.
- [03:19]
Ben Rhodes
Coming in hot.
- [03:21]
Tommy Vietor
It was that guy. Come on. Although it was fun watching their press like actually kind of like take the piss out of them and ask like super shitty questions and kind of make fun of them a bit. I was like, where's that guys US press corps?
- [03:34]
Ben Rhodes
There's no like politico playbook, you know, Nigel, making things interesting.
- [03:38]
Tommy Vietor
Well, there's no like Lindell TV in the room.
- [03:42]
Ben Rhodes
Give it a minute. Maybe they'll get a UK correspondent for.
- [03:45]
Tommy Vietor
Yeah, yeah, I guess there are a bunch of Murdoch rags in the room, but whatever. We got a lot to cover today, Ben. We're going to start with Greenland, which is the dumbest and yet potentially the most consequential international crisis in, I don't know, decades. Then we're going to talk about why Donald Trump told millions of Iranian protesters that he would rescue them and to go into the streets and to take over the government and then did nothing when thousands of them were massacred. We'll help you guys understand the new board of Peace. We'll help you fill out your applications if you want to apply. Just $1 billion. And I think you know, the Common app. They probably accept that. And then we're going to explain some major developments about governance and the future of Syria, why Elon Musk's Grok AI tool has been banned in a number of countries. And then finally, we are once again going to put our fate in the hands of our producer, Michael, who is going to show us a video that we have not seen and he has seen in Risk cancellation. So that's exciting, as always.
- [04:38]
Ben Rhodes
It's always the best.
- [04:38]
Tommy Vietor
And then, Ben, you did our interview today. Tell us what we're going to hear.
- [04:41]
Ben Rhodes
Yes, I talked to Yusra El Bagir, who's the Sky News Africa correspondent. Yusra has been on before. She just covered the Ugandan elections, Tommy. And we've had Bobby Winon. Both you and I have talked to him. Basically, we had another, you know, not exactly or not even close to a free and fair election. The Internet was shut down. Yusra describes kind of war zone, like conditions on the ground, military out threatening people, you know, the tallies being seemingly manipulated. Yusra was there for it all. So she kind of walks through what it was like to be there for that election, what it says about the direction of politics in Africa, like the rest of the world, where the strong men are kind of just not giving an inch and it seems to be working for them. How do younger ugandans, including the 70% of the country that's under 30, feel about it? What's next for Bobby Wine? And again, what does this mean for the broader African landscape? So very important to cover a story like that. That can get drowned in Greenland. So you should check it out.
- [05:38]
Tommy Vietor
Great. I mean, really important story. Also, you know, Bobby Wine, such a brave guy. For those who don't know. I mean, this guy was like a rock star. And he decided to dedicate his life to politics. And he's met, he's been beaten, he's been locked up in his own house. I think he just had to escape his own house. Right. Because the security forces were coming for him.
- [05:54]
Ben Rhodes
And the kind of Don junior Museveni, the president's kid, is like online tweeting, like threatening to kill him. I mean, it's. It's pretty. It's pretty dark, but it. It's important.
- [06:03]
Tommy Vietor
Yeah, really important story. A great reporter, by the way.
- [06:06]
Ben Rhodes
She's very good. Very. And she has an eye both. She dives right into the story. She's like, there she was. She interviewed Ms. 70. She's interviewed Bobby Wine. She was at the vote tally locations. She gets out and Gets the story.
- [06:20]
Tommy Vietor
Your sister's a total badass too. Yeah, that's great.
- [06:23]
Ben Rhodes
We just sit in a room in LA and talk about.
- [06:27]
Tommy Vietor
So, speaking of which, Ben, next week, for those of you who are part of our Friend of the POD subscriber community, you're going to hear Ben and I answer some questions from the Friend of the POD Discord. So if you want to hear that, or if you want to submit a question, go to crooked.comfriend to join and become a Friend of the Pod. Or if you just want to support Crooked Media, support you like the show. You like progressive independent media. Becoming a subscriber is the single most helpful thing for us because it helps us reduce our dependence on these big tech platforms and connect directly with you. So again, that's crooked.com friends. And of course, you know, we'd love for you to also nurture our dependence on big tech platforms by subscribing to Pod Tape the World on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. And then, Ben, you have a big announcement for us today. Drumroll.
- [07:08]
Ben Rhodes
Big announcement. That was a drum roll for those not watching on YouTube. But after four years of work, my next book, all we say Battle for American a history in 15 speeches, is coming out in May.
- [07:20]
Tommy Vietor
May.
- [07:20]
Ben Rhodes
The pre order links are live. You can hit it on Bookshop, you can hit it on Amazon, but essentially just for this audience, this is where I'm announcing it, because these are my people here. I wanted, after writing a book about the rise of authoritarianism, I sense that the answers to that question that's gnawing on all of us, which is like, how the fuck did we get here? 250 years into this experiment lay in the past. And I spent four years looking at how to tell the story of the argument we've been having. Essentially the argument about what it means to be an American. Who gets to decide that? We've been having that argument since our founding. And So I chose 15 speeches. This is not an anthology, though. This is meant to understand the threat of the arguments we've been having back since our founding. J.D. vance has one answer. We kind of begin the prologue with J.D. vance's answer.
- [08:07]
Tommy Vietor
I was just going to joke. How many Stephen Miller speeches did you choose?
- [08:09]
Ben Rhodes
I don't do a J.D. vance speech, but he says recently he made this speech where he said, america is not a nation founded on a creed.
- [08:17]
Tommy Vietor
Oh, right, yes.
- [08:18]
Ben Rhodes
The Declaration of Independence is not the right way of thinking about what it means to be American. And he basically gives the blood and soil argument. There's a kind of Christian nationalist argument. We are defined by a certain kind of people that founded this country, white Christians. And we're defined kind of by our use of power and American exceptionalism. Right. And counter to that is obviously the story of multiracial democracy and a nation that protects rights and a nation that is. Is enriched by welcoming people from other parts of the world. And those two stories, I kind of want to trace the argument between them throughout our history. I begin at the founding. Benjamin Franklin gave this, like, extraordinary speech at the Constitutional Convention that was about compromise and about how the only way we can start this country is if we agree to disagree about important things. Well, that worked, but it didn't work because the things that we didn't agree about were things like slavery or who gets to be American or what is the basis of how power works in this country. And then I kind of follow those through threads. And each chapter is not just about a speech. It's about the political movement and conditions that could produce that speech. And we have the kind of strain that most of us identify with, like the abolitionist strain. Extraordinary people like Mariah Stewart and Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King, but also then how they interacted with presidents like Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt and ultimately our former boss, Barack Obama. You know, that's one side of this argument.
- [09:41]
Tommy Vietor
And then you end with Biden's NATO press conference after the debate.
- [09:47]
Ben Rhodes
He. I know what you're thinking. He doesn't have a. Well, anyway, no PhD there, but on the other side, pretty hard delivery. I have the Confederate, you know, I've got the white supremacist arguments. I've got, you know, up through some of the kind of xenophobic nature of American populism, up through Ronald Reagan. And unfortunately, the book ends with Donald Trump, but the story doesn't end with Donald Trump. And that's actually kind of the important part here is that we are living in the latest iteration of a competition that we've had since the beginning. And Trump makes a lot of sense if you read him in the context of American history. But so does the possibility that if people stand up and make a case and build a movement and persuade people that we can take this in a different direction. And that's part of what I took away from this, Tommy. It's like, obviously, speeches are kind of the purest form of persuasion. You stand in front of an audience, you try to convince them of something. We stopped doing that for a lot of reasons. And I get into that technology, social media polarization. But Actually, part of what's missing in the movement against Trump is what is our unifying story? What do we think it means to be American? Like, how do we persuade our fellow citizens that we are going down a very, very dark path? So, to me, I really hope people pick up this book. It was fun to write. They're amazing characters, they're amazing stories, they're amazing movements, amazing breadcrumbs that, again, make a lot of sense in terms of today. You look at the past and you're like, oh, that seems familiar. I can draw a direct line from this thing that happened to where we got to today. So I think that this story matters more than ever. It's very. Even though it's a history book, it's very much about this moment. How do we get here and how do we get out of it? If you can pre order this book, do it. It is hugely helpful.
- [11:25]
Tommy Vietor
Get some on the bestseller list.
- [11:27]
Ben Rhodes
Look, if you're going to buy this book when it comes out, God bless you and I thank you. But it's not just the bestsellers. It's like that way, they're like, oh, we better print some more of these or get these to the bookshops. Right? You can help launch this book so that it gets kind of up into the orbit in an attention economy where books have a hard time breaking through. I'm going to be talking about it from time to time. I may even like delve into the substack verse. Oh, yeah. To share thoughts on this. But also, like other things that I think are going on in the country, things maybe we don't get to talk about in this podcast about where the hell America is going and how we got here. So please keep your eye out. You can go today and pre order all we say on all the platforms where you support independent bookstores by doing on bookshop, or if you're a prime addict, you can do it on Amazon however you want to get it. Please consider picking it up.
- [12:15]
Tommy Vietor
Ben's coming for Heather Cox Richardson.
- [12:18]
Ben Rhodes
Yes.
- [12:18]
Tommy Vietor
On this sub, sack jokes aside, I'm very proud of you. I can't believe that you write books. It seems impossible. This one was hard to sit down for that long.
- [12:25]
Ben Rhodes
Four years of my life on this.
- [12:26]
Tommy Vietor
One and do that much work. Question for you. In 30 years, do you think the next Ben Rhodes will do a book on like the top 15 political TikToks of all time?
- [12:36]
Ben Rhodes
Possibly.
- [12:36]
Tommy Vietor
I mean, is speechwriting a lost art? Do you think it's dead soon?
- [12:40]
Ben Rhodes
The last three are Reagan. Okay, Obama, Trump, Right. And that was a. Just that little snapshot alone was fascinating because, like, spoiler alert. But the Obama speech I did is a race speech. It's impossible to imagine a politician delivering that speech today. Like a 45 minute, like, brilliant meditation on multiracial democracy.
- [13:04]
Tommy Vietor
It was covered in depth too.
- [13:05]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah.
- [13:05]
Tommy Vietor
That people watched the whole speech.
- [13:07]
Ben Rhodes
People read it, engaged. And actually that's part of the problem is like, we, we don't listen to each other, we don't make long arguments. You know, not even a little tick tock version.
- [13:18]
Tommy Vietor
That is very exciting.
- [13:19]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah.
- [13:19]
Tommy Vietor
But please buy a copy, Buy it early. And if you have like a maga uncle, buy him one and then take it to his house, then burn it on his porch, then you're both happy. Ben gets a sale. What?
- [13:28]
Ben Rhodes
I like to think there needs to be some space for progressive patriotism here. Not because we don't see clearly the bad parts of the story. And I have actually a native Seneca chief gave this extraordinary speech in the early 19th century that basically sounded like was delivered at a Black Lives Matter protest. Right. But this is the only country we have, and if we don't win the argument, then it's going to be the worst version of itself. Whereas if it's the better version of itself, it can do a lot of.
- [13:56]
Tommy Vietor
Good for people and we are not doing a lot of winning these days. Everyone could brush up a little bit. I think that'd be helpful. It's very exciting. Please pre order Ben's book. All right, so we're getting dark already, Ben. Let's start with Greenland. So when you guys hear this, Donald Trump will probably and be in Davos. He'll probably be screaming at a group of random European leaders.
- [14:18]
Ben Rhodes
We'll be debating an emergency. YouTube.
- [14:19]
Tommy Vietor
Yeah, he really wants to, like, steal Greenland from Denmark. So on Tuesday, the Prime Minister of Greenland told his constituents that they needed to start preparing for a possible invasion of Greenland. Prime Minister Jens Frederick Nielsen said, quote, it's not likely there will be a military conflict, but it can't be ruled out. Well, ominous. Trump's commentary on the subject was a little less serious and sober. He posted an AI generated image of himself planting an American flag in the ground next to a sign that said Greenland U.S. territory established 2026. He posted a screenshot of a text from French President Emmanuel Macron where Macron said, I do not understand what you are doing on Greenland. I don't either. He also posted a screenshot of a sycophantic, pathetic text from NATO Secretary General Mark Ruta. He later attacked the UK over an unrelated issue. So this past weekend, Ben Trump sent a text to the Prime Minister of Norway that said the following quote. Dear Jonas, considering your country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped eight wars plus, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of peace. The world is not secure unless we have complete and total control of Greenland. Thank you, President djt. I excerpted. I cut a bunch of even crazier shit because it's just too long. So, Ben, this Greenland obsession went from being something that I think a lot of people treated like a joke to genuine crisis that is threatening to destroy NATO in the global order. Trump himself said there is no going back at this point. In past episodes, we've explained in more depth why Trump might want Greenland. The quick and dirty is the melting Arctic is opening up shipping routes. There's mineral deposits, oil and gas. Then there's this big stupid fucking ego and he wants to expand the size of the United States. But this most recent temper tantrum seems to have stemmed from a misunderstanding. So basically, a few European countries recently sent a tiny number of troops to Greenland for military exercises. The Financial Times said it was one British soldier, two Finns, a few dozen Danish, German and French troops. That's all we're talking about. They thought that those countries thought this would be like a. They would show Trump that they were taking his Arctic security concerns seriously. He interpreted it as defiance or an affront to him. So he announced tariffs on Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, the UK until we get control of Greenland. French President Emil Macron and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney responded to Trump during their speeches at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Tuesday. Here's a bit of what they said. Carney is first, Macron is second. We knew the story of the international rules based order was partially false, that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And we knew that international law applied with various rigor, depending on the identity of the accused or the victim. This fiction was useful and American hegemony in particular helped provide public goods. This bargain no longer works. Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition. It's as well a shift towards a world without rules, where international law is trampled under foot. Cooperation gives way to relentless competition. Competition from the United States of America through trade agreements that undermine our export interests, demand maximum concessions and openly aim to weaken and subordinate Europe, combined with an endless accumulation of new tariffs that are fundamentally unacceptable. Even more so when they are used as leverage against territorial sovereignty. This is all very serious for you not watching on YouTube. Macron's wearing sunglasses because he has like, I think he got a big guy or something.
- [18:15]
Ben Rhodes
But it's not the sunglasses, it's the blue. Why those sunglasses? It's like if Joe Biden took mushrooms and bought a new pair of aviators that happened to be mirror blue.
- [18:30]
Tommy Vietor
It looks like his AI.
- [18:33]
Ben Rhodes
We gotta laugh at something.
- [18:35]
Tommy Vietor
It's so funny. Sorry, everybody. So Ben, the S and P is down 2% on Tuesday, so maybe the business world is taking this more seriously than we are right now. That said, the response from Europe is pretty feckless. It's like a, you know, stern speeches. At least Carney's like, pretty serious looking. Okay, we're gonna try to get it together. But if you were at Davos.
- [18:59]
Ben Rhodes
Yes.
- [19:00]
Tommy Vietor
And you were at a strategy session for a bunch of European leaders, like, what are we telling them to do at this point?
- [19:05]
Ben Rhodes
So look, first of all, I think part of what's happening here is the Greenland thing. It's, it's serious. It's deadly serious. He keeps coming back to it. He clearly means it. It's not just a control. Like he clearly wants to conquer Greenland. Yeah, we've been through those reasons. But the other thing is it also can't be separated from where we're. One year into the Trump administration. He just kidnapped the president of Venezuela. Whatever you think about that guy, right? He's just invaded Minneapolis. He's just tried to like arrest the head of the Federal Reserve. Like this guy is out of control, right?
- [19:37]
Tommy Vietor
Yes.
- [19:37]
Ben Rhodes
And so to pivot to the leaders here and the people of Davos, you know, Carney gets up there and he says, well, you know, it looks like the rules based order is ending or it's over. It is fucked. The music has stopped. It doesn't exist anymore. Trump's reelection was the end of that. Like, these guys, and they're almost all guys, have been living through this year where they've basically mimicked all the tactics of all the capitulators. And we've talked about this, the law firms, the universities, like, if we can just kiss his ass hard enough or flatter him hard enough, or the British give him like a, or appease him long enough. Mark Ruda calls him Daddy, giving us a spanking and like a text, like they.
- [20:17]
Tommy Vietor
This, which actually happened, by the way.
- [20:19]
Ben Rhodes
That'S actually a thing that happened in the world. Right. This doesn't work. It's. And in fact like any bully, like the more you give him your lunch money, the more he's gonna come back for something else. And by the way, it's not the fucking Nobel Peace Prize. If they gave him the Nobel Peace Prize, like he'd demand the Eiffel Tower, you know, like if they don't stand up to him, and I think they finally figured this out. If they don't stand up to him, he's going to take Greenland. Like the status quo. We should all just name this. Absent something changing, he will try to take Greenland in some fashion which will shatter NATO and usher in this era of like imperial conquest and competition. Right?
- [20:53]
Tommy Vietor
And Greenland might not be, might not be last. I mean, he also put out an AI image that had Canada marked with a US flag.
- [20:59]
Ben Rhodes
You know, and why not? We have to take this stuff all seriously and literally, to use an early Trump ism. But look, what could they do? They need to, everybody needs, by the way, to just. We have to push back. This guy is clearly out of control. He's clearly the worst version of himself. If I'm the Europeans, I'm sending actual troops to Greenland, right. Like show that there is a military commitment to defend this territory. I would be anting up the tariffs, right. I would be threatening to essentially invoke the coercion principle in the eu. Right. That this is the idea that if you are trying to coerce the EU territorially, which is exactly what he's trying to do, that you're essentially going to rug pull them from European markets. Right?
- [21:41]
Tommy Vietor
Basically that would, that, that could cut off the United States companies, including like service providers, tech companies, from the entire half a billion person European market that is often described as like a bazooka. Well, it's like a massive tool that.
- [21:55]
Ben Rhodes
Would send a message and they don't have to necessarily use it. But if you start to threaten these things or you start to kind of pull from US investments, by the way, like there would be, you know, some economic costs like we saw today. I would much rather there be some market disruption.
- [22:08]
Tommy Vietor
Me too.
- [22:09]
Ben Rhodes
Then the US through this appeasement strategy of the Europeans then invades and takes Greenland and breaks NATO. And by the way, if people want to say, like, oh, you know, are you siding with the Europeans? No, as an American, I don't want us to do that. Like I would like this president to be stopped if. Same thing with the Republicans in Congress who like to go on like codells to Denmark and reassure them, don't reassure them. Get to fucking work drafting a resolution.
- [22:32]
Tommy Vietor
You can't reassure them. No power.
- [22:34]
Ben Rhodes
Well, try to assert power. Right. And Trump may try to ignore you, but everybody needs to be pushing back because he's made it clear that he's not going to stop.
- [22:42]
Tommy Vietor
Yeah. And like, and just the Europeans should understand that this is not popular. Like, there's a CNN poll, 75% of U.S. voters oppose the U.S. taking Greenland. Quinnipiac had a poll, 55% oppose U.S. buying Greenland. 90% oppose the United States taking it by force. Also, the guy's lying.
- [22:57]
Ben Rhodes
Right?
- [22:57]
Tommy Vietor
Like Trump keeps saying. Oh, the, the, the Chinese are all over the Arctic. No. The former head of NATO said he hasn't seen the Chinese naval ship there in a decade. Like the Russians are there. Sure. But destroying NATO is the greatest thing you could do to Putin.
- [23:10]
Ben Rhodes
That's much better than, you know, anything else.
- [23:12]
Tommy Vietor
His oligarchs are laughing. I'm with you on, like, the anti coercion tool. There needs to be some sort of massive economic cost. It could be tariffs, it could be the coercion tool. And it's got to be now. And like, I actually, Trump actually does respond to pain. If the market sits 10%, 20%, it.
- [23:28]
Ben Rhodes
Gets in the bond markets.
- [23:29]
Tommy Vietor
Yeah. And if his donors started calling him, like, that's when they're, like, that's when he backs off. Also, Ben, I just, I would quickly want to point out Trump pretends not to care about the elites and the establishment. He's currently leading the largest ever delegation to Davos in presidential history. No one cares more about the fucking elite opinion than he does. It actually would matter.
- [23:50]
Ben Rhodes
Well, yeah, we should. Bill Clinton went to Davos. George W. Bush never went to Davos. Barack Obama never went to Davos. Right. So this guy runs against elites and he just can't wait to get to Davos.
- [24:01]
Tommy Vietor
Obsessed with them.
- [24:02]
Ben Rhodes
Every single one of his cabinet secretaries seems to be there, but gave the.
- [24:05]
Tommy Vietor
New York Times a three hour interview the other week.
- [24:07]
Ad-Lib or Guest Voice
Right.
- [24:07]
Tommy Vietor
He's obsessed with these people.
- [24:09]
Ben Rhodes
But the core point is you're not going to charm him or persuade him. Right. The charm is these sycophantic texts and praise. I mean, the Mark Ruta thing, we should just spend a minute on this cloud. Right? I mean, NATO needs to toss that guy overboard. Not that they will, but I will defend your policies on Ukraine. On television, he's saying, like, policies that run directly counter to what NATO wants or the rest of NATO wants. But, but, like, they've tried that. You need leverage. Like, not persuasion, not charm. You need to show you've got skin in the game. I would say one of the reasons the European leaders don't do it right, is that they feel politically weak, like their approval ratings are in the shitter. I would say maybe one of the reasons why your approval ratings are in the shitter is cuz you look weak. Right.
- [24:54]
Ad-Lib or Guest Voice
Toughen up.
- [24:55]
Ben Rhodes
Like, toughen up. You might actually like get a little bump at home. The reason people are probably going to the AfD in Germany or the national rally in France or Nigel farage in the UK is cuz@ least they look like, quote unquote, strong leaders. Right?
- [25:08]
Tommy Vietor
Yes.
- [25:08]
Ben Rhodes
Keir Starmer shows some fucking backbone, man. Like, if you want to, if you want to face down Nigel Farage, like, show that you will do that by defending British interests and European sovereignty.
- [25:18]
Tommy Vietor
The new Japanese Prime Minister, Takechi Sanai just called a snap election because her approval rating is at like 70% in part because she just picked a giant fight with the Chinese.
- [25:28]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah.
- [25:29]
Tommy Vietor
That she can't win militarily. Like, you're right. Like there is some value to strength. Just one last thing on this NATO point. Trump did this, like absolutely insanely. It was like nearly 2 hours, 100 minutes or something like that press conference today. It was rambling, it was low energy. And he was asked if he was committed to staying in Naito. This is his answer as of Tuesday, January 20th.
- [25:50]
Yusra El Bagir
Mr. President, are you committed to keeping the US in NATO?
- [25:54]
Donald Trump (quoted)
I've. I've had such a good relationship. I've made it so much better, so much stronger. It's so good now. Naito is so much stronger now. I don't agree with a lot of the things they've done, but that was done before I got there. I think NATO has been good. Sometimes it's overrated, sometimes it's not. But we have a strong Naito. When I came here, we had a weak NATO. We had a NATO at 2% and they weren't paying. You had a nothing Naito. NATO's, whether you like it or not. It's only as good as we are if NATO doesn't have us. NATO is not very strong.
- [26:31]
Tommy Vietor
To your point at the top, like about the music having stopped. He's speaking in the past tense.
- [26:36]
Yusra El Bagir
Yeah.
- [26:37]
Ben Rhodes
And he's fundamentally wrong. Right. The strength of NATO isn't like a percentage. The strength of NATO is the collective defense commitment. And if one NATO member is threatening to invade and annex a territory or another, that goes out the window, I should say. And this will anticipate your transition to our next topic. I'm also. I'm mad at everybody today cuz it's been such a crappy couple weeks. Mad at me, not you.
- [26:58]
Tommy Vietor
Okay?
- [26:59]
Ben Rhodes
Not our wonderful team here. Okay, great.
- [27:01]
Tommy Vietor
You guys are fine.
- [27:01]
Ben Rhodes
I'm stuck with the media here for a second because you know, he says these things. Nobody is spending 5%. No, that is a fiction thing. They all promise to do it sometime in the future. They're not spending 5% of their GDP on defense. It's not something happening in the real world. He has not ended eight wars. We've covered that. He's not ended any of them last I checked. But he's allowed to believe this cartoon because he has his own state media. But also because the actual media just repeats these fictions as if like this man has the emperor, has no clothes. And unless collectively foreign leaders, congressional leaders in this country, media, citizens, and by the way, it's citizens who are doing it, places in Minneapolis start to just call complete bullshit on this guy. Like he's going to drive this entire world off a cliff.
- [27:51]
Tommy Vietor
Yep. Even on just on this NATO 5% spending thing. Even if you believe for a second that they are all really going to spend 5%, it is. The way it breaks down is it's like three and a half percent on kind of like core defense spending, like guns and shit. And then 1.5% on this nebulous category of like cybersecurity or critical infrastructure or civil preparedness. Like it's a fake thing. It's a fake thing. But he just repeats it over and over again. It drives me crazy. Okay, that felt good. I'm sorry for laughing so hard at the macro.
- [28:22]
Ben Rhodes
You need a little levity.
- [28:23]
Tommy Vietor
I just.
- [28:24]
Donald Trump (quoted)
It.
- [28:24]
Ben Rhodes
It's a reason by there to subscribe to us on YouTube. Yeah, because if you saw the glasses, I think you'd be laughing with it.
- [28:30]
Tommy Vietor
It was one of those things where like I cracked once and then I made the mistake of looking at you and then you looked and then we just couldn't make eye contact and we had to get it over. This episode is sponsored by Better Help. The new year doesn't require a new you, maybe just a less burdened you. Therapy can help you figure out what's weighing you down, what's holding you back and brings an unbiased perspective to better understand your relationships, motiv emotions. Better Help therapists work according to strict code of conduct and are fully licensed in the US BetterHelp does the initial matching work for you so you can focus on your therapy goals. A short questionnaire helps you identify your needs and your preferences and their 12 years or more of experience and industry leading match fulfillment rate means they typically get it right the first time. If you aren't happy with your match, switch to a different therapist at any time from their tailored wrecks. With over 30,000 therapists, BetterHelp is one of the world's largest online therapy platforms, Having served over 5 million people globally and it works with an average rating of 4.9 out of 5 for a live session based on over 1.7 million client reviews. BetterHelp makes it easy to get matched online with a qualified therapist. Sign up and get 10% off at betterhelp.com crookedworld that's betterhelp H-E-L-P.com crookedworld pod save the World is brought to you by Helix It's January. It's cold everywhere, even in California. That means you're spending more time indoors. Maybe that means you're spending more time in the morning lounging in your bed. You're going to bed a little earlier and you need a great mattress. If you're looking for one, Helix is your answer. Helix offers a variety of mattresses designed to fit your sleep needs. You can figure out which one works best for you and your body by taking the Helix Sleep Quiz, which will match you with the perfect mattress based on your personal preferences, making it easy to find a mattress that suits your sleep needs. Helix will deliver your mattress right to your door with free shipping in the US The Happy with Helix guarantee offers a risk free customer first experience designed to ensure you're completely satisfied with your new mattress. You can rest easy with seamless returns and exchanges. They even offer a 120 night sleep trial and limited lifetime warranty. We've got a Helix mattress at my house. It's super comfortable. Everyone has ever stayed there or slept on. It has said something in the morning about wow, that's really great mattress you have. Where'd you get that bed? Highly recommend helix. Go to helixsleep.comworld for 27% off site wide. That's helix sleep.comworld for 27% off Site wide. This offer is exclusive to Pod Save the World listeners. Make sure you enter our show name after checkout so they know we sent you helix sleep.com World.
- [31:03]
Ben Rhodes
Last week.
- [31:04]
Tommy Vietor
When we recorded it seemed like the United States was on the cusp of bombing Iran again. And that is because Trump said he would, quote, rescue the Iranian protesters if the Iranian regime started killing them. Trump even urged protesters to, quote, take over your institutions. And then he said help is on its way. But then the Iranian regime cut off the Internet and started massacring innocent people. And Trump so far has done absolutely nothing. So we don't know exactly how many people were killed. There's a number of organizations that estimate, like in a range of Several thousand, like 4,000 confirmed deaths. There are other outlets have much higher estimates. I saw one as high as 16,000 people killed, tens of thousands of hundreds of thousands injured. We just don't know. But look, as listeners know, we were not in favor of Trump going to war with Iran. But what is so awful in this case is that Trump clearly got hundreds, if not thousands of additional people killed by promising them protection and then doing nothing to actually help them. And the question is why? So what happened? So there's been a bunch of news reports on the kind of TikTok backstory of how he came to the place of doing nothing. Some of the big takeaways for me, Ben, were first, when Trump promised to rescue these protesters, the United States did not have the sufficient military assets in place they needed to conduct a large scale operation against Iran. And then especially if Iran retaliated against the US Or Israel in large part because the US redeployed a bunch of naval assets and aircraft carrier a lot more to the Caribbean because we decided to invade Venezuela. So that's one even worse Trump. Trump tweeted about intervention on January 2, but Axio says that the first high level meeting to actually consider U.S. responses, it was chaired by J.D. vance, wasn't until January 9th. And Trump himself wasn't presented options until January 13th. So we waited like what, 10, 11 days to even see what these options could be after promising them. And by then the regime had already started the massacre. I imagine they could have just seen this tweet and figured like, let's get this done now before it's too late, before he has time to respond. Trump was also reportedly convinced by assurances from the Iranian Foreign minister that were made to Steve Witkoff that Iran would not harm more protesters or not execute protesters. Trump was pressured to hold off on bombing by Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, who said that Israel wasn't ready to defend itself from retaliatory strikes again, largely because the US didn't have the right hardware in the region. And then Trump was also lobbied not to bomb by leaders in the Gulf, in particular the Saudis, because they don't want a new war with Iran, they don't want to destabilize the region. And you know, Gulf monarchs don't really want their people to see a successful protest movement lead to a change in government. So ultimately, Trump decided not to act and spin the decision by saying, well, actually, I prevented 800 Iranians from being executed after Iran threatened to publicly execute a bunch of people. So, though, since Trump made those comments, I think a bunch of Iranian officials are on the record saying they might do the executions anyway. So, Ben, I'm sorry, you and I both were joking before. Like, we're coming in hot today. I'm so outraged by this. Like, Trump. Like, look, Trump, this should go down in history with other, like, infamous moments in US History where the US Told people to rise up and then did nothing and got them killed. Like in 1991, George H.W. bush told Iraqis to rise up against Saddam Hussein. Tens of thousands of them did. Then they were massacred, and the US just did nothing. In 1956, a bunch of Hungarians took to the street to demand freedom from the Soviet Union. They were encouraged by the US Run Radio Free Europe broadcast networks. But then the Soviets rolled in tanks and the US did nothing and rolled tanks into Budapest. We did nothing to help people being slaughtered. The point is not that the US should have gone to war in these cases. The point is that the President's words matter. And I felt like you and I learned this the hard way during the Syria redline conversation. And none of those rules are being applied to what Trump just did to the Iranian people given out. Many people were killed.
- [34:59]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah. I mean, look, the red line thing in which we live was about chemical weapons use, and then when chemical weapons are used, there was not a military strike. And look, I can. We can relive that. I accept the criticism, though, that if you say it's a red line, that. That at a minimum, you shouldn't have used that, you know, kind of foreshadowing and then not follow through on it. And the reason I make this point and to connect it to everything else today is I do think that Trump is treated differently. This is not a new insight. We have to stop treating him differently. He's the President of the United States of America, whether he's Donald Trump or somebody else. He told people to rise up, and he said help would be on its way. And let's not forget the pageantry of that week. You've got Lindsey Graham flying around Air Force One with Make Iran great again hats. You've got, like, the Shah's son out there, like, he was conveying a ramp up to Iranians, and then he did a rug pull on them to Use a crypto.
- [35:50]
Tommy Vietor
Can I read a Lindsey Graham's tweet to you? President Trump is not Obama. Freedom now, Freedom forever for the long suffering Iranian people. I believe your nation's nightmare will soon be coming to an end. Make Iran great again. So he was part of a chorus of people making these assurances. Lindsey Graham was.
- [36:02]
Ben Rhodes
And it is profoundly irresponsible. And look, I don't support military action for all the reasons we talked about, which I don't think you can engineer regime change with bombs and have it end well. But then you shouldn't have encouraged them that way. You should have found other ways to show solidarity, other ways to call out the regiment, other ways to mobilize other countries to impose certain consequences or to try to help support Iranian protesters in whatever way you can, whether it's provision of Internet or getting their stories out or whatever way. But don't suggest you're gonna go to war and then pull back in the middle of the crackdown. I mean, the absurdity of this thing is this guy lives in a consequence free world because nobody will ever tell him to his face that what he did was wrong. But like the climb down was so clumsy.
- [36:41]
Tommy Vietor
He thanked the Iranian regime for not executing their own people.
- [36:45]
Ben Rhodes
And it was like one person was gonn get hanged. And then they called and were like, and by the way, this terrible regime, but to the point about not capitulating, they did their crackdown in his face. And then they had like someone called Steve Witkoff, probably a Rachi from the foreign Ministry who's been around there forever and be like, hey, your threat really got to us. We're not gonna execute these people, we're not gonna hang them. They killed potentially tens of thousands of people already, you know, and they're not releasing the political prisoners.
- [37:14]
Tommy Vietor
No.
- [37:15]
Ben Rhodes
So, so to your list there, I think all those things mattered. First of all, it bears in mind we said, a lot of people said when you move all this military assets to the Caribbean, they're not going to be opportunity cost there. And you can't, you didn't have a military option. And the Iranians knew he didn't have military option. They knew we weren't postured there. We knew we didn't have a carrier strike group. They knew that we'd be worried about retaliation and we couldn't provide the missile defenses to our bases or to the Israelis. And so they knew they had a window to crack down because this guy was irresponsible. And then I do think at the end of the day he listens to the Gulf Arabs and they saw those threats. They saw where things could be going in the region and called them. And he's like, the combination of it, this seems like a lot of effort. This seems like it could go wrong. I got the Gulf Arabs telling me not to do this. All of a sudden it's not Lindsey Graham in his ear and he's like, he backs off, but this should be attached to him. And look, I'm not asking. I hope it doesn't result in him bombing them in a week, because I don't think that's the answer either. No, we're just making a point here. This should be held against him as like a horrible thing that he did.
- [38:19]
Tommy Vietor
Yeah. Like he, he can't undo what was done. Right. His words got thousands of people killed. So if he bombed tomorrow, it doesn't solve anything. Imagine getting a call from Bibi Netanyahu and being told not to bomb Iran. Do you think you assume it's one of those prank shows or something?
- [38:32]
Ben Rhodes
I mean, at the end of the day, the thing about Bibi that people have always wondered is like, does it's the same way that he, he built up Hamas, he needs Hamas. Absent Hamas, what is the rationale for Bibi Ninyahu? Like, you know, I'm always torn. Does he want the regime change or does he always want to be on the precipice of regime change? Because he needs an Islamic Republic of Iran? Because absent that, how can he scare people into supporting him? You know, I don't know, but he always gets up to the line and tacos.
- [38:57]
Tommy Vietor
Yeah. Trump was asked on Tuesday that same bacos BB always. Yeah, baco. I like that. Trump was asked if military options against Iran are still on the table during the same like ranging press conference on Tuesday. Here's his weird answer.
- [39:14]
Donald Trump (quoted)
So with Iran, they were going to hang 837 people and they let them be known that. And we let them know that if that happens, that will be a very bad day for them. And they decided not to do it. They didn't hang the people. I can't tell you what's going to happen in the future, but supposedly they've taken that off the table. So we're just going to have to see what happens with Iran. Is the military option off the table?
- [39:38]
Tommy Vietor
Yeah, I can tell you what's going to happen in the future. They're going to hang them behind closed doors in prisons you'll never see. And by the way, but it's such bullshit here.
- [39:44]
Ben Rhodes
I mean, not could do the media. But he stands up there like Castro giving a six hour press conference and asserts this 837 number 8 wars, 5%, 837 bullshit. They've killed thousands of people. And then the Iranians themselves called you and be like, hey, we're about to execute these 837 people, but maybe we won't do it because we're so scared of you. Yeah, like he got played.
- [40:05]
Tommy Vietor
Got played. The Supreme Leader is on TV calling him a criminal, saying he's responsible for the casualties. State TV in Iran is airing footage of forced confessions and interrogations. Like these guys were just shooting innocent people in the face with bird shot. There's countless people are blinded and just scarred forever. I mean, because of this, you know, look, they were out there on the streets because they were fighting for their own rights. But Trump encouraged countless people. Yeah, okay. Speaking of peace, Ben. So let's talk about the latest leaked details about Trump's planned Board of Peace. So we talked about this on Pod Save America yesterday, and I just want to warn you in advance, it is both confusing and stupid, so buckle up, but we will get there. So the reason the administration is now talking about the Board of Peace is because they claim that it's time to move from phase one of the Trump Gaza cease fire to phase two of the Gaza peace plan, which, remember, is supposed to be the point where the conflict goes from temporary ceasefire to permanent end to the war. Which is just nuts because there is not an actual ceasefire in Gaza. An estimated 450 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli airstrikes or military activity since October, as have three Israeli soldiers. There is no international peacekeeping force. Hamas has not given up its weapons. Israel is still occupying 53% of the Gaza Strip. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are displaced or living in tents, tents that can't withstand the wind or the cold. And did you see, Israel is refusing to allow poles for the tents into Gaza because they are claiming it's a.
- [41:35]
Ben Rhodes
Dual use product and Israel's banned a lot of very credible international human rights and aid organizations from operating.
- [41:44]
Tommy Vietor
Just them bulldozing UNWRA today.
- [41:46]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah, well, and even like Doctors Without Borders. So remember, part of the ceasefire, phase one was all this aid getting in. It is not getting in. Right. So none of the things that he said, this is what I get. Again, the theme of today, the fiction of Donald Trump's presidency, that he brought all this stuff is bullshit. There's no peace in Gaza. There's still Palestinians being killed there. The aid's not getting in Hamas is not demilitarized. None of these things are happening.
- [42:09]
Tommy Vietor
It's so frustrating. But so regardless of those facts, the Trump administration announced like, all these are Board of Peace entities. So there's four of them. There's the Board of Peace, which we'll get into in a second. But then below that, there's the Executive Board, which is like the kind of working level for the Board of Peace. It's like Jared Kushner, Tony Blair, Marco Rubio, random business guys.
- [42:28]
Ben Rhodes
They're a huge husu of dicks.
- [42:30]
Tommy Vietor
Yeah, they run the day to day. It's also like the crony capitalism piece. Then there's another board called the Gaza Executive Board, which oversees Gaza reconstruction. That is the entity that the Israelis hate because there's a Qatari and Turkish official on it. And then there's the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza. That is the Palestinian technocrats that are supposed to govern Gaza day to day. But apparently they're just sitting in a hotel in Cairo. They can't even get into the Gaza Strip because it's not safe there. So it's confusing and nothing's really working. But let's focus on the Board of Peace because that's the most like senior entity. So this was proposed back first in, in September of 2025. It was framed as supporting Gaza reconstruction. But the charter that was just released this week does not mention Gaza. It is instead, it seems like it's like slapped together, this proposal that is designed to replace the United nations, though kind of in name only, because there's no real legal authority or structures to actually do anything. It's just like a new thing on paper. The gist though, is that Trump is in charge of the whole thing. Like not the President of the United States is in charge like Donald Trump is personally in charge. The White House has extended invitations to at least 60 countries to join the Board of Peace. But Trump gets to pick who is part of the board and all the substructures. He gets to veto decisions made by the board. He serves as the inaugural chairman of the Board, but the chairman nominates his successor until he quits or is pushed out by unanimous vote. And then there's the demand. I guess they just like Baron Trump is the next Chairman of the Board of Peace or something. And then there's a demand that members of the board pay the billion dollar fee if they want to maintain a permanent membership on the board. So there's this slush fund element that Donald Trump would get to control. So far, I think like A dozen countries have agreed to join, like all the best countries like Belarus and Hungary. The Russians were invited. France said no. Then let's just pause there. Like, what the fuck do we even. What do you do with this? This is, it's just like, it's like nothing. But also a threat to the entire United nations system.
- [44:27]
Ben Rhodes
Well, I mean, actually just one question. Where is this billion dollars going? Right? I mean, we keep hearing about it like it's the subscription fee that kicks in after the first 90 days or something. Right. But. But this is not an actual institution. There's no clear charter and mechanism. So I have a lot of questions about the billion dollars. Could be going to like, for all I know, it could be going to like Trump COIN or something. I mean, seriously, for sure. I'd like to see the budget plan here. This is like fundamentally unserious and fundamentally clearly not about Gaza. Right. He wants this kind of superstructure that he controls. It's kind of parallel international system. This is like a much worse version of the Chinese building, you know, the Belt Road Initiative or something. And no capacity to do anything but. And reminds you of the Venezuela thing when he's asked, well, who's gonna run Venezuela? And he's like, the guy's behind me. And it's like Rubio and Hegseth standing there. That's the. It's the same guys, every time there's anything where he's asked who runs something, it's always like Marco Rubio. And you know, we get, we got Tony Blair membership here because that guy's just so desperate to be in the country club.
- [45:32]
Tommy Vietor
What is he thinking? Yeah, but I mean, it's not like his reputation is in the best place.
- [45:36]
Ben Rhodes
No.
- [45:37]
Tommy Vietor
Regarding the Middle East. But like, this is. He should know better than this. This is crazy.
- [45:40]
Ben Rhodes
I mean, I know how many Hamilton stands you've out there, but he's got a bit of the Aaron Burr, like, all I want to do is be in the room where it happens. Five to that guy. But I would say the border peace doesn't seem like an actual threat to replace the UN because I have very little confidence it will do anything. Yeah, prove me wrong.
- [45:58]
Tommy Vietor
No, that's probably right.
- [45:58]
Ben Rhodes
But. But I don't know. He clearly thinks it's kind of his roaming band of brothers that parachute in and I guess try to resolve conflicts, but essentially just extract wealth and resources from places. And so to me, it's just like a. If it actually happened, it's just a modus operandi for corruption and influence peddling and People kissing his ass and putting band aids on problems instead of solving them. Like all the eight wars he claims he solved and none of which are actually over.
- [46:28]
Tommy Vietor
I guess the question is though, what if, like, Trump creates the Board of Peace, Everyone just appeases him as always, and they go along with it and then Trump sucks away all the funding and resources for the actual UN and just like pushes attention over to this new bullshit.
- [46:42]
Ben Rhodes
And that's the danger. And so my recommendation is all the way back to the Greenland thing. Nobody should join this thing if Trump wants to have a meeting. By nobody, I mean no self respecting country or foreign leader. If Trump wants to have a meeting, that's him and Viktor Orban and Lukashenko from Belarus and whatever Gulf Arabs. Like, you know, he can kind of shake down into coming to it, make him look ridiculous, like, you should not participate in this. This is not a real thing. This is not an. The UN is flawed. Fine. Like, like maybe we need different institutions. This is not the answer to it, right? This, this kind of Trump Organization corporate structure. You know, we know, by the way, how good the books were at the Trump Organization. So yes, it is a threat to the UN system. It's meant to be kind of a combination. It's like everything with Trump, it's like part threat, part troll of the un. Then don't go along with it. You don't need to. It's not the answer to Gaza. It's certainly not going to get them to phase two of Gaza.
- [47:41]
Tommy Vietor
It's just there's like, oh, there's so much plate spinning. And you're right, it's like Marco Rubio doing all of it like panda style again. It just, I mean, I guess again the media will refer to the Gaza ceasefire until one of the parties declares the ceasefire's gone or something. But like, you know, there was one day where, you know, I think some Hamas guys shot at IDF troops and there was like 45 massive airstrikes throughout the Gaza Strip. You know, like, life is intolerable for the people there. There's no effort to build it back. I mean, it's just.
- [48:11]
Ben Rhodes
I don't know, but this is. And again, I swear, people are getting harmed, you know. Yes. And I swear to God, this is not about, like, us. It's about how to deal with Trump. If there was any other president, I'm not even just Barack Obama, like George Bush, Bill Clinton, Joe Biden, Barack Obama, if any other US President had gone out and declared, there's a ceasefire and I'm staking My whole presidency on it. And, oh, by the way, I won the Nobel Peace Prize for it. And then there's like, a day like you described where there are 45 airstrikes. People would have been like, there's no ceasefire. There's this thing with Trump where it's like we all are adjusting to the fiction that he's presenting. And it's time. We're one year in. Like, my plea today is let's. It's time to stop that.
- [48:58]
Tommy Vietor
Yeah, it's getting real bad. All right, we're going to take a little break. But, Ben, you're not the only one with a new book coming out. Crooked Media's newest book, hated by all the Right People, Tucker Carlson and the Unraveling of the Conservative Mind, is releasing next week on January 27th by one of the best journalists in the business, New York Times Magazine writer Jason Zengerly. You know Jason well. Like, he's written some of my most unbelievable, like, legendary profile pieces ever of people. I interviewed Jason Monday on Pod Save America. If you want to learn more about the book, it's just an incredible look at Tucker Carlson and his trajectory from, like, establishment media darling, like, one of the best magazine writers. He was a host on cnn. He was a host on MSNBC for a while. Then he went to become the highest rated Fox News host ever. To leaving, to becoming whatever he is today. It tracks, you know, who he is, his career and how and what it tells you about the media these days, the MAGA world, Donald Trump.
- [49:56]
Ben Rhodes
Tucker's a fascinating figure to me.
- [49:58]
Tommy Vietor
Fascinating figure.
- [49:58]
Ben Rhodes
I do wonder, does it tell you where that kind of log cabin is that he does?
- [50:03]
Tommy Vietor
We talk about that. Yeah. It's on an island in Maine.
- [50:06]
Ben Rhodes
Is it? I mean, it's kind of weird, rustic background.
- [50:09]
Tommy Vietor
He's like, isolated. Isolated, yeah. It feels like that middle of nowhere now. And like that. I think that paranoia is, like, kind of part of the story.
- [50:14]
Ben Rhodes
Answers my question.
- [50:15]
Tommy Vietor
It's amazing. Also, Pod Save America. We are going to Auckland, New Zealand. We're going to Australia. So the exact visit is Auckland on February 11, then we're going to Australia. The Melbourne show is February 13, Brisbane on the 14th, Sydney on the 16th. Tickets are on sale right now. Cricket.com events if you live in Australia, if you live in New Zealand, please come see us. We'd love to see you, Ben. I was recently told that our Auckland show is on the one and only night that Lord is playing in New Zealand.
- [50:47]
Ben Rhodes
I love Lorde.
- [50:48]
Tommy Vietor
She's really good. So that's a tough competitor, but crooked.com events come see us. Positive the world is brought to you by Bilt. It's 2026 and if you're still paying rent without Bilt, it's time for a change. BILT is the loyalty program for renters that rewards you for your biggest monthly expense rent. With Bilt, every rent payment earns you points that can be used towards flights, hotels, Lyft rides, Amazon.com purchases and much more. And here's something I'm excited about. Starting in February, BILT members can earn points on mortgage payments for the first time. Soon you'll be able to get rewarded wherever you live and unlock exclusive benefits. With more than 45,000 restaurants and fitness studios, pharmacies and other neighborhood partners, there's some great ways you can redeem your points. Like fitness classes. You just use them on Amazon Lyft Rides. They have gift cards at over 120 brands. 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All right, so let's turn to some big developments out of Syria that are less related to Trump than most of their stuff. So on Sunday, the Syrian government, led by President Ahmed El Shara announced a, quote, ceasefire in full integration with the U. S. Backed Kurdish militia forces in Syria, the Syrian Democratic Forces, or sdf. So this deal came together after the Syrian government forces made a bunch of territorial breakthroughs in the northeast part of Syria which had been controlled by the Kurds. But this deal they announced Sunday seemed like it was starting to unravel. By Monday. There were reports of fighting in northeast Syria, including around prisons that hold a lot of ISIS militants that have been guarded by the SDF for years. But under the terms of this new agreement, those prisons would now be controlled by Shara's government. The Trump administration has come out very strongly in support of this integration idea and of the Syrian government. So Trump's special envoy, Tom Barrack said, quote, the, quote, greatest opportunity for the Kurds in Syria right now lies in the post Assad transition under the new government. He said the US Military presence in Syria was justified by the counter ISIS mission. But now the CHAR's government is on board with fighting ISIS. It changes the US relationship with the SDF. The SDF should get folded into the national military. The Kurds should seize this opportunity to integrate into the Syrian state. So the Kurds, the sdf, they feel completely hung out to dry here. Until recently, they controlled like a third of Syria. I think they were probably hoping that would be the case in perpetuity. They fought incredibly bravely against ISIS at their request of the United States. I think they were hoping to be rewarded with their own state. But instead they're being asked to join a government led by a guy who was once a member of an extremist group group that tried to kill them. So, Ben, I'm curious what you make of this, because I can see both perspectives. Of course, the new Syrian government wants to control the entire country and not have an essentially an autonomous military operating within its borders. On the flip side, the Kurds feel like they're owed a lot given what they sacrificed. And they understandably, I think, don't trust the new government. But they have no choice. Seemingly with the Trump administration going all in on support of Shara. So I don't know, how are you, what are you thinking about this? Like, what's the right move?
- [55:41]
Ben Rhodes
I think you, you summed it up well. You know, one interesting thing is that the same dynamic happened in Iraq. Right? Same thing. You have Kurds in the north of Iraq who always opposed Saddam Hussein, were always good friends with the United States, kind of did everything we asked them from the Gulf War all the way through the invasion of Iraq and wanted their own state. And, you know, after the fall of Saddam Hussein, they weren't going to get their own state because the Turks, we were going to invade them and actually did invade northern Iraq a couple times, and the US didn't want to fracture it and would destabilize the region, all these things and, oh, we need a central government and, and actually, like, I wondered a bit though, whether there are lessons to take from Iraq of some of the things that worked, because essentially Iraq, which went through hell along the way, kind of did arrive at this weird federal type solution where there is a kind of semi autonomous Kurdish region with its own government, but they are a part of Iraq and there are Iraqi security forces that are the predominant security force in Iraq. Again, it's not apples to apples and it didn't always go smoothly. But I do think, to take into account your excellent summary, the answer, the best answer would be somewhere in between, just swallowing up the Kurds entirely. There's one security forces, one government, that's it. Versus, I do agree it'd probably be unsustainable to have a totally, certainly independent Kurdistan. That would be a very hard plane to land. I don't think the regional powers would go for it, but totally autonomous security force in government. But if you could negotiate, the trick here is how do you negotiate a degree of autonomy? So there's a sense that Kurds are relatively self governing in the territories they control. They, you know, in Iraq there's a combination of national security forces, but then kind of like local, almost national Guardish type forces. That's what you want. That's hard. The Turks may object to this and that, but the diplomacy should be trying to land the plane there because the worst case scenario is the Kurds give up all their leverage and then they end up getting essentially massacred or swallowed up.
- [58:00]
Tommy Vietor
Yeah, I mean, that's probably why Tom Barrack is in part so bullish on the Alshara plan, because the Turks, as you mentioned, they don't like the Kurdish forces because they're separatist groups that are connected to them. It's very complicated. So this is really important. We'll watch this one going forward. It also will likely have huge bearing on Alshara's treatment of other minority groups within Syria. And something important to watch. Okay, a couple more things from us. So many listeners may have heard of a ketamine adult white nationalist who learned how to code named Elon Musk. Elon bought a company called Twitter. He renamed it X because he thought that was cool. It features a generative AI chatbot named Grok. Last summer there was a software update to Grok. It morphed Grok into a full on Nazi. Grok literally referred to itself as Mecca Hitler. Remember those stories?
- [58:46]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah, those are the days. Yep.
- [58:48]
Tommy Vietor
But I guess Elon was not content with that being Grok's worst news cycle. So at the end of December, they announced that Grok would now generate images based on your prompt. And so, in the least surprising turn of events ever, people on Twitter started using Grok to undress others. Mostly women and at times children or minors at least. So I'm going to read you a quick graph from the Guardians coverage of what all happened. This is verbatim. Relatively tame. Requests by X users to alter photographs to show women in bikinis rapidly evolved during the first week of the year, hour by hour, into increasingly explicit demands for women to be dressed in transparent bikinis, then in bikinis made of dental floss, placed in sexualized positions and made to bend over so their genitals were visible. By January 8, as many as 6,000 bikini demands were being made to the chatbot every hour, according to an analysis for the Guardian. So good stuff there. So Elon's response at first was to kind of laugh about it and make fun of it. Then they limited the feature to only paying users. Because I think we all should agree that $8 a month entitles you to undressing teenage girls on the Internet.
- [59:54]
Ben Rhodes
Check mark. And undressing teenagers.
- [59:55]
Tommy Vietor
Yeah, it seems like it makes sense, but this is where governments started to step in. Indonesia and Malaysia, they blocked Grok altogether. Regulators in the EU and the UK and then France, they all launch formal investigations. Japan is threatening legal action. Then the Attorney General of California sent a cease and desist and launched an investigation into Xai. There's some users who are suing, including Ashley St. Clair, who is the mother of one of Elon Musk's many children. But there is a silver lining here, Ben, which is that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth recently announced that the Pentagon will integrate GROK into its network. So, quote, very soon we'll have the world's leading AI models on every unclassified and classified network throughout our department. Hegseth said. So what could go wrong? I guess.
- [60:40]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah. I mean, just to start on that and then go back to the grotesque, the. The next. If we somehow get to 2029 and there's a Democratic president, you know, there's a lot of bumps along that road. I have always been worried that they're going to, like, basically subcontract out the entire DoD budget to, like, GROK and Palantir and. Yeah, yeah, you're going to have to rip out a lot of stuff because you trust GROK with, like, the U.S. military.
- [61:10]
Tommy Vietor
No.
- [61:10]
Ben Rhodes
So that's something to watch.
- [61:12]
Tommy Vietor
And bumps along the road for you, too.
- [61:13]
Ben Rhodes
You know, if I'm in Congress and, you know, this is something to be paying attention to. This shows how little guardrails. If you can't even put guardrails around this. Right. Like, you're not going to use your chatbot to essentially. I mean. I mean, it's horrible to think about what people could do with this tool.
- [61:33]
Tommy Vietor
I also, like, love that the party that brought you QAnon is like, now.
- [61:35]
Ben Rhodes
We'Re good with this, and it's not hard. I mean, it shouldn't be hard. Or even if it is hard, they should have to prevent this from happening. Just write some fucking code. You guys are smart enough to do that. If you're apparently such geniuses, you prevent people from creating naked versions of human beings, like, just full stop. Right. But I think, again, to continue the theme of leverage today, ban X, ban Grok. I actually don't know why more countries don't ban X. I mean, if I was a European leader and he's using it to promote white nationalist Nazis in my country. Show some leverage to Elon Musk. I mean, there's just this kind of fallacy that there's a inevitability to the worst things. If this man is allowing his AI that he's plowing money into to be used to generate naked images of living children, then shut him down.
- [62:28]
Tommy Vietor
Yeah, and also, if you watch Elon closely, he's gotten real insane recently. The white nationalism is. He's basically retweeting white genocide memes and saying every day it will be real. Yeah, you make a good point about banning it in, like, this sort of pathetic sense of inevitability. Like, yeah, J.D. vance will go to Europe and lecture them about their, like, tech laws, but he won't say a word about the Russians banning Twitter, you know?
- [62:53]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah. And look, look, I mean, I know there'll be free speech things here, but I. I live in California, I have daughters. I would like the state of California to ban Grok if it doesn't fix this. And I don't think that's a speech issue. Like, what on earth does free speech have to do with the capacity for a technological tool to generate a naked image of a teenage girl like, or anyone. Yeah, yeah. By the way, there are plenty of free speech carve outs around pedophilia and child sex trafficking. Right? It's constantly agree. The one of the things that people agree on here. So, yeah, the QAnon party over there, they used to like, not like Jeffrey Epstein. And you know, like, I don't know. Spare me your free speech arguments. When it gets to these kinds of.
- [63:37]
Tommy Vietor
Images, truly terrible people paywalling, it is just really, just like the perfect kind of metaphor for like their entire worldview. It's like, well, this horrible thing. It's fine if I get paid. Finally, Ben, over in Cadiz, Spain. I think that's how you say it. We saw an unusual entry in the city's annual contest of carnival groups. An event we should have. One we should have here in Los Angeles, I think. So one group flexed their creative muscles to bring us this incredibly moving tribute to, of all people, scientist Stephen Hawking. So again, Ben and I have not seen what this tribute looked like.
- [64:12]
Ben Rhodes
This is not what I thought. I thought we'd get like a Liz Truss.
- [64:14]
Tommy Vietor
We don't know what we're in for. No. For some reason, we've decided to repeatedly throw caution to the wind and risk cancellation by letting the professional instigators on the Pod Save the World team make us cold watch videos. So with that throat clearing done, let's watch whatever the hell this is going to be. What the. Is this. Giving them facials? So much worse than I thought it was gonna be. Okay, so what we saw, there was a dozen Stephen Hawking impersonators doing an impression of him. And then at the end, they sprayed them in the face with silly string. Why did they spray them with string?
- [65:17]
Ben Rhodes
What is happening? Maybe the world already ended. Maybe the world ended like 10 years ago and we're all living in the simulation in an AI generated simulation where shit like that happens or manual crone's wearing blue sunglasses. Like, why? Why Stephen Hawking too, like, okay, so there's some more. Why Stephen Hawking? Because, like, I mean, he was hyper relevant like 50 years 30 years ago. But, like, I haven't thought about that guy in a while.
- [65:44]
Tommy Vietor
So there's some more context that I hadn't read yet that I'm now going to share. So this is 12 comedic musical performers. They say their act was to raise awareness for mobility issues in als. The lyrics from their song included. With my will to live in my wheelchair, I have reached the very top. Even the stars. Leonard Cohen, eat your heart out. Have you seen the. Remember when SORA came out the AI?
- [66:11]
Ben Rhodes
I want to know how our team found that.
- [66:12]
Tommy Vietor
Yeah.
- [66:13]
Ben Rhodes
What are you watching?
- [66:14]
Tommy Vietor
Corners of the Internet. Was that on the Liz Truss show? Is that how you found it?
- [66:19]
Ben Rhodes
I have a weird scrolling problem myself, but it tends to lead me to, like, you know, deep NBA Twitter.
- [66:26]
Tommy Vietor
Yeah, well, no, the Twitter for you tab has just gotten into my real sicko part of my brain. It's like, all, like, clavicular in the maga. Influencers, like, mogging each other and getting into fights with other dudes outside clubs in Miami. And then they all got banned. Did you see the SORA videos that people were making early on when it came out of Stephen Hawking wrestling and, like, going off the top rope and, like, taking dudes out? They're really good. Oh, God.
- [66:49]
Ben Rhodes
I mean, I think I know what was going on there at the end, but I don't want to say it with my words.
- [66:54]
Tommy Vietor
I didn't like the silly string. I didn't like the optics.
- [66:56]
Ben Rhodes
I didn't like what the silly string was saying.
- [66:57]
Tommy Vietor
I didn't like how it made me feel. So this is strange.
- [67:01]
Ben Rhodes
So this is for people watching. I usually save my nicotine lozenge till after the podcast, so I'm just popping this baby in now.
- [67:08]
Tommy Vietor
Okay, well, on that note, we are going to take a quick break, but when we come back, you're going to hear Ben's interview about what's going on.
- [67:16]
Ben Rhodes
Yusra, please, I hope you didn't listen.
- [67:18]
Tommy Vietor
That's not the worst we've ever done. They'll talk about what's happening in Uganda with opposition candidate Bobby Wine and their elections. What's happening in Sudan. A lot of really important stuff. So we just had to give you. We had to give you a break before we got to that. So please stick around for that.
- [67:38]
Donald Trump (quoted)
Pod.
- [67:39]
Ad-Lib or Guest Voice
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- [68:59]
Yusra El Bagir
Choose to show up with the bold styling of the Mazda CX30.
- [69:16]
Ben Rhodes
Okay, I'm very pleased to welcome back to Pod Save the World Yusra El Bagir. She's the Africa correspondent for Sky News and she's just back from Kampala where she was reporting on the Ugandan election in the middle of an Internet blackout, which could not have been easy. Yuzra, welcome back to the show.
- [69:32]
Yusra El Bagir
No problem. Thanks for having me, Ben.
- [69:34]
Ben Rhodes
So we wanted to start by talking about this Ugandan election. On one side you had the 81 year old kind of strongman President Museveni, who's been in power since 1986. On the other hand you had 43 year old opposition leader Bobby Wine, who's actually been on this podcast a couple of times for those who remember once with his wife Barbie actually, who also ran in 2021. And just to kind of set the scene, Yusra, you know this something of a rematch. Bobby Wine, at some risk to himself, has kind of stayed largely in Uganda in recent years. The election took place amidst an Internet blackout. You described Kampala as feeling like a war zone. Just set the SCENE what was the mood in the country leading up to this election? How did people that you interacted with see the vote before it happened?
- [70:30]
Yusra El Bagir
I mean, there was definitely an electricity and nervousness when we arrived. It could have gone anyway. And I think people were very aware of one of what the state was willing to do to prevent any sort of protest action, but also this looming Internet shutdown. So we arrived, say, 48 hours before the shutdown, but it had been disputed because the government actually came out and said, no, we're not going to be shutting down the Internet. So people then kind of let their guard down. And then the day before voting, the telecoms ministry, government agency put out a note to say that they'd be shutting down the Internet. So there was just this feeling of suffocation and looming doom. There was definitely a sense of dread. And the people we spoke to, some of them said they wouldn't vote, that there was no point. They knew that it would be, or they felt that it was definitely going to be rigged and that their vote wouldn't matter and that they didn't want to risk their lives to basically cast a ballot that would go uncounted. And the shift was on the day that the votes were counted. So we went to a tally center in the center of Kampala. That was where the votes were counted, not just announced, that's the national tally center, but where actually you could see people declaring the results in different polling stations. And when we arrived, it was very quiet. We were told it was lunchtime. And we were actually like, what are we going to film here? Everyone's having food and drinking coffee. And so we went to one tent where a woman was declaring results. And it had a sense of apprehension, anticipation. People were kind of hanging on to every word. And then as soon as two people voiced their opposition to the results that were being declared, that they were not matching up with what their agents had told them were the actual results in those voting stations. It was so crazy to see, to see how quickly kind of the state versus the people manifested in that environment. Immediately there was this deployment of military, of police, backing National Resistant Movement officials who were crushing any voices of dissent just in that voting tent. And so we went from this really heated brawl in the tally center to the streets where people were burning tires and being hunted down. Ben not just cracked, you know, we always say cracked down, but they were hunted down. There was such an intense deployment of troops, huge APVs, trucks, just police, military, just descending on the center of Kampala, this huge roundabout where you know, you have to the kind of roundabout that everyone has to pass through to get anywhere in Kampala. And it, there was such an intensity to that day that it, it felt like a war zone. I saw soldiers act in ways that wouldn't even be allowed in the bush, wouldn't even be allowed on the front line. And this zero tolerance approach is what people have been dealing with in Uganda for months. Every time they go out and protest, even just yelling slogans of support for Bobby Wine saying, people power Bobby. Immediately they're met with this, this. It's just like a punch in the gut. Don't even try and breathe a word against Yuri Museveni.
- [74:03]
Ben Rhodes
Well, the tally that you mentioned, Museveni won claiming 72% of the vote. Obviously that's disputed by Bobby Wine in the opposition. Museveni in his victory speech called the opposition terrorists who are working with foreigners and homosexuals. I guess one place need to start. I mean, that 72% figure, I mean, is there any sense of legitimacy around it? I know we can't get any kind of independent tally here, but what is your sense of the likelihood that that number matches any reality?
- [74:46]
Yusra El Bagir
Well, the number is just under 20% more. So he got 58% last time and now he's got the 72%. The likelihood of that is very slim. I think realistically there's such voter apathy that I would be very surprised if people were rallying in that way to vote for President Museveni. But then there is also the fact that a lot of people are seeing the wars happening on the continent. They're seeing the war in the drc, they're seeing the war in Sudan. And some people do feel like they need a strong man like Museveni to hold it together. Someone with decades of experience who has a hand in all of these wars in a way that is materially beneficial for Uganda. So there are people who are voting for, for President Museveni for those reasons, for, for the kind of security and stability that you get with a despot, you know, with someone who's just held the country together and monopolized power in a way that, you know things would fall apart without him. Very similar to Omar Al Bashir in Sudan. The reason that the rigging allegations feel like they have some credence is because we witnessed firsthand the fury of the people monitoring every single declaration and telling us this does not not add up to what our agents are telling us on the ground. Speaking to a 23 year old member of the National Unity Party. Bobby Wines Party, who was so full of angst that her voice was breaking, like, what are we meant to do? We went out, we voted. We did what we were meant to do. Like, what more can be done for us? What can the international community do? This exasperation that was so genuine, that felt truly genuine, that they followed everything step by step, and they wanted their ballot to be their bullet, their weapon. And just the despair that comes with that was very real, very palpable. I did speak to the prime minister of Uganda as the results were declared. She was there, kind of representing the state in the national tally center. And I asked her, is this a free and fair election? She goes, it was. It was very quickly, before I finished. So I asked, you know, then why are the military and police deployed in the streets? And she said, well, no, the military and the police are deployed because there are agents of chaos, and they are. There are people who are rejecting and creating anarchy. And that's always the response. So there's this intense militarization around a process that's meant to be democratic. And then when people are hurt and brutalized by that show of force, they're called criminals. But we've been. We were there when opposition party officials were calling the government criminals. So this was not a free and fair election. Just by the sheer intensity of the militarization. If we get down to the votes and vote rigging, I think that that's going to be quite a process to prove. But the climate was not a climate of democratic. It was not a democratic exercise by any means. It was definitely an authoritarian process of fake legitimacy.
- [78:13]
Ben Rhodes
So I want to ask about both the government and the opposition, starting with the government. You actually sat down with President Museveni a few days ago, I should add. He's been backed over the years by the United States. I think, much to our discredit. In a lot of ways, the African Union kind of defers to him. I noticed they didn't exactly mount any concerns about the result. But, Museveni, I noticed in the talk with you, he even went out of his way to say that he's not senile. I will tell you, Yusra, I was in a meeting with him 10 years ago. It was a multilateral meeting about. Held in Ethiopia, about South Sudan. And in that meeting, he wasn't. I mean, I don't want to. I will resist being, you know, a doctor, but let's just say he wasn't the sharpest guy at the round table that I was at. He had to kind of be Reminded of some of the agenda and stuff. What is your sense of his, you know, his faculties, his. What he's trying to do. He has a son, you know, who's kind of the Don junior Of Uganda, who's constantly making threats online. He's threatened to kill opposition figures. He's threatened to invade Kenya. What is the current state of President Museveni and kind of his succession plan and his approach to politics based on your time with him.
- [79:43]
Yusra El Bagir
So to just talk about maybe lucidity. Yeah, I found him to be quite lucid. I mean, there were the ramblings of someone who is of a certain age but also has so much they want to say and goes off on tangents, homophobic tangents, for example, tribalistic tangents. But he was. What was interesting is that he was up for the fight. He liked that he was being interviewed properly. I, I actually found that I, I felt like at some point he enjoyed that it was a bit of a fight that we were, you know, I wasn't agreeing with him that I was challenging him. So I found that interesting that there was still that kind of spirit in him where he wanted to be challenged and not just pander to, like everyone around him in terms of his health. Moved, walked very quickly, was very. Seemed very fit. I was actually quite surprised because, you know, he's my father's age on paper and, you know, he seemed very fighting fit, you know, for, for his age in terms of his movements and how quickly he moved around the gardens. We were in the garden of the State Lodge where he lives in the State House compound in the center of Kampala. What succession plan for me was. Was a no, almost like a dead end. Because as soon as you ask him about succession, he says, whoever my party wants. As soon as I asked him about him how long he wants to rule, he said, whatever my party wants, whatever the people want. So he kind of sticks to that line that he had as a rebel leader, which is it's about the people. Because I did challenge him on that because I met him 40 years on from the Bush war victory that brought him into power. And what people kind of forget is that he had two unelected terms before the 1996 election. So he's actually seeking his. He's now going into his ninth term after seven election wins. And so I was really curious to see what changed for him in terms of his mentality, because there's so many quotes on record of him saying that the problem with Africa is not the people, it's the leaders who Want to hold on to power. You know, he has all these kind of like, he just has these gems about democracy and people power and you think it's real. So I wanted to find out what the contradiction was. And his constant rebuttal was, the people have elected me. They want me. And so it did kind of bring some insight or it kind of helped me understand that this whole process is about that for him potentially, that he sees this process as a legitimization of this continued reign so that he can somehow feel like the things that he believed in when he was younger and the things that he espoused when he was younger still hold true. Because he never. He never really shifted on that. He never said no. Well, things change. He said no. The people have elected me because I'm here and I have the knowledge and I have the experience. And you should be so lucky. Essentially, the people of Uganda are lucky that he's still around to share the experience that he has. And I do feel like there's this paternalism that he has that Mugabe had that a lot of, you know, liberation leaders turned despots have, where it's, I'm the one who could hold it together because I'm the one who knows what it took to have this, to create this, to build this for you all. Kagame and Hawaii. His line about the intern. Kagami ANC.
- [83:24]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah. Yeah. large.
- [83:26]
Yusra El Bagir
But it's the in. And that kind of showed in the lineup of we built the Internet.
- [83:31]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah.
- [83:31]
Yusra El Bagir
Because that's it. We built this country so we can switch it off and we can shut it down when we want. And I, I kind of knew going into it that that was potentially the mentality. And so it was really interesting to see the ways that it kind of manifested in the micro, whether it was the Internet or it was. You know, he spoke to me about Sudan and his time, you know, talking to Bashir and Turabi about the issues in Sudan. And one of the things that was interesting is that he said to me, you know, we spent a lot of time telling Omar Al Bashir that you should be looking at interest, not identity. And the irony is, is that Museveni has created many districts based on ethnicity and tribe. And in. In Uganda, he's multiplied districts. And so I actually believe that he's done both. It's identity and interest, but ultimately self interest. So speaking to him, there's an interest in his son being his successor. There's an interest in kind of keeping everything within the family and keeping everything kind of held within the National Resistance Movement. But there's also something really, you know, watching NRM celebrate in the election hall, in the tally center when they won the election was this feeling that it, it doesn't really have any meaning anymore.
- [85:00]
Tommy Vietor
Yeah.
- [85:00]
Yusra El Bagir
You know, these wins, there's just an entitlement to it that they're just holding on to rather than actually recovering anything. And, and I'll just go to one thing. When the ANC lost their majority in the 2024 election, I remember interviewing an MK vet who was the Minister of defense in that. In that administration before the Government of National Unity. And I said to her, how do you feel that the ANC has lost their majority? How do you feel that you've lost shoes? Like, we're the ones who created this democracy. We're the ones who gave people the right to vote. And she was very angry. And so it just really comes down to that. As we built it, we hold onto it and we can destroy anything to do that.
- [85:45]
Ben Rhodes
That raises the question though, whether that's how people see it, which gets to the opposition and also just the people of Uganda. Bobby Wine, he's 43. He kind of comes out of the arts there. A musician who went into politics, generated a lot of excitement, showed a lot of personal courage by staying in the country when he could have chosen the path of exile. But as you pointed out, 70% of Uganda is under 30. Right. So he may be paternalistic, but it's hard to imagine an 81 year old kind of being in touch with the concerns of. Of the 70% of his people that are young. What is your sense of, is it fatalism that this is just the way things are? Is it anger? Is there any hope of changing things through politics? Do they want anything out of the international community which doesn't really exist anymore? What's your sense of that younger population and what's next for this opposition movement that has now tried this with Bobby Wine twice through no fault of his own, really, that just kind of can't get. Can do things through democratic means. What's the mood, do you think, among younger Ugandans?
- [86:51]
Yusra El Bagir
I think there's a lot of frustration. And that's regional. Right. It's also in Kenya, it's also in Tanzania. This, this regional Gen Z angst about what they're kind of left to deal with and, and the fact that actually they, they inherit all the issues in these countries and then they don't have any say in how the countries are governed. Because Uganda, I mean, President Museveni spoke about the economic growth. And he had those statistics immediately to hand, 3.9 billion GDP when he came into power in 1986 and now it's 64 billion. But what he, no one ever speaks about is the national debt crisis. They've got around $32 billion in national debt and that's the debt that young people are going to inherit. They also have really bad youth unemployment. I mean I met a young woman in, in the voting line in Bobby Wines stronghold and polling station who said, you know, I graduated and I don't have, I can't get a job with my degree, I don't know what to do. And her voting for Bobby is kind of a vote. It's not a wasted vote. It's this whole concept that Bobby keeps saying protest votes but you vote out of protest. She said, you know, we know he's going to win, but will he actually be announced the winner? I'm voting to ensure that he has won even if that's not the result that's shared. So there's, it feels like this was an exercise in agency even if that doesn't lead to results, tangible results. And I think, you know, Bobby will continue to call people to protest. I mean he's just shared that he doesn't, he's not going to dispute the, the results in court because the judiciary is influenced by Museveni and his administration. But he's calling people to protest. The concern with that is that young people know they're going to get killed.
- [88:49]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah.
- [88:50]
Yusra El Bagir
And that's, I think that's where Bobby is struggling a bit because I, I mean I interviewed him in 2018 and he was an MP and he was full of life and full of energy and optimism and idealism. And we went to the social media tax protest, kind of one of the first big protests they organized where people actually came out. It was when the Ugandan government started, you know, were proposing to charge tax for the use of social media. So it's always been a weird Internet kind of battleground where the Internet is what brings people out in frustration, the lack of Internet or the controlling of it. But seeing him, he did seem, I don't want to say defeated. I didn't feel defeat from him but I felt a sadness, I felt exhaustion, really like someone who's been beleaguered. And I, I did kind of push him on the blood, the bloodshed and what protection he's offering Ugandans when they kind of go out and support him and face the security apparatus in full force. And he was, he was Very adamant. I'm just one Ugandan. It's on the security forces to not shoot. I'm a leader. I show the way, I lead the way. I'm doing that. But there was a, there was a hollowness to his responses because I think ultimately he has to go and speak to the families of these kids. And he had spoken to a family just the day before I spoke to him. A man who was 33 killed in the polling station area in Bobby's neighborhood. So someone from his community. And I do think that there is, that is the breaking of the spirit that Mahuzi, that the state are kind of working on, that they want to just crush the dissent as soon as it happens so that people decide it's not worth their time and that Bobby ends up being someone that eventually is blamed for, for this amount of bloodshed. And I think to some degree it could work. I mean, when the votes, when the election results were announced, we drove back and we saw people gathered around TVs. We're like, wait, are they watching the election results? Are they waiting for a speech? And they're actually watching the Manchester United Man, Man City game. Yeah, like completely checked out. Gathering to watch the results. No protests. Everyone back at work. I mean, I've been checking in since we've been back for the last kind of two days and, and I still haven't heard a protest pick up again. I think there's generally just a sense of all right, it didn't work. You know, it doesn't mean they won't protest again. And Bobby continuing to call for protests might change something. But that one day, Ben.
- [91:41]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah.
- [91:42]
Yusra El Bagir
Where votes were being counted and the security forces and the military descended was so aggressive and so brutal that I do think that they took the kind of air out of it for a little bit. They definitely made it very clear that people would lose their lives if they went out to protest. I honestly felt like we were on the front lines. And I've been to a lot of protests in, in, in the last few years around these sort of issues of, of Gen Z upset and you know, Ruto must go. I haven't seen anything like this, you know, in Kenya. It's very dynamic. It's, it's gunfire, but loads of tear gas and lots of chasing and snatch squads in, in Maputo. Very trigger happy police officers who just kind of shoot in the air and shoot at people and, and have rabid dogs, rabid police dogs going for protesters. But this is the first time that I felt that this was a battlefield that could have been in the bush.
- [92:45]
Ben Rhodes
Well, look, I think that's a very important and powerful picture. And I think you're kind of describing this moment where the balance is really tipped in these kind of strongman direction. Museveni Kagame in Rwanda, Ruto in Kenya. But we go Cameroon, but frankly, we go to Iran. We could go to the United States, we go to Russia. This is not just limited Africa, but it does feel like at some point something has to give here, you know, like these people are not gonna live forever. Gen Z's growing, so it's something to watch how long this dynamic can hold. Well, Yusra, really appreciate you coming off such fresh reporting. We'll have to have you back at some point. There's Somaliland, there's Sudan. There's so many things happening on the continent that bear attention. But really thankful for you to give us this, a powerful glimpse into what's happened in Uganda. So thanks for that and for your reporting.
- [93:38]
Yusra El Bagir
Thanks, Ben. Appreciate it.
- [93:44]
Tommy Vietor
Thanks again to Yusrabugir for joining the show. I think I will probably let him do that to us.
- [93:50]
Ben Rhodes
Thanks to Manual Macron for the glasses.
- [93:53]
Tommy Vietor
So I bet he had. Yeah, he must just had pink eye.
- [93:56]
Ben Rhodes
He had a minor eye procedure, they said, so. Oh, don't ever, you know, don't come at us and be like, oh, you're being insensitive. I'm sorry. There's a way to not wear those glasses and deal with your minor eyes.
- [94:07]
Tommy Vietor
I mean, I was always taught that you got pink eye because someone farted on your pillow. The last time I got it, actually, I think it was because I changed the diaper and you know what happens next.
- [94:19]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah, that's not good. Anyway, I'm sure next week we'll have. Actually, I'm sure I'll see you before. The odds of us doing some Davos, you know, special, are pretty high.
- [94:30]
Tommy Vietor
Who can resist? Anyway, thanks for listening. Subscribe. Pod Save World is a crooked media production. Our senior producer is Alona Minkowski. Our producer is Michael Goldsmith. Our associate producer is Anisha Banerjee. We get production support from Saul Rubin. Our executive producers are me, Tommy Vitor and Ben Rhodes. The show is engineered, mixed and edited by Jordan Canter. Audio support by Kyle Seglin and Charlotte Landis. Thank you to our digital team, Ben Hefcoat, Mia Kelman, William Jones, David Toles and Ryan Young. Matt De Gro is our head of production. Adrian Hill is our senior vice president of news and politics. If you want to listen to Pod Save the World ad free and get access to exclusive podcasts. Go to crooked.com friends to subscribe on Supercast, Substack, YouTube, or Apple Podcasts. Don't forget to follow us at. Click Crooked Media on Instagram, Tik Tok and Twitter for more original content, host takeovers and other community events. Please subscribe to Pod Save the World on YouTube for access to full episodes, bonus content, and much more. And if you're opinionated like us, leave a review Our production staff is proudly unionized by the Writers Guild of America. East. With Venmo Stash A taco in one hand and ordering a ride in the other means you're stacking cash back. Nice. Get up to 5% cash back with Venmo Stash on your favorite brands when you pay with your Venmo debit card. From takeout to ride shares, entertainment and more, pick a bundle with your go tos and start earning cash back at those brands. Earn more cash when you do more with Stash. Venmo Stash terms and exclusions apply. Max 100 cash back per month. See terms at Venmo me terms.
- [96:22]
Yusra El Bagir
Choose to show up with the bold styling of the Mazda CX30.
- [96:32]
Ben Rhodes
I wake up.