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Pod Save the World
Israel’s Plan to Flatten and Occupy Gaza
01:34:05
Tommy and Ben discuss President Trump’s firing of National Security Advisor Mike Waltz and the dangers that come along with consolidating responsibilities into fewer hands, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s visit to the White House, and cuts to the CIA, military, and other intelligence agencies while Trump plans a “big, beautiful” military parade on his birthday. They also talk about Israel’s plan to occupy and hold Gaza indefinitely, the anti-Trump effect in the Australian election, but a rightward turn for elections in the UK and Romania. Additionally, they cover the rocky start for Germany’s new Chancellor Friedrich Merz, the Trump administration’s defense of Germany’s far-right AfD party after being designated as an “extremist endeavor”, India’s military response to a terrorist attack in the Kashmir region, and they take bets on the papal conclave. Finally, Ben speaks to Clayton Weimers, Executive Director of Reporters Without Borders in the US about the grim state of globa...
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- [00:00]
Tommy Vitor
This podcast is brought to you by wise. WISE is the smart way to manage your money internationally. Sending or spending money abroad. Major banks may be taking a cut. With Wise, you'll always get the real mid market exchange rate so you can use money around the globe with minimum fees and maximum ease. Setting up your Wise account is easy and you'll have access to over 40 currencies in just a few seconds. From buying overseas properties to tapping your card on the metro, get the real deal for your money all around the globe. And with 24. 7 live support and real time transaction tracking, you know your money is secure. 12 million customers managing their international money with WISE can't be wrong. Download the Wise app today or visit wise.com Terms and conditions apply. Welcome to Pod Save the World. I'm Tommy Vitor.
- [00:51]
Ben Rhodes
I'm Ben Rhodes.
- [00:52]
Tommy Vitor
Ben, all the way live from Singapore. You look very international right now.
- [00:56]
Ben Rhodes
I mean, you know, Q International hotel room could be anywhere. But yes, good morning. Good Wednesday morning, Tommy. It is Wednesday morning in Singapore where I. Which I love by the way because you can walk two blocks in any direction and eat a bowl of noodles. But I'm here for a philanthropy summit. I'm here to help support the Obama foundation and its remarkable leaders here who had dinner with last night. So yes, coming to you from.
- [01:25]
Tommy Vitor
Did you see Donald Trump attacked the Obama presidential library in his Oval Office meeting?
- [01:29]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah, I woke up to that. Actually didn't see the specific report, but yeah, I'm probably not doing any favors for it by saying I'm, I'm, I'm here on its behalf in Singapore.
- [01:38]
Tommy Vitor
But yeah, yeah, well, you're, you're fine. He basically accused all the construction workers in Chicago of like doing land acknowledgments and screaming their pronouns and not like hammering in nails or something. So it's going slow. It was very, very stupid. Regardless, Ben, today's a tough day for me. A great one for you, even if it's a different day because the Knicks beat the Celtics in overtime in game one of this playoff series and Boston losing one at home. I don't like that.
- [02:04]
Ben Rhodes
No, you never like to let the other team steal game one. I have to tell you, Tommy, I was up yesterday morning watching this and sports is so funny because I was so invested when the Knicks came all the way back from 20 points down, I was like, you know, I always feel fear. The worst as a Knicks fan.
- [02:21]
Tommy Vitor
So I was like, you should.
- [02:22]
Ben Rhodes
First I was worthy. Exactly. First I was worthy to get blown out. Then the way it came back. I was like, oh, my God, if we come all the way back and lose, then that'll be awful. And so as it's like 100, 100, I'm sitting there, I'm not, like, a particularly religious person, and I'm like, everything has been so bad. Can I please just have this one nice thing?
- [02:41]
Tommy Vitor
Like, that was like, I was like, finding the force in the world could.
- [02:45]
Ben Rhodes
Deliver the nicks of victory. So I'm glad that worked out for me. I'm still a little afraid of you guys, but less afraid than I was two days ago.
- [02:53]
Tommy Vitor
Yeah, we got time. We'll come back. Good game.
- [02:56]
Ben Rhodes
Just don't take 63 pointers. I don't understand. If you're like Jason Tatum or Jalen Brown, just dribble towards the basket and shoot it. You don't need to pull up, especially.
- [03:03]
Tommy Vitor
If you're bricking them. Yeah. Also, Ben, I want to say thank you to everyone who has subscribed to the Pod save the World YouTube page. We've been putting up a ton of content on that channel recently, including, we did a YouTube exclusive segment on reports that Trump had actually waved off an Israeli plan to bomb Iran's nuclear infrastructure. We did a segment last week about Mike Waltz getting fired as National Security Advisor and Secretary of Middle Management Marco Rubio getting offered the gig. So please subscribe to the Pod Save the World and pod save America YouTube page, if you don't mind, because we're. We're cranking out originals over here, and big picture, Democrats are getting crushed by Republicans on YouTube. And when you guys subscribe and you. You help us grow the channel, and that helps us get good information from a progressive perspective to people who are just searching for political news. And if, you know, if they don't get it from us, they're gonna get it from Ben Shapiro. So we really appreciate you subscribing. So today we're gonna cover some big stories. We got the chaos that has now engulfed not just Pete Hegseth over the Pentagon, but a big chunk of Trump's national security team. We're gonna talk briefly about Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney's visit to the Oval Office. Peter. The Israeli government's horrible new plan for Gaza, Trump's maybe real, maybe sort of bullshit deal with the Houthi rebels in Yemen, some sort of ceasefire elections in Australia, the uk, Romania, and Singapore. Bit of a mixed bag there. How the German government almost toppled before it was stood up earlier today. And why Trump officials are mad about the treatment of the far right. AfD party in Germany. Then we'll do a quick update on tensions between India and Pakistan, and then we will preview the papal conclave in the best way we know how. And then bet, have you done a mock draft or filled out your papal bracket yet?
- [04:46]
Ben Rhodes
No, I haven't. Yeah, like, I, I'm just reading up on the Mel Kuiper big board of who the Cardinals are. I should be watching.
- [04:54]
Tommy Vitor
I wonder if Shador will drop in this draft, too. Time will tell. And then, Ben, you just did our interview at like whatever 6am or whatever Singapore time it is. What are folks going to hear?
- [05:05]
Ben Rhodes
I talked to Clayton Weimers, who's the executive director of Reporters Without Borders in the US and they released their Global Press Freedom Index last week around Global Press Freedom Day. Spoiler alert, Tommy. It's not going well for press freedoms around the world.
- [05:20]
Tommy Vitor
Bummer.
- [05:20]
Ben Rhodes
But what was really interesting in this report and in this interview was talking about the kind of economic hurricane that has hit journalism globally as you have, you know, social media, you know, taking over media deserts, but how authoritarians are increasingly interacting with that. And, you know, Trump is doing this in the US now, where essentially they're seeing what's happening in terms of vulnerability and how they're using that to kind of further kill independent journalism or turn it into, you know, part of their authoritarian playbook. So we, we kind of COVID that in the US and also how it's affecting things globally. We talk about Gaza and what it means when the US Kind of totally turns a blind eye to any accountability for the killing of journalists in places like Gaza and the West Bank. Kind of what people can do, like what kind of independent journalism is necessary. Also importantly, the funding cuts for USAID and voa, Voice of America and overseas broadcasting. So not a great picture, but I think people need to get smart on this so they understand both what's happening, but also how to support independent journalism in this country and globally.
- [06:23]
Tommy Vitor
Excellent. Everyone should check that out. It's a very, very important topic, I think, under discussed when it comes to the rise of authoritarianism. And your mention of the Gaza piece of this reminded me that our friends over at Zateo News have a documentary coming out called who Killed Shireen? About the execution by the IDF of this famous Palestinian American journalist and the total lack of accountability for it during the Biden administration. So I'm looking forward to watching that.
- [06:49]
Ben Rhodes
And we talk about that case like on the, on the interview. Yeah. As an exemplar of the wrong way to do it in terms of accountability.
- [06:58]
Tommy Vitor
Absolute moral failing there. All right, Ben, so let's start with the chaos in Trump's national security team, because I do think it's like a big evolving story. As I mentioned at the top, Mike Waltz is out as National Security Advisor. Rubio was given the job on an interim basis and is now technically Secretary of State, interim National Security Advisor, acting USAID administrator, and acting Archivist of the United States. So that makes a lot of sense. Walt will be nominated to serve as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. I look forward to that confirmation hearing. There's a bunch of new reporting about why Waltz got fired. Since we talked about this last week on YouTube, it sounds like part of it was obvious, like Trump never got over the signal gate fiasco and the weeks and weeks and weeks of bad headlines that followed. But additionally, the Washington Post reported that Trump was pissed at Waltz for coordinating with the Israeli government before Prime Minister Netanyahu's visit to the White House back in February. I guess Waltz and the Israelis were talking about military options to target Iran's nuclear program. Waltz, when Trump wanted to try diplomacy first, and that pissed him off. Also, as we've discussed, it sounds like the rest of the White House just thought Mike Waltz was a moron and they hated working with him and they wanted him out. JD Vance went on tv, I think it was with Brett Baer on Fox, and tried to describe Waltz's firing as a promotion because the job is Senate confirmed. I believe there's something like 1300 Senate confirmed jobs, Ben. So we all had a good laugh at that. And here's Trump talking about these personnel moves on Meet the Press this past weekend.
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Donald Trump
Mr. President, was that move a punishment?
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Reporter
No, I just think he'll do a nice job in the new position. Marco is doing an outstanding job. No, Marco won't keepmarco's very busy doing other things, so he's not going to keep it long term. We're going to put somebody else in. But I think Mike, who's, as you know, he's a fine guy, and I think he'll do a very good job, knows the countries, knows leadership, and I think he'll do a very good job at the United Nations. And in the meantime, Marco's really doing something special and it's going to work out very well.
- [08:58]
Donald Trump
We're hearing some potential names. Stephen Miller's name, one of your longtime, most loyal aides. His name has been talked about as a potential national security adviser. Is he someone you're looking?
- [09:11]
Reporter
Well, I'd love to have Stephen there, but that would be a downgrade. Stephen's very. Steven is much higher in the totem pole than that, in my opinion.
- [09:19]
Donald Trump
Can you tell us who the frontrunner is right now?
- [09:21]
Reporter
I have a lot of people that want it. I will tell you. I have everybody calling, everybody wants to be a part of this administration. So at some point we'll, you know, probably do that. You know, there's a theory Henry Kissinger did both. There's a theory that you don't need two people, but I think I have some really great people that could do a good job.
- [09:41]
Tommy Vitor
So calling Walt a fine guy, such a brutal description, unless he meant fine and, like, thinks he's hot. But, Ben. So this change at the White House, the national security advisor position comes as this chaos around Hegseth just won't go away. The Wall Street Journal reported that Hegseth made at least a dozen signal chats where he talked about sensitive information, including one where he told AIDS to, quote, inform foreign governments about an unfolding military operation. In that story, the Pentagon tossed Hegseth's military aid under. Under the bus and told the Journal that he was the guy who shared classified information with Pete Hegseth's wife and brother. But despite this mess, Ben, like you can hear in that Meet the Press clip that Trump just doesn't really seem to think he needs a national security adviser or NSC staff. I don't know. Maybe he just thinks he's the genius behind it all.
- [10:31]
Ben Rhodes
Well, I think he does. I think he's his own national security adviser. And, you know, he wants to have kind of these personal emissaries like Steve Woodkoff flying around the world who have a direct line back into Trump rather than having a national security adviser coordinating the State Department, Defense Department, the intelligence community. The risk of that is the kind of chaos in the government, Right. Because the national security advisor's job, which is, you know, with all due respect, I mean, the UN Ambassador job is more important in Democratic administrations, but in Republican, particularly Trump administrations, it's a massive demotion. It's a joke, because the national security advisor coordinates the UN Ambassador, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, in terms of developing policy and implementing policy or if there's a crisis, like some of the things we're going to talk about today. You know, India bombs Pakistan, who convenes the meeting in the national Security, in the Situation Room to figure out how to respond to that, Right? So there's just a huge vacuum in terms of being able to deal with particularly a crisis or being able to Implement an objective. I worry too about the authoritarian playbook of this, all right? Because part of what you want to do, if you want to truly consolidate power, you essentially debilitate the kind of normal workings of the government. You pull all decision making into the office of the president and then you just deal with loyalists. And that kind of brings us to the Stephen Miller and Hegseth of it all. Stephen Miller to me, is the scariest guy to be in this job. First of all, it's kind of weird that Trump would think being national security advisor is a demotion from Stephen Miller being deputy Chief of Staff for policy. There's some weird world where Stephen Miller is in charge of both domestic and national security policy, which is scared of me. But I think the particularly dangerous thing about a guy like Miller is he is someone like the Project 2025 people who've looked at how to use national security authorities, right? So kind of post 911 authorities to deport people to El Salvadorian gulags or to impose tariffs. These are not things that have a lot of legal basis or any legal basis, say in the case of terrorists, but they're using these emergency authorities, right? And when we think about the more extreme examples, delaying an election or something, or deploying the military in the streets, all of that would be based on a, quote, unquote, national emergency, a national security emergency. And so that's why I don't want guys like Miller who've actually thought about that to be in that. That'd be a signal, an alarming signal. And lastly on Hegseth is a lot of people say to me, when Trump threatens to invade Greenland or Canada, which we'll get to today, or take back the Panama Canal, well, would the military actually do that? Well, you see Hegseth kind of purging generals and now wanting to kind of get rid of 20% of all generals. What the Pentagon looks like in two years versus what it looks like today could be very different. If they basically are trying to build a MAGA military or maybe within the military, like a MAGA wing that they can count on for some of their more far fetched things. However, I will say with Pete Hecseth, he's one of those people that has kind of gross incompetence and lack of any kind of discipline makes me kind of assures me, like on the one hand it's kind of scary that nobody's like running the Pentagon or. But on the other hand it's maybe a good thing that like the guy who might be in charge of trying to turn the military into something that would invade Canada is like, a guy who seems to day drink and has a makeup studio and is firing his own, like, you know, longtime loyalists.
- [14:03]
Tommy Vitor
Everybody. Yeah, everyone around him. Yeah. It is a. Yeah. I guess his inability to plan is helpful. Although Trump, amazingly amazing moment on Meet the Press, Trump did actually rule out a military invasion of Canada. So I, I guess that's reassuring. But you're right about Stephen Miller. I mean, he's, like, declaring in a national emergency that the latest Indiana Jones movie was filmed internationally. So God help us if there was something that really did happen. But I. You're. I'm glad you brought up the India, Pakistan tensions as an example of why you want a national security advisor and a secretary of state, because right now. We'll get to the substance of this in a bit. But, like, Marco Rubio should be calling his counterparts in India and in Pakistan and trying to calm things down. He should then go to the region and try to, like, be there and kind of, like, physically prevent a military escalation. And then the national security advisor should be sitting in Washington and running a process for contingency planning and, like, where to get other parts of the national security establishment involved. Like, you know, if Hegseth wasn't a moron, he would be calling his counterparts in both India and Pakistan and telling them to chill out. Maybe Trump makes a call. Like, right, you'd have to staff that. You'd have to develop a package for what the message looks like, what. What, you know, threats could look like. But Rubio just can't do both at once. Like, that's not even a shot at him, even though I love taking shots at him. Like, nobody can physically do both of those jobs.
- [15:20]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah. Like, and this is a good example. Right. So. And you set this up well, Tommy. But, like, the national security advisor would convene this meeting in response to something like this. The intelligence community would brief everybody in that meeting in the Situation Room about, hey, what do we know about what's going on, you know, in India and Pakistan? Then you'd make a plan for diplomatic engagement, which, by the way, would include outreach from, you know, people like the State Department and Marco Rubio to India and Pakistan, but also to all the other countries. Like, you know, there are other countries called the Chinese. Yeah, yeah, call the Chinese. What are the, you know, other countries that have influence in India and Pakistan. You'd be trying to make sure that everybody's kind of speaking with one voice because India doesn't want you Know, the US Kind of come in and mediate it, but they, if they're hearing the same message from lots of countries, that's helpful. The military has contacts. You know, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff calling the chief of staff of the army or the military in both India and Pakistan would be part of this diplomatic security. Like what are we doing to, you know, secure our diplomatic facilities in Indian Pakistan in case all hell breaks loose here? Right. Thinking through worst case scenarios. Right. Who's watching the nuclear weapons? There's a lot of stuff to be doing. American citizens. What services need to be surged to support American citizens who are in a potential conflict zone. I don't think that's happening. Or if it's happening, it's not being coordinated. Marco Rubio, as a national security advisor, can't both run that process, brief the President and be the Secretary of State. You just can't do that. Right.
- [16:49]
Tommy Vitor
He doesn't even have a deputy and everyone else is just a mess. I mean, you know, last week Reuters published this photo of Mike Waltz from a cabinet meeting where you could see the screen of his phone and on it he was using this app called Telemessage. Telemessage is an Israeli developed app that was sold to some US company called Smarsh. I guess that's the actual name. Waltz and other administration officials use this app to archive their signal chats to, I assume comply with the Presidential Records act, which says you have to, you know, archive all of your communications and correspondence. But some hacker told a News outlet called 404 Media that he was able to hack the Telemessage app in like 15 minutes and pull the names and contact info for hundreds of US Government employees. So great work there. Again, the operational security is strong. Reuters reported that in the first few days of the administration, Pete Hegseth may have halted military aid shipments to Ukraine without first telling the White House that he was going to do it. That is kind of a shocking process foul. Again, would be good to have a national security advisor sort of coordinating these things. And then finally, Ben, I just wanted to play a quick clip for you in case you missed it. You probably asleep when this happened of newly elected Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney in the Oval Office today. Here's a quick excerpt of how it went.
- [18:07]
Ben Rhodes
As you know from real estate, there are some places that are never for sale.
- [18:12]
Reporter
That's true.
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Ben Rhodes
We're sitting in one right now. You know, Buckingham palace that you visited as well. That's true. And having met with the owners of Canada over the course of the campaign last several months. It's not for sale. Won't be for sale ever.
- [18:26]
Reporter
But never say never. Never say never.
- [18:28]
Tommy Vitor
So, you know, Trump's talking a little less tough these days to our Canadian friends. You know, like I said, he was talking shit about Justin Trudeau, but less so to Mark Carney. There's.
- [18:35]
Ben Rhodes
I mean, like, Carney's, like, brushed this guy back, you know, and Carney's got a pretty strong mandate from the Canadian people. Again, as we've discussed, I think, you know, Carney appears to have threatened to dump US Bonds in ways that could. In treasuries in ways that could, you know, significantly impact the economy. And he just, you know, he's not being bullied. I mean, you know, compare Mark CARNEY to, like, U.S. law firms, you know, like, that approach works. Capitulating to Trump does not work. You know, and Trump is. Is so incapable of dealing with someone kind of punching him back that all he can be is, like, you know, you never say never. You know, like, that tough, you know?
- [19:14]
Tommy Vitor
Yeah. He spends a lot of time yelling about Biden or Trudeau. Not so much his counterparts. There was a great episode of this podcast and YouTube show called Pablo Torre finds out about how Wayne Gretzky's relationship with Donald Trump and his refusal to just come out and say, like, hey, Canada will never be the 51st state has caused all these Canadians to be furious at Gretzky. And it goes into the weirdness of Gretzky sitting in a box next to Cash Patel during those two games when Ovechkin tied and then broke his scoring record. Highly recommend it, Ben. It's right up your alley.
- [19:51]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah. The MAGA International celebrities jet set. Like, this is the weirdest collection of people. You know, weird crowd, like Wayne Gretzky. Like, if you're, like, the greatest hockey player of all time, why do you want to hang out with, like, Cash Patel? Like, I mean, even if your politics turn in the wrong direction, like, it's just there's something so, like, I don't know, lame about it, to use a. Yeah, it's weird.
- [20:13]
Tommy Vitor
I guess Patel is, like, a. A big hockey player. He plays on some, you know, club team.
- [20:18]
Ben Rhodes
Oh, yeah, I'm sure he's, like, you know, the great one, you know, Cash.
- [20:21]
Tommy Vitor
Patel, Gretzky, I think, like, became a Trump buddy after he retired and was living in New York. Probably, like, chasing around the same.
- [20:30]
Ben Rhodes
Do you think Cash Patel is having hockey games? You remember how Putin used to have those hockey games where he would win against like pro players, like 72 to nothing or something. Do you think Cash Patel, like organizes scrimmages at the FBI where he's, he has to be allowed to score, you know.
- [20:45]
Tommy Vitor
So according to this report, apparently Cash Patel has like a standing Sunday night game and some of the reporting around it. I think they talked to some of the players on his team who said that the FBI knows not to bug him during this period. And boy, that's not how the FBI director job operated back in our day. Ben. Also, Cash Patel lives in Las Vegas, so the fact that he's like going to D.C. still for his club hockey game and obviously there's a lot of reasons to be in D.C. but it's worth watching. It was eye opening.
- [21:12]
Ben Rhodes
I'll take it out.
- [21:13]
Tommy Vitor
Anyway, a couple additional Trump things. So the Washington Post reported that the CIA may be planning to reduce its workforce by about 1200 jobs via, you know, early retirements or buyouts. I'll be honest, I'm not that worked up about that one. The agency probably shrinking a bit. Pete Hegseth announced something similar. He's going to clean out some of the senior leadership at the Pentagon. He's telling the military to cut 20% of its four star generals, and he's telling the National Guard to get rid of 20% of its top positions. Here's our boy Pistol Pete talking about this plan in this weird video that the Department of Defense released via Twitter.
- [21:48]
Ben Rhodes
We're back with more DoD reforms. This one is General and flag officer reductions. That's the official title. My title is less generals, more GIs. So it used to be a ratio of one general to 6000 troops. Today it's one general to 1400. More generals than admirals does not equal more success. Now, this is not a slash and burn exercise meant to punish high ranking officers. Nothing could be further from the truth. This has been a deliberative process, working with the Joint Chiefs of Staff with one goal. Maximizing strategic readiness and operational effectiveness by making prudent reductions in the general and flag officer ranks.
- [22:33]
Tommy Vitor
Stirring stuff. Those watching on YouTube may notice that Hegseth filmed this video with like a two camera shoot, but they still had this former TV anchor reading off a piece of paper, not a teleprompter, which just seemed like very dumb. Come on, guys, the Pentagon's got to have a teleprompter over there. Again, Ben, on the substance, I don't, I'm like, I don't think I'm that worked up about a reduction of four star generals. If it's done as described. But I do worry about these cuts being just cover for an ideological purge. Also, some related bad news. The Supreme Court just said that Trump can ban transgender service members. So that, that is obviously terrible.
- [23:08]
Ben Rhodes
The worst thing about this, and I alluded to earlier, but to be specific, the worst things Trump could do involve the weaponization of the US Military. So the deployment of the US Military to quash dissent in this country, the use of the US Military after an election that, you know, Trump or the Republicans used to, you know, I mean, we know after Trump lost last time that, you know, there were proposals to use the military under the Insurrection act or some other kind of authority to kind of seize control. Right. You know, or overseas. Right. Not just Canada, but like the, the US Military being ordered to like seize the Panama Canal or seize Greenland. I don't think the US Military would be willing to do some of those things in its current form. If the 20% cut to general officers is kind of a precursor to like a broader kind of purge and the promotion and elevation of a leadership that is kind of in Pete Hegseth's image, then all of a sudden the military in two years when Trump may want to do some of those things is scarier. Right. And, and look, maybe they'll just do parades on Trump's birthday. That's a different thing. But that, that's the only thing that be worried about there. You're right. Like, I'm not sure there can be less four star generals. That's fine. Like, I'm not. That doesn't stress me out. So the question is, is that a part though of a bigger project? Then the other thing I just say on the CI piece, same thing. I agree with you. Like, but there's a difference between early retirements. But we saw in USAID they were firing people that were overseas and leaving them there. If there are CIA officers who are serving overseas who are like shit canned and kind of the rug is pulled out from under them, guess who's going to be approaching all those CIA officers? China, Russia. And they have sources, human sources, whose lives obviously are at stake. So again, there's a smart way to have some early retirement, downsize the force, and then there's a dumb doge way like we saw in usaid that would be potentially dangerous.
- [25:07]
Tommy Vitor
Yeah, that's very, very well said. You said, I believe you mentioned military parades. Ben, I got some news for you then. Trump is finally getting the military parade he has always dreamed of. So on June 14th, we will all be celebrating the 250th anniversary of the US army and Flag Day and Trump's 79th birthday. So I'd rank those in from least to most important. The parade will cost an estimated $45 million. It will include more than 50 aircraft, 150 military vehicles, and 6,600 soldiers. Here's Trump talking about his birthday parade again on Meet the Press.
- [25:43]
Reporter
We're going to have a big, beautiful parade.
- [25:45]
Donald Trump
Military parade.
- [25:46]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah, sure, okay.
- [25:46]
Reporter
We're going to celebrate our military. We have the greatest military people. Peanuts compared to the value of doing it. We have the greatest missiles in the world. We have the greatest submarines in the world. We have the greatest army tanks in the world. We have the greatest weapons in the world. And we're going to celebrate it. If you look at Russia, they celebrate Victory Day. If you look at France, I was talking to Prime Minister Macron and he says, yes, yes, Victory Day. Victory Day. And I say, victory Day for What? World War II. I said, well, we had more to do with winning World War II than any other nation.
- [26:23]
Tommy Vitor
Why?
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Reporter
Why don't we have a Victory Day? So we're going to have a victory Day for World War I and for World War II.
- [26:28]
Tommy Vitor
I think the Russians lost a few more guys than we did. Are we going to parade a submarine into D.C. is that what he's saying there? I mean, excited for this little North Korea style celebration?
- [26:37]
Ben Rhodes
Well, that's the thing. It's easy to kind of chuckle at this and because it is kind of like his insatiable need for validation requires him to stand and watch, like, missiles being driven in front of him. But, like, there's a serious point to this, which is like this, there's this kind of slow motion frog boiling into fascism that we've been going through for 10 years. And, like, I just don't want to be in a fucking country where like, the leader sits on a parade stand and watches some fucking missiles go by in front of him. Like, that's what happens. Yeah, no, that's what happens in North Korea. And sure, it happens in some other places that, like, are not as scary as that. But, like, that's what this is about. Like, what is more fascistic than a leader on his birthday wanting to see some missiles driven on trucks in front of him. And so it sucks that we have to live in that kind of country.
- [27:28]
Tommy Vitor
It does suck. I do think a powerful, confident country does not have to parade its missiles. You just got to know you have them and you pray you never have to use them. That's kind of the approach I would prefer. We're going to take a quick break, but Ben, if you care about the country, and I know you do, and you're looking for a great book to read, check out when we're in the Next Generation's Guide to Leadership by Amanda Lippman. It's out on May 13th. It is the playbook you have been waiting for if you want to get more involved in politics. Amanda is the co founder of Run for Something. She spent years helping launch young political careers. Now she's sharing the insights that will help the next generation of leaders make an impact without burning out, which is quite hard these days. So you can pre order it now@crooked.com books or wherever you get your books. Foreign the World is brought to you by fatty 15. Have you heard about C15? It's an essential fatty acid that's naturally found in whole fat dairy products. But over time our intake of these foods has decreased. Combined with the Natural decline of C15 as we age, many of us aren't getting enough of this important nutrient. Introducing fatty 15C 15 supplement a simple way to replenish your body with with this essential fatty acid. Co founder Dr. Stephanie Van Watson discovered the benefits of C15 while working with the US Navy. Backed by science and supported by over 100 studies, C15 helps support cell function and resiliency and can be a valuable part of a long term health strategy. Fatty 15 is vegan, 100% pure and free from flavors, fillers, allergens or preservatives. Best of all, fatty 15 comes in a gorgeous reusable glass or bamboo jar and refills are shipped right to your door. So do yourself a favor. Replenish your C15, restore your health and let your cells do the heavy lifting with fatty 15. I've been a fatty 15 head for months now. Fatty 15 had you say keep it right by the old bed. Pop one in the morning. You know that I'm squatting £2,000. Squatting £2,000. Yeah. That's amazing. That's so heavy. I think I'm reverse aging. Wow. I'm Benjamin Buttoning before your eyes. Yeah. Yes. Thank you. Fatty 15 going backwards. Fatty 15 is on a mission to optimize your C15 levels to help you live longer and healthier. You can get an additional 15% off their 90 day subscription starter kit by going to fatty15.comworld and using the promo code World at checkout.
- [29:39]
Donald Trump
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- [30:15]
Tommy Vitor
All right, Ben. So per usual, we got nothing but bad news out of Gaza. On Sunday night, Israel's security cabinet voted to greenlight a plan to gradually reoccupy and then hold Gaza indefinitely. Netanyahu is trying to spin this as part of some pressure campaign to get to a ceasefire with Hamas, but his far right coalition is thrilled in talking about these as a long term solution. The finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich said, quote, we are finally going to conquer Gaza. We are no longer afraid of the word occupation. Remember that Gaza was fully occupied by the Israelis for decades and they withdrew in 2005. Smoshrich was also asked about a plan from another far right lunatic, Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, who proposed permanently blocking all humanitarian supplies to Gaza. Smotric, when asked about that comment or that plan, said, quote, I do not disagree with him morally, but practically the world is not going to allow us to starve to death 2 million people in Gaza, end quote. Absolutely chilling, unequivocally genocidal language right there. This plan will go into effect on May 15 unless Israel and Hamas reach some sort of deal first. That date coincides with the end of Trump's trip to the Middle east next week. I think he's going to Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the uae. Here are some of the details of Netanyahu's new Gaza plan. So everyone living in Gaza will be displaced and pushed into southern Gaza, the rafah area, about 2 million people. The IDF will flatten all remaining buildings and destroy Hamas's tunnel network. The plan envisions all humanitarian relief being distributed by some new international foundation and by private US Companies. I assume we're talking about private US Security contractors, but I'm not entirely sure. The United nations, every international aid organization has already said they will not be a part of this plan. They think it is terrible. And to pull it all off, Ben, Israel will have to mobilize 70,000 reservists, most of whom have already served for close to a year after the October 7 attacks. This Gaza plan from Netanyahu is wildly unpopular as Axios noted in their great reporting on all of this, recent polls show that between 60 to 70% of Israelis oppose occupying Gaza and a majority want a deal to free the remaining 24 hostages and end the war. Ben, I reached out to a friend in Israel just to get a sense from this person of why this is all happening now. And he said, quote, Trump has given up and lost interest and now BBC is a free hand. And that range pretty true to me. Even if, you know, Steve Witkoff or others on his team are, are well intentioned and really want a deal, it does seem like Trump is like, I don't know, whatever, do what you want now.
- [32:53]
Ben Rhodes
Well, yeah, I mean, even Steve Wykoff, this is like far down his punch card, right? I mean, he's got, he's got the Ukraine negotiations, then he's trying to negotiate a new Iran deal there. I mean, Trump's trip to the Middle East. He'll want something to announce between Iran and maybe, you know, some Saudi normalization deal with Israel that tries to cut out the Palestinians or, you know, has some kind of weird language about some future Palestinian state and addressing the humanitarian situation in Gaza. Clearly Trump could give a shit about the humanitarian situation in Gaza. And it doesn't seem to be the thing that is getting Steve Witkoff on planes and flying to the region in the same way that even the Iran talks are. And look, I mean, what we're looking at is the kind of slow motion ethnic cleansing of Gaza. They're just moving millions of people back and forth into smaller and smaller enclaves while bombing them and starving them to death and denying them medicine so that if you're, if you're sick or wounded, you will die. And then making plans to reoccupy parts of Gaza. And then there's movements to start building probably settlements. And you know, they'll say we have to build settlements in northern Gaza Strip as a buffer or something. And, but that what's happening is the destruction of the Palestinian people in Gaza and just making life so miserable for them that they might someday leave, but nobody wants them. Right. So it's just an absolute calamity and the fact that there's nothing kind of stopping it. The US Is obviously not going to stop it. Global condemnation doesn't seem to matter. Just kind of points to kind of a totally broken international system.
- [34:40]
Tommy Vitor
Yeah, totally broken. Just another sort of update that coming out of the same region. So we've talked a lot about the Houthi rebels in Yemen. Listeners probably remember they've been firing missiles and drones at Israel proper and its ships in the Red Sea. In protest of the Israeli military campaign in Gaza over the weekend. The Houthis actually managed to to get a missile past Israel's missile defense systems, and that missile struck near Ben Gurion International Airport in Tel Aviv. The Israelis responded by destroying Yemen's international airport and by hitting the main port at Hudaydah. However, earlier today, Trump in the Oval Office announced that his team had negotiated some sort of truce with the Houthis. Axios said that Marco Rubio's boss, Steve Witkoff, although if Rubio has four jobs now, Ben, is Wyckoff his boss four times over or just at State, I.
- [35:31]
Ben Rhodes
Don'T think he takes the same interest, Wyckoff in the National Archives position. So maybe that. Maybe Marco can focus on that, you know.
- [35:37]
Tommy Vitor
Okay, that's a good call. So regardless, it sounds like Wyckoff cut some deal with the Houthis. It was brokered by Oman, but it sounds like this deal is only. It basically says we will stop. We, the US Will stop bombing the Houthis and the Houthis, and in return, we'll stop firing shots or missiles or drones at US Ships, but not at Israel. So none of this is confirmed. We'll see if this thing holds big picture. It's probably a good thing if Trump, much like Biden before him, figures out that you cannot bomb the Houthis into submission and he instead opted for diplomacy. But it does feel like a bit of a. I'll believe it when I see it hold for several weeks.
- [36:18]
Ben Rhodes
That's right. I think that Trump, again, is worried about his trip. Like, he doesn't want to go over the Middle east and have something going on with the Houthis. That's what he really cares about in terms of his own image. They were worried about how expensive the thing was. I mean, the US Was using some pretty expensive hardware in that bombing campaign and not really achieving anything in terms of degrading the Houthis that much. Certainly not stopping their capacity to launch that kind of attack on Israel. But, yeah, I'd rather we stop bombing them. So that's good. But whatever they try to spin here, like, nothing is different after this bombing campaign than before the bombing campaign, you know. So what was that about, other than, I don't know, Trump wanting to. To bomb some people, you know, and it just shows you the pointlessness of the whole enterprise.
- [37:06]
Tommy Vitor
Yeah, I mean, if the Houthis stop firing missiles at any ships in the Red Sea, obviously that would be a win. If they stop firing missiles at Israel. That would be a good thing, but we'll see if that's skeptical.
- [37:17]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah, I remain skeptical that that's going to hold beyond Trump's trip.
- [37:21]
Tommy Vitor
You know, we'll see, we'll see. All right, Ben, we had a bunch of elections that we wanted to cover, so we're going to kind of tick through a few of them here. First, we'll start with Australia. Per usual, our friends in Australia bless us with some good news. Anthony Albanese from the Labour Party crushed the opposition, the very confusingly named Liberal Party, which is very conservative. So for the purposes of this conversation, just remember, labor good, Liberal Party bad. The outcome was surprising for a few reasons. First, Albanese badly lost a 2023 referendum about Aboriginal rights, which was seen as a warning sign for his administration and political standing. Then he was trailing in the polls for a long time. And then, just historically speaking, it's rare for an Australian party in charge to pick up seats going into a second term. So. But regardless of all those headwinds, like, something clicked for labor, and they went from holding 78 seats out of 150 in Australia's House of Representatives to holding around 86 seats. They're still counting the votes. We don't know an exact number, but it was clearly a improvement. We wanted to reach out to an actual Australian to get his take on what happened. So here is a clip from our friend Dan Illick. He's a climate activist, he's a comedian, he's the host of a podcast. It's called Irrational Fear. It's very funny and excellent. Let's listen.
- [38:37]
Dan Illick
Coming into this election, November, December, the Liberals in the coalition were riding high on a sentiment of Donald Trump, and they were looked like they were pretty much going to get in. The polls were not good for Labor. They even were copying Donald Trump's homework. They came in with very similar policies. They were going to do a Department of Government Efficiency, they were going to rip up immigration, they were going to destroy the renewable energy transition. The problem when you copy Donald Trump's homework, is that he's not the smartest kid in school. And Australians, we are all compelled to vote, and we are great at smelling bullshitters. And we know when somebody is bullshitting us. Come January, something was happening in America, something to do with tariffs. And then everybody kind of smelt that. That was terrible. We saw the chaos that the Department of Government Efficiency was causing in America, and we were like, I don't think we want that here. And gradually, the whole of the electorate started to back away slowly from the coalition towards labor and we're like, hey, sorry, we were looking at that other guy. Maybe there's something with stability that we, we actually like. Maybe there's something about our record low employment and our slowly coming down inflation that is comforting. Australians have gone, oh, you know, we don't want more uncertainty. Thanks. I think we'll just kind of stick with what we've got. And this government, labor, the labor government are very good at not doing much. They are very astute governors when it comes to doing things very slowly over a long period of time. And I think given our electoral cycle is only three years, I think Australians, I want to see what else this labor government has got.
- [40:14]
Tommy Vitor
Great, great summary there from Dan. I was listening to a bunch of Australian podcasts, Ben, where I heard a bunch of analysts talk about how this wasn't, we don't want to make this about ourselves, about America. This was not the Canadian election where, you know, voters were responding to Trump trying to annex them. But it does sound like there was a sense that Australians kind of looked at our politics and looked at some of the things that Peter Dutton was saying and they were like, you know, this brand and vibe sucks and we just like, we don't want that. And by the way, like in Canada, Peter Dutton, the right wing Liberal Party opposition leader, lost his own seat, a seat he had held since 2001. So a great outcome. What, what were your big takeaways from this, Tommy?
- [40:57]
Ben Rhodes
I just want to point out we don't do a lot of like victory laps on this podcast about. I mean, the most important victory lap is for the Australian people. Rich 10 did, but like, we've been talking about this potential Trump effect for weeks now. So it's always nice to see like the news analysis piece pop up in the feed. That's what we were talking about a few weeks ago. But there's really two things that jump out to me that do connect to us. But obviously this is above all about Australians. But these things are not inconsistent. One is, yeah, Trump is a really unstable guy. Tariffs are destabilizing the global economy. There's weird shit going on. And that kind of helps a competent incumbent, you know, and that's what the Australians have. But the second and more interesting thing that you and Dan talked about, but that really bears kind of emphasis is it's not just who can stand up to Trump or who can deal with uncertainty, it's that Trump is discrediting a whole brand of politics in the kind of advanced Economies of the world that these guys like Dutton and Poliev in Canada kind of looked Trump litish. And people don't want that. They're seeing, you know, shit, if we take a risk on that, maybe it would feel good. Maybe I don't like these technocratic labor guys, but you know what, If I vote for this right wing guy because it might feel good to punish these people, I might end up with outcomes like what the Americans are going through, you know, And I think that is a kind of intangible part of global politics now. And this Dutton guy was a fucking right wing asshole. This wasn't just kind of some center right guy. After the Australian liberals lost the last election, they kind of had that same kind of debate about the direction of the right wing party that the Republicans had in 2012. Should we tack to the center or should we go further to the right? And they went much further to the right. And it is very good for Australians and for the world that that guy not only lost the national election, but he lost his seat because people start to need to get the message that we don't want this.
- [43:02]
Tommy Vitor
Yeah. And I think Australians are traditionally a little more centrist than even we are probably. Ben, Last thing on this, the AP had a story about how after voting on Saturday, many Australians had what they call a democracy sausage. Have you heard about this?
- [43:16]
Ben Rhodes
No, but I saw some great. Some Australian world. Those are sending me some great pics of like, Australians, like voting in their bathing suits and stuff, which is awesome.
- [43:23]
Tommy Vitor
Yeah, I saw that too. So the democracy sausage insert Bill Clinton joke here, according to the ap, it is a grilled sausage wrapped in a slice of white bread topped with onion and ketchup. I guess democracy sausage vendors camp out at polling places and sell these things, like everywhere, including at polling places for citizens abroad. This apparently began, like, as bake sales in the 1920s. It evolved into the democracy sausage iteration in the 1980s as people had access to portable barbecue grills. But voting is required by law. So it happens on a Saturday in Australia, which makes total sense. It's a family affair. People bring their kids, the dog, whatever, and it'll be at like some local high school and there'll be someone with a barbecue hawking a bunch of sausages out front. And I tweeted like, is this a real thing or is this a dumb thing that Americans talk about? Because it sounds funny. And a bunch of Australians replied to me that, like, oh, no, democracy sausage is the real deal. And so maybe next election we should go and snag one.
- [44:21]
Ben Rhodes
It literally sounds what Bandit the Dad in Bluey would do on election day is just like stand outside flipping a bunch of democracy sausages. So I'm fully on board with this. I kind of one of the, I keep in mind, different quintessential worldos out there, like an Australian progressive eating a democracy sausage and voting to kind of kill the far right in Australia is like kind of our right in the, like the core of our listenership. So congratulations to everybody.
- [44:50]
Tommy Vitor
Yeah, those are the best. All right, Ben, so now I'm going to try to lump together a couple of races that didn't go quite as well. First, there was a parliamentary election by election in the UK and in the us we'd call it a special election. It was for a seat that was vacated by a Labour Party member who I believe punched a constituent. I remember reading this, listeners, correct me if I'm wrong, but this dude assaulted a constituent. So they had a by election. Nigel Farage's far right Reform Party won that seat by six votes over a Labor candidate. Literally six votes. And reform also did extremely well in a bunch of local elections, crushing the Tory party in a lot of cases. So that is ominous for the trajectory of politics in the UK generally, but also for Keir Starmer and the UK Labor Party. And then things got pretty Trumpy in Romania. George Simeon is a Euro skeptic, 38 year old, big Trump fan. He won about 40% of the vote and is expected to win the runoff election on May 18 last year. Listeners probably remember this far right weirdo named Colleen Georgescu came out of nowhere to win the first round of the presidential election. But then Romania's Constitutional Court annulled the result because of alleged Russian interference and then they banned him from running again. So in this election, Simeon actually cast his ballot with Georgescu, I think, together in solidarity. Fun facts about Simeon. He's banned from Ukraine and Moldova. Cool. His comms director used to work for Andrew Tate. Very fun. He's against military aid for Ukraine. He's anti vax. He wants to buddy up with Georgia Maloney once he takes power. Also, this little tidbit from the Wall Street Journal jumped out at us, quote, to bolster his nationalist message. He has used stage actors to impersonate people from Romania's medieval past, including Vlad the Impaler, the historical figure who is the basis for the character Dracula, which is actually pretty badass. Ben, Romania's president has a lot of sway over military matters and foreign policy. So this could have pretty big implications for the EU and NATO. And in the interim, Romania's prime minister has resigned because his party got smoked. So some pretty big changes in Romania. Ben, thoughts on this kind of cacophony of voting we just talked about?
- [47:00]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah, I mean, the Romanian piece is alarming, but it's been feeling like it's been building in that direction for some time. But I mean, what you don't want to see, you know, we've already seen in places like Hungary and Slovakia, like, you know, is the kind of contagion of the normalization of far right people actually, you know, not just being protest votes, but winning, you know, and, and, and we saw this in Austria too. Right. So the big European countries like Germany and France have, you know, they've been kind of beating back this trend. But you're just starting to see like these small countries really matter because one, they can gum up the works in European institutions. Two, they can kind of again, normalize this, this as successful form of politics. But also to take to the U.K. yes, we, in this podcast, we want left parties to win or center left parties to win. Like, it's kind of scary to me that reform is overtaking Tories. Right.
- [47:57]
Tommy Vitor
Big time.
- [47:57]
Ben Rhodes
I would rather there be like, you know, center right parties that I don't disagree with that are not crazy, that can hold the line. I would rather like a Mertz in Germany is the, you know, the CDU, you know, center right party chancellor than the AfD that Nazis. Right. And, and that's what's scared to me about reform is that if they can become the ma, the right wing alternative to labor, their chance of actually winning and then, you know, having a, you know, maga, whatever version agenda of that in the UK is, is that much higher.
- [48:30]
Tommy Vitor
Yeah. And we're going to get to Germany in one second. Lastly, on elections, Ben, Singapore had an election. The ruling People's Action Party wanted a landslide, further tightening their grip on power. Any thoughts from there on what just happened? And please don't get caned with your comments.
- [48:45]
Ben Rhodes
No, I've been here. I mean, like, people did think that this was genuinely a good result for the ruling party, in part because it upped the vote share from the last election. Right. So they've been kind of diminishing their vote share and it went up. And frankly, when you talk to people here, like, what you hear is that the Trump effect really did matter because Singapore's economy, and I think this is quite interesting, Singapore's economy is really dependent on globalization. Right. And so tariffs are a big danger, instability is a big danger and there is a sense that like hey, the ruling party, obviously these guys have been around forever essentially since the founding of the country. But they are kind of competent hands that can guide us through like the stormy period. So the Workers Party opposition, you know, didn't make the inroads that they might have thought they would have made say six months ago. I will note Tommy, that the campaigning period in Singapore, I learned while I was here is nine days.
- [49:44]
Tommy Vitor
Oh my God.
- [49:45]
Ben Rhodes
So it is not the two year.
- [49:46]
Tommy Vitor
Canada was 37. I was like, dude, that sounds incredible.
- [49:49]
Ben Rhodes
I, well I said to, you know, somewhere between the two year cycles we have in the US and nine days is a much more rational. Yeah, let's probably closer to nine. It's like a three month period. So I will say that. But this was definitely a vote for kind of stability and familiar leadership here.
- [50:10]
Tommy Vitor
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- [51:29]
Donald Trump
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- [52:05]
Tommy Vitor
All right, Ben. So two stories out of Germany that we wanted to mention. The first is that earlier this morning, Friedrich Merz, the leader of Germany's Center Right Christian Democratic Union, or CDU party, suffered a shocking historic defeat in the Bundestag of Germany's parliament. Remember in February, the CDU won the most seats in Germany's federal election. Mertz and the CDU entered into these coalition talks with the Social Democratic Party, or spd. They announced a coalition agreement in early May. And so this vote today was supposed to be like a formality. Mertz just needed a majority of the Bundestag representatives to vote for him to be Chancellor. And the combined CDU SPD coalition currently controls like 328 seats. So it seems like a foregone conclusion. But when the first round was tallied, mertz only got 310 votes, which was six short of the 316 he needed. And this just shocked everybody. It shocked Mertz, it shocked the media, it shocked foreign diplomats. Angela Merkel was like in the chamber watching it all go down. I think there was a party scheduled for afterwards and it was a secret ballot, so we don't really know what happened or who voted what way. I reached out to Bundestag member who is part of this government coalition and this person said that it was actually that they believe it was Mertz's own party, members of his own party making life hard for him. People who were pissed, like they didn't get a job or that wanted to send a warning to Mertz in for some reason they just decided to vote against him. But for a few hours this morning, the world was left wondering if this new stable seeming German government was about to collapse on itself before it got started. And Germany could have been forced to have new elections. And that likely would have seen the far right AFD party do even better and improve its margins. So luckily that didn't happen. The Bundestag scheduled a second vote. Mertz is now chancellor. He got 325 votes. But man like, pretty surprising Ben, that Mertz, his own party would want to hobble and humiliate him before he takes power. And it really makes you wonder about the quality of his political operation if they didn't see this coming.
- [54:10]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah, I'm not a Mertz, Stan. Right. I'm more of a social democratic flavor in German politics. But we need Mertz to succeed in some respects. Like, we need him absolutely to beat back the far right afd. We need him to help figure out how to stand up to Putin and be a part of the solution in supporting Ukraine. And this is just not good. Beginning your tenure with a kind of unprecedented failure to, to kind of go through the ceremonial victory procedure is. Is not a good sign about your capacity. To your point, like, this is parliamentary democracy. It's akin to like not whipping votes right in the US Congress and not knowing that you've got a problem on the horizon. So, you know, it is a question about his political operation. But also the AFD has been raising a lot of noise, by the way, helped out by people like Marco fucking Rubio about.
- [55:09]
Tommy Vitor
We'll get to that.
- [55:10]
Ben Rhodes
Because basically the AFT is bitching about being treated as a non mainstream party and this will help play into their narrative. I think that there's something fishy in German politics that they're excluded and maybe that's why Mertz couldn't get votes. So it also worries me that it kind of plays into the AFD narrative about something wrong with German politics. Thanks.
- [55:34]
Clayton Weimers
Yeah.
- [55:34]
Tommy Vitor
So on this AFD narrative. So last week, Germany's domestic intelligence agency designated the AFD as, quote, an extremist endeavor, which makes it easier for German intelligence to conduct surveillance on the AFD and presumably its members. Previously, the AfD had been designated by German intelligence as a suspected extremist group. The intelligence agency that announced this decision, it's called the Office for the Protection of the Constitution. It's a very cool name for an intel agency. They said they did a three year review of the AFD party and that, quote, the AfD's ethnic and descent based understanding of the people, which devalues the entire population groups in Germany and violates their human dignity. That was a key driver of their decision, along with their anti immigrant and anti Muslim views. So the AFD is the second largest political party in Germany right now. This ruling could restart a debate about whether the AFD should be banned, though that process would take years. The designation, though, as you mentioned, Ben, of the AFD by this intel agency in Germany, it seemed to enrage the Trump administration. Marco Rubio called it tyranny in disguise. JD Vance tweeted something and got very mad online. I saw the German Foreign Ministry was tweeting back at Rubio saying this is democracy. We have learned from our history that right wing extremism needs to be stopped. So, Ben, I don't know. I feel torn on this one. Like, on some level, if German intelligence thinks that the AfD is full of dangerous extremists, they should obviously say as much. There's obviously a very dark history here that they're trying to avoid repeating. But that history includes spying on German citizens. And that part makes me uncomfortable too. Banning the AfD entirely, I think seems likely to just backlash spectacularly and you'll see people migrate to some new party that is also extremists. And I just, like, I think you have to beat these people at the ballot box. But what did you make of this move within Germany? And then the Trump world's completely over the top seeming response.
- [57:30]
Ben Rhodes
I think that my, like, I'm, I'm more sympathetic to what the German government is doing here than I even probably would have been like a few months ago.
- [57:41]
Tommy Vitor
Because of what we're January 5th.
- [57:43]
Ben Rhodes
Well, yeah, because in part though, Tommy, I as, you know, as an effort to kind of understand the worst versions of where things can go. I've been reading a lot about how the Nazi party came into power.
- [57:54]
Tommy Vitor
Me too. What are you reading?
- [57:56]
Ben Rhodes
I just finished a book called the Meaning of Hitler, which is like, you know, about essentially by Sebastian Hafner, which is try to understand him. Sebastian Hafner also wrote a great book called Defying Hitler that was contemporaneous and it was about being an individual and watching the country getting taken over. And I read the Rise of the Third Reich, which is about how did Hitler come to power.
- [58:16]
Tommy Vitor
That's the mother tome. Right. I'm reading the Wages of Destruction, which is the Making and Breaking of the Nazi economy, is from 2008. Adam Tus, who's a economist that gets into all the economic forces that led to the rise of the Nazi party. It's really interesting because it really just narrows in on, you know, not just like the inflation piece of it, but all, all the underpinnings of the Nazi ideology and how it allowed for such extremism.
- [58:39]
Ben Rhodes
Well, and it was a convergence of some familiar things. I mean, not to, to turn this, but like it was a mixture of like a very extreme ideology with, you know, deep, deep anti Semitism as a part of it and a kind of stab in the back narrative about World War I. But also the familiarity is, you know, hey, there's high inflation. People are angry. You know, they're moving to the extreme right. Or the extreme left. There's polarization, there's a capitulation by, like, institutions and by industrialists to the Nazis. Point being, the reason this is relevant is, like, it should be the case that fucking Germany has some pretty extreme guardrails against safari coming back to power. That should happen. I support that. You know, in a way that I probably wouldn't think it was the right thing. In another country that doesn't have that history, they should go the extra mile to keep these people out. And the reality is some of these people are extremists in the AfD. There was like, a coup attempt in Germany, remember, that was foiled, like, just a matter of years ago by AfD people. And I'm not saying that's everybody in the AfD, but those people are in the AfD. And if they're seeing that, they should fucking deal with it and we should start to take this as the threat that it is. This is not about people I disagree with on policy, winning elections in certain countries. It's about literal Nazi descendants, and I don't mean ethnically descendants, but ideological descendants of Nazism in places like Germany. And the fact that the US Government that does not comment on Marco Rubio does not comment on small d democratic issues in a lot of places. Right? All the oppressed people around the world. Right. Obviously, Gaza is the most extreme instance of this. There are people being repressed in many different countries around the world. And the fact that they choose to speak out about the ethno nationalist far right in fucking Germany is terrifying to me. And it should be. Americans should be furious about this. Like, people's grandparents fought the fucking Nazis on the fucking beaches and we now have people who. Secretary of State and Vice President, United States who are trying to defend them in Germany. Like, what is going on here, people? Sorry to rant there a little bit, but how could this not? And one more thing. We hear about antisemitism all the time. Some college kid chants like, river to the sea, and we're gonna deport people in this country. But these are the anti Semites that you need to worry about. The far right people, some scary ones.
- [61:00]
Tommy Vitor
Do you think there was like a German Selena zito in, like, 1932 who's saying we should take Hitler seriously, but not literally.
- [61:06]
Ben Rhodes
Yes. Yeah, yeah. Talking about all the.
- [61:08]
Tommy Vitor
All the. All the angry, you know, economically disadvantaged Bavarian farmers.
- [61:14]
Ben Rhodes
Bavarians are mad about the price of eggs, you know, and guess what? The Bavarians were mad about the price of eggs. But it doesn't mean that that was.
- [61:20]
Tommy Vitor
Like, okay, yeah, because they were wheel bearing around cash to try to pay for them. Well, we're gonna watch this one. Yeah. It is very weird that like J.D. vance, Marco, Rubio, these guys are like primarily animated by this defense of the AfD, which again, we talked about the aft a bunch on the show. But you know, Marine Le Pen, like the far right in France, thought the AFD was too extreme. Like, this is not. This is not an edge case. You know what I mean? This is not like cpac. These are like scary Nazi people.
- [61:48]
Ben Rhodes
This is not Pierre Polyev or Dutton in Australia. These are the extreme right people in Germany.
- [61:53]
Tommy Vitor
Yeah. All right, so, Ben, two more quick things. So last week we covered the terror attack in India controlled Kashmir and how it has dramatically ratcheted up tensions between India and Pakistan. If you want to go deeper on that topic, check out last week's show. But shortly before we started recording, India's armed forces released a statement saying they had launched a military response to this terror attack. This is from the Indian government statement, quote, a little while ago, the Indian armed forces launched Operation Sindor, hitting terrorist infrastructure in Pakistan. And Pakistan occupied Jammu and Kashmir from where terrorist attacks against India have been planned and directed. Altogether, nine sites have been targeted. The statement says no Pakistani military facilities were targeted and that, quote, India has demonstrated considerable restraint in the selection of targets and method of execution. Hard to confirm if that's true with the limited information we have available. A military spokesman in Pakistan said, quote, pakistan will respond to this at a time and place of its own choosing. This heinous provocation will not go unanswered. So now I guess we all sit and kind of wait. Hopefully the escalation here will be measured in like adjectives in press statements and not like, you know, volume of ballistic missile strikes, but serious stuff. One to watch. Like, top of the list of World War three watch at the moment.
- [63:10]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah. Surging to the top of the list. I mean, I would note that the Indians in their statement kind of said, justice is served.
- [63:18]
Tommy Vitor
They were clearly trying to close the book.
- [63:20]
Ben Rhodes
They're trying to close the books. Like, you know, we got attacked now we just bombed a bunch of stuff and. And it's over now the ball is in Pakistan's court, unfortunately, in the sense that, you know, if they do something in response in India. So you just have to manage this risk of escalation. You just have to hope that reason is so dangerous if one thing goes wrong. Right? Like if one target ends up being something that is more consequential than is intended. If a plane is shot down, you know, this could ratchet up and their nuclear armed powers. So this is not a surprise, but it needs to be managed. And I just don't think there are many external forces that are kind of doing enough to urge de escalation. I mean, that's, I'm sure what everybody's saying, but I mean, it's really up to the Indians and Pakistanis to just climb down from this precipice.
- [64:08]
Tommy Vitor
Yeah, I mean, as we talked about at the top, diplomatic work like this requires effort and creativity and a lot of thought and, you know, a staff that's capable of executing. And I just don't know that Trump has that right. Now you mentioned on last week's show that in a previous instance of the escalation between India and Pakistan, there are times when the Pakistanis will like fire a missile at nothing into the woods and be like, yeah, we killed a bunch of Indian troops. Hopefully that's the outcome here and we all can just chill out. But we'll see. And then finally, Ben, the Papal Conclave is going to start on Wednesday, May 7th. So the day this episode comes out. I'm not Catholic, you're not Catholic. I don't know about the church, I don't know about most of the cardinals who are running to be the next Pope, but people are betting on it. So here's what the smart money is telling us. So Poly Market has odds for the top four candidates, sort of as of this recording. So the first one is Pietro Perlin, 26% likelihood of becoming the Pope. He's seen as a compromise candidate. He's the current Vatican Secretary of State.
- [65:08]
Ben Rhodes
That's my guy.
- [65:09]
Tommy Vitor
That's your guy.
- [65:09]
Ben Rhodes
Met with when I went there to. Oh, no. Relations with the U.S. cuba. I spent like a couple hours with that guy. Great guy.
- [65:16]
Tommy Vitor
Oh, fuck.
- [65:17]
Ben Rhodes
Great.
- [65:17]
Tommy Vitor
So the New York Times called him a quiet, plodding Italian who is deeply cautious. Does that jive with your. Sounds like a good time.
- [65:23]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah, maybe that's what he was doing. I mean, actually, the funny thing, Tommy, is that I, we went and the Cubans met with him first. He was the Secretary of State of the Vatican.
- [65:33]
Tommy Vitor
Right.
- [65:33]
Ben Rhodes
So essentially they're a foreign minister type. And so they know they're hosting the meeting, but they don't know how much progress we and the Cubans have made. And the Cubans go in first because he wants to meet one at a time with us before meeting together. And when the Cubans come out and we go and he's kind of shocked because he, you know, we're going to normalize relations. Like, he didn't know all this.
- [65:52]
Tommy Vitor
Oh, yeah. It's like a real deal. Yeah, yeah.
- [65:54]
Ben Rhodes
And he's like, are you. You really, like, you guys are normalizing relations? He had to confirm it with me that this was really happening. I was like, yeah. And he kind of goes through the list of things where exchange prisoners, and he looks at me and he goes, who are you? And then he goes, does John Kerry know about this? It was kind of like, who are you, young man? Nick.
- [66:14]
Tommy Vitor
Pietro, it's me.
- [66:14]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah, it's me.
- [66:15]
Tommy Vitor
Oh, that's a great story. Well, maybe he owes you. He could do you a favor, you know, send you some. Some specially blessed holy water or something.
- [66:24]
Ben Rhodes
You can get that at the Vatican, by the way. You can get some holy water. Yeah.
- [66:27]
Tommy Vitor
We'll talk some business opportunities. Okay, so we got Luis Antonio Tagla at 22%. He's from the Philippines. He'd be the first Asian Pope. He is viewed as liberal for a cardinal, kind of more in the Pope Francis mold. Time calls him a cardinal influencer with an active presence and dedicated following on social media. So question is, Ben, can he bypass the MSM gatekeepers and tick tock his way into eternity? I think we're gonna find out. Then we got mateo Zuppi at 10% odds. Seen as a continuity candidate, the Italian progressive. He's known for his work with the poor and with migrants. He's also the Vatican's envoy for Ukraine. Sky News referred to him as a street priest, which I'm gonna choose to believe means he's first in line for every supreme drop. But we'll see. And then we got Pierre Batista Pizzabala, which is amazing. Yeah. So Pizza Ball is service is in Israel, the Palestinian territories, Jordan and Cyprus. His time away from the Middle east and from the Vatican in his relative youth seems to have diminished his chances. But he's fluent in Hebrew, which is pretty cool. He's got by far the best named of all the dudes we've mentioned. But are Catholics ready to elect a Jewish priest? We don't know. Actually, he's not Jewish. I'm just kidding. But you know, it's cool that he speaks Hebrew. It's cool that he's living in Israel. He actually seems like maybe there'll be continuity there of giving a shit about Gaza. That'd be great. So Ben Per the economist, Roman banking houses were taking bets on the Popes. As far back as 1503, the Vatican as the conclave starts, Will reportedly cut off phone signals in the Vatican City. They'll use signal jammers around the Sistine Chapel to prevent the news from leaking. The last two conclaves lasted about two days. Are you gonna put some money on this bad boy?
- [68:12]
Ben Rhodes
I mean, I guess I'm gonna go with my guy, Cardinal Parolin, just cause he's like the only one I've, you know, would have been in the same room with. I will say, Tom, you know what's funny to me is there's that running joke on like Twitter that, you know, everybody's, you know, something will happen and everybody's a pandemic expert. And then on this one, like, because a bunch of people saw the movie Conclave, like they think they really know the inner workings of the Vatican, you know, and I would just say, you know, that's, you know, a little context and color, but like we don't know what's going on inside the freaking conclave here.
- [68:48]
Tommy Vitor
God only knows in terms of the process.
- [68:50]
Ben Rhodes
God only knows. You're right, actually. God only knows.
- [68:52]
Tommy Vitor
God only knows. 135 cardinals are eligible to vote. As we mentioned, after Pope Francis died, Francis elevated 108 of them. So 80% of the vote will be from cardinals who owe their jobs to Pope Francis. Which makes me hopeful that we might get some sort of continuity with him.
- [69:10]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah, a little progressive Pope. We, we want to keep the tradition of the progressive Pope here.
- [69:14]
Tommy Vitor
Yeah, that would be good. 22 were selected by Benedict, five by John Paul II. Again, cardinals under 80 years old get the vote. There's one vote on the first day, then there's up to five, four votes every day after. You need a 2/3 majority to elect a new Pope. And see that sweet, sweet white smoke. So time will tell.
- [69:32]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah, we'll see. Wrapped attention.
- [69:35]
Tommy Vitor
Okay, we're going to take a quick break. When we come back, you're going to hear Ben's interview with Clayton Weimers about the state of press freedom both in the US and around the world. So stick around for that. This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. Mental health awareness is growing, but there's still progress to be made. 26% of Americans who participated in a recent survey say they've avoided seeking mental health support due to fear of judgment. When people hesitate to get help, it doesn't just affect them, it impacts families, workplaces and entire communities. This mental Health Awareness month, let's encourage everyone to take care of their well being and break the stigma. The world is better when people are healthy. And happy. As we've said for years on this show, everyone needs therapy. Not just in their own lives, but because of all the things happening around us.
- [70:21]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah, we're not gonna, we're not gonna.
- [70:22]
Tommy Vitor
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- [70:54]
Donald Trump
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- [71:30]
Ben Rhodes
All right, I'm very pleased to be joined by Clayton Weimers, who's the executive director of Reporters Without Borders usa. Clayton, thanks for joining us.
- [71:38]
Clayton Weimers
Thanks so much for having me.
- [71:40]
Ben Rhodes
So we wanted to have you on to spotlight obviously, the grim picture for press freedom globally. It was, you know, recently World Press Freedom Day and Reporters Without Borders, which is a great organization and the US Is part of a, you know, the broader family of organizations to protect press freedom around the world. You released your annual World Press Freedom Index. And probably not surprising to people, it's, it's not a, a banner year for press freedom around the world, but I want to go through some of the factors with you about what is happening here in the United States and, and globally. But first, I just want to ask you what is your takeaway about kind of the top line from this report? You, you described the global state of press freedom as difficult. I think, you know, that, that, that, that's probably an intended understatement to some extent. But what do you look at in terms of what the index shows about the trend line globally for Press freedom?
- [72:40]
Clayton Weimers
Yeah, in a word, the trend is bad. Press freedom has been trending downward for a number of years. And in the 2025 index, which we just released, we hit a new low point. People might be familiar with the color coded map that we use where bad countries are red, good countries are green. The global average of all the countries press freedom scores has gone into the orange zone for the first time. That's that difficult indicator that you mentioned. That's a first. For as long as we've been measuring press freedom, we've been doing the index since 2002. We're seeing a decline on all the indicators that we measure. But the one that seems to be driving the biggest pullback here is the economic indicator that we measure. And that's because we've seen the marketplace for the news media kind of crumbling all around the world as advertising revenue shifts more towards the tech giants instead of the news media. But we're also seeing governments turn increasingly towards economic pressure as a means of controlling the press. So we still see a lot of assassinations and arrests of journalists all over the world, but the more sophisticated, if you will, regimes are turning to economic pressure as their preferred tool for controlling the narrative.
- [74:04]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah, I want to, I thought this was really interesting and probably, you know, to people that don't follow this issue closely, maybe the most interesting part of the report, right, because people are familiar with, you know, the threats from Trump about fake news and, and we'll talk globally about obviously, some of the more extreme violence and risks that journals face. But just to focus on the U.S. for starters, how do you assess the state of press freedom in the U.S. you, you have us clocking in at 57th out of 180 countries, which is, you know, not exactly near the top of the rankings. The trend line has been going negative. But on this balance between economic impacts, right. You know, the, the kind of death of local journalism, the kind of vacuuming up of media space by social media platforms that, you know, kind of don't compensate the journalists who produce the original source material. How do you balance that as the, the difficulty versus, you know, Trump targeting specific media organizations or cutting off funding for VOA or radio for Europe? You know, how much is a Trump effect and how much is kind of this structural economic piece? Or are those connected, as you just indicated at the end of your last answer, is Trump kind of coming in behind some of the already difficult economic circumstances for news media?
- [75:31]
Clayton Weimers
They're definitely connected. I think Trump understands this idea of using economic pressure pretty well. You look at some of the media companies that he's singled out or targeted. He's targeted cbs, which is owned by Paramount. And Paramount is trying to undergo a pretty complicated merger right now that the US Government has a lot of power to slow down or halt altogether. And Paramount has made it pretty clear that they would rather make a deal with Trump over his 60 minutes complaints stemming back to an interview that he alleges they doctored with Kamala Harris. They would rather make a deal with the Trump administration in order to facilitate their other business transactions than go to war over the First Amendment and the rights of the reporters who work at 60 Minutes. There's been a similar deal discussed with Disney, which would rather not be in the president's crosshairs if they can avoid it. But that comes at the expense of the reporters doing journalism at ABC News. And obviously, Trump understands that he can put these companies into a bind here where they have to make a decision between the much more lucrative parts of their company that are making them a ton of money and the news media part of their company, which, let's face it, is not making a ton of money. And that's the other big factor here, which is that for the past decade, we've seen massive layoffs in the media industry, thousands of journalism jobs just gone every year. There's an estimate that every week, two local newspapers in this country close, and they're not being replaced. And now, on top of that, the added economic pressure, that's also political pressure from the Trump administration. When he does things like threaten the funding of public media. He wants to cut off all the media, all the funding that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting gives to NPR and pbs. But at the end of the day, what the effect that that has is, it cuts off the funding for the local independent affiliates all around the country, and it's disproportionately going to harm the media outlets that are serving rural communities, places that are already at risk of becoming news deserts or may already be news deserts. And so the impact is really going to be felt on the ground. It's not going to have a primary impact on the D.C. offices of empire.
- [77:57]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah, I mean, we try try to talk about kind of the authoritarian playbook around the world on this podcast. And, you know, this is familiar to me in terms of leaders weaponizing revenue to kind of further accelerate the collapse of media or using other tools to kind of try to punish or compel positive coverage. You write that this economic fragility piece in your report is hitting is a threat to the media in 160 out of 180 countries. So that's a pretty high percentage. How much do you see what is happening here now that you just described kind of Trump coming in behind these economic pressures as part of a playbook that you're also seeing in other countries that are shifting towards authoritarianism? Like, how do you understand this combination of economic fragility and increasingly autocratic leadership globally as a phenomenon that is worldwide? Or do you see different countries have quite different flavors of economic fragility and authoritarianism?
- [79:08]
Clayton Weimers
The playbook is not new. We have seen this play out in several countries before, most recently in places like Hungary and Turkey and before that in Russia on an even more extreme scale. But it's also, it's a two way street. The Trump administration takes inspiration from some of these regimes, but it's also impacting the way other governments are behaving towards their press. The world takes notice when the United States government says with a loud, clear voice, we no longer defend press freedom, not here and not abroad. I'll just give one example. In Serbia, the Ministry of justice raided the offices of serta, which is the largest fact checking organization in Serbia. And in justifying that raid, they put out a press release that says, we know that CRTA received a grant from usaid and we know from Elon Musk that USAID is a criminal organization, therefore we have to go in and investigate money laundering, because clearly they're taking money from a criminal organization. So they're not even making us work hard, hard to connect the dots here. They're just very clearly taking the cues from the Trump administration.
- [80:20]
Ben Rhodes
Well, and to kind of take this in the direction of some of the more violent and extreme threats to journalists and how that connects to how the US does or does not advocate for press freedom. Obviously, one of the more extremely dangerous places to be a journalist is been the Middle east, particularly in Gaza and the West Bank. And in addition to the Palestinian journalists who've been killed covering the conflict in Gaza, you know, we've seen in, in recent years, Even, even before October 7, a journalist like Shree Nabu Akla, a Palestinian journalist, you know, killed in the west bank, you know, after an investigation, multiple investigations, determined killed by like an Israeli sniper, no accountability really in the US in, under Biden seem to kind of not want to talk about it. You know, and what, what is the risk of that? You know, when other countries see seeming double standards on where we speak out against threats to journalists or where we demand accountability for violence against journalists, does that have an effect of promoting either impunity or suggesting some degree of kind of hypocrisy. And when and where the US Chooses to raise its voice about press freedom.
- [81:38]
Clayton Weimers
Yeah, impunity is something we talk a lot about in the press freedom community. UNESCO has a statistic that something like 88% of crimes against journalists never receive any kind of justice. And the, you know, the pernicious problem of impunity is that it just encourages more bad behavior if no one's being held accountable. Shereen Abu Akle, I think, is a prime example, because not only was she very clearly killed in what was a crime against humanity, she's also an American citizen. And the US Government really did everything it could to sweep this issue under the rug, did not want to raise it with Israel, with Bibi Netanyahu. It really echoed a similar assassination of a journalist. Jamal Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist who was killed during the Trump administration, was a legal resident of the United States, and the Trump administration simply did not want to push the Saudis for any accountability there. These kinds of episodes sent a clear message to the bad actors who would do this again that they're not going to suffer any kind of repercussions. And then, so it's maybe not surprising, it's shocking, but not surprising that the United States also has failed to stand up for the hundreds of journalists who have been murdered in Gaza, many of whom, as the RSF can document, were killed while doing their jobs as journalists, who were clearly marked as journalists or traveling in vehicles. They were clearly marked as press, were wearing press vests, were holding microphones, were doing everything they could to make it clear that they repressed and were targeted. Nonetheless, none of them have had justice for their murders. And meanwhile, the Israeli government has continued a blockade against Gaza. International journalists can't get in and can't tell the story. How many times have we heard the Israeli government say something akin to, well, you can't trust the death toll that the Gaza Health Ministry puts out there, because that's just a Hamas propaganda tool and you know, they're not trustworthy. If you really believe that, let the journalists go in and figure it out for themselves. Let, let independent investigators come to their own conclusions, but they haven't done that.
- [83:59]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah, you don't, you don't have capacity for any international journalists to be there. But also you have this kind of, you know, these. The Israeli government claiming that anybody who claims to be a journalist is Hamas, when, you know, as you can say.
- [84:12]
Clayton Weimers
You can document and the claims are laughable too. I'm thinking of one in particular where after the fact, they accused a journalist of having been an engineer for Hamas and they pointed to a specific project he had supposedly worked on. He would have been about 8 years old at that time if he had. Really? That's a pretty, that's a pretty far fetched claim to be making.
- [84:35]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah, well, just one other global piece that emanates from the United States because I think it is important. You know, you obviously have the cuts to voa, the Voice of America and kind of international broadcasting generally. But I think people also aren't aware that, you know, USAID funding reaches a lot of support for independent journalism in other countries. People may say, hey, that sounds sketchy. Why is USAID funding journalism? But as someone who's kind of worked on this, this is often money that kind of passes through, you know, other entities that, that are more impartial and is meant to train journalists, is meant to help support be a lifeline in poorer countries where there's not a lot of revenue. As we talked about economic fragility for journalism. What do you see as the impact of this kind of US retreat under Trump from any funding source whatsoever for Radio Free Europe or Asia, for voa, For USAID and its journalism partners, it.
- [85:30]
Clayton Weimers
Is just a massive gift to authoritarian censorship regimes like China, like Iran, like Russia, who are just giddy at the prospects of being able to come in and fill the void that's being left behind by US leadership in these spaces. I think you brought up a really good point, which is that sometimes people get a little squeamish when they hear about the US Government funding media projects. And I think that's an understandable reaction. The key to remember here is that that funding was going towards things like you said, like safety training. I know of one program in particular in South America that was training journalists to be safe while reporting in the Amazon on issues like illegal mining and illegal foresting. And what are the best practices for reporting out from remote areas where you don't necessarily have a connection to the outside world. That program just stopped. They didn't have the money to keep it going anymore and they're not going to be able to start it up again. Even if by some miracle the funding gets turned on again, it's just over. A lot of funding was going to Ukraine to help their beleaguered press who are covering an extremely bloody war. This money goes towards worthy causes. We can have a conversation about whether or not the United States needs to be Funding all of these things. But simply cutting off the funding overnight threw the entire field into chaos and like I said, has completely opened the door to, for example, the Chinese Communist Party, which has no qualms about going in and setting up outright propaganda outlets. In one case, I know that the airwaves that VOA was once broadcasting over have now been taken over, thankfully by the BBC, which is another state broadcaster. So it could be a lot worse. But that's kind of the point here, is like, you can't just turn this back on easily. Once you shut it off, the world will move on. Plus, when you're talking about radio for Europe and Voice of America, these public interest broadcasters who are basically like public media but for the rest of the world, their audience is not going to trust these outlets anymore because they're just going to assume, well, if it got turned back on now, this is just pro Trump propaganda from the U.S. government.
- [87:54]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah. And people probably don't realize the reach of these entities. Dozens of countries, dozens of languages, hundreds of millions of people. Now we focus on the kind of grim outlook economically and politically. What did you find bright spots? I mean, would you point to places where, hey, this is kind of an interesting way of responding to the economic pressures on journalism in X country or region or we saw this positive trajectory in a particular country. Like where do you see not only bright spots, but approaches that might be replicated to kind of push back against this alarming trend?
- [88:35]
Clayton Weimers
Yeah, well, once again, Norway is at the top of the list for I believe, the eighth year running. They're actually the only country where on all five indicators they got are good ratings. So they're, they're green across the board. You know, we can't all be Norway though. You know, Norway is a very rich country that has a very strong democratic tradition and very strong legal protections. But the bottom line of what they're getting right here is that there is robust funding for independent media that is independent of any sort of political handling, which is really the key because you can have robustly funded state media, but that's no good for press freedom because it's just PR for the government. You need to have money flowing to journalists to do the work independently of outside influence. The problem in a lot of countries is not necessarily that the media are under the boot of the government. They might just be overly influenced by corporate owners or there just might be too few voices or too few outlets out there for enough pluralism to exist, exist. And so the public is just starved of enough different points of view. We try to take a really holistic view when we're measuring press freedom. That's why we do these five indicators. We do a lot of qualitative and quantitative data. We survey media experts in all 180 countries that we're researching, and we try to get a really, really robust picture of everything that's going on. Because traditionally, we think of press freedom as being about, you know, the arrest of a journalist, the killing of a journalist. But increasingly, the problems facing journalism are a lot more existential or systemic because there's a lot of countries where a journalist isn't being killed, but journalism is being killed. And it's being killed by things like a digital information space that is rigged against journalism because the algorithms are burying it, or it's being. Or it's being killed by a crisis of trust between the public and the news media. And so people are turning away from journalism as a source of information. By the way, these are factors that are really driving down the US's score. So it's not all Trump, necessarily. It's a variety of things that are contributing to an erosion of press freedom. Something that's been happening in the United States for the past decade. Frankly, when we started doing this in 2002, the United States was ranked 17th. Now we're at 57th. You can't blame that all on Trump. Also, it's worth noting all of this data from the index was collected last year in 2024. So everything that's happened under Trump since he took office in January, not part of this index, which is the scary part, because it could get so much worse.
- [91:24]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah, probably not. I wouldn't be betting on a huge surge for the US in the rankings next year. Well, look, Clayton, thank you so much for joining us. I would encourage people to, to think about these issues because if journalism and press freedom does get kind of strangled in the way that we're seeing, we really will be living in a world without any prospect of, of shared truth, reality, or accountability. I'm actually just, you know, coincidentally, Clayton had been reading a book about Vietnam. Classic, right? A bright shining lie that kind of reminds you that if journalists didn't tell us the truth about what was happening in Vietnam, the US government sure as wasn't going to. Right. And, and, and that could be the kind of world in which, you know, we, we seem to be headed. So people should definitely check out the World Press Freedom Index. People should support Reporters Without Borders. People should support independent journalism, if you can. If you're getting, you know, news on social Media, you know, think about what the original source is and if the original source is a independent journal, journalistic news outlet or, or anything that can be supported, try to do so. So that you're, you're not just paying, you know, Mark Zuckerberg with your ad revenue on Instagram, your or your data. You're, you're actually supporting the, the raw material. So I didn't mean to give a speech at the end there, Clayton, but, but I just want people to, to think about this issue and encourage it and, and want to thank you for the work you're doing.
- [92:53]
Clayton Weimers
Well, I appreciate it. We need more evangelists for journalism because I mean, let's face it, without journalism we don't have a democracy.
- [93:00]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah, that's right. We really don't. We just have people who are powerful and who try to tell us what to think.
- [93:06]
Clayton Weimers
Exactly.
- [93:07]
Ben Rhodes
All right, thanks so much, Clayton. We will keep in touch and wish you the best.
- [93:12]
Tommy Vitor
Great.
- [93:12]
Clayton Weimers
Thank you, Ben.
- [93:17]
Tommy Vitor
Thanks again to Clayton Weimers for joining the show. Thanks again to you Ben, for logging in from very far away. Yeah, what's the, what's, how long is that flight?
- [93:26]
Ben Rhodes
It is one of the longest flights in the, in the world. It's like 16 hours. And, and I actually, you know, my kids were really interested in this question of like what is the longest direct flight in the world? And Singapore, New York. Singapore and L A. Singapore are in the top 10 for sure.
- [93:43]
Tommy Vitor
Do you like go over the top of the like, how does this work?
- [93:47]
Ben Rhodes
I was trying to like, like I was looking at the in flight map, you know, and I almost kind of didn't understand where we were flying. Like, like, fair enough. Like it was like, like yeah, you're definitely going like under, you know, and, and under the world. Depends on which way you're like turning the world. But you're going over some serious ocean there for a long time.
- [94:10]
Tommy Vitor
Yeah, I bet that always makes me a little nervous.
- [94:12]
Ben Rhodes
Although that's when you look down when the in flight map is just the, the circular earth but it's only water, you know, Pacific Ocean is a pretty big place, you know.
- [94:22]
Tommy Vitor
Yeah, you're minded the Pacific Ocean is pretty big. Maybe you can grab onto some of that garbage patch we floated out in the middle of it if things go bad. But you know, you never know. Anyway, fly safe, you'll be fine. Great to see you and talk soon. Pod Save the World is a crooked media production. Our senior producer is Ilona Minkowski. Our associate producer is Michael Goldsmith. Our executive producers are me, Tommy Vitor and Ben Rhodes Say hi, Ben.
- [94:46]
Ben Rhodes
Hi.
- [94:47]
Tommy Vitor
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