Trump Reignites the Forever Wars

Summary

Pod Save the World: "Trump Reignites the Forever Wars" – Detailed Summary

Release Date: March 19, 2025

Hosts: Tommy Vietor and Ben Rhodes

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1. Resumption of Israeli Bombing in Gaza

Timestamp: [04:34] – [09:22]

The episode opens with a deep dive into the recent escalation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israel has resumed extensive airstrikes on the Gaza Strip, breaking a previously established ceasefire. These strikes have reportedly resulted in the deaths of at least 400 people and injured over 500, including several children.

Tommy Vietor emphasizes the humanitarian impact:

"Resuming the bombing campaign is going to do much besides lead to the deaths of innocent people and the remaining hostages." ([05:10])

Ben Rhodes analyzes the political motivations behind Netanyahu's decision:

"Netanyahu does not actually want to end the war because he will get attacked from the right wing of his political coalition." ([06:50])

The hosts discuss how the ceasefire talks collapsed due to differing objectives. Israel sought a temporary extension of the ceasefire in exchange for the release of hostages, whereas Hamas pushed for a permanent end to hostilities. Netanyahu's inability to compromise, driven by domestic political pressures, has led to this resurgence of violence.

2. Netanyahu’s Domestic Political Crisis

Timestamp: [10:23] – [17:32]

Netanyahu is embroiled in a significant domestic political crisis following his attempt to dismiss Ronan Bar, the head of the Shin Bet (Israel’s domestic intelligence service). This unprecedented move has sparked widespread controversy and criticism within Israel, especially as the Shin Bet has been investigating government corruption and leak scandals.

Tommy Vietor highlights public sentiment:

"Recent polling found 70% of Israelis want the ceasefire and hostage talks to continue, even if it means Israel releasing terrorists and having to end the war permanently." ([09:40])

Ben Rhodes connects Netanyahu's actions to his broader strategy of consolidating power by sidelining others:

"He is consolidating power by pushing out other leaders in government, even though a recent poll found that 70% of the country wants him to resign." ([14:51])

The discussion underscores how Netanyahu's refusal to take accountability for the October 7th attacks has intensified his grip on power, alienating a significant portion of the Israeli populace and exacerbating internal divisions.

3. Trump Administration’s Bombing of Houthi Rebels in Yemen

Timestamp: [17:33] – [28:14]

The podcast transitions to the Trump administration's military actions in Yemen, where airstrikes targeted Houthi rebels following threats to attack ships in the Red Sea. These strikes resulted in the deaths of 53 people and injured nearly 100 more.

Ben Rhodes critiques the administration's approach:

"This is an effort to take away their ability to control global shipping... [T]his campaign will continue until that's carried out." ([18:33])

Tommy Vietor questions the efficacy and motives behind these actions:

"I don't think that they're going to make a material difference here." ([20:21])

The hosts argue that the aggressive stance against the Houthis mirrors a broader Trump-era foreign policy characterized by increased military interventions without clear strategic objectives, leading to further destabilization in the Middle East.

4. Impact on USAID and US Soft Power

Timestamp: [28:14] – [36:12]

An essential part of the discussion centers on President Trump’s dismantling of USAID and other soft power initiatives. Ben Rhodes highlights the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of these cuts:

"Last week, the New York Times reported that without US aid, 1.65 million people could die from HIV-related complications, half a million from lack of vaccines, and hundreds of thousands more from insufficient food and malaria prevention." ([31:07])

Tommy Vietor laments the reduction of America’s positive global influence:

"We're cutting all soft power gone, all of it. Right. We're cutting all of USAID, all of PEPFAR... It’s the only good things America does in the world that we're cutting." ([34:52])

This segment underscores the shift from America's traditional role in global humanitarian aid to a more isolationist and militaristic posture under Trump's leadership, diminishing the country's ability to foster goodwill and stable international relations.

5. Trump’s Call with Vladimir Putin and Implications for Ukraine

Timestamp: [52:07] – [60:26]

The episode delves into the extensive phone conversation between President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin regarding the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. The call lasted between an hour and a half to three hours, during which Putin agreed to a temporary pause in bombing Ukraine's energy infrastructure.

Ben Rhodes offers a critical perspective:

"The only thing Putin can be said to have done that is any different tomorrow than today if he actually fucking does it. And then he's just adding to the list of demands on the Ukrainians." ([55:45])

Tommy Vietor interprets Putin’s position as non-concessional:

"Putin was like, no, I'm good." ([53:29])

The conversation highlights the futility of the negotiations, with Putin maintaining his stance on Ukraine’s sovereignty and foreign support. The hosts suggest that the call did not yield meaningful progress towards peace, instead solidifying Putin’s position and prolonging the conflict.

6. Massive Protests in Serbia Against Corruption and President Vucic

Timestamp: [60:42] – [71:08]

The hosts turn their attention to Serbia, where hundreds of thousands have protested against government corruption and President Alexander Vucic. These protests, characterized by student leadership and widespread public support, have been escalating since November, following a tragic accident at a train station.

Ben Rhodes describes the protests as an organic movement:

"This is the only thing that has a remote chance of arresting a democratic backsliding is to see this number of people on the streets." ([68:05])

Tommy Vietor criticizes external influences:

"These are the same left-wing actors weaponizing events like the Novi Sad rail station collapse to push their agendas." ([65:47])

The discussion explores how Vucic’s authoritarian tactics echo broader global trends of corrupt leadership and the suppression of dissent, while also highlighting the resilience and creativity of grassroots movements in combating such regimes.

7. Incident at a Chinese Restaurant Offering Refunds

Timestamp: [70:03] – [74:11]

A lighter yet concerning topic is addressed when a viral video shows customers vandalizing a hot pot restaurant by urinating into boiling broth. The restaurant chain responded by offering refunds to approximately 4,000 affected customers.

Tommy Vietor vents frustration with the incident:

"Netanyahu is just like pushing out other people in other power centers and consolidating." ([74:11])

Ben Rhodes contrasts the absurdity with the episode’s serious topics:

"These are the kind of stories we need." ([71:22])

This segment serves as a metaphor for the chaotic and often inexplicable nature of contemporary social and political issues, juxtaposing minor scandals with major geopolitical conflicts.

8. Interview with Pankaj Mishra on "The World After Gaza"

Timestamp: [76:25] – [100:25]

The latter part of the episode features an in-depth interview with Pankaj Mishra, author of The World After Gaza. Mishra explores the transformation of Israel’s national identity post-Holocaust and its ramifications on current conflicts.

Discussion Highlights:

• Holocaust Memory and Israeli Identity: Mishra argues that the collective memory of the Holocaust has been instrumentalized to justify Israel's current military policies, creating a narrative of perpetual existential threat that legitimizes aggressive actions against Palestinians.

  Mishra states:

  "Collective memory is always constructed with very particular ideological ends... the memory of the Holocaust in Israel." ([84:51])

• Hindu Nationalism and Israeli Far-Right Alliances: The conversation delves into the ideological parallels between Hindu nationalist leaders like India’s Narendra Modi and Israel’s Netanyahu, highlighting shared ethno-nationalist agendas that exacerbate regional tensions.

  Mishra explains:

  "There's a kind of ideological affinity... something they themselves aspire to." ([91:15])

• Global South Perspectives and Future World Order: Mishra emphasizes the emerging perspectives from the Global South, advocating for a new world order rooted in decolonization and shared global norms to counteract rising ethno-nationalism.

  Mishra concludes:

  "We need to move away from these sort of fantasies of a purified national community... toward a shared global order." ([94:11])

Ben Rhodes connects these themes to current events, stressing the danger of sidelining critical reflections on Western foreign policy and the rise of authoritarianism.

9. Closing Remarks and Final Thoughts

Timestamp: [100:25] – End

The episode wraps up with a recap of the discussions, emphasizing the interconnectedness of global conflicts, domestic political crises, and the erosion of international aid and soft power. Tommy and Ben express concerns over the future trajectory of global politics under Trump's administration, warning of increased militarization and diminishing humanitarian efforts.

Ben Rhodes urges listeners to challenge destructive narratives and support movements advocating for transparency and accountability:

"Keep opening up fresh perspectives... responsible citizens, whether as writers or just ordinary citizens." ([98:17])

Tommy Vietor emphasizes the critical role of informed discourse in combating authoritarianism and promoting sustainable peace:

"This show is pointing us the right direction... fighting these lunatics together." ([47:07])

The hosts conclude by promoting resilience and awareness, encouraging listeners to stay engaged and informed about the pressing global issues discussed in the episode.

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Notable Quotes:

• Tommy Vietor:

  "Resuming the bombing campaign is going to do much besides lead to the deaths of innocent people and the remaining hostages." ([05:10])

• Ben Rhodes:

  "Netanyahu does not actually want to end the war because he will get attacked from the right wing of his political coalition." ([06:50])

• Tommy Vietor:

  "We're cutting all soft power gone, all of it." ([34:52])

• Ben Rhodes:

  "The only thing Putin can be said to have done that is any different tomorrow than today... he's just adding to the list of demands on the Ukrainians." ([55:45])

• Claudia:

  "This is not what America first turned out to be." ([29:05])

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Conclusion:

In "Trump Reignites the Forever Wars," Tommy Vietor and Ben Rhodes provide a comprehensive analysis of the latest geopolitical developments, highlighting the interplay between domestic politics and international conflicts. The episode critically examines the implications of aggressive foreign policies, the dismantling of humanitarian aid programs, and the rise of authoritarianism both within and beyond the United States. Through insightful discussions and expert interviews, the hosts urge listeners to remain vigilant and actively engage in shaping a more just and peaceful global order.

Transcript

[Tommy Vitor]

This podcast is brought to you by Wise, the app for doing things in other currencies. Wise believes that sending and spending money abroad should be fast, easy and affordable. Wondering why you're still putting up with hidden fees from your major bank? We are too. Whether you're sending money internationally to loved ones, paying bills abroad, or finally purchasing your dream snorkeling excursion overseas, Wise makes managing your money across borders simple so you can save time, money and stress. What makes Wise Different? They have one app offering up to 40 currencies and you'll never deal with hidden fees. With Wise, you can tap to pay in euros seamlessly, send pesos across borders, or quickly receive rupees from around the globe. You'll always get the real mid market exchange rate like the one you usually see on Google, which means you always know what you're paying. You'll spend less on fees and more of your money gets to where you need it to be. So Ben Rhodes. Yeah, my co host of the show. Your friend, my dear friend. He was overseas in Tehran and he bought a bunch of centrifuges and some aluminum tubes and he used Wyze to pay for it. Fast, convenient. He made a lot of friends. You know what he's used to paying for it with? Pellets of cash, right? He's more of a pellets of cash guy. But you don't always have a C17 on hand to fly cash to wherever you need to go. So Ben just used Wyze. Millions of customers around the world trust Wise. Download the Wise app today or visit wise.com Terms and Conditions apply. Hello, it's Claudia here. This week on the slow newscast from Tortoise, the surfer who took on the impossible.

[Ben Rhodes]

It was like this mountain of white. It was something that none of us had ever seen. And he said, I'm getting the biggest wave ever here.

[Claudia]

World record.

[Ben Rhodes]

You don't know what it's like to get pounded by 30 meter waves and.

[Tommy Vitor]

The fallout left in his wake.

[Ben Rhodes]

I don't think it was as big as they're saying at all.

[Tommy Vitor]

But once it's out there, there's no stopping it to listen. Just search for the slow newscast. Wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to POD Save the World. I'm Tommy Vitor and Ben Rhodes. I can look you directly in the eyes in this new setup.

[Ben Rhodes]

It's kind of intense.

[Tommy Vitor]

You like it?

[Ben Rhodes]

It's like old school Charlie Rose or something.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah, we're missing a black curtain. You know we need it. Is one of those cameras in the round Just kind of spins around all the time.

[Ben Rhodes]

It just kind of follows us around.

[Tommy Vitor]

If you're listening to this and you're like, what are these idiots talking about? Subscribe to Pod Save the World on YouTube. We're trying some new setups in the studio here. Looks cool, feels cool, different vibes.

[Ben Rhodes]

What you can see is Tommy and I are sitting like three feet across the table from each other, just staring at each other.

[Tommy Vitor]

Oh, there's no way I'd rather have it then. We got a great show for you today. There's lots of things happening in the world. One of those weeks where we could have done two hours, unfortunately. Today we're going to explain why Israel's resumed bombing in Gaza and how Netanyahu has created yet another domestic political crisis in his efforts to evade accountability. For October 7th, we're going to talk about the Trump administration following President Biden's lead once again in bombing the Houthi rebels in Yemen. We'll cover the impact of Doge Gang gutting the Voice of America and some new reporting about the impact of USAID cuts. And then Trump just got off the phone with Vladimir Putin. We'll fill you in on how it went and tell you if there's any progress towards peace in Ukraine. We'll talk about these huge protests in Serbia and why a restaurant chain in China is going to have to cut a big old check to its customers. Ben Surprised for that one. And then, Ben, you did our interview earlier today. What'd you talk about?

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, I talked to Pankaj Mishra, who is a really extraordinary writer and thinker. He has a book out now called the World After Gaza. And so we talked about the resumption of the war in Gaza. We talked about the different flavors of anti Semitism in the world today. Obviously the focus on Hamas and kind of campus anti Semitism, but also the ethno nationalism and far right anti Semitism that seems to get less attention. We talked about the kind of synergies between Netanyahu and the Israeli right and some of the other right wing movements around the world, like the Hindu nationalists in India.

[Tommy Vitor]

A lot of that in today's episode, unfortunately.

[Ben Rhodes]

Well, a lot of ethno nationalists in today's episode. And we talked also about like the global south perspective on not just Israel, Gaza, but everything that's happening in the world, whether or not there's ideas coming from within the global south that might help us find the next global order. So pretty wide ranging conversation. We've talked about the role of the writer in this world today. So it was a little know, put on your thinking caps and stick around for it. It was really smart conversation.

[Tommy Vitor]

Definitely excited to listen to that. It must be weird to write a book called the World After Gaza and then have the war flare up.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, the day I shouldn't be laughing. But I mean, essentially that was my first question, you know. So we are not after Gaza.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah, no, unfortunately. So let's start with that. I mean, some terrible news overnight, which is that Israel broke the Gaza ceasefire and launched this massive series of airstrikes on the Gaza Strip that reportedly killed at least 400 people and wounded hundreds more. I think I saw estimates of over 500 wounded. Hamas said that at least five senior officials in the organization were killed, as were many children and innocent people. Israel said the strikes are in response to Hamas's intransigence during the ceasefire extension talks. Ben, it's hard not to notice that these strikes also come as Netanyahu is in the midst of a domestic political crisis, thanks to him trying to fire the head of the Shin Bet, their domestic intelligence service. But we'll get to that in a second. With respect to the peace talks themselves, though, Israel wanted a seven week extension of the ceasefire in exchange for Hama releasing half of the living hostages and the remains of half of the dead hostages still in Gaza. The Hamas position was, no, let's work on phase two of the original agreement we all signed, which would have led to a permanent end to the war. But as we've discussed many times, Netanyahu does not actually want to end the war because he will get attacked from the right wing of his political coalition. And the Israeli position is also basically that Hamas must not have any power going forward, which is understandable after October 7, but also clearly kind of a hard pill for Hamas to swallow. So, you know, that leads us to this moment. In the first phase of the ceasefire, Hamas released 25 living prisoners and the remains of eight hostages, while Israel released 1500 Palestinians they had in captivity. So, Ben, this is a really tough part of the talks, right? Because of course you can understand each side's position. Israel wants to permanently eradicate the threat of a Hamas attack. Hamas wants to continue to exist as a political organization, but also as a military wing, and they want the IDF to out of Gaza. I guess where I lose my kind of empathy for the Israeli position is the idea that resuming the bombing campaign is going to do much besides lead to the deaths of innocent people and the remaining hostages. But I don't know how. How are you analyzing Netanyahu's move over the weekend?

[Ben Rhodes]

Well, you summed up what happened in terms of the breakdown of the talks. Well, in the sense that technically, Hamas was just sticking to the original agreement, which is that there was this phase one, and then you move to phase two, and the additional hostage releases are tied to making agreements in phase two, which is about kind of the end of the war. Israel wanted to just extend phase one and, you know, make more exchanges within that framework. And. And those. We've talked about this a lot. I mean, essentially, the real rubber hits the road because Hamas wants the end of the war and Israel doesn't. And you can't really move to the next phase unless you're willing to entertain the end of the war, and Israel is not willing to do that. Obviously, there's an inherent tension between Israel having a continued objective of essentially destroying Hamas and Hamas having to agree to this. So I don't know how you ever cross that bridge unless you're willing to entertain Hamas continuing in some fashion inside of Gaza, which they're going to probably do anyway, because there's a lot of support from us. A couple of things, things I'd add to it in terms of the Israeli political context. You mentioned the kind of uproar over him firing the head of the Shin Bet, something that's not happened before because of investigations ever in Israeli history. So this is not normal. But also, the Israeli government is supposed to pass a budget by the end of the month, and if they don't, that's one of the things that can trigger the collapse of the government. There's a lot of reasons that Bibi needs to kind of return to his tried and true card of, like, playing to his own far right. And resuming bombing is a way to do that, as ghoulish as that may be. And, you know, the way in which this was broken, you know, in the middle of the night, bombing campaigns literally violating the ceasefire. You know, just obviously we are sympathetic to the idea that there is inside of Israel a great degree of fear or opposition to Hamas being in charge in Gaza. At the same time, there is no way, shape or form in which there's any risk whatsoever of another October 7th happening tomorrow. Like, these strikes did not end some threat that was facing Israelis. This is punitive. This is obviously causing huge civilian harm. And there's no clear endgame other than just more war, more suffering for the people of Gaza. The last thing I want to say, Tommy, is that keep in mind this comes on top of weeks now where we've had a complete cutoff of food and aid getting into Gaza, electricity. So this is not happening even in a vacuum. It's happening in terms of an already worsening humanitarian situation.

[Claudia]

Yeah.

[Tommy Vitor]

And we should just be clear that, you know, this is a decision made by the Israeli government that is not backed by the Israeli people. I mean, there's some recent polling that found 70% of Israelis want the ceasefire and hostage talks to continue, even if it means Israel releasing terrorists and having to end the war permanently. So Netanyahu is just way off sides with the people he's ostensibly governing, including Yard and Bibas. We've talked about the Bibas family before. This was an entire family that was kidnapped. Yarden Biwas, his wife and two little children were murdered by Hamas or died in the Gaza Strip. I'm gonna say they were murdered because if you take children hostage, you are responsible for their life, and if they die, it's on you. He posted on Facebook, we must stop the fighting and bring everyone home. So there's this groundswell of support for continuing these negotiations, getting the rest of these hostages home. I think less than half of the 59 hostages still in Gaza are alive. But unfortunately, you know, once again, the United States President, President Trump, has enabled the continuation of this war. I think we've shipped over what, like 8 or 12 billion dollars worth of weapons.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah.

[Tommy Vitor]

To the Israelis. And interestingly, Ben, I mean, there's a Trump official who had done some direct talks with Hamas, this guy Adam Bowler, who had been nominated for this, you know, Senate confirmed hostage negotiations or release job. He seems to have been demoted or his position changed to some sort of special government employee that is no longer a Senate confirmed.

[Ben Rhodes]

Confusing him with Rubio.

[Tommy Vitor]

No. The secretary. Sort of Secretary of state. No. Yeah. So it's, it's, it's confusing. I mean, it just. It's. It seems like there's a critical mass of things showing diplomacy kind of petering out here.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah. It feels like there was this push by Trump and Steve Witkoff as envoy to get a ceasefire in place right around his inauguration because they wanted the optic of him coming in and things getting better. Obviously, they wanted some hostage releases, but they never really seemed that committed to actually ending the war, and they certainly didn't seem committed to addressing the underlying question. I mean, Wyckoff said something about two state solution, but nobody's talking about that right now. So I think the questions going forward are, does this bombardment continue? Does the aid cutoff continue? That alone is enough to bring massive suffering on the Palestinians. Do you see in the context of that bombardment, Trump start to talk about ethnically cleansing the Gaza Strip again, trying to move them into Egypt or Jordan. There's some noise about trying to find African countries to move the Palestinians to. That was a little worrying. There's a question of whether there's a ground invasion, which Netanyahu I think would probably want Trump sign off on. He didn't care what Joe Biden thought. But with Trump, he probably wants to make sure that Trump's on side with that. But I think what this indicates is that Gaza is just this kind of open ended. I don't want to call it a war because Hamas isn't really fighting.

[Tommy Vitor]

It doesn't seem like they've responded.

[Ben Rhodes]

They're not even really like fighting back. I mean, at some point I'm sure they'll fire some rockets, but there's this kind of ongoing bombardment of Gaza. It's just going to be open ended, maybe stop and start and actually negotiating some kind of end to this seems to have been deprioritized.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah, and you mentioned it happened during Ramadan in like 2:30 in the morning. So it's terrifying for civilians. The political crisis that I refer to was Bibi trying to fire Ronan Barr, the head of the Shin Bet. So this announcement happened suddenly on Sunday. It's the latest example of Netanyahu demanding accountability from everyone but himself for October 7th. So you know, they pushed out the defense minister, they pushed out the IDF chief of staff. Also we should just point out the Shin Bet has launched a bunch of investigations into Netanyahu's staff, including allegations that the Qatari government paid money to some of Netanyahu's top aides. Seems relevant here. They're also looking into the leak of sensitive intelligence documents to a German newspaper, which Netanyahu then used to as like a pretext to blow up the hostage talks. We talked about that at the time was to build this German outlet. On top of all that though, Ben, the Shin Bet is publicized a summary of its own failures in preventing October 7, which talked about like their internal mistakes, that not taking seriously enough intelligence about Hamas planning to attack southern Israel. But they also pointed the finger at political decisions by the Netanyahu government for letting Hamas getting funding from Qatar, for failing to target Hamas's leadership and then just sort of like general chaos around the Netanyahu's political moves during the judicial coup that we talked about a bunch that just made Israel look weak and divided basically. You know, they're talking about how The Netanyahu government's policy was contain Hamas, kind of prop them up in some sense to keep the Palestinian movement divided and weaken the Palestinian Authority. That obviously ended catastrophically for everyone involved. But instead of accountability for Netanyahu, what seems to be happening is he is consolidating power by pushing out other leaders in government, even though a recent poll found that 70% of the country wants him to resign. However, instead we're talking going back to these same tactics and, you know, kind of pushing out other people in other power centers and consolidating. So on Wednesday, the day this episode comes out, the cabinet will vote on Ronan Barr's dismissal. The Attorney general, the Israeli Attorney General said Bibi can't fire Ronan Barr unless it goes through a process to determine whether doing so is lawful. We'll see if, you know, Netanyahu goes along with that ruling from the ag, or else we might have a constitutional crisis brewing. But I mean, Ben, what did, what did you make of this? I mean, it's, for us now, it's pretty familiar to see like unpopular right wing kind of autocrats driving countries into a ditch. But this feels, this feels like a real escalation to me.

[Ben Rhodes]

And memory holding their own crimes, or in Yao's case, there's a lot to look at. There's literal crimes and then there's him doing everything he can to memory hole his own massive and glaring failures. Around October 7th, you know, why was the IDF up in the west bank chasing around settlers to commit violence against Palestinians instead of guarding that border? You know, why was all this money essentially used to prop up Hamas with Netanyahu himself telling members of the crude party, we want Hamas. It's a justification for there never being a Palestinian state. It's a justification for keeping the Palestinian leadership separated. You know, those are things that he wants to just kind of literally sweep under the rug. And I think part of what is so concerning here is he has learned the lesson of the last year and a half that perpetuating this war is a way to constantly keep the political pressure off of himself and to kind of placate the far right that wants kind of an open ended, brutalist Israeli policy. Right now, Tommy, we are looking at the bombardment of Gaza resuming. Israel continues to be in southern Syria where they've done all kinds of, they've taken land, they've bomb targets, they are making threats about the Iranian nuclear program. So there's a potential front there, obviously in Lebanon, there's a tenuous ceasefire on that border. We're talking like multiple countries where Netanyahu has this capacity to turn the dial up or down. And every time he feels political pressure, he seems to turn the dial up. And that's not some conspiracy. That's literally what's happened the last. Whenever he feels politically cornered, something is going to get hotter somewhere else. Right now. Nobody's even fighting back. Right. Hamas isn't fighting back. The Syrians aren't fighting back. There's a ceasefire in Lebanon. The Iranians are trying to get into nuclear talks.

[Tommy Vitor]

It's only the Houthis, which we'll talk about in a second.

[Ben Rhodes]

Except the Houthis. Yeah, which teeing this up for the transition. But the reality is there are more places, including Iran, where this could escalate further. The more the, you know, the political pressure builds on him, the more you might expect to see him, or the west bank for that matter, the more you might expect to see him do dramatic things to kind of get the attention off of his own political fortune.

[Tommy Vitor]

And he's also, I mean the man has fought an independent review of October 7. What has happened is independent components of the Israeli like security state have done their own investigation and reviews into their own conduct. But he has just evaded any real accountability by, you know, a sort of 911 commission style look back at how October 7th, it's, it's, I mean it's probably why he's at a 70% disapproval rating, but it's just infuriating.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, but not surprising.

[Tommy Vitor]

Not at all surprising. Okay, so Ben, sort of in the neighborhood. Let's check in on our own anti war President Donald Trump. So over the weekend, Trump, the Trump administration launched a major series of airstrikes on Houthi rebel targets in Yemen, which local authorities say killed 53 people and injured near, near a hundred more. Those strikes included targets in the capital of Sanaa. This came after the Houthis threatened to resume attacks on ships in the Red Sea, which they say are in response most recently to Israel cutting off humanitarian support into Gaza. Listeners probably remember that back In November of 2023, the Houthis started attacking ships in the Red Sea, including US Warships calling this an act of solidarity with Gaza. So at the time, the Biden administration retaliated against the Houthis with strikes on Houthi targets, most of which were designed to destroy military infrastructure and anti ship missiles. But Trump may have started something bigger here. Here's a clip of Marco Rubio discussing their plans on CBS News over the weekend.

[Ben Rhodes]

This is not a message, this is not a One off. This is an effort to deny them the ability to continue to constrict and control shipping. And it's just not going to happen. Not going to have these guys, these people with weapons, able to tell us where our ships can go, where the ships of all the world can go. By the way, it's not just the U.S. we're doing the world a favor. We're doing the entire world a favor by getting rid of these guys and their ability to strike global shipping. That's the mission here, and it will continue until that's carried out. That never happened before. The Biden administration didn't do that. All the Biden administration would do is they would respond to an attack.

[Tommy Vitor]

These guys would launch one rocket.

[Ben Rhodes]

We'd hit the rocket launcher. That's it. This is an effort to take away their ability to control global shipping in that part of the world. That's just not going to happen anymore.

[Tommy Vitor]

So we're doing the world a favor by getting rid of these guys. Sounded a little regime changey to me, Ben. But then I also noticed Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Defense, said the bombing campaign against the Houthis will end if the Houthis stop shooting at US Ships. So that is clearly more limited. But Hegseth also said, quote, we don't care what happens in the Yemeni civil war, which is very nice of him. So, Ben, what do you make of this old but new war from our anti war president? Are we back in regime change mode, or is this more limited?

[Ben Rhodes]

I mean, first of all, Marco Rubio, despite his very best efforts, sounds like the least tough person on the face of the earth. You know, you can tell he kind of rehearsed this.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah, he's practiced that one in the mirror.

[Ben Rhodes]

And he wanted to sound like a tough guy, and he wanted to say things like these guys a bunch of times. And he literally just sounds like the kind of kid what he. That voice doesn't sound like someone threatening Houthis. It sounds like a kid who ran in from the schoolyard to tell the teacher on somebody else or something. These guys are trying to mess up international shipping.

[Tommy Vitor]

You know, like, so careless with his word choices.

[Ben Rhodes]

I just don't get it. But anyway, put. Put General Rubio aside for a second here. The thing that worries me about this is, look, the Biden policy wasn't the clearest policy in the world. It was. Every now and then, we'd just go bomb a bunch of the Houthis and their infrastructure. But part of what is troubling to me Is that the messaging from Trump on down to Rubio? Cause, you know, Rubio's on whatever messages he's been commanded to deliver, so he has to take that shot at Biden. This just seems to be informed by, like, our strikes on the Houthis are gonna be a little bit bigger than Joe Biden's. So we can say that they're bigger. You know, and there's not really any logic if you. If you unpack what he said, because the Houthis have, you know, they kind of stop shooting at ships and then they do. This is not a new thing, kind of stop and start from them. They've tied it to the resumption of hostilities in Gaza. There's no indication that one round of airstrikes is going to, like, make the Houthis go away or change their fundamental calculus.

[Tommy Vitor]

I was talking to an expert today who said he thinks that Trump was almost certainly told by, like, CENTCOM or some of his military advisors that all we need to do, sir, is take the gloves off, sir, and stop caring about civilian casualties and get rid of these Biden restrictions, sir, and then we'll take these guys out and Is just bullshit.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah.

[Tommy Vitor]

Like, they might be attacking leaders. They might have found intel and leaders that seem like they're hitting warehouses or other targets in cities. But I just don't think that they're going to make a material difference here.

[Ben Rhodes]

And I think. I think what happened to Tommy, you're right. And, like, in talking to some people, it seems like there were some people at CENTCOM that wanted the more maximalist option. That did include, for instance, trying to hit individual Houthi leaders, like you said. And sometimes you actually don't have good intel on where those guys are. Sometimes you might, but, like, you might kill a whole bunch of civilians in doing that. And they went, Mr. Trump, sir, Joe Biden was afraid to take out these guys. But the reality is that the Houthis are people that live in Yemen. Like, they're not even analogous to isis. The last time Trump wanted to prove he was tougher than someone basically just took the same Obama plan and loosened some restrictions on civilian casualties, which I think is not a good thing. But the ISIS was foreign fighters. Right? They're not going to go away in Yemen unless you go commit a genocide or something. Like, they're people that live there. And so I don't really think. If anything worries me about this, it's Trump doing the opposite of what he said about getting a set of wars in a situation in which you Have a war in Gaza. Like I said, you've got Syria, there's sectarian violence picking up there. The Israelis are occupying southern Syria. There are people stirring the pot there. And the government can't really get its legs under it because there's sanctions. Yemen, you got an active civil war in the Sudi thing, you've got the Iranians, like, trying to avoid a war over their nuclear program, but not clear whether there's a deal like this whole region could still, if Trump's impulse is to continue to show that he's tough by, like, saying yes to the most, you know, square jawed general that calls him sir, like we, you know, this.

[Tommy Vitor]

Could be the coolest nickname.

[Ben Rhodes]

Exactly. Who's our new chairman? I forgot the nickname.

[Tommy Vitor]

Snailbag.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Tommy Vitor]

Madam and Mosul.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Erasmitaz or something.

[Tommy Vitor]

That was our guy, Nick. Yeah. I mean, just to really, like, hammer home the point you're making about the Houthis living in Yemen. I mean, they are, they're a tribal.

[Ben Rhodes]

Group from northern Yemen tribe, you know.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah. They practice former Shia Islam. And, like, the Houthi movement emerged in the 90s in part in opposition to, like, Saudi influence and hardline Saudi religious practices. But then they came onto, like, the international community's radar in a big way in 2014 when they seized the capital of Yemen, when they forced the Yemeni president at the time to run for his Life. And by 2015, the Houthis controlled a big chunk of Yemen's territory. And in 2015, the Saudis decided to launch this major military operation to dislodge them. And that proved to be a catastrophic failure on a military and a humanitarian level. It led to hundreds of thousands of Yemenis dying either in the fighting and, or from the famine. And by 2022, the Saudis were like, all right, we're good on bombing. We're going to try to cut a deal. And, you know, I think everything was reawakened by October 7th. Now, like, everyone points out that the Houthis get a lot of support from Iran. That is true. It's also, I think, important to say, Ben, that, like, there are some quarters of the left that embraced the Houthi rebels because they were seen as doing something to end the war in Gaza. But we should say, these are not good guys. They are authoritarian. They have kidnapped and killed aid workers, they've terrorized the population. Like, no one should cheer for them. But back to the military campaign, Ben. I mean, this expert I was talking to and other people who left the Biden administration have said the same thing to me, which is that by the end of their Houthi military campaign, they realize that like, you can't deter these guys.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah.

[Tommy Vitor]

Like you can, you can degrade them.

[Ben Rhodes]

You can take away some of their capabilities.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yes, you can degrade them. You can set up like defensive infrastructure in the Red Sea. You can like create a missile defense wall around Israel. But like really dismantling them is a years long project with way better intelligence. Some sort of ground campaign. Like, it's a disaster.

[Ben Rhodes]

The Saudis and the Emiratis have fought a war for nearly a decade against these guys with plenty of U.S. support. And they were somehow stronger at the end of that process than they were at the beginning.

[Tommy Vitor]

Right.

[Ben Rhodes]

And also Trump, and this is why the Iran part worries me. In his like truth socialing, which is, I guess, where we announce military operations now, he was like, this is a message for Iran, all caps or something. And the Iranians do not control the Houthis.

[Tommy Vitor]

It's a very important point.

[Ben Rhodes]

This is so important. Like, this is actually not like Hezbollah or something. They do give them some weapons and they have. And maybe they could stop doing that. I don't think that would impact the Houthis behavior that much. You know, they do their own thing, these guys, you know. And what is Trump exactly saying in terms of the message to Iran? The message that we're gonna bomb you next? I mean, this whole thing could get, could go sideways pretty fast. And let's also point out, whether we're talking about Gaza or Yemen or wherever, we used to think about what we're doing to obviously civilians, from a humanitarian perspective, also from a just multi decade anti American sentiment radicalization perspective, this kind of the casual nature of these, pretty large scale bombing, I mean, these are not like drone strikes. No, people should give us plenty of shit about those too. But this is like, you know, we're dropping huge ordinance on multiple countries or we're giving Israel to ordinance to do that. And I, I just, I don't know. I don't like where this is probably headed for the Middle east, you know.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah. And that, that tweet from Trump blaming Iran, saying you're responsible for anything the Houthis do.

[Ben Rhodes]

They're not. They're just not.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah. Apparently the Houthis. The Pentagon says the Houthis have fired 174 projectiles at US Navy ships since 2023, and like 150 more at commercial ships. So they've been firing off a lot of stuff. And if we're holding Iran responsible for all of that. That's a problem because to your point, I mean, the Houthis have a high degree of autonomy. And this Houthi expert was telling me that after the Soleimani assassination, that kind of strategy of more distributed authority and autonomy to their kind of so called proxy forces has. Seems to have been a policy because it allows them not to have to, like, have such close ties or create, you know, intelligence channels that can be intercepted, et cetera. But it has also allowed for a lot of proliferation of missile and drone technology. Like, there's some concern that the Houthis could be sharing this stuff with Al Qaeda or Al Shabaab.

[Ben Rhodes]

And that's what I mean about terrorism coming our way.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah.

[Ben Rhodes]

Because if you start to really go after these guys, they're not going to surrender. And in this, this imagine Trump after a terrorist attack, I just, this, none of this makes me feel good.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah. And then just in terms of Yemen itself, like, there's nothing. A lot of good options to deal with the Houthis right now, but the current plan, if we just sum it all up, is Israel resuming the war in Gaza with, you know, eight or $12 billion worth of additional U.S. weapons. TRUMP GUTTING USAID and cutting off parts of Yemen to humanitarian support. And now we're bombing the out of Yemen again. And that just like, that is catastrophic to the point where even the Saudis are like, do not do this. Like, we went down this path.

[Ben Rhodes]

Saudis are gonna end well. You know, and the USAID point's really important because in the kind of pretty dark, contradictory reality of American foreign policy, USAID was a huge donor to addressing humanitarian needs in Yemen. And now that's gone. So a lot more people are gonna suffer than even suffered in past bombing campaigns.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah. And it won't be the Houthis, who I think represent like 15% of the population. It'll be women and kids and civilians who always get hurt.

[Ben Rhodes]

Who will blame America?

[Tommy Vitor]

Potsy of the World is brought to you by Helix. We got a bunch of visitors in my house right now. It's a full house. We have in laws, sister in law, a bunch of people here. So we're rotating people sort of through. Really. We're coming up well, that really. Oh, I think, like, to different rooms. No, like, people are coming in staggered to staggered times. And everyone who sleeps on our guest room on the Helix mattress says, best sleep of my life. Slept like a baby. There you go. Almost slept through breakfast. It was so good. It was so comfortable. In fact, my mother in law was with us all week and she slept on a Helix mattress and also loved it. There you go. Look at all the in laws. How will you know which Helix mattress works best for you and your body? You take the Helix Sleep quiz and you find your perfect mattress in under two minutes. I took this quiz a long time ago. I'm pretty sure I was a Don Lux, but it doesn't matter what the quiz said. You seem like a Dunlux. I was, you know, it was a fantastic mattress. It is super comfortable, everyone raves about it and it's just an easy way to figure out like the best fit for you. The helix lineup offers 20 unique mattresses including the award winning luxe and ultra premium elite collections. Helix Plus a mattress designed for big and tall sleepers. Helix Kids, a mattress designed for growing bodies that's been endorsed by child sleep experts. Helix knows there's no better way to test out a new mattress than by sleeping on it in your own home. That's why they offer a 100 night trial and 10 to 15 year warranty to try out a new Helix mattress. Plus your personalized mattress is shipped straight to your door free of charge. Go to helixsleep.comworld for 20% off sitewide. That's helixsleep.comworld for twenty percent off sitewide helixsleep.comworld Charlie Heller is the CIA's most brilliant computer analyst whose life is turned upside down when his wife is murdered in a terrorist attack. Wrought with grief, Charlie decides her killers must pay. Without any field experience, Charlie must trek.

[Ben Rhodes]

The globe and use his biggest weapon, his intelligence, to enact his revenge. Because the most unexpected threat is an amateur. Starring Academy Award winner Rami Malek and Academy Award nominee Laurence Fishburne. The Amateur, rated PG13, only in theaters.

[Tommy Vitor]

In IMAX April 11th. Ben speaking of kind of the gutting of US power abroad, including soft power, talk about the voice of America. Voice of America, or VOA, was founded in 1942 during World War II to be counterweight to Nazi propaganda. The idea was you provide news and information and cultural programs to audiences literally around the world while also promoting American values like press freedom, democracy, et cetera. After World War II ended, VOA's mission evolved into a tool to combat communism in the Soviet Union. More recently, that mission evolved further. They are doing programing in the Middle East, Asia. There's combating extremism, China, Iran, etc. Right? So that was until Friday. Last week, Trump released an executive order targeting VOA's parent organization the US Agency for Global Media, which also funds other US backed news outlets like Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia, etc. Combined, these outlets reach 420 million people in 100 countries and broadcast in 63 languages. The impact of this EO is that nearly all of VOA is 1300 staff members have been put on paid leave. Their programming is gone. It's been replaced by, like, Muzak or, you know, Dead air or whatever. Trump has installed failed Arizona Senate and gubernatorial candidate Carrie Lake to run voa, basically with the mission to destroy it. Ben, do you want to talk about the mission of VOA and the impact of these new services being eviscerated?

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah. So the numbers begin to tell a story. The over 400 million people in over 60 languages. And I think what people have to realize is think of VOA something like a wire service, largely, like, it's pretty straight news to the point that we actually used to get. Shit like, why aren't you doing your own propaganda? RT is so much better at propagandizing. But part of the idea behind it is a lot of the places, sure, we can focus on the places where we're trying to get information into the Iranian people or places where there's geopolitical tension. A lot of these are places where there's no other access to straight news, just knowing what the fuck is going on. That's why you do it in all these languages. And if you think that that seems like a luxury, consider the fact that we're living in a world in which people are constantly bombarded on social media or through various propaganda channels with garbage, you know, and people trust.

[Tommy Vitor]

It's more important than ever.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, I know people in Southeast Asia, for instance, who are living in pretty tough places. Myanmar, Cambodia. Places where you have civil conflict or you've got dictators who put out all kinds of disinformation all the time, or misinformation. And people could trust a VOA product or a Radio Free Asia product. Right. But if you remove that, not only is that just denying credible news source to people, it is opening the door for people to be further radicalized or brainwashed, essentially through disinformation. It's just literally pulling the plug on hundreds of millions of people that rely on this information. And I think what I find so kind of grotesque about this, to take a step back is to connect what we were just talking about. America first, right. A lot of us had to be like, well, I can see some of the points Trump's making, you know, but this is. He was talking about like the credible version of America first is the forever war. We fought 20 years of fucking dumb wars in the Middle East.

[Tommy Vitor]

Let's not do that.

[Ben Rhodes]

And we killed hundreds of thousands of people and thousands of our own people died. And we spent all this money. Let's not do that. And that's not what America first turned out to be. We are still fighting the dumb fucking wars. We're still bombing people in Yemen. We're still sending 8 to 12 billion dollars of assistance to Israel to bomb people. We're upping the defense budget. That's the only thing that went up in the recent thing that streamer capitulated to. What are we cutting? We're cutting the only good things America does in the world. You know, we're taking away usaid. All soft power gone, all of it. Right. We're cutting all of usaid, all of pepfar, which is, you know, obviously life saving systems for hiv, aids. All of Voice of America and its various cousins. That is not the America in the world. Sure people grumble about foreign aid, but I don't think that's what people were upset about in terms of the excesses of the deep state or whatever you want to call it. And so that's what is so disgusting about what we're watching is like we're seeing the methodical destruction of anything good America might do in the world or anything that might improve people's lives around the world, or anything that might combat autocracy around the world. And we're not seeing any diminution in if anything, we're seeing ratcheting up of geopolitical tension with tariffs and military action and all the rest of it.

[Tommy Vitor]

And before we started recording, you and I were talking about how Deputy Assistant Secretary Rubio used to really care about a certain component of voa.

[Claudia]

Yes.

[Ben Rhodes]

Well, this drives me fucking nuts about Marco Rubio's I used to get. I had this argument with him because we. One of the bloated parts of this whole enterprise is something called Radio Marti, which has been broadcasting from basically South Florida, where it supports a bunch of jobs, by the way, into Cuba, right. And seemed like a lot of money to be spending on something that wasn't really working. Cubans blocked it. So it was kind of like a radio station that hardliners in Florida, Miami likes. So Rubio fights to the death if Barack Obama wants to cut $1, but then Rubio fucking shuts it all down.

[Tommy Vitor]

When he sets the state literally turn off the switch.

[Ben Rhodes]

Turning off the switch, like killing jobs in Florida. And just to connect some dots with Marco Rubio, right now you've got Venezuelans being flown into gulags in El Salvador, something that Marco Rubio would have once seemingly objected to. I thought we wanted to help the Venezuelan people. We've got, you know, Cubans are not allowed in this country anymore. It's something that Marco Rubio used to care about. Like all Marco Rubio used to complain about conditions in Cuban prisons that fucking the El Salvadorian prisons make that look like, you know, a country club. I mean, this is insane. What? Marco Rubio is single handedly proving how full of shit he was in just two months. Yeah.

[Tommy Vitor]

I mean, on the Salvadoran part, Ben. So on positive America, we spent a bunch of time digging into Trump's most recent immigration moves. I do think, like, taken together, they're horrifying and scary. But I think the most relevant part of this for us is Trump using this law from 1798. All the best laws are written then called the Alien Enemies act, which they're using to deport Venezuelan men to El Salvador to be held in prison there. Like, literally any Venezuelan male over 16 can be declared a part of a gang and now shipped to El Salvador. At the moment, these deportations are being blocked by the courts. Trump is furious about that. He called the judge who halted the deportations a radical left lunatic and demanded that the guy be impeached. That statement actually prompted a response from Chief Justice John Roberts, who was like, hey bud, impeachment isn't how you deal with a ruling you don't like. You try the, try the appeals process. You know, like, let's be an adult here. But Ben, I mean, this, this is so scary. It's scary on its face, but it's also a scary precedent that could be expanded to other groups that Donald Trump does not like. And to your point, I mean, it's worth reminding everyone just how bad El Salvador's prison system is. It. There's a lot of components to this. 2% of the population of the country is in prison because Naya Bukele has put in place a mass incarceration policy where he indiscriminately rounds people up and throws them in jail with no due process. To your point, I was talking to a human rights expert in El Salvador a couple months ago who said that prisoners in Venezuela have more due process than prisoners in El Salvador under this current system. Because Bukele declared this state of exception, which is their sort of. It's like a state of emergency where he suspended Due process rights, ostensibly to deal with gang violence for like, a month, but then, like every state of emergency, it just gets extended over and over and over again. And he's used it to sweep people up and indiscriminately throw men into prison. And now the United States is going to help keep Bukele in power by paying El Salvador money to house prisoners from the US with no due process. And there was a point in time where conservatives like a Marco Rubio, like a John McCain, cared deeply about human rights, or at least they talked about it a lot. Right. And that is just. I guess it's just gone. I mean, Rubio tweeted something about the Uyghurs the other day, and it made me think about when credibility.

[Ben Rhodes]

Does he have to talk about that?

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah. I remember when Trump. John Bolton, Trump's former national security advisor, said in his book that Trump not only did not care about millions of Uyghurs being thrown into concentration camps, he told Xi Jinping that it was the right thing to do.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah. I mean, we're literally subsidizing, like, one of the largest gulags, if not the largest gulag in the world. You know, I have to check it. Don't. No libel suits, Bukele. But. But it's a big fucking prison where terrible things happen to people. Horrible. I think one way to think about it, too, Tommy, is because you guys had a very good conversation on the psa. You know, I think a lot about this, you know, kind of authoritarian playbook that we're living through. And I wrote, like, my last book was about this. We are.

[Tommy Vitor]

You're ahead of the curve on that book, unfortunately.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah. The whole Orban, Putin, Trump comparison.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah, I didn't like that. That was kind of prescient.

[Ben Rhodes]

I know. And so as I think back on that, what's scary about living through it now is in some ways, we are so far ahead of, like, Orban has never approached this. Right. Like, these people that we think of as dictators in their wildest dreams, they could never think of, like, randomly deporting lots of people to prisons in third countries. Because what we're seeing is, yes, Trump is implementing a playbook. Ignore judges, do whatever you want. Install loyalists. Like, we all now, unfortunately, are familiar with that playbook. But what's scary is when you're the President of the United States, there's things that are available to you that are not available to the Bolsonaros and Orban's and even Dutertes of the world, which are you can pressure countries in Latin America to take all these people and throw them into your prisons. Right. And. And so we're seeing, I think Americans have to get their minds around, like, we are not, you know, at the beginning of this, we're kind of pretty late in the spectrum, which is, like, there's no constraint on him. But we're also seeing how, like, Trump, for all of his railing against the deep state, he is using the awesome powers of the American national security state for his authoritarian impulses. So he doesn't like. He talks shit on the FBI. He loves ice. He loves those military planes that are flying people down there, and he's posting, like, fascist snuff videos with them. And we're starting to see what it's like to have that US national security apparatus wedded to the authoritarian playbook. And that's what I find scary about it.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah, it's really scary. That point about his ability to force other countries to do things that no other dictator would be able to do. And also, the United States is usually the one calling out other countries and trying to, at least to deter these kinds of human rights violations.

[Ben Rhodes]

Oh, and we're gonna see that. We're gonna see all kinds of copycat stuff happening around the world. I mean, you wait a few months to see the ripples of not only USAID being gone and VOA being gone, but seeing other people saying, well, oh, look what Trump's doing. Like, I'm gonna do whatever the fuck I want.

[Tommy Vitor]

In fact, you're already seeing it, right? Because once you have Trump and Elon Musk and others in the government saying that, like usai, corrupt, you know, organization designed to for regime change that gives every authoritarian around the world the Pretext to raid NGOs supported by USAID, et cetera. Right. Yeah, we'll get to that in a minute. In Serbia. So one last thing on this, Ben. We've been trying to keep everybody updated on the impact of Trump gutting usaid. Along those lines, there was a really well done piece in the New York Times by Nick Kristoff over the weekend. It had the headline, musk said no one has died since aid was cut. That isn't true. Highly recommend reading this. He went to Sudan, South Sudan, met with people who are going to die or know of children who died because USAID is gone. The Times also worked with the center for Global Development to estimate how many people at risk of dying within a year. Here's the stats. They came up with 1.65 million people could die without US help to fund HIV prevention and treatment. Half a million could die without vaccine funding. More than half a million could die without food from America. Almost 300,000 could die without malaria prevention funding from the U.S. 310,000 could die without U.S. funding for tuberculosis prevention. There's also this broader concern about us helping reignite drug resistant tuberculosis strains all around the world. So that's great. But look, read the Kristof piece. Share the impact on social media. Like, I don't think we have any hope of saving USAID at this point, but I do think we need to make these monsters own the impact of what they're doing.

[Ben Rhodes]

And the only thing I'll say about this is our ketamine addled white South African deputy dictator tweeted out something about how he gets all this hate when he's never harmed a person in his life. He's gonna be directly responsible for the deaths of millions of fucking people. Millions of people.

[Claudia]

Children, okay?

[Ben Rhodes]

Children. Elon Musk is gonna be responsible for the deaths of children of so many people. I can't get my mind around it. And there's going to be a relentless effort by him and all of his, like, you know, I don't do douchebag want to be, you know to say like, oh, all this irrational Elon derangement syndrome. Like, I don't know, maybe go talk to the people in places like Sudan who are dying right now because they're not getting nutrition the way these guys.

[Tommy Vitor]

Think they're the victims. You know, you and I were talking about this before.

[Ben Rhodes]

Oh yeah, I got criticized online.

[Tommy Vitor]

How dare you tweet me? Tweeted me on the platform I own where I can ban you. People should be boycotting Tesla.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, boycott Tesla.

[Tommy Vitor]

I'm not saying like harm Teslas or just do not buy Tesla.

[Ben Rhodes]

Don't ever buy anything that Elon Musk makes.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah, I, I honestly for a long time I like wanted a, a one of those Tesla power walls at my house.

[Ben Rhodes]

So did I. Yeah.

[Tommy Vitor]

Because I like, I am actually worried about blackouts in la, but like, there's absolutely no way that I would buy one from Tesla now. No one should buy anything from Tesla. Like, he's a terrible person.

[Ben Rhodes]

It's.

[Tommy Vitor]

Maybe some sort of economic impact will matter to him because these fucking rapacious billionaires actually really care if they're the number one richest or the number three. Like that's how awful they are.

[Ben Rhodes]

He will care more about that than he will care about the assessment of how many people die because he cut off usaid. So Please boycott this.

[Tommy Vitor]

And to all the people who say, well, you know, the climate impact of creating Tesla is incalculable. He has already done more harm in his couple months in government than good than he has ever done.

[Ben Rhodes]

Buying your Tesla is. There are other EVs and you know, guess what? It's a drop in the bucket compared to the Carmen.

[Tommy Vitor]

Cheaper and better made. Okay, we're going to take a quick break, but before we do that, Ben, we need to address something we do, which is there is a lot of heat in, like the Comments on the YouTube on social media from our Canadian listeners who I think feel like we've been talking about the tariff war with Canada and some of the political machinations happening in Canada in a way that is flippant. And so I don't know exactly what we said. I'm sorry if we offended anybody. I, I sort of am confused why we, why would anyone would listen to this conversation and think we are not on your side versus the fucking morons, like, trying to crush the Canadian economy? I think that's stupid and ridiculous.

[Ben Rhodes]

I, I, I, Look, I, I will apologize to the people of Canada. I feel your pain and I mean that seriously, genuinely. What I take from it is when it feels like there's a lunatic who's trying to take over your country and destroy your economy. Like maybe you don't want the humorous banter about it, which I get. But bear in mind, we're living under this lunatic too, and sometimes we turn to the dark humor of it all. But I'm feeling Mark Carney's hockey fighting energy like we dig it. We love you guys. We love our Canadian listeners and we hear you.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah, I want to apologize substantially less than Ben. I reserve the right to make fun of anything I'm going to make fun of for being low key. We have fucking Donald Trump as our president.

[Ben Rhodes]

We're trying to survive, guys.

[Tommy Vitor]

No, but the director and Deputy Director of the FBI actively hate both of us. They do. Things are bad here.

[Ben Rhodes]

Let's be clear about that. Let's be clear.

[Tommy Vitor]

We do not want to tariff you.

[Ben Rhodes]

Personally are aware of who we are. We do not want to tariff you. We liked Justin Trudeau. We had him on the show. Yeah, we like Mark Carney, but we get it.

[Tommy Vitor]

No one wants his tariff war. I know. It's a very serious thing. Trump is actively trying to destroy the Canadian economy and that is insane and stupid.

[Ben Rhodes]

Let's all fight, let's all fight these lunatics together and not turning on each other.

[Tommy Vitor]

We're on the same team also. Fuck Pierre Poliev. Also, we wanted to tell you about an amazing new podcast from Crooked Media. We all need a little break from the news. Ben. And we are releasing a new podcast we think worldos in particular are gonna love and might already love, because the first episode is in your feed. It's called Shadow Kingdom, God's Banker. Here's what it's about. In the summer of 1982, the Vatican's top money man was found dead. Roberto Calvi, known as God's Banker. I tried to do an Italian accent. Calvi was embroiled in an infamous money laundering scandal that tied him to an ultra secretive far right society, the Sicilian Mafia and the Catholic Church. His death at the time was ruled a suicide. But the evidence, it told a different story. For decades, no one could say what really happened. Until now. Journalist Nicola Minoni is following a new lead, one that could finally answer the question, who killed God's banker? This is a fun, wild story. It's a little bit sinister too.

[Ben Rhodes]

There are Masons involved.

[Tommy Vitor]

There's some Masons.

[Ben Rhodes]

Can I say something that was interesting about the last time you have feedback on this? So this is like, you ever, like, find out that you're communicating with like your parents through the podcast? No, like, like because they listen and they hear something and they. My, my grandfather was a Mason.

[Tommy Vitor]

No way.

[Ben Rhodes]

I, I, yes. Which I, I, I'd once known and forgotten. So when I was kind of, you know, throwing some shade at the Masons, my dad was like, oh, remember, your grandfather's a Mason.

[Tommy Vitor]

I bet that there's a, and by.

[Ben Rhodes]

The way, he was a Mason in small town Texas. So he wasn't like running the world in some headquarters. He was, he was in like Baytown, Texas.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah, and look, I also, I assume most Masons were just like part of any kind of fraternal organization that got people together in like a civic way and did things together. I, my, my time in government has led me to believe that most conspiracies don't exist because no one can keep a secret and get anything.

[Ben Rhodes]

Because the actual reality is kind of the ultimate conspiracy theory. There are a bunch of rich, powerful.

[Tommy Vitor]

People controlling the world in front of our faces. Elon Musk in the doge, cutting all.

[Ben Rhodes]

The so shat God's Banker. You know, Shadow Kingdom. Like that. At least get a good story out of it.

[Tommy Vitor]

This is a great story because we are living in this horrifying far right world led by awful people. And you can see the beginnings of this far right movement in Italy take form in this podcast in a way that provides a lot of context for what we're dealing with today. So episode one is in the Pod Save the World feed. You should check it out and if you love it, you can hear episode two now by subscribing to the Shadow Kingdom feed wherever you get your podcasts. And if you don't want to wait, you can binge the whole series today by joining the Friends of the [e-mail] friends or by subscribing on the Shadow Kingdom Apple Podcast Channel. Pod Save the World is brought to you by Haya Typical children's vitamins are basically candy in disguise. Filled with two teaspoons of sugar, unhealthy chemicals and other gummy additives growing kids should never eat. That's why Haya created a super powered chewable vitamin. HA fills in the most common gaps in modern children's diets to provide a full body nourishment our kids need with yummy taste they love. Formulated with the help of pediatricians and nutritional experts, Haya is pressed with a blend of 12 organic fruits and veggies, then supercharged with 15 essential vitamins and minerals to help support immune system, brain energy, mood, concentration, teeth, bones and more. It's non gmo, vegan, dairy free, allergy free, gelatin free, nut free and everything else you can imagine. Free Haya is designed for kids to and up and send straight to your door so parents have one less thing to worry about. Isn't Charlie a big Hai fan? Big Haya fan. He just loves these things. Doesn't get all his vitamins because all he eats is spaghetti and also we don't want to have him have a bunch of sugar. So Haya is perfect, lovett said. He came over to your house the other day and Charlie was playing Go versus a supercomputer and he'd just taken a Haiya. Anyone? Is that all right? That is correct. Are you tired of battling with your kids to eat their greens? Hai now is a Kid's daily Greens and Superfoods, a choice chocolate flavored greens powder designed specifically for kids. Packed with 55 whole food ingredients that support brain power, development and digestion. Just scoop, shake and sip with milk or any non dairy beverage for a delicious and nutritious boost your kids will actually enjoy. We've worked out a special deal with Haya for their best selling children's vitamin. Get 50% off your first order. To claim this deal you must go to hyahealth.com world. This deal is not available on their regular website. Go to H I Y A H E a l t h.com world and get your kids the full body nourishment they need to grow into healthy adults.

[Ben Rhodes]

The last thing you want to hear.

[Tommy Vitor]

When you need your auto insurance most is a robot with countless irrelevant menu options. Which is why with USA Auto insurance, you'll get great service that is easy and reliable, all at the touch of a button. Get a quote today. Restrictions apply. USA okay, let's move on to the Russia, because earlier today Trump and Vladimir Putin's book on the phone about the war in Ukraine. It's interesting that they previewed this one. Ben as like Trump has previously suggested in some news conferences that he's talked to Putin a few times since he's been in the White House. But I guess who really knows because they're a bunch of liars. So NBC News says the call was at least an hour and a half long. Other outlets said it was up to three hours. I was talking to some of our team here. Like, I suspect that's a lot because of translation and also because Putin likes to give long historical rants about his grievances. Yeah, I imagine Trump even gets a flavor of that, but who knows? So the biggest deliverable out of the call is Putin saying he's agreed not to bomb Ukraine's energy infrastructure for 30 days. What a win.

[Ben Rhodes]

Trump announced at the end of winter. By the way, this is not. I haven't seen this point out in coverage, but they bombed the energy infrastructure in like November, December, heading into the winter. Guess what time of the year it is is March, April. Yeah, Putin doesn't need to bomb the energy infrastructure anymore.

[Tommy Vitor]

And also it doesn't get unbombed, like if it's not working anyway. So also Trump, they announced they're going to begin talks about a possible ceasefire in the Black Sea. It's worth noting that there have been these little partial ceasefires along the way between the Russians and the Ukrainians. Friend of the pod, Max Seddon, tweeted an analysis of Putin's Russian language readout of the call with Trump. Max's big takeaway is that Putin gave almost no ground. Putin wants a total end to foreign military support and intelligence to Ukraine. The readout said that any deal must, quote, take into account the unconditional necessity to remove the initial reasons for the crisis and Russia's legal security interests. You could drive a truck through kind of the implications of that language, which we can unpack in a second. The readout also says that Trump and Putin talked about some non Ukraine topics, including mutually beneficial partnership in economics and security, some sort of cooperation in the Middle east, non proliferation, and then some shit about hosting hockey games, which I guess means it just effectively ends the kind of sports isolation of Russia, which.

[Ben Rhodes]

Trump's probably not even aware of. Yeah, so fucking dumb, right? If you want to be great if we have hockey games. He doesn't realize he's just like removed a huge source of pressure.

[Tommy Vitor]

It is a big carrot, right? Because like the Russians were competing in the Olympics under like some non flag. I can't remember what it looked like. But anyway, it sucked for them. They were pissed about it.

[Ben Rhodes]

The goon flag?

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah, the goon flag. And now it's. Now they're just back, I guess. So I guess like, look, my takeaway, Ben, was I don't want to criticize diplomacy just because Trump is doing it, but I think we should be honest that a one month energy ceasefire is not only not that much, given the context you just talked about about the time of year, but also Trump pushed the Ukrainians to sign a 30 day unconditional ceasefire. And Putin was like, nah, I'm good. And he also didn't signal any real willingness to give ground and other stuff. So. So I don't know what was accomplished. Maybe Putin agreed to buy a bunch of Trump coin with Russian oil and gas. Half kidding about that. But what were your takeaways from this?

[Ben Rhodes]

Well, yeah, first of all, in the time hearing that brought back not great memories of. I sat through probably, I don't know, after the invasion of Crimea, up through the end of the Obama administration, I probably sat through five or six of these two hour phone calls. And it makes it sound like a really substantive, robust conversation. Each side probably spoke three or four times in those two hours because Putin sits there and reads like a 20 minute speech about literally reads, reads about all of his fucking grievances and how hard, what bunch of bastards the Ukrainians are. And he gives you a history lesson going all the way back to. He goes way back, you know, the, you know, Bulgaria joining NATO and shit, Ottoman Empire. And then that has to be fucking translated, right? And so you're sitting there and you're like. So then we'd put out like they spoke for two hours. And I'm like, it's not as cool as you guys think it is, you know, but anyway, put that aside. Yeah, I think that what's amazing about this is he's just walking Trump right along his fucking path where Putin is literally Taking the things that he would usually have to negotiate at the end of the fucking negotiation, right? Ukraine can't rearm, can't have foreign forces there, can't get any intel, you know, can't join NATO. Like his whole list, he's even laundering in his version of history. He congratulates Trump for not voting for the UN resolution, the General assembly resolution, calling him the aggressor, like, good job, Donald and voting with me in Belarus on that. And he's trying to pull all these issues forward into the negotiation about the 30 day ceasefire. And Trump is so thirsty for either a combination of Putin's friendship and in some partial news cycle win that he's literally celebrating like a partial ceasefire around just hitting energy targets when he didn't get anything else. Like Putin is not moved off of any other position. Literally the only thing Putin can be said to have done that is any different tomorrow than today if he actually fucking does it. And I could see him just violating it anyway is this thing about not hitting energy targets. And then meanwhile, he's just adding to the list of demands on the Ukrainians. And this is what happens when you humiliate the Ukrainian president in the Oval Office, cut him off from intelligence and military support, which Putin grabbed. You notice that Putin said, oh, see, well, you better go back to cutting them off. Cuz I saw you did that once before, you can do that again, right? So Putin is just like moving the goalpost further and further in his direction. And we're not negotiating peace, we're negotiating literally like Russian demands on behalf of Putin.

[Tommy Vitor]

Well, Putin's moving the Gulf post, as are the Trump team. I mean, there was a, there was a leak in Semaphore like today or yesterday about how Trump is considering recognizing Russian control of Crimea. Now I don't think there's any like, peace deal that ends with the Ukrainian sides fully controlling Crimea. But why are you doing that?

[Ben Rhodes]

Why are you considering this now? I mean, it's just, this is like. And anybody like, and this is what, like you made this point last week. And it's true. Anybody who's ever had any experience with Putin, and this is exactly what he does, he just tries to pocket every single thing at the table before even entertaining any concession by himself. And none of these guys have ever. Trump thinks that and Witkoff, that like, you know, selling some fucking golf courses in Florida is like, akin to like dealing with issues that have been at the subject of war and peace and geopolitical tension for hundreds of years in Ukraine. Like these Guys have no idea what they're doing.

[Tommy Vitor]

Putin is in no rush either, right? What rush is he in the broader context is we talked late last year, I think, in August about this surprising Ukrainian offensive into Kursk, which is part of Russia, and they occupied like 500 square miles worth of territory within Russia in the Kursk region. The Russians, along with these North Korean troops, have slowly but methodically battled back and pushed the Ukrainian forces out of Kursk, except for, like a sliver right along the border that the Ukrainian forces are now using to keep the high ground and prevent essentially the Russians from entering into another part of Ukraine. So Putin knows that the momentum is on his side. You know, he, the, the Americans are no longer supporting the Ukrainian side. He's getting reinforcements from North Korea. The weapons are flowing from Iran and others. And so things are just. He's looking good. So if I'm Putin, I'm thinking I'm in this job for life. This dipshit's there for four years. I'm gonna play this negotiation out as long as I can get whatever I want from it. Wait this idiot out, and then play the next guy who's in the job.

[Ben Rhodes]

And by the way, he also loves, in the Russian readout, they had this language about, you know, Russia and the US Consistent with their international responsibilities. Talked about this in the Middle east and that he's making himself bigger in the United States, smaller. And Trump is not even aware that that's what he's doing. It's. Oh, God, it's.

[Tommy Vitor]

Trump ostensibly thinks that the big fish are him and Xi Jinping. Yeah, you're right.

[Ben Rhodes]

No, no. Now it's like Xi Jinping's the big fish. And then Trump is in the second class with Putin.

[Tommy Vitor]

Great, great. Okay, let's switch gears here, Ben, and talk about these massive protests in Serbia. I don't know if we've talked about this on the show before.

[Ben Rhodes]

No, we should have.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah, you're right, we should have. Well, so this past weekend, hundreds of thousands of protesters took to the streets in Belgrade to protest against the government, the government corruption, and President Alexander Vucic. There were reports of up to 300,000 people, which in Serbia is a massive number. So these are student led protests. They've been happening since last November. There's this horrible incident where a concrete canopy that was part of the newly renovated train station collapsed and killed 15 people. As often happens with protests like this, though, over time, they evolved from being about, you know, outrage about this tragic incident at the Novi Sad rail station to outrage about Corruption generally, the lack of transparency about construction of this train station, the treatment of protesters, which include, you know, mass arrests of individuals who are on the streets, but also these government sponsored efforts to harass and violently assault protesters. Some really bleak stuff. There was a video that Ben and I, you saw this weekend of like reports of a sonic weapon being used on protesters. So pretty awful. So on Monday, the protesters even blocked access to a Serbian public TV station called RTS because of the way it was reporting on them. I guess a journalist referred to them, the peaceful protesters, as a mob. So the President of Serbia, this guy named Alexander Vucic, he's been in Serbian politics for decades. In the late 90s, he was Slobodan Milosevic's information minister. How about that fucking job?

[Ben Rhodes]

That's a great thing in your fucking cv.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah. So for those who don't know, Milosevic was charged with war crimes and genocide and put on trial at the International Criminal Court. There was a massacre, horrific massacre in 1995 where 8,000 Bosnian Muslims were killed by Bosnian Serb forces. And Buchid said, quote, you kill one Serb and we kill 100 Muslims, as a quote attributed to the current president. So charming guy. More recently, Vucic has been head of the Serbian Progressive Party since 2012. He was Prime Minister from 2014 to 2017. Has been and has been president of Serbia.

[Ben Rhodes]

Not those kind of progressives.

[Tommy Vitor]

No.

[Ben Rhodes]

20.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah, yeah. Don't let the name fool you. The name of the party fool you? Yeah, he's far right. He's authoritarian.

[Ben Rhodes]

National Socialist. We're not socialists.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yes. Something we unfortunately have had to clarify in the show as well. He's authoritarian. He's far right. He's also someone who, he'll mouth like pro eu, pro Western sentiment. I think he gets a lot of credit from the population or has gotten leeway for their economic growth recently. But like, you know, every autocrat, like corruption catches up to you. So that gets us back to these protests. Vucic has blamed the protests on leftist radicals. He's blaming the United States and usaid. It's always interesting to note which Americans are dumb enough to regurgitate those kinds of claims by authoritarian leaders. Which brings us to a clip from a recent episode of Donald Trump Jr's podcast triggered where he interviewed Vucic. Here's a clip. We also talk about the protests you've been seeing in Belgrade. I'm sure the media will cover them only one way. There's seemingly evidence that they are all tied in some form to the same left wing actors here in America. There's even some reported links to usaid. It feels to me, as someone who's watched this play out in America and with my family, a tragic incident, of course, but it was later weaponized, perhaps like our January 6th. I was saying the same to my people here.

[Ben Rhodes]

It was huge amount of money that was invested from outside, from different countries, different foundations.

[Tommy Vitor]

Well, there's another planned protest in a couple of days. How much of that is manufactured? I've read and I've seen and spoken to other people here. Some of these protests, they're offering kids €100 to show up. So a little super cut of Don Jr. Regurgitating kind of right wing autocrat talking points. I mean, it's worth pointing up and just Friend of the pod, Rick Grinnell was like a special envoy for Serbia. He's become thick with Vucic. There's all those reports of the Serbian government giving approval to Jared Kushner or some developer in Dubai, the Trump family, to build, like, a Trump family hotel on the site of the former Yugoslav Ministry of Defense in Belgrade that was bombed by NATO in 1999. I think there was something part of the lease said that there had to be a memorial to those injured or killed. By NATO. Yeah, by us. Anyway, Ben, thoughts on this protest movement and why it is that there's always a nexus between the Trump family and, like, the shittiest autocrats in the world?

[Ben Rhodes]

Oh, God. Well, let's start with, like, the dumb part and then the good part. I mean, I'm so fucking sick. I mean, maybe one good thing that could come from USCID being shuttered is maybe these guys can stop blaming everything on USAID or something. Or what they're alluding to, I'm sure, is like George Soros and the Open Society Foundations, you know, probably that too.

[Tommy Vitor]

I mean, in February, the Serbian police raided four NGOs. They said that was because they had USAID ties. But three of the four had gotten, like, a small amount of money from usaid, one had gotten none. None of them are the reason these people are protesting.

[Ben Rhodes]

And this is the thing. That's right. They'll go and they'll find somebody got like $50,000 grant for new computers from USAID or something. And suddenly the reason that there's millions of people on the street, I mean, they assign or even open societies, which does great work. But, like, if Open society, you know, the Soros foundation was as all powerful as these people, you know, we wouldn't be in the fucking mess we're in, right? There'd be left wing government. Like, this is not what is happening in the world, you know, so I'm just so tired. The fact that people, they've been on the same talking points about Soros and USAID and foreign funding for 20 years now, you know, and the fact that people still swallow that shit is such like the amount of money that the Trump people are gonna put in there in their various developments is far more than they came in from USAID or some foundations. I will say on a hopeful note, this is a entirely organic student led movement that is able to get like, I'm not that good at math, but it's like something like 5% of the population. If you're trying to get 300,000 people on the street. And they're wildly popular, wildly popular, innovative, they look like they're having fun message to America, like, where are we? We need to get out in the streets like this. This is the only thing that has a remote chance of arresting a democratic backsliding is to see this number of people on the streets. 300,000 people in Serbia is like having millions and millions and millions of people out in the streets here. And I think my hope is it is showing that there are people in parts. Serbia is a tough part, tough place to protest too. Right. You're taking some degree of risk. You've got a creepy, pretty autocratic president. He's kind of, kind of like Putin adjacent. Right? This is, you know, hopefully breaking the fear factor for people to stand up against these far right movements or these kind of corrupt. And it also shows you that the argument, the thing that got people in the streets at the end of the day was not just about like democracy, it was more about corruption. It was more about, we know these people have patronage networks. We know that their autocracy is directly screwing us. It's leading to things like this thing collapsing and that's getting people killed. And so I think it's a message that this combination of like using corruption as a motivator and using protest as a vehicle is something that can be replicated in other places.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah, I mean, right, exactly. I mean, Vucic calls the protesters, he says it's a color revolution. He says it's usaid. It's total bullshit. The government allowed a bunch of Chinese companies to renovate this railway like a year ago, this rail station, and then this giant piece of concrete collapsed and killed 15 people. So that's why people took to the streets. And this movement there was a great, I think it's Al Jazeera did a Great piece on the protesters. They've been organized in a really interesting way in that there's no leader.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yes.

[Tommy Vitor]

Like, these students will get together.

[Ben Rhodes]

Hong Kong.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah, exactly. Just like Hong Kong. Like, they'll all get together in some big, you know, you know, hall or something. Like a big lecture room.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah.

[Tommy Vitor]

And they'll put forward ideas, and they'll all vote on them. And they've been doing interesting things, like walking on foot from. For miles and miles from city to city. And something like 80% of the population of the Serbian population supports their demands, which are pretty focused around, like, transparency, accountability, not punishing the protesters, supporting higher education. So you're right. I mean, I do think, despite what Vuchi says, despite what fucking morons like Don Jr. Said, like, this is the way for anyone. Yes. This is wink, wink, hint, living under authoritarian rule.

[Ben Rhodes]

Well, and one other thing I'd say is that in addition to being specific in their demands, being creative in their tactics, having fun, by the way, it's a good thing to. It's a fun protest together.

[Tommy Vitor]

It's a movement you want to be a part of.

[Ben Rhodes]

They made an alliance with labor. Right. And so they have labor unions who have their own power bases. And so that's an interesting way to. You start with students, and then you bring in labor, and then all of a sudden, you're bringing other people. Right.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yep. That's exactly right. Yeah. Not. Not Jared Kushner buying the old Defense Ministry building.

[Ben Rhodes]

What's the corruption that's happening in Serbia? Is it like a few USAID grants and a few foreign foundations? Or is it like the massive amounts of Chinese money paying for shitty infrastructure projects lining the pockets of Vucic cronies while, you know, Jared and Rick Grinnell are making real estate deals. I think there's a little more money.

[Tommy Vitor]

On one side with the former information minister for the slipper down below, genocidal war criminal. Let's just close out this section by listening to a clip of some protesters who spoke to the BBC. And I'm protesting because I want to live in a safer country, a country.

[Claudia]

Without corruption and a country with a.

[Tommy Vitor]

Much higher level of democracy.

[Claudia]

This corruption has led to many lives being lost. It's just awful living in this kind of climate in Serbia right now.

[Ben Rhodes]

I was at every protest in every city.

[Claudia]

It was magical to be in Novi Sad where it all happened.

[Ben Rhodes]

It felt like a celebration of democracy.

[Claudia]

The protest gave me back the pride I had in my country because of.

[Tommy Vitor]

The students who allowed me to hope.

[Claudia]

That things can get better and that we can do better.

[Tommy Vitor]

So not usaid.

[Ben Rhodes]

No, wink, wink, Americans, you know what to do.

[Tommy Vitor]

You know, this show's really pointing us the right direction, I think. Okay, final thing, Ben. Did you know that one of China's biggest restaurants is offering refunds to an estimated 4,000 customers? Sounds exciting, right?

[Ben Rhodes]

Sounds very exciting.

[Tommy Vitor]

Unfortunately, the reason is because a video went viral of a customer standing on a table and pissing into a vat of boiling broth at a hot pot restaurant.

[Ben Rhodes]

No, no, no, these.

[Tommy Vitor]

So these, like I got some 17 year old guys were in a private room. I'm sure they were hammered. They pissed into this hot pot thing. It went super viral. And I guess the restaurant chains, like didn't respond forever. And then finally, like, people were not thrilled with the food safety implications. So they've offered to compensate anyone who is at the chain. Part of the chain's 4,100 orders between February 24th and March 8th. So I guess justice in the end. Thank you CBS News for all this reporting, by the way.

[Ben Rhodes]

These are the kind of stories we need. I do have like a general wariness when you go. I mean, the hot pot here too is not that good. Let's face it.

[Tommy Vitor]

I haven't done a lot of hot pot.

[Ben Rhodes]

I've done it and I love anything involving like bowls with stuff in it and broth and meat and noodles and stuff. But it just doesn't look appetizing. Like there's this. Where's this liquid they bring you, these liquids that they drop on your. I don't know. Like, this is confirming my worst fears about hot pot. You know, I suppose anything could happen in the kitchen that I don't know about. But the communal space aspect, I'm excited.

[Tommy Vitor]

For the feedback on this commentary because I'm sure people are going to torch us. But I am so pathetic about spice that like, if something is like Anthony Bourdain wouldn't look me in the eye were he still alive. And we talked about this because I remember one of my first. Early on, like first. Not first dates, but like early on in dating Hannah, we went to this really cool, like new Thai place in D.C. that did this progressive coursing, little syrup. Yes.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah. I was like, I was a regular.

[Tommy Vitor]

Right? On like 14th, right? Yeah.

[Ben Rhodes]

They knew me by name there.

[Tommy Vitor]

Okay. And there was no reservations. So I.

[Ben Rhodes]

Your scalp starts sweating the second course. Yeah, Yeah, I love that place.

[Tommy Vitor]

That place was so good. By the end of the meal, they were bringing me milk after milk after milk because I was like sweating bullets and I Just couldn't do it, and I couldn't get through. And I wanted to eat it so badly because it was so delicious, but I just. I just couldn't do it. And, like, no amount of practice makes me better at that, which is why I haven't been, like, a big hot pocket.

[Ben Rhodes]

I like spice. I. It's like, I like actually just to put in a plug nearby. I went and got a. I don't know if you guys, Any. Any of the crew back there has been to Land Noodle on La Brea in Santa Monica.

[Tommy Vitor]

Good.

[Ben Rhodes]

I got the spicy land Noodle, and I was literally. I like the spice, but it doesn't mean you don't have natural reactions. Yeah, so I just had tears, like, coming out. I was like, if someone could have been looking at me and just thinking I was having, like, some kind of breakdown, because I'm literally just crying, but, like, crying with joy.

[Tommy Vitor]

If I went on Hot Ones by the third wing, my face would look like a fire engine.

[Ben Rhodes]

Well, yeah, this is the problem with the.

[Tommy Vitor]

And I'd be dripping and the snot and the tears, and it would be. I would never get.

[Ben Rhodes]

At least you weren't. Wouldn't be eating piss to bring this home. And that's the problem with the hot pot, and that's the problem with Netanyahu. Sure. People may be triggered by this. So this is just one man's opinion.

[Tommy Vitor]

You're allowed to have an opinion on.

[Ben Rhodes]

This show, but I also kind of don't want to cook my own food. I mean, that's why you go out, right? I don't need to.

[Tommy Vitor]

I like Korean barbecue for that reason. That's fine.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, you can bring it to me, you know.

[Tommy Vitor]

Okay, we'll go out, we'll get some hot pot. We'll see what everybody says to us. Okay, we're gonna take a quick break. When we come back, you're gonna hear Ben's interview with Pankaj Mishra about his book the World After Gaza. So stick around for that. This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. I know for a lot of people, therapy can feel like a big investment of time and money and resources, and maybe it's, like, nice to do, not need to have. That's the wrong way to think about it. Your state of mind is just as important as your physical health, and you need to act accordingly. Let's talk numbers. Traditional in person therapy can cost anywhere from $100 to $250 per session, which adds up fast. But with BetterHelp online therapy, you can save on average up to 50% per session. With BetterHelp, you pay a flat fee for weekly sessions, saving you big on cost and on time. Therapy should feel accessible, not like a luxury. With online therapy, you get quality care at a price that makes sense and can help you with anything from anxiety to everyday stress. Your mental health is worth it and now it's within reach. You know who would benefit from therapy? Everyone running our government. JD Vance is who I was thinking. Oh yeah, you know, if he wasn't just such a, like a petulant, insecure, brittle, condescending, insufferable schmuck. Yeah, I think he'd be better off with over 30,000 therapists. BetterHelp is the world's largest online therapy platform, having served over 5 million people globally. It's convenient too. You can join a session with a click of a button, helping you fit therapy into your busy life. Plus switch therapists at any time. Your well being is worth it. Visit betterhelp.com crooked world to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp. H-E-L-P.com CrookedWorld this podcast is supported by Comedy Central's Emmy Award winning series, the Daily Show. Jon Stewart and the Daily show news team are covering every minute of every hour of President Trump's second first 100 days in office with brand new episodes every weeknight. From the lowest lows to the highest lows and everything in between, they'll be there to break it all down. Comedy Central's the Daily show, new tonight at 11 on Comedy Central and streaming.

[Ben Rhodes]

Next day on Paramount Plus. Okay, I'm very pleased to be joined, joined by Pankaj Mishra. He's the author of the new book the World After Gaza. Also one of our leading thinkers, writers, essayists. You can read his work in many different places. Pankaj, thanks so much for joining us.

[Claudia]

Thanks, Ben, for having me.

[Ben Rhodes]

So I really recommend everybody read this book. It's tough, but bracing and fearless and connects so many different threads. To answer kind of a question that you pose in the book that I think kind of sums it up. How did Israel, a country built to house a persecuted and homeless people, come to exercise such a terrible power of life and death over another population of refugees, many of them refugees in their own land? And how can the Western political and journalistic mainstream ignore, even justify, its clearly systematic cruelties and injustice, which I feel like the book sets out to answer that question through everything from intellectual history to political analysis to wrestling with current events. Before we dive into that though it's interesting, we're speaking the day after Israel resumed its bombardment of Gaza, and I wonder what your reaction is to that event, because it feels to me like as shocking as these images are and hundreds of people killed, children killed, people are so worn down by experiencing this. How do you connect, you know, being out in the world, talking about this book, which is about the world after Gaza, to the kind of resumption of what we're seeing in Gaza?

[Claudia]

Well, Ben, it's become more and more difficult, you know, because in a way, I was one of those people who did not believe the ceasefire would last. It was extremely fragile, and of course, it was being violated all through these previous weeks, previous four, eight weeks. But in any case, I think the sudden violation of it this morning and the number of casualties just in a single day, I think it's. The current figures are more than 150 children. It leaves you speechless. And again, that question, like, what strategic objectives, what geopolitical goals are being met through this kind of indiscriminate bombing? And it's very clear, again, the answer is that Netanyahu is doing this in order to preserve his, at this point, weakening hold on power. We know that he's few steps away from prison and he keeps postponing that sort of moment somehow. And there are people in his cabinet who help him do this. And of course, there is now the Trump administration willing to give him a green light to really whatever he wants to do at this point. So I think, in a way, we are in a more kind of desperate stage where the culture and politics of cruelty is now truly global, especially after the arrival of President Trump in the White House. And there is simply no really recourse to any ideas of sustainable peace or let alone things like compassion or empathy.

[Ben Rhodes]

Well, I think what's so important about your book is you step back from this and you. You look at the kind of narratives and identity politics, for lack of a better way of putting it, that helped produce the moment we're in. And I should just say some people may find this a challenging read. I hope people read this book who might go into that being inclined to disagree with it. I think that's actually the most important reader for you. So I'm gonna go through some of those pieces of it, and one that you talk about a lot is the interconnection between Israel and the Holocaust and how that has evolved over time. And I'll tell you, Pankaj, I was very challenged by this because I'm one of those People, I'm a secular Jew who grew up in my identity was not religious, but it was tied to the Holocaust. Right. We had family in the Holocaust and Israel was a part of the reckoning for the Holocaust. In kind of my self conception, right, that it was an achievement to have this kind of safe haven. And yet you kind of build, I think, a pretty compelling case that it wasn't immediately, you know, Zionism obviously predated the Holocaust. And even when the state of Israel was declared independent, the Holocaust did not play as central a role in its identity as it came to do later. And. And you kind of talk about, and to quote from the book, this deepening fixation with the Shoah and official Israeli rhetoric and a radical re envisioning of Israel's identity and purpose as a country that would forever be on guard against another Shoah, which I think is a statement that nobody would really disagree with. Talk about why that to kind of tee you up here, you kind of make an argument that that kind of infinitely justifies anything Israel does vis a vis security threats, vis a vis the Palestinians. That if you are imbued with that kind of moral mission to prevent another Holocaust, you kind of have a certain impunity. Why did you decide to focus on this piece of the conflict in the Israeli identity?

[Claudia]

You know, because, Ben, like many people out there, I tended to think that the memory of the Holocaust, at least, you know, as commemorated in Israel, flowed very naturally out of this extraordinary traumatic experience of it. And there were survivors who then transmitted their memories to their children. And so within the culture at large, that memory was slowly sort of institutionalized in a way. But then, much to my great shock, I discovered that was certainly not the case. And that in fact, the survivors were treated with great contempt when they first arrived in the State of Israel because they seemed to project an image of weakness that the leaders of the State of Israel at that point recoiled from, because they were invested in a very different image of Israel altogether. It's this very strong country. So it's only in the 1960s that politicians turned to invoking the Holocaust as a sort of shared narrative, as a kind of nation binding glue for the Israeli population. You have to remember, you know, large part of the Israeli population at that point, in fact more than 50% consisted of people who had come to Israel from Arab countries. And so they had to be educated into this, you know, European experience and to this European narrative. So I think, you know, unscrupulous far right politicians started to deploy the Shoah, you know, Precisely at the point, again, worth remembering in the 1960s when Israel actually becomes a supreme military power in the Middle East. So on one hand, you have this extraordinary military power which is capable of taking on simultaneously several Arab nation states, several Arab armies, and defeating them at the same time. There is this emphasis on the idea that the Shoah happened once, it could happen again, and that you're living in a country that's surrounded by potential Nazis. You know, that Israel's borders are, as Moshe Dayan put it, the borders of Auschwitz. So this kind of very deliberately cultivated paranoia is something that replaces really what might have been for some people, at least, a memory flowing out of that particular experience. So what I'm trying to say is in the book is that individual memory is one thing, collective memory is quite another. Collective memory is always constructed with very particular ideological ends. And that is certainly the case here with the memory of the Holocaust in Israel.

[Ben Rhodes]

Well, and I want to apply this to a number of things that are happening around the world right now, because basically part of what follows from that idea is that the risk of a genocide of the Jewish people, the risk of anti, Semitism, you kind of show how it transferred from actual Nazis, the German flavor, to kind of putting that on the Palestinians or the Arabs. Right. That even though there was no evidence that they weren't responsible for the Holocaust. Right. But what confuses me, Pankaj, you know, what do you make of the fact that today the discourse on anti Semitism, particularly in this country, tends to focus almost wholly on Hamas or the kind of left. Right. So Hamas, which did horrific, horrific pogrom on October 7, but I don't think anyone would think that Hamas is capable of destroying the state of Israel. But even to go beyond that, you know, college kids getting deported from Colombia because they pose some violent threat to Jews, there's this kind of this zero tolerance for essentially criticism of Israel or solidarity with a certain kind of Palestinian politics at the same time that we see a rise of the very far right ethno nationalism in Europe and the United States, that I think actually was the political force that led to the actual Holocaust. So what do you make of this redirection that at precisely the time that we see these kind of echoes of the thirties in the rise of ethnonationalism in the west, instead of focusing on that, the entire anti Semitic conversation about antisemitism seems to be focused on either the Palestinians or the Western left?

[Claudia]

Well, it's fascinating. I mean, I think it attests in a very significant way to the success of the Israeli narrative, you know, that we are under sort of constant. We live with this constant threat of being exterminated. And this is a narrative that the State of Israel has very successfully persuaded many other people outside of Israel to believe in, to subscribe to. So this is why you have this sort of extraordinary disparity or discrepancy where Israel is a formidable military power. You can see that right away it's engaged in a war with Yemen, with Syria, with Lebanon, and of course, it's bombing Gaza as we speak and doing that without any serious military response whatsoever from any of these parties that it's engaged in this war with. So you have Israel becoming stronger and stronger, partly thanks to American support, and at the same time becoming closer and closer to far right formations across Europe and of course the United States, the Christian evangelical. So the object of anxieties for many people in the United States, which is the State of Israel, what they have really not noticed is how in kind of really disturbing ways, this state that they wish to be protective of or sympathetic to, has gone down this very dangerous, very sinister path of closer and closer alliances with not only far right political groups or personalities or governments in Europe, but actually actively, explicitly antisemitic movements. There was a piece on Haaretz only yesterday about this very, very close links being developed between the State of Israel and various notoriously antisemitic organizations in Europe. So this conversation in the United States seems to be completely detached from these developments, the internal developments within the State of Israel, the rise, the emergence of far right and the fact that the Israelis themselves, the Israeli regime is today, you know, establishing intimate relations with some of the most powerful anti Semites in the world.

[Ben Rhodes]

But you also talk about the relationship between Narendra Modi and Bibi Netanyahu. I want you to just describe for listeners who might not be familiar, like, what are the overlapping roots and the overlapping project of the Hindu nationalisms we see from Modi and the kind of ethno nationalisms we see from Netanyahu? And is this the future of politics? I mean, because it feels like that all around the world there's a different flavor of this.

[Claudia]

I grew up in India in a Hindu nationalist family, very sympathetic to Israel, and partly because Israel we saw as a country that was merciless in its treatment of, you know, potentially treacherous forces such as, you know, the Muslim population of Palestine. So that was one major sort of source of admiration for us. And I think today there are many more people in India who feel that Way, you know, Netanyahu has his biggest fan base in India, and of course the Modi government is actually an exception within the global south, within Asia and Africa and Latin America in having such close relations. And I think it's partly because again, I think like other far right formations or ethno nationalist movements and personalities, they see Israel essentially as getting away, doing a lot of things that they would like to pull off but can't. So Israel really is a great sort of object of envy for them. And I think there's a kind of ideological affinity, of course, with the majoritarian ethno nationalist project. But I think on a psychological level there is this great feeling of identification with a country that can be so indiscriminately brutal and uncompromising. And that is something they themselves aspire to. So it works at very many different levels. It's not just people point to arms sales or increasing trade or India becoming part of some Middle Eastern kind of anti China group or narrative. But I think it's also really important to look at these ideological and psychological affinities between not only India and Israel, but also other far right groups and Israel today.

[Ben Rhodes]

Well, if I were to play devil's advocate and say from the perspective of a Modi or Netanyahu or any number of these figures, Putin has his own version of this history. Orban, Hungary, lost territory after World War I, et cetera. I think the way they wouldn't describe it, but I think the way their minds might work is this world is corrupt, it's cruel, it's a tough place. And you know what? If we want to survive in this world, we might just need to be cruel ourselves. You know, that the Indians suffered under the yoke of the British and before that the Mughal Empire, I guess. And you know, the Russians got humiliated at the end of the Cold War. Obviously the Jewish people have suffered for centuries. And you know what? You might not, you know, guys like you and me might not like it, but this is how the world works. And if you don't have this kind of ethno nationalist, strong man type state, you're going to end up being on the other end of that. How do you wrestle with that possibility that maybe they're right?

[Claudia]

I think, I mean, that's certainly the trend right now. And it was of course a trend back in the 19th century, the scramble for Africa, all the sort of clashes between imperialist powers. And then we saw two world wars in the 20th century. I think the whole point of countries like India or places where people fought, devoted a large part of their lives to fighting imperialism and fighting for national sovereignty was that we create a new world order where this kind of social Darwinist survivalist mentality which causes constant conflict, forces nations to live in this atmosphere of fear and paranoia that we can get away from all that create society or international global order based on some shared norms, some norms of civilization. So if you want to go back there to those dark days of racial imperialism in the 19th century, kind of naked exploitation, naked expansion, well, maybe these people have a point. But if we don't want to go back there and find ourselves in a third world war, then I think we need to move away from these sort of fantasies of a purified national community. A national community purified of its treacherous elements. All this is really potentially extremely violent, not just to the nations themselves, but also to world peace at large. So I think these people may have persuaded some parts of their population that this is the right way. But I think you can see very clearly a future full of more and more conflict, if not catastrophic World war.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, no, the history shows it leads to bad places. And I want to ask you about this because the world order seems to have unraveled at least as the post World War II US led order. Another core point of your book, which I think, again, I hope people in this country read, because you make it very persuasively, is that for most of the world's people, right, there's not the same narrative of the last hundred years where the central events were World War II and the Cold War and the Holocaust. It's actually the story of decolonization which encompasses, by the way, many holocaust of non white peoples and many liberation struggles. And, and you're kind of reflecting the perspective, to use the shorthand, that can be problematic. But the Global south view, essentially the decolonized world is probably looking at what's happening in the US now. It's certainly looking at what's happening in Gaza now and see it kind of confirming all of their worst experiences and perspectives on the West. Is there a potential, as someone who's written about this in other books too, do you see any potential for some different kind of concept of order to generate not from within the west, but from within the Global South? What is the potential for something to emerge out of this wreckage of a period of history we're living through in which some of the countries that are generally seen as more marginal to world events but are rising in power and influence? Could we see something emerge from that narrative that is more durable than the order that President Trump is currently deconstructing.

[Claudia]

Well, it's interesting you ask that because obviously India is not the leader in the way it used to be of the non west, as it were. It was once it had this very morally prestigious position. The leader right now is South Africa. South Africa, which is kind of insisting that certain norms be observed. And for that reason, we know it risk a great deal by going to the Hague, by filing that case against the state of Israel. But again, it comes out of that long experience of fighting against racist imperialism, of fighting against racial discrimination and saying, look, we can't have this anymore. We can't have, you know, sort of a nation whose borders have never been clearly defined, that keeps expanding all the time, then periodically bombing people. So I suppose the South African initiative in recent months, a very risky initiative for which it is being severely punished as we speak by the Trump administration, is probably one sign that within the global south, some of those energies that went into the anti apartheid struggle or went into the struggle for decolonization, the urge for a new world order, those impulses, those desires are probably still alive and can occasionally take surprising forms. Like the South African case against Israel, which again I say, was a huge gamble and a huge risk and obviously they are paying the price for it right now.

[Ben Rhodes]

And one last question. Another one of your books that I really liked is from the Ruins of Empire, where you detail some of the writers and thinkers from within these parts of the world, whether it's China, India, the Islamic world who kind of seeded what became liberation movements. What is the role of the writer today? Because it can probably feel so overwhelming. People are on social media. People are in this kind of pretty dumbed down discourse. You are someone who've written for the New Yorker, the New York Review Books, London Review Books, write these books. How do you think about the role of a political writer in this kind of very both scary and sometimes stupid period we're living through?

[Claudia]

I think, Ben, I sometimes feel like all we can do is kind of keep opening up fresh perspectives, keep exploring experiences that haven't been explored before, persuade people to step out of their boxes, their silos, their particular narratives, and make them see that there are other ways of understanding this, you know, other ways of perceiving the world and try and make them see how the other looks at it, you know, how people in different parts of the world look at it. And again, as I said, there are so many histories, and those are the histories that I've been engaging with that have not really been properly told, because who will tell them? You know, you need a lot of institutions, a lot of institutional power, a lot of cultural power to relate those histories. And I think as, you know, responsible citizens, whether as writers or just ordinary citizens, it's our kind of responsibility to bring those experiences into play, to make people think that there is not only just this one story, there are so many different stories out there. And, you know, if as writers, we can insist on the multiplicity of these stories and the multiple perspectives that go with those stories, then perhaps we would have made a tiny contribution. Obviously, we don't have any kind of political power. We watch as helplessly as anyone else the mayhem in the world today. But at least we can make a small difference just by creating this little archive that people can look to for some kind of intellectual and even perhaps emotional support.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, well, look, I really appreciate the conversation. The book is the World After Gaza. People should read it. If you have been critical of Israel, you will learn much about the history of how we got here. If you are supportive of Israel, I think it's even more important, again, for you to kind of wrestle with some of the difficult questions that are raised in the book. So, Pankaj, thanks for writing the book and thanks for joining us. Us.

[Claudia]

Thanks so much, Ben, for having me.

[Tommy Vitor]

Thanks again to Pankaj Mishra for joining the show. What else should we get? We'll get a little hot pot. I do. I love the Korean barbecue in this area.

[Ben Rhodes]

Korean barbecue in LA is just incredible.

[Tommy Vitor]

Off the charts, incredibly good. What else we eat?

[Ben Rhodes]

We got good Vietnamese. I mean, like. Like there's pockets of amazing Vietnamese around. You know, the. I mean, La's.

[Tommy Vitor]

La's got a good 15.

[Ben Rhodes]

La's got.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah, we got a good 15. All right, that's it for this week. Talk to you soon. Positive World is a crooked media production. Our senior producer is Ilona Minkovsky. Our associate producer is Michael Goldsmith. Our executive producers are me, Tommy Vitor and Ben Rhodes. Say hi, Ben. Hi. The show is mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Jordan Kanner is our audio engineer. Audio support by Kyle Seglin and Charlotte Landis. Thanks to our digital team, Ben Hefcoat, Mia Kelman, William Jones, David toles and Molly LaBelle. Madeline Herring is our head of news and programming. Matt De Groat is our head of production. If you want to get ad free episodes, exclusive content and more, consider joining our Friends of the Pod subscription [e-mail] friends. Don't forget to follow us at Crooked media on Instagram, TikTok and Twitter for more original content, host takeovers and other community events. Plus, find Pod Save the world on YouTube for access to full episodes, bonus content and more. If you're as opinionated as we are, please consider dropping us a review. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East Building a business may feel like a big jump, but On Deck small business loans can help keep you afloat. With lines of credit up to $100,000 and term loans up to $250,000, on deck lets you choose the loan that that's right for your business. As a top rated online small business lender, OnDeck's team of loan advisors can help you find the right business loan to fit your needs. Visit ondeck.com for more information. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by Ondeck or Celtibank. Ondeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval. Auto insurance can all seem the same until it comes time to use it, so don't get stuck paying more for less coverage.

[Ben Rhodes]

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[Tommy Vitor]

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