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Pod Save the World
Trump Tariffs Create Global Chaos
01:38:58
Tommy and Ben discuss the disastrous impact of Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs, how a fringe right-wing conspiracy theorist got Trump to fire top national security officials, Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to Washington and the upcoming talks between the Trump administration and Iran. Then they explain why South Sudan is teetering on the edge of civil war, and the dramatic end of South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol’s time in power. Finally, Tommy speaks to Noah Bullock, Executive Director of Cristosal, about the brutality of El Salvador’s prison system and why Donald Trump and Nayib Bukele have forged such a close relationship.
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- [00:00]
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 border 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 have to 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 where you need it to be. That's why millions of customers around the world trust Wise. Download the Wise app today or visit wise.com Terms and conditions apply. Welcome back to Pod Tape the World. I'm Tommy Vitor.
- [01:08]
Ben Rhodes
I'm Ben Rhodes.
- [01:10]
Tommy Vitor
You enjoy watching the stock market crash? I have a tip for everyone who's looking at their 401k. You got to make sure you go to the wine store or the boo store now.
- [01:19]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah.
- [01:19]
Tommy Vitor
If you're buying anything from overseas because it's about to get terrible.
- [01:22]
Ben Rhodes
I did that, by the way. I did too. As a man who enjoys a glass of Bordeaux every afternoon, I know your style. I definitely went after that. Yeah, I don't know how long I was thinking today. I noticed today that the front page of the Times doesn't have the ticker anymore. I was wondering how long we can watch this go down in real time. I did throw on. I was gonna throw in Margin Call, my favorite financial crisis movie. Oh, go back to those days.
- [01:51]
Tommy Vitor
That's a good movie. I went to the Boo store the other day. I asked the guy if people were hoarding foreign European wines yet. He said not quite yet. But then I noticed a rum called Crossfire Hurricane, which I felt like they're definitely gonna get tariffed. Ben, first of all, I just wanna say thank you to everyone who subscribed to the Pod Save the World YouTube.
- [02:10]
Ben Rhodes
Yes, we need you to subscribe.
- [02:11]
Tommy Vitor
We're over the 100,000 mark. Actually, 102,000. Like I said when I begged you last time, we. We are trying to catch up to like The Daily Wire, TPUSA, these horrible right wing outlets that have massive YouTube presences. So we're, we're putting more exclusive content on YouTube. We're trying to really focus there because a lot of young people use YouTube as a search engine and what they find is awful conservative content. So crooked media has got to get in the game.
- [02:38]
Ben Rhodes
We got to get in the game, guys. Yeah, I've had some people dunk on me recently for, you know, the. Well, look at tpusa. Where are you guys? You know.
- [02:48]
Tommy Vitor
Also, we're going to try something a little different in today's episode. So we're going to do a couple fewer topics with the goal of going deeper into each one of them. Listeners have probably noticed that we tend to have kind of a really long top of the show. And then there's lots of things where we, like, maybe check the box at the end, which we want to do, because there's, I don't know, a million things we could discuss every week. But sometimes we feel like there's more value when we have more of a discussion into fewer things. So, I don't know, tell us what you think.
- [03:12]
Ben Rhodes
And there's some pretty big things going on that it's hard to deal with in a couple minutes.
- [03:17]
Tommy Vitor
Yeah, there's some meaty, meaty stuff like Liberation Day. Happy Liberation Day. By the way. I didn't tell you yet.
- [03:22]
Ben Rhodes
It feels like that was a week ago. Yeah, feels like a long time ago.
- [03:25]
Tommy Vitor
Feels like a year ago. So we're gonna talk about Liberation Day, Trump's tariffs. We'll talk about how a fringe right wing lunatic named Laura Loomer is literally dictating national security personnel decisions at the White House. We'll cover the news. That'd be Netanyahu's visit to the White House on Monday. Why people are concerned about a civil war in South Sudan. The president of South Korea was finally removed from office months after he declared martial law. We'll tell you the backstory there and what might come next and what it means for us. South Korea relations. And then we're going to look to Europe, Ben, for some laughs.
- [03:58]
Ben Rhodes
Always Europe and Australia, always a good source of laughs.
- [04:02]
Tommy Vitor
Love, love the Aussies. Some weird shit happening with European leaders that we're gonna dig into.
- [04:08]
Ben Rhodes
Yes.
- [04:08]
Tommy Vitor
And then, Ben, you're gonna hear my interview with Noah Bullock. He's the executive director of Crystal Sal, which is a human rights organization that is based in El Salvador. He's based in El Salvador. And Noah has been looking at Nayib Bukele's regime for a very long time. And has watched the way he has used the state of exception, the suspension of due process and constitutional rights for citizens there to sweep people up, throw like 2% of the population into these prisons, which has made the country safer, but has led to this, you know, incredibly authoritarian, oppressive regime. So we talk about these prisons because the obvious most recent context is the United States sending Venezuelan men down into these transnational gulags with no due process. But we also talk about the role of these prisons in Bukele's regime, how it props him up, and also his foreign policy views, like how he went from kind of like bitcoin guy to Trump stooge to CPAC attendee. So really, really interesting conversation. And he had some, I thought, just like really thoughtful, smart observations about what that kind of system does to a population over time and the comparisons to the slow erosion of rights we're seeing in the U.S. yeah.
- [05:23]
Ben Rhodes
And something that we all need to learn more about. So people should definitely listen to this one.
- [05:27]
Tommy Vitor
Definitely. But let's start with the tariffs bend. Because it was Liberation Day where President Trump finally rolled out his tariffs. And if you're a lover of global economic chaos, boy, did it deliver. Here's what Trump announced. There's a universal 10% tariff that took effect April 5th. Then there are country specific tariffs on over 180 countries that go into effect on April 9th. So tomorrow when this comes out, the way the White House determined the tariff rate on each country was this nutty formula based on each country's trade deficit with the United States, which makes no sense. Also, Russia, North Korea, Cuba and Belarus were exempted from the tariffs. As long as we're cataloging things that don't really make any sense. For those who are like, what's a tariff? A tariff is just a tax on an imported good. The company importing the good pays the tariff. So if you're like, Ben, you want some French wine? An importer purchases that wine, they pay the tariff that Trump slapped on, you know, whatever, Bordeaux, and then the importer will almost certainly pass that cost along. To me, Ben, the consumers in the form of higher prices. Tariffs were the main way the U.S. collected revenue through the early 1900s. In 1913, the 16th Amendment gave Congress the power to levy and collect income taxes, which over time became the main source of federal revenue. Presidents from both parties have put in place targeted tariffs like on Chinese imports of steel or tires or electric vehicles, which. But what Trump did, again, was take each country's trade deficit with the US Divide it by the country's exports to the US and then divide by two to get the rate we're going to tariff them, which former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers said the process was, quote, to economics what creationism is to biology. Astrology is to astronomy or RFK thought is to vaccine science. Good quote from Larry.
- [07:10]
Ben Rhodes
Wow, Larry quote, machine.
- [07:12]
Tommy Vitor
Good tweet from Larry. In practice, this math has a slapping 50% tariffs on tiny little countries like Lesotho, 41% tariff on Syria, and then massive tariffs on a lot of our biggest allies. According to Treasury Secretary Scott BESANT, More than 50 countries have approached the US about cutting a deal, though nothing has been inked yet. The EU has offered to go to zero tariffs for zero tariffs. I just get rid of them all. But they're also preparing to retaliate. There are some key EU members, like Italy, though, that seemingly don't want to retaliate against the Trump administration. China, however, is spoiling for a fight. They said they're going to impose a reciprocal tariff of 34% on U.S. products, which Trump threatened to respond to with another 50% tariff. So, Ben, everybody is trying to make sense of, like, what Trump is doing here. Do you have a theory of the.
- [08:01]
Ben Rhodes
Case, my theory of the case, on why he's doing it, and we can get into the ramifications. I mentioned to you, Tommy, that for this book I've been working on, I unfortunately had to go back and read Trump's announcement speech for president in 2015. People will remember that he rode down the escalator at Trump Tower. People usually remember the line where he talks about Mexicans bringing in rapists and stuff. But actually, the preponderance of that speech, an extraordinary amount of it, like three quarters of it, is about tariffs, it's about trade deficits. And this is a guy whose worldview was born in the 1980s when people were pissed that the Japanese were doing better than us economically. He seems to genuinely believe he's figured something out wherein you leverage tariffs to compel countries to do what you want, and you kind of orchestrate engineer the global economy as you'd like it to be. So, in Trump's mind, it's like, it's like some real estate deal. You know, somebody's sitting across the table from you and you want them to do something, and so you pose a penalty on them, and therefore they start buying more your stuff, and then you're making that stuff in the US and everything is great. The problem is the world doesn't work like a bilateral real estate transaction. You know, different countries have different Interests. Different countries have different resources, different countries have different politics, different systems. You, you can't sit in Washington and enter a terror formula into like a ChatGPT model, which they might have done and. Yeah. Which it seems like they did, and re engineer the whole global economy in a couple of years. You know, that's just not how it works.
- [09:47]
Tommy Vitor
And just to dig into that a little bit, like, what he seems to be primarily mad about is trade deficits. Meaning, like we buy more, which is not. Than you buy.
- [09:54]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah.
- [09:54]
Tommy Vitor
But if you're a country that your export is bananas.
- [09:57]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah.
- [09:57]
Tommy Vitor
We're never, we're never going to make enough bananas on our own. Right. The United States is not going to have a banana industry. There's no logic here.
- [10:06]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah, I mean, I've really earnestly tried.
- [10:09]
Tommy Vitor
Me too. Maybe that's a mistake.
- [10:10]
Noah Bullock
No.
- [10:10]
Ben Rhodes
And people who listen to the podcast or like the stuff I've been writing since the election, this issue of globalization and deindustrialization and decades and decades of working class communities in this country being ravaged by job losses and globalization, that's a real problem. This is just not the answer, though. I think sometimes people think that because Trump figured out a way to speak to people that have been harmed by free trade, harmed by de. Industrialization, that that means he understands, means he understands how to demagogue it. This is not the answer to the challenges that he's diagnosing. And you're not going to bring back manufacturing to the industrial Midwest by putting tariffs on random African countries. You're not going to isolate China for its unfair trade practices. What China does is plows state subsidies into certain industries, steals intellectual property. It does things that are bad, that deserve to be called out. You're not going to solve that problem by putting like near 50% tariffs on Southeast Asian countries that are the alternative supply chains to China. Like, everything he's doing is kind of in conflict with his stated objectives. And the bigger problem is, and where we should spend some time is it is just disappearing, not eroding, disappearing any global confidence in the United States as the kind of central hub of the global economy and global financial system, which we've been since World War II. And it is going to rapidly accelerate countries moving away from that and isolate us. Because why would countries say, okay, Mr. Trump, we come out, we're going to ship our factories back to the United States.
- [12:03]
Tommy Vitor
There's no political incentive.
- [12:04]
Ben Rhodes
You're going to start. Even the jobs that are lost, we're not going to do to textiles and we're not going to assemble iPhones. And that's just not a workforce that we have anymore anyway. Even if we wanted to, and if we did want to do that, that would take 20 years to regenerate. So this is just not. This is him responding to a worldview. He already had a political constituency that he effectively identified angry white working class people largely, but not just white, but angry working class people in this country about globalization. But. But then like the remedy, the medicine, as he says, is just the wrong. It's like telling people to drink bleach during fucking Covid.
- [12:47]
Tommy Vitor
It doesn't make sense. Like, targeted tariffs can help protect an industry, one industry. Right. Or like help you grow a nascent industry. But like just tariffing everyone is not going to do that. It has to be coupled with some sort of industrial policy and investment, like the Chinese do. By the way, like the CHIPS act was from Joe Biden that he now says he wants to get rid of.
- [13:06]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah.
- [13:06]
Tommy Vitor
And the other problem with this is like, okay, I've been trying to. I probably spent way too much time trying to understand this too and rationalize it and sanewash it. I assume he's just trying to exert leverage to cut deals, but his what he wants is so all over the place. Like, for example, the European Union was like, all right, you don't like our tariffs, let's go zero tariffs to zero tariffs. Right? Like basically free trade. And Trump said, no, that's not enough. He wants the EU to buy $350 billion worth of energy from the United States. Like, okay, that's coming out of absolutely nowhere. So again, we're just trying to zero out the trade deficit. And you know, I keep beating this drum. Like the most confusing part of this is the China piece, because if China is the real threat, and that's what he ran on, and that's where there's a bipartisan consensus in Washington. Hammering all of our allies is not gonna help us deal with China. And also, Ben, if you look at these news reports, the Chinese are telling people that they're trying to get meetings with the Trump administration in Cant. And I've talked to people directly who have talked to the Chinese who say they are like, they want to meet with Waltz or Rubio or like someone on staff, they can't get a meeting, or they're like running up against some grifter or hanger on who's trying to sell him or herself as like a line into the Trump administration because they have a Mar A Lago membership or there's Just, you know, a bunch of kind of crazy hardliners in the administration. And like the, the Chinese are like, we're not going to put Xi Jinping just directly into a conversation or a meeting with Trump unless it has a clear agenda and an end game. Because no one wants to get Zelensky, you know, and have fucking JD Vance pissing on your leg from the other couch as like, Marjorie Taylor Greene's boyfriend yells at you about your outfit. Right? Like that's not a context they're going to go for.
- [14:49]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah, I guess I'd summarize my concerns beyond the corporate crashing market, which I'll end on first. None of these countries know what the deal is that they are supposed to be striking. And I've talked to people mainly in Europe, but they have no idea what they're supposed to be doing to what they want. What does Trump want? And that leads to the second point, which is it is creating this kind of massive uncertainty. Even if Trump lifted all these tariffs tomorrow, I think the damage is already done because no one will ever trust the United, certainly not while Trump is president, will ever trust the United States to be a reliable trading partner, reliable steward of the global economy. So in addition to everything else, what you're gonna see is other countries are just gonna begin to try to insulate themselves from the United States. So rather than kind of reshoring things to the United States, they're gonna try to have alternative supply chains, alternative trade agreements, alternative trade blocs that exclude us. So that's really going to hurt us in the long run too. To your China point, that includes countries like Vietnam has been very careful. I remember when we were negotiating the Trans Pacific Partnership trade Agreement, which Trump killed the Vietnamese, I looked at a graph of their export import relationships. They were very careful to have kind of the exact match of us, China, Europe. They wanted to diversify. They didn't want to be overly reliant on China, so they made a point of exporting to the United States. They were hedging against China. They want to be a part of our China strategy because they fear a large, powerful China right above them that has historical antagonism to them. This is just us pushing them into the Chinese. If you are a Southeast Asian country now, you're gonna wanna sell your stuff to the Chinese and you're gonna therefore need to buy stuff from the Chinese. That means we're gonna pay higher prices. We're not gonna get investment from those. This is not gonna work in that regard. And even on the China piece, you know, the Chinese had this statement out today when Trump threatened hire terrorists, where he said, like, the Chinese said, we will fight to the death or something like that. They will. I mean, to take a bigger view of history, this is a Chinese Communist Party that lived through Mao Zedong, that lived through a famine, that lived through a cultural revolution. I'm no fan of theirs, but the idea that they're gonna change their entire model to please Mr. Trump, who's gone.
- [17:02]
Tommy Vitor
He'S at one term.
- [17:03]
Ben Rhodes
Who's gonna be gone in four years when the Chinese Communist Party knows they're gonna be there in four years, that's not gonna happen. And that's just illustrative of how little the countries he's dealing with. He doesn't understand the Southeast Asian countries desire to have a hedge against China. He doesn't understand China's belief that their staying power is their advantage over us. He doesn't understand that the Europeans, it's the trust that they had in the United States that is the core of the alliance, not some brute force burden sharing that he forces on them. And so this is going to have immediate impacts in terms of a potential global economic crisis that is already unfolding before our eyes. But beyond that, it's going to remake the global economy away from the United States. Things like the dollars or reserve currency are going to come into question, because why is everybody going to do trades in the dollar if the person who's sitting in charge of the economy in the United States is weaponizing that to fuck everybody in the world? So it's hard to overstate the impact that this could have over many years. Not just the kind of weird, you know, stock market freefall we're living through.
- [18:07]
Tommy Vitor
Yeah. I mean, it's just two final observations on this. Like, not that Trump gives a shit, but there's an organization called the International Trade Union Confederation, Global Rights. They do an index of the countries that score the worst in terms of, like, conditions for workers. In that country, of the 89 countries that scored the worst in their index, about half of them got awarded the Trump administration's lowest tariff rate. So, like, the worst human rights abusers are getting the lowest tariffs. Again, I know he doesn't care, but it's just kind of telling. And then finally, I keep banging on this, but the, the legal authority that Trump is using.
- [18:42]
Ben Rhodes
Oh, yeah, this is important.
- [18:44]
Tommy Vitor
Put in places, just crazy. So they're using a law called IBA. It's the International Emergency Economic Powers act of 1977. It gives the President the authority to regulate international commerce in response to a national emergency abroad. And it's mostly used to freeze assets or impose sanctions on individuals or foreign governments. Trump is essentially declaring an emergency all over the world and using it to create a de facto tax on every single American, really on every single citizen in the world in a way that has never been used before.
- [19:17]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah.
- [19:17]
Tommy Vitor
Ever, Ever.
- [19:18]
Ben Rhodes
And it's an important reminder that the kind of authoritarian stuff that we talk about is fundamentally connected to everything else, because the reason that there's checks and balances set up so that presidents can't abuse authorities like this is because this would never get through Congress. This would never get through even with his compliant Republican Congress. They would never pass these tariffs into law. But because he's abusing his power, he's able to do things that the system would usually prevent him from doing. And I actually think it's kind of an indictment of the US Kind of war on terror era that he is using some of those authorities on sanctions have been, I think, already overused by presidents, including President Obama when we were there. And he's now just driving a fucking truck through the opening that was created by those authorities in the same way that he is abusing his authorities and flying people down to El Salvador with this kind of militarized ice force that was created after 9, 11, too. So we're kind of seeing all the, you know, this is the worst version of America showing up in the world, and that's what the world is dealing with. There's also just a meanness to it too, Tommy. Like poor African countries like Lesotho that he made fun of in the State of the Union, getting these massive tariffs.
- [20:41]
Tommy Vitor
Cambodia, you're impoverished, like, millions of people.
- [20:43]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah. I mean, countries that, of course, they're exporters, they don't have money to import things. I mean, this is. You're thinking about trade deficits. Like, the people in Lesotho can't buy American goods. They can't afford them. So of course there's a trade deficit.
- [20:56]
Tommy Vitor
It's crazy. Okay, Ben, speaking of crazy, if the global economy wasn't melting down, I do feel like this would be like the biggest story in Washington, which is that this fringe right wing conspiracy theory lunatic named Laura Loomer is, according to all these news reports and according to her own Twitter feed, making major national security personnel decisions. So just a quick 101 allure, loomer listeners might remember the time she literally chained herself to Twitter's office door in New York to protest getting banned from the platform. I don't. I Don't know if you remember this, Ben. She was wearing a Star of David at the time. To compare her treatment by Twitter to that of the Jews during the Holocaust, seems comparable.
- [21:36]
Ben Rhodes
Seems like someone who has things in perspective.
- [21:38]
Tommy Vitor
Yeah. She said 911 was an inside job. She celebrated the deaths of Muslim refugees who drowned while trying to cross the Mediterranean, including children. I think she tweeted the clapping hands emoji saying more of that. She's just a truly vile person. But despite all of that context, last week, Donald Trump took 30 minutes out of his day on Liberation Day of all days, to meet with Laura Loomer, where I guess she ranted in the Oval Office about the loyalty of various national security staffers and did it in front of Trump, Mike Waltz, National Security Advisor, Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, and J.D. vance, who I believe is still the Vice President, although it's not clear it might be Elon Musk. The next day, the firings began, including the Senior Director for Intelligence, the NSC Ledge affairs person, the senior Director for technology and National Security, the senior Director for international organizations, and then later, Timothy D. Howe, the head of the National Security Agency, or NSA, and also U.S. cyber Command, along with Wendy Noble, his deputy. So, Ben, I just want to make sure our listeners understand how senior influential these positions are. Obviously, like, people have probably heard of the nsa, that is the organization in charge of collecting signals intelligence. They intercept phone calls and emails, et cetera. They're probably responsible for, what, 75, 80% of the intelligence consumed by, you know, policymakers. They also conduct offensive cyber operations. That leadership was decapitated. And then the nsc roles like those are also incredibly influential. Like the NSC Senior Director for Intelligence is the person in the White House overseeing the intelligence agencies, covert action programs, all, like, the most sensitive detail, sources and methods, collection technology. Like, all the shit I don't even know anymore. That person's gone, thanks to Laura Loomer. This is like, it's almost funny because it's so absurd, but it's really chilling stuff because these people, like, is she going to get to pick who comes next? We have no idea.
- [23:34]
Ben Rhodes
It's a truly troubling story because what it tells you is that in this second iteration of the Trump administration, he is listening to this wing of his party on everything.
- [23:47]
Tommy Vitor
There's no Jim Mattis in there.
- [23:49]
Ben Rhodes
There's no Jim Mattis. There's no H.R. mcMaster, there's no. Even Mike Pompeo, who's, as listeners to the show, will know. We're no fans of Mike Pompeo. Part of what's going on here is that when Trump staffed up his administration, you'll remember that they didn't like these kind of extreme MAGA people, like Laura Loomer, didn't like the Rubio choice for state. They wanted Rick Grinnell. They wanted a true MAGA guy in there. Grinnell didn't get the job, poor one out, but they got kind of, there's a scattering of lunatics around the national security enterprise. And then you get Mike Waltz and then there's this guy, Alex Wong, who's the deputy national Security advisor, who is like a pretty conventional right winger. He worked for Tom Cotton in the Senate. He worked in the first Trump administration on like, I think, Korea issues. And he's seen as, by the Loomers of the world, suspiciously conventional.
- [24:45]
Tommy Vitor
Yeah, she went after him, but didn't.
- [24:47]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah, she went after him, didn't get a scout. But all these people were kind of, you know, I talked to people in Washington like, these were like the Alex Wong people at the nsc, you know, the kind of professionals coaching tree and by the way, not people that you and I agree on about most things. You know, they're kind of neocons or they're kind of hard ass China hawks, but they're just not lunatics. They're just not like burn it all down, Laura Loomer type, you know, foreign policy people or even they're not like the J.D. vance flavor.
- [25:14]
Tommy Vitor
They live in reality.
- [25:15]
Ben Rhodes
They live in reality, you know, and so the first thing that this tells you is that Trump, like one meeting with Laura Loomer and suddenly he's just clearing the brush of anybody that isn't kind of MAGA pilled completely, even if they're pretty hard right wingers. Right. Then if you look at the jobs there, and as you say, the nsa, the director of the National Security Agency, his head role the next day too. So you're talking about the people in charge of intelligence, the National Security Agency, signals intelligence, people in the NSC that are responsible for things like export controls. That sound wonky, but that's basically how do sensitive technologies, military technologies, AI, move out into the world. Massive portfolios that are just left empty so that he can appease and give a scalp to Laura Loomer, by the way, at the exact same time that he upends the American relationship with every country in the world through tariffs, he then fires some of the people that would normally have to come in behind and try to clean up that mess and figure things out. Never mind that These are also the people that are in charge of some of the most sensitive issues, like AI and, you know, intelligence relationships.
- [26:27]
Tommy Vitor
So in Mike Waltz, their boss is so embarrassed and neutered by the Signal Gate scandal and inviting Jeffrey Goldberg to be in all his little chats about classified information that he just. He can't defend them.
- [26:42]
Ben Rhodes
Well, if you think about it, now, you've got Marco Rubio, who's basically an intern at the State Department. Right. You've got Mike Waltz, who, you know, literally just got neutered because he argued against firing these people, and these are his staff, and Laura Loomer fired them, basically. Who's in charge? It's Trump. It's just Trump and what's in his head and who he just talked to. And then it's J.D. vance, who seems to have kind of wiggled his way into foreign policy pretty effectively. It's Steve Witkoff, who is accepting paintings of Donald Trump from Vladimir Putin and.
- [27:13]
Tommy Vitor
Leading the Iran talks.
- [27:14]
Ben Rhodes
And leading the Iran talks, it's Pete Hegseth, who is, you know, trying to get rid of women in combat.
- [27:19]
Tommy Vitor
He's just doing burpees, having a good.
- [27:21]
Ben Rhodes
Time, and, like, dropping emojis into Signal chats. Like, it's Trump. Vance Hegseth Witkoff. Like, this is real crazy town at a time when there are wars going on, tariffs, trade wars. There could be a global recession. Not good.
- [27:39]
Tommy Vitor
Not good. But also, I think it's good to highlight this and to watch this stuff, because if there is an intelligence failure or something bad happens, something slips through the cracks, we absolutely all need to point to this bloodletting from Laura Loomer that pushed out all these competent people and created chaos in the midst of, as you mentioned, like a. An economic crisis. And God knows what else is happening behind the scenes that we don't know about.
- [28:03]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah. And can I bring one more scary thing to this conversation, since I guess it's that kind of day. Post Liberation Day, the Trump presidency just happens to align with the four years in which AI is going to move out into the world.
- [28:15]
Tommy Vitor
Yep.
- [28:16]
Ben Rhodes
That's already troubling enough. These were the kind of semi adults that were going to competently manage that. Now they're gone. Like, who's in charge of this? We could have an economic crisis that is followed by mass economic and job displacement from AI, followed by, like, an AI arms race in the world between American and Chinese AI. You would think you would want some competent people just kind of running this store, because Trump probably doesn't have strong views on these things. So that's just another thing to watch.
- [28:47]
Tommy Vitor
Yeah, not good. I want to take a quick break, Ben, but before we do, I want to make sure that everyone's listened to Crooked's newest series, Shadow Kingdom, God's Banker. Want to make sure it's your next obsession? This story starts with a tip to journalist Nicolo Minoni from an old friend, one that pulls him deep into the story of a Vatican banker named Roberto Calvi, who was found hanging under a London Bridge in 1982. Officials called it a suicide, but Nicolo is not so sure. The question is, was Calvi laundering money? Mafia money through a Vatican bank? From there, things escalate quickly. An Italian warehouse raid uncovers a far right society plotting a couple toppling Italy's government and forcing Calvi into a corner. Just as he turns to the Vatican for protection, an assassination attempt on the Pope shakes the church to its core. What happens next? You're going to have to listen Ben, to Shadow Kingdom, God's Banker, which is available wherever you get your podcasts or binge all episodes now@crooked.com friends or on the Shadow Kingdom Apple podcast feed. Podcast 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. Haya fills in the most common gaps in modern children's diets to provide the full body nourishment our kids need with the 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 energy, brain function, 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 two and up and sent straight to your door so parents have one less thing to worry about. Lots of my friends give high vitamins to their kids. The kids love them, they taste good, but they're not unhealthy, so you don't have to feel bad about it. Uh, it's a huge pain in the ass sometimes to get your kids to take a vitamin, but with Haya, the fight goes away and it's an easy experience. And if you're tired of battling with your kids to eat their greens, Haya now has kids daily greens and Superfoods a chocolate flavored greens powder designed specifically for kids. Packed with 55 whole food ingredients to 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. Receive 50% off your first order. To claim this deal you must go to hayahealth.com world. This deal is not available on the regular website. Go to H I Y A H E a l t h.com world to get your kids the full body nourishment they need to grow into healthy adults.
- [31:29]
Ben Rhodes
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- [32:05]
Tommy Vitor
All right Ben. So Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu was in Washington on Monday who meet with Trump do his usual ass kissing and groveling session. The funny part of it all was Israel preemptively got rid of all their tariffs on the United States and Trump still slapped them with a 17% tariff in return. During the meeting there's like this extended Q and A with reporters. Netanyahu promised to eliminate Israel's trade deficit with America, but even that couldn't get Trump to commit to getting rid of tariffs on Israel.
- [32:34]
Ben Rhodes
So now Russia, Russia gotta pass.
- [32:36]
Tommy Vitor
Yeah, Russia gotta pass. Great relationship there. When asked directly if Trump would give Israel concessions on trade, Trump responded, don't forget we help Israel a lot. And then he turned to BB and said congratulations by the way. And ringing all this cash out of the U.S. honestly, I left. Trump also rehashed his plan for Gaza. Let's listen.
- [32:54]
Donald Trump
I think it's an incredible piece of important real estate and I think it's something that we would be involved in. But you know, having a peace force like the United States there controlling and owning the Gaza Strip would be a good thing because right now all it is is for years and years all I hear about is killing and Hamas and problems. And if you take the people, the Palestinians and move them around to different countries and you have plenty of countries that will do that and you really have a freedom. A freedom zone. You call it the Freedom zone. I don't understand why Israel ever gave it up. Israel owned it. It wasn't this man. So I can say it. He wouldn't have given it up. I know him very well. There's no way they took oceanfront property and they gave it to people for peace. How did that work out? Not good.
- [33:45]
Tommy Vitor
So that was a thoughtful take on Gaza. And then Trump expressed surprise that Hamas is not nice. Let's listen to that part.
- [33:53]
Donald Trump
You know, I had people right in this office, this beautiful Oval Office. They came in, 10 people hostages. You know that? And I said to them, so how was it? And the stories they told me, I mean, as an example, I said to them, did the Hamas show any signs of, like, help or liking you? Did they wink at you? Did they give you a piece of bread extra? Did they give you a meal on the side? Like, you know, you think of doing, like, what happened in Germany, what happened elsewhere, People would try and help people that were in unbelievable distress. They said, no. I said, all of them. I said, did they ever wink at you? Like, you'll be okay, you're going to be okay? No, they didn't do that. They'd slap us. The hatred is unbelievable.
- [34:42]
Ben Rhodes
So what is German reference? Because The Germans killed 6 million Jews.
- [34:47]
Tommy Vitor
He does seem to think the Nazis were nice, which is troubling.
- [34:50]
Ben Rhodes
That's very troubling.
- [34:51]
Tommy Vitor
He's also surprised that the terrorist organization Hamas is cruel to people. So the big news out of this meeting was Iran. We'll get to that in a second. But I did think it was worth reminding listeners that Trump is still pledging to ethnically cleanse and then occupy militarily, the Gaza Strip. And then also. That part was very weird. He seems to think the Nazis were nice.
- [35:13]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah, I'm sorry I missed that the first time. That's why I just had this reaction of, like, the Germans. The Germans, I mean, they were hiding some people. Not enough, obviously, in, you know, other European countries. But I don't really remember the. You know, maybe you saw Schindler's List.
- [35:31]
Tommy Vitor
I was going to say.
- [35:32]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah, that's probably his understanding.
- [35:33]
Tommy Vitor
I think he was Chancellor.
- [35:34]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah. Like, he referred to Gaza as a piece of real estate. I don't think you'd usually refer to other countries as real estate. So there's a kind of dehumanization there. He referred to America owning it. I don't know what that means. Like, to take ownership of this land, like it's a development There are people that live there. There are human beings that live there. There are men, women and children who have lived there for other generations or they got displaced there in the first place. Then he suggests that it was Israel's and they gave it back. No, it was illegally occupied by Israel for a period of time and some settlements were built. And then under Ariel Sharon, not exactly a peacenik, they decided to pull out of Gaza. So there's so much historical inaccuracy and revisionism on the most sensitive issue in the world. And then there's this completely implausible idea of a US. I mean, he's proposing a US military force there. It wasn't ambiguous because those always go.
- [36:38]
Tommy Vitor
Well and it's always simple.
- [36:40]
Ben Rhodes
And then we're moving the Palestinians around. What's scary is that he keeps coming back to this, like tariffs. It seems like he really believes this. So add this to the list of things that we probably should take both seriously and literally.
- [36:53]
Tommy Vitor
Yeah. And you just kind of have to keep an eye on. We should mention, Ben, that there was some really awful reporting. I think the New York Times had this about the killing of 15 rescue workers in Gaza, just briefly. I mean, on March 23rd, Israeli forces killed six members of Gaza's Civil Defense Emergency Unit. This is an UNWRA staffer. There were eight Red Crescent workers, and then they buried them in a mass grave. The IDF claimed that the ambulances were advancing suspiciously. They didn't have headlights on or emergency lights on, and they said that's why they opened fire. But video obtained by the New York Times from one of the deceased paramedics phones very clearly shows the ambulance is lit up. They had lights and sirens. The IDF has since tried to walk back part of its story. They said the incident is under investigation. But, like, look, longtime observers of IDF statements should not be remotely surprised that they lied so brazenly about this incident. And this is just. It's another horrific war crime.
- [37:50]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah. There's no other way to describe it. It's a war crime. And the only thing I'd add to this is this, the brazenness of how they lie about it and then say they're going to do investigation and let's. I'm just going to roll back the tape. This is what just drove me crazy about Tony Blinken and the Biden officials. Every time something like this would happen, they'd say, there's an Israeli investig. And they get pressed at their briefings and say, well, the Israelis had the capacity to investigate. The Israelis never. Nobody's ever held accountable. It's a joke, you know, and this just proves what an absolute farce it is to think that anything that they're saying about these so called investigations can be trusted.
- [38:30]
Tommy Vitor
Same with the killing of Shireen Abu Akla, who's a Palestinian American journalist who was shot by an idea of if.
- [38:37]
Ben Rhodes
You enable that kind of behavior over time you get this kind of outcome. And it's why the ICC gets involved. Because if you can't trust the governing authority to actually hold itself accountable.
- [38:49]
Tommy Vitor
Exactly.
- [38:49]
Ben Rhodes
That's why there's international justice.
- [38:50]
Tommy Vitor
That's right. So the big news out of this Oval Office meeting between Netanyahu and Trump was Trump just announcing that the US Is going to have direct talks with Iran this weekend about its nuclear program. Turns out, I think they're indirect talks once the details came out, but the talks are going to take place in Oman. Iran's foreign minister said he's going to be their representative and then actual Secretary of State Steve Witkoff is going to.
- [39:15]
Ben Rhodes
Be the Rep. From noted Iran expert.
- [39:16]
Tommy Vitor
Noted Iran expert. We should get into. So Netanyahu, I don't know. Netanyahu in the meeting was saying he wants a deal along the lines of what happened in Libya when they denuclearized. Basically that was them like putting all their gear into boxes, shipping it out of the country, like fully getting rid of everything back in 2003. Here's how Trump himself though talked about these talks.
- [39:38]
Donald Trump
Everybody agrees that doing a deal would be preferable to doing the obvious. And the obvious is not something that I want to be involved with or frankly that Israel wants to be involved with if they can avoid it. So we're going to see if we can avoid it.
- [39:55]
Noah Bullock
If diplomacy fails, is the United States.
- [39:58]
Ben Rhodes
Under your leadership ready to take military action to destroy the Iranian nuclear program program and remove this threat?
- [40:07]
Donald Trump
I think if the talks aren't successful with Iran, I think Iran is going to be in great danger and I hate to say it, great danger because they can't have a nuclear weapon. You know, it's not a complicated formula. Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. That's all there is. Can't have it. If you're going to negotiate a new.
- [40:28]
Reporter
Deal with Iran, can you elaborate how.
- [40:30]
Tommy Vitor
It'S going to be more effective than the jcpoa?
- [40:33]
Donald Trump
Well, I can't really say that, but I think it'll be different and maybe a lot stronger.
- [40:40]
Tommy Vitor
So I don't know that. I mean, I think Bibi floating the Libya comparison is interesting because I think people probably realize that's way too hardline of an approach. And I think actually a smart Iran observer reminded me that back in 2020, Trump accused John Bolton of. Of poisoning the well in talks with the North Koreans by bringing up the Libya model, which is interesting, and I wonder if Bibi was aware of that. But Ben, I was just thinking back to the jcpoa. Like, these are highly technical conversations about, like, amounts of low enriched in uranium and centrifuges and inspections and heavy water plutonium limits and the arms embargoes and all this shit. Like Steve Witkoff doesn't know fuck all about any of that. Like, maybe he'll be. You have some, you know, State Department experts in tow?
- [41:30]
Ben Rhodes
No, because they fired most of those people.
- [41:32]
Tommy Vitor
So, like, I don't know, maybe this is just talks designed to kind of like feel out the willingness of both sides to make a deal. But I don't know, you like, have to have some knowledge of the details.
- [41:44]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah, I've tried to not have extreme PTSD from this whole thing, but I'll indulge my own PTSD from working for seven fucking years on the Iran deal that Trump tore up. Our talks with the Iranians began, you'll remember, exactly this way. So the reports are that Wyckoff is going to Oman and they're gonna meet and kind of meet indirectly in Oman with Omanis hosting both parties and kind of passing messages back and forth. That's where we were. I know in 2013.
- [42:17]
Tommy Vitor
It was Jake in the stash, Jake Sullivan and Bill Burns.
- [42:21]
Ben Rhodes
We, after four years of negotiation and fighting with Congress, got this deal done that Trump tore up. And so what was the point of this whole thing, what was the point of this whole exercise in tearing up the Iran deal? Just to stick it to the black president that you didn't like because he's more popular than you, so that you could be sitting in the oval office in 2020. What year is it?
- [42:46]
Tommy Vitor
5.
- [42:47]
Noah Bullock
20?
- [42:47]
Ben Rhodes
10 years after the Iran deal was signed? A decade.
- [42:51]
Tommy Vitor
Run it back.
- [42:52]
Ben Rhodes
A decade after the Iran deal was signed. We're rolling the tape all the way back to 2013.
- [42:57]
Tommy Vitor
They're making a new Naked Gun movie.
- [42:58]
Ben Rhodes
I'm so apoplectic that I don't remember what fucking year it is. Like, this is insane to me that we're having this conversation about Iran deal in the Oval Office. He doesn't even know what was in the jcpoa. He doesn't even know what the JCPOA is. He doesn't know what that acronym stands for.
- [43:13]
Tommy Vitor
Right.
- [43:14]
Ben Rhodes
And so here we Are. And you got Bibi floating the Libby option to kill the deal.
- [43:20]
Tommy Vitor
Definitely.
- [43:21]
Ben Rhodes
Bibi is many things. He's not dumb.
- [43:22]
Tommy Vitor
No, it's not.
- [43:23]
Ben Rhodes
And the reason that that killed the North Korean deal is everybody knows that Gaddafi gave up his nuclear weapons and where did he end up? Fucking with a bullet in his head and a drainpipe. Okay. And that's what the Supreme Leader.
- [43:34]
Tommy Vitor
That's the Libya model.
- [43:35]
Ben Rhodes
So, okay, that's off my chest. I mean, I think the thing to watch here substantively is will the Iranians come out with their hands up and maybe I'll be proven wrong. They'll give up every bolt and screw of their nuclear program. If it's anything like the Iranians that the world has dealt with, they'll drag this out and they'll try to keep pieces of their nuclear infrastructure and make concessions over here for trades over there. They'll want sanctions relief over here and their capacity. If they can't just steamroll them because the Iranians are weaker. If they can't just kind of steamroll them. I see them probably coming out with something that might look quite like the JCPOA that they declare as stronger if they do get a deal. And what did we all just spend 10 years of our lives on?
- [44:28]
Tommy Vitor
I don't know. I mean, yeah, the context is similar, but different in a lot of ways. I mean, the context around the JCPOA was years and years and years of crushing US and multilateral sanctions that were designed to pressure the Iranians to come to the table to have these talks. Right now, Iran is so much closer to getting a nuclear weapon than they ever were then. So that's riskier. However, their proxies in Hezbollah have been decimated. I don't know.
- [44:55]
Ben Rhodes
Well, that's. You make an important point, though. They're much closer to a nuclear weapon today than they were even when we send the jcpoa. And so that's the urgency here. And he's pretty blunt about the military threat. The one thing I just added on the table, Tommy, here, is that there's this trip that I think Trump has planned to Saudi. His first foreign trip is to Saudi and Israel. I think. Watch that space, because it wouldn't shock me. Trump likes to do things fast and he likes big announcements, and they may try. And the Saudis have been getting tight with the Iranians. Like there's been. Not tight, but they've been. They've restored relations. They talk to each other. MBS has talked to the Iranians. It wouldn't surprise me if The Saudis try to use that trip to stage some meeting with Trump and the Iranians.
- [45:46]
Tommy Vitor
He would love that.
- [45:47]
Ben Rhodes
Or some. He'd love that because he likes to make history, you know, or some announcement of a deal that maybe isn't fully negotiated. So that's the wild card here, is that trip. I bet that's what Wyckoff's assignment is. Yeah.
- [45:59]
Tommy Vitor
And look, if the Iranians are smart and they can just put down the bullshit and the bluster, they will make up some nonsensical story about how they all went to the mosque to pray for Trump after he was shot in Butler and commissioned some.
- [46:15]
Ben Rhodes
A portrait. Like they give Wyckoff a portrait of the oil painting.
- [46:18]
Tommy Vitor
Yeah. Get a rug made with Trump's face on it with a bunch of gold leafings. You know what I mean? Load up Witkoff's sad thing is, some barrels of oil buy some Trump coins.
- [46:27]
Ben Rhodes
Well, that's the thing. They probably would. The funny thing is they'll probably offer all this oil, which we never could have accepted because we'd be violating our own sanctions. Trump be like, I got the oil.
- [46:38]
Tommy Vitor
Listen, by the way, can you imagine how many of these tariff deals are gonna be sorted out via Trump coin transactions?
- [46:45]
Ben Rhodes
Oh, yeah. Yeah. A little meme coin.
- [46:47]
Tommy Vitor
Something to look forward to.
- [46:52]
Noah Bullock
Foreign.
- [46:56]
Tommy Vitor
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- [48:00]
Laci Mosley
What's poppin listeners. I'm Laci Mosley, host of the podcast Scam Goddess, the show that's an ode to fraud and all those who practice it. Each week I talk with very special guests about the scam scammiest scammers of all time. Want to know about the fake errors? We got em? What about a career con man? We've got them too. Guys that will wine and dine you and then steal all your coins. Oh, you know they are represented because representation matters. I'm joined by guests like Nicole byer, Ira Madison III, Conan O'Brien, and more. Join the congregation and listen to Scam Goddess wherever you get your podcasts.
- [48:44]
Tommy Vitor
All right then, let's change gears here. So we've talked a lot about the civil war in Sudan over the last two years, but we've not dug into the situation in South Sudan recently. So we did wanted to cover that today because there's some real concern that it could tip into a civil war there too. So just some background that I'll try to be quick about. South Sudan gained its independence in 2011. This came after decades and decades of civil war that finally ended after the Sudanese government and the Sudan People's Liberation Movement, or SPLM, signed a peace agreement in 2005 called the Comprehensive Peace Agreement. The Comprehensive Peace Agreement, or cpa, set forward this process that ultimately led to a near unanimous vote for independence in south Sudan in 2011. But unfortunately, soon after South Sudan's independence, the country fell into civil war that killed literally hundreds of thousands of people. In 2018, mediators finally got both sides to agree to a power sharing structure to stop the fighting and calm ethnic tensions between the two main ethnic groups in Sudan, the Dinka and the Nuer. But that was sort of a temporary fix. So Salva Kir, who represented the Dinka, became president. Reek Machar, who represented the Nur, became the vice president. This deal was also include a bunch of other steps that got it to a more like durable piece that I will not outline for you guys because none of them got implemented. But over the years, South Sudan's government and power sharing structure was basically held together by patronage from oil revenue that was sort of papering over these ethnic rivalries. But here's where the challenge comes. South Sudan is really dependent on these oil pipelines that flow through Sudan itself. And because of the civil war in Sudan, one of those pipelines became inoperable in South Sudan's oil exports and revenue were cut off for about a year, cutting off that source of patronage money that could kind of keep the lid on things. Further complicating things is the fact that the oil pipelines go through territory held by both sides of the civil war in Sudan. So it led to complicated politics. So in the last few months, Salvakir, the president has started firing ministers close to Machar, the vice president that violated this power sharing agreement. And then in late March, Machar himself was arrested and put under house arrest. Meanwhile, these militia groups that seem to have political ties have been attacking civilians, government troops, even UN forces. So, Ben, in previous administrations, the international community would probably look to the United States to try to help mediate the conflict, prevent it from spilling out into a civil war, prevent something even worse from happening. But what did State Department junior help desk technician Marco Rubio announce over the weekend? That he was revoking visas for South Sudanese nationals and barring any South Sudanese citizens from entering the US Because South Sudan is apparently not accepting repatriation flights fast enough. So, Ben, I was talking to some like South Sudan experts today to try to get a handle on this. We got into a bunch of the details, but big picture, one of them said to me, this is basically the final act of a failed state and a state building project that began in 2005 during the Bush administration when the, the U.S. was at its height, the height of its nation building frenzy. And that really has been deeply troubled ever since. I mean, even in 2011 after the referendum vote, a lot of people saw the writing on the wall here. And the really hard part is there's just no clear sense of what, if anything, the international community can do to kind of help or reverse the trend line. And it was just very sobering conversations.
- [52:08]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah, it's, we had the precipice of civil war between the same two guys, Salva Kir and Machar, in the second Obama administration. And it took a lot of effort to kind of get them to climb down and come up with some power sharing formula that they continually push against and violate. And the reality is the country's never really had. It was born without any institutions, without any infrastructure, so to speak. The leadership, the political leadership. Salva Kirk I remember talking to someone who went to deliver a message to him once and he had a strong smell of alcohol and he yelled at the person about how he's fought in the bush his whole life. He's not going to surrender, right? I've heard similar stories, yes, same stories. And it's tragic for the people of South Sudan that they are kind of trapped under these leaders who just revert to Patronage, tribalism and violence to kind of maintain their politics and do nothing to kind of build up the country. And I think. So where does this go? You're right. In normal old times, those good old days that, you know, weren't that great. But the un, the US would get involved with a group of, with the African Union and a group of regional countries and try to negotiate something and try to have experts on the ground and try to have some kind of peacekeeping capacity and stabilize things. There is no functioning capacity for the UN to do that with the US So out to lunch and trade wars going on and a civil war in Sudan just to the north. And so what I think is interesting to watch here is it just is going to push it further and further. Even in the Obama years, I remember we relied a lot on Kenya and Ethiopia and Uganda and the kind of regional powers that had influence into these different parties to kind of lean on people and to kind of arm twist and to do whatever diplomatic formulas they could work out. I think what we're going to see is the kind of increasing regional. And by the way, those are the countries that are bearing the burden of hosting refugees. So this is a real issue for them because they already have huge amounts of refugees in place like Kenya. So I think the burden is just going to get pushed further and further onto regional organizations like the African Union and regional powers like that, because you know what the US did in the middle of all this, junior assistant to the assistant to the assistant's assistant, Marco Rubio, announced last weekend that the US will be revoking all visas for South Sudanese passport holders. We have no answer to this other than our immigration policy. Like, we have no formula for it. Right. And so I think that that just pushes it. It's just going to be left on the laps of the regional parties to deal with it.
- [54:56]
Tommy Vitor
In adding to your point about leaning on these regional actors, I think into the fray has entered another one that we've talked about in the Sudan context, which is the uae. And they are funding one side of the civil war. They're funding the rsf. But also, I think the UAE turned to South Sudan and some of these tribal militias to get fighters for their project in Yemen for years and years and years. And they built these ties to Salva Kir. And it sounds like the, the guy that Kier is named to be a successor is sort of like seen as the UAE's guy and kind of a money guy with, with no real political or military experience or clear ties to the splm. But he has these queer ties to the UAE that I think are making people wonder about that.
- [55:39]
Ben Rhodes
It just. Sudan is just got an overall deal. Sudan and South Sudan, just this playground for these external parties and these ambitions. By the way, the U.S. right. I mean, we were going to. I mean, Bush got very involved in this because it's Christian part. You know, South Sudan is a Christian part of what used to be Sudan. And there was. We were going to state building in the Obama years. We got all excited about the newly independent country of South Sudan and we kind of projected this, like, savior complex, let's be honest about it, onto this place where we had no capacity to build something.
- [56:15]
Tommy Vitor
Yeah. And there's the real question of, like, once the international community creates a failed state, what do you do with it? What happens now?
- [56:26]
Ben Rhodes
What should happen is like basically a receivership. Right. That the un. I mean, there have been times, like in Central African Republic, where with borderline UN governance, essentially, but the. You. That requires kind of the Security Council to be able to get together and put that together. And I'm just not optimistic.
- [56:43]
Tommy Vitor
No.
- [56:44]
Ben Rhodes
That the us, Russia and China could agree to some receivership for South Sudan.
- [56:48]
Tommy Vitor
Yeah. I think that's a huge peacekeeping force. Yeah. And there's some speculation that Salvakir, the president, is dying and again, he's trying to anoint the successor.
- [56:56]
Ben Rhodes
I mean, these guys have been around for a while.
- [56:58]
Tommy Vitor
They've been around for a long time. And Kir Mashar, they. Someone was telling me they barely have armies at this point. They're all sort of like linked militias. But, you know, I was talking to Alan Boswell, who's a crisis group expert on Africa generally, and he was just saying that, like, regionally, the pressures that are leading to fragmentation are so much stronger than the pressures that would normally consolidate countries. And there just doesn't seem to be any force that's kind of bringing them back together.
- [57:23]
Ben Rhodes
That's a really good point. Well, because. And this is again, what the. What the UN is supposed to fill that gap, but the UN can't. It's not their fault that you have a dysfunctional Security Council because they can't do it. It was hard enough when you had things working well in, like, the 90s. Now it's seemingly impossible.
- [57:43]
Tommy Vitor
Seemingly impossible. Speaking of political dysfunction, let's turn to South Korea, Ben. So we talked in the show a bunch about South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol's political drama and career. It's finally coming to a close. Four months after he invoked martial law, the country's Constitutional Court has finally ruled that Yoon should be removed. In South Korea's interim president has announced a snap election on June 3rd. So a quick rewind on how this all played out last year. On December 3, Yoon shocked everyone by declaring martial law. He claimed at the time that these anti state forces were a threat to the country in North Korea, blah blah blah, and then sent troops into the parliament and what was clearly a coup attempt that was obviously bullshit in a pretext. The reality was UNIT effectively been politically neutered because the Democratic opposition had taken control of the national assembly and they were not only trying to impeach a lot of his cabinet members, but also slash his government's budget. So the martial law decree created chaos. But that chaos only lasted a few hours, thanks to really brave protesters who took to the streets and then members of the national assembly who rushed down to the national assembly and voted to lift the martial law declaration by about 4:30 the next morning. Since then, though, the drama has not stopped. So Yoon was impeached on December 14. On December 31, South Korea issued a warrant for his arrest. He refused to come in for questioning. Over and over again there was this six hour standoff. It got crazy. But now Yoon has finally been removed from office. He still has to deal with criminal charges, a criminal trial that starts on April 14th that includes the charge of insurrection. That could get him life in prison or even the death penalties. So this election that's coming up will likely put the opposition in power. E.J. myung is the leader of the opposition Democratic Party. He's the current front runner. He has dealt with his own legal challenges in the past. But more interesting, Ben, is how much he differs on policy. So I was talking to our buddy Danny Russell earlier today. He was a top Asia hand in the Obama administration. He's now the Vice President for International Security and Diplomacy at the Asia Society Policy Institute. And Danny was saying that if Myung wins, Trump is going to have a partner in South Korea who is far more accommodationist with North Korea, which I don't know. That could cut both ways with Trump. He loves Kim Jong Un, but also is probably going to be far more willing to work with the Chinese and resistant to US Entreaties to be hardline against China. So a huge context from the. A huge change from the context that Biden was working with with Yoon, where you had hardline on North Korea, the willingness to mend fences with the Japanese and have these trilateral meetings, et cetera. So Ben, thoughts on this saga. And just like what things could look like going forward between the US And South Korea.
- [60:32]
Ben Rhodes
Quite a saga. With everything going on in the world, this didn't get quite the attention it might have otherwise gotten. I think one of the things I learned throughout the saga, Tommy, is okay, on the one hand, the institutions of South Korean democracy kind of held right. Like they resisted the martial law declaration, the Kanaku attempt, and they ran through a process that ultimately removed a guy that, you know, I'm not a legal expert on South Korean legalese, but pretty clearly there's pretty good grounds to beat.
- [61:01]
Tommy Vitor
This guy for sure.
- [61:02]
Ben Rhodes
What I don't fully understand, I have to acknowledge, is the kind of depth of these cleavages in South Korean society that were so on display. There's always been a kind of left right divide, generational divides, divides about the feelings about the military dictatorship, divides about feelings about the U.S. presence. Right. So all of these things enter into this left right divide. And I don't think you heal that just with booting this guy and having an election. You've had now two consecutive conservative presidents get impeached, now this guy for pretty good reason, and then I think three consecutive ones at least going to prison, you know, so the stakes, you know, they're playing high table stakes in South Korean politics for the US Piece of it. What's interesting is as creepy as some of these more conservative leaders have been, they generally work better with the US because they're generally hawkish on North Korea. They're generally supported the US alliance. And, and, and so if it swings to the left, I think that the combination of Trump, I mean, you teed this up, but the combination of Trump and the tariff dynamic and this change, we should expect a South Korea that is getting much closer to China and starting to see that maybe its long term economic security, if not its security, is going to have to depend not just on the United States, but on China as well. And that raises questions about the US Troop presence long term and certainly alignment with US Diplomatic priorities. So that may be fine with Trump, but we could start to see this really intense network in the same way that NATO is fraying, that kind of network of Asian alliances fraying as well.
- [62:45]
Tommy Vitor
Yeah, I mean, on the tariff point, you just made South Koreans, like, the Japanese made huge commercial investments in the US like building factories and production plants, and now they're like, hey, Mr. President, like, you're still going to tariff the shit out of us, like, but Trump only cares that they did it under Biden, so it doesn't count.
- [63:03]
Ben Rhodes
And they have A free trade agreement. I mean, it's one of the things that's kind of missing is we're tariffing all these countries that we have free trade agreements ratified through our Congress with.
- [63:12]
Tommy Vitor
Yeah.
- [63:13]
Ben Rhodes
I mean, binding for decades. Like, it's crazy.
- [63:16]
Tommy Vitor
It is completely crazy.
- [63:16]
Ben Rhodes
Like, what's the point of an agreement? It's just words on paper. And by the way, people used to say to us, after the Obama administration, I used to get this line of criticism when Trump tore up the Iran deal and the Cuba opening. Well, you guys should have pushed that through Congress. Then he wouldn't have been able to do it. He's tearing up stuff that is treaties ratified through Congress, free trade agreements ratified.
- [63:37]
Tommy Vitor
Through Congress by declaration.
- [63:39]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah.
- [63:39]
Tommy Vitor
That's crazy. Yeah. Someone I was talking to made a similar point to me about, like, South Korea will remove this chapter of their political saga, but the population kind of went from like a third left, a third moderate to a third right wing to like 50, 50 polarized. Polarized like us. And there also, there's this weird growing divide in South Korea between men and women. There was a 2019 poll found 70% of Korean men in their 20s think the problem of discrimination against men is a serious one. That's a lot of that stems from mandatory military service for men. But there was a 2021 Ipsos fold that found polarization among men and women in their 20s and 30s is the most severe in South Korea. And women are increasingly identifying as liberal and men are conservative. And President Yoon sounds a little familiar. Yeah, President Yoon ran, like, similar kind of reactionary, getting rid of, like.
- [64:30]
Ben Rhodes
Did he go on Joe Rogan, basically.
- [64:33]
Tommy Vitor
Yeah, sort of, like, ran on some of. I mean, I do think you alluded to something. I think it's really important, which is, is Trump going to want to withdraw troops from the Korean Peninsula? And you're starting to see polling where like, two thirds of South Koreans are, you know, supportive of getting their own nuclear weapon. I mean, if the U.S. yes. Pulls out this, like, if. If a more lefty administration comes in, that will likely blunt that popular sentiment, because I don't think they're going to want to develop a nuke. But if we leave.
- [65:04]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah. And it was always like, the older generations were more supportive of the US Presence because they remembered the aftermath of the Korean War and the US Kind of feeling like it saved their country in some ways. So that could all be dissipating. We're moving out of this era, the era defined by all these post war, post Cold War institutions and relationships and this is a big part of that, by the way, just one light point. Do you remember before Trump, even years before Donald Trump, when we were in Korea and we're trying to negotiate the Korus agreement? And I know you remember this. That's why I'm teeing this up. That I won't name the reporter, but Barack Obama's doing a Jordan press conference with the President of South Korea, Lee Mumbach, and this reporter stands up and starts screaming at the President of South Korea about why Americans who fought and died for his country should have to pay more for Hyundais or something.
- [65:59]
Tommy Vitor
I was so embarrassed that whole trip. That was one of the worst trips we've ever been on because we got it, they stiffed us on. I forget where we were before that. It was one of those 10 day trips to Asia where you just never sleep the entire time.
- [66:11]
Ben Rhodes
We were in India before that and then we didn't get the free trade agreement finalized. Then a reporter for the New York Times lectured the South Korean president about how people died and shouldn't have to buy Hyundais or something. And then we got really drunk on at the karaoke place in Yokohama, Japan.
- [66:33]
Tommy Vitor
On the Bloomberg tab.
- [66:34]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah, I was gonna say. Okay, thank you, JG Han. Actually, those Hans and JG don't work there anymore, so we can say that Bloomberg paid for a really good karaoke. By the way, to defend them. I'm sure that, you know, they learned a lot that night.
- [66:48]
Tommy Vitor
Yo. Yeah. God knows what we said. God knows if they remembered it.
- [66:51]
Ben Rhodes
They certainly learned that I sang the Greatest Love of All by Whitney Houston beautifully and blew out my voice beautifully.
- [66:59]
Tommy Vitor
Okay, we're on a little long. A couple fun things to close. Ben, because it's been dark lately, we've been skipping the fun section at the end of the show. So we found some stupid shit that brought us joy. So the first such stupid thing happened at a recent event at Windsor Castle. King Charles blew a carrot. A carrot that had been carved into a recorder gifted to him by the London Vegetable Orchestra, which according to their website is a real thing and two features a mouth watering selection of courgettes, peppers, potatoes, swedes and butternut squash. Accompanying a soaring lineup of carrot recorders. Charles took the instrument for a spin. Here's the results.
- [67:48]
Ben Rhodes
I hope we have. Do we have video of this? Because this is why you should subscribe to the YouTube, by the way.
- [67:53]
Tommy Vitor
Yeah, when I think of what royals do in their free time, it is flating a carrot. Well, to the tune of Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.
- [67:58]
Ben Rhodes
It did look like the kind of blowjob class in and that in old school, you know, they're sitting around with the fruit, you know, like, except it was the king of England.
- [68:14]
Tommy Vitor
I immediately sent the link to Alistair Campbell and I was like, tell Rory Stewart to get his shit together and not let this ever happen again. He was like, I don't know, man. Brits like this weird shit. Across the channel, Ben. Staffers in the Elysee palace are reportedly close to wearing gas masks or at least clothing pins on their nose because President Emmanuel Macron has taken to a certain style. So a new book reports that he wears, quote, industrial amounts of Dior Au Sauvage, I think is how you say it, using the musky floral scent to mark his territory. A direct quote from the book is quote, just as Louis XIV made his perfumes an attribute of power when he paraded through the galleries of Versailles, Emil Macron uses his as an element of his authority at the Elysees. I just have to imagine, Ben, what the Oval Office smelled like during his visit when the Dior missed with the Trump signature scent of fart lingering in a love seat, you know.
- [69:11]
Ben Rhodes
Well, actually, I'm interested to take this opportunity to make the. Did you see how much gold is in the Oval Office too? What happens? Like, it looks like a tacky. I don't know what it looks like.
- [69:22]
Tommy Vitor
There's gold leafs on the side of the fireplace, all the statues. Like, wasn't there a plant there that was from like.
- [69:29]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah, now this is the Kennedy administration. Yeah, now there's like some weird gold flourish. I mean, people should look at this, look at the before and after the Oval Office.
- [69:37]
Tommy Vitor
Yeah, it looks like a Saudi receiving room.
- [69:40]
Ben Rhodes
That's what I was trying to think of, what it looks like. And that's exactly what it looks like. And it probably smells kind of funny, especially after Emmanuel McCrone visited.
- [69:48]
Tommy Vitor
Finally, Ben, save the best for last year. So imagine you're the world's largest bird and you get sentenced to live out your life in a Texas wildlife park where people constantly gawk at you from the cars. One day you spot a deeply unserious mop headed blonde man looking at you particularly stupidly, and you think, I fucking had it. You lean into his rented Chevy Malibu and you go for an eye. He dodges barely, but you catch a whiff of his scent. Prawn mayo, sandwich, red wine and incompetence. He survived to live another day, but if he ever comes around again, you're gonna get him anyway. This fan fiction around is actually about A real encounter with former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson had with an ostrich. Here's the clip. So that very brief audio was actual real audio of Boris Johnson getting bitten by a massive ostrich while he's holding his little tod. That was brought to us courtesy of his wife's Instagram feed.
- [70:46]
Ben Rhodes
What I would like is in the movie version, maybe we should produce this because we're all going to have to find additional work in this new economy. What if we took all the villains of the last 15 years, right? Boris Johnson for Brexit and Trump and Putin, MBS and whoever. And what if the world's kind of weirdest collection of animals just decided to attack them?
- [71:09]
Tommy Vitor
Oh, I like that.
- [71:10]
Ben Rhodes
You know, like, like and, and nothing could turn it off. Like, nobody could explain it. Like all of a sudden, you know, like Tony Abbott goes back to Australia and like a kangaroos are just descending upon him like crazy. You know, like, that's funny.
- [71:22]
Tommy Vitor
I like that a lot. Or maybe all those horrible leaders become animals who are characters in like the worst zoo.
- [71:29]
Ben Rhodes
Oh, that's good.
- [71:30]
Tommy Vitor
It's sort of like a fascist, populist, incompetent zoo. What would Liz Truss be? I guess I had a lettuce.
- [71:36]
Ben Rhodes
Oh, just getting chatted. Eaten by it earlier. Resistance humor.
- [71:41]
Tommy Vitor
Good stuff. Okay, that is it for the news section of the show. We're gonna take a quick break and when we come back, you're gonna hear my interview with Noah Bullock. We're gonna talk about all things El Salvador, their mass incarceration regime, the prisons that these Venezuelan men are getting sent from the United States into, how Nayibu Kaylee uses the prison system to prop up his authoritarian rule. So stick around for that.
- [72:14]
Ben Rhodes
Pot.
- [72:14]
Tommy Vitor
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- [74:00]
Laci Mosley
I'm Laci Mosley, host of the podcast Scam Goddess. The show that's an ode to fraud and all those who practice it. Each week I talk with very special guests about the scammiest scammers of all time. Wanna know about the fake errors? We got em. What about a career con man? We've got them too. Guys that will wine and dine you and then steal all your coins. Oh, you know, they are represented because representation matters. I'm joined by guests like Nicole byer, Ira Madison III, Conan O'Brien and more. Join the congregation and listen to Scam Goddess wherever you get your podcasts.
- [74:41]
Tommy Vitor
Noah Bullock is the executive director of Christosol, a human rights organization based in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. Noah, great to see you. I should tell listeners that we were next door neighbors when I was what, 4 years old? You were 2, you were 1. What's the timeline we talk about here?
- [74:57]
Noah Bullock
Yeah, that's right. You were like the first friend I can remember in my life. So good to see you 40 years later.
- [75:04]
Tommy Vitor
Good to see you 40 years under such great context. Yeah, we're not playing Thundercats or whatever it was back.
- [75:11]
Noah Bullock
You remember playing Thundercats?
- [75:13]
Tommy Vitor
It's one of the best TV shows of all time. I remember how you get an idiot.
- [75:17]
Noah Bullock
I kind of remember you always wanted to be Lionel and I wanted to be Lion O.
- [75:22]
Tommy Vitor
Today we're both Lion O. Is it?
- [75:26]
Noah Bullock
That's actually a snowflakey of you, Tommy.
- [75:30]
Tommy Vitor
Wanting to be Liono.
- [75:31]
Noah Bullock
Everybody wins.
- [75:31]
Tommy Vitor
I don't even remember the characters. That is true. That is a very lib thing. It's very four year old soccer team. But we digress. We're here to talk about El Salvador. Naye Bukele, a insufferable millennial dictator who has been on my radar screen for a while, but I think has sort of leapt into the consciousness of a lot of American citizens because of the Trump administration's policy of sending these Venezuelan men down to rot in these hellish prisons in El Salvador with no due process. But along those lines, I mean, earlier today the White House announced President Trump is going to welcome President Bukele for a working visit to Washington on April 14th. The conversation is going to focus on this policy of sending migrants in the U.S. to El Salvador to be held in their many mega. There's one mega prison that we're all seeing on the news, but there's a whole network of prisons. Let's just start there. Can you tell us about the conditions in these prisons? Both the infamous terrorism confinement center, but also, you know, I know you guys have have looked into the conditions in prisons all over the country.
- [76:42]
Noah Bullock
Yeah. Okay, let's start there. The terrorist confinement center is a new prison. It was built in during what we call in El Salvador the state of exception. So three years ago, in response to a weekend where gangs massacred over 80 people, the President of El Salvador asked the legislator declare like an emergency in El Salvador. In Salvadoran constitution is called a state of exception. And in that state of exception, in the emergency decree, they basically restrict due process rights and police and soldiers proceed to do mass roundups of people. Where I live, Tommy, like literally a cattle truck rolled into the, I live in kind of a village, into the rural village and pulled people out of their houses in their underground underwear without even checking their IDs at like 11 o'clock at night. So. So three years later, 85,000 Salvadorans have been detained without previous investigations, without due process. And they have been held almost indefinitely in a series of maximum security prisons in which they haven't had contact with their families, they don't have access to legal counsel. Those are conditions that constitute forced disappearances. Family members tell us that they don't know after three years, if their family members are dead or alive, that sort of separation is one component and lack of transparency is one component. The other really important part to understand is that our organization has documented systematic practices of torture. Right? So when people enter the prisons, it's common that the guards will say to them, you won't leave here walking. There'll be sort of induction beatings. You see a little of that aggression in the videos of the Venezuelans. But in the other prisons with Salvadoran prisoners captured in the state of exception, it's systematic. Just last week, our forensic investigators were in the field verifying the death of a 24 year old man. He apparently died of kidney failure. We were able to do a forensic assessment of the body. 24 year old men don't usually die of kidney failure, much less than a question of months. Those are usually deaths that are caused by two things in the prisons. One is the systematic denial of access to water and a bathroom that causes kidneys to fail or beatings that destroy their internal organs. We see that also. We have cases of people who have died of starvation because their stomachs were destroyed by beatings. This is the panorama. This is the context of the penitentiary system that President Bukele offered to President Trump. But I should make one caveat here. It is really important for listeners to understand the maximum security prisons or the overwhelming majority of the people captured in the state of exception. The 85,000 are being held are the older maximum security prisons. The secot that was built during the state of exception is where, as far as we can tell, older gang members who are already in prison, serving sentences prior to the state of exception were transferred there. And you can see that because the image of these people are fully tattooed faces. You see the names of the gangs on their chests and on their faces. That's a practice that gangs haven't been doing for like 15 years. So the reason I bring that up is because the Sikhat has become the terrorist confinement center, we call it. The Sikhat has become sort of the public face of the Bukele security model. It's the branding and they do that intentionally to show these images of gang members that are somewhat terrifying looking, but they are, in these videos and photos, dehumanized. And the optics of it tells you the message, which is, these are monsters. These are people who are enemies of society. And this is how strong men deal with the worst of the worst. That's the narrative that they convey through the optics of it. But it's the actual people in El Salvador who have been detained. In our research, in a sample of like 1200, only 54 even had tattoos, and only 9 of those were gang members. The people being detained are poor. They're, they're farmers, they're informal salespeople, they're construction workers, day laborers, even like pregnant women. So I guess it's important to make that distinction. The conditions that you see on the videos of Sickot show modern looking facility whose architecture and design is built for cruelty. There are no doubt that they celebrate, even in those videos, certain practices that are analogous to torture. But sadly, those conditions might be better than the conditions that the 85,000 are being held in in other maximum security prisons.
- [82:03]
Tommy Vitor
Yeah, I should just say, I mean, I was talking yesterday to a lawyer who works at an organization that is coordinating across a lot of the lawyers who are representing some of the Venezuelan men who have been rendered from the US to El Salvador, and they've had no contacts, their families had no contacts with any of these individuals since they left the country. Most of the information that these lawyers know or their families know about where these men are are because Bukele is this super online, like, millennial dictator who had not only his own kind of like internal camera crews filming these like hype videos where we see some of the torture, like techniques you're talking about. I mean, these men are being at a bare minimum roughed up. But then there are these situations they put them in where they essentially like get them down on their knees and shove their faces into the ground and stack them together. Like the inhumanity and brutality is on display and very much by design, as you said. But Bukele, he's been president since 2019. His shtick is he thinks he's a cool dictator. He launched this aggressive crackdown on gangs. He locked up 85,000 people. As you said, he was reelected last year in this landslide victory, although you guys have documented a lot of context for that victory that I think would be worth you getting into. Can you explain to listeners though, how this sweeping mass incarceration policy that you just described is at the root of his political strength? Essentially?
- [83:42]
Noah Bullock
Yeah, I don't know. I would say I would start with this idea that's consistent in El Salvador and I think around the world that the punitive populist band of politics is very effective in election cycles. Very few politicians can tell societies that are being affected by indiscriminate violence that they're going to defend rule of law and due process and win against the candidate. That's saying, I'm going to do whatever it takes to destroy these enemies. And so the idea of punitive populism is a seductive political strategy that's worked for Bukele, but it's worked consistently everywhere. And actually, one of the things that most concerns me when I listen to the discourse in the United States right now is how, as I'm hearing, the discourse of security in exchange for rights, this idea that the only way to deal with this emergency and to eliminate the enemies that are affecting our society is to suspend rights, is to.
- [84:59]
Tommy Vitor
And to hype the threat. Right. Like no one had heard of Trende Aragua two or three years ago. Now that, you know Fox News, the Trump administration, they're trying to put them on par with, like, al Qaeda in 2002.
- [85:09]
Ben Rhodes
Right.
- [85:10]
Noah Bullock
And to be honest, Democrats, like the little D ones, people who believe in democracy as a superior form of governance, need to figure out how to address the security narrative. It's a very challenging one. There's a lot of pitfalls. We begin to talk about defending institutions against threats, real or perceived, and we look like we're defending the status quo against a reformer who's going to finally fix the problem. Right. So it's a narrative that's known, it's a dangerous one that really opens the pathway to consolidate, expanding to executive power and consolidating authoritarian control. So just that piece of it. But going back more specifically to your question, our organization has spent the last 15 years assisting families fleeing gang violence, narco trafficking, violence in Central America. All of us who live in Central America, all of us who live in El Salvador, have lived under the terror of the gangs. We've seen the atrocities. It's a society that, after the signing of the peace Accords in 1992, had incipient hopes of becoming a democracy. But very quickly, mass migration, corruption, gang violence creates a sense of sort of collective humiliation. And so the Salvadoran people's support of President Bukele is very similar to other authoritarian sort of psychological, emotional connections that leaders build with populations who have suffered collective humiliations. He promises a better future. He promises a new idea of a country, and that becomes very seductive to people, especially people in the diaspora in the United States. Right. And so with the narrative of having, like the day one, when Bukele comes to office, they begin to say, we have reduced homicide rates. And so security becomes his way of sort of consolidating. It's, it's the. It's the physical proof that he is the change. Right. What's ironic about that is the. What the indictment of the Attorney General of the Eastern District of New York says about that period of time, and they say that Nayib Bukele made an agreement with the gangs during his first three years in office to create the perception of reduced homicide rates that benefited the president and his party in two elections. In the sense this popularity that you're referring to in the early years of his presidency is the result of. Of an illicit negotiation, according to the Attorney General of New York, with the very gangs he is now credited for having combated. Right. So there. There is an irony to that. What I'll say, though, is after this three years of state of exception, that outburst of violence is understood to be sort of the sign that the agreement between the Bugeli government and the gangs is over. And after you round up 85,000 people and imprison them indefinitely with no due process rights, most of the population understands then that the government can do whatever it wants to whoever it wants. And there are no institutions in the country that are independent to intervene to protect rights. And in that context, Polling shows that 80% of the population say they support President Pukele, while 83% of the population also says that they fear expressing an opinion that is not aligned with the president and his party. So in a sense, what the Salvador people are telling you is, sure, I support the president, but if I didn't, I would be too afraid to tell him. And so that's an indicator not of a free and open society, but of a closed and autocratic society.
- [89:15]
Tommy Vitor
I think that's really important. You made that point to me, that you have to understand his approval rating in the context of the security situation, but also the freedom of speech and the political and media climate that exists on the ground. I think that's an important barometer for understanding, I think, the approval of any authoritarian government in the world, really. It's been interesting from over here in the US Watching Bukele's kind of like, public image and political efforts abroad evolve over time. He made himself kind of this early cheerleader of Bitcoin. He was celebrated by various, you know, Silicon Valley luminaries who, you know, mostly ignored his authoritarian tendencies. They've also kind of mostly ignored the total failure by the government to get actual citizens of El Salvador to use Bitcoin. But never mind. Now it's clear he seems to have pivoted a bit. Right now he's doing everything possible to cozy up to the Trump administration. He's become a fixture on the kind of conservative political conference circuit. How do you Describe or make sense of his foreign policy worldview or efforts at least.
- [90:26]
Noah Bullock
Yeah, that's a good question because he was elected as a social Democrat. Really? If you listen to his campaign speeches in 2018, I would give him a job at a crystal salad human rights organization to do workshops on democracy like he was in social justice. He was like a social democrat when the Salvadoran people fell in love with him. And he transitions. There's multiple. It's hard to know exactly how that happens. But the, I think his worldview, where is it now? And this aligns very much with Trump, is he sees himself as a disruptor to a rules based international system. Right. He says, for example, he repeats this phrase often that human rights and democracy standards are the failed prescriptions of the international community. And I think you can see alignment with the way Trump deals with dei, for example. Or he says sometimes, like, what does he say? A radical left, lunatic left agenda. And so they have this shared idea that the rules based order, this is an alternative to like the great plat power diplomacy. Like that phrase, the powerful do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. That was the old system. And then after World War II, we decided, oh, maybe we should have limits on power, even geopolitical power, and it could benefit everybody. They see that system as a limit on their own power or their own ability to act, and they don't like it. So that is like one of the, like, worldviews that unites them, but unites the autocratic world in general. Right. And so Bukele definitely identifies himself with that. And I think specifically on the issue of like the deportations of Venezuelans, President Bukele and President Trump are allied in an effort to normalize this idea that in societies there are internal enemies and these groups of people are such threats to society that they should not be protected by law and that the President claims a power to decide who those individuals and groups are. President Bukele has claimed that power in El Salvador and exercised it to the extent of rounding up 85,000 people arbitrarily. And President Trump is now claiming that power in his supposed response to the immigration situation in the United States.
- [93:04]
Tommy Vitor
So they're aligned, literally declaring them terrorists.
- [93:07]
Noah Bullock
And they're aligned in that, that idea, that normalization of that. And, and, and I think they're also aligned in trying to legitimize the idea that you can take away that those people's rights and do whatever you want to them. And so that for President Bukele, he has this deep desire to be seen as an international model. And he gets that when the United States contracts his penitentiary system, known for massive systematic human rights violations, he contracts surfaces from them. You legitimize that model of security. And it's a model of security, like we talked about at the start of the conversation, that's based on this idea, the human rights, the democratic checks and balances, that any person or institution that would obstruct the power of the president to do what he desires to is an obstacle to security. Human rights in the background see themselves. It's a total contradiction. Sorry, I'm going on so long. But it's a total contradiction of what the Universal Declaration of Human Rights says. Right? Like this is. I read that and I get weepy. I hope people now go home and read just the preamble is good enough. It's like four paragraphs. It's the World War II generation, our grandparents saying to us that when we reflect on one of the darkest moments in human history, we conclude that fundamental respect for human rights and dignity is the basis. It's the foundation for peace and security in the world, not agreements between great powers. It's the limitation that is implicit in respecting human dignity and rights. And that's what's being turned on its head with. On a micro level, that's what's being turned on its head. I think that's something that in all societies, like Salvador, maybe in the United States. I don't know who really feels in the United States that their life has gotten way worse because of the trend at AGUA or how many people that is. But to. So it makes sense if you are affected by organized crime to say at first that, you know, do what you need to do. You're right, let's sacrifice rights in exchange for security. But sooner or later that the sacrifice of rights for one group affects everybody. And that's what we're seeing.
- [95:37]
Tommy Vitor
Absolutely. And last question for you. I mean, unfortunately, the United States were Elon Musk and the Doge crew and Trump are killing off USAID and the humanitarian work and the pro democracy work that the US Government used to do abroad. That gap is, to the extent it can be being filled by NGOs like yours. I mean, what is it like for you to work at a human rights organization in a country led by a scary, powerful, authoritarian man who doesn't want your research seen by others and probably resents it? I mean, do you feel, is it dangerous to operate and then, you know, can people listening support your work?
- [96:22]
Noah Bullock
Yeah, I would say that Crystal South. Well, so when I was in New York last week and I was talking with people and they were like, you know how liberals are talking about this at the moment? I said, people like, a little hysterical, like, this is autocracy. And they're like, well, you're so. No, you're like, so mellow. And I was like, well, yeah, I mean, we've been living with dictatorship for six years and. And, you know, like, that means. That's meant for me personally and for our organization that, you know, like, my phone has been tapped with Pegasus. So espionage monitoring of our work, the sort of administrative and legal oversight authority of the state has been used to take away our tax status to try and revoke our operating permit. There's constant campaigns. Bukele has a sophisticated troll network, constant campaigns trying to delegitimize me and my colleagues individually. But our work in general, people who work around us have been detained and threatened and criminalized. But some of that you get used to. But every single day, we are still people, Us, like me, we are better off than the people in the communities who have denounced abuses, denounced corruption. The consequences for people at the community level for speaking out, proposing something that's not aligned with the regime is potentially risking being detained in the state of exception. Just a couple weeks ago, colleagues of ours in a smaller human rights organization were arrested and accused of illicit association, disappeared into prison along with 30 community leaders. So it is a context and which defending rights isn't free. But for now, we still have a space to work in. And I say that maybe for people in the US too, because, like, in these processes of consolidating autocracy, there's like an abundance of pragmatic people who say, no, I'll just keep my head down. I won't confront. Maybe this won't get worse. And what we need are people who fight back against the normalization, the shifting of standards that is implicit in an autocratic process. Like, autocracies are not reform projects, they're destruction and revenge projects. And people should not believe that that won't affect them at some point.
- [98:57]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah.
- [98:57]
Tommy Vitor
Wow. Really well said. Well, Noah, thank you for the work you're doing. Folks who want to read more about Christosol or donate to your organization should go to the Crystal website. And I don't know. Thank you again. I really appreciate it.
- [99:12]
Noah Bullock
Yeah, thank you, Tommy, and good to see you again.
- [99:18]
Tommy Vitor
Thanks again to Noah Bullock for doing the show, and I think thank you to Boris Johnson's wife for posting.
- [99:24]
Ben Rhodes
For posting that. Yeah, yeah. Props to her. Also thanks King Charles for being good support.
- [99:28]
Tommy Vitor
Yeah, that's good luck that also Boris, I don't. Maybe you don't have your little kid like in in pecking distance of the.
- [99:37]
Ben Rhodes
Giant ostrich and laughing at him though. That was the best part of the clip.
- [99:41]
Tommy Vitor
It was mocking his dad. Good stuff. All right, talk to you guys next week. Positive World is a Crooked Media production. Our senior producer is Ilona Minkowski. Our associate producer is Michael Goldsmith. Our executive producers are me, Tommy Vitor and Ben Rhodes. Say hi, Ben.
- [99:55]
Ben Rhodes
Hi.
- [99:57]
Tommy Vitor
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 Hethcoat, Mia Kelman, William Jones, David Tolles and Molly Lobel. Madeline Herringer 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 community@cricket.com friends. Don't forget to follow us at Crooked Media on Instagram, Tik tok 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.
- [100:49]
Reporter
Hi, I'm Roman Mars, host of the podcast 99% invisible. Design is everywhere in our lives, but it's easy to not notice or take it for granted. 99% Invisible is a weekly exploration of the process and power of design and architecture. It's stories of who we are through the lens of the things we build. Like have you ever wondered why we use the 1kHz bleep sound to cover up inappropriate words on radio and TV? Or or what aspects of infrastructure allow 5 year olds in Japan to run errands by themselves while kids in the US are completely dependent on their parents or their parents cars? Or why the historic flag of South Vietnam shows up at right wing protests all the time. Or why people are obsessed with houseplants. And when did we start bringing plants from halfway around the world into our homes to begin with? 99% Invisible will explore all of that and more every Tuesday. Follow and listen to 99% invisible wherever you get your podcasts.