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Isaac Saul
Why choose a Sleep Number Smart Bed.
John Law
Can I make my site softer? Can I make my site firmer? Can we sleep cooler?
Isaac Saul
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Isaac Saul
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John Law
From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle.
Isaac Saul
Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, and welcome to the Tango Podcast, a place where you get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking, and a little bit of my take. Today is our big 2025 annual review of what we got right and wrong. We do this every year in the first Friday edition after the new year where we go back and we review a bunch of takes from the previous year. This year was special because I was out for paternity leave in the beginning of the year, so we had different writers on the team writing the MyTake section. We introduced the staff Dissent section this year and also throughout the year we just had different people reviewing different issues and writing their own personal analysis. It wasn't just me on the my take. So you're going to hear some different voices today on the podcast. There's so much ground to cover. We review about 25 different takes, so it's not just me reading it. We've had some diversification of the voices on the show, which I'm excited about. And before we jump in, I want to be clear about why we do this, one of the things I loathe most about the media is that there's just no accountability. This lack of accountability, it extends beyond media spaces. It pervades society from the halls of Congress to the executive offices of our biggest corporations. And I think accountability is a big part of what the media is missing right now. So in an attempt to live out that value, I started this tradition where we just review what we got right and wrong and grade ourselves, literally grade the work that we've done. We did this in 2021, 2022, 2023, and we did a two parter in 2024, which we're doing again this year. So the way this is going to work is we're going to go back, revisit a story that we covered, tell you the date we covered it, read an excerpt from what our take was at the time, whoever wrote the piece, and then we're going to reflect on the take we wrote and then give ourselves a letter grade from A to F, and then we add those grades up at the end and do a little gpa. So the way we choose the stories is not cherry picking the ones we did really well. This year, we did happen to do really well. We ended up with the best grade of any of the years we've had, which I'm super thrilled about. I think it's just a product of the incredible editorial team we've built, but we picked stories to review based on the ones that, looking back on the year, were the big stories of the year. And so that's just generally how we're choosing what to revisit, the ones that really drove a lot of reader feedback or permeated the conversation in a way that felt really meaningful. All right, with that, we have a ton to cover. This is going to be a long episode, but I hope it's worth it. And we're going to kick things off with something I wrote about Pete Hegseth's confirmation hearing and then the Signal Chat controversy, which were additions from January 15 and March 31. So in January, we covered Pete Hegseth's confirmation hearing with a skeptical tone about his readiness for the job. In March, we revisited that take after Hegseth shared war plans in a Signal group chat that included Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of the Atlantic. Here's what I wrote after his confirmation quote. As I've said in the past, we as Americans have been remarkably safe in the post 911 era from foreign threats, and we are totally unaware of how Good. We have it here in the US Our soldiers are in about as little danger as they've ever been in my lifetime. We're pulling back from many major conflicts, and the vast majority of the issues facing our Department of Defense involve wasteful spending, inventory issues, shaky leadership, and the fact we are falling behind on advanced military technology. I don't see any reason to believe that Hegseth, who has a leader of several smaller, less complicated organizations, has been followed by allegations of poor leadership, disorganization, sexual misconduct, poor financial management, and drunkenness, is the right person to solve these issues. And after the signal controversy, I wrote the most disappointing part about the entire spectacle is that there's been no accountability. This administration has made meritocracy a central point of its entire ethos. President Trump repeatedly and rightly criticized President Biden on the campaign trail for not firing anyone for major mistakes in his administration like the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal. Hegseth, whose mantle of meritocracy was always something I was skeptical of, has completely dodged any ownership of how bad this looks. Will the administration pay for this politically? It seems unlikely. If you watch a few minutes of Fox News's coverage of the story, you get the sense that much of Trump's base won't have to grapple with the seriousness of what happened. All right, reflecting on this, I feel pretty good about this one, Hegseth's first year has been marred by controversies, constant leadership shakeups in the military and fresh military engagements. It's been rocky in many of the ways I expected it to be, and we now have a more aggressive military with soldiers more in danger than we did a few months ago. Yet I do give him credit on three counts. One, he made some waste cutting reforms. Though small in the grand scheme, they amounted to more than $5 billion of cuts to contracts, grants, et cetera. Two, I genuinely did not expect him to last through 2025, but I never made that prediction publicly. And three, we've had two high profile military engagements, Iran and Venezuela, that were tactical successes, which is really his job. I will note on Venezuela that Hegseth spoke passionately just a few weeks ago about the end of regime change and feckless nation building and then carried out these strikes and capture of Maduro. But still, my point has always been that Hegseth was the wrong person to address the actual problems. The military has wasteful spending, inventory issues, shaky leadership, and the risk putting our relatively safe soldiers into more danger. The Pentagon just failed its eighth straight audit and it's not clear to me what hegseth plans to do about it. At the same time, we're now witnessing a military buildup around Venezuela. We just had two National Guard soldiers killed in Syria, and we seem poised for more military entanglements in the Western Hemisphere. So our grade for this take is a B minus. All right, next up is the Israel Hamas ceasefire deal and the Israel Hamas peace plan, which we cover January 16th and then October. In January we covered the ceasefire deal negotiated between Israel and Hamas. The agreement was designed to end the war through a three phase process that included the return of hostages, disarming of Hamas, and a total removal of Israeli forces from Gaza and a Gaza reconstruction plan. Here's an excerpt from my take from that piece. I wish I could tell you this war is over, but I can't. The hard part doesn't start until the first stage is completed. Negotiations for phase two will begin on the 16th day of phase one and will require Hamas to coordinate the release of all its remaining living hostages and Israel to commit to a lasting peace and total withdrawal from Gaza. We are a long way out from a more secure future. This agreement in many ways is a baby step. Sadly, even that small step is off to an inauspicious start. In October, months after that peace plan had fallen apart, we covered another Israel Hamas peace plan. This one Hamas and Israel both eventually agreed to. I wrote in support of the fundamentals of the 20 point plan and then said this. To be here now almost feels unbelievable. I am swimming in skepticism. We had a multi phase deal earlier this year that never came to fruition and Israel was still striking locations in Gaza over the weekend. I'm just waiting for the news that some agreed upon condition has been violated, that some bad actor dynamites this agreement, that some part of the progress was misreported. But I'm tentatively hopeful that we may finally have a light at the end of the tunnel. All right, so reflecting on this piece. I mean, hope springs eternal, but it can also die quietly. I try to maintain my optimism, but it's hard to Both sides have leveled credible accusations about the other side violating the ceasefire, but Israel's violations have been plainly more egregious and violent. One single day of strikes in late October killed over 100 civilians and militants after Israel said Hamas killed an Israeli soldier near the Rafah border. For context, about 151 Israeli soldiers died in all of 2025, and around half of those died in accidents, various diseases or suicide, that is not in combat. In other words, Israel killed more people in Gaza in a single day after the ceasefire than Israeli soldiers died in combat in all of 2025. At the same time, terrorist attacks in Israel have begun anew, while with all eyes on the tenuous ceasefire in Gaza, Israeli extremists are continuing to escalate land grabs in the west bank, squeezing Palestinians into small, smaller enclaves across the region. It's all so ugly, so desperate, so horrifying that most of the world has simply moved on. Tangle has not covered the war since the October peace plan was announced, in large part due to how the story has faded into the background amid other major international news items. As it stands today, Hamas has now returned all but one of the hostages alive or their remains. This was always a key focus of ending the war and a critical demand from the Israeli government and Israeli citizens, something I've supported in Tangle. Yet the strikes, clashing and violence continues. Israel has not left the Strip. It still controls 53% of Gaza per the first phase of the ceasefire deal. Soldiers still roam the streets, drones still infiltrate every part of Gazan life, and the so called yellow line that demarcates military zones has been expanding. In short, for all intents and purposes, there is no ceasefire in Gaza. My skepticism in January was warranted, as it was in October, and I'm despondent enough now that I can hardly fathom a realistic sounding solution. Our grade for this piece was a B. We'll be right back after this quick break.
John Law
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Ari Weitzman
Hey everyone, this is Managing editor Ari Weitzman, and I'm starting with the first piece I reviewed this year, which were Biden's final acts as president from January 22. As a reminder, during the final days of his presidency, former President Joe Biden issued several executive orders on major domestic and international issues. Additionally, he commuted the sentences of nearly 2,500 criminal defendants a single day record, and he granted sweeping pardons to members of his family and other political figures. I focus my take on the Biden pardons, writing Joe Biden probably did not treasonously collude with China or Ukraine to enrich his family through his son Hunter. Dr. Fauci probably didn't commit crimes in recommending strict federal vaccination policies or covering up the origins of COVID 19 and General Mealy probably did not treasonously collude with Chinese officials. That's a far cry from saying any of those parties is above reproach. It's just to say that if there had been federal trials, I would bet money on all of them being exonerated. Even ceding all of that, these pardons are still a terrible last move for Biden's administration, not just because they close off a major pathway to determining whether wrongdoing occurred, but because they escalated the use of a new major weapon in in the partisan arms race. Blanket pardons for everyone I know for as far back as I can justify. End quote. When I look back at Biden's final days in office, I think of the outgoing president, shrouded in defeat and swirling rebukes about his mental fitness, exiting the public sphere amid a flurry of clemency actions and presidential pardons. Focusing my take on the pardons was, I think, the right call. Hindsight shows that those actions were by far the most significant of Biden's final days. On the outgoing executive orders, I was right to say they were for display purposes only and correct that they would be immediately undone by President Donald Trump. As for the blanket pardons, I also believe that decrying the terrible precedent they set was a strong take. I ended my take by arguing that presidents shouldn't even have the power to issue broad preemptive pardons at all. I stand by all of that. However, I do notice a logical inconsistency with this take on reread. I say Biden is not to blame for the bad precedence of his predecessors. But then I say he's partially to blame if Trump uses the blanket pardon precedent after he leaves office. Both of these things can't be true. So if I were to write this take again, I'd still criticize Biden for expanding presidential clemency powers, but I'd give him a lot more slack for the standards that slipped before he entered office and for playing defense against the actions of his predecessor successor. As for a grade for this take, I'd give it a B plus.
Will K
Hi everyone, this is Senior Editor Will k. Back on February 3rd, we covered Trump's new tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China when the White House announced new tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China, it marked the beginning of a tariff saga that would continue through the year and continues today, separate from the Liberation Day tariffs that came a few months later. These duties were described as a way to increase pressure on the three countries to address their alleged roles in allowing unauthorized migrants and illegal drugs to enter the United States. At the time I wrote that, tariffs were one of the few issues on which President Trump has never wavered, both as a politician and a private citizen going back decades. I also noted that Trump's tariffs on China in his first term failed to produce the desired results, and I covered the tariffs with general skepticism. Here's what I wrote. With Mexico, we appear to be headed for a best case scenario better enforcement on their side of the border leading to declines in drug trafficking and migration before either country feels an enormous economic impact. A similar agreement may be possible with Canada, but Trump's goals for the tariffs are harder to determine. The White House claims that fentanyl production is rising in Canada, but CBP data from the past three fiscal years shows that the amount of fentanyl captured coming from Canada makes up less than 1% of all fentanyl seized nationwide. Now, here's a reflection on that take. I think my assessment has largely proven accurate, but given all the delays and reversals the tariffs, broader impact is still very hard to determine. Trump announced these duties on February 1st, but the Canada and Mexico tariffs were delayed until March, then adjusted repeatedly. Meanwhile, the China tariffs were implemented immediately but have since been modified twice. Even for someone who follows the news as their job, keeping track of which tariffs are in effect, which are just threats, and which have been withdrawn has been a bit like playing Three card Monty. I can make a few judgments, though. In retrospect, the commitments that Canada and Mexico made in response to the tariffs were little more than symbolic. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum sent 10,000 troops to the border, but according to a Washington Post report, they seized a small amount of fentanyl compared to their US Counterparts on the US Side of the border. Meanwhile, Canada appointed a fentanyl czar as part of a revamped border security program. But as I noted at the time, Canada is responsible for just a fraction of the fentanyl trafficked into the US at the same time I wrote, quote, I suspect Trump is primarily using the tariffs as a tool to address America's trade deficits, which has aged well. It wasn't long before the president dropped the pretense of illegal immigration and drug trafficking and started talking about the tariffs only with regard to trade imbalances. Above all, I was right to say that this tariff agenda risked lasting damage to our relationships with allies. Just think of how different our relationship with Canada and the European Union is today compared to this time one year ago. We'll talk more about the impact of Trump's Liberation Day tariffs a bit later on, but for this initial set at the start of 2025, I think I was on target in predicting where we were headed. With all that in mind, the grade for this take is A B.
Ari Weitzman
On February 24, we covered the future of USAID or USAID following a week of upheaval at the U.S. agency for International Development, or USAID, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced he had taken over as acting administrator of the agency and told lawmakers that he intended to work with Congress to reorganize it. USAID would officially shut down and merge its remaining operations with the State Department later that year. On July 1, in my take, I struck an ambivalent posture about the initial moves, writing, I agree with a lot of the communications that have been coming out of the federal government, especially from Rubio. If the United States government is going to be in the philanthropy business, it should be directing its funds strategically. However, I disagree with a lot of the government's communications too, especially from then White House advisor Elon Musk. Let's realign this organization to follow the national interest is completely different from let's shut this whole thing down. And dangling USAID off the sharp edge of a precipice has real consequences. There are plenty of good reasons to want to shake up usaid, but citizens and noncitizens alike shouldn't be left trying to give our best guess on what those reasons are. And government by rug pull isn't a great strategy for the most powerful person on the planet. I was broadly critical of the administration putting the entirety of USAID's budget in the crosshairs. For that, I'm saved a failing grade, but I'm left grimacing as I reread this take for several reasons. First of all, I said at the time that it was too early to judge whether USAID would be removed entirely. And sure, caution and prudence make sense, but all the signs were there, and I should have stated that it looked like the program was doomed. Second, and more importantly, I was too blase about USAID's global importance and the risk of the program getting slashed. USAID provided good value for everyone involved. It was a small part of the federal budget. It allowed us to exercise soft power through humanitarian diplomacy and gave us a good standing in relationships that counter the geopolitical interests of Russia and China. And, of course, it saved lives. And sure, the agency's functions aren't exactly extinct they're under the auspices of the State Department. But those programs are significantly hampered, and the agency itself is in the past. The bottom line is I spent too little time promoting the benefits of this program and too much time considering how a potential reorganization could be in our nation's interests. Personally, I highly value international cooperation. If all I knew about myself was what I read in this take, though, I never would have gathered that. When I give this a grade, I give it a D.
Isaac Saul
We'll be right back after this quick break. Why choose a sleep number? Smart bed?
John Law
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Isaac Saul
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John Law
Hey everybody, this is Executive producer John Lal. On February 25, we covered the what did you do this week? Email to federal workers. In February, we covered Elon Musk's demand that federal employees responded to an email from the Office of Personnel Management detailing their work in the past week. Here is an excerpt of what Isaac wrote about the new no self respecting person would take an email preceded by an explicit threat of losing their job, demanding they list five things they did in the last week as a fair way to be treated. Every single person regarding this would be somewhere between annoyed and enraged, and rightfully so. Imagine your reaction to getting this on a Saturday night with a 48 hour deadline to answer, and at the behest of a person you'd never met, don't work for, and who was gleefully mocking you on social media while issuing it. Of course, nothing illustrates the self defeating and ineffective nature of this directive more than Trump's own agency heads instructing their employees to ignore the email. Here's Isaac's reflection. Along with criticizing this as cruel and silly, I also pointed out that it was a pretty pointless exercise and made little sense for agencies to fire people for not responding to an email from someone who isn't their superior. I question not only the efficacy of Musk's tactic, but the usefulness of the exercise at all. Not because federal workers are all infallible, efficient employees, but because emailing 2 million people asking them what they did that week, pretending you're going through their responses and making employment decisions off of them, is just plain dumb. I think all of that aged pretty well. Most agencies ignored the email entirely, telling their employees they didn't have to reply to it. Some tried to enforce the rule not by asking them to reply to opm, but by asking them to reply to their frontline supervisors. While Trump touted the email as brilliant and Musk expressed frustration that it wasn't being done, everyone else just moved on quietly. In August, OPM ended the requirement to send the email, adding that we believe that managers are accountable to staying informed about what their team members are working on and have many other existing tools to do so. Which well, yeah, we decided to give this grade an A.
Isaac Saul
In February, we wrote about Kash Patel and Dan Bongino now leading the FBI. We broke down their appointments and like the appointment of Pete Hegseth and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. They drew some of my most critical feedback for the administration yet. Here's an excerpt. Patel, at best has some relevant experience, but I'm still not thrilled about him leading the bureau. He has openly promised retribution against Trump's political enemies. He's made his career a loyalty show to Trump. He said the figure at the center of the QAnon cult should get credit for all the things he has accomplished. He hawks dietary supplements to reverse the vax and get healthy, and he claims he's going to crack down on leakers and prosecute journalists. He also still will not admit that Joe Biden won the 2020 election. Bongino leading these agents is just as hard to fathom. He's so radical again, just read a few of his sample quotes, and so power hungry that I struggle to imagine what he'll do with so much control. My only hope is that there are still enough ethical and law abiding agents and lawyers among the FBI's roughly 38,000 employees to check Patel's and Bongino's worst desires, but I can't say I'm enthusiastic about the odds. All right, reflecting on this, I wouldn't say I'm surprised I by how either of their tenures has gone. Bongino is already out and seems genuinely thrilled to be back to podcasting. As a senior FBI official, Bongino conceded that he now had to follow the facts and be careful about what he said. Imagine that. Given that he's back in the podcast chair, I presume he'll pick up where he left off, indulging all manner of conspiratorial thinking and speculation. Patel, for his part, seems to be on thin ice with even some of Trump's most ardent supporters. Not just for controversies about gallivanting on taxpayer money with his girlfriend, but more because he's like the dog that caught the car. He and Bongino both had to spend much of their first year trying to convince their biggest fans that many of the conspiracies they pushed, like the Epstein Files, didn't actually have much there, so much that their followers began wondering if they themselves had been compromised. For me, watching Bongino and Patel squirm as they had to switch from talking heads to FBI officials was genuinely cathartic and and the brief period of time where they stayed more attached to reality was appreciated. In this piece, I predicted that Bongino and Patel would be disasters. While reviewing that claim, I realized that I didn't have a great metric for objectively grading the performance of the FBI or FBI officials. But a few things come to mind. On two separate cases, Patel announced the arrest of high profile subjects, only to then have to backtrack and say they had the wrong person. The agency disbanded a key public corruption squad in its Washington office and upended how it prosecutes white collar crime and not in a good way. Despite promising unprecedented transparency, Patel has made a habit of confrontationally dodging questions in public. The FBI scaled back staffing and work on domestic terrorism. Patel has followed through on his promise to act as a personal police force for the president, including by arresting James Comey and firing an FBI agent for not perp walking him. The good news, I suppose, is that the FBI has not been so derelict under Patel for an unprecedented wave of preventable crime or domestic terrorism to break out. But the embarrassments and hiccups after just one year are notable. I'm genuinely not sure what I would write differently if I rewrote this take today, so my grade is an A.
John Law
Next up on March 3rd, we covered the Trump Zelensky Oval Office blow up. On February 28, Trump Vice President J.D. vance and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy met at the White House to conduct final negotiations over a mineral rights deal. Toward the end of the meeting, Vance and Zelenskyy clashed over how the administration might navigate Russian President Vladimir Putin. After the meeting, Zelenskyy left the White House without signing the minerals agreement. Isaac's take was mostly a play by play analysis of how the meeting went wrong and concluded by apportioning blame all around, isaac wrote. I really don't know what will happen now. Zelenskyy obviously still wants the deal. The Ukrainian people seem to support how he comported himself, even if they understand it may have been damaging. If Trump and Vance really do decide to end our support for Ukraine and pull out of this deal, Zelenskyy's actions will go down as one of the most catastrophic diplomatic failures I've ever seen, and for us, it'll be little more than a national disgrace. As Trump himself said on Friday, we shouldn't play games with World War three. That message is applied just as well to Ukraine's leader as it is our own. Here's Isaac's with some time between now and the incident in question, the play by play remains accurate. I wrote that comments from both sides created a maddeningly, infuriatingly unnecessary situation, and I feel the same way today. Zelenskyy should just have let it go, and Vance shouldn't have escalated. That said, I do have a few knocks on my take here. For one, my conclusion reads like I'm putting Vance and Zelenskyy on the same level. I think Zelensky had reason to push back, even if he shouldn't have, while Vance's motivations remain a total mystery. For two in my focus on the blow up, I didn't get into a broader discussion on the chances for a US Brokered peace deal to succeed. I don't necessarily feel bad about leaving that out to focus on the details, but it does seem like a big omission in retrospect. We give that grade a B. Next up on March 11, we covered Columbia University's funding cut and Mahmoud Khalil's arrest In March, we covered the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil and the Trump administration's decision to cut federal funding to Columbia University. In Isaac's take, he's reminded readers that he's often had critical things to say about student protesters, and to keep that in mind, given what he was about to write, Isaac wrote, I say all this to remind you that my views on student protesters have some nuance but are far from innately positive. I hope that gives my statement more weight when I say that the arrest of Khalil is one of the most chilling acts by the Trump administration yet. Most importantly, President Trump is infringing not just on the inalienable right of free speech, but the fundamental ethic of it. The Trump administration promised it would focus its deportation efforts on the worst of the worst, but instead are bringing the force of the state down on a Columbia University alumnus with no criminal record who just got his master's degree in international affairs and whose wife is an American citizen and eight months pregnant. No matter how you feel about Khalil, his movement, the students at Columbia, or anything else, if you value civil liberties, due process and free speech, you should find this development deeply disturbing. Here's Isaac's reflection. This take was decidedly a mixed bag. The upside for Migrade is this was a harbinger of things to come. The Trump administration has continued to infringe on free speech, not just for immigrants, but also American citizens, corporations and institutions. Waves of aggressive deportations have mistakenly caught innocent people and American citizens in their wake. Far from a focus on the worst of the worst, the Trump administration has continued to predominantly deport unauthorized migrants in the country who have no criminal record. They've targeted workers in the parking lots of Home Depot and people showing up to immigration hearings that is following the law. On the other hand, the administration has successfully pegged Khalil for an immigration crime and likely found a legal pathway to deporting him. It turns out he committed fraud on his green card application by omitting his involvement with two the United Nations Relief and Works Agency of Palestine Refugees and Columbia University Apartheid the West. He has now received a deportation order to Syria, his native country, or Algeria, where he is a citizen. Still, Khalil very obviously was punished for his speech. The Trump administration is not pursuing his deportation or fishing for violations like this is an audit of green card holders. They're doing it because they want to make an example out of him, which to me, and I hope everyone else is still a terrifying flex of government power. At the same time, I have to dock myself some points given that they have found a legitimate pathway for deporting Khalil and which I did not expect when I wrote my take. We give this grade a C. Hey everybody, this is John, Executive Producer for Tangle. We hope you enjoyed this preview of our latest episode. If you are not currently a newsletter subscriber or a premium podcast subscriber and you are enjoying this content and would like to finish it, you can go to readtangle.com and sign up for a newsletter subscription or you can can sign up for a podcast subscription or a bundled subscription which gets you both the podcast and the newsletter and unlocks the rest of this episode as well as ad free daily podcasts, more Friday editions, Sunday editions, bonus content, interviews and so much more. Most importantly, we just want to say thank you so much for your support. We're working hard to bring you much more content and more offerings, so stay tuned. I will join you again for for the daily podcast. For the rest of the crew, this is John Law signing off. Have a great day y'.
Will K
All.
John Law
Peace.
Isaac Saul
Our Executive Editor and founder is me, Isaac Sol and our Executive Producer is John Law. Today's episode was edited and engineered by John Law. Our editorial staff is led by managing editor Ari Weitzman with Senior Editor Will Kick and Associate editors Audrey Moorhead. Bailey Saw Lindsay Knuth and Kendall White. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75 and John Law. And to learn more about Tangle and to sign up for a membership, please visit our website@readtangle.com.
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Host: Isaac Saul
Release Date: January 9, 2026
This special “Friday Edition” of the Tangle podcast marks their annual tradition of accountability and self-review, in which the team grades their major predictions, policy takes, and analyses from 2025. Host Isaac Saul and his editorial staff revisit coverage from across the year, reflecting on their accuracy, insights, and where their initial perspectives did or didn’t hold up. The episode features a diversity of staff voices reflecting the expanded range of contributors during Isaac’s paternity leave, making for a multifaceted, candid look at the most important political events of the year from their independent, nonpartisan perspective.
Quote:
“One of the things I loathe most about the media is that there’s just no accountability. … So in an attempt to live out that value, I started this tradition where we just review what we got right and wrong and grade ourselves, literally grade the work that we’ve done.”
— Isaac Saul (2:20)
Segments: 4:30–8:53
Quote:
“My point has always been that Hegseth was the wrong person to address the actual problems. The military has wasteful spending, inventory issues, shaky leadership, and the risk putting our relatively safe soldiers into more danger.”
— Isaac Saul (8:05)
Segments: 8:54–12:01
Quote:
“Hope springs eternal, but it can also die quietly. I try to maintain my optimism, but it’s hard to. … For all intents and purposes, there is no ceasefire in Gaza.”
— Isaac Saul (11:50)
Ari Weitzman Segment: 14:13–16:57
Quote:
“Blanket pardons for everyone I know for as far back as I can justify. … These pardons are still a terrible last move for Biden’s administration, not just because they close off a major pathway to determining whether wrongdoing occurred, but because they escalated the use of a new major weapon in the partisan arms race.”
— Ari Weitzman (14:38, original take)
Will K Segment: 16:57–20:25
Quote:
“Even for someone who follows the news as their job, keeping track of which tariffs are in effect, which are just threats, and which have been withdrawn has been a bit like playing Three card Monty.”
— Will K (18:44)
Ari Weitzman Segment: 20:25–23:05
Quote:
“I was too blasé about USAID’s global importance and the risk of the program getting slashed. USAID provided good value for everyone involved. … I spent too little time promoting the benefits of this program and too much time considering how a potential reorganization could be in our nation’s interests.”
— Ari Weitzman (21:54)
John Law Segment: 24:34–26:50
Quote:
“Not because federal workers are all infallible, efficient employees, but because emailing 2 million people asking them what they did that week, pretending you’re going through their responses and making employment decisions off of them, is just plain dumb.”
— Isaac Saul (25:22)
Isaac Saul Segment: 26:50–30:15
Quote:
“He and Bongino both had to spend much of their first year trying to convince their biggest fans that many of the conspiracies they pushed, like the Epstein Files, didn’t actually have much there, so much that their followers began wondering if they themselves had been compromised.”
— Isaac Saul (28:44)
John Law Segment: 30:15–32:42
Quote:
“As Trump himself said on Friday, we shouldn’t play games with World War Three. That message is applied just as well to Ukraine’s leader as it is our own.”
— Isaac Saul (31:27)
John Law Segment: 32:42–35:46
Quote:
“Khalil very obviously was punished for his speech. The Trump administration is not pursuing his deportation or fishing for violations like this is an audit of green card holders. They’re doing it because they want to make an example out of him, which to me, and I hope everyone else is still a terrifying flex of government power.”
— Isaac Saul (34:45)
The panel’s tone is rigorously self-critical, transparent, and unapologetically independent. Each contributor scrutinizes their prior judgments with a mix of humility and principle, often directly quoting earlier analyses and then quickly pulling back the curtain on what they would change in hindsight. There’s plenty of editorial candor, occasional dark humor, and a determination to model the accountability they see lacking elsewhere in political media.
For more, subscribe to the Tangle newsletter and gain access to the full archive and ongoing analysis: readtangle.com