PREVIEW - The Sunday Podcast: Isaac and "White Smoke" Weitzman discuss the new Pope, reader criticism, and Joe Biden.

Summary

Podcast Summary: Tangle – PREVIEW - The Sunday Podcast Host: Isaac Saul
Guest: Ari "White Smoke" Weitzman
Release Date: May 11, 2025

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Introduction

In this preview episode of "The Sunday Podcast" from Tangle, host Isaac Saul teams up with Managing Editor Ari "White Smoke" Weitzman to delve into pressing political topics, including the significance of the newly elected American Pope, addressing reader criticisms of their coverage on former President Donald Trump's administration, and a brief nod to President Joe Biden. The conversation promises an insightful exploration of current political landscapes through diverse perspectives.

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1. Celebrating the New American Pope

Isaac Saul opens the discussion with excitement about the election of the first American Pope, highlighting its monumental significance within the Catholic Church and globally.

Isaac Saul [04:46]: "The first American Pope. This is huge for us."

Ari Weitzman elaborates on the demographic shifts within the Catholic Church, noting that the future leadership will likely reflect the growing Catholic populations in Latin America and Africa.

Ari Weitzman [03:22]: "The future of the Catholic Church is going to be more and more Latin American, African. So we are a little behind the curve with representation for North American popes."

The hosts discuss the cultural phenomenon surrounding the Pope’s election, emphasizing how it has captured public interest in ways previous papacies did not, possibly due to the pervasive influence of the Internet era.

Isaac Saul [04:00]: "This has been like an unbelievable cultural phenomenon... It just feels like this has really captivated the world in a way that maybe the last one didn't."

They touch upon the Pope’s engagement with modern platforms like Twitter, which has sparked varied reactions across the political spectrum, showcasing how personalities interpret his actions through their ideological lenses.

Isaac Saul [09:43]: "The idea that the Pope has a Twitter history... people are looking for hints about how his ideology fits into American politics."

2. Addressing Reader Criticism on Trump's Presidency Coverage

Transitioning from the Pope, Isaac Saul introduces the second major topic: reader criticism regarding Tangle’s previous coverage of Donald Trump’s presidency, specifically the use of a "promise meter" to evaluate the administration's fulfillment of campaign pledges.

Isaac Saul [15:53]: "We got a lot of criticism last week at the end of last week for our review of Trump's presidency that I felt like was worth diving into and talking about."

Ari Weitzman presents the critics' perspective, arguing that the "promise meter" approach may inadequately capture the gravity of Trump's actions perceived as threats to democracy and constitutional integrity.

Ari Weitzman [16:25]: "For many of us, these are not footnotes. They represent existential threats to the American experiment."

Isaac Saul defends the methodology, asserting that evaluating a presidency based on campaign promises provides an objective and consistent framework. He emphasizes that this approach avoids bias and allows for a fair assessment regardless of personal opinions on the administration's policies.

Isaac Saul [19:52]: "It's the degree to which you think a presidency was successful is typically based on what your definition of success looks like. So like Trump ran on something, he had a campaign and he promised a bunch of stuff... that's just a totally fair, reasonable thing."

3. In-Depth Responses to Criticisms

The conversation deepens as Isaac Saul shares a poignant reader comment from Andy Francisco, who criticizes Tangle for not adequately addressing what he perceives as existential threats posed by Trump's presidency. Andy feels that the coverage downplays significant issues like judicial overreach, attacks on free speech, corruption allegations, and the undermining of democratic norms.

Isaac Saul [17:04]: "For many of us, these are not footnotes. They represent existential threats to the American experiment."

Ari Weitzman responds by acknowledging the validity of these concerns but explains that Tangle aims to balance individual issues with broader trends, advocating for readers to draw their own conclusions based on the presented facts.

Ari Weitzman [26:11]: "There's an amount where we want to say this bothers us, and then there's an amount where we want to kind of let the reader do the thinking for themselves."

Isaac further clarifies that their analysis highlights not only the unfulfilled promises but also introduces uncertainty and corruption associated with Trump's actions, painting a critically comprehensive portrait.

Isaac Saul [31:17]: "This is a really critical piece. And I get that. I say, you know, I'm feeling discouraged, whatever. I don't think that's merely what I said. I think that's ultimately what I said."

Despite the criticisms, Issac maintains that their coverage remains balanced and continues to uphold the integrity of their evaluative methods.

Isaac Saul [32:41]: "I'm not trying to be defensive... we are sleepwalking into becoming a country I no longer recognize."

4. Concluding Thoughts

The episode wraps up with Isaac affirming the importance of maintaining an objective framework while acknowledging the complexities of political coverage. Ari reiterates the need for balanced reporting that allows readers to engage critically with the issues presented.

Ari Weitzman [28:48]: "How'd I do? ... We are sleepwalking into becoming a country Andy no longer recognizes."

The hosts emphasize their commitment to presenting multifaceted political analyses, encouraging listeners to engage thoughtfully with the content and form their own informed opinions.

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Notable Quotes

• Isaac Saul [04:46]: "The first American Pope. This is huge for us."
• Ari Weitzman [03:22]: "The future of the Catholic Church is going to be more and more Latin American, African."
• Isaac Saul [09:43]: "People are looking for hints about how his ideology fits into American politics."
• Isaac Saul [19:52]: "That's a totally fair, reasonable thing."
• Isaac Saul [31:17]: "This is a really critical piece."
• Ari Weitzman [28:48]: "How'd I do?"

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Conclusion

In this insightful preview episode, Isaac Saul and Ari Weitzman navigate complex political discussions with clarity and depth. From celebrating a historic moment in the Catholic Church to critically evaluating their journalistic methods in covering Trump's presidency, the hosts demonstrate Tangle's commitment to diverse and independent political discourse. Listeners are encouraged to engage with the content thoughtfully, reflecting on the multifaceted nature of political leadership and media coverage.

Transcript

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[Isaac Saul]

Coming up, white smoke in Rome. White smoke Weitzman. We address some criticism about Trump's presidency. Biden goes on the View. I think more people should be talking about that. And Ari and I share a grievance today. Very special moment in the history of the grievances. All right. It's a good one. You're going to enjoy it.

From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle.

Good morning, good afternoon and good evening and welcome to the Tangle podcast, a place we get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking and a little bit of my take. I'm your host, Isaac Stahl, here with Tangle managing editor Ari Weitzman. Ari, white smoke. White smoke in Rome, baby.

[Ari Weitzman]

White smoke. Whites. That's what they call me. Yes, sir. To quote Isaac Saul, let's jump right in with the.

[Isaac Saul]

Yeah. With the Pope, dude. I mean, is there. Are the flag colors just coursing through your veins right now? The first American Pope. This is huge for us.

[Ari Weitzman]

I mean, the thing I'm thinking about is two things. One, like in the newsletter a couple days ago, when you were so desperate to put the USA chant somewhere in there, just looking for a home for it. I'm glad you found the home for it, which is on the podcast talking about the Pope. Perfect. And my other response is, yeah, honestly, about time. In terms of population distribution, we should have had a couple Western hemisphere popes by now. Should have had an American Pope by now. The future of the Catholic Church is going to be more and more Latin American, African. So we are a little behind the curve with representation for North American popes. And soon we're going to get more African popes because that's just where Catholics are. Seems pretty straightforward to me.

[Isaac Saul]

Kind of a DEI selection, you're saying?

[Ari Weitzman]

I think it's more of a proportionality selection. It's like, who are the Catholics? The Catholics are by, like, demographically, by and large, more Latin American and African. I don't think it's more like, if we keep selecting European popes, that's more dei.

[Isaac Saul]

Yeah, it's a pretty wild. I. I don't think I've. I mean, we haven't really. We, you know, we did our coverage, our coverage of the. The papacy, but this has been like, an unbelievable cultural phenomenon. Like, my friends are texting in the group chat about, you know, who the Pope is and, like, what his background is and what people think of him like this. Whatever the stuff he said about Trump and Vance. And I mean, it's. There was this game, the game going around that, like, everybody on the Tangled team took, which was like, to figure out which Pope you were based on answering 15 questions or something, which I thought was totally hilarious. It just feels like, yeah, there is, like, a real. This has really captivated the world in a way that maybe the last one didn't, because we. It wasn't like, quite the Internet era that this. I mean, we were in the Internet era, but this feels like a little bit different to you. Like, are people in your life talking about this who are not Catholics and shouldn't care that much?

[Ari Weitzman]

A lot of people in my life who work for Tango are talking about it a lot. I think my family members. Not at all. I remember more the last Pope selection because the last Pope retired, which was unusual. And our last pope before the most recent one, like Pope Benedict, the Nazi youth Pope, with The Gucci shoes. He was kind of controversial in the other way. So I always think about him and John Paul when I think of the papacy. And I also kind of think about how I just. I'm. I'm the guy on the team that cares the least. I think about organized religion and about the Catholic Church in general. I recognize its influence. And of course, it might not go without saying, but just in case it does not respect everybody's, like, decisions for their own faith and highly tolerant of that, I just don't really. It does not matter to me, so. And since I'm such a contrarian, as you know, the more I hear people talk about it, the more I'm like, next channel. I. Nah, I'm gonna wait. I'll catch the next story. I'm not in on this one.

[Isaac Saul]

Yeah, I.

[Ari Weitzman]

Sorry.

[Isaac Saul]

Well, no, I was.

[Ari Weitzman]

It is interesting. It's interesting to follow.

[Isaac Saul]

I think it's interesting to follow. I had a lot of fun. Or I've. You know, again, it feels weird because I know this is, like, a really serious endeavor and, like, super meaningful for a lot of Americans, have people globally, obviously, the Catholic Church is gigantic. And then. And it's like, you know, Pope Francis died, so it's, like, weird to talk about how it's a lot of fun to, like, find his replacement.

[Ari Weitzman]

That's a good point. Yeah.

[Isaac Saul]

Conclave. Conclave Help to like that. Sort of also poured gasoline on all this. Yeah. It's like.

[Ari Weitzman]

But what kind of smoke does gasoline make?

[Isaac Saul]

I think white, actually.

[Ari Weitzman]

White.

[Isaac Saul]

No, no, no, it doesn't. No, it burns dark. Gasoline burns dark. I've seen that. That's not. That's a. That's way tangential. I took. I think the most on brand thing that's ever happened to me is I took one of those quizzes to see which cardinal I was, and I matched with Angelo de Donates, which is a centrist cardinal. The quiz told me, which I really appreciate. Everybody on the team was taking the quiz to see which cardinal they were most like. And it seemed like our ideological diversity as a group came out in a really hilarious way. Like, some people were progressive popes, some people were conservative popes. I was the centrist pope.

[Ari Weitzman]

I will say Will got Cthulhu. That was interesting.

[Isaac Saul]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Ari Weitzman]

Some light photoshopping, but it was a very good post by our friend Will.

[Isaac Saul]

Yeah, it was really funny. I will say. I'm just, like, looking at the immediate reaction. And at least here in the States, it's very interesting to see the way everybody is just sort of grasping on to our kind of Western American political lens to talk about this. Like, I saw Will Chamberlain, who is a big conservative activist who was like, tweeted something like, were there really no Pope candidates who had not publicly attacked both the President and Vice President of the United States? And he was like, sub tweeting a Robert Prevost post from 2015 about why Trump's anti immigrant rhetoric is so problematic. And then Charlie Kirk is tweeting out the fact that he's a registered Republican who's voted in Republican primaries when not living abroad, and that he's pro life. And then I'm seeing these progressive lawyers. The new Pope has posted five times in the last two years on Twitter, and they were like him criticizing J.D. vance's take on Jesus, posting an article critiquing Vancey's statements on deportation policies, retweeted the Pope's health, and retweeted criticism of Trump and Bukele laughing at Abrego Garcia. It's really this. This content is so weird to me. Like, you.

[Ari Weitzman]

The idea that the Pope has a Twitter history.

[Isaac Saul]

The idea that the Pope has a Twitter history, the fact that people are looking through it like these, like, conservative activists and liberal activists are looking through it, like, looking for hints about, you know, how his ideology fits into American politics. Then they're like, framing him sort of solely based on that. And then it's like there's this air of like, I've uncovered something. You know, Charlie Kirk is like, scoop. The Pope is a Republican voter. I'm like, well, that's a scoop. Like, he obvious, you know, like, duh. I don't think that's surprising at all. An American Pope who's a representative of the Catholic Church. Church is a registered Republican. Like Eric Erickson. Yeah, Eric Erickson, increasingly one of the, like, most rational voices on the right. He said, so we have a Pope who is aggressively pro life, critical of Trump's immigration policy, supportive of gun control, critical of same sex relationships and same sex child adoptions, and critical of transgenderism. This should not surprise or shock anyone.

[Ari Weitzman]

Like, yeah, that is, like, very representative of that demographic.

[Isaac Saul]

Yeah, of course. I. And I was really, I was like, I'm very confused. People are upset that the Popes are these, like, humanitarians who look kindly on refugees and immigrants and the poor. Is that, Is that like, this is. If you were expressing surprise at this, you're kind of telling on yourself about perhaps your misunderstanding of some of the, you know, Christian Judaic faiths and the kinds of things that they preach. So I don't know. A very weird subject.

[Ari Weitzman]

I get that. Yeah, that is interesting. And I'll. The way that it tells us. The reaction tells us something about the way different people see the. The blocks culturally and politically in the States right now. I'll also add my. The point that I'm always making now, anytime we talk about the Pope, which goes back weeks, veritable days, of me making this point, which is that we should care. He's an influential head of state. He is the leader of a country, and that's a position that has legitimate political power. So it's an important thing to keep tabs on and reasonable to ask questions about his past, given that.

[Isaac Saul]

Totally important, too. I mean, I think he. I think. I think it. There's just some. Yeah, I can't quite put my finger on it. There's just something bizarre about, like, watching people reduce him to, like, was he critical of J.D. vance's comments he made on Twitter? So I'm just like, this is the Pope. Like, I. Nobody cares. You know, like, he's.

[Ari Weitzman]

People.

[Isaac Saul]

Do you care, though? I mean, nobody cares, like. Or. Nobody should care. They should care about, like, the degree to which he. He's instituting the doctrine, you know, or, like, living up to what forms of the church. And yeah, not like, whether he once tweeted that the Trump administrator, it would be news if he. If he was like, oh, I totally agree. We should ship all those refugees out to El Salvador. That would be news that, like, he's critical of the, you know, draconian and strongman immigration policies. Whether you think those policies are right or wrong, it's just like, of course he is. It's the Pope. I don't know, Whatever. But anyway, we got the white smoke from Rome right before. I love saying that. White smoke. We got the white smoke from Rome right before we logged on.

[Ari Weitzman]

So I felt that would have been a really great nickname for me if I ever played, like, pickup basketball. White smoke. White smoke. Come on.

[Isaac Saul]

Yeah, that is good. I'm gonna just start calling myself that, maybe.

[Ari Weitzman]

No, I got that. Hypothetically. You gotta wait for me to pick it up.

[Isaac Saul]

All right, yeah, fair enough. We'll be right back after this quick commercial break.

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[Isaac Saul]

All right, well listen, we have a couple things on our agenda that I feel like we, we must get to. And so I don't want to, I don't want to dilly dally on the, the Pope stuff. Plus we got a lot more to learn about this, this American Pope. Usa.

[Ari Weitzman]

Usa.

[Isaac Saul]

Usa.

[Ari Weitzman]

Out of your system?

[Isaac Saul]

Out of my system. Yeah, we, we got a lot of criticism last week at the end of last week for our review of Trump's presidency that I felt like was, was worth diving into and talking about. And increasingly I think the podcast is like such a great venue to do some of that because it kind of allows us to have a longer form conversation about, you know, some of the stuff that's obviously bothering our readers or listeners.

[Ari Weitzman]

Yeah. Before we get started, I Want to put a, like kind of a posture for myself here because it is a good forum to have a longer form conversation. But the conversation is very one sided, like it's us trying to represent the criticisms and then respond to it with our opinions. So what I'm going to try to do as you go through this and set the table is try to respond as if I'm channeling the criticisms from the readers that I've been hearing as I understand them. So that way we can try to sort of emulate what a conversation here would be. So how's that sound?

[Isaac Saul]

Yeah, that sounds good to me.

[Ari Weitzman]

Cool. So what's up?

[Isaac Saul]

Okay, so I think maybe I'll just start by chant like you're going to do the channeling. I'll just do the summarizing of some of the criticism. One, the first thing I want to talk about is there was this sense that the promise meter, you know, the looking at what Trump's promise he was going to do and then talking about the degree to which he fulfilled that promise, was a really poor way to handle an administration that is, quote, unquote, you know, threatening to undermine democracy and like sending the country into a constitutional crisis. First of all, let me just be really clear. We have used that format, we used the format, that format to cover the Trump administration the first time. We used it to cover the Biden administration at various intervals through his presidency. And we're going to keep using it to cover the Trump administration. Why? Because it's actually a really good, like, objective, neutral way to talk about a presidential administration. And it, it's, it's really hard to say. This is why I hate the presidential rankings. It's really hard to say whether a president is good or not because the degree to which you think a presidency was successful is typically based on what your definition of success looks like. For some people, a successful presidency might mean totally overhauling our energy systems and reducing the use of oil and coal. And for other people, it might be the complete opposite. So like Trump ran on something, he had a campaign and he promised a bunch of stuff. And it's our job to hold him accountable for the things that he promised since he got elected on those promises. And so I think in a vacuum, it's not the best. You can't just do that. But I think as one tool, which is how we use it to measure a presidency, it's actually really good. It's just saying, like this person said he was going to do things, he got elected on the promises he made, did he do them. And that, to me, is like a totally fair, reasonable thing. On top of the fact that it's like a consistent way to do it. Since we did it for past presidents and we'll do it for future presidents, we're not going to break the protocol for any specific person. On top of that, I think it's just like. That feels to me like a totally reasonable, smart metric for measuring somebody's success as a. As a leader.

[Ari Weitzman]

I think the feedback, as I best understand it, is that it is not Tangle who would be breaking protocol, but Trump who has already broken it. And thus, it is incumbent upon us to recognize this president is doing more by executive order, working with Congress, less violating due process concerns in a way that we have admitted we're concerned about. And in that kind of situation, we should, as a news outlet, call out, hey, this is a president who ran on controlling the border and ran on deportations, both people who are accused of being in the country illegally and protesters on college campuses, which were both promises he made. Those weren't confusing or surprising, but it should require a little extra work for us to say, you know, there's. There's feedback to this. There's reasons why this isn't great and why we don't like it, and we have to try to centralize it or at least weight it differently. The fact that we had all the core promises in one big edition Thursday, and then you had to wait a day to see what else was coming, didn't feel great. So that's what I think the first big concern was.

[Isaac Saul]

Yeah, and that makes sense. Like, I suppose that's fair. I'm just, yeah, whatever. We explained what we were going to do, and then we did it. And I think there's a really clear defense for why you should do it this way and how it removes the degree of bias that you introduce. You know, like, if, again, it's like, to just use Trump as an example, he's promised to deport 20 million people, and he ran on that promise and he got a majority of the vote. So for half the country, you know, him deporting 20 million people would be presumed to be a good thing. So, like, our judgment on his presidency, whether I think that thing is good or not personally, can't just be like, oh, I think this is good or bad. This is the best presidency ever because he's deporting 20 million people, or this is the worst presidency ever because he's deporting 20 million people. I think there should be some element of, like, here's what he ran on and here's what he's doing. And that's a good way to kind of structure how we think or talk about it. So that's one criticism. Foreign. We'll be right back after this quick commercial break.

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[Ari Weitzman]

You could set the table on the second criticism if you want. I've got more in the bag, so I'm sure there's going to be looking for ammo.

[Isaac Saul]

I have one more that I definitely want to talk about and maybe it'll be different from yours. The second criticism is just that we didn't meet the moment because we didn't truly capture the threat that Trump represents. One commenter, Andy Francisco. He has the top comment, the top, the most liked comment on part two of the review. And he starts by just saying, like, I really love tangle and value all the work you do. And by the way, this is a great way to deliver feedback. It was constructive. It's thoughtful. He quotes our writing directly. He's not like, miss. What's the word?

[Ari Weitzman]

Mis. Presenting. Misrepresenting.

[Isaac Saul]

Yeah, mispresenting or misrepresenting what we wrote. He's not straw manning. He just like straight up addresses what we said and explains why he doesn't like it. I love this kind of criticism because it gives me something to think and talk about. So thank you, Andy. He said his quote says what I think many of my fellow left leaning commentators find so frustrating from the independent minded voters at large is the reluctance to recognize the moment. And then he says, you admit. And he quotes my writing. Of course, this is all without even touching the collision between the judiciary and the executive branches, or the attacks on free speech, or the open corruption of his crypto grift, or the many regulations he slashed that make corruption easier, or the predictable poor performances of some of Trump's most high profile cabinet appointees. For many of us, this is now Andy talking. For many of us, these are not footnotes. They represent existential threats to the American experiment. Why the decision to not deal with them in this two part analysis. Frankly, I don't care about the effect of economic policy on my 401k. If we have slipped into some kind of kleptocratic nightmare state that focuses its resources on going after perceived enemies to reach the end of today's newsletter find that you ultimately land on merely feeling discouraged fuels my concern that we are sleepwalking into becoming a country I no longer recognize. What is it going to take for those in the middle to admit that we have crossed the Rubicon and and should start ringing the alarm bells? Your voice carries weight and the evidence is staring us in the face. Please say something.

[Ari Weitzman]

I respond to this one. Can I? Maybe we'll flip, flip rolls here for a second, see how it goes.

[Isaac Saul]

Sure. Yeah. Yeah, go ahead.

[Ari Weitzman]

I know you're gearing up. I know you got something. So I want to see if I can represent this a little bit and start off by saying we have, I think directly said ring. Use the phrase ringing alarm bells before. Like that's something that you've said in your take. It especially as relates to the Abrego Garcia case of him being sent to a country where he had a court order saying that he could not be sent to and then the government saying nothing we could do about it. That is alarming. I think the big response that I would have, maybe yours is a little different, is that there is an amount where we want to say this bothers us, and then there's an amount where we want to kind of let the reader do the thinking for themselves. And to say we've covered all of these issues individually about crypto, about free speech, the chilling effect about the judiciary and executive just completely eclipsing the role of the legislative right now. We've talked about all that stuff. What we're really discussing now is a weighting issue. What I'm hearing is the concern of you said this, but I wanted you to say it more. And I think it's a little bit of a mismatch between what we believe is important for us to do and what some readers who are critical believe is important for us to do. Because what we think is important is going and kind of digging out some of the larger things, like what are the larger promises, what are the accomplishments, achievements so far. And just try to talk about those as plainly as we can so that we aren't getting overly indexed upon those individual issues that are serious, that are concerning, but are kind of individual or not totally representative. I think of forward trends that we could extrapolate forward. This is a thing, a little soapbox of mine. I'll get on it right off. That annoys me about both sides of any political debate in the us, Left or right, is assuming that the thing we're watching now is a trend that if you do not act now, will become a wave that overflows and destroys our society or culture. With a right, you hear it all the time about culture issues or the degradation of moral character. With the left you hear it about norms, the attack on courts, free speech. Whereas I think it's probably more accurate to think of things right now as a high watermark rather than as an upward sloping trend that's going to keep extrapolating to infinity. So that kind of informs our difference in tone, I think, as well as the difference that we have and the weighting of our coverage. How'd I do?

[Isaac Saul]

I think that's all great. I mean, I agree with a lot of that and would certainly be part of like the defense or response or whatever you want to call it. Because I'm not trying to be defensive, though I have to be honest that I, despite this criticism, being popular with some of our readers, clearly, because it's the top comment on this post that I don't find didn't move me to believe that we are somehow doing the wrong thing in the way we covered this. I would add something too, about the writing, which is just like the way the my take was structured, which is what this writer, this commenter, is addressing, is that I went down through the promises and I made the case that on the things that Trump was saying that he was going to do, even among the biggest, most important promises he made, the centerpieces of his campaign so far, there were basically two things that felt like he could credibly claim his victories, and both of them had major caveats. That sort of Undermined them. So the structure of the piece of what I was writing was through the lens of even if you're supportive of the President and you want him to succeed at the things that he's supposed to succeeding at, then he's not doing very well. Right. Like, even if you are aligned with him on these five core campaign goals, like core campaign promises, core visions for the country that I think Trump has had and has had forever, then he, then he's struggling, you know, like he's, he's not fulfilling the promises at that level that he says that he's going to fulfill. And that's like resolving the conflicts, cutting spending and waste, the tariff rollout. As you look at those things specifically, basically the only of them that he's, I think really credibly has made progress on is reducing the chaos at the southern border, which he has done. And then I'm saying all of this is not even talking about these like significant term defining issues.

[Ari Weitzman]

Like, it's saying I'm starting with the strongest case you could build.

[Isaac Saul]

So tackling that first, which is just like a rhetorical, like to me, the takeaway from that is like that Trump's presidency is off to a really horrendous start because he's, he's not, he's not succeeding at many of the things that I want him to succeed at. And he's also doing a bunch of really horrible stuff that I didn't imagine he would be doing. It's like a very, I don't know how you could read this without coming away. Like, this is a really critical, like a real, a really critical piece. And I get that. I say, you know, I'm feeling discouraged, whatever. I don't think that's merely what I said. I don't think that's ultimately what I said. That wasn't like the core takeaway of my writing. I think the core takeaway of my writing was that if you're supportive of the president, he's off to a rough start fulfilling the promises he made to you, from my view. And on top of that, he's introduced tons and tons of uncertainty about the future and he's been doing overtly corrupt things like the cryptogrift. And so all of this is just, I think, a pretty unflattering portrait. And I read it as being a pretty critical piece. And it's like there's this element, there's this undertone of it that's like, if I'm not saying that Trump is threatening the future of the country or that.

[Ari Weitzman]

Going all the way to 10.

[Isaac Saul]

Yeah. That democracy might, you know, collapse just fuels the concern that we're sleepwalking into a country Andy no longer recognizes. Just for what it's worth, like, we are a very similar country to what we were a year ago right now, and in three years, we're going to be a really similar country to what we were two years ago. I really believe that. I'm not saying that Trump won't challenge the reach of his executive authority. I'm not saying that he won't do unlawful, unconstitutional stuff. We very well may have a crisis on our hands in the near future. I also think there's, like a really good chance.

[John Law]

Hey everybody, this is John, executive producer for Tangle. I hope you enjoyed this preview of our Sunday podcast with Ari and Isaac. 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 retangle.com and sign up for a newsletter subscription. Or you 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 for the daily podcast on Monday. For the rest of the crew, this is John Law signing off. Have a fantastic weekend, y' all. Peace.

[Isaac Saul]

Our executive editor and founder is me, Isaac Saul, 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 K. Back and Associate editors Hunter Casperson, Audrey Moorhead Bailey, Saul, Lindsey Knuth and Kendall White. The 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 [e-mail].

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