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Foreign,
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Some die of thirst.
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No way of knowing which way it's going. Hope for the best, expect the worst. Welcome to the Commentary magazine daily podcast. Today is Friday, June 12, 2026. I am Jon Pod Horowitz, the editor of Commentary magazine. We are today going to be closing our special July August issue, our summer issue. And the overriding concept is 250 years of America, 372 years of American Jewry. So we are trying to interweave the story of the reasons to celebrate this unimaginably great political experiment with the unimaginably great way in which this land took the Jewish people to its heart and its bosom, even with the horrors that we have been greeted since October 7th. So that should be available Monday morning or Monday sometime. Very proud of the issue. A lot of very good stuff in it. And if you are a subscriber who gets the hard copy, we have a very, very special cover that I am going to tease to you because we've never done anything like this cover before. So commandeering and helming the closing of that issue is, of course, Executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe.
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C
Hi, John.
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A
And somebody who closes an issue every hour, Washington Free Beacon editor Eliana Johnson. Hi, Eliana.
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B
Hi, John.
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A
I assume that the three of us are sitting here in a state of disbelief, despair and terror and hoping against hope that we're not getting accurate information about what is in this supposed deal that Trump announced yesterday afternoon after he called off a halt to the second time, that he was going to destroy their civilization and take their oil and bomb Carg island and make them hurt and suffer. That apparently we're going to do that. But instead, what we've decided, based on everything we're hearing so far, is to capitulate completely and lose the war unilaterally. Am I misreading what I'm reading? Could not be true. Could be that everything we're getting is just Iranian disinformation. But the Iranian disinformation that we are getting is a surrender of the United States to Iran.
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B
I think we should tick through what, where the information that we're getting might be useful, which is that there's a memorandum of understanding that would, under which Iran would open the Strait of Hormuz in exchange for us removing the blockade and releasing half of Iran's frozen assets. And during this 60 days negotiating over the nuclear issue, and I think quite significantly, the issue of Iran's ballistic missiles and funding of proxies are not included at all in this agreement.
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A
Oh, one thing not about the funding of the proxies. But item one in the leak from the Fars News Agency is the cessation of the Israeli action against Hezbollah in Lebanon. Number one, first point in the memorandum of understanding, as the Iranians are displaying it, is not just what we're going to stop doing, but that we are going to force Israel to stop defending itself against Iran's proxy.
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B
Yes, Israel's not a party to the agreement, but the matter of Israel's fighting in Lebanon is part of the agreement. And as part of the nuclear negotiations, Iran would get full sanctions relief. So, John, I will say my optimism comes from. Comes where my optimism has always come from, right, which is that Iran will snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and not agree to any of this. And we'll go on as we have been going on. I mean, even though Trump announced this crummy agreement yesterday, Iran was still firing on our Gulf allies overnight. And so that's where my optimism comes from. But this deal, as leaked, is a very bad deal.
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Abe?
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C
Yeah, I tend to agree with Eliana's point about the Iranians never letting Trump ultimately make the terrible deal that he wants to make, except I'm starting to think that he's getting to sort of Obamacare levels of desperation where he will heap all sorts of goodies, throw all sorts of goodies into the mix to get them to just say yes, probably in hopes of being able to announce it by July 4th. Because this mad rush of this sort of flurry of announcements and zigs and zags that are. That are coming from the administration regarding Iran now makes me think that they are in this, like, desperate push to get this done. And by the way, John, I share everything you said at the beginning, the despair and the horror, but not the disbelief. I, you know, I've sort of, I picked up, I don't know, a few weeks ago that Trump has been signaling, signaling, signaling that he's very capable of folding,
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B
by the way, saying he was gonna. Saying yesterday morning that our attacks were gonna continue and then calling them off. Well, Iran's attacks are continuing on our allies even as they participate in negotiations. This is totally asymmetrical. And if we do want to negotiate a deal, our attacks should also continue. As they continue their attacks. We should not be see, sawing between attacking and negotiating.
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We attacked this week as a counter strike after the Apache helicopter incident to
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the attempted murder of two Americans.
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A
Right. But my point here is that we are not taking action against Iran. We are not staging a military offensive against Iran. That we will then suspend as a result of this negotiation. We're not hitting them hard in order. We're not escalating in order to de escalate. All Trump is doing is opening his mouth, blathering about how tough he's going to be, and then blathering back that he's not going to be tough anymore. We haven't been engaged in a war for two months. We have observed the ceasefire for two months. They have not observed the ceasefire for two months. They have fired at Kuwait, they have fired at Saudi Arabia, they have fired at Israel. And then they made the mistake of firing on our helicopter. And that forced Trump to act, though, remember, in the first hours after we found out about the Apache helicopter attack, he said it wasn't a big deal. So we are left with Abe's presumption of a couple of weeks ago that he just wants out of this thing. And not only I'm willing to say this, we come to a deal of the sort that we're seeing the outlines of from the Iranian news agency. This is a worse deal than the JCPOA, this deal, this 60 day deal, because it leaves Iran's nuclear theoretically, even though obviously the nuclear program is buried under rubble. As it stands, we are not conditioning any change on a change in Iranian posture toward its nuclear program or its ballistic missile program or its support for its terrorist proxies. Nothing. All we're doing is saying, you open the strait and we're gonna talk about you opening the straight and us lowering the blockade that we're doing to your thing. And then if everything is nice, you're gonna get about $300 billion.
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B
We're essentially paying them to reopen the strait.
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A
They only got $150 billion out of Obama. This is apparently close to $300 billion in sanctions relief. $300 billion. So it's worse. If Trump is right and the JCPOA was the worst deal ever, then he has now succeeded in beating Obama. He always wanted to be. Now he wins the award for making the worst deal ever after setting the table to get the best deal ever, which would be the collapse of the Iranian regime and the removal of the mullahs after 47 years and the end of the Iranian nuclear program. And he started it and then he quit.
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B
And can I just point out, John, that we agreed to a two week ceasefire on April 8th. We're now in June 12th. So the two week ceasefire was a two plus month non ceasefire. He's now announced a 60 day. You know, this agreement supposedly contains a 60 day negotiating period that will take us to mid August. And the point I made on Wednesday was if his goal is to wrap this up before the midterms, he's not succeeding at that. We're going to get another two months of headlines and low grade Iranian violence in the Strait that continue this conflict and the headlines around it all the way through to the midterm elections.
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A
Think about this 60 day period just quickly, okay, so we have, we've blockaded and they're, and they're, they're, they're doing what they can to close the strait. They're sitting at a negotiating table somewhere, who the hell knows? They're having the Paris peace talks, they're sitting in a hotel, whatever, and they don't like what we bring up on, say, July 12, so they blow up a tanker in the Strait. What are we gonna do? Is Trump gonna go back to war? He's basically made it clear he's not gonna go back to war. They can act with impunity during the 60 day period in the Strait of Hormuz.
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B
Jack the oil pricer, and closer and closer to the election, which is their goal, to drag this as close to November as possible when his ability, his freedom of action as they perceive it, and I think perceive correctly, grows more and more limited.
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A
But their freedom of action is only enhanced. Here is my point. He has signaled. Yeah, go ahead, Abe.
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C
He's shown them what his version of a ceasefire is. So they know that a ceasefire means the US ceases firing and we don't. And I think, John, in addition to what you cited as making this worse in the jcpoa, in addition to the details and the money transfer and folding Israel and Lebanon into it and everything else, I think the worst part about this deal and what makes it so much worse than the jcpoa, is that this is a deal of US Military surrender. These are the terms, essentially. I know Trump acts as if we're forcing these terms on the Iranians. This is what they're willing to give
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us
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C
if we surrender. And the devastation of that fact is so much worse than everything else.
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A
I think this is a really important point because the JCPOA was obviously conducted, negotiated over two years when we were not in a conflict with Iran. I mean, so it was a diplomatic negotiation, like diplomatic negotiations take place under normal conditions, under which two parties meet and they say yes or no to something. It could be an economic treaty, it could be an economic understanding, it could be anything. Lots of details dotting I's crossing T's One party is more interested in getting to the deal. The other holds firm and makes the other party bend. We went to war with Iran. Now, we can say, and I think rhetorically, it's true that Iran has been at war with us for 47 years and has certainly been at war pretty much with Israel for the last year, year and a half in its own way. But there was no active military conflict between the US And Iran. There was. There is. He started it. He started it February 28th. And so we are surrendering in the sense that we started a war. We did not achieve our aims. Our aim at the beginning of this war wasn't to have them close the Strait of Hormuz and then we negotiate and give them $300 billion to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
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C
Right? This is what they've won militarily. Won in the sense that Trump's decided they've won, right?
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A
Now he says he's won, right? And there is a very great supercut. I'm sorry to say that CNN did. Of the 39 times that Trump has said that we have won, you can go, go to Twitter or social media and you can see this super cut every time he has said that we have received victory.
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B
The part that gives me hope about this, John, is there's the other super cut is of Trump declaring 39 times that we're gonna have a deal within a few days, which is also where we are now and gives me a little confidence that we won't have a deal.
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A
You know, when I go out and people who are listeners to the podcast see me on the street, they're always asking me, is that quince is what you're wearing quince? And the answer is yes, it's usually quints. And why I keep coming back to quints is because they focus on high quality essentials that feel and look amazing. Think breathable linen and soft organic cotton, particularly for summer. Well made basics, but without the luxury markup. It's that rare balance where everything feels elevated but still effortless. Quince European linen pants and shirts. Perfect warm weather upgrade to add to your rotation. Starting at just $34. Their tees are soft and easy to wear and their lightweight cotton sweaters are perfect for cooler summer nights. Elevate your summer wardrobe. Go to quint.com commentary for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's Q U I n c e.com commentary for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com commentary, The bipolarity. I don't mean bipolarity in the sense that once there was a world in which the US and the Soviet Union were, you know, were the superpowers. I mean, mental bipolar disorder. If you think about what we're saying today and what we said in yesterday's podcast, this is what Trump is up to. What he has done, the way he is behaving is unconscionable because you can't see saw like this and be a comprehensible player on the world stage whose actions, if you follow what we like, we will do what we can to reward you or make friends with you. And if you do what we don't like, we will do what we can do to make you uncomfortable. That's the position that we're in as the world's leading power. I assumed, and have assumed from the beginning of the ceasefire that even though everybody says he would like to make a deal and he wishes he didn't have to go to war again and all of that, that mere logic of we're in the catbird seat and they're not, they don't have a whip hand against us and we do against them, would occur to him and that he wouldn't capitulate because capitulation doesn't make any sense, and now we may capitulate. And then the question is, what is everybody else going to think about America for the next two and a half years? Who is going to believe that Trump is either going to keep his word or that his threats will have any power? Remember, even economically in his mind, he had succeeded not against Iran, but that he had shown the world how tough we were going to be because he was imposing the tariffs and did the whole tariffs thing. Last year, well, the Supreme Court ruled the tariffs unconstitutional. So that shit is no longer in his pocket. He is not tariff man controlling the world's economy with U.S. tariffs. I mean, they haven't quite figured out how the tariffs are going to be repaid or whatever the hell it is that has to be the redress for the tariffs. But he's lost his economic leverage and now he's losing his military and geostrategic leverage. What does he have left? Like presiding over a UFC fight and building an arch in which his statue is going to be the same size as Thomas Jefferson's. He's an embarrassment. This is, I want to read to you from Erik Erickson. Our friend, Erik Woods Erickson, who is, you know, a conservative commentator, was very, very far to the right, like, 15 years ago. He and I got into a big tussle and argument over whether or not the government should be shut down against Obama in 2011. He believed in fighting. He thought McConnell was a wimp. All of that. Eric writes the following at least 30 times.
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B
I think it's important to say he's been a big proponent of this war, a big supporter of the war.
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A
Yeah. And basically is a hardline conservative social conservative who did not, you know, who is not part of the Trump podcaster radio fan club. He likes Trump, but he likes him and he doesn't like him. But he doesn't like him. But he tries to be respectful and here's what he Sundays. At least 39 times in the last 65 days, the President of the United States has declared the United States and Iran were close to a deal only to have the Iranians openly mock him and deny it. Yesterday the President went on Fox and Friends in the morning to declare bombings would resume by the afternoon. He declared bombings would cease. He claimed buy in from the Egyptians, the Emiratis, the Saudis, the Kuwaitis. He Egypt said it had no knowledge of any deal. Israel said it had no knowledge of a deal. Then Fars, the semi official Iranian news agency, said there was no deal. Overnight, word came from the Ayatollah that he refused the deal. Then the Iranians started flying drones at commercial vessels in the Strait of Hormuz. The President the other day said Iran was playing us. The only one being played is President Trump. The ceasefire is a true as a farce. The state of war exists between Iran and its neighbors.
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The.
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The President has turned into a clown. He has turned into a clown. That is even for Eric, that is astoundingly harsh rhetoric. And he's right. If what we're reading is what's going to happen, he is a clown. He has embarrassed himself. He has embarrassed the United States. And the question I have, and I actually don't know what your answer to this, Abe, is we said when all of this started like six weeks ago, where we were like, people are saying he doesn't know what the hell he's doing and what the hell is going on. You were like, whatever is the case.
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B
However, Wait, wait, John, I have breaking news. The President of the United States has truthed and he has truthed that the terms that Iran leaked out to the fake news have nothing in all caps to do with the terms that were agreed to in writing. Shocker. What they said, including their weak and pathetic statement on having a deal, bears no relation to the truth. Very Dishonorable people to deal with. With them, there's no such thing as dealing in good faith. Amazing. Also, their totally rebuffed drone attack last night against Indian chips leaving the Hormuz straight is totally unacceptable. All caps. They better get their act together and fast.
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A
Okay, so that's what I'm talking about. Being bipolar, like, living in this atmosphere, this is not sustainable as a country, as an executive branch, as the way our politics works. He is driving us all insane. And I'm sorry. You know, I said to Matt Con Netti yesterday, a couple hours after we had podcasted, it's like we're podcasting every day. It's like we need to podcast every hour because the story changes every hour and we need to take the temperature every hour. You would think podcasting every day would be enough in order to summarize where the country was. In fact, you might say it's way too much because we shouldn't have to have these conversations daily.
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C
Except the story. But the story hasn't changed in two months, actually, because it's the. Trump's narrative changes every hour. But the story is the same, which is that we've ceased to continue to fight victoriously and Iran continues to benefit from it. That's the story.
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A
But he's just said they're dishonorable. Okay, go ahead.
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B
He said the story, which is they're tapping us along and they're playing us for suckers, and they're very dishonorable people to deal with. And his grave mistake is to sit at the negotiating table with them while cease firing and indulge the illusion that you can negotiate with them in good faith.
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A
I mean, I don't want to say he's not schizophrenic, but his policy, his behavior. Schizophrenic's not the right. Because that's actually a clinical diagnosis of something. But he. It's like he's got multiple personality disorder or Jekyll and Hyde. One person is, we're not giving. We're going to get the dust. And they're dishonorable, and every word that comes out of their mouth is a lie. And then the other part is, we have a deal. We're just about to strike it. It's a beautiful deal. We may sign it next week. The Ayatollah is very brave. He's the same person saying these things alternately. I don't think. I can't think of a time in world history where anything remotely like this has happened. I don't know how you go 10 more minutes after this tweet. Without thinking or truth, without thinking there's going to be another truth that reverses this truth.
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C
But the thing, John, about when you talk about the Jekyll and Hyde, neither one is real. Also, I mean, you know, he says, we're going to take Cargill, we're not going to take Cargill. He says there's a deal, but there's not a deal. I mean, so it doesn't. The disconnect between Trump's public face and what's actually happening is what I find the most disorienting and the most impossible to sort of take. There's no way to actually figure out what's going on because he's telling you an alternate story and he's telling you two alternate stories. We're gonna bomb the hell out of them. Or they are so desperate for a deal, it's all done very close. And it's those two fake stories over and over and over again.
- [27:36]
D
I started with one shop. No college degree, no big investors. It was just a willingness to work. Over time, that one shop turned into a multi billion dollar business called Crash Champions. All the lessons I learned along the way came from the grind. And that's what my show Pod Crash is all about. We have real conversations with people who've built things the hard way. We talk to founders, athletes, and blue collar leaders who kept going when things got tough. You'll hear stories of grit, leadership and growth, plus real world lessons you can take back to your team and your life tomorrow.
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A
When you get momentum, you step on the gas. That's how you get separation from everybody else. I was at Harvard Law School. I was. Blah, blah, blah. I looked up, let me tell you something.
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E
There's kids in my neighborhood putting in
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A
sheetrock that is smarter than you. AI is going to disrupt a lot of stuff.
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C
It is never going to disrupt physical
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A
blue collar trade skill. And the guy just looked at me and he said, it's bloody impossible. So I asked him this question.
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E
I said, it's impossible.
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A
Unless that's.
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D
Podcast with me, Matt ebert. Watch on YouTube and listen wherever you get your podcasts.
- [28:44]
E
From the State House to the courthouse, in the emergency room and in the classroom, Americans are losing trust in their leaders. In a 2025 U.S. news and World Report survey, 85% of Americans said government leaders care more about their own power than the people they serve. 73% are disappointed in healthcare leaders, 72% in business, and 68% in education. But there are still leaders worth believing in. I'm Eric Gertler, CEO and executive chairman of U.S. news World Report. This is the Best Leaders Podcast sponsored by the Noble Reach Foundation. On this show, we'll go deeper into the stories, challenges and lessons of extraordinary leaders across public service, business, healthcare and education. You can find the Best Leaders podcast from U.S. news World Report on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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A
If we want to play the game of doing the. He's the New York real estate guy and he's using the art of the deal and the things that he learned from the art of the deal, right? So let's, let's play that game because it's one way of understanding Trump. In the end, when you're negotiating over a building or a, you know, a development space or, you know, like a big lot, you get it and you build the building and then you make a lot of money or you don't get it and you go, you lick your wounds and you go look for another place. He has gone to war with a regime that has been in power in the world for 47 years. It is the longest surviving dictatorship in the world. The Ayatollah Khamenei was in power for 37 years until he was killed three months ago or whenever it was. They don't. There's no going back for them. This isn't. He's up against real estate developer, you know, Robert Solow or you know, Steve Roth of Vornado or whatever. He is up against a regime that is fighting for its survival, that has a deep religious, millenarian component to how it views its position in the world, its purpose in the world, its standing in the world, and what God intends of it. And he's not equal to understanding that when you are playing at this level, and when you are, it's not play. It's not a real estate negotiation. This is the planet's future. And he's an unserious man. He went to war as an unserious person. He got this boost from seizing Maduro and out of Venezuela, plucking him like the funny bone in the game operation without touching the sides and making the nose buzzer go red. And so he thought, I'm the king. We'll just bomb the hell out of them and decapitate them. And then blah dee da. And then it's like, no, you know what? These guys are tough. They fought a war for 10 years against Iraq. They lost a million people in that war. They are the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism for the last 40 years, they murdered 40,000 of their own people in January. They are not effing around. This is no game to them. They got nothing left except to win and beat him. And it turns out that that may not be that hard to achieve. And I so didn't think this two months ago because. Or three months ago because I assumed you go to war with Iran, you're like, okay, we're finally doing it. It's been 46 years since they took the hostages, or 46 and a half years since they took the hostages. We are finally telling them that they are no longer going to play us for suckers or tap us along or do whatever it is that we're doing and that they are evil and that we are taking them out and making the world a better place. That was what I. If you're gonna do it, that's what I assume you're doing it for. So what did he do it for? I mean, seriously, what does he think? That we don't know? But I mean, what did he do it for? Because he could kill the leadership.
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C
No, I mean, he thought it would be easier than it was, obviously. I mean, you know.
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A
Now define it, remember? So we had this whole thing. He didn't want, he wasn't going to do regime change. So what was it? It was getting them to the table. Basically. He then had this physical idea, right, that they would give us the nuclear fissile materials and that would be how the war ended. We would get something physical from them. They get us to let them alone, we take their uranium away from them, right? If we're not getting regime change, then we at least get that now we're getting nothing. They're getting a 60 day ceasefire. That will be forever. They are going to have conditional rights over the closing of the Strait of Hormuz forever, and we are getting nothing. And what we will have done is kill their leaders and bomb the hell out of them for however long we bomb the hell out of them. So this is where I was going with this question, Abe. You know, you said six weeks ago or eight weeks ago, no matter what happens from here on in, you would still be and remain grateful that we did the job that we did in the opening weeks of the war to degrade their capabilities and hit them where we hit them and all of that. Do you still feel that way?
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C
Well, I am still grateful that we destroyed their nuclear program. As for all the rest of it, first of all, I don't even know what their missile capability is at this point, because they're recovering. We're allowing them to recover what. What we had rubbled. And I have to say, yes, it's true that he. He took the nuclear threat off the table for years to come, but again, he has introduced a new and different threat in the form of American defeat. John, as you said, Trump is the guy who said, we're finally going to do this. This is. This is the showdown that we have all been waiting for, some of us hoping for, for decades and decades, and we blew it. And that introduces a new kind of global instability, this essential defeat, massive defeat of the American superpower, The hands of the Iranians, makes for a different kind of dangerous world. So I don't know how to balance the books anymore on this, to be honest.
- [36:45]
A
I'll give you another question, maybe. Eliana, think about this. So he's the craziest person ever to be president, right? So he, I think we sort of agree, is the craziest person. He's a crazy person. And so he's been trying to use being a crazy person as a tactic, right? Like, you better go along with me. I'm crazy. You have no idea what I'm gonna do. The madman theory of history. I am going to embody this like no one has ever embodied it. And even he chickens out at the end. So also taken off the table historically is the idea that the United States elects its most extreme version of a disruptive political actor who no longer follows any international norms. And even he can't get the job done in a unilateral war against an undeniably evil regime that does not deserve to exist. Even he chickens out. Obama chickened out, did whatever he did with that deal. You know, Bush wouldn't finish the job in Iraq until, you know, his back was really against the wall. We pulled out of Afghanistan. What credibility do we have? We can impose astounding damage on another country the way no one else could ever do ever in history, but we don't do the job.
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B
Well, I think that the trap Trump has fallen into is becoming subject to conventional political thinking and conventional political forces and becoming predictable. He's lost kind of the madman edge that he had, which is that he can issue over the top threats, but nobody's believing them anymore because the Iranians, our Gulf allies, Israel, the world knows he doesn't want to go back to war. He won't go back to war. He won't do what he did with Operation Midnight Hammer in June or Operation Epic Fury in Israel. So what arrow does he have in his Quiver. Now it's to issue empty threats.
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C
You know, I do want to take some solace where we can here. The truth that Eliana read out, it's
- [39:26]
B
better than that, right?
- [39:27]
C
Yes.
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A
Okay. Oh, yay.
- [39:32]
C
The truth that Eliana read from Trump saying that the horrible terms that the Iranians released have nothing to do with the supposed deal. Let's look at that. This all could mean. It's still insane, but it all could mean that every time Trump says there's going to be a deal, he thinks he's going to get a deal in accordance with the hardline US Terms. The kind of deal that we would say, okay, that's a real deal. And every time, he's apparently surprised not to get that deal. And because as many times as we've gone through this cycle, at least each time he doesn't say, yes, those horrible terms are the ones that we agreed to. So it could be that he will eventually, and God knows what eventually means, come to the realization that there is no way to get the kind of deal that he knows if he knows this we need to get without absolutely obliterating the regime.
- [40:55]
A
There are a couple of possibilities that you raise in this optimistic scenario, neither which are grounds for optimism in the sense that they fulfill what Matt Con Netti was talking about yesterday, which are the four I's of William Safire's imagining four problems for America in 1980, which were Iran, Israel, incompetence, and I can't remember what the fourth was.
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B
Inflation.
- [41:26]
A
Inflation, right. So we have inflation. Abe went from incompetence to incoherence. Said incoherence would be a better use of that. I. There is the possibility that there is some demented form of negotiation going on, which, of course, is taking place between interlocutors who do not speak the same language literally. And we in the United States no longer seem to employ in these negotiations people, as we have in every negotiation, who are, say, fluent in Farsi, who are fluent in Arabic and therefore can either listen from the side and translate properly and not through the translator who works for the other team, but also might actually be able to bring some clarity, as we did in the Iran Iraq negotiations with Afghanistan. Like, there were native speakers of these languages who were part of the American team who understood grammatical differences and things like that and were able to spot tricks and ploys. I mean, Witkoff doesn't speak Farsi or Arabic, and neither does Jared Kushner, and neither does, you know. I mean, and from what we can tell, there aren't a lot of Other people in the room. And the State Department is not really involved in this negotiations. So maybe we're just hearing two different things. Maybe Witkoff says, Look, here are 10 points. And the other guy says, well, these are very interesting. And then he goes back and says, they've agreed to our 10 points, but they actually did the opposite, because the word interesting means I hate you. Not interesting, if you understand how it's said in a certain context. Or they're lying to Trump, or our negotiators are lying to Trump and they want to take credit for having come up with a deal. And they go back to him and say, it's working, it's working, it's working, it's working, it's working. Don't be mad at us. It's working, but it's not working. Or they're negotiating with somebody who has no power to negotiate and keeps saying, yes, we agree to give you the uranium. And then it turns out, of course, that whoever is saying that is actually the janitor and not the head of the IRGC and has no right to say that you could have the nuclear material or not. So it's possible that something's going on here where we have the world's most incompetent negotiation in which the President is being informed of negotiating breakthroughs or things that actually aren't happening and that our negotiators themselves don't understand, aren't happening, because they're not diplomats, they're not experts in the countries that they're negotiating with. They don't speak the language. They don't know the cultural framework. They know nothing. And I understand. I don't, you know, Itube, I'm against, you know, the State Department's ideological capture and the State Department's going native and being part of the deep state and all of that. But the Iran desk at the State Department or the CIA or the DA understands Farsi and knows everything that's happened in Iran over the last hundred years and knows when they're pulling something that. That somebody pulled in 1927 that they've all learned how to do in Tehran and that you're not gonna let them get away with. That's the virtue of expertise. We wouldn't let me run the computer system that controlled the nuclear football because I don't understand computers. But we're letting these know nothing morons run the most important negotiation of the 21st century. And maybe they're just doing it all wrong. I mean, that shouldn't give you confidence that anything good is gonna happen. But it could mean that Trump is, in some weird sense, acting out of innocence.
- [45:58]
C
It's a better scenario than the idea that he is open to a horrible deal. I mean, honestly, you know, I'd rather he stumble, stumble his way to enlightenment here than, you know, just give it all up.
- [46:18]
B
And they have twice before. They were negotiating before Operation Midnight Hammer in June. There were negotiations before Operation Epic Fury in February. The difference, I think, is that President Trump doesn't seem to have the will and the wherewithal to go back to war for a third time here. I hope I'm wrong, but that does seem to be the difference to me here, because I'm not sure, you know, maybe it's a translation problem, but this is what the Iranians intend to do, is to have negotiations that go around and around in circle. And Matt mentioned yesterday that he didn't realize that the lead Iranian negotiator, Araghi, is a published author. That was something that Amit Siegel had mentioned in his newsletter. And he's the author of a book about the purpose of negotiations, which is to exhaust the opponent through continuing negotiations. On and on and on and on and on. And that does seem to be what we are witnessing here.
- [47:33]
A
Okay, let's, you know, Monday, we may be saying something entirely different. Right. So I want to move on to something that Eliana really, really wants to talk about and I think is very worth talking about. We had finally the servicing of the second named victim of the. What would you call it? Sort of like not victim, but the second named person to confirm Graham Platner's full knowledge of the meaning of his Nazi tattoo and explaining that his reason for not removing it, as he said to her, was that he wanted a reminder of how bad America was and how evil America's actions were, and that this was going to be on his body as a reminder of this fact. So along with Lindsey Fifield, we now have this woman whose name I can't remember after Lindsey's testimony.
- [48:32]
B
I'm not sure if she's been named, but she's a.
- [48:36]
A
She has a bizarre Twitter handle.
- [48:38]
B
She's a woman who he was cheating on a former fiance with.
- [48:45]
A
Right.
- [48:45]
B
And the. The former fiance, her name is now out there, but this is a woman with whom he was. You know, cheaters don't just cheat once. So Grant Platner was previously engaged. He was cheating on the fiance with this woman between February and July of 2021. And she writes that he told her, you know, all about his Totenkopf but anyhow, brings us to the fact that Jodi Kanter, who is the Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times reporter who broke the Harvey Weinstein story and is sort of, I referred to her as the doyen of the New York Times MeToo coverage, along with her colleague Megan Tuohy, she was interviewed by Casey Hunt of CNN about these allegations against Graham Platner. And we had one of the most astonishing instances, but predictable. I saw our friend Josh Krausher saying on X that he didn't see this coming. And I was joking on our text chain, I so did see this coming. She emerged to say that the allegations against Platner of behaving in emotionally and physically abusive ways towards women are not MeToo. And she said they're not me too, because they're not about a boss and a young female employee being subjected to sexual advances. And, and then most importantly, she said they're different accusations than the ones that President Trump faced, which I should note were also not about a boss and a young female employee. The accusations from Stormy Daniels and E. Jean Carroll, they, they didn't work for Donald Trump either. And she said, you know, now we're bundling together all these gender related accusations, but they're actually very different. So I started doing some Googling to find that Jodi Kantor is on a New York Times the daily podcast, the number one podcast everywhere, talking about Brett Kavanaugh and the accusations by some woman he may have never met in high school as a MeToo case. And her colleague Megan Touhy is referring to Christine Blasey Ford as an icon, you know, talking about how she's seen as an icon by many women, while Kavanaugh is seen as a representation of male grievance. And I started thinking about how this does fit into a pattern of Democrats sticking up for women, except when they need an important Senate seat or it's a lion of their party. So Ted Kennedy could leave a 28 year old staffer for dead at the bottom of a pond in Martha's Vineyard. Bill Clinton could sexually harass Paula Jones and rape Juanita Broderick, but that didn't get in the way of his reelection. So, and it fits in with Ron Klain, the one of the most senior members of the Democratic Party climbing in to the Instagram comments of a post. And he's now the chief legal officer of Airbnb climbing into the comments of an Instagram post from the Republican Jewish Coalition to explain that Platners Totenkopf Nazi tattoo was inked on his chest to remember his fallen comrades in Afghanistan, which is an excuse that even Platner himself and his surrogates have not surfaced to date. And Platner got the tattoo before he ever set foot in Afghanistan.
- [53:08]
A
Jodi Kantors first, if I'm right, because I think Ronan Farrow is given credit for breaking the Harvey Weinstein story that began the MeToo moment. Right?
- [53:20]
B
He did. But I believe that with Ronan Farrow, he was at NBC News, and much of the reporting was held back. And so ultimately some of it went to the New Yorker, but certainly, you know, Cantor and Tuohy, and here's what
- [53:34]
A
I want to bring up, but Tuohy and Kantor, if I'm right, I'm looking this up, and it's Tuohy's not on this story. But as I recalled, the first big story that Cantor was involved in had to do with the comedian Louis C.K. this was published in November two of 2017. And this is a story about how Louis C.K. invited two younger comediennes to his hotel room and pleasured himself in front of them. And they say in the story that he never laid a hand on them. If he had touched them or if he had, like, helped, kept, try to keep them in the room or something like that, it would have risen to the level of assault. He didn't do that. He just wanted them to watch him do this. And this story was a huge story, front page, basically destroyed Louis C.K. s career. Right? They didn't work for Louis C.K. it worked for him. They weren't in a relationship with him. They voluntarily came to his hotel room. He behaved. It's gross and disgusting. And like, you know, this whole world of men in prominent. In prominent positions wanting women to watch them pleasure themselves into plants is a whole other thing that I. My mind can't even be wrapped around. I'm only bringing this up to say that the accusation or what Lindsay Fifield says about how Platner behaved toward her was that he had savagely yanked her arm getting out of a taxicab and that he had effectively locked her into a closet that he would not allow her to leave and held the door closed until she fell asleep in the closet and stayed there all night and then woke up in the morning and left. That rises to the level even though she did not go to the cops, according to the Cantor standard laid out in 2017 in her big story about Louis CK to the level of felony abuse. Now. So she's saying that what Platner did doesn't deserve to be mentioned.
- [55:56]
B
And she says, because it's different, because it occurred within a consensual relationship, which presumably is where most physical and sexual abuse takes place. And she says, well, there was one accusation of physical abuse, so it's really not that bad. It's. It is hilarious and astonishing and gobsmacking and entirely predictable. I mean, because they must win Maine to keep the Senate. And at the New York Times, everything is subordinate to opposing Trump. Everything.
- [56:37]
A
When I was a teenager, there was a breakthrough in our understanding of sexual assault, and it was the idea that there was such a thing as rape in marriage. This was the rideout case, late 70s, early 80s. Greta Rideout, I believe was her name, accused her husband of rape. And previous to this, the idea would be that that was. Sexual relations within marriage were an entirely private realm and did not involve the authorities, that this was a different kind of relationship. And that understanding was overturned by the courts. And in fact, we now have statutes. I think probably every state has them, and there may even be federal statutes, depending on how those would function, defining the most consensual relationship that you can have, which is a marriage, as having boundaries beyond which a man cannot go. He cannot force his wife to have sex, even within the bounds of marriage, or be abusive to her even within the bounds of marriage. For Jodi Cantor, 45, 47 years later, to say, well, it's okay because he only locked her in a closet once. Who is she? She published a whole book called. What was it called? She says.
- [58:15]
B
She said.
- [58:16]
A
She said, the whole thing is like, now we've really learned how the power relationship works. But we had already been through exactly this 20 years earlier when it was decided that basically, even though what people did nominally was say he didn't do it, was that it was okay that Bill Clinton did whatever the hell he did with his intern or with Paula Jones or with Juanita Broderick or whoever, because otherwise, these Christian moralistic fascists led by Newt Gingrich were going to take over the country and take away all women's rights. And therefore, Bill Clinton also had to be defended at any cost. By 2017, when all this MeToo stuff comes out, then all of a sudden, a bunch of liberal leftist commentators and columnists, female commentators, go, you know, we should have said the same thing about Bill Clinton. You know, we kind of. We missed a beat there because he started it and we didn't do it. You know, bad on us. Well, it wasn't bad on you. You chose deliberately to do it. You did it. You knew at the time, what you were doing. And now you're sorry that you didn't do it then because you understood that there might be consequences that you didn't like from being honest about Clinton in 1998 and in 2018. There are no consequences for being honest about Bill Clinton because he's not ever gonna be in pop power again, and Hillary Clinton is never gonna be president. So you get to go back 20 years in time and try to correct the record.
- [60:02]
B
John, they said, sorry, we're throwing Clinton under the bus. And they founded Time's up, the whole organization. And then those women who founded Time's up were discovered behind the scene trying to smear Andrew Cuomo's accusers and had to shut down Times up because everything is subordinate to keeping Democratic politicians in power.
- [60:30]
A
Right. Look, we can. What about this? We can say that there are obviously cases of the same kind of defenses going on on the right that are going on on the left. The defenses of Trump by MAGA people after January 6th or saying he didn't do anything that everybody else didn't do and. And ministers of the cloth saying that he's like King David or that he's the most holy God brought him to us to do X, Y, and Z. Obviously, negative polarization and extreme partisanship have an unbelievably hypnotic effect on people's moral sense and the moral framing that they go by or that they seem to want to go by as they go through their lives. But this.
- [61:18]
B
Okay, but we Weren't the lead MeToo reporters at the New York Times.
- [61:22]
A
Right.
- [61:22]
B
We hold ourselves out as protectors of women and the lead feminists in the United States.
- [61:29]
A
Yeah. And win a Pulitzer Prize for it and have movies made about us. She said was made into a movie. I can't remember who played Jodi Cantor. I didn't see it. Which shows you how little I care for this entire line of inquiry, since I see most things. But it is. I mean, calling out the hypocrisy of liberal and leftists as they talk about sexual peccadillos is a. You could do it from morning until night, and you would never. 24 hours a day. And you would never get to the bottom of it. You would never get to the bottom of it. Well, anyway, so this has been a depressing show. This has been a very bipolar week. I hope everybody enjoys the UFC fighting match on the lawn of the White House. And, you know, is so revivified by that experience that we return Monday with a renewed commitment to sports without any rules. And, you know, and the enrichment of Trump's friend Dana White and all of that. Oh, also, congratulations to Elon Musk on becoming a trillionaire today. For our first trillionaire, and probably not our last. You know, if he wanted to throw, you know, some scratch commentaries way, I'd be very, you know, pocket change. You know, he could give us a $50 million donation towards 501C3, and he wouldn't even know that he had done it. So I'm willing to take it. If he's, you know, if he's going to cash in any of that SpaceX stock, I'm guessing we're not going to get it. But I just thought I would just throw that out there because we are a nonprofit. FRAIB and Eliana John Pothoricz Keep the candle burning.