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- [00:00]
Kiko Toro
Foreign.
- [00:04]
Mike Pesca
It's Monday, Jan. 5, 2026, from Peach Fish Productions. It's the gist. I'm Mike Pesca. Here is a quote from over the break ran in the Wall Street Journal. See if you can see who said it. They say aspirin is good for thinning out the blood. And I don't want thick blood pouring through my heart. I want thin nice blood pouring through my heart. Does that make sense? It does not. You maniac. You maniac. President Donald Trump, the thick blood. I don't know, maybe he was thinking about giblet gravy or something. But then a few days after extolling the virtues of thick blood, our plus sized plasma pumping president, plump plasma pumping president, if you will, he authorized that raid on Venezuela that you may have heard about and we got Maduro and we're bringing democracy back to the people. No, we are not. But we are taking the oil. And now, because this got me thinking in the mind, I was in the mind of thickness and thickness studies. Here is a fun fact about Venezuelan oil from the Wall Street Journal. The type of crude Venezuela produces is thicker than most oil consumed on the global market. And refiners from the U.S. gulf coast to China and India can wring more profit out of it than other grades of crude, making it highly attractive for fuel makers. Although I did see an oil expert on Bloomberg, Mukesh Sadev. He was seeking to water down the viscous descriptions of Venezuelan oil.
- [01:38]
Kiko Toro
This oil is so heavy to produce and the number of refineries in the US and elsewhere is declining. Who wants this kind of an oil? We already know Saudi Arabia in the recent times canceled 1 million barrels per day heavy crude oil project Safari. So this is not the oil what the world needs in the future as we go where we need less gasoline, less diesel. So I guess a lot of hot talk, a lot of, I guess, you know, wrong analysis happening. And that's, I wanted to just call.
- [02:10]
Mike Pesca
Out, like so many background actors in a Meghan Trainor video, those refiners just can't handle the thickness. But it's good that Madhav is on a mission to combat the syrupy rhetoric about thick oil. Trump, too, is something of a truth teller on this issue, wrapped in a habitual actual lie. And here's what I mean. Okay, so previous Republican administrations, they also deposed leaders, invaded countries, got involved in oil centered interventions, but they always called it liberation. And it was up to the critics to say it's not liberation. The real motive is economic. Trump just comes out and says, oh, yeah, this is about the oil. And that is his definition of liberation. Remember, he had Liberation Day that wasn't about voting rights or giving more civil rights to people. It was a purely economic play. It also possibly like this initiative, did not go well. Did not go well. There was a successful early initial military operation with that one. I think Liberation Day was a nonstarter right from the start. But the important point is he equates liberation with economics. Our thick blooded president certainly has a thin margin for error in this one. On the show today, we will focus entirely on the Maduro extraction. We have a spiel looking back at Trump's history of bluster, exaggeration and lying about his success on the international stage. Trump does seem to be the kind of guy you wouldn't trust to do an employee self assessment. Right? Another A plus. Hey, Don. But does that mean, does any of the bluster and the lies, does it necessarily mean that he's failed? Even if he has failed to be accurate? But first, and before that, great interview with Francisco Chico Toro, who is an expert in Venezuelan politics. He was recently on the show to talk about his book Charlatans, how grifters, swindlers and hucksters bamboozled the media, the markets and the masses. I don't know, maybe that area of expertise gives him some sort of insight into the personalities of Trump, Maduro and the cast of characters who might replace Maduro. And this I give you is the gist pledge for 2026. Every time the administration executes a daring raid to abduct a foreign head of state, we shall endeavor to bring you wall to wall coverage. We do that today here. Now, Kiko Toro. I'm here to talk about performance in bed. No, not monkeys jumping on it. Not the North American snoring championships. Not folding a sheet. You know, performance in bed. I'm here to suggest you take control of ED with personalized treatments made with doctor trusted ingredients. It's 100% online. It's HIMS. You can access all of this if prescribed. They offer treatment options ranging from personalized products to trusted generics. That I'm going to say this is important and might help with performance. Just knowing this. That costs 95% less than brand names if prescribed. It's not a one size fits all care. It's a real doctor, it's a real medical professional. They will put your health and goals first. Real medical providers to make sure that you get your results. Don't get intimidated. ED is really quite common in the way himss goes about attacking it and not just it, but a lot of other things is the most efficient, most streamlined way to get you what you need. Simple online access to affordable care for ed, hair loss, weight loss and more. Visit himss.com the gist that's hims.com the gist for your free online visit hims.com the gist Featured Products include compounded drug products which the FDA does not approve or verify for safety, effectiveness or quality. Prescription required. See website for details, restrictions and important safety information. Actual price will depend on product and subscription plan you know why we make New Year's resolutions? Well, it's because what we did in December kind of destroyed us. All those holiday parties and the skipped workouts and maybe some late nights decorating the tree so you know you have to get a bit healthier and maybe you're thinking things like gym or sleep. That's hard. What's not hard, but depends on you recognizing how important it is, is to get the right amount of healthy water. And that starts with COVID Pure. When you think about the garbage that might be in your water and therefore in your body, you're starting off behind the curve before you even begin. So Cove Pure changes all that immediately. Their technology is certified to remove up to 99.9% of contaminants. Pretty much anything that isn't water. You know, pfas and microplastics and pharmaceutical residue and fluoride. It all gets removed. This is the purest water you can get. And there are a couple points about COVID Pure that when I extol their virtues, I don't talk about enough. One is with the touch of a button you get hot water so you don't have to put on a tea kettle. Tea kettles are nice seeming and sounding, but they burn a little bit and they minutes. The hot water is great and also you might be tempted to install a complicated system right into your pipes. But if you rent, that's not even an option for you. So this is really the best way to purify your water and by extension your body if the house you live in is not your own. I use Cove Pure every day, many times a day, and it is quite delicious. I will attest to that. CO Pure makes it so easy to get pure water with the push of a button. So this year make a New Year's resolution that sticks. Improve your health with clean water. Right now you can get $200 off for a limited time if you use my link cove pure.com/the gist. Here comes the spelling portion of the show C O V E p u r e.com/the gist to start this new year. Right? Well, as we've been saying, Nicholas Maduro is right now, as I'm speaking to you, a couple miles away from me. Huh, What a turn of events. So we go to of course Japan, where a Nicholas Maduro expert resides. See, Kiko Toro is a Venezuelan, but of course he doesn't live there anymore, which is why he can speak to me freely. Kiko has been on the show a few times. He is the director of Climate Repair at the Anthropocene Institute. The writer of one percent Brighter. He contributes to Persuasion and the Free Press and other publications. Hi, welcome back to the Gist. What do we say? What's the etiquette? We were just speaking of this. Congratulations. Your dictator has been deposed.
- [09:12]
Kiko Toro
I don't know, it's. It's all been so weird.
- [09:15]
Mike Pesca
I'm a. I'm a hard news guy. But I'll start with feelings. What are you feeling today?
- [09:21]
Kiko Toro
I've really struggled with that because of course we've been hoping to get rid of Maduro for the longest time. It's been a nightmare for Venezuela. The guy destroyed the gun. The regime has been really a catastrophe. But we got rid of him and of Celia, his power broker wife. But the regime is still in place. The political prisoners are still in political prison. Communications are still censored. People are not any more free than they were on Friday. So it's this strange double sense of, well, an important thing happened. We're not actually, actually better off.
- [10:02]
Mike Pesca
Right? Because for a dictator to be important and potent enough to warrant this sort of intervention, he has to have tentacles and a large network of suppression. And that was exactly the case. In fact, has he perfected or expanded the regime that Chavez started?
- [10:22]
Kiko Toro
Yeah, look, Maduro is really a creature of the Cuban regime. He came up into the revolution because he was a member of this like extremist pro Cuban party that was founded as a guerrilla outfit in the 1970s. That's where he got his education. That's what he was good at. And what the Cubans did is they built these like systems of social control that were not really based on one person, that were in a way depersonalized. They learned a lot from the East Germans and the Russians, but then they brought it to Latin America and they made it their own. And my little brought that stuff to Venezuela. But it wasn't a personalist regime. This was not a kind of one man show at all. And what's been really, really strange is that he's. Now that he's gone, you can see that this regime has its own kind of internal momentum and its own internal structures and it's ticking along. So I thought it was really telling that there were a lot of venzolans celebrating in the streets of Lima and of Miami and, and wherever like these 8 million Venezuelans have had to leave. But not in Caracas. And Caracas are not celebrate.
- [11:35]
Mike Pesca
Right. Because they know that they will be the first ones to bear the brunt of any crackdowns which are quite possible. So I did want to ask you about that. Has U.S. foreign Policy overindexed for the influence of the Venezuelan exodus in America. In other words, these would be the most anti Maduro and also the most impassioned, maybe the people with the most resour who wanted his ouster the greatest.
- [12:00]
Kiko Toro
Well, that was my fear going into this. But I don't think that's where we are right now. Those people are all feeling really, really betrayed. You know, these are people who tended to vote for Trump if they could vote. People who tended to support the magazolanos is what we call them sometimes. And they thought that the idea was that you would depose the regime in order to put Maria Corina Machado, the leader of the Venezuelan opposition and the pro democracy move in power. But that's, that's not what's happened. I think these people are just feeling betrayed now because in his press conference right after Maduro was well extracted. I don't even know what the right verb is. You know, Maria Corinacho is very nice, but he does. She doesn't have the support to run the country and that she's going to go with the people who are there now, including Delriguez who has is a died in the world and the world like communist extremists. Really.
- [13:00]
Mike Pesca
Yeah. So that is the. She's the vice president, I guess she's the president now. And she. When you say communist extremist people who thought the Soviet Union weren't communist enough, that's her ilk.
- [13:11]
Kiko Toro
Yeah, yeah. So these are people like Maduro who joined initially was called the Liga Socialista. This was the pro Fidel. I don't know to what extent Americans really understand that Cuba and Fidel Castro they always had an independent foreign policy during the, the Cold War. Now they didn't just follow whatever Moscow said and they were often a lot more radical than the Soviets and they were founding these guerrilla groups all over Latin America. And this is like their political tribe. It's Communism, but it's not Soviet communism, it's Cuban communism. That's her political tribe. That's where she came. That's how she came up. When Nicolas Maduro became President of Venezuela, he brought with him this cadre of fringy pro Cuban extremists, mostly because, well, I think the reason is that the Cubans initially installed him in the Vice Presidency. They wanted their guy there. So it's a really weird, it's just inexplicable to me that a guy like Marcos Lubio, who is a Cuban American who like, understands the extremism of Cuban communism better than almost anyone in Washington, looked at a lady like Densi, whose father founded the pro Cuban League Associalista. There's a whole story there. And, and said, yeah, this is the moderate that we can, that we can work with. Like, no, you'll never find a Venezuelan who would call Del C. Rodriguez a moderate. She's definitely not that.
- [14:39]
Mike Pesca
She's like in many ways the Marine Le Pen of Venezuela, just in terms of her lineage and the radical legacy, though not aligned ideologically. So Rubio was asked about who are you going to work with, who is going to lead Cuba on the Sunday shows. And on one of them he said, we'll see. We're going to make an assessment. We're going to make an assessment on the basis of what they do, not what they say publicly. In the interim, what do you think Delsey Rodriguez or anyone else can do in the next few weeks that would convince Rubio, and I guess by extension Trump, that this is our person to lead Venezuela?
- [15:17]
Kiko Toro
I mean, I think Trump telegraphed this pretty clearly in his press conference. If she signs the appropriate deals with the appropriate American oil companies, and clearly the Americans are expecting some concessional deals that allow U.S. oil companies to come in and pump oil in conditions that they never would have gotten even before Chavez came to power. Then they'll look the other way and they'll just let the political prisoners stay in their political prisons and the torture chambers run the way they always have been. I mean, if there's one thing that we cannot accuse Trump of in this whole thing is hypocrisy. He's never pretended this is about Venezuelan democracy. He's at least spared us the indignity of trying to pretty this up as some kind of pro democracy thing. It's like, no, he wants to extract oil and if he can cut a deal with a socialist hardliner to allow him to do that, he isn't particularly care what happens to Venezuelan civil rights, I don't think.
- [16:22]
Mike Pesca
Right, right. So do you think he is opposed to Maria Corina Machado, the Peace Prize winner, being installed because she is at heart a Democrat?
- [16:33]
Kiko Toro
I mean, I think that's part of it. I think the other part of it here, I almost see the logic from his point of view. He clearly Trump doesn't want to have a full scale invasion of the country, doesn't actually want to depose a Republican regime that would cost too many American lives, that would fracture the MAGA movement in the US that's just off the table. Right. So if you're not going to militarily overthrow the regime, then you're going to keep the regime in place. And if you want to keep the regime in place, you want to probably keep it intact because you want to be able to do deals with this regime. Right. And so then you're going to need a regime insider who is able to command the loyalty of the people in the regime, somebody who gives confidence of the people in the regime. If you can find a regime insider who will cut these oil deals, they'll probably go for it. And that, that appears to be the size of what they're trying to do in Venezuela. I mean, I think one of the.
- [17:24]
Mike Pesca
More common heuristics in how people think, it's called different things, mirroring. But it's to believe that your adversary, your peer, everyone else thinks like you do. So Trump is entirely transactional. And I assume that he's assuming that these corrupt leaders are driven primarily by corruption and not a combination of corruption and ideology. But I wonder, as you're, as you're detailing just how steeped in ideology Rodriguez is and the rest of the cadre of leaders who at least say it, but also seemed to walk the walk to the extent that the people of Venezuela suffer because they are so committed to communism or Bolivar ism or Chaviz ism. What's your assessment of that? Are they more corrupt and willing to deal as Trump would assume? Or is Trump going to run into problems because of these leaders, their actual ideological commitments?
- [18:24]
Kiko Toro
I mean, they're awfully corrupt, there's no question about that. But I also do think on the.
- [18:29]
Mike Pesca
Plus side, for the US they're awfully corrupt. Joke. Right.
- [18:32]
Kiko Toro
But I do think there's a hardcore of ideology there, especially for Diladrigas and her brother, who we haven't mentioned, who is the head of Congress and probably now the number two or three most powerful person in Venezuela. These are people who grew up inside this pro Cuban Communist way of looking at the world. I think the real challenge for them is that they're going to want to protect the revolution, but also the Cuban revolution to the extent that they want. And, and the question really is what happens when those two things really come into conflict. When Marco Rubio notices that a bunch of the money that is coming out of these oil deals, that some of it will have to flow back into the Venezuelan regime. Well, some of that is going to end up in the Cuban Communist Party's coffers too. So at what point does that become unsustainable or unacceptable to the American administration? I don't know. I tend to think that what's going to happen here is that we're going to go between periods of disengagement and dealing and then periods of the American administration feeling that they're not being kowtowed to enough. And then maybe there'll be bombing rates every six months. I mean, it looks to me almost the way Iraq looked between the two Gulf wars when there was a no fly zone and they were still kind of bombing every few weeks, radar installations and such. It wasn't really a war, but you weren't actually at peace either. It looks very murky to me right now. But I don't know, I just, I keep thinking of it from the point of view of the like the thousand, roughly 1,000 political activists who are in prison in Venezuela right now. Like this must be inexplicable to them.
- [20:18]
Mike Pesca
So obviously the regime will say things about and try to bang the drum of anti colonialism. That is some rhetoric that they could, that that will be in their interests. But how true is it if the United States is seen, like in Iraq as imposing will, as opposed to like in Panama, of taking away a dictator who is oppressive. And pretty quickly there was able to rush into the maw of Noriega's absence with real democracy. What's the dynamic there among the people or among the people who have levers of power? How much can a fervor for self rule be undercut by messages and reality of colonial imposition?
- [21:03]
Kiko Toro
Yeah, that's, that's a really good question. That's what we're going to be finding out. Because what, what's clear is that for both sides in this dynamic, the appearance of, you know, for the Venice Islands being seen to be independent and for, for Donald Trump being seen to be dominant, the appearance, appearance of that, the sort of optics of that are really, really important. I don't think Donald Trump will be satisfied just to make A bunch of oil deals. If you know that if Delilah is like spitting, spitting at his like, image every, every two weeks on, on venison tv. I know, you know, but, but, but also for Lodriguez, like, being sick, seen to kowtow to the Americans is probably not something that she or her movement can stomach. So how sustainable this arrangement that seems to be getting proposed is, I don't know. Trump and Ruby are saying very explicitly that they plan to coerce Delsy into doing what they want him to do. Can Dilsey get away with that? She's reported to be really smart and quite good at like, negotiating out of tricky situations. I guess this will be put to the test.
- [22:23]
Mike Pesca
And what about the stated rationale of the raid, which wasn't liberation, as we've been talking about? He didn't go down the road of neocon rhetoric, but the stated purpose was, and there's legitimacy to it, was that Maduro was in, in addition to everything else, essentially a drug kingpin. And putting aside hypocrisy and the President, Honduras and all that, will this significantly interrupt whatever drug operations that he and the Cartel of the sun, which I think might be a misnomer, were in charge of?
- [22:58]
Kiko Toro
I mean, we're going to find out about that too. Venice Elvis is not a drug producer. It's a cocaine trafficking point, mostly for Europe and not the U.S. so the state of rationale was really, really thin. I mean, I think this was a real, this was actually a real politic thing where, you know, Donald Trump did not like Russian and Cuban companies having big stakes in like a major energy producer in the Western hemisphere. And that, that is what this is about. And he didn't want to say that too explicitly beforehand. They needed some kind of rationale. I think that he, Trump got sold, or Marco Rubio thought that he had sold him on this rationale of portraying it as a law enforcement operation. Trump kind of stepped all over that framing by saying just very explicitly that from his point of view this was about taking the oil. But I don't think anybody takes that stuff to too, too seriously. It's just they were unable to do a deal with, with Melodo. It's being reported today, by the way, that as of six months ago, the discussion was to give Maduro a kind of golden exile in Turkey and moved in very much in the same direction that we're going in now with Del C in control of the government and making oil deals with the Americans.
- [24:18]
Mike Pesca
So I like that, by the way. I like that. Michael Clayton Foreign policy. I'm not the guy you kill, I'm the guy you bribe. I mean, if you could get those results without risking $150 million. I mean, sorry, 150 lives and many millions of dollars the raid cost, it seems like something the United States used to pursue more and could pursue more of. But I just want to go back to this point. Should we think of Venezuela as a narco state or was that just, you know, aside a pot that they had their hands in? But it's not as crucial to the state as some other really explicit narco states.
- [24:56]
Kiko Toro
There are a lot of businesses, many of them legal, many of them illegal, that Venezuelan regime connected officials are involved in. Everything from like things like fishing and like insurance and construction to like illegal mining and like diamonds and gold and uranium too, and things like this and drugs like cocaine trafficking and oil sanctions, bucks. And these were all sort of portfolio bits of the portfolio of, of illegal, well, sometimes legal, sometimes illegal money flows to, to this connected elite. I don't think it was really sort of the most important one. This is not a situation, well, like in Honduras where it really was sort of a main way that the, the country made money under Landes. So I, I don't think anybody should take the narco stuff too seriously. Yes, it happened. It was not a main way that the venison regime was, was funding itself.
- [26:01]
Mike Pesca
And I'm not going to ask you to make a solid prediction. Give me a band of outcomes in a year. What do you think the life of the average Venezuelan will be vis a vis what their leaders or our leaders have done?
- [26:15]
Kiko Toro
That's a really hard question. I mean, I do think that it is not impossible. It's maybe a 50, 50 scenario where the arrangement that they seem to be going towards does kind of stick and more investment does go into Venezuela and that should slide, that should stop the slide of the Venezuelan currency and should sort of slow down inflation, might begin to see a bit of economic growth. It's not impossible. You start to see some Venezuelan, some of the 8 million venison left who have, most of them want to live in Venezuela, is where their families are, is where they're from, is where their networks are. You could start to see some migration back to Venezuela. I don't, I wouldn't entirely rule that out. But there's so many pitfalls and it's so easy to see the wheels coming off of this thing because both sides are so intransigent and so doctrine.
- [27:10]
Mike Pesca
Kiko Tor is the director of Climate Repair at the Anthropocene Institute and the writer of one percent Brighter, which is his substack. He is a Venezuelan and expert on these matters. Thank you so much, Kiko.
- [27:25]
Kiko Toro
Thank you.
- [27:33]
Mike Pesca
You know, when I'm seen about town wearing my camel hair double breasted overcoat and they have two, but mine's in the more camel brown caramel type color. I draw stairs and it's because much like their responsible down hooded parka, no camels were actually injured. But I create quite the show. I cut quite a figure and I am warm. Quince has unbelievable cold weather coats for men and women and everyone who is even smaller and maybe having a little bit of mucus dribbling out their nose, put them in a quince. They'll look better, they'll feel better, they'll be warmer. They have men's Mongolian cashmere sweaters, wool coats, leather suede overcoats. It's impressive. They have, like I said, the down jackets and the camel hair and Italian leather outerwear. They cut out the middlemen. Sorry, Middlemen. You could still qualify for an excellently priced Quint's product costs. As a middleman or woman, you are still in America or Canada. But because the middleman is cut out, there are no markups. They give you unbelievable quality, the same quality as luxury brands at a fraction of the price. Sounds like a cliche about how quints does it, but that really is how they do it. So you'd be a fool not to take advantage of the fact that middlemen are getting cut out left and right. If the middleman economy has to suffer, I mean, shouldn't you be the beneficiary? Plus middlemen will be warmer. You got to see some of their Italian leather outerwear that the middlemen are wearing. Now refresh your winter wardrobe with quince. Go to quince.com the gist for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns now available in the cold land of Canada as well. That's Q U I-N C E.com the Gist free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com/the Gist. And now the spiel. The United States, in a raid both tactically brilliant and politically questionable, has abducted Nicolas Maduro from Venezuela. The Trump administration will not say abducted. Instead they will say detained or arrested. What they did specifically, what he, Donald Trump did say, was to bring outlaw.
- [30:00]
Kiko Toro
Dictator Nicolas Maduro to justice.
- [30:03]
Mike Pesca
Trump also did say that the US Will be running Venezuela now and articulated this is his plan going forward.
- [30:11]
Kiko Toro
We're in the oil business, we're going to sell it to him. We're not going to say we're not going to get.
- [30:15]
Mike Pesca
In other words, we'll be selling oil probably in much larger doses because they.
- [30:20]
Kiko Toro
Couldn'T produce very much because their infrastructure was so bad. So we'll be selling large amounts of oil to other countries, many of whom.
- [30:27]
Mike Pesca
Are using it now. But I would say many more will come. So he is saying that this is regime change for justice, but also more tangibly, oil. But you know, Trump says a lot of things, which is the point of this spiel. When evaluating the Trump presidency, commentators, including careful ones, do what they can do. The only thing they can do, they can go by what the man says. And what he says is not the truth. It is true that Trump just isn't. He lies constantly, he exaggerates, he misstates, he performs analysis without a crystal ball, but with his own inaccurate words point out to the public that he is spouting nonsense. And good. It's good to point that out. The lies are correctly identified. They're catalog their fact check. But you know what happens? The exposure of falsehoods becomes something like a proxy for evaluating the entire operation. Was it smart? Didn't work well. Trump lied about it. Must not have gone so well that he could have told the truth. But this is important to remember. He can't tell the truth if Trump says something inaccurate or absurd. The inference that follows is that the thing itself must be unserious, failed or illusory. It feels like an intuitive conclusion to draw. Problem is, it's frequently mistaken. As hard as it is to acknowledge, Donald Trump's relationship to the truth is a poor indication of of how outcomes are actually produced. His rhetoric is so unreliable. But rhetoric is not the mechanism through which military campaigns or intelligence operations or bureaucratic programs are executed. These unfold through institutions, institutions with people much more proficient than Trump. And even though he has done a purge of many of the institutions, there are enough staffs there and planners and career officers and logistics experts to produce excellent results. That Trump narrates badly. This doesn't mean that events obediently mirror the bad narration. And I'll also acknowledge that this term, specifically one key military planner. So long as I'm holding the military up as an example of competence during the Trump administration, one key military figure is Pete Hegseth, who offers no better relationship to accuracy, which is essentially why he was tapped to lead the department. In fact, the department, which should be called the Department of Defense, he calls the Department of war. Think about this right now after the Maduro raid is being sold as a defense of Americans from drugs or a defense of the democratic ideals of the Venezuelan people, sort of a humanitarian intervention. Wouldn't a message other than this is war go down a bit more easily? President Trump is deadly serious about stopping the flow of gangs and violence to our country, deadly serious about stopping the flow of drugs and poison to our people, deadly serious about getting back the oil that was stolen from us, and deadly serious about re establishing American deterrence and dominance in the Western Hemisphere. This is about the safety, security, freedom and prosperity of the American people. This is America first. This is peace through strength, and the United States War Department is proud to help deliver it. Trump's statements and Hegseth's bluster heard there are weak evidence about the facts on the ground. They tell us little about damage assessments or strategic effects or execution. US Operations are designed and carried out, as I said, by professionals with redundancy and delegation and buffers that limit how much presidential confusion and distortion can actually have an effect on the real world. Once you recognize this, you might begin to think differently about the most common form of analysis. In the immediate wake after a military operation, Trump said x that is a lie. Therefore, the operation success buttressed by the lie can't be credited. Sometimes that's the right way to look at it. I mean domestically, let's take domestic situation. He has said great things that are totally inaccurate about health care or doge or tariffs. They were all going to be so great and also going so well, and none of that was true. Also internationally is spoken that way about solving the war between Russia and Ukraine. He has lied and been stymied. But internationally, and especially militarily, there are plenty of examples of a lie queuing analysis that the operation was flawed or failed or a disaster or a time bomb, when in fact a fair analysis would indicate the operation seems more or less successful. Take the bombing of the Fordeau facility in Iran. Trump said tonight I can report to.
- [35:35]
Kiko Toro
The world that the strikes were a spectacular military success. Iran's key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.
- [35:47]
Mike Pesca
Obliterated means something. It has a definition in the dictionary, and that definition does not apply to what happened to Iran's facilities at Fordo and the other nuclear enrichment sites. However, now that we have the benefit of some analysis and some distance and some deep breathing, the important thing doesn't become if the word obliterated was right, the important thing becomes, well, what happened in Fordeau? And it turns out that despite Trump's words, despite the contradictory assessment by one of the intelligence agencies issued with low confidence in the days immediately after, it seems that Fordeau went pretty well from an American perspective and certainly not an Iranian1. On November 21, the Institute for Science and International Security, which is very respected, wrote the main nuclear sites at Fordo, Netanz and Esfahan were largely destroyed and have seen little significant activity since the war. Overall, satellite imagery suggests that Iran's uranium enrichment program remains significantly set back. At present, Iran does not appear able to enrich uranium in any significant manner or make gas centrifuges in significant numbers. Iran's key nuclear enrichment facilities, its facility to produce uranium, and its centrifuge manufacturing and research and development facilities remain severely damaged or destroyed. Now, in the moments afterwards, obliterated was the word to seize upon and rebut. And that's what many in the media and the Democratic Party did. Here was Simone Sanders talking to Senator Chris Van Hollen about the leakers of that initial skeptical assessment.
- [37:37]
Kiko Toro
When the government is not telling the truth, when the government is lying, when the government is fudging the facts, the importance of these people who are willing to come forward and give the information out, I think is critical, particularly in this climate where misinformation and disinformation will get literally around the world twice before the truth ever shows up.
- [37:55]
Mike Pesca
Van Hollen went on to say that the administration was sending the message, if you tell the truth, we will punish you. But the truth was not on his side. In that case, the truth didn't come out of Trump's mouth with the word obliterated. But the overall truth was mission successful and certainly no wider war sucking in the United States and costing millions of lives. Here are some more examples. In the first term, Trump killed Qasem Soleimani. His public understanding of what went on appears shallow. His messaging was chaotic. It was of course self centered, yet the targeting was accurate, the execution was precise, and it really affected things to the benefit of American foreign policy. So you don't have to credit Trump's often inaccurate boasting, but you do have to evaluate what happened independent of the boasting. Here's another good example, the defeat of the Islamic State, which more or less happened. Oh, Trump said it happened before it happened. And he claimed instant and total victory. And that was false. But during his term, ISIS lost significant territorial control, governing capacity, revenue streams, conventional military strength. They're basically, they're almost nothing now. They're not a major fearful player in the region. So he did lie about how quickly that came about and how completely that came about and how it was only because of him. But you can't take the lies as evidence that the program didn't work. And of course, the things he gets wrong do lodge in your brain because it's wrong and shocking that a president lies like that. And so you pay attention. And of course, of course we shouldn't excuse dishonesty. Rhetoric shapes trust, legitimacy and long term cohesion. Leadership quality matters. But it does mean that holding a president to account for speech is not the same thing as holding power to account for outcomes. So what I generally do is I don't disregard Trump's lies. I track them down. But I discount his narration as an evaluation tool. I come back to what really happened after better conclusions can be drawn. We should all do this, but we don't. Was the last time you read or heard about that assessment of Fordeaux that I shared? Responsible media, even the ones who received the leaks at the time, if you recall all said things about now, this is preliminary now. We have to wait a long time for the better information to come out. Here was Ken Delaney, and on msnbc.
- [40:31]
Kiko Toro
These have been completely and totally obliterated.
- [40:34]
Mike Pesca
But three people familiar with the matter.
- [40:36]
Kiko Toro
Are telling NBC News there's a new.
- [40:37]
Mike Pesca
Intelligence assessment out today that paints a much different picture. This initial battle damage assessment by the Defense Intelligence Agency estimates that this American.
- [40:46]
Kiko Toro
Bombing attack may have only set back.
- [40:48]
Mike Pesca
Iran's nuclear program by as little as.
- [40:49]
Kiko Toro
Three to six months.
- [40:51]
Mike Pesca
But of course, when the better information did come out, it wasn't as much as a story as it was in the immediate days after, when the strike was on everyone's mind, but so was contradicting the lies of Donald Trump. Just as Trump says whatever pops into his head, he has really bad impulse control. The media doesn't always exhibit the best habits of careful, considered communication. They don't lie exactly like Trump, but they're less than honest. I want to be fair. They're less than clear in a slightly different way. They don't lead you towards the truth, as maybe some different habits which take longer would accomplish. They allow disqualification over Trump's pronouncements to do too much work to cement in the public's mind an assessment of Trump's policies. Otherwise, critique becomes satisfying but shallow, accurate about the words in a way that Donald Trump isn't, but inaccurate and inattentive to the effects. And that's it for Today's show for 2026. Corey Wara is the producer. Jeff Craig runs our socials. We have a pretty great new website with a lot of features that Astrid Green contributed greatly to. Catherine Sykes. She's still doing the just list, which, you know, it's no longer discounted. We told you all about it. But please go and check that out@mike pesca.substack.com and still running it all, even in this late year. Michelle Pesca, CEO of Peach Fish Productions. And thanks for listening.