← The Rest Is Politics: US
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Your emotional well being matters to you, but it also matters to everyone. Everybody else in your life. Find support and feel lighter in therapy. Sign up and get 10% off@betterhelp.com Tripus that's better.hp.com Tripus. Hello and welcome to the Rest Is Politics Us with me, Katty K. I am jumping on to give you a quick update on political news here in Washington and then we will bring you the full episode that Anthony and I recorded did earlier, which touches on Iran and the economy and all the latest on that. But I thought it was worth coming on because Donald Trump has fired his first White House official. Kristi Noem is out as head of the Department of Homeland Security. She's been given some kind of title about some invented job, about Shield of the Americas, which is a bit like being told you're going to go and do the gardening. I think it is clearly a firing. There has been a storm of controversy swirling around Kristi Noem, also the person that Anthony likes to call Jailhouse Barbie. Ever since the Minneapolis shootings and the deaths of the two American citizens, it's an open secret in Washington that there was quite a lot of dissatisfaction with her. The president was hearing from people inside the White House, I'm told quite a lot over the last few weeks, Susie Wiles included, who didn't appreciate what Christine Owen was doing, saying that it was time she went. Just in the last day there was reporting that the president had been calling members of Congress up, Republicans up in the House and in the Senate, trying to canvass whether he should let her go or not. And at around 2:00 clock Eastern Time today, he made the announcement, as is his way on Truth Social, that she was out and he was bringing in the senator from Oklahoma, Mark Wayne Mullen, who's a staunch Trump loyalist, to do her job. So what is it that went wrong for Christine O. Well, first of all, she contradicted the president. That is not great. She was in a hearing in which she said that the president had signed off on a $220 million advertising campaign for her role on the border, with pictures of her on the border. The president today said actually he had no idea about that. Never great when your boss is saying publicly that you have said one thing in Congress and he has no idea about it. She'd also been doing this ad campaign which showed her riding in horseback by Mount Rushmore, which is in her home state of North Dakota. I guess that didn' go down terribly well either. Of course, she is the woman who has appeared in multiple bizarre and slightly creepy, I think, and what one Republican has described to me as outright offensive photographs, most famously the one where she's standing in kind of full makeup with a baseball hat on in front of prisoners in seacot, that awful prison, really draconian prison for people down in El Salvador. So that caused a Ferrari. Also, Kristi Noem caught up in various financial scandals, like how much money she was spending on a private jet which had a bedroom to deport, apparently detainees, people who had been picked up who were in the country illegally to deport them out of the country. Not quite clear why they needed a luxury jet when they were going to be deported out of the country. And she has been open secret dating a senior advisor of hers, Corey Lewandowski, who was actually Donald Trump's first campaign manager in his 2016 campaign. Side note, if you happen to be listening to our series on Donald Trump, you'll get to meet Corey Lewandowski. That's our series for founding members. So that also apparently didn't go down very well in the White House. One person did tell me today that he thought that one of the reasons that Corey Kristi Noem might not be fired was because Corey Lewandowski, the first campaign manager for 2016, has known Donald Trump for so long that maybe he has so much dirt on Donald Trump that that might protect Kristi Noem in the end, it didn't. Too many financial scandals, too much about jets, too much about her and advertising campaigns openly contradicting her boss. He didn't like the scenes from Minneapolis of the ICE agents going in and shooting American citizens in particular, he didn't. The way she came out straight away and called those people domestic terrorists. She was grilled about that on the Hill over yesterday and today. So I think that all of that finally got to the point where he had no choice. He decided that he had to let it go. And I say he had no choice because Donald Trump hasn't wanted to fire anybody in this administration. He's been very resistant to the idea that he would be seen to be succumbing to media pressure to fire somebody. And it's worth pointing out that at this stage in his first administration, 37 senior members of his team had either been fired, including Anthony, we like to remind him, or had actually stepped down. There was an enormous amount of turnover in that first administration. That's 34% of the original postings had already turned over by this stage in the first term. And this is the first one. There's been tons of speculation. Would it be Kash Patel at the FBI? Would it be Pete Hegseth at the Department of Defense? Would it be Kristi Noem? And he resisted. He has resisted right up until now because he didn't want to make it look like he had made any mistakes or that he was succumbing to media pressure or that he was listening to criticism of these people because he had chosen the best team there was, and he wanted that to be the narrative. But now, of course, she's out, and we will see. I don't think this marks much of a change in DHS policy. We've already seen something of a pullback of ICE agents from cities around the country. Not totally, but there's been something. We're not seeing a repeat of those scenes in Minneapolis. And I imagine that Mark Wayne Mullen will continue whatever the policy is that Donald Trump wanted it to be. Anyway, back to the original episode. Thanks, guys. What are we going to talk about this week, Anthony?
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A
Well, I mean, I think we have to talk about Iran, and we have to talk about the president's decision to go in Iran, the reaction of the American people, the ramifications for the economy and oil. But you go first, Katty. How do you think it's going for the president, and how do you think it's going for the administration? And could you talk a little bit about Pete Hegseth? Because as an American, I've had very embarrassing things happen to me, but I could not have been more shamed or embarrassed by this person's speech, conversation, monologue yesterday, but go ahead.
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B
I was texting you yesterday, right. About Pete Hegseth. Unhinged Pete Hegseth, how excruciating it was to listen to him, particularly when he was asked about American service members who have been killed during this conflict. The six Americans who have been killed so far. He was being asked about that by the press. And what does he do? He attacks the press, which Caroline Levitt then did as well. In the White House press briefing room. Hegseth has decided just that this is an opportunity for him to talk to Donald Trump and I guess show Donald Trump that he's in his corner every moment, and he's turning it into a nonstop attack of the press. A rah, rah. We've. You know, bro, we've sunk everything. We've attacked everything. We're gonna go on forever. We have total dominance. You know, this is not a fair fight. It was not meant to be a fair fight. I get it. He's the Secretary of Defense. He likes to call himself the Secretary of War. And the role of the secretary of the defense in a press briefing is to tout the. The military operation. But if you compare Pete Hegseth's performance yesterday to that of General Dan Kane, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who was sober, talking about the military aspect of this immediately, the first thing he did when he took the podium was to pay tribute and name the six fallen soldiers, reservists who have been killed in the region. It was night and day compared to Pete Hegseth. And Pete Hegseth sounded like it was a sort of clown show, really. I don't know how else to describe it. Of ego and bombast and an American prowess and rah, rah. And there was General Kane very calmly talking about the situation as it is and therefore having far more credibility, I felt, when it came to actually telling Americans how this war is going.
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A
Yeah, I mean, listen, I was horrified. It was literally like a rhetorical orgy of Fox News hosts, as if they all got together and said, what kind of bombast can we put into a speech for a guy playing the Secretary of Defense?
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B
Yeah, it was a show.
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A
I think it took away from some of the things that he said, by the way, because there were some things that he said, caddy, that seemed to be true. When you're doing your reporting. I'm doing my reporting. They have put a hurt on the Iranian missile capability, launch capability. They put a hurt on the air defenses of Iran. Obviously, they sunk a naval vessel, and maybe 10 other naval vessels have been taken out of commission by the American Navy and the American military. And you know from the reporting in Tel Aviv that the alarms are going off less and there are less missile strikes there in other parts of the Gulf. So it seems to be working. What the plan was does seem to be working.
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B
What the military plan was.
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A
And I think, yes, the execution of the military plan seems to be working. But I guess my question to you about that is what do we, what does the west, what does the United States, what does Israel get out of this plan?
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B
So I think those are all the right questions, Antony, and I agree with you. My reporting is that militarily this seems to be going very well. It's worth everybody, by the way, reading Karl Rove in the Wall Street Journal this morning because he is making the point that this is going very well militarily. But there is such a deficit when it comes to American opinion polls on this because the president has not done a good job of explaining a coherent narrative, and the narrative is still slightly all over the place. We had the president yesterday saying, well, they were two weeks away from making a nuclear bomb. I've tried to see if I could get anyone in the intelligence community to stand that up, but nobody's going to say that that was the case, particularly after the events of last June. So I think where we are, this snapshot when we're recording on Thursday morning, both of us seem to agree and we mentioned this last week, that this could work. Militarily, this seems to be going in America and Israel's favor. Militarily, they have not, because of the strikes from Iran against the Gulf states, they have not lost their Gulf allies. In fact, they've probably pulled their Gulf allies closer to them. There are some big questions out there. I think there are still questions about that girls school that you and I mentioned. Pete Hegseth was asked about that yesterday. Again, he kind of refused to answer, just said it's an investigation. We're getting lots of other military details. But curiously, they give us details about that girls school. But I think that they have not done a good job of selling this to the American public. And I think we are beginning to see fractures in the MAGA coalition that have been exacerbated over the last couple of days. And we're seeing these war votes play out on Congress. I don't know how particularly important those are, but there's a lot of skepticism around the country. You've got the latest opinion polls are suggesting what, 60% disapproval, 40% approval for the operation in Iraq. Now I know polls can depend on how you ask the question. Some other polls, CBS polls, is a little closer than that. But that's not a great position for a president to be in when he's only got 40% approval in the days when the military operation is going successfully. My memory of military operations over the last 20, 30 years in America has been in the days at the beginning, you get a rally round the flag effect, you get a rally around the commander in chief effect. And particularly when it's going well, you get a spike in support for the military operation that then reflects on the President. I don't think we're seeing that for this president at the moment. There are still a lot of Americans who are asking themselves, why are we doing that? And they're asking, why are we doing that? Because the case hasn't been made coherent and the case is all over the place. Right, Anthony? Yeah.
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A
I mean, I just want to add a couple of stats, which I think people will be interested in. 68% of the independents are against it.
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B
I love this. You've dug into the cross tabs. We love a crosstab on this.
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A
Well, we have to do that because the independents are really going to decide the midterms and decide the 2028 election. So almost 70% of them are like, this is absurd. This is ridiculous. You know, the other thing you should know, Caddy, and you probably do know this, but I want to share this with people. 12% of the Americans favor sending troops to Iran. 12%. Can you imagine that? Imagine how crazy that is. And he's talking about it now. I'm not saying he's gonna do it, but, I mean, there's no room for him in this, meaning he doesn't have unshakable support from even his base on what he's doing here. So if this is so good for America, why are so many Americans against it?
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B
I think it's because the case hasn't been made. The President has put out various ideas. We're doing this because we were about to be attacked. An attack was imminent. Marco Rubio has says, we're doing this because Israel was about to attack, and so then we would have been counterattacked, and we have to do it. We're doing that because they were two weeks away from a nuclear weapon. That's the latest explanation. Meanwhile, Americans are thinking, this has nothing to do with my cost of living. In fact, cost of living has got worse because of this operation. So why are we out there thousands of miles away, trying to take down the Iranian regime when it doesn't feel to Americans like there was an imminent threat. I think one thing that is worth saying is that there is the traditional, the old Republican position that you would have remembered, Anthony would have been hawkish on Iran. There's not a lot of love lost for the fact that the Ayatollah has been taken out or that Iran is getting punched on the nose. So you've got this kind of discrepancy between Donald Trump, who is saying, I came in to stop the forever wars, but now has become the commander in chief, who goes for Venezuela, who threatens Greenland, who actually goes for Iran not once but twice in the course of the last year, and puts himself seemingly at odds with his MAGA America first base, which voted for him because they said they didn't want the forever wars, and yet scratch into Congress. I think where you're seeing this support for Donald Trump at the moment, and there is still in the Republican Party a desire for America to lead and a desire for America to hit America's enemies, particularly Iran, which has been an enemy for so long. So I think it's a more complicated picture than perhaps the polling is suggesting. And I think there is this rump of traditional Republicanism on foreign policy, on this foreign policy issue that is helping Donald Trump at the moment. So there are MAGA voices, you're right. There are the Tucker Carlsons, the Marjorie Taylor Greenes. There are a bunch of MAGA voices that have come out against this operation, but they tend to be MAGA influencers on the sort of one extreme of the MAGA base. I don't know that he's going to lose MAGA over this.
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A
No, I don't think he loses MAGA over this, but I don't think he's got all of maga. I think he's fractured maga and I think he's leaked a little bit of maga. But I did a seance last night in preparation for this, and I.
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B
How are the ghosts doing? I know. God, you do believe all this? Yeah, I know.
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A
Well, yeah, I channeled the spirit of Dick Cheney. So it took a while because I'm here in Dublin and I had the sorcerer thing and Dick tamed down. He is thrilled. Dick Cheney.
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B
Cheney.
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Let me just tell you how happy Dick Cheney. Very happy Dick Cheney is like, this is a neocon's wet dream.
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B
Vindication. Yes.
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A
He cannot believe this. He's like, whoa, we got the reality television star in the White House. Liz didn't want him, you know, before he moved on because, you know, Cheney's in purgatory, right? He's not quite in heaven because of all the bad deeds. And he's like, you know, I'm here waiting to see if I can get to.
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B
You can't say that about the dead. You can't say that, Anthony, about the dead. This is the period of Lent. We're heading into Easter. You're a good Catholic.
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A
I'm just letting you know what's going on. And so he's sitting there waiting for St. Peter to let him in the pearly gates. But he's very happy right now because he's like, this is like, even better than I thought. And so let me give the unitary executive power pitch. Dick Cheney on steroids. That would be Donald Trump. And remember, just to remind everybody, this is the peace president, Donald Trump. This is the President that was campaigning for the end of forever wars. He has taken the Dick Cheney playbook to the max. And so, as I said last week, what is the Dick Cheney playbook? We're going to behead Iran. We're going to install somebody that we can corrupt and that's secular, and we're going to see if we can do to Iran what we did to Venezuela. Now, Caddy, I am sure of this. And this is not based on reporting. This is based on my gut. And so I'm going to tell you my gut and then I want you to respond to it. I am sure that Trump is pissed off at the Israelis and let me explain why. The Israelis have a diverging objective to Donald Trump. The Israelis want to kill everybody. The Israelis have been terrorized by the Iranians. They funded Hamas. They created this fiasco in Gaza. And they've hurt, hurt tons and tons of Israelis over the 47 years. And so now that the Israelis have opened fire like this, they're killing everybody. I mean, they went through the top 40 in like five minutes, okay. Of the senior leadership. And Trump is very pissed off about
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B
this, including, by the way, the senior leadership that he was hoping to put back in there after they'd taken out the very top.
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A
That's my point. Cuz I'm watching the interviews of Trump. He's sitting there in front of the gilded fireplace now. There's like so much gold coming off the fireplace from Home Home Depot. It's like, that's another revolting thing. But Trump is saying, he's saying, who am I going to bribe? Trump is basically looking at the media and saying, bibi killed so many people. I can't figure out which secularist I'm going to bribe. Okay, so that is an opinion by me, and I'd like you to react to that. Go ahead. That was everything from Dick Cheney, by the way. And then I let his spirit go back into. Yes, he went back up. Yes.
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B
Or.
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A
Or down, wherever he may have gone. Actually, I'm not sure, but go ahead. Go ahead. What is your opinion of that?
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B
Next time we need to know what's happening, we're gonna call up your seance situation. Look, I think that one of the most honest things that was said this week was when Marco Rubio came down and in this very kind of mangled way, said the quiet part out loud and said the Israelis were gonna go for it. And so we had to jump in there in case we got hit. And we didn't wanna get hit inadvertently. So we thought, well, we better join the Israelis and make sure that we were protecting ourselves. And I think this. Bibi has been, I understand, in the White House nonstop pushing Donald Trump to do this, obviously, but Donald Trump could have said no. Now, I had reporting this morning of somebody who'd had lunch with Donald Trump a month ago in Mar? A Lago who said he was gagging to strike Iran. You know, Bibi was clearly pushing. They could have said no to Bibi. They chose not to say no to Bibi. But maybe Rubio wanted to use that as the excuse. Rubio. Israel was pushing. Maybe Rubio has his own reasons for saying that, but. And they could have definitely said no to Bibi and not let him do it. But I think Donald Trump came out of Venezuela feeling as many presidents do when they see the awesome power of the American military high on the power of American power. He loves power anyway. He loves to prove his predecessors were weak and stupid and wrong. That's a constant theme with his presidency. They didn't do this because they were too weak to do this. You and I have been doing this series on Donald Trump. He loves to show that he is the only person that can fix things. Only Donald Trump had the balls to go after Iran and punch them where it hurt and actually kind of obliterate their military machine. Only I have done this thing. That's impossible. And you know what? However this turns out, at this point, he declares a win short of massive American casualties, which, looking at the. What you and I are hearing from the region, looking at the military situation at the moment, they seem to have avoided that so far. Fingers crossed. But short of massive American casualties, Donald Trump can go to the American public and say anything is better than what was there. I don't really care about what regime comes next, what their ideology is, so long as this is a regime. But look, American public, they don't have access now to their nuclear weaponry. They don't have access to their ballistic missiles that were pointed at our US Bases in the region. And he doesn't care about whether the Iranian population rises up and takes over, which is probably going to lead to a bloodbath for the Iranian population. But the problem is it doesn't get America out of a cold war that it's been with in Iran since 1979. It's still going to be in a cold war. It just won't have the weapons. And maybe that's enough. Maybe that's enough for him to be able to sell this reasonably plausibly as a win to the American public.
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A
Okay, so before we go to another topic, I just want to throw a few more things at you, because I'm looking for Delsey Rodriguez.
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B
Yeah, you probably killed her, by the way.
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A
Yeah. So that's what Trump said. Okay. And this is the beauty of Trump. He literally said, well, the attack was so successful, it knocked out most of the candidates. It's not going to be anybody that we were thinking of because they're all dead. Second and third place is dead. Those are literally Trump's words. But I'm going to throw out two people to you, okay? One is Hassan Khomeini. This is the grandson of the ruler, obviously, that was taken out earlier in the week. And he seems to be more secularized and he seems to be more pragmatic. Now, I'm not saying that's the direction he's going to go in or not. And then the other one, I would say is Ali Lahrajani. Am I saying his name right? He's probably the most powerful transitional figure that's left alive right now.
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B
He's probably been running the country for the last year, by the way.
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A
Yeah. And he's probably running the country. And maybe he's not dead because the Israelis don't want to kill him, if we're just being brutally honest with everybody. And he's more or less, I think, run the country. National Security Supreme, National Security Council. He's the one that's worked with the Europeans and the Chinese, and he has some technocratic credibility. So my question to you is, is this somebody that could work with Donald Trump? And now, as I'm saying that to you, remember, the Israelis, they don't mind failed states. They like the failed state of Lebanon. They don't mind the failed state of Syria, and they ideally would like this to be a partitioned failed state. Trump does not want that. We both know that. So the question is, which direction is it going in? And do either of those two people sound like to you as potentially people that Donald Trump and the Americans could deal with?
- [25:06]
B
I think it's potentially, you know, one of those two, assuming they stay alive for a while because these bombardments are continuing and the Israelis are going after the security forces and the Americans, Hegseth has said we're going to stay, step up the bombardments over the next day or two. What Trump seems to be looking for is kind of Iran's Deng Xiaoping, right, the post Mao leader who America can deal with. I have a question about the Iranian society, though, because I've reached out to a couple of Iranian friends over the last few days and people who are Iranian but live abroad, and they say Iranian society is so fed up with the model that they've had that will they accept the anything that is adjacent to that model? Will they be satisfied with Alaranjani? Will they be satisfied with Khamenei's offspring? They are seriously unhappy with the status quo, and will that be something that they can tolerate? Khomeini was very opposed. My understanding is to reform of any kind because he saw the Soviet model and he thought once you open the door to any kind of reform, Gorbachev style, then all hell breaks loose and you lose the regime. So there aren't very many people around him who were real reformers. I mean, I don't think Dulcie Rodriguez was a real reformer, but Venezuela is a very different case. Venezuela has been democratic and pro American much more recently than Iran has. They've kind of gutted a lot of the leadership, anyway, is now still staunchly radicalized. So I think all of those are good questions. And I think we don't know. I mean, there's also these reports that are coming out that the CIA is trying to help the Kurds in the north, while the poor Kurds have been through this before. So I hope if the Americans really are saying they're going to support the Kurds, they're going to do a better job of this than they did in the first Gulf War when they kind of abandoned them. So there are a lot of moving parts in this. Is Trump really trying to foment civil war in the country? Will the Iranian public accept somebody who wears a turban? I mean, let's put it bluntly, who comes from the clerical side, will they accept somebody who has anything to do with the regime like Laranjani does? I mean, it's going to be up to, I guess, having decimated Iran's defenses, it will be up to Israel and America, because they're not going to tolerate somebody who they feel they can't do business with. I think all of the. This is why Karl Rove is writing this article today in the Wall Street Journal, which is saying, look, we just need a more coherent theory of the case rather than the prospect of Donald Trump one day clicking his fingers and saying, okay, let's call it quits. We've had a victory. We're done. Because if you leave so many of these questions unanswered, your victory could evaporate.
- [27:55]
A
I think it's a really insightful analysis, and I'll just add a few things to it. So you have everything you just said, and now you have the big supreme question caddy, and that is, will whatever's left standing in that government play ball with the Americans? And I think it's hard to know because they've got a couple of different factions in there, right? Faction one are the pragmatists. They've been severely damaged. These are the ones that were very close in Geneva. You know, they were reporting to reporters that they thought or they were almost there with a deal. Okay? And there will be a backstory about that. You know, Jared and Steve Witkoff, because you guys were very close to the deal. But, you know, Bibi didn't want that deal. Bibi wanted to bomb everybody, Right? So the pragmatists are there and they are damaged. The second group are the irgc. These are the hardliners, okay? These guys are also militarily weakened, but they're the ideological maximalists. And the question is, what are we doing with them? And how many of them are left in power? These are the ones that are shooting the rockets at the Gulf states. You know, the foreign minister, you probably heard this, called the foreign minister of Qatar to offer some level of apology. That's not an IRGC thing. That's the pragmatist faction. Right? Right. And the Qatari foreign minister says, hey, you're not just shooting at American bases here. You're blowing up apartment buildings and hotels. Cut it out. So you've got a couple different factions, and this is the one that I want to ask you about, and that is the people. Katie K. Because I think Trump is misreading the people. And hear me out for a second, okay? The Iranian people, he is I think he's misreading them. He's like, you know, go overthrow the government. Go overthrow the government. But then he's also telling the press, where's Delsey Rodriguez 2? Where's Delsey Rodriguez 2? And I think Trump's gonna put himself in a weird position because I don't think the general population wants a deal with the regime.
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B
Yeah, I think you're right. That's what I was saying. Yeah.
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A
I think they want fundamental change.
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B
I agree.
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A
Which is frankly, fundamentally different from Venezuela. So you could be in a situation where, let's say Trump finds Delsey Rodriguez too, but you have lots of tumult in the place of the people where they're like, no, that's not what we want. We want a full renewed Iranian revolution. And I think Trump, Trump is misreading that. That's just me personally, because he likes and he enjoys this. He does it to everybody. He talks out of both sides of his mouth. I'm not for forever wars. Let's bomb the living daylights out of these guys like Dick Cheney. I want you guys to overthrow the government. Hey, is there someone in the government I can bribe that I can do business with? And so if he gets the guy or the person that he can bribe to do business with, I think the people are going to generally be unhappy. Am I wrong in that?
- [30:43]
B
No, I think you're exactly right. It's what I was saying that they won't tolerate somebod who is regime adjacent. Now, that doesn't mean that we're about to see a huge uprising from the Iranian people. They've been traumatized and brutalized for years, and they're not. At the moment, my understanding is they are absolutely terrified and will not be going out onto the streets because there are regime remnants and security services in IAJDC who are walking around with guns who are going to shoot anyone who so much as puts their head above the parapet. And I think you're not likely to see within the next six to months to a year a huge big rising up of the Iranian population short of massive American support, which I don't think Donald Trump is going to do. He's just kind of vaguely hoping that they'll do this by themselves because they've been hurt really hard. I mean, I think they're much more likely the Iranian people right now to hunker down and try to repair themselves. They're under bombardment right now as we speak. But that doesn't mean that they are happy about the idea of this bombing campaign. Starting and then being abandoned and this not leading to wholesale regime change. Speaking to people who know the country much better than I do, where we know there's something like only 15% support for the regime, but people are very, very wary there at the moment and they don't like the idea of America not finishing this job and giving them full. That would be massively disappointing to the Iranian people. If we end up with an enfeebled but still Islamic republic type of regime in the country, that is exactly the last thing that they want. Okay, talking of factions, where is Mr. J.D. vance these days? Mr. No More Forever wars. I voted for Donald Trump because he is the only one who understands how awful it was that America started all of these wars and we must never start any more wars. Have you seen him recently? Is he there with you in Ireland? Because he's not here in Washington.
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A
He's not here with me.
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B
Have we had a seance for him?
- [32:38]
A
Maybe in a seance with, with, with Dick Cheney. But the thing with J.D. vance. And again, I'm not patting myself on the back, but I sort of am patting myself on the back because I told you J.D. vance, like in the movie Fargo is gonna go through the wood chipper. And so conspicuously gross. No, conspicuously not in the room during the Venezuelan thing. Conspicuously not in Mar a Lago during the Iranian invasion. And you know, he said, oh my God, we gotta set up some mock up situation where he's sitting there looking like a bozo in some kind of photo op in another Situation Room. That has nothing to do with the real Situation Room Power center. Yeah, exactly. Is this sort of nonsense. And he's doing things right. He headlined that fundraiser. He went out to go with 50, 50 people. You probably saw that in the paper with Donald Trump Jr. They had 50 people give him a hundred thousand dollars each. It was a very lucrative fundraiser for them all. But I think Vance is in big trouble with Donald Trump. I think he has been completely and totally sidelined on this issue.
- [33:44]
B
On this issue, on this issue.
- [33:45]
A
But generally, Trump wants nothing to do with him. Now, on the other thing, okay, the eagle that is soaring right now is little Marco, okay? Little Marco is almost like a clay pigeon caddy, you know, like, and it's up in the air right now and he's soaring and Trump's telling you he's the greatest secretary of state in the world. And in six months, click, click, kaboom, okay? The clay pigeon is going to burst in the sky and Donald Trump is going to eviscerate little Marco. Okay, so that's going to happen as well, because Trump honestly cannot, and I repeat, he honestly cannot help himself. And somebody said to me here in Dublin last night, I was at an event, who does Trump want to be his successor?
- [34:30]
B
Nobody.
- [34:31]
A
Okay, thank you, Katie K. So I answered with Gavin Newsom, and they went, oh, a Democrat. I said, well, hear me out. You guys were nobody before I got here. Now you're somebody, but only because of me. And, oh, by the way, when I leave, you're going to be nobody. Okay? And that's what's going on here. So, J.D. vance. Bye. Bye. Okay, now what J.D. vance did, which I found very interesting, Katty, and I want you to react to it. He had his staffers leaked to the press that he wasn't for the strike.
- [35:04]
B
Yeah.
- [35:05]
A
Didn't help him with Trump, but he's trying to get a poll position in place for the 2028. So react to that, please.
- [35:10]
B
So he didn't even just leak it to the press. He wrote an op ed in the Wall street journal back in 2024 in which he said his primary reason for supporting Trump had been that he started no wars. In October of 2024, he said, said our interest, I think very much is not going to war with Iran. He doesn't even need to leak it to the press. I mean, he's been quite blunt about this. And to the extent that he represents the anti interventionist wing of the Republican Party, which he clearly does and is the champion of, that wing, is losing at the moment, the Steve Bannon Wing, the J.D. vance Wing, they're the ones that are not being able to restrain the president. They couldn't stop him from Venezuela, they couldn't stop him from doing Iran. And now JD Is in the position where he's having to go out and talk to some of these anti interventionists, and he has had to come out in public, which he's done, and sell the administration's line. But as he does that, he's losing some of his political capital with that group. So he is having to spend his own political capital. He's in a You're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't. He's got to spend his political capital with that group to defend the administration's actions in Iran, knowing that if he's gonna run in 2028, he's gonna need their support. And they are now a little bit disappointed with him. A reminder to J.D. vance, you can't win here. You can't Be half pregnant. You can't be half maga. You have to be kind of full maga. It's a bit like John Cornyn. We spoke about him in Texas. You've gotta be 100% on board.
- [36:49]
A
So in 1960, on the eve of the election, at a press conference, one of Eisenhower's last press conferences, the press raised their hand and said, Mr. Nixon is running for president in the last eight years. Could you please tell me an achievement of his in your two administrations? And Eisenhower looked at the guy and said, if you give me a week, I'll think about it, okay? And it was like literally like a Scud missile going into Nixon's campaign headquarters. Trump did a number, he did a number on J.D. vance said differently. He hit him with a karate chap into the Adams Apple caddy. He said, and I quote, it didn't take much persuading of J.D. vance because the press went to him and said, the Vice President has expressed reservations of going to this war. And Trump just went right at him and demeaned him and takes away the
- [37:46]
B
invitation to come down to Mar a Lago as the war is starting to.
- [37:49]
A
Exactly. And so by the way, J.D. that was a sign of disloyalty.
- [37:53]
B
I agree with that.
- [37:54]
A
And here's the thing, okay. Because J.D. actually had some chops on this. He's a former Marine, he was in the wars, he had some chops on this and he had some gravitas on this.
- [38:06]
B
And a long history. You know, there's video for everything, right? There's video and op EDS for everything. So interesting. Vance. And we're going to move on to the economy and what it's doing to the American economy, because I think that's also interesting that. But Vance did do an interview with Fox News. What he said the President has clearly defined what he wants to accomplish. There's just no way Donald Trump is going to allow this country to get into a multi year conflict with no clear end in sight and no clear objective. That is JD Vance trying to talk out of both sides of his mouth. In the first part of that, he is trying to say, Donald Trump, you're right. You know, he's done exactly the right thing. Not that we think Donald Trump has clearly defined his, what he wants to accomplish, because he clearly hasn't. And then in the second part of that, he's saying to his non interventionist based, don't worry, this is not a forever war and please forgive me for the position that I'm in.
- [38:53]
A
How's that gonna work out?
- [38:54]
B
For him, Katty, that's gonna work out really well.
- [38:56]
A
Can you hear the wood chipper in the background? Can you hear the woodchipper? It's right outside my window by the seance studio. Can you hear it?
- [39:03]
B
You know why it doesn't work out? Because we live in an era where there is no forgiveness for people not being authentic. There is no room for 100% people in this communications world. World, in this age of populism, particularly, you have to be somebody that the people believe you are. That's why Donald Trump gets away with it 100%. Donald Trump can say 50 different things at once and have 50 different positions on something, but he is who he is.
- [39:32]
A
Yeah.
- [39:33]
B
He's consistently mad, he's consistently inconsistent. JD Vance is trying to make a coherent position, but revealing himself as trying to satisfy everybody. And in this world, you can't try and please everybody.
- [39:52]
A
This episode is brought to you by Aura Frames. Now, it's Mother's Day coming up and Aura Frames is perfect for the mum who says she doesn't need anything.
- [40:00]
B
Yeah, and moms are always tricky to shop for.
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A
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- [40:14]
B
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A
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B
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- [40:46]
A
That's a U R A frames.co.uk promo code Politics US. This deal is exclusive to listeners, so order yours now to get it in time for Mother's Day. Don't forget to add Politics US at checkout. Terms and conditions apply.
- [41:02]
B
Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same Premium Wireless for $15 a month month plan
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A
that I've been enjoying. It's not just for celebrities. So do like I did and have one of your assistant's assistants switch you to Mint Mobile today.
- [41:17]
B
I'm told it's super easy to do@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment of 45 for 3 month plan equivalent to $15 per month required intro rate, first 3 months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees, extra default terms. @mintmobile.com. Let's talk about the economy.
- [41:39]
A
Okay.
- [41:40]
B
I had an interesting conversation this morning with Congressman Jim Himes and asked him whether we're going to start seeing Democrats make more of a case linking the economy and the potential costs of the economy and this war. Because just in the last day or two, you've heard Democrats saying, hold on a second, gas prices are going up, the war cost a billion dollars in the first 24 hours. At the same time, the Republicans in the White House are trying to cut your healthcare subsidies. So is this somewhere where Democrats think they're gonna go, that they're gonna hammer this? Not on the grounds, because I think it's complicated for them. Not on the grounds of this was a bad idea because they realize Americans don't like Iran and a lot of Democrats don't like Iran either. But they're gonna start linking this to the key issue that they know is the issue in the midterms, which is affordability. Do you think that's, do you think that's where they're gonna go? And would they be smart to go there?
- [42:35]
A
I do, and I think it's smart to go there. Frame it properly. Like if they got to the camera, looked straight into the camera and said, this is the war tax that nobody voted for because gas prices went from the low $2 to $3.20 in five days. Okay. And now you have a liquid natural gas crisis going on around the world where those prices are up substantially. You also have a forecast coming out by E and Y Parthenon that's saying that the growth in the US the GDP is likely going to be down 50 to 100 basis points as a result of this. So that slowdown is going to hurt everybody. And then the, the weird thing, Caddy and I'd like you to talk about this. You know that he's trapping the Fed. Okay? So the worst enemy of Donald Trump is Donald Trump because he wants the rates to go down. But you're setting up a situation now for stagflation, right? You see what's going on. Like Mohamed El Erian, one of my buds, used to run the Howard Endowment. He's was at alliance, he's one of the top capital allocators, top macro thinkers in the world, is saying these types of situations could really hamstring, you know, Hamstring the Fed to be locked in accordion not because they can't move and Trump wants lower rates, but you got the prices going up.
- [43:54]
B
Yeah. And if Kevin Walsh is not going to want to come in and raise interest rates after all of the campaign he made to get that job, that is not the thing he's going to want to do. But if you, if oil and gas prices keep going up, it's going to be certainly very difficult for him to cut rates. Apparently you've got Susie Wiles is calling oil industry executives frantically on the phone saying, what can we do? Find me something. Find me some good news. I need you to do something to try and bring down oil and gas prices, particularly prices at the pump. I don't know why the administration didn't think going into this that gas prices would go up, but why didn't they
- [44:33]
A
open up the Strategic Petroleum Reserve the last war? We opened up the SPR or suspend
- [44:38]
B
as they're talking about now. You suspend the gas tax or something. They're throwing out all of these ideas. Let's suspend the gas tax for a year. The White House is acting in a panic over gas prices right now. All of the political sides realize what an incredible cost this can be. This is what helped get Joe Biden booted out of the presidency. No question it was damaging to his campaign. It was the single thing, right? They care about gas prices more than they care about the price of eggs.
- [45:05]
A
Voters see, the White House thought that they were going to have a triple intensity 12 day war, but the Iranians were going to respond to it like they did the 12 day war, okay? They did not expect the Iranians to start bombing apartment buildings and hotels in Dubai. No way. Because that's evidenced by the lack of planning with the embassy and getting people out of the country. They were think about it in a way that shows extreme arrogance, meaning never underestimate your adversary or your potential opponent. And the Iranians are saying, hey, I got the number here. I'm going to choke off the global economy. And so I see the Strait of Hormuz as a mini Covid. And just hear me out for a second because even if they slow down, they could mine the strait, they could slow down the tanker activity in the Strait. Then what happens, Caddy? You get factory shutdowns in South Korea, factory shutdowns in China. You get a whole host of things that happen in Europe as a re adjustment and reallocation of capital due to energy prices as well as the United States. And it's like a Mini Covid recession and the administration, what are you doing? They weren't thinking about this. And so I just find it really weird that they thought that they were going to get a 12 day war response where the Iranians were like, hello, we're going to bomb this site and you get your people out of there so that we we don't escalate this too far. But the Iranians are not doing that. Now, look, the missile strikes are down. This is the stuff that General Kaine said. And you know, obviously the US Will have air superiority, but the Iranians have done something which is they've choked off elements of the global economy, which is going to hurt the approach the Fed is going to take over the next six months and it's going to generally hurt global gdp.
- [46:53]
B
And by the way, if, if tankers, like we heard off the coast of Kuwait do start getting hit and oil starts leaking into the Gulf, how many oil companies and tanker companies are going to want to send their ships there? I mean, that's going to depress even the fear of Iranians blowing up your tankers full of oil is going to make people wary about trying to be in that region. So I think that's going to hurt prices. I mean, the longer this goes on, the more destabilizing it is to the economy, the more destabilizing it is to the White House because they have to deal with the fallout of this and the more the American people risk turning against this. If this is all done and dusted in the case of the next week, then we may not be having this discussion in a week's time. And I think we have to have the humility to recognize that that's a possibility.
- [47:42]
A
I still think he hurt the economy. We'll have a different discussion. But Katty, we've been doing this Trump series, as we both know, for our founding members and I listened back to the second episode. I really want to encourage people to listen to it because the whole foundation of Trump's decision making and the whole lack of caution and general recklessness combined with the luck. Okay. Has gotten us to where we are right now, which is why the President is incredibly overconfident in doubling and tripling down on the things that he's doing. And thus far, because he's won the presidency twice, Caddy, much to the chagrin of many people, including myself, he's won it twice. I think we do a very good job in this episode. We should play a clip, do a very good job in this episode of explaining the sentiment and the foundation of the Trump decision making said everybody like Merkoch because Merkoch was bringing back the police officers. Marra Koch was trying to bring back the businesses. Amir Koch needed Trump and Trump needed Koch. And you know what they both disliked about that? What I just said. Cuz neither one of them liked needing each other. You see what I mean? And so bam, bam, bam. They were constantly going at it with each other. Of course, Koch being a politician, always used a cutout and he'd always throw different commissioners in front of Trump and to try to block Trump. And Trump was a Steve Steamroller. But the most famous thing that happens in the 80s that Trump writes about in the Art of the Deal is the Walman Rink. But you have to think about this. And these numbers aren't staggering to us today, but these numbers were staggering to the 1980s. Okay, so the rink closes in 1980. $13 million is spent by the city to try to get the rink reopened. 1980 to 1986, $13 million. Gatti. Bureaucratic infighting, contractors fired, multiple design changes.
- [49:48]
B
This is an ice skating rink, guys. I mean, he has a point. It's an ice skating rink.
- [49:52]
A
So Trump goes on the air, okay? He goes on the radio, he goes on tv, like local news. This is before the real advent of cable. And he says, I'm a private citizen. I'll take this over. I'll get private contractors. I'll fix this thing in six months. And so now you can hear the drum beat from the city, Let him fix it. Let him fix it. Signs go up, let him fix it. And so Kadi, he completes the rink in about four months.
- [50:19]
B
What does he want to call it?
- [50:20]
A
Trump Ice, Inc. Of course he wants to do that. Akoch blocks that, right? So that's like the first blocking of the Trump Kennedy Center. Trump can't do that. But it doesn't matter. They have this big ribbon cutting ceremony. And there he is. And there's a great picture of him standing up on the rink. It's 1987 and the rink is opened. He's in that famous top coat of his. And this is great branding and great messaging for a private citizen, private entrepreneur coming into government like services. And I'll show you right, because that's ultimately his message in 2016. But it goes back to the Wollman Rink. And I think people have to understand how important this rink is to him. While he's doing this, he's flying high. He's in the process of building his casinos, which we'll talk about but he does something bat shit crazy.
- [51:24]
B
Yeah. You really hear in that clip, Anthony, how He believed this Mr. Fix it Persona. It was born out of his years of business in New York where he was working there on the ice rink. I mean, we've gone from an ice rink to a war in the Persian Gulf. And the thinking behind it, from Donald Trump's own point of view of himself, how he sees himself, is basically the same. I am the only person that can fix this. The problem with that is that now he is in the Oval Office, the stakes are so much higher. This is potentially a much bigger regional war. And if he thinks he can do it alone, it means he's not listening to the smartest people in the room.
- [52:06]
A
He's the smartest person in the room. There's nobody smarter.
- [52:09]
B
He's not listening to people that will say no to him. And in foreign policy, you need a good president, has people around them who will say to them, no, you're wrong. Try this approach. Have you thought of this? This is the nuance of the Iranian population. They may not be what you think. And he doesn't have those people around him because he's surround himself in this presidency with yes people. And I think we can see. This is why I love doing this series and why it's so timely right now. If you want to understand Donald Trump's world that we are all living in, listen to this series and you'll understand where it came from. So if you'd like to sign up and get this series, you can become a founding member by going to therestispoliticsus.com and clicking on the link.
- [52:55]
A
Well said.
- [52:56]
B
Thank you so much for listening. Clearly a lot going on. We'll be back next week with more.
- [53:01]
A
Thanks, guys. We'll see you next week.
- [53:08]
B
To some, he is the revolutionary hero who restored China to its rightful place on the global stage.
- [53:14]
A
To others, he's a brutal despot accused
- [53:17]
B
of presiding over more civilian deaths than either Stalin or Hitler. Mao Zedong has one of the most rich recognizable faces in the world. Yet he started life in a muddy provincial village.
- [53:28]
A
A rebel son who hated his father,
- [53:30]
B
survived a 6,000 mile walk across China and rose to become a figure of titanic proportions. From Empire. The Goal Hangar World History Show. I'm Anita Anand. And I'm William Duranpool. In this six part series, we're joined by world renowned expert Rana Mitta to explore the life of the father of Communist China, Mao Zedong. We'll track his rise from a bookstore owner to a guerrilla commander. And we'll witness his ruthless elimination to secure total power. And we'll descend into the dark experiment of the Cultural Revolution, a time when ancient temples were burnt, children denounced their parents, and a nation worshiped a mango
- [54:12]
A
as a sacred relic.
- [54:14]
B
Subscribe to Empire wherever you get your podcasts to listen now.