10/21/26: Trump’s Bizarre Sexual Comments At Rally, GOP Early Vote Panic, Auto Loan Crisis

This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human. I turned off news altogether. I hate to say it, but I don't trust much of anything. It's the rage bait. It feels like it's trying to divide people. We got clear facts. Maybe we can calm down a little. NBC News brings you clear reporting. Let's meet at the facts. Let's move forward from there. NBC News, reporting for America. This is Matt Rogers from Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang. This is Bowen Yang from Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang. You know when people try a new food and suddenly it's like, okay, hold on, I got a new favorite food. That's the reaction a lot of people are having when they first try Kewpie mayo. Yeah, it's the one with the red cap and the little baby on the bottle. You've probably seen it at the grocery store. And this mayo is different. Most mayonnaise uses whole eggs. Kewpie only uses egg yolks, which gives it this rich umami flavor. It's smoother, deeper, almost buttery. Once people try it, they start putting it on everything. Egg sandwiches, fries, burgers. Chefs use it. Restaurants use it. People who really care about flavor use it. Put it on just about anything. Then you'll understand. Kewpie, the original Japanese mayonnaise. Had a busy day? Don't have time to listen to the show? Catch up on Breaking Points with our free daily newsletter. You'll get our breakdown of every daily story. And. And lots of links in your inbox every day. So, head over. BreakingPoints.com. You can sign up for the newsletter at the top for free today. Well, it looks like early voting patterns appear to favor Democrats. Let's start with the president, who's really clearly feeling the heat right now. Trotting on a new campaign tactic. And then we'll break down why Republicans, in addition to the polls, but when you're starting to look at some of the hard facts on the ground, there's polling, there's where the money is moving, but then also early voting patterns that tell us, why the president might be using lines like this one, D1. If you want to see what is at stake in this election, just look at what's happening in France, a once great nation that is being conquered, looted and burned to the ground by migrants, jihadists and communists who hate Christianity and they hate, frankly, the Western civilization itself. And as we're seeing in Europe, globalist left-wing politicians, have treasonously imported millions and millions of third world migrants who are totally incompatible with the West. And they are incompatible with Western values. They despise everything about France and they're destroying that country. And we're not going to let that happen to this country. OK, so tough to make the argument in a place like North Carolina or Kansas that, listen, these are. Kansas will be. Burned. This is, yeah, they're not exactly, they're not like exactly even like an Abdul El-Sayed populist, like an Adam Hamilton or certainly Roy Cooper. And these are the places where Trump has been for his week, his week of rallies. Now, he was in Kentucky and cannot, cannot stop talking about John Husted in Ohio. D2, let's listen. He came up and he was talking very nicely. And I stood right over here and I examined his ass. I never did that. No, I never did that with a man before. I examined his ass and then I looked at his shoulders. I looked at his feet. I looked at his hand. I looked at his jawline. Studying. He's got a jawline. This is, you would be very unfortunate if you picked a fight with him at a bar someday. You want to give me that seat? No, I'm not going to give you the seat. But I then patted him on the shoulder and it was like a piece of steel. I'm still recovering. My hand was like, so he's over here. I'm over here and I'm studying his body. I've never studied the body of a man before. It's not my thing. Nothing wrong with it, of course. Nothing. I always proceeded by saying nothing wrong, but it's never been my thing, to be honest with you. But I looked at his ass. And then I looked at his legs and I said, his ass is shit. It's like, it's like a pile of muscle. Then I looked at his legs and I said, man, his feet are big. Then I looked at his shoulders and I tapped him on the shoulder and it actually hurt my hand. It was like a piece of steel. I said, this guy's a monster. I can't be mad at that, Ryan. I mean, Ryan, Ryan was cracking up. Imagine you're John Husted. You're going to lose to Sherry Brown. Yeah. Looks like you're going to lose Sherry Brown on the way out. You're just getting a nice little pat. Sherry Brown does not have the ass that John Husted has. All that work for nothing. I'm going to take his word for it. We don't know because we haven't heard from Trump how that would compare, but probably a more winning argument than half the other things he's been saying on the campaign trail, to be honest, and it's not even an argument. So it's not working, apparently. Let's read some of the tea leaves here. This is D3. According to the Texas Tribune. Texas voter registration is breaking a record. So it's at 19 million so far. Registrations are up 2.2 percent from the last major general election in 2024, up 2 percent from primary elections in March. And the latest figures are also, get this, 7.7 percent higher than the last midterm elections in November 2022. Interestingly, some of the suburbs, some of the fast-growing suburbs, they say, are seeing some of the biggest growth. Texas obviously had a lot of people migrate to the suburbs. From places like California, Washington, like blue states, people who are not necessarily like hardcore Republicans but didn't like pandemic restrictions or felt like they were paying too much in taxes, didn't like the way some of the cities were being run, moved to Texas. But they're not, you know, like dyed-in-the-wool Texas Republicans. They're not like Ken Paxton lovers. And interestingly, there's also a poll of CBS Austin. CBS Austin says, according to the University of Houston's Hobby School of Public Affairs, independence. Independence say they plan to vote for Tallarico. Only 32 say they plan to vote for Ken Paxton. And the reason I bring that up is when you're looking at fast-growing suburbs with high voter registration, some people might say, well, maybe they're really excited to go for Paxton. I think that's really unlikely. Independence, according to Quinnipiac Nationwide, are swinging for Democrats as well. So something to keep in mind as we go through the rest of these numbers. Early voting up as well. D4 in Texas. So this is early vote tracking that shows James Tallarico. According to their modeling here, VoteHub's modeling, 47.3% to 56.6% for Tallarico, 41.2% to 50.5% is their expected margin based on the modeling of where those votes are coming in. That's VoteHub's data. D5, we can go to Virginia. One point on D4. Yeah, so more than 700,000 people voted. The only caution I would give on this is that people are comparing this to 2024. Yes, 2024 is a presidential year. 2026 is a midterm. One of the differences is that there's, what, 7% more people. So when you're comparing aggregate, like, well, there's more people. But also there are a lot more voting locations. 2024, there were more restrictions in place. And that's been opened up a little bit. So it's easier for people to vote. And I think the voting lasts like two more hours or something into the evening. So Democrats who are super excited about the fact that they're crushing expectations say it's not. It's not apples to apples. Right. But the fact that it's presidential versus midterm, it cuts the other direction. Anyway, go ahead. And also I think in Texas where we're seeing some of it. Like when we're talking about the suburbs, that's, I think, genuinely interesting. But those would be the places that also just have more people. So worth noting that. Let's go to Virginia. Virginia, the early vote versus the same point in 2022. Huge increase. It was 417,867 in 2022. According to data right now, TargetSmart's data right now, 709,219. So that is a very, very big jump in early voting in Virginia. Obviously a pretty blue state. There should be a second one there that shows who those people are voting for. And it's Democrats. It's Democrats. But anyway, go ahead. There you go. Yeah. Well, no, it's. Let's go to Florida. According to. Not who they're voting for, who they are. Right. They could be voting for anybody, but they're registered Democrats. Yes. Makes sense. Jason Frascatore. Data analyst points out that Florida vote by mail and in-person early voting. As of October 20th, Florida's now surpassed 10% statewide live turnout and over 1.3 million votes. Democrats increased their lead by a lot compared to the 3 p.m. Update. So statewide vote totals 577,903 from Dems, 518,729 from Republicans and around 300,000 from others. So, again, more good news for Democrats. And if we go to the final element here, this is from. a New York Times chart. presidential approval heading into midterm share of Americans who approved of the president's job performance in each midterm election year. Ryan pointed this out in the show, uh, another point in the show, Harry Truman, the only president to have a lower approval rating heading into midterms than Donald Trump in modern history. That was 1946. Harry Truman was at 33% Donald Trump, 34%. George W. Bush was higher at this point in his presidency, uh, 37%, 37%. Joe Biden was pretty low, 41%, but Trump is almost, I mean, Trump is running significantly behind Joe Biden in 2022, significantly behind himself in 2018. He was at 42%, eight points behind himself in 2018. So Trump is, Trump is unifying, Trump is unifying the country against him. And one, one way that the, these early voting, and then we can move on, um, uh, what these early voting numbers might actually be undercounting the wave is that there's just kind of an assumption like, oh, look at all these registered Republicans who have come out. So yeah, okay. There's more Democrats that have voted than Republicans. That's not, that's bad for Republicans, but at least those Republicans voted. But as callers to your show have suggested and lots of other anecdotal and also polling evidence suggests a significant chunk of Republicans are, moving away from Trump. Or Trump voters, people who voted Republican in 2020, 2022, and especially 2022, but then 2024, when they felt like it was kind of peak cultural leftism, they thought, no. Just because a Republican is turning in a mail ballot doesn't mean that's a vote for a Republican in the House or Senate. It's a good point. And you can say the same thing about Democrats in a place like Ohio, like Rust Belt places, like people who have just consistently voted Dem and then after Obama flipped for Trump, but that would be hard to make. Now in 2026, because it's not a lot of, there wasn't a lot of change from 24 to 20. Ryan is showing me right now the Drudge Report lead story, which the headline is Trump thirsts over male senator's body, quote, ass like a pile of muscle. All the president's hotties. That's a good place to leave it. So that's really what this election comes down to. Great closing message from Trump here. Who does Donald Trump think is hotter? That's how you should vote. Yeah. All right. Well, let's go ahead and get to more bad news, this time in the economy. Running a little short before payday, you can request up to a $500 cash advance from Clio to help bridge the gap. No interest, no credit checks, repayment options that work for you, whether it's groceries, utility bills, an unexpected expense, or just making ends meet. Clio can help when you need it most. Getting started is quick and easy right from your phone. Download Clio and get back on track today. Depending on eligibility, you can get a $500 cash advance. Terms and conditions apply. It's the rage bait. We got clear facts. NBC News. Reporting for America. This is Jacob Goldstein from What's Your Problem? Running a business is hard enough. Don't make it harder with a dozen apps that don't talk to each other. One for sales, another for inventory, a separate one for accounting. That's software overload. Odoo is the all-in-one platform that replaces them all. CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, HR, fully integrated, easy to use, and built to grow with your business. Thousands have already made the switch. Why not you? Try Odoo for free at odoo.com. That's odoo.com. Things not looking good out there in the economy. I'm going to put up E2 here. Delinquent auto loans are absolutely surging. And the reason that this is such, and this is this car buzz, but others are reporting this too, $1.7 trillion market might be on the verge of collapse, they say. The reason that this is such a glaring, red light to the economy is that, think about it. What is one of the last things that you're going to stop paying? It's your car note. In fact, you're often, you stop paying your rent often before you stop paying your car note. Because rent, you can fight your landlord and maybe you can get some kind of agreement or get on a payment plan or something. And maybe you can get another apartment if you end up, you do get evicted six months later after you're fighting with the landlord. Your car note, though, if you lose your car, you lose your job. And you can live out of your car if you're real dire straits. Or you can drive home to live with your parents. Like, your car is the lifeline. And so it's not just intuitive, but economists will tell you that statistically, the car note is the thing that people pay before they pay everything else. And also because it's easier for the capitalists to say, snatch your car than it is to snatch your apartment. They can take you to court and change the locks, but there's a lot more protections. You can go to landlord-tenant court. You can start making payments. And certainly when it comes to student loans or credit card debt or other things, the consequences are less immediate. If you get your car repossessed, it's gone. Like, you just go out with your keys. You're looking like, wait, I'm pretty sure I parked it here. I have nowhere to go. And now it's gone. And so now you call in and you're like, I'm going to be late today because I don't have a car. And you do that a couple times, you're fired. And now you're really screwed. So that's why when they start seeing auto loan delinquencies ticking up significantly, it's a sign that everything else is much worse. Like, this is the last thing. This tends to be the last thing to go. Um, and meanwhile, of course, we've been chopping up all these auto loans and, you know, putting them in the financial blender and then serving them as these like AAA smoothies to investors, throwing them into pension funds and everything else saying this, okay, yes, every one of these loans by itself is bad, but we mixed them all together and now they're good. You may remember that from such films as, um, everything about the great financial crisis. Which you, you may, speaking of which, by the way, why don't we even skip to E5 here? The free press had a genuinely good article by Bethany McClain, uh, who wrote, like literally wrote the big, or that was about the pandemic, but didn't she, she wrote one of the big books, um, about the financial crisis and is saying basically that. Oh, she wrote the Enron book, right? Oh, the Enron book. I'm sorry. That's what it was. Enron. Um, and is asking our data centers, the next big short, or are they the next Enron? And when you look at the circular financing, which we've covered a lot here, you have NVIDIA investing in the AI companies who are then dependent on NVIDIA and all of that. It's an open question. Uh, one of the things she writes is that like when you talk to experts, um, about the, like, this is a great line that she says, this might lead to the most profound difference between the AI boom and the sagas of Enron and the global financial crisis. And the latter two, the smartest people I knew were skeptics. It was the dumb money that kept the party going this time. I know very smart people on both sides of the argument last week, notwithstanding, it's going to be a while before we know who's right. Very smart people on both sides of the argument. Now you don't have to even be a very smart person to say, how is open AI paying for all these data centers? If they're not profiting, if they're not turning a profit in any given year, but they're spending all this money on the data centers. Uh, yeah, it's a huge problem. And actually let's go ahead and put this, uh, next element up on the street. E2, I'm sorry, not ET, but let's put E3 up on the screen. This is from the National Association of Realtors released Tuesday, a report that showed home sales at a record low. They started doing this in 2001, record low. The pending home sales index tumbled 7.3% to 66 last month, record low since 2001 monthly home sales. And yeah, and these, these things are related because the AI, um, build out is relying on trillions at this point of dollars of capital pouring in. Much of it is pouring in by way of debt. What that debt is doing is crowding out all the other debt. It's, it's a, it's a, it's a real vivid example of this idea of crowding out that they often talk about when it relates to government borrowing, but you're actually seeing it happen in a, in a real and visceral way. So in other words, if you are somebody who wants to buy bonds because there's so many of these, uh, these data, data center bonds, what that means is that if you are a home buyer or if you're like just Pepsi Cola or something, you now have to pay a much higher interest rate to attract investors because there's so much debt out there. Investors can just go and get debt from open AI or cloud or whatever. Right. And, and so, what that's doing is it's just driving up interest rates and driving up mortgage rates as well. So not only is your electric bill up because of these data centers, but you're, you're, you're Your mortgage rates are way up, too, and that's the thing that is seizing the housing market up. And if we put the Axios tariff sheet up next, this looks like it's only going to get worse because they report the number of housing units started by builders fell 5.2 percent last month, according to the Census Bureau, to 1.22 million. That's down 7.4 percent year over year and near post-pandemic lows. So housing units starting is falling. Sales are at a record low since 2001, according to the National Association of Realtors. So that's foreboding. That's not good. And just to give Bethany McLean her flowers, yes, she wrote a very prescient 2001 piece on Enron. She was then co-author of the book The Smartest Guys in the Room. Yes. It's like the seminal book on Enron. And then she wrote All the Devils Are Here. Which is a seminal book on the 2008 financial crisis. So she has the credibility to weigh in on the AI financial engineering and to say, uh-oh. And you were circulating an amazing chart recently that showed that the amount of investment into the AI bubble relative to GDP is greater substantially than our investment in the Internet, investment in radio, in railroads. And even canals before that. I knew you were going to mention the canals. You immediately latched onto the canals. Because you were like, that was a massive capital investment. That was our first bubble. Yeah. It was the canal bubble. It's not even close. Right. Not even close. Right. And we were digging up half the country. Shaky. And this is to the McLean article. She's saying there are very smart people, very fine people, very smart people on both sides of this argument about whether this is a bubble. And previously there was nobody except for maybe one or two people. Like in the wilderness saying that we might have been in a bubble. So that in and of itself is kind of an argument we're in a bubble. Like we never detected any of it before. So add another notch to the bubble column. Yeah. Things are looking bleak. All right. Let's bring in Noga. Running a little short before payday? You can request up to a $500 cash advance from Clio to help bridge the gap. No interest, no credit checks. Repayment options that work for you. Whether it's groceries, utilities. Pay bills, an unexpected expense, or just making ends meet. It's the rage bait. If we got clear facts, maybe we can calm down a little. NBC News. That's soft. Overload. CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, HR. Fully integrated, easy to use, and built to grow with your business. Why not you? That's odoo.com. All right, new surveys this week show the opposition moving ahead of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ahead of the elections this coming Tuesday. Joining us to discuss all of this is Israeli journalist Noga Tarnopolsky. Noga, joining us from Jerusalem, thank you so much for being here. My pleasure, Ryan. All right, so our understanding is that neither the opposition camp or Netanyahu's camp at this point have a majority outright without the two Palestinian parties, which are expected to get about 14, 15 seats in the election. In the Knesset, but that the opposition has been willing to form a government with the Palestinian parties. And if the surveys, as they are being rolled out this week, are accurate, and my understanding is they tend to be accurate at this point in the election, that with the Palestinian parties and the opposition, there would be enough to form a government that would oust Netanyahu. How would you describe the current state of affairs with just now less than a week to go before the election? Well, the main thing I would say is very, very tense, and there's a real feeling in Israel that Prime Minister Netanyahu could do anything to even still try and postpone the elections. This is being said by former Prime Minister Bennett, by the leading opposition candidate Eisenkot. There is a very clear sense that Netanyahu will do everything he can. Now, he hasn't been able to do everything he wanted to do. For example, his party requested a ban on these Arab-majority Palestinian-Arab-Israeli parties. I'm making a bit of a muddle of how I'm defining them, because there are Palestinian citizens of Palestine, of the Palestinian Authority, who are not Israeli citizens. And here we're talking about complete Israeli citizens who are of Palestinian ethnicity or identify as Arab-Israelis or Palestinians. So the parties that are not uniformly Arab, but that are majority Arab, they could be the kingmaker here. But we don't really know. What we do know is that the last time anyone beat Netanyahu, which was in 2021, a government formed by Prime Minister, the man who became Prime Minister Bennett, who is absolutely a right-winger. There's no question about that. He did form a government with one of these two majority Arab parties that he has a very conservative party. It's an Islamist party. It's not in any way, I don't want to make any implications. It's a completely mainstream party, just very conservative and is conservative in a religious way. But it wants explicitly, and its leader wants to join into the next Israeli government. It's the main platform point of Mansour Abbas, the very, very interesting leader of this party, who appoints a leader who is a very, very conservative. And it's a very, very conservative leader who appointed not just a Jew, but a former deputy head of the Israel police and an internal security man, Yoav Segalovich, to be his number two. So he is explicitly not going in a kind of Arab nationalist direction. He explicitly wants to be part of the government. It's hard for me to imagine any opposition government that would turn that down. Well, so this is very interesting. Reuters had a piece on this with a dateline in Nazareth. They wanted to get your take on Noga, where they're kind of breaking down. For Americans, the Israeli election process is foreign. It's just so different from how we do our elections, obviously, as parliamentary, and you're electing. People vote for party, and then you go to the Knesset and take the top 50 that have been selected by each party. They get representation in the Knesset, and then they vote and elect a leader. So the alliances are really important. Can you break down for us how Arab voter turnout could affect what the makeup of the Knesset looks like, and then who is elected prime minister? Just explain to us what those. I guess alliances and numbers would add up to to get a different outcome than Netanyahu being president. It would be Eisenkot, certainly, right? So no one is going to be president because. A prime minister, yes. Yes. Israel has a president, and he's not part of the government. Right. Like, what remains in former mandatory Israel from the British mandate, whatever you want to call that. Prime minister. Yeah. So in terms of prime minister, let me just take a step back, because it really is, a Baroque system, and I'll try and break it down. Basically, whoever is the leader of either the largest party, elected the party that gets the most votes for the parliament, the Knesset, or the leader of the party that is part of the largest Knesset bloc. So there are blocs that are natural allies. The opposition, in this case, the opposition to Benjamin Netanyahu, is really, like, the widest possible tent you can imagine, going all the way from, I would say, at the really right-hand end of this, a Vigdor Lieberman. He's sort of an old-school hard-right guy. He believes in democracy and law and order, but he's very much a hard-right nationalist. All the way to, I don't know if we're going to define the other end either by that's called the United Arab List, officially run by Mansour Abbas, who started his career as a dentist up in the Israeli north, or if we'll go to the largest center-left mixed party. Also, this is a party that is majority Jewish, but has Arab candidates called the Democrats. And that party, as you can imagine, is running on a platform of basically trying to preserve what still can of Israeli democracy. The Netanyahu block is the block we know. It's the current coalition, it's a very, very right-wing, extremist, religious, nationalist bloc. So the polls right now are showing a paradox. When Israelis are asked who would make the best prime minister of Israel, both Gadi Eisenkot, the leader of this larger centrist party that's called Yashar, he's beating Netanyahu by 12 points. And Naftali Bennett, the former prime minister who's leading also a kind of a centrist party, maybe slightly to the right of Eisenkot's party, he also beats Netanyahu quite handily. That said, when we look at the public polls about how people actually vote, their intention of voting, you vote here for a party, not for a leader. And so when people tell you what party they're planning voting for, what we are seeing is something of an impact. We're seeing a huge contrast among the two blocs. Now, there's still a sizable chunk between 8 and 10 percent of undecideds. And Israeli polls, you know, are a mixed bag. There have been election nights when the polls have been largely right, and then there have been election nights when the polls really were far off. So I'm preparing a kind of mental yoga for election night so I can be flexible as the results begin to come in. And so where does. Where does Eisenkot stand? Tell us who is Eisenkot, and where does he stand when it comes to West Bank settlement or the attempted ethnic cleansing in Gaza? Well, I just want to say the main issues in this election, you might be surprised to know, are neither of those two issues. The main issues in this election are cost of living and security as it's defined by Israel, which is, can they ever feel safe again in the state of Israel? Third is, will there be a state of Israel? In the sense that somewhere between above 60 and sometimes above 70 percent of Israelis say that they're concerned about, you know, the structure of the state. That is how kind of febrile things are here. Gadi Eisenkot is not exactly a cipher, but close to it. He's not a. He was not a major known public figure, you know, 10 years ago in Israel. He was chief of staff of the army. He does have an interesting story. He's the son of Moroccan immigrants. He is very much a self-made man. He strikes me as a profoundly moderate pragmatist. That's my main impression. The issues that he has made his top campaign issues are issues of vast consensus among Israelis. He says. He says, first things, they will begin to cancel the coup d'etat legislation that Netanyahu passed, that they will immediately establish an independent commission of inquiry into what led to October 7th and what has happened since, which begins to address Ryan's question. He has a whole list of these kinds of questions, saving the education system in Israel, that are very much consensus issues. So he has been attacked. He's been attacked. He's been attacked for being mushy among a lot of people. I'm not sure I see it that way. I think that if you are kind of an unknown, it's not a bad way to start if you're facing a very frightened population to say that you stand by the main issues that concern them. I want to add something to this that may play on Election Day. And I may have mentioned to you in the past, I can't remember. Gadi Aizenkot has paid it a monumental and almost incalculable price for this war, Netanyahu's war. He lost a son, and he lost two nephews, all within the span of one year. And somehow, his quiet nature, his sort of anti-Netanyahu-ness, and just the dimensions of the loss that his family has paid, seem to have provided a kind of Teflon for him during this campaign. So Netanyahu has even put out videos kind of mocking the loss of Gadi Aizenkot's son, who was called Gal. He's put out just racist, flat-out racist campaign videos. His top proxy in the Israeli media space, fake media space, a guy called Inon Magal last week referred to Gadi Aizenkot as a monkey. That's how bad things have gotten here. And yet Gadi Aizenkot is just like floating past it all. I think that's the most important thing I can say about him right now, is he's a consensus candidate, and he seems immune to most of Netanyahu's arrows. Right. And we wanted to play this ad. Actually, I think it's going to be a voiceover because it's in Hebrew, but we can put it up on the screen, where the catchphrase is "Benjamin is Palestine." And this is apparently an Aizenkot ad. So some of this is going back and forth. Noga, hoping that you could explain to us a little bit about, we just heard here what's coming from the Netanyahu camp, probably shocking for a lot of people to hear. Yeah, tell us, tell us. All right. I just have to interrupt because it would be huge. That ad is a joke ad. It is a real ad put out by the Aizenkot camp, but it is mocking Netanyahu. I don't think you should run that ad if you don't run the original. What's the original? Give us the context. Yeah, give us the context. Tell us what's happening, going back and forth between them. Netanyahu, which is Netanyahu's ruling party, has really struggled to find any slogan that would stick in this election. Something in Netanyahu's messaging is just clearly not working. And their latest slogan is "Hayyamin o Falestin," which rhymes, as you can hear it. And what that means is either the right or Palestine. And this is in part a racist slur against Aizenkot, but it's much more a racist slur. A racist slur against all Arabs who vote in Israel and all of the majority Arab parties in Israel. What Netanyahu is saying is, I'm the only legitimate right. This is how he's trying to kind of decapitate the right wing parties that are in the opposition to him. He's saying, I'm the only right. And if you go with them, you're going to get Palestine. That's the slur. And the Aizenkot party has responded in an intentionally kind of Armageddon-like manner. It's mocking this, like, catastrophizing tendency of Netanyahu and says, no, no, Binyamin, which is Benjamin, his full name, it's either Benjamin, right? If you vote for Benjamin, you'll get Palestine. And in fact, what he's showing is all the times that Netanyahu shook Yasser Arafat's hand or lied about West Bank issues or somehow— The Qatar elements, right? I'm sure that comes up as well. Actually, I have—I can share with you really bad news for Netanyahu today on the legal front. Not only is the investigation into his top aides being agents of Qatar heating up, and we're expecting an indictment against his right-hand man, Yonatan Uri, in the next few weeks, but there has been an avalanche of accusations in the last week that Netanyahu himself is suspected of acting as a Qatari agent. Now, I may have hinted at this before when talking with you, but this is no longer hints, and it's not just me. Naftali Bennett, the former prime minister, Rony Alsheikh, the former chief police officer—police commissioner of Israel, Udi Levy, who was in charge of terror financing for the Mossad, and many more top officials who have top security clearances, crucially, are coming out in public in the last week and saying he has to be investigated for treason. I'm not the one using the word, they are. So that confronts Netanyahu. Plus, today, the worst news for him is that a previously established investigative committee into something that basically also amounts to treason, an investigation into the illicit or improper sale of submarines to Egypt— I won't get into all the details, but the bottom line is that Netanyahu authorized a sale of German submarines to Egypt behind the back of his own army, against the security interests of Israel, and to the financial benefit of his first cousin. That came up today because Netanyahu has now been formally and officially called to provide testimony under oath to that commission. So he's not having a good week. And so if Gadi Eizenkot is known, here in the United States, he's mostly known as the guy who came up with the Dahiya Doctrine, which was this 2006 doctrine. It was established in 2006. It said that if you—tell me if I'm describing it accurately—if you punish a civilian population enough, they will then force out Hezbollah. And so it's this idea that collective punishment can be strategically valuable. Does that play a role at all, or is it so domestic focused? The election is kind of domestic focused just on the kind of Israeli population, that none of this really matters. And it's just kind of from outside that we're like, these are the different candidates? It's hard for me to answer that because it's a multi-layered question that you've asked me. I think that kind of security policy hawks, like you just said, do know Agadez and Koch for what was known at the time, 10 years ago, 20 years ago, as the Dafya Doctrine, which was not exactly the way you put it, but basically the doctrine held that if Israel confronts attacks, at the time we were talking about missiles launched from civilian population centers, that's why it's called the Dafya Doctrine, for the Dafya neighborhood in the south of Beirut, where at that time Hezbollah had basically its head of operations. It's all of its operations. They were also in the south of the country, but they were launching attacks from the Dafya. This doctrine held that Israel should respond disproportionately. That was the word that's the heart of this doctrine. That doctrine also, one could say, is the doctrine that has failed to provide Israel security either in Lebanon or in Gaza. If the Dafya Doctrine was ever really fully adopted by Israel, I think we'd have to say it was after October 7th in this certainly disproportionate and also I think it was in the vein, no results in terms of Israeli security destruction, wanton destruction of Gaza. But the reason that that is not an issue in this election is that Eisenkot was known in Israel at the time that he was the military chief, which is 20 years ago now, mostly for other things. For example, he became very well known because he stood against Netanyahu in the case of a soldier, who I'm sure you remember, Elor Azaria, an Israeli army soldier who shot and killed a Palestinian who was accused of committing a terror attack, who lay wounded and incapacitated on the ground, and who was handcuffed and his legs were cuffed, who absolutely had no threat, no ability to threaten any soldiers. This soldier came up and just shot him in the head. And he was court-martialed and he was sent to jail. And he, that happened because Eisenkot said that was the only way to maintain any kind of discipline. Netanyahu initially supported Eisenkot in that very famous case here locally, and then U-turned and supported the amnesty, the pardon of this soldier and demanded that he be released, became a huge scandal here. So Eisenkot's doctrine during the time that he had military power was never put into place. And since, I don't know if what happened, since October 7th can fairly be called the Dahya Doctrine, but something like that, Netanyahu was taken full credit for it. And it's not even associated with Eisenkot, who did join Netanyahu's government at the beginning of the war as a kind of national unity effort, and then abandoned the government when he publicly said that Netanyahu was engaged in a policy of eternal war with no strategic aims in Gaza. So those are the issues if we're talking about security that have been, I would say, pretty major. So Netanyahu gets the Trump endorsement this week. Is there daylight between Eisenkot that you can tell us about and Netanyahu when it comes to the U.S. alliance? Like, do they have a different posture on Trump and then, specifically on Trump, and then generally on the alliance, the security alliance with the United States? I think the answer is yes. But first, let me tell you that Netanyahu has always boasted about his flawlessness. He has always boasted about his flawlessness. English and it's become like a calling card for him. Eisenkot's English is halting. Eisenkot's English is much like the English of many foreign leaders, right? Heavily accented and a little stumbling. And so many of the original or the initially couped ads mocked Eisenkot for not speaking English, as if, as we heard this week, as if he were being seen as a monkey, right? Or as a kind of a mental idiot, something very offensive. That is another effort that really boomeranged. You know, I think we've seen a lot of people say that, you know, we've seen a lot of people say that, you know, we've seen a lot of people say He was humiliated by Trump, let's not forget, on more than one occasion, but notably when Trump forced him to apologize from a pre-written text to the Qatari prime minister on the phone from the Oval Office. What Eisenkot says is that Israeli-American ties have to be rehabilitated. And now I'm quoting, like every other strategic interest this country has. So he's referring to the judiciary, the education system, and he's counting the Israeli-U.S. relationship as one of those strategic assets. Now, Netanyahu, on the one hand, depends so much on Trump that he begged for this endorsement. And on the other hand, in the last year, basically to placate kind of, I would say, rebel Republicans, he has gone on the record saying that he wants to wean Israel from American security aid. In the real world, he's running an eternal war policy. That depends almost entirely on ongoing and even greater U.S. security aid to Israel. So Eisenkot has not gotten into the details of that. He very much has decried the collapse of Israel's diplomatic standing and what he calls also the irresponsible crash of Israel's standing in the United States. Whenever Netanyahu puts out a statement about how he's Trump's best buddy, Eisenkot says a lot of good. That did you on October 7th, right? Or that kind of retort. But Eisenkot has not put out any significant policy sheets or had like a major press conference devoted to the Israel-U.S. relationship. And what is the thinking inside Israeli political observers about what Netanyahu might do between now and the election? I know that there's a lot of rumors that we could get renewed major combat operations against Iran, that he could launch an attack that delays the election, or it could come after the election to make it difficult to form a government. What are people thinking about what Netanyahu might do between now and Tuesday? I'd have to say that for serious observers of the political scene here, and I'm counting among them, you know, former Prime Minister Ehud Barak and other very senior officials who've gone on the record, they're saying explicitly and openly to Israelis that the greatest danger facing the nation is what Netanyahu could do, and that he could do anything. So, for example, again today, there was an issue with the Likud, Prime Minister Netanyahu's party, attempting to trick electoral observers. There's a whole system here of election observers, and being able to basically trying to put in place a system whereby, the Likud will be able to intimidate people who have previously voted for the Likud, but haven't come in to vote yet this time. That's completely illegal, but the Likud is not really even hiding the efforts to do that. They're making efforts to intimidate Arab-Palestinian voters. They made an effort to try and prevent people who live in old age homes from voting. And every single day, every single day, Netanyahu is hitting this gong that you just described, of basically declaring that war, a renewed war with Iran, could come any day, any minute. And he has succeeded in scaring a lot of people. I spent a day yesterday in Jerusalem doing a kind of vox pop. I went around a kind of a neighborhood where you have a lot of garages and kind of hardware stores, that kind of an urban scene. And I talked to quite a few people, like between six and eight people, who, who had traditionally voted for the Likud for Netanyahu. And then when I spoke with them over the last year or so, just chit-chatting, basically told me they realized that he was over and that they were looking for someone else to vote for. And some of those people came back to me yesterday and said, you know, we looked, but there's no one else who can replace him. And Netanyahu is really using fear. I mean, terrifying people. It's to that extent that you almost don't hear Israelis making petitions. You hear people saying, you know, like, well, let's meet Wednesday for dinner, like, if nothing happens. There's tremendous fear. There's tremendous fear that if there's an electoral surprise and Netanyahu, you know, undisputedly loses the elections and that becomes known fairly early, right? We'll see the first exit polls will be at 10 p.m. Israel time on Tuesday. We may or may not then have a panorama of how things look, but there is a very great fear that Netanyahu will try to unleash violent gangs, violent gangs who have been armed by his interior defense minister, a former terrorist, Itamar Ben-Gvir. There are real fears of major disturbance is also on election day. Netanyahu is known in the past for kind of pulling off illegal, ugly surprises on election day, like putting up a video saying that the Arabs are voting in hordes, that kind of thing. It's expected to be worse this year. There's a feeling of like almost like physical girding for any number of shenanigans that Netanyahu and his party could still pull off. And it's, I think, important to remember, by far, Netanyahu is the most powerful person in this country. And while there are still guardrails, they're weakened. And he's in a very desperate situation. So if he thinks there's a real chance that he could be out, I think he may try and do anything. Well, Noga, thank you so much for updating us. We watched this closely. Appreciate it. Thank you. It's always great to talk with you guys. All right. We'll see you next time. Take care. Bye-bye. As we were talking, somebody actually just forwarded me a news report going around Israel that at a commencement ceremony, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, an officer's graduation ceremony, talking about Iran's nuclear program and saying the only way to stop it is to remove the regime. So he's really, he's ramping up his rhetoric in the days leading into this election. Yeah. And we'll stay on top of that. We'll bring anybody updates on the, we'll bring everybody updates on the Brad Lander case as we get them, obviously, follow Ryan on X for that. And I will be laser focused on them. He's claiming that the Iranians are trying to pursue a nuclear weapon again. Oh, wow. Oh, I thought they were on the brink of collapse. There's only one way to remove this threat, toppling the regime in Iran. Yeah. Well, while you guys cover that, I'll be laser focused on the brewers. That's what I was going to say. Excellent. All right, everyone. Go brewers. Have a great weekend. We'll actually see you on Friday. Crystal and Sagar will be back in tomorrow, but hope you all have a wonderful weekend. Stay safe. We'll see you soon. You stay in control, giving direction and choosing the final output. Put ChatGPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Get started at ChatGPT.com by selecting work mode available on plus and pro plans. Texas roads can be tough on a car and unexpected expenses never seem to wait for payday. When life throws you a surprise bill, you can request Clio for up to a $500 cash advance. No interest, no credit checks, repayment options that fit your schedule from a flat tire to an unexpected repair. Clio can help you handle life's little setbacks and applying takes just a few minutes right from your phone. Download Clio today and take care of it. There are exciting things happening at your local CVS. Shop new extra big deals with ExtraCare every two weeks. No coupon needed. Plus get access to exclusive sale prices, personalized deals and more as a member. ExtraCare is the way to save at CVS. Join for free online or in-store and start saving. Visit your local CVS store or cvs.com slash extra big deals for this week's deals. Guaranteed human.