8/19/26: Trump Panics As Bond Markets Crumble, Trump Crypto Firm To Become Bank, Kushner Bends Knee To Bibi

This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human I survived nine months in captivity and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. I'm Elizabeth Smart and these are the survivor files. Every week I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable, abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced. These are stories about what it takes to make it out alive. Listen to the survivor files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you hear the new episode of the Hey Jonas Podcasts? We are at D23, so we'll see who stops by. The cast of Frozen stopped by. Kristen Bell, Josh Gad, and Adina Menzel. I auditioned for Frozen. What? For Kristoff. They said okay. What are you going to be singing today? I said I don't know. That must have been why you didn't get it. That was you probably won. Plus, Jon Stamos, Jason from Star Wars, and more. And I guess I can share that. Oh, listen to the latest episode of Hey Jonas on the iHeart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, this is Hayes Davenport and Sean Clements. We host the podcast Hollywood Handbook. Each week we talk to someone in show business and try to help them with their careers and see what they have to offer us. Everyone has a good time and no one gets mad at their publicists for letting them do our show. We've had a lot of great guests like Sarah Sherman, Adam Scott, Danny McBride, Ben Stillert, and a lot of other big shots that wouldn't be where they are without us. Listen to Hollywood Handbook on the iHeart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey guys, Saga and Crystal here. Independent media just played a truly massive role in this election and we are so excited about what that means for the future of the show. This is the only place where you can find honest perspectives from the left and the right that simply does not exist anywhere else. So if that is something that's important to you, please go to breakingpoints.com, become a member today and you'll get access to our full shows, unedited, ad free, and all put together for you every morning in your inbox. We need your help to build the future of independent news media and we hope to see you at breakingpoints.com. One thing we have been keeping a close eye on and that Trump also seems to keep a close eye on is the bond markets. There's been a lot going on there and no one better to break it down for us. Then Jeff Stein pulled surprise winning journalist and reporter over at notice. Great to see you. I'm so good to hear Pulitzer prize when I'm just going to make sure to be guys obnoxious about that with everyone in my life as possible. I saw the smile light up your face when I said that Jeff. So happy to happy to provide you all of your accolades. Let's go and put D1 up on the screen here. We've had a bond sell off here for the New York Times. They say it sent the borrowing cost to the highest level since 2007 yields on the 30-year US Treasury and government bonds across the world rose to multi-year highs as investors fret about inflation, deficits, and AI spending. Talk to us about what this article is indicating and why we should care. Yeah, it's a huge topic. The bond yields runner. Do you want me to start on why it matters or what's going on? Why it matters? I think the why it matters is huge, huge, huge, huge, huge parts of the American economy are incredibly, incredibly sensitive to this financial indicator that seems totally abstract and sort of beyond what most people understand. And basically the way this works is that borrowing prices are tied to the amount that Treasury Department pays in response to issuing debt. It's basically Treasury says, it's just an IOU that says, "I will pay you back at this rate over this amount of time if you, the private borrower, buy my debt in exchange for immediate cash." And that percentage, that rate that Treasury pays on that IOU is the benchmark for an impossibly large amount of borrowing in the US economy, including mortgages, car loans, or credit card rates. So it really has a very sort of visceral immediate impact on millions of small businesses that might want to loan millions of homeowners that might be trying to buy their first house, millions of students who are trying to get student loans if they don't have a federal benefit. And then there's sort of a second potential sort of macroeconomic impact that could have impact sort of you directly. And that is the higher these yields get, they're called the sort of that IOU spread is the yields. The higher that gets, the more at risk our financial system is because our banks, not so much the really big ones, but the medium smaller ones, are really, their margins are based on expectations for what those IOUs will yield. And if we have huge fluctuations as we're seeing in the bond market, it means that the balance sheets of these banks could be a skew in ways that are really dangerous. And the last time we saw really elevated bond yields was 2023. And one of the impacts of that era was we saw Silicon Valley Bank go under the Biden administration mobilized effective bailout. It was a very big moment for financial markets that it could have had this sort of major ripple effect throughout the economy. And there's the sort of immediate effect on consumer borrowing, and then there's this sort of second tier layer of sort of internal plumbing to the financial markets where if we see big shocks that we don't know where they're going, that that is gets really scary and gets us back to questions about 08 or maybe more like 2023 or but but it creates this instability both for foreign governments and for banks because these treasuries are sort of just the bedrock asset that people used to hold liquidity. And so you do not want to see major fluctuations and then we can sort of get to the why has this happening if that's all. Yeah, yeah, let's get to that because if we put this Bloomberg tear sheet up on the screen, they mentioned US 10 year yields climbed to highest since 2025 as route deepens and famously trump didn't waver at all. So basically after quill liberate liberation day until he said the bond markets were getting a little yippy if I'm remembering correctly Jeff. So what's happening this time around and you've covered Trump and Trump's relationship with the bond markets got best and as well. What could we expect to see from the admin? We have a well, so I guess what's happening now is you have sort of the structural problem in the immediate problem, the structural problem is that as you know with the West ages, we have sort of a lot of government spending and not enough revenue coming in and that has pushed out a huge and sort of unprecedented. You know, issuance of debt, not just in the US, but Germany, the UK, Japan, and what's happening is there's so much debt being issued and not enough buyers, which means that the buyers have the upper hand and they can demand a higher premium, which means that the borrowing gets more expensive for the US government, which is sort of the underlying structural problem. So on top of that, we've had a series of, as you alluded to, really serious geopolitical developments that sort of exacerbate the sort of like the structural issue there and basically when when the street of hormones, you know, on off, on off with the Iran war and the effect of that is to raise the risk of inflation. The question goes up, if you have a bond, you're going to say, I need a better rate of return because my value of my bond is going to road over time. So that plus a few other things that Federal Reserve not being clear that it's going to fight inflation, the AI spending boom has really created a huge extra demand for capital, so that's another reason that there aren't as many people and institutions buying bonds. And so that's creating all of the short term pressure on yields. What the administration is going to do about it is a great question of and trying to get the answer to we saw a couple of weeks ago, treasure secretary Scott Besson go out of his way and move to protect the Japanese yen. The administration said this is absolutely just about protecting our allies and helping our allies, but it wasn't lost on people that treasuries are held over over a trillion, a trillion dollars and treasures are held by the Japanese. They are the single biggest foreign holder of US treasuries, and if their currency really is in trouble, they could mass dump the yen, the dollars that they do own to prop up the yen, and that would that would be really bad for for US the US yields. What else the administration is going to do today, just a few hours ago, we got an announcement from the treasure department that they are basically changing, they're basically buying older debt and trying to issue new debt. The mechanics of this are complicated and really boring, frankly, so I don't want to waste your time, but it's another move aimed at basically improving liquidity in the treasury market in the short term, but doesn't really do anything about sort of the underlying structural issue or the war, which is, you know, someone said to me, like, are we basically risking the entire US economy because Israel persuaded Trump to go to war with Iran, and there's like not not true to that. There isn't a story there that has a lot of evidence to support it. Yeah, and not just the US economy and say the entire global economy is being risked right now because of the choices that have been made for some series of perplexing reasons. Jeff, you're writing over at notice about how important the bond yields are, how closely Trump follows this metric with the midterms looming, you know, is there a particular level interest rate that he's going to be looking at is there some sort of like catastrophic things. that could unfold that would really cause problems like what are the specifics here that we should keep our eyes on? Yeah, we are approaching 5% on the 10 year and we're at like 5.3 on the 30. If those numbers, if the 10 year rises above 5%, and the 30 year rises above 6, that's when economists have been telling me like we will expect to start to see real trouble in financial markets at some of the banks that I'm pretty confident that the administration is going to be doing whatever it can to keep it below that number. But I think, you know, Emily, you mentioned the Liberation Day tariffs, which I think is a really instructive counterpoint because that was a moment last year where you might remember. I think I was on the show a few times when it looked like the Trump administration understood that the massive tariffs they were imposing were causing these huge problems in the bond market and they backed off. But the thing about that crisis was it was kind of like a switch, like a lever that was like, you know, we can pull this in one direction or the other. Like we can turn this on or off to use the switch analogy. And now I think it's pretty clear that it's a lot harder. You know, then Trump could just say, actually, no, that's not really the tariffs and that's kind of what they did. Can they really just say like the war is over and the trade reform was open and also AI spending is like the number of problems that are causing this current flare up are so much bigger and more complicated than the tariff switch that they could turn on or off last year. So in some ways, it's more out of their hands. They have a situation that is not as easily resolved as it was last time. And I think that's going to be a real problem if they can't figure out how to get this under control quickly. Jeff, I wanted to talk to you to a little bit more about this Japanese yen situation that you raised. We can put D3 up on the screen. Scott Besson is many things, but one of them is he is sort of a master at currency markets and currency manipulation. That's how he made a lot of his fortune alongside George Zoro. So we can go back and take a look at that track record in any case. There was an extraordinary thing that unfolded where journalists was able to capture a photo journalist was able to capture a picture of like a grocery style to do list. And on that to do list was this massive intervention into the Japanese yen market to prop it up. That looks to have not really lasted at least for the long term. Philip Pilkington says it's been 18 days since the US treasury undertook an all hands on deck bailout of the yen. Intervention has now been completely wiped down. Japanese are going to start considering liquidating US treasuries to get the situation under control. And my understanding, Jeff, is that this has implications not only for treasuries and baños. Obviously that's really important, but also could have huge implications in terms of AI investment because of this yen carry trade where for a longest time you could borrow money in Japanese yen at basically 0% and then use it to invest in things like US treasuries and the AI data center build down. That trade is no longer making the sense that it used to bake. So this could have significant impact on our entire economy. It seems to me. Yeah, and you look at what the mechanics of what Besson did with the first attempt to prop up the yen. And basically, you know, you would say, okay, well, if the US is going to buy the yen, right? If you buy the yen, it increases demand. So it stops the sell off and allows Japan to basically manage its economy without having to dump US dollars. That's kind of the, but if you're thinking this through, you're like, well, doesn't that mean that the US needs to sell its own treasuries to buy the yen? And what's really important, and I think interesting about the way they went about this is Besson sold the euro. So the US has holdings of the euro, and that's what it does to be able to buy the yen. So it was a move it to say, okay, well, we don't want to prop up the yen to save the US treasury markets by dumping treasury. That's like completely kind of productive. But Europe is just over there. They're mostly doing okay, like not really, but the war in Ukraine, but it is someone we can kind of take a bit of a shot at their currency and not have it immediately blow back to us. Europeans don't have as many US treasuries as Japan or even China. So it's, it seemed like a logical place to go. The problem is, as you're saying, this intervention has not held up. And now it's like, where's the ammo going to come from? You could issue more US debt to do this. You could sell US treasuries, but that kind of contradicts potentially the sort of motivation of doing this in the first place. And as you're saying, it's not just US treasuries that are very well integrated throughout the global economy. The Japanese yen is, you know, the Japanese, you know, there's an old saying among economists that there are four kinds of economies in the world. Developing developed Japan and Argentina. Part of what makes Japan distinct is because they they've had, you know, they've been running a debt of like 400% the GDP, like twice what we have. And so their debt issue is sort of scattered throughout the global economy. And if they have a real sudden currency shock, you could see similar sort of balance sheet problems to what we have with the sudden evaluation in US treasuries. Well, let's get to Trump's latest world liberty, financial situation. Jeff is going to stick around, so stay tuned for that. When I was 14 years old, I was kidnapped and health captive for nine months. I survived, and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are the survivor files. I just remember this low taunting voice next to my ear saying, shut up, don't say anything. Every week, I'm with survivors who lived through the unthinkable. I knew if he woke up, without a doubt, he was going to hurt me. I started feeling that there was someone at the end of my bed, and I just started screaming. They are abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced. But these aren't stories about what's taken from them. Their story is about what it takes to make it out alive. Listen to the survivor files with the Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. If you're a bookshelf and you're for you page are equally important to your personality, welcome home. This is Pro's Society, the weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsessives, and anyone who thinks pride and prejudice and love island deserve the same level of discourse. 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Each week we talk to someone in show business, aka The Biz, and try to help them with their careers and see what they have to offer us. We've had a lot of great guests like Sarah Sherman, not that great. Can you help me shape this? How about we flip it on his head? How about we flip this around? Okay, what is the surprise one then? Actually, you think as the straight man is actually the one who's acting weird. Adam Scott, this entire time you've been expecting Adam Sandler to come to visit the show. I would never let go of that. I would never set expectations for something like that. If the universe allows for something like that to happen, I am open to it. I'm always going to accept, you know, Danny McBride, fine. Yeah, it's all this fragile masculinity exuding. I could smell it walking on the hallway to be honest with you. I was like, is that what you need? Nope, it's fragile masculinity. Ben Stiller, no. I think there's a lot of times out of context, people don't get it or even know what a circle is. You know what I mean? Like you're like, it's so stupid. Everyone's so dumb. And fake. Right, fake and also not interested. Or just like, oh, I've got my life. I don't care about your life. And a lot of other big shots that wouldn't be where they are without us. Oh, and by the way, Will Ferrell told us personally he loves the show and he wants to be a guest on every episode, but he's just so busy. Listen to Hollywood Handbook on the iHeart Radio app Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. A major development in the Trump family crypto corruption. Let's put this first headline up on the screen. Brazen act of self-dealing lawmakers, watchdogs alarmed after Trump regulators let Trump firm start a bank. Just the lead here from C&N reports regulators appointed by Trump are allowing the Trump family flagship cryptocurrency venture to become a bank, a move that is alarming ethics watchdogs and some lawmakers, World Liberty Financial, a crypto firm, Trump and his sons launched in 2024, announced late Friday that it received a preliminary conditional approval from from banking officials to become a trust bank. Final approval hinges on a series of conditions being met. Jeff Stein, reporter at Notice, is back with us and Jeff, I'm hoping you can help us understand what the hell is going on because World Liberty Financial has just mentioned from the CNN report. It's a crypto company. Crypto banking right now, they have their clarity act that's hanging in the balance and may or may not pass by the end of the year. But this is a really like murky regulatory area. So what does this even mean? What does this approval even mean? Is it going to stand? Do you think help us break this down? So this is a charter from the OCC, the Office of the Council for the Currency. It's been approved by an official that Trump appointed to that position. And what it effectively means is that it does not entail deposit insurance. It doesn't mean that World Liberty Financial has federal backing for if they have a crisis. That is not the case, but I think is a bit of a relief to some people. But it does essentially enable them to issue their stablecoin. USD1 is the name of the World Liberty Financial Coins, the currency that they issue. And they don't have to go through an intermediary set of institutions to do that. There are a few other benefits. It gives them sort of additional federal credibility. It allows them to a really big one is that they now override state regulation. So if New York was saying, "Hey, Trump, you can't sell your crypto whatever this way," New York is now not able to go after this bank because it has this sort of federal protection. But the real immediate sort of short-term financial benefit for Trump's crypto company and that he will be able to issue this stablecoin. And I was new to a lot of this, so I've been trying to learn a lot about exactly how this works. But essentially, this is both, the stablecoin is basically something that you can buy and trade. It's like a meme stock in a way. You can buy your stablecoin and then trade it. But it also is sort of a way to transact or exchange, have a financial exchange. So if you're a bank and you're trying to buy certain number of parts from a company or whatever, you can instead of going through a bank or going through, think about it like Venmo or PayPal. Basically, you can conduct this transaction now in USD1, which is the Trump crypto company. And this is the real thing that I think people need to know. The Trump administration, or not the Trump administration, the Trump family will get a cut. We don't know exactly what that is, the rate is very, but it's typically between one and four percent, maybe two percent. That is the percentage that they will get on whatever transaction, let's say a bank or a private company or even an individual wants to do. And so there's no public disclosure as far as we know. I already talked to him. We won't know. Maybe for a long time, what exactly? Who is doing this? So if Trump gets a call from the head of Goldman Sachs and he says, yeah, I might stick the DOJ on you, but can you conduct your next billion dollar deal in my cryptocurrency? They can do that and no one would know. The Trump family would get the transaction fee. Correct. There's a series of holding companies that make it hard to say they own this percentage because it's like Trump owns 70%. Trump personally owns 70% of the holding company that owns the other holding company that owns the blah, blah, blah. But effectively, they are the owners, along with the Emirates, about a 49%. Yeah. And then it's run by Zach Wichoff, who of course is Steve Wichoff's son. So you've got all kinds of family corruption going on in this administration. And for my Republican friends out there, I think a good way to visualize this would be, remember when Hunter Biden was selling his paintings. And we didn't know who was buying these paintings for prices that seemed a little bit above market price, except we're talking about billions of dollars, changing hands here potentially. All thoroughly without any transparency, no scrutiny. And Jeff, just help put this into some historical context because you start to feel crazy tracking this stuff. The level of wealth, specifically through this crypto company, that Trump has been able to accumulate in the second presidency has got to be historically unprecedented. Certainly for the US, perhaps for the entire world. Yeah, yeah, I don't know what the, you know, percent of GDP comparisons would be with like whatever land deals George Washington made. But he made over $500 million, I think, from world liberty financial alone. I'm not 100% sure about that number, but I'm pretty sure that's right. Over a billion dollars from his crypto investments last year while being president. And you know, it's kind of like a resist live thing when they're always like Jimmy Carter was forced to sell his peanut farm. And I think that sometimes allides the amount of money having, you know, working on a biography of Bernie Sanders and, you know, reliving some of the Clinton family self enrichment, which is astonishing in its own right. I think Hillary made like something like $2 million from Wall Street speeches or the two of them made about that much money, which is itself amazing. But this is still, I mean, $500 million, Wall president in one year from one of your many crypto ventures, that it is sort of beyond, I think it's safe to say anything we've seen at least in the modern era and probably longer. Which of course is also directly tied to the foreign policy that he's overseeing his president. Like it's, these are deals with the UAE to your point, Jeff, about how that's the backer in this case. And that's just get, I mean, that's like basically just scratching the surface chair and cushioning obviously as well had huge infusion of cash from the Saudi royal family. But the UAE is tied into a world liberty of financial right. You were just mentioning that it's enormously significant. And there's really no direct parallel between Hunter Biden or the Clinton's obviously who also had their own foreign dealings. But this is the sitting president with that fund. And a lot of foreign policy implications on alignment. We're in Iran. The UAE we covered earlier in the show says two missiles were launched at it in the last 24 hours. Yeah. And I spent all day yesterday on the phone working on a story in this realm that I'm not going to spoil. So you guys have to have me back on to discuss that. And read notice everyone. Thank you guys. I hope there's a brilliant cryptocurrency at some point maybe. Crystal coin. Oh my god. We're not that desperate yet, Jeff, but we'll see. We'll see how the next couple of years go. Jeff's dying. Thank you so much for doing double duty today. We appreciate it. My pleasure. Happy to be on anytime. Thanks guys. I survived. And I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. You just remember this low taunting voice next to my ear saying shut up. Don't say anything. Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable. I knew if he woke up without a doubt, he was going to hurt me. I started feeling that there was someone at the end of my bed. And I just started screaming. If your bookshelf and your four-year page are equally important to your personality, welcome home. I'm Eli Rallo and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having. I'm obsessed. It's like if you can hide some real messages inside compelling characters and that is a Trojan horse, whether you're looking for literary deep dives, smart pop culture conversations, or a community of readers who love to think a little too much, you're in the right place. Listen to Pro's Society on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. for letting them do our show. - We've had a lot of great guests like Sarah Sherman, not that great. - I actually, can you help me shape this? - Yeah. - How about we flip it on his head? - No. - Okay, how about we flip this around? - No. - Okay, what is the surprise one, man? Who actually you think is the straight man is actually the one who's acting weird. - Adam Scott, love. - This entire time, you've been expecting Adam Sandler to come to visit the show. - I have, I would never set expectations for something like that. - It seems like if the universe allows for something like that to happen. - I am open to it. - I'm always going to accept, you know. - Danny McBride, fine. - Yeah, it's all this fragile masculinity exuding. I was like, "Is that weed?" Nope, it's fragile masculinity. - Ben Stiller, no. - There's a lot of times out of context, people don't get it, or even know what a circle is. Like you're like, "Oh, I got my life. I don't care about your life." - And a lot of other big shots that wouldn't be where they are without us. - Oh, and by the way, Will Ferrell told us personally he loves the show and he wants to be a guest on every episode, but he's just so busy. Listen to Hollywood Handbook on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. - Jared Kushner was recently in Israel for meetings over the purported Gaza Peace Plan in an interview after those meetings he indicated that they would let Israel quote unquote finish the job. Let's take a listen. - We're very committed to the fact that we have a plan to rebuild Gaza, but we will not allow Gaza to be rebuilt until the demilterization occurs. Nobody wants to put more money into a place that's gone on for so long until if it's just going to be taken over by terrorists or blown up again. We're also not going to restrict Israel's right to defend itself if there are any imminent threats. And so we had to clarify what that means. We could be seeing progress in as little as 30 days, hopefully on starting to take some of the weapons out and hopefully filling in some of the tunnels as well, the next 60 to 90 days as well. So progress could come quite soon, but we do need cooperation from both sides and we're going to hopefully get through, but we've made a lot of progress to get here. For Israel, we think this is a win-win situation because if Hamas actually gives over the weapons and the tunnels willingly over the next 60 to 90 days, that obviously would be the elimination of a huge security threat for Israel, almost an unthinkable achievement. And if they don't fall through now on their commitment, everyone will see that they're not genuine about peace and then Israel will have a lot more support from the U.S. and others to go and finish the job in the appropriate way. - Those comments represent one more instance of the U.S. capitulating to Israeli demands and positioning this time with regard to potential demilitarization and derming of Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Join us now to talk about why we seem to see this trend happening over and over again, our Eli Clifton of the Quincy Institute and Ion Lustig political science professor at the University of Pennsylvania. They are also co-authors of a new book, Israel's lobby America in the grip of a foreign power. Gentlemen, welcome to you both. - Thank you for your service. - Yeah, of course. I am, let me go ahead and start with you. Why did you think it was important to write this book at this particular moment? - There have been many books in the past about the Israel lobby, John Hirshimer and Steve Walton wrote an important book 20 years ago, but the world has changed so much and the lobby has changed with it to pose threats to America which are much more severe than people have realized in the past. In the past, what is now a toxic special relationship with Israel cost America a great deal in its foreign relations. Now it's not just a matter of paying a high price abroad for policies that can have no daylight between Washington and Jerusalem, but there's threats to American freedoms at home because the lobby unable to defend Israeli policies is resorting to suppressing American freedoms specifically punishing, prosecuting anyone who tries to seriously criticize the relationship between the United States and Israel or criticize Israeli policies, especially in Gaza and Lebanon. - And Eli, I want to ask about that point about the changes that have taken place just in very recent years. You get into a lot of this in the book. Both the changes in Israeli politics, but also just wanted to zero on this one point you all make. You write the 2010 Citizens United versus Federal Election Commission Supreme Court decision combined with a dramatic increase in the proportion of national wealth controlled by the super rich opened the floodgates for narrow special interests to invest unlimited money in the American campaign finance economy. And could you walk us through a bit how we have seen post citizens United particularly money started concentrating, start concentrating even more on this issue in particular. - That's right. So to be clear, when Citizens United, when that in the speech now decisions first came down, the greatest fear that was being discussed was the possibility of the corporate money and dark money would flood our campaigns. And they did to a degree that was a well placed fear but perhaps the thing that people hadn't anticipated is that a small group of plutocrats, of billionaire donors would mobilize and would do so publicly stating that the reason that they were doing it was because of Israel and their desire to get politicians elected and to get policies in place that would continue that no daylight policy between Washington and Israel. And what we saw in the first post citizens United election which was in 2012 was suddenly Sheldon Adelson who came out of the gates giving millions and millions of dollars to first to Newt Gingrich's primary campaign and then Mitt Romney's when Mitt Romney was the nominee for the Republican party. And what was really interesting to see in that campaign was the degree of honesty and forthright manner with which Adelson, his advisors and Newt Gingrich talked about this new influx of money into the campaign saying that the reason that Adelson himself said the reason he was doing it was because of Israel, Newt Gingrich said the reason my biggest donor is doing this is because of Israel, a foreign country. And Adelson's own advisors were out there really trying to make clear that the reason this was happening was because of Israel. Now flash forward as we track in our book nine billionaires gave over $1.7 billion into our campaign finance system to influence our elections since Citizens United and all of those billionaires spoke about or through their philanthropy we can infer that the reason that they were motivated to engage in our political process and to give such large sums of money was because of Israel. That was their central driving issue for engaging with that degree of money and wealth seeking to determine the outcomes of elections. So I would say that it is a key element is the Citizens United decision allowed the lobby to pivot to this focus on a small group of ultra-rich individuals even as Israel's public support for Israel within the electorate creators during this time. But it is made up for by the fact that our elections have become something that plutocrats are allowed to have an outsized say in. - And Eli, is that the only mechanism that is used here to create impact in our politics, to wield influence in our politics? And I don't mean to downplay whatsoever. We've all witnessed just in this election season alone the tens of millions of dollars that are flooding into some of these races. Mostly to confuse and mislead voters, the ads have nothing to do whatsoever with Israel, oftentimes the money is funneled through a variety of different packs to try to secure where it ultimately is coming from. So we know that that has a massive impact. Are there other mechanisms that they use as well though in order to try to get the results from our elected leadership that we may not be as aware of? - Well, I think that in trying to control the debate which is something that I and referenced earlier, that these plutocrats when you look at what the other things they advocate for and the things that they are actually directly involved in controlling, for instance, Miriam Adelson serving as the president of the Maccabee Task Force. Maccabee Task Force is the main organization that was pushing for the deportation of Muud Khalil that has been pushing for the withholding of federal funds to universities because they've allowed criticism of Israel on their campuses. And as a result, you're seeing that there is basically a mobilization of state power to try to stifle criticism of Israel and calls for a meaningful change in policy from elected officials. Now, it really helps if you're leading that push for the weaponization of state power to stifle speech. If you happen to also have been the largest donors to the politicians who have the ability to make those decisions. - I also wanted to ask, what it's like to be a researcher in the space, the writer in the space, because obviously your reference to your signboard, that's been something that we've had him talk about on the show as well. But just talk to us a little bit about the pressure, the pushback. Maybe it's less now because of public opinion as Crystal referenced earlier, but the headwinds, what's it been like to work on this book and to speak out on this issue? - Well, I mean, I've been working in this space for over half a century. I have felt a responsibility in a fascination. I'm Jewish. I have been exposed to just about every argument, every smear you can imagine. But in fact, I've survived. And what I have found it has changed since the Walton Mirchheimer book is that the country knows that APEC and the Israel lobby is now an issue. And although the reviewers of the Walton Mirchheimer book could smear them as antidepressants. Semites and then prevent people from really ever reading the book. Most of those reviews never dealt with anything the book said just talked about the authors as if they were anti-Semites. I don't think the lobby can get away with that with our book. I think they're going to have to either try to stay silent because they can't argue against us or actually engage the arguments. In which case we will have accomplished a great deal because the objective of the lobby now is to prevent discussion of Israel publicly and to control and punish those who try to raise that issue. So things have changed. One has to have a thick skin and a sense of humor. But one also has to focus on the facts, on the analysis, not on appeals to prejudices, appeals to mysterious conspiracy theories. No, we're talking about very specific mechanisms of power, mechanisms of influence that operate in the United States and that do so legally and that do so with success because of the commitment of the people behind them and because of the structure of American politics that encourages the mobilization of special interests. You led to pick up on some of that. So we've been tracking, of course, in today's show, the Florida election results on the one hand, which are highly relevant to this conversation. Actually, on the one hand, you have the shock victory of Angie Nixon, who is a DSA member. She's an avowed anti-Zionist. She opposes genocide. She introduced a resolution that got two votes in the Florida State House calling for a cease-fire in November, you know, just a month after October 7th. Then on the Republican side, you have some, I think it's fair to say, genuine bigots running, capturing the attention of young Republicans in particular at James Fishback running for governoria, Dan Bilzerian running against another bigot, Randy Fine, in that primary. Both of them lost, but they both also got into double digits and they both also did quite well, quite well, among young Republicans. So I'm curious what you make of those, how you make sense of those developments and how you view them and whether or not you are concerned that some of the genuine information that you reveal here could fuel some of those bigoted conspiracy theories. >> Well, to answer both of those questions, to address the first one, I think it's really important to zoom out from sort of the horse race, political coverage, and believe me, I'm susceptible to being pulled into that as much as anyone. But I think it's really important to look at overall, what does it take for Israel's lobby to continue to be competitive within this environment? Whereas we talked about earlier, they can't even talk about Israel and the ads that they are paying to put on the air. And the simple answer is that the price is literally going up. At this point in the 2026 election cycle, Israel lobby superpacks have raised around $160 million and spent around $150 of that. And that number is going to continue to take up going into the general election. They're not raising, they're not done raising or spending. I think it's entirely plausible that they will raise and spend somewhere in the vicinity of a quarter of a billion dollars trying to influence election outcomes, both in the primaries as well as in the general election in this cycle. So the numbers are going up at a really, really rapid pace of what they have to spend. And the short answer is obviously, as you alluded to, mixed success in getting the candidates elected that they would like to see. But each win and each loss is costing a lot more money than it used to. That is very, very clear. As for whether the message and the facts that we present in our book can be misused by bigots or anti-Semites, I'm sure that some of them can. But I think it's also dangerous to abandon this space and to avoid engaging with the very, very clear reality that the pro-Israel special interest groups and the roles that they have in our elections and in our democracy at this point. Because abandoning that space, not engaging with it because of the fact that there might be some uncomfortable facts in there that could be misused by people who already hold anti-Semitic or conspiratorial views effectively sort of abandons that space to those people, allowing them to sort of run roughshod with whatever theories, even if they're no longer fact-based in any way, shape, or form, they want to try to propagate for their own nefarious purposes. So I think it's extremely important to present facts, to engage with this as a real phenomenon in our democracy and to talk about it in a manner that explicitly rejects anti-Semitism and bigotry and generalizations about Jewish Americans. The lobby would like nothing more than to conflate Jewish Americans with the Israel lobby. And as we try to lay out explicitly in our book from the introduction onwards, that is a falsehood, that is an anti-Semitic trope as a matter of fact. And we really need to examine the facts to understand why that is so, so wrong. And last question for me is to you, Ian, and you can certainly pick up on that last point as well. We started this segment with the Jared Kushner clip, the recent Jared Kushner clip, he's certainly been involved in these negotiations, arguably leading these negotiations in the Iran War, the Gaza conflict as well. What have we seen with the Trump administration that takes this to a different level? Let me follow up a bit on Eli's. Yeah. Because there's no question that the lobby is using the conflation of anti-Semitism with criticism of Israel in order, as I said, to suppress and prevent discussion of Israel and it's evaluating its policies. One of the techniques they use is to call Israel the collective Jew. And once they treat Israel as the collective Jew, then any criticism of Israel can be seen as and condemned as an attack on all Jews. This is outrageous because it forces American Jews into a position as if Israel is their homeland. It's their country. That's not true. But then the lobby goes ahead in benefits, tries to benefit from what it sees as an, or codes as an upsurge in anti-Semitism. There really is a threat of anti-Semitism in the United States. And most of it is due to Israel's policies in the name of the Jewish people. So it's people like us who are focusing on the facts, not on wacky conspiracy theories or mystical ideas that can make that key distinction between criticism of Israel and normal and real anti-Semitism. Now look at Jared Kushner. You know, I find it a little amusing. When Jared Kushner was on CBS, so-called success of forming the border piece and ending the war, what he said was very clearly, yes, we got the deceased fire and all this other silly stuff. We had spent a lot of time on the complex issues. There's nothing's absolutely going to be done about it. And so I don't take seriously all of this fluff about the border piece and reconstruction. He is shoulder to shoulder with the Israeli government. He may put a few ambiguous words around it, but you could tear in that talk that he gave that he never looks for what the interests or the safety of Palestinians are. Everything is couched as if it's all a matter of what's a win-win for Israel. This is exactly what we're talking about. This demand by the lobby that any American government, whether it's ID associates, whether it's an ideological commitment as Biden had designism, whether it's a purely transactional commitment, which is what the Trump administration has, but the insistence of the lobby that there be no daylight between the American government and the Israeli government, and that is costing the United States more and more and more. I did want to get your perspective as a political scientist on some of the election results that we've seen, specifically this Angie Nixon shock victory in Florida. She spent literally zero dollars on television, zero dollars, and was able to win, and it wasn't even close. Alex Vanden as well-known figure was the star of one of the Trump impeachments. He was running millions of dollars of TV ads across the state. I'm not going to pretend Israel was the only issue, but it was a very clear dividing line between these two candidates. And Angie Nixon was able to prevail against incredibly long odds here. I wonder what you make of this result. And perhaps tie it back to you, started by saying we're at a particularly dangerous moment because of the way that the Israel lobby is trying to crack down on free speech here in the U.S. It also seems that they're at a particularly precarious and vulnerable moment given the way that these political results have changed, and given the way that public opinion has shifted so dramatically. Well, there's a complicated set of questions you're asking me, and one can't learn everything one wants to learn by the outcome of a one election, a one primary election in Florida. One thing that's happening is that the democratic base has become much more critical of Israel, and for the first time, motivated to vote in large measure about the Israeli situation, plus a commitment, commitments to associated with alienation from capitalism that capitalism isn't working for a lot of the people in a democratic base, and they don't think it can. But on the other hand, I think those who are concerned that too many candidates from that progressive DSA orientation might not be able to prevail in the general election are correct. This country is polarized, there's a very even split, and I think people can reasonably worry about that. I think one of the things is going on, which we have been tracking since Obama came to power, is the role of social media. And whether Vindman, for example, ended up spending his money very, very unwisely on conventional television commercials, whereas Nixon actually cleverly used social media, which is much more important for, at least for the Democratic base voters in the primary. So there's a lot that's going on on the Israeli side. Israelis are increasingly aware, but that their love affair with Trump has cost them enormous and their extremity of the policies that Netanyahu has engaged in, has cost them tremendous amount of standing in the United States. They're now fighting for an Israeli position in the United States they never had to at the public opinion level and starting, starting to feel that at the level of the political class. These royars are in an election campaign right now. Netanyahu may or may not win return as a prime minister. I, my hunch is that he will not, but in Israel, there'll be an attempt by the lobby to use the disappearance of Netanyahu as a new day that Israel has completely changed, but really the government that wakes in the wings, although it won't have the extremity of the, some of the ministers in the Netanyahu government, they will not change Israel's policies toward Palestinians. That, those policies are not going to change. The fear that I have is that American politicians will use a cosmetic change in Israeli profile, political profile to treat it as if everything has changed and the United States can go back to a comfortable, special relationship with the "only" democracy in the Middle East. In my opinion, the United States really has to reorient itself toward this problem and think about solutions in the future that are anchored in an end to the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza through integration of all the people who live between the Jordan and the sea into one democratic country. It can be called Israel. It can be called Israel Palestine, but it has to be democratic and it has to honor the collective principle of equality for everyone who lives under the same government. And Eli, one last one for you. We have seen examples, of course, in both recent and longer history of presidents that buck what Israeli leadership wants them to do. Probably the most significant example in recent years is President Obama moving forward with the JCPOA, the Iranian nuclear deal. How do you explain those instances? And is there a danger that this analysis that focuses so much on simply the interest of the Israeli lobby and the impact of that money? Denies agency to Biden and Trump for taking these, what I think most Americans would agree are horrific actions and enabling what most would say is a genocide. >> Well, I think Obama's success with the JCPOA, at least short term success with it since ultimately it was torn up, was that he proved that you can stare down the lobby, that you can actually mobilize your party. If the lobby leans in and makes this a partisan issue, which they did, much by following Netanyahu's lead in mobilizing Republicans to oppose it, it turns out that most Democrats, if urged to do so by the leader of their party, when that leader is the president, will ultimately choose to stand with the Democratic Party. And I think that that's something that APAC even going into that fight was very concerned about, because that was a monumental shift in how the Israel lobby functions, in that they had previously held a great deal of power by only picking fights that they could generally win, but also maintaining the appearance of a bipartisan consensus around their core issues. And that was really APAC becoming partisan, starting to engage in partisan politics, they quickly spun up a super PAC in the wake of that, which again engages in both primary and general elections around the country, they entered into our electoral politics in a way that they had not done so before. Now, as for does this somehow sell short the agency of presidents, I don't think it does. Obviously they have agency, but what we try to show in the book time and time again are the instances in which presidents really did state what it was that they wanted to do. What their top advisors wanted them to do. We pride examples, Truman, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, certainly an example of Obama, obviously an example of Trump, certainly Obama in his first term, incidentally, with his failed attempt to push for a two-state solution as his foreign policy priority in his first term. And time and again, what we show are the instances in which they have pretty much shown both with their top advisors and these presidents wanted to pursue. And then we show the mechanisms through which the lobby tried to steer these presidents away from either imposing a piece on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or the ways in which they sought to shape U.S. policy regionally when it comes to issues like Iran. And what that shows isn't that these presidents didn't have agency, but that the lobby did have an enormous capacity and really a one-sided ability to bring pressure onto presidents to shape their decision-making in a manner that brought in concerns about domestic political repercussions, but in doing so, steer them away from the strategic and security-oriented policies that they wanted to pursue. Now, again, that doesn't remove any agency from these presidents, but it does show how a lobby that is largely aligned with a foreign country can operate when there is absolutely, at least historically, nothing to counterbalance its influence inside the halls of power. The book is Israel's lobby could not possibly be more timely, highly recommended to everyone to go and pick it up and check it out. Gentlemen, thank you so much for joining us this morning and also for writing the book and helping to elucidate this dynamic for all Americans. Thank you. Well, that doesn't for us on today's edition of Breaking Point. Crystal, Jeff Stein gave me a really good new idea. Crystal Coin. I like this. The Crystal Crypto endeavor. I think we can make a lot of money. I think you can make a lot of money. I think I could lose any shred of integrity or self-respect I've ever had, and probably lose a lot of money. What we're going to do is launch Kyle Coin. Nobody's going to tell him. All right, we'll work on that one. In the meantime, I'll be back here tomorrow with soccer and we will see you guys then. Sounds good. Have a great day, everyone. I survived nine months in captivity and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable, abducted, stalked, controlled and nearly silenced. Listen to the survivor files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. We are at D23, so we'll see who stopped by. 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